The Sunday Times of London has as a lead story this morning the revelation that Israel has working plans for nuclear strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. The plans call for the use of conventional, laser-guided bombs to "tunnel" into the concrete and rock - up to 70 feet - that shield the nuclear facilities, followed immediately by low-yield nuclear-tipped bunker-buster charges.
Two Israeli Air Force squadrons are training for the mission to take out the Iranian nuclear program with low-yield nuclear weapons.
“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.Israel is stinging from the ill-advised and poorly conceived war with Lebanon last summer, and from criticism that it's own soldiers have leveled against Ohlmert and the IDF leadership. Now they are feeling like they have something to prove.
The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.
Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.
The rest of the world needs to let Israel know in no uncertain terms that if they launch a first strike using nuclear weapons, they will be signing their own death warrant. Decency - Humanity - requires that the world shun any country that will use nuclear weaponry. Membership in civilized society demands that decent people repudiate the notion of a nuclear strike. That we are at this point a mere 62 years after the world experienced the horror of nuclear weapons unleashed, makes me weep for our prospects as a race of civilized beings.
Public reaction to this news - worldwide public reaction - must rise as a chorus. This situation is unacceptable and the entire world has an interest in the geopolitics of the middle east.
A swift, stern rebuke is in order. I look to "my people" - Russ Feingold, Carl Levin, Barney Frank, Diane Feinstein, Charles Schummer - Mensches in positions of leadership to step forward and denounce this reckless notion of a nuclear strike by Israelis against Iran.
I grew up uttering the words "never again" but they had a dual meaning. On my mother's side were holocaust survivors. And then there was my Catholic father - who might well have died in an American invasion of the Japanese homeland, but was spared that eventuality and returned from that war to make the Navy his career. He would live on to fight two more wars and father more children, one of whom is me. But when we lit the candles on the high holy days, when we remembered the dead, my father intoned "never again" along with us.
But to him, it invoked visions of a different holocaust.
Update: The Times of London has reported this story before, several times, going all the way back to March 2004. Click here, here, here and here for previous reporting on the topic by the (Murdoch owned) Times of London.
Let's hope a nuclear strike by Israel is no more imminent now than it was all those other times. Hat tip to Laura Rozen at War and Piece for posting the links.
