🚀 go-pugleaf

From ACTIV-L@UMCVMB.bitnet Mon Feb 18 16:02:50 1991 - it deserves more readers
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 91 18:57:31 CST
From: csime%cdp@labrea.Stanford.EDU

BUSH'S WAR OF ANNIHILATION

By Dr. Michio Kaku
Professor of Nuclear Physics
City University of New York

     President George Bush has now dropped all pretense
about attacking Iraq in order to "defend Saudi Arabia" or
"liberate Kuwait."  Gone is the phony rhetoric about
defending freedom and "our way of life."  His strategy is
now to wage a war of annihilation against Iraq and protect
the "way of life" of Exxon.

     In the greatest air strike of all time, surpassing the
saturation bombing of World War II or the Vietnam War, the
Pentagon unleashed the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs
of high explosives in just the first two weeks.  On the
first day alone, 18,000 tons of high explosives were
dropped, while the Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of only
13,000 tons.

     The magnitude of these murderous strikes defies
imagination.  In the first three weeks, 47,000 sorties were
sent over Iraq.  (By contrast, during Nixon's infamous
Christmas bombing of Vietnam, only 2,500 sorties were sent
to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong.)  There are 2,000 each day; a
raid against Iraq leaves Saudi air bases at the rate of more
than one per minute.  The bulk of NATO forces, designed to
fight World War III with the Soviet Union and the combined
Warsaw Pact nations, is now in Saudi Arabia, pounding a
small Third World country into rubble.

     Bush has given new meaning to the word "overkill."

     According to numerous interviews with eyewitnesses from
Europe and the U.S. who have toured Iraq and refugees
flooding into Jordan, hospitals, schools, community centers,
apartment buildings, parks, shops, and religious shrines
have all been demolished.  Large areas of Iraq are now
without water, power, fuel, medical care or food.  Hospitals
that are still standing are overwhelmed by the number of
wounded.  Pictures of the destruction show vast residential
buildings that have been ripped apart by the bombing.

     Peace delegations from the U.S. and Europe in Baghdad
have been horrified at the massive destruction all around
them.  They reported that apartment buildings have
collapsed, killing their inhabitants, that ambulances
continually rush wounded civilians to hospitals, and that
homes have been demolished.  Parts of the city now look like
the surface of the moon.

     The Pentagon scoffs at these eyewitness reports by
stating that the air war consists of "surgical strikes" with
super accurate laser weapons.  However:

   *  The laser weapons cleverly hide the fact that much of
the brutal air war is fought with gravity (dumb) bombs.  For
example, the carpet bombing by the huge B-52s is
indiscriminate; each B-52G can drop 40,000 pounds of high
explosives, which destroy everything in a swath one mile
long and half a mile wide.  Every day, almost 30 B-52s have
been dropping about 450 tons of high explosives in the war.

   *  The huge guns of battleships like the Missouri (which
were used to rain death and destruction in Lebanon)
regularly miss their targets and indiscriminately slaughter
people in the killing zone.  These crude World War II
vintage weapons are mainly terror weapons used to crush
civilians and have marginal military value.  Each shell
fired from the 16-inch guns can travel 25 miles and weighs
as much as a Volkswagen.  Without any guidance systems
whatsoever, they rarely hit their intended targets, but can
create vast carnage to a civilian population.

   *  By the Pentagon's own estimate, 20% of the strikes
have missed their targets, meaning that the destructive
power of at least one Hiroshima bomb has exploded on non-
military targets.  Military analysts who have studied the
kill rate of smart weapons, point out that a 50% success
rate for high-tech weapons is probably more realistic,
meaning that perhaps half the tonnage dropped over Iraq has
hit civilian targets.

   *  The Pentagon has now finally admitted that pilots have
been given the freedom to select their own targets.  This is
partly because the Pentagon is rapidly running out of
targets to hit.  Traveling faster than the speed of sound,
without benefit of satellite pictures, these pilots cannot
possibly distinguish civilian from military targets by
eyesight.  This has vastly increased the destruction over
Iraq.

   *  The Pentagon carefully edits all videotapes of the
bombing, displaying only the most sensational hits of the
laser weapons, reducing the carnage to a Nintendo game.  We
never see the tapes of the bombs that have missed and may
have demolished schools and hospitals.  In this video game,
no blood is ever shown, no one is ever wounded, no one is
ever blown apart.

     A staggering $1 billion a day is being spent to flatten
every building of significance in Iraq.  With fewer and
fewer targets left to hit, the Pentagon, in frustration, is
now hitting the same targets repeatedly, which only makes
the rubble bounce.  With so many bombing raids, the U.S. is
now accidentally killing its own Marines with Maverick
missiles.

     But even that is not enough.  Ominously, Pres. Bush,
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, General Norman Schwarzkopf
and Vice President Dan Quayle have now all publicly stated,
on several occasions in different interviews, that nuclear
weapons might be used on Iraq.  Gen. Schwarzkopf, even
before the war began, formally asked Pres. Bush for
permission to use tactical nuclear weapons for the war.

     Gen. Schwarzkopf asked that nuclear weapons:

  (a) be detonated over Baghdad to unleash an
electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would destroy all
communications in Iraq,

  (b) be used against hardened bunker positions of dug-in
Iraqi troops.  He asked that the neutron bomb would be used
against these troops.  Without the Soviet Union to challenge
the U.S., the Pentagon feels emboldened and believes that
using tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq will not set off
a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.