I'm not going to get into finger-pointing over who did what, with which, to whom, and who did it first. The facts appear to be that Iran had refused to give up its uranium enrichment program. According to Israel, Iran had, in fact, gathered enough enriched nuclear material to make up to 15 nuclear weapons, and was in the process of trying to assemble them over the past week or so. Israel felt it had no choice but to interrupt the process. As a result, the bombs and missiles (so far, thank God, non-nuclear) are flying again.
The problem with a nuclear weapon is that it changes the dynamic permanently if, and only if, it's used. Israel has had nuclear weapons since the 1960's, if rumor is correct, and (based on the Vela incident in 1979, of which I had more than passing knowledge) probably upgraded much of its nuclear arsenal to thermonuclear weapons in the 1980's and beyond. However, because it's never admitted to having them, and has never been proved to have detonated one, it's been able to stop further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Let that "plausible deniability" curtain be torn down, even by a nuclear test, and every nation in that part of the world will have nukes before you can say boo to a camel. Let a nuclear weapon be used against an enemy, and that'll happen even faster. (For example, I understand Saudi Arabia has bankrolled part of the Pakistani nuclear program, and Saudi has Chinese ballistic missiles that can carry such weapons. I think it'd take only as long as transport aircraft would need to fly from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia for the latter country to have its own nuclear arsenal.)
So far, Israel's strikes against Iran have used only conventional weapons. One hopes that'll continue . . . because if one of those strikes should (God forbid) actually set off one of Iran's nukes, or blow up a reactor causing massive radiation pollution of the area and everything (and every country) downwind, then hell's come to breakfast. If Israel uses a nuclear weapon against Iran, hell will be there for lunch and supper too.
The real tragedy of these strikes, and any Iranian retaliation, is that the "little people" nearby - the ordinary citizens who live close to the targets - are going to suffer very severely. Bombs don't care if you're innocent or guilty; they'll kill you anyway. There may be thousands killed and wounded in these strikes, on both sides. Nobody is thinking about them, and they'll get precious little help from the authorities, who are preoccupied with preserving their weapons and related programs, and with hitting back.
I have all too intimate personal knowledge of the victims of violence, those caught in the crossfire between two enemies. I've tried to stop the bleeding from their shattered limbs, and held them in my arms as their lives fled their tortured, tormented bodies. I've picked up the pieces of their corpses (and yes, I mean that literally). They are not responsible for the evils being done around them, but they pay the greatest price for them. Nobody cares about them. Those giving the orders and wreaking the havoc are focused on "bigger" problems. The innocent who are caught up in the violence are just "collateral damage".
That may sound OK to those killing them, but it's very cold comfort indeed to those doing the dying. Try telling a shrieking, wailing two-year-old whose mother has just been decapitated by a burst of fire from a machine-gun that "everything's going to be OK". It's not. She may not be able to reason at all, at her age, but she knows that the face that's looked down with love at her all her little life is now unrecognizable raw red blood and brains and fragments of bone splattered against a wall. She knows - but cannot understand why - the arms that have always cradled her when she needed comfort are now limp and lifeless. A strange man she's never seen before is trying to take her away from her mother to whom she's desperately clinging, whose love and reassurance she desperately needs but will never know again. How do you tell that child that she's just "collateral damage", and that she should suck it up and get on with life?
Those are the people I'm thinking about this morning. Once you've seen their suffering, you can't forget it.
May Almighty God have mercy on them all . . . because nobody else is going to.
Peter
27 comments:
Kudos to you, sir! A person, a human being, in his/her individuality, is all too rarely mentioned in the "main stream" media.
It pains me to say it, but the alternatives were few, and all bad. Did innocents get hurt? Certainly. In this instance, I’m prepared to lay the guilt on the Iranian leadership who brought the circumstances to this pass. Where we are now is better than a nuclear war, and that seemed to be Iran’s desire.
Did they? It's been over 30 years as I remember that Iran has been CLOSE to A NUKE.
Seems the fog of {{Propaganda}} is deep here.
Innocents suffer but hey, as long as it's over there who really cares, judging from most commenters.
As a medic I hated seeing children covered with their mother's blood. Kneecapped teens that grow up as terrorists and blood feuds that never end.
Sadly, it's what humans do and have done since time began for our race. Hate, jealousy and "fight or flight" is built in. The information age plops in down in our laps 24-7 now. Not a religious person, however one of the first stories in the Bible is about Cain and Abel, two middle eastern brothers.
