Bookmark www.milnet.com Contact milnet@milnet.com
_____________________________________________________________________________________
On the first of June, President George W. Bush announced a corner had been reached in U.S. policy..."to be ready for pre-emptive action, when necessary, to defend our liberty and to defend our lives..." 1 . But while clear action is already indicated, we see little sign that the speech was anything more than rhetoric...
While the Government Dithers...
A small freighter from Libya has cruised slowly across the Atlantic, its decks full of cargo containers, those forty foot ubiquitous metal boxes that can carry anything from textiles to toys. It has been sailing for many days and is just now ending its long journey. Off the starboard bow, the glow of the lights of New York City just before the dawn makes an errie lighthouse that the Libyan captain can steer to effortlessly. In a few minutes the sky behind him will light up with the first light of dawn and shortly after that, his lookouts will be reporting the first signs of land.
But landfall is not to be for this tired old rust bucket. For one of the containers has a 100 KT fission weapon inside, and a suicide bomber is hiding with it, a small aerial antenna designed to pick up a commercial radio broadcast station within 25 miles. Once the terrorist hears the station clearly, he will know it is time. He will simply open a concealed panel on a crate, reach in and press a button, then sit back and have enough time to pray to Allah before he goes to visit his God.
People walking along the coastline, perhaps watching for the dawn, would see a bright flash, and then, if they weren't temporarily or permanently blinded, would see, in the dawn's early light, a cloud reaching up to 10,000 feet or more, easily visible from the coastline.
Then shortly afterward, a shock wave will have crested a tsunami like wave front that will strike down everything up to a mile or two inland. But that is not the worst that this event will have caused. The prevailing inland winds will carry nuclear debris -- fallout -- in the form of radioactive particles of water, irradiated air molecules, dust and minerals from the water turned to steam, will begin falling on New York City in a few hours and continue for up to a week. Even if people could be evacuated, the number would be so small it wouldn't really matter. The winds will carry it further as well. Some fallout will move up into the jet stream, carrying it hundreds of miles before it falls back to earth.
The hospitals In New York City and Northern New Jersey would quickly be at their maximum entry capability and despite having the proper gear to decontaminate, the long lines leading into hospitals would soon be clogged with patients puking in the parking lots and frantic first responders trying to make them comfortable. Then they would begin setting up oral delivery and/or inoculation stations to supply the Iodine based drugs used to strip the body of the radiation in their blood stream, hopefully before it settles forever in the bone marrow. Nearly half the fatalities will be those people unable to be treated quickly -- those standing in lines in the parking lots.
Within 30 days, 10 to 25 thousand New Yorkers will die form radiation poisoning form the fallout. A similar death rate in Northern New Jersey.
Or this could be a port in Miami, Louisiana, Texas, California, Oregon
or Portland. In fact any port on the coastlines near a major city
could be the target.
The Bomb
And what is being done about this possible disaster? Open threats to replace Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And the Coast Guard has had a container program of some sorts whose details -- for once -- have not been released to the public so that the terrorists won't be warned and thereby avoid the procedures.
But the terrorists DO know the limits of inspection regimes -- there is International law which allows a ship to cruise right up close enough to deliver a nuke with impunity. The U.S. has not made sure that International law has kept up with the dangers to our coastline from nuclear attackers.
Where would such a bomb be manufactured? In Iraq? Perhaps.
More likely in Iran, a country which has been sold a nuclear plant capable
of manufacturing weapons grade material 2. Many
analysts have said that the weapons grade nuclear material is the one saving
grace for us all -- without weapons grade material, the terrorist can't
build the bomb. A nuke in the hands of Iran is nearly as dangerous
as in the hands of Iraq.
The Speech
U.S. President George Bush, at a speech at West Point, has racheted up the rhetoric yet another notch, informing the cadets that the U.S. has moved from deterrence and non-proliferation efforts to the more proactive pre-emption. What is a pre-emption policy? Simply, it means not waiting for all the evidence to be in -- just enough evidence to convince policy makers that the danger has moved from probable to sufficiently possible enough that a strategic strike to remove the capability is warranted.
