Holocaust; Shmolocaust? Would Israel be willing to threaten...

Holocaust; Shmolocaust? In the coming nuclear armed Middle East would Israel be willing to threaten...

...all human life on earth to protect its purloined olive groves and overextended, over crowded residential housing developments -- if it had the thermonuclear technology to build a Dr. Strangelove style doomsday machine? The way Israel lives today, half its population might take a quick exit -- quickly followed by other half -- should the Arabs or the Persians leave behind to be discoverd an unexploded nuke in some back alley in Tel Aviv.

Back in the 60's I read that a weapon of total destruction (WTD) could be constructed by putting a shell of cobalt around a thermonuclear bomb (everyday reading fare back when I could watch a B-52 shoot 600 mph at 500 feet over my apartment house in the Bronx in that year's Operation Skyshield).

Eighth grade math can show that half of today's Israel's conventional military could shrug off any Arab conventional invasion (ex., 3000 NATO quality tanks can hold off three times as many equal quality on defense and maybe twenty times as many Arab tanks! -- the Arabs possess 5000). Then there's those hundreds of nukes.

If half of the same billions invested by Israel (and the US!) in Israel's wildly overbuilt military (no partner for peace?; more like no opponent for war) in profit making industries, then, a few million Israelis could by now have bought as much semi-desirable West Bank and Gaza real estate (from a few million delighted Palestinians) -- without the extra cost being the biggest instigator of a clash between Christian and Islamic billions -- and without the extra cost of condemning future generations of Jews in Israel and around the world (about half live each in Israel and the US) to join German children living down the sins of their ancestors...

...and without the danger of making the phrase "smart Jew" -- in the case of the Israeli half anyway -- become an oxymoron.

Maybe Israel could build a pretend doomsday machine; it needn't have the thermonuclear technology; it could just bluff. No; the US would be forced to bomb any such construction. Better Israel sheds the delusions of a self-important teenage street gang and matures into a grownup entity.