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Or we could nuke them. It is cheaper. I much prefer Iran to have 2 choices - submission or destruction and let them choose. Closing of the strait means Iran has to be broken to a state where they are incapable and not unwilling to do that.
Starting an aggressive war and then going nuclear is in my opinion a terrible idea. We've kept the nuclear genie in the bottle. Setting it free for marginal gain is a horrible idea. And I'm pretty sure nuking Tehran, might end up with Trump in the Hague and would be much more unpopular then a ground invasion. So why not send in the Marines rather then killing 10 million men women and children and still not getting the straight open.
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I do not think nuking them will be cheaper than compensating them.
Wiping out Tehran will not significantly reduce Iranian capabilities to attack ships to in the strait. Rural Afghanistan could interdict passage on the strait if they had the coasts. So you would need to make a few hundred kilometers of coastline uninhabitable up to a few dozen kilometers inland. That does not sound cheap even in direct costs.
And the long term consequences would make W's adventures look like a walk in the park. Consider Denmark. As far as I know, they do not have nukes not because nukes are beyond their reach (their GDP is larger than Iran's), but because for them nukes would be a solution looking for a problem, so far. In a world where Trump has just glassed Iran, they would feel that they would get the same choice really soon. Countries are very willing to spend more than ten percent of their GDP on their own Trident program if they feel that the alternative is their capital getting nuked by Trump.
North Korea has some kinds of nukes and is the world's rank #139 by GDP. Within a decade, every country from Albania to Zambia might start nuclear tests. Or they form defensive pacts with saner countries against US attacks. Probably North Korea could make a killing just by selling their tech.
Yes it will. You can fly drones 24/7 over the areas that shoot anything that breaths and moves.
The nuking was in response to the equally absurd suggestion to bribe them. It is a stupid war, but once started Iran has to be broken. Personally I will start with attacking their oil wells. Once they start burning they will change their tune fast.
You could do that without Nuking Tehran.
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You sure could nuke them. In fact, as a non-Iranian, I wouldn't mind seeing this. It is a very flashy way to admit (an unnecessary) conventional defeat and speed up nuclear proliferation and the collapse of your world-system.
The problem is that Trump, for all his faults, doesn't really want to nuke anyone. And even if he could credibly threaten to nuke – the current Iranian leader had barely survived an attack that had wiped out his family. He's well aware the US and Israel have the means to kill with impunity. Do you seriously think more naked intimidation will work? Do you have no theory of mind for men?
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Would you say the Russians were foolish to not start nuking the Ukrainians after they failed to achieve total victory in the first month?
Russia's stated goal is to conquer Ukraine, and nuking them would kind of be a detriment to that. The US is no worse off if the entire Iran is a uninhabitable radioactive wasteland and 100 million iranians are dead. But it's certainly troublesome for Russia if all the Ukrainians are dead.
Well, Putin could have nuked Kiev and announced that he would continue to nuke one city every 24 hours until unconditional surrender. The destruction might not have been so different from a few years of conventional warfare. He did not do so because otherwise every one of his neighbors would have started nuclear programs asap, and because it seems entirely possible that the Ukrainian army would have been willing to fight him in the ruins of their cities.
Likewise, for the US, the Iran problem would be over. Instead they would have the problem that every other country in the world (excepting Israel, perhaps) would consider them genocidal maniacs on a scale dwarfing Hitler, Stalin and Mao together. Every non-nuclear country would either try to get nukes or enter defensive alliances with saner countries.
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be that bloody. There are plenty of ways to use nuclear weapons on Iran or Ukraine that would be highly effective and cause minimal civilian casualties.
There are a quite a few nuclear powers, and quite a few have been fighting conventional wars which were very frustrating for them.
If Putin could have won Ukraine in his original timeframe by launching a few small tactical nukes, or Nethanyahu could have installed the Shah by dropping a few tactical warheads on the IRGC, or if the Soviets could have won Afghanistan in a similar way, it seems strange why nobody did so.
I view tactical nukes as similar to chemical and biological weapons. If they were 'I win' buttons, similar to what gunpowder became in Europe, their use would be widespread. Instead, they are long on horror but short on effectiveness.
There is some overlap between the smallest nukes and the largest conventional bombs, and the MOAB and friends are very much niche. If a few tens of kilotons TNT would have changed the Iran war, the US air force could have just delivered that using conventional explosives.
The other thing is that on the scale of hand grenades to city-glassers, chemical vs nuclear energy storage is the Schelling fence. Normalizing the use of tactical nukes will also normalize the use of larger nukes.
It’s a norm that evolved gradually. For most of the forties and fifties it was assumed that nukes were going to become commonplace in combat, and it would only be worrying if superpowers used them against each other.
Then Truman passed on using them in Korea, and Eisenhower passed on using them them to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. That began to solidify that these were really only special occasion devices, not just something you use because not doing it would be a pain in the ass.
Once you get to the Nixon administration, it’s starting to get set in stone. The Nixon admin considers using them in Vietnam, but determines the international blowback would be too severe.
Now, we’re getting close to Dune levels of nuclear taboo, where using them in any context would be highly controversial.
They aren’t necessarily an instant win button, but in both Ukraine and Iran they would be extremely useful. Iran’s nuclear facilities and underground missile bases would be pretty easy to dismantle with nuclear ground bursts. In Ukraine, every time the Russians had to spend nine months besieging an empty town like Bahkmut or Kramantorsk, they could have just dropped a 380kt warhead on it and been done in a week (mostly waiting for the fallout to settle).
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