Friday, February 09, 2007
Apocalyptic Vision
To one degree or another, everyone is a prophet, in all the senses of predicting the future, telling the truth as perceived, and “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” as my friend and former pastor would put it. There are those of us who have apocalyptic visions. The Bible has many such visions; they are a standard item with all the prophets as well as John and Paul.
Among the bloggers I read, Gerard is certainly the most expressive and his vision of a nuclear device exploding in San Diego is a chiller. I have commented there and in this blog on the possible consequences. I have also had much to say recently about my thoughts on the capability of this country to wage a winning war in Iraq. But today as I was showering, my thoughts in contemplating the current world were bleak indeed.
It has now become obvious that the Western world will not take the necessary measures to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In fact, I think that Iran will build many nuclear weapons. I do not mean so-called dirty bombs, but true fission devices with large kiloton yields. The thinking is just like al-Qaida, create a large, intimidating effect. A dirty bomb would not do that. The physical destruction would be minimal and the radioactivity would disrupt, but would be cleaned up or dissipate fairly rapidly. It would be disruptive but not terrifying with a large number of fatalities.
Iran has as its goal the destruction of Israel and the United States. They are our publically declared enemy whether we wish to deal with or not. So far we are doing next to nothing to deal with it, and by the time we do decide to deal with it, it will be too late.
Here is my vision of the future:
Regardless of what we do about Iraq, we will do nothing about Iran. The MSM has created an atmosphere of disregard and the overall tenor is to withdraw from the world. It will make no difference who is the President, we will continue to do nothing about Iran. In the meantime, Iran will create and test a single atomic bomb with the help of North Korea and the backing of Chavez, and covertly Russia and China. Once that occurs, there will be the building of at least 10 weapons. As far as delivery is concerned, that is an easily solved problem from their standpoint. Smuggle 2 or 3 of the weapons to Palestine and give them to Hezbollah to mount on short-to-medium range missiles. Those will be used to hit Tel Aviv and any other sites in Israel except Jerusalem. (Remember Jerusalem is holy to Muslims as well as Jews and Christians.) The remaining weapons will be smuggled into the US via Canada or Mexico. They will need no delivery system, a van will do the job.
In the US the targets will be New York, Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and either Los Angelos or San Diego. I am thinking in terms of two ideas, symbols and decapitation. The fuedal thought processes of jihadists think that if the leaders are killed, then the followers are helpless. If they remove our leadership, Washington and the Pentagon, then we will be helpless. New York is a symbol and is also our financial capital. Chicago and New Orleans are the two biggest shipping and transport centers in the middle of the US. San Francisco is symbolic, and San Diego or Los Angelos are the two main Pacific centers for shipping.
It is important to realize that they are patient. They think of this as a continuation of a war started hundreds of years ago—witness the statements of al-Qaida that Andalusia is to be returned to Islam. The Moors were thrown out of Spain almost a thousand years ago. If it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to acquire the necessary materials to make that many bombs they will take the time. I don’t think it will take that long. They will obtain nuclear material both from their own production and on what will develop as a black market of oil for uranium or plutonium. It will take about 80 lbs of material per bomb, 45 lbs is the minimum but that would require ideal fabrication. Unlike the bomb in Tom Clancey’s “Sum of All Fears” the bombs will not be sophisticated fusion-enhanced devices, but simple fission devices. The alternative is that they manage to purchase existing weapons on the black market. Those would be more effective still.
A van with a simple 40 Kton yield will wipe out anything within a couple of miles and severely damage far beyond that, with corresponding huge amounts of fallout since they would be ground blasts. The entire southern end of Manhattan, almost all of Washington, D.C., the entire Pentagon, all of New Orleans, the entire downtown of Chicago and the train yards, all of downtown San Francisco, the shipyards of either Los Angelos or San Diego would be destroyed. If Congress is in session, we will lose our entire Presidential succession, the President, the Supreme Court, and the entire Cabinet. We will lose our stock markets and much of our investment banking. Everything North and East of the sites will be contaminated with fallout. The destruction elsewhere will cause massive disruptions in services and shipping. It will be a massively destructive blow.
What will happen then? We will have no national civilian leadership, and our highest level of military command structure will be eliminated. I believe we will recover, but it will be a nasty and brutal process. We will lose most of our freedoms for a while if not permanently. Tolerance will be at an all-time low.
