Problem

[Keanumoreira]

the reactions of the operator of this thread... is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from a five year old child or a legit debater.

Okay that is gold. Pure 100% gold. From now on I will call OP the THREAD OPERATOR.

 

And what is your point? Is this suppose to deter me? I can see your debating skills have been well refined.

Edited June 22, 2012 by Keanumoreira

[Keanumoreira]

I'm not calling it anything. My only point is no official declaration of war was ever made.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just saying that, depending on who you ask, it was an official war.

[Ghogiel]

Constitution states> "The Congress shall have Power " "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;"

 

Thomas Jefferson > "... Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war,"

[HeyYou]

I'm not calling it anything. My only point is no official declaration of war was ever made.

 

The US never officially declared war on N. Korea. (that I am aware of). S. Korea did though. Officially, a state of war still exists between the two countries, as the war ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. S. Korea is one of our allies. If someone attacks them, we are obliged to help defend them.

[Ghogiel]

S. Korea is one of our allies. If someone attacks them, we are obliged to help defend them.

 

Wasn't it really another UN 'peace keeping' mission though, from the US stand point anyway... I don't think there was an official defence treaty between the 2 nations, S.Korea and the US, prior to 1953, So it wasn't the mutual defence treaty coming into effect, US involvement came from some other angle. AFAIK that was UN actions no ta US war.

[HeyYou]

S. Korea is one of our allies. If someone attacks them, we are obliged to help defend them.

 

Wasn't it really another UN 'peace keeping' mission though, from the US stand point anyway... I don't think there was an official defence treaty between the 2 nations, S.Korea and the US, prior to 1953, So it wasn't the mutual defence treaty coming into effect, US involvement came from some other angle. AFAIK that was UN actions no ta US war.

 

Back in the 50's, yep, that was indeed the case.

[Vagrant0]

S. Korea is one of our allies. If someone attacks them, we are obliged to help defend them.

 

Wasn't it really another UN 'peace keeping' mission though, from the US stand point anyway... I don't think there was an official defence treaty between the 2 nations, S.Korea and the US, prior to 1953, So it wasn't the mutual defence treaty coming into effect, US involvement came from some other angle. AFAIK that was UN actions no ta US war.

 

Back in the 50's, yep, that was indeed the case.

It was a peace keeping mission intended to prevent the spread of communism from the U.S.S.R. Similar to Vietnam almost a decade later. Arguably we only entered Vietnam because we managed to have some level of success with Korea. The cold war was all about doing one thing and calling it differently so that the other side doesn't have official reason to start dropping nukes.

 

The difference between these cases and the Middle East is that you have an insurgent force which is fighting for their own ideals, often in contrast with the moderate majority, while in Korea and Vietnam there was about an equal population on both sides. Maintaining a belief of "kill them all and let God (or Allah) sort them out" really only manages to make that moderate majority hate the West enough to want to help the extremists.

 

To put it in perspective, what was being suggested is the rough equivalent of finding the idea funny of nuking the central US just because you had prejudices against fundamental Christian groups, or Americans in general. As a matter of fact, those with hostilities towards the West were even using imagery from Fallout 3 to try and promote their cause for destroying America. But we never think about how the other side might view our "jokes" now do we?

[Zephyr2011]

NORTH KOREA

No official war has been started between the U.S. and any other nation since World War II. That is no matter of opinion, that is complete fact. Only congress can officially call America to a state of war and FDR was the last president to ask for (and receive) a declaration of war from congress. Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and the current 'War on Terror' are all results of executive orders, decisions, initiatives and resolutions. Congress has never declared war on any of the countries involved in that and the U.S. has not been actively involved in an alliance with any nation they gave aid to with those wars, therefore, the U.S. has not truly gone to war since 1945 (when the last real war ended). Now if the U.S. is in an alliance with S. Korea (I believe it is, but it may not be, I'm speaking hypothetically right now, so I won't look it up) and N. Korea re-initiates hostilities (which it may or may not, the new kid on the block seems a little more stable than his dear old dad) resulting in a war between the Koreas, the U.S., by treaty, would also be at war (Congress [if there is an alliance, again hypothetical right now] already approved this when it ratified the treaty or alliance). But this hasn't happened so the U.S. still hasn't gone to war since 1945. The U.S. has, undoubtedly, been in a war-like state. During Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War etc. America was in a war in every way shape and form save for name and title. Congress's declarations of war have been brushed aside in recent history by further Imperial-ization of the presidency that truly began during FDR's time in the oval office (long-winded and ludicrous as it was). Now they are more of a formality than anything, but still, officially, there has been no declaration of war.

