To those of us who have been following the Administration’s hard line on Iran, it was a tad surprising that so many folks in wwwLand seemed shocked this past weekend when Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has been generating plans for attacking Iran, some of which include the use of nuclear weapons.

Had they all forgotten Mister Bush’s famous pre-Inaugural line to NBC’s David Gregory 15 months ago?

Gregory: About Iran, will you rule out the potential for military action against Iran if it continues to stonewall the international community about the existence of its nuclear weapons program?

Bush: I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.

Like an increasing number of Americans, I empty a salt-shaker atop every utterance Mister Bush emits. This one, however, I took at face value. Too many of the Administration’s ideological mentors have argued for the practical necessity of using nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War age to presume that “any option” would exclude  a pre-emptive nuking.

Indeed, these men are the very ones who have long pushed to deploy bunker-buster nukes that they think could be exploded without eliciting the global outrage that most certainly would ensue if they were to use some of the giant city-crushers developed for blowing the USSR to kingdom come during the Cold War. Men like Stephen Cambone, Linton Brooks, Steven Hadley, J.D. Crouch. Many of them, along with former CIA chief James Woolsey, are connected with the National Institute for Public Policy, a rightwing think-tank whose members believe the United States should adopt policies to fight nuclear war “rationally.”

So any option obviously includes the possibility that the next radioactive mushroom clouds you see will be American, just as were the last ones six decades ago.

What is off the table, however, is the option that might actually defuse the situation: face to face negotiations. Again, on Monday, according to the Financial Times coverage of Mister Bush’s question-and-answer session with students in Washington:

Mr Bush’s rejection of any bilateral negotiations will be a disappointment to the EU3 countries of France, Germany and the UK, which have been urging the US to engage in direct talks with Tehran. The Iranian government has also sent out signals that it desires such direct negotiations with Washington.

Mr Bush said any effort to engage the Iranians directly on the nuclear issue would weaken efforts to dissuade Iran.

“It’s amazing that, when we’re in a bilateral position or negotiating one-on-one, somehow the world ends up turning the tables on us. And I’m not going to put my country in that position,” he said.

Meanwhile, Seymour Hersh said Monday in an interview with the BBC that:

…the Pentagon had told the Bush administration initially that a nuclear attack was the only way of guaranteeing success:

“Nobody was advocating it, they were just saying a 100% guarantee. Where it becomes interesting, the joint chiefs, in one of its subsequent papers, wanted to withdraw that option because of course it’s madness, a nuclear weapon in the Middle East to an Arab [sic] Muslim country, my God. And the White House won’t withdraw.

“That’s the issue, that the White House, some people there still wanted to have this option. That’s what’s causing the trauma, not that they’re going to do it, but the White House won’t take it off the table.”

Since the New Yorker and Washington Post articles appeared, there’s been widespread sentiment that the whole attack scenario (whether nukes are used or not) might well be a bluff. But, as James Fallows notes in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a pre-emptive bombing campaign was a bad idea two years ago:

Everything that has changed since then increases the pressure on the United States to choose the “military option” of a pre-emptive strike–and makes that option more ruinously self-defeating.

{snip}

Perhaps the American and Israeli hard-liners know all this, and are merely bluffing. If so, they have made an elementary strategic error. The target of their bluff is the Iranian government, and the most effective warnings would be discreet and back-channel. Iranian intelligence should be picking up secret signals that the United States is planning an attack. By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create `excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices.

Simply put, it means that the Administration may very well find itself unable not to bomb because that would mean backing down, and that would give the Iranians (and other nations) the idea that the United States is, as, Mao used to say, a “paper tiger.” In other words, Mister Bush will be required – in his own mind, at least – to deliver on the tough-guy posture he’s struck regarding Iran.

Fallows concludes:

The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the last five years have left us with a series of choices–and all of them are bad. The United States can’t keep troops in Iraq indefinitely, for obvious reasons. It can’t withdraw them, because of the chaos that would ensue. The United States can’t keep prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (and other overseas facilities) indefinitely, because of international and domestic challenges. But it can’t hastily release them, since many were and more have become terrorists. And it can’t even bring them to trial, because of procedural abuses that have already occurred.

Similarly, the United States can’t accept Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power, but it cannot prevent this through military means–unless it is willing to commit itself to all-out war. The central flaw of American foreign policy these last few years has been the triumph of hope, wishful thinking, and self-delusion over realism and practicality. Realism about Iran starts with throwing out any plans to bomb.

Mister Bush’s reference to “any option” first appeared January 17, 2005, the same day The New Yorker posted another Hersh piece, in which he wrote:

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved [in negotiations with Iran]. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, `The only solution is to bomb.’ “

Whoever that unnamed diplomat is, s/he seems to have hit the bullseye.

With “any option” still on the table, it would have been hilarious Monday when Mister Bush called what’s contained in last week’s Hersh piece “wild speculation.” Hilarious, except it’s another war we’re talking about, and the President didn’t deny Hersh’s accuracy.

In his earlier article, Hersh had noted that the:

… Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer [2004]. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

A month later, in February 2005, Scott Ritter, the former Marine and U.N. weapons inspector who stirred a good deal of rightwing hate with his claims in 2002 that Iraq wasn’t a threat, said the Administration planned to attack Iran in June 2005.