Our military will take over the leadership in the vacuum that occurs. It is dispersed, and for the last couple of decades the emphasis has been on decision-making at the lowest levels possible. We have a military that is capable of responding in the event of no leadership. There will be rioting, and vigilantes will destroy every identifiable Islamic structure in the country. Anyone looking the least like a Muslim, brown skin, head scarf, turban, will be attacked. There will be a horrible rage across the country, and God help anyone preaching political correctness. Demagogs will rouse people to horrible acts of vengeance. Food will become scarce in areas. Finally the governors will call in the military to establish order. The greatest risk will be if the military is given enough latitude, or takes it, to, in effect, stage a coup. Tradition will be our greatest protection there; our country has always had the military subject to the civilian government, and all the top military men whose writings I have read, agree with that principle.
There will also be the inevitable political jockeying. I expect the governors to immediately try to rebuild some sort of national order, but the methods will be highly variable and in some cases definitely suspect. They will all try to do it in a manner to gain power for themselves. Without a central government we will most likely revert to something functionally akin to the Articles of Confederation or the early Federal Republic. Having finally gotten back their power the governors will be slow to relinquish it.
There will be several months of confusion as things are sorted out. Of necessity there will have to be a national level of government. Representatives will be elected, appointed, and created by back room deals. Senators will be created the same way. The fundamentals of the Constitution will be re-established. I suspect that in order to get a President and vice-President as soon as possible, with all the legally determined succession dead, the governors will simply announce two of themselves to those offices after a lot of wheeling and dealing. Under the circumstances I think it will be as effective as any other process and won’t be too bad a choice, since they would have been elected at least once already and have executive experience. The government will convene in a new location, more likely someplace like St Louis or Kansas City, or perhaps the Colorado Springs NORAD facility. A new cabinet will be appointed, and within a few months the US will be represented to the world as a funcitioning entity. Unlike the Tom Clancey fairy tale for adults, “Executive Orders”, it will be messy and much of the old politics will still obtain. However, a couple of issues will definitely be solved—the borders will be sealed, and multiculturalism will be dead. The general populace will stand for nothing else.
In the meantime, the military command structure that is left will launch retaliatory strikes. I don’t expect them to be conventional weapons either. I doubt if we will worry about proving who did it. There will be a wholesale nuclear bombing of Iran, possibly North Korea for helping them, and conventional strikes on any other suspected allies. If enough of Israel is left, they will target most of the Middle East. When it is done, Islam as a religion will be gone, as well as all state sponsorship of it. Mecca and Medina will be glass, and much of Iran. Justice will not be the issue, nor will retribution, it will be vengeance, pure and simple. Americans are the most generous people in the world, but given the provocation we have the capacity to be the most brutal.
China may use the confusion to launch an attack on Taiwan. It may succeed in subjugating the Republic of China. We won’t be in a position to respond in time. Once it is done, we won’t be able to undo it. We wasted the possibility of preventing it years ago. Europe will either, wake up and finally do something about their Islamic invasion or else, give up completely. The recovery of our financial institutions will take a bit longer. Fortunately most of them now have duplicate centers, and there will be relative few losses of information. It may be more a moratorium on transactions for a few days than a disruption of services.
Iran’s expectation will be that by destroying the head of the dragon, the dragon will die. They are entirely unable to conceive of the regrowth of the head. Instead of our destruction they will have obtained their own and their allies destruction. They will also have remade the world in a new and more brutal image. Having finally seen what isolationism will do to us, the US will transform itself internationally into a bully. We will still be the strongest force on the planet, and we will determine to remain that way. We will approach allies with a whole new suspicion, and there better be plenty of reciprocation for our cooperation. We will also react much more strongly to smaller events, having finally learned that letting things go to be nice doesn’t pay. We will also take our own self-interest more seriously.
At home we will find out that we don’t need a central nanny after all, and the governors will be very jealous of their new-found power. Radioactivity will prevent the call to rebuild what was destroyed, and the energy will be invested into new building, not the recreation of the past. There will be a major change in reliance on foreign sources for critical items, such a military ammunition, oil, minerals. We will see that we are in a hostile world and can depend only on ourselves. Our so-called allies will have their hands full with their own Islamic uprisings, and will not provide any help or assistance. There will also be an element of schadenfreude on their part, to see the mighty brought low.
We are currently asleep and dreaming. We will one day wake up to a nightmare.
