I'm sick of these war drums: How Many Civilians Would Be Killed in an Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Sites

[morningfog]

For Iranians these days, life under economic sanctions is a crescendo of hardships. With the Iranian currency at an all-time low against the dollar, shortages of essential medicines and quadrupling prices of basic goods like shampoo and bread, a sense of crisis pervades daily life. Now Iranians are worrying about one more thing: imminent death from an American or Israeli military strike.

With talk of an attack growing more feverish by the day, the mood in Iran is unsettled as never before. In their fear and worry, Iranians say they feel alone, stuck between a defiant government that clings to its nuclear ambitions and a world so unattuned to their suffering that the fatal consequences of a strike on the Iranian people has so far been totally absent from the debate. “We are close to reliving the days of the Iran-Iraq war, soon we will have to wait in line for everyday goods,” says a 60-year-old, middle-class matron from Tehran. “Things are getting worse by the day,” says a 57-year-old Iranian academic preparing to emigrate to North America. “It is better to get out now while it’s still possible.”

While Iranians are increasingly fretful of an imminent attack, they remain broadly unaware of just how devastating the human impact could be. Even a conservative strike on a handful of Iran’s nuclear facilities, a recent report predicts, could kill or injure 5,000 to 80,000 people. The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble, a report written by an Iranian-American scientist with expertise in industrial nuclear-waste management, notes that a number of Iran’s sites are located directly atop or near major civilian centers. One key site that would almost certainly be targeted in a bombing campaign, the uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan, houses 371 metric tons of uranium hexafluoride and is located on the city’s doorstep; toxic plumes released from a strike would reach the city center within an hour, killing as many as 70,000 and exposing over 300,000 to radioactive fallout. These plumes would “destroy their lungs, blind them, severely burn their skin and damage other tissues and vital organs.” The report’s predictions for long-term toxicity and fatalities are equally stark. “The numbers are alarming,” says Khosrow Semnani, the report’s author, “we’re talking about a catastrophe in the same class as Bhopal and Chernobyl.”

Beyond those initially killed in a potential strike, the Iranian government’s lack of readiness for handling wide-scale radiation exposure could exponentially raise the death toll, Semnani says. His study, published by the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and the nongovernmental organization Omid for Iran, outlines Iran’s poor record of emergency response and notes that its civilian casualties from natural disasters like earthquakes have been far greater than those suffered during similar disasters in better prepared countries like Turkey. With virtually no clinical capacity or medical infrastructure to deal with wide-scale radioactive fallout, or early warning systems in place to limit exposure, Iran would be swiftly overwhelmed by the aftermath of a strike. The government’s woeful unpreparedness remains unknown to most Iranians. “This issue is a redline, the [Iranian] media can’t go near it,” says Jamshid Barzegar, a senior analyst at BBC Persian. “To talk about this would be considered a weakening of people’s attitudes. The government only speaks of tactics and resistance, how unhurt Iran will be by an attack.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/09/27/how-many-civilians-would-be-killed-in-an-attack-on-irans-nuclear-sites/#ixzz27lJvVXzW


It's feeling more like the run up to Iraq every day.

[leveymg]

1. In Iran, or Americans when they retaliate?

A war with Iran would essentially be a war with the Shi'ia, the second largest branch of Islam, the world's largest religion. It would go on for years as a war of retribution. The Romans and Persians fought it out for centuries. America would become a total police state. If you liked the period after 9/11, imagine that ten times worse for decades.

[PATRICK]

2. Though the issue is presented

with zero concern about the innocents, a great many of whom are opposed to this "most dangerous government" and in fact moderate and threaten to turn it completely away from the past, the innate cowardice of the bloodthirsty "pragmatism", of cold blooded geopolitics, is to create an incident. With Bush gone that effectively leaves Israel or smaller parties to try something and thus their exposure is increased.

Provoke, manufacture, propagandize. The same shit every day in every way from time immemorial it seems. The pressure for "regime change" gets to be a byproduct of this impatience to shed blood. The danger is the totally unimpeded process agitating for this atrocity, this disaster. This shame precedes the actual crime.

And no, they absolutely do not care about the horrible deaths and mutilations of women and children or whose Holocaust it is. "They" are never never threatened except by their own frustration of not getting to demonstrate their "strength" to live with the stellar accomplishment of war crimes. Impotence gets projected on their supposed need to protect their nation. All the turds on both sides of the absurdity seem to have a lot in common that way.

[Junkdrawer]

3. UN Show-and-Tells w/ Props are usually a good indicator that attacks are imminent...

[Nye Bevan]

4. When is Ayatollah Khamenei up for re-election?

Sounds like what Iran needs is more moderate and sensible leadership.

[Logical]

5. About 1 million less than if they get nukes!

[HopeHoops]

6. I'd say at leas 100K directly and another million in secondary problems. It shouldn't happen.

As a world, we're way beyond the need for deterrent or aggressive nuclear weapons. Diplomacy must take the primary seat.