All your eggs in one basket thing. 5 planes with one bomb each means 5 planes to shoot down to stop the attack.

On the other hand, this is just the sort of thing that a cruise missile was designed to do. Unless the yield needed was just to small to use on any existing missile. And that's assuming it even happened. A big flag for me was the line about the Israeli AF using their own planes to escort the US attack. I can't think of a reason why country B would be involved in a direct attack of country C by country A. Unless it actually never happened as it's all a big propaganda story, in which case it would make sense to involve a second enemy "conspiring against us".

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Notice, yes, care, no

Notice that they didn't say "bombers"; they said "fighter-bombers". I was confuzzled by that at first, but then remembered that that was an old phrase for what are now called "attack" planes: designed for hitting ground targets like a bomber, but smaller, faster, and more maneuverable, like a fighter. The dedicatd "attack" class of plane was new once, in a world that already had fighters and bombers in it, so they described it in terms of what they were familiar with. The modern American attack plane is the A-10, named "Thunderbolt" or "Warthog". It's about the size of compact light fighters like F-16, F-18 (versions A-D), and F-35. The Arabic source probably just didn't know that such planes are now called "attack" planes in English. (They might still be called the equivalent of "fighter-bomber" in Arabic.)

Not exactly. An attack plane is a tactical aircraft primarily designed to strike ground targets. It has little or no air-to-air combat capability. A fighter-bomber can do both missions although it typically does one better than the other. For example, the F/A-18 is a fighter-bomber. It has a good air-to-air capability as well as having the ability to carry bombs and anti-shipping missiles. The F-16 is a fighter but it's primarily used for ground attack instead of aerial combat. Conversely, the A-10 is a terrific close air support plane. I think A-10s might've shot down a helicopter or two during the 1991 Gulf War but that's about the limit of their air-to-air capability.

The F-15E Strike Eagle's primary mission is interdiction. It's intended to go deep into enemy territory and strike critical targets but it also has the abilty to attack other fighters but primarily to defend itself while performing the primary mission. A former Squadron Officer School classmate of mine used to fly F-111s but was reassigned to fly F-15Es when the F-111s were phased out. He was very happy about the assignment. His words were "Running away sucks. If someone messes with me, I want to turn around and shoot them in the face!" Last I heard, he became a test pilot and was commanding a flight test squadron at Edwards Air Force Base.

So many posts, and not one shred of evidence that Al-Jazeera actually reported such nonsense.

"Israel Insider Dot Com"?! Yeah, that sounds like a "fair and balanced" source about Al-Jazeera.

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Yes, this propaganda by the Israelis. It must be a victory for Israel to penetrate a website focused on astronomy....

And to quote Nelson from the Simpsons, "You gotta nuke something".

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I've noticed on this board, evidence is something that everyone else is expected to provide

Not at all.

To make a claim- evidence is required.

Otherwise- all one has to do is spout claims all over the place- with no restraints in place to ebb the flow.

But quite a few here kindly do the research for others- positng links and pages and quotes to provide answers to questions.

Being able to back up your claims is a very good habit.
It promotes critical thinking, the seeking of knowledge, self analysis and scientific process.

It reduces confussion, assumptions, guesswork and handwaiving.

I cannot list in detail, without clogging up a few BAUT pages, just how much BAUT has taught me to do this

It makes me question everything, seek out evidence in everything- and I have learned and expanded on existing knowledge a great deal.

I still have a long way to go- But hopefully, a step at a time, I'm learning the skills necessary to do learning well.

I made no claim, plus I even said that I could not find any such article on Al Jazeera's website. Noclevername also mentioned the lack of finding it anywhere else.

Just the ludicrousness of somebody suggesting the USA nuked somebody was worth noting. Although after rereading my opening post, I had orignally mentioned the lack of finding it anywhere else but apparently took it out for some reason before posting.

Edited to change "nothing" to "noting"

But you linked to an article which does make the outrageous claim, without comment. Normally, that's an implicit endorsement.

Not enough. Upon reading that, some people just concluded that Al-Jazeera probably has the allegation in its Arabic edition, but not in its English edition. Except that there's no evidence that it's even in the Arabic edition to begin with.

It is a pretty ludicrous claim for the Israeli magazine to make. And, reading their article, it's oddly vague on the details, particularly regarding what it was that Al-Jazeera actually reported, and what is just speculation by the Israeli magazine. The first paragraph in the article (quoted by you) simply says:

The claim that the attack was carried out by the US Air Force is dubious (though note that it comes from "unnamed Israeli and Arab sources" -- reliable?), but nowhere is it claimed that nuclear weapons were used in the strike.

The article does make that suggestion in the next paragraph:

...but it's not at all clear whether it's quoting Al-Jazeera, or whether the Israeli author is just speculating all by himself.

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"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Well, yeah. I mean, how could you cover up the fact that you nuked someone? And how would a single nuke vaporise any trace of a supposed nuclear power plant? I'm not an expert on atomic warfare, but even if a nuclear bomb could litterally vaporise such a large structure (one built with the thought of a nuclear disaster in mind, being a nuclear power plant and all), the evidence of such an attack would be anything but discreete.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
Ignore enough evidence and anything can be called mysterious or unexplained.

Remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both smaller than todays tactical nukes.

I mentioned that it wasn't on any of the U.S. cable news channels that I get. "Anywhere" is a much bigger place, I think.

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"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Let's see

• I commented about conspiracy theorists having a field day with it
• I doubted it was true
• I couldn't find any mention on Al Jazeera's website

How is that not commenting?


So I'm responsible for how other people think and come to conclusions?

It is a ludicrous claim. I quoted the first couple paragraphs as, ususally, the first one or two do provide the meat of the article.

