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"The BLU-82 and the MOAB are, in fact, much larger and more powerful weapons even than an FAE. They are based on a mix of ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminium in an aqueous suspension or slurry, with a binding agent to hold the materials together before detonation. The effect of the BLU-82 is astonishing, and rare film shows a detonation, shock wave and subsequent mushroom cloud very similar to a small nuclear weapon, even if it is actually a conventional bomb."
After sending these musings to some friends, and people on my lists, one of them wrote me back saying:
"Hi,
My brother is an ex-Marine (I know - no such thing). He told me months ago (rather casually, I'm afraid) - when we were arguing over the phone about Bush possibly using nukes on Iraq - that these were just low-grade depleted uranium nukes they were talking about using - NOT the mushroom-cloud generating nukes that we traditionally think of when we talk about nukes - e.g., the ones that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Besides, he told me - the US had ALREADY used many of these low-grade depleted uranium nukes in Iraq, during the FIRST Persian Gulf war, back in the early 90's. He seemed to believe that this was common knowledge amongst the military, and most ex-military personnel. He said the only difference between Bush I and Bush II was that Bush II was being straight up front about the use of these weapons."
To which I replied:
"Thank you for sharing with us this insight of a man on the spot. Please thank your brother too. I am quite certain that your brother has had solid information that nuclear weapons were used, especially in the landings on the Kuwaiti shore. However, I believe your brother was referring to a LOW-YIELD Nuclear Weapon, rather than a LOW-GRADE weapon? It is almost impossible to get a fission reaction going with U-238 except under immense neutron flux, it being, under normal conditions, a FISSIONABLE material, but NOT a FISSILE material, the latter class being capable of spontaneous fission under certain quantitative and kinetic material density increases and other considerations, as is possible with the traditional U-235 and Plutonium-239. However, U-238 or so-called "Depleted Uranium", i.e., U-238 fairly leached of its fissile U-235 content, IS fissionable under heavy neutron flux, which jumps it up into Plutonium 239 when it is deliberately used for the casing on the FUSION aggregate of a thermonulear weapon (Hydrogen Bomb)."
"What I believe your brother meant, are LOW-YIELD nuclear weapons, i.e., of (relatively) low energy output, (between a few tons' and a few hundred tons' TNT-equivalent) which, due to clever design, such as the use of Red Mercury or Mercuric-Stibic Heptoxide (Hg2Sb2O7) as carrier and tamper for Pu-239 incorporated into its crystalline structure, combined with electromagnetic implosion using heavy fields generated by FCGs (Flux-Compression (explosive) Generators), can make even relatively miniscule amounts of Pu-239 fission, and are also much more efficient in the percentage of fissile material they manage to fission when they are initiated, so fallout is low, and the "Neutron Bomb" which is something like a very small nuke, produces a high-density neutron flux which can penetrate armor and also underground facilities and killed, most likely, the Iraqi soldiers in their dugouts in Kuwait, before they were bulldozed over."
The Lucom Plan: Use the Neutron Bomb
Wilson C. Lucom
Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2001
Here is the Lucom Plan to save the United States from being destroyed as a great nation by worldwide terrorism. It could also save your life if the terrorists struck in your neighborhood.
President Bush and Congress must realize the very survival of the United States as a great nation is now at stake. The United States will not survive unless President Bush and Congress take action now before there is another terrorist strike. This could be one of the last strikes against the U.S.
Part 1 of Lucom Plan
Instead of being "politically correct," President Bush must be like the great Harry Truman, who was "politically incorrect" in having the courage to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, immediately ending World War II and saving thousands of American soldiers' lives. President Bush must immediately drop the neutron bomb, ending the terrorist war immediately. He must drop the neutron bomb instead of allowing the war to continue, which would keep his high approval ratings but let hundreds of thousands of American soldiers be killed unnecessarily.
Psychologically, the threat of an action is almost as effective as the action itself. Bush should at least threaten to use the neutron bomb to isolate the nations that protect terrorism from the nations that support the United States.
