Important piece at
Time on the issue almost no one in U.S. or Israel--or, apparently, Tehran--has raised: How many civilians would likely die in an attack on Iran's alleged nuke sites. Yes, we've heard a debate on whether such an attack would be successful and wise, but dead Iranians? Crickets.
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 or injuring as many as 70,000 and exposing over 300,000 to
radioactive material. 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.”
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