It wouldn't matter if they did. Christ Almighty, you'd have been one of Napoleon's Marshal's getting anally fisted by Spanish Guerrilla fighters and wailing as to how its happening when you have nice shiny cannons and cavalry. You haven't got a sodding clue how insurgency warfare works, and that it can even the odds rather straightforwardly. For example, nuke? What the flying fuck would they be nuking if they can't pin down the enemy's location? Are you suggesting they carpet bomb entire states?
And you seem to forget the military/DC has learned from their time in the ME how to find and root out insurgents, if they have no red tape in the way.
That's not even counting phone tapping, internet monitoring, persistent drone surveillance, satellite surveillance, glowies all over the place, or other intel abilities that they'd have even more of on the homefront than they'd have in the MidEast.
And yes, if the rebels got close enough to obtaining nukes of their own, I am very sure DC would break open some instant sunshine rather than let rebels get their own nukes.
Your ancestor would call you a coward and your belly aching shames him and every American who fell for the freedom of the Thirteen Colonies.
And you really do not grasp how lopsided things were against the Colonials in 1776. The were a militia against the fucking British Army. The massed ranks of bayonet, musketry and cannon were the air power of their day. The principles of war do not change. And the reason they got foreign support was because they fought well and ultimately clapped Burgoyne's cheeks at Saratoga. There's a good chance they'd have won on their own in the long run.
Different time, different situation, and the only reason the Colonies won was because the fire than could have consumed my ancestors fort, and left Washington's entire western flank open to Indian and British out of the Ohio Valley, happened to be put out by a miraculous rain shower shortly after a raid managed to get a fire going in the main part of the fort.
1776 was a very near thing, a lot dicier than most realize these days, and that was just with the weapons of the time.
The principles of war do change, and have changed, a lot with the introduction of airpower, rapid comms, and nukes. There was no such thing as MAD in 1776, that's for sure, and neither was airpower even a topic then (cannon do not count as 'airpower' in any meaningful fashion).
Also, we got French help because they wanted to fuck with the Brits, and it was Tsarist Russia who actually helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris.
My ancestor was smart enough to know how to fight smart and effectively against the Brits and Indians in a land he knew/grew up in/knew very well; that does not mean he'd be blind to the changes modern weapons have caused in the calculus of modern war, even in familiar terrain. It is not cowardice to understand when a fight cannot be won using the tactics and methodology of a war that happened a long time ago and no longer necessarily hold true anymore.
