How would you like to be chased by a 7-ft tall turkey? That would be a sight!
S.A. Kleinheider
By BROCK VERGAKIS, Associated Press Writer
29 minutes ago
Fossils discovered in southern Utah are from a new species of birdlike dinosaur that resembled a 7-foot-tall brightly colored turkey and could run up to 25 mph, scientists said Tuesday.
Fossils of the meat-eater's hand-like claw and foot were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near the Arizona border, giving paleontologists reason to believe some dinosaurs known as raptors roamed from Canada to northern New Mexico about 75 million years ago.
Much smaller variations of the dinosaur had been found previously in Montana, South Dakota and the Canadian province of Alberta.
"This is the southernmost occurrence of this group, and it's about two times the size of the ones up north," said Lindsay Zanno, a doctoral student at the University of Utah who named the dinosaur Hagryphus giganteus, or giant four-footed, birdlike god of the Western desert.
The dinosaur had a strong toothless beak, powerful arms and formidable claws that made it capable of eating animals and plants. Large feathers grew on its hind end, giving it a resemblance to a turkey, Zanno said.
Scientists are not sure what purpose the feathers served, but it was not for flying. "It's quite different from modern birds," she said.
Mike Getty, collections manager at the university's Museum of Natural History, found the fossils in 2001. Scientists needed several years to excavate the fossils and publish their findings, he said.
The dinosaur was named in a paper published in December by the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It was the first new dinosaur from the national monument to receive a name.
"This is the last great, unexplored dinosaur bone yard in the lower 48 states," said Scott Sampson, the museum's chief curator who wrote the journal article with Zanno.
Three other dinosaurs discovered at the monument are expected to be named soon, Sampson said, including a meat-eating tyrannosaur, a horned dinosaur and a duckbilled dinosaur with a 7-foot-long head.
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On the Net:
Utah Museum of Natural History: http://www.umnh.utah.edu
Yes...Jesus could have walked on ice...but he walked on WATER! This is the ultimate GLOBAL HOAX story! Pseudo science is used to discredit one of Jesus' miracles! This is ridiculous!
S.A. KLEINHEIDER
Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.comTue Apr 4, 2:00 PM ET
Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.
The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.
Looking at temperature records of the Mediterranean Sea surface and using analytical ice and statistical models, scientists considered a small section of the cold freshwater surface of the lake. The area studied, about 10,000 square feet, was near salty springs that empty into it.
The results suggest temperatures dropped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius) during one of the two cold periods 2,500 1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.
With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake's western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found.
"We simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," said Doron Nof, a Florida State University Professor of Oceanography. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."
Nof figures that in the last 120 centuries, the odds of such conditions on the low latitude Lake Kinneret are most likely 1-in-1,000. But during the time period when Jesus lived, such spring ice may have formed once every 30 to 60 years.
Such floating ice in the unfrozen waters of the lake would be hard to spot, especially if rain had smoothed its surface.
"In today's climate, the chance of springs ice forming in northern Israel is effectively zero, or about once in more than 10,000 years," Nof said.
The findings are detailed in the April 2006 Journal of Paleolimnology.
How Ice Melts: Longstanding Mystery Solved Photos Show It's True: No Two Snowflakes Alike Ice Ages Blamed on Tilted Earth New Phase of Ice Might Exist
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Scientists disagree about the risks of TCE. But residents near a former air base are dead certain.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer
March 30, 2006
SAN ANTONIO On nearly every block surrounding the former Kelly Air Force Base, small purple crosses sprout from front lawns, marking the homes where cancer has struck.
The residents call their neighborhood the "toxic triangle," alleging that the Air Force poisoned it with an industrial solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE. It was casually dumped at the base for decades and spread for miles through a shallow aquifer under 22,000 nearby houses.
Texas health authorities have found elevated rates of liver cancer among residents, as well as higher-than-normal rates of birth defects. Though state health officials say it is impossible to prove that TCE causes the sickness here, this blue-collar community has little doubt about the connection.
"We are dying day by day," said Robert Alvarado Sr., who has lived in a small clapboard home for 36 years that sits about 14 feet over the TCE plume. "I have kidney failure, my wife has thyroid cancer, my neighbor just died of breast cancer."
