Nuking Iran By Night

As his handlers and fluffers prepare the Codpiece for his big speech about a "new strategy" in Iraq and the new speaker of the House calls the debacle there what it is, that is, "Complete Chaos", at the same time there is another sick flower threatening to unfold in bleeding stubs of sick delight.

I am referring to the reemergence in the news of the upcoming show of sheer insanity called, "Nuking Iran By Night".

The odd thing is that its news cycle has been, apparently, short. Reported in the Times of London, one day and denied the next by government officials, it would seem that perhaps it was what in Danish journalism is known as a "newspaper duck" [avis and].

On the other hand, since my birthday is that of (un)Holy Hiroshima, my feathers ruffle easily at loose talk about once again loosing atomic crapola on humanity. We let the genie out of the bottle twice and got away with it -- the third time, we might not be so lucky.

First of all, one should look at the byline of the Times article, one of the authors is Sarah Baxter and seems to have a reputation for serious reporting -- that means the story is not complete bs.

Secondly, one should always ask, where did this come from, why and why now? The timing is always important and, in this case, we should also ask, "Why again?"

That both the US and Israel have long had plans to take out nuclear facilities in Iran with so-called "surgical strikes" is by no means new news. What

Symour Hersh has come out with several investigative reports on US plans including nuclear-tipped bunker busters. The Times had a report on Israeli plans back in March 2006 during the Sharon government. In fact, that old growler, Dick Cheney, not long after reelection was quite blunt about using Israel as a sort of rottweiler:

"One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked... Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,"

You can't really ask about the timing without asking who is leaking and why.

When Judith Miller during heat up to the Iraq invasion wrote article after article about the danger the Saddam regime presented to the world in general and the USA in particular, she was recieving "official leaks". She was the willing mouthpiece for government propaganda.

In the present case, with Baxter's article, it is more like a real leak, that is somebody somewhere is both disgusted and probably afraid of what leaders are planning.

There are good reasons to fear.

First of all, if we keep screwing over the Muslim world from positions of arrogant power, hubris is going to bite us in the ass sooner or later.

Secondly, the idea that you can take out bunkered nuclear facilities even not using atomics -- just "conventional" weapons -- the idea that you can do that without spreading contaminents all over the place is crazy, ridiculously so.

What they don't say too loudly is what makes a bunker penetrating bomb penetrate is that it is tipped with something heavy -- "depleted uranium, aka "Uranium Lite". Another thing is that one of the sites they want to take out is a storage facility with several hundred tons of gaseous uranium (I assume this must be uranium flouride -- you put it through a cascade of thousands of centrifuges and separate U235 from the the U238).

The point is, when you blow things up, things get spread around and in this case, when the shit hits the fan it will blow all over every man.

You can read more and better comment here, in the sense that it is more serious -- but just as scared.