Senior military officers, including the new chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey and Admiral James Winnefeld, respectively, are making plain the repercussions would be far-reaching.
Still, it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that the repercussions of the present crisis will be made much more far-reaching if it precipitates the sort of panic that took hold after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979 or the oil leak off Santa Barbara a decade earlier.