First, an observation: ultimately it doesn't matter whether we're dealing with a new user of experienced user. What's at issue is the question, not the user, and while new users might be expected not to know the rules, plenty of experienced users mess them up as well. As a matter of self-expression, everyone ought to know better than to write a problematic question. But problematic questions happen, and we should show an amount of consideration to the authors.
There are a few things I measure when I'm thinking about a question that influence how I respond to it:
- Is the question pointed: the expression of an opinion with a trivial question line that challenges readers to agree or disagree, in whole or part?
- Is the question juvenile or excessively naïve: something that a typical young adult ought to be able to form a reasoned opinion on without prompting?
- Is the question deliberately insulting or provocative: invoking assumptions or using language that is clearly meant to demean, scare, and/or infuriate certain people?
- Is the question gaslighting: asserting positions that are clearly unreasonable and attempting to frame responses so that these unreasonable positions must be accept as truths?
A well-framed question delineates clearly between what is known, what is believed, and what is yet to be understood (the immutable, the mutable, and the undefined). That allows answerers to find the context, address (possibly) mistaken beliefs, and fill in the gaps to produce a good answer. Questions that present beliefs as 'alternative facts', that offer a pre-given answer that must be refuted before another answer can be given, or that try to poison the well by dismissing or disparaging certain viewpoints are not well-framed, and ought to be fixed or deleted.
When someone offers a question that badly violates any of these principles then I generally have no qualms about saying so (and voting immediately for closure). There's a certain point where I have to presume that no one is that unintentionally wrong-headed, and there's no value in pussy-footing around with such people. They won't learn anything in any case; they're here for purposes other than learning. with less extreme violations I usually try to cue them in to the problem, and I watch how they respond; if after a couple of exchanges they seem defensive and fully committed to maintaining the worldview they expressed, then (again) I will give up on the idea that they are unintentionally that wrong-headed.
The problem with this particular 'nuclear bomb' question is that it's on the naïve and provocative side. I mean, I'm certain that if I posed this question to a typical class of high-school seniors, they would all (over the course of a class period) recognize problems with the idea of handing a nuke to some country in the middle of an invasion, and would do a halfway decent job of explaining the issue. That makes me wonder why the question asker didn't do the basic due-diligence of thinking the question through before posting. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem in itself — I've seen my share of 'Dude!' questions from stoned kids with a sudden, cool, but ill-considered thought — but questions involving the use of nuclear weapons are provocative by nature. It's difficult not to view such questions satirically, and this isn't the right place for snide, satirical commentary.
I mean (for example) there is an episode of the Simpsons ("The Cartridge Family") where Homer buys a gun and uses it in ridiculous ways: to shoot a basketball off the roof, open a beer, turn off a light-switch... That's satire. Now if I were to post a question suggesting that someone do that in real life (as the solution to some odd problem), could you honestly take the question seriously? That's the problem we face here.
