US 'plans nuclear strikes against Iran'

Just saw this on an Australian News Website, thought it may interest some members!

THE administration of US President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Mr Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
"That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Mr Hersh writes.

One former defence official said the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government," The New Yorker pointed out.

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Mr Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

"There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

"If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle," the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker

www.news.com.au...

[Mod Edit: External quote tags - Jak]

[edit on 8/4/06 by JAK]

The actual article in The New Yorker magazine

I always take such concerns with a grain of salt because I like to think we aren't at that point yet, so I looked this up. Surprisingly, the news.com.au story linked in the original post doesn't appear to have exaggerated the wording or implied meaning of the New Yorker article. The question is whether the New Yorker article has it right, of course. I do find this moderately troubling.

As was said before in other threads like this, it's strictly PLANNING. Planning doesn't mean we're actually going to follow through with it, just that if we are forced to, we won't be running around like chckens without heads trying to figure out what needs to happen, etc. It's always a good idea to have warplans for areas you may be called to fight in.

Using Nuclear bunker busters even low yield versions of the B61-11 could have huge and wide spread repercussions. Even these Nuclear Earth Penetrator you could still be talking massive "collateral damage" because they can blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area. Depending on the size (anywhere from 10KT-300KT) it could have extensive radioactive fallout over nearby countries.

That being said these are just plans and the US has plans for Nuclear wars with som many countries N Korea, China, Russia and any number of others. All options and eventualities must be considered.

I concur that it is only provisional and contingency planning. However, I am still concerned by the assertion that Iran's president is viewed by some in the defense department and white house as a potential "Adolf Hitler," and that they are seriously pondering the possibility that Iran could trigger the third "world war." That, along with the assertion that they are also considering utilizing nuclear weapons of any kind (irrespective of their scale or nature), is an alarming series of statements.

I am hoping - and, for now, assuming - that this is all just hyperbole for the sake of encouraging Iran to yield to diplomatic pressure.


[edit on 8-4-2006 by AceWombat04]

The United States has people planning attacks on every country all the time. Whether at peace or at war. We have a plan ready to go if we had to invade Jamaca!

I would say that such a scenario is EXTREMELY unlikely, and the Iranians know this perfectly well.

As mentioned in other posts, collateral damage would render a nuclear attack, except as a retaliatory defensive measure of last resort, completely pointless.

If the US does intend to attack Iran, surely it is to replace the present regime, not to render the whole area completely uninhabitable for the next 300 years.

Yikes! That is some disturbing news. However, not surprising. On one hand logic says this is only planning, and it is unlikely to happen. On the other, we do have a pres. and v.p. who are a little trigger happy.

If the shoe fits ...

I believe Iran needs to be removed.. They have a very finatical leader, whom has a large finatical following..

He believes that if he can create this ' great war ' he will bring back his religous figure...
if he fails and is killed, he will meet allah and his virgins...
win win dont you think?

he gets the chance to remove his greatest enemy.. Israel... and potentially destroy the leader of the world, the USA

With the rhetoric, missle tests, nuclear research and all the attacks in IRAQ sending the country to civil war ( which I believe is IRAN trying to bog down the USA ) the only way the USA can theoretically finish this gigantic error in human reasoning.. is to completely level Iran, and show the world, and the iranian helped Iraqi insurgents that if you dont bow down to the USA... you will be made to follow suit.

man kind gave the USA free reign over the world the second we celebrated the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now mankind must face the fact...
The finatical muslims whom dont fear death.. are going to create one hell of a war.. in order to destroy what they percieve as the great infidel.

We fell right into this as a world wide community simply because we allowed GW bush to control the most powerful country on the planet.
Had it been a smarter, wiser and less controlled president.. we wouldnt be in this mess.

After all that has happened I cant belive this world is going to let Bush & Co start another war..
and beleive me when I say this.. should this war come it will be WW3, and it will completely change life as we know it.

here is the link for the new yorker article.

www.newyorker.com...

I have given most of the background on this current Iran
VS USA buzz that is presently going on. I gave it a lot
of detail months ago, before it became a current item.
I also have given the latest news of negotiation efforts
between Iran and the US on about page 5 of that thread.
More toward the middle of it, I told of the birth of the
nuclear bunker in US strategy and why it came about.
For those wanting more you might go back and look at this
old thread, which I recently updated. The thread I am
referring to is "Iraq, a master stroke of military strategy"

www.abovetopsecret.com...

This thread has a lot about Iran, their strategy and how
it has been helpful and not helpful at times.