President Bush has to have foresight, or the U.S. is lost forever. He has to choose to be a great president like Harry Truman and drop the neutron bomb, saving thousands of American soldiers' lives. He must not waste more precious time trying to build a weak coalition of those nations that support the United States in name only. They do not support the U.S. with their military forces, which means they will strongly oppose attacking any nations that harbor terrorists.
President Bush does not need the consent of the U.N. or any Arab nations in a coalition to defend the U.S. against terrorist attack. President Bush must defend the U.S. first before any more terrorist attacks can occur. This is why the Lucom Plan must be used. The more Bush delays, attempting to build the tenuous coalition, the more time he gives the terrorists for more attacks on the U.S. It is believed that the State Department is giving Bush bad advice, not the Department of Defense.
How can you stop this terrorism? Join our movement to get President Bush and Congress to use the Lucom Plan. The Lucom Plan would put an end to terrorism not just in one country but wherever it exists. Neutron-bomb them first – before they attack the U.S. again. Otherwise the war against terrorism could continue for 10 years at great cost to the United States in huge war taxes and the loss of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers' lives. This must be avoided. It is hoped Bush wants to save these soldiers' lives. Truman did!
To exist, terrorism needs a country from which it can operate and in which it can be protected. This delay gives the terrorists enough time to kill millions of Americans and eventually destroy the United States. President Bush must first hold a public war trial in the United States, charging all terrorists, either by name or as John and Jane Doe, as being evil and condemning them to death. The terrorists, after all, condemned to death without a trial over 6.000 Americans in the Twin Towers terrorist attack. If another terrorist attack appears imminent, Bush must use the neutron bomb without waiting for the trial to end.
President Bush must tell any country harboring and protecting the terrorists that they are condemned to death and the U.S. demands their immediate extradition to carry out the death sentence. Otherwise, the terrorists will strike again. Bush must tell any harboring country that if it refuses to turn over the terrorists it is collaterally guilty with the terrorists, and the United States will immediately drop the neutron bomb on it until it no longer exists as a nation. This is what Harry Truman would have done. This takes leadership in the best interest of the U.S., not the followership of the Arab nations.
The United States will drop the neutron bomb on all nations that harbor terrorists. It is far cheaper and will cost far fewer lives of American troops than a ground war. Not one American soldier would be killed. The harboring country would be bombed as Japan was bombed. If Iraq or another terrorist-supporting country was bombed, the other harboring countries would get the message and oust all terrorists, leaving them nowhere to go. They would be turned over to the U.S. for carrying out the death sentence or cease to operate. Even if not turned over, they would have no home base to gather and plan future attacks, so they would be out of business. The Lucom Plan is the most competent, efficient way to end terrorism in a short time – wherever it exists.
Part 2 of Lucom Plan
If President Bush wants to simultaneously try a nonviolent plan (because Gen. Powell said war is evil and all nonviolent ways must first be tried), here is the Worldwide Organized Voters Ending War Nonviolent Plan.
President Bush and Congress should offer $1 billion for the capture of Osama bin Laden and any other terrorist leaders. A protracted war could cost up to $500 billion. World War II, at today's prices, cost $486 billion, with over 1 million American soldiers killed and injured. What a horrible cost! Compared to $486 billion, this billion-dollar reward is minute. It is a very small amount to the U.S. government, whose 2001 annual budget is $1.3 trillion. The U. S. government can easily offer this billion-dollar reward for the capture of terrorists. Even if five terrorist leaders were caught, it is still a minute amount to pay out compared to $500 billion a protracted war could cost.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Congress are absolutely against offering such a large reward, but they are very wrong. Such a huge reward would shorten any war considerably, saving hundreds of thousands of American soldiers' lives. President Bush and Congress must try to save the lives of American soldiers by offering the billion-dollar reward.
