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Notes -
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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