Nuclear War, WMD issues

[Crafty_Dog]

Well, some of us here HAVE been discussing action against Pakistan.

As for the Norks, the answer is two fold, they are too hard a nut to crack and-- I am open to correction here-- they are not plotting to wipe out the Sorks or anyone else.

[G M]

Iran has been waging a war against the US since 1979. Until 9/11, Iran's proxy warfare construct, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist entity. You think they wouldn't consider a nuke attack against us? This is a nation that glories in bloody martyrdom and jihad and chants "Death to the Great Satan", meaning us.

[G M]

Let's do nothing while Iran finishes up it's nuclear program.....

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=08a28e1c-6ece-4134-ba8e-e706d703401b&p=1

Ahmadinejad's demons

National Post ·



During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September, 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as 12 years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child's neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.

These children who marched to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979. This volunteer militia went enthusiastically, and by the thousands, to their own destruction. According to one veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, "It was sometimes like a race. Even without the commander's orders, everyone wanted to be first."

The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a source of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite "special units" have been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. Last year, they formed the potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a man who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War -- to the presidency.

Ahmadinejad revels in his alliance with the Basiji. He regularly appears in public wearing a black-and-white Basij scarf, and, in his speeches, he routinely praises "Basij power." Ahmadinejad's ascendance on the shoulders of the Basiji means that the Iranian Revolution, launched almost three decades ago, has entered a new and disturbing phase. A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors.

Most Basiji came from the countryside and were often illiterate. When their training was done, each Basiji received a blood-red headband that designated him a volunteer for martyrdom.

The chief combat tactic employed by the Basiji was the human wave attack, whereby barely armed children and teenagers would move continuously toward the enemy in perfectly straight rows. It did not matter whether they fell to enemy fire or detonated the mines with their bodies. Once a path to the Iraqi forces had been opened up, Iranian commanders would send in their more valuable and skilled Revolutionary Guard troops.

"They come toward our positions in huge hordes with their fists swinging," one Iraqi officer complained in the summer of 1982. "You can shoot down the first wave and then the second. But at some point the corpses are piling up in front of you, and all you want to do is scream and throw away your weapon. Those are human beings, after all!"

Why did the Basiji volunteer for such duty? Most were recruited by members of the Revolutionary Guards, which commanded the Basiji. These "special educators" would visit schools and handpick their martyrs from the paramilitary exercises in which all Iranian youth were required to participate. Propaganda films -- like the 1986 TV film A Contribution to the War -- praised this alliance between students and the regime, and undermined those parents who tried to save their children's lives.

In 1982, the German weekly Der Spiegel documented the story of a 12-year-old boy named Hossein, who enlisted with the Basiji despite having polio: "One day, some unknown imams turned up in the village. They called the whole population to the plaza in front of the police station, and they announced that they came with good news: The Islamic Army of Iran had been chosen to liberate the holy city Al-Quds -- Jerusalem -- from the infidels .... The local mullah had decided that every family with children would have to furnish one soldier of God. Because Hossein was the most easily expendable for his family, and because, in light of his illness, he could in any case not expect much happiness in this life, he was chosen by his father to represent the family in the struggle." (Of the 20 children that went into battle with Hossein, only he and two others survived.)

At the beginning of the war, Iran's ruling mullahs did not send human beings into the minefields, but rather animals: donkeys, horses and dogs. But the tactic proved useless: "After a few donkeys had been blown up, the rest ran off in terror," Mostafa Arki reports in his book Eight Years of War in the Middle East.

The donkeys reacted normally -- fear of death is natural. The Basiji, on the other hand, marched fearlessly to their deaths. The curious slogans that they chanted while entering the battlefields are of note: "Against the Yazid of our time!"; "Hussein's caravan is moving on!"; "A new Karbala awaits us!"

Yazid, Hussein, Karbala -- these are all references to the founding myth of Shia Islam. In the late seventh century, Islam was split between those loyal to the Caliph Yazid -- the predecessors of Sunni Islam -- and the founders of Shia Islam, who thought that the Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, should govern the Muslims. In 680, Hussein led an uprising against the "illegitimate" caliph, but he was betrayed. On the plain of Karbala, Yazid's forces attacked Hussein and his entourage and killed them. Hussein's corpse bore the marks of 33 lance punctures and 34 blows of the sword.

His head was cut off and his body was trampled by horses. Ever since, the martyrdom of Hussein has formed the core of Shia theology, and the Ashura Festival that commemorates his death is Shiism's holiest day. On that day, men beat themselves with their fists or flagellate themselves with iron chains to approximate Hussein's sufferings.

At times throughout the centuries, the ritual has grown obscenely violent. In his study Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti recounts a first-hand report of the Ashura Festival as it occurred in mid-19th-century Tehran:

"500,000 people, in the grip of delirium, cover their heads with ashes and beat their foreheads against the ground. They want to subject themselves voluntarily to torments: to commit suicide en masse, to mutilate themselves with refinement ... Hundreds of men in white shirts come by, their faces ecstatically raised toward the sky. Of these, several will be dead this evening."

During the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini took this inward-directed fervour and channelled it toward the external enemy. He transformed the passive lamentation into active protest. He made the Battle of Karbala the prototype of any fight against tyranny. On the one hand, the scoundrel Yazid, now in the form of Saddam Hussein; on the other, the Prophet's grandson, Hussein, for whose suffering the time of Shia revenge had finally come.

The power of this story was reinforced by a theological twist that Khomeini gave it. According to Khomeini, life is worthless and death is the beginning of genuine existence. This latter world is accessible to martyrs: Their death is no death, but merely the transition from this world to the world beyond, where they will live on eternally and in splendour.

Military victories are secondary, Khomeini explained in September, 1980. The Basiji must "understand that he is a 'soldier of God' for whom it is not so much the outcome of the conflict as the mere participation in it that provides fulfilment and gratification."

For those whose courage still waned in the face of death, the regime put on a show. A mysterious horseman on a magnificent steed would suddenly appear on the front lines. His face -- covered in phosphorus -- would shine. His costume was that of a medieval prince.

A child soldier, Reza Behrouzi, whose story was documented in 1985 by the French writer Freidoune Sehabjam, reported that the soldiers reacted with a mixture of panic and rapture: "Everyone wanted to run toward the horseman. But he drove them away. 'Don't come to me!' he shouted, 'Charge into battle against the infidels! ... Revenge the death of our Imam Hussein and strike down the progeny of Yazid!' "

The mysterious apparition who was able to trigger such emotions is the "hidden imam," a mythical figure who influences Ahmadinejad to this day.

The Shia call all the male descendants of the Prophet Muhammad "imams" and ascribe to them a quasi-divine status. Hussein, who was killed at Karbala by Yazid, was the third Imam. His son and grandson were the fourth and fifth. At the end of this line, there is the "Twelfth Imam," who is named Muhammad.

Some call him the Mahdi (the "divinely guided one"). He was born in 869, the only son of the eleventh Imam. In 874, he disappeared without a trace, thereby bringing Muhammad's lineage to a close. In Shia mythology, however, the Twelfth Imam survived. The Shia believe that he merely withdrew from public view when he was five and that he will emerge from his "occultation" in order to liberate the world from evil.

In Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, V. S. Naipaul described seeing posters in post-Revolutionary Tehran bearing motifs similar to those of Maoist China: crowds, for instance, with rifles and machine guns raised in the air as if in greeting. The posters always bore the same phrase: "Twelfth imam, we are waiting for you."

According to Shia tradition, legitimate Islamic rule can only be established following the twelfth imam's reappearance.

Khomeini, however, had no intention of waiting. He vested the myth with an entirely new sense: The Twelfth Imam will emerge only when the believers have vanquished evil. To speed up the Mahdi's return, Muslims had to shake off their torpor and fight.

It was this culture that nurtured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's worldview. Born outside Tehran in 1956, the son of blacksmith, he trained as a civil engineer and, during the Iran-Iraq War, he joined the Revolutionary Guards.

His biography remains strangely elliptical. Did he play a role in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy, as some charge? What exactly did he do during the war? We have no definite answers.

We do know that after the war's end, he served as the governor of Ardebil Province and as an organizer of Ansar-e Hezbollah, a radical gang of violent Islamic vigilantes. After becoming mayor of Tehran in April, 2003, Ahmadinejad used his position to build up a strong network of radical Islamic fundamentalists. It was in that role that he won his reputation -- and popularity -- as a hardliner devoted to rolling back the liberal reforms of then-President Muhammad Khatami.

Ahmadinejad positioned himself as the leader of a "second revolution" to eradicate corruption and Western influences from Iranian society. And the Basiji, whose numbers had grown dramatically since the end of the Iran-Iraq War, embraced him.

Recruited from the more conservative and impoverished parts of the population, the Basiji fall under the direction of -- and swear absolute loyalty to -- the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor. During Ahmadinejad's run for the presidency in 2005, the millions of Basiji -- in every Iranian town, neighbourhood, and mosque -- became his unofficial campaign workers.

As Basij ideology and influence enjoy a renaissance under Ahmadinejad, the movement's belief in the virtues of violent self-sacrifice remains intact. Since 2004, the mobilization of Iranians for suicide brigades has intensified, with recruits being trained for foreign missions. Thus, a special military unit has been created bearing the name "Commando of Voluntary Martyrs." According to its own statistics, this force has so far recruited some 52,000 Iranians to the suicidal cause. It aims to form a "martyrdom unit" in every Iranian province.

The Basiji's cult of self-destruction would be chilling in any country. In the context of the Iranian nuclear program, however, its obsession with martyrdom amounts to a lit fuse. Nowadays, Basiji are sent not into the desert, but rather into the laboratory. Basij students are encouraged to enroll in technical and scientific disciplines. According to a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guard, the aim is to use the "technical factor" in order to augment "national security."

What exactly does that mean? Consider that in December, 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it "will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

Rafsanjani thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level of damage Israel could inflict is bearable -- only 100,000 or so additional martyrs for Islam.