What's happening in this neighborhood of modest low-slung homes, crisscrossed by railroad tracks and dominated by aircraft hangars on the horizon, has been playing out for years at other cities that are home to military bases, industrial plants, nuclear weapons laboratories and NASA centers.
Hundreds of communities with major TCE contamination have waited more than a decade for scientists to explain the cancer risks created by exposure to TCE. The clear solvent used to take grease off metal parts is officially branded as a probable carcinogen by half a dozen state, federal and international agencies. It is most often linked to liver and kidney cancer, as well as birth defects and childhood leukemia.
But scientists representing major polluters, particularly the Department of Defense, have successfully delayed action on scientific assessments that TCE is a far graver threat to public health than recognized by federal standards. When the Environmental Protection Agency drafted a TCE assessment in 2001, finding that it was far more toxic than originally believed, the issue was wrested from the EPA's control.
A panel of elite scientists organized by the National Academy of Sciences will issue a report this summer that is supposed to shape government policy on TCE. The report is all but certain to intensify the battle no matter what it says.
If the academy endorses the view that TCE is a big risk, it would lay the groundwork for stricter cleanup standards across the nation and probably lower permissible levels of TCE in the environment. If it rejects the EPA's earlier research, it will trigger a political rebellion by exposed communities.
"If the national academy comes out with some kind of a weaker standard, it is going to ignite this all over again," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who has fought regulatory delays along with other Democrats and Republicans in Congress. "We are headed for a battle."
The national academy has been working on its report for more than a year and is now as much as six months behind schedule. One member of the group, Harvard University professor Thomas J. Smith, said the group was dealing with many missing pieces of a difficult puzzle and many bits of data that don't seem to fit anywhere. "It is a complicated picture," Smith said.
Even after the national academy issues its report, the matter will go back to the EPA for another risk assessment that could take another two years. Any further regulatory action to reduce public exposure to TCE could take several more years. The EPA first began amassing scientific data in the mid-1990s and began assessing the risks in 1997.
It is a pace that has left TCE exposure victims disheartened and angry.
Anne Elizabeth Townsend died a month ago in Moscow, Idaho, the result of liver disease and TCE exposure, according to her death certificate and a liver biopsy.
She was married to Tom Townsend, a former major in the Marine Corps who was based at highly polluted Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, after returning seriously injured from combat duty in Vietnam in 1965.
The Townsends lived at the Paradise Point housing complex, which was served by a base water-supply system that carried 1,400 parts per billion of TCE, a later investigation by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry would disclose.
The current EPA limit on TCE in drinking water is 5 ppb. The standard might have dropped to 1 ppb had the risk assessment conducted by the EPA in 2001 been adopted, experts say.
In 1967, the Townsends had a son born with cardiovascular birth defects. He lived only three months.
"We had an autopsy done and there wasn't a system in his body that wasn't screwed up," said Townsend, a retired college administrator and a former city councilman. "That autopsy report had 10 pages of findings. It was a mercy that he didn't last.
"They wiped out two members of my family," Townsend, 75, added. "I am proud that I served in the Marines, but there are some days I want to forget that I did."
The Marine Corps was alerted to the TCE contamination in 1980, but did not disclose the pollution or make any changes to its water system until 1985. It was a five-year period in which thousands of Marines were exposed.
At the request of Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), the Government Accountability Office is investigating whether the Marine Corps covered up the TCE problems at the base.
"Nearly 20 years have elapsed since the last contaminated well was closed at Camp Lejeune, and we are still unable to address the related concerns of former residents," Dole wrote in 2004.
"We have an obligation to provide them with definitive answers to their questions regarding the circumstances and extent of the contamination as well as the likely adverse health effects."
Among Dole's concerns is the slow pace of a study by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A still-incomplete study of 12,598 children born at the base from 1968 to 1985 found 103 cases of cancer and birth defects, including 22 cases of leukemia, double the national average. No studies have been conducted of the adult men or women who drank the base water.
Jerry Ensminger, a former Marine drill sergeant, lived at the base in the 1970s and his wife gave birth to a daughter in 1976. Their daughter, Janey, died of leukemia at age 9.
