AP: Rumsfeld spricht von Atomwaffen gegen Irak
Lueko Willms
Nachrichtenagentur "Associate Press", entnommen der Webssite der "New
York Times", einem autoritativen Sprachrohr der US-amerikanischen
Bourgeoisie, über die Angriffspläne der USA gegen Iraq.
Dem Artikel zufolge erwägt der US-Kriegsminister Rumsfeld den Einsatz
von Atomwaffen zum Angriff auf den Irak:
Atomwaffen gehören im allgemeinen Verständnis zu den
"Massenvernichtungswaffen".
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Experts Analyze Iraq Attack Options
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- No matter what war plan President Bush chooses, if he
decides to attack Iraq, the assault is almost certain to start from
above.
Strikes from U.S. warplanes and Tomahawk cruise missiles would aim first
to destroy Iraq's relatively sophisticated air defenses, war strategists
believe. The strikes would focus not on the surface-to-air missile
batteries and anti-aircraft guns themselves but on the radar and
communication networks that tie them together.
``You don't have to break every piece of an air defense system,'' said
retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who commanded the Air Force during the
Persian Gulf War.
The U.S. goal would be to own the skies; to be able to bomb Iraqi sites
and provide air support to ground forces with impunity.
The airstrikes would be aimed at isolating or killing President Saddam
Hussein and other Iraqi leaders and damaging Saddam's elite Republican
Guard units and the internal security mechanism around him. Rumsfeld
said during the weekend that U.S. military action would focus on Saddam,
not Iraq's infrastructure.
Initial airstrikes also would try to destroy Saddam's nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons facilities and his long-range missiles, targets
on which the United States has intelligence but are easy to hide.
Thus, many experts agree that removing Saddam and getting rid of Iraq's
banned weapons programs almost certainly would require ground troops,
possibly entering Iraq as early as days after bombing started.
``You're not going to be able to deal from the air with weapons of mass
destruction,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told lawmakers last
week. ``It would take deep penetrators and would require capabilities
that would have some effects that would not be nice.''
Rumsfeld's allusion was to nuclear weapons, which would be needed to
blow up deeply buried bunkers.
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Vollständiger Text unter:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-War-Scenarios.html
MfG,
Lüko Willms http://www.mlwerke.de
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Lueko Willms
schrieb L.Wi...@JPBERLIN.de (Lueko Willms)
auf /DE/SOC/POLITIK/MISC
in 8XVoc...@jpberlin-l.willms.jpberlin.de
ueber AP: Rumsfeld spricht von Atomwaffen gegen Irak
LW> Hier der Anfang eines Artikels der Us-amerikanischen
LW> Nachrichtenagentur "Associate Press",
und hier nun ein Artikel aus der britischen Tageszeitung "The
Guardian", die noch ausführlicher erläutert, wie sehr die Kriegsherren
in Washington und London ihr atomares Horrorarsenal bei einem Krieg
gegen den Iraq einzusetzen:
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The new nukes
The US is developing a range of handy, 'low-yield' bombs - and it's
prepared to use them. Richard Norton-Taylor reports
Tuesday August 6, 2002
The Guardian
For the first time since the height of the cold war, the US is seriously
contemplating the use of nuclear weapons. But this time they would not
be used, as they would have been then, against another nuclear power.
The proposal is that they would be used against countries developing
weapons of mass destruction - chemical and biological as well as nuclear
weapons.
Last week the Pentagon, for the first time, secured funds from Congress
to develop "mini-nukes", low-yield nuclear weapons designed in
particular to destroy underground bunkers. The plan to build a new
generation of nuclear weapons, military analysts say, is behind the
growing pressure on the White House to withdraw from the comprehensive
test-ban treaty. American nuclear scientists last week also secured an
agreement whereby tests on new warheads could start within a year of any
request, rather than the existing mandatory delay of three years. They
have been instructed to drill new boreholes in the test grounds of the
Nevada desert.
"Part of American thinking is that some tasks cannot be achieved without
using nuclear weapons," says Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at
the University of Bradford.
