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>>> Iran planning Gulf 'swarm' drill involving 100 gun boats within days, US officials say
By Lucas Tomlinson
Fox News
8-2-18
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/08/01/iran-planning-gulf-swarm-drill-involving-100-gun-boats-within-days-us-officials-say.html
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard is expected to put 100 gun boats in the Persian Gulf sometime in the next 48 hours to practice "swarm" tactics simulating actions which could potentially shut down the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly 10 percent of the world’s oil passes through each year, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.
Iran normally conducts its annual "swarm" exercise in the fall, but officials said the event has been moved up likely due to recent threats made between President Donald Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in recent days.
In a statement about the exercise, Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, said: "We are aware of the increase in Iranian naval operations within the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman. We are monitoring it closely, and will continue to work with our partners to ensure freedom of navigation and free flow of commerce in international waterways." The Arabian Gulf is also known as the Persian Gulf.
U.S. officials said there has been no mention of any threats to American forces.
President Trump, however, had strong words for his Iranian counterpart last week which seemed to allude to rising tensions.
"To Iranian President Rouhani," Trump tweeted. "NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH."
Currently, the guided-missile destroyer USS The Sullivans is in the Persian Gulf., with some British and French warships nearby. There are 10 American patrol craft based in Bahrain at the headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s 5th fleet.
The U.S. destroyer is part of the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier strike group, but the aircraft carrier is not in the Persian Gulf or surrounding area right now, having returned early to Norfolk, Va., late last month following a three-month deployment.
President Trump said Monday he would be willing to meet with Rouhani with “no preconditions,” on the heels of a fiery exchange of threats last month.
Iranian officials rejected Trump's overture to meet a day later.
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>>> Report: North Korea Is Building New Missiles
Washington Post
7-31-18
by Ellen Nakashima, Joby Warrick
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-spy-agencies-north-korea-is-working-on-new-missiles/ar-BBLhxFf?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=msnHomepage
U.S. spy agencies are seeing signs that North Korea is constructing new missiles at a factory that produced the country’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, according to officials familiar with the intelligence.
Newly obtained evidence, including satellite photos taken in recent weeks, indicates that work is underway on at least one and possibly two liquid-fueled ICBMs at a large research facility in Sanumdong, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe classified intelligence.
The findings are the latest to show ongoing activity inside North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities at a time when the country’s leaders are engaged in arms talks with the United States. The new intelligence does not suggest an expansion of North Korea’s capabilities but shows that work on advanced weapons is continuing weeks after President Trump declared in a Twitter posting that Pyongyang was “no longer a Nuclear Threat.”
The reports about new missile construction come after recent revelations about a suspected uranium enrichment facility, called Kangson, that North Korea is operating in secret. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged during Senate testimony last week that North Korean factories “continue to produce fissile material” used in making nuclear weapons. He declined to say whether Pyongyang is building new missiles.
During a summit with Trump in June, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to a vaguely worded pledge to “work toward” the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. But since then, North Korea has made few tangible moves signaling an intention to disarm.
A May 28 satellite image of a building that U.S. analysts believe is a secret uranium enrichment facility near North Korea’s capital. Instead, senior North Korean officials have discussed their intention to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads and missiles they have, as well as the types and numbers of facilities, and to rebuff international inspectors, according to intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies. Their strategy includes potentially asserting that they have fully denuclearized by declaring and disposing of 20 warheads while retaining dozens more.
The Sanumdong factory has produced two of North Korea’s ICBMs, including the powerful Hwasong-15, the first with a proven range that could allow it to strike the U.S. East Coast. The newly obtained evidence points to ongoing work on at least one Hwasong-15 at the Sanumdong plant, according to imagery collected by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in recent weeks.
“We see them going to work, just as before,” said one U.S. official, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive intelligence. The exception, the officials said, is the Sohae Satellite Launching Station on North Korea’s west coast, where workers can be observed dismantling an engine test stand, honoring a promise made to Trump at the summit.
Many analysts and independent experts, however, see that dismantling as largely symbolic, since North Korea has now successfully launched ICBMs that use the kind of liquid-fueled engines tested at Sohae. Moreover, the test stand could easily be rebuilt within months.
Buttressing the intelligence findings, independent missile experts this week also reported observing activity consistent with missile construction at the Sanumdong plant. The daily movement of supply trucks and other vehicles, as captured by commercial satellite photos, shows that the missile facility “is not dead, by any stretch of the imagination,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The Monterey, Calif., nonprofit group analyzed commercial photos obtained from the satellite imagery firm Planet Labs Inc.
“It’s active. We see shipping containers and vehicles coming and going,” Lewis said of the Sanumdong plant. “This is a facility where they build ICBMs and space-launch vehicles.”
Intriguingly, one image, taken July 7, depicts a bright-red covered trailer in a loading area. The trailer appears identical to those used by North Korea in the past to transport ICBMs. How the trailer was being used at the time of the photograph is unclear.
Lewis’s group also published images of a large industrial facility that some U.S. intelligence analysts believe to be the Kangson uranium enrichment plant. The images, first reported by the online publication the Diplomat, depict a football-field-size building surrounded by a high wall, in North Korea’s Chollima-guyok district, southwest of the capital. The complex has a single, guarded entrance and features high-rise residential towers apparently used by workers.
Historical satellite photos show that the facility was externally complete by 2003. U.S. intelligence agencies believe that it has been operational for at least a decade. If so, North Korea’s stockpile of enriched uranium could be substantially higher than is commonly believed. U.S. intelligence agencies in recent months increased their estimates of the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, taking into account enriched uranium from at least one secret enrichment site.
The Kangson facility was first publicly identified in May in a Washington Post article that cited research by nuclear weapons expert David Albright. Some European intelligence officials are not convinced that the Kangson site is used for uranium enrichment. But there is a broad consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies that Kangson is one of at least two secret enrichment plants.
This commercial satellite image shows North Korea’s Sanumdong missile assembly facility south of Pyongyang on July 7. The red vehicle in the inner courtyard is similar to those used by North Korea to transport missiles. Several U.S. officials and private analysts said the continued activity inside North Korea’s weapons complex is not surprising, given that Kim made no public promise at the summit to halt work at the scores of nuclear and missiles facilities scattered around the country.
The North Koreans “never agreed to give up their nuclear program,” said Ken Gause, a North Korea expert at the Center for Naval Analysis. And it is foolish to expect that they would do so — at the outset of talks, he said.
“Regime survival and perpetuation of Kim family rule” are Kim’s guiding principles, he said. “The nuclear program provides them with a deterrent in their mind against regime change by the United States. Giving up the nuclear capability will violate the two fundamental centers of gravity in the North Korean regime.”
Pompeo, at the Senate hearing last week, sought to assure lawmakers that the disarmament talks with North Korea remained on track and that the effort to dismantle the country’s nuclear arsenal was just getting underway. He brushed aside suggestions that the administration had been deceived by Kim. “We have not been taken for a ride,” he said.
But some independent analysts think the Trump administration has misread Kim’s intentions, interpreting his commitment to eventual denuclearization as a promise to immediately surrender the country’s nuclear arsenal and dismantle its weapons factories.
“We have this backward. North Korea is not negotiating to give up their nuclear weapons,” Lewis said. “They are negotiating for recognition of their nuclear weapons. They’re willing to put up with certain limits, like no nuclear testing and no ICBM testing. What they’re offering is: They keep the bomb, but they stop talking about it.”
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>>> North Korea has increased nuclear production at secret sites, say U.S. officials
6-30-18
NBC
Courtney Kube, Ken Dilanian and Carol E. Lee
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/north-korea-has-increased-nuclear-production-at-secret-sites-say-us-officials/ar-AAzmpc8?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=ansmsnnews11
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, U.S. officials told NBC News.
The intelligence assessment, which has not previously been reported, seems to counter the sentiments expressed by President Donald Trump, who tweeted after his historic June 12 summit with Kim that "there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea."
Analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies don't see it that way, according to more than a dozen American officials who are familiar with their assessments and spoke on the condition of anonymity. They see a regime positioning itself to extract every concession it can from the Trump administration — while clinging to nuclear weapons it believes are essential to survival.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, even as the two sides engaged in diplomacy, North Korea was stepping up its production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, five U.S. officials say, citing the latest intelligence assessment. North Korea and the U.S. agreed at the summit to "work toward" denuclearization, but there is no specific deal. On Trump's order, the U.S. military canceled training exercises on the Korean peninsula, a major concession to Kim.
While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, "there's no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production," said one U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence. "There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S."
Four other officials familiar with the intelligence assessment also said North Korea intended to deceive the U.S.
U.S. intelligence agencies have stepped up their collection against North Korea in recent years, and it appears to be paying off with greater insights into a country that has long been the world's hardest spying target, officials say. NBC News agreed to withhold some details of the latest intelligence assessment that officials said could put sources at risk.
"There are lots of things that we know that North Korea has tried to hide from us for a long time," a U.S. intelligence official said.
It's long been understood that North Korea had at least one undeclared facility to enrich nuclear fuel, aside from Yongbyon, its main nuclear site.
"When North Korea constructed the enrichment facility at Yongbyon in 2009, the North Koreans did so at a pace that suggested this was not their first rodeo, i.e. not the first time they had assembled large cascades of centrifuges," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program for the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Joel Wit, who negotiated a 1994 nuclear agreement with North Korea, said the U.S. always believed North Korea had two facilities to enrich nuclear material: Yongbyon and a second site the U.S. is aware of but whose name has not been disclosed.
"People have been open to the possibility there might be more," he said.
The latest U.S. intelligence assessment concludes that there is more than one secret site, officials tell NBC News. The question is whether Kim will be willing to admit it.
"This is why people want North Korea to declare all its facilities up front," said Wit, a former Clinton administration official and senior fellow at the Stimson Center who founded a web site devoted to North Korea, 38north.com.
The intelligence assessment comes on the heels of a report by 38north.com showing that North Korea was continuing to make improvements at its major disclosed nuclear facility at Yongbyon.
"The observed activity appears inconsistent with a North Korean intent to abandon its nuclear weapons programs," said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst and North Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation. "There seems little reason to continue expansion plans if the regime intended to dismantle them as would be required under a denuclearization agreement."
One senior U.S. intelligence official offered a different view, noting that the decision by Kim to suspend nuclear and missile tests was unexpected, and the fact that the two sides are talking is a positive step.
But that official also acknowledged that intelligence analysts expect the Kim regime to try to deceive the United States.
"Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles," he said. "We are watching closely."
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>>> North Korea Threatens to Call Off Summit Meeting With Trump
By Choe Sang-Hun and Mark Landler
May 15, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/world/asia/north-korea-postpones-talks.html
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea threw President Trump’s planned summit meeting with its leader, Kim Jong-un, into doubt on Wednesday, threatening to call off the landmark encounter if the United States insisted on “unilateral nuclear abandonment.”
The statement, made by the North’s disarmament negotiator, came hours after state media warned that the summit meeting might be canceled to protest a joint military exercise between the United States and South Korea that began this week.
The warnings caught Trump administration officials off guard and set off an internal debate over whether Mr. Kim was merely posturing in advance of the meeting in Singapore next month or was erecting a serious new hurdle.
In a statement Wednesday, Kim Kye-kwan, a vice foreign minister, rejected the administration’s demand that it quickly dismantle its nuclear program as Libya did 15 years ago, singling out John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s new national security adviser, for condemnation.
“If the United States is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the D.P.R.K.-U.S. summit,” the statement said, using the abbreviation for the North’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Mr. Kim said his country would never follow the path of Libya and Iraq, which he said met a “miserable fate” at the hands of “big powers.”
He said North Korea had “shed light on the quality of Bolton” in the past, “and we do not hide our feelings of repugnance towards him.”
North Korea had previously signaled flexibility about the military exercises, appearing to remove a perennial obstacle to talks between North and South Korea. But the North cited its objections to the joint American-South Korean air force drill in postponing a separate high-level meeting with South Korea that had been planned for Wednesday.
As the White House scrambled to assess the North Korean statement, the State Department said planning for the June 12 summit meeting remained on track, and pointed to Mr. Kim’s earlier acceptance of the exercises, which had been conveyed to the United States by South Korean officials.
The North Korean statements injected sudden tension and uncertainty into what had been months of warming relations on the Korean Peninsula, most notably the summit meeting between Mr. Kim and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea on April 27 and their declaration to pursue peace.
The confusion created by the statements also underscored the risks for Mr. Trump in meeting with the 34-year-old North Korean leader. And it served as a reminder that for all of Mr. Kim’s camera-ready smiles and diplomatic gestures of recent months, North Korea remains an opaque, unpredictable country.
“The South Korean authorities and the United States launched a large-scale joint air force drill against our Republic even before the ink on the historic inter-Korean declaration has dried,” the official Korean Central News Agency said earlier in the day. “There is a limit to our good will.”
“We will be closely watching the attitude of the United States and South Korean authorities,” the news agency added.
It declared that the drill, known as Max Thunder, was a “deliberate military provocation” that had violated the inter-Korean summit declaration. The United States and South Korea, the North’s statement said, had mobilized 100 aircraft in the exercise to “make a pre-emptive airstrike” and “win the air.”
Senior officials from the two Koreas had been scheduled to meet in the “truce village” of Panmunjom on their border Wednesday to discuss putting in place an agreement to improve ties and ease military tensions, building on the declaration signed by their leaders on April 27.
The Pentagon said Max Thunder was an annual exercise to maintain military readiness to defend South Korea. “The defensive nature of these combined exercises has been clear for many decades and has not changed,” said a Defense Department spokesman, Col. Rob Manning.
The State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, said: “Kim Jong-un had said previously that he understands the need and the utility of the United States and the Republic of Korea continuing in its joint exercises. They are exercises that are legal. They’re planned well, well in advance.”
She also said the United States had received no notification of a change in plans for the summit meeting. “We will continue to go ahead and plan the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un,” she said.
There was some ambiguity about whether Mr. Kim had dropped his objection to all joint exercises, or merely the ones that were underway at the time that he opened a dialogue with Mr. Moon. When Mr. Kim met with South Korean envoys in March, he agreed to meet with Mr. Moon despite a round of joint military drills that were about to be conducted.
South Korean envoys quoted Mr. Kim as saying he understood that those exercises must continue. But those drills are over. The new round of annual United States-South Korean drills began last Friday.
In their March meeting, Mr. Kim told the South Korean emissaries that he hoped the United States and South Korea would “readjust” their annual military drills “when the situation stabilizes,” according to the envoys.
Joel S. Wit, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who negotiated with North Korea during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Kim was pulling a page from Mr. Trump’s playbook.
“It’s probably them acting like North Koreans after being pussy cats since January,” he said. “Acting like tough guys. Like Trump saying he would walk out of the summit if he didn’t like the deal.”
Christopher R. Hill, who negotiated with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, said it was possible that the threat was serious. The North, he noted, has a history of insulting the South, and normally, the United States comes to the defense of its ally.
Mr. Trump did not immediately react to Mr. Kim’s warning, and the White House issued only a bland statement. “We are aware of the South Korean media report,” the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said. “The United States will look at what North Korea has said independently, and continue to coordinate closely with our allies.”
While Mr. Trump has raised expectations for a breakthrough with Mr. Kim, other officials have tried to strike a more cautious note. In an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation” last Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has met Mr. Kim twice, said, “We have our eyes wide open with respect to the fact that the North Koreans have not proved worthy of their promises, but we’re hopeful that this will be different.”
Tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula have eased considerably since Mr. Kim launched a fast-paced string of diplomatic overtures in recent months, starting with his decision to send North Korean athletes to the Winter Olympics held in the South in February.
Last month, North Korea announced an end to all nuclear and long-range missile tests. Last week, it freed three Americans held in North Korea, sending them home with Mr. Pompeo.
This week, the North invited international journalists to watch its engineers shut down its only-known nuclear test site later this month. The two Koreas have also started dismantling loudspeakers they have used to blare propaganda broadcasts across the border.
It is not unusual for North Korea to abruptly cancel and postpone meetings with its neighbors. The North’s decision to postpone the border talks was delivered only 15 hours after it proposed those talks on Tuesday and the South quickly accepted the offer.
In 2015, a North Korean band packed up and returned home only hours before it was scheduled to perform in Beijing in a gesture of friendship between the two countries’ Communist governments. In January, North Korea agreed to send an advance team of officials to the South to prepare for its participation in the Winter Olympics, but abruptly delayed their trip.
“Seoul is a soft target,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, referring to the North’s history of “periodically threatening to walk away from talks” in order to raise its leverage during negotiations. “The North will resume the canceled talks in time — likely as early as later in the week.”
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>>> Trump welcomes N. Korea plan to blow up nuke-site tunnels
ABC
By Kim Tong-Hyung,
Associated Press
May 13, 2018
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/korea-hold-ceremony-dismantling-nuke-test-site-55117299
North Korea said Saturday that it will dismantle its nuclear test site in less than two weeks, in a dramatic event that would set up leader Kim Jong Un's summit with President Donald Trump next month. Trump welcomed the "gracious gesture."
In a statement carried by state media, North Korea's Foreign Ministry said all of the tunnels at the country's northeastern testing ground will be destroyed by explosion, and observation and research facilities and ground-based guard units will also be removed.
Kim had already revealed plans to shut the test site by the end of May during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last month. Analysts say that while the closure of the site is important, it doesn't represent a material step toward full denuclearization.
"A ceremony for dismantling the nuclear test ground is now scheduled between May 23 and 25," depending on weather, the Foreign Ministry's statement said, adding that journalists from the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Britain will be invited to witness the dismantling.
The ministry said the North will continue to "promote close contacts and dialogue with the neighboring countries and the international society so as to safeguard peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and over the globe."
Trump, in a tweet Saturday, thanked North Korea for its plan to dismantle the nuclear test site, calling it "a very smart and gracious gesture!"
Following the Moon-Kim meeting, Moon's office said Kim was willing to disclose the process to international experts, but the North's statement Saturday didn't address allowing experts on the site.
South Korea had no immediate response to the statement.
The North's announcement comes days after Washington announced that the historic summit between Kim and Trump will be held June 12 in Singapore.
South Korea has said Kim has genuine interest in dealing away his nuclear weapons in return for economic benefits. However, there are lingering doubts about whether Kim would ever agree to fully relinquish the weapons he probably views as his only guarantee of survival.
During their meeting at a border truce village, Moon and Kim vaguely promised to work toward the "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula, but made no references to verification or timetables.
North Korea for decades has been pushing a concept of "denuclearization" that bears no resemblance to the American definition. The North has been vowing to pursue nuclear development unless Washington removes its 28,500 troops from South Korea and the nuclear umbrella defending South Korea and Japan.
Some experts believe Kim may try to drag out the process or seek a deal in which he gives away his intercontinental ballistic missiles but retains some of his shorter-range arsenal in return for a reduced U.S. military presence in the South. This could satisfy Trump but undermine the alliance between Washington and Seoul.
Kim declared his nuclear force as complete in December, following North Korea's most powerful nuclear test to date in September and three flight tests of ICBMs designed to reach the U.S. mainland.
North Korea announced at a ruling party meeting last month that it was suspending all tests of nuclear devices and ICBMs, as well as the plan to close the nuclear testing ground.
Kim said during the meeting that the nuclear test site's mission had come "to an end" because the North had completed developing nuclear-capable intermediate-range missiles, ICBMs and other strike means.
The North also said for the first time at the meeting that it had been conducting "subcritical" nuclear tests. These refer to experiments involving a subcritical mass of nuclear materials that allow scientists to examine the performance and safety of weapons without triggering a nuclear chain reaction and explosion.
North Korea's reference to such activity is designed to communicate that even without underground testing, the country intends to maintain its nuclear arsenal and be a "responsible" steward of those weapons at the same time, said Andrea Berger, a senior analyst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
Still, the closure of the underground testing site could be a useful precedent for Washington and Seoul as they proceed with the nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang, analysts say.
"Now that North Korea has accepted in principle that agreements should be verified, U.S. negotiators should hold them to this standard for any subsequent agreement," said Adam Mount, a senior defense analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "It will make it more difficult for Kim Jong Un to deny inspections now that he has placed them on the table."
North Korea has invited the outside world to witness the dismantling of its nuclear facilities before. In June 2008, international broadcasters were allowed to show the demolishing of a cooling tower at the Nyongbyon reactor site, a year after the North reached an agreement with the U.S. and four other nations to disable its nuclear facilities in return for an aid package worth about $400 million.