Osama bin Laden has laid a clever trap for President Bush. He wants Bush to use American troops. This is pitting Christian non-Muslim infidels against Muslin troops, uniting the Muslim countries against the United States and probably starting World War III. Bush can evade this bin Laden trap by hiring or else supplying Muslim troops like Afghanistan's Northern Military Alliance. He should supply them with guns, ammunition, Stingers and other war equipment to defeat the Taliban. Thus, Bush will have evaded the bin Laden trap by having Muslims fighting against Muslims. The $1 billion reward would really motivate them.
It is reported there are over 200,000 Iranian soldiers on the border of Afghanistan because Iran worries that Afghanistan might use the guided missiles it is developing against Iran. If the billion-dollar reward were also offered to these Iranian troops, Osama bin Laden and other terrorists would soon be caught.
In this nonviolent way, up to 1 million American soldiers will not be killed or injured. This is why the nonviolent Plan should be tried simultaneously with the violent Plan. Either way, under the Lucom Plan the United States ends the terrorist war soon.
If Bush delays too long consulting the U.N. and possible future Arab enemies by trying to build a tenuous coalition, kiss the United States goodbye as a great nation. President Bush has been reacting instead of vigorously, determinedly acting in the best interest of the United States. Terrorism must be stopped before it can again attack the United States. The Lucom Plan does this. Voters should contact their senators and congressmen urging the adoption of the Lucom Plan, including the billion-dollar reward offered by the president.
Wilson C. Lucom is a former assistant to U.S. Secretary of State Stentenius.
The former commander of Iraq's Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons in its war against the Middle East country.
Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that US forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before
the April 9 capture of the Iraqi capital. Al-Rawi is one of the most wanted associates of Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, still on the run.
"The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones," he said. "The bombs annihilated soldiers but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added."
A neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that produces minimal blast and heat but releases large amounts of lethal radiation that can penetrate armour and is especially destructive to human tissue. About 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops "fought until they were martyred", according to al-Rawi. He said the Iraqi military command was surprised by the speed of the US land offensive, expecting air bombardment to last much longer. "We had not expected the enemy to launch its land offensive from the very first or second day. We expected the air raids to last at least a month," he said.
"The land offensive came at the same time as the air offensive. That was a situation we did not expect," he told Al Jazeera. Al-Rawi, who carries a $1m US bounty on his head,
was also the jack of clubs on the deck of cards of 55 most wanted Iraqis distributed by the Pentagon before the invasion in 2003
Fourth-Generation Nuclear Weapons
First- and second-generation nuclear weapons are atomic and hydrogen bombs developed during the 1940s and 1950s, while third-generation weapons comprise a number of concepts developed between the 1960s and 1980s, e.g. the neutron bomb, which never found a permanent place in the military arsenals. Fourth-generation nuclear weapons are new types of nuclear explosives that can be developed in full compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) facilities such as the NIF in the US, and other advanced technologies which are under active development in all the major nuclear-weapon states - and in major industrial powers such as Germany and Japan.11
In a nutshell, the defining technical characteristic of fourth-generation nuclear weapons is the triggering - by some advanced technology such as a superlaser, magnetic compression, antimatter, etc. - of a relatively small thermonuclear explosion in which a deuterium-tritium mixture is burnt in a device whose weight and size are not much larger than a few kilograms and litres. Since the yield of these warheads could go from a fraction of a ton to many tens of tons of high-explosive equivalent, their delivery by precision-guided munitions or other means will dramatically increase the fire-power of those who possess them - without crossing the threshold of using kiloton-to-megaton nuclear weapons, and therefore without breaking the taboo against the first-use of weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, since these new weapons will use no (or very little) fissionable materials, they will produce virtually no radioactive fallout. Their proponents will define them as "clean" nuclear weapons - and possibly draw a parallel between their battlefield use and the consequences of the expenditure of depleted uranium ammunition.12
In practice, since the controlled release of thermonuclear energy in the form of laboratory scale explosions (i.e., equivalent to a few kilograms of high-explosives) at ICF facilities like NIF is likely to succeed in the next 10 to 15 years, the main arms control question is how to prevent this know-how being used to manufacture fourth-generation nuclear weapons. As we have already seen, nanotechnology and micromechanical engineering are integral parts of ICF pellet construction. But this is also the case with ICF drivers and diagnostic devices, and even more so with all the hardware that will have to be miniaturised and 'ruggedised' to the extreme in order to produce a compact, robust, and cost-effective weapon.
