Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA When the nukes start dropping ... By Julian Delasantellis
Most men, it is generally agreed, will do anything to survive. In my favorite
World War II/Holocaust movie, Lina Wertmuller's 1975 Seven Beauties, a
harmless little nebbish of an Italian petty thief, Pasqualino (Giancarlo
Giannini), finds himself in a horrible, hellish Nazi concentration camp; the
camp setting is some sort of huge, enclosed, indoor hall, a setting so evil
that the inmates never even see the sun.
To survive, Pasqualino agrees to make love to the camp commandant, a ghastly,
sadistic, Brobdingnagian-girthed gorgon-like SS officer, played by Shirley
Stoler. Pasqualino outlasts both the camp and the war, but his soul dies. He
did what he had to do to survive.
Failing being placed in a circumstance where their lives are at
stake, there are things that men don't want to do. One of those is to kiss
another man. In 1978, on the NBC Network program Saturday Night Live,
the troupe performed a skit lampooning the legends of white slaveowners forcing
themselves onto their black slaves in the US ante-bellum south. The script
called for comedian Bill Murray, playing a slaveowner, to attempt to force his
desires on an unwilling slave; the comedy was in that the slave was not a
woman, but America's favorite, cheerful, non-threatening African-American of
the time, O J Simpson.
The show went out live, and you could clearly see that, as Murray pressed his
lips towards Simpson's, Simpson turned his face away; not even as comedy could
he kiss another man on the lips. His life was not the line, so Simpson wouldn't
do it; at his trial for double murder 17 years later, Simpson, too, proved that
he would do anything to survive.
But one thing that men apparently need no threats or intimidation to do is to
plan, plot, scheme, even to detail and diagram, the killing of millions of
their fellow men, women and children. As evidence of this, I present before the
bar of humanity this item I recently came across on the Internet, a report
authored by respected military analyst Anthony H Cordesman of the US Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank, entitled "Iran, Israel
and Nuclear War" [1].
I have always enjoyed Cordesman's informed, educated and enlightening
commentaries on matters strategic and military, particularly his take on the
military and political situation in Iraq. In no way do I think of him as a sort
of Dr Strangelove-like figure, from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie of the same
name, warped in both mind and body from a lifetime of contemplating mass death.
But, just as we have extensively studied and documented the effects of nuclear
weapons when they detonate, perhaps this is an under-investigated line of
inquiry - what happens when they don't.
Remarkable - just the presence of nuclear weapons among them turns even the
best of men at least a little bit mad.
The 77-page report is formatted in the US Pentagon's current dominant lingua
franca, the ubiquitous Microsoft Powerpoint - my goodness, you'd almost think
that it was destined to be shown there! How foolish it was for Osama bin Laden
to think he could take down the entire US military with just one plane, or even
a dozen, slamming into the Pentagon; a virus or bug that disabled all the
Powerpoint software the US Department of Defense runs would have brought the
world's most powerful military to its knees. In slide after slide, the report
catalogs the weaponry, tactics, targets, contingencies, most importantly the
results, that would occur should everybody in the Middle East with a button,
perhaps simultaneously, perhaps in sequence, push it.
The first and core scenario of the report involves a nuclear exchange between
Israel and Iran, some time between 2010 and 2020. It is speculated that during
this period, the Iranians would have about 50, mostly minimum-yield, nuclear
weapons at their disposal. Thirty would be in the form of missile warheads to
be emplaced on their Shahab 3 and 4 intermediate range ballistic missiles, 20
in the form of bombs that would be carried on the now antique F-14 Tomcats
bought from the US by the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, along with a few on the
old Russian SU-24s, and the more modern SU-37s, that Iran has recently
purchased during shopping trips to the world's global arms swap meet.
Israel has been a nuclear-capable power since at least the mid 1960s; it is
speculated in the report that by 2010 it will have over 200, higher-yielding
nuclear warheads in its arsenal, deliverable by both Jericho 3 ballistic
missiles and American-supplied F-16 and F-15 fighter bombers.
The differing technological capabilities of the two countries would dictate
their respective strategies once the missiles and bombs started flying. Israel
has access to America's super-sophisticated satellite reconnaissance and
targeting technology. Besides knowing just where to point their nukes, Israel
also possesses the technology that assures that its weapons will fall where
desired.
