"(the largest regular conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal is ONE ton). "

I wonder, in what fantasy land did you get that figure?

The largest conventional US bomb is not one ton, it's 15 tons.

Wow...you were only wrong by a factor of 15. Kudos. Why is it that reporters insist on massive ignorance wrt all things military? Arent you supposed to report the TRUTH? Doesnt that entail research? And if you are SO off base on this why should i expect any of the rest of your article to be any more accurate?

From what i see, it's just so much hyperventiallating from a man who does not even understand what he's discussing.

Typical behaviour from a reporter. Especially one on an Op-Ed page.

Sincerely,
An ex Corporal.

I read the Post's story of 3-31-06 and also your blog, both have one GLARING omission.

Quoted from the 3-31-06 article, "The test, code-named "Divine Strake," will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials."

Is that the best a post reporter can come up with? Reads like sloppy reporting to me.

This"high desert valley bounded by mountains" reside within Newe Sogobia, Sacred Lands of the Western Shoshone.

On March 10, 2006, a decision was rendered by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

The United States was urged to "freeze", "desist" and "stop" actions being taken or threatened to be taken against the Western Shoshone Peoples of the Western Shoshone Nation.

This monumental action challenges the US government's assertion of federal ownership of nearly 90% of Western Shoshone lands. The land base covers approximately 60 million acres, stretching across what is now referred to as the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California.

The land base has been and continues to be used by the United States for military testing, open pit cyanide heap leach gold mining and nuclear waste disposal planning.

http://shundahai.org/3-10-06Western_Shoshone_UN_Press_Release.htm

I'd like to urge the Post to do more complete reporting in the future. It's omission is as insulting as the name Divine Strake.

im bored

I found a URL that explains that Divine Strake is not the largest conventional explosion tested.

http://www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/gs-divinestrake.htm

And it all happens in my name?

Americans really are the scum of the earth!

dog
(god)

The Government of the United States of America is in the hands of insane persons.

"

Point and point: From our perspective (i.e., a Western one), the Islamic world is awfully one sided in its communications with the West. Their radicals are allowed to set the agenda and tone, and their moderates do not ever seem to disagree. Conversely, woe be unto the liberal who even hints at this fact; he shall be run out of his camp on a rail. A conservative who does the same thing is painted as an anti-Islamic bigot, but at least is allowed back into the house.

Does anyone know why this is so?
posted by Tom Canick
"

Perhaps their enemies from the west have been terrorizing their populations more agressively and invasively for a longer time than the other way around?

The political purpose of TERROR is to quash dissent at home by solidifying one's enemies, thus making your own society/country easier to control by pointing back at the reactionary vengeful face of the victim, after all. It's a simple cycle one learns about in kindergarten.

Hopefully the US Isn't the only Nation with Bunker Busting Bombs! I'll be dead, but at least the cockroaches like Cheney, Bush, Republicans and Democrats will be "brought to very swift justice"!

And if you want to see what a buried 18-ton explosion looks like, this is a 1916 film of the blowing of Hawthorn Redoubt on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme.
British sappers tunneled 1000ft, to 75ft below the strongpoint, and planted 18 tons of ammonal. There are hundreds of German soldiers in the dust plume you see. Hawthorn crater is still there today.

This is much deeper than a bunker buster, which would be less contained. http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/video/somme/mpeg/vsom13.mpg
http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/footage/malins.mov (same thing)

Perhaps I underestimated a bit the depths attainable by the biggest yields. But 1200-1300 feet is definitely safe. Also, I understated the damage above ground.

This isn't a real parallel but it's a guide to scale:
Storax Sedan was a test of the feasibility of digging an emergency replacement Panama Canal with buried bombs if someone blocked the original.

It was a 104Kt bomb buried 640 feet underground. Up to a certain point, the deeper a bomb is buried the bigger the crater it excavates.

Here you'll see pics of the blast, then the base surge, and finally the crater: Sedan Crater, Nevada, 1280 feet wide and 320 feet deep.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Storax.html
(By coincidence, the other test mentioned on this page is the 18-Ton one I mentioned earlier. You'll see the Davy Crockett bomb, the smallest nuke ever, which looks just like a tiny classic barrage-balloon-shaped bomb. It could be fired from a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle.)

I mention Sedan just for scale, it bears little relation to a bunker buster, which by comparison is basically detonating on the surface. The bunker-buster would excavate much less earth but it would be much more radioactive and would travel much further, and there'd be fantastic heat, and a localised earthquake. Worse, the base surge would be much bigger and harder than Sedan's, which was caused by soil falling back to earth, not by blast.