And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a "worthwhile" outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic thinking. In one of his first TV interviews after being elected president, he enthused: "Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr's death?" In September, 2005, he concluded his first speech before the United Nations by imploring God to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam.

A politics pursued in alliance with a supernatural force is necessarily unpredictable. Why should an Iranian president engage in pragmatic politics when his assumption is that, in three or four years, the saviour will appear? If the messiah is coming, why compromise? That is why, up to now, Ahmadinejad has pursued confrontational policies with evident pleasure.

The history of the Basiji shows that we must expect monstrosities from the current Iranian regime. Already, what began in the early 1980s with the clearing of minefields by human detonators has spread throughout the Middle East, as suicide bombing has become the terrorist tactic of choice. And the Basiji who once upon a time wandered the desert armed only with a walking stick is today working as a chemist in a uranium enrichment facility.

- Matthias Kuntzel is a political scientist in Hamburg, Germany and author of Djihad und Judenhass (Jihad and Jew-Hatred).

[JDN]

Well, some of us here HAVE been discussing action against Pakistan.

As for the Norks, the answer is two fold, they are too hard a nut to crack and-- I am open to correction here-- they are not plotting to wipe out the Sorks or anyone else.

I have read with interest comments on Pakistan (I've said before I particularly enjoy Ya's comments), but frankly I doubt if we will do anything nor does it seem on a national scale are we discussing doing anything.

As for Korea, yes, they are a hard nut to crack, however the rhetoric seems to go up and down.  The North has promised to wipe out the South plus a few nearby allies of ours.  Just this week.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57330909/n-korea-threatens-south-with-sea-of-fire/

And while GM points out, "Iran has been waging a war against the US since 1979." I don't think they have killed one American on American soil.  Nor do they have the delivery system to do so.
And "proxy" is not the same... as Iran attacking America.

That said, the world would be better off if Korea, Pakistan and Iran didn't have WMD.  Frankly, I wish China and Russia didn't have nuclear weapons either.  But I'm not sure it's in America's interest to physically attack (diplomacy and sanctions are fine) any of them, including Iran.  The cost to America would be prohibitive.  And the direct threat to America is minimal.

[Crafty_Dog]

 The logic of Mutually Assured Destruction works with the Russians and Chinese.  I'm quite a bit less sure about that with the Ayatollahs and Mullahs see e.g. GM's post immediately prior to yours for but one example.

Agreed that Team Baraq is not likely to do anything about Pakistan, nor would your man Huntsman  .  Newt just might though    Agreed that little has been done (apart from here and the sources YA cites) to persuade and prepare the political will necessary to act viz Pakistan--indeed I have been arguing here for several years that our policy is incoherent-- my point was that we here are not being inconsistent with regard to this.

[DougMacG]

Conservatives here voiced quite a bit of support for John Bolton's view advising strikes against N.K. nukes as well as stopping Iran.  The N.K. threat is different  and more complicated because of having its big brother China on the doorstep, not to mention you can see the home of the Russian Pacific Fleet from North Korea's northern-most coastal border.  Who is Iran's big brother keeping them contained, the new government of Iraq??  Pakistan is its own unique case and I hope we are working through all the options of when and how to take action and contain its dangers.  I don't see how recent failures of our policies toward NK and Pak make failure in Iran more desirable.

In the history of the world in our lifetimes, Israel struck a Saddam reactor in Ozarik 1981 and a 'military site' in Syria in 2007 and the French played a lead role in deposing Kadafy.  Not much else ever happens in non-proliferation enforcement or tyrant/terrorist abatement without the U.S. taking the lead or unilateral role.  

A similar line of defeatist thinking was used in the unsuccessful argument against deposing Saddam Hussein, we shouldn't take down Saddam because we did nothing here and nothing there around the globe.  That logic escapes me.  How does our inaction or failure in N.K, Pakistan or anywhere else help with the question facing us right now, what is the right thing to do about the threat posed by Iran who according to most reports is about to become a real nuclear power right now under our watch.

"I don't think they [Iran] have killed one American on American soil."  And this: "the direct threat to America is minimal".

Inventing a category to find them innocent and why is there a qualifier on the threat to America?!  If they are our enemy by their choosing, co-conspiring in thousands of American deaths and causing a war to be years longer than it needed to be, they are a threat.  If they are developing nuclear and extending the range of delivery systems as a declared enemy of the United States, they are a threat.  If they earned the distinction of being the world's number one state sponsor of terrorism, they are a threat.  If their delivery systems could hit locations where we have security agreements, they are a threat.  These security relationships were formed precisely with this thinking in mind: we will not wait ever again for enemies to land on our shores to begin our action.  GM already wrote: "Iran has been waging a war against the US since 1979".  I would add that if they choose to be our enemy and act on it, then the feeling is necessarily mutual.  There should be a price to pay for being an active and declared enemy of the United States.  Having your nuclear proliferation facilities taken out in air strikes seems like a pretty natural consequence to supporting a war effort against the US while declaring yourselves a new nuclear power to be dealt with.  To not do so is what sends the message of weakness that makes the next war more likely and more costly.

Stopping Iran at this point IS a step forward in stopping N.K., just as vice versa would have been - using the same logic presented - why aren't we treating them the same.  Stopping both programs is a step forward in focusing attention on larger threats inside Pakistan.  To allow threats to grow and develop right while we have reason, justification and perhaps opportunity to take action is exactly what has landed us in this triple threat situation, IMHO.

[ccp]

"To allow threats to grow and develop right while we have reason, justification and perhaps opportunity to take action is exactly what has landed us in this triple threat situation, IMHO."

Bolton was on a few days ago and agreed that if Iran gets nucs so will S. Arabia, Turkey, Egypt go after them.
It doesn't seem like anyone knows if Israel can do it or not.   Only Israel knows what it has and only Iran knows what it has.

Didn't the nuclear holocaust in the movie "The Day After" start with nuclear devices going off in the Middle East?

I remember not being able to sleep that night after watching the movie.

The doctrine of mutually assured destruction doesn't fit this situation like it did between USA USSR when we had two superpowers with more rational leaders and more or less equal capability.

Now we have disprotionate foes.

[Crafty_Dog]

4th Generation nuclear war games with people who believe in death more than life. 

What could go wrong?

[G M]

4th Generation nuclear war games with people who believe in death more than life. 

What could go wrong?

Don't worry, JDN has pointed out that because Iran has never nuked the US before, it's proof it'll never happen in the future as well.

[G M]

4th Generation nuclear war games with people who believe in death more than life. 

What could go wrong?

Don't worry, JDN has pointed out that because Iran has never nuked the US before, it's proof it'll never happen in the future as well.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/iran-showed-al-qaeda-how-bomb-embassies_610943.html?nopager=1

Iran Showed Al Qaeda How to Bomb Embassies


9:45 AM, Dec 3, 2011 • By THOMAS JOSCELYN

In a little noticed ruling on Monday, November 28, a Washington, D.C. district court found that both Iran and Sudan were culpable for al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings. As is typical in state sponsorship of terrorism cases, neither Iran nor Sudan answered the plaintiffs’ accusations. But in a 45-page decision, Judge John D. Bates issued a default judgment. The court found that the “government of the Islamic Republic of Iran…has a long history of providing material aid and support to terrorist organizations including al Qaeda,” which “claimed responsibility for the August 7, 1998 embassy bombings.”




Judge Bates continued (citations omitted, emphasis added):

Iran had been the preeminent state sponsor of terrorism against United States interests for decades. Throughout the 1990s – at least – Iran regarded al Qaeda as a useful tool to destabilize U.S. interests. As discussed in detail below, the government of Iran aided, abetted and conspired with Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda to launch large-scale bombing attacks against the United States by utilizing the sophisticated delivery mechanism of powerful suicide truck bombs. Hezbollah, a terrorist organization based principally in Lebanon, had utilized this type of bomb in the devastating 1983 attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Prior to their meetings with Iranian officials and agents, Bin Laden and al Qaeda did not possess the technical expertise required to carry out the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The Iranian defendants, through Hezbollah, provided explosives training to Bin Laden and al Qaeda and rendered direct assistance to al Qaeda operatives. Hence, for the reasons discussed below the Iranian defendants provided material aid and support to al Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings and are liable for damages suffered by the plaintiffs.
 
The court further explained (citations omitted, emphasis added):
 

Following the meetings that took place between representatives of Hezbollah and al Qaeda in Sudan in the early to mid-1990s, Hezbollah and Iran agreed to provide advanced training to a number of al Qaeda members, including shura council members, at Hezbollah training camps in South Lebanon. Saif al-Adel, the head of al Qaeda security, trained in Hezbollah camps. During this time period, several other senior al Qaeda operatives trained in Iran and in Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon. After one of the training sessions at a Lebanese Hezbollah camp, al Qaeda operatives connected to the Nairobi bombing, including a financier and a bomb-maker, returned to Sudan with videotapes and manuals “specifically about how to blow up large buildings.”

None of this should come as a surprise. In Iran’s Proxy War Against America (PDF), I summarized the evidence demonstrating Iran’s and Hezbollah’s complicity in the 1998 embassy bombings.

Federal prosecutors in the Clinton administration found Iran’s hand in the embassy bombings as they prepared to try some of the terrorists responsible. They even included the relationship with Iran and Hezbollah in their original indictments of al Qaeda.

In his plea hearing before a New York court in 2000, Ali Mohamed – the al Qaeda operative who was responsible for performing surveillance used for the bombings – testified that he set up the security for a meeting between bin Laden and Hezbollah’s terror master, Imad Mugniyah. “I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between Mugniyah, Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden,” Mohamed told the court. (My profile of Mugniyah and his ties to al Qaeda, published after his death in 2008, can be read here.) 
 
Mohamed also confirmed that Hezbollah and Iran provided explosives training to al Qaeda. “Hezbollah provided explosives training for al Qaeda and [Egyptian Islamic] Jihad,” Mohamed explained. “Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons.”
 
