As we have seen, we Americans must learn to think outside the box because our enemies do so. We must prioritize every possible attack, and prepare for those which are most dangerous--i.e., most likely to occur, multiplied by the number of casualties/amount of damage to our nation that each would cause. On this basis, we must assign top priority to defending against a nuclear 9-11.
Other attacks are no doubt more likely--we have seen small, pinprick attacks in America, all the way from the 'Beltway Snipers' (John Mohammed and his sidekick), to terrorists using automobiles to drive into crowds of anonymous Americans at intersections, or shooting people at random in Jewish Community Centers, and even planning to blow up New York City landmarks and buildings in cities from Los Angeles to Boston. We have seen men arrested for planning to murder American soldiers in recruiting offices and at Fort Dix, New Jersey. We have even seen men attempt to blow up airliners full of Americans with bombs concealed in their shoes. But all of these are nothing in comparison to the toll of death and suffering that would result from an atomic bomb exploding at an American seaport or airport in a major city at noon. Take it from Old Bill: a single atomic bomb can ruin your whole day.
At a conference I attended last year at USC, it was pointed out by a weapons expert (I believe it was Dr. Michael Intrilligator, former Director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA--if it was another participant, and I have misremembered, please forgive me) estimated that a single bomb of about 10,000 tons equivalent yield (similar to the primitive bomb we dropped on Hiroshima) detonated in a ship at the dock in the Port of Long Beach would kill over 100,000 people instantly, and many tens of thousands more ultimately due to radiation poisoning, plus wounding and crippling several hundred thousand more. One atomic bomb can ruin your whole day.
But why stop at one bomb? Why count the cost when you're destroying the "Great Satan" as the Iranian Ayatollahs of Hate always refer to America? Once the Ayatollahs have their bomb-factories running at full capacity, they will likely be able to manufacture about a bomb a month--maybe several. This was approximately the capacity of our first, very primitive bomb facory at Oak Ridge.
We must not ask what we would do with such power; history provides the answer: once our murderous enemies in the Japanese Empire surrendered, we proceeded to use our nuclear weapons to create the "Long Peace", as John Lewis Gaddes has called it, that stopped the Communist tanks of Stalin's Soviet Union from rolling across Europe to the English Channel, just as Hitler's had in 1940. We thus gave Europe--and the world--what is now 64 years of Mostly Peace, a period of Peace in Europe exceeding the international peace that lasted from 1815-1870; we will overlook the 19th century civil wars in Italy, and the Wars of German Unification, simply in an effort to let the Europeans feel good about themselves, and think of us Americans as tactful for calling them peace-loving. Who says Old Bill can't be diplomatic?
But Old Bill will not be diplomatic at the expense of endangering America's survival. We must recognize that we live in a world full of many different peoples with utterly different cultures and histories, not to mention political systems--and one of these happens to be the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the recently re-fraudulently pseudo-elected Despotic Dictator Mahmoud Ahmedinejad continues to oppress his own people with goon-squads committing, literally, murder in the streets, and perhaps even worse, show-trials brazenly aping those of Stalin's Communists in the (so-called)courts.
These atrocities, these Crimes Against Humanity (for denying a people's right to elect their leaders in genuinely democratic elections is certainly a Crime Against Humanity) are committed by the Ayatollahs' regime against their own people. What mercy can we infidel Americans, citizens of the "Great Satan" expect from such as these? The same mercy the Nazis showed the Jews, nothing more. Incidentally, "President" Ahmedinejad still persists in denying that any massacre of Jews by the Nazis during WWII even took place.
And we are supposed to engage in diplomatic negotiatiions with such men on a matter as crucial to our survival as whether or not they will agree to abide by the treaty they long ago signed agreeing not to build nuclear weapons, as a necessary preliminary to purchasing (mostly from Russia and China and North Korea, but also from Germany and France) the technology and tools necesssary to build atomic bombs!? Can Old Bill sell you a used tank? These ayatollahs are congential liars and tyrants, convicted by the evidence of our own eyes and the testimony of their own oppressed fellow-countrymen. We must not allow them to obtain the means to destroy us.
Many observers comment that surely, the Israelis will strike the Iranian nuclear bomb factories in time to prevent them from actually acquiring A-bombs, if the Iranians rashly refuse to cease their rush to armageddon. No doubt they would like to, and we all recall their bold and successful strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1982 which prevented Sadam Hussein from acquiring A-bombs in the 80s. History, however, seldom repeats itself, and never identically. The Iranians also observed this Israeli strike, and learned many lessons.
