Posted on 11/05/2007 5:27:34 PM PST by joseph20
It was two months ago tomorrow that Israeli warplanes bombed what Israel and the United States believed was a nascent Syrian nuclear complex along the shore of the Euphrates River. But the political shock waves that should have accompanied that remarkable event -- which was both an audacious act of preemption and a revelation of an apparent Syrian bomb program-- have been bottled up by the decisions of the Israeli government and the Bush administration not to speak publicly about the strike.
Now Israeli and U.S. officials are quietly debating whether to go on the record and allow those shock waves to explode across the Middle East and beyond. At stake are not only Israel's tense relations with Syria, which so far has chosen not to retaliate, but a host of other pressure points: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; the integrity of the International Atomic Energy Agency; Western leverage over Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; and -- not least -- the fragile U.S. nuclear bargain with North Korea, which is believed to have aided the secret construction.
For the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert, the decision to suppress news of the strike in September -- including the military censorship of Israel's aggressively free press -- was pretty straightforward. Trumpeting the successful attack not only would have prompted global denunciations of Israel but might have pushed Assad into launching an attack on the Golan Heights or a missile at Tel Aviv. The architect of the attack, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is a former head of Israel's most elite clandestine commando squad, and he remains convinced that military special operations are best kept secret.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
it don’t matter = it doesn’t matter.
No, that is a popularly misunderstood myth. A neutron bomb produces a conventional fission explosion about the size of that used on Hiroshima from its primary. It is essentially a H-bomb with different casing and different ratios in the secondary. The secondary is designed to maximize neutron output that will kill in a ring around the primary explosion, leaving the infrastructure in that ring intact. It accomplishes this using super-cooled tritium gas instead of depleted uranium in the secondary “pencil.” This, and tritium’s 12-year half life, makes them considerably more expensive to maintain than your run-’o-the-mill H-bomb.
The advantage to this is that the x-rays and gamma-rays produced by the secondary are able to penetrate tank armor - even armor capable of surviving some of the blast itself. The same would apply to heavily-armored facilities as this one may have been. That is the real beauty of this weapon.
Hope that helps.
It’s a crying shame, too, but I suppose it was thought that a conventional confrontation in Europe with U.S.S.R. heavy armor would have been the primary opportunity for the neutron bomb. It would help to put a few back in our arsenal if for no other reason than as a deterrent, given the way the world has (again) changed...
That does help - thank you, Sir.
Does their status jibe with a neutron?
Another WaPo fishing expedition, designed to hurt Bush and Israel, and get North Korea and Syria off the hook.
You have to love the hints at unnamed (even by title) “officials’ wanting to go public, and the centerpiece, the two republicans who surfaced briefly, who haven’t been heard from since, but who, according to the desperate WaPo, are pressing hard for full disclosure.
I’m QUITE sure Syria fears The Wrath of El Barado even more than they fear Israeli bombs and air defense suppression systems.
This rehash piece is so obviously contrived, I have to conclude that the Post is spiralling down the tubes in close formation with the New York Times.
Sadly Bush and Rice want a deal with Kim....that deal would be part of his legacy....so someone up high has decided not to embarrasses the NK's....by tying them to this.
Only if it was out of the blast radius but within the kill zone (the “ring”). Honesty, I doubt a neutron weapon was used in this situation. While far, far less destructive with a much smaller long-term radiation footprint than a H-bomb, it is still equivalent to a small fission weapon like we used in WW II; there would still be a small area of long-term radiation even though the radiation in the outlying areas would decay to safe levels in a matter of days...
It is an interesting thought, however.
I hadn’t considered it until someone else upthread mentioned it. Doubt it too, but it would kinda be ‘stunning’.
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