For a powerful bomb against a deep bunker visualise a distant horizon with the bomb just under the skin of the surface and the bunker far below. The bomb explodes in a spherical shock wave. The shock must travel hundreds of feet down and pulverise the reinforced concrete bunker. Clearly it has a similar effect horizontally, and vertically there's no possibility of containment.

The RNEP would have been 10-20 times the yield of Sedan exploding less than one-twentieth as deep. It would look like the Sun landing on the Earth.

Ah yes, down to the mines.
There would be much time, and little to do. But...ah...with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that we could then work our way back to the present GNP within say, 20 years.
...It is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a HIGHLY stimulating nature.

Best movie of all time (except maybe 7 samurai).

Absolutely fascinating, OD, and I thank you for the wonderful and comprehensive explanation. I truly had no idea that deeply buried targets were so resistent against "small" nuclear blasts--much less huge ones. So all we'd probably do is generate lots and lots of radioactive fallout were we to try to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program using our own arsenal. It's like "Wargames": the only winning move is not to play.

Or, perhaps, what we have here is a mineshaft gap...

700 tons.

Divine Strake?

what are these guys on?

Well the FAS website is down, but I'll do the best I can off the top of my head.

Naturally it depends what you mean by hardened and buried. The key thing to remember is that the bomb itself can't penetrate more than about 30 feet even in soft ground. Even boosting bomb velocity with rockets won't get around the physical limits governed by the laws of long-rod penetration.

A 40-foot deep bunker is a pretty soft target, and if the ground is soft and the concrete not too thick might just be crackable by the biggest air-dropped conventional bunker-busters.

But when the Livermore and Sandia types started talking up nuclear bunker-busters, they were mentioning hardened targets as deep as 900 feet.

That's why the proposed RNEP was a megaton-yield weapon. In this context the purpose of bomb penetration is not, of course, to reach the bunker, but to get deep enough to 'ground-couple' the explosion so the whole blast isn't bounced back into the air.

The fundamental problem is that given the bomb's minimal penetration, even the tiniest mini-nuke is going to excavate a crater - there's no way to contain the blast underground even if the shock waves are ground-coupled.

The excavated soil is hugely radioactive - far more so than normal fallout because it's been exposed to the nuclear fireball itself, rather than just sucked up into the mushroom cloud later by convection.

And of course with a warhead as big as RNEP's, fallout would be the least of the worries of those living close by.

Anyway, to roughly answer your question, the smallest nuclear warhead ever tested by the US yielded 18T (0.018Kt). That might take out a 50-foot bunker leaving a very small crater and a small 'Roman Candle' of fallout.

The biggest warheads in the US arsenal, around 2-5 Mt, might destroy a 400-500 foot deep bunker, with surrounding devastation that would obviously dwarf Hiroshima.

As for 900-foot deep bunkers, the pointyheads are dreaming.

I don't know how deep Iranian facilities are buried, but as well as potentially using mineshafts they have plenty of sites where they can tunnel horizontally into mountains. Think NORAD at Colorado Springs.

It's theoretically possible (though very expensive) for them to put facilities completely beyond reach. It's remarkably easy for them to protect facilities enough that America couldn't touch them without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

I presume they drew lessons from Osirak. But as I say, I'm not well-informed on the subject of Iranian bunkers.

OD: I haven't had time to check out FAS on very low-yield nuclear devices' efficacy against hardened targets, but (speaking as a total layman here) I've always assumed that it couldn't be THAT difficult to take out a buried, hardened target with a small (i.e., sub-kt - low-kt) nuclear bomb delivered with sufficient precision (this isn't exactly something I've given much in-depth analysis...). But then you know what happens when you "assume"...

I've also assumed that a conventional airstrike against Iran's nuclear program wouldn't do more than tick them off... perhaps I'm wrong? Maybe we don't need to start lobbing nuclear weapons just yet?

Anyone, including OD, who knows: just how large of a blast would it take to defeat the "typical" hardened, buried target (by "typical," I mean the kind of targets any attack against Iran's nuclear program would involve)? 5 kt? 15? 50? Larger? (Geez, you'd think nuclear weapons would kill whatever they're dropped on. Goes to show what I know).

