US accused of using neutron bombs (4 years ago in Baghdad)

[elehhhhna]

US accused of using neutron bombs


The former commander of Iraq's Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons in its war against the Middle East country.

Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that US forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9 capture of the Iraqi capital.


Al-Rawi is one of the most wanted associates of Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, still on the run.

"The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones," he said.
The bombs annihilated soldiers but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added.

A neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that produces minimal blast and heat but releases large amounts of lethal radiation that can penetrate armour and is especially destructive to human tissue.


http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BA8304F2-89FE-49DC-8FB0-2212FE7889F7.htm

[msongs]

1. gee could al jazeera be looking for ratings? and money ? nt

[Matamoros]

2. ...and he's some kind of expert?

Jimmy Carter stopped the production of Neutron bombs. They were never produced.
Nice try though.
Regular bombs will do those things.

He has no idea of the awful power of even the weakest of nuclear weapons. There would be no hiding it.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. I think you are fooling yourself if you think we never produced them

and we don't have them in our arsenal.

But you are right, it would be much more obvious if we had used them. Why bother, when you have phosphorous and napalm.

[Occulus]

10. I heard about neutron bombs in our arsenal years and years ago

This was in my late teens, I think. I'm almost 32 now.

[Matamoros]

12. President Carter stopped them from ever being made.

It was a huge success of President Carter. He banned them. We never made them.

[RaleighNCDUer]

16. You do remember who came into office immediately behind him,

don't you?

Ronnie Rayguns never saw a weapons program he didn't like. And if he was willing to covertly fund an illegal war, why wouldn't he spend just a little more and build a couple dozen neutron bombs? The $400 for a toilet seat was obviously paying for something.

We have them. I'd bet you anything. I just hope we never have the opportunity for me to be proved right.

[youngdem]

13. And Reagan restarted it....Weapons were produced...GWBsr mothballed it

The inventor, strangely enough, was given a PEACE AWARD for its invention !

"In 1979, Pope John Paul II conferred on one of the authors (Sam Cohen) a peace medal for his invention, the neutron bomb. This was a small nuclear weapon designed to do its work, killing enemy military forces, without destroying a country’s infrastructure."

:crazy:

[Squatch]

3. He's been reading too many comic books.

We just kicked the shit out of his forces at the airport and he's just pissed.

[donsu]

19. we kicked the shit out of them with illegal weapons in an illegal occupation

nt

[Squatch]

20. So, you're buying this shit?

[w4rma]

4. Phosphorus, I think yes. Neutron, I'm sure no. (nt)

[azurnoir]

6. Agreed

it is known that we used white phosphorus in Falluja, Neutron bomb no. This was posted last night from aljazeera Arabic, no mention of white phosphorus was made in the translation however, this makes more sense

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=605472

[Monkeyman]

9. Yep what they call the Neutron was in fact Daisy Cutters

Daisy Cutters were used in the Vietnam War it is a very powerful weapon.

[Monkeyman]

11. Here this is what he is talking about your tax money at work how to kill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_siJJWYFs0

[rasputin1952]

14. I don't think they used a Daisy Cutter either...

There is a hell of az blast from that, and it would have been reported. The effects would have been to incerate quite a few people and buildings, blow out windows a long distance away and render the airport unusable, a tactical error of extreme importance.

When you take a whole lot of flammable liquid, nebulize it, then ignite it, the effects are pretty spectacular. Napalm tends to stick to what it hits and burns quite fiercly, WP leaves the telltale white cloud and a whole lot of 'streamers' when it goes off.

I figure WP was used in some cases, scares the hell out of those in the area, and if you get some on you, it's gonna burn very hot, and you can't put it out easily, water is a serious OH SHIT when added to WP.

I figure some pretty good sized convention weapons were used, and this is all BS anyway. There is no way a nuke was used...it would have had an incredible effect.....this guy got his idea via Dell Comics and the 1930's Death-Ray stuff...:eyes:

[slj0101]

5. If true (it appears not), it reminds me of "Kill the Poor" by the Dead Kennedys.

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home:

The sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Gonna
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor:Tonight

Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rate's gone
Feel free again
O' life's a dream with you, Miss Lily White
Jane Fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals it's okay
So let's get dressed and dance away the night

While they:
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor:Tonight

Of couse, the DKs were not condoning killing the poor, if clarification is needed.

[Dhalgren]

7. Alas, the US has become such a rogue, criminal state that almost any

accusations against it has immediate credibility. I would put absolutely nothing beneath the murderous, criminal government of the US. It may be that some of this man's claims are not technically possible, but that is only arguing over what kind of weapons the murderers used to commit the murders - the murders are a fact...

[ContraBass Black]

18. No, accusations like this still have no credibility.

This is like saying that we're launching missles at Iraq from a secret base on Pluto. There is no way in hell.

