Part 4: 
Don't open the Pandora's Box
 of Nuclear War!

Unfortunately, that is what the world is moving towards. "All options are on the table" in the pursuit of war, regardless of whether or not society can sustain itself in the shadow of those options. 

The already 'accomplished' depleted uranium (DU) poisoning of the world in the full knowledge of its worldwide effect didn't deter society's fascist resolve to increase the horror. The 9/11 event was used like a 'key' re-open the DU-weapons box even though 300,000 US soldiers had returned sick from Iraq and were languishing as disabled and broken people on what some call America's  "DU-death-row." It was also known prior to 9/11 that the Iraqi people that had to go on living in their new DU-poisoned land were forced to suffer infinitely worse effects than the Iraq war vets were experiencing. But this already unspeakable human tragedy didn't deter society to go for more of the same. The depleted uranium box was opened again. Undeterred the horror story resumed and became worse. It resumed with a three times greater intensity in Afghanistan, and five months later with a five times greater intensity in Iraq. And to make matters worse, much of depleted uranium that was used in Iraq was exploded right in the major cities as if to maximize the DU-poisoning effect. 

That is the nature of the modern resolve to dig ever deeper into the box of universal inhumanity. Now the veteran's "DU-death-row" has swelled to well over 500,000. Even Adolf Hitler didn't intentionally poison his own soldiers on such a massive scale Soon a million civilians per year might be joining the Iraq vets on "DU-death-row" should the six-fold increase in reported lung cancer in the USA continue.

Of course there is far more evil in Pandora's nuclear box than dirty DU-bombs and the overwhelming resolve to use them. Consequently the USA is now officially committed to dig deeper into that box and bring onto the table, nuclear war. The use of "nuclear bunker busters" is now fully authorized. It is authorized to commence with the planned bombing of Iran. It is said that the nukes are 'necessary' as a means for destroying Iran's deep underground nuclear facilities. Iran has built these facilities for nuclear research and in support of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure that every nation on the planet has the right to create. America's coveted war to destroy these facilities and anything associated with nuclear power is officially based on the theoretical possibility that this research and the facilities can also be used to build an atom bomb in five to ten years time. But that is not the real reason, is it? The world is awash with close to 40,000 nuclear bombs already, half of them actively deployed with the rest sitting on the shelf or on the shelves of the black market. One more wouldn't tip the scale. So, obviously, all the gibberish about denying Iran the right to develop nuclear power is a wall of lies to hide the real intent to start another war for profit. And that is how the authorized use of thermonuclear bombs needs to be seen and understood.

The terminology 'nuclear bunker busters' sounds  almost harmless. 

Ah, but the reality is in the opposite. Nuclear bombs are not effective for digging deep holes. The huge fifteen megaton surface blast at the Bikini atoll in 1954 blew a hole into ground over a mile wide, but it penetrated only 250 feet deep. In the process of that atomic test the blast vaporized over thirteen billion cubic feet of coral, rock and water into a radioactive cloud that extended 130,000 feet into the stratosphere with a mushroom top that grew 60 miles wide. All of that vaporized material in the cloud had become extremely radioactive in the moment of fission, with fallout effects that were felt worldwide. Of course, the fallout had devastating local effects. Through twelve years of nuclear testing in the Bikini Islands, that ended in 1958, the islands became uninhabitable and remained so to the present day.

The presently considered bunker buster nuke, the B61-11 (Earth Penetration Munitions) is a much smaller device than 'Bravo' and comes in a variety of 'flavours' according to the desired explosive yield. Unfortunately the radioactive fallout that it produces for the kind of job it performs tells a tale that is barely imaginable. 

With its smallest yield of 0.2 kilo-tons, the B61 digs a hole 70 feet deep and produces 25,000 tons of radioactive fallout in the process. To reach 10 feet deeper a 5-times larger yield is needed (1 kt) that produces 60,000 tons of fallout. To get down to 100 feet deep, a 5 kt yield is needed that produces 200,000 tons of fallout. In order to dig down even further, to 220 feet deep, a 100 kt yield would be needed (10-times as big as the Hiroshima bomb), that would create a whopping 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris, being thrown high into to the atmosphere. 

It stands to reason that Iran's secret nuclear facilities would likely placed far deeper underground than 220 feet, possibly located in deep mines. Consequently it will likely take many successive nuclear blasts to excavate them out of their hidden recesses. The largest explosive yield that could be used for this purpose would be 12-times bigger still (1.2 mt - 120-times as big as the Hiroshima bomb was). With that yield the Earth Penetrator is expected to reach 1000 feet deep, but with a fallout that's incalculably large, probably in the range of the tens of millions of tons.  

