Mushroom cloud north of Kabul

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This is a 10/30 story from the MSNBC website-- see http://www.msnbc.com/local/wmtv/i78994.asp. Note the casual last two sentences. Mushroom cloud? And suddenly on 10/31 the media is filled with stories about the nuclear threat to the U.S. Perhaps a coincidence...

Copied for educational use. ========== Some U.S. Troops Inside Afghanistan

The United States has a "modest number" of troops inside Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday in the Pentagon's clearest acknowledgment yet of the American ground presence in the anti-terror war.

The troops are doing liaison work with anti-Taliban fighters and helping with resupply for those groups, as well as pinpointing targets for U.S. bombers.

"We do have a modest number of troops in the country," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon press conference. He declined to be more specific about the number.

He said some of the uniformed American troops are in the north, where the main Taliban opposition is fighting, and that others have "come in and out of the south" of Afghanistan.

About half of the U.S. bombing effort also is going to help the opposition, Rumsfeld said.

Tuesday, 80 percent of the effort was aimed at front line Taliban troops arrayed against opposition known as the northern alliance.

Meanwhile, in the air campaign, U.S. planes swept through the skies over the front lines north of the Afghan capital throughout the day Tuesday. A huge explosion at front lines about 25 miles north of Kabul sent a mushroom cloud at least 1,000 feet high. The origin was not clear, since no airplanes could be seen overhead.

-- neil (nmruggles@earthlink.net), November 01, 2001

Answers

If this mushroom cloud results in radioactivity or other evidence of use of atomic weaponry, no matter how "small", the Taliban will surely NOT keep this a secret. The converse is not true, however: Any Taliban claims that atomic weaponry has been used by the U.S. need verification.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), November 01, 2001.

Subsequent mainstream media claims were that this was a conventional U.S. explosive that hit a depot loaded with ammo and/or fuel...I think I heard that on MSNBC but I cannot be sure.

In any event, that's what is being claimed. It is worth remembering that any explosion if large enough will create a "mushroom cloud," it's not a phenomenon specific to a nuclear explosion. Of course, the bigger the boom, the bigger the cloud.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), November 02, 2001.


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