Nuclear Terror in the Middle East

[polly7]

Lethality Beyond the Pale

By Nick Turse

Source: TomDispatch.com

Monday, May 13, 2013

In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.

This could be Tehran, or what’s left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.

Iranian cities -- owing to geography, climate, building construction, and population densities -- are particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to a new study, “Nuclear War Between Israel and Iran: Lethality Beyond the Pale,” published in the journal Conflict & Health by researchers from the University of Georgia and Harvard University. It is the first publicly released scientific assessment of what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean for people in the region.

Its scenarios are staggering. An Israeli attack on the Iranian capital of Tehran using five 500-kiloton weapons would, the study estimates, kill seven million people -- 86% of the population -- and leave close to 800,000 wounded. A strike with five 250-kiloton weapons would kill an estimated 5.6 million and injure 1.6 million, according to predictions made using an advanced software package designed to calculate mass casualties from a nuclear detonation.

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/nuclear-terror-in-the-middle-east-by-nick-turse

[bananas]

1. Cham Dallas: Nuclear war in the first third of this century

Cham Dallas says there is an urgent need to grapple with the prospect of nuclear attacks, not later, but now. “There are going to be other big public health issues in the twenty-first century, but in the first third, this is it. It’s a freight train coming down the tracks,” he told me. “People don’t want to face this. They’re in denial.”

[AverageJoe90]

3. True to a point.

While the threat of a traditional full-scale nuclear war scenario is virtually all but something for the history books(and something that isn't at all likely to make a comeback, ever, despite what the neo-cons would like us to think), the threat of nuclear terrorism, unfortunately, has actually somewhat increased in recent years. Even just one small detonation in a major city very well could cause a regionwide, if not perhaps a worldwide panic.

[pmorlan1]

2. Barbaric

It just makes me sick to think that there are people out there who are ok with this just like they were ok with torture.