“… be centuries before anybody could go there and survive again..”

I’m not trying to argue your other points; (not that I agree with ALL of them), just trying to interject some real world measurements and experience into the equation.

Don’t make me go get my long time friend who was an engineer up at the Nevada Test Site and has direct and timely experience of what happens after some pretty big nuke explosions. ;-)

I would nuke Buraday in the north, the home of the Wahhabi death cult; Riyadh, the capital; and then scour out the southern corner where the evil Al Ghamdi tribe live. Two of the Sep 11 skyjackers were Al Ghamdis.

Leave the Hijaz and Eastern Province alone. The Hijaz are somewhat civilized for Saudi barbarians. They can run Mecca. The Eastern Province has the oil wells and is largely oppressed Shiite in a Sunni Saudi Arabia.

And don’t worry about anybody missing the Saudis. They won’t.

Here are some FACTS about the radiation exposure for one ‘ground zero’ site a mere 62 years after the event. (It, admittedly, wasn’t big by modern standards)

Not very big, and using a completely different type of mechanism than modern weapons, which has a great deal to do with the amount of contamination produced.

In general, though, it’s well-established that the closer to the surface an explosion takes place, the greater the amount of environmental irradiation there will be. An air burst is relatively clean; a ground burst (though actually less destructive) is radiologically far more dirty (literally).

http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/watson/watson27.html
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q1290.html

George and/or Subsunk, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the ‘automatic‘ launches only happen if C&C are destroyed; If the President, V.P (and maybe Speaker) are killed or incommunacado for X? hours?….

LegendHasIt on May 10, 2007 at 5:10 AM

Sir, we are at risk of touching on classified material there. Let us just say that Command and Control of some sort is necessary for the launch of nuclear weapons. Our Strategic Deterrent Forces cannot launch on their own at any time. Loss of Command and Control Communications has an entire book dedicated to it, and the plans cover so many areas as to be infathomable in this thread. However, there are Admirals and Generals assigned to act in the event of a nuclear attack rendering civilian Command and Control incapable of direction, and their strategic communications equipment is sturdy and as well designed as possible to withstand massive nuclear strikes.

A lot of responsibility rides on those gentlemens’ and ladies’ shoulders. They have a book to guide them also. I couldn’t even guess what it has to say. However, I am sure if faced with a choice which demands retaliation or risks a second more devastating attack on the United States, they will all follow the guidance outlined above.

Our country is never completely undefended, even when Dhimmicrats refuse to fund the front lines of defense, as they are now doing. If required to use pitchforks and shovels, there are some of us who are proficient with both.

Subsunk

Legend, I did not mean to imply that a deus ex machina is in place. I don’t think that Subsunk did either.

Gerorge, all due respect, but it doesn’t promise nuclear anhillation to the muslim world if they use WMDs on us. At least in the declassified one… (Maybe you have access to the classified stuff and it does.)

What it says, in bureaucrateese not easily deciphered by Mo and Jam Sixpack, is that we reserve the right to use any and all options to retaliate upon those we decide to hold responsible. NOT that we will definitely do it, nor thast it will be wide spread if we do.

As I read it, NPSD 17 is about a clear deterrent message to the entire Muslim world as Casper Milquetoast telling a drunk and agressive Hells Angel that he has a gun at home and MIGHT go get it and use it if the biker beats him up.

Nope, we HAVE to issue a much more clear and certain message than that if we want any kind of deterrent effect on the terrorist community.

I’m sure that the PLANS for the nuclear strikes that you and Subsunk are mentioning have been made and programmed into the targeting computers. But I have serious doubts that they surely and automatically will launch upon the use of any WMDs against us, even with the current Administration.

You guys may know it for a sure fact, a done deal… (even way back when, when I was THE guy that would have actually set up our unit SADMs, the authority for ‘pressing that last button’ was way, way, WAY beyond my paygrade.). If so, or if I have misinterpreted your statements in any way, my apologies. But I remain very skeptical that it any kind of certain thing.

The only thing that would really convince me (much less Mohammed) that we are really serious is if the House, the Senate and the President passed a Binding and non-expiring Resolution to proceed in that way. A public Presidential Executive Order would reassure me somewhat, but only for the next year and a half.

