If this bomb is used and people die, those who ordered it will bear the legal responsibility. But Albright has put his name behind it,
https://x.com/RezaNasri1/status/2111054120752726376
David Albright's first claim about the MOAB is that it is "like a small nuke." The last is that its blast "would be on the surface" and nearby communities "would be unlikely to be affected." Between those two sentences, a weapon he compares to a nuclear bomb becomes a tool for sealing tunnel doors.
The 21,600-pound bomb has been used in combat once, on ISIS caves in a remote Afghan valley. Using it on a country's infrastructure would be a first, and posts like this exist to make that first feel routine. "Worth trying, if there is one to spare," he writes, as if it were leftover stock.
He deliberately tells only half the story. According to CNN, the plans envisage the MOAB against Iran's energy infrastructure as well as its nuclear sites. Albright focuses on the target he can frame as a technical problem and stays silent on the one that exposes the criminality. Power stations are civilian objects. Most of Iran's sit near its cities and keep hospitals, water pumps and medicine storage running. Destroying them with a bomb CNN says can devastate nine city blocks would be a war crime under Additional Protocol I, the Rome Statute and the US War Crimes Act. Every expert who presents the MOAB as a clever, contained option at Pickaxe makes it easier to use the same bomb on the edge of a city of millions.
Pickaxe is no lawful target either. IAEA member states have resolved that any attack on, or threat against, peaceful nuclear facilities, including those under construction, violates the UN Charter and international law. The Security Council condemned Israel's 1981 strike on Osirak as a violation of the Charter. A think tank's satellite images cannot make it a lawful target. Albright skips the law entirely.
And what does he want it to achieve? He admits the underground halls "would remain unknown." The plan is to blast the entrances shut, watch them from orbit, and treat any attempt to reopen them as an "observable change requiring action." That is bombing without end. His model is Natanz and Isfahan, where no one has known for months what is happening inside because the bombing ended the inspections.
His claim that Pickaxe is "isolated" and its neighbours safe is false. The most exposed are those at the site: engineers, workers, guards, mostly civilians. Washington and Israel say Iran may have moved enriched uranium into Pickaxe. If so, a massive blast is no surface event. Uranium hexafluoride reacts with moist air to form hydrofluoric acid, and contamination goes where the wind goes.
Officials quoted by CNN doubt the MOAB can even pierce Pickaxe's granite, and call it a "psychological tool" for a symbolic win. A symbolic win is not a military advantage, and only a concrete one can be weighed against civilian lives.
This is when the law demands restraint. It does not ask whether harm is "unlikely" to a commentator studying satellite photos. It requires planners to verify targets and effects, choose means that spare civilians, and call off attacks expected to cause excessive harm. In doubt, the presumption favours the civilian. Albright turns it upside down.
Nor has he the standing to judge. He is a physicist running a think tank, not a weapons-effects engineer, targeting officer or lawyer, and has no data on who lives or works around that mountain. He sounds surer about this bomb than the officials who would drop it.
We have seen this before. In 2002, John Yoo drafted memos defining torture so narrowly that waterboarding could pass. He never touched a prisoner; he supplied the respectable rationale others cited. Albright's vocabulary, "monitored condition," "observable change requiring action," "worth trying," does the same job.
If this bomb is used and people die, those who ordered it will bear the legal responsibility. But Albright has put his name behind it, waved away the risk to human life with no basis, and lent his reputation to a step that makes the next, worse use easier. That makes him complicit in whatever follows.
\https://x.com/RezaNasri1/status/2111054120752726376
posted by Satish Sharma at
06:40
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home