Will Bush and his lot never learn? Bombing Iran will not lead to an uprising of the people against the leadership just like the Iraqis didn`t recieve the Americans with open arms, just as the Vietnemese didn`t back the Americans enough to defeat communisim. Bombing Iran will lead to thousands of deaths and make the Islamic world( If it is possible) Hate America even more.

I've read a number of websites which say that all of this talk of nuking Iran is a form of psychological warfare designed with the purpose of making Iran react by backing off.

On my regular (every 10 min) search of "Iran" on Google News. I found this little article in the Monsters and Critics website. Pretty Interesting

Because the deployment of a 'limited contingent' of Russian troops to Iran would provide several possible benefits to both Moscow and Tehran during an escalating Iranian-American crisis, the possibility that this scenario could occur must be taken seriously. For if the advantages of such a move were obvious to my undergraduates playing the parts of Moscow and Tehran, they may also be obvious to the Russian and Iranian governments.

The link is here... Monsters and Critics

Actually, Thinking about my post above it occured to me that Russia would have to do this fairly quickly, the amount of time I would imagine it takes for a limited Russian Deployment would be say a couple of days, also wouldnt this be common knowledge by the time it gets to the troops (through the spy network and loose lips)

If they did do this, It would be construed as an act of war by the Russians.

hehe Run for the Hills... especially after reading the blast radius of a 25MT Airburst.... not nice.

incidentally I have already set in place evacuation procedures for my fellow co-workers here in Austin Tx, we grab the water bottles, flashlights, Radios, Med Kit and a Pick and Tools from the engineers office..

Better to be prepared.

How would we qualified an attack from Iran on US's soil? OWNED!! An attack to democracy? Hell with Bush in office, the democracy is not what it was....

It's the same in Iran, an attack on Iran by the US army is an attack to democracy as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected! So all those who thinks that the US army will go liberate the Iran's people as they did in Iraq, they are fools!

Who here of the "they are just plans" crowd believes that if Iran remains steadfast and determined to enrich uranium and keeps thumbing their nose at the US administration, the plans will not come off the table and into a general's hands with a seal of approval? The article cannot be right? Who in their right mind would do this? This is utter lunacy! If this is not some bad nightmare, then these maniacal robber barons in government need to be "shut down" before we all lose any hope of a future. Unbelievable!

Basically these entire articles come from a single "senior pentagon advisor" who is probably overzealous and cannot desipher rhetoric from serious consideration from actual plans. And the notion that US combat teams are already operating in Iran is highly unlikly considering some of them would have been killed by now and shown on Iranian TV after a fire-fight..how would they be operating inside Iran w/o the Iranian govt even knowing..maybe they're just some 'spies' and they have no capability to damage anything in Iran.

Originally posted by NeoQuest
I've read a number of websites which say that all of this talk of nuking Iran is a form of psychological warfare designed with the purpose of making Iran react by backing off.

This logic doesn't seem very logical as it may cause more harm than good if you know what I mean. By all accounts, Iran will not bend to demands and does not seem to worried about what anyone thinks, most of all our administration. So, I seriously doubt this is a scare tactic to push Iran into submission.

Yes. One thing I always try to keep in mind is that during the Cold War, there was great misperception on both sides with respect to exactly how great the threat each saw in their adversaries was (not how great the threat each side posed was, but how great the threat perceived by each side was - i.e. many Russians never imagined American citizens were genuinely afraid of a Russian first strike, and thus saw our actions as a policy of inevitable offensive war.) This has a mutually reinforcing effect, in that both sides see activities and arms build ups as offensive planning rather than defensive contingency planning. Of course, that may very well be the case regardless, but in the event that it isn't, it makes it difficult to avert disaster when both sides believe their counterparts aren't afraid of them and are simply planning to go on the offense as soon as they're ready to and/or if one provides the other with an opening. In a way, this causes an exponential progression toward the point at which one or both sides start to see conflict as inevitable. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and increases the risk of one or both sides miscalculating.

This of course assumes, however, that one or both sides don’t already have it as general policy to initiate conflict at some point down the road. If they do, then all the saber rattling and planning in the world wouldn't make much difference apart from the magnitude of death and destruction wrought (possibly more; possibly less) since that perception would then match the eventual reality.

My fear is that the U.S. will view Iran as an irresolvable issue without military action once a certain threshold is passed, and that Iran will believe it has no choice but to develop nuclear weapons. Since neither side would be likely to know for certain whether one was acting out of fear or out of aggression, that combination of attitudes would all but ensure war.


[edit on 9-4-2006 by AceWombat04]