Mohamed was forthcoming about al Qaeda’s rationale for seeking Iran’s and Hezbollah’s assistance:
 

And the objective of all this, just to attack any Western target in the Middle East, to force the government of the Western countries just to pull out from the Middle East. . . .Based on the Marine explosion in Beirut in 1984 [sic: 1983] and the American pull-out from Beirut, they will be the same method, to force the United States to pull out from Saudi Arabia.
 
Jamal al Fadl, an al Qaeda operative who was privy to some of al Qaeda’s most sensitive secrets, conversed with his fellow al Qaeda members about Iran’s and Hezbollah’s explosives training, which included take-home videotapes so that al Qaeda’s operatives would not forget what they learned. Al Fadl told federal prosecutors, “I saw one of the tapes, and he [another al Qaeda operative] tell me they train about how to explosives big buildings.”

When the 9/11 Commission investigated the embassy bombings years later, it also found Iran’s and Hezbollah’s hands in the attack. See, in particular, pages 61 and 68 of the commission’s final report.
 
To recap: A D.C. district court, Clinton-era prosecutors, and the 9/11 Commission have all found that al Qaeda received assistance from Iran and Hezbollah in executing the 1998 embassy bombings. The bombings were al Qaeda’s most successful attack prior to September 11, 2001.

And yet, many in the foreign policy establishment pretend that Iran and al Qaeda are either incapable of collusion or opposed to one another in some meaningful sense. The truth is that they have long cooperated against America.

Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

**I can already anticipate "But those were conventional explosives".....

[G M]

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4157460,00.html

'Saudi Arabia may join nuclear arms race'


Ex-spy chief says Saudi Arabia to consider acquiring atom weapons to match region rivals Israel, Iran

AFP Published:  12.05.11, 19:15 / Israel News 
 






Saudi Arabia may consider acquiring nuclear weapons to match regional rivals Israel and Iran, its former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal said on Monday.

 

"Our efforts and those of the world have failed to convince Israel to abandon its weapons of mass destruction, as well as Iran... therefore it is our duty towards our nation and people to consider all possible options, including the possession of these weapons," Faisal told a security forum in Riyadh.

 

Related stories:

'Iran's missile program suffered serious setback'
Iran sanctions pose legal conundrum for expats
'We'll give up nukes if Iran does same'



 


"A (nuclear) disaster befalling one of us would affect us all," said Faisal.

 

Israel is widely held to possess hundreds of nuclear missiles, which it neither confirms nor denies, while the West accuses Iran of seeking an atomic bomb, a charge the Islamic Republic rejects.

 

Riyadh, which has repeatedly voiced fears about the nuclear threat posed by Shiite-dominated Iran and denounced Israel's atomic capacity, has stepped up efforts to develop its own nuclear power for "peaceful use."


 
 

Abdul Ghani Malibari, coordinator at the Saudi civil nuclear agency, said in June that Riyadh plans to build 16 civilian nuclear reactors in the next two decades at a cost of 300 billion riyals ($80 billion).

 

He said the Sunni kingdom would launch an international invitation to tender for the reactors to be used in power generation and desalination in the desert kingdom.

 


The United Nations has imposed successive packages of sanctions against Tehran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. Those measures have been backed up by unilateral Western sanctions.

[Crafty_Dog]

Pasting PC's post here as well:


THE SQUARE AXIS: CUBA//IRAN/IRAQ/CHINA
By Manuel Cereijo

IRAN
Dr. Miyar Barruecos, El Chomi. Dr. Luis Herrera. Cuba and Iran.
Since 1990, Cuba and Iran have cooperated in the development of weapons of massive destruction. Dr. Miyar Barruecos, physician, very close to Castro, has been the force behind the throne in this alliance. Dr. Luis Herrera, from the CIGB, and one of the main scientists in the development of the CIGB and the biological weapon programs in Cuba, has been the operator, the facilitator, in the massive and huge cooperation between Cuba and Iran.

Cuba just finished, May 2001, the construction of a Biotechnology Center in Teheran. Cuba served as the source of technology, selling of equipment, and project management for the Center.

Iran has bought the best fruits of the CIGB, recombinant protein production technologies in yeast and Escherichia coli, as well as the large scale purification protocols for both soluble and insoluble proteins synthesized in or excreted by them.Iran can use these technologies to create bioweapons of massive destruction.

Iran, with Cuba's assistance, is capable of producing the bacteria known as Pseudomonas. The pathogen is not usually lethal to humans, however, produces partial paralysis for a period of time, and therefore but is an excellent battlefield weapon.

Sprayed from a single airplane flying over enemy lines, it can immobilized an entire division or incapacitate special forces hiding in rugged terrain otherwise inaccessible to regular army troops-precisely the kind of terrain in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and similar terrorist regions.

Besides Cuban scientists, at least there are about ten scientists from the Biopreparat Russian Center working in Iran. The New York Times reported in December 1998 that the Iranian government dispatched a few scientific advisors attached to the office of the presidency in Moscow to recruit former scientists from the Russian program.

In May, 1997, more than one hundred scientists from Russian laboratories, including Vector and Obolensk, attended a Biotechnology Trade Fair in Teheran. Iranians visited Vector, In Russia, a number of times, and had been actively promoting exchanges. A vial of freeze-dried powder takes up less space than a pack of cigarettes and is easy to smuggle past an inattentive security guard.

The Soviet Union spent decades building institutes and training centers in Iran and Cuba. For many years, the Soviet Union organized courses in genetic engineering and molecular biology for scientists from Cuba and Iran. Some forty scientists from both countries were trained annually.

In 1997 Russia was reported to be negotiating a lucrative deal with Iran and Cuba for the sale of cultivation equipment including fermenters, reactors, and air purifying machinery.

A report submitted by the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment to hearings at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in late 1995 identified 17 countries believed to possess biological weapons. Among them: Cuba and Iran.

The Cuba/Iran alliance posses a real threat to the national security of the United States.



IRAQ
Dr. Rodrigo Alvarez Cambra. The main coordinator of the alliance.

Viruses and bacteria can be obtained from more than fifteen hundred microbe banks around the world. The international scientific community depends on this network for medical research and for the exchange of information vital to the fight against disease.

According to American biowarfare experts, Iraq obtained some of its most lethal strains of anthrax from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland, one of the world's largest libraries of microorganisms. For $35 they also pick up strains of tularemia and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, once targeted for weaponization at Fort Detrick, United States.

Iraq was also given by the CDC the West Nile virus in the late 1980s. At the same type, the CDC gave Cuba the St. Louis encephalitis virus, very similar to the West Nile virus. Since the 1980s, Cuba and Iraq established very close relations. This was partially due to Dr. Rodrigo Alvarez Cambra, a well known orthopedic surgeon, who has operated on Hussein's knee, and also has treated other members of his family, including one of his sons.

By early 1990s, Iraq had provided Cuba with anthrax, for its further development. A report submitted by the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment to hearings at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in late 1995 identified seventeen countries believed to posses biological weapons-Libya, North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Taiwan, Syria, Israel, China, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos Bulgaria, India, South Africa, Russia, and Cuba.

At the time Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected in 1995, he not only denounced Iraq activities in these weapons of massive destruction, but also the close relationship of Iraq, first with the former Soviet Union, and presently with Cuba. Yury Kalinin , one of the most important persons in Russia's biological development, visited Cuba in 1990 to establish in Cuba the Biocen, a Center very similar to Russia's Biopreparat. He acknowledged at the time, the involvement of Cuba in biological weapon development. Some 25 Cuban scientists were periodically trained in the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1992.

Furthermore, Cuba has advanced tremendously in the area of nano-technology, an essential tool in the development of bio-weapons, and computer related technology. Fidel Castro Diaz Balart, Castro's oldest son, and former head of Cuba's nuclear program, visited India and Iraq to strengthen collaboration on this vital area.

Castro visited the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASSR) in October, 2000. Cuba and India agreed in collaboration on areas like biotechnology, tropical medicine, nano technology and computational technology.

Prof. V. Krishnan, JNCASR President said Cuba had tremendous advancement in biotechnology and nanotechnology. After his visit to India. Castro Diaz Balart visited Iraq and Iran.

The Cuba/Iraq cooperation is the most important threat faced by the United States in this fight against terrorism.



CHINA
The fall of communism has not reduced the level or amount of espionage and other serious intelligence activity conducted against the United States. The targets have not changed at all: there is still a deadly serious foreign interest, and mainly from the new China/Cuba consortium, in traditional intelligence activities such as penetrating the U.S. intelligence community, collecting classified information on U.S. military defense systems, and purloining the latest advances in the nation's science and technology sector.

There is also a growing importance in maintaining the integrity of the country;s information infrastructure. Our growing dependence on computer networks and telecommunications has made the U.S. increasingly vulnerable to possible cyber attacks against such targets as military war rooms, power plants, telephone networks, air traffic control centers and banks. China and Cuba have increased their cooperation in this area through the Bejucal base in Cuba, as well as in Wajay (near Bejucal), and Santiago de Cuba. On these bases they use technologically sophisticated equipment, as well as new intelligence methodologies that makes it more difficult, or impossible for U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor or detect.

The international terrorism threat can be divided into three general categories. Each poses a serious and distinct threat, and each has a presence already in the United States. The most important category is the state sponsored threat. This category, according to the FBI, includes the following countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lybia, Cuba, North Korea. Put simply, these nations view terrorism as a tool of foreign policy. In view of this list, we need to evaluate the recent trip made by Fidel Castro.

There are three main areas of concern for us in the new and dangerous axis formed by China and Cuba: radio frequency weapons, computer technology, missile capabilities. The problem with the Chinese Cuban rapprochement is that it is driven by by mutual hostility towards the United States.

Radio frequency weapons are a new radical class of weapons. Radio frequency weapons can utilize either high energy radio frequency (HERF), or low energy radio frequency(LERF) technology. HERF is advanced technology. It is based on concentrating large amounts of RF EM energy in within a small space, narrow frequency range, and a very short period of time. The result is an overpowering RF EM impulse capable of causing substantial damage to electronic components.

