There's a thread over at Charles Johnson's site about this article in the LA Times.

As I point out in his comments section, I think that the concern over nuclear winter is overblown. That theory has been pretty throughly discredited, at least as originally propounded by Sagan et al. No one really knows what the effects of a massive nuclear war would be, but if it's unlikely that a Soviet-US exchange would cause one, it's hard to see how Israel alone could. However, Israel is certainly capable of making glowing parking lots out of places like Baghdad, Riyadh and even Mecca.

To the commentator who suggested that the West Bank itself might be a nuclear target, there are a number of reasons that this would be unlikely. The Israelis wants that territory for itself, and won't want to have to clean up a radioactive mess. They'd prefer to keep everything intact.

Which brings up a disconcerting thought. Have they developed a neutron bomb?

These posts are getting depressing. I'll try to shift the subject back to space a little later today.

Maybe I'm an incurable optimist, but I think this particular cloud has a silver lining. There's no way we're going to get a full-fledged nuclear winter, but mightn't we get a nice little offset to the global warming everybody's so worried about?

Anybody else remember the dire predictions of climate effects when Iraq set the Kuwait oil fields on fire during the gulf war?