The Iran-Divine Strake Connection

[helderheid]

By Andrew Kishner

26 June, 2008
Idealist.ws

To a few individuals in the civilian and defense communities, Divine Strake was more than just an exercise to determine the lowest nuclear calibration needed to destroy a hardened underground bunker in limestone geology. The 'other' purpose of Divine Strake, one that I personally never had much belief in, was to conduct a 'dry run' on an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Such an event would have disastrous radiological consequences not just for Iran, but also Pakistan, China, and other nations in that entire region. The 'thinking' is that if you hit a deeply buried object with a nuclear bomb, the 'dirty stuff' most likely will not just stay in the ground. That's where the term 'bunker buster' becomes infused with the word 'fantasy'. It seems that there really are no ideal conditions for a fully contained, successful bunker buster. The reason is that even if a detonation can result in the explosion being contained beneath the surface, the event will still result in a collapsed crater or at the very least an open passageway from which the bomb entered. Harmful clouds of radioactive gasses will emerge vertically up through the crater or the passageway and reach the surface where gasses and contaminated particulates can travel over a great area.

Divine Strake, in the eyes of a few defense and other conspiracy theorists, was a dry run to see what will happen when radioactive dust is thrown into the atmosphere. This is where you have to put on your 'I'm thinking sinister' hat and go along for a bumpy ride: Since the DOE knew there was plutonium in the soils at the Divine Strake ground-zero and plutonium is a good substitute in experiments for uranium since the two closely resemble each other, the DOE would have the perfect rock formation, blast size, charge depth, tunnel depth, etc... and surrogate radiological substance at the Nevada Test Site to determine the size and toxicity of the plume that may be emitted from a less-than-perfect nuclear bunker blast on a uranium-packed facility in Iran. Where would the uranium dust go? How far? What would be the health effects?

This is really no less wacky than many other conspiracy theories since it would mean that the people in the American West would have been used as guinea pigs to determine how much damage an attack on Iran could have on peoples in China and Pakistan and other nations. Then again, the people in the American West WERE guinea pigs for atomic experiments at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc... The implications of irradiating people in Iran, China and Pakistan and neighboring countries and therefore the severe diplomatic fallout would be enough worry to military planners to justify 'playing out the scenario' on Westerners to see how much cancer and deaths would follow from the leaky bunker 'bust' on Iran's facilities. Then the military planners could multiply the toxicity resulting from the 'smaller event' from the Divine Strake test several times to equate with the estimate of exposure from bombing Iran's facilities and they'll finally have a 'collateral damage' statistic of thousands or millions exposed. Whittling that number down to likely immediate or near-term deaths and then it becomes a routine exercise that insurance companies do all-the-time: can we invest in this or is there too much risk?

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http://www.countercurrents.org/kishner260608.htm

[helderheid]

1. k

[Bobbieo]

2. Nuclear weapons will always be the enemy of humankind no matter who has them.

This should have been the headline for the Kishner story!

[helderheid]

3. would probably not sink so fast too