Those foreigners whose job it is to watch America have no doubt noted the formal statement of policy in NPSD 17 PROMISING that we will go nuclear.
georgej on May 10, 2007 at 3:23 AM

Well, not disagreeing, but just to interject something: That is a pretty reasonable assumption as long as the Commander in Chief is Bush or just about any of the other Rep. candidates.

But what about if (God forbid) nearly any one of the Dem’s gets in?

I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, Obama gets elected that one of his first executive orders was that there would be no immediate retribution of any kind, especially not nuclear. Of the Dems, the only one that I can imagine allowing massive retaliation is Hillary… Not because she particularly cares if a big chunk of America gets zapped, but because she would view it as a personal affront and messing up her plans.

George and/or Subsunk, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the ‘automatic‘ launches only happen if C&C are destroyed; If the President, V.P (and maybe Speaker) are killed or incommunacado for X? hours?

But even if I’m completely off base with that, I will still have my doubts that ‘NPSD 17′ will have any deterrent effect on any of the non-State sponsored Terrorist groups… Or even Ahmadinejad. The guys in Al Qaeda etc, don’t care if Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus and even Kabul are glowing. Zawahiri and his boys will be willing to take their chances in their caves.

Plus they hope and expect that their allies in the Democrat Party will protect them from anything massive.

And Ahmadinejad WANTS it to happen. I’m not sure if his bosses do, but HE would welcome it…. At least until he realizes that that burning sensation will continue for eternity and there ain’t no 12th Imam OR 72 Virgins coming.

I still think that the best way to avoid this isn’t MAD, but by a well and widely publicized threat that every ‘Mohammed and Jamila Sixpack’ in every mosque in the world will hear and understand:

That the sites that they revere most, Mecca, Medina etc. will be destroyed and defiled if they allow their more radical brethern to use a WMD on American (or Israeli) Soil. You have to play to their psychological weaknesses. The concept of widespread nuclear annihilation is really not a significant fear in their worldview, even among the ones who are capable of grasping the realities of it. But the concept of the destruction of a small single target is something they can easily grasp.

georgej on May 10, 2007 at 3:23 AM

I would like to endorse every word in this post. Georgej understands the situation completely and absolutely. The rest of us should take notice and heed these warnings.

I cannot stress strongly enough how correct his post is. Read it, or weep at the Holocaust thrust upon us in the future.

Subsunk

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Life will find a way to exist in almost anyplace, including the tubeworms which thrive and grow at 400 degrees Fahrenheit on the ocean floor next to volcanic vents to the cockroaches which swam in the TMI reactor core during its cleanup, without horrible ill effects, I might add.

One millirem is about half what my monthly exposure was underway on nuclear power and one twentieth what my highest occupational exposure employees (ELTs for you nukes) received in a month. And my monthly exposure while I was inport was about twice what my underway exposure was. (All that water overhead screened out most of the cosmic rays). The hype and smoke over radiation exposure is belied by the fact that the largest radioactive source to people is the Sun.

Thanks LegendHasit for injecting facts into the discussion. Man would find a way to exist in radioactive Mecca within years of blowing it up, and if you think we can’t get to the oil in a few years after leveling Saudi Arabia, you are not sufficiently mercenary to imagine it.

Subsunk

Subsunk and I are both predicting that a nuclear weapon detonated inside the United States will probably result in the destruction of Islam and it’s adherents. Subsunk gave you the mechanics with respect to how our military would respond. I pointed out Wretchard’s conjecture of why the decentralized nature of Jihad (as well as their willingness to die for Allah) would make it impossible to call the war off even if we wanted to.

Some do not think America would actually do it, or would be shunned by the rest of the world as a result.

Some think that some kind of warning should be issued to deter attack by convincing Muslim countries to do more to contain their jihadist elements.

Others think that the scenario of over a billion human beings destroyed by our retaliation is unlikely, that we simply wouldn’t do it.

Let me clarify some points.

The unclassified portion of NSPD 17 (”National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction”, December 2002)_ explicitly states:

The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including through resort to all of our options — to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.

