On Empty
Via the Downside World News, the Global Research site in Canada has a 29 April article titled "Consider the Consequences of Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Power Plants, and Pray."
In keeping with its name, Downside News specializes in collecting apocalyptic articles, but this one is especially harrowing, because a number of people who think they have their hands on the future's throat keep speaking of how the Bush bombing of Iran is still in the works, and occasionally, as if trying to give things an extra push in that direction, they will even suggest that such an attack is imminent.
I still don't expect it to happen, yet I can't get away from the absolute starkness of a passage like this from the article:
The Persian Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran have more than half the world’s known oil reserves. The 1981 study by Fetter and Tsipis in Scientific American on “Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity” estimated that bombing a nuclear reactor would cause 8600 square miles around the reactor to be uninhabitable, depending on which way the wind blows. Bombing the Bushehr reactor will mean half of the world’s oil is instantly inaccessible. Bombing Iran means that Americans will not be driving cars any where, any more, for a long, long time. The American Way of Life will be finished. An economic collapse unimagined by Americans will follow. Mechanized farming and food transport will be finished. Famine is a possibility. Food riots are a certainty, in the land of plenty, with the fuel gauge on empty.
So, even allowing for some slight exxageration, there we have it, right? The Bushehr power plant can't be bombed, because it already has 82 tons of uranium U235 on hand for making electricity, and that stuff, which would surely be blasted into the air far and wide with the detonations of Bush bombs, has a half life of 700 million years. Yet the Bush military is reputed to have identified not only Bushehr but close to 10,000 other possible targets in Iran, and Israeli military figures have similarly threatened that country, though so far Iran hasn't physically attacked either country or any other nation in recent centuries or even millennia.
A Sunday night radio serial from my childhood, "The Shadow," always began ominously with the question, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" And followed by a threatening laugh.
That was way back in the 1940's, at a time when the Axis Powers were already showing well enough exactly what evil lurks in those organs, and by now, so many years later, that knowledge should be universal, not only of evil but also of absolute insanity, like bombing Iran. And yet people are still being elected to high positions in government who have such hearts, and their thinking is still found to be rational. This is one of many matters of which, if I ever had any comprehension at all, that was illusory, and now all that slight understanding is leaving my noggin by leaps and bounds.
In keeping with its name, Downside News specializes in collecting apocalyptic articles, but this one is especially harrowing, because a number of people who think they have their hands on the future's throat keep speaking of how the Bush bombing of Iran is still in the works, and occasionally, as if trying to give things an extra push in that direction, they will even suggest that such an attack is imminent.
I still don't expect it to happen, yet I can't get away from the absolute starkness of a passage like this from the article:
The Persian Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran have more than half the world’s known oil reserves. The 1981 study by Fetter and Tsipis in Scientific American on “Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity” estimated that bombing a nuclear reactor would cause 8600 square miles around the reactor to be uninhabitable, depending on which way the wind blows. Bombing the Bushehr reactor will mean half of the world’s oil is instantly inaccessible. Bombing Iran means that Americans will not be driving cars any where, any more, for a long, long time. The American Way of Life will be finished. An economic collapse unimagined by Americans will follow. Mechanized farming and food transport will be finished. Famine is a possibility. Food riots are a certainty, in the land of plenty, with the fuel gauge on empty.
So, even allowing for some slight exxageration, there we have it, right? The Bushehr power plant can't be bombed, because it already has 82 tons of uranium U235 on hand for making electricity, and that stuff, which would surely be blasted into the air far and wide with the detonations of Bush bombs, has a half life of 700 million years. Yet the Bush military is reputed to have identified not only Bushehr but close to 10,000 other possible targets in Iran, and Israeli military figures have similarly threatened that country, though so far Iran hasn't physically attacked either country or any other nation in recent centuries or even millennia.
A Sunday night radio serial from my childhood, "The Shadow," always began ominously with the question, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" And followed by a threatening laugh.
That was way back in the 1940's, at a time when the Axis Powers were already showing well enough exactly what evil lurks in those organs, and by now, so many years later, that knowledge should be universal, not only of evil but also of absolute insanity, like bombing Iran. And yet people are still being elected to high positions in government who have such hearts, and their thinking is still found to be rational. This is one of many matters of which, if I ever had any comprehension at all, that was illusory, and now all that slight understanding is leaving my noggin by leaps and bounds.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 10:00 AM
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