3 Million People Dead When Cheney Uses his Nukes on Iran???

leftchick

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Mon Sep-03-07 12:10 PM
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3 Million People Dead When Cheney Uses his Nukes on Iran???

Watch the Video Animation. This is insanity.....

animation
The Nuclear Bunker Buster
Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

This animation depicts a proposed weapon with a one megaton yield. The funding for this weapon was cut in 2005 defense appropriations. However, the United States still has a B61-11 nuclear 'bunker buster' in its arsenal which has a 400 kiloton yield, which could still cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and spread radiation to other countries. Learn more.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_weapons/nuclear-bunker-buster-rnep-animation.html

Figure 1: Fallout from the use of RNEP against the Esfahan nuclear facility in Iran would spread for thousands of miles across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It would kill 3 million people within 2 weeks of the explosion and expose 35 million to cancer causing radiation.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_weapons/the-robust-nuclear-earth-penetrator-rnep.html

National Laboratory intend to use an existing high-yield nuclear warhead—the 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear bomb—in a longer, stronger and heavier bomb casing. The B83 is the largest nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, and nearly 100 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb used on Hiroshima.<1>

Technical realities:
According to several recent scientific studies, RNEP would not be effective at destroying many underground targets, and its use could result in the death of millions of people.<2>

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RNEP would produce tremendous radioactive fallout: A nuclear earth penetrator cannot penetrate deep enough to contain the nuclear fallout. Even the strongest casing will crush itself by the time it penetrates 10-30 feet into rock or concrete. For comparison, even a one-kiloton nuclear warhead (less than 1/10th as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb) must be buried at least 200-300 feet to contain its radioactive fallout.<3> The high yield RNEP will produce tremendous fallout that will drift for more than a thousand miles downwind. As, Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration told Congress in April, "the laws of physics will far enough to trap all fallout. This is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive over a large area" if it goes off underground.
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RNEP could kill millions of people: A simulation of RNEP used against the Esfahan nuclear facility in Iran, using the software developed for the Pentagon, showed that 3 million people would be killed by radiation within 2 weeks of the explosion, and 35 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India would be exposed to increased levels of cancer-causing radiation (see Figure 1).<4>

Nuclear Bunker Busters Are Dangerous, Ineffective, and Unneeded (10/26/05)

http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=297&contentId=401

This is a major victory for a saner nuclear policy. There was widespread confusion in the public and press about nuclear bunker busters (confusion that the Administration did little to correct). A remarkable number of reports conflated nuclear bunker busters with so-called “mini-nukes.” Putting aside for the moment that a “mini” nuclear weapon is defined as one with an explosive yield of five thousand tons of TNT, or one third the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, the bunker busters were genuinely gigantic bombs. The largest being considered had a yield of 1.2 million tons of TNT. The other misconception was that the bombs would burrow deep inside the Earth before detonating, substantially reducing effects on the surface. In fact, the bombs would penetrate at most only a few meters into rock, causing no reduction in blast, fire, or fallout damage on the surface. The largest RNEP would have blown out a crater almost a thousand feet across and thrown a cloud of radioactive fallout tens of thousands of feet into the air where it would be blown hundreds of miles downwind.

Even with this enormous power, nuclear weapons are not particularly effective at destroying deep underground tunnels. The National Academy of Sciences reported that even megaton bombs could not reliably destroy tunnels more than 300 meters deep. Nations around the world started putting critical facilities underground in the first place in response to precision-guided weapons that made virtually all fixed surface targets vulnerable. The response to a nuclear bunker buster is obvious: just dig deeper. Any nation that can dig under a hundred meters of hard rock can dig under a kilometer of hard rock.

U.S. nuclear weapons simply have no remaining role on the battlefield of the future. Abandoning the RNEP is a big step toward a more rational, safer, nuclear policy.