Via digby: Jorge Hirsch at UC San Diego has gathered a few of his friends — Nobel Laureates, Boltzmann and Fields Medalists, Medal of Science winners, and past Presidents of the American Physical Society — to write a letter to President Bush, urging him not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The signatories are:
- Philip Anderson, professor of physics at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Michael Fisher, professor of physics at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland and Wolf Laureate in Physics
- David Gross, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Kavli Institute of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego
- Leo Kadanoff, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and recipient of the National Medal of Science
- Joel Lebowitz, professor of mathematics and physics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Boltzmann Medalist
- Anthony Leggett, professor of physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Eugen Merzbacher, professor of physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former president, American Physical Society
- Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Andrew Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and former president, American Physical Society
- George Trilling, professor of physics, University of California, Berkeley, and former president, American Physical Society
- Frank Wilczek, professor of physics, MIT and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Edward Witten, professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study and Fields Medalist
In reality, winning a Nobel Prize doesn’t make you an informed judge of geopolitical affairs. But anyone in their right mind can see it would be a bad idea to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran or anyone else, and these folks are in their right minds. Hopefully they can lend some heft and gather some publicity for the cause.
Part of me wonders whether the administration understands perfectly well that a nuclear strike would be madness, but they want to give the impression of being reckless cowboys so that Iran will dismantle their nuclear program — that’s a hopeless plan, of course, but at least not wildly irreponsible. Then I remember that they have consistently acted like reckless cowboys in every previous situation, and my heart sinks a little. Remember DeLong’s Law: “The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.”
If America attacks Iran, the finger on the button will belong to a right-wing Republican; but much of the responsibility will lie with the liberal hawks who provided cover for the adventure by treating the violation of international law as a normal activity. For a great many people, including many who are not obviously fundamentalist nut jobs, it has become perfectly rational to treat world domination the obvious and legitimate goal of American foreign policy. I expect we’ll pay for this hubris.
If I were an Iranian, I’d sure want my government to have the bomb.
It’s interesting to review the cold war as a historical data point. The myth in the United States was that we were building up our nuclear arsenal to counter the Soviet threat. The reality was that the U. S. was in the lead and the Soviets were responding to our buildup.
I do not believe the issue is nuclear capability, it is a cultural divide Christianity vs. Islam that is at the core of this. Islam is growing faster than Christianity and that shift in “market share” is what’s worrying a lot of people. Until we respectfully accept the differences of their belief structure and are willing to openly discuss the “ownership” of oil issue which is at the root of some of this, we cannot hope for a long term effective resolution of this issue.
We don’t run the world. We should stop acting like we do.
This kind of reminds me of the 1966 Jason study by Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg and others advising that using tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnamese infiltrating into South Vietnam was not a good idea. As in the Iranian case, the point being made is completely obvious and there’s no evidence the U.S. military wanted (or wants now) anything to do with such a nutty idea.
But, as in the case of Jason and Vietnam, this document stays silent on the much more real and serious issue of whether non-nuclear warfare makes any sense under the circumstances. Vietnam was a horrific disaster for the Vietnamese and for the US, and the real danger here is that we are just at the 1966 stage of an even greater US vs. Iran-Iraq war that will grow out of control over the next few years. It would be helpful if well-known physicists and others would start publicly addressing this problem, not just the tactical nuclear weapon issue.
Eugene,
Indeed, nuclear weapons are in an entirely different class than other forms of weapons in terms of destructive ability.
However, that is not germane to whether not the US should use nuclear weapons apart from the stigma they carry. The US already has an enormous, well-managed and well-practiced nuclear capability, so if one small nuke gets the job done better than 1000 conventional sorties, why not use it? This would not be an enhancement of the US’s capability, just a use of it.
***
Pacian,
I agree that the world would see a nuclear deployment as an escalation. Everything the US does is symbolic to the world.
Sourav says :
I think you are missing the point. Nobody doubt that you can reproduce the power of a small nuke with lots and lots of conventional weapons. The real question is whether you want to cross that threshold (and thus legimatizing others to cross it). In your opinion, you stated that this threshold has already being crossed.
