Are They Useless? XIII-Iraq? Afghanistan?
Were we able to find a use for nuclear weapons in our other wars? Or whatever they were?
Iraq times two and still
The next of these wars or whatever they were came after Iraq invaded Kuwait, a small but oil-rich kingdom on their southeastern border, on August 2, 1990. Iraq took Kuwait in two days.
To counter this action, our President, George H. W. Bush, put together a large coalition of countries. The NATO countries of course, but also, for the first time, some from the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact. On January 17, 1991, the coalition started a massive air attack and after several days attacked with ground forces across the border of Saudi Arabia and into Iraq and Kuwait.
Only conventional weapons were used, fighters, bombers, tanks, infantry. Our latest, of course. Our forces were obviously up to the task. They quickly drove the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and by February were within 150 miles of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. President Bush decided to stop there. He decided not go on into Baghdad and kick out the strongman leader, Saddam Hussein, which it was clear he could have done. A ceasefire was declared on February 28.
Some members of President Bush’s party thought he shouldn’t have stopped but he did.
Did we win this war? Well, we did get done what we said this war was about, driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. So it was a successful war, if not one we actually won. It was certainly a better result than in any of the other big ones we’d gotten involved in since World War II.
By March, most of our troops were out of there.
Some bad environmental damage was being caused by the hundreds of oil wells the Iraqis set on fire before they retreated. Insurrections got started in Shia towns in the south of Iraq and in Kurdish areas in the north. We helped put out the fires, which was no small thing, but didn’t get involved in any of the insurrections. Again, some in our country thought we should have.
So no nukes used, and no thought of using them in any of this.
Twelve years later, in 2003, President George W. Bush, the son of the President George H. W. Bush who had successfully conducted the Gulf War, invaded Iraq, whose leader was still Saddam Hussein, and started another war-like something. Our Congress hadn’t declared this war either but because of the Global War on Terror that President Bush had declared all by himself, they had said he could invade Iraq if he wanted to.
The big reason George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said they wanted to invade Iraq was to find and destroy the Weapons of Mass Destruction Saddam Hussein was producing. Nuclear weapons are Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Other WMDs, like chemical and biological weapons, would also be eliminated, of course.
Our ally Israel especially didn’t want Saddam Hussein to have any nuclear weapons. In fact on June 7, 1981, more than twenty years earlier, Israel’s jet fighters, bought from us, had bombed and destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building. The French were helping him build it.
The Israeli attack was, then, “preventive.” Or “preemptive,” which is actually something a little different.
When George W. Bush attacked Iraq in 2003, he also was doing a “preventive” or “preemptive” attack. It was the only one of these we’d done since World War II.
How did it work out?
President Bush and Dick Cheney invaded in March. It seemed to start well. By December, Saddam Hussein had been captured. He and the members of his Baathist party were all removed from power, every one of them. President Bush had himself photographed on an aircraft carrier under a big “Mission Accomplished” banner.
The country was searched from top to bottom by the U. N. International Atomic Energy Agency. No weapons of mass destruction, of any kind, were ever found.
President Bush and Dick Cheney also seem to have gotten the idea that Saddam Hussein was supporting Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that had orchestrated the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center buildings in our country on 9/11 in 2001. No evidence of that was ever found either.
I know some people, I guess I was one, who thought that because his father had stopped short of going all the way to Baghdad, President George W. Bush wanted do him one better and go all the way to Baghdad now. He wanted to throw out Saddam Hussein and make Iraq into a country like ours.
As time has passed, the wisdom of the father and the bad judgment of the son have become more and more obvious.
This war was not a success, the way the Gulf War had been. We didn’t lose it exactly. But we sure didn’t win it.
In 2022, our troops are no longer there, not in large numbers, but Iraq is still in terrible turmoil.
In 2013, a study of President George W. Bush’s action was commissioned by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno. The report was finally released in 2019. It concluded that the only winner in this conflict was Iran. [South, Todd (4 February 2019). "Army's long-awaited Iraq war study finds Iran was the only winner in a conflict that holds many lessons for future wars". Army Times
What role did nukes play in the conflict? They, or the fear of them, were what brought the whole mess on. We certainly had been able find no use for them.
The Soviet Union and the U.S. in Afghanistan
Over the years, the Soviet Union must have considered using nuclear weapons against other countries. I mean in some way other than as retaliation on us for an attack on them. Or possibly in defensive uses against someone who had invaded their country the way the French had in the nineteenth century and the Germans in the twentieth. Or as China might if the two communist countries got crosswise again as they had when President Nixon was in office.
The Soviets have never used nuclear weapons, though, not even once. In 1962, they did introduce those tactical nukes and Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles into Cuba, claiming that it was entirely for defensive purposes, to keep us from invading Cuba again.
That had turned out to be a terrible idea. They had been forced, everybody thought, to take all their nuclear weapons back home. It’s true we haven’t actually invaded Cuba since then though we’ve done what we can to make things rough for Cuba and its people with covert programs of sabotage and an economic embargo. We hadn’t promised we wouldn’t do that.
Perhaps when the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan they’d looked for possible offensive uses for their nuclear weapons, as we had in Vietnam. They hadn’t found any.
The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after being attacked at home on 9/11 by terrorists from Egypt and Saudi Arabia who had been allowed to have a base in Afghanistan. Our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were part of what President George W. Bush had called the “Global War on Terror.” Congress didn’t declare that war either. I wonder what would have happened if they had been asked to. Might someone have wanted to know how we’d know if we’d won?
The Soviets had left Afghanistan after ten years.
We left after twenty years.
That made it the longest war, or not-war, in our history.
In 2017, during our occupation of Afghanistan, we had dropped what we called the Mother of All Bombs. It was the largest conventional bomb we’d ever built. It had a yield of 11 tons.
Which is less than a thousandth of the yield of the Hiroshima bomb.
But neither we nor the Soviets ever used nuclear weapons in Afghanistan.
So neither we nor the Soviet Union nor any of the other seven countries that have acquired nuclear weapons by now has found a military use for nuclear weapons.
Should that not be taken as more evidence that nuclear weapons are useless for military purposes?
“Terror” is, of course, not a military use. If “terror” is what you are after, and you have nuclear weapons, you might well find them useful.
Next: Are They Useless? XIV. What was Project Plowshare? How did that work out?