Thus, their nuclear arms facilities are not concentrated in one place (target), but are dispersed in nearly a hundred locations. Nearly all of these, furthermore, are either located in heavily populated cities, or buried under hundreds of feet of rock and steel-reinforced concrete sufficient to withstand even a nuclear bomb, or both.
The argument that one need only seal the entrance to an underground facility overlooks the fact that, when the laboratory is not isolated on a desert island (as were the Japanese caves on Iwo Jima), but in the heart of a modern nation of 75 million people (such as Iran), digging out the entrance will only be a matter of days or, at most, weeks--after which the facility will be back 'online' with a vengeance.
Only the United States is known to currently be developing 'bunker buster' bombs that may be able to knock out such hardened sites without also, of necessity, killing the hundred thousand or so civilians in the blast radius of a weapon with sufficient power to do the job the old-fashioned way--sheer kilo-tonnage. And it is by no means certain that even we can deliver enough of these precision-guided weapons on target without incurring horrendous losses to our own aircraft and aircrews, thanks to the first-class anti-aircraft radars, missiles, guns, and fire-control systems being supplied to the ayatollahs by comrade Putin's Russia.
You doubt me? Talk to some F-16 pilots. And speaking of F-16s (and F-15I Strike Eagles)--Israel recently made a big show of flying across the Mediterranean to Greece and back, a range roughly equal to a flight from Israel to Tehran. The purpose of this, of course, was to warn the ayatollahs to cease and desist. Just one problem. Not all Iran's bomb factories are within even this radius of Israeli airfields, and certainly not if the Israelis are forced (by that superb Russian-supplied air defense system) to take circuitous routes, evasive action, and dogfight their way to the target, as is likely.
And it gets worse: Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor to Pres. Jimmy Carter, long rumored to harbor the same anti-semitic streak as his former boss, has recently added further fuel to that fire by recommending, publicly, that if the Israelis should attempt to overfly Iraq to attack the Iranian nuclear bomb factories, the United States Air Force should actually shoot them down!!!
This is literally like recommending to FDR in 1940 that, if the British Royal Air Force should attempt to bomb the Wehrmacht in occupied Vichy France, American aircraft carriers should be sent to the English Channel to shoot down the Spitfires and Wellingtons, and prevent the war-crazy Brits from defending themselves against the peaceful Nazis. No wonder Carter's only response to the Iranian hostage-takers (who included Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, by the way) was to send a pathetic forlorn hope of a few aircraft and less than a hundred soldiers to attempt the rescue of our hostages from the middle of Tehran!
Fortunately, there are other alternatives than either incinerating a couple of dozen Iranian cities, or sending hundreds of American--or Israeli--pilots to their deaths for the purpose of merely delaying the Iranian A-bomb program for 24 months. I am not talking about talking, either. The lesson of the last 30 years is clear: attempting to negotiate with the ayatollahs, whether for a hundred American hostages in Tehran, a dozen in Beirut, or for an end to Iranian supplies of bullets, bombs, and explosively-formed-projectile booby-traps to terrorists in Iraq,(where they have inflicted the majority of casualties on Americans for the last 5 years) is simply a fool's errand; and we have no more time in this crisis for fools. We must take effective action immediately to prevent the ayatollahs from getting any closer to acquiring enough enriched uranium for even one atomic bomb--remember: even one atomic bomb can ruin your whole day.
What action can accomplish this? Well, not mere sanctions, if by sanctions we mean a resolution by the UN demanding that everyone stop buying pistachio nuts until the ayatollahs let us inspect their beards for hidden kryton transistors (the key component needed to trigger an A-bomb). But if we are determined to stop them, and not merely posture for the cameras, we Americans have a means of doing so which will not kill a single human being, and which cannot fail if properly used. That is the United States Navy.
"Whosoever controls the seas of the world, controls the trade of the world, and therefore the world itself."---Alfred Thayer Mahan, "Seapower", once the bible of the world's admiralties, and it ought to be required reading for every college freshman in the United States. Anyone remember what happened in 1962 when the Soviet Union tried to put flesh to Khruschev's bombastic "We will bury you!" by secretly placing hundreds of nuclear missiles in Cuba, within 5 minutes' flight time of Washington D.C.?
