Pentagon altering nuclear weapons plans?
Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 0135Yahoo news has a headline that reads :Pentagon document would alter nuclear weapons plan
Please can someone tell me this is a sick early April fools? I can’t believe that they can consider using nuclear force as a pre-emptive strike. Conventional bombing of someone you *think* might be after you is bad enough. But the sanctioning of nuclear weaponry that’ll devastate a country, the only backing for which is some cooked up evidence that they’ve got “WMDs”…? Come on.
Looks like another famous Denyerec “over-reaction” …
the site quotes : “could seek approval to use nuclear weapons in the face of an enemy’s imminent biological weapons attack that “only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy,”
In such circumstances, perhaps a biological weapons facility is based in a reinforced position impenetratable by conventional weapons which contains biological weapons which are “worse” than Nuclear weapons? In such a case where the biological strains cannot be destroyed through conventional means (chemical / heat / concussion based) and only nuclear attacks would kill it off.. well, I wouldn’t say no.
Of course you wouldn’t, that’s the reaction this legislation manages to get passed on. You chose not to pick on this:
I particularly enjoyed “rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms”, oh boy that’s a gem isn’t it? What’s that? Losing in Iraq? No worries, couple of these puppies should sort that out…
As for overreaction, yeah, I’m famous for that but we are in the “rants” category, I just forgot the usual disclaimer 😉 Should do something about that actually, and have the template include it at the foot of anything posted in “rants”…
I can’t think of many countries which wouldn’t want a “favorable war termination”.
Most conventional wars are far more bloody and grisly than nuclear weapons.
Vietnam took over 10 years, and over 60,000 US soldiers alone were killed in the guerilla jungle war .. don’t even get me started on the WWI front. They reckon that if they hadn’t deployed Nukes in Japan (to cause a “favorable termination on U.S. terms) then the Pacific casualties could have been factors higher … not to mention prolonging the entire WWII conflict in the process (as the US would have been heavily engaged with Japanese and Asia forces, and unable to pour the same resources into Western Europe that they did)
<– also in Rant mode 😉
ok . you know I meant the WWII front, right?
OK, so the pacific conflict aside (Which were heavy in military not civilian lossses until the US dropped the bombs (Of course, not counting the millions of Chinese civillian dead at the hands of the Japanese invasion, but if you think the US wanted to end the war to stop that alone then you’re kidding yourself)) you mention a war the US started in a foreign country because they didn’t agree with their government system and wanted to bouy the arms economy back home. Further you’re suggesting that they should have put and end to a war they started, on someone elses turf, with nuclear weapons? Think about what that means for just a second…
I never said they should have put an end to that war using Nukes .. I was merely pointing out that conventional warfare (especially jungle warfare) can be just as bloody and horrific as a nuclear attack. And weapons which cause horrible disfigurement along with long, slow and painful deaths (such as napalm, chemical and biological weapons) are not necessarily worse than Nuclear attacks which (apart from the nuclear fallout) causes the majority of it’s casualties through instant vapourisation
As for the Vietnam, it was actually a civil war where the US backed the more democratically charged “Southern Vietnamese” forces, not only pouring in their own troops but also helping one side of the civil conflict .. I’m not saying that it was a good idea, in my honest opinion they should have left them to it, but it wasn’t “USA vs Vietnam” .. it was “USA & South Vietnam vs North Vietnam”.
Erm .. also .. you said “the pacific conflict aside” ..
why put that aside .. it is the only time in history that nukes have EVER been deployed against humans.
I wish we could say the same about chemical attacks … the effects of mustard gas and nerve gas are still continuing, even 50 years on, not to mention so-called chemical after-effects from the Persian Gulf ..
Pacific conflict, depends whether you mean the Japan-China war which was going on long before WW2, or you simply refer to the American involvement in the Pacific in the closing stages of WW2. The yanks dropped those nukes as much to show Russia they were boss than anything, with 100’s of thousands of civilians the cost. Vietnam, thousands of litres of napalm and agent orange poured onto civilians. Yugoslavia, thousands of depleted uranium rounds used, devastating the ecology of the country.
The radioactive effects of bombsites and bomb tests are also being felt around the world also, they’re not nearly as localised as, say, mustard gas.
In short, green card for nuke use = bad.
erm … depleted uranium shells..
does the word “depleted” hold any meetings for ya ?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uranium/story/0,7369,943633,00.html
“As it stands, smoking cigarettes will kill you far more quickly than being exposed to depleted uranium.”
Yes, depleted means plenty to me. It means toxic, it means non-degradable, it means environmentally disasterous. “unconventional-Conventional” weaponry is not much better than dropping a nuke on someone in that people die and the environment is wrecked, with the caveat that “conventional” weaponry is typically more localised, if not more discriminating.
(Though with “conventional” weaponry the discrimination is in the hands of the armed forces, not the direction of the wind.)
http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0999/0912.htm
http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james29.htm
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
Gets all messy though doesn’t it? Are DU shells a conventional weapon? DU, Agent Orange, toothbrushes with loose bristles… Don’t confuse “conventional” with “non nuclear” cos those weapons all suck bad for the victims’ children. Also given that smokers can be hospitalised and dead from lung cancer before they hit 50 I don’t really fancy exposure to DU any more than I fancy exposure to cigarettes.
“According to research” a high sugar diet isn’t bad for you.
using depleted uranium is like saying “I’m gonna kick you where it hurts but I’ll only hit ONE testicle”, its all bad you still fall over