by Michel Chossudovsky January 3, 2006 GlobalResearch.ca

The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.

Coalition partners, which include the US,  Israel and Turkey are in “an advanced stage of readiness”.

Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack. 

Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister  Recep Tayyip Erdogan “to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets.”  Goss reportedly asked ” for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.” (DDP, 30 December 2005).

In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March:
 
All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran…. The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran’s nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action.
(James Petras,  Israel’s War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs, Global Research, December 2005)

The US sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage, as to the nature of NATO’s involvement in the planned aerial attacks. 

“Shock and Awe” 

The various components of the military operation are firmly under US Command, coordinated by the Pentagon and US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska. 

The actions announced by Israel would be carried out in close coordination with the Pentagon. The command structure of the operation is centralized and ultimately Washington will decide when to launch the military operation. 

US military sources have confirmed that an aerial attack on Iran would involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US “shock and awe” bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003: 
American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted.
Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities … or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq 
(See Globalsecurity.org at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes.htm)

In November, US Strategic Command conducted a major exercise of a “global strike plan” entitled “Global Lightening”. The latter involved a simulated attack using both conventional and nuclear weapons against a “fictitious enemy”.

Following the “Global Lightening” exercise, US Strategic Command declared an advanced state of readiness (See our analysis below) 

While Asian press reports stated that the “fictitious enemy” in the Global Lightening exercise was North Korea, the timing of the exercises, suggests that they were conducted in anticipation of a planned attack on Iran.  

Consensus for Nuclear War

No dissenting political voices have emerged from within the European Union. 
There are ongoing consultations between Washington, Paris and Berlin. Contrary to the invasion of Iraq, which was opposed at the diplomatic level by France and Germany, Washington has been building “a consensus” both within the Atlantic Alliance and  the UN Security Council. This consensus pertains to the conduct of a nuclear war, which could potentially affect a large part of the Middle East Central Asian region.  

Moreover, a number of frontline Arab states are now tacit partners in the US/ Israeli military project.  A year ago in November 2004, Israel’s top military brass met at NATO headquarters in Brussels with their counterparts from six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt,  Jordan,  Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. A NATO-Israel protocol  was signed. Following these meetings, joint military exercises were held off the coast of Syria  involving the US, Israel and Turkey. and in February 2005, Israel participated in military exercises and “anti-terror maneuvers” together with several Arab countries. 

The media in chorus has unequivocally pointed to Iran as a “threat to World Peace”.  
The antiwar movement has swallowed the media lies. The fact that the US and Israel are planning a Middle East nuclear holocaust is not part of the antiwar/ anti- globalization agenda.  
The “surgical strikes” are presented to world public opinion as a means to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  

We are told that this is not a war but a military peace-keeping operation, in the form of aerial attacks directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities. 

Mini-nukes: “Safe for Civilians” 

The press reports, while revealing certain features of the military agenda, largely serve to distort the broader nature of the military operation, which contemplates the preemptive use of tactical nuclear weapons.  

The war agenda is based on the Bush administration’s doctrine of “preemptive” nuclear war under the 2002  Nuclear Posture Review. 

Media disinformation has been used extensively to conceal the devastating consequences of military action involving nuclear warheads against Iran. The fact that these surgical strikes would be carried out using both conventional and nuclear weapons is not an object of debate. 

According to a 2003 Senate decision, the new generation of tactical nuclear weapons or “low yield” “mini-nukes”, with an explosive capacity of up to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb, are now considered “safe for civilians” because the explosion is underground. 

Through a propaganda campaign which has enlisted the support of “authoritative” nuclear scientists, the mini-nukes are being presented as an instrument of peace rather than war.  The low-yield nukes have now been cleared for “battlefield use”, they are slated to be used in the next stage of America’s “war on Terrorism” alongside conventional weapons:  

Administration officials argue that low-yield nuclear weapons are needed as a credible deterrent against rogue states.[Iran, North Korea]  Their logic is that existing nuclear weapons are too destructive to be used except in a full-scale nuclear war. Potential enemies realize this, thus they do not consider the threat of nuclear retaliation to be credible. However, low-yield nuclear weapons are less destructive, thus might conceivably be used. That would make them more effective as a deterrent. ( Opponents Surprised By Elimination of Nuke Research Funds Defense News November 29, 2004)

In an utterly twisted logic, nuclear weapons are presented as a means to building peace and preventing “collateral damage”. The Pentagon has intimated, in this regard, that the ‘mini-nukes’ (with a yield of less than 5000 tons) are harmless to civilians because the explosions ‘take place under ground’. Each of these ‘mini-nukes’, nonetheless, constitutes — in terms of explosion and potential radioactive fallout — a significant fraction of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.  Estimates of yield for Nagasaki and Hiroshima indicate that they were respectively of  21000  and 15000 tons ( http://www.warbirdforum.com/hiroshim.htm).

In other words,  the low yielding mini-nukes have an explosive capacity of one third of a Hiroshima bomb. 
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