He has been fighting to force the Marine Corps to notify tens of thousands of Marines, their families and civilian employees exposed to TCE. He formed a group, "The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten," along with a website (www.tftptf.com) to reach out to Marine families.
"The Marine Corps has done everything in its power to not notify the people who were exposed," Ensminger, 53, said. "There is something wrong with our government."
TCE is the most widespread water contaminant in the nation, present at 1,400 Defense Department pollution sites, according to Air Force documents.
The Defense Department contends that scientific evidence that TCE causes cancer is weak and that the EPA needs to conduct more studies before tightening its standards or ordering tougher cleanups.
Certainly, not all TCE contamination was caused by government agencies. It is estimated that at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of current and former industrial sites across the nation have TCE pollution.
When the National Academy of Sciences held a public hearing at UC Irvine last year, Amanda Evans showed up carrying an urn with her father's ashes. Gary Evans died of liver cancer in 2002, after working as a vice president at a View-Master factory in Beaverton, Ore., owned by Mattel Inc. The company acquired the manufacturing plant in its 1997 merger with Tyco Toys and closed the factory in 2001.
The plant used TCE extensively to degrease metal parts for the stereoscopic viewers produced there, though TCE use had ceased long before Mattel acquired the plant. The TCE was released into the soil, where it contaminated an aquifer that supplied the plant's drinking water. A later government investigation found the aquifer had TCE levels of 1,670 ppb.
As many as 25,000 workers were exposed to TCE at the plant since the mid-1960s, according to a 2004 report by the Oregon Department of Human Services. Based on a list of about half of those workers, the study found nearly triple the expected rate of kidney cancer and double the expected rate of pancreatic cancer.
Evans, who works in the entertainment industry, founded Victims of TCE Exposure and hopes to produce a documentary on TCE. When she showed up in Irvine with her father's ashes and what she calls the "Wall of 300 Victims at View-Master," national academy officials refused to allow her to set it up.
"I told them I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, I have this wall," Evans said. Campus police were called but declined to take any action.
Evans said she was suing Mattel, but the matter must first go through a workers compensation claim. Donald Stewart, a former U.S. senator from Alabama representing Evans, acknowledged that such toxics litigation was complex and not always successful. "But you have good people on juries who recognize that these substances do cause harm," Stewart said.
Civil suits involving TCE have typically wilted because it is difficult to prove that illnesses result directly from exposure.
In "A Civil Action," author Jonathan Harr recounted the prodigious efforts of an attorney from a small Boston law firm who tried but largely failed to prove two major U.S. corporations had caused health havoc in a New England town after releasing TCE into the water supply. The story was later made into a movie starring John Travolta as attorney Jan Schlichtmann.
In San Antonio, the former Kelly Air Force Base ranks among the nation's largest TCE sites, with contamination that migrated several miles past the base boundary.
So far, the Air Force has spent more than $300 million on the cleanup and expects to spend another $155 million over the next 15 years. Residents want the cleanup completed much sooner, though Air Force officials say the plume is shrinking.
The community that lives over the contaminated water has about double the expected rate of liver cancers, said Melanie Williams, senior cancer epidemiologist at the Texas Department of State Health Services. A twofold rate of excess cancer is "not a huge margin," Williams said, but she noted that the excessive cancers have continued for 10 years.
"The consistency is a concern," she said.
Despite the huge petrochemical industry in Texas and all of the environmental health issues that go with it, Kelly is one of the highest-priority toxics sites in the state, Williams said.
In addition to cancer, the department has found excessive rates for three types of birth defects involving the heart, stomach and lungs, according to Peter Langlois, a birth defects epidemiologist at the department. The birth defect rates range from two to three times higher than expected.
But Williams and Langlois said they could not establish any definitive link to the TCE contamination in the community. Kelly was a major repair depot for the Air Force and used TCE to clean oil and grease from metal parts. Giant tanks of TCE were drained directly into the ground, former workers have said.
The TCE contaminated a shallow aquifer about 14 feet below the surface. The aquifer is not used by the city and little proof has surfaced that the TCE-tainted water ever penetrated down to the 1,000-foot-deep water drawn for the municipal drinking supply, said Dr. Fernando A. Guerra, director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.
