Israel Divulges Plan to Nuke Iran
Saturday January 06th 2007, 11:41 pm
Not to worry. The “mini-nukes” Israel will use against Iran’s Natanz facility and the heavy water reactor at Arak “would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb,” thus we should not worry about the downwinders, mostly Iranians.
“Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear ‘bunker-busters,’ according to several Israeli military sources,” reports the Sunday Times. “The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
The Hiroshima Bomb was equivalent to 12.5 kilotons of TNT, so a fifteenth would put a Israeli nuclear bunker-buster under a kiloton. Let’s round that off to a kiloton for the sake of argument. According to Robert W. Nelson, writing for Physics Today, an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon of the 1-kiloton range, used in an urban area, “would kill tens of thousands.”
Not a problem for the Israelis and the neocons, of course. After all, we’re talking about Muslims here, Muslims that hanker to “wipe Israel off the map,” never mind there is no evidence Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever said this. Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, either, but that didn’t stop the media, with its neocon contrived script, from repeating the lie over and over until millions of Americans took it as fact.
It also does not matter that Iran, under the NPT, is perfectly within its right to develop nuclear energy. In fact, as Dr. Helen Caldicott notes, “Iran was actively encouraged by the United States to develop its own nuclear power program.”
This brings to mind April Glaspie, ambassador to Iraq, telling Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990 that the United States had “no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”
“When the blast breaks through the surface, it carries with it into the air large amounts of dirt and debris, made radioactive by the capture of neutrons from the nuclear detonation, as well as fission products from the bomb itself. The radioactive dust cloud produced in the blast does not rise as high as a classic mushroom cloud, but instead typically consists of a narrow column of vented hot gas surrounded by a broad base surge of ejecta and suspended fine particles.”
“At a depth of 15 meters, a one-kiloton explosion would knock down homes within a radius of one kilometer, killing most inhabitants, states a study by Physicians for Social Responsibility,” writes Cristina Hernández for Tierramérica. “The survivors would absorb hundreds to thousands of rems of radiation, enough to be fatal. The rem is a unit used to measure the biological effects of radiation…. Even limited contact with radiation could affect the brain’s capacity to regulate blood circulation, reduce fertility and increase the incidence of cancer. Furthermore, DNA damage could give rise to genetic mutations in the offspring of affected populations.”
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