Evidentiary basis

Almost everyone believes that threats to destroy cities will coerce successfully. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, for example, they'll have enormous influence in the Middle East because they're fanatics, they'll threaten to destroy cities with nuclear weapons and everyone will believe them. It goes without saying in these scenarios that threatening to destroy cities always coerces.

What is the evidentiary basis for this belief?

It certainly isn't the German experience in World War II. Scores of German cities were attacked and destroyed, yet the Germans fought on. It certainly isn't based on the conventional bombing of Japan in the summer of 1945. Japan had 66 cities -- including 80 percent of its cities over 100,000 -- destroyed but they were still plotting resistance to the US invasion.

It isn't based on some other conflict in which a state threatened to destroy another's cities and forced capitulation during peacetime. There is no such example of a threat to destroy cities being effective.

The only "evidence" for this point of view is Hiroshima. And as I've shown, what Hiroshima demonstrates is that even if you destroy a city with a nuclear weapon, leaders still will not capitulate.

We may all "feel sure" that such a threat would succeed. But where is there any evidence for this feeling? 

Call it "faith-based security policy."

Comments

[Aaron Tovish]

Dear Ward,
There is a very long blog string about Hiroshima at:
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=7517#comments
I have made a number of contributions to it referring, in places, to your research.
You might want to check that I have 'gotten it right.' And you might wamt to jump into the discussion which is not entirely trivial.
There was one thing that occurred to me, though: why has it taken so long for the records of the final meetings to become public. Perhaps you have explained that somewhere, but I do not recall reading it.
Is there any hint that there was a deliberate attempt to suppress this important information?
Regards, Aaron