Mark A. Weegar, senior project manager at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said it was impossible for the contaminated water to migrate from the shallow aquifer into the city's water supply.
But residents say Guerra and Weegar have consistently underestimated their exposure. Dozens of unauthorized shallow wells were sunk into the TCE-contaminated water and used for drinking, bathing and gardening, according to residents and federal officials. The Air Force has capped 75 such wells in the last decade.
"We know that people used the wells in the shallow aquifer for drinking water," said George Rice, a hydrologist who has studied the neighborhood's problems. "You have to assume that people used those wells to water their lawns, wash their cars and the children used those hoses the way kids use hoses."
The Air Force also dumped TCE and other chemicals into open pits on the base for years, which periodically flooded during heavy Texas rainstorms and sent the overflow through surrounding neighborhoods that lacked storm drains, said Yolonda Johnson, a community activist who lives a few blocks from the base boundary. Johnson's daughter and two of her granddaughters have kidney disease.
No air monitoring tests inside homes have been conducted for TCE, even though the contamination is in a shallow aquifer. Soil tests for vapors indicated there was no cause for concern, Texas authorities concluded.
Outside health experts say the shallow contamination alone should have prompted air monitoring tests long ago.
Adam G. Antwine, the civilian who manages the local cleanup for the Air Force, suggested that some "pathways" might have potentially exposed the community to TCE.
"I don't know that we want to totally dismiss any potential pathways," he said.
"This is a low-income minority population and that raises concerns of environmental justice."
The base shut down in 2001 after 80 years of operation. Because the latency period for many cancers is 10 years or more, higher TCE levels long ago might only now be causing illness.
Former Kelly workers describe conditions inside the base during its heyday as an abysmal toxic nightmare.
Mary Lou Ornelias, a frail 59-year-old woman, worked in the Kelly plating shop for 18 years.
With her bare hands, she would dip cotton cloths into buckets of TCE and then wipe grease from aircraft parts. The air in the plating shop was a steamy, solvent-rich brew that turned the walls yellow and had a stench that made visitors wince, she said. The exposure made her dizzy and caused outbreaks of scaly rashes.
"I would scratch and scratch the sores," recalled Ornelias, who has no claims or suits against the government.
The sores would not be her last or biggest problem. Ornelias tires easily, looks gaunt and sometimes falls down all part of her life with liver cancer.
"In 2002, I started throwing up blood," she said.
Outside the plant, community activists have pushed for a faster cleanup, but say progress has been slow and the problems have festered.
"Living in this contamination area is a miserable burden," said Armondo Quintanilla, a former employee at Kelly who has spent most of his life in the neighborhood. "It is shameful. People deserve better."
U.S. Experts Wary of Military Action Over Nuclear Program
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 2, 2006; A01
As tensions increase between the United States and Iran, U.S. intelligence and terrorism experts say they believe Iran would respond to U.S. military strikes on its nuclear sites by deploying its intelligence operatives and Hezbollah teams to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide.
Iran would mount attacks against U.S. targets inside Iraq, where Iranian intelligence agents are already plentiful, predicted these experts. There is also a growing consensus that Iran's agents would target civilians in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, they said.
U.S. officials would not discuss what evidence they have indicating Iran would undertake terrorist action, but the matter "is consuming a lot of time" throughout the U.S. intelligence apparatus, one senior official said. "It's a huge issue," another said.
Citing prohibitions against discussing classified information, U.S. intelligence officials declined to say whether they have detected preparatory measures, such as increased surveillance, counter-surveillance or message traffic, on the part of Iran's foreign-based intelligence operatives.
But terrorism experts considered Iranian-backed or controlled groups -- namely the country's Ministry of Intelligence and Security operatives, its Revolutionary Guards and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah -- to be better organized, trained and equipped than the al-Qaeda network that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Iranian government views the Islamic Jihad, the name of Hezbollah's terrorist organization, "as an extension of their state. . . . operational teams could be deployed without a long period of preparation," said Ambassador Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism.