I disagree. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are poor analogies when compared to the current scenario. The former is the (highly debatable) use of nukes as a way to quickly end a war that has raged for 6 years and a hundred million lives. The latter is the use of nukes to stop an alledged possibility of a future threat.
The world has collectively pulled back in horror from the use of nukes after Hiroshima/Nagasaki. We should be thankful. Why should we let the cat out of the bag again, when we have tried so hard in the past few years to keep it in? The cat has grown a million fold and will kill everyone, including the ones who think they are its master
I must be missing the point. What is the difference between dropping a tactical nuke and the damage-equivalent of conventional weapons? The only difference I can see is stigma. Force is force, and that is what is legitimate/illegitimate, not how one chooses to deliver it.
I don’t see why if a military chooses to use a 1 kiloton tactical weapon as an alternative to conventional bombardment, it would suddenly be more tempted to use 10 megaton warheads. Similarly, just because the US chooses to deploy a 1 kiloton weapon, it would not suddenly entice countries to develop nuclear capability who do not already have such ambitions. Finally, the US has already developed technologies upto multi-megaton and down to suitcase nukes, so the use of tactical nukes would not spur further development.
> What is the difference between dropping a tactical nuke and the damage-equivalent of conventional weapons?
E.g. the nuclear fallout
By the way, the Hiroshima & Nagasaki (10kilo-ton) bombs would be considered tactical nuclear weapons today. Even a ‘small’ 5kilo-ton bomb has the equivalent of 10000 conventional bombs, plus the nuclear fallout.
Cynthia,
I agree with Wolfgang, but there are also some other factors to consider here. Iran won’t be able to produce a large stockpiles of nules very soon. Israel is capable to take out incoming Iranian missiles, provided there aren’t too many. It is thus doubtful if Iran would be able to attack Israel at all.
Countries such as the US, Russia and Israel that are capable of detecting incoming missiles are at a clear advantage.
During the Cold war the US would have attacked the Soviet Union within the 20 minutes it would have taken for the Soviet missiles to arrive. A number of B-52 bombers were always on standby with their engines running, ready to take-off on a nuclear bombing mission.
Just one more remark. The B61-11 nuclear bunkerbuster bomb has a “dial-a-yield” function and the yield can probably reach from 1k-ton to 100k-ton.
However, I doubt it would be set to anything smaller than 5kT for the simple reason that for very low yield one has all the disadvantages (radiation & bad politics) without the ‘advantages’ (the high energy). If the US would use the B61-11, I assume the politicians want to be sure the job is finished with only one round of bombing to contain at least the poitical fallout.
I agree with Peter Woit. And if we only talk about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, then the pro-war camp could use that to argue that a war with Iran wouldn’t be so bad because ”we could do it without nukes”.
A war with Iran would have devastating consequences for the West. Iran’s best strategy is be to destroy all the oil installations in the Mid East with their missiles. The oil installations are not defended against a missile strike, so the Iranians don’t have to simultaneously fire a lot of missiles at the same target.
Once the Saudi, Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil installations are destroyed the war will be lost for the US. Iran could still supply the world with their oil after the strike, so they would gain enormously in power. The US could take revenge and bomb targets in Iran, but that wouldn’t get the oil back flowing.
If the oil installations are rebuild, then Iran could just take them out again. So, the US would have no option but to negotiate a cease fire, or to remove the regime in Teheran.
Taking out the missiles by bombing them is not going to work. In the Iraq war Saddam was able to fire missiles at Kuwait and Doha despite all the intelligence gathering from overflights of the no-fly zones.
My pet theory about why Bush went into Iraq was that the Saudi Royal family told him to. Because they were afraid of Saddam coming south again through Kuwait into S. A.. I don’t think they will instruct him to attack Iran because the geography does not lend itself for Iran to “invade” Saudi Arabia.
Another worth reading,
http://forward.com/main/article.php?ref=creveld20060419101
Wolfgang,
Doesn’t radioactive fallout above background levels only last for a few months? Of course, the concern for collateral damage is enhanced because bunker-busting would throw a lot of contaminated dirt in the air.
(Of interest: a debate on bunker busting nukes at Physics Today.
