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by Andrew McKillop 21st Century Wire
Sure, the boys with the cigars ‘love a good war’, but are they missing something? Frankly, I am appalled and amazed this real threat “doesn’t exist” in the mainstream media (MSM) and posh academic circles.
There are many hangovers from the past Soviet epoch in eastern Europe, not least of, all those old RBMK and VVER reactors supplied by Russia to its Sputnik-era “satellite states” like Ukraine.
This is why peace and stability is paramount in this region. All parties should be pursuing peace as of yesterday – because these sitting targets are just sitting there. It’s a huge risk, not just for the people of the Ukraine, but to every other surrounding population withing a 1,000 mile radius.
If the mad dogs in Washington, Brussels, London or Kiev need any more incentive for peace than this, please let us know.
Don’t Expect the MSM to Warn You
Only niche publishers and blog producers will actually tell you the clear unambiguous threat of the Ukraine War, or (un)civil war/conflict, Russia-West standoff, separatist uprising, etc, etc. It could go nuclear easily, and at any time. We can be fairly certain that neither NATO, nor Russian military strategists, have an asymmetric ‘nuclear’ war plan for all of Europe and western Russia. The war maps are full of stunning first strike knockout targets.
Wasn’t Ukraine the home of the great Chernobyl disaster? But of course, “It can never happen again”, like all nuclear disasters. It’s always after the fact that our leaders and media geniuses ever express their shock and regret. Maybe Chernobyl was simply too far back in time for post-Facebook civilization to treat seriously and chant “Pripiat mon amour”? In those times before the iPhone 6.x.i, nuclear catastrophes actually happened! That’s right – exactly like the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, but the New One and Next One could be an ‘asymmetric’ dirty bomb scenario. It’s cheap and dirty warfare, a low expenditure of 105mm or 155mm artillery shells, short-range surface/surface missile attack, Grad rocket attack, aerial bombing attack, drone attack, cyber attack, kamikaze attack, denial of electricity and water supply to the target NPP.
The great powers are playing with fire it seems. They will have two choices: Die on your feet or quit the ‘Total Exclusion Zone’ (TEZ). Fast. Another reason why we need peace in the region.
Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’ (Image: Wikipedia)
The devastation is almost unthinkable. Away from the professional football league results and certainly not the coming 1- 0 win of the Ultras vs. the al-Sisi in Egypt, the MSM will be whining about the nuclear devastation and the big TEZs around deliberately attacked nuclear plants in Ukraine. And TEZ really does mean TEZ. There will be no fighting inside the Dirty Bomb TEZs and as we know from the Chernobyl template for nuclear TEZs, they can become splendid long-stay wildlife parks!
Wait a minute, I thought that the Twitterized consumer masses love “the ecology”, so what’s the problem? Where is the concern and righteous indignation? Where are the green doves?
NCB Weapons for The Consumer Masses
An analogy to nuclear dirty bombing is the 1976 Italian Seveso Disaster which like a giant “dirty chemical bomb”, and not unlike the notorious 1984 Bhopal Disaster in India. Seveso is perhaps a good analogy to dirty nuclear weapons and their TEZs, because Seveso could be called “a paradoxically classic disaster” (See: http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu21le/uu21le09).
Of course, the most important player in all of this is Average Joe Consumer citizen, who has imbibed so much MSM propaganda about “clean-cheap-safe” nuclear power that he really doesn’t care if a nuclear dirty bomb explodes someplace – so long as its outside of his sacred back yard. Among the ‘Lower Races’ is absolutely fine for him, but not in my Hamlet, thank you very much! However, the brain trust in Washington and London will have to accept the fact that a giant nuclear dirty bomb in Ukraine will make it awfully difficult to reserve the Ukraine for the West. You have to agree!
Both Seveso and Bhopal had short-life TEZs, but in the cases of Ukrainians and Japanese “civil nuclear accidents” the consensus view, among honest expertsanyway, is that these nuclear TEZs will have to be maintained for “say 400 years”. It might be less, perhaps 100 years, depending on nuclear actinide types involved and what “realistic” rad-protection standards were applied. All of this has to be taken into consideration when these risks are still on the board.