There. In black and white is all the warning that is needed for Islam to take note as to what will happen if the USA is struck with a WMD, not just a nuclear weapon. This is the open, bald-faced PROMISE of overwhelming retaliation (and the phrase “all of our options” means nuclear weapons, don’t kid yourself otherwise). There should be no doubt that we will retaliate with nuclear weapons.

I suspect that should a nuclear weapon be detonated in an American city, that Muslim countries around the world will be falling all over themselves claiming and trying to prove their innocence, hoping to avoid our retaliatory hammer.

Allahpundit says: “First we’d need to figure out who did it.” The presupposes that the people of the United States are going to care which jihadist group and which sponsor of state terrorism was involved. I do not think the American public will care, nor do I think the the federal government will dilly-dally trying to prove guilt in a court of law, or to the UN Security Council who’s responsible.

Personally, I think the op-orders have already been issued, and distributed to Strategic Command, as contingencies. I think which specific option is invoked may depend upon which ‘bad guys’ is the *likely* (not absolutely) culprit. I think that any retaliation will be wide (as in national or regional) as opposed to narrow or a specific “camp” or target.

While I would like to think that the United States would provide relief assistance after our strike, it would not surprise me that we simply let them rot. And I guarantee that there will be NO occupation, NO “nation building.” Our experience in Iraq will have foreclosed that option. No, we’ll strike hard, destroy cities and large areas of real estate, and maybe send in a few “blankets” and medical supplies afterwards, but I doubt that we’d send in any massive humanitarian aid.

What America’s enemies in the region — and our domestic enemies here at home, including ~60% of all Democrats and 100% of the domestic left — are missing in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is Wretchard’s THIRD conjecture. That the world is in a “golden hour,” that period of time where millions of American lives and billions of Muslim lives can still be saved if George W. Bush’s experiment in Democracy succeeds in Iraq.

So, let me point out to liberals and Democrats reading this: YOUR WILLINGNESS TO SABOTAGE THE WAR IN IRAQ IS LIKELY TO RESULT IN THE HORRIBLE SCENARIO THAT WE HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING HERE. In other words, you’ll be held responsible if the worst case scenario occurs.

If we succeed in Iraq, if Iraq becomes a democratic, non-secular, oriented government, the chances of Al Qaeda succeeding in their war against us, drops. If they win, Iraq will be the center of their efforts for world domination, they WILL get a nuclear weapon (from Iran, Pakistan, North Korea or the Russian black market or somewhere), they will use it against America and Islam will die, along with several million Americans.

So in addition to any Islamofascist generated genocide against the people of Iraq, once they strike, which ever country they are active in will be utterly destroyed.

I’ll leave you with one final note: After 9/11, the world was struck in awe by two things — Kabul didn’t vanish in a mushroom cloud as some in the UK press predicted, and that we bothered to invade a country on the other side of the world and take down the regime. When we did it a second time, 1 1/2 years after 9/11 in the strongest arab military power in the middle east, the world was again surprised at the ease at which we toppled Saddam.

Those foreigners whose job it is to watch America have no doubt noted the formal statement of policy in NPSD 17 PROMISING that we will go nuclear.

Don’t believe all the green propaganda you hear.

People occupied Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the bomb blast. Neither city is a radioactive desert today.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved air burst weapons. Presumably, if terrorists smuggled devices into American cities, they would be ground burst. That difference has enormous implications for fallout and long-term radioactive affects. The sites of ground burst devices would indeed be dangerously radioactive for centuries (and anything downwind would see substantially greater amounts of radioactive fallout, too).

That’s not to say that some sort of cleanup might not be possible–I imagine it would involve scooping up literally multiple mountains’ worth of irradiated soil and debris and disposing of it, somehow. But I don’t know how feasible an engineering undertaking that would be.

RD on May 9, 2007 at 10:40 PM

The Kaaba is not one gigantic piece of nickel meteorite. It is a hollow building made of primarily black granite and marble tiles and blocks. Thus, relatively fragile in terms of being able to withstand even a decent conventional bomb/missile.

The ‘Black Stone’ (the Hajar al-Aswad) is about a foot across and not even set in the ground:
PHOTO HERE
and isn’t even a single monothic stone itself, and may or may not even be a meteorite; Best guesses are that it was a hunk of basalt or lava, but no modern mineralogists/meteoritic has been able to examine it closely.