But in September 2008, the North declared that it would resume reprocessing plutonium, complaining that Washington wasn't fulfilling its promise to remove the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The administration of George W. Bush removed North Korea from the list in October 2008 after the country agreed to continue disabling its nuclear plant. However, a final attempt by Bush to complete an agreement to fully dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program collapsed that December when the North refused to accept U.S.-proposed verification methods.
The North went on to conduct its second nuclear test in May 2009.
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>>> China's first home-built aircraft carrier begins sea trials as Beijing ramps up its maritime might
By Neil Connor
The Telegraph
May 13, 2018
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/13/chinas-first-home-built-aircraft-carrier-began-sea-trials-beijing/
China's first home-built aircraft carrier began sea trials on Sunday, a major step for Beijing as it ramps up its military might.
The carrier will be the second to enter the Chinese navy, and comes as Beijing seeks to modernise its armed forces.
The ship, which is known only as "Type 001A", set out for the trials from the north-eastern port of Dalian, where it was built.
The trail was to "test the reliability and stability of the carrier's power system and other equipment," Xinhua news agency said
"Construction on the carrier has been carried out as planned since it was launched in April last year, and equipment debugging, outfitting and mooring tests have been completed to make it ready for the trial mission at sea," it added, citing sources.
Images posted by Chinese media online showed the huge carrier not far from its dock, apparently setting off for trials with smaller vessels.
China's military has been updated and modernised since Chinese president Xi Jinping assumed power five years ago.
The carrier, which is not expected to enter service until 2020, is the latest milestone in China's military development, and comes as Beijing is asserting itself in the strategic waters of the South China Sea, and against Taiwan.
Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), said: "This is clearly a landmark development, particularly in demonstrating the ambition and intention of the Chinese Government under Xi Jinping.
"Aircraft carriers are for power projection and for domination, and this is just the first of several more indigenous carriers.
"The world should take notice of Xi’s determination ‘to make China great again’."
The country's first carrier, the Liaoning, was bought second-hand from Ukraine in 1998, refitted in China, and commissioned in 2012.
Both Chinese aircraft carriers have similar "ski jump" ramps, and closely resemble Soviet style vessels.
They will "not pose major challenges" to the "US domination of the sea lanes", Prof Tsang told The Telegraph.
The US's 11 vessels are nuclear powered and have far superior technology, including catapult systems for launching aircraft.
Prof Tsang added: "But for the rest of China’s neighbours, the new carrier based doctrine of the People's Liberation Army is frightening, as none of them can remotely match China’s new naval capabilities."
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>>> Researchers create a real cloaking device
by John Biggs
Tech Crunch
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/researchers-create-a-real-cloaking-device/
Researcher Amanda D. Hanford at Pennsylvania State University has created a real cloaking device that can route sound waves around an object, making it invisible to some sensing techniques.
From the report:
Hanford and her team set out to engineer a metamaterial that can allow the sound waves to bend around the object as if it were not there. Metamaterials commonly exhibit extraordinary properties not found in nature, like negative density. To work, the unit cell — the smallest component of the metamaterial — must be smaller than the acoustic wavelength in the study.
Hanford created an acoustic metamaterial that deflected sound waves under water, a difficult feat. In testing she and the team were able to place the material in water and measure sound waves pointed at it. The resulting echoes in the water suggested that the sound waves did not bounce off or around the material. This means the new material would be invisible to sonar.
Obviously this technology is still in its early stages and the material does not make the objects invisible but just very hard to detect in underwater situations. However, the fact ship captains could soon yell “Activate the cloaking device” as evil, laser-toting dolphins appear on the horizon should give everyone a bit of cheer.
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How a single Swedish submarine defeated the US Navy -
The key is the use of a sterling cycle engine, which allows the submarine to be virtually undetectable -
>>> US Navy re-establishes Second Fleet amid Russia tensions
5-4-18
By Ryan Browne
CNN
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-navy-re-establishes-second-fleet-amid-russia-tensions/ar-AAwLxzG?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Amid heightened tensions with Russia, the US Navy announced Friday the re-establishment of the US Second Fleet which will be responsible for Naval forces along the East Coast and in the northern Atlantic Ocean.
The areas are seen as critical to counter the rising threat of Russia and the new US defense strategy that focuses more on great power rivalry, according to multiple US defense officials.
The Defense Department also announced that the US has offered to host and lead NATO's newly proposed Joint Force Command for the Atlantic at Norfolk, Virginia.
A US Navy official said that "the return to great power competition demands that we focus on the Atlantic." Re-establishing the second fleet "ensures dedicated reinforcement of the region and demonstrates a capable and credible deterrence effect" against adversaries, the official said.
A Navy official said the fleet will eventually involve 250 personnel and be led by a three-star admiral.
The Second Fleet was disestablished in 2011 for cost-savings and a changing strategic environment. The Second Fleet was originally formed following World War II as the Second Task Fleet and was re-designated in 1950 as the Second Fleet with the primary mission of supporting NATO.
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>>> China Is Using Lasers to Target U.S. Pilots in Djibouti
5-3-18
Newsweek
David Brennan
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-is-using-lasers-to-target-us-pilots-in-djibouti/ar-AAwGjGQ
The U.S. Air Force has issued a warning to its pilots in Djibouti regarding Chinese laser weapons being used at a nearby base.
The Chinese facility is Beijing’s first overseas military base, and sits just a few miles to the north of the American Camp Lemonnier at Djibouti’s Ambouli International Airport. The U.S. military says Chinese troops are using high-powered lasers to interfere with U.S. flights in the area, the South China Morning Post reported.
The military issued a notice to its pilots, later published by the Federal Aviation Administration, urging them to “use extreme caution when transiting near” the Chinese base, citing the use of a “high-power laser” on multiple occasions.
Camp Lemonnier is the only permanent American base in Africa and is home to around 4,000 troops. Opened in 2001, the installation has become a vital staging point for U.S. counter-terrorism operations, especially as a regional hub for American drone missions launched from a network of other nearby bases. Initially an 88-acre base, an agreement was signed with the Djibouti government in 2006 to expand the facility to 500 acres.
Chinese military observers told the Post that China’s laser use may be trying to scare off birds near its airfield or disrupting spy drones flying above, rather than targeting foreign pilots. Analyst Zhou Chenming told the newspaper, “The Chinese and U.S. bases in Djibouti are really close, so one could disturb the other if the two sides don’t have a proper communication mechanism.”
a group of people sitting on a rock© Provided by IBT Media
Work on the 90-acre Chinese base began in 2016. The facility was intended as a resupply hub for ships partaking in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in the area. Troops were deployed within weeks of its completion and quickly began live-fire exercises. It is believed that around 1,000 troops will stationed at the base.
Its location in the Gulf of Aden and proximity to the Suez Canal makes Djibouti a strategically important location. The government has a liberal policy towards foreign bases, and France, Spain and Japan also all have facilities in-country. Some of the world's busiest shipping routes run past the country, and the region is a hotspot for piracy.
China is working on a network of naval and air bases in and around the Indian Ocean as Beijing invests to create a military capable of force projection and increased global influence. The U.S. is watching its strategic rival closely, well aware of China’s superpower potential. Still, Beijing has some way to go before it catches up the the U.S., which maintains almost 800 overseas military bases worldwide.
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>>> The U.S. Should Be Reaching out to Russia — Not Risking War
By James Rickards
April 9, 2018
https://dailyreckoning.com/u-s-reaching-russia-not-risking-war/
The U.S. Should Be Reaching out to Russia — Not Risking War
There’s no greater villain in the world today than Vladimir Putin. He stands accused in the media and global public opinion of rigging his recent reelection, imprisoning his political enemies, murdering Russian spies turned double-agent, meddling in Western elections, seizing Crimea, destabilizing Ukraine, supporting a murderous dictator in Syria and exporting arms to terrorist nations like Iran.
The list of bad acts laid at Putin’s feet is much longer than the one just recited, but you get the idea. He’s no Mr. Nice Guy.
Vladimir Putin, president of Russia and newly elected to a six-year term, meets Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and de facto ruler. Russia and Saudi Arabia are two of the three largest oil producers in the world, along with the United States. Their success in maintaining higher oil prices has given a boost to both economies.
At the same time, the country of Russia is more than Mr. Putin, despite his authoritarian and heavy-handed methods. Russia is the world’s 12th-largest economy, with a GDP in excess of $1.5 trillion, larger than many developed economies such as Australia (No. 13), Spain (No. 14) and the Netherlands (No. 18).
Russia is also the world’s largest oil producer, with output of 10.6 million barrels per day, larger than both Saudi Arabia (10.5 million barrels) and the United States (9 million barrels).
Russia has the largest landmass of any country in the world and a population of 144 million people, the ninth largest of any country. Russia is also the third-largest gold-producing nation in the world, with total production of 250 tons per year, about 8% of total global output and solidly ahead of the U.S., Canada and South Africa.
Contrary to many analysts’ perceptions, Russia is on a sound financial footing. Russia’s government debt-to-GDP ratio is 12.6%, which is trivial compared with 253% for Japan, 105% for the United States and 68% for Germany. Russia’s external dollar-denominated debt is also quite low compared with the huge dollar-debt burdens of other emerging-market economies such as Turkey, Indonesia and China.
Under the steady leadership of central bank head Elvira Nabiullina, the Central Bank of Russia has rebuilt its hard currency reserves to $455 billion after those reserves were severely depleted in 2015 following the collapse in oil prices that began in 2014.
Even as Russia’s foreign exchange reserves dropped from $525 billion in late 2013 to $355 billion in mid-2015, Nabiullina never stopped acquiring gold for the central bank. Total gold reserves rose from 1,275 tons in July 2015 to almost 1,900 tons today. Russia’s gold-to-GDP ratio is the highest in the world and more than double those of the U.S. and China.
Russia’s exports are not highly diversified, consisting mostly of oil and natural gas. Still, Russia is highly competitive in the export of nuclear power plants, advanced weaponry and agricultural products. This export sector produces a positive balance of trade for Russia, currently running at over $16 billion per month. Russia has not had a trade deficit in over 20 years.
More to the point, Russia is a nuclear superpower on par with the United States and well ahead of China, France, the U.K. and other nuclear powers.
In short, Russia is a country to be reckoned with despite the intense dislike for its leader from Western powers. Russia is rich in natural resources, financially sound and a nuclear superpower.
It can be disliked but it cannot be ignored.
Russia is even more important geopolitically than these favorable metrics suggest. Russia and the U.S. are likely to improve relations and move closer together despite the current animosity over election meddling and the attempted murders of ex-Russian spies.
The reason for this coming thaw has to do with the dynamics of global geopolitics. There are only three countries in the world that are rightly regarded as primary powers — the U.S., Russia and China. These three are the only superpowers.
All others are secondary powers (U.K., France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc.) or tertiary powers (Iran, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.). This strategic reality sets up a predictable three-party dynamic.
In any three-party dynamic, whether it’s a poker game or a struggle for global control, the dynamic is simple. Two of the powers align explicitly or implicitly against the third. The two-aligned powers refrain from using their power against each other in order to conserve it for use against the third power.
Meanwhile, the third power, the “odd man out,” suffers from having to expend military and economic resources to fend off adventurism by both of its opponents with no help from either.
China is the greatest geopolitical threat to the U.S. because of its economic and technological advances and its ambition to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific sphere of influence. Russia may be a threat to some of its neighbors, but it is far less of a threat to U.S. strategic interests.
Therefore, a logical balance of power in the world would be for the U.S. and Russia to find common ground in the containment of China and to jointly pursue the reduction of Chinese power.
Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. China and Russia are forging stronger ties while the U.S. finds itself at odds with both Russia and China over different issues. This two-against-one strategic alignment of China and Russia against the U.S. is a strategic blunder by the U.S.
As China’s power expands and as U.S. power is put to the test in Asia, it is likely that the U.S. will correct its recent strategic shortsightedness and find ways to work with Russia. This will not be done out of wishful thinking about the true nature of Putin or his regime but as a simple matter of geopolitical necessity.
With this economic and geopolitical backdrop in mind, what are my predictive analytic models saying about the prospects for the Russian economy and its markets in the months ahead?
Right now, the Russian economy is poised for strong growth, which will be reflected both in higher Russian stock prices and a stronger Russian ruble.
The biggest single factor leading to this conclusion is the high level of real interest rates in Russia.
Right now, the central bank policy rate in Russia is 7.25%. Inflation is only 2.20%, slightly higher than in the U.S. and Europe but rock-bottom compared with many past inflationary episodes in Russia.
As a result, the real interest rate in Russia is 5.05% (7.25% policy rate minus 2.20% inflation equals 5.05% real rate). By way of comparison, the real rate in the U.S. is only 0.15% (1.75% policy rate minus 1.6% core inflation equals 0.15% real rate).
This high real rate gives the Central Bank of Russia enormous ammunition to stimulate the Russian economy with a series of rate cuts. At a time when other major central banks such as those in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Europe are taking steps to tighten monetary policy through rate hikes, forward guidance or asset purchase tapers, Russia will be the only player that can actually produce monetary ease.
Also, Russia’s success in working with OPEC, especially Saudi Arabia, to maintain oil production quotas has put a floor under oil prices for the time being. This means that Russia’s reserve position will continue to grow. This gives the Central Bank of Russia room to cut interest rates without having to worry about capital outflows and a weak ruble.
This coming policy ease and stimulus from the Central Bank of Russia will be a major catalyst for capital inflows and a much higher Russian stock market. Improved relations with the U.S. will be a further tail wind for Russian stocks.
Regards,
Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning
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Former CIA Director James Woolsey said - "The North Koreans have been able to detonate, in orbit, for several years, a nuclear weapon... I think they have been able to knock out our electric grid for several years"
The interview was posted on YouTube in July 2017. He's referring to EMP/electromagnetic pulse. Woolsey said this is relatively easy to do, just put a satellite in orbit and detonate it over the target country. No need for re-entry, heat shields, targeting, etc.
North Korea has already put 2 satellites into orbit (2012, 2016). The 2016 satellite is in a polar orbit that passes directly over the US every few days. Kind of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside -
>>> Russia 'test-fires hypersonic Kinzhal missile'
BBC
3-11-18
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43362213
Media captionRussia's defence ministry released footage of the Kinzhal missile test-launch
Russia says it has successfully test-launched a hypersonic missile, one of a range of nuclear-capable weapons announced by President Vladimir Putin earlier this month.
The country's defence ministry released video footage showing the missile detaching from a fighter jet and leaving a fiery trail behind it.
It said the intended "target" was hit.
On 1 March, Mr Putin described the Kinzhal missile - named for a type of dagger - as "an ideal weapon".
He said it was part of a new stockpile of "invincible" weapons.
The Kinzhal is said to travel at 10 times the speed of sound and have a range of 2,000km (1,200 miles).
The defence ministry said the missile was launched from a MiG-31 jet that took off from an airfield in south-west Russia on Saturday.
"The launch went according to plan, the hypersonic missile hit its target," the ministry said.
Mr Putin is widely expected to be re-elected as Russia's president in a week's time.
As part of his annual state of the nation speech on 1 March, he played a video graphic that appeared to show missiles raining down on the US state of Florida.
The US state department said this was not "the behaviour of a responsible international player".
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(continued) This delaying action by Kim Jong could be remembered by historians as a pivotal point in world history. As Rickards explains (see link below), assuming Kim Jong will never voluntarily denuclearize, a war in Korea is inevitable -
Either -
1) A preemptive war is launched soon by the US to prevent Kim Jong's nuke missile program from going operational, or
2) Once those missiles are operational, the US will from then on be powerless to do anything due to the North's ability to 'launch on warning' and nuke (or EMP) the US and/or Japan. Having effectively neutralized the US from acting, there is nothing to stop Kim Jong from attacking South Korea, which has always been his goal.
Much worse than N. Korean nukes going off over some US cities, an EMP attack could be the end of the United States. Once Kim Jong has that ability, the US can thereafter be held permanent hostage. As former CIA Director Woolsey explains (link below), all it takes is one or two well placed EMP devices exploded in low orbit, and the US goes back into the stone age (all solid state electronics on the ground are fried). N. Korea has already put 2 satellites into orbit (2012, 2016), and the 2016 satellite (in polar orbit) passes directly over the US.
The next several months could determine the fate of the US and by extension, the rest of the world. We're in a heap of trouble even if Kim Jong's delaying tactic doesn't work, but if it does then it's much worse. So no good outcome here folks.
Can a 2 or 3 month delay alter world history? In WW 2, the Nazis had to delay their attack on Russia until late June in order to first occupy Yugoslavia and Greece to secure their southern flank. That 2 month delay meant they were unable to take Moscow before the winter set in. If they had taken Moscow and subsequently defeated Russia, WW 2 may have lasted long enough to see a Nazi developed atomic bomb, and their V-3 rocket in development had sufficient range to hit New York. So a couple months can mean a lot -
>>> South, North Korea to hold summit in April <<<
(Note - Kim Jong is playing for time, and has no intention of denuclearizing. According to Jim Rickards' sources in the Deep State, N. Korea is believed to be extremely close to producing the nuke-tipped missile that will make a US attack virtually impossible without risking, at minimum, an obliterated or EMP'd Tokyo.
We know N. Korea already has the missiles and the nuclear devices. The last remaining step required is miniaturization and ruggedization of the warhead.
There is some question how close they are to achieving this final step, but realistically it could be a matter of months. Once even one missile is operational it changes the entire paradigm for the US.)
>>> South, North Korea to hold summit in April -S.Korea says
Reuters
3-6-18
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/south-north-korea-to-hold-summit-in-april-skorea-says/ar-BBJVoTN?OCID=ansmsnnews11
North and South Korea will hold their first summit in more than a decade in late April, the South's presidential office said on Tuesday after a senior delegation returned from a visit to the North where they met leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea said there was no need to keep its nuclear programme as long as there was no military threat against it and the safety of its regime was secured, the head of the delegation, Chung Eui-yong, told a media briefing.
North Korea also said it was open to talking with the United States regarding denuclearisation and normalising ties, Chung added.
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EMP related - seeing the locations of the world's nuclear power reactors (previous post), it's obvious who is most vulnerable. According to EMP expert Dr. Peter Vincent Pry (ex-CIA), nuclear reactors have backup power to run their water coolant systems for approx 1 week. In the event of an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse), power grids that are not hardened against EMP will immediately stop working and the backup power systems going to nuclear reactors, assuming they still work, will only last 1 week. After that, these reactors will all overheat and melt down due to lack of coolant.
So imagine hundreds of Fukashima events. Pretty compelling argument for bailing out and heading to a remote place far away from nuclear reactors, preferably in the southern hemisphere (Coriolis effect).
Far more devastating than an EMP attack would be a solar event called a Carrington Event, an unusually strong eruption from the sun. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) happen all the time, but usually don't hit the earth, or if they do are not large enough to cause serious damage. One that did was in 1859, and if that happened today it would fry virtually every electronic device on earth. A Carrington size CME occurred in 2012 but fortunately missed the earth -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
>>> North Korea Launches Satellite to Space
By Mike Wall
Space.com
February 8, 2016
https://www.space.com/31860-north-korea-satellite-launch.html
North Korea Launches Satellite to Space
This satellite image from Nov. 26, 2012 shows a marked increase in activity at North Korea's Sohae (West Sea) Satellite Launch Station, which hosted a rocket launch on Feb. 6, 2016.
North Korea has apparently launched a satellite to orbit, in a move that the United States and other nations quickly condemned as an attempt to further develop a prohibited long-range missile capability.
The liftoff occurred from the Sohae launch facility in western North Korea at 7:29 p.m. EST Saturday (Feb. 6; 0029 GMT and 8:59 a.m. local North Korean time on Sunday, Feb. 7), according to a media advisory from the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).
"The missile was tracked on a southerly launch over the Yellow Sea. NORAD determined that at no time was the missile a threat to North America," the USSTRATCOM advisory read, referring to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint effort of the United States and Canada. ?
North Korea has launched several rockets and missiles as part of budding space program. Here's how North Korea's Unha-3 rocket works.
North Korean officials claimed the launch succeeded in putting an Earth-observation satellite called Kwangmyongsong-4 into orbit. USSTRATCOM officials told CNN that at least two new space objects were detected after the liftoff; these are likely the satellite and the rocket's first stage, an expert told CNN.
Officials in the United States, Japan, South Korea and a number of other nations, however, viewed the launch as primarily cover for the testing of military missile technology. North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, and experts believe the secretive, unpredictable nation is working to develop the means to deliver them great distances.
Pyongyang has certainly voiced a desire to use nuclear weapons against its perceived adversaries. In 2013, for example, North Korean officials — apparently angered by United Nations sanctions and joint U.S./South Korean military exercises — said they would turn Washington, D.C. and other major American cities into "seas of fire."
