Millions could be at risk from W.'s nuclear threats.

Yesterday W. finally got around to talking about Sy Hersh's story in the New Yorker that says Bush is planning on possibly using nukes in any attack on Iran. It's all "wild speculation," he says. The WaPo reports he "emphasized that his doctrine of preempting threats does not necessarily mean the United States has to use force to stop other countries from developing weapons of mass destruction."

W. says, "I know here in Washington prevention means force. It doesn't mean force, necessarily. In this case, it means diplomacy." Of course it does, that's why according to Hersh so many officers are thinking about resigning if W. doesn't take the nuclear option off the table.

Hersh said on CNN:

"What I'm writing here is that if this [plan to use nukes] isn't removed and I say this very seriously, I've been around this town for 40 years, some senior officers are prepared to resign. They're that upset about the fact that this plan is kept in. And one thing about our military, they're very loyal to the president, but they're getting to the edge. They're getting to the edge with not only Rumsfeld, but with Cheney and the President."

It's about time these officers start honoring their oath to the constitution and not to whoever happens to be president. As Lt. General Newbold said in an article in the NYT, "We must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it."

Globalsecurity.org has information on the effects of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNE) If it were actually used in Iran, millions of people could be killed and the fallout of such an attack would spread over a large swath of the Middle East and South Asia.

Anyone, who seriously thinks a "limited" nuclear stike by a "bunker buster" can be achieved in Iran ought to be relieved of their duty immediatly and locked up in a looney bin.

A "Free Executive Study" finds that "current experience and empirical study indicate that earth-pentrator weapons cannot penetrate to depths required for total containment of the effects of a nuclear weapon."

For a one kiloton bomb: "The same yield and weather conditions, the number of casualties from an earth-penetrater detonated a few at a few meters depth, is for practical purposes, equal to that from a surface busrt of the same weapon yeild...For attacks near or in densely populated urban areas using nuclear earth-penetrater weapons on hard and deeply buried targets (HDBTs), the number of casualties can range from thousdands to more than a million."