US Nuked Syria?


Rather serious if true:

The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.

A US Air Force F-22 Raptor, an F-117 Nighthawk, an F-4 Phantom and an F-15 Eagle fly over Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.
Photo: US Air Force

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

If true, the US stepped past the bright red line. Nukes? The, er, fallout, will be extreme overseas. The use of nukes is the last taboo.


Ian Welsh November 3, 2007 - 8:03pm

Maybe someone's just doing a clever bit of judo with this - using the weight of a US/Israeli disinfo campaign against itself.


"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Escher Sketch November 3, 2007 - 8:32pm

I've been following ArmsControlWonk about the September 6th air raid. Jeffery has debunked every major "Syria has nukes" claim in the media. This looks suspicious as well.

Lesly November 3, 2007 - 8:37pm

are both right.

Ian Welsh November 3, 2007 - 8:41pm

That nukes were used in the attack. Only that the planes were armed with them, and that the facility took only one hit. All fighter jets can be armed with tactical nukes, but a single modern non-nuclear bunker-buster, properly targetted, would acheive the desired effect on an above-ground facility.

The Syrians also seem to have made a significant effort to sterilize the grounds since the attack, which would be kind of difficult if it were truly radioactive.

I suspect you've jumped the gun here a bit.

Joes Bar and Grill November 3, 2007 - 8:50pm

Why would you load a nuke you aren't intending to drop on a plane that you're sending to do a conventional bombing mission over hostile territory?


"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Escher Sketch November 3, 2007 - 9:38pm

Nukes would simply be a part of the plane's arsenal, if such an arsenal were verifiable at all. My point was that the article makes no assertion about a nuclear payload actually being delivered. Whether or not the jets were armed thusly is also open to speculation - nuclear missiles are not necessarily marked as such, such that they are visible to observers. Nevertheless, it's clear that US sorties do fly armed with nukes occasionally, whether or not they are delivered.

Joes Bar and Grill November 4, 2007 - 5:16am

I'm not sure what's in "bunker buster" bombs... but its plausible that they might use uranium-238 to make them. Uranium is extremely dense, and thus falls HARD... but only uranium-235 can be used for nuclear weapons, and you can't make U235 from U238... so there's no risk in flying over enemy territory with U238 tipped weapons.

Maybe the reporter got the types of uranium mixed up, and thought they were flying with nukes...

Although I'm pretty sure modern US nukes use plutonium...

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

bex November 6, 2007 - 12:26pm

website is claiming this.

Tina November 3, 2007 - 9:16pm

www.aljazeera.net/etc

One speculation: maybe Syria is going to invite an outside party to examine the site and they want an explanation for any detected radioactivity.

tfisb November 3, 2007 - 9:59pm

they are kind of hard to miss. Especially in the desert where they would tend to leave big glassy craters. And no reports of EMP-like effects in the area that I am aware of. Tho I am not by any means an expert, the apparent absence of any of those side-effects would make me tend to think nukes were not used.


"I beseech you in the bowels of christ think it possible you may be mistaken."

Scott M November 3, 2007 - 9:18pm

Precisely how is it again that we became certain that this site is the one in question, anyway? Through what channels of info?


"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Escher Sketch November 3, 2007 - 9:40pm

...and Paul Brannan at ISIS based on commercial overheads, confirmed off the record by the IC. Albright has a very, very good rep.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 3, 2007 - 10:27pm

...and he doesn't even have relevant academic creds, nor any indication that he's ever done this kind of work before.

Brannan was part of the WMD crowd when the Iraq invasion was being planned. Although he questioned some of the "evidence" (you'd had to be an idiot not to), he never came out against the invasion.

Another "think tanker".

Petronius November 5, 2007 - 12:40pm

...mixed up. This particular Paul Brannan was an undergraduate during the runup to Iraq - are you maybe thinking of the Paul Brannan that works for the Beeb?