A thorough discussion of the potential of nanotechnology and microelectromechanical engineering in relation to the emergence of fourth-generation nuclear weapons is therefore of the utmost importance. It is likely that this discussion will be difficult, not just because of secrecy and other restrictions, but mainly because the military usefulness and usability of these weapons is likely to remain very high as long as precision-guided delivery systems dominate the battlefield. It is therefore important to realise that the technological hurdles that have to be overcome in order for laboratory scale thermonuclear explosions to be turned into weapons may be the only remaining significant barrier against the introduction and proliferation of fourth-generation nuclear weapons. For this reason alone - and there are many others, beyond the scope of this paper - very serious consideration should be given to the possibility of promoting an 'Inner Space Treaty' to prohibit the military development and application of nanotechnological devices and techniques.
While no major U.S. media have reported on the neutron bomb charge, David Hambling, author of “Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth to Our High-Tech World,” says there’s something to it. Hambling notes that the U.S. has already admitted to the use of phosphorus weapons in the Iraq invasion.
Writing on April 13 for the Danger Room blog at Wired, Hambling says that from the description al-Rawi gives in the Al Jazeera interview of a series of explosions that killed the occupants of buildings without destroying the structures, “Interestingly, there is a weapon in the U.S. arsenal designed to do exactly that. ... The AGM-114N.”
Hambling continues, “On May 15th, 2003, just a few weeks after the action at Baghdad airport, Donald Rumsfeld praised the new weapon. ... Although officially described as ‘metal augmented’ or even ‘hyperbaric,’ the new warhead is not distinguishable from thermobaric weapons which produce the same sort of enhanced blast with a lower overpressure and longer duration for more destructive effects. Like many thermobarics, the AGM-114N used finely powdered aluminum. The military are generally quiet about thermobarics because they have received such bad press. Human Rights Watch criticized them because they ‘kill and injure in a particularly brutal manner over a wide area.’
Captain May says, "I think the Battle of Baghdad was emblematic of the whole misadventure in the Middle East. There is nothing that I thought then that I don’t think now has been validated by time. The American public still doesn’t know that there was a Battle of Baghdad because the media-military apparatus constructed the Private Jessica Lynch mess to hold attention."
May continues: "The best evidence that I have from international sources, scientific sources, is that our position was becoming untenable at the Baghdad airport and we used a neutron warhead, at least one. That is the big secret of Baghdad airport. If one looks into international data, there are reportings of enhanced radiation of some livestock, and of human metabolic effects—death and disease. It explains why, after the Battle of Baghdad, we got fragmentary stories of things like truckloads of dirt being moved out and moved in. It made no particular sense at the time, until one puts it into perspective, as a decontamination operation. Again, that part of the Battle of Baghdad, the fact that we went nuclear, explains a lot of things that came out afterwards and also explains why it is that it had to be covered up."
Ten days into Operation Iraqi Freedom, 12 year Ali Abbas’ family was burned alive. He, himself, sustained bizarre non-contact heat burns across his torso and his forearms which were both incinerated. The village where this horrifying crime was committed was 30 miles from Baghdad. Ten members of Ali’s family turned into dust and the only evidence of this crime that we have is Ali’s burned body. But these burns, while they result in the same disabilities and liabilities to survivability as if they were contact burns, are not, in fact, contact burns. These are radiation burns. Anyone who has watched what happens to organic material that cooks too long inside of a microwave oven will attest, the substance in the oven burns from the inside, out.