Most likely several nuclear blasts might need to be thrown down into the same hole, successively, in order to burn the deepest facilities out or the ground with the radioactive fallout becoming astronomically massive in the process. 

One of the few people who are still around from the early nuclear weapons tests, warns: This Way Lies Madness. Unfortunately, that is what the world has become committed to and is inclined to tolerate in its apathy towards its self-poisoning by accepting fascism as an inevitable way of life.

What fascism proposes is a life that no one can live and survive. America had conducted altogether slightly over 300 nuclear tests in the atmosphere, with the Soviets probably having a similar number to report. The health horrors from the combines fallout had already such staggering worldwide effects that it forced the entire testing scheme underground. It has been our historic experience that whatever comes out of the nuclear Pandora's Box does have worldwide effects.

It is no longer true that America is a far and distant land from the theatre of war where it can drop its bombs with impunity, being hidden and protected half-way around the world. That's no longer valid. America is in the world and there is no place to hide anymore when the effects of war have global reach. If any part of the world is poisoned with the 'smog of war' America will be poisoned too, as does the rest of the world. That is what the massive DU poisoning of the world, with dirty uranium bombs, has amply demonstrated. 

Apart from that, America might also become overwhelmed with compensation claims from the already accrued worldwide damage, inflicted contrary to international law. In fact 9/11 related compensation claims are already being made. They may not succeed. But the trend is evident. Especially now, with Iran being targeted for no lawful reason the claimable damage that will then be inflicted may soon be mounting up, and more so when the nuclear bunker buster bombs begin to blacken the sky and the fallout starts to cover the Middle East and from there begins to drift into Europe and America. War damage claims are nothing new. They have long been a feature of international relations. Only the size of the claims will be unprecedented. Of course, no monetary claim can ever resurrect the dead and repair the damage society inflicts on itself by not preventing the wars in its midst.

The historic radioactive 'soup' that had blackened the sky in Hiroshima had not been as deadly that what is normally produced with ground level explosions of the same yield. The Hiroshima blast was a high-level explosion. The fallout from a surface-level blast is typically more deadly, and evidently more so when the fallout comes from the deeper, subsurface blasts for which no precedent as yet exists. The radiation-rich nuclear bunker-buster 'soup' will most likely fall back to earth in the downwind direction where it begins to kill and sicken large populations as it contaminates the environment sufficiently to render large areas 'unusable' for generations to come. 

Here is a comment from a concerned writer on the subject that should raise at least some eyebrows:

One cannot help but wonder what as citizens we still do not know about the subject of nuclear weapons, not only in the sense of the surreal excesses of the Cold War past, but in terms of the hidden, weaponized nuclear present that will be with us for as long as we know time. - Michael Light

Michael Light is author of 100 Suns, the photographic record of the US atmospheric tests. (See: Michael Light - 100 Suns)

(Also see: ATMOSPHERIC NUCLEAR TESTS IN NATIVE AMERICAN DOMAINS: PACIFIC OCEAN AND NEVADA )

Some of the fallout from the nuclear bunker busters that are authorized to be used against Iran will likely be transported to North America within the channels of the northern jet streams and in the South within the tropical trade winds. The fallout will then spread across the major population centers of the USA that the jet streams feed into. From there they become a part of the circulation pattern of the North American Polar Anticyclone that also the trade winds feed into from the South. How much damage will be inflicted on America by the nuclear weapons fallout in South Asia, and from further DU-dumping in that region, can of course not be predicted. Nor will the larger health effects become visible until a few years have passed, by which time it will be far too late to cry. 

The already existing health crisis and its potentially global extend, is expected to be made significantly worse by the likely simultaneous eruption of still another crisis that is already gathering storm. 

The additional crisis will be the general breakdown crisis of the world-financial and economic system that is widely expected to result in the aftermath of the destruction of Iran, since Iran is is a major part of the global oil-supply infrastructure. With the world-financial system already teetering at the brink of collapse, reeling under destructive financial speculation that amounts to nothing less than insanity pervaded with unpayable mountains of debt, the whole global system is expected to blow out in synchronized unison with the Iran bombing shock. This horrendous financial and physical collapse may be tearing the world's economic house down at a time when the greatest biological crisis in history might be unfolding, caused by the same shock. 

