All Posts Tagged With: "Up"

Israel Could Almost Certainly Devastate Iran’s Nuke Program But It Would Need Help to Keep It That Way

A new report titled “Can Military Strikes Destroy Iran’s Gas Centrifuge Program? Probably Not,” by The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) says the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program would require a sustained air combat campaign by the United States presumably because Israel couldn’t sustain it after its initial attacks. .

ISIS’s premise is that Iran’s nuclear program has been dispersed, concealed, and protected and this would rule out a limited air strike on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. Destruction it says “would need multiple strikes against many sites.”

ISIS said because Teheran’s uranium enrichment program is based on gas centrifuges, they could be dispersed throughout Iran. Conversely Iraq and Syria had sought to develop nuclear weapons based on reactors it made both vulnerable to pinpoint strikes.

ISIS thinks that “Following an attack, Iran could quickly rebuild its centrifuge program in small, easily hidden facilities focused on making weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons,” the report, dated Aug. 7, said.

The two leading Iranian nuclear facilities were identified as Isfahan and Natanz. ISIS said the destruction of these two facilities would require “far more military ordinance than that used” to bomb Iraq’s Osirak reactor or Syria’s Al Kibar. Israel destroyed Osirak in 1981 and Al Kibar in 2007. ISIS does not describe how or if Israel could wipeout Isfahan and Natanz.

Absent ISIS opinion on that subjects it is very likely that Israel has sophisticated ordinance that it could almost certainly deliver spot on target with devastating results.

Further ISIS infers that Israel has likely mapped Iran’s nuclear facilities in detail it, most probably with on-ground agents as it did in Syria last fall. It does not discuss what would be “ball bearing plant equivalent” for Iran’s or where it is making precision centrifuge parts. Once know that becomes equivalent to destroying Nazi Germanys ability to make ball bearings for it was those steel balls that literally propelled Hitler’s war machines - so it is with the centrifuge parts factories.

The report says Isfahan was said to contain more than 300 tons of uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, a feeder gas that could facilitate the production of more than 30 nuclear weapons. Clearly destroying that would create a significant contamination problem for Iran and set Iran back many months and it a priority.

ISIS’s contention that Iran can somehow establish a cottage industry of thousands of centrifuges and effectively serialize the sequential refinement of purer and purer uranium 235 feels far fetched.

Whether ISIS’s report is spot on, flawed or of limited efficacy it does underscore the complexities involved.

ISIS said Western intelligence remains uncertain of the precise locations and vulnerabilities of Iranian nuclear facilities.

Personally I have little doubt Israel has and can apply the tactics necessary to badly damage Iran nuclear ambitions, and unless Iran suddenly shows a hitherto unseen willingness to be reasonable it is going to be proved, and sooner than later.

Nannycrats Back and Fill as children’s bodies pile up in Sacramento County

Under fire for a string of seven recent deaths of children who had been known to Sacramento County Child Protective Services, county officials said they will conduct an independent review of the troubled agency. Children’s advocates have called for a stronger response, specifically a new investigation of the agency by the county grand jury.

The county’s Health and Human Services Department said an oversight committee that reports to the Board of Supervisors will handle the review. Not good enough say child advocates fearing a white wash and more dead children.

Earlier this month a 4-year old child who was the subject of a CPS case opened five weeks before was beaten to death, and authorities have charged the mother’s live-in boyfriend with murder. The case piled on top of six other deaths spawned a firestorm of criticism of CPS.

Meanwhile a legislator has introduced an anti-child spanking law that compared to seven dead children seem like classic hypocrisy or simply stupidity. The child was not spanked to death he was beaten to death while supposedly being protected by those county bureaucrats.

Of course there is no shortage of plan stupidity inside or outside the nannyocracy like the harebrained grandmother who put her month old granddaughter through an airport luggaged xraying machine

Seymour Hersh and NY Times are at it again.

Seymour Hersh, 71. first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre; then in 2006 he reported on an alleged US military plan for Iran, which allegedly called for the use of nuclear weapons against that country but that was later discredited, has now written an article in The New Yorker magazine criticizing the U. S. for staging covert special warfare operations to damage Iran.

Hersh’s article continues a pattern that has included: a 1986 book alleging that the Soviet murder of the civilians on Korean Air Flight 007 in September 1983 was a U. S. and Russian miscalculation; in 1991 his book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy ignited debate about his intentions toward Israel and the U. S.; and in a 2004 article, he alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the normal intelligence analysis function of the CIA in their quest to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The newest article cites disgruntled general officers pining for the good old days and openly disgruntled about maverick special operations who refuse to kiss their rings and simply get on with the “wet work” without hundreds of millions of dollars in support but with a knife or rifle. Since 1963 when JFK created the SEALS as a counter terror group in the US Navy military, traditionalists have opposed and resisted the idea of “special warfare” because that opposes their near Napoleonic tactics.

Simultaneously the NEW YORK TIMES wrote a front page article describing U. S. special operations in Iran and elsewhere that critics say exposes American special warfare troops to grave dangers, and is otherwise reprehensible.

For the Democratic and the Republican Parties, I endorse