Point and point: From our perspective (i.e., a Western one), the Islamic world is awfully one sided in its communications with the West. Their radicals are allowed to set the agenda and tone, and their moderates do not ever seem to disagree. Conversely, woe be unto the liberal who even hints at this fact; he shall be run out of his camp on a rail. A conservative who does the same thing is painted as an anti-Islamic bigot, but at least is allowed back into the house.

Does anyone know why this is so?

I wonder if the whole thing - trying to get a bomb big enough to destroy underground complexes that are not radioactive - isn't a bit misguided.

Maybe, given drone technology, it'd be easier to use a whack-a-mole approach - as soon as anybody/anything goes near the entrances, or pops out the exits from an underground complex - they/it gets blown up - much smaller bombs will work, and if you do that enough, and maybe no one will do the work, and no materials will be available to work with underground.

I wonder if the whole thing - trying to get a bomb big enough to destroy underground complexes that are not radioactive - isn't a bit misguided.

Maybe, given drone technology, it'd be easier to use a whack-a-mole approach - as soon as anybody/anything goes near the entrances, or pops out the exits from an underground complex - they/it gets blown up - much smaller bombs will work, and if you do that enough, and maybe no one will do the work, and no materials will be available to work with underground.

What's truly insane about all of this is that China has been telling us for some time now that they will invade Taiwan if we attack Iran AND, if we interfere with their invasion, they are prepared to sink the entire Sixth Fleet and our bases in Japan and Korea. Russia has been making similar noises. Is this WHitehouse so out of touch with reality that they are willing to risk starting World War III just to look "tough". The Bush people are lunatics; their "intelligence" are cribbed notes from Arabic and Chinese web sites; and their policy of "globalization" has reendered this country utterly helpless in being able to defend ourselves from attack.

In the tricky world of deterrence, which only exists if the other side feels they have something to lose, posturing and demonstration of capability is a part of the game, as is conveying intent. So the DoD calling it Divine Strike er Strake is simple part of the game of letting the Iranians know that if they don't play by the rules, there is no impunity. We currently can take out a deep bunker, but we have to use nuclear weapons to do it. The problem w/ nukes always has been that they tend to destroy everything. That, however, would seem to be the goal in the case of a terrorist state like Iran and their nuclear weapons program, we would settle for no less than total destrustion of their capabilities. Plus, if you all remeber, it was on this very blog that Arkin reported the pentagon's intentions to arm ICBM's and other nuclear delivery systems with conventional warheads, thus giving us the payload capabilities to deliver large conventional strikes to far inland targets. As an aside,to all those who still cling to the non-proliferation fantasy, pandor's box was opened 60 years ago by a guy named Oppenheimer and his team. Nuclear weapons are such an incredible exponent for national power that there is no way we will ever be able to convince the Indias and Irans of the world not to pursue them, since they are the one thing a country can acquire that vaults that country onto the list of states that matter, just think, the genocide that continues in the Sudan would have been over years ago if Sudan was nuclear, that's a fact.

Dangerman: 'Hopefully, the fact that the US has a credible method of destroying Iranian nuclear targets without dropping megatons all over the Iranian landscape will make all the non-fanatics within Iran's gov't.'

Except that that isn't a fact. The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator that was recently being studied and was dropped in October had a proposed yield in the 1-2 MT range (yes M not K).

That was ditched partly because it became obvious to observers that it would in fact cause megadeath as there's no way such a blast could be contained at bomb-penetration depths.

Now they're experimenting with true mini-nuke size blasts, but it won't destroy hardened bunkers. Not even close. Check out the Federation of American Scientists' website for the real goods.
Bob Owens: 'ANFO is a relatively slow-burning explosive, and probably replicates something less than .5 Kt yield.'

Sounds logical I know, but actually 700 tons of ANFO should mimic a bomb with a yield of more than 0.7 Kt. Nuclear yields are generally overstated.

Minor Scale, for example, used 4740 tons of ANFO to simulate an 8Kt bomb.

In response to Mr. Canick's post:

Tom, good point. However, I think you overlook the fact that plan A (the touchy-feely plan) is a two-way street. To avoid pushing the West into the more militant direction (plan B), the global, moderate Islamic community must show a greater willingness than it has to police its own global terrorists. The West must see that the "touchy-feely" plan does in fact work and only the moderate Muslim community can demonstrate the fruits of this option.

The Husseins, the Amadinejhads (sp?), the Bin Ladens, these radicals should be handled predominantlty through a large-scale, coordinated, moderate Arab response with minimal involvement from the West. Until that happens, Western armies will continue to execute plan B and ensconce themselves on Arab lands while trying to handle a problem that moderate Arab nations refuse to and/or cannot handle.