All true, Peter. Trouble is, what alternative was there? Iran has been openly hostile to both Israel and the United states. Having nukes would only galvanize its gonads. For Israel, the potential of a nuke-armed Iran was akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids. She couldn't allow that to come to pass.
From my point of view, I've never seen anything that has more potential to trigger WW3 than this in my 64 trips around the sun. May God INDEED have mercy on ALL of us...
Cue the "they deserve it, turn Iran into a glass parking lot" and "maybe the suffering will get them to change their government!1!" posts in 5...4...3...
Despicable and predictable.
"Collateral damage" (so wonderfully antiseptic a word) may be unavoidable, but acting like it's actually desirable or deserved is pure evil. God help the innocent and helpless. Christ have mercy.
The story of Cain and Abel comes after their parents, Adam and Eve, rebelled against God Most High by breaking the one rule that He had given them. They were created innocent and perfect, and they threw it all away by choosing to believe the serpent’s lie, “You shall be as God.”
Uh, no. Only God is God, and He will not share His glory with another.
Amen...
Pete maybe not be PARTY to the evil?
Our founding Fathers spoke passionately about "No Entangling Alliances" as they saw that Europe was always going to be a battle ground.
When the Barbary Pirates decided to mess with our young country we sent in a navy response, did the punishment and LEFT. No garrisons, no attempt at "Nation Building" and "Spreading Democracy and Homosexuality".
We don't have to have SNIP
Approximately 750 military bases
The United States has approximately 750 military bases located in at least 80 countries worldwide. This includes at least 128 military bases specifically noted in various territories as of early 2025. The presence of these bases is a result of the U.S. military's role as a global peacekeeper and its historical engagements
MAYBE we should go home and DEAL with the flaming mostly peaceful BS and such AT HOME?
" if one of those strikes should (God forbid) actually set off one of Iran's nukes"
Is that even possible? It's my understanding, from the reading I've done about the Manhattan Project, that a properly stored nuclear bomb can't detonate by accident. Well, a 'slug-gun' design like Little Boy (the Hiroshima Bomb) could go off by accident, but only if you're stupid enough to store it in a "ready to blow" condition, which nobody does for exactly that reason. I doubt the Iranians would do it either.
May God bless you and yours. You strike me as a good, caring man. You remind me of a good friend of mine. He is a fireman/EMT who has seen some horrible things. I've held him as he cried about some of them. He's my brother from another mother.
Jeffersonian
Islam - the religion of peace. The adherents misinterpret that "submission" was supposed to be by the adherents to God (Allah), not by the non-believers submitting to the adherents. Seems to be a failure to communicate.
So the solution is to let the Muslims just kill all of the Israelis, then the rest of us, who are also non-believers in the religion of peace? Doesn't sit well with me.
Well Don, there are Muslims INSIDE America as I type.
In Texas I understand they were building a City for themselves, some legal hassles I've also heard.
Some are even Senators I hear.
Got any good ideas about how to deal with that?
Because of the way nuclear and thermonuclear weapons work that scenario is highly improbable verging on impossible. Nuclear and thermonuclear weapons physics are very complex processes with timing requirements in the ten millionths of a second range to achieve the supercritical state to initiate nuclear detonation (let alone thermonuclear which has to be initiated by a nuclear detonation). A nearby thermonuclear detonation (like meters distance) MIGHT provide a heavy neutron pulse to initiate some fission in stored nuclear weapons. However the proximity (remember I guessed meters) to the fusion blast will mean the weapons would soon be experiencing temperatures rivaling the center of a star. Normal matter simply becomes plasma under those circumstances and physical blast and radiative pressure would likely disperse the plasma. Heat and blast effects from a more distant strike MIGHT ignite the explosives of a nuclear weapon. If the weapon is an implosion type(Fat Man) what you would get is a brief is at most a brief fizzle likely in the range of hundreds of pounds of TNT. If it is of the gun type(Little boy) the propellant charge might go off, but likely the initiator which provides the pulse of neutrons would either not be present or be so damaged that it would not fire. In either case what you get is a radioactive dirty bomb greatly increasing the nearby fallout (assumption Israelis would use air bursts not ground bursts although some buried structures might require ground penetrating strikes which would be very dirty)
Maybe it's just me but in my 71 years I have never met an Iranian that wasn't charming, engaging and welcoming. I have never accepted the drumbeat notion that the Jimmy 'peanut' Carter hostage crisis required me to forever hate them. No-can-do. If I awakened one day to news that Tehran had been nuked and destroyed it would crush me.