Wolfgang, there wasn’t any fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they were air bursts. The total amount of local deposited activity was just 0.02% measured in Nagasaki, according to Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1950. See also http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm#faq12
The neutron induced activity at ground zero didn’t produce residual doses that would cause radiation sickness.
When you hear about the black rain due to the firestorm at Hiroshima, remember that resulted from the firestorm which got going 30 minutes later. By that time, the mushroom cloud had been blown downwind. So the fallout was trivial. American and British observers surveyed the very low levels of fallout and neutron induced activity on 9 September. In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm#faq2
An airburst won’t take out Natanz.
Also worth a read:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/04/19/notes041906.DTL
Let me pose a simple question to all the nuclear strategists: why would one believe our species is resilient enough to survive the detrimental effects of radioactive fallout emerging from a massive scale nuclear bomb? Needless to say, Homo sapiens are far from being related to Extremophiles in the domain of Archaea. Consequently, our extremely fragile species is incapable of winning any battle with a nuclear bomb. More importantly, our highly refined species – the embodiment of frail complex life – is even less able to survive the aftermath from a large-scale/nuclear-fission experiment.
Cynthia, because 200 fission megatons detonated in the atomsphere in the 1950s didn’t exterminate everyone! In the worst accident, 239 Marshallese Islanders downwind were contaminated but because the fallout dose rises slowly, they were saved by evacuation two days later.
You could also try to explode a thermonuclear weapon without a nuclear bomb as a trigger. So far, there is no known way to do this. Perhaps it is possible to use Hf-178 or Ta-180m to make a gamma ray laser that can be used to make radiation implosion work.
Only if you were an Iranian who opposed democracy, freedom of speech, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of assembly, due process, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, fair trials, and freedom from torture. And, moreover, you supported extra-judicial killings, disappearances, summary executions, arbitrary arrest, global terrorism, inhumane prison conditions, the destruction of Israel, and general oppression by a tyrannical clerisy. Then, sure.
Otherwise, you’d be praying for American intervention.
Lots of Iranians are unhappy with the policies of their government; but even liberal Iranians want Iran to be run by Iranians; and they have every reason to fear attack from imperial powers, granted the history of the last 150 years. Remember they suffered millions of casualties during their war with Iraq, a war we supported diplomatically and that was before world domination became the more or less acknowledged aim of our foreign policy. The Iranians also have to operate in a region where four other powers (China, India, Pakistan, and Israel) have nuclear weapons and in an era when the norms of international law have been drastically eroded.
If I were an Iranian, I’d sure want my government to have the bomb.
Of course Belizean probably figures that the loss of national independence is a small price to pay for the delights of American occupation, motivated as it surely would be the purest idealism. Why the freedom from torture alone would be worth it.
Iran’s missile batteries would be targeted in the initial surprise attack. [Their SCUDs are short range and inaccurate. Their longer range No-dongs require support infrastructure easily identifiable from space. Their even longer range Taep’ o-dong 4s and 5s can’t be shot from mobile launchers and are similarly sitting ducks.]
I’m going out on a limb here. But I’m guessing that if Iran blew up all middle eastern oil operations outside of their country, we would be inclined to remove the regime there.
But you raise a good point. The chance that this terrorist-supporting regime might attempt to damage the world’s oil supply is yet another reason to remove it forthwith.
No country would be happy if their neighbors were supplying an aggressor with much needed energy supplies. When war is imminent, the Iranians would probably demand that their neighbors stop supplying the West with fuel. If they refuse to do that then they are collaborating with the enemy. An attack on their oil installations would then be allowed under international law.
Iran has developed mobile solid fuel missiles that are very hard to take out.
They are not merely unhappy. Many are suffering and dying; millions are brutally oppressed.
Wrong. They’d rather have Iran run by a liberal foreign power than by local despots, just as you’d rather have the U.S. run by Canada than by a tyrannical regime of Christian Rightists. Read a few Iranian blogs. Irrespective of this, the U.S. has no interest in running Iran. It would happily end its hypothetical occupation once convinced that another tyrannical minority was unlikely to seize power.
Iran doesn’t have national independence now. The nation of Iran has no say whatsoever in its government or its government’s policies. Only a few of the tyrants in the ruling clerisy do.