Aster Risk

Digby saith sooth**; heed thou his words***.

Hullabaloo

[snip and cut to the footnotes...]

* Imo, I think it's beyond serious doubt that if Bush is not stopped, the attack on Iran will be pre-emptive and include nuclear weapons. Both Hersh's recent article and the response make that clear. Whatever they might be called - surgical, tactical, whatever - they are nuclear bombs, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They may be a bit smaller, they're still atomic bombs and atomic bombs do rather nasty things to lots of people. Furthermore, given what we know of his personality from his past behavior, it's safe to say that Bush has no intention of letting anyone - let alone the head of an official Axis of Evil country - be the first person since Truman to order atomic bombs dropped on people.

** Whilst the Digster is right about the use of nukes, IMHO, he errs on the side of sanity regarding the likely yield of the "tactical" bunker-busters that would be employed. Talk on the scientific street is that they'd strap up to a 1.2 MT (that's 100 times the yield of "Little Boy") B83 warhead onto a longer, heavier, and mechanically stronger bomb casing in order to create a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" (RNEP) that would blow a 1,000 ft deep hole in the Persian dust. Alternatively, the "dial a yield" (up to 400 kT) B61-11 EPW might be employed. In either case, they'd make the Hiroshima bomb look like a firecracker.

*** I am attempting to adhere to the blog integrity rules proposed by Thersites. Thus, only civil speech is permitted when posting. For example, one may no longer simply say, "fuck"; instead, one must use a more polite equivalent such as "fuck thee." "Thou suckest" is also preferred to "you suck!". Latin equivalents are, of course, always acceptable. So, Dubya: Futue te ipsum et caballum tuum!

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