Saturday's launch came just one month after North Korea (which is also known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK) conducted an apparent nuclear test. Pyongyang claimed the Jan. 6 test involved a hydrogen bomb, but outside experts said it instead probably detonated a less-powerful fission weapon, which North Korea has tested multiple times in the past.
UN Security Council resolutions prohibit North Korea from conducting ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons tests. So Saturday's liftoff elicited nearly immediate condemnation from the United States, Japan, South Korea and other nations.
"This is the second time in just over a month that the DPRK has chosen to conduct a major provocation, threatening not only the security of the Korean peninsula, but that of the region and the United States as well," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement Saturday.
"We reaffirm our ironclad commitment to the defense of our allies, including the Republic of Korea [South Korea] and Japan," Kerry added. "We will continue to work with our partners and members of the UN Security Council on significant measures to hold the DPRK to account."
North Korea has now conducted four known nuclear tests, as well as a number of long-range missile/rocket launches. Attempts to loft satellites in 1998, 2009, and April 2012 failed, while a December 2012 launch apparently did place an object in orbit (though it's unclear if that object is actually doing anything as it zips around Earth).
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EMP - Carrington Event -
>>> Solar storm of 1859
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
The solar storm of 1859 (also known as the Carrington Event)[1] was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, September 1–2, 1859. The associated "white light flare" in the solar photosphere was observed and recorded by British astronomers Richard C. Carrington (1826–1875) and Richard Hodgson (1804–1872). The now-standard unique IAU identifier for this flare is SOL1859-09-01.
A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread disruptions and damage to a modern and technology-dependent society.[2][3] The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet.[4]
... The March 1989 geomagnetic storm knocked out power across large sections of Quebec. On July 23, 2012 a "Carrington-class" solar superstorm (solar flare, coronal mass ejection, solar EMP) was observed; its trajectory missed Earth in orbit. Information about these observations was first shared publicly by NASA on April 28, 2014.[4][22]
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>>> North Korea obtains EMP weapons from Russia (?), could now melt most of the electronics in Asia
By Sebastian Anthony
November 7, 2013
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/170563-north-korea-emp
Hot on the heels of (reportedly) harnessing nuclear fusion and a slew of ballistic missile launches, South Korea’s intelligence agency is now reporting that Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea is developing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon. At a bare minimum, this EMP could theoretically damage electronic equipment south of the Korean DMZ. At higher power levels, a real EMP device can melt any electronic device or system within hundreds of miles. The EMP weapon would be part of North Korea’s larger cyberwarfare efforts, which have so far been mainly focused on gathering intelligence by hacking South Korean computer networks and devices.
According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), North Korea has purchased EMP weaponry from Russia, and is now developing its own in-house version. As you’d expect, given the sensitive nature of this information, we don’t have a whole lot of details about either the Russian EMP weapon or the DPRK’s homebrew variant. We can attempt to extrapolate some details from Russia’s previous EMP tests and what we know about EMP weapons in general, though.
As you probably know from The Matrix and various other action/sci-fi settings, electromagnetic pulses are the ultimate weapon against anything electronic — from telephone wires to the power grid to the computer chips that control cars, planes, and smartphones. Weaponized EMPs generally come in two forms: nuclear and non-nuclear. Non-nuclear EMPs are fairly weak (on the order of one million times weaker than their nuclear counterparts), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re just trying to knock out the electronics of a small, localized area (a military base or water pumping station, for example). At this point, we have no idea if North Korea has acquired nuclear or non-nuclear EMP tech from Russia — but as non-nuclear EMPs are pretty dull, let’s just assume the worst and assume that North Korea now has a nuclear EMP in its possession.
Standard nuclear bombs, like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, create a huge amount of gamma radiation when they explosively fission atoms. This gamma radiation ionizes — strips electrons away from — atoms in the atmosphere, creating a huge mass of free electrons. These electrons are then deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, creating a huge electromagnetic pulse — or E1, in EMP terms. The E1 induces very high voltages in just about everything, causing wires to melt, fuses to blow, and insulators to break down and become conductors. The E1 pulse is incredibly fast — just a few nanoseconds after the nuclear detonation.
There are also E2 and E3 pulses: E2 is fairly similar to lightning, and E3 is comparable to geomagnetic storms caused by solar flares (the nuke distorts Earth’s magnetic field, basically). Surge protectors generally protect against E2. E3 is hard to protect against, but its effects are generally only felt by larger electrical installations, such as power lines. The massively powerful E1 pulse — around 50,000 volts per meter, or a peak power density of 6.6 megawatts per square meter — is what knocks out the majority of your electronic infrastructure.
Because the E1 pulse is generated by gamma rays striking the atmosphere, the most effective nuclear EMPs are detonated at high altitude — around 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. This allows the gamma rays to spread out before they hit the atmosphere, creating a huge area of effect. The nuclear device doesn’t even need to be that big, either — in 1962, the USA tested a 1.44-megaton nuclear EMP (Starfish Prime) above the Pacific Ocean that caused electrical damage 900 miles away in Hawaii. Kiloton-yield nukes would still be very effective as well, and to maximize the size of the EMP it’s actually better for the nuke to be plain ol’ fission, rather than a thermonuclear fission-then-fusion device. If a big EMP was detonated above the USA, the E1 burst would probably melt most of the electronics within 1,000 miles or so. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.)
The Soviet Union also performed some successful EMP tests in the early ’60s, fusing hundreds of miles of telephone wire and burning down a power plant (for some reason the Soviets performed the test over a populated land mass). Since then, though, as far as we know, there have been no further testing of nuclear EMPs by either the US or Russia. It’s fairly safe to assume that the world’s nuclear powers have developed advanced EMPs — the power to knock out a country’s infrastructure without frazzling millions of people is pretty awesome — but they’re impossible to test without giving away the game.
Which brings us back to North Korea. It’s unlikely that Russia would give Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un a nuclear weapon. It’s possible that North Korea has its own fission device that it’s planning to combine with older Russian/Soviet EMP tech, and then detonate it over South Korea with one of its intermediate-range BM25 Musadan ballistic missiles. But really, how North Korea obtained an EMP isn’t all that significant. It’s now been more than 50 years since the first nuclear EMP detonations. With modern tooling and technologies, creating an EMP weapon isn’t particularly hard. For me, the fact that North Korea has tested or acquired a certain weapon of mass destruction is hardly surprising — for me, it’s much more surprising that the Supreme Leader hasn’t used any of them yet.
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>>> North Korea Backs Off Threat to Hit Guam
The Wall Street Journal
Chun Han Wong, Jonathan Cheng, Jacob M. Schlesinger
8-15-17
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/north-korea-backs-off-threat-to-hit-guam/ar-AAq3obu?OCID=ansmsnnews11
North Korea pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory, after days of trading increasingly bellicose rhetoric with U.S. President Donald Trump, and hours after China took its toughest steps against Pyongyang to support U.N. sanctions.
North Korean state media said Tuesday that Kim Jong Un had made his decision not to fire on Guam after visiting a military command post and examining a military plan presented to him by his senior officers. But it warned that he could change his mind “if the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions.”
The turnabout came as the U.S. and China were engaged in a delicate contest on two fronts, with each trying to push the other to handle the North Korea situation in the way it preferred, even while both sparred over trade issues that they insisted were unrelated.
Beijing said it would ban imports of North Korean coal, iron and seafood, starting Tuesday, measures that hew to sanctions passed by the U.N. Security Council this month targeting Pyongyang’s nuclear-arms program. The timing of the announcement was a response to Mr. Trump’s plans to kick off a probe into China’s alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property, according to people with knowledge of the Chinese leadership’s thinking. That probe was officially announced later on Monday.
“This action on North Korea should help ease the renewed trade tensions,” a government adviser involved in making policy said. China had been expected to disclose such steps and said in an official statement that its move was made to enforce the latest U.N. sanctions.
Beijing’s move on North Korean imports followed a weekend phone call between Mr. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on how to deal with North Korea’s advances in developing nuclear weapons and missiles.
Mr. Trump on Friday warned that U.S. military resources were in place, “locked and loaded,” should North Korea “act unwisely.”
North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile program has advanced rapidly, and a missile test in late July put the continental U.S. firmly in range of a strike. Pyongyang this month threatened to lob missiles toward the Pacific island of Guam.
The advances have prompted questions about whether Mr. Kim’s regime obtained Soviet-designed rocket engines. The liquid-propellant rocket engines North Korea has been using in recent tests were probably acquired through illicit channels originating in Ukraine or Russia, a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Monday.
Stephen Noerper, a professor of political science at Columbia University and senior director at the Korea Society, warned tensions on the Korean peninsula were liable to quickly ramp up again, given upcoming joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea slated to begin next week in South Korea.
“I don’t think we should overassume,” he said. “The escalatory nature of things on the peninsula are that you can go from zero to 10 very quickly…This could get very hot again.”
Earlier on Monday in Seoul, before news of Mr. Kim’s decision, Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. must take threats from North Korea seriously, despite fresh skepticism from South Korea that Pyongyang has the ability to reliably deliver an intercontinental ballistic missile to the U.S.
“I honestly think it’s an academic issue whether it can happen today or happen tomorrow,” Gen. Dunford told reporters after wrapping up meetings with South Korea’s president and other defense officials.
Gen. Dunford noted that North Korea had conducted missile and nuclear tests “at a historic rate”—at least 15 tests in the past year.
But uncertainty remains about the North’s ability to endanger the American homeland or even Guam.
Those doubts were underscored Sunday by a senior South Korean defense official, who said that both Seoul and Washington had concluded Pyongyang lacks the missile re-entry technology to successfully launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at the continental U.S.
John Delury, a China historian and North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul, said Mr. Kim’s decision was likely a response to more tempered language from the Trump administration over the weekend, including from Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo, national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Secretaries of State and Defense Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis.
“The signaling from the Trump administration dialed it down a notch—we have to give them credit,” Mr. Delury said. Referring to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Mr. Delury added, “When’s the last time the secretary of state and the secretary of defense wrote an op-ed together?”
Mr. Trump’s move on Monday was part of an effort to juggle Washington’s competing policy goals with China, balancing the desire for more cooperation in controlling North Korea against a desire to curb the $347 billion bilateral trade deficit.
Mr. Trump made no mention of China’s import ban while at the White House signing ceremony on Monday in which he directed aides to explore the prospect of sanctioning Beijing for the “unfair” acquisition of American technology. He also offered no indication that tensions with China had eased: He said as he signed the directive that “this is just the beginning.”
The directive was the first formal China trade action taken by a president who has long blasted the country for improperly aggressive commercial practices.
“We will stand up to any country that unlawfully forces American companies to transfer their valuable technology as a condition of market access,” Mr. Trump said, echoing a complaint made frequently by U.S. firms seeking entry to the world’s second largest economy. “The theft of intellectual property by foreign countries costs our nation millions of jobs and billions and billions of dollars each and every year,” he added.
While Mr. Trump’s tone was tough, the process he launched was measured.
He specifically ordered his trade representative to begin a study into whether to launch a formal investigation about complaints that Beijing forces multinationals to license valuable technology to Chinese companies as the price of entry into China’s markets. Aides said if the investigation does proceed, it could take a year before any decisions are made on imposing trade sanctions.
Mr. Trump has said he would cut Beijing slack over trade disputes if he felt the Chinese were being helpful in reining in Pyongyang. But there is a difference of opinion within the administration on whether to keep economic and security issues on separate tracks, said a person who was briefed on the process of formulating Monday’s China order.
The White House had originally planned to unveil the China probe in early August, but put the announcement off until after China voted on Aug. 5 in support of the Security Council resolution on North Korea, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
Asked whether the White House was linking its handling of China trade pressure with the North Korea issue, a senior administration official said “these are totally unrelated events.”
China, too, separated the issues. “The North Korean nuclear issue and the China-U.S. trade issue are totally different and it is not appropriate to use one as a tool to keep pressure on the other issue,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday before the move to curb North Korean imports.
She said China has been improving its regulations on intellectual property rights, while boosting social awareness of the issue.
North Korean state media didn’t immediately comment on China’s announcement.
China is by far North Korea’s biggest trading partner, accounting for more than 80% of North Korea’s external trade for the past five years.
China has long shied away from severe punitive steps, such as cutting off fuel and food supplies, that could trigger the collapse of the North Korean regime.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly questioned China’s willingness to ratchet up pressure on North Korea.
In recent months, his administration moved toward unilaterally tightening sanctions, targeting Chinese companies and banks the U.S. says are funneling cash into Pyongyang’s weapons program.
Beijing has resisted Washington’s suggestions that it isn’t doing enough to pressure Pyongyang, saying the U.S. must directly engage North Korea to curb its nuclear ambitions.
<<<
Yikes - >>> North Korea could cross ICBM threshold next year, U.S. officials warn in new assessment
The Washington Post
July 25, 2017
Ellen Nakashima, Anna Fifield, Joby Warrick
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/north-korea-could-cross-icbm-threshold-next-year-us-officials-warn-in-new-assessment/ar-AAoPw9k?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Missile were on display at a military parade in April in Pyonyang, North Korea. North Korea will be able to field a reliable, nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile as early as next year, U.S. officials have concluded in a confidential assessment that dramatically shrinks the timeline for when Pyongyang could strike North American cities with atomic weapons.
The new assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which shaves a full two years off the consensus forecast for North Korea’s ICBM program, was prompted by recent missile tests showing surprising technical advances by the country’s weapons scientists, at a pace beyond which many analysts believed was possible for the isolated communist regime.
The U.S. projection closely mirrors revised predictions by South Korean intelligence officials, who also have watched with growing alarm as North Korea has appeared to master key technologies needed to loft a warhead toward targets thousands of miles away.
The finding further increases the pressure on U.S. and Asian leaders to halt North Korea’s progress before it can threaten the world with nuclear-tipped missiles. President Trump, during his visit to Poland earlier this month, vowed to confront Pyongyang “very strongly” to stop its missile advances.
The DIA has concluded that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be able to produce a “reliable, nuclear-capable ICBM” program sometime in 2018, meaning that by next year the program will have advanced from prototype to assembly line, according to officials familiar with the document. Already, the aggressive testing regime put in place in recent months has allowed North Korea to validate its basic designs, putting it within a few months of starting industrial production, the officials said.
The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to address any classified assessments.
But Scott Bray, ODNI’s national intelligence manager for East Asia, said in a statement: “North Korea’s recent test of an intercontinental range ballistic missile — which was not a surprise to the intelligence community — is one of the milestones that we have expected would help refine our timeline and judgments on the threats that Kim Jong Un poses to the continental United States. This test, and its impact on our assessments, highlight the threat that North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs pose to the United States, to our allies in the region, and to the whole world. The intelligence community is closely monitoring the expanding threat from North Korea.”
One of the few remaining technical hurdles is the challenge of atmospheric “reentry” — the ability to design a missile that can pass through the upper atmosphere without damage to the warhead. Long regarded as a formidable technological barrier for impoverished North Korea, that milestone could be reached, beginning with new tests expected to take place within days, U.S. analysts said. U.S. officials have detected signs that North Korea is making final preparations for testing a new reentry vehicle, perhaps as early as Thursday, a North Korean national holiday marking the end of the Korean War.
“They’re on track to do that, essentially this week,” said a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence report who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive military assessments.
North Korea has not yet demonstrated an ability to build a miniaturized nuclear warhead that could be carried by one of its missiles. Officials there last year displayed a sphere-shaped device the regime described as a miniaturized warhead, but there as been no public confirmation that this milestone has been achieved. Preparations reportedly have been underway for several months for what would be the country’s sixth underground atomic test. The last one, in September, had an estimated yield of 20 to 30 kilotons, more than double the explosive force of any previous test.
North Korea startled the world earlier this month with its successful July 4 test of a missile capable of striking parts of Alaska — the first such missile with proven intercontinental range. The launch of a two-stage “Hwasong-14” missile was the latest in a series of tests in recent months that have revealed startlingly rapid advances across a number of technical fields, from mastery of solid-fuel technology to the launch of the first submarine-based missile, current and former intelligence officials and weapons experts said.
“There has been alarming progress,” said Joseph DeTrani, the former mission manager for North Korea for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a former special envoy for negotiations with Pyongyang. “In the last year they have gained capabilities that they didn’t have, including ones that we thought they would not have been able to obtain for years.”
The July 4 missile test also caught South Korea’s intelligence service off guard, prompting a hasty revision of forecasts, according to South Korean lawmakers who have received closed-door briefings.
“The speed of North Korea’s ICBM missile development is faster than the South Korean Defense Ministry expected,” said lawmaker Lee Cheol-hee, of the left-wing Minjoo party, who attended an intelligence committee briefing after the July 4 test.
The South Korean government, which is actively trying to engage the regime in Pyongyang, has declined to call the most recent test a success. North Korea still has not proved it has mastered some of the steps needed to build a reliable ICBM, most notably the reentry vehicle, Lee said.
Still, officials across the political spectrum acknowledged that North Korea is rapidly gaining ground. “Now they are approaching the final stage of being a nuclear power and the owner of an ICBM,” said Cha Du-hyeogn, who served as an adviser to conservative former president Lee Myung-bak.
U.S. spy agencies have detected multiple signals that North Korea is preparing to test a reentry vehicle. Analysts believe that the July 4 test was intended to demonstrate range — the ability of its new two-stage ICBM prototype to reach altitude and distance milestones — while the new launch will seek to validate engineering features designed to protect the warhead as it passes through the upper atmosphere and then is delivered to a distant target.
The latest designs appear to cobble together older systems — including portions of a missile frame used to launch satellites into orbit — with a more advanced engine that North Korea began testing earlier this year. Much of the technology is based on old Soviet-era designs that have been reworked by what U.S. experts describe as an increasingly capable cadre of homegrown engineers, goaded along by a leadership that has pursued nuclear weapons and delivery systems with single-minded zeal.
Kim vowed in January to successfully test a nuclear-capable ICBM in 2017, achieving a long-sought goal that North Koreans believe will serve as the ultimate deterrent against threats to the communist regime’s survival. At the time, the U.S. intelligence community’s formal assessment still held that a credible ICBM threat would not emerge until 2020 at the earliest.
“North Korea’s timeline moved faster than we expected,” said the U.S. official familiar with the new DIA assessment. “We weren’t expecting an ICBM test in July.”
Former U.S. officials and weapons experts said a successful test of a nuclear-capable ICBM would dramatically raise the stakes in the North Korean crisis, putting new pressure on North Korea’s neighbors and increasing the risk of miscalculation.
“The danger is that decision time and warning is greatly reduced when North Korea has the weapons, and that escalation can happen quickly,” said Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for arms control and nonproliferation with the Obama administration’s National Security Council.
The specter of a nuclear-armed, ICBM-capable Kim “takes the risk to a new level but does not change the nature of the threat we have faced for some time,” Wolfsthal said. “We have to deter North Korea from ever using any nuclear weapons and make clear that any move to use these weapons is suicide.”
<<<
>>> Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow
The Washington Post
Greg Jaffe, Adam Entous
7-19-17
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-ends-covert-cia-program-to-arm-anti-assad-rebels-in-syria-a-move-sought-by-moscow/ar-AAosDOq?OCID=ansmsnnews11
President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.
The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.
Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington’s limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.
Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that “in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government.”
Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.
After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.
The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.
Trump’s dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria.
Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.
“This is a momentous decision,” said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. “Putin won in Syria.”
With the end of the CIA program, U.S. involvement in Syria now consists of a vigorous air campaign against the Islamic State and a Pentagon-run train-and-equip program in support of the largely Kurdish rebel force that is advancing on Islamic State strongholds in Raqqa and along the Euphrates River valley. The Trump administration’s long-term strategy, following the defeat of the Islamic State, appears to be focused on stitching together a series of regional cease-fire deals among the U.S.-backed rebels, the Syrian government and Russia.
Some analysts said the decision to end the program was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.
“We are falling into a Russian trap,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. “We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. .?.?. We are really cutting them off at the neck.”
Others said it was recognition of Assad’s entrenched position in Syria.
“It’s probably a nod to reality,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russia’s direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.
Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.
“This is a force that we can’t afford to completely abandon,” Goldenberg said. “If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake.”
U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.
Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. “We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria,” Trump said. “If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria.”
One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons — including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS — to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.
Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldn’t abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.
Even those who were skeptical about the program’s long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria’s future.
“People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you’d do for free,” said a former White House official. “To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish.”
