Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
Just deliberately murdering entire families because it’s easier:
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
Oh and this is not an accident, this was explicitly authorised:
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
But it’s blood libel to suggest Israel is committing genocide.
Twenty years ago I was still in the UK, having spent my vacation time with Sandra trying to stop the War on Iraq when the news came through that we had failed.
It had been clear from the start that the war was inevitable, that it was going to happen regardless of how many of us marched or protested against it. Bush and Blair had decided they wanted it and damn the consequences. If I had any illusions left at how politics worked in the “free west”, they were gone now. Nothing in the twenty years since have brought them back. Democracy only matters if you stay within the lines of what your rulers decide and any horribly destructive project they want can be realised by the simple expedient of lying your face off and smearing any opposition to it. The victims don’t matter, those are just statistics, the only things that matters is if you get your way.
At the time it still felt like we could achieve something, if not prevent the war, limit the damage. In hindsight Sandra was right when she remarked later that only if the big demonstration in London on the 15th February had marched straight to Parliament and seized power there and then the war could’ve been stopped.
Nobody responsible for the war has had to account for it. Alistair Campbell gets to play the wizened political commentator on BBC television, Bush is rehabilitated as a kindly old grandpa making bad self portraits and even Blair is still seen as somebody to respect. For all the pious press coverage this deeply sad anniversary will get, any desire to dig for the truth behind the war will be limited. As with every disaster that followed it, the media and politicians, in the UK, US and elsewhere were equally guilty in making it into a reality. Everybody else who could see it coming?
Being a child of the late Cold War means that occassionally you spent your sunday morning watching old nuclear holocaust documentaries. (Some disturbing images of Hiroshima victims as well as footage from a civil defence exercise; be careful.)
It was just a casual tweet mentioning this particular documentary that sent me down the rabbit hole of early eighties British nuclear war programmes. This was the stuff of literal nightmares for me as a child growing up in eighties Holland, seeing nuclear war casually referenced on the news and even on children’s television. It’s hard to imagine forty years later just how dangerous that period of 1979 to 1986 felt like, that idea that at any moment the bombs could drop. That nuclear war was inevitable not because either side wanted it but simply because there were too many weapons, too many complexities that made certain the war would happen by mistake sooner or later. Though it didn’t help that we got an American president talking about winning a nuclear war and who deliberately upped tensions to the point the Soviet leadership became convinced he was planning to strike first.
What fascinates me about this documentary, a 1980 Panoram special, is its tone. When we think about 1980s nuclear holocaust angst we tend to remember movies like Threads or The Day After or Raymond Briggs’ when the Wind Blows or the various pop songs about nuclear war that were a staple of the hit parades. All very emotional outbursts of rage and horror of what we might do to ourselves, all of which contributed to that anxiety me and so many other children felt growing with them. But here there’s none of this emotion, just calm, rational men talking in posh accents about the end of the world and how it might come about. There’s no sensationalism, but the horror of the subject is conveyed anyway; as Paxman’s heard saying at the end of it: that’ll send them to bed happy”. That remark may be as much about how unprepared the UK government was for the prospect of nuclear war as the actual horrors of the war itself, because the focus of the documentary is firmly on the former.
How to survive a nuclear attack, a 1981 Thames Television TV Eye documentary on Operation Hot Seat, a monthly exercise rwargaming the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain. Held for local and regional government officials including the emergency services, police and army, the intention was to prepare them for their roles after the bombs dropped. Again a very understated sort of documentary, following civil servants as they go about arranging food for the population of their fictional county and brainstorm how to deal with looters. Everybody involved takes the exercise very seriously, but you do wonder if all these people would show up if the real thing had happened and if so, how much control they would’ve really had. Even in the exercise the participants come to the conclusion that just expecting people to obey their instructins is futile when people are cold, hungry and slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The absurdity of it all is best shown in the quote taking from it I’ve used as the title for this post.
