Yesterday:
"An Iranian attack against Israel would trigger a tough reaction that would lead to the destruction of the Iranian nation," National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said in remarks of rare virulence. [...]This week, Gen. Petraeus will talk to Congress about Iraq, and is expected to contribute to the ongoing sales snow job for endless war in Iraq and the wholesale destruction of Iran.
Israel, along with its ally the United States and other Western powers, accuses Iran of pursuing the development of a nuclear bomb under the guise of its civilian nuclear programme - a charge Tehran denies.
Ben-Eliezer, Bush and Petraeus are so roughie-toughie, the whole world shits the bed nightly. It's been said producing a nuclear warhead requires floor space equivalent to the American auto industry. I haven't been to every auto plant in the country, but I've been to almost all of them, and I assure you, you're talking about a couple hundred square miles of factory space. Even if that were all happening underground, under the strictest secrecy, in this day and age, it would be a fact known by every person on earth.
They keep telling us Iran is building nuclear warheads, but they don't have the photo evidence. Let's see the pictures, the complete set of satellite surveillance photos. They can't show those because there's nothing to photograph—not that a lack of evidence stops the Bush administration from lying us into war.
We've known for some time the attack plan of choice is to hit 2,000-plus targets in Iran as quickly as possible using ballistic missiles as earth penetrators armed with "low yield" nuclear warheads thought to yield five megatons apiece, in a maneuver called "over-the-shoulder bombing." Five megatons is 333 times the yield of the 15 kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It was suggested some targets might require more than one warhead.
Forget the initial attack will probably kill almost everyone in the country. Forget the gamma radiation cloud that will shower lethal radiation for 20 hours after each detonation, and that more than a billion people downwind will be showered by radioactive fallout, including India, a country to which the United States provides enriched uranium free of charge. That's never happened before, so we don't know how people will take it. It doesn't matter anyway. What else can we say about the environmental impact of such an attack?
A recent program on the History Channel stated that an asteroid exploding over a major city with a force of 20 megatons would inject enough dust into the upper atmosphere to encircle the earth and produce an extinction-level event. I don't know if their physics is good, but that's probably true. And, that isn't even radioactive dust.
Let's assume one five megaton warhead each for 2,000 targets. The yield would be 10 billion tons, or 10 gigatons. I'm not a nuclear physicist. I'm ballparking (guessing) that a nuclear yield of 10 gigatons is far more than required to produce an extinction-level event.
Let's also assume there are no other nuclear exchanges, and the attack goes as planned. What will it look like?
Everything would seem normal for a couple days or so as the massive, radioactive dust cloud travels around the world and from pole to pole. Then, one morning you'll wake up and the sky won't be blue, but a strange, brown color. During the day that brown will turn black as india ink, and the air will become saturated with radioactive dust and chunks. Breathing very little of it will make you sick.
And like everyone and everything else, you will die quickly in horror and agony as your body sizzles and comes apart. It isn't a happy prospect. I'm not sure what operative issues are so urgent as to require that, and conclude these guys are typical suicide jockeys who believe everyone hates living as much as they do.
The governments of Israel and the United States are fully aware of the environmental impact of such an attack, and still can't wait to make it happen. Don't make the mistake of thinking the subject never arises. If a guy in the middle of nowhere can figure it out, don't think the people who own these damn things can't. Don't think that the impact of such an attack will be that the United States' image around the world will be diminished! There won't be a world that thinks one way or the other about it, with all life extinguished globally—including the very idiots who made it happen. It's just another one of the hard facts excluded from today's current events discussion, because this is a world full of little, frightened wienies who are too scared and too cowardly to simply say it.
I'm not willing to get involved in that conversation anymore. It isn't sophisticated, it's ignorant and callous, hateful and deceitful, and part of scheming murder, even from those who claim to oppose it. It's better to be a lone voice in the silence than a part of the deplorable cowardice that debates the political pros and cons. Life is about living, not killing and dying. I thought it was self-evident. Apparently not.