LERF utilizes relatively low energy, which is spread over a wide frequency spectrum. It can be no less effective in disrupting normal functioning of computers as HERF due to the wider range of frequencies it occupies. LERF does not require time compression neither high tech components. LERF impact on computers and computer networks could be devastating. The computer would go into a random output mode, that is, it is impossible to predict what the computer would do. A back up computer will not solve the problem either. One example of LERF use was the KGB's manipulation of the United States Embassy security system in Moscow in the late 80s.

Worldwide proliferation in RF weapons has increased dramatically in the last five years. The collapse of the Soviet Union is probably the most significant factor contributing to this increase in attention and concern about proliferation. The KGB has split into independent parts. One of them is referred to as FAPSI. It has been partially privatized. Spin-off companies have been created, with very attractive golden parachutes for the high officers. FAPSI, or its spin-off companies have been heavily involved in China and Cuba in RF technology, as well as computer technology.

China, PRC, has stolen design information on the United States most advanced thermonuclear weapons. The stolen information includes classified information on:

Seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal
Classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (neutron bomb), which neither the USA , nor any other country has yet deployed
Classified information on state of the art reentry vehicles, and warheads, such as the W-88, a miniaturized, tapered warhead, which is the most sophisticated nuclear weapon the United States has ever built.
These and other classified information have been obtained in the last 20 years. However, the now presence in Cuba, with the use of the Bejucal base, and the proximity to the United States, makes the China/Cuba new axis a very serious threat to this nation. In 1993, a Cuban nuclear engineer, and high officer of the Cuban Intelligence military apparatus, was awarded a one year stance at Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, doing research on Physical protection of nuclear facilities and materials. The officer is, since 1999, in exile in the United States.

The PRC has acquired also technology on high performance computers(HPC). HPCs are needed for the design and testing of advanced nuclear weapons. The PRC has targeted the U.S. nuclear test data for espionage collection. This can be accomplished through the facilities in Cuba.

China'new venture in Cuba will:

Enhance China's military capability
Jeopardize U.S. national security interests
Pose a direct threat to the United States
END


Manuel Cereijo
INGMCA@aol.com


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[G M]

Quote from: G M on June 06, 2008, 01:59:30 PM

A headline from the future with President Obama: "The Sunni-Shia Nuclear Arms Race Escalates".

I wonder how much gas will be then....


http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/10/10369793-report-saudi-arabia-to-buy-nukes-if-iran-tests-a-bomb

Report: Saudi Arabia to buy nukes if Iran tests A-bomb






Mustafa Ozer / AFP - Getty Images, file


Saudi special forces take part in a military parade in the holy city of Mecca on November 10, 2010.


By msnbc.com staff, NBC News and news services

Saudia Arabia would move quickly to acquire nuclear weapons if Iran successfully tests an atomic bomb, according to a report.

Citing an unidentified Saudi Arabian source, the Times newspaper in the U.K. (which operates behind a paywall) said that the kingdom would seek to buy ready-made warheads and also begin its own program to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The paper suggested that Pakistan was the country most likely to supply Saudi Arabia with weapons, saying Western officials were convinced there was an understanding between the countries to do so if the security situation in the Persian Gulf gets worse. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have denied such an arrangement exists.
 
Iran, which follows the Shiite branch of Islam, and Sunni Saudi Arabia are major regional rivals.

The Times described its source for the story as a "senior Saudi," but gave no other details.

Israel uses MEK terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists, US officials say


Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describes what Iranian leaders believe is a close relationship between Israel's secret service, the Mossad, and the People's Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

"There is no intention currently to pursue a unilateral military nuclear program, but the dynamics will change immediately if the Iranians develop their own nuclear capability," the source told the newspaper. "Politically, it would be completely unacceptable to have Iran with a nuclear capability and not the kingdom."
 
It also cited an unnamed Western official as saying that Saudi Arabia would ask Pakistan to honor the alleged agreement "the next day" after any Iranian nuclear bomb test.
 

The U.S. and other nations suspect that Iran is using its civilian nuclear work as a cover for a weapons program, but Iran insists that its nuclear ambitions are strictly peaceful. The U.S. has used sanctions and diplomacy to pressure Iran on the issue, but has long refused to rule out military action saying that all options are on the table. Israel is also believed to be contemplating a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.


Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now believes there's a strong possibility that Israel will attack Iran in an attempt to thwart Tehran's nuclear ambitions, according to U.S. officials. NBC's Richard Engel reports.


In a statement issued Friday by the Pakistan Embassy in Saudi Arabia, Ambassador Mohammed Naeem Khan was quoted as saying that "each Pakistani considers (the) security of Saudi Arabia as his personal matter." Naeem also said that the Saudi leadership considered Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to be one country.
 
 
 
In January this year, Saudi Arabia's former ambassador to the U.S., Prince Turki al-Faisal, said in an interview with The Associated Press that unless a zone free of weapons of mass destruction was created in the Mideast there would "inevitably" be a nuclear arms race, and "that's not going to be in the favor of anybody."
 
He stressed that the Gulf states were committed not to acquire WMD.
 
"But we're not the only players in town. You have Turkey. You have Iraq which has a track record of wanting to go nuclear. You have Egypt. They had a very vibrant nuclear energy program from the 1960s. You have Syria. You have other players in the area that could open Pandora's box," the Saudi prince told The AP.
 


Iran envoy: We could hit US forces anywhere in world if attacked

Asked whether Saudi Arabia would maintain its commitment against acquiring WMD, Turki said: "What I suggest for Saudi Arabia and for the other Gulf states ... is that we must study carefully all the options, including the option of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. We can't simply leave it for somebody else to decide for us."

Turki is also a former Saudi intelligence chief and remains an influential member of the Saudi royal family.
 
Turki said the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council should guarantee a nuclear security umbrella for Mideast countries that join a nuclear-free zone — and impose "military sanctions" against countries seen to be developing nuclear weapons.
 

"I think that's a better way of going at this issue of nuclear enrichment of uranium, or preventing Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction," he said in the AP interview.
 


 

In October, the U.S. claimed that agents linked to Iran's Qud's Force, an elite wing of the Revolutionary Guard, were involved in a plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., Adel Al-Jubeir. Iran said the claims were "baseless."
 



'Meddling'
Turki said in November that there was "ample and heinous" evidence that Iran was behind the alleged plot. He added that the evidence "indicates the depths of depravity and unreason to which the (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad regime has sunk."
 

Turki called the plot "the tip of the iceberg," saying Iran was "meddling" in the affairs of many other countries, including Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan and especially Iraq.
 
 

The Saudi government has also accused a terror cell linked to Iran of plotting to blow up its embassy in Bahrain, as well as the causeway linking the island kingdom to Saudi Arabia.
 

In a secret diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks, Saudi King Abdullah allegedly urged Washington to strike at Iran and "cut off the head of the snake."
 



Turki dismissed the cable in November, telling reporters that Saudi Arabia supported sanctions and diplomatic pressure against Iran but not a military strike.
 
 

He said military action would only stiffen Iran's resolve, rally support for the regime and at best delay, but not halt, the nuclear program. "Such an act I think would be foolish, and to undertake it I think would be tragic," he said.
 


 
 
The Associated Press, NBC News and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

[Crafty_Dog]

Any comments on the 80% cuts in our nukes trial balloons being floated by Team Baraq?

[G M]

Any comments on the 80% cuts in our nukes trial balloons being floated by Team Baraq?

His attempt to destroy this country is going as planned....

[G M]

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/fearful-of-nuclear-iran-the-real-wmd-nightmare-syria

Fearful of a nuclear Iran? The real WMD nightmare is Syria
 By Charles P. Blair | 1 March 2012

Article Highlights
 ■Syria has one of the largest and most sophisticated chemical weapons programs in the world and may also possess offensive biological weapons.
 ■Longstanding terrorist groups and newly arrived Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters from Iraq have been active in Syria during that country's recent insurgency.
 ■The United States and regional powers -- including Saudi Arabia and Iran -- need to start planning now to keep Syria's WMD out of terrorist hands if the Assad regime falls.
 
As possible military action against Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program looms large in the public arena, far more international concern should be directed toward Syria and its weapons of mass destruction. When the Syrian uprising began more than a year ago, few predicted the regime of President Bashar al-Assad would ever teeter toward collapse. Now, though, the demise of Damascus's current leadership appears inevitable, and Syria's revolution will likely be an unpredictable, protracted, and grim affair. Some see similarities with Libya's civil war, during which persistent fears revolved around terrorist seizure of Libyan chemical weapons, or the Qaddafi regime's use of them against insurgents. Those fears turned out to be unfounded.
 
But the Libyan chemical stockpile consisted of several tons of aging mustard gas leaking from a half-dozen canisters that would have been impossible to utilize as weapons. Syria likely has one of the largest and most sophisticated chemical weapon programs in the world. Moreover, Syria may also possess an offensive biological weapons capability that Libya did not.
 
While it is uncertain whether the Syrian regime would consider using WMD against its domestic opponents, Syrian insurgents, unlike many of their Libyan counterparts, are increasingly sectarian and radicalized; indeed, many observers fear the uprising is being "hijacked" by jihadists. Terrorist groups active in the Syrian uprising have already demonstrated little compunction about the acquisition and use of WMD. In short, should Syria devolve into full-blown civil-war, the security of its WMD should be of profound concern, as sectarian insurgents and Islamist terrorist groups may stand poised to seize chemical and perhaps even biological weapons.

Read it all.

[Crafty_Dog]

Note the man's background at the end of the article.

By REUEL MARC GERECHT
In recent speeches, interviews and private meetings, President Obama has been trying hard to dissuade Israel from bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. All along, however, he's actually made it much easier for Israel to attack. The capabilities and will of Israel's military remain unclear, but the critical parts of the administration's Iran policy (plus the behavior of the Islamic Republic's ruler, Ali Khamenei) have combined to encourage the Israelis to strike.

Public statements define a president's diplomacy, and in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this month Mr. Obama intensely affirmed "Israel's sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs." He added that "no Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel's destruction."

