[continued from previous message] 
  
 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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