Laughing at horror

I was utterly disturbed to read John J. Mercieca's letter ( September 29). Mr Mercieca wrote that my mention of the use of the horrendous bunker buster nuclear bombs in Iraq "made him laugh" and that these monstrous bombs "with a proposed yield of 2-5 kilotons can barely be considered all that dangerous as a nuclear weapon". Worse still that he is "...in favour of the use of tactical nukes if the situation requires it..."

Does he know that five kilotons are at least as powerful as the bombs launched on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which exterminated more than 500,000 innocent people and that people are still dying from exposure to radiation from those murderous bombs to the present day?

As for his assumption that they were not used in Iraq, I invite him to read The Mirror of September 25 which reported a parliamentary question by the father of the Commons in the English parliament, Tom Dalyell who said: " ...It is not a question of using nuclear weapons targeting Saddam's bunkers. The issue is whether this British territory (of Diego Garcia) is to be used for an initial nuclear offensive" (against Iraq)? To which the Ministry of Defence responded with a "no comment" reply.

Former British Prime Minister John Major admitted in an interview with the Daily Star that, even in the Gulf war of 1991, British and American troops had deployed nuclear weapons, including the infamous neutron bomb which kills people but does not "harm" objects or oil facilities!

Nuclear bunker buster bombs and other weapons of mass destruction, or "overwhelming force", were indeed used in the Iraq aggression and surely Mr Mercieca must have seen TV footage and pictures of those mushroom clouds rising high in the air all over that battered country. In fact, these hideous instruments of death and carpet bombing with anti-personnel cluster bombs (which Mr Mercieca exchanged for anti-armour multiple warhead guided ordnance) were at the core of the "shock and awe" plan devised by Richard Pearl, President George Bush's military adviser. That is why Iraq was overrun so comfortably, "like a knife cutting through butter" as General Tommy Franks described it.

The result was that 25,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed, according to the latest estimates by UN humanitarian agencies. These should be added to the 1.5 million Iraqis killed from Gulf War One till the outbreak of this latest onslaught against Iraq, with many children affected by radiation from nuclear and depleted uranium tipped bombs and ammunition.

As to how harmless these bombs are, Mr Mercieca had better look closely at the photo of the seven-year-old Iraqi boy from Mosul, whose only fault was that of living in the neighborhood where one of these DU bombs fell. And he would do well to read what two prominent people wrote about the use of the first nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in June 1945: "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing".

And again: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons...

"I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

For Mr Mercieca's information, the latter quote was that of the American hero in the war in the Pacific, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), while the former was from the person who later was to become president, Dwight Eisenhower.