Ironically the global society, including the American society, cares too little about its physical existence to take meaningful actions to prevent the fascist forces from erupting their intended enormous new crisis. Too few people are standing up for peace in the face of the terror of pre-emption, and fewer still stand up for the Principle of Universal Love, and far fewer still seek peace as an active expression, as society's Universal Kiss unfolding individually and collectively. Peace can never be a passive thing. Peace must be an active quality. The Universal Kiss must be the expression of society from the grassroots level to the highest realm in business, science, culture, even in the politics of its Congress and Senate, all the way up to its Presidency. The Principle of the Universal Kiss is imbedded in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble of its Constitution. The nation is founded on the Principle of the Universal Kiss and not on a dead principle that can be shelved and be forgotten. On this principle rests mankind's security and prosperity. Without it, mankind has neither, universally across all nations.

One thing is certain. A portion of the gory bombs that the American government intends to dump physically on Iran, resulting not only in direct killing, but far more so in nuclear pollution or DU-pollution, will come back to the USA. The physical poisoning of the world will flow back to America via the 'highway' of the jet streams and the air flows in the Intertropical Convergence Zone that 'moves' with the trade winds. America will also, undoubtedly, reap in rich measure the financial disintegration that it has been promoting for many decades already with its massive looting of the world. 

While the worst of the looming tragedy can still be prevented with long established principles, there is too little serious commitment apparent in any nation to take the required steps to establish an active peace. If the global society doesn't break out of its doldrums with the Principle of the Universal Kiss, the prepared for tragedy will probably happen. Indeed, if no one cares enough to love our humanity sufficiently to stop the intended madness, and replace it with a 'kiss,' why wouldn't the presently planned catastrophe happen?

One can find a parallel in this situation with the trade winds. The tropical pollution is actually not spread across the world by the trade winds.  In reality it is the Earth that moves beneath the Intertropical Convergence Zone. By this latency the particular air mass of the Hadley Cell that the Mid East fallout feeds into, will become positioned over America in ten to fifteen days. This means that it won't be the wind per say, but the latency in the system, that brings the pollutants back to us without fail. 

The winds will however drive the portion of the fallout that gets fed into the northern jet streams. This portion gets moved with the force of powerful fast moving winds that will reach the USA within a couple of days or three. In the spring the jet-stream driven fallout from Iran would enter the USA from the South on the West Coast, fanning out from there across most of the USA with the fringe reaching north into south-eastern Canada before it becomes a part of the North American Polar Anticyclone system. The anticyclone is a centrifugal driven by cold-air flow coming down from northern Canada into the Gulf of Mexico with a return path over the East Coast and parts of the Atlantic circling back into the Arctic.

The parallel is, that in either case, with the combined effect of active winds and passive latency, America will reap a major portion of the horrors that it sows as the result of its geographic position on the planet. The same happens economically, both by passive latency and by active destructive processes that are driving the economic system into the ground, such as by looting the world's wealth instead of creating new wealth with productive processes.  The very opposite of this passive latency and active destruction is the Principle of the Universal Kiss.

The sudden six-fold increase in lung cancers in the USA that may add up to a million new deadly cases per year, seems to confirm America's unique exposure to airborne contamination originating in South Asia. America finds itself to be a part of the world that it abhors, and not being isolated from it. In terms of the nuclear-bomb contamination that America now indents to produce in large quantities with the planed Iran bombing (and the bombing of North Korea that is still on the agenda), a vastly more deadly cocktail of over 300 different fission products would be added to the already deadly DU-contamination of North America. It has also been learned from the early bomb tests that surface blasts, inherent in bunker busters, produce more deadly fallout than those set off at higher altitudes. In the surface blasts more material becomes irradiated and vaporized to produce exotic radioactive by-products. The resulting deadly effect will likely be increased as the bunker busters reach deeper and deeper into the ground. The final end result would them be affected by so many factors that nothing can be forecast with any certainty, except to say that the result won't be pleasant. A single one megaton bunker buster blast would create fallout with short term deadly effects that would reach far into India, killing an estimated one million people, and would in addition have long term global effects that are incalculable.

One might even suggest that we haven't seen anything yet, as indeed we haven't. No precedent exists for the nuclear bunker busting that is already planned, which incidentally also includes the vaporizing of nuclear materials in the targeted nuclear fuel processing facilities. The whole project of 'piling insanity upon insanity' is utterly absurd, especially since nothing productive comes out of it. Indeed, nothing good has ever resulted from war. War is a contradiction in itself.

Since the American people have now committed themselves to revisit the Cold War arena with a stern resolve to the insanity to use nuclear weapons, except this time in an unprovoked manner against a people that do not possess such weapons of mass destruction, it may be useful to consider how vulnerable North America itself is in the arena of nuclear war. 