The possibility of a military confrontation has been raised only obliquely in recent months by President Bush and Iran's government. Bush says he is pursuing a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but he has added that all options are on the table for stopping Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Speaking in Vienna last month, Javad Vaeedi, a senior Iranian nuclear negotiator, warned the United States that "it may have the power to cause harm and pain, but it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wants to pursue that path, let the ball roll," although he did not specify what type of harm he was talking about.
Government officials said their interest in Iran's intelligence services is not an indication that a military confrontation is imminent or likely, but rather a reflection of a decades-long adversarial relationship in which Iran's agents have worked secretly against U.S. interests, most recently in Iraq and Pakistan. As confrontation over Iran's nuclear program has escalated, so has the effort to assess the threat from Iran's covert operatives.
U.N. Security Council members continue to debate how best to pressure Iran to prove that its nuclear program is not meant for weapons. The United States, Britain and France want the Security Council to threaten Iran with economic sanctions if it does not end its uranium enrichment activities. Russia and China, however, have declined to endorse such action and insist on continued negotiations. Security Council diplomats are meeting this weekend to try to break the impasse. Iran says it seeks nuclear power but not nuclear weapons.
Former CIA terrorism analyst Paul R. Pillar said that any U.S. or Israeli airstrike on Iranian territory "would be regarded as an act of war" by Tehran, and that Iran would strike back with its terrorist groups. "There's no doubt in my mind about that. . . . Whether it's overseas at the hands of Hezbollah, in Iraq or possibly Europe, within the regime there would be pressure to take violent action."
Before Sept. 11, the armed wing of Hezbollah, often working on behalf of Iran, was responsible for more American deaths than in any other terrorist attacks. In 1983 Hezbollah truck-bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241, and in 1996 truck-bombed Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. service members.
Iran's intelligence service, operating out of its embassies around the world, assassinated dozens of monarchists and political dissidents in Europe, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East in the two decades after the 1979 Iranian revolution, which brought to power a religious Shiite government. Argentine officials also believe Iranian agents bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 86 people. Iran has denied involvement in that attack.
Iran's intelligence services "are well trained, fairly sophisticated and have been doing this for decades," said Crumpton, a former deputy of operations at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. "They are still very capable. I don't see their capabilities as having diminished."
Both sides have increased their activities against the other. The Bush administration is spending $75 million to step up pressure on the Iranian government, including funding non-governmental organizations and alternative media broadcasts. Iran's parliament then approved $13.6 million to counter what it calls "plots and acts of meddling" by the United States.
"Given the uptick in interest in Iran" on the part of the United States, "it would be a very logical assumption that we have both ratcheted up [intelligence] collection, absolutely," said Fred Barton, a former counterterrorism official who is now vice president of counterterrorism for Stratfor, a security consulting and forecasting firm. "It would be a more fevered pitch on the Iranian side because they have fewer options."
The office of the director of national intelligence, which recently began to manage the U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to allow its analysts to discuss their assessment of Iran's intelligence services and Hezbollah and their capabilities to retaliate against U.S. interests.
"We are unable to address your questions in an unclassified manner," a spokesman for the office, Carl Kropf, wrote in response to a Washington Post query.
The current state of Iran's intelligence apparatus is the subject of debate among experts. Some experts who spent their careers tracking the intelligence ministry's operatives describe them as deployed worldwide and easier to monitor than Hezbollah cells because they operate out of embassies and behave more like a traditional spy service such as the Soviet KGB.
Other experts believe the Iranian service has become bogged down in intense, regional concerns: attacks on Shiites in Pakistan, the Iraq war and efforts to combat drug trafficking in Iran.
As a result, said Bahman Baktiari, an Iran expert at the University of Maine, the intelligence service has downsized its operations in Europe and the United States. But, said Baktiari, "I think the U.S. government doesn't have a handle on this."
Because Iran's nuclear facilities are scattered around the country, some military specialists doubt a strike could effectively end the program and would require hundreds of strikes beforehand to disable Iran's vast air defenses. They say airstrikes would most likely inflame the Muslim world, alienate reformers within Iran and could serve to unite Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, which have only limited contact currently.
