Iran and the bomb

Let's start with an excerpt from The Economist, on a possible air attack on the Iranian nuclear program:

Attacking Iran: Up in the air

But even if things went off without a hitch Iran would retain the capacity to repair and reconstitute its programme. Unless Israel was prepared to target the programme’s technical leadership in civilian research centres and universities the substantial nuclear know-how that Iran has gained over the past decades would remain largely intact. So would its network of hardware suppliers. Furthermore, if Iran is not already planning to leave the NPT such an attack would give it ample excuse to do so, taking its entire programme underground and focusing it on making bombs as soon as possible, rather than building up a threshold capability. Even a successful Israeli strike might thus delay Iran’s progress by only three or four years, while strengthening its resolve.

In other words, an air attack simply will not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

From the print edition:

Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders.

In my opinion also, the best possible thing that can happen to a paranoid xenophobic regime like Iran or North Korea is a limited attack on it. Think about it: the government chiefly legitimizes itself by creating a worldview where their state is under constant attack from a hostile surrounding world. It's totalitarianism 101. An attack on Iran would basically tell the population that the bearded crazies ranting about how the Great Satan America is going to attack them any minute now were right all along. In an article I link to later, Iran's opposition "Green movement" is quoted as saying that a US/Israeli attack is the worst possible thing that could happen to reform in Iran. There can be little doubt that they're right.

As an article in the Washington Monthly strongly argues, the whole notion of a nuclear-armed Iran as a horrible disaster for the whole world doesn't seem to be grounded in any actual strategic scenarios. On the contrary, Iran only seems to want a nuclear capability to deter the US and Israel. Not that any clear case for the air strikes is being made, either; the USAF chief of staff recently wondered what the objective of an air campaign might be, in fairly skeptical terms.

It should be remembered that Iran constantly faces an aggressive near neighbor with a considerable nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal and a propensity to invade nearby countries: Israel. Iran is also one of the rare nations that has had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the not-so-distant past; the conventional carnage of the Iran-Iraq war was horrifying enough, but Iraqi atrocities like the Halabja attack added an element of pure horror to the war. Iranian leaders are unlikely to have forgotten that the Iraqi chemical arsenal was provided by the very countries that are now so stridently opposed to Iran's nuclear program, or that the US helped silence reports of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians.

Iran can also hardly be expected to forget that those same Western powers have for decades tacitly accepted Israel's nuclear arsenal, even keeping quiet when Israel actively participated in the apartheid-era South African nuclear program. From Iran's point of view, the West's position seems to be that while Western allies are allowed to use weapons of mass destruction against Iran, and countries like Israel and apartheid South Africa can develop a nuclear capacity, Iran can't. It's a policy that's hard to justify to its victims.

An attack on Iran would be militarily risky, wouldn't stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and would seem to have no positive consequences whatsoever for the security and stability of the Middle East. And that's exactly why Israel is so likely to carry it out.

The basic strategy of Israel since its founding has been the strategy of the "iron wall", best described by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book of the same name. In short, throughout its existence Israel has deliberately maintained a high state of tension with its neighbors. Most of the time, little active effort has been required, but when it has, Israel has resorted to terrorism and provocations, and as a last resort, invaded its neighbors. This strategy of tension serves to keep Israeli domestic policies in line; with the constant threat of an external enemy, criticism of the powers that be can be stamped out as treason, and any external criticism dismissed as anti-Semitism. Israel's entire foreign policy rests on its image as a peace-loving victim of its innately evil neighbors; without that image the world would be too free to take a long, hard look at the way the Palestinians are being treated, and at other disagreeable aspects of Israel. The only lasting peace Israel can conceive of is one that it dictates.

This policy was last prominently seen in action in the criminal Israeli raid on the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. From a strategic point of view, the way Israel handled the situation was a disaster: nothing in the relief mission to Gaza was of sufficient importance to justify such a brutal attack, let alone the international outcry that followed - unless creating that outcry was one of the strategic aims of the operation: to once again "prove" to the Israeli people and their government's supporters abroad how the world is in league against poor, misunderstood Israel. The same motive has informed Israel's "settlement" program, which is deliberately designed to, among other things, sabotage the Palestinian peace process. It last accomplished this function when it was used to destroy the high-profile peace negotiations started by an astonishingly naive Obama administration.

