Abaddon

Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died - Leonard Cohen

A quick review of the teaser of the nuking of Iran before they roll out the feature presentation.

First of all, the target isn't Iran, though of course it will be Iranians who may die by the hundreds of thousands should nuclear weapons be greenlighted for Washington's latest McGuffin. But Iran is no more the target than Japan was for Fat Man and Little Boy.

The principal target demographic for the atrocity still on storyboards is Russia and China. The nuking of Iran will be a blockbuster remaking of the demonstration events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which announced to the Soviet Union and all comers that the American Aeon had arrived. At least that's how it will appear, and how it's being sold in the boardroom of America Inc. But the large stakeholders who are short-selling their shares in the Homeland, who supply sewage to its army for drinking water and whose loyalties are neither to that nor any other nation-state, may intend, rather, a windfall gotterdammerung that's more Springtime for Hitler.

The Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs primes the pump with triumphalist glitz in its March/April issue, confidently anticipating the coming end of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction with the proclamation, "It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike."

Ring them bells: some would have it that the new balance of terror has been wargamed, and the balance has so tipped that the United States can terrorize the world at will. On the irradiated soil of the simulated East, everything's coming up roses:

To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical U.S. attack on Russia's nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned U.S. nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.

This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington's actual strategy, which the U.S. government has spent decades perfecting. The real U.S. war plan may call for first targeting Russia's command and control, sabotaging Russia's radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures - all of which would make the actual U.S. force far more lethal than our model assumes.

According to our model, such a simplified surprise attack would have a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM. This finding is not based on best-case assumptions or an unrealistic scenario in which U.S. missiles perform perfectly and the warheads hit their targets without fail. Rather, we used standard assumptions to estimate the likely inaccuracy and unreliability of U.S. weapons systems. Moreover, our model indicates that all of Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal would still be destroyed even if U.S. weapons were 20 percent less accurate than we assumed, or if U.S. weapons were only 70 percent reliable, or if Russian ICBM silos were 50 percent "harder" (more reinforced, and hence more resistant to attack) than we expected. (Of course, the unclassified estimates we used may understate the capabilities of U.S. forces, making an attack even more likely to succeed.)

There's a secondary audience for this, and it's us. Going nuclear has long been unthinkable, and the Dark Powers consider the problem to be the prohibition of our ethical tripwire, not the weapons themselves. So leaks are leaked and denied and the media assets go to work. It's how the unthinkable enters thought.

And one more thought. If Iran is nuked, it doesn't mean we're suddenly in an End Game scenario. We're already in it. Except for the shadows beneath the mushroom cloud apocalypse doesn't come in an instant. The breaking of souls is incremental. We are meant to acclimatize ourselves to Hell, to raise our children in it, and teach them to expect worse to come.

J Robert Oppenheimer became Death, the destroyer of worlds. Since George W Bush's religious alter is Christian rather than Hindu, perhaps what he's becoming is contained in this packet of Revelation 9:11 Truth: "They had as king over them the Angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon." And in English, Destroyer.

We're ready for your close-up, Dr Oppenheimer.