You did see the sentence that has the words "the use of nukes" in it right? And at the end where it says "it would be the first use of nuclear weapons in the world for a non-test purpose since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945"?


Finally, that article does have a link to Al Jazeera (which I don't remember seeing earlier, they must have added it later). I can't read Arabic though so it might just be a chicken soup recipe for as much as I know.
Aljeezra article
Oh wait, Google has a beta of Arabic to English, gonna try it ...
Wow, it actually made fairly good progress, some day we might just have a Universal Translator. Here's Google's translation. Hmm... if I'm figuring this out right, their source is Israeli.

Yes, I even commented on it in my post.

So? What does that have to with Al-Jazeera?

I'm afraid I do not trust automatic translators.
Having said that...

...interesting how that ain't quite how the Israeli article reports it, isn't it?

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

I appreciate Captain Kidd's further research, providing the Al-Jazeera site (which I note is the .net, not the .com). I'm not up on nuclear forensics(? terminology?), but I think Swift's comments are probably accurate in that the actual use of a nuke was unlikely.
Still, here, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...9&chanId=sa003 , is a link I found to a Scientific American story in regards to a relevant U.S. policy shift, uncovered by the Federation of American Scientists. The time lag in the process of their Freedom of Information Act extraction results in policy being dated by about 4 yrs.
Perhaps, (as in maybe, conjecture, supposition, speculation, or I wouldn't actually put money on this, unless, maybe, you were to give me some tempting odds...) the original source for U.S./nuke attack story was a agent for U.S. hawkish interests, disseminating misinformation to see what regional political vectors of anti-nuke sentiment could be drawn out to better prepare as the Iran response rhetoric escalates.
Perhaps the military only complied with F.A.S.'s F.I. request (something they could have probably gotten around or indefinitely prolonged), to send a subtle warning to Iran.
Perhaps not.
I notice with all the interesting talk in this thread of variation in yield and differing forms of delivery devices, there's been no mention of the somewhat controversial development in the last few years regarding the U.S. pursuing research into lower yield nukes.

The notion that any country would use nuclear weapons in this situation is beyond ridiculous. In case all of the above points don't convince someone, here is one more. IIRC, all the major nuclear powers (I'm not sure about India and Pakistan) are bound by a treaty not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country.

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So, in case of a nuclear conflagration, nuclear powers will destroy themselves leaving the non-nuclear nations free to jump ahead while they descend into a Dark Age? No leveling of the playing field? Hard to believe...

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IIRC, all the major nuclear powers (I'm not sure about India and Pakistan) are bound by a treaty not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country.

I know of no such treaty. Perhaps it exists but I'm skeptical. The term weapons of mass destruction is defined in the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms as:

(DOD) Weapons that are capable of a high order of destruction and/or of being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people. Weapons of mass destruction can be high-yield explosives or nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological weapons, but exclude the means of transporting or propelling the weapon where such means is a separable and divisible part of the weapon. Also called WMD. See also destruction; special operations.

If a nation conducted a non-nuclear WMD attack against the US, odds are good that the US would respond with WMDs of our own - almost certainly nuclear.

Eve if such a treaty really did exist, treaties make poor defenses. They depend entirely on the honor system.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

The US does have a treaty in which they promise not to threaten non-nuclear countries with nukes. It's more diplomatic etiquette than anything else.

Instead, the US uses it's carriers and the fact it can take down counties, like Iraq as a more realistic threat for diplomacy.

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The US does have a treaty in which they promise not to threaten non-nuclear countries with nukes. It's more diplomatic etiquette than anything else.

Treaties have names. I'd like to know the name of this treaty if it exists.

Yeah, I remember that one. I think it was called the Second Khitomer Accords

I'll bet all the Air Force personnel relieved of command over this incident know they exist: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/19/loo...ref=newssearch

Also, Radiation Specialist, are you sure that wasn't the Duchy of Grand Fenwick?

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I don't see how this is relevant. If the Syrian facilities that were bombed were part of a nuclear compound, as Israel claims, then I imagine that the treaty, if it exists, would not apply. Unless, that is, the alleged "nuclear facilities" were civilian, and had no weapons. Then again, did Syria ever sign the treaty?... But all this is speculation. Turtles all the way down. If nuclear weapons had been used, we would have heard about it already.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

The general story I'm seeing is that Israel bombed a site in Syria on September 6. They're not saying much about it, but it seems to be commonly believed that Syria was starting on a "research" reactor (a small reactor that could make bomb fuel). Syria hasn't said much about it either, but apparently cleaned up afterwards (this was seen from satellite photos). All the discussion indicates an attack with conventional weapons. That makes sense: The point would be to destroy the facilities before they go operational. And, unless a facility was very well protected, it certainly could be destroyed by conventional weapons. There didn't seem to be any indication of a reinforced underground enclosure, just some surface facilities without a containment building.

From a little googling, there are statements (I don't know if they are true) that there are folks working at the Jerusalem Post that wouldn't always have the most positive views of the U.S. or Israel. I don't know who came up with the story originally, but it makes more sense to me that it would be somebody that wants to cause a negative emotional reaction by showing the U.S. helping Israel in a way that would get special notice. I think it's pretty clear what ethnic groups there would tend to have the most negative reaction to that.

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Well, I'm not seeing any such specific treaty, however it seems to be an unwritten "it's a nice thing to do" part of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treat. But there's no good explanation of how that came to be. Or even if this treaty is the cause of it. Might just be that since this treaty is about weapons, it's being linked to the "let's not blow up non-nuclear countries" unspoken agreement with nukes.
From Wikipedia

Why would a sane person think Fox News would boast about the use of tactical nuclear weapons?

Hello, Fraunkensteen and welcome to BAUT!
How's Eye-gore?

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Any news media would. That's a Big Scoop!

Report on it, yes. But brag or boast about it? I doubt it.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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