All this was foreshadowed by the leaking, in March, of the Pentagon's
"nuclear posture review". The classified document blurs the long-
accepted distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. It
foresees the use of nuclear weapons in three scenarios: against targets
able to withstand attacks by non-nuclear weapons (such as underground
bunkers); in retaliation for an attack with nuclear, biological or
chemical weapons; and "in the event of surprising military
developments", such as an "Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbours, or
a North Korean attack on South Korea or a military confrontation over
the status of Taiwan".
"North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya are among the countries that
could be involved in immediate, potential or unexpected contingencies,"
it says.
The review shows how the Pentagon unashamedly seeks to claim some kind
of moral high ground: new kinds of nuclear warheads, it says, could
actually reduce "collateral damage". What it is saying is that small
nuclear weapons might kill fewer civilians than conventional weapons.
Such an assertion contradicts scientific studies about the short- and
long-term consequences of radiation resulting from a nuclear blast -
even from a low-yield weapon striking a deep-underground bunker.
According to William Peden, a Greenpeace expert, even a small nuclear
weapon would kill thousands, and thousands more would suffer from burns,
radiation sickness, blindness and other injuries leading to genetic
deformities - as happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A weapon of five
kilotons or even one kiloton -the Hiroshima bomb, regarded today as
tiny, was 15 kilotons - would be extremely dangerous, precisely because
the military would regard it as "usable", Peden says.
The Washington-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which
campaigns for nuclear disarmament, says that an attack on Saddam
Hussein's presidential bunker in Baghdad with a B61-11 bomb, for
example, "could cause upwards of 20,000 deaths".
Even Nato admits that "any nuclear weapons use would be absolutely
catastrophic in human and environmental terms... Such human cost would
ensure an enormous political cost for any nation that chose to use
nuclear weapons, particularly in a first strike."
But, of course, not everyone agrees, or at least not everyone is
listening. One keen advocate of small, precision-guided, low-yield
nuclear weapons is Stephen Younger, a former director of the Los Alamos
nuclear weapons laboratory and now head of America's Defence Threat
Reduction Agency, responsible for "counter-proliferation" programmes. "
Nuclear weapons pack an incredible destructive force into a small,
deliverable package," Younger wrote last year in a paper entitled
Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century.
A report published last year by America's National Institute for Public
Policy, a conservative thinktank, declared that "nuclear weapons can...
be used in counter-force attacks that are intended to neutralise enemy
military capabilities".
The authors of the report include Stephen Cambone, now a senior Pentagon
policy-making official; Stephen Hadley, George Bush's deputy national
security adviser; Robert Joseph, a member of the national security
council, and William Schneider, one of Bush's defence advisers.
"The old doctrine was that nuclear weapons were far too big and nasty to
use, and now they've moved towards developing nuclear weapons they can
actually use," says Peden.
And, as the defence analyst Dan Plesch puts it, by developing a missile-
defence system in combination with new nuclear weapons, the Bush
administration is "extending the notion of casualty-free war to nuclear
war".
Washington's new policy directly contradicts the so-called "negative
security assurances", the official policy of the US, whereby Washington
has pledged not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-armed state
"unless that state attacks the US or its allies in association with a
nuclear-weapons state".
Meanwhile, the British government, which abandoned Labour's traditional
"no first use" policy after the 1997 general election, appears to have
adopted the emerging US nuclear doctrine allowing for pre-emptive
strikes against a state that has no weapons of mass destruction, if it
is perceived to be a threat.
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, told MPs earlier this year: "I am
absolutely confident, in the right conditions, we would be willing to
use our nuclear weapons." However, he also said he was less confident
that they would deter "states of concern" - a reference to Iraq in
particular - from threatening or attacking Britain with weapons of mass
destruction. He later insisted that the government "reserved the right"
to use nuclear weapons if Britain or British troops deployed abroad were
threatened by chemical or biological weapons.
The government has declined to enter into any debate about nuclear
weapons policy, refusing to explain what it meant when it referred to
the Trident missile's "sub-strategic" role in its 1998 strategic defence
review. (The smallest nuclear weapon that Britain's Trident could
deliver now would be 100 kilotons, which is a "city destroyer".)
The government is also investing more than £2bn in the atomic weapons
establishment at Aldermaston, where nuclear warheads are designed.
Scientists from the centre have been stepping up their visits to nuclear
laboratories in the US.
Defenders of nuclear weapons have always insisted that they are needed
as a deterrent. Britain and the US appear to be admitting that this is
no longer the case.
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