anybody else as scared as I am?

read

Yep, scary.

ISTR reading or hearing that the intended use (if used) would be against fortified underground chemical/biological storage facilities.

If this whole Iraq scenario is straight up ( as being told by Dubya & Friends ), then I could see that such facilities are a problem for the military - conventional attacks could just lead to mass dispersal of the agents, whereas the temperatures involved in a nuclear attack would destroy them outright.

It's certainly not a happy World at the moment.

It's certainly not a happy World at the moment.

Nope. Though I have applied a little filter to this story....

This story cited in the Washington Times and, when I look at Google News, many of the related citations refer back to the Washington Times and UPI, both news outlets owned by the Moonies.

I looked at nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com. A search on "bush+nuclear" turns up nothing related for past 30 days.

My conclusion? I don't have one. Speculations and questions? NYTimes/WAPost still fact checking? Or beaten to the punch? Story leaked to Washington Times? Story accurate?

Back just before Desert Storm, Bush Sr. warned Sadam that if he used chemical weapons against our troops or allies, we would retaliate with nuclear force. I believe that was a much better and more responsible act than what Bush Jr is doing. I also seriously hope that the decision to use nuclear weapons does not get transferred to StratCom (for one thing, it is based at Offutt AFB - Omaha, NE. My guess is they are pissed at the world for getting that tour).

I linked to this story, if not this actual report, before, but: Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable, by William M. Arkin, who seems to have good credentials.

I linked to this story [....] by William M. Arkin, who seems to have good credentials.

Thanks.... that pretty much turns off the Moonie filter (no sign of a "Let's bomb North Korea!" subtext!!).

And he doesn't hesitate at a little editorial:

" But the NPR's call for development of new nuclear weapons that reduce "collateral damage" myopically ignores the political, moral and military implications--short-term and long--of crossing the nuclear threshold.

No kidding.

Rumsfeld reigns. Star Wars redux. I mean, we would probably take them to task if they didn't fully explore contingencies, but methinks their assumptions and vision are warped: "Why, we had no other choice but to nuke that mountainside and the 14 villages in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq."

[edit: Ah, I just realized that your Arkin piece is from march, 2002, so the Times/UPI stories don't seem like such "new" news, just a scary update: Plan completed and approved.]

Yes.

"It's hard to be brave when you're very small." Piglet

I would be scared if I was in the Iraqi military.

Annoucing that we will use nukes in retaliation may actually prevent us from ever having to use them at all.

It's certainly not a happy World at the moment.

Allegedly Thatcher wanted to nuke Buenos Aires during the Falklands War. Allegedly JFK, during the Cuban missile crisis, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff "What do we do now? Should we nuke Berlin?"

Sometimes you just have to hope that the world is actually being run by a shadowy cartel of industrialists and Freemasons, and not by the idiots we've elected to run it.

Peter

Hopefully whenever somebody suggests nuking a country then one of their advisors are smart enough to tell them it's a stupid idea and would just cause themselves to be eradicated as well...

Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!



- Trevor

Nah, I ain't scared. If we're all going to die then it should encourage us to live life to the full and run up big credit card bills, safe in the knowledge that we won't need to pay it back.

Just as I read peter's post and thought, would I feel better if the Stonecutters were the secret society in charge, I got to your post...

Allegedly JFK, during the Cuban missile crisis, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff "What do we do now? Should we nuke Berlin?"

I find that hard to believe. Kennedy was hardly an idiot, and he had witnessed the building of the Berlin wall only a year or so before the Cuban missile crisis. In addition, by many accounts, he was nervous that Khrushchev would provoke an attack in Berlin, so it seems unlikely that he would try to insigate one himself.

You should check out the article Learning from the Missile Crisis, by Max Frankel. Mr. Frankel was one of the few journalists allowed around during the Cuban missile crisis before the situation was made publically known, and he does a good job deconstructing the events surrounding the crisis, including placing some blame on the Kennedy administration for not understanding the Soviet Union well enough, amongst other things. It's very interesting, and says a lot of things that I don't think are well known about the crisis, including looking at it from both the Soviet and Cuban points of view.