If the Arab world doesn't like our military presence over there or our bellicose operational names, they need to clean up their own terrorist mess. Now how they should do that, I won't even pretend to know, but I would think that they would have a better idea than Western military planners.

I fully agree that the West should not alienate the moderate Islamists. However, they should not alienate the West with a dearth of action against their own radicals.

On a much more minor point: I don't think the second word in the codename had to start with "ST". I believe that word could be randomly chosen.

At least the US gov't. cares enough about collateral and political damage to test out a low yield solution to destroying hardened/buried targets... I mean, they could just say, "the heck with it" and go with something that will definitely do the trick, like a 100 kt weapon...

And I'd argue it's legitimate to use nuclear weapons against a state not yet possessing nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent the non-nuclear state from becoming a nuclear state... I mean, Iran does have a choice here...

Hopefully, the fact that the US has a credible method of destroying Iranian nuclear targets without dropping megatons all over the Iranian landscape will make all the non-fanatics within Iran's gov't. realize that they're best option is to work out a diplomatic solution to the crisis. And if not, at least we'll be able to assure our own safety without murdering untold numbers of the Iranian population. The murder will be kept under control by using small nuclear weapons, killing far less than a typical night of conventional bombing during WWII.

My first job in the service was as a Munitions Specialist in the Air Force. I worked in what is popularly known as the "Bomb Dump". This sound like a simulation for a nuclear device. I don't believe you could get a much conventional explosives like the one being tested off the ground. To get a bomb or missile with the explosive force being tested, it would have to be nuclear to be light enough to use tactically.
I have been screaming at my elected officials about a nuclear strike against Iran for a long time. A "succesful" stike against multiple targets in Iran would bring about a number of Chernobyls. The radioactive fallout of that one nuclear accident was felt around the world. Just think what would happen with a country as strategically located as Iran. Nuclear fallout all over the Middle East(including Israel) as a starter. With changes in the wind, it could go in every direction. These people do not have a clue. I think the calling them idiots is rather mild, but perhaps insane would be a better description.

A publicly announced military test such as this might be used for more than one purpose in addition to the one stated.

ANFO is a relatively slow-burning explosive, and probably replicates something less than .5 Kt yield. I'm not a physicist nor an explosives expert, but I would not be surprised to find that the yield of this massive ANFO bomb more closely resembles the blast of the .3 Kt tactical B11 Mod 11, our smallest and most common airborne tactical nuke. Or perhaps that might be what we want the Iranians to think this test is about. Of course, it could be something else entirely, such as testing/calibrating a new supercomputer and its application-specific software.

You never really know, do you?

Concerning the 700 tons of fuel used in the bomb. The US burns more than 20 million barrels of fuel each day. Given that 42 gallons are in a barrel and 315 gallons are in a metric ton - the US burns close to 1 Billion tons of fuel each year. So that 700 tons amounts to less than 1 one millionth of our national fuel consumption. I think it is a small price to pay to test a weapon that can defeat a dangerous potential advesary. What is the alternative - to leave our nation prostrate and helpless before our enemies? That is not to say that there is only a military option to the looming crisis with Iran, but our nation is far better served to negotiate from a position of strength than from one of weakness.

The Pentagon is having you on, Arkin. 700 tons of ANFO is nowhere near being the largest US conventional test.

As I say this I am holding an Air Force publicity photo of the 'Minor Scale' test blast, White Sands Missile Range, Alamogordo Desert, New Mexico, June 27 1985.

According to the Defense Nuclear Agency blurb, Minor Scale was "the largest planned conventional explosion in the history of the Free World."

It involved the detonation of 4,740 tons of high explosive, ammonium nitrate, and fuel oil. More than six times bigger than this new test.

It was designed to mimic the heat and blast from an 8-kiloton battlefield nuke. The primary equipment tested was the Hardened Mobile Launcher for the Midgetman missile. Also tested were Soviet tanks, US missile silo covers, and Swiss civil defence fallout shelters. Germany and Sweden also tested some equipment in the blast.

This test is clearly simulating a small nuclear explosion. All part of America's new avowed willingness to attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons. Hey, it's right there in the National Security Strategy of the United States. Who voted for these loons? No-one seems willing to own up to supporting them anymore.