Funny, where I come from "think tank" isn't a pejorative. Or is it only when one disagrees with them?

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 5, 2007 - 1:20pm

I said "Brannan" in connection with Iraq, when I meant "Albright", his boss. But I'm not impressed with Brannan's credentials. From the ISIS website:

"Brannan graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 2004 with a B.A. in Government and a concentration in International Affairs. He has been with ISIS since September 2004."

That's it--the whole of Mr. Brannan's CV. That really qualifies him as a satellite surveillance expert, doesn't it?

Albright was the one I was thinking of. From The Great WMD Hunt:

Take the ubiquitous David Albright, a former U.N. inspector in Iraq. Over the years, Albright had been cited in hundreds of news articles and made scores of television appearances as an authority on Iraqi weapons. A sample prewar quote from Albright (CNN, 10/5/02): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions."

But when the postwar weapons hunt started turning up empty, Albright made a rather candid admission (L.A. Times, 4/20/03): "If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell. I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance." (Recently, Albright has become a prominent critic of the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.)

It's Albright whom I really question. The facility in question was built in 2003. Now the story is that because the bombed site's been cleared, it must have been a reactor.

What the story doesn't have is independent verification. "Ubiquitous" certainly does describe the guy.

Petronius November 5, 2007 - 9:18pm

..."when one disagrees with them."

As to Mr. Brannan's credentials, well, how to put this delicately? I'd stack three years of working day in and day out with overheads at ISIS up against the other talking heads on this one - yours, mine, the Pope's for that matter. In another life I did a significant bit of microscopy (pretty much every day for six years) - it, like image interpretation near as I can tell is something one learns through practice over time. I'm sure there are folks that have much better technical skills than Mr. Brannan out there, but frankly this one just don't seem to require "da mad skillz". It's a great big building with unusual proportions that are allegedly broadly consistent with a known nuclear reactor profile, in a semi-secluded location, that was apparently struck, destroyed, and the location sanitized, post-strike. Near as I can tell, none of that is difficult to verify and all elements save the BDA rest on minimal technical interpretative skill. In brief, one either believes that the signature is indicative of a reactor and post-strike sanitization or one does not, but the signature itself is not terribly difficult to characterize.

Though Jeffery's tongue in cheek id as a potential Lego storage warehouse is highly amusing, frankly I think there's a real good chance he's got the short end of the argument on this one. Folks just don't build massively robust 24 metre tall structures shaped like cubes for storage - lots of warehouses are that tall, but they have a strong predisposition towards much, much larger areal footprints (in the storage biz, one tends to spread laterally of preference to spreading vertically when given the option). They also tend to integrate the storage facility into the transport net, which this structure is manifestly not. Similarly the signature seems inconsistent with what we know of the other alternatives (SCUD assembly, bioweapons research and production) elsewhere in the world, including quite specifically in Syria itself. I dunno what it was, but I danged sure know that the argument that it was consistent with a reactor ain't a bad one, and it ain't one that I've seen anyone falsify yet.

As to the build date of the structure, per Jeffrey's commentators, we know it predates 2003 - it is present on imagery shot on 8 September 2002, but not present on imagery from 26 May 2001.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 6, 2007 - 11:44am

But the AEI is a "think tank" -

Tobacco issues
In 1980, the American Enterprise Institute for the sum of $25,000 produced a study in support of the tobacco industry titled, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Regulation: Consumer Products. The study was desgined to counteract "social cost" arguments against smoking by broadening the social cost issue to include other consumer products such as alcohol and sacchrin. The social cost arguments against smoking hold that smoking burdens society with additional costs from on-the-job absenteeism, medical costs, cleaning costs and fires.[3] The report was part of the global tobacco industry's 1980s Social Costs/Social Values Project, carried out to refute emerging social cost arguments against smoking.

