Help Me Obe Wan

Fox News caused a stir when it ran a report from The Times about a possible Israeli nuclear strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Here is how the reporters depict the actual attack:

"If things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole. The theory is that they will explode deep underground, both destroying the bunker and limiting the radioactive fallout."

Neat trick. Israel has obviously developed the first bomb that digs a shaft deep into the earth. Mere mortal bombs just blast craters. That's what high-explosive does. According to this report, however, Israel has a bomb that actually excavates. Then, just like Luke Skywalker, other pilots arrive with nukes that they magically drop straight down the freshly excavated shaft to destroy the Death Star. Here's a map detailing Iran's known nuclear facilities:



So, let's see here. They're going to use nuclear weapons, yes plural, to blow up a site(s) full of what they claim is enriched nuclear material. Okay, so where is all that material going to go? I mean if they can find a place to put all the dirt they excavated with the first bomb, surely they'll have a place to neatly put all the fallout from the nuclear explosions, right? Will Israel's mini-nukes act like a fuse for Iran's enriched nuclear stockpile? Is this going to be a mega-blast?

Who cares about a couple of bunkers anyway? I don't, do you? But the victims of a nuclear attack like the one described won't be in the bunkers. Physicians for Social Responsibility used the US Defense Department's methodology and concluded attacking Iran's nuclear facilities would cause three million immediate deaths.

Then there's the fallout, the inevitable nuclear cloud. You see, you don't want to be downwind of this sort of thing but an awful lot of people are including the folks of neighbouring Afghanistan and, beyond them, Pakistan and India. Within four days an estimated thirty-five million people would be exposed to radiation of 1 rem per hour.

Do you believe Pakistan would take that without retaliating against Israel? I wouldn't want to take that bet.

Now, just where would this multiple-nuke attack leave Israel? A global pariah, spurned from the international support that has kept the state alive all these decades and surrounded by neighbours that might be clamoring for its destruction. The trouble is, you can neither predict the measure of reaction nor hope to control it.

Oh, and by the way, how are we going to keep the Iranians from reading the newspapers? Of course that might be the whole idea, to spook them. If they're spooked at all, they'll probably be busy diversifying - spreading their key equipment, people and nuclear material to ensure they would retain enough after an attack for their programme to survive.

There may be ways to defang Iran without resort to nuclear attack. That's where we need to concentrate our attention.