Blair feared US would 'nuke' Afghanistan

British Prime Minister Tony Blair feared President Bush would "nuke the shit" out of Afghanistan in revenge for 9/11, a sensational documentary will claim this week. Giving the inside story on the war, former British ambassador to the US, Chris Meyer reveals: "Blair's real concern was that there would be 'a knee-jerk reaction' by the Americans.… They would go thundering off and nuke the shit out of the place without thinking straight." Nuclear strikes would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. In Channel 4's candid two-part documentary The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair, Meyer claims the threat explains why the prime minister vowed to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Bush over the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. But it meant sending British troops to Iraq knowing Washington had not made preparations for its post-war reconstruction. Blair's ally Peter Mandelson tells award-winning documentary-maker Andrew Rawnsley: "Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after, to the planning and what we would do once Saddam had been toppled. But I remember him saying at the time, 'Look, you know, I can't do everything. That's chiefly America's responsibility, not ours.'" Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to Baghdad after the war, blames the lack of preparation for today's problems in Iraq in the program. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell blasted the revelations as "a devastating indictment" of the prime minister's policies.