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>>> U.S. and North Korea One Step Closer to War
By James Rickards
July 6, 2017
https://dailyreckoning.com/u-s-north-korea-one-step-closer-war/
U.S. and North Korea One Step Closer to War
On Tuesday North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Some analysts believe the missile had a range of at least 3,400 miles.
That would bring the U.S. states of Alaska and Hawaii and possibly the major city of Seattle within range.
North Korea claims the missile could carry a large nuclear warhead.
The U.S. and South Korea responded with an announcement that they had conducted their own ballistic missile drill to counter North Korea’s gambit.
We’re heading toward a war with North Korea. It’s fairly obvious at this point, unless either North Korea agrees to cease its nuclear program or the U.S. allows the North the ability to directly threaten the continental U.S.
Neither possibility is likely.
The U.S. national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, along with the secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, have both given very clear indications on this. Meanwhile, two carrier task force groups have been dispatched to the region.
And then President Trump said earlier today that he’s considering “some pretty severe things” to respond to North Korea’s provocations.
When President Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April, he sought China’s help to pressure North Korea into scrapping its nuclear weapons program. In exchange for that assistance, Trump said he wouldn’t label China a currency manipulator or initiate a trade war.
It seems President Xi indicated he needed time to deal with the difficult North Korea, and that Trump may have given him 100 days to arrange a deal with North Korea.
Well, those 100 days will be up on July 15. And North Korea has not shown the slightest intention of backing off its nuclear program. If anything, it’s accelerating it.
Right now there’s no doubt that the greatest threat to world peace in general, and the U.S. in particular, is coming from North Korea.
“U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council that North Korea’s actions were ‘quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution’ and that the United States was prepared to defend itself and its allies,” reports Reuters.
“One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces. We will use them if we must, but we prefer not to have to go in that direction,” she added.
North Korea has made great strides in short-range and intermediate-range missiles and, as Tuesday’s test proves, is working toward an ICBM that could reach West Coast cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ultimately, much of the rest of the United States could be vulnerable.
North Korea also has a store of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) that can be converted into nuclear weapons. It has also made progress in the miniaturization and ruggedization of those weapons so they can be converted to warheads and placed on the missiles.
When these technologies are perfected and merged, North Korea will be able to kill 1 million residents of Los Angeles with the push of a button. This nightmare reality is probably just three years away.
The only remaining element of the nightmare scenario is intent.
On that score, North Korea has left no doubt. Kim Jong Un has threatened to reduce the United States “to ashes” with nuclear attacks.
The U.S. has taken none of this lying down. Echoing U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that diplomatic efforts to contain North Korean ambitions over the course of the Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama administrations have failed, and the time for diplomacy is past.
Tillerson made it clear that the U.S. would engage in pre-emptive warfare with North Korea to stop their nuclear program if necessary. Tillerson also refused to rule out supplying nuclear weapons to U.S. allies including Japan and South Korea in order to deter North Korea on a regional basis.
There is no doubt that North Korea and the U.S. are on a collision course and headed for war unless North Korea relents, which seems unlikely, or the U.S. can develop a superior technology to neutralize the North Korean threat.
The most important point is that the North Korean threat to destroy Los Angeles will not be allowed to go forward. No president can gamble Los Angeles on the intentions of a mad dictator like Kim Jong Un.
This means that either war will occur or an effective means of neutralizing the threat will be developed in the next year or two at the most.
Regards,
Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning
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THAAD anti-missile system -
>>> Raytheon Company develops technologically integrated products, services, and solutions worldwide. It operates through five segments: Integrated Defense Systems (IDS); Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS); Missile Systems (MS); Space and Airborne Systems (SAS); and Forcepoint. The IDS segment provides integrated air and missile defense; land and sea-based radar solutions; command, control, communications, computers, cyber, and intelligence solutions; and naval combat and ship electronic systems. The IIS segment offers a range of technical and professional services, such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, navigation, DoD space and weather, cybersecurity, analytics, training, logistics, mission support, engineering, and automation and sustainment solutions; and air traffic management systems. The MS segment develops and supports a range of weapon systems, including missiles, smart munitions, close-in weapon systems, projectiles, kinetic kill vehicles, directed energy effectors, and combat sensor solutions. The SAS segment provides electro-optical/infrared sensors, airborne radars for surveillance and fire control applications, lasers, precision guidance systems, signals intelligence systems, processors, electronic warfare systems, and communication and space-qualified systems for civil and military applications. The Forcepoint segment develops cyber security products comprising insider threat solutions, data loss prevention, firewall technology, cross domain transfer, and cloud and on premise Web and email security products. The company serves the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Armed Forces, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Homeland Security, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other international customers. Raytheon Company was founded in 1922 and is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. <<<
>>> Cybersecurity Kicks Into High Gear
By James Rickards
May 15, 2017
https://dailyreckoning.com/cybersecurity-kicks-high-gear/
Friday’s cyberattack just highlights the growing nature of the threat, and the need for much greater security.
WikiLeaks’ March release of 7,818 web pages, called the “Vault 7,” was a major development. This collection amounted to more than several hundred million lines of code, and gave away the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.
It was by the largest release of CIA intelligence documents in history.
And WikiLeaks’ released proved that U.S. intelligence agencies have lost control of its hacking tools.
This is part of a much larger problem.
Barely a day goes by without some company or government agency announcing that one of its systems has been compromised or attacked.
These attacks can take many forms. The most common is a distributed denial of service, or DDOS. In this type of attack, a system is overwhelmed with malicious message traffic so that legitimate users of a website cannot gain access. A DDOS attack does not actually penetrate the system or steal information. It simply obstructs normal access so that the target site is effectively shut down.
Attacks that penetrate firewalls and get inside a system are more serious. These are often conducted by criminal cybergangs who steal credit card and password information that can then be used to conduct unauthorized purchases of goods and services.
This is a more serious kind of breach, but the damage is usually limited by cancelling compromised credit cards or accounts and issuing new ones to affected customers. This can be annoying, time-consuming and somewhat costly, but not life-threatening to the parties involved.
In addition to financial losses, such attacks can cause enormous reputational damage to the entity whose systems were breached. For example, the 2013 hack of Target Corp. was executed just ahead of the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas shopping season and involved the theft of 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million pieces of personal information, such as customer addresses and phone numbers.
Target’s stock crashed, and the company was subject to over 90 lawsuits alleging negligence. Target spent over $60 million in damage control immediately following the attack, but final damages were much higher. Many customers closed their Target accounts and refuse to make further purchases there.
The reputational damage to the Target brand continues to this day.
Similar attacks were launched against JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot and Anthem Health Insurance. Many more have happened, and many more are yet to come.
The most damaging attacks are not those launched by criminal gangs seeking financial gain. The most dangerous are those launched by the military and intelligence agencies of Iran, China, Russia and other rivals of the United States aimed at damaging national security and critical infrastructure.
These attacks may involve the theft of secret military, intelligence and diplomatic files. Some attacks seek to gain control of critical infrastructure and involve the use of sleeper viruses that can be switched on to disrupt a system at a particularly opportune time for an enemy.
For example, a virus implanted in the control system of a hydroelectric dam could open floodgates to inundate downstream targets, killing thousands by drowning and destroying bridges, roads and agriculture. Other viruses could shut down major stock and commodity exchanges.
In 2010, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security discovered an attack virus in the computer systems of the Nasdaq stock market. That virus was disabled, but others may remain.
On Aug. 22, 2013, the Nasdaq was mysteriously shut down for over three hours, disrupting trading in Apple, Google, Facebook and other investor favorites.
Military planners make use of a fighting doctrine called the “force multiplier.” The idea is that any given weapon can be used with greater-than-normal effect when combined with some other state or condition that gives the weapon greater impact.
For example, if Russia wanted to disrupt a U.S. stock exchange, they might wait until the market is down over 3%, say, 500 points on the Dow Jones index, for reasons unrelated to the cyberattack.
Launching the attack on a day when the market is already nervous would “multiply” the impact of the attack and possibly result in a drop of 4,000 Dow points or more, comparable in percentage terms to the one-day drop on Oct. 19, 1987.
All of these scenarios are worrying enough, but a couple years ago the U.S. government suffered a cyberattack even worse than shutting a stock exchange or opening the floodgates on a dam.
Chinese hackers had gained access to the files of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Estimates of individuals affected range from 4 million up to 32 million. The Chinese hackers actually obtained credentials to gain access to the system, and once inside systematically downloaded the database.
If the stolen information were limited to names, addresses, Social Security numbers and the like, the damage would be immense and the affected individuals would be at constant risk of harassment and identity theft.
But the damage was far worse.
Many of the files consisted of responses to a questionnaire called Standard Form 86, or SF-86. This is the form used to apply for security clearances up to and including the top-secret level.
The form itself is 127 pages long, which is daunting enough.
But the attachments and documentation required to support the information on the form, including tax returns, personal net worth statements, explanations of answers to certain questions, etc., can run to hundreds of pages more.
The government requests this information in order to evaluate the fitness and loyalty of those applying for security clearances. A typical question is:
“Have you EVER been a member of an organization dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government, and which engaged in activities to that end with an awareness of the organization’s dedication to that end or with the specific intent to further such activities?”
The U.S. government also requests extensive personal financial information. The reason is that someone with a security clearance who is in personal financial distress can be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency that offers that individual cash to betray his country. Treason for money was the motivating factor in the notorious cases of Aldrich Ames at the CIA and Robert Hanssen at the FBI.
Since the U.S. uses SF-86 to identify vulnerabilities in our intelligence agents, the Chinese can do the same. By gaining access to the SF-86 files in the OPM computers, the Chinese gained a virtual playbook on how to identify and compromise those entrusted with America’s most sensitive top-secret information.
Many observers believe that such cyberwarfare and criminal cyberhacking is inevitable and there is not much that computer systems operators can do to fight it. This is not true. In fact, there are effective firewall, encryption, compartmentalization, verification and other cybersecurity techniques that companies and governments can use to safeguard their information.
The problem is that such solutions are expensive, and companies and government agencies have been slow to take the needed measures to protect critical data. This mindset is changing, and the Trump administration has pledged to greatly increase spending on cybersecurity. In fact, just last week President Trump signed an executive order giving cybersecurity high priority.
The costs of data breaches, both financially and in terms of national security, are simply too high. Suddenly solutions that used to seem expensive now seem cost-effective compared with the damage caused by systems compromises.
A massive multibillion-dollar tidal wave of spending on software and systems security is about to be unleashed. A relatively small number of firms stand to benefit the most because of their talent, track records and trustworthiness.
The time to get into this space is now.
Regards,
Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning
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>>> Making Sense of the “Super Fuse” Scare
The Saker
May 11, 2017
http://www.unz.com/tsaker/making-sense-of-the-super-fuse-scare/
For weeks now I have been getting panicked emails with readers asking me whether the USA had developed a special technology called “super fuses” which would make it possible for the USA to successfully pull-off a (preemptive) disarming first strike against Russia. Super-fuses were also mentioned in combination with an alleged lack by Russia of a functioning space-based infrared early warning system giving the Russians less time to react to a possible US nuclear attack.
While there is a factual basis to all this, the original report already mislead the reader with a shocking title “How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze” and by offering several unsubstantiated conclusions. Furthermore, this original report was further discussed by many observers who simply lack the expertise to understand what the facts mentioned in the report really mean. Then the various sources started quoting each other and eventually this resulted in a completely baseless “super fuse scare”. Let’s try to make some sense of all this.
Understanding nuclear strikes and their targets
To understand what really has taken place I need to first define a couple of crucial terms:
•Hard-target kill capability: this refers to the capability of a missile to destroy a strongly protected target such as a underground missile silo or a deeply buried command post.
•Soft-target kill capability: the capability to destroy lightly or unprotected targets.
•Counterforce strike: this refers to a strike aimed at the enemy’s military capabilities.
•Countervalue strike: this refers to a strike on non-military assets such as cities.
Since strategic nuclear missile silos and command posts are well protected and deeply buried, only hard-target kill (HTK) capable missiles can execute a counterforce strike. Soft-target kill (STK) capable systems are therefore usually seen as being the ultimate retaliatory capability to hit the enemies cities. The crucial notion here is that HTK capability is not a function of explosive power, but of accuracy. Yes, in theory, a hugely powerful weapon can compensate to some degree for a lack of accuracy, but in reality both the USA and the USSR/Russia have long understood that the real key to HTK is accuracy.
During the Cold War, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were more accurate than submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) simply because targeting from the surface and from a fixed position was much easier than targeting from inside a submerged and moving submarine. The American were the first to successfully deploy a HTK capable SLBM with their Trident D-5. The Russians have only acquired this capability very recently (with their R-29RMU Sineva SLBM).
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just a decade ago only 20% of US SLBMs were HTK capable. Now, with the ‘super-fuse’ 100% of US SLBMs are HTK capable. What these super-fuses do is very accurately measure the optimal altitude at which to detonate thereby partially compensating for a lack of accuracy of a non-HTK capable weapon. To make a long story short, these super-fuses made all US SLBMs HTK capable.
Does that matter?
Yes and no. What that means on paper is that the US has just benefited from a massive increase in the number of US missiles with HTK capability. Thus, the US has now a much larger missile force capable of executing a disarming counterforce strike. In reality, however, things are much more complicated than that.
Understanding counterforce strikes
Executing a disarming counterforce strike against the USSR and, later, Russia has been an old American dream. Remember Reagan’s “Star Wars” program? The idea behind it was simple: to develop the capability to intercept enough incoming Soviet warheads to protect the USA from a retaliatory Soviet counter strike. It would work something like this: destroy, say, 70% of the Soviet ICBM/SLBMs and intercept the remaining 30% before they can reach the USA. This was total nonsense both technologically (the technology did not exist) and strategically (just a few Soviet “leakers” could wipe-out entire US cities, who could take such a risk?). The more recent US deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems in Europe has exactly the same purpose – to protect the USA from a retaliatory counterstrike. Without going into complex technical discussions, let’s just say that this point in time, this system would never protect the USA from anything. But in the future, we could imagine such a scenario
1) The USA and Russia agree to further deep cuts in their nuclear strategic forces thereby dramatically reducing the total number of Russian SLBM/ICBMs.
2) The USA deploys all around Russia anti-ballistic systems which can catch and destroy Russian missiles in the early phase of their flight towards the USA.
3) The USA also deploys a number of systems in space or around the USA to intercept any incoming Russian warhead.
4) The USA having a very large HTK-capable force executes a successful counterforce strike destroying 90% (or so) of the Russian capabilities and then the rest are destroyed during their flight.
This is the dream. It will never work. Here is why:
1) The Russians will not agree to deep cuts in their nuclear strategic forces
2) The Russians already have deployed the capability to destroy the forward deployed US anti-ballistic system in Europe.
3) Russian warheads and missiles are now maneuverable and can even use any trajectory, including over the South Pole, to reach the USA. New Russian missiles have a dramatically shorter and faster first stage burn period making them much harder to intercept.
4) Russia’s reliance on ballistic missiles will be gradually replaced with strategic (long-range) cruise missiles (more about that later)
5) This scenario mistakenly assumes that the USA will know where the Russian SLBM launching submarines will be when they launch and that they will be able to engage them (more about that later)
6) This scenario completely ignores the Russian road-mobile and rail-mobile ICBMs (more about that later)
Understanding MIRVs
Before explaining points 4, 5 and 6 above, I need to mention another important fact: one missile can carry either one single warhead or several (up to 12 and more). When a missile carries several independently targetable warheads it is called MIRVed as in “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle”.
MIRVs are important for several reasons. First, one single missile with 10 warheads can, in theory, destroy 10 different targets. Alternatively, one single missile can carry, say 3-4 real warheads and 6-7 decoys. In practical terms what look like one missile on take-off can turn into 5 real warheads, all targeted at different objectives and another 5 fake decoys designed to make interception that more difficult. MIRVs, however, also present a big problem: they are lucrative targets. If with one of “my” nuclear warheards I can destroy 1 of “your” MIRVed missiles, I lose 1 warhead but you lose 10. This is one of the reasons the USA is moving away from land-based MIRVed ICBMs.
The important consideration here is that Russia has a number of possible options to chose from and how many of her missiles will be MIRVed is impossible to predict. Besides, all US and Russian SLBMs will remain MIRVed for the foreseeable future (de-MIRVing SLBMs make no sense, really, since the entire nuclear missile carrying submarine (or SSBN) is a gigantic MIRVed launching pad by definition).
In contrast to MIRVed missile, single warheads missiles are very bad targets to try to destroy using nuclear weapons: even if “my” missile destroys “yours” we both lost 1 missile each. What is the point? Worse, if I have to use 2 of “mine” to make really sure that “yours” is really destroyed, my strike will result in me using 2 warheads in exchange for only 1 of yours. This makes no sense at all.
Finally, in retaliatory countervalue strikes, MIRVed ICBM/SLBMs are a formidable threat: just one single R-30 Bulava (SS-N-30) SLBM or one single R-36 Voevoda (SS-18) ICBM can destroy ten American cities. Is that a risk worth taking? Say the USA failed to destroy one single Borei-class SSBN – in theory that could mean that this one SSBN could destroy up to 200 American cities (20 SLBMs with 10 MIRVs each). How is that for a risk?
Contrasting the US and Russian nuclear triad
Strategic nuclear weapons can be deployed on land, in the oceans or delivered by aircraft. This is called the “nuclear triad”. I won’t discuss the aircraft based part of the US and Russian triads here, as they don’t significantly impact the overall picture and because they are roughly comparable. The sea and land based systems and their underlying strategies could not be any more different. At sea, the USA has had HTK capabilities for many years now and the US decided to hold the most important part of the US nuclear arsenal in SSBNs. In contrast, the Russians chose to develop road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles. The very first one was the RT-2PM Topol (SS-25) deployed in 1985, followed by the T-2PM2 «Topol-M» (SS-27) deployed in 1997 and the revolutionary RT-24 Yars or Topol’-MR (SS-29) deployed in 2010 (the US considered deployed road-mobile strategic missiles, but never succeeded in developing the technology).
The Russians are also deploying rail-mobile missiles called RT-23 Molodets (SS-24) and are about to deploy a newer version called RS-27 Barguzin (SS-31?). This is what they look like:
Russian road mobile and rail mobile ICBMs
Russian road mobile and rail mobile ICBMs
SSBNs and road and rail mobile missiles all have two things in common: they are mobile and they rely on concealment for survival as neither of them can hope to survive. The SSBN hides in the depths of the ocean, the road-mobile missile launcher drives around the immense Russian expanses and can hide, literally, in any forest. As for the rail-mobile missile train, it hides by being completely indistinguishable from any other train on the huge Russian railroad network (even from up close it is impossible to tell whether what you are seeing is a regular freight train or a missile launching special train). To destroy these systems, accuracy is absolutely not enough: you need to find them and you need to find them before they fire their missiles. And that is, by all accounts, quite impossible.
The Russian Navy likes to keep its SSBNs either under the polar ice-cap or in so-called “bastions” such as the Sea of Okhotsk. While these are not really “no-go” zones for US attack submarines (SSN), they are extremely dangerous areas where the Russian Navy has a huge advantage over the US (if only because the US attack submarine cannot count on the support of surface ships or aircraft). The US Navy has some of the best submarines on the planet and superbly trained crews, but I find the notion that US SSNs could find and destroy all Russian SSBNs before the latter can launch unlikely in the extreme.
As for the land-based rail-mobile and road-mobile missiles, they are protected by Russian Air Defenses which are the most advanced on the planet, not the kind of airspace the US would want to send B-53, B-1 or B-2 bombers in. But most importantly, these missiles are completely hidden so even if the USA could somehow destroy them, it would failed to find enough of them to make a first disarming strike a viable option. By the way, the RS-24 has four MIRVs (make that 4 US cities) while the RS-27 will have between 10 and 16 (make that another 10 to 16 US cities vaporized).
Looking at geography and cruise missiles
Finally, let’s take a look at geography and cruise missiles. Two Russian cruise missiles are especially important to us: the Kh-102 and the 3M-14K(?):
KH-102 3M-14K
Range: 5500km 2600km
Launcher: Strategic bomber Aircraft, ship, container
Warhead: Nuclear 450kt Nuclear (unknown)
What is important with these two cruise missiles is that the KH-102 has a huge range and that the KM-14K can be fired from aircraft, ships and even containers. Take a look at this video which shows the capabilities of this missile:
Now consider where the vast majority of US cities are located – right along the East and West coasts of the USA and the fact that the US has no air defenses of any kind protecting them. A Russian strategic bomber could hit any West Coast city from the middle of the Pacific ocean. As for a Russian submarine, it could hit any US city from the middle of the Atlantic. Finally, the Russians could conceal an unknown number of cruise missile in regular looking shipping container (flying a Russian flag or, for that matter, any other flag) and simply sail to the immediate proximity to the US coast and unleash a barrage of nuclear cruise missiles.
