Tactical nuclear weapons – used in Syria?
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Two explosions rising into the skies just like ’nuclear mushrooms’, about a year ago above Homs and Qasyoon, raised a wave of rumors these were the product of a strike using tactical nuclear weapons launched from the air. In order to get to the bottom of this and see if there is any truth to it, and whether the ’nuclear genie’ did get out of the bottle in the Middle East, Veterans Today sent Jon Snow to interview nuclear arms specialists and hear what they had to say.
The most meaningful and surprising statement came from Greg Thielmann, an expert on nuclear arms control, who said “what we see in both cases, in the real-time videos, are tactical nuclear blasts carried out using aircraft-launched cruise missiles. The aircraft came from either close to the border with Syria or from the direction of the Mediterranean. It is very likely the perpetrator in both cases is Israel – the only nation capable of using such weapons without fear of retaliation.”
Thielmann further explained that “tactical nuclear weapons lower the threshold on use of a nuclear bomb as their modern incarnation can be tuned in yield in order to target military sites using stand-off weapons without escalating by destroy surrounding civilian infrastructure.” He went on to say, “Keep in mind a nuclear bomb sounds like a huge device, but its can be carried by F-15s.”
Another strategist who was interviewed and asked to remain anonymous, made another argument: “we are not on the verge of an age when the world is beginning to play with ’nuclear fire’ or with other means of mass destruction. One example is the chemical weapon Syria still holds. All this poses a real danger, so the application of tactical nuclear weapons could be much more useful than big bombs that could bring about a nuclear holocaust.”
The expert went on to say that despite this, it cannot be completely ruled out that the explosions were indeed the result of an airstrike whose origin was out of Syria, “but in this case, it would have been an explosion of some major depot for fuel storage or a major arms depository.”
Veterans Today was unable to come with an unequivocal solution to the mystery they set out to crack wide open, so they ran the story with a question mark in the headline. Nevertheless, one question remains unanswered: why was the story pulled shortly after it aired?
