COLUMN LEFT : Will There Be Anything Left to Nuke? : The U.S. is flattening every ‘strategic’ target in Iraq, but talk of nuclear options persists.

Only three weeks into the war and already the big question: Why not nuke them? An optimist could count this as progress. In the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur first asked for A-bombs only two weeks after it began, on July 9, 1950.

By December, when the Chinese and North Koreans were chopping up his troops, MacArthur asked for discretionary permission to nuke up to 24 targets, and President Harry Truman had said that use of the A-bomb was under “active consideration.” By April, 1951, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered immediate nuclear retaliation if enemy reinforcements or bombers from Manchuria came into the fighting.

Substitute the Iraqi elite troops for those Chinese and North Koreans. Suppose the war, and thousands of American lives, hinged on putting them out of action. What would Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf request, or the President grant?

Members of the Bush high command hint that the nuclear option is off the agenda. Maybe. You can’t believe anything said by men dropping cluster bombs along the Amman-Baghdad road and bombing the outskirts of Baghdad with B-52s while claiming they are doing everything to minimize civilian casualties.

The fact is that Bush, an excitable fellow at the best of times, probably does not know himself what he’d do if a man on the phone told him that a nuke would mean life instead of death for 10,000 Americans.

All the talk about the nuclear option distracts attention from what is already happening in the way of mass destruction, as Iraq is steadily bombed back into the 19th Century: power plants, bridges, bus terminals--in the end, everything can be claimed as a military asset, including the schools and mosques in which it’s claimed Iraqi soldiers are sheltering, no doubt holding biological weapons disguised as infant formula.

It never did go nuclear in Korea, but by the end there wasn’t anything left for the U.S.-led coalition to bomb, including the dams on which North Korean agriculture (a “strategic asset,” after all) depended.

The Gulf War has already gone nuclear to a certain degree. On Jan. 17, U.S. bombers attacked the nuclear research center at Tuwaitha, some 12 miles from central Baghdad. The assault, said Gen. Colin Powell, “finished” the facility.

At Tuwaitha there was a 5-megawatt thermal reactor supplied by the Soviet Union in 1968 and a 500-kilowatt thermal machine supplied by France in 1987. It was very small-scale stuff, on the order of nuclear research facilities at U.S. campuses such as MIT.

Outside of Bush’s public relations team, which latched onto Iraq’s nuclear potential when it began to show up in the polls as something that bothered Americans, few authorities believe that Iraq was close to getting nuclear weapons. A national intelligence estimate at the end of last year said that it would take, at the least, five to 10 years, which is what you can say about any moderately developed economy that might want to build a nuclear arsenal.

The best the Iraqis could do, weapons-wise, with their 25 kilograms of enriched uranium (inspected last November by the international atomic energy authority) would be to pack it in a suitcase and blow it all over a battlefield with explosives. That’s assuming it hasn’t already been blown all over Baghdad by U.S. bombers.

But the script of Operation Desert Storm required that Iraq’s “military nuclear capability” be destroyed, and so the reactors were flattened. Any risk of resulting radiation? Though they had absolutely no way of knowing, the briefing-room generals said there wasn’t.

There are many variables, and I had three different estimates from the first three experts I called, but Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist who once headed the Stockholm Peace Research Institute and who has visited Tuwaitha, tells me that the radioactive release could have been 3/100ths of the release at Chernobyl. That’s not inconsiderable. Barnaby said that children around Tuwaitha could be particularly at risk from radioactive iodine and cesium.

This is the first time operational, and thus radioactive, reactors have ever been bombed. Such bombing contravenes the Geneva Convention (which prohibits attacks on installations containing “dangerous (i.e. nuclear) forces,”) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which both the United States and Iraq are signatories. If Bush will do that for a headline, what will he do when the going really gets tough?