And by the way, a surface-detonated 0.5Kt nuke is not going to dent a seriously buried bunker. It takes A LOT more than that, especially without ground-coupling the explosion. If the test is pronounced a success, you can be sure the target was a joke bunker.

Comment on Rigel post:

Instead of "Diatribe Lame," you could have suggested "Diatribe Stupid" so that you would stay with the DI and ST theme.

As to the theme of your post, I think that the US should seek not to alienate the moderate arab or Islamic world. I assume that most Islamists seek to drink tea, pray, go to work, raise their kids, have family meals, or other non-violent activities. Therefore, let's find a way either to get them on our side or at least not to push them to the other side.

An alternative to this approach is to define the entire Islamic population as our enemy and proceed on a genocidal campaign against them.

While I prefer Plan A (the touchy-feely one, above), if we (the West) don't figure out a coherent scheme soon, we'll be looking for a way to implement Plan B (the genocidal one).

I would like to complement "Patriot House" for his use of an off-site blog to post comments. Those of us who want to post very long documents should consider following his example.

Reading between the lines in Arkin's divine waste of ones and zeros, one detects the same old leftist message of appeasement that reads "don't upset the terrorists."

Instead of getting upset about codewords, the Arab community on this planet should be offended that muslim radicals are reshaping the general islamic image to be that of suicide bombers, beheaders and kidnappers.

I have my own suggestion for a codename for Arkin's article using the "DI" letter block:

"DIATRIBE LAME"

There are roughly 3500 usable "di" words in my big dictionary. That the word "divine" was the word of choice should send chills through us all.

I can see it now - a Kamikaze 747 full of nitroglycerin - oh, the irony...

I suspect ANFO's being used instead of TNT because of cost and availability. And I'm not convinced setting off a .5 kt conventional weapon in the middle of the desert will cause much environmental impact, but what do I know? What's interesting is how transparently obvious our purpose in doing this test, yet the media doesn't even raise an eyebrow... we're literally seeing if using small nuclear weapons is an effective way of attacking hardened Iranian nuclear targets... we're prepping for small scall nuclear war, for real. That's legitimate in my mind, given the risk of inaction on Iran, but that's also a huge development in the Iranian crisis, and deserves to be front-page news. Not every day we actually say, gee, if we were to set off a .5 kt nuke over a hardened target, just how effective would it really be? If it's less effective than we would have guessed, that's important information we need to know. It would be really bad to hit Iran with several small nuclear weapons in an attempt at pre-empting them, only to find out the really hard way that we needed, say, a yield of 2.5 kt to defeat a target. Or at least that's what I strongly suspect is going on here.... again, what do I know?

All your HDBT are belong to us.

Why use fuel? Do we not have a shortage of fuel? If there is to be a cloud above Las Vegas, what will the fallout area be? As it is the environmental people are trying to lessen the EPA qualifications for manufacturers and chemical plants!!! we have a rught to clean air!!!!

Why use 700 tons of ANFO to simulate 593 tons of TNT? Why not just set off 593 tons of TNT? Is it too expensive? Otherwise, this sounds odd.

Pyros: Why not "Subtle Persian Crater". BTW, is there an Iranian spy satellite?

Where are the Weapons?

I really would like to know what happened to the 3 large freighters, reported aimlessly circling off the North East coast of Africa about two months before our people went into Iraq. This news bite was reported exactly once that I could find and then disappeared. Could they have contained WMDs; were they quietly attacked and sunk by someone's Navy? Or, did they leave for some sheltered port with their unknown cargo? Some one out there has to know!

(see my blog at:) http://patriothouse.blogspot.com/

How can we be sure the test is using high explosive, and not an actual nuke, since they have announced that there will be a mushroom cloud over Vegas? Not that the military would ever try to sneak a nuclear test in on us. I mean, as pointed out already, a 500 ton weapon is not deliverable except by an armada of B-52s hitting the same spot at the same time (and not each other). I think Dangerman has it right.

Well, I guess we could ask permission from our adversary to ship in the explosives via freight train or we could build a magic bomber... they're so many ways to deliver a 500 ton conventional bomb against a hardened/buried ground target, though they all do involve rail transport or magic....

I mean, come on... this is obviously a way to do a full-scale nuclear test using conventional means, and it can't be anything but that, given, well, physics (500 tons of explosives is a heck of a lot to get to a target). Not that I'm opposed to seeing what happens when you set off a .5 kt tactical nuclear device over a tunnel complex, but let's not have any illusions about what this is.... a test of whether we could defeat Iranian nuclear targets with directed, surgical strikes using small, "special" (i.e. nuclear) weapons. Again, this might be the least worst option against Iran, but let's at least admit that we're testing whether a small nuke would be sufficient (wouldn't it be embarrassing to use a small nuke only to find it wasn't big enough to defeat the target?).