Same as with everyone else. Keep yourselves to yourselves and spread your faith by persuasion only, and we're cool.
Start trying to spread your faith by the sword, and we come down on you like a ton of bricks.
I used to work on nukes while in the Army, back in the 1980s. I spent a year at a joint-services school maintaining everything in the inventory and a few that we kept around for allies.
The physics involved in creating a high-yield detonation are intricate and involve presice timing, but certain warheads were susceptible to "popcorn" detonation. The neutron pulse of one going off could initiate low-yield explosions from others stored nearby.
I have no data on what kind of bombs Iran has been working on, but from the open-source Intel I have seen I would guess they were trying to duplicate our Little Boy gun-tube design. Much simpler than an implosion pit design and within their industrial capacity to build. The smaller cross-section would be a better fit for their missiles as well.
There is a certain fate that is unavoidable and a really horrible human life calculation that accompanies every decision in a military battle.
Pray for those whose departures truly are collateral consequences.
Pray for those who by tolerance of evil are in proximity and suffer death.
Pray for the enemies vanquished.
But in the end never shirk the responsibility of administering death when justified.
Do it well, honorably and decisively.
30 years of being "close to a nuclear weapon"? Hardly. The first reports that they were trying to acquire them or the technology to produce them are that old, but hardly "close" to building them. Iran Nuclear Crisis Chronology. If you think those fundamentalist religious nutballs have had an active uranium enrichment program for most of this century (and they admit they have), and yet haven't reached a point where they can rapidly assemble a number of them assumes too much, either in their good will or in their technical inability.
@Anon12:04PM: Have you ever met and really gotten to know any of the Iranian leadership? They are the ones who actually count in this, not emigres. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many Nazis could be charming, engaging, and welcoming -- when they wanted to be. That means nothing.
@Chaplain Tim: Precisely. That's what South Africa did in the 1980's to produce six or seven nuclear warheads: used a gun-type design instead of an implosion one. Much simpler technologically, and relatively simple to design.
Under Iran's doctrine evey Jewish Israeli man, woman, and child (and by extension, every Jew period) is an enemy occupying what is properly considered Islamic land and a legitimate target
Thererefore, every action by Iran against the Little Satan (or the Great Satan) that might look aggressive to Western eyes is in reality defensive.
And for them, only Muslims would be "collateral damage" but since they would be dying in jihad, they go straight to Paradise, which is really doing them a favor anyway.
On the other hand Iran uses its own population as human shields against attacks by enemies with Treaty of Westphalia derived rules of war. Which I think would even include the USA and USSR each holding the other country and its population hostage under MAD.
I must agree with you, Larry.
Larry, have you taken a LOOK at OUR "Leadership"?
The Clintons, Mad Maxine and so on.
People in power are not nice folks. Look at the lawsuits about even religious folks abusing kids.
The Epstein Files, need I say more?
Few if any of the folks in "leadership" are folks you want to meet and greet at a BBQ.
It's SO EASY to swallow propaganda because it's designed by OUR Leadership to make us feel like "We Wuz RIGHT" dem Iranians are EVIL.
The people always pay for the actions of their government, either for the good or the bad. That's why good government is so vital. The people won't pay with their lives.
I@Micharl, I claimed nothing about our leadership, one way or the other. If tu quoque is all you've got regarding Iran, then you've got nada.
I expect that simple design is what Iran would use so no enhanced weapons (injecting say Tritium to increase neutron flux and increase yield) nor 2/3 stage fusion weapons (that physics is NOT well known for obvious reasons). What was complex in 1944/45 is well understood now. Iran became masters of making shaped charge weapons providing variants of them throughout the middle east to insurgents. A decent TI 89 calculator or a raspberry pi could easily be programmed in Python to do the hydrocodes for the calculations. The speeds and containment needed for a gun bomb mean it has a long length for the projectile to come to sufficient speed AND the containing barrel needs to be strong steel (Little Boy's was literally a piece of a 5" naval gun). Smaller gun weapons were made (e.g. I think most of the US artillery shells were in that form) and I think A.Q. Khan ("father" of the Pakastani Bomb) is thought to have used a gun type design in Chagai-I. Unless Iran tests one above ground and we get fallout from it we won't know until it is used (G*d Forbid). Either way best they NOT have them.
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