But so far, this is purely rhetoric. Lebanon is housing the largest group of terrorists and training camps, with its neighbor Syria being a close second. Iran also continues to be a training ground. Our hypothetical bomb on the Libyan freighter could have had its nuclear material shipped from Iran, and the weapon assembled in Lebanon. The bomb could have been then transported to a port and loaded on our old Libyan freighter and then the final part of its journey across the Atlantic to anywhere along the U.S.' long coastline. Or around the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico, or through the Panama Canal an up the Western coast.
If we were truly in pre-emption mode, we should already have taken out the Iranian reactor. Taken out sites in Iraq too. But timid State Department officials wring their hands at such a troublesome move. For some reason, it is far more acceptable to launch cruise missiles at training camps then attack a nuclear facility.
And what is it about Lebanon that keeps U.S. and Israeli warplanes from going after the terrorist camps. One source cites the problem as poor intelligence. Where have we heard that one before? The problem is, that the whole country is an armed training camp? Hezbollah lives in every city and village. Ditto for Syria. Israel has a similar problem in the West Bank and Gaza. The terrorists don't wear a big red T on their jackets and look like innocent Arabs and more recently, dress up like Israeli Soldiers, or even more disturbing, Orthodox Jews on the way to temple.
But if you want targets, think about the Iranian reactor.
'"The reactor is a source of neutrons. I tell you that any VVR-1000 reactor can be used to produce -- without authorization and without the IAEA specialists knowing it -- weapons grade plutonium. ThereThe reactor is due to go online on 2005. So maybe we are waiting 'til then?
are no engineering or technical complexities and the task is realistic," said leading Russian nuclear expert Maxim Shingarkin' 2
When the first use of a terrorist bomb occurs, are we going to be pointing back at that Iranian plant as the source of the material? If so, then every day that goes by that we haven't taken it out is a missed opportunity and will mean our government has, while trotting out Tom Ridge to tell the story on the new Department of Homeland Security, has dithered away the opportunity to destroy the most likely sites where nuclear bomb material will be manufactured. And of course there is Iraq.
If George W's rhetroic were real, we should have seen big conventional explosions in Iran and Iraq, to destroy the facilities we suspect, and waves of missile and bomb attacks on Lebanon to take out 85% of the terrorists living there. And then, as almost a second thought, perhaps our government might also consider explaining to Pakistan that we aren't willing to trust them not to use nuclear weapons and destroy their capability too, and at the same time go after Al Qaida and Taliban hold up in villages in Pakistan.
But of course, the rhetoric is simply a tool to attempt to cool hot tempers and make the sheeple go on with their daily lives, convinced our President is decisive and tough on terrorism and tough on nuclear weapons suppliers to terrorists. Perhaps he is a good leader -- but clearly has not shown the guts necessary to take real action to protect the U.S. citizen at home.
This is in contrast to Israel, who, convinced a weapons grade material manufacturing plant was going operational in a neighboring country, simply flew in with fighter bombers and leveled it. See Israel is not complacent and Israel has no doubt which country is the target of a nuclear weapon created in Arab nations. It doesn't take much vision to figure out that Tel Aviv and Haifa will be the first cities to feel the heat of a nuclear blast if a terrorist has a nuke. Now that terrorists have proven that the U.S. is also a delicious target for them, we too should be as convinced and as responsive.
And yet we don't see ships being stopped for inspections far out from the coastline so a nuclear weapon can't be used to blow down or dust U.S. cities with radioactive fallout. And we certainly don't see pictures on our television of Hezbollah going up in smoke, no reports of U.S. attacks on Iranian weapons grade nuclear power plants being taken out, and Saddam Hussein is rapidly approaching the days when he will conduct a test changing forever the strategic balance of the Middle East. And our friends, the Russians, French, Italians, and Germans, continue to sell dual use equipment to Iran and Iraq with virtual impunity.
Clearly we aren't really serious about this pre-emption business. It is "sorta like pre-emption, only different."
Sources:
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
distributed worldwide
by AFI Research
afi@supanet.com