There’s considerable evidence that the Administration’s war against Iran did begin then, with clandestine bombings and sabotage. But the aerial assault never developed. This may well have been because the prevailing attitude at the White House was exactly as foreseen by that Western diplomat Hersh cited: push the Security Council to take action that neither China nor Russia would likely countenance, blame the United Nations, and then bomb.

So, today, with a crescendo of verbal attacks against Tehran appearing practically every day – aided by the outrageous comments of the messianic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – a real attack, beyond whatever black ops are going on already, seems ever more likely.

Although some have argued that 450 targets are at risk in Iran, which would presumably mean massive casualties, even a relatively narrow assault could mean thousands dead, as the Oxford Research Group pointed out in its Iran: Consequences of a War published two months ago. That wouldn’t, of course, be the only bad outcome.

The BBC noted Monday:

But a nuclear attack is improbable.

There are three main reasons of military and diplomatic importance for this.

* The first is that even a nuclear “bunker-buster” would produce large amounts of radiation. This could cause thousands of casualties among civilian populations.

The Federation of American Scientists says that “the bombs would penetrate at most only a few metres into rock, causing no reduction in blast, fire, or fallout damage on the surface. The largest would have blown out a crater almost a thousand feet across and thrown a cloud of radioactive fallout tens of thousands of feet into the air where it would be blown hundreds of miles downwind.”

  • The second is that the political implications are so huge of the US attacking, with nuclear weapons, a country (and in the Muslim world) which is not armed with similar weapons and which says it has no intention of making.
  • The third reason is that, doctrinally, the US is moving away from developing new nuclear bunker busters. It does have one already, the B61-11, but it cannot penetrate very deeply and last year Congress withdrew, at the administration’s request, funding for further research.

However, if insanity won the day and an attack did go nuclear, the death toll could be frightful. In January I took note of the May 2005, report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Projected Casualties Among U.S. Military Personnel and Civilian Populations from the Use of Nuclear Weapons Against Hard and Deeply Buried Targets.

Using computer software ― the Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability developed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency ― PSR experts modeled a single-nuke attack on the city of Isfahan, Iran, The impact of a 1.2-megaton bomb was modeled:

From the HPAC calculations, we estimate that within 48 hours of an … attack, over 3 million people would die as a result of the attack. About half of those would die from radiation-related causes, either prompt casualties from the immediate radiation effects of the bomb, or from exposure to fallout. For example, the entire city of Isfahan would likely be covered in fallout producing 1000 rems of radiation per hour, a fatal dose. Over 600,000 people would suffer immediate injuries of the kind described previously. …

…within 48 hours, prevailing winds would spread fallout to cover a large area in Iran, most of Afghanistan and then spread on into Pakistan and India. There is little likelihood, in most seasons, that rain would mitigate the spread of fallout.

In this scenario, over 35 million people in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India would suffer significant radiation exposure of 1 rem per hour or above within four days of the use of the RNEP. At this rate, the 25 rem limit at which physical effects can be expected would be reached within 25 hours of first exposure, and the 100 rem limit at which more severe damage could be caused would be reached in only 4 days. (Given the lack of modern communications in this area, as well as the lack of advanced education available to the affected populations, it is unlikely that warnings would spread quickly enough to allow mitigating measures to be taken). Immediate effects would include skin burns and diarrhea secondary to gastro-intestinal cell damage. Long-term effects could include cancers. Many, if not all, of the approximately 20,000 American armed forces, intelligence and diplomatic personnel deployed in Afghanistan would be at risk of exposure at these radiation levels. While U.S. personnel could be evacuated, and would receive sophisticated medical care if necessary, this would not apply to the local population in most of the affected area.

However, unless targets were bured very deep – 1000 feet –  the more likely choice, as Hersh has noted, is the bunker-buster known as the B61-11. It has a dialable yield ranging from subkiloton to 340 kilotons (30 times the yield of Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki).

Whether several of these could actually destroy the hardened, deep underground facilities Iran may have is unclear. Eight-foot deep tunnels around Natanz would present little problem. But a National Research Council study noted that a nuclear warhead  set off at the surface would take 25 times more power to destroy a buried facility than would a bomb exploded a few meters underground. Nonetheless, it would require a 300-kiloton earth-penetrating nuclear weapon to destroy a target 650 feet underground, and a 1-megaton weapon to destroy a hardened 1000-foot-deep facility.

The NRC concluded that:

Conclusion 3. Current experience and empirical predictions indicate that earth-penetrator weapons cannot penetrate to depths required for total containment of the effects of a nuclear explosion.
{snip}
Conclusion 6. For attacks near or in densely populated urban areas using nuclear earth-penetrator weapons on hard and deeply buried targets (HDBTs), the number of casualties can range from thousands to more than a million, depending primarily on weapon yield. For attacks on HDBTs in remote, lightly populated areas, casualties can range from as few as hundreds at low weapon yields to hundreds of thousands at high yields and with unfavorable winds.

It will take more than petitions to stop this madness.