Nuking Iran

Some readers have been asking me about the rumors of an April nuke attack on Iran. This prompted me to look in some detail into the rumor and I can say I don't buy it.

I have no doubt that the Republicans want to attack Iran. They have been trying to build their fake case for months. But the chances of them actually invading are very slim. Bombing runs are quite possible, but invasion would be the stupidest thing they have done in their entire stupid administration. We are bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq with almost no allies left and with a military stretched to a breaking point. And Iran is far tougher than any opponent we have fought since WW II. They kicked Iraq's butt when Iraq invaded. We cannot fight across the whole area of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

The latest rumor is that Dick Cheney told the Saudi king that we are going to nuke Iran, possibly in April, and Saudi Arabia is planning for nuclear fallout. This rumor has been making the rounds through the liberal blogsphere. While I believe Bush wants endless war, I do not believe this rumor at all.

If we planned on using nukes on Iran, Saudi Arabia would not be the first nation we would warn. Nor would we let the rumor out the way it has come out. Russia and China are very much opposed to our going to war with Iran...and they are unlikely to be complacent about us using nukes against Iran, or anywhere for that matter. If we used nukes against Iran, we would be universally condemned and it might be just the trigger for all those nations we now owe so much money to (thanks to Bush's massive deficits) to start using those debts against us. We would suddenly be the rogue nation that we claim Iran is. Nuking Iran would trigger a crisis on the level of the Cuban Missle Crisis.

Furthermore, there are far more people in the area who we would be warning about fallout. Israel, India, Jordan, Turkey...our own troops stationed far closer to Iran than Saudi Arabia is. These would all be warned before Saudi Arabia. And do you think they would quietly accept nuking Iran? I seriously doubt it.

Finally, there is one basic consideration that the people circulating this rumor are not taking into account: wind. I asked my wife, the climatologist, about the prevailing winds in that area. And this is what she found:



You can see very clearly that if we nuked Iran the fallout would be blown AWAY from Saudi Arabia and right over Afghanistan and Pakistan...and on into India and China. The winds not only blow the opposite direction from Saudi Arabia, but they blow very rapidly away and into regions where our troops are.

We have moved an unprecedented amount of naval hardware, including three carrier groups and a nuclear sub, into the Persian gulf. We have committed huge resources to the area, at the expense of fighting al-Qaeda whose strength is growing in Somalia, North Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but NOT in Iran. And only in Iraq once we invaded. So it is very clear that Bush is far more interested in picking fights in Iraq and Iran than he is in fighting the bastards who actually attacked America. But I can safely say that this particular rumor of the Saudi's publishing a warning about fallout from a nuke attack on Iran coming because Cheney warned them we are about to attack just doesn't make sense.