How much reaction time would such a barrage give the US government?
Understanding reaction time
It is true that the Soviet and Russian space-based early warning system is in bad shape. But did you know that China never bothered developing such a space based system in the first place? So what is wrong with the Chinese, are they stupid, technologically backward or do they know something we don’t?
GlobalWarheadInventoriesTo answer that question we need to look at the options facing a country under nuclear missile attack. The first option is called “launch on warning”: you see the incoming missiles and you press the “red button” (keys in reality) to launch your own missiles. That is sometimes referred to as “use them or lose them”. The next option is “launch on strike”: you launch all you got as soon as a nuclear strike on your territory is confirmed. And, finally, there is the “retaliation after ride-out“: you absorb whatever your enemy shot at you, then take a decision to strike back. What is obvious is that China has adopted, whether by political choice or due to limitation in space capabilities, either a “launch on strike” or a “retaliation after ride-out” option. This is especially interesting since China possesses relatively few nuclear warheads and even fewer real long range ICBMs .
Contrast that with the Russians who have recently confirmed that they have long had a “dead hand system” called “Perimetr” which automatically ascertains that a nuclear attack has taken place and then automatically launches a counterstrike. That would be a “launch on strike” posture, but it is also possible that Russia has a double-posture: she tries to have the capability to launch on warning, but double-secures herself with an automated “dead hand” “launch on strike” capability.
Take a look at this estimate of worldwide stocks of strategic nuclear warheads: While China is credited with only 260 warheads, Russia still has a whopping 7,000 warheads. And a “dead hand” capability. And yet China feels confident enough to announce a “no first use” policy. How can they say that with no space-based nuclear missile launch detection capability?
Many will say that the Chinese wished they had more nukes and a space-based based nuclear missile launch detection capability, but that their current financial and technological means simply do not allow that. Maybe. But my personal guess is that they realize that even their very minimal force represents a good enough deterrent for any potential aggressor. And they might have a point.
Let me ask you this: how many US generals and politicians would be willing to sacrifice just one major US city in order to disarm China or Russia? Some probably would. But I sure hope that the majority would realize that the risk will always remain huge.
For one thing, modern nuclear warfare has, so far, only been “practiced” only on paper and with computers (and thank God for that!)? So nobody *really* knows for sure how a nuclear war would play itself out. The only thing which is certain is that just the political and economic consequences of it would be catastrophic and totally unpredictable. Furthermore, it remains very unclear how such a war could be stopped short of totally destroying one side. The so-called “de-escalation” is a fascinating concept, but so far nobody has really figured this out. Finally, I am personally convinced that both the USA and Russia have more than enough survivable nuclear weapons to actually decide to ride out a full-scale enemy attack. That is the one big issue which many well-meaning pacifist never understood: it is a good thing that “the USA and Russia have the means to blow-up the world ten times over” simply because even one side succeeded in destroying, say, 95% of the US or Russian nuclear forces, the remaining 5% would be more than enough to wipe-out the attacking side in a devastating countervalue attack. If Russia and the USA each had, say, only 10 nuclear warheads then the temptation to try to take them out would be much higher.
This is scary and even sick, but having a lot of nuclear weapons is safer from a “first-strike stability” point of view than having few. Yes, we do live in a crazy world.
Consider that in times of crisis both the US and Russia would scramble their strategic bombers and keep them in the air, refueling them when needed, for as long as needed to avoid having them destroyed on the ground. So even if the USA destroyed ALL Russian ICBM/SLBMs, there would be quite a few strategic bombers in holding patterns in staging areas which could be given the order to strike. And here we reach one last crucial concept:
Counterforce strikes require a lot of HTK capable warheads. The estimates by both sides are kept secret, of course, but we are talking over 1000 targets on each side at least listed, if not actually targeted. But a countervalue strike would require much less. The US has only 10 cities with over one million people. Russia has only 12. And, remember, in theory one warhead is enough for one city (that is not true, but for all practical purposes it is). Just look what 9/11 did to the USA and imagine of, say, “only” Manhattan had been truly nuked. You can easily imagine the consequences.
Conclusion 1: super-fuses are not really that super at all
The super-fuses scare is so overblown that it is almost an urban legend. The fact is that even if all the US SLBMs are now HTK capable and even if Russia does not have a functional space-based missile launch detection capability (she is working on a new one, by the way), this in no way affects the fundamental fact that there is nothing, nothing at all, that the USA could come up with to prevent Russia from obliterating the USA in a retaliatory strike. The opposite is also true, the Russians have exactly zero hope of nuking the USA and survive the inevitable US retaliation.
The truth is that as far back as the early 1980s Soviet (Marshal Ogarkov) and US specialists had already come to the conclusion that a nuclear war was unwinnable. In the past 30 years two things have dramatically changed the nature of the game: first, an increasing number of conventional weapons have become comparable in their effects to small nuclear weapons and cruise missiles have become vastly more capable. The trend today is for low-RCS (stealth) long range hypersonic cruise missiles and maneuvering ICBM warheads which will make it even harder to detect and intercept them. Just think about it: if the Russians fired a cruise missile volley from a submarine say, 100km off the US coast, how much reaction time will the US have? Say that these low-RCS missile would begin flying at medium altitude being for all practical purpose invisible to radar, infra-red and even sound, then lower themselves down to 3-5 m over the Atlantic and then accelerate to a Mach 2 or Mach 3 speed. Sure, they will become visible to radars once they crosses the horizon, but the remaining reaction time would be measured in seconds, not minutes. Besides, what kind of weapon system could stop that missile type of anyway? Maybe the kind of defenses around a US aircraft carrier (maybe), but there is simply nothing like that along the US coast.
As for ballistic missile warheads, all the current and foreseeable anti-ballistic systems rely on calculations for a non-maneuvering warhead. Once the warheads begin to make turns and zig-zag, then the computation needed to intercept them become harder by several orders of magnitude. Some Russian missiles, like the R-30 Bulava, can even maneuver during their initial burn stage, making their trajectory even harder to estimate (and the missile itself harder to intercept).
The truth is that for the foreseeable future ABM systems will be much more expensive and difficult to build then ABM-defeating missiles. Also, keep in mind that an ABM missile itself is also far, far more expensive than a warhead. Frankly, I have always suspected that the American obsession with various types of ABM technologies is more about giving cash to the Military Industrial Complex and, at best, developing new technologies useful elsewhere.
Conclusion 2: the nuclear deterrence system remains stable, very stable
At the end of WWII, the Soviet Union’s allies, moved by the traditional western love for Russia, immediately proceeded to plan for a conventional and a nuclear war against the Soviet Union (see Operation Unthinkable and Operation Dropshot). Neither plan was executed, the western leaders were probably rational enough not to want to trigger a full-scale war against the armed forces which had destroyed roughly 80% of the Nazi war machine. What is certain, however, is that both sides fully understood that the presence of nuclear weapons profoundly changed the nature of warfare and that the world would never be the same again: for the first time in history all of mankind faced a truly existential threat. As a direct result of this awareness, immense sums of money were given to some of the brightest people on the planet to tackle the issue of nuclear warfare and deterrence. This huge effort resulted in an amazingly redundant, multi-dimensional and sophisticated system which cannot be subverted by any one technological breakthrough. There is SO much redundancy and security built into the Russian and American strategic nuclear forces that a disarming first strike is all but impossible, even if we make the most unlikely and far-fetched assumptions giving one side all the advantages and the other all the disadvantages. For most people it is very hard to wrap their heads around such a hyper-survivable system, but both the USA and Russia have run hundreds and even thousands of very advanced simulations of nuclear exchanges, spending countless hours and millions of dollars trying to find a weak spot in the other guy’s system, and each time the result was the same: there is always enough to inflict an absolutely cataclysmic retaliatory counter-strike.
Conclusion 3: the real danger to our common future
The real danger to our planet comes not from a sudden technological breakthrough which would make nuclear war safe, but from the demented filled minds of the US Neocons who believe that they can bring Russia to heel in a game of “nuclear chicken”. These Neocons have apparently convinced themselves that making conventional threats against Russia, such as unilaterally imposing no-fly zones over Syria, does not bring us closer to a nuclear confrontation. It does.
The Neocons love to bash the United Nations in general, and the veto power of the Permanent Five (P5) at the UN Security Council, but they apparently forgot the reason why this veto power was created in the first place: to outlaw any action which could trigger a nuclear war. Of course, this assumes that the P5 all care about international law. Now that the USA has clearly become a rogue state whose contempt for international law is total, there is no legal mechanism left to stop the US from committing actions which endanger the future of mankind. This is what is really scary, not “super-fuses”.
What we are facing today is a nuclear rogue state run by demented individuals who, steeped in a culture of racial superiority, total impunity and imperial hubris, are constantly trying to bring us closer to a nuclear war. These people are not constrained by anything, not morals, not international law, not even common sense or basic logic. In truth, we are dealing with a messianic cult every bit as insane as the one of Jim Jones or Adolf Hitler and like all self-worshiping crazies they profoundly believe in their invulnerability.
It is the immense sin of the so-called “Western world” that it let these demented individuals take control with little or no resistance and that now almost the entire western society lack the courage to even admit that it surrendered itself to what I can only call a satanic cult. Alexander Solzhenitsyn prophetic words spoken in 1978 have now fully materialized:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life (Harvard Speech, 1978)
Five years later, Solzhenitsyn warned us again saying,
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing. Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
We have been warned, but will we heed that warning?
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X-37B - >>> Military space plane lands after secret mission
CBS News
William Harwood
5-7-17
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/military-space-plane-lands-after-secret-mission/ar-BBAQmNp?OCID=ansmsnnews11
An unpiloted military space plane, launched by an Atlas 5 rocket in May 2015, glided to an unannounced landing on the long shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, closing out a 718-day mission. It was the first Florida landing of a returning spacecraft since Atlantis flew home in the program's final mission in 2011.
050717-x37-1.jpg© US Air Force 050717-x37-1.jpg
Sonic booms rumbled across central Florida around 8 a.m. and a few minutes later, the Air Force tweeted that the Boeing-built X-37B space plane -- a compact, delta-wing craft equipped with a payload bay, a solar power boom and a sophisticated computer control systems -- had returned from orbit and landed safely.
"Today marks an incredibly exciting day for the 45th Space Wing as we continue to break barriers," Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, 45th Space Wing commander, said in a statement. "Our team has been preparing for this event for several years, and I am extremely proud to see our hard work and dedication culminate in today's safe and successful landing."
It was the fourth clandestine flight of the X-37B, the longest in the program and the first to end in Florida, where Boeing has taken over two former shuttle processing hangars that have been modified to handle the secret spycraft. The first three missions ended with landings at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles.
Total time in space by both vehicles across four flights now stands at 2,085 days.
"This mission once again set an on-orbit endurance record and marks the vehicle's first landing in the state of Florida," Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, X-37B program manager, said in the Air Force statement. "We are incredibly pleased with the performance of the space vehicle and are excited about the data gathered to support the scientific and space communities."
The program's fifth launch is expected later this year.
Two X-37Bs, also known as OTVs, or orbital test vehicles, are known to exist. OTV-1 flew the program's first and third missions while OTV-2, flew the second and fourth, which began with launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 20, 2015.
A nose-on view of the X-37B, one of two autonomous military spaceplanes used for classified missions in low-Earth orbit.
The spacecraft are believed to fly as orbital test beds for advanced technology sensors and other systems but the program is classified, and the Air Force provides almost no details on the nature of the space plane's missions, what might have been accomplished or when the reusable craft might fly again.
But before OTV-2 took off on its just-ended flight, the Air Force acknowledged two experiments: a NASA materials science project and one to test an Aerojet Rocketdyne Hall-effect thruster, which generates low but steady thrust by accelerating electrically charged xenon ions. The thrusters are used aboard Advanced Extremely-High Frequency military communications satellites.
But in general, the X-37 program is conducted in near total secrecy.
Joan Johnson-Freese, a space policy analyst at the Naval War College, said before the most recent launching that the X-37B appears to be what the Air Force claims, a technology demonstrator and testbed. But she said the secrecy surrounding the program likely will continue fueling interest among potential adversaries.
"What's interesting to me is it's being done in such an opaque manner," she said. "If the Chinese were doing this, oh my God, there would be congressional hearings on a daily basis and programs being ginned up to respond to it. It has capabilities that other countries aren't sure about, and so they're going to be very nervous about them. If it's a highly maneuverable space vehicle, that has some pretty significant implications."
Watch: SpaceX launch a major test for its re-usable technology
The original idea for a small unmanned orbiter was developed by NASA and built by Boeing's Phantom Works division. But the program was turned over to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in 2004.
Two years later, the Air Force took over. The first X-37B took off on the program's initial orbital test flight April 22, 2010. The spacecraft spent nearly 225 days in orbit before gliding to a computer-controlled touchdown at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
A second X-37B, the same one that landed Sunday, was launched on March 5, 2011. It spent 469 days in space, landing June 16, 2012, at Vandenberg. The third flight, the second for the original OTV-1, took off on Dec. 11, 2012 and landed in California on Oct. 17, 2014, after logging nearly 675 days aloft.
The unmanned orbiters are based on the same lifting body design used for the space shuttle and they fly a similar re-entry trajectory.
But the X-37B features more lightweight composite materials, improved wing insulation and tougher heat-shield tiles that "are significantly more durable than the first generation tiles used by the space shuttle," according to a Boeing website description. "All avionics on the X-37B are designed to automate all de-orbit and landing functions."
The X-37B is equipped with a scaled-down 4-foot-by-7-foot payload bay. But unlike the space shuttle, which relied on fuel cells for electrical power, the Air Force spaceplane is equipped with a deployable solar array that permits it to remain in orbit for long-duration missions.
But exactly what the X-37B does in orbit remains a mystery.
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>>> UFOs flown by the military - Not aliens.....
http://www.greyfalcon.us/restored/UFO.htm
Many are convinced that the mystics and gifted scientists and engineers of Germany combined to produce flying saucers shortly before WW2. Many also believe that other nations, headed by the British, have used captured German technology to build their own flying machines.
There are piles of reports of British and US pilots being tracked by fireballs which danced around their aircraft while driving their electronics systems crazy. When the war ended, many German scientists were engaged by the USA to head their space program.
But what of the German discs? Many believe that massive German U-boats transported many of them to a secret base in the Arctic. That is when the US military kicked into action sending Admiral Byrd in his men to the frozen north. The battle that ensued saw heavy losses by the American's but there are very few reports as to what actually happened there.
Byrd also found plenty of magnetic anomalies, all of which were classified top secret when he got back. The interesting thing is this "magnetic anomaly", it may be an entrance to a large "hollow place" That's what "magnetic anomaly" means......
At the end of WWII, three weeks before the U.S. went to Peenemünde to nab the V-2s and the scientists, including Wernher von Braun, the Brits went into the underground redoubts of the Nazis in Austria, the Black Forest and Thuringia. The results were three top secret trains, one of them 8 miles long (that one train alone was 655 box cars and flat cars). The trains took the stuff, some of which was too large to fit in box cars and had to be covered by tarpaulins on its way to the coast of Brittany (France), there to be loaded on board ships, taken through the Panama Canal up the coast to Vancouver, B.C., and from there by train 100 miles inland to the newly constructed surface facility of the A. V. Roe Company, whuch took over the research and development of the wingless jet powered saucer craft.
150 pre-fab factory buildings were sent from England to the same site. By 1947 it was dug completely underground for security reasons to protect from prying Russian overflights An underground facility with vertical shaft, still exists cobwebbed and silent about 150 miles East of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Operation Backfire
The British Operation Backfire occurred immediately after the war had finished. It was designed to completely evaluate the entire V2 system, interrogate German personnel specialized in all phases of it, and then actually launch several missiles across the North Sea.
At the end of WWII, more than 8000 German rocket personnel had been captured, along with hundreds of scientists. A proposal was put forward that the German rocket troops be forced to demonstrate their V2 handling and firing procedures by actually preparing and launching some V2 rockets.
The gun testing range at Altenwalde near Cuxhaven, Germany, which was in the post-war British zone of occupation, was chosen as the testing site. The captured German rocket troops were fairly willing to demonstrate their V2 firing procedures, and soon 200 scientists, 200 V2 firing troops, and 600 ordinary POWs were transported to Cuxhaven.
The next step was to find some intact V2s. The Americans had removed enough parts from the underground Mittelwerk facility to assemble no less than 200 rockets in the United States. After the Americans were finished, the British were given their opportunity to salvage what was left before the Russians took over the Mittelwerk. British officials found that they had enough parts to assemble about 8 rockets for their testing. They also found that they were missing several key components, as well as support vehicles needed to fuel and fire the rockets.
What followed was an amazing search of Europe for the missing items. Search parties were sent out everywhere with soldiers who were fluent in German - each with a convoy of trucks - to hunt for the needed missing parts. When the search was finished, 400 railway cars and 70 Lancaster flights were used to bring the quarter-of-a-million parts and 60 specialized vehicles to Cuxhaven, the most elusive part being the batteries that operated the guidance gyros. Tail units were also hard to find intact, so some of these were called back from the United States. The explosive material in the warheads of the missiles was steamed out and replaced with sand.
By the beginning of October 1945, the British were ready to begin testing the V2 systems. The rockets that were to be fired were painted in a black and white chequered pattern, similar to the early German colour schemes. On October 1, the first V2 launch attempt failed due to a faulty igniter. Another V2 was ready and the first successful British-directed firing of the V2 across the Baltic occurred on October 2, 1945, almost three years to the day after the first successful German test. The third and last British V2 launch took place on October 15, 1945, with British, American, and Russian officials present. The V2 performed flawlessly and landed near its target point in the North Sea. The operation was concluded by mid-October.
And the US? They were so impressed with the V2 that their famous Redstone rocket was developed by many of the same scientific team that had worked on the V2, and - further - used very similar technology. The Redstone was the first large US ballistic missile to be deployed overseas, joining the NATO Shield Force in 1958 and was not declared obsolete until 1964. The Redstone rocket also launched the first US satellite and put the first American astronaut into space.
Many of the German team that had been responsible for the design of the V2 continued working on the American space program right through to the 1969 landing of men on the Moon.
At the end of WWII, three weeks before the U.S. went to Peenemünde to nab the V-2s and the scientists, including Wernher Von Braun, the Brits went into the underground redoubts of the Nazis in Austria, the Black Forest and Thuringia. The results were three top secret trains, one of them 8 miles long (that one train alone was 655 box cars and flat cars). The trains took the stuff, some of which was too large to fit in box cars and had to be covered by tarpaulins on its way to the coast of Brittany (France), there to be loaded on board ships, taken through the Panama Canal up the coast to Vancouver, B.C., and from there by train 100 miles inland to the newly constructed surface facility of the A. V. Roe Company, whuch took over the research and development of the wingless jet powered saucer craft.
150 pre-fab factory buildings were sent from England to the same site. By 1947 it was dug completely underground for security reasons to protect from prying Russian overflights An underground facility with vertical shaft, still exists cobwebbed and silent about 150 miles East of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Brits also grabbed the disc engineers, including Richard Miethe (later traced to the employment of A.V. Roe).
Just like the Nazi Wernher von Braun and his Nazi cohort scientists were excused for their mistreatment of assembly line slaves and invited to partake in America's rocket program, saucer scientists like Herr Miethe and his Nazi cohort scientists were invited and taken to work for A.V. Roe in the compound outside Vancouver.
[Background on Nazi craft and scientists imported to Canada: The addenda in the books by Harbinson, Genesis, Revelation, and Projekt Saucer. The suppressed and out of print book by Renato Vesco Intercept But Don't Shoot, republished as Flying Saucers: From 1944-1994 by Renato Vesco and David Childress.]
The British Space Program was well underway during World War two with men such as Arthur C Clarke and H.E Ross launching an in-depth study of the possibility of moon landings. The British undertook intensive rocket testing at a huge range in South Australia, beginning in about 1946. The range was named Woomera and it is possible that the studies launched there led to manned spaced travel in years much earlier than we have been led to believe.
Dr Carol Rosin was the first female corporate manager of Fairchild Industries and was spokesperson for Wernher von Braun in his later years.
She founded the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space in Washington, DC, and has testified before Congress on many occasions about space-based weapons.