[edit]

- and the Fraser Institute is a "think tank" -

There are also questions about how much the institute's work is shaped by its corporate funders.
In 1999, the Fraser Institute sponsored two conferences on the tobacco industry: "Junk Science, Junk Policy? Managing Risk and Regulation" and "Should government butt out? The pros and cons of tobacco regulation." [Ibid]
More recently, the Fraser Institute has led the campaign to deny the science behind and the dangers of climate change, with several of its fellows and authors signing letters to political leaders and writing Op Eds to that effect. ExxonMobil donates to the Fraser Institute for "climate change" work.
Professor Ross McKitrick, author of the popular book that denies climate change "Taken By Storm" and known for his opposition to the Endangered Species Act in Canada, is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

Yes, the term "think tank" is now beginning to carry a well-merited pejorative connotation, but that has less to do with what you "take it as" than it does with the reality that at least some "think tanks" today do little of what might be thought of as traditional academic "thinking", and exist more as PR agencies to bring ideology to market or intentionally undermine solid scientific research that threaten the interests that pay them for their conclusions.

The role of at least some think tanks long ago moved from "thinking about solutions" to "thinking about marketing an ideology or agenda" or "thinking about ways we can defend industry 'X' from damaging research". I'm not tarring ISIS with that brush. But the poor reputation that "think tanks" are beginning to suffer from is at least in part a direct result of the actions of some "think tanks" themselves, and can't be quite so breezily dismissed.


"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Escher Sketch November 6, 2007 - 2:10pm

...impressed with dismissing someone like Albright as a "think tanker" when he offers up evidence that folks choose not to like is that it bespeaks a distinct lack of familiarity with who he is, what he believes, and what he and his institution stand for. More importantly it's indicative of not being familiar with his track record, other than via selective googling, of course. Finally and most pertinently it's the antithesis of what this forum used to be about - weighing the evidence on its merit, rather than lazily dropping the ad hom bomb.

But hey, what the fuck would I know? I'm just another think tanker.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 6, 2007 - 2:28pm

picked up a pejorative connotation as a question in the abstract; that was me answering the question in the abstract (granted it was obviously meant rhetorically, but I disagreed with the underlying assumption).

No disrespect to your own integrity, or that of your institution (which I don't even know the name of, but I seriously doubt is a pack of rent-a-scumbag I'll-argue-the-Earth-is-flat-for-ten-drachma sophists like the FI or AEI), or ISIS, was intended.


"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Escher Sketch November 6, 2007 - 3:32pm

...by generalizations on this topic. Me, personally, I don't think the term should be used as a pejorative - if one wants to go after individuals (and I will accept even some institutions) with some precision, hey, have at it - but I'm very deeply concerned by the trend to broad strokes. Though it is currently fashionable to disdain places like AEI, WINEP, Hudson, and Brookings I have found they defy easy characterization. As an example, my shop is nothing like AEI or Hudson (on quite the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, in fact), yet I've had productive workings with my counterparts (to be clear, not in their foreign policy shops) in both of those organizations. We certainly don't agree and we come to radically different conclusions and policy prescriptions, but it simply isn't as simple as saying that these guys are devil spawn or know-nothings. Me, I fear the current backlash against independent institutions that sponsor folks who call it like they see it, ideologically motivated or not. I've seen the response of the internet mediated punditocracy and I find that it simply can't cope effectively with complex issues.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 6, 2007 - 3:59pm

...nuclear arms were used, one can safely dismiss the notion. The target is billed as an above ground, as yet incomplete reactor - no need for special weapons. Though they are robust structures, such targets have been hit before with conventional arms - with PGMs the simple reality is that they're there for the taking.

Additionally, there is a fairly significant number of countries with space based and terrestrial systems looking for NUDETs. There's about zero chance that all of them would either miss a release or agree that it was not in their national interest to release evidence of a release.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

JustPlainDave November 3, 2007 - 10:33pm

is because nuclear bombs leave unmistakable, irrefutable evidence. Syria could easily call in UN inspectors equipped to take samples and measure them for specific types of radiation. If a nuclear strike were confirmed, the Bush administration instantly would become international pariahs, and the world would scream for their heads.