 

MUSLIMS (warning, my emotions definitely get the better of me in this section)

Okay, I noticed an interesting little statistic: less than 15% of Muslims would be terrorists? Are you frieking kidding me? How about less than one tenth of a percent of Muslims are terrorists? How many Muslims are there in the U.S.? Millions. How many have committed acts of terrorism? Oh? Next to none? That's funny, I thought they all wanted to crash planes into buildings. Or around 15% of them do anyway. The terrorists who want to completely destroy America are all extremists mislead by hate and charismatic leaders, much like the Nazis and Hitler. They are by no means the majority or even register-able minority in a pie chart they'd be like a pixel or a dotted line that you have to look at a magnifying glass to see. It is simply a matter of the extremists and vast minority cause the most noise and do the most damage, therefore they get all the attention. It's completely foolish to think that an entire religious nation (in the "people" sense of the word) wants to destroy everything unlike them and everything that embodies freedom or America. Another interesting little tidbit is that all of this hate started with us by robbing the Palestinians of their country and handing it to Israel (Thanks Truman, you're a pal). The reason the Arab world has a deep mistrust of the West is because of how slippery we have handled the Israel/Palestine issue and rightfully so (Truman's Secretary of State resigned because of it). Let's also look at the other wonderful things we have done in the Mid-East (prior to the current situation): we have supported several vicious dictators (Mumbarik [i'm not sure about spelling] of Egypt, Hussein during the cold war etc.) that have allowed no form of democracy or freedom and completely oppressed their people. Why did we support them? To get what we want. To get oil. For all of America's High Horse talk of morality and making the world safe for democracy and stopping the spread of red communism and oppression, when there is something we want on the line we will do whatever it takes and we don't give a damn who suffers. Then we act like everyone else is the bad guy when we started the mess in the first place (Vietnam, the whole cold war [Wilson for both of those]) and what's worse, for all the civil rights hoo-hah we supported oppressors in other countries and our own, we have in the past and we still do (to slightly less of a degree but still it occurs), and we, as a nation, stereotype ethnicities and cultures like insensitive fools. The government even profiles when scanning people in at the airport! Statistically a terrorist is less likely to be a Middle-Eastern Muslim than any person of Anglo-Saxon or Caucasian descent. Why? There are more 'white' people entering U.S. Airports. Yet the government has stricter, more thorough security procedures for Islamic individuals. It's moronic. Anyway, rant disengage.

 

BOMBING THE MIDDLE EAST

Your average U.S. Nuclear sub has 6-12 nuclear missiles on it, each of which can level an area the size of Texas. This is your average arsenal and we don't have much smaller than that. Let's think about Chernobyl for a second and how much radiation was put out and how you will still get readings from a Geiger counter there, non-lethal, but the radiation is still there. It is only just now survivable and it's been 30+ years. Now let's bump that up a few notches, 10 times, to be conservative. Now let's also consider how big of an area that'll be: the size of Texas. Goodbye oil supply, hello 20 dollar a gallon gasoline. The world can barely handle the oil supply now, imagine what it would be like with the entire middle east untouchable for the next couple hundred years. Let's also consider impact. You'd obliterate a massive amount of land, you'd basically vaporize all of the Middle East and a good chunk of Africa, Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Add in the fallout from the detonation as it rises into the atmosphere, basically the Eastern Hemisphere has maaaany years of irradiated rain and far denser cloud cover causing a huge drop in temperatures. A significant amount of radiation and debris would enter the oceans, basically killing the entire Mediterranean Sea and severely damaging the Oceans' ecosystems and helping to crush the world's food supply in addition to the oil. But hey, at least we got those couple thousand terrorists. Who cares if millions (possibly a billion with all the side effects included) of other people died. Who cares if we will be paying 20 or so dollars a gallon for gas, that we have virtually no alternatives for for making plastics, fueling our vehicles and running our machines. Who cares that we can barely feed people since the U.S. and far east Asia are about the only places that can safely produce large amounts of crops (and that's a very optimistic outlook). There's a lot less people on Earth now so we might not need that much food anyway. Don't worry about transporting it, it will work itself out. And at least we got those dang terrorists.

[Aurielius]

"Your average U.S. Nuclear sub has 6-12 nuclear missiles on it, each of which can level an area the size of Texas. This is your average arsenal and we don't have much smaller than that."

 

@Zephyr Kronos

You really need to check your facts just a little. The current missile platform used by the Ohio Class SSBN is a Trident II missile which has a 10 Megaton yield. If the Trident was a Mirv that would lower the yield to 4-5 Megatons per. We do have smaller nuclear missiles..ie the Cruise Missile platform.

A blast radius is equal to the square root of the megatonage. A one megaton bomb has a blast radius of severe damage of about 4 miles. Therefore a 200 megaton bomb (14 being about the square root) would have about a 56 mile radius. You might just want to look up the acreage of Texas. If all fourteen of the Ohio class launched all their missiles at Texas they couldn't completely wipe out the state. Wild hyperbole tends to invalidate a thesis.

Edited June 26, 2012 by Aurielius

[Ghogiel]

The Trident II can fit 4 of these warheads. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/W88.html

Puts each missiles yield about 2megatons.

 

The largest single warhead yield in service is 1.2 megatons, the B83. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Wpngall.html

 

Each sub shouldn't even be holding 200megatons. 2megatons isn't puny boom boom

Edited June 26, 2012 by Ghogiel