It has long been a custom to name sons after their fathers. As the fathers in the Pentagon consider themselves gods of destruction, naturally they are going to call their hellish offspring "divine" this or that -- until people whose brains are not on fire make them stop their very profitable and murderous business.

Hold on. They're going to detonate this much explosive, sending up the "first mushroom cloud over Las Vegas in decades" that will scatter potentially radioactive dust from decades of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site?

Does anyone else see why Reid and other Nevada natives should have issues with this? How could you blame him?

The problem with this test is more than the name - its where they are doing the test itself. (Of course, I'm sure it could be argued there's really no "good place" to do this, but scattering soil and dust from a site known around the world for the nuclear tests done there is somethign else entirely.)

Well said, Dangerman....funny how there has been no talk of how absolutely impossible it would be to ship, airlift and DROP a 500+ ton conventional weapon.

Well said, Dangerman....funny how there has been no talk of how absolutely impossible it would be to ship, airlift and DROP a 500+ ton conventional weapon.

Remember we had to change the name of the attack on Afghanistan because someone put "crusade" in the name.

If the government doesn't like the media reporting on all the dumb things it does, it should stop doing dumb things.

The attitude on the right seems to be how can America claim its rightful place as the moral conscience of the world when those darn reporters keep harping about all the terrible things we do!

As for the test itself, gee, I can't think of a better thing to do with 700 tons of fuel oil, now that we're facing a supply crunch, than to blow it up real good!

Someone has stock in Exxon.

Is it a democracy yet? OIL - Operation Iraqi Liberation! It's been 1,660 days since GWB said he'd catch UBL Dead or Alive, even though he is already dead!

Is Israel going to renounce violence or give up their secret nookular programs or weapons of mass murder? oh! Is the USA? oh! Why would any nation attack the USA or Israel with nookular WMDS? Come on!

Isn't blowing up Nuclear Power Plants uh, terrorism? Dirty Bombs huh? Does that open US National Nuclear Labs to pre emptive strikes! The USA sort of deserves to be nuked into a sheet of glass starting with the politicos in DC. We are going down!

Former US Ally Saddam Hussein charged over Kurd crackdown
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12147335/
Saddam and seven others have been on trial since Oct. 19 in a separate case -- the deaths of more than 140 Shiite Muslims following a 1982 assassination attempt against him in the town of Dujail.

US Army War College: NO PROOF SADDAM GASSED THE KURDS!
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/helms.html
This is serious stuff, because the US Army War College tells us that 1.4 million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the sanctions, which is 3,000 times more than the number of Kurds who supposedly died of gassing at the hands of Saddam.

It's been 1660 days since Bush said he'd catch Osama bin Laden 'Dead or Alive!'

This is another offensive step in a long series of them, hopefully not to be quite as erroneous as 'Shock and Awe'? It would seem that the military do not acknowledge an omnipotent god, as they are assuming divine powers to themselves.

I would be very unhappy if the Iranis tested a man-portable gelled gasoline bomb and named their test "Allah Hates Americans."

We are a divine theocracy now, you know. Not to worry, God is on our side.

Until the voters of this country wake up and kick the religious fanatics out of office, the military will increaingly mix religion and warfare. Praise the Lord and pass the divine strake!

Um... another approach would be to write how this is obviously a test designed to see what happens when we detonate a .5 kt nuclear weapon over, say, an Iranian hardened target.... and how slow the media's been to figure that out...

Did I really just spend the last 5 minutes reading a lengthy article addressing the suitability of a government codeword?

What, is it a slow week in the beltway, or what?

Nevermind the fact that most people wouldn't even be aware of the existance of a project nickname like "Divine Strake" if it weren't for the like of journalists like Mr. Arkin who make a living by trumpeting these facts as loud and as often as they can....I realize you have a "job" to do, but seriously.....this is kinda lame.

Maybe we should call our operations and tests something else, something that the politically correct elite would prefer,...something that (oh my God, no!) wouldn't offend our potential adversaries..

How 'bout "Fuzzy Pink", or maybe "Impotent Resolve"?

As far as I'm converned this program should be given the subtle nickname "Persian Crater"........