Just over 60 years ago, the United States became the first and only country to use nuclear weapons on civilian targets. Roughly 200,000 men, women and children in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed in less time than it took you to read this sentence. Thousands more died from radiation sickness in the weeks and years following.
Granted, the atomic age was in its infancy at the time and neither the scientists nor the politicians fully grasped the destructive power they had unleashed. That was then.
Today the general public has come to realize a nuclear weapon doesn’t qualify as a smart bomb. Nuclear weapons annihilate cities. They incinerate the families that live in those cities.
Most people consider the use of such weapons an act of terrorism. However, the folks in the Bush administration aren’t like most people.
According to Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, the rear echelon Republicans in the White House have been busy developing an invasion plan for Iran, an invasion plan that includes bunker-busting nuclear weapons.
Does anyone find it a little oxymoronic that the president, with all his mushroom cloud rhetoric, wants to use nuclear weapons to prevent another country from developing the bomb?
The nuclear weapon in question is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), a bunker-busting missile that bores to a depth of a few meters and detonates, creating a shock wave that will theoretically destroy underground facilities. A 1 megaton RNEP would be needed to destroy a target buried 1,000 feet below the surface. That’s 67 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the few meters of penetration achieved by the missile would not be enough to contain the explosion or the ensuing radioactive fallout. A Pentagon study revealed that a strike on a major Iranian nuclear facility would likely result in 3 million fatalities and create a cloud of radioactive fallout stretching 1,000 miles eastward into India.
The president dismissed the idea of using nuclear weapons as “wild speculation” during a recent press conference, but should we believe him? According to the president, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee … that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” Thanks for the advice George. Let’s follow the president’s befuddled version of homespun wisdom and assume he’s not being honest. Then let’s do a little digging.
In 2002, the Bush administration released a Nuclear Posture Review which endorsed a pre-emptive first strike policy, including a first strike involving nuclear weapons. The memo also revealed the administration’s desire to lift the moratorium on nuclear testing.
In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported a sharp increase in proposed funding for the RNEP program ($485 million). According to Donald Rumsfeld that money was for “a study … nothing more and nothing less.”
That same year the Nevada nuclear test site, which has lain dormant since 1992, received $22 million for “grooming” purposes.
According to Hersh, who interviewed multiple senior defense officials, U.S. Naval aircraft have been simulating “over the shoulder” (nuclear weapon delivery style) bombing runs just south of Iran for the past six months. Hersh’s sources also reported U.S. troops are already working covertly inside Iran, positioning themselves to aid in the targeting of key facilities.
So who should we believe? A man who has lied repeatedly about the reasons for invading another Middle Eastern country, or a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent the past 47 years exposing Americans to the painful truths of U.S. foreign policy?
Hersh’s response to the president’s “wild speculation” spin is both instructive and foreboding. According to Hersh, Iran war planning “is not wild speculation. It’s simply a fact that the planning has gone beyond the contingency stage, and it’s gone into what they call the operational stage, sort of an increment higher.
“And it’s very serious planning, of course. And it’s all being directed at the wish of the president of the United States. And I can understand why they don’t want to talk about it, but that’s just the reality.”
Another Pentagon official interviewed by Hersh put it more succinctly, “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.

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