At the height of the Cold War 65,000 nuclear bombs were hanging over the world in an East/West standoff with swords drawn for a fight to the death. The actual crossing of the swords never happened. We came close, but a few reasonable men prevailed for the great fortune of mankind. Nevertheless, even now, twenty years later, the swords remain drawn. The number of the warheads, as we prefer to call them to deceive ourselves, has been reduced to less than 40,000 depending on which ones are counted. We call this reduction progress, but all of this progress has not reduced the danger one bit. We are far from the point where the danger ends since the destructive effect of these weapons has been so 'improved' that a single missile with a dozen warheads can potentially disable Canada and the USA together as functioning nations. 

The bottom line is that the world is as vulnerable today as it has always been, if not more so in today's political world of increasing insanity in high places. Mankind should certainly not open the nuclear Pandora's box any wider that it already has, by taking the nukes out of the strategic strong box and putting them on the shelf for field use. That adds up to suicide. The days are over when any nation anywhere on the planet can play the proverbial elephant in a china shop and expect to get away with it with impunity. We have wasted fifty years in trying to resolve this issue with force, terror, and fear, instead of by developing the Principle of Universal Love for a new platform for civilization unfolding actively in what might be called the Principle of the Universal Kiss. It appears that we have no options left, but to become serious in finding a platform for an active peace in which we can live securely, richly, and have a bright future. Apert from that, we have no future.

I started writing a novel in the 1980s, Brighter than the Sun (free access online). The goal was to explore the deep vulnerability that we have created for ourselves as a society living in the world of nuclear weapons insanity.  Much of the novel was written at the height of the Cold War. I then updated the novel slightly in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union since it appeared that the Cold War hasn't really ended, but has actually become worse and has increased our vulnerability as the policy to create tension in the world has been put increasingly onto the 'front-burner.'

The danger of the policy of tension is that something can snap in an incalculable manner, even with the best intentions standing in the background, and more so when evermore conspiracies and private interests enter the scene as we have it today. And then there is the factor of patriotism. When the national governments loose the trust of the people the chances become increased that some frightened individuals begin to take things into their own hands. 

The novel begins in Russia with an act of sabotage designed to frighten the world leaders with the magnitude of their own game. A missile is launched targeting a dessert. No one is supposed to get hurt. But unknown to the saboteur the targeting had been reprogrammed and the most sensitive spot in North America is hit, the Bangor nuclear submarine base and the Hanford nuclear reservation, the nation's chief dumping ground for nuclear waste. The resulting fallout gets into the jet stream and is carried eastward as the ash fall had been from the Mt. St. Hellens eruption. In the East, the North/South air currents spread the radioactive 'poison' across the most densely populated area of North America. America needs to be evacuated. 

Of course, scare stories do not solve anything. Fear does not uplift the thinking of society. Thus the bulk of the novel is therefore focused on the resulting human dimension of responding to such a great universal crisis and recovering from it. Consequently the novel is focused on the unfolding dimension of a love for one another that naturally results when the artificial division and isolation is shifted out of the way by the magnitude of this kind of new situation in which the old 'conventions' no longer apply, both socially and politically. Thus the crisis story becomes a love story, and hopefully the love story will add one small bit towards raising the universal love towards one-another that we must raise throughout the world on order that this kind of a crisis will never come to pass. 

The Principle of the Universal Kiss is really our only hope to create an active peace, to accomplish in our nuclear armed world what we must accomplish to survive and have a future, but which has never been accomplished before.

Maybe some movement is happening along this line. According to the New Yorker July 3, 2006, the use of nuclear weapons against Iran has been taken off the table as politically unacceptable. Also, according to the Los Angeles Times (June 30, 2006), reporting on a U.S. Supreme Court decision, it has been determined by the court that the Geneva Convention is not dead (which affords a minimal protection of human beings in the conduct of war) and might in the future lead to war-crimes charges against U.S. President Bush and his cabal who put themselves above the law of the land and international law.

While the war against war is far from being won, it is encouraging to note that a few small steps have been taken in the right direction. May they serves an an overture to the giant steps that need yet to be taken to save mankind.

Continue: Part 5: Private Armies, Captive People

 Related Internet links

 9/11-related links

 Depleted-uranium related links

 Future-related links (future wars, science, and the coming Ice Age)

The above exploration is presented by Rolf A. F. Witzsche, an independent researcher, publisher, and author of eleven novels. The novels are focused on exploring the Principle of Universal Love, the principle that is reflected to some degree in every bright period throughout history with the added challenge for today to give it an active expression as Our Universal Kiss.

Novels by Rolf Witzsche

free online with love