By so framing the Iranian nuclear debate, the president has forced a spotlight on two things that his administration has wanted to leave vague: the efficacy of sanctions and the quality of American intelligence on Tehran's nuclear program. The Israelis are sure to draw attention to both in the coming months.

Enlarge Image

CloseGetty Images
 
President Barack Obama (right) talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they walk along the Colonnade of the White House, March 5.
.Given Mr. Khamanei's rejection of engagement, Mr. Obama has backed sanctions because they are the only plausible alternative to war or surrender. Ditto Congress, which has been the real driver of sanctions. But the timeline for economic coercion to work has always depended on Israeli or American military capabilities and the quality of Western intelligence. Neither factor engenders much patience.

Even the U.S. Air Force might have difficulty demolishing (with conventional explosives) the buried-beneath-a-mountain Fordow nuclear site near Qom, where the Iranian regime has been installing uranium-enrichment centrifuges. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu and his hawkish defense minister, Ehud Barak, may have waited too long to raid this now-functioning facility; steady Iranian progress there certainly means that the Israelis must strike within months if they are serious about pre-emption.

Although the Iranian regime dreads new Western sanctions against its central bank, and especially the ejection of the Islamic Republic from the Swift international banking consortium, Tehran still has a huge advantage concerning time. Iran made around $79 billion last year from the sale of oil. Whatever the cost of its nuclear program, the regime has surely spent the vast majority of the monies required to deliver a nuclear weapon, and Tehran certainly still has the few billions required to finish producing highly enriched uranium, triggering devices, and warheads for its ballistic missiles.

Sanctions that cannot starve the nuclear program could still conceivably collapse the Iranian economy, bringing on political chaos that paralyzes the nuclear program. But if we have learned anything from the past 60 years of sanctioning nasty regimes, it is that modern authoritarian states have considerable resilience and a high threshold of pain.

Many Iran observers would like to believe that sanctions could rapidly exacerbate divisions within the regime and thereby force Tehran to negotiate an end to possible nuclear weaponization. But this scenario beggars the Iranian revolutionary identity. Mr. Khamenei has shown no willingness to halt the program. Commanders of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, who are handpicked by the supreme leader and now control much of the Iranian economy and oversee "atomic research," have not even hinted they differ with Mr. Khamenei on the nuclear question.


The sanctions-political-chaos-nuclear-paralysis scenario envisions either the supreme leader or the Revolutionary Guards abandoning nukes just when they are within grasp. To verify the cessation of the nuclear-weapons quest, so the theory goes, these men would allow the unfettered inspection of all nuclear and military sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In other words, everything Mr. Khamenei and his praetorians have worked for since 1979—the independence and pre-eminence of the Islamic Republic among Muslim states in its battle against the "world-devouring," "Islam-debasing" United States—would be for naught.

The supreme leader and his allies are acutely sensitive to the age-old Persian conception of haybat, the awe required to rule. Those who still believe in the revolution are obviously more ruthless than those who want change (hence 2009, when security forces brutalized the pro-democracy Green Movement). Whoever might want to compromise on the nuclear issue within Iran's ruling elite surely lives in fear of those who don't.

Mr. Khamenei hasn't allowed the Revolutionary Guards to expand their economic reach because he wants them to be rich—it's because he wants them to be powerful. Iran's ruling elite are in a better position to survive sanctions today than they were when President George W. Bush described them as part of an axis of evil in 2002. Sanctions are a good tool to deny Tehran resources, but as a tool to stop nuclear weapons they aren't particularly menacing. They may now have become primarily a means to stop the Israelis, not the Iranians, from achieving their desired ends.

Under presidential pressure, the CIA's traditional sentiments toward Israel—suspicion laced with hostility—have likely been forced underground. Sharing intelligence has probably become de rigueur. The Israelis (like the British and the French) now undoubtedly know what we know about the Iranian nuclear program.

It's an excellent bet that the Israelis now know that the CIA probably has no sources inside the upper reaches of the Iranian scientific establishment, Mr. Khamenei's inner circle, or the Revolutionary Guards' nuclear brigade. They know whether the National Security Agency has reliably penetrated Iran's nuclear communications, and how Iran has improved its cybersecurity since Stuxnet.

The Israelis surely know that when the administration says it has "no evidence" that Mr. Khamenei has decided to build a nuclear weapon, this really means that Washington has no solid information. That is, Washington is guessing—most likely in the spirit of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which willfully downplayed Tehran's nuclear progress.

Because of his multilateral openness with our allies, Mr. Obama has likely guaranteed that the Western intelligence consensus on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program will default to what the Israelis and French have always said is most critical to weaponization: How many centrifuges do the Iranians have running, and are they trying to hide them or put them deep underground?

The Israeli cabinet reportedly still hasn't had the great debate about launching a pre-emptive strike. Democracies always temporize when confronted with war. But that discussion is coming soon and Barack Obama—who, despite his improving efforts at bellicosity, just doesn't seem like a man who would choose war with another Muslim nation—has most likely helped Messrs. Netanyahu and Barak make the case for military action.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA's clandestine service, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

[Crafty_Dog]

By JON KYL
When President Obama beseeched the Russian president to give him "space" until after the November election to deal with Moscow's concerns about U.S. missile defenses, it was with his larger objective of a world without nuclear weapons in mind. In explaining his remarks, the president said: "I want to reduce our nuclear stockpiles; and one of the barriers to doing that is building trust and cooperation around missile-defense issues."

It appears the president is willing to compromise our own missile-defense capabilities to secure Russian support for another round of nuclear-arms reductions. To accomplish that, he may have to ignore or circumvent commitments he made to Congress to secure support for the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start)—among them, that he would deploy all four phases of planned U.S. missile-defense systems for Europe, and that he would modernize the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system for the protection of the U.S. homeland.

The president's re-election prospects could suffer if concessions on these systems were to be openly discussed before the election.

The Russians have made clear their concern about the range and speed of U.S. missile-defense interceptors planned for deployment later this decade, as well as American plans to base those interceptors in Poland, in Romania, and on naval vessels. In particular, the Russians decry the development of the SM-3 block IIB missile, which is planned for deployment at the beginning of the next decade. This potential missile would be the only U.S. theater missile-defense system capable of catching intercontinental-range Iranian missiles, making it important for the defense of our homeland.

Russia also wants increased involvement in actual operation of NATO missile defenses and would not want to see expansion and improvement of our existing national missile-defense system (which already has been curtailed by the president).

It is questionable whether concessions on missile defense would induce Russia to further reduce its nuclear arsenal. Unlike the U.S., Russia maintains a robust nuclear warhead production capability, and its national security strategy is to increase reliance on nuclear weapons. Russia is also modernizing ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

In addition to worrying about our missile-defense capability, the American people should question the assumptions behind the president's quest to reduce the number of nuclear weapons well below New Start Treaty levels. While in South Korea last month, President Obama said that he "can say with confidence that we have more nuclear weapons than we need."

U.S. military planners don't necessarily share that view. During Senate hearings in 2010 on the New Start Treaty, the then-Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Kevin Chilton testified that, "I think the arsenal that we have is exactly what is needed today to provide the deterrent."

Would the world be safer and more peaceful if the U.S. had fewer nuclear weapons? Is the current nuclear balance unstable? Are there incentives to strike first during a crisis? Are there pressures to increase the numbers of nuclear arms? Do our allies worry about the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella?

The answer to all of these questions is "no." Yet very low numbers of deployed nuclear weapons, as the president appears to have in mind, could engender instability. Lower numbers of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces could encourage China and other nations to seek equivalence. Our allies would be less certain about American nuclear guarantees, and they would then have an incentive to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

Very low numbers could prove destabilizing during a crisis, when even small amounts of cheating could tip the balance. With a very small nuclear arsenal, we would be less able to respond quickly to new threats and strategic challenges. It is far from certain that the supposed benefits of the additional reductions favored by the president outweigh the risks of lower numbers in our nuclear stockpile.

As the president has noted, any new arms-control treaty would have to be supported by the Senate. His failure to request full funding to modernize our nuclear weapons laboratories—another pledge he made to secure ratification of New Start—is another reason his proposals would be met with strong skepticism in the Senate.

As he said on his recent trip to South Korea, President Obama believes that, because we are "the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons," we now have a "moral obligation" to pursue nuclear disarmament. In fact, the United States used two atomic weapons to end World War II in order to fulfill a moral obligation to save the lives of perhaps a million American GIs.

Today, the federal government has no higher moral obligation than to protect the American people and to help ensure the human race never again experiences the ruin and destruction of the wars that occurred before the advent of nuclear weapons. Supporting a robust nuclear deterrent and an effective missile defense is a moral obligation for all those who are entrusted with ensuring our nation's security.

Mr. Kyl is a Republican senator from Arizona.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577311601745664294.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/world/cartwright-key-retired-general-backs-large-us-nuclear-reduction.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120516
Former Commander of U.S. Nuclear Forces Calls for Large Cut in WarheadsBy THOM SHANKER
Published: May 15, 2012
 
WASHINGTON — Gen. James E. Cartwright, the retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of the United States’ nuclear forces, is adding his voice to those who are calling for a drastic reduction in the number of nuclear warheads below the levels set by agreements with Russia.

General Cartwright said that the United States’ nuclear deterrence could be guaranteed with a total arsenal of 900 warheads, and with only half of them deployed at any one time. Even those in the field would be taken off hair triggers, requiring 24 to 72 hours for launching, to reduce the chance of accidental war.

That arsenal would be a significant cut from the current agreement to limit Russia and the United States to 1,550 deployed warheads each, down from 2,200, within six years. Under the New Start agreement, thousands more warheads can be kept in storage as a backup force, and the restrictions do not apply to hundreds of short-range nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals.

“The world has changed, but the current arsenal carries the baggage of the cold war,” General Cartwright said in an interview. “There is the baggage of significant numbers in reserve. There is the baggage of a nuclear stockpile beyond our needs. What is it we’re really trying to deter? Our current arsenal does not address the threats of the 21st century.”

