If the US does a hit on Iraq and Iraq responds by launching scuds at Israel, Israel might become the second nation in human history to use atomic weapons on human beings. The first was of course the United States.
An assessment of Iraq’s capabilities says that the US is unlikely to knock out many, if any, of President Saddam Hussein’s mobile missile-launchers in a first wave of airstrikes. It raises the possibility of Baghdad hitting an Israeli city with a missile carrying biological agents, saying that Saddam is likely to use chemical and biological weapons.
Israel’s likely reaction would be nuclear ground bursts against every Iraqi city not already occupied by US-led coalition forces. Senators were told that, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, when Washington urged Israel not to retaliate against Iraqi missile strikes, Israeli leaders have decided that their credibility would be hurt if they failed to react this time.
It doesn’t seem that the possibility of thousands of civilian casualties is in any way deterring the US from its single-minded march to war. Furthermore, if this is true it doesn’t suggest that the US is in any way attempting to restrain the hand of Israel. These right-ling nutjobs in the US would love to hasten armageddon.