Waiting for the big bang
George Bush didn’t exactly deny Seymour Hersh’s report in The New Yorker that the Administration is considering using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.
Neither did Scott McClellan.
Bush called it “wild speculation,” and McClellan said the United States would go ahead with “normal military contingency planning.”
Those are hardly categorical denials.
So let’s look at what the human costs of dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on Iran might entail.
They are astronomical.
“The number of deaths could exceed a million, and the number of people with increased cancer risks could exceed 10 million,” according to a backgrounder by the Union of Concerned Scientists from May 2005.
The National Academy of Sciences studied these earth-penetrating nuclear weapons last year. They could “kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas,” concluded the report, which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.</i>
Continue reading The Human Costs of Bombing Iran
