An Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Would Be A Nuclear War by Ed Ciaccio

by Ed Ciaccio
Dandelion Salad
Featured Writer
March 9, 2012

An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, by Israel, the United States, or both, would be a nuclear war for two important reasons:

1. The GBU-28 “bunker buster” bombs which would be used to destroy hardened Iranian nuclear sites use depleted uranium to penetrate concrete. This means lethal radioactive contamination from those exploding bombs would be spewed into the air, ground, and water of Iran, with long-term health consequences to all the people of Iran as well as those in surrounding regions. The people of Fallujah, Iraq, already suffer these horrible consequences from the criminal U.S. & NATO use of depleted uranium there, war crimes which remain unpunished.

See this article: Depleted Uranium Situation Worsens

2. Destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, even by non-nuclear weapons, would release lethal radioactive contamination from those facilities into the air, ground, and water of Iran, with long-term health consequences to all the people of Iran as well as those in surrounding regions.

See this article: What No One Is Saying: The Horrors That Would Be Unleashed By a Strike on Iran

Whether Israel or the U.S. or both wage this avoidable, illegal war of aggression, the supreme international crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunals, on Iran, whether before or after the U.S. November elections, it would be a war crime and a crime against humanity of tremendous magnitude, inflicting irreparable harm on the people of the Middle East and affirming, for all time to Muslims everywhere, that the United States, which has reportedly supplied such “bunker buster” bombs to Israel, has absolutely no regard for Muslims as human beings.

Justifiably and correctly, such a monstrous attack would be seen as state terrorism against the civilian population of a sovereign state by one or more other states.

There is no telling what blowback would result from such an atrocity, but it would certainly cause Iran, and every other nation which fears itself to be in the crosshairs of the United States, to redouble their efforts to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent to U.S. and Israeli attacks.

Attacks of vengeance against U.S., NATO, and Israeli soldiers as well as civilians would certainly increase, as would terrorism against the West nearly everywhere.

Such a future world, even more heavily nuclear-armed than now, and facing unprecedented crises about food, water, and refugees resulting from the catastrophic climate changes already occurring, will be an unimaginably dangerous world for all living creatures.

Is this future world what Israel and the United States want for their children and grandchildren?

Is this what any sane person wants?

Then why are we allowing it to happen?

Why are we even tolerating discussion of such a war in our media and political circles, as though it is both “normal” and inevitable?

The Charter of the United Nations, which binds both the United States as well as Israel, specifically and clearly prohibits such threats of war on other states.  All United States officials, from the President on down, take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.  Because of the Supremacy Clause of that Constitution, the United Nations Charter as well as the Nuremberg Principles are now parts of United States law which these officials all swore an oath to uphold, protect, and defend.

Whether or not the Corporate Media cares to point it out, every time a United States official says that “all options are on the table” with respect to stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, that official is violating his or her sworn oath of office.

United States and Israeli hegemony over the Middle East is what is really threatened by Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, not the respective existence of either nation. Iran is a dictatorial, oppressive theocracy which does support terrorism in other nations to further its own interests, just as the United States and Israel both also do to further their interests.  But Iran’s leaders are neither irrational nor suicidal.  Their eventual development of a nuclear weapon, if it ever happens, will be done for the same deterrent rationale which the United States and the USSR maintained all during the Cold War, and which Israel now maintains with its own nuclear arsenal.

It is past time that the United States and Israel realized that they cannot dominate and control the Middle East according to their own selfish interests any longer.

Either they learn to share power and influence, or they will plunge us all into horror.

The sanest alternative to such horror is a completely nuclear-weapons free zone throughout the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, the United States, Russia, and NATO.  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the United States and Iran, but not Israel, signed, pledges all signatories to eliminate nuclear weapons.

It is time we insisted that the United States live up to that treaty and that Israel sign it as well.

Perhaps then, a whole planet free of the terrible threat of omnicide by nuclear weapons can begin to come into being.

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Ed Ciaccio’s first book, Heartlines: Selected Personal Works 1966-2011, is now available at http://www.createspace.com/3722975 or www.amazon.com/.

see

Economic Warfare and Strangling Sanctions: Punishing Iran for its “Defiance” of the United States by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Noam Chomsky on Iran, the 2012 Presidential candidates, Anonymous, the Internet, Syria, Bahrain, Turkey, the Security Council and Education

What Are Iran’s Intentions? by Noam Chomsky

Foreign Policy’s Irresponsible Reporting on Iran’s Nuclear Program by Jeremy R. Hammond

The Nightmare by Felicity Arbuthnot

Iran Israel US Nukes