But beyond the nature of the burns there is the rectangular area of Ali’s burns: Ali’s head and legs are left intact, suggesting that whatever ionizing radiation struck near his family’s home in March, 2003, that radiation was readily deflected by the everyday building materials available in a Baghdad suburb in 2003. Only neutron radiation can be deflected by common household building materials. Provided that the blast is far enough away from the building to leave it standing, a tactical neutron bomb can readily incinerate human bodies unprotected by distance (from the blast), or common materials (such as graphite) that can readily absorb excess neutrons.
However, the form that is exercised currently is the indiscriminate use of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, namely the usage of uranium based weapons. This mode of the perpetual death lives up to its name because it continues to foster deaths of thousands silently and indiscriminately. In fact, the usage of the Weapons of Mass Destruction alters the texture of the ecosystem wherein the victims reside. This ultimately condemns the people living there and future generations to death, and deprives them of their fundamental human right, the right to live.
The perpetrators of this horrible crime are the governments of the United States and that of the United Kingdom. The US and the UK are the only two countries used these horrible weapons indiscriminately in Iraq during the Gulf War and Balkans in the 1990s and in Afghanistan from October 7th, 2001 onward. Meanwhile, based on past experiences with victims of the US-UK bombing in Iraq and the Balkans, every informed source suspected to have similar situation in Afghanistan. Tragically, the US-UK armed forces have used three times more uranium based weapons in Afghanistan than they did in Iraq or in the Balkans. In fact, the types of Weapons of Mass Destruction used in Afghanistan are more potent than those used in Iraq.
This became evident with the recent report by the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC), establishing the presence of a mysterious metal in Afghan soil samples and urine samples of victims. The investigation carried out by the two teams of experts, one concentrated on the city of Jalal Abad while the other on the capital Kabul. The two teams gathered data and established the use of uranium-based weapons there. They discovered symptoms in population of illnesses associated with exposure to depleted uranium contamination similar to that in Iraq and Balkans. This added to the curiosity of the investigators and collected soil samples from impact sites to investigate them here in the US. The investigators were also surprised to find high concentration of uranium in the urine of subjects from Jala Abad. In fact, the level of uranium was 400% to 2000%, the highest level of uranium ever recorded in civilian population. Incidentally, the uranium discovered in the urine samples from subjects in Jala-Abad exhibited characteristics more potent than depleted uranium. The report said the following in regards to the impact of the uranium-based weapons:
"Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine and radiology and a former science adviser to the US military, who set-up the independent UMRC, has been testing US, British, and Canadian troops and civilians for DU and uranium poisoning over the past few years. His findings confirm significant amounts in the subjects' urine as much as nine years after exposure."
Originally posted by Silk
Maybe the op is confusing the use of DP (depleted uranium) shells against armour instead of the release of conventional (battlefield) nukes.
Originally posted by SpaDe_
Can we have a summary of this extremely lengthy post. My attention span is about that of a gold fish. It looks like you did an excellent job gathering information on the subject. I will read it and try to digest all this info.
Originally posted by DarkspARCS
The accusation from the Iraqi Commander of the Republican Guard has been substantiated by both Military Analysist David Hambling, as a weapon known as the AGM - 114N, and by Retired U.S. Army Captain Eric May, a former intelligence and public affairs officer, who believes that the U.S. military did use neutron weapons in the Battle of Baghdad.
The accusation from the Iraqi Commander of the Republican Guard has been substantiated by both Military Analysist David Hambling, as a weapon known as the AGM - 114N, and by Retired U.S. Army Captain Eric May, a former intelligence and public affairs officer, who believes that the U.S. military did use neutron weapons in the Battle of Baghdad.
Funny. I was at the Battle of Bagdad. I was in an aircraft orbiting just west of the city. I think they would have told us something.
And I wouldn't imagine "The Worker" having any sort of agenda......