Neutron bombs are physically destructive. They do not leave buildings and equipment at the blast site untouchable. Furthermore, the radiation would be detected in every country in the world with modern radiation sensing equipment. A neutron bomb explosion can not be a secret.

[Dhalgren]

23. As I said,

"It may be that some of this man's claims are not technically possible..." So?

[ContraBass Black]

24. So, a table knife is not a warehouse full of gas-powered chainsaws.

The type of weapon used is the substance of the atrocity he describes, but the weapon he names makes it outlandish to an extreme of extremes. It's not a minor issue here. The story is about the weapon.

[rasputin1952]

26. How'd you know about that base on Pluto? Very few of us have any

knowledge of that...

[YankmeCrankme]

15. Use of neutron bomb on Baghdad

http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/27537

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/neutronbomb.html

http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/56250.php


Here are a few links with information on the possibility of the US using a neutron bomb on Baghdad. I remembered an interview I read from Capt. May.

I do not know the veracity of any of these sources or what credibility May has. I find interesting the article from 1997 describing the potential use of the bomb and its residue effects.

[meldroc]

17. I smell bullshit on the neutron bomb claim.

If the U.S. used actual nuclear weapons in Iraq (and a neutron bomb, while it has a minimized blast and fireball, is still a FUCKING NUCLEAR BOMB - with a blast in the kiloton range,) we'd all know it. Not only would we know it, but the Russians would know it, as well as the Chinese, as well as Britain, France and the rest of Europe.

Other conventional bombs, like phosphorous bombs (wheee, Willie Pete!), FAEs (Fuel Air Explosives), and really big bombs like daisy cutters or MOABs I can see being used.

[sofa king]

21. I highly, highly doubt it.

Phosphorous weapons were certainly used, as the United States has an ongoing love affair with "Willy Pete" that won't soon go away.

Part of the reason why white phosphorous is so much preferred is because it's an indiscriminate weapon. A large WP shell can be lethal in a radius of 150 feet over flat unprotected ground.

There is no such ground in the city of Baghdad, and if there is, you won't find insurgents standing on it. Instead, WP shells are fired into specific buildings with the intent of driving the people inside of them out. Still highly indiscriminate, but far less deadly because walls contain most of the deadly substance, though smoke, dust, secondary particles and most obviously intensely burning fires can account for many more casualties. What do I mean by far less deadly? One WP shell fired into a building might kill two dozen people instead of the two thousand or so you might kill if you fired one onto the floor of a Grateful Dead show.

A neutron bomb is totally different. First, no matter how small it is, it is still much larger than even a 155mm WP shell. Second, its lethal area can be described as a three-dimensional cone (actually part of a much larger lethal sphere, but most of that area is in the air where nobody is. The gamma rays created by the blast are only partially interrupted by building structures.

What that means is that if you were to detonate a neutron bomb at the height of at tall building and just above one of those buildings, the radiation would kill or severely sicken everyone in that building, everyone on the ground around it, everyone in the buildings surrounding it, and most of the people in the buildings surrounding those--including any allied soldiers aboveground and within the lethality cone. The only survivors in that cone would be people who by happenstance found themselves in "shadows" which are created when enough intervening material blocks most of the gamma rays, like along the wall of a below-ground floor on the outside perimeter of the blast. There would be at a minimum hundreds of casualties, with enough time for many dozens of them to wander the streets like brain-fried zombies before they died. Drop one over a Grateful Dead show and everyone, including the kids getting high in the parking lot, is going to die sooner rather than later.

I don't pretend to think anymore that these folks wouldn't contemplate the idea of using one if it suited their purposes, but that's the thing: it doesn't suit their purposes. Covering up the crime would be too difficult. The friendly fire casualties would be certain and even more difficult to conceal. The lingering effects of irradiated heavy metals in the blast area would keep geiger counters singing for years.

Forget the moral angle. It's simply a crime too sloppy for them to want to commit.

[elehhhhna]

22. thank you

the reason I posted the OP was to attempt to find out whether the claim sounds liek BS or not.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. They must have used that missing 9-11 plane to deliver it.

You know... the one that didn't crash into the Pentagon.

[Orrex]

30. I thought the used the jet that shot down Flight 93

I just can't keep track...

[Ganja Ninja]

27. I doubt the Russians or Chinese would let us use a neutron bomb

and not raise a stink about it or at least make it widely known. They would certainly have the ability to detect it.

[Richard Steele]

28. Every scientifically advanced nation in the world would know if we had done that.

We might be able to conceal the blast amidst the
rest of the war, but instruments all over the world
would register that sudden burst of neutrons.
Such things don't occur naturally.

Phosphorus, and/or other high-temp incindiaries, you betcha.
Plenty of evidence & testimony to that.

But a 'neutron bomb'? Highly unlikely. Almost certainly
never happened.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

29. ROFLMAO

Neutron bombs used on the airport. That's a good one.