What makes you think that nukes can be used only against cities? Why not armies amassed at the border? Why not naval armadas, or bases? Why not pulverize some empty desert as a warning? Why not blow a single one in the atmosphere to kill the grid of the attacker?
A foreign state launches a successful nuclear strike on a major population center of the an-cap society. The an-cap society responds how?
- By using nuclear weapons against the enemy military? Firstly, not all members of the military are going to be volunteers - the conscripts are innocent, to target them in response to violence for which they are not responsible is a violation of the NAP. Secondly, seriously targeting the military establishment of an enemy state with nuclear weapons is going to almost always involve killing large numbers of civilians - it’s not as though military bases are always hundreds of miles away from the nearest populated areas. Nuclear weapons are blunt instruments, they cannot discern between civilians and military (let alone between military volunteers and military conscripts).
- As for using nukes as EMP weapons, that violates the NAP in the same way - as obviously most of the people affected (having their property destroyed) are not responsible for the act of aggression that prompted this retaliation.
- Pulverizing some empty desert as a warning just begs the question…warning of what, what can the an-caps actually do with their nukes without violating their own NAP.
Bottom line: for MAD to work, the risks faced by each side have to be high and roughly proportional. There was no war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R because each could have killed the majority of the other’s population in a nuclear exchange. If U.S. could have done that, but Russia could only have retaliated with limited strikes against some of the more remote U.S. military bases (where civilian causalities would be minimal), the situation would have been quite different, and war far more likely, and rational from the perspective of the U.S. government. The logic of deterrence is to make the cost of aggression too high, and it seems to me that the NAP restricts the possibilities for the use of nuclear weapons by an-caps to such an extent that nuclear deterrence is non-viable. And then the only defense against nuclear attack is missile defense, which is pretty flimsy. Under these conditions, it’s not hard to see how an an-cap society would be subjected to extortion under the threat of a nuclear strike, by states that understand and are willing to exploit the ethical stance of the an-caps.
And this problem is not really unique to nuclear weapons. An an-cap society can defend itself very well. The problem is that they cannot effectively deter because they cannot effectively retaliate. The distinction I’m making between defense and deterrence is the distinction between (for example) holding off an infantry assault with rifle fire and responding to a successful missile strike with a retaliatory missile strike. An-caps can retaliate for relatively small scale attacks, but when a proportional retaliation would necessarily involve killing innocents (as with nuclear retaliation), the NAP ties their hands.
And, again, there is the conscript problem, which is really even more serious, as it potentially limits even very precise attacks on military targets.
Minarchist, I for one consider the NAP to be more about justice than action per se.
Most of the points you make have some merit. I was thinking of avoiding this, but anyway there’s no point in beating the bush:, I’d retaliate against any state which attacked a free society (if, say, I was the territorial defense contractor) even if it meant that civilians and/or conscripts over there will have their property and/or lives destroyed.
I do not think that any government on earth would be foolish enough to nuke a nuclear power (even if that power is not a state), but in the highly unlikely scenario that they did, I’d respond in a de-escalated, though still nuclear, fashion. Breach of the NAP? Probably.
U.S is not a person, its just an abstract entity. The person who actually sends the nuclear missile WILL be 100 % deterred since he will almost definitely be assassinated by someone from the free society.
Minarchist, I for one consider the NAP to be more about justice than action per se.
Could you elaborate?