An escalation of tension in the Middle East would be in Israel's interests as part of its continuing strategy of tension with the Muslim world. For that reason, they may very well present the US with a fait accompli in the form of an unilateral strike on Iran before the next presidential election. Because the topic of Israel simply cannot be addressed rationally in US politics, it would be electoral suicide for the Obama administration to not support an Israeli attack, no matter how counter-productive it would be from the point of view of US strategy. As long as US politicians continue to pretend that the United States and Israel have the same strategic goals, US Middle Eastern policy will be at the mercy of Israel's military adventurism. When this combines with the fact that US public discourse on Iran is completely detached from reality, Israel's design stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the long run, an Iranian nuclear capacity would probably stabilize the Middle East by making Iran more secure from intervention. The same thing happened with both the Soviet Union and China, even though hawks in the West prophesied disaster at the time. In its political history so far, the Islamic Republic of Iran had shown itself to be a largely rational state actor. So far, nuclear weapons in Muslim hands haven't led to a global or even local apocalypse. Treating Iran as a collection of genocidal lunatics to be cowed by a surgical use of American military power is repeating the same hubris that led to decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with potentially far worse results. In fact, the one thing that could be relied on to push Iran's leaders toward unreasoning radicalism would be a brutal US-Israeli attack. And that may well be exactly what Israel's political leadership wants.

If the aim is stability and consequently security in the Middle East, it seems to this blogger that the best way to achieve it in the current situation would be through mutual deterrence, as pioneered and perfected between the superpowers in the Cold War. Erect the paraphernalia of Mutually Assured Destruction anew in the Middle East: mutual and third-party verification of weapons, arms control treaties, a telephone hot line, the lot. There should still be plenty of Cold War know-how around. Such an arrangement would represent an equitable solution that addresses both parties' need for security and the rest of the world's interest in a peaceful oil-producing region. Included in the negotiations would be Iran's support for terrorist groups like the Hezbollah, and Israel's assassination campaign against the Italian nuclear program.

In the real world, this will never happen, because the West seems to be unable to exert the kind of diplomatic pressure on Israel that would bring it to the negotiation table and actually agree to a solution. Even acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons seems to be an insuperable obstacle, let alone bringing them up for negotiations.

Another option would be for the United States to extend some kind of security guarantee to Iran; essentially a "non-invasion" promise similar to the one made to the Soviets on Cuba. This, too, seems impossible. President Kennedy could do it, President McCain might have; President Obama simply can't. Even if he somehow found the foreign policy willingness and ability that his administration has so conspicuously lacked, letting the right go berserk over "appearing islamofascism" could decide the election.

Once again, the most likely outcome is that stability in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever; not because of any inherent characteristics of the region and its inhabitants, but as a consequence of the West's continuing insistence on treating Israel's interests as identical to theirs. As long as this dangerous illusion persists, the West's policy will remain essentially counter-productive to any lasting peace in the region.

It's almost inconceivable that the US, still embroiled in two wars (despite Obama's cold war-esque "withdrawals"), is contemplating intervention in Iran and even Syria to boot. Unless cooler heads prevail, the ongoing Middle Eastern entanglement (1990-?) and concurrent "war on drugs/terror/civil liberties" will become a national trauma to dwarf Vietnam, with far worse consequences for the stability of the whole world.

How many nuclear bombs would it take to destroy the Earth?

Let's start with pinup model Sabina Kelley.

The Helsinki International Film Festival was showing a movie about Grant Morrison, and the Finnish-language blurb mentions that Morrison "grew up in Scotland, near an army base holding enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world 50 times over".

I haven't seen the movie, and from the blurb I can't tell what "army base" they're talking about. Given that (as near as I can tell) neither V-bombers, British ballistic nuclear missiles nor US SAC aircraft were based in Scotland at the time, The most reasonable guess would be Faslane, home to the Royal Navy's nuclear submarines.

In the late '60s, Faslane became home to the Royal Navy's four Resolution class ballistic missile submarines. They each carried 16 Polaris A3 missiles, each carrying three 200kt independently-targeted warheads. So, 48 warheads at 200 kilotons each makes 9.6 megatons per submarine, and 38.4 megatons of total destructive power.

In other words, the total nuclear destructive power housed in a single Resolute clas ssubmarine was less than the 50-megaton yield of the Tsar Bomba, or less than two SS-18 Mod 2 warheads. The four submarines combined carried 192 200kt warheads; hardly enough to destroy the entire world even once. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were even enough to destroy the entire surface of Scotland.

Scotland has a total land area of 78,772 km2; according to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would take approximately 250 one-megaton nuclear warheads to destroy it. So late 60's Faslane didn't even hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy Scotland completely, let alone the world.

**

The notion that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over gets thrown around constantly, even at fairly high levels of government; last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the US and Russia that "We have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over".

Do they?

There's a beautiful series of infographics over at Information is Beautiful titled How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Kinda), that nicely illustrate the answer. In a word, no. The total explosive yield of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't nearly enough to destroy the whole inhabited surface of the world, let alone the world, let alone several times over.

This isn't to say that a global nuclear war wouldn't have unimaginably disastrous consequences. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at the height of the Cold War would have been an unparalleled planetary disaster, resulting not only in the direct deaths of millions, but in widespread radioactive fallout and, in all probability, a nuclear winter.