The proposals are contained in a report to be issued Wednesday by Global Zero, a nuclear policy organization, signed by General Cartwright and several senior national security figures, including Richard Burt, a former chief nuclear arms negotiator; Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska; Thomas R. Pickering, a former ambassador to Russia; and Gen. John J. Sheehan, who held senior NATO positions before retiring from active duty.

General Cartwright’s leading role in the study is expected to give heft to the proposals; he was the top officer at the United States Strategic Command, overseeing the entire nuclear arsenal. The report’s proposals also may help shape the election-year debate on national security.

President Obama has pronounced a goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, but the specific steps and timetable remain aspirational.

Pentagon officials have drawn up options for the president, ranging from an arsenal that remains at New Start levels to one with 300 to 400 warheads. But officials emphasized that this internal review was still under way and that no decisions had been made.

In March, Republicans criticized Mr. Obama after he was overheard telling his Russian counterpart during a nuclear terrorism conference in South Korea that he would have more flexibility to deal with Moscow’s concerns on arms control after the November election.

Among the striking Global Zero proposals is one to eliminate outright the fixed, land-based intercontinental nuclear missiles that form one leg of the three-part nuclear arsenal, and instead rely solely on submarines, which are nearly impossible to detect, and long-range bombers, which can be summoned back from an attack should a crisis ease. The proposal calls for 360 warheads deployed aboard submarines and 90 gravity bombs aboard strike aircraft, and calls on Russia also to limit its arsenal to 900 warheads.

Given the low likelihood of a huge nuclear exchange with Russia or China, General Cartwright said, these steep reductions in the American arsenal are necessary if the United States wants credibility to urge restraints on the weapons programs of smaller nuclear powers like India and Pakistan — and on potentially emerging nuclear states like Iran and North Korea.

General Cartwright said that countries like India and Pakistan viewed their weapons more as a shield to protect their sovereignty than as a sword to be used in conflict. They and some potentially emerging nuclear powers ignore Washington’s calls for curbing their nuclear aspirations, saying that the United States is guilty of hypocrisy because it maintains a huge arsenal.

“A significant number of countries are not part of the dialogue” on reducing nuclear weapons, he said. And as more nuclear weapons are held by more nations — whose arsenals are not guarded by the layers of high-tech security systems in place over American weapons — the greater the opportunity for them to fall into the hands of terrorists, General Cartwright noted.

The Global Zero study also says that the large reductions make sense in a time of constrained Pentagon spending. The delivery systems in the American nuclear arsenal are nearing the end of their service life at nearly the same time, presenting a bill of hundreds of billions of dollars just as the Defense Department must cut spending.

Bruce Blair, who directed the study and is a co-founder of Global Zero, said that decisions should be made soon on nuclear arms reductions, so that money is not wasted on weapons programs that should be eliminated.

Mr. Blair said that land-based intercontinental missiles “have no role to play any longer.” In fixed silos, they are vulnerable to targeting. And the study includes maps to show that America’s land-based missile force would have to fly over Russia to reach potential nuclear adversaries like North Korea or Iran. That route “risks confusing Russia with ambiguous attack indications and triggering nuclear retaliation,” he said.

The report emphasizes the importance of missile defense in bolstering American deterrence in an era of smaller offensive nuclear arsenals.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3580/tehran-west-caving-on-iranian-nuclear-program

Tehran: West Caving on Iranian Nuclear Program
by Joel Himelfarb  •  May 16, 2012 at 11:06 am

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3580/tehran-west-caving-on-iranian-nuclear-program


Iranian and United Nations officials claimed to have made progress in negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program on Tuesday. But initial reports have provided little substantive information beyond an announcement that representatives of the Iranian regime and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will meet again next week in Vienna, Austria.

Iranian officials waxed optimistic, claiming the West is coming to terms with the inevitability of Iran's nuclear program. In a New York Times interview, Hamidreza Taraghi, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragged that Tehran had managed to skew the current nuclear negotiations in its favor by making uranium enrichment (a potential path to nuclear weapons) a reality that the West cannot stop.

Taraghi told the Times that Iran had convinced the West of the importance of a fatwa against the possession of nuclear weapons that Khamenei issued. Iranian officials emphasized that edict during last month's negotiations in Istanbul.

American officials countered that they brought up Khamenei's fatwa in an effort to provide the Iranians a "face-saving" way to reach a compromise. But Iranian negotiators left Istanbul believing they had prevailed. "We have managed to get our rights," Taraghi said. "All that remains is a debate over the percentage of enrichment."

That may be posturing. But a new analysis by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests the Islamist regime has good reason to believe it has the upper hand in the nuclear standoff.

The IAEA's own reports show "that Iran has moved far beyond the point where it lacked the technology base to produce nuclear weapons," Cordesman writes. "Iran has pursued every major area of nuclear weapons development, (and) has carried out programs that have already given it every component of a weapon except fissile material." Moreover, "there is strong evidence that it has carried out programs to integrate a nuclear warhead on [to] its missiles."

Cordesman finds that Iran's nuclear efforts are diversified and can be concealed from international inspectors. Even if it were to suspend uranium enrichment, Tehran could "pursue nuclear weapons development through a range of compartmented and easily concealable programs without a formal weapons program."

Even if Tehran agreed to controls on its current enrichment facilities or saw them destroyed in a military strike, it would not necessarily put an end to the regime's nuclear capability. It "would take an amazing amount of intelligence access to prevent" Iran from creating replacement enrichment facilities if its existing programs were destroyed in bombing raids, Cordesman writes.

In short, "Iran could appear to agree to arms control or appear to have had its programs destroyed and still go on creating better future enrichment capability."

Read the full article here.



continued

[Crafty_Dog]

Alan Dershowitz: The Message Obama Should Have Sent
Forget about a 'red line.' Try a warning to Iran in black-and-white..
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

On Monday in New York, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised that Israel will be "eliminated," a variation on his previous threats to the nation's existence. He was in town for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, a gathering that reliably sees leaders issuing pronouncements that, even if not new, at least are given a bigger stage. On Tuesday, the first day of the gathering, President Obama delivered a speech that also struck familiar notes, including the statement that "a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained." He moved no closer to giving a signal of what he might consider an intolerable development in Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapon.


For months, U.S. and Israeli officials have debated whether Mr. Obama should publicly announce a "red line" that, if crossed by Iran, would prompt an American military response. Announcing such a threshold publicly or privately might be helpful, but it may not be necessary for the president to specify what would constitute such a red line (a certain degree of uranium enrichment, for example, or other evidence of weaponization).

Instead, Mr. Obama has another good option: Tell the Iranian leadership that under no circumstances will it ever be permitted to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, and that the U.S. is prepared to take decisive military action to make sure of this.

Such a statement wouldn't tip the president's hand regarding a precise red line, but it would send a clear message that Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons are futile and ultimately will lead to disaster for Iran's rulers.

Mr. Obama's prior statements—that containing a nuclear Iran is not an option; that a country committed to wiping Israel off the map, promoting terrorism and arming Hezbollah and Syria can't be allowed to have nukes—have been strong. But Iran's leadership still doesn't seem to believe that an American military option really is on the table.

Iran's skepticism is understandable in light of some Obama administration rhetoric. This week the president himself characterized Israeli concern over Iran and threats of military action as mere "noise." Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has repeatedly and emphatically outlined the dangers of military action against Iran, and this month Vice President Joe Biden criticized Mitt Romney for being "ready to go to war" with Iran.

Being ready for war with Iran, after all, might be the only way to deter that country from going nuclear.

Were Mr. Obama to affirm America's dedication to blocking Iran's nuclear ambitions through military force if necessary, he would maintain his flexibility to act while putting pressure on Iran's mullahs. He would not be acknowledging, as some fear, that the combination of sanctions and diplomacy is failing. Rather, he would make this combination more effective by convincing Iran's leaders that there is no good reason for them to continue bringing the economic pain of international sanctions onto their country. The message is that their sanctions-provoking projects are pointless because the U.S. will never allow Iran to become a nuclear power.

A policy of sanctions, diplomacy and an absolute dedication to the use of force if necessary has a far better chance of working than sanctions and diplomacy alone. Sanctions have certainly made life difficult in Iran, at least for the general population, but they haven't slowed the regime's nuclear march. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders have been forced to consider unilateral action in the absence of America's clear commitment to stopping Iran before it's too late.

There are many ways to communicate American preparedness, including by increased military planning and exercises. But there is no substitute for a firm commitment, unambiguously stated by a president whose subordinates do nothing to blur the message and, if anything, signal a steely resolve.

There are those who argue that an American president should never make a threat that he may not want to carry out. But President Obama has already committed his administration to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, which necessarily means employing the military option if all else fails. He has also told the world that he does not bluff. If that is true, then there is no downside to his stating U.S. policy and intentions explicitly.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).

[G M]

Mr. Dershowitz assumes that Buraq doesn't want a nuclear Iran.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5T5CF1jhTg&feature=youtu.be

[Crafty_Dog]

Hat tip to BD; posting this here in addition to his posting of it on the Iran thread:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/11/27/diagram-suggests-iran-working-on-explosive-more-than-triple-force-hiroshima/

[Crafty_Dog]

Reliability unknown:
http://www.radicalislam.org/analysis/more-secret-nuclear-sites-discovered-iran/#fm

More Secret Nuclear Sites Discovered in Iran
Thu, November 29, 2012
by: Reza Khalili



International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s chief inspector Herman Nackaerts & Iran's IAEA ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh (R) (Photo: Reuters)Just as the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report increased alarm about Iran’s illicit nuclear program, now comes word that the Islamic regime has created even more secret nuclear sites.
 
The IAEA report indicated that not only has Iran completed installation of 2,784 centrifuges at Fordow, the previous secret site deep in a mountain believed to be immune to air strikes, but also could within days increase output of highly enriched uranium to the 20-percent level, well on the way to nuclear weapons.
 