A report by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks cited al-Qaeda's long-standing cooperation with the Iranian-back Hezbollah on certain operations and said Osama bin Laden may have had a previously undisclosed role in the Khobar attack. Several al-Qaeda figures are reportedly under house arrest in Iran.
Others in the law enforcement and intelligence circles have been more dubious about cooperation between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, largely because of the rivalries between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Al-Qaeda adherents are Sunni Muslims; Hezbollah's are Shiites.
Iran "certainly wants to remind governments that they can create a lot of difficulty if strikes were to occur," said a senior European counterterrorism official interviewed recently. "That they might react with all means, Hezbollah inside Lebanon and outside Lebanon, this is certain. Al-Qaeda could become a tactical alliance."
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Government in secret talks about strike against Iran
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 02/04/2006)
The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran.
A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.
A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence
Tomorrow's meeting will be attended by Gen Sir Michael Walker, the chief of the defence staff, Lt Gen Andrew Ridgway, the chief of defence intelligence and Maj Gen Bill Rollo, the assistant chief of the general staff, together with officials from the Foreign Office and Downing Street.
The International Atomic Energy Authority, the nuclear watchdog, believes that much of Iran's programme is now devoted to uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, technologies that could provide material for nuclear bombs to be developed in the next three years.
The United States government is hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little international support. British military chiefs believe an attack would be limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants - a land assault is not being considered at the moment.
But confirmation that Britain has started contingency planning will undermine the claim last month by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that a military attack against Iran was "inconceivable".
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, insisted, during a visit to Blackburn yesterday, that all negotiating options - including the use of force - remained open in an attempt to resolve the crisis.
Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from US navy ships and submarines in the Gulf would, it is believed, target Iran's air defence systems at the nuclear installations.
That would enable attacks by B2 stealth bombers equipped with eight 4,500lb enhanced BLU-28 satellite-guided bunker-busting bombs, flying from Diego Garcia, the isolated US Navy base in the Indian Ocean, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Whiteman USAF base in Missouri.
It is understood that any direct British involvement in an attack would be limited but may extend to the use of the RAF's highly secret airborne early warning aircraft.
At the centre of the crisis is Washington's fear that an Iranian nuclear weapon could be used against Israel or US forces in the region, such as the American air base at Incirlik in Turkey.
The UN also believes that the production of a bomb could also lead to further destabilisation in the Middle East, which would result in Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia all developing nuclear weapons programmes.
A senior Foreign Office source said: "Monday's meeting will set out to address the consequences for Britain in the event of an attack against Iran. The CDS [chiefs of defence staff] will want to know what the impact will be on British interests in Iraq and Afghanistan which both border Iran. The CDS will then brief the Prime Minister and the Cabinet on their conclusions in the next few days.
"If Iran makes another strategic mistake, such as ignoring demands by the UN or future resolutions, then the thinking among the chiefs is that military action could be taken to bring an end to the crisis. The belief in some areas of Whitehall is that an attack is now all but inevitable.
There will be no invasion of Iran but the nuclear sites will be destroyed. This is not something that will happen imminently, maybe this year, maybe next year. Jack Straw is making exactly the same noises that the Government did in March 2003 when it spoke about the likelihood of a war in Iraq.
"Then the Government said the war was neither inevitable or imminent and then attacked."
The source said that the Israeli attack against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 proved that a limited operation was the best military option.
The Israeli air force launched raids against the plant, which intelligence suggested was being used to develop a nuclear bomb for use against Israel.
Military chiefs also plan tomorrow to discuss fears that an attack within Iran will "unhinge" southern Iraq - where British troops are based - an area mainly populated by Shia Muslims who have strong political and religious links to Iran.
They are concerned that this could delay any withdrawal of troops this year or next. There could also be consequences for British and US troops in Afghanistan, which borders Iran.
The MoD meeting will address the economic issues that could arise if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president - who became the subject of international condemnation last year when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" - cuts off oil supplies to the West in reprisal.
Iran factfile
There are thought to be at least eight known sites within Iran involved in the production of nuclear materials, although it is generally accepted that there are many more secret installations.
Iran has successfully tested a Fajr-3 missile that can reach Israel, avoiding radar and hitting several targets using multiple warheads, its military has confirmed.
