Canadian Professor Echoes Seymour Hersh that the U.S. is planning a Nuclear War

Excerpts from Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Columnist

The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.

Coalition partners, which include the U.S., Israel and Turkey are in "an advanced stage of readiness".

Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack.

Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets." Goss reportedly asked " for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation." (GlobalResearch.ca 2006)

In turn, the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks sometime in Spring 2006.

The alleged U.S. sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage, as to the nature of NATO's involvement in the planned aerial attacks.

While Asian press reports stated that the "fictitious enemy" in the Global Lightening exercise was North Korea, the timing of the exercises, suggests that they were conducted in anticipation of a planned attack on Iran.

"Mini-nukes" have been alleged to be "Safe for Civilians"

The press reports, while revealing certain features of the military agenda, largely serve to distort the broader nature of the military operation, which contemplates the pre-emptive use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The war agenda is based on the Bush administration's doctrine of "pre-emptive" nuclear war under the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review.

Media disinformation has been used extensively to conceal the devastating consequences of military action involving nuclear warheads against Iran. The fact that these surgical strikes would be carried out using both conventional and nuclear weapons is not an object of debate.

According to a 2003 Senate decision, the new generation of tactical nuclear weapons or "low yield" "mini-nukes", with an explosive capacity of up to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb, are now considered "safe for civilians" because the explosion is underground.

Through a propaganda campaign which has enlisted the support of "authoritative" nuclear scientists, the mini-nukes are being presented as an instrument of peace rather than war. The low-yield nukes have now been cleared for "battlefield use", they are slated to be used in the next stage of America's "war on Terrorism" alongside conventional weapons:

In an utterly twisted neo-conservative logic, nuclear weapons are presented as a means to building peace and preventing "collateral damage". The Pentagon has intimated, in this regard, that the 'mini-nukes' (with a yield of less than 5000 tons) are harmless to civilians because the explosions 'take place under ground'. Each of these 'mini-nukes', nonetheless, constitutes - in terms of explosion and potential radioactive fallout - a significant fraction of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

About the author:

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, internet site reference: globalresearch.ca He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His most recent book is entitled: America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005.