Plus any pipeline and associated pump stations etc are easy targets.
Not to mention the terminals themselves.
Reference Ukraine and Russia's facilities.
"Raining oil" after Ukrainian drone attacks.

No, 'they' would not have used nukes for minimal loss of life or treasure.

Not even close if it involved nuking general population.

There's some threshold where they would have agonized over the use, even back then. We could come up with countless hypothetical scenarios and argue all day as to what they would have decided, but I'm not wasting energy on alternate history fantasies.


As I said, "culprits to target". But since 9/11 was 100% an attack against civilians, it actually would be proportional to nuke an equivalent number of enemy civilians, if that's what you wanted to (to say nothing of military targets). There's nothing magical about nuclear weapons that make them any more or less proportional than any other weapon. Yes, we can target and "dial-a-yield" to achieve specific end results.

It would be a good idea to consider fallout effects on nearby allies or neutrals, if any.

What is an "enemy civilian"?

So, Saudis?

That was the problem with 9/11, hard to pin down the guilty parties. The Saudi regime most certainly did not participate, approve, etc. Some Saudi nationals, including royal family, did (the Saudis actually cleaned their own house in those cases). Bearing in mind that there are thousands of royal family members, many of which have too much time and money on their hands.


But the discussion was about a hypothetical 9/11 scale event perpetrated by a nation-state.

The civilians wouldn’t have been Saudis, those were the terrorist. They were expelled from Saudi Arabia. The enemy civilians would be the people who offer the terrorist safe harbor.

It’s not confusing unless you want it to be.

https://i.ibb.co/qLrB47ZN/image.png

Weird, I don't see Iraq or Afghanistan on that list.

Civilians associated with a national entity which conducted a WMD attack against US civilians. Could be a nation-state, or even someone like hamas. Basically if you don't want to get nuked, better not let your government conduct WMD attacks against major nuclear powers (whatever you have to do to prevent that).

Worth noting that a WMD attack *might* be something like a mass cyber attack, ie shut down the economy, power, water utilities, and vital supply delivery. We do not have a no first use policy (not that those are worth the paper they're printed on anyway).

Enemy civilians? Not necessarily.