Among the bloggers I read, Gerard is certainly the most expressive and his vision of a nuclear device exploding in San Diego is a chiller. I have commented there and in this blog on the possible consequences. I have also had much to say recently about my thoughts on the capability of this country to wage a winning war in Iraq. But today as I was showering, my thoughts in contemplating the current world were bleak indeed.
It has now become obvious that the Western world will not take the necessary measures to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In fact, I think that Iran will build many nuclear weapons. I do not mean so-called dirty bombs, but true fission devices with large kiloton yields. The thinking is just like al-Qaida, create a large, intimidating effect. A dirty bomb would not do that. The physical destruction would be minimal and the radioactivity would disrupt, but would be cleaned up or dissipate fairly rapidly. It would be disruptive but not terrifying with a large number of fatalities.
Iran has as its goal the destruction of Israel and the United States. They are our publically declared enemy whether we wish to deal with or not. So far we are doing next to nothing to deal with it, and by the time we do decide to deal with it, it will be too late.
Here is my vision of the future:
Regardless of what we do about Iraq, we will do nothing about Iran. The MSM has created an atmosphere of disregard and the overall tenor is to withdraw from the world. It will make no difference who is the President, we will continue to do nothing about Iran. In the meantime, Iran will create and test a single atomic bomb with the help of North Korea and the backing of Chavez, and covertly Russia and China. Once that occurs, there will be the building of at least 10 weapons. As far as delivery is concerned, that is an easily solved problem from their standpoint. Smuggle 2 or 3 of the weapons to Palestine and give them to Hezbollah to mount on short-to-medium range missiles. Those will be used to hit Tel Aviv and any other sites in Israel except Jerusalem. (Remember Jerusalem is holy to Muslims as well as Jews and Christians.) The remaining weapons will be smuggled into the US via Canada or Mexico. They will need no delivery system, a van will do the job.
In the US the targets will be New York, Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and either Los Angelos or San Diego. I am thinking in terms of two ideas, symbols and decapitation. The fuedal thought processes of jihadists think that if the leaders are killed, then the followers are helpless. If they remove our leadership, Washington and the Pentagon, then we will be helpless. New York is a symbol and is also our financial capital. Chicago and New Orleans are the two biggest shipping and transport centers in the middle of the US. San Francisco is symbolic, and San Diego or Los Angelos are the two main Pacific centers for shipping.
It is important to realize that they are patient. They think of this as a continuation of a war started hundreds of years ago—witness the statements of al-Qaida that Andalusia is to be returned to Islam. The Moors were thrown out of Spain almost a thousand years ago. If it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to acquire the necessary materials to make that many bombs they will take the time. I don’t think it will take that long. They will obtain nuclear material both from their own production and on what will develop as a black market of oil for uranium or plutonium. It will take about 80 lbs of material per bomb, 45 lbs is the minimum but that would require ideal fabrication. Unlike the bomb in Tom Clancey’s “Sum of All Fears” the bombs will not be sophisticated fusion-enhanced devices, but simple fission devices. The alternative is that they manage to purchase existing weapons on the black market. Those would be more effective still.
A van with a simple 40 Kton yield will wipe out anything within a couple of miles and severely damage far beyond that, with corresponding huge amounts of fallout since they would be ground blasts. The entire southern end of Manhattan, almost all of Washington, D.C., the entire Pentagon, all of New Orleans, the entire downtown of Chicago and the train yards, all of downtown San Francisco, the shipyards of either Los Angelos or San Diego would be destroyed. If Congress is in session, we will lose our entire Presidential succession, the President, the Supreme Court, and the entire Cabinet. We will lose our stock markets and much of our investment banking. Everything North and East of the sites will be contaminated with fallout. The destruction elsewhere will cause massive disruptions in services and shipping. It will be a massively destructive blow.
What will happen then? We will have no national civilian leadership, and our highest level of military command structure will be eliminated. I believe we will recover, but it will be a nasty and brutal process. We will lose most of our freedoms for a while if not permanently. Tolerance will be at an all-time low.