Von Braun revealed to Dr Robin a plan to justify weapons in space, based on hoaxing first, a Russian threat, then a terrorist threat, an asteroid threat, then finally an extraterrestrial threat.(Rosin was also present at meetings in the 1970's when the scenario for the Gulf War of the 1990's was planned.)
Undoubtedly some kind of deal was struck between the British secret service and the O.S.S. They brought down a couple of the jet powered saucers from British Columbia, and got to watch us sending V-2 firecrackers into the sky at White Sands.
Then the fateful, fabulous New Mexico weather with thunder and lightning sprouted up out of nowhere like it does and ruined their little lend lease program by striking one of the craft with lightning as it was on its way back to White Sands after a test flight. The unfortunate single body found was an ALIEN. A Canadian......
It is important to note here that at the time of the crash (July 1947), the Roswell US military base was the only base to store nuclear weapons. White Sands, a short aeronautical distance from Roswell, was the "Area-51" of its day.
Who knows what happened at Roswell?
Was one of the anti-gravity craft being tested and then struck by lightening?
Did the military then release the alien space-ship story to divert attention from something that would have been in fact a far greater threat to national security.
Did an alien spacecraft crash in the desert (shot down or malfunctioning)? Was the technology recovered used to develop some of the amazing advances in technology seen at the time? 1947 saw the sound barrier broken for the first time, the jet plane was tested successfully and the transistor invented.
ROSWELL : the "E.T. MYTH" VS. the "NAZI UFO LEGEND"
The government initially put out the alien story and then retracted it, but the seed had been placed into the inquisitive minds of Americans and they wondered if little green (or tall grey) men were 'watching us"..."preparing for an invasion."
They harassed Max Brazel for 20 hours straight, unclothed in his skivvies, until they were sure that he would not reveal that it was an unconventional jet powered aircraft of some sort.
For the White Sands tests, and the very existence of the nuclear powered disks, to be kept under wraps, the diversionary stories of alien bodies and crashed extraterrestrial space craft, although fully denied, were an excellent cover. The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
In the '50s, the news that British boffins were building a saucer set off alarm bells at the CIA. Was the United States being left behind by its staunchest allies in the race for a technological edge? And if Britain and Canada could build a flying saucer, then surely the Soviet Union wouldn't be far ahead.
Recently released documents from the CIA archive are full of accounts by former German scientists of their desperate work to save the Fatherland with revolutionary circular aircraft supposedly capable of enormous speeds. But when the CIA set up a study group in 1952 to look into the phenomenon, it discovered something extraordinary far closer to home: In Canada, British engineers were in the process of building a flying saucer of their own!
From: "LOOK"
VOLUME 19, June14, 1955
Persistent and fairly credible rumors recur that a Canadian aircraft manufacturer, A. V. Roe, Canada, Ltd., has had a saucer design under development for two years. One report has it that the project was abandoned by the Canadian government because it would cost over $75 million to get a prototype flying model into the air. The A. V. Roe people maintain a confusing silence about the whole thing. They can't deny the project has been abandoned because they never announced it had begun. Our own Air Force offers "no comment."
At a recent meeting of engineers, it was indicated that, while flying saucer or sphere projects may still be purely hypothetical, new air-defense problems are setting up requirements for aircraft performance that would seem to be most ideally met by a saucer craft such as illustrated above.
One problem, recently stated by Brig. Gen. Benjamin Kelsey, deputy director of research and development of the Air Force, is this:
Airplanes today spend too much time gathering speed on the ground and not enough flying in the air.
Today's fighters, he pointed out, need extremely long runways and there are few in existence that are now long enough. These few, and the concentration of the planes using them, provide a worth-while target for an A-bomb. With a single blow, the enemy might cripple a substantial portion of our air defense.
Planes that could take off vertically would not need long runways, which cost millions of dollars. They could be dispersed widely and safely. In this country, four vertical-rising aircraft already have been revealed. All but one, however, are modifications of conventional plane designs. None yet approaches the performance a true saucer might be capable of..
What are the requirements of an ideal defense fighter? 1) Ability to take off and land vertically; 2) high speed of over Mach 2. (more than 1500 mph); 3) high rate of climb; 4) excellent maneuverability; 5) heavy armament; 6) ability to operate at 60,000 feet.
Soon after this 1955 LOOK Magazine article, news releases covered the story of the clunky "AVRO Aircar", driven by a couple of fan blades that wobbled. The thing didn't get more than 4 feet off the ground. This seemed to satisfy the "public need to know" about saucers being produced at A. V. Roe Company.
Project Silver Bug- Avro Canada History
In 1952, the U.S. probably traded the H-bomb secrets to Great Britain in return for all the saucer technologies and wind tunnel research done in Canada. By 1958 the technology had developed silent, electro-gravitational, Biefeld-Brown type drive.
The "motors" inside the remotely flown, pilotless craft, draw their power from electrical current fed into the Schumann cavity (an area between the surface of the Earth and 50 miles up from the surface). The electrical and magnetic fields set up inside the craft are not conducive to life.
In 1973 British Rail was granted a patent for a 'Space Vehicle', which explains in detail how to construct a nuclear powered flying-saucer seating 22 passengers.
The proposed space craft works on the basic principle of nuclear fusion. The jet of fuel - which could be types of hydrogen - is fired through a nozzle at the bottom of the saucer.
A generator activates pulses from laser beams which are trained on the fuel. Each pulse starts a nuclear fusion reaction, releasing large amounts of high energy particles.
Some of these hit the bottom of the saucer, providing momentum. Others are deflected downwards by electromagnets, giving added momentum. The charge from yet more particles is collected by electrodes as the main electrical power source for the saucer. A lead shield above the fusion point protects passengers and crew from radiation.
The potential means of rapid intercontinental - or even interplanetary - travel was the invention's chief attraction. However the patent expired in 1976 as British Rail decided that, technically, the saucer was too far in advance of its time.
BRITISH RAIL FLYING SAUCER
(1973)
By Rob Arndt
The bizarre British Rail flying saucer was designed by a British engineer named Charles Osmond Frederick who worked at the British Railway Technical Center, Derby. His primary work at the research center concerned the interaction of train rails and wheels. However, Frederick started working on feasibility studies directed towards a British Rail lifting platform that through numerous revisions ultimately led to an unorthodox passenger craft that operated through the use of nuclear fusion!
This might seem radical to some, but Frederick had previously investigated stress phenomena in nuclear fuel elements for the UK Energy Authority back in the 1960s. He became fascinated with interplanetary space travel and, combined with his British Rail expertise, gave birth to his concept of laser-pulsed nuclear fusion for a disc-shaped space transport.
The fusion generator for this craft would be located at its center and pulsed at 1,000 Hz to prevent resonance that could potentially damage the disc. The laser pulses of energy would then have been transferred from a nozzle into a series of radial electrodes running along the underside of the craft, which would have converted the energy into electricity that would then pass into a ring of powerful electromagnets. These magnets would supposedly accelerate subatomic particles emitted by the fusion reaction, providing both lift and thrust. Frederick had alternately proposed the use of futuristic superconductors as well for this purpose instead of the electromagnets.
A protective layer of graphite running above the fusion reactor would have acted as a thick shield against radiation emanating from the reactor core located below the passengers sitting above it.
Theoretically, the disc would be piloted in such a way that the rapid acceleration and deceleration of the craft would have simulated gravity in zero gravity conditions.
This forgotten patent came to the attention of the media when it was featured in The Daily Telegraph newspaper, dated July 11, 1982. However, when the patent was rediscovered in 2006, a group of scientists examined the design and declared the Rail flying saucer to be unworkable, expensive, and very inefficient. Michel van Baal of the ESA (European Space Agency) claimed “I have had a look at the plans, and they don’t look very serious to me at all”, adding that "many of the technologies proposed for the craft, such as nuclear fusion and high-temperature superconductors, had not yet been discovered.“
In 1996, when The Railway Magazine obtained the patent for their May 1996 issue and featured a short section on it, the outcome was the same. The magazine stated that the passengers would have been fried anyway!
Regardless of the criticisms, Frederick’s patent lapsed in 1976 due to non-payment of renewal fees.
British Rail flying saucer plan
BBC News
March 13, 2006
A Channel Tunnel or tilting train may once have seemed far-fetched, but these plans were grounded compared to British Rail proposals to use flying saucers.
Recently uncovered plans show bosses filed for a patent in 1970 for a spacecraft powered by "controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction".
With a passenger compartment upstairs, it would have been cheap to run and super-fast, according to its inventor.
The proposals were recently found on the European Patent Office website.
The original patent application said the reaction would be "ignited by one or more pulsed laser beams".
The application was made on behalf of the British Railways Board and the patent was granted in March 1973.
A patent document reads: "The present invention relates to a space vehicle. More particularly it relates to a power supply for a space vehicle which offers a source of sustained thrust for the loss of a very small mass of fuel.
"Thus it would enable very high velocities to be attained in a space vehicle and in fact the prolonged acceleration of the vehicle may in some circumstances be used to simulate gravity."
But, it seems, the patent later lapsed because of non-payment of renewal fees, while the spaceship - the invention of Charles Osmond Frederick - clearly never materialised.
- Did the BAC and British Rail persist with their registered 'invention' which was actually fully operational but highly classified?
- Were they being tested in the USA in October/November 1975 when high security bases along the US/Canada border were the scene of many UFO reports and Travis Walton was taken in perhaps the most famous alien abduction? Many of the sightings occurred over areas used for the storage of nuclear weapons.
- Were the disks being tested en-masse over Iran on September 18 and 19, 1976?
Were they being tested in Australia when Fred Valentich disappeared in August 1978?
- Were they being tested off the east coast of New Zealand later in that year when news crews captured some remarkable footage?
- Where they being tested near Rendelsham in Britain 2 years later when many bright objects were sited over military facilities?
A pioneering disk type air craft developed within the Soviet Union was revealed to the public in early 2001.
The development of the Ekip was undertaken with spying and surveillance being it's prime task. Many tests were carried out successfully.
Soviet research into UFO's began under Stalin he was intrigued and worried about the many reported UFO sightings and by the late 1970's a UFO research centre had opened in Moscow.
Photographs of project Ekip were released in an apparent effort by the Russians to revive interest and spending in the Russian Space Program before their share of cosmic dominance is eaten up by the Chinese.
The Ekip was designed at the same facility which produced the Yak-38 a vertical lift-off-and-land fighter. The front of the aircraft is pierced by two jet intakes. Exhausts behind the crest of the 'poached egg' blow over the rear section creating enormous lift and forward motion. It uses an air-cushion similar in principle to a hovercraft.
Experts associated with Ekip believe such an aircraft has the ability to be re-designed to accommodate up to 1300 passengers. Initially the team’s goal is to manufacture a craft to carry about 400 and travel to an altitude of more than 3900 meters. This version would measure 36m by 26m about a length of the Boeing 767 and be capable of 640kph and have a range of 8000km.
The History Channel, Sunday 12th February 2006
In the latest episode of UFO Files, we are taken on a tour of man-made flying saucers from World War II to the present day and asked to consider the possibility that all UFO sightings are of top secret, terrestrial aircraft.
As defeat loomed for Hitler’s Germany in 1944-45, Nazi scientists were tasked with developing new and exotic weapons that might turn the tide of the war. The most famous of these new super weapons were the V-1 and V-2 rockets developed and launched from Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.
However other projects were also underway. A man named Viktor Schauberger designed a flying disc-type aircraft. It was hoped that this craft would manoeuvre like a helicopter, using magnetic rotation to create lift, but also be able to travel at supersonic speeds and be undetectable to the enemy. Working with other brilliant engineers and scientists, several disc designs were tested and even flown.
As the war drew to a close, German science worked feverishly to develop these new weapons: flying saucers, rockets, jet aircraft and who knows what else, but time was running out for them. Allied bombing raids were causing great damage and Allied troops were closing in on all fronts.
As Germany surrendered, a frantic scramble between the western powers and the Soviet Union began to capture the brilliant German scientists behind what was at the time the most advanced aviation technology on the planet. The US managed to capture factories that were producing V-2 rockets and men such as Wernher von Braun, while the Soviets got their hands on the latest Nazi jet aircraft and a good number of rocket scientists.
After the war, Schauberger and other flying saucer designers such as Rudolf Schriever and Walter Miethe ended up working for the Americans, while their former comrade, Andreas Epp, is said to have worked for the Soviet Union. As the struggle for global nuclear dominance intensified, flying disc research continued in secret.
Then in 1947, the UFO sighting of pilot, Kenneth Arnold, made headlines around the world. He described nine, crescent-shaped craft travelling at over twelve-hundred miles per hour, a speed almost unheard of in those days. ‘UFO fever’ gripped America and thousands of reports began to flood in. Military officials appeared on television, calming public fears, but also declaring that they were not testing or flying saucer-shaped rockets or aircraft.
Then in July of that year, a flying disc was reported to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. It was quickly explained away as being a weather balloon. In private, US generals were concerned that these UFO sightings could be secret aircraft from the Soviet Union, designed by their captured German scientists.
Many blueprints and plans for Nazi jet aircraft had been captured at the end of the Second World War and one of these was the Horton 229, a flying wing jet that bore a striking resemblance to Arnold’s crescent-shaped UFOs. It was feared that the Soviets had developed a flying, supersonic version of this jet.
As the Cold War evolved in the 1950s, and the Korean conflict brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, the public’s paranoia was reflected in popular movies such as Earth Vs The Flying Saucers and Invaders from Mars. The US military used this fear as a smokescreen to hide its top secret projects in places such as Area 51 in Nevada, where tests of all kinds of exotic aircraft, rockets, balloons, high-altitude parachute drops and satellites were performed.
Project Mogul, the use of high-altitude balloons with trains of radar reflectors designed to detect Soviet atomic testing, came out of this era and was the final explanation for what crashed in Roswell.
With the Soviets taking the lead in jet fighter technology in the Korean War, the Americans needed to catch up and radar-invisible, supersonic flying saucers were one avenue of possibility.
The secret truth behind
U.S. built flying wing disc aircraft
This official flying disc (or "flying saucer") illustration is taken from an Air Force Manual, AFM 200-3, Chapter 9, Page 3. The caption at the bottom of the page states, "The Air Technical Intelligence Center is responsible for the prevention of technological surprise"
In 1952, the US Air Force became aware of a project by the Canadian avionics company, Avro, to build a flying saucer. British designer, John Frost, was the mastermind of the idea, inspired by UFO sightings from all over the world. He learned of Nazi flying saucer projects and eventually met with Walter Miethe., who said he had worked for ten years on German saucers and also showed Frost plans and photographs of his work.With a $10 million grant from the USAF, Frost set up his special projects division at Avro and began work on a supersonic flying saucer.
The first attempt was with ‘Project Y’, a spade-shaped aircraft that would serve as a tail-less, supersonic, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet interceptor. After several failed tests, Project Y was abandoned.
Frost’s next attempt was to create a circular aircraft that utilised rotary engines set along the outside edge of the airframe. This was called ‘Project Y-2’. A test of a 50-foot, six-engined design almost ended in disaster for the entire team when the tethered engines spun out of control, almost destroying the hangar. The supersonic Y-2 project was suspended and a smaller, test design was commissioned. This was to become known as the Avrocar.
The Avrocar was designed to fly forwards at 300 mph at thirty-thousand feet and to land and take off vertically. In 1959, the first two prototypes were rolled out. It was hoped that this design could become a kind of flying Jeep for the US military. Early test flights proved that the craft could fly, although it only moved a few inches above the ground. Problems were also discovered when it flew over grassy areas, with the engine intakes sucking up all sorts of debris. The circular design was also very difficult for the pilot to handle, making the craft unwieldy and problematic to steer. Despite attempts to make the Avrocar more stable, the program was eventually scrapped in 1961
Forty years ago, Jack Pickett, a publisher of American military magazines, was visiting MacDill AFB in Florida when he saw what appeared to be four flying saucers parked outside in a restricted area. They ranged in size from twenty to a hundred and nineteen feet in diameter and perfectly circular. Pickett was shown photographs of the craft in flight, sometimes with conventional jet escorts. He was told that the craft, which had a large, vertical tail section, were capable of 15,500 mph and had even achieved space flight. Pickett asked why such an amazing project had been discontinued (the craft were in a section for scrapped airplanes) and was told that better, more stable designs had replaced them.
During the 1960s, UFO reports continued to make the news headlines. Alan Brown was the chief engineer of the US stealth project at the Lockheed Skunkworks. He is convinced that all UFO reports can be attributed to secret US military aircraft. He maintains that the amount of testing that went on at Area 51 made it inevitable that people would see strange-shaped aircraft in the skies from time to time.
In 1978, Warren Botz was attending a flight reunion at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, when he saw disc-shaped aircraft parked in a hangar. His description of the craft almost exactly matches that of Jack Pickett’s circular aeroplanes.
In 1988, the USAF revealed to the world the F-117 stealth fighter. Alan Brown said that the only reason that this remarkable aircraft was unveiled was because they had to begin flying it in daylight because of several night-flight test accidents that had resulted in the loss of pilots. It was hoped that confirming the existence of this plane to the world would reduce the number of UFO reports. Not surprisingly, reports of triangular UFOs began to appear in the news.
With the end of the Cold War, it wasn’t until the Gulf War in 1991 that the F-117 saw its first action, impressing the world with its stealth capabilities and accurate bombing power. Despite all of its success, though, the stealth fighter still had to be piloted by a human being.
The next phase of aerial combat will be with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Already, we have UAVs designed for reconnaissance, such as the Sikorsky Aerobot, but the future lies with UAVs that can perform in combat. It is likely that such craft are already in existence and have probably already been used in the 'War on Terror'.
If supersonic flying saucer technology has been abandoned in favour of triangular stealth aircraft and slow-moving, circular drones, how does this explain the continued raft of UFO sightings that contain disc-shaped objects moving at unbelievable speeds and defying the known laws of physics? Are the US military still developing flying saucers?
This program offered a brief glimpse into the world of secret aviation development and the craft described are incredible feats of engineering, but to suggest that all UFO reports can be explained as test flights of these craft is absurd. What about close-up sightings on the ground where non-human figures are seen? What about sightings in orbit by US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts? If the US military has craft that can achieve orbit so easily, why are we still sending people and equipment up on the top of a gigantic firecracker?
It is clear that the more we try to answer these questions, the more questions we create from the answers.
<<<
Laurance Rockefeller - The Disclosure Project and the UFO Disclosure Initiative -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer
http://sitsshow.blogspot.com/2016/04/The-Laurance-Rockefeller-UFO-Disclosure-Initiative-Official-Government-Documents-Clinton-OSTP-Confirm-Knowledge-of-UFOs-and-ETs.html
Rockefeller Foundation - ¨UFO Briefing Document - The Best Available Evidence.¨
http://www.ufoevidence.org/researchers/detail59.htm
>>> J. Antonio Huneeus
Chilean-American science journalist J. Antonio Huneeus is considered one of the world's top experts on UFOs. When Laurance S. Rockefeller commissioned Marie Galbraith and Sandra S. Wright to assemble a report on the best evidence for UFOs to send members of Congress and selected VIPs worldwide in the mid-90s, Huneeus was one of the co-authors (with Don Berliner and M. Galbraith). This report was recently published as a Dell paperback under the title of ¨UFO Briefing Document - The Best Available Evidence.¨
Huneeus has covered the UFO field from an international perspective as a science journalist, investigator and lecturer during the past 24 years. His articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals in the Americas, Europe and Japan. These include Fate magazine, The Anomalist, and the New York City Tribune in the US; the magazines Mo Cero and Mundo Desconocido in Spain; Phenomena in France; Magazine 2000 in Germany; Planeta in Brazil; Cuarta Dimension in Argentina; Borderland and Super Science in Japan; the newspapers La Tercera and La Segunda in Chile and El Tiempo in Colombia; Anomalia in Russia; Notiziario UFO in Italy; UFO Magazine in Hungary, and other specialized publications around the world.
Huneeus edited the anthology 'A Study Guide to UFOs, Psychic and Paranormal Phenomena in the USSR' (NY: Abelard Publications, 1991); was consultant and producer for a LaserActive disc in Japan, 'UFO & ET,' produced for Pioneer Electronic by the Tokyo company Studio Garage in 1995; author of the 1998 and 1999 UFO Calendar (NY: Stewart, Tabori & Chang); one of several essayists of the book 'Of Heaven and Earth,' edited by Zecharia Sitchin (The Book Tree, 1996, published also in Germany); and commentator for the DVD 'Ultimate UFO! - The Complete Evidence' (Central Park Media, 2000).
