Oh, come on! None of those are enough to “destroy America,” even combined. Almost all of them are self-correcting problems:
- Loose nukes. A nuclear weapon can only be used once, after which it’s gone. If the supposed terrorists had a large supply, they’d be a problem — but without that, all they can do is cause some damage and fade away.
- Peak oil. “Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can’t maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle.” If gas and oil prices get too high, people will use alternate means of getting where they need to go, and getting their food and other necessities to them. If it happened unexpectedly it would cause some chaos, but even then people would adapt.
- Antibiotic resistance. Even assuming that science couldn’t come up with new ways to fight disease (which I wouldn’t bet on), humanity survived for untold centuries without antibiotics, and would again.
- China unloads US treasuries. Again, short-term chaos, but both the people and the country would survive and adapt. Within ten years everything would be stable and growing again.
- Israel-Arab war. Neither of them would want to use nuclear weapons — they’re after the same land, making it unfit for human life would be counterproductive. As such, I can’t see that any war between them would be any different than a war anywhere else, even if the US does get involved, no matter what religious books might say to the contrary.
Each of these would be horrific in its own way, but “apocalyptic”? Sorry, they’re barely in the same category.
If Israel actually goes under, which they nearly did during the last invasion, the Yom Kippur War of ’73, they could launch nukes as part of what is half-jokingly referred to as the Sampson Doctrine. (Sampson, if you remember the story, took out the Philistine Temple while blinded and made it collapse with himself in it and died.) Add Iran or another Arab nuclear power (Syria nearly got a weapons-grade reactor, and is probably still seeking the capability) to the mix and you have something potentially volatile I suppose. And to think I’m thinking of moving there! I’m much safer from terrorism in NYC? 😉
“Oh, we’re going to lose political power, so let’s nuke our enemies. Forget the population that we supposedly serve, who will probably be sent to live at Ground Zero if we do. And forget the fact that this region is small enough that everybody in and around it will feel the physical effects from it. Hey, we’re going down, so we’ve gotta take everybody with us!”
That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Well, almost the stupidest.
Well, nuclear war isn’t exactly the smartest idea in general. Hopefully it will never come to that, but those 80+ nuclear weapons Israel has are there for a reason I suppose, so like any country with nuclear weapons they have use doctrines for them. (There are scenarios of first-use with the American and Russian arsenals too.) Don’t worry though, Israel’s nukes aren’t kept under a hair-trigger, it is a fairly rational government in spite of it’s quirks; I trust them with nukes more than say Iran or PRNK; I suspect even most Arab countries, although they don’t say it aloud, do as well. Also, the Samson Doctrine is not a fixed one in the Israeli government as far as I know, it just has been brought up before in strategic discussions.
The only sensible reason for Israel to have nuclear weapons is as a deterrent. If other countries think that they’d use their nukes if they were invaded, then said other countries would be a lot less likely to invade them.
That said, actually using them is still a pretty stupid idea.
Well, their nukes aren’t a nuclear deterrent, unless Iran or another middle-eastern country also gets the bomb; so making noises about a “Samson Doctrine” (this is only if they go down the tubes, not for any invasion whatsoever) is probably a good idea even if they don’t have an actual plan to carry it out.
Also, you forget, although Israel is a tiny country, the Middle East is pretty big – Saudi Arabia and Iran are both large countries, and that isn’t the whole Middle East. So if Israel say nuked Tehran, over 900 miles away from Jerusalem, they wouldn’t get too much fallout in Tel Aviv; unless they used some awful “dirty bomb”, of the kind that the US decided not to include in their arsenal and Israel I don’t think has, and the winds went the wrong direction.
Remember, if you use small enough nukes, you can do something like bomb Hiroshima; and Tokyo doesn’t notice it except with a seismograph. The “large areas of fallout” scenerios where human civilization undergoes a “reset” you’ve probably seen are for a Soviet-US conflict where large amounts of large “silo-and-underground-command-center busting” (at least that’s the reason they give for building them) multi-megaton nuclear bombs are used over and over again hundreds or even thousands of times in an “unlimited” nuclear scenerio. Each one of these many thousands of large H-bombs in the US and Russia’s arsenal are a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than the A-bomb used in Hiroshima, and Israel is not known to even have the H-bomb; though they are said to know how to make one.
Of course, this proves your point, that this doesn’t qualify as an “apocolypse”.
If it deters an invasion, then it’s a deterrent, even if the invader doesn’t have nukes themselves. 🙂
True, and after the lesson in geography, you can see why some of Israel’s “neighbors” aren’t so close that if they get a nuke dropped on them, that Israel will end up glowing in the dark too. 😉