Iran has started to feed uranium hexafluoride gas into four new cascades, increasing the number of centrifuges at Fordow from 700 to 1,400, therefore doubling its output of highly enriched uranium and cutting the time needed for having enough high-enriched material for one nuclear bomb. The regime already has enough low-enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs if further enriched.
 
However, according to a source within the engineering department of the Revolutionary Guards, the regime is working on its nuclear bomb program from several secret sites unknown to the world.
 
One such site, the source said, is in the outskirts of the small city of Shahrokhabad in Kerman Province.
 

Kerman, known for its deposits of copper and coal, also has uranium ore deposits, the source said, and is as high a quality as the deposits at Gachin near the city of Bandar Abbas, which the regime has long used for its yellow cake supply. The regime, with its need for yellow cake, not only has explored various sites within Iran but as far away as Venezuela and Bolivia. Both of those countries have close ties with Iran, and both have vast uranium deposits.
 
The new site, under the control of the Revolutionary Guards, is code-named “Fateh1.” Fateh in Farsi means victorious. The site’s official name is the Martyred Bahonar Training center, but it is used as a front for regime’s nuclear activity. A six foot wall surrounds the site, on top of it are iron bars and on top of them barbed wires.
 

According to the source, the uranium ore at the new site is processed into yellow cake then converted to uranium hexafluoride, which is then fed into centrifuges to produce enriched uranium.
 

It is unclear at this time if the conversion of the yellow cake into uranium hexafluoride is done at the new site or sent to the Isfahan uranium conversion facility, but the source said activities at the site point to underground facilities within the site, covered with dirt or a special rolled asphalt to camouflage its activities from satellites. This is similar to what the regime has done at other sites – enriching uranium at underground facilities.
 



The source added that the site, surrounded by security towers and barbed wire, is under heavy Revolutionary Guard control, with checks at the entrance and security posts within the facility.
 

The Guard commander of this operation, according to the source, is Col. Habibollah Sanatgar, who reports directly to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, headed by Fereydon Abbasi, though all coordination is under the supervision of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, the father of Iran’s nuclear bomb program. The source added that another facility not far from the site is involved in plutonium work.
 
Peter Vincent Pry, formerly with the CIA and now executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a congressional advisory board, regards the discovery of another Iranian underground nuclear site as ominous.
 
“Reliable sources in recent months appear to have disclosed two more previously unknown facilities serving Iran’s nuclear program,” Pry said. “Moreover, the sources have provided some credible evidence that at least one of these facilities is actively engaged in nuclear weaponization. If any of these allegations is even partially true, the whole timeline for Iran developing a nuclear weapon must be recalculated. The advent of a nuclear-armed Iran is much nearer than assumed by the Obama administration.”
 
Pry warned that the United States cannot afford to let Iran, the leading sponsor of international terrorism, develop even a single nuclear weapon.
 
“The congressional EMP Commission warned that Iran could launch a nuclear-armed short-range missile off a ship to inflict an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) catastrophe on the United States using just a single warhead,” Pry cautioned. “The EMP attack would collapse the national electric grid and all the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans. Iran has practiced making exactly such a ship-launched EMP attack and has openly written about making an EMP attack to eliminate the United States.”
 
Exclusive reports by WND on Oct. 8 and Nov. 1 revealed that Iran is operating another nuclear site at which scientists are testing a neutron detonator and implosion system for a nuclear bomb as well as on a nuclear warhead design and enrichment to weaponization levels.
 
The 5+1 group has requested new talks with Iran over the nuclear impasse. The Islamic regime has hinted about freezing nuclear enrichment to the 20-percent level in exchange for removal of all sanctions, guarantees on providing the country with high-enriched uranium and acceptance of the regime’s full rights to nuclear energy. Such a deal would allow the country’s thousands of centrifuges to continue to enrich to the 5-percent level.
 
Regardless of the outcome of any further negotiations, the source said, the Islamic regime, with work at many secret sites, is very close to obtaining the bomb.
 
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and author of the award winning book “A Time to Betray” (Simon & Schuster, 2010). He serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI).

[Crafty_Dog]

And where is the serious Rep response to this? , , ,

==============================


Obama's Nuclear Fantasy The president is setting the stage for a world with more nukes in the wrong hands
By BRET STEPHENS
WSJ
 
As a young Soviet military officer, Viktor Esin was stationed in Cuba during the October 1962 crisis, where he had release authority over a nuclear-tipped missile targeting New York. On his first visit to Manhattan in December, I made sure to thank him for not obliterating our city.

Gen. Esin rose to become chief of staff for the Strategic Rocket Forces, and he is now a professor at the Russian Academy of Military Science. So what's been on his mind lately? Mainly the stealthy rise of China to a position of nuclear parity with the U.S. and Russia. "All in all, they may have 850 warheads ready to launch," he says. "Other warheads are kept in storage and intended to be employed in an emergency." He estimates the total size of the Chinese arsenal at between 1,600 and 1,800 warheads.

That is something to bear in mind as the Obama administration seeks to slash the U.S. arsenal to about 1,000 strategic warheads. That would be well below the ceiling of 1,550 warheads stipulated by the 2010 New Start Treaty. The administration also wants to spend less than the $80 billion it promised on modernizing America's rusting nuclear-weapons infrastructure.

On the strength of that promise 13 Republican senators gave President Obama the votes he needed to ratify New Start. Suckers! Now the president means to dispense with the Senate altogether, either by imposing the cuts unilaterally or by means of an informal agreement with Vladimir Putin. This is what Mr. Obama meant in telling Dmitry Medvedev last year that he would have "more flexibility" after re-election.

But what, you ask, is so frightening about having "only" 1,000 nuclear weapons? Surely that is more than enough to turn any conceivable adversary Paleolithic. Won't we remain more or less at parity with the Russians, and far ahead of everyone else?

It all depends on China. It is an article of faith among the arms-control community that Beijing subscribes to a theory of "minimum means of reprisal" and has long kept its arsenal more or less flat in the range of 240-400 warheads. Yet that is a speculative, dated and unverified figure, and China has spent the last decade embarked on a massive military buildup. Isn't it just possible that Beijing has been building up its nuclear forces, too?

When I broached this theory in an October 2011 column—noting that the U.S. had, in fact, underestimated the size of the Soviet arsenal by a factor of two at the end of the Cold War—I was attacked for being needlessly alarmist. But one man who shares that alarm is Gen. Esin. In July 2012, he notes, the Chinese tested an intermediate-range DF-25 missile, which Russia carefully tracked.

"In the final stage the missile had three shifts in trajectory, dropping one [warhead] at each shift," he notes. "It's solid evidence of a MIRV [multiple warhead] test." A month later, the Chinese launched a new long-range, MIRV-capable missile, this time from a submarine.

The general runs through additional evidence of China's nuclear strides. But what should really get the attention of U.S. military planners are his observations of how Russia might react. "If China doesn't stop, Russia will consider abandoning the INF Treaty," he warns. "Russia cannot afford not taking this factor into account."

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, is a cornerstone of the settlement that ended the Cold War. If Russia abandons it and begins building a new generation of intermediate-range missiles, the U.S. would either have to follow suit or lose parity with Moscow. We'd be off to the nuclear races once again.

And not just with Moscow. As North Korea gears up for a third nuclear test, South Korea is eager to begin recycling plutonium—ostensibly for peaceful purposes, in reality as a nuclear hedge against its neighbors.

Then there is Japan, which is scheduled to bring on line a reprocessing plant at Rokkasho later this year. As nuclear expert Henry Sokolski notes, "the plant will produce eight tons of nuclear weapons usable plutonium each year (enough for 1,000 to 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs) at a time when Japan has no nuclear reactors to burn the material."

Like the South Koreans, the Japanese don't want a nuclear arsenal: They have lived peacefully under the nuclear umbrella of the United States for nearly seven decades. But as that umbrella shrinks, it covers fewer countries. Those left out will look to deploy umbrellas of their own. "The U.S. has obligations on extended deterrence in Asia," Gen. Esin says. "The problem has to be at the forefront, not avoided."

President Obama has often said that he wants to live in a world without nuclear weapons. Who wouldn't? Even Gen. Esin is a "Global Zero" signatory. But the real choice isn't between more nuclear weapons or fewer. It is between a world of fewer U.S. nuclear weapons and more nuclear states, or the opposite. In his idealism, the president is setting the stage for a more nuclearized world.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

[G M]

Buraq gutting our nuclear and non-nuclear military isn't accidental or because of a lack of understanding.

[DougMacG]

"And where is the serious Rep response to this? , , ,"

SOTU Republican response is tonight immediately following the President.  Hopefully opposition to unilateral disarmament is in it.

Nearly all Republicans are strongly pro-defense.  Where is response of sane and responsible Democrats and independents to weakening the United States and making the world more dangerous?

[Crafty_Dog]

The Coming Nuclear Breakout
As the U.S. deterrent fades, atomic weapons are poised to proliferate..
 
President Obama came to office in 2009 promising to negotiate with America's enemies and create a world without nuclear weapons. Four years later, North Korea is threatening America with nuclear attack, Iran is closer to its own atomic arsenal, and the world is edging ever closer to a dangerous new era of nuclear proliferation. The promises and the reality are connected.

The latest talks between the West and Iran failed this weekend, with no immediate plans for another round. The negotiations by now follow a pattern in which the U.S. makes concessions that Iran rejects, followed by more concessions that Iran also rejects, and so on as Tehran plays for time.

North Korea, meanwhile, has moved medium-range missiles to its east coast in preparation for what is expected to be another launch as early as this week. This follows its third nuclear test and an explicit government authorization to strike U.S. targets with nuclear weapons. South Korea and Japan are in the direct line of fire.

The U.S. responded at first with a modest show of deterrent force (B-2 bombers, Aegis cruisers), but lately it has downplayed the threat and even cancelled a U.S. missile test lest it discomfit the North's young dictator Kim Jong Eun. U.S. policy now seems to be to beg China one more time to do something about its client state. This is worth trying given that China has a new senior leadership, but the public nature of U.S. pleading (see the weekend's newspapers) also projects weakness.