In my mind, the recent studies that suggest even a small-scale nuclear exchange could cause a global environmental catastrophe are suspect. The Second World War saw massive bombing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands and incinerated huge swaths of urban areas, but caused no notable climate effects. A similar instance was the predicted disastrous consequences of the oil well fires in Kuwait following the first Gulf War, which also seemed to ignore the experience of the Second World War. I'm not at all convinced that a small-scale nuclear exchange would have decisively more catastrophic effects. It would still, at the very least, be a horrible disaster for the populations involved.

**

To understand why nuclear weapons can't actually destroy the world, it's absolutely vital to understand several things about them. In my experience, it's these misunderstandings that usually lead to a hugely inflated notion of their destructive capabilities.

Firstly, nuclear weapons effects do not increase geometrically with yield. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13-18 kt. It destroyed buildings in a 1.6 kilometer radius. From this, it's often erroneously assumed that a 100kt weapon would have 5-10 times that effect, and a 1Mt weapon would have 50-100 times the area of effect. This is far from true; a 1Mt weapon would cause severe fire damage out to a radius of approximately 10km, and complete destruction of urban areas to a radius of 2.4km. That's a big bang, but far from 50-100 times the actual destruction caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

After the several megaton range, effects decrease even more sharply relative to the yield. The 50Mt Tsar Bomba caused total destruction out to a 35km radius, not the 500km that a simple calculation from one-megaton explosions would suggest.

This, by the way, is why it annoys me when nuclear bomb yields are described in "Hiroshimas", as in a bomb having so-and-so many times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It gives a totally misleading picture of the effects of the bomb in question.

Secondly, for nuclear weapons to destroy the world, they'd have to be targeted at the whole world. In other words, to get the most destructive area out of our nuclear weapons, we'd have to target them in order to maximize the damaged area. But in a real nuclear war, the targeting priorities would be completely different. It's assumed that some missiles won't make it, so all important targets will be targeted by several missiles. If all the warheads make it, overkill will result, meaning that some of the warheads won't even detonate at all. So for starters, a whole bunch of destructive power will be lost to a variety of causes like mechanical malfunctions and overkill.

This targeting also means that the nuclear weapon effects will be concentrated in a fairly small list of targets. In a Soviet-US nuclear exchange, missile bases, airbases and other military facilities, as well as cities, would have received far more than their "share" of nuclear destruction. So calculating the total area of the world our nuclear weapons could potentially damage is a totally theoretical number, since there is no plausible scenario in which nuclear weapons would be used for maximum area effect. That would require targeting a nation's nuclear arsenal all over the world, which, even in the context of full-scale nuclear war, would be completely insane. Nuclear warfighting plans have detailed, thought-out strategies for using nuclear weapons; they don't just say "press button - destroy world".

Even if we tried, we couldn't even destroy the total inhabited surface area of the world; and we're not even trying.

**

The idea that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over is totally false. We don't. It's remotely possible that if we put our minds to it, i.e. combined the total nuclear arsenals of the world and made a concerted effort to use them to destroy human life, we might be able to kill everyone. Then again, if we persuaded everyone to walk off a cliff, that would do it as well.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous and frightening in their own right; there's no need to concoct these ridiculous "enough nukes to destroy the world 50 times over" myths to prove it.

Turkey time

Der Spiegel: Turkey Accused of Using Chemical Weapons against PKK

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts. The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings.

As I'm writing this well before it'll be published, more information on this story may well have broken. Sounds like mustard gas to me, for what it's worth. It's good to see someone carrying on Saddam Hussein's minority policies.

**

Whether the story turns out to be true or not, the condition of the Kurds is something worth remembering. In 2008, the Kurds made up 18% of the population of Turkey. Ever since Turkey was founded in 1923, the central government has vigorously persecuted the Kurds. Until the 1990's, their objective was nothing less than total cultural genocide. The very existence of the Kurds was categorically denied; they were classed in censuses as either "mountain Turks" or "eastern Turks" to avoid even admitting that there were such people in Turkey. Their language was banned, and over a million people were forcibly relocated.

Unsurprisingly, the Kurds rebelled against this treatment, and the army was sent in. Eighty years later, they're still at it, now with chemical weapons.

It's worth remembering that the Turks actually invented genocide. From 1915 onward, the Turks killed somewhere between half a million and 1,5 million Armenians in the Armenian genocide. The full panoply of ethnic cleansing was deployed for the first time by the Turks, with forced relocations, concentration camps and death squads.

In international politics, the Turks also still illegally occupy Northern Cyprus, in defiance of the UN and the international community. In what may be a world record of sorts, no country other than Turkey has recognized Northern Cyprus as a state.

**

Turkey has been seeking membership in the European Union for a good while now. Most of the discussion around their membership revolves around Islam and, frankly, xenophobia, but a real issue that should get a lot more attention is their genocidal policy against the Kurds and the continuing debacle of the Cypriot occupation. A country that behaves like this should have no place in the European Union.