It was unnecessary and we argued against it. Wrong or right is hardly relevant here. Those are the facts.
I'm not sure I agree. There are, to my understanding, two actually good arguments against the destruction of Isan being necessary (or at least I do not remember being impressed by any others):
- Asuma could have fully cooperated with Takahashi, shared intel about the nuke, and worked together to properly lock down Isan and suppress proliferation.
- With runes we can put up anti-nuke wards that keep major population centers safe. Without the ability to target them, an EM Nuke ninja becomes only about as problematic as a scorch squad.
The first route is... possible, I'll give it that, but it also strikes me as pretty optimistic. Setting aside that Asuma at the end of the day wasn't willing to give up a monopoly on the nuke and assuming he went all-in on this, there are still multiple major points of failure along the way. Takahashi already demonstrably did not have enough control over Isan to prevent proliferation, so in order to actually succeed here we'd need to give Takahashi a much greater amount of power over Isan's famously uncooperative people. Maybe doable, but from where I'm standing hardly a sure thing. All it takes is one breach and the jig is up, after all.
It's not that it was an outright foolhardy gamble, but it
was a gamble, with the fate of the world on the line. It is, in my opinion, a defensible position to err on the side of caution when it comes to such things.
The second route, rune wards, I must first say we did not have at the time when the choice must have been made. We did not even have runes, merely a hope that if we keep pushing our Earthshaping high enough we'll figure out how to make them work. I remember discussions of nuke wards at the time, we did not have reason to believe they would be a realistic goal.
But my true objection to the second route is that I cannot see us actually succeeding at warding every major city against the nuke. Leaf and its cities, most certainly. Perhaps Fire's allies as well. I'm not concerned about rune proliferation (apparently mere samples aren't enough) and I'd willingly go public about runes for this cause, but I do not think, even with AMITY on our side, we could convince our enemy villages to allow Goketsu Hazou of the Village Hidden in the Leaves to install a permanent mega-seal in every major city of theirs, a mega-seal that Leaf
claims will protect them from nuclear war but cannot be meaningfully verified without actually attempting to nuke them. And that's not even getting into the Eastern Continent and all the villages there that would need protection yet if anything are even
harder to diplomatically reach out to.
In practice, I expect this route to lead to half the world shielded and the other half dying in bitter cold. Isan gets to be one of the survivors, sure, but that's a pretty cold comfort.
Does this mean nuking Isan was the only viable option? No, I wouldn't go that far. If we really buckled down we could've taken the risks, played our cards, and done our best to steer the world to a golden ending where nobody gets nuked. But unless y'all have been holding out on me all this time, there was no way to save Isan without wagering other villages as the buy-in price. And it's fair if you wanted to make that gamble, if in true Team Uplift fashion you refuse to buckle down and compromise, but that hardly makes the safe option that guarantees no proliferation "unnecessary".