Egregoros

Right, but you're talking about an area 1/3 the side of the continental US, that will require millions of nukes to contaminate all of it.

And "all of it" is what we're talking about because the Iranians are operating out of mountain encampments - there are some things they can't move, but many things which can.

That said, Chinaman said he thinks Russia will use the threat of vaporizing the top 100 American cities to keep nukes off the table in this conflict...

Nuclear (weapon) radiation is not as persistent or as bad as fictional media has portrayed it. Fallout is not going to happen anywhere for any reason. No amount of nuclear radiation will fuck an area (critically) for more than a few decades at most.

Apparently this Uranium is under a rumble pile and the concern is they excavate it. Dropping a tactical nuke on the site might do the trick.

@DC5FAN @Eiswald @cjd If the US does that, the Russians are likely to bombard our navy in response, since we all agreed to not use nukes anymore.

Any use of nuclear weapons triggers M.A.D. protocols. There is no win condition once nukes become involved.

That's why I have a bad feeling. There is no way to win conventionally.

That's certainly true for a Chernobyl type meltdown but that also involves a lot more nuclear material than is used in any nuclear weapon by several magnitudes.

@Eiswald @DC5FAN @cjd Yeah we wont be living in Fallout, there would just be a lot of destruction, the cancer and birth defect rates would go way up, and fertility would go way down.

chernobyl is special because it's literally all the nuclear fuel melted into a pile at hte bottom of the reactor along witht he graphite housing it, that's not how nuke bombs work.

EMP = Stone Age. Or just nuke the nuclear sites.

EMPs are kind of over-played. Same as any electromagnetic radiation: Power drops with the square of distance, so you need a SHITLOAD of power to have an effect at any meaningful distance.

Second issue is most electronics are shielded - particularly anything military - that's why you don't see EMPs being used on missiles or drones. They're not effective against properly shielded electronics.