Slate.com: "Talkin' World War III" (British Source: 'We came close' the day of Israel's Syria raid)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.slate.com/id/2178792

Talkin' World War III
The return of the repressed.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Updated Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET
Could we have a little talk about World War III? It's back again, that phrase, and it doesn't look like it's going to go away soon.

This past month may be remembered as the one when World War III broke out. Not the thing itself, obviously, but the concept, the memory, the nightmare, which had been buried in the basement of our cultural consciousness since the end of the Cold War. The beast suddenly broke out of the basement and it's in our face again. The return of the repressed.

There was George Bush's Oct. 17 warning that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III," you ought to worry about the prospect of Iranian nukes. Many found the phrase jolting, coming out of the blue. First, because it had not been in widespread use, certainly not from a White House podium, and second because "World War III" generally connotes a global nuclear war, while Bush was speaking about regional scenarios involving Iran and Israel. Why the sudden rhetorical escalation?

Especially coming from the man who has the "nuclear football," the black briefcase with the Emergency War Orders, always by his side, and enough megatonnage at his disposal to threaten the existence of the entire human race.

Then, a few days after Bush's Oct. 17 shocker, I came upon a less widely noticed, perhaps even more ominous quote, originally published two weeks earlier in London's usually reliable Spectator, in a story about the Sept. 6 Israeli raid on that alleged Syrian nuclear facility. A quote from a "very senior British ministerial source" contending, "(I)f people had known how close we came to world war three that day there'd have been mass panic." Here, it wasn't Bush theorizing about the future; it was a responsible official saying we'd already come close to Armageddon.

And then there was the "mistake" that came to light about the same time as the Israeli raid, the mistake in nuclear weapons handling, which allowed—for the first time in 40 years—six nuclear warheads to be flown over U.S. airspace, suspended from the wing of a long-range B-52 bomber en route from Minot, N.D., to Barksdale, La., a staging point for Mideast missions. And though the incident appears to have been an accident, it set off seething blogospheric speculation about its connection to the Israeli raid, and a prospective U.S. raid on Iran. Could it have been a signal of sorts? Even if it was a simple error, the unauthorized flight of the exposed nukes betrayed profound flaws in our control of our nuclear arsenal. Suddenly, the bombs that we knew, on some level, were there somewhere, were out in the open, waving: Hey, we're still here!

And now we have the crisis in Pakistan, one that portends a nightmare scenario in which Pakistan's so-called "Islamic bomb" falls into the hands of al-Qaida sympathizers. Such an outcome would put us on a fast-track route to World War III, because logic would dictate an immediate attack on those Pakistani nukes before they could be dispersed or launched, and logic on the other side would dictate that their new possessors launch or disperse them as soon as possible under a "use it or lose it" threat.

Finally, there was the almost unprecedented declassification of an element of the U.S. nuclear war plan formerly known as the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan, now called OPLAN 8044. The heavily redacted document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Hans M. Kristensen, a nuke specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, is almost completely blanked out, save for a few headings suggesting that we have off-the-shelf plans for nuking "regional" states, a phrase Kristensen believes applies to states that have weapons of mass destruction programs, such as North Korea and Iran. Soon, if not already, one can be sure, there will be "robust contingency plans" for Pakistan, as Martin Walker put it recently in the New York Times.

And—as if demonstrating a kind of synchronicity in the collective unconscious—the cultural realm has begun to break out with World War III talk. We've had publication of two new books, Richard Rhodes' history of the Cold War nuclear arms race, Arsenals of Folly, which takes us up to 1986 and the failure of the superpowers to ban the bomb, and Jonathan Schell's utopian revival of the cause of nuclear abolitionism in The Seventh Decade.

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[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Very disturbing.

We have no foreign policy, and no respect internationally... thanks to the idiots in the WH. Guess I will just cross my fingers since impeachment is off the table.

[aquart]

2. What an absolute pantload.

Okay, folks. WWIII breaks out. It's (and I assume, according to the British, Israel) alone against the planet. They mop us up with a sponge since our army is exhausted and offing itself almost faster than we can offer them money (we demand back as soon as they get a hangnail) to get them to enlist. Oh, and we're outta money so whatever we offer the soldiers is worth 40 cents anyway.

Damn that was a short war.

[MADem]

4. The article suggests the unlikely event would focus around Pakistan

I suppose that, in the time it took such a war to go from regional to World War status, we'd have to raise a brand new, fresh Army to deal with that sort of business...good thing those draft boards are all up and running, now! Freshly minted, with new members!

Israel is the Fify First State. An attack on them is an attack on us, so they wouldn't be alone for very long if other large armies on the planet started going after them. If they want to fight with their neighbors, that's one thing, but if it got big, the US would jump in, even though there would be objections from some quarters.

I think this is the urgent debate question that should be posed to both parties' candidates. What happens if Pakistan falls into the hands of al-Qaida-inclined elements? What happens if Musharraf hands over the launch authorization codes before he's beheaded?

Don't kid yourself: At this very moment, there's a high probability that this scenario is being wargamed incessantly in the defense and intelligence ministries of every nuclear nation, most particularly the United States, Russia, and Israel.

War is just a shot away, a well-aimed shot at Musharraf. But World War III? Not inevitably. Still, in any conflict involving nukes, the steps from regional to global can take place in a flash. The new "authorized" users of the Islamic bomb fire one or more at Israel, which could very well retaliate against Islamic capitals and perhaps bring retaliation upon itself from Russia, which may have undeclared agreements with Iran, for instance, that calls for such action if the Iranians are attacked.

If Pakistan is the most immediate threat, U.S., Israeli, and Iranian hostilities over Iranian bomb-making may be the most likely to go global. That may have been what the "very senior" British official was talking about when he said the Israeli raid on Syria brought us "close ... to a third world war." Iranian radar could easily have interpreted the Israeli planes as having its nuclear facilities as their target. On Nov. 21, Aviation Week reported online that the United States participated in some way in the Israeli raid by providing Israel information about Syrian air defenses. And Yossi Melman, the intelligence correspondent with Haaretz, reported a few days later that—according to an Israeli defense specialist—the raid wasn't about a nuclear reactor but something more "nasty and vicious," a plutonium assembly plant where plutonium, presumably from North Korea, was being processed into Syrian bombs.

[MADem]

3. Interesting article. K and R. nt

[lovuian]

5. It definitely is a Interesting situation

US took out syria radar station with computers

[sarcasmo]

6. I honestly think those Nukes were heading for Israel and someone in the Military

squealed, Thankfully. Israel would have had them ready to launch on Iran, Syria and Pakistan.

[Swede]

7. I never thought of the "use them or lose them" scenario.

Thanks for scaring the hell out me. K&R

[OzarkDem]

8. Show me the money

we're broke and in debt for the next couple of generations.

[Swede]

9. You never read the article.

It's the reverse of MAD if Pakistan falls. They would want to launch before we hit them,and we would hit them before they launch.

[OzarkDem]

10. Yes I did read the article

I don't give a rats ass what happens or how they plan to deal with it. I reject the premise that these wars need to be fought at all, period.

We don't have the funds to keep fighting these bullshit wars, let alone escalate them

We need to start using diplomacy again and working with allies.

When did everyone get so brainwashed that we began thinking that:

--the US can only wage wars to deal with diplomatic issues

--the US is the only one who can control and fund these wars

That's not how international diplomacy has worked for the last 50 years or more. Its time to reject neanderthal foreign policy and restore sanity to the process.