When you're a conservative activist stuck with printing an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, it means you're really pitching a story that no one in a reputable newspaper will believe. James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation wants to warn us about the peril of a nuclear weapon detonating over the Pentagon. It would be really, really bad.
An enemy detonates a nuclear weapon over the Pentagon. In four seconds, the blast wave reaches the Jefferson Memorial. It collapses in an instant. Scorching hot winds, at 300 miles an hour, scour every person and vehicle off the Memorial Bridge.
The fireball, bright as a thousand suns, quickly reaches the Capitol building. The structure shakes, yet stands. But inside, everything flammable -- from clothes to curtains -- bursts into flames.
Soon, 40 square miles are covered by roaring flames. Fingers of fire stretch as far as eight miles from the blast.
The D.C. area is home to 5.3 million people. All who haven't died within the first hour of the attack are in desperate need.
It's not a happy scenario. And Washington's doing nothing to improve it. In fact, President Obama plans to invest less, not more, in preparing our military to provide help in the wake of a catastrophic disaster on U.S. soil.
Looking at some nuclear blast radius calculators, I'm guessing that Carafano decided to use a 100-kiloton nuclear weapon to make his point. Now there aren't many countries who can field a nuclear weapon of that size, and certainly no terrorist group could get such a device. The usual scenario of a 10 kt nuke has a much smaller footprint and wouldn't kill millions at the onset of the blast. But that's irrelevant for Carafano's purposes. He wants to gripe - about all things - that the Obama administration cut down the number of National Guards troops dedicated to responding to a potential WMD event within the United States from 16,000 to 13,000.
Never mind that two of the three CCMRFs that he's referencing weren't even in existence for Bush's second term of office. It's the principle of the thing - when the terrorist super-nuke goes off, where will we get those extra 3000 troops? I just don't know. How did we ever get through Hurricane Katrina or Haiti? Oh, yeah. There were other forces brought in. What a concept.
This is a particularly unacademic discussion by Carafano. He comes up with this ridiculously low-probability scenario (and for once, he didn't use it to justify missile defense), and he wants to gripe about a difference of 3000 troops to make a point against the Democratic administration. He picked a really weak example to preach about, and that's why you aren't reading about this topic in a real newspaper.
But then again, I didn't count on Time Magazine picking up on this ridiculous story. For shame.
You know I'm starting to think you're the only one paying attention to these guys J.
I mean all of us stuck in the middle with you hacking it out one way or another really aren't concerned with guys like Carafano.
Now I could have done the same thing you did, pull up Google maps, pull in an app or two. But if I ran across it and legitimately thought I really need to consider this guys opinion for a second, then I'd see he's one of these 1%'s like you think of Cheney, who are I argue at the time and circumstances who was good to go, then I'd see this guy was exaggerating things and dismiss.
I guess your vitriolic rhetoric makes me have to do both now though, just in case you're wrong. And shit, I just don't have time.
I hope you're right mister.
Posted by: NVH | 31 March 2010 at 09:03 PM