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You eject the advisor who raised the dilemma for the same reason you would if they raised the fear of waking Godzilla: if you are in a decision to launch nuclear missiles, you want serious people asking serious questions.
If you are right to fire him you've just avoided a catastrophic nuclear policy failure that would lose your nation it's global position as a credible power for generations. Assuming a mass nuclear strike at odds with all intelligence, precedent, and political contexts of the supposed aggressor and backer states is the mark of an incompetent who should not be in the halls of power. You will have done your nation a service.
If he was right and the incoming missiles are nuclear missiles planning a preemptive nuclear holocaust, then your country is already doomed to lose its global position as a credible power regardless because there is currently a mass nuclear holocaust in progress and nothing you can do would stop it. You won't feel bad, or anything, for long, and he'll be dead too soon to be vindicated. The fact that the fate of the nation is the same whatever option he offered the atomic underscore to the point that it wasn't a good policy question.
Regardless of which, the second-strike nuclear capability is already underway and ready to ruin the lives of those who were so irrational that nuclear deterrence doctrine wouldn't work against them anyway, so even if you are about to be nuclear ash you can rest easy (or at least with a bit of spite).
Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.
Ah, but we are! We are, if anything, over-prioritizing them. And not understanding that is why the advisor is incompetent, and should be removed from the deliberations immediately.
If the incoming missiles are a nuclear decapitation strike, the American (or French, or Russian) people are already dead to nuclear genocide, because that is the level of mass nuclear strike that is needed to prevent a counter-MAD reaction by us. The people are doomed regardless, and the advisor's proposal will not help them. This is a consequence of the advisor posing his option after the mass missiles are already flying, where we are in a nuclear response paradigm, and not before, when nuclear pre-emption theory might have mitigated damage.
If the incoming missiles are not a nuclear decapitation strike, then the advisor's proposal will harm the nation's people for the foreseeable future due to the international geopolitical consequences of conducting one's own nuclear genocide on others. If we didn't care about that and were willing to conduct nuclear genocide we would be doing so on our own terms under more favorable conditions before, or later, but not during a context where we will bear maximum and most obvious culpability for irrationally choosing nuclear escalation to the conflict. Arbitrarily doing so in response to yet another conventional strike wave in a war of years of nuclear-capable missile exchanges only heightens the damage, by demonstrating the [insert your state here] as irrational nuclear irrational.
More to the point, if the incoming missiles are not a nuclear decapitation strike, but the enemy actually has the ability to, then retaliating in the advisor's form would result in the [insert your nation's people here] getting nuked, because you provided the nuclear provocation first. That this is happening in the context of a multi-year conventional war with no history of nuclear use / intent / capacity even to use nuclear weapons in the first place, and decades of precedent on the opposing sides own willignness to use nuclear weapons.
The advisor is not providing a recommendation for mitigating the damage of a nuclear exchange, but one that will maximize the damage to the nation's people of a nuclear conflict.
The fact that this is all a consequence of the advisor forgetting the difference between nuclear pre-emption and nuclear response paradigms when his job is supposed to be knowing the difference is why he is out of a job for not paying attention.
He should probably have at least read up on the French nuclear doctrine history instead, which is far more open about the use of a limited pre-emptive nuclear demonstration target to demonstrate awareness, intent, and readiness for further escalation.
But look at the big board! trips They're getting ready to clobber us!
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