Our military will take over the leadership in the vacuum that occurs. It is dispersed, and for the last couple of decades the emphasis has been on decision-making at the lowest levels possible. We have a military that is capable of responding in the event of no leadership. There will be rioting, and vigilantes will destroy every identifiable Islamic structure in the country. Anyone looking the least like a Muslim, brown skin, head scarf, turban, will be attacked. There will be a horrible rage across the country, and God help anyone preaching political correctness. Demagogs will rouse people to horrible acts of vengeance. Food will become scarce in areas. Finally the governors will call in the military to establish order. The greatest risk will be if the military is given enough latitude, or takes it, to, in effect, stage a coup. Tradition will be our greatest protection there; our country has always had the military subject to the civilian government, and all the top military men whose writings I have read, agree with that principle.
There will also be the inevitable political jockeying. I expect the governors to immediately try to rebuild some sort of national order, but the methods will be highly variable and in some cases definitely suspect. They will all try to do it in a manner to gain power for themselves. Without a central government we will most likely revert to something functionally akin to the Articles of Confederation or the early Federal Republic. Having finally gotten back their power the governors will be slow to relinquish it.
There will be several months of confusion as things are sorted out. Of necessity there will have to be a national level of government. Representatives will be elected, appointed, and created by back room deals. Senators will be created the same way. The fundamentals of the Constitution will be re-established. I suspect that in order to get a President and vice-President as soon as possible, with all the legally determined succession dead, the governors will simply announce two of themselves to those offices after a lot of wheeling and dealing. Under the circumstances I think it will be as effective as any other process and won’t be too bad a choice, since they would have been elected at least once already and have executive experience. The government will convene in a new location, more likely someplace like St Louis or Kansas City, or perhaps the Colorado Springs NORAD facility. A new cabinet will be appointed, and within a few months the US will be represented to the world as a funcitioning entity. Unlike the Tom Clancey fairy tale for adults, “Executive Orders”, it will be messy and much of the old politics will still obtain. However, a couple of issues will definitely be solved—the borders will be sealed, and multiculturalism will be dead. The general populace will stand for nothing else.
In the meantime, the military command structure that is left will launch retaliatory strikes. I don’t expect them to be conventional weapons either. I doubt if we will worry about proving who did it. There will be a wholesale nuclear bombing of Iran, possibly North Korea for helping them, and conventional strikes on any other suspected allies. If enough of Israel is left, they will target most of the Middle East. When it is done, Islam as a religion will be gone, as well as all state sponsorship of it. Mecca and Medina will be glass, and much of Iran. Justice will not be the issue, nor will retribution, it will be vengeance, pure and simple. Americans are the most generous people in the world, but given the provocation we have the capacity to be the most brutal.
China may use the confusion to launch an attack on Taiwan. It may succeed in subjugating the Republic of China. We won’t be in a position to respond in time. Once it is done, we won’t be able to undo it. We wasted the possibility of preventing it years ago. Europe will either, wake up and finally do something about their Islamic invasion or else, give up completely. The recovery of our financial institutions will take a bit longer. Fortunately most of them now have duplicate centers, and there will be relative few losses of information. It may be more a moratorium on transactions for a few days than a disruption of services.
Iran’s expectation will be that by destroying the head of the dragon, the dragon will die. They are entirely unable to conceive of the regrowth of the head. Instead of our destruction they will have obtained their own and their allies destruction. They will also have remade the world in a new and more brutal image. Having finally seen what isolationism will do to us, the US will transform itself internationally into a bully. We will still be the strongest force on the planet, and we will determine to remain that way. We will approach allies with a whole new suspicion, and there better be plenty of reciprocation for our cooperation. We will also react much more strongly to smaller events, having finally learned that letting things go to be nice doesn’t pay. We will also take our own self-interest more seriously.
At home we will find out that we don’t need a central nanny after all, and the governors will be very jealous of their new-found power. Radioactivity will prevent the call to rebuild what was destroyed, and the energy will be invested into new building, not the recreation of the past. There will be a major change in reliance on foreign sources for critical items, such a military ammunition, oil, minerals. We will see that we are in a hostile world and can depend only on ourselves. Our so-called allies will have their hands full with their own Islamic uprisings, and will not provide any help or assistance. There will also be an element of schadenfreude on their part, to see the mighty brought low.
We are currently asleep and dreaming. We will one day wake up to a nightmare.
// posted by Bill @ 11:29 AM 
Comments:
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A good post, Bill.
We here in New York know that the threat is very real, and I'm surprised that a nuclear attack on our city hasn't already happened.
The question is, what ought we to do?
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We here in New York know that the threat is very real, and I'm surprised that a nuclear attack on our city hasn't already happened.
The question is, what ought we to do?
<< Home
