Nukes and actively supporting terrorists. Great, just great.
I hope those Special Forces guys are openly wearing their uniforms. Wouldn’t want them declared unlawful combatants and locked up and tortured would we.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best bombing campaign for Iran is to drop millions upon millions of small satellite dishes on them, set to receive channels dedicated to sports, Farsi-dubbed reruns of Dallas and hour after hour of hardcore porn. Just set it up so the Mullahs, trying their damnedest to outlaw the dishes or jam the signal, look like even greater killjoys than they already do to their own population.
Giving Muslims common cause has never worked; turning them against each other always will.
If true, and I have no doubt it is true considering the hard-on Bush has for uppity Muslims, then the USA is actively supporting and engaging in terrorism against, by the standards of the region, a democratic government.
But i’m sure the Usual Suspect will be along to explain why funding and actively helping terrorists and threatening a sovereign state is different when the USA does it and why Special Forces if they are out of uniform should not be consigned to a legal black hole and tortured.
The full Hersh story is available online. The nuclear option is only one aspect of it - he concentrates more on Bush’s intent on using force for regime change, while giving lip service but only that to “diplomatic efforts”.
There’s nothing I can do to eclipse Stranger On A Train’s outstanding lesson on nuclear weapons, but there’s one point that some folks (the ones who tend to think a nuclear weapon is just like any other weapon in the arsenal) don’t seem to grasp: even a small nuclear weapon makes a very, very, very big boom.
Let’s just review the math: a JDAM GPS-guided bomb, the kind most frequently dropped by tactical aircraft, has a ton of explosives in it. A small nuclear weapon – let’s say a five kiloton weapon – has the explosive power of 5,000 of those weapons.
Some people like to compare a small nuke to the MOAB, aruging that there isn’t much difference. A MOAB is supposed to have around ten tons of explosives, so it would take about 500 MOABs to produce a poof roughly the size of a small nuke.
It has been estimated that a five kiloton nuke detonated 20 feet underground would displace one million cubic feet of dirt. How big is one million cubic feet? Imagine the size that Noah’s ark is supposed to be: length and width of a football field, and as deep as a ten story building is tall. Cut that by about a third and there you have a million cubic feet of dirt flying all over hell.
And I’m just talking about the very small sizes of nuclear weapons. Hopefully everyone can do the math about the destructive power of weapons with yields of 100 kilotons or greater.
I could go on, but the insane idea proposed by folks like Quartz that nuclear weapons are conceptually inflated to be somethinig more than they are is just not true. Nukes are way, waaaaaaaaaaaaay more powerful than conventionial weapons, and that is why they are regarded differently.
I have to reiterate something else – a partially-buried bomb like such a “bunker-buster” would not only throw up a horrendous quantity of solid material, but it would be heavily irradiated and come back to us as fallout, radiating for all it was worth. This is arguably worse than a high-altitude burst depending upon what’s under it, in terms of widespread and long-lasting damage. I understand the ground around the Project Sedan shot is still extremely radioactive, and that’s the closest thing we’ve had to such a shallowly-buried explosion. As for the fallout itself, ask the Downwinders.
You people out there in your reality-based world, with all your fancy ‘facts’ and ‘lessons learned’ from past ‘mistakes’ just refuse to get with the program don’t you.
That has got to be the funniest location I’ve seen yet in six years here.
That’s all I got except that 5 kt is not even close to the smallest nuclear weapons. At one time, and I have no idea if they still exist or not, there was a weapons system called a nuclear cannon that fired rounds in the deciton and smaller range. Also, there are waht are known as “backpack” or “briefcase” nukes used by the Navy Seals in the event that they need to close a harbor that are extremely small.
Granted none of those would mean dick as a bunker buster but it should at least be put out there that there are smaller nukes. ISTR the govt was working on a nuclear mortar at one time but I can’t find any reference online and I doubt if y’all would accept a cite from one of my moldy old books
Lastly, if the insane bastards that are in power at the moment actually do nuke Iran in a first strike, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye…at least kiis goodbye any chance of ever living the life you are now able to lead, even under the idiotic bastards in Washington. I think, and truly believe, that most if not all of the civilized world would turn instantly against us and we’d be in a quagmire so deep that the only out would be unconditional surrender or total nuclear war.
