SuiNeko wrote:
I seriously think that the justification for nuking a country should be positive evidence they actually set the container off, or were engaged in the plot to do so, not simply that they pissed you off with 'belligerence'. I dont think that's anything to do with the United States; I'd hold it true as a, well, point of principle, that you dont kill millions of people without very significant cause and certainty of culpability.
Your standard of evidence seems to be They dont like us (belligerance), they want nukes (wanting to obtain), and we dont know who else it might have been.
That to me seems to be far, far too low a bar. 'Be mean to us and we'll nuke you if anything bad happens'.
I don't see why you think this bar would be too low. If we couldn't verify positively that the weapon came from some other source, then it almost certainly came from one of them. The chances are beyond miniscule that terrorists could cook up their own weapon in some desert lab; that only works in Tom Clancy novels, and even then they used a captured existing nuclear weapon as the basis.
The only real question would be is, which one of them it came from. In reality it would most likely be fairly easy to determine which provided the nuke. If we couldn't, well then **** it. Don't be a belligerent ******* that seeks nuclear weapons and constantly threatens war; someone might, you know, see you as a likely culprit when they get nuked.
The real problem here is essentially the attitude that America just got attacked by a nuclear weapon, and your main concern is whether or not America overreacts in some fashion. Even your characterization of their behavior minimizes their belligerence and maximizes that of America. It is not a matter of them "being mean" to us; it's a matter of these countries constantly threatening war against us or our allies for reasons that amount to "you're picking on other Muslims we otherwise don't give a **** about" (Iran) or "You're preventing us from trying to overrun our neighbor to unify us under the Dear Leader" (North Korea; the unlikelyhood of them defeating South Korea anyhow notwithstanding).