[continued from previous message] 
  
 even done on occasion not because they are going to be used, but to 
 demonstrate that certain ideas are impractical or unwise, or to show 
 ourselves we are thoroughly prepared to prevail in a designated contingency. 
 In my opinion, this news is a tempest in a pot of tea." 
  
  Then I asked a former senior nuclear strategist with Nato about the 
 practicalities of the US launching nuclear strikes against 400 separate 
 sites, most of them underground, in Iran. His answer was blunt. "The only 
 nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 
 bomb", he said. "If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The 
 fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else." 
 There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even 
 more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more 
 than $100 a barrel. 
  
 So that, one would assume, settles it. Here are two experts who know as much 
 as anybody in the world about nuclear weapons as tactical deterrents, and 
 they make the idea seem insane. But the second man, now safely out of Nato 
 and the Pentagon, also said darkly that the Bush administration's denials 
 over Iran sound horribly like its pre-2003 denials over Iraq. There are 
 midterm elections coming up in November, he noted, and, although not all 
 military men are right-wing hawks, not by any means, "Bush is a jackass who 
 needs to prove his manhood". 
  
 Here we come full circle, back to the struggle being fought in Washington. 
 The dominant view, including from the Pentagon, is that nuclear strikes 
 against Iran would be disastrous, militarily and politically. Yet there 
 remains the terrifying wild card of what Hersh so rightly calls Bush's 
 Messianic complex. 
  
 It is a sign of how dangerous the situation has become that the current 
 focus on the possibility of a nuclear attack actually makes the prospect of 
 a conventional strike seem like a soft option. 
  
 Inside the bunker, Rumsfeld has already written off Rice (and, in effect, 
 Straw), dismissing her admission that the Bush administration has made 
 thousands of mistakes in Iraq. "I don't know what she was talking about, to 
 be perfectly honest", he said, adding that her comments probably reflected 
 "a lack of understanding ... of what warfare is about". She's only a woman, 
 you see, and one now tainted irrevocably by all those commies in the State 
 Department. 
  
 But he-men like himself and Bush and Cheney are made of sterner stuff, ready 
 to nuke the world if they have to do that to save it, whatever the wimps 
 outside the bunker may say. Whether the increasingly united Washington 
 establishment will let those hunkering down in the bunker prevail is a 
 different matter. 
  
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