"Scenario: Moslem nuclear terrorism & escalation"
By
Stephen Goodfellow
 

Scenario:

A Moslem extremist group manages to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States via shipping container. A simple trip mechanism sets off the bomb.
Someone opens the door and it takes out a major American city.

Communications scrambled, shocking pictures gradually reaching the American public, telephone communications jammed or down as desperate people attempt to contact their loved ones in the stricken city.
The economy crashes, it's delicate web torn asunder by the interruption of trade.

Picture if you will, the state of mind of the American public. Shock and horror, rapidly giving way to unrelenting rage.

Throughout the United States, Arabs, Moslem adherents and anyone who remotely fits the Middle Eastern stereotype is in constant danger of being lynched. Individual police officers stand by and do nothing, either because they approve or because the situation is entirely out of control.

It makes the US riots against German immigrants in the First World War seem like a picnic in comparison.

In the White House, the President's options are limited.

The president will first consider announcing that even more stringent measures against Moslem extremists will be enacted, but the situation is way past this option. The citizenry would tar and feather the president if this is all that is offered.

The second - and seemingly most obvious option - is a retaliatory strike, but against what or whom? Should the President take out a Moslem city? If so, which one?
The aftermath would be the condemnation of the World, and turn the entire Moslem population towards war with the United States.
There would be no assurance that another American city would not be taken out, on the contrary, it would be even more likely.

That brings the President to the third - unthinkable - option.

The elimination of the entire Moslem World.

The justification and reasoning would be as follows, and consist of two parts, one theological, the other rational:

Part one - The Christian Western World, largely lulled to sleep by its societal and technological inventions, would wake and rear it's ugly head. How long would it take for it to universally condemn  the Moslem faith is an abomination? In the west, Islam will rapidly become viewed as a branching off from the Christian Faith, a dead-end path that leads inevitably to sectarian violence on a catastrophic level.
Islam's fundamental grip and deeply conservative approach to its societies all but insures that the economy of Moslem nations will be hobbled. The inability to emancipate the female population alone, insures that their economies cannot compete with Western countries.
Thus, the Moslem World's inability to compete with the prowess of Western technology,  with its social advances and its accompanying military power, must inevitably produce a burgeoning extreme element in Moslem populations.
This element has correctly assessed that their faith is in crisis. They see their young people lured to the non-secular materialism of the West and with it the corruption, if not outright demise, of the strict adherence to their conservative religion and way of life. They only have to look at the fate of Christianity in the framework of technological Western Civilization; fractured, with only lip service paid to it by the vast bulk of the Western populations.
Their response is predictable. With nothing to lose, they are completely dedicated to the destruction of Western Civilization by any means necessary, as evidenced by the nuclear bomb that has now destroyed a major Western city.
The West has no entity it can approach, to find compromise, to reason with. In the eyes of the fundamentalist Moslem, this is an issue so elemental that life itself is secondary, as evidenced by their willingness to sacrifice themselves in order to obtain their ends.
Since there is no one with which to reach détente, the only option is the complete annihilation of the enemy.

Part two - Who is the enemy? Since the terrorists are nurtured and trained in Moslem countries, these counties are culpable, no matter that only a fragment of this population is associated with the protagonists. In the present climate - a Western city reduced to nuclear rubble - such niceties will be quaint notions of a bygone past.
The rationale of this New Age will be that the nuking terrorists were tolerated within these Moslem populations, thus they are culpable and must pay the ultimate price.

Who pays this price? If you are going to punish the population of a society with extinction, what would be the extent of this punitive action, and to what end?
The desired endpoint is that your society is not threatened by nuclear extinction. A limited punitive strike would in effect be a declaration of a religious war, which in a very real sense is precisely what it is. Such an outrage would cause the Moslem World would unite to destroy you. The only real feasible way to ensure a settlement of the issue is the wholesale destruction of the Moslem World. This final step is the logical endplay of nightmarish proportions; the death of fully one quarter of the Earth's population.

The horrible aspect of this option is that it is 'Doable'.
The United States has a huge arsenal of neutron bombs capable of wiping out the entire World, let alone a quarter of its population.
Neutron bombs shatter living tissue, but leave property intact. Furthermore, using them does not create "Nuclear Weather" - huge clouds of radioactive material swept up and circulated throughout the world in the Earths atmosphere.
Starting with the countries that have an ability to strike back, the United States starts to systematically wipe out Moslem countries with dense populations. The new time-delineated biological warfare weapons that shut down after a prescribed period of time would be used on large rural areas.
How long could it take? Two days? A week?

A sweating president will be considering the following:

What would be the ramifications for the nation and - more specifically - for the administration, if it ware to embark on this course?

The US and World economy would already be shattered. With the wholesale destruction of the Moslem World, what would it matter if the recovery took just a little longer, if you could be assured that no further nuclear attacks were forthcoming on your cities?

Would any power with nuclear weapons retaliate on the United States?
Russia, with it's compromised power and a Moslem uprising of its own in Chechnya would probably not step forward to defend the Moslem nations. On the contrary, they might take the opportunity to do a number on their own uprisings. They certainly would think twice about engaging in a nuclear exchange with a powerful irate nation that did not have you in their sites.

China, with its autocratic elite in perpetual fear of their huge Moslem population might quietly follow the example of the West on the flimsiest excuse.

The United States would find the greatest difficulty with Pakistan, with it's arsenal of dirty nuclear weapons. An exchange of dirty weapons between Pakistan and India would be likely, leaving a large - but tolerable - amount of radiation in the atmosphere, but far enough away to cause only minor inconvenience to the West. Most unfortunate that Hindu followers will take the brunt of this complication, but there is always collateral damage when such giant enterprises are undertaken. Such are the misfortunes of war.

What would be the aftermath?
The convenient thing about a neutron bomb holocaust on this scale is that there are few media images of crying mothers holding dead babies, because everyone - or almost everyone - is dead. It is simply impossible to comprehend the destruction of populations in such numbers. That's just what it becomes - numbers, not people.
There would be outrage and outcry, but with an American city destroyed and fresh on the minds of the population, there would be little that couldn't be handled by the administrations damage control.
The hardest task would be the logistics of mop-up. The US (and other Western nations?) would have to dispatch units to shut down and isolate industrial functions in the depopulated areas so as to eliminate any major ecological disasters. Of course, oil production would have to be secured as well. In some areas, a second neutron strike might be necessary to eliminate survivors or whatever remaining population had drifted into the urban areas. Ugly, but no one ever said that religious war was pretty.
Eventually, survivors would be given an option. Denounce Islam or death.
 

How do we know if this is going to happen? Here are the signs to look out for:

• The destruction of a major US city by Islamic terrorists.
   

• Established Christian institutions begin to condemn Islam as an abomination.
   

• Twenty four hours after the destruction of the city, the president tells all US citizens to remove themselves from Islamic countries and recommends that other Western countries do the same.