Posted on 01/20/2006 5:34:18 AM PST by Rutles4Ever
Headline only at this point
If Europe gets nuked - Iran's in bed with AQ -- that makes them fair game for retaliation....
Good business dictates good policy. Canada will be a good neighbor only inasmuch as they continue to profit from trade with the USA. Social issue wise, they are a globalist puppet to the UN and their youths have sold their souls on the altar of the nanny state and socialism. Yet they crave our culture of excess and materialism at the same time. I think the prevailing attitude is:
America would be a wonderful country...if there weren't so many Americans there!
I wager the Iranian money is moving to China or Russia and guess which nation will block any UN Security Council vote against Iran???
Positing the idea that we remain as the sole superpower in the world, who is going to say anything with any effect? The international bankers have made certain that our economies are closely linked. Sanctions against us harm everybody. Besides, unless a Democrat is in the White House, negative world opinion never stopped us from doing anything....
My guess is that in reality this has something to do with the stock market tanking today.
You'd be right. The markets are skittish over, supposedly, 30 billion in assets leaving European safekeeping. Are those all US stocks? Probably very few. This is all happening in the wake of an overbought and overly bullish stock market.
Might even be a hell of a buying opportunity. Anyone want to run into the burning building?
"As oil hits over 100 bucks a barrel and we are paying over 6 bucks a gal for gas, the screams you will hear will be those of the Democrat Party (among others) saying ... "War for oil"!"
Oil will hit over 100 bucks a barrel and prices won't go down during the next few years - I would expect prices to settle around 120-130. But that has little to do with Iran, and a lot with China's growth.
So, f*ck oil, and let's just do the right thing. Iran must not have a nuclear bomb, even if that means paying 6 dollars per gallon at the pump. Europeans have been doing that for decades and they survived.
Yeah, and 80% or more of that $6 that is probably taxes - which has gone towards propping up their socialist governments.
Whereas the major fraction of our $6 gas would go towards propping up ... who, exactly?
You - or your source, which ever the case - do not know what you're talking about. Neutron radiation can be 99% stopped by a few inches of steel + 4 - 6 feet of polyethylene.
I do know whereof I speak, as I worked in the field at one time.
A herd of starving pig carcasses...
We have spigots too.
foreign aid
food
communications
Internet
etc.
If we start turning off some of our spigots to nations that are not with us or are "neutral" , who would yell "uncle" first ?
Um, what must be done? Turn DC & NYC into craters?
I mean, 9-11 woke up NYC'ers. The City's population, en mass, woke up and saw that the DNC was hardly the Party to protect them from terrorism, and voted Republican ever after, having learned their lesson....right? Right?
An interview with the father of the neutron bomb:
LOS ANGELES - For most of Sam Cohen's life, he has struggled against politicians who, in his opinion, have sacrificed good sense when it comes to the nation's defenses. Cohen is the physicist who invented the neutron bomb, the one that kills people but leaves things like tanks and buildings intact. Plans to deploy his creations in Europe during the '70s and '80s awakened the "peace movement" across that continent, stopping its deployment.
With that and other battles lost, the 76-year-old Cohen finds solace in his Brentwood home, nestled high on a hill overlooking Los Angeles. There the world is far more peaceful, or so it seems. Just down the road is the Rockingham estate of one O.J. Simpson. Cohen would pass there often during his morning walks, and occasionally see the former football star. "He was always pleasant," Cohen recounted.
Cohen would probably be unfazed if confronted by a knife-wielding mugger - a threat insignificant in the scheme of things. What worries him are weapons of mass destruction - nuclear ones that destroy whole cities.
The politicians tell us that our security has never been better. Cohen describes the present situation as "scary, more scary than ever before." He's concerned that the Clinton administration has decided it is politically incorrect to even think about the design and development of nuclear weapons. The head of the division of the Livermore National Laboratories in charge of such weapon development has threatened to resign if he is ordered to develop new weapons, Cohen noted in a recent interview.
The government doesn't want people to even think about nuclear weapons, which is like telling Sam Cohen he is no longer permitted to breathe.
As a kid from Brooklyn who graduated with a physics degree from UCLA, he enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor. In 1944 Cohen was assigned to the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop atomic weapons at Los Alamos, N.M. Cohen had the mundane job of calculating how neutrons behaved in "Fat Man" - the nickname of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier was nicknamed "Little Boy.")
The boring work was all worthwhile because Cohen eventually stood in the Nevada desert and witnessed something on par with the Transfiguration: an atomic explosion. Cohen saw firsthand the awesome power of the unleashed atom as human history entered a new age. "Awesome spectacle" is how Cohen still describes the event. Puffing on a cigar as he relaxed in his easy chair wearing a T-shirt and jogging pants, Sam remembered that day vividly.
World War II flying hero Jimmy Doolittle stood next to him when the bomb went off. "The little guy was blown down," Cohen recalled.
After the war ended, Cohen joined the Rand Corp. where he was paid to continue thinking about nuclear weapons. He was obsessed with the idea of a neutron bomb, one that would make use of the lethal particles he had observed so studiously at Los Alamos.
The earliest bombs had used nuclear fission, splitting heavy atoms to release energy. Later bombs used nuclear fusion, which fused hydrogen atoms to release energy. Both designs produced tremendous blasts that could level whole cities, and left them uninhabitable for long periods because of lingering radiation.