It's a bit too soon for that.

"Adapt or perish." Murphy's Law? Nope, Darwin's Guarantee.

Jimbo92107 November 3, 2007 - 10:49pm

In Israeli geological records for any seismological evidence? granted, this would be for an above-ground detonation, but I would think there should still be something...

-5.75,-4.05
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny--
Did you ever try buying them without money?
-- Ogden Nash

justadood November 3, 2007 - 11:29pm

An above ground detonation would increase global atmospheric background radiation. This would be detectable by just about any instrumentation that was more sensitive than a basic Geiger counter. I can recall doing this in the mid '60s while above ground testing was going on.

Any such increase would have been noted by too many observers to put the toothpaste back into that tube.

m November 4, 2007 - 7:58am

An above ground detonation would increase global atmospheric background radiation. This would be detectable by just about any instrumentation that was more sensitive than a basic Geiger counter. I can recall doing this in the mid '60s while above ground testing was going on.

Any such increase would have been noted by too many observers to put the toothpaste back into that tube.

Yeah, and the neighbors would be pretty outraged about fallout. Hard to keep the lid on something like this.

tjfxh November 4, 2007 - 12:21pm

Little trial run. Show of force for Iran.

If there was a reactor and Syria denied its existence, then they can't really come out and tell the world can they?

Just supposition.

I haven't a clue if this is true.

I did inhale.

Don November 4, 2007 - 3:39pm

But the claim the the location is remote is, itself, an exaggeration.

The Box-on-the-Eurphrates is a little more than a mile from a well-known tourist site, the ruins of Halabiya (or Halabiyya or Halabiyah), which the Syrian Ministry of Tourism website describes as “forward-defence lines against Persian invasions.”

Lots of people, actually, do go there — or at least pretty damn close.

ACW

Tina November 5, 2007 - 12:19pm

construction date of the “Box-on-the-Euphrates” in 2001

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1694/acw-readers-rock-the-box

Tina November 6, 2007 - 11:42am

Nov 7, 2007

Air strikes first, questions later
By Khody Akhavi
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK07Ak05.html

WASHINGTON - More than two months after Israeli warplanes conducted a mysterious raid in northeast Syria, there is a growing consensus among US government and independent analysts that the suspicious target was a nuclear facility.

But the evidence they are relying on - a series of satellite photos showing a building and an adjacent pumping station near the Euphrates River - is anything but definitive, given how closely guarded US-Israeli discussions have been. With the exception of

several highly classified one-on-one briefings about the incident to a handful of US congressional leaders, the George W Bush administration has kept mum.

Western analysts say a tall, boxy building on the site may have contained a nuclear reactor under construction similar to a North Korean design, but the structure itself was razed after the September 6 air raid. They say that the secret nuclear reactor may be several years old.

Whether or not the facility was nuclear, the episode - and Israeli, Syrian and US silence over the issue - raises even more questions as to the actual threat posed by the facility, the timing of the raid, and what the unilateral action portends for the nuclear ambitions of Israel's regional neighbors.

A United Nations watchdog inquiry into the suspected Syrian covert nuclear site may end inconclusively without more information than the satellite pictures that are already available. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has asked to see the intelligence that prompted the attack, and is also seeking information from Damascus about its alleged program.

Syria is required to inform the IAEA of any activities relating to nuclear activities.

"At the IAEA, we have zero, and I stress 'zero', information on the attack," IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei told the French newspaper Le Monde last week. "Frankly, I venture to hope that before people decide to bombard and use force, they will come and see us to convey their concerns. We would have gone to there to check."

The air strike unequivocally shows that the US and Israel have decided to circumvent the UN's monitoring of nuclear proliferation situations in the Middle East, according to analysts.