It was broken up in the middle ages and is now thought to be in 8 to 15 pieces embedded in some kind of conglomeration; probably natural resins and other crap and set in a silver bowl-like frame. In other words, it is very delicate. You could smash it to powder with a hammer.

The black rock itself really isn’t what is worshipped, Even the cube isn’t itself worshipped. It is the stone, cube, ‘plaza’ and surrounding structures taken all together, with their history and mythology that is meaningful to Muslims.

A couple of B-1s or Cruise missiles could take the cube out totally and permanently with conventional explosives. Heck, a Special Forces Team or Ranger platoon with a SADM could lay permanent waste to the cube.
A B-52 would be able to obliterate the whole site with one load of HE.

Subsunk on May 9, 2007 at 1:03 AM

Spot. on.

In that event, a question about Ka’aba physics: Would even a direct nuclear blast be enough to do this, assuming the “stone” were actually a solid nickel- or XXX-alloy meteorite? It’d be cold comfort to find out after the fact that obliterating the “rock” was more like trying to smash a solid metal cube than a piece of sandstone. Same issue applies to trying to “move” it – as heavy as rock is, metal’s heavier yet – I don’t know that we have a way to lift that much dead weight, even assuming it’s not fused to the ground or protrudes some ways into the ground.

If one wanted to guarantee that the Ka’aba vanished, including the bit below the surface of the ground, what all would be required? The question applies as much to the material that makes up the meteorite as it does to the size or the location.

But it’ll be 600 to 1200 years before that land becomes habitable for human beings. That’s a long long time to drive around the long way to get to grandma’s house.

Griz

Don’t believe all the green propaganda you hear.

People occupied Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the bomb blast. Neither city is a radioactive desert today.

I was thinking about Mohammad’s only “prophecy” today, regarding the Ka’aba (Bukhari Hadiths 2; 26; 665-666), in which he predicted that the “holy cube” will be destroyed “by a black man” (from “Ethopia”… a generic term for Africa in the 7th century Muslim mind).

Then I thought about a possible Obama presidency as a way to fulfill this prediction. Barrack, as Commander-In-Chief is forced to respond to a nuke attack on the U.S., and unwittingly brings about Mohammad’s only prophetic vision, destroying the Ka’aba (and Mecca with it).

Hey, it’s Mohammad’s presentiment, not mine.

I hope Obama gets no nearer the White House than a tour.

Based on the type of attacks carried out by AQ, they don’t need much money. They just need a place to train relatively unmolested. Where’s that? Iran.

Krydor on May 9, 2007 at 3:56 PM

Let’s hurt them too. Yeah, Iran is trying to establish itself as the head of the Islamic world, just as Khomeini did. But the British mosques and the mosques over here, as well as the ‘middle eastern studies’ programs in Western Universities have been sponsored by the Saudis. Yes, Iran is a serious problem, serious enough to nuke, but the Arabs are the worst in the long run. The pan-Arabist clan is the worst. The Muslim Brotherhood is probably being helped by Iran, but it was started by the Arabs.

I sense some snark coming your way from me, and hopefully Robert Spencer takes a gander at it. Up until September 11th, 2001 the main killer of Americans via terrorism were Iranian backed militant groups. One of the key players in Iraq right now is the Mahdi Army, an Iranian backed militia. One of the main suppliers of weaponry to both Sunni and Shia radicals in Iraq is, surprise, Iran. The best organized infiltration into the west was done by Iran. Any sort of nuke will come from Iran.

A withdrawl from Iraq directly benefits Iran. Everything, since 1979, is about Iran. It will be about Iran tomorrow and next week and next year. The other states in the region are at least paying lip service to killing radicals. The only one welcoming them with open arms is Iran.

Based on the type of attacks carried out by AQ, they don’t need much money. They just need a place to train relatively unmolested. Where’s that? Iran.

Subsunk on May 9, 2007 at 1:03 AM

Subsunk on May 9, 2007 at 10:05 AM

Subsunk on May 9, 2007 at 10:49 AM

Damn, subsunk, you’re just like Reggie Jackson in the 1977 World Series – everytime you’re at bat you hit a home run.

From another ex-submariner, well done.