F**K IT! LET’S JUST BOMB THOSE RUSSIANS: For the most part, Joe Average remains clueless to the real risks of asymmetric warfare.
The real question is: “What is a clean bomb?”
The MSM will tell you that it’s one which allows our ‘Boys with their Boots on the Ground’ to walk away clean-and-proud from whatever civilian atrocity they committed, “bringing democracy to the unwashed, oriental masses”. For example, consider the Afghan and Iraq wars. Joe Consumer citizen can Tweet as much as he likes about numerous war crimes, but the ugly truth is that his sacred democratic system produced the war criminals who conjured-up and executed these anti-civilian wars, motivated by either an Anglo-American superiority complex, and-or oil greed, and-or showing Russia and China ‘who’s boss’, or in the case of Hitler, ‘who’s Hugo Boss‘.
Herein lies the key dilemma for our future global society – how do we eliminate our nuclear junk in order to prevent the risk of dirty bomb raids in a brave new 21st century world? This issue has yet to be seriously addressed at any time during the war hawks’ 35-year campaign of “surgical wars over the horizon”.
What happens when a damaged facility releases the maximum possible percentage of its radiological inventory – even higher than Chernobyl’s release, and much higher than Fukushima’s admitted-at-present radiological release? What then? Has John Kerry, Petro Poroshenko or John McCain thought about this?
Asymmetric Nuclear War
Any losing side in a conflict can deal a massive strike at the winning enemy, whenever the enemy has nuclear power plants (NPPs) to hit inside the territory controlled by the enemy. That is the asymmetric nuclear war doctrine. Don’t expect the MSM to tell you about it!
In the case of Chernobyl 1986, the nuclear TEZ was and is (for a long time into the future) about 3,000 square kilometres.
Ukraine, today, teeters near the event horizon of asymmetric nuclear war. Minsk 2.0 gives Ukraine a spanking new DMZ-TEZ the size of Switzerland or 50,ooo square kilometres, but its unlikely to last very long. If Minsk 2.0 collapses, all bets are off.
They were winning, weren’t they?
Other TEZ’s
Japan’s very own nuclear TEZ, unveiled and declared in 2011, enabled by Shinzo Abe and therefore downsized, is not even 2200 square kilometres. It, however, sterilized some very good farmland in farmland-starved Japan, but we can’t expect Neolibs like Shinzo Abe to care about those trifling details. He bailed out TEPCO, not the Pacific Ocean in which all the radioactive filth from the Fukushima disaster is dumped, 24/7. TEPCO and Japan Inc call it “leaks”.
As we know, those heroic defenders of the market economy and consumer civilization, the Americans, have drones with standoff air-ground missile capabilities usually used to kill or maim bearded al Qaeda suspects in their Toyota Landcruisers, as well as old Mercedes minicabs. The “Islamic radicals” gave away their exact location with the GPS tag that Apple thoughtfully places in all its major products, sold to people stupid enough to buy Apple products.
Not so with the civil NPPs. They are such big targets. Claims like a few NPPs such as the European fantastic-priced EPR “can resist a civilian airliner crash” impress no military planner. How does it resist to a half-dozen direct hits with 155mm artillery? The eggshell meets the hammer. Not pretty.
You Can’t “Can’t Do That”
Fact: in all human history when anybody invented a new weapon, it was used.
After the Spanish Reconquista home match, the European away match anti-Arab Crusades of 1095-1299 employed biological and chemical weapons on a regular basis – used by both sides. With industrial civilization “harnessing the powers of science” we inadvertently invent and use new weapons, not only on ourselves but also on our innocent animal brethren and the environment.
The Chernobyl TEZ is already recognized as Europe’s biggest most beautiful wildlife sanctuary. The reason is simple – it’s a TEZ for all humans but the bears, birds and deer (they can’t read the warning signs and don’t use Internet or watch TV).
So don’t play innocent-ignorant, and tell me, “Who would think of that weapon?”
Instead of fighting over gas pipelines and dominion over the bread-basket case which is the Ukraine, maybe our leaders should sober up and deal with this nuclear risk first – before it spins out of control.