"The Bush administration's decision not to share its intelligence on the Syrian site with the IAEA and thereby encourage and support the international agency's aggressive inspection and evaluation of this alleged threat to peace, was another demonstration of the contempt in which the present US administration holds the UN organization," wrote former CIA analyst Ray Close in an e-mail to Inter Press Service (IPS).

"It suggests, in effect, that the United States intends to manage the international nuclear proliferation issue all by itself, independent of the rest of the international community - except for deputizing Israel to be the nuclear policeman of the Middle East," he wrote.

Close also told IPS that the US's decision not to publicize the intelligence that presumably justified the Israeli attack suggests that Washington did not find the Israeli evidence altogether persuasive. Another photo, taken on September 13, 2003, by a US commercial satellite, suggests that US officials may have known about the facility long before the Israeli mission, but did not consider it an immediate threat. During that time, the White House officials were sounding the alarm on the reconstitution of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, but, ironically, never discussed the presumed effort in neighboring Syria.

The White House's complicity in Israel's action also points to the rift within the administration, between right leaning hawks such as former UN ambassador John Bolton and the pragmatism favored by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bolton's role cannot be overstated.

Bolton, now a fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, repeatedly clashed with the intelligence community over Syria's intentions when he was undersecretary for arms control. In the summer of 2003, Bolton's testimony on Capitol Hill was delayed because some intelligence officers felt that Bolton overstated the Syrian threat. As former CIA officer Philip Girardi wrote in the pages of the American Conservative, "At one point, Bolton was forced to strike from a speech language suggesting that Syria had a nuclear program."

Girardi continues: "On another occasion, Bolton's judgments on Syria were challenged by Robert Hutchings, director of the National Intelligence Council, who charged that Bolton 'took isolated facts and made much more of them ... cherry picking ... to present the starkest possible case'."

Fast forward to 2007. Writing in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal more than a week before the Israeli strike, Bolton asserted, "We know that both Iran and Syria have long cooperated with North Korea on ballistic missile programs, and the prospect of cooperation on nuclear matters is not far-fetched.

"Whether and to what extent Iran, Syria or other might be 'safe havens' for North Korea's nuclear weapons development, or may have already benefited from it, must be made clear," he wrote.

The focus on North Korea comes as the US prepares to implement a deal to end the country's nuclear weapons program, a diplomatic approach that has drawn the ire of neo-cons like Bolton.

"Bolton represents the crowd that is very distressed that the US has declared defeat in North Korea by trusting the North Koreans. They would like to scuttle that agreement," wrote Syria expert Josh Landis, on his widely-read blog, www.syriacomment.org.

At the Korea Economic Institute Forum last week, executive director of the Arms Control Association Daryl G Kimball said, "If Syria was indeed building a reactor and if North Korea was involved, there are other steps the United States could - and should - take to hold the DPRK accountable and ensure that Pyongyang provides no further nuclear assistance to other states without derailing the prospects of verifiably dismantling North Korea's nuclear program and risking the possibility of further North Korean proliferation transgressions."

Israel's action also came as Rice shuttled about the Middle East in preparation for substantive peace negotiations between Israel and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, presumably the first time "final status" issues would be discussed between the two sides in seven years. It remains to be seen what impact Israel's foray will have on the peace process.

"By its attack on Syria, the Israeli leadership has demonstrated that it attaches a higher priority to restoring the credibility of its military dominance over its neighbors than it does to supporting American diplomatic efforts to advance the peace process - on which Israel's real security ultimately depends," Close told IPS.

Tina November 6, 2007 - 7:32am

there is a growing consensus among US government and independent analysts that the suspicious target was a nuclear facility.

Whether or not the facility was nuclear,

Washington did not find the Israeli evidence altogether persuasive

Is it, is it not, is it, is it not..... someone please drop a bomb on this story, a nuclear one if possible.

adrena November 6, 2007 - 8:00am

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