|
|
|
Subject:
Fission bombs in the Persian Gulf
Adam Selene
8/23/2002 3:05:22 PM
|
| One of the many reasons for wanting a "regime change" in Baghdad is that Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti Mafia compatriots have spent several decades striving to achieve a capacity to threaten the rest of the world with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Perhaps the most knickers-tightening of the three categories is "Nuclear," which capability yields up the prospect of the proverbial "Suitcase from Allah" (or more likely the "Cargo Container from Allah") if not something with which a Scud IRBM can be armed.
Those inclined to much whistling in the dark blather about how - even if Saddam and his ilk somehow figure out how to replicate Fat Man and/or Little Boy - the Ba'athi Boojums haven't got a viable delivery system with which to exploit their achievements in practical nuclear physics. They seem to think only in terms of military applications, and their thinking is purblind in the bargain. Consider the phone call from Baghdad that goes:
"Hello, Dubbya? In the name of Allah the compassionate, the merciful, guess what my guys managed to smuggle into New York city?"
And even if a somewhat less strategic use was made of such "goes-boom" gadgetry, consider the use of clumsy, old-fashioned Nagasaki-style fission weapons as command-detonated mines, either sequestered in the path of a mechanized attack on land or (even nastier) planted in the mud at the bottom of an anchorage likely to attract coveys of convoys.
(Anybody out there such an old SPI grognard as to remember *The East is Red* and those Chicom nuclear demolitions charges?)
It is to be hoped that neither Saddam nor any of his potential co-belligerants have such a capability - but, then, hope provides no protection against either blast or radiation.
...
|
| |
|
|
|