On the 8th Day, a documentary from 1984 shows that all the preparation and planning for the “post-attack era” are just so much nonsense, as it explains the concept of nuclear winter and how long the climate would be destabilised after a nuclear war. What the bombs and the radiation hadn’t killed owuld be finished off by the immense dust clouds kicked up by the war blocking out the sunlight, plunging Europe and America inot a new ice age. Featuring the always calm voice of Carl Sagan as he explains the horrors of it all.
Nuclear Nightmares is a 1979 Peter Ustinov narrated documentary about how nuclear war could start. Written by Nigel Calder, it was his book of the same name that was a primary driver of my own nuclear nightmares back then. A very pre-Reagan view of nuclear deterrence, when you could still assume that rational men where in control of the nuclear arsenal. One of the more cheery parts in this documenary is John Erickson stating that the 1980s would be the most dangerous decade for nuclear war as technological advances favoured the side that attacked first.
A British Guide to the End of the World is a much more recent BBC Arena documentary, using much of the footage created for the previous documentaries, focusing both on the idea of what was planned to happen after the nuclear attack and the realities of what the preparations for waging nuclear war meant in reality. Which this documentary does by looking at the treatment of British service men present on Christmas Island during the first tests of British nuclear weapons and how the radiation they ingested there impacted their health and that of their children. It’s not just that they got deliberately exposed to radiation, but that the UK government completely abandoned them to their fate even after its affects became clear. That disdain may be the real horror of the nuclear age.
My favourite gen-x pop culture and nuclear holocaust obsessive does a quick explanation of how fucked up growing up as a kid in the shadow of mutually assured destruction was in the eighties, compared to in hindsight much less scary fifties and sixties:
While the early Atomic Era spread its cultural tendrils far and wide, they were nowhere near as up front and morbidly (and joyously) blatant as they were when I was kid. It was prevalent enough in the mellow malaise of the late Seventies, but went into hypercriticality after Reagan took office and ramped up the belligerent rhetoric alongside the nation’s nuclear stockpiles. The specter of armageddon overshadowed every aspect of my formative years. There was no escape even in the traditional avenues of escapism.
It’s not that a nuclear war wouldn’t have mussed up our hair had say the Cuban Missile Crisis turned hot — and certainly we here in Europe would’ve been screwed — but there were so many more nuclear weapons aimed at us in the eighties, so many more opportunities to see it all go horribly wrong. We all know that on at least one occasion only the willingness of a fairly low level Soviet officer to wait just a bit longer before launching the missiles. Or the other way around, having Reagan joke on live television that the bombing starts in five minutes, which almost starts the bombing for real. An aggressive military build-up by a Republican administration talking about a winnable nuclear war combined with a paranoid, verging on the senile Soviet leadership meant that when NATO started a particularly realistic military exercise including preparations for nuclear war, we got as close to the real thing as we’d ever got. Note that this happened only a month or so after Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov managed to save the world from nuclear death by false alarm.
The weight of it actually broke my brain during junior high school. There was stretch of my eighth grade year where I lived in constant panic of sirens, the sound of jets overhead, and unexpected interruptions during TV or radio broadcasts. I was afraid to sleep, because it brought nightmares where my family and friends would rot away and die from radiation poisoning. It was triggered by reading a book club edition of On The Beach, but amplified by years of ceaseless atomic anxiety.
It’s no wonder that pop culture and the public consciousness was drenched in nuclear war. I remember the nightmares, triggered by reading pop science articles or seeing something about Pershing or cruise missiles deployments on the evening news. The Netherlands is not quite small enough that a single h-bomb would destroy it, but it was pretty clear even as a kid, especially one like me who was a bit of a military nerd, that there were enough targets here that it didn’t matter much where in the country you lived come World War III. I wasn’t quite as traumatised as Andrew Weis describes here, but the nuclear nightmares recurred through most of the eighties.