John Kennedy, who had unknowingly invited the Russian bearhug by trying to be friendly and all smiles when he negotiated with Krushchev the previous year, and thus convincing K. he was 'young, inexperienced, foolish and weak' (a paraphrase, but essentially what K. wrote in his memoir "Krushchev Remembers") was able to recover from a disastrous misreading of Russian intentions by using America's control of the World Ocean to "quarantine" Cuba and prevent the emplacement of further missiles, while demanding--and obtaining--the removal of those which were already there. This was done without firing a shot---but it was only possible because Kennedy was ready, and the United States was able, if needed, to sink every ship that attempted to penetrate the American blockade (for that is what it really was) of Cuba.
But Iran is not an island, you say? True--but irrelevant. Iran moves nearly all its exports, and receives nearly all its imports, through the Persian Gulf; significantly including all its gasoline--ironically, the Iranians are more vulnerable to a cut-off of fuel than we are! A regime with the wholehearted backing of all its people would still be brought to its knees, as industry and commerce collapsed entirely, if we were to "quarantine" Iran until it allowed us to remove all nuclear bomb-making materials.
The Iran of the ayatollahs, divided as it is between the fanatic supporters of the ayatollahs and the majority of Iranians who are enraged at the rigging of their elections, the betrayal of the promise of democracy and reform, and who want desperately to be allowed to live a normal life and resume their progress into the modern world which was so unexpectedly interrupted by the 7th-century mores of the sharia-obsessed ayatollahs in 1979, will not be nearly so difficult to defeat.
Once the nuclear materials are gone, the ayatollahs will be soon to follow--they have for the last 20 years used this bomb-mania as one of their chief devices to persuade unhappy, unemployed, but nationalistic Iranians to tolerate them and their brutal regime. Once subjected to a humiliating defeat, and with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Shia caliphate smashed, the balance of power within the Iranian armed forces is likely to shift decisively away from the ayatollahs' supporters toward more normal human beings--at least, that is the opinion of many observers, American and Iranian, and why not give it a try before doing anything more bloody?
There remains the more general problem of deterring any future nuclear terorist attack on the USA by other groups--Al Quaeda, for instance, or Hezbollah (a notorious cut-out for the Iranians, used by them to place the bombs in Beirut which killed hundreds of Americans in 1983), or Hamas or any of a dozen other America-hating fanatic jihadi groups, literally spanning the globe from Mecca to Manila, and with South American communist terrorists added in by such players as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega (who adopted as the Nicaraguan national anthem a tune that called the United States '...the enemy of all mankind...'), or fellow socialist Evo Morales. So many enemies, so little time!
In the good old days of the much simpler Cold War, it was sufficient to deter the Marxist, hence atheist Russians by adopting a policy of 'Massive Retaliation'---if any nuclear weapons were used against America or any of our allies, anywhere, America would retaliate with a massive strike which would annihilate the aggressor. Of course, there could only be one such aggressor in the pre-proliferation days of 1950-1980, so who to strike was no problemo.
Today it's different--but still not impossible to do. We simply have to figure out what policy will work to prevent any America-hating fanatics from indulging their nuclear wet-dreams by nuking us---remember: one nuclear bomb will ruin your whole day.
Fortunately, that still cuts both ways: we only need to take the leaders of hostile regimes aside, and assure all of them, privately and confidentially, that any nuclear attack on the USA will result in immediate annihilation of them and their capital cities to ensure that they will not permit any of their cut-outs to engage in any such crime. Even Jacques Chirac, the President of France, made such an announcement to the world a few years ago, in a moment of uncharacteristic wisdom. Can we Americans do less?
Let me emphasize that I am not calling for an ill-considered threat to Mecca, the holy of holies to a billion Moslems--not at all; I am merely saying we must make it clear to the leaders of the America-hating, terrorist-sponsoring regimes, both jihadi and communist, that they personally, and all they hold dear, will not survive by more than a few hours any nuclear strike on the territory of the United States, or any of our fleets at sea. Likewise a nuclear attack on any nation under the American 'nuclear umbrella' that has sustained the Long Peace since 1945 in Europe and Japan.
It is also prudent to let them know that any attack using germ warfare, or massive clouds of nerve gas, or an electro-magnetic pulse bomb knocking out all our comuters and electronic devices, would receive the same massive reply. No one gets to murder a hundred thousand Americans, or our allies, and get away with it---and I'm not talking about sending Interpol to arrest them and hold them for extradition, either. As that brilliant analyst of international affairs Rush Limbaugh has observed, we live in a world ruled by the aggressive use of force: let's pray that the strongest tribe on the planet will continue to be the Good Guys---led by the United States of America.