Huneeus has lectured at dozens of Conferences in the Americas, Europe and Asia during the past 18 years, including throughout the USA, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Japan and South Korea. He received the "Ufologist of the Year" award at the National UFO Conference in Miami Beach in 1990; the 1991 annual award of the New York Fortean Society; and the In Memoriam Colman S. von Keviczky medal (international category) in 2000, awarded by UFO Magazine in Budapest, Hungary. He has served for many years as International Coordinator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
In addition to his UFO endeavors, Huneeus worked for many years as a science journalist with emphasis in space-related issues and also the environment. He was science editor for the weekly magazine Que Pasa in Santiago, Chile, in the 1970s, and wrote a weekly science column in the 1980s for the New York City Tribune and the Hispanic NY daily Noticias del Mundo. He was born in 1950 in New York, the son of a Chilean diplomat and United Nations official. He studied French language and civilization at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1970, Journalism at the University of Chile in Santiago in 1972-73, and took a course on Communications Theory at the Catholic University in Santiago in 1974. He is fully fluent in Spanish, French and English, and has some understanding of Portuguese and Italian.
<<<
The Fine Art of Propaganda
>>> Institute for Propaganda Analysis - Hadley Cantril
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Cantril
Hadley Cantril
Born
1906
Hyrum, Utah
Died
28 May 1969
Alma mater
Dartmouth College
Harvard University
Occupation
Psychologist, researcher
Spouse(s)
Mavis L. Cantril
Hadley Cantril (1906–1969) Was a Princeton University psychologist who expanded the scope of the field.
Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view."[1] His influence is felt in education, law, philosophy, politics and psychiatry.[1]
"Hadley Cantril, Princeton psychologist, is representative of most quantitative scholars of social influence who, while holding their political commitments close to the vest, nevertheless saw themselves clearly in the ranks of reformers loosely attached to the progressive movement…. Focus on social process and a psychological view of people put the academic scientists of society in a frame of mind to assume the polis languished chiefly because of inaction on the part of enlightened administrators."[2]:74
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Public opinion research
3 Works
4 References
Biography[edit]
Cantril was born in Hyrum, Utah in 1906 and first studied at Dartmouth College, graduating Bachelor of Science in 1928. He did graduate study in Munich and Berlin, then studied at Harvard graduating with Doctor of Philosophy in psychology in 1931. He was hired as an instructor by Dartmouth and joined the Princeton University faculty in 1936. The next year he became president of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and one of the founding editors of Public Opinion Quarterly. Later be became chairman of the Princeton University Department of Psychology.[1]
Cantril was a member of the Princeton Radio Research Project. The Project looked at the reaction to Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds and published a study accenting the public's disturbance.[3]
In 1940 he served as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.[4]
Cantril's later psychological work included collaboration with Adelbert Ames, Jr. developing a transactional method for studying human perception, as well as other research in humanistic psychology.[5]:389–90
Public opinion research[edit]
Though trained as a psychologist, Cantril's most important work concerned the then-new topic of public opinion research. Influenced initially by the success of George Gallup and Elmo Roper during the 1936 presidential election, Cantril sought to apply their systematic polling technique to academic social psychology.[5]:388 While Hadley Cantril was department chairman he became a presidential advisor:
Cantril’s small-scale program at Princeton became more extensive in September 1940 when Nelson Rockefeller, FDR’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked the Princeton psychologist to "set up mechanisms which would guage public opinion in Latin America." In cooperation with Gallup, and with funds from the Office of Emergency Management, Cantril established an ostensibly independent research organization, American Social Surveys. He recruited his friend Leonard Doob, and another researcher Lloyd Free, to analyse Nazi propaganda coming into Latin America. Through Rockefeller’s office, the results of Cantril’s program were brought to the attention of FDR. The president asked Cantril to monitor public sentiment on avoiding war verses aiding Britain. Cantril duely kept tabs on views about aiding England and on the public’s willingness to change U.S. neutrality laws in favor of Britain.[2]
In 1942 Cantril conducted a small-sample survey of Vichy officials in Morocco, prior to Operation Torch, that revealed the intensity of the anti-British sentiment of the French forces there. This information influenced the disposition of forces during the operation, with American troops landing near Casablanca and mixed forces at Oran and Algiers.[5]:389[6]
In 1955 he and Lloyd Free founded the Institute for International Social Research (IISR).[7] The IISR was often asked by United States government agencies to conduct small-sample public opinion polls in foreign countries.[8] Notably, Cantril and Free conducted a poll of Cuba during 1960 demonstrating great support for Fidel Castro, which was overlooked during the presidential transition between Eisenhower and Kennedy and read only after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco.[7]
Cantril's most-cited work is The Pattern of Human Concerns, notable for the development of the self-anchoring scale (also known as "Cantril's Ladder").[9] Cantril and Free also first discovered the paradox that American voters tend to oppose "big government" in general while supporting many specific liberal social programs.[7]
During the late 1950s, Cantril served on the International Objectives and Strategies panel of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Special Studies Project.[10]
Works[edit]
1934: Social Psychology of Everyday Life
1935:(with Gordon Allport) Psychology of Radio from Internet Archive
1939: Industrial Conflict: a Psychological Interpretation,
1940: The Invasion from Mars, a Study in the Psychology of Panic
1940: America Faces the War, a Study in Public Opinion
1941: Psychology of Social Movements from HathiTrust
1944: Gauging Public Opinion, Princeton University Press, via Internet Archive
1947: (with Muzafer Sherif) Psychology of ego-involvements : social attitudes & identifications via HathiTrust
1950: The "Why" of Man's Experience, 1950
1950: Tensions that cause wars (a report for UNESCO), 1950
1951: (with Mildred Strunk) Public Opinion, 1935–1946, massive compilation of many public opinion polls from the USA; also some polls from Europe and Canada online
1953: (with William Buchanan) How Nations See Each Other, a study in public opinion
1954: (with William H. Ittelson) Perception: a Transactional Approach
1956: On Understanding the French Left
1958: Faith, Hope, and Heresy: the Psychology of the Protest Voter via HathiTrust
1958: Politics of Despair via HathiTrust
1960: Reflections on the Human Venture
1960: Soviet Leaders and Mastery over Man
1961: Human Nature and Political Systems
1965: Pattern of Human Concerns
1967: (with L. A. Free) Political beliefs of Americans; a study of public opinion
1967: The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research
1988: (Albert H. Cantril, editor) Psychology, Humanism, and Scientific Inquiry: the Selected Essays of Hadley Cantril
References[edit]
1.^ Jump up to: a b c F. P. Kilpatrick (November 1969) "Hadley Cantril – The Transactional Point of View", Journal of Individual Psychology 25: 219–25, reprinted as Epilogue, pages 229–34, in Albert H. Cantril, editor (1988) Psychology, Humanism and Scientific Inquiry, Transaction Books ISBN 0-88738-176-6
2.^ Jump up to: a b J. Michael Sproule (1997) Propaganda and Democracy, page 184, Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-47022-6
3.Jump up ^ Hadley Cantril, Hazel Gaudet, and Herta Herzog (1940) The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic: with the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast, Princeton University Press
4.Jump up ^ Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States. United States Government Printing Office. 1940. p. 3244. "and a special consultant for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter- American Affairs"
5.^ Jump up to: a b c John Gray Geer (2004) Public opinion and polling around the world: a historical encyclopedia, Volume 1, ABC-CLIO ISBN 9781576079119
6.Jump up ^ Stuart Oskamp, P. Wesley Schultz (2005). Attitudes and Opinions. Routledge. p. 314. ISBN 0-8058-4769-3.
7.^ Jump up to: a b c "Lloyd A. Free, 88, is dead; Revealed Political Paradox", New York Times, November 14, 1996.
8.Jump up ^ "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A." New York Times, December 26, 1976
9.Jump up ^ Understanding How Gallup uses the Cantril Scale from Gallup
10.Jump up ^ Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports. Doubleday. 1961.
<<<
>>> Early “Psychological Warfare” Research and the Rockefeller Foundation
By James F. Tracy
Global Research,
April 29, 2012
http://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594?print=1
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
The Rockefeller Foundation was the principle source for funding public opinion and psychological warfare research between the late 1930s and the end of World War Two. With limited government and corporate interest or support of propaganda-related studies, most of the money for such research came from this powerful organization that recognized the importance of ascertaining and steering public opinion in the immediate prewar years.
Rockefeller philanthropic attention toward public opinion was twofold: 1) to review and establish the psychological environment in the United States for anticipated US involvement in the coming world war and 2) to wage psychological warfare and suppress popular dissent in foreign countries, particularly Latin America. Recognizing how the Franklin Roosevelt Administration was bogged down politically and less capable of planning for war in terms of domestic and foreign propaganda efforts, Rockefeller Foundation-funded projects and research institutes were established at Princeton University, Stanford University, and the New School for Social Research to monitor and analyze shortwave radio transmissions from abroad.
The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States.
A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks.
Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two.
When the Princeton venture commenced another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at the broadcast network. At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion.
The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.
Pointing to the dearth of “basic information on its formation and operation”, the Foundation thereafter developed an even more concerted interest in understanding public opinion during wartime. “The war in Europe”, the Foundation’s 1939 Report asserted, “has given this country an unusual opportunity for studying the development of public opinion, the changes which opinion undergoes under varying conditions, and the reasons for change.”
Appointing Cantril to the task of revisiting several years of polling and interview data, the Foundation’s leadership concluded that the project
would supply essential facts on the formation and trend of opinion from peace to war time and from one stage to another under the force of successive war crises. It is expected that further analysis of the data will demonstrate the influence of such factors as family relationship, educational experience, and occupation; the group origins of reported intensity of opinion or apparent lack of it on many issues.
Thus as the US entry into World War Two approached, Rockefeller provided $15,000 to Princeton for establishment of the Office of Public Opinion Research. A primary objective of OPOR was to systematically examine how public opinion is forged, the motivating factors behind mass public sentiment toward certain ends and, in Cantril’s words, “follow[ing] the course of American public opinion during the war that had already started in Europe in which I felt the United States would soon be involved.”
In 1940, the Foundation increased the amount of funding devoted to research on public opinion and mass communication to $65,000, with $20,000 apportioned to continuing Cantril’s OPOR. In addition, a $25,000 grant was given to Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs for monitoring and assessing European shortwave radio transmissions, and $20,000 for University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell to launch an institute at the Library of Congress “for more general studies of radio transmissions, the press, and other media.” A similar shortwave monitoring station was set up at Stanford University to assess transmissions from Asia.
Cantril succeeded in predicting voting behavior on important referendums through covert sampling procedures in both the US and Canada. Such achievements brought the young psychologist to the renewed attention of old school tie Nelson Rockefeller, who at the time was a close associate of Franklin Roosevelt. Rockefeller oversaw the State Department’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs office, a US intelligence arm focused mainly on psychological operations in Latin America. Given the American public’s apprehension toward propaganda, titles like the one afforded Rockefeller’s agency were intended to obscure such undertakings.
A foremost concern of Rockefeller was ascertaining public opinion in South America in anticipation of extending Rockefeller banking and oil interests in the region. In Rockefeller’s view, no longer would power be determined by military control over colonies, but rather through the exertion of “soft power”, where the understanding and anticipation of public opinion figured centrally. To this end in the early 1940s Rockefeller helped Cantril and public opinion impresario George Gallup establish American Social Surveys, an ostensibly non-profit entity that carefully assessed public opinion throughout South America.
In 1942 Cantril also began The Research Council, Inc. with initial funding from advertising tycoon Gerard Lambert. Housed at Princeton, the Research Council embarked on a nationwide survey mechanism to monitor public opinion in the US during wartime and in anticipation of the postwar environment. With Nelson Rockefeller acting as intermediary, Roosevelt closely consulted Cantril’s findings in crafting his speeches during the war. The Research Council proceeded to carry out projects for the Psychological Warfare Branch of Military Intelligence in North Africa, the Department of State on US attitudes toward foreign affairs, and the Office of Strategic Services on public opinion in Germany.
Cantril’s Research Council continued its activities for US interests in the postwar period, measuring public opinion in France, Holland and Italy to anticipate and quash popular political and social movements. It was later revealed that for much of its existence the Research Council was being funded by the Central Intelligence Agency via the Rockefeller Foundation, a technique often employed by Rockefeller to support a variety of covert projects.
Nelson Rockefeller was so delighted with Cantril’s continued public opinion analyses 0f European countries that while working as a psychological warfare consultant for President Eisenhower in 1955, he offered the researcher and his associate Lloyd Free with lifetime patronage of $1 million to continue providing such information. “Nelson had always been a great believer in utilizing psychological concepts and tools for the understanding of peoples”, Cantril recalls. With the formidable sum, revealed two decades later in the New York Times to have actually originated from the CIA by way of the Rockefeller Foundation, the researchers founded a nonprofit entity, the Institute for International Social Research, with Rockefeller slated as one of its distinguished trustees.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in domestic persuasion continued apace throughout the war. Between 1938 and 1944, for example, the organization directed a total $250,000 to produce educational and documentary films through the American Film Center. By the late 1940s Foundation officials had developed an even more pronounced interest in opinion management. As the Foundation’s 1948 report read, “An understanding of communication and attitude change is important to our educational system, to those who lead great organizations, and to those who are concerned with political opinion and behavior.” Toward this end the Rockefeller Foundation devoted an unprecedented amount of funding to psychological warfare research. In 1954, for example, a $200,000 grant went to support Yale psychologist Carl Hovland’s attitude change and persuasion studies.
Yet with the Cold War as a backdrop such work was increasingly funded by the US military where often the same social scientific talent was tapped that had been groomed under Rockefeller aegis. As historian Christopher Simpson observes, in the postwar era government funding now accounted for at least 75 percent of Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and Columbia University and Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research at Princeton.
In accord with the more far-reaching educational and social scientific efforts the Rockefeller Foundation saw fit to develop, the elite class to which the Rockefeller family belongs has traditionally failed to distinguish between domestic or foreign subjects as targets for propaganda and behavioral modification. From a perspective that often recognizes national boundaries as obstacles to expanding a certain agenda of political-economic power and control, all are equally subject to similar designs of manipulation and persuasion and the often unwitting acquiescence they cultivate.
One need look no further than the legacy of supporting certain philosophical and pedagogical approaches to US public education from the early 1900s that has resulted in a vast reduction of the quality and scope of educational institutions to recognize how the Rockefeller interest in psychological warfare is but a chapter of a much larger saga. This holds true as well in terms of the Rockefellers’ broader philanthropic activities, which from the days of mollifying an outraged citizenry following the Ludlow massacre and John D. Rockefeller’s famous dime dole outs have constituted a thoroughgoing and carefully coordinated exercise in impression management.
James F. Tracy is professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University.
References
Cantril, Hadley and Gordon Allport. 1935. The Psychology of Radio. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.
Cantril, Hadley. 1940. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
—. 1967. The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Cramer, Gisela. 2009. “The Rockefeller Foundation and Pan-American Radio”, in William J. Buxton (ed.) Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities, pp. 77-99, Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Engdahl, F. William. 2009. Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press.
Gary, Brett. 1999. Propaganda Anxieties From World War I to the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press.
Glander, Timothy R. 1999. Origins of Mass Communication Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications. New York: Routledge.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1969. “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir”, in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, pp. 270-337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Maessen, Jurriaan. 2012. “Documents Reveal Rockefeller Foundation Actively Engaged in Mass Mind-Control”, Infowars.com, 4 March, http://www.infowars.com/documents-reveal-rockefeller-foundation-actively-engaged-in-mass-mind-control/
Pooley, Jefferson. 2008. “The New History of Mass Communication Research”, in Jefferson Pooley and David W. Park (eds.) The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, pp. 43-69. New York: Peter Lang.
Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report – 1939. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/annual-reports/1930-1939
Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report – 1940. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/annual-reports/1940-1949
Simpson, Christopher. 1993. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shaplen, Robert and Arthur Bernon Tourtellot (eds.). 1964. Toward the Well Being of Mankind: Fifty Years of the Rockefeller Foundation. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company.
<<<
>>> Vatican Considers Possibility of Aliens
CBSNews / AP
November 11, 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vatican-considers-possibility-of-aliens/
Vatican Considers Possibility of Aliens
In this July 17, 2008 file photo, Pope Benedict XVI admires the sky above Sydney, Australia. The Vatican has hosted a dayslong conference to study the possibility of alien life in the universe and its implication for the Catholic Church. / AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia
E.T. phone Rome.
Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.
"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology - the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.
Funes said the possibility of alien life raises "many philosophical and theological implications" but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue.
Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said it was appropriate that the Vatican would host such a meeting.
"Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe," he told a news conference Tuesday. "There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe."
Thirty scientists, including non-Catholics, from the U.S., France, Britain, Switzerland, Italy and Chile attended the conference, called to explore among other issues "whether sentient life forms exist on other worlds."
Funes set the stage for the conference a year ago when he discussed the possibility of alien life in an interview given prominence in the Vatican's daily newspaper.
The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically through the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited.
Scientists have discovered hundreds of planets outside our solar system - including 32 new ones announced recently by the European Space Agency. Impey said the discovery of alien life may be only a few years away.
"If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound," he said.
This is not the first time the Vatican has explored the issue of extraterrestrials: In 2005, its observatory brought together top researchers in the field for similar discussions.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said in that interview.
"Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God's creative freedom."
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered "part of creation."
The Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science has come a long way since Galileo was tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant his finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
Today top clergy, including Funes, openly endorse scientific ideas like the Big Bang theory as a reasonable explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.
Earlier this year, the Vatican also sponsored a conference on evolution to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
The event snubbed proponents of alternative theories, like creationism and intelligent design, which see a higher being rather than the undirected process of natural selection behind the evolution of species.
Still, there are divisions on the issues within the Catholic Church and within other religions, with some favoring creationism or intelligent design that could make it difficult to accept the concept of alien life.
Working with scientists to explore fundamental questions that are of interest to religion is in line with the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made strengthening the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.
Recent popes have been working to overcome the accusation that the church was hostile to science - a reputation grounded in the Galileo affair.
In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared the ruling against the astronomer was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."
The Vatican Museums opened an exhibit last month marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first celestial observations.
Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy's national institute of astrophysics, said at the exhibit's Oct. 13 opening that astronomy has had a major impact on the way we perceive ourselves.
"It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don't have a privileged position or role in the universe," he said. "I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they'll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude."
The Vatican Observatory has also been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world's best.
The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has his summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
<<<
>>> The long, strange history of John Podesta’s space alien obsession
Washington Post
By Philip Bump
April 8, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/08/the-long-strange-history-of-john-podestas-space-alien-obsession/?utm_term=.8edc0c6094c8
?
Alien abduction warning signs are posted in the "alien vault" booth during the Black Hat USA 2015 cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)
You know how sometimes you stake out a controversial or weird position solely for effect, using it to troll people you know, and then over time you sort of convince yourself that your position is right? For example, one time I was hanging out with friends and I decided that I was going to tell everyone I hated Stanford. There was no reason for it; it just seemed funny to me. But then I just ... started sort of hating Stanford and its fancy campus and its "oh, we're Ivy League but not weird and old and also no snow" thing. By the time I ended up actually moving to California, I legitimately thought Stanford was pretty lame. A tree mascot? Get over yourselves.
So every time there's a news article about where Hillary Clinton adviser (and former Bill Clinton chief of staff) John Podesta talks about how President Hillary Clinton would release classified information about UFOs -- as he did again on Thursday -- I'm led to wonder. Is he just taking the joke too far? Has he committed so completely to the bit that now he just sort of answers the questions about space aliens without blinking? Or ... does he think that the government has information about visits from outer space that should be shared more widely?
A little history is in order.
During the 1990s, there was an effort by Laurance Rockefeller (of the Rockefeller Rockefellers) to encourage the United States government to release any classified information it had about extraterrestrials, alien spacecraft and UFOs. The effort, referred to as the Rockefeller Initiative by UFO truthers, included meetings between Rockefeller and senior Clinton administration staff. In August of 1995, the Clintons stayed at Rockefeller's ranch in Wyoming, and Hillary was photographed with him while holding a book titled, "Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life." (A large number of documents pertaining to Rockefeller's advocacy on this issue were released under the Freedom of Information Act several years ago.)
The subject was not an uncommon one for the White House at the time. That Christmas, Bill Clinton gave a speech in Belfast, in which he described letters he'd gotten from schoolchildren. He thanked a 13-year-old named Ryan for his letter and did his best to answer Ryan's question. "No," Clinton said, "as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know."
Podesta started as deputy chief of staff for Clinton in 1997 and stayed with the president until the inauguration of George W. Bush. He himself was apparently somewhat obsessed with aliens. In 1998, The Post quoted Press Secretary Mike McCurry. "John can get totally maniacal and phobic on certain subjects," McCurry said. "He's been known to pick up the phone to call the Air Force and ask them what's going on in Area 51."