Thus, if Israel decides to commence the war with a pre-emptive strike against
Iran's nuclear research and production facilities, shown in the report as lying
in a northwest/southeast axis from Lashkar A'bad on the southwestern shores of
the Caspian Sea to Gachin, just west of the Strait of Hormuz, it could do so
without inflicting the massive casualties of a nuclear strike on Teheran.
Included in the report are satellite images of the Iranian nuclear facilities
at Arak and Isfahan; to me, they look a lot like what an Israeli pilot in his
F-16, or maybe an American pilot in his F-22, would tape to the canopy of his
cockpit in order to provide a visual verification that he was bombing the right
target.
The Iranians lack the ability to precision-target their weapons in the same
manner in which the Israelis can, so the report postulates that the main
targets for their nukes would be the core coastal Israeli metropolis, from
Haifa in the north to Ashkelon just north of the border with Gaza. Haifa, the
report notes, is surrounded by hills, which means that the destructive force of
any nuclear device detonated over the city would bounce off the mountains and
double back onto the city, greatly amplifying its damage. Tel Aviv is on a
long, flat coastal plain, but it is a very densely populated city, with an
estimated 7,445 of population per square kilometer.
Of course, if the war commenced not with the "limited" Israeli strike against
Iran's nuclear production facilities (this attack would be classified as
"counterforce" by the nuclear cognoscenti ), but with a full-blown
"countervalue" Iranian strike against Israel's cities, it is doubtful that the
Israelis would feel obligated to limit their retaliatory vengeance to just
Iran's military targets.
From out of their hardened silos would fly the Israeli missiles and bombers,
with their primary target being Tehran, along with Iran's other population
centers. With over 7 million people just within the bounds of Tehran itself, 15
million in the surrounding metropolitan area, the city contains over 20% of
Iran's population and is the center of the nation's communications, production,
educational and cultural infrastructure.
Casualties from this exchange would be nightmarish, horrific, incalculable -
except by Cordesman and his CSIS team.
The lower yield and less accurate Iranian volley, sparing Jerusalem due to its
centrality to the Moslem faith, would inflict between 200,000 to 800,000
Israeli fatalities along the coastal plain in the first 21 days. These are
called "prompt" casualties; it's who dies before people start dropping from
longer-term radiation exposure. Any surviving residents of the central core of
urban Tel Aviv would still be exposed to 300 REM (roentgen equivalent man) of
radiation 96 hours after the blasts, as opposed to an exposure during an
average dental X-ray of about .010 REM.
The more accurate and bigger Israeli nukes, the report speculates, would
inflict a far greater toll on Iranian cities - in between 16 million and 28
million in just "prompt" fatalities. The report says that that an Israeli
recovery from its damage would be "theoretically possible in population and
economic terms", whereas an Iranian recovery would be "not possible in normal
terms"; in essence, the Iranian nation will be destroyed.
Thus, what the report is saying is that one day next decade you might wake up
with an Iran, after almost 6,000 years as a national entity and still there at
sunrise, would be wiped off the map by sunset.
The rest of the report speculates on various other assorted scenarios for
Mid-East Armageddon. Syria, generally assumed to be many years away from
possessing a nuclear capacity, might, for some reason, decide to launch a CBW
(chemical, biological weapon) missile strike on Israeli population centers.
Israeli dead under this scenario would once again be between 200,000 and
800,000. Recovery, however, would be quicker, since this type attack spares
civilian buildings and infrastructure. Syria, with 80% of its population
concentrated in just 11 cities, would suffer between 6 million and 18 million
dead in a counterattack; the higher number would represent about 95% of its
estimated 2007 population. Not since the Roman destruction of Carthage at the
end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC would one nation have made another suffer
so dearly as punishment for losing a war.
The report does not speculate as to why this might happen, but if Egypt got
drawn into all this the results would be pretty dammed bad for the Western
world's cradle of civilization on the Nile as well. From Alexandria in the
north to Luxor in the south, with Cairo in between, just a few rounds from
Israel's nuclear clip could devastate Egypt's Nile River-based population
centers; over 12 millennia of human civilization in the Nile Delta would end.
Once again, not speculating as to why this would happen, the report games out
the results of a possible Iranian nuclear strike against the six Arab nations
of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Iranian strike could maybe kill 2
million to 8 million of the 40 million population of the GCC; once again,
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