Beware the “Nuclear Rogue State” (Hint: Not Iran)

There's no need to write anything new!

Last week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told congressional lawmakers it would take Iran “several” months to produce a nuke. The top US general said that the US military has “developed multiple options” for a potential response.

Milley claimed Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon within two weeks and it would then only take "several more months" for Tehran to produce an "actual nuclear weapon.”

I was asked to comment on this latest installment of Distraction Theater™ and I realized I could virtually re-share an article I wrote in [wait for it] August 2012 — in the heat of the Obama vs. Romney campaign.

That article is pasted below — with very minimal edits — for your perusal:

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I’ll start this piece with some Marxism... from Duck Soup:

Ambassador Trentino: "I am willing to do anything to prevent this war."

President Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho): "It's too late. I've already paid a month's rent on the battlefield."

Before you take offense at the suggestion America goes to war for frivolous reasons, please consider: WMDs? Saddam Hussein connected to 9/11? Liberating Libya, Grenada, Kuwait, etc.? Noriega deals drugs? The sinking of the Maine, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tonkin Gulf, and [wait for it] to help spread democracy? 

Even Harpo would be laughing out loud…

Our history books and newspaper headlines portray the ever-benevolent US as minding its own business yet incessantly plagued by surprise events and unprovoked threats to test its celebrated patience. 

This long record of conjuring up dubious rationales to wage war indicts those on both sides [sic] of the proverbial aisle — equally. 

Corporate-funded war criminal, Barack Obama said: "We're leading the fight against nuclear dangers. We've applied the strongest sanctions ever on Iran and North Korea — nations that cannot be allowed to threaten the world with nuclear weapons."

Corporate-funded war-criminal-in-waiting, Mitt Romney said: "The number one national security threat to our nation is a nuclear Iran."

Can someone please ask Harpo to quiet down?

Since Iran obviously has the audacity to make decisions without first asking for US (or Israeli) permission, we are now faced with the spectacle of America — the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on civilians — warning the world about how nuclear weapons might be, well, used on civilians. 

Of course, this is very familiar ground for the Land of the Free™. I could go on for pages but below is a short refresher.

I'll Take Manhattan

“With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.” (Henry Kissinger)

It was in 1942, at the University of Chicago, that physicists working under Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and others produced fission of the uranium isotope U-235. In other words: a nuclear chain reaction.

With an ultra-secret $2.2 billion investment (the equivalent of about $33 billion today), the Manhattan Project began that same year. 

Nearly 200,000 workers toiled in 37 installations in 19 states and Canada. On July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb was successfully detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico after which Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut called it “the most important thing in history since the birth of Jesus Christ.” 

While the long-term effects of the Manhattan Project are still being calculated, the initial consequences of this Second Coming, of course, were felt by Japanese civilians. Sixty percent of Hiroshima, a city with a population of roughly 343,000, was destroyed on August 6, 1945. 

A Tokyo radio broadcast two days later described how “the impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast.” 

Tokyo radio went on to call Hiroshima a city with corpses “too numerous to be counted … literally seared to death.” It was impossible to “distinguish between men and women.” 

The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account: a Japanese solider who described the victims as “bloated and scorched — such an awesome sight — their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister.”

The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, has never been convincingly explained. “Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb?” asked historian Howard Zinn. “Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?”

The men that devised and carried out America's nuclear attacks on Japanese civilians are generally considered to be part of this country’s "greatest generation" yet, by any sane definition, what I just detailed is nuclear terrorism — and it continues to this day.

Just DU It

“A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.” (Margaret Thatcher)

Nuclear weapons may be a hot topic when discussing Iran or North Korea, but how many know that the US has regularly used depleted uranium (DU) when waging its seemingly endless wars (and when training in places like Vieques for such wars)?

DU is the byproduct of uranium enrichment, a waste product of the nuclear industry. As the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons explains: "Depleted uranium itself is a chemically toxic and radioactive compound, which is used in armor-piercing munitions because of its very high density. It is 1.7 times denser than lead. This allows it to easily penetrate the steel armor of tanks and other vehicles when fired at high velocity."

"When fired," explains journalist James Ridgeway, "the uranium bursts into flame and all but liquefies, searing through steel armor like a white-hot phosphorescent flare. The heat of the shell causes any diesel fuel vapors in the enemy tank to explode, and the crew inside is burned alive."

"Depleted uranium burns on contact," says Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness, "creating tiny aerosolized particles less than five microns in diameter, small enough to be inhaled." These minute particles can travel "long distances when airborne," she adds.

John Gofman is a former associate director of Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and co-discoverer of uranium-233. He knows a thing or three about radiation. 

"There is no safe dose or dose rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold dose," Gofman says. "Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not 'hypothetical,' 'just theoretical,' or 'imaginary.' They are real."

Also real: Eight decades of fallout from US nuclear testing.

All of this radioactive reality comes courtesy, not of Iran but instead, it's brought to you by none other than the Home of the Brave™.

We're told we can't allow just anyone (except allies like Israel, of course) to acquire such lethal technology — and we can't let anyone help arm men so evil they might, well, use nuclear weapons on civilians. We hear this while pretending that our tax dollars aren't funding the forces that regularly use nuclear weapons on civilians.

“Why did we drop [the bomb]?” pondered author Studs Terkel in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. 

“So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we’ve got the cards,” Terkel explained. “That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we’ve got something and they’d better behave themselves in Europe. That’s why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they’ll spit in your eye.”

Whether Obama or Romney wins in November, the US will happily use depleted uranium weapons on Iranian civilians in the name of stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons that they may use on civilians. #logic

The cycle of violence that includes such deadly hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of our dominant culture. Thus, genuine and enduring social change will never happen "within the system" or from the top down.

The path, as always, begins with us choosing to think for ourselves, us sharing our knowledge and skills, and us taking immediate and sustained action. 

Today, with the US once again howling about "evildoers" potentially nuking innocents, Obama claims he is "leading the fight against nuclear dangers."

The "99 percent of Americans" Studs Terkel mentioned in 1995 still very much want to spit in someone's eye — but this time around, we're just crazy enough to be aiming upward, at the top 1%.

As (Groucho) Marx said: “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.”