Cohen's neutron bomb would use nuclear fusion, but in a different way. The detonation of a neutron bomb would still produce an explosion, but one much smaller than a standard nuclear weapon's. The main effect of a neutron bomb would be the release of high-energy neutrons that would take lives far beyond the blast area. The result: fewer buildings, cars, tanks, roads, highways and other structures destroyed. (ExSoldier's note to IonImplantGuru: this is because the radiation will go straight thru those vehicles and buildings to KILL the personnel inside -- just as we learned at the Armor Officers Advanced Course -- Neutron Radiation is a TANK KILLER)
And unlike standard nuclear bombs that leave long-term contamination of the soil and infrastructure, the neutron radiation quickly dissipates after the explosion.
For Cohen, the neutron bomb is the ultimate sane weapon. It kills humans, or as he puts it "the bad guys," but doesn't produce tremendous collateral damage on civilian populations and the infrastructure a civilian population needs to survive.
This meant, in Cohen's mind, that a conventional war could escalate without immediately leading to an all-out nuclear holocaust. If regular nuclear weapons were used across Europe, the radioactive fallout could turn the continent into a wasteland for decades. That wouldn't be the case if neutron bombs were used.
Between 1958 and 1961 the neutron bomb idea was tested successfully, but the politicians in Washington nixed development and deployment of the weapon. Cohen persisted. As the Vietnam War began and festered in the 1960s, Cohen became an advocate of using neutron bombs there. To Cohen, his weapon was "a perfect fit" for dealing with the Viet Cong hidden in the jungles and rice paddies.
Again, the politicians had other ideas. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ruled that no nuclear weapons of any type would be used in the war. The use of the small neutron bombs would have brought the war to a quick end, Cohen still argues, and saved the loss of more than 50,000 American lives.
In 1969, Cohen was fired from the Rand Corp. for continuing to advocate the use of tactical neutron bombs to end the conflict. "I lost all my battles," Cohen says today.
In 1979, he was in Paris helping the French build their own arsenal of neutron bombs when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan came through on a European tour. Cohen met with Reagan to brief him on the neutron bomb. Reagan grasped the idea of neutron weaponry immediately, and made a pledge to Cohen, and later a public pledge, that he would reverse Carter administration policy by building and deploying a large number of neutron bombs.
As president, Reagan fulfilled that pledge and approximately a thousand weapons were constructed. But criticism from European allies kept the weapons from being deployed across Europe.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism as we knew it, the Bush administration moved to dismantle all of our tactical nuclear weapons, including the Reagan stockpile of neutron bombs. In Cohen's mind, America was brought back to Square One. Without tactical weapons like the neutron bomb, America would be left with two choices if an enemy was winning a conventional war: surrender, or unleash the holocaust of strategic nuclear weapons.
Other nation's haven't been afflicted by the U.S. blindness regarding neutron bombs. According to Cohen:
Evidence exists that China has neutron bombs stockpiled, and that the United States gave the Chinese the technology to build them.
Russia has a large quantity of such weapons, as well as the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Israel has hundreds of neutron weapons. The neutron bombs would allow Israel to stop advancing Arab armies and tank columns - even one on Israeli soil - without permanently contaminating the land.
South Africa, which constructed a cache of neutron weapons before the end of white rule, claimed it dismantled those weapons before handing over power to the Nelson Mandela government. Cohen, however, claims to have it on good authority that white military leaders still control the secret stockpile as "an insurance policy."
Most frightening for Cohen is the relative ease by which neutron bombs can be created with a substance called red mercury. Red mercury is a compound containing mercury that has undergone massive irradiation. When exploded, it creates tremendous heat and pressure - the same type needed to trigger a fusion device such as a mini-neutron bomb.
Before, an obstacle to creating a nuclear bomb was the need for plutonium, which when exploded could create a fusion reaction in hydrogen atoms. But red mercury has changed that. The cheap substance has been produced in Russia, Cohen said, and shipped on the black market throughout the world.
Cohen said that when U.N. inspectors went to Iraq to examine the Iraqis' nuclear weapons capabilities, the U.N. team found documents showing that they had purchased quantities of red mercury. The material means a neutron bomb can be built "the size of baseball" but able to kill everyone within several square blocks.
The public isn't being warned about this development because the politicians have little desire to combat the menace or to confront nations like Iraq, Iran and Libya that likely would use such weapons, Cohen said.
Cohen has little faith in the politicians anyway. "Every president since Truman, with the possible exception of Eisenhower, would have sold the country out if it came down to a nuclear confrontation," he said.
What must be done is a massive air assault on the Mullahs' nuke facilities, to save ourselves.
Thanks.
It looks to me like something is up... Here's what we have in a matter of days:
- an attack wiping out 4 or 5 top Al Qaeda members where we had 2 sources on the ground affirming Zawahiri's presence.
- Iran promising to withhold its oil if not allowed to continue with nuclear program
- a Bin Laden tape we've only heard 4 minutes from, and those 4 minutes have been incorrectly translated as an "offer of a truce", not an "offer to accept a truce"
- Iran promising a nuclear test by March
- terror threats against our Alaska oil pipelines
- Iran asking OPEC to cut oil production
- a 17-18 minute Zawahiri tape we've heard little about besides his quoting the "Jihad poet"
- Iran pulling all of its assets out of European banks
forgot one more occurrence over the past couple days under the category "pigs are flying":
- france says it will use its nukes against "terrorist states"
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