This anti-proliferation failure, in turn, has friends and allies increasingly wondering if they need their own nuclear deterrent. Chung Mong-joon, a prominent member of South Korea's ruling party, has called for the U.S. to return tactical nuclear weapons to the peninsula. George H.W. Bush withdrew them from South Korea in 1991 in a gesture to stop North Korea from going nuclear.

"Some say that the U.S. nuclear umbrella is a torn umbrella. If so, we need to repair it," Mr. Chung said in February, adding that if the U.S. refuses South Korea should develop its own nuclear weapons. A recent poll found that 66% of South Koreans support a home-grown deterrent.

The South Korean government says it has no such plans, but it's no coincidence that it is now pressing the U.S. for permission to produce its own nuclear fuel. While the supposed rationale is civilian use, the ability to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel is also a step toward making a bomb if South Korea ever chooses to.

That kind of talk is watched closely in Japan, which has refrained from getting its own bomb under the U.S. umbrella and the legacy of World War II. Few politicians are making the case for a Japanese bomb other than the nationalist Shintaro Ishihara, but that will change if the North keeps expanding its arsenal or the South goes nuclear. Japan already has a reprocessing facility that will soon be producing tons of weapons-usable plutonium.

Likewise in the Middle East, Iran's march to the bomb has other countries preparing the ground for their own nuclear breakout. Saudi Arabia has announced plans to build 16 reactors—precisely the number that nuclear inspectors say it would need for both civilian and military use. The world's largest oil exporter does not need nuclear power for electricity.

Neither does the United Arab Emirates, which is nonetheless building a nuclear power plant only a few hundred miles from Iran. The UAE has promised not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel, and in return the U.S. is providing technical advice on the plant. But few expect that promise to stand if Iran gets the bomb.

Elsewhere in the region, Syria tried to import a nuclear-energy capacity until Israel blew it up in 2007 (despite the disapproval of then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice). Turkey and Egypt are also likely to seek their own nuclear deterrent if Iran isn't stopped.

***
All of this is occurring even as Mr. Obama has pursued the most aggressive nuclear arms control agenda since the 1970s—or more likely because of it. In April 2009, the President famously declared that reducing U.S. nuclear stockpiles "will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don't proliferate nuclear weapons."

Mr. Obama has since cut the U.S. arsenal in the Start treaty with Russia and he's negotiating more reductions that he may not submit for Senate ratification. None of this "moral authority" has had the least deterrent effect on Iran or North Korea.

The truth is the opposite. The world can see the U.S. has acquiesced in North Korea's weapons program and lacks the will to stop Iran. It can see the U.S. is shrinking its own nuclear capacity through arms control, even as rogue threats grow. And it can see the U.S. is ambivalent about its allies getting nuclear weapons even as it does little to shore up the U.S. umbrella or allied defenses.

Above all, the world can hear Mr. Obama declare for domestic American audiences that "the tide of war is receding" despite the growing evidence to the contrary. On present trend, the President who promised to rid the world of nuclear weapons is setting the stage for their greatest proliferation since the dawn of the atomic age.

[Crafty_Dog]

Chemical Weapons and Consequences
Syria calls President Obama's bluff on WMD..
 
'As President of the United States, I don't bluff." So President Obama famously said in March 2012, warning Iranian leaders that he would not allow them to acquire nuclear weapons. Those are words Iranian leaders surely have in mind as they watch to see if Mr. Obama was bluffing about the warning the President has repeatedly delivered against the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria.

"I've made it clear to Bashar al-Assad and all who follow his orders: We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people, or the transfer of those weapons to terrorists," Mr. Obama said last month. "The world is watching; we will hold you accountable."

Or not. On Thursday, the White House confirmed in a letter to Senators John McCain and Carl Levin that the U.S. intelligence community now believes "the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin." That comports with similar claims by the French, British and Israel.

As for the accountability Mr. Obama promised, that's much less clear. The White House letter also said that "We are currently pressing for a comprehensive United Nations investigation that can credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what took place."

To recap: In a world in which there are few limits on war's brutality, chemical weapons have since World War I largely been the exception. Yet now there is growing evidence that Mr. Assad is the first known leader to use chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein murdered his own people in the Kurdish city of Halabja in 1988. The Syrian attack violates red lines Mr. Obama personally laid down. And now the Administration will . . . go to the U.N.?

At Turtle Bay, the U.S. will need permission from Syria's protectors in Moscow and Beijing merely to begin an investigation. If such a probe does get launched, it is unlikely ever to reach the site of the attacks in safety. At which point—several months, if not years, down the road—proof of the attacks will be all-but impossible to come by. Surely Mr. Obama and his military advisers know that it is impossible to gather from a battlefield the kind of proof needed beyond a reasonable doubt in a courtroom.

This message about American bluffing won't be lost on Iran, which has refused to bend on its nuclear program despite claims by Secretary of State John Kerry that time is running out. It also won't be lost on Israeli leaders, who can't afford to let Syria's chemical stockpiles spread to its other enemies in the region.

The growing strength within the Syrian insurgency of the al Nusra Front—now an official franchise of al Qaeda—means the chances of chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists has never been greater. Israel will have to consider its own military options to secure the stockpiles if the U.S. won't act, and that would run the risk of further regional escalation.

Mr. Obama has strived mightily to avoid intervening in Syria, despite his repeated demands that Mr. Assad "must go." The Administration's U.N. gambit looks like one more way to avoid doing something it promised it would do if chemical weapons were used. Presidents who are exposed as bluffers tend to have their bluff called again and again, with ever more dangerous consequences.

[objectivist1]

Do You Feel Lucky? The Threat of EMP

Frank Gaffney - March 22, 2013 - www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org

In 1987, Ronald Reagan mused that, if the world were about to be devastated by an alien force – perhaps a collision with a large asteroid, peoples of all nations, ideological persuasions and political parties would come together to save the planet and our civilization.  We may be about to test that proposition.

At the moment, no asteroid is known to be hurtling our way.  But a naturally occurring phenomenon is, one that may be as fatal for modern industrial societies and for the quality of life they have made possible – thanks principally to electrification.  The technical term for this threat is geomagnetically induced currents (GMIC) generated by the coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that laymen call solar eruptions or flaring.

Think of it as “space weather.” And there is a strong possibility that some of the heaviest such weather in hundreds of years is headed our way.

GMIC engenders intense bursts of electromagnetic energy.  No fewer than five studies mandated by the executive or legislative branches have confirmed that such electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is lethal for the electronic devices, computers and transformers that power everything in our 21st Century society.  Since these things are generally unprotected against EMP – whether naturally occurring or man-induced, they would almost certainly be damaged or destroyed.  The U.S. electrical grid could, as a result, be down for many months, and probably years.

We know that this EMP-precipitated effect could also be achieved by the detonation of a nuclear weapon high over the United States.  And actual or potential enemies of this country – notably Russia, China, North Korea and Iran – understand our acute vulnerability in this area, and have taken steps to exploit it.

“Catastrophic” is a term often used to describe the repercussions for our country of the cascading shut-down, first of the key elements of the grid, then inexorably, all of the electricity-dependent infrastructures that make possible life as we know it in this country. That would include those that enable: access to and distribution of food, water, fuel and heat; telecommunications; finance; transportation; sewage treatment and cooling of nuclear power plants.

President Reagan’s Science Advisor, Dr. William Graham, who chaired a blue-ribbon congressional commission on the EMP threat, has calculated that within a year of the U.S. electrical grid being devastated by such a phenomenon, nine out of ten Americans would be dead.

Did that get your attention?  Or, as Dirty Harry would say, do you feel lucky?

Unfortunately, we have no way to prevent such an event – any more than we could if we knew an asteroid were headed our way.  Persisting in our present state of vulnerability is an invitation to disaster, if not at the hands of some foe, then as a result of the cycle of intense solar storms in which we now find ourselves.

The good news is that there are practical and affordable steps we can take to mitigate these threats, if only we have the will and the wit to adopt them before we are hit by heavy space weather or its man-caused counterpart.

The present danger and our options for defending against it will be the subject of an extraordinary conference in Washington this week: the Electric Infrastructure Security Summit.  Many of the nation’s foremost authorities on EMP will participate, including: bipartisan champions of this issue in Congress; nuclear physicists and other experts; executive branch officials from the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Department of Homeland Security; and representatives from the quasi-governmental North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and from the utilities industry.

The single biggest challenge to date has been the lack of public awareness of the EMP peril.  This is particularly ironic since a television program envisioning life in America after the lights go out, NBC’s “Revolution,” has been quite popular.  But most viewers seem to think the precipitating event is the stuff of science fiction.  An intensive effort is needed now to disabuse them of this comforting, but unfounded notion, and to enlist them in the corrective actions that are necessary on an urgent, bipartisan and nation-wide basis.

To that end, some discernible progress is being made. For example, on May 16th, at the instigation of Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, the FERC issued a final rule that, in the words of the trade publication Power Magazine, “orders the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to develop, by the end of the year, reliability standards that address the impact of geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) on the nation’s bulk power system.”

The Maine state legislature is poised to adopt legislation that would require the FERC to submit a plan by the end of June to insulate Maine’s grid from that of the rest of the Northeastern states and harden it against EMP.  This measure could serve as model for similar state-level initiatives elsewhere and help catalyze counterpart legislation at the federal level along the lines of that introduced in the last session of Congress by Representatives Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY), dubbed the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage (SHIELD) Act.

Important and necessary as these measures are, they are not sufficient to contend fully with the urgent threat our country is now facing.   We are on a collision course for catastrophe of a magnitude, if not exactly of a kind, with that that could be inflicted by the kind of dangerous asteroid President Reagan envisioned decades ago.  There is simply no time to waste in joining forces and implementing the steps needed to ensure we are not counting on luck to keep America’s lights on.

[Crafty_Dog]

Aaaccckkk!