Shock and awe - designed to crush the enemy morale

SHOCK and awe is based on a concept drawn up by the Pentagon's National Defense University seven years ago, under the Clinton administration.

The concept is simple: to crush the enemy's morale by delivering an overwhelming blow that leaves soldiers and civilians alike psychologically scarred for life.

One of the report's authors, Harlan Ullman, has drawn parallels between shock and awe and the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima.

Within days of the campaign beginning, he said, the Iraqis would be "physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted".

He said that using this policy would bring the enemy to their knees "rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima".

Before shock and awe was coined, the policy was known by a rather more prosaic title: Rapid Dominance.

According to the 1996 report: "The key objective of Rapid Dominance is to impose (an) overwhelming level of shock and awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on.

"In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyse or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels. An adversary would be rendered totally impotent and vulnerable to our actions . . .

"Theoretically, the magnitude of shock and awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.

"The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used.

"The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of shock and awe."

However, terrifying as it undoubtedly was to people in Baghdad, last night's bombardment pales beside the Allied bombing of Dresden in the dying days of the Second World War.

On the night of February 13, 1945, Allied bombers laid siege to the German town, once known as the "Florence on the Elbe".

The goal was not only maximum destruction and loss of life, but also to show their communist allies what a capitalist war machine could do, in case Stalin had any expansionist ideas of his own.

Using the Dresden football stadium as a reference point, more than 2,000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards.

The inferno that resulted was eight miles wide, sending clouds of smoke three miles high.

For the next 18 hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this blaze - the cocktail created a firestorm of unprecedented ferocity.

Winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm.

Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that sucked the air out of human lungs.

Seventy per cent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases. The intense heat melted some bodies.

Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. Afterwards, it was impossible to count the number of victims.

Even conservative estimates place the death toll at 135,000, some put it closer to 250,000. Either way, no one disputes that the figure was much higher than the 70,000 immediate deaths after the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

This terrible act provoked second thoughts by the Allied commanders (although Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who ordered the attack, had no such qualms); it even prompted Churchill to note: "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."

Will the policy of shock and awe eventually turn out to nag the American national conscience in the same way? Millions of people - not least those in Iraq - will be praying that last night's bombardment does not end in the same massive loss of innocent life.

22/03/2003