After Clinton left the White House, Podesta's advocacy continued. In 2002, he spoke at the National Press Club to encourage the government to release whatever information it had about investigations into unidentified flying objects.
Leslie Kean, who wrote a book called "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" -- with a forward from Podesta -- explained that effort in 2015.
"In 2002," Kean and co-author Ralph Blumenthal wrote, "Podesta began publicly supporting what became a landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Freedom of Information, an independent advocacy group. NASA had been stonewalling and refusing to release its records concerning a significant 1965 UFO incident in Kecksburg, PA." Documents were released, but they "did not include one iota of information relating to the Kecksburg case, despite an earnest and thorough effort by NASA staff."
It's apparently those documents to which Podesta was referring when, after a brief stint working in the Obama White House, he tweeted that failing to secure the release of UFO files was his "biggest failure of 2014."
(It's worth noting that under President Obama, the CIA for the first time released information about Area 51, and that Obama was the first president to acknowledge it.)
After Podesta joined Hillary Clinton's campaign last year, the subject came up once again. In December, she told a reporter in Conway, N.H., that she would "get to the bottom" of the UFO issue. Why?
ABC's Jimmy Kimmel raised the subject with Clinton during an appearance at the end of last month -- as he had with her husband and with President Obama. Kimmel noted that Bill Clinton had looked into the issue -- in particular about Area 51, as he said to Ryan in Belfast -- and asked what she would do.
Clinton pledged, again, to release whatever information the government had that could be released.
Which brings us back to the conversation between Podesta and CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday. "What I've talked to the secretary about, and what she's said now in public," he said, "is that if she's elected president, when she gets into office, she'll ask for as many records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that's a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to."
UFO theorists would demand that we look at the evidence at hand. And that evidence seems clear: Podesta is not joking about his interest in alien life. It's not necessarily clear that he knows that there is evidence of alien life buried in a giant wooden box in some government warehouse, but it's clear that he thinks that what does exist should be made public.
Or that he's really, really committed to the bit.
<<<
>>> China launches first domestically-built aircraft carrier
4-26-17
Reuters
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-launches-first-domestically-built-aircraft-carrier/ar-BBAnvI9?OCID=ansmsnnews11
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a newly-built aircraft carrier is transferred from dry dock into the water at a launch ceremony in Dalian in northeastern China's… China launched its first domestically built aircraft carrier on Wednesday amid rising tension over North Korea and worries about Beijing's assertiveness in the South China Sea.
State media has quoted military experts as saying the carrier, China's second and built in the northeastern port of Dalian, is not expected to enter service until 2020, once it has been kitted out and armed. Foreign military analysts and Chinese media have for months published satellite images, photographs and news stories about the second carrier's development.
China confirmed its existence in late 2015. The launch "shows our country's indigenous aircraft carrier design and construction has achieved major step-by-step results," Xinhua news agency said. State television showed the carrier, its deck lined in red flags, being pushed by tug boats into its berth.
Fan Changlong, a vice chairman of China's powerful Central Military Commission, presided over the ceremony, Xinhua said, during which a bottle of champagne was broken on the bow.
The launch follows China's celebration on Sunday of the 68th birthday of the founding of the Chinese navy, and comes amid renewed tensions between North Korea and the United States over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs.
Little is known about China's aircraft carrier program, which is a state secret. But the government has said the new carrier's design draws on experiences from the country's first carrier, the Liaoning, bought second-hand from Ukraine in 1998 and refitted in China.
The new conventionally powered carrier will be able to operate China's Shenyang J-15 fighter jets. Unlike the U.S. navy's longer-range nuclear carriers, both of China's feature Soviet-design ski-jump bows, intended to give fighter jets enough lift to take off from their shorter decks. But they lack the powerful catapult technology for launching aircraft of their U.S. counterparts.
'NO NEED' TO MATCH THE UNITED STATES
China's navy has been taking an increasingly prominent role in recent months, with a rising star admiral taking command, its first aircraft carrier sailing around self-ruled Taiwan and new Chinese warships popping up in far-flung places.
The Liaoning has taken part in military exercises, including in the South China Sea, but is expected to serve more as a training vessel. State media has said the new carrier will be more dedicated to military and humanitarian operations.
China claims almost all the South China Sea, believed to have huge deposits of oil and gas, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year, and has been building up military facilities like runways on the islands it controls. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims.
Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own, has said China is actually building two new aircraft carriers, but China has not officially confirmed the existence of another carrier. Chinese state media has quoted experts as saying that the country needs at least six carriers. The United States operates 10 and plans to build two more.
Major General Chen Zhou, a researcher at the Academy of Military Science, told reporters in March that China would not exceed the United States in carrier groups. "China has no need for this," he said.
Sam Roggeveen, a senior fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute, said that by the time China had half that number, it could go toe-to-toe with the U.S. navy in the Asia-Pacific.
"Given that the Americans have global obligations and responsibilities but China doesn't, then effectively by that point they would be evenly matched," Roggeveen said.
Most experts agree that developing such a force will be a decades-long endeavor but the launch of the second carrier holds a certain prestige value for Beijing, seen by many analysts as keen to eventually erode U.S. military prominence in the region.
"With two aircraft carriers you could say without much fear of contradiction that China, other than the United States, is the most powerful maritime force in the Asia-Pacific," Roggeveen said. <<<
>>> North Korea’s display of new missiles is worrying, analysts say <<<
(North Korea has both nukes and missiles that can hit the US, and we've spent the last decade worried about Iran, who has neither. Make sense, sheesh..)
>>> North Korea’s display of new missiles is worrying, analysts say
The Washington Post
Anna Fifield
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/north-korea%e2%80%99s-display-of-new-missiles-is-worrying-analysts-say/ar-BBzRPO0?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
TOKYO — North Korea put on a huge military spectacle Saturday to celebrate its founder’s birthday, parading its series of new and technologically advanced missiles in front of Kim Jong Un, and in a defiant show of force in front of the world.
North Korea did not, however, carry out another nuclear test or ballistic missile launch, against widespread speculation that it would seek to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s 105th birthday with a bang.
April 15 is the most important day in the North Korean calendar, and Kim Jong Un has celebrated his grandfather’s birthday with great fanfare as a way to boost his own legitimacy as the successor to the communist dynasty.
North Korea presented two of its newest model missiles at the parade in Kim Il Sung Square on Saturday, including the submarine-launched ballistic type it successfully fired last year and the land-based version it launched last month.
“And there were a lot of them,” said Melissa Hanham, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. “The signal that they’re trying to send is that they are moving ahead with solid-fuel missiles.”
North Korea has been working on solid fuel — which, unlike liquid fuel, can be preloaded into missiles — as a way to fire missiles quickly to avoid prior detection by satellites.
Analysts were working to identify all the missiles that were shown off on Saturday, many of which appeared to have new paint jobs or be variants of known missiles.
One of the missiles looked similar to the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea had included in previous parades. This missile has a theoretical range of about 7,500 miles, which is enough to reach all of the United States from North Korea, said Joshua Pollack, editor of the Nonproliferation Review.
It also put two ICBM canisters, which protect solid-fueled missiles from the effects of the environment, on the trucks that had carried the ICBMs previously. One may have been a KN-14, another missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, although it has a slightly shorter range.
The trucks that carried the missile canisters were Chinese ones that have been exported to North Korea’s Forestry Ministry but have shown up in military parades like this one.
Saturday’s display was worrying, Hanham said.
“They have an indigenous tank system now, so they have more launchers, and they have solid fuel, which means they can launch a lot more of these things in quick succession without having to refuel,” she said.
The overall message to the world was that North Korea was pressing ahead with its missiles and making technological progress.
The parade took place amid stern warnings from the outside world and mounting fears about some kind of military action in the region. China has been particularly vocal in warning both sides to remain calm.
The United States has sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the Korean Peninsula region, and President Trump has repeatedly tweeted that if China will not use its leverage to rein in North Korea, the United States will act.
Vice President Pence arrives in Seoul on Sunday on the first leg of an Asia tour, and he will underscore Washington’s strong alliances with South Korea and Japan and its determination to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump administration officials describe the situation as more dangerous than in the past, because of the progress North Korea has made in its nuclear weapon and missile programs and because of the hostility on both sides. But U.S. officials said no decision has been made about how to respond to any new test — nuclear or ballistic — by North Korea.
While officials do not rule out other actions, they also stress their desire to ensure that the situation does not escalate out of control. Pentagon officials denied recent media reports that the Trump administration is ready to launch a preemptive strike if North Korea appears to be about to conduct a nuclear test.
North Korea has a habit of fueling tensions to increase the rewards it might extract from the outside world if it desists. Previously, the North has agreed to return to denuclearization talks in return for aid or the easing of sanctions.
But with his approach, Trump is tearing up the old playbook of how to deal with North Korea, analysts said.
“This approach to North Korea is relatively new,” said James Kim of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “The approach in the past has been very calculated.”
That has gone out the window with talk about military options, he said. “We always knew all these options were there, but no one was bold enough to go down that path. It’s a new approach.”
Right now, Trump has some cards to play, said Kim of the Asan Institute.
“He might say: ‘If you want one less battleship in the region, what are you going to give me?’?” he said — a reversal of the usual situation, in which North Korea asks what it can get from its adversaries in return for changing its behavior.
Simon Denyer in Beijing contributed to this report.
<<<
>>> Laser weapons edge toward use in US military
Laurent BARTHELEMY
4-8-17
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/laser-weapons-edge-toward-use-in-us-military/ar-BBzybp9?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce© Provided by AFP The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce
A sci-fi staple for decades, laser weapons are finally becoming reality in the US military, albeit with capabilities a little less dramatic than at the movies.
Lightsabers -- the favored weapon of the Jedi in "Star Wars" films -- will remain in the fictional realm for now, but after decades of development, laser weapons are now here and are being deployed on military vehicles and planes.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon -- all the big defense players -- are developing prototypes for the Pentagon.
The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce.
Lockheed Martin has just announced a 60-kilowatt laser weapon that soon will be installed on an Army truck for operational testing against mortars and small drones.
The weapon can take out a drone from a distance of about 500 yards (meters) by keeping its beam locked onto the target for a few seconds, Jim Murdoch, an international business development director at Lockheed, told reporters this week.
But unlike in the movies, the laser beam is invisible to the naked eye.
By focusing the beam onto a target, the technology rapidly heats the inside of an incoming mortar round, causing it to explode mid-air. An impressive feat considering the round is moving at hundreds of miles per hour.
The laser weapon can also pierce the outer skin of a drone, taking out key circuits and making it crash.
For the moment, the lasers being tested are all of about this same power.
- Defeating a missile -
Unlike conventional canons that need shells, laser canons are limited only by the amount of electricity that can be generated© Provided by AFP Unlike conventional canons that need shells, laser canons are limited only by the amount of electricity that can be generated
Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, sees that relatively small output increasing rapidly.
Within just a few years, he expects far more powerful prototypes of more than 150 kilowatts.
Such a laser could knock out a missile sideways on, where it is most vulnerable.
He said special operations forces want to test such a system by 2020 on an AC-130 gunship that specializes in ground support for troops.
And within six to eight years, US forces could begin using laser systems of more than 300 kilowatts, he added.
That degree of power could knock out an incoming missile head-on. Eventually, reality will increasingly catch up with fiction.
The US military is also weighing the possibility of mounting lasers on drones flying at very high altitudes, making them capable of shooting down ballistic missiles shortly after launch.
Another bonus for the military from lasers is the promise of seemingly unending and cheap firepower.
Unlike conventional canons that need shells, laser canons are limited only by the amount of electricity that can be generated.
Gunzinger deems lasers as especially promising on warplanes, which could potentially get an unlimited reservoir of firepower to defend against adversaries' missiles.
"An aircraft doesn't have to return to base to upload more weapons. It could refuel and continue to operate with its nearly unlimited magazine," he said.
- Physical constraints -
But before laser technology can be integrated into combat planes, it must first be shrunk in size.
Currently engineers are running into physical limitations on how much portable power can be produced and ways of cooling the technology.
Lockheed wants to increase the power of its truck-mounted laser.
"For a vehicle like this, there will be some engineering limits," said Murdoch.
"We will run out of space ... that's the kind of challenge we are working."
But industry reps and military officials say there's only one thing stopping lasers from garnering widespread operational use: government funding.
Congress is cautious. Lawmakers recall a lengthy program that cost more than $5 billion in which a Boeing 747 was retrofitted to carry a laser gun supposedly capable of shooting down enemy missiles.
The program was scrapped in 2012 over concerns it could never be operationally viable.
The laser beam used in that technology was generated by chemicals so was not strong enough to take out a missile.
<<<
>>> South Korea to “strongly deal” with North Korea missile launch as US troops flood region
By Daily Star -
April 5, 2017
https://reportuk.org/2017/04/05/south-korea-to-strongly-deal-with-north-korea-missile-launch-as-ustroops-flood-region/
North Korean war bosses launched the missile towards Japan as US troops, warships and helicopters amass on the doorstep of the totalitarian state.
The projectile was fired from the eastern Sinpo region less than 24 hours after Pyongyang threatened to take “eventful steps” against the US.
But the launch is thought to be a warning shot and did not pose a threat to American troops, the US military confirmed.
US ally South Korea has lashed out at the communist nation over the launch on Wednesday into the sea off the Korean Peninsula.
Seoul officials warned Kim Jong-un that continued missile provocations will lead to the “self destruction” of his regime.
In a statement the foreign ministry said: “Our government strongly condemns this [latest missile test] in that it is an outright challenge to a series of UN Security Council resolutions and an act that poses a threat to peace and security not just on the Korean Peninsula but also to the whole world.”
A spokesperson added: “The North Korean regime should squarely see that these reckless provocations along with the recent assassination of Kim Jong-nam with a chemical weapon would strengthen the push for sanctions and punitive measures and eventually accelerate its path toward self-destruction.”
Japanese cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga confirmed the missile landed in Japanese waters but only flew 10km.
He condemned the launch and pledged to “file a grave protest against North Korea”.
He added: “Our country … won’t tolerate repeated provocative actions by North Korea.”
Crisis talks between US and China are taking place this week after Donald Trump pledged to “solve North Korea”.
<<<
>>> FT exclusive: Trump ready to tackle North Korea alone
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ft-exclusive-trump-ready-to-tackle-north-korea-alone/ar-BBzdaVC?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Donald Trump has warned that the US will take unilateral action to eliminate the nuclear threat from North Korea unless China increases pressure on the regime in Pyongyang.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the US president said he would discuss the growing threat from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear programme with Xi Jinping when he hosts the Chinese president at his Florida resort this week, in their first meeting.
“China has great influence over North Korea. And China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t,” Mr Trump said in the Oval Office. “If they do, that will be very good for China, and if they don’t, it won’t be good for anyone.”
But he made clear that he would deal with North Korea with or without China’s help. Asked if he would consider a “grand bargain” — where China pressures Pyongyang in exchange for a guarantee that the US would later remove troops from the Korean peninsula — Mr Trump said: “Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you.”
The White House views North Korea as the most imminent threat to the US after Barack Obama warned his successor about the progress Pyongyang had made developing long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.
“There is a real possibility that North Korea will be able to hit the US with a nuclear-armed missile by the end of the first Trump term,” KT McFarland, the deputy White House national security adviser, told the FT in a separate interview.
While Mr Trump is increasingly worried about North Korea, his view on Europe has moderated. He stressed that Brexit would be a “great deal for [the] UK and?.?.?.?really good for the European Union” but said he was less convinced that other countries would follow the UK out of the EU. “I think that it [the centre] is really holding. I think they have done a better job since Brexit.”
Ahead of the US-China summit, Mr Trump raised hopes that he would reach some kind of deal with Mr Xi, despite heavy criticism about China’s trade surplus and exchange rate policy. “I have great respect for him. I have great respect for China. I would not be at all surprised if we did something that would be very dramatic and good for both countries and I hope so.”
The National Security Council has completed a review of options on North Korea that Mr Trump ordered after his inauguration, according to two people familiar with the review. One of those people said the review had been accelerated to have the options ready for the Trump-Xi summit.
Mr Trump said it was “totally” possible for the US to tackle North Korea without China. Asked if that meant dealing with Pyongyang one on one, he said: “I don’t have to say any more. Totally.”
Barring a pre-emptive strike on North Korea — which the administration will not rule out since all options are on the table — many experts believe the US needs Chinese help as Beijing has the most sway over Pyongyang. But Washington could consider alternatives, ranging from more effective sanctions to various kinds of more controversial covert action.
“What President Trump is trying to do here is to press the Chinese hard by warning them what comes next if they don’t help or join with the US to deal with this problem,” said Dennis Wilder, a former CIA China analyst who later served as the top White House Asia aide to George W Bush.
“What he is signalling is that the next step is to begin secondary sanctions, which we have avoided. They are sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals who deal with North Korea,” he added.
Mr Wilder said Mr Trump could also pressure China not to use North Korean labour, which is a source of revenue for Pyongyang. “Then you get to the other options, which are much more controversial, like taking covert action against North Korea, for example using cyber.”
The mounting concerns about North Korea were underscored recently when Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, said during a visit to Asia that the previous US “policy of strategic patience has ended”.
China has also raised alarms about the increasingly dangerous situation on the Korean peninsula. Last month, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, called on North Korea to halt its missile and nuclear programmes, while urging the US to stop military exercises that anger Pyongyang. “The two sides are like two accelerating trains coming towards each other with neither side willing to give way. The question is, are the two sides really ready for a head-on collision?” Mr Wang said.
<<<
Fort Meade, Maryland -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_George_G._Meade
>>> Fort George G. Meade
Fort George G. Meade
Military installation
Part of
Intelligence and Security Command
Borders on
W: National Cryptologic Museum,
W: National Vigilance Park,
W: Training School Cemetery
Area
7.92 sq mi (20.5 km2) [1]
- CDP 6.6 sq mi (17.1 km2)
Population
48,008 CDP residents
dependants: 6,000[1]
42,133 employed (2010)
military: ˜10,689[1]
NSA: >20,000[5]
DISA: 4000[6]
Access
Controlled
Fort Meade is along the Baltimore–Washington Parkway near the Baltimore/Washington airport
Fort George G. Meade[4] is a United States Army installation located in Maryland, that includes the Defense Information School, the Defense Media Activity, the United States Army Field Band, and the headquarters of United States Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Defense Courier Service, and Defense Information Systems Agency headquarters. It is named for George G. Meade, a general from the U.S. Civil War, who served as commander of the Army of the Potomac. The fort's smaller census-designated place includes support facilities such as schools, housing, and the offices of the Military Intelligence Civilian Excepted Career Program (MICECP).
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Contents [hide]
1 History 1.1 Cold War air defense
1.2 Expansion
1.3 Hazardous waste
1.4 Defense Information Systems Agency
1.5 Defense Information School
1.6 Security incidents
2 Geography
3 Museums
4 Gallery
5 References
History[edit]
For the 1898 Camp Meade[7] at Middletown PA and the "Meadeboro" camp near the Pickett's Charge field, see Harrisburg ANGB and 1913 Gettysburg reunion.
Initially called Camp Annapolis Junction, the post was opened as "Camp Admiral" in 1917 on 29.7 sq mi (77 km2) acquired for a training camp. The post was called Camp Meade Cantonment and Field Signal School by 1918,[8] and in 1919, the Camp Benning tank school—formed from the World War I Camp Colt and Tobyhanna schools—was transferred to the fort before the Tank Corps was disbanded.[9] Renamed to Fort Leonard Wood (February 1928[10] – March 5, 1929),[11] the fort's Experimental Motorized Forces in the summer and fall of 1928 tested vehicles and tactics in expedition convoys (Camp Meade observers had joined the in-progress 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy). In 1929, the fort's 1st Tank Regiment encamped on the Gettysburg Battlefield.[12] During World War II, Fort Meade was used as a recruit training post and prisoner of war camp, in addition to a holding center for approximately 384 Japanese, German and Italian immigrant residents of the U.S. arrested as potential fifth columnists. The Second U.S. Army Headquarters transferred to the post on June 15, 1947;[11] and in the 1950s,[specify] the post became headquarters of the National Security Agency.
Cold War air defense[edit]
From the 1950s until the 1970s, the Fort Meade radar station had various radar equipment and control systems for air defense (e.g., the 1st Martin AN/FSG-I Antiaircraft Defense System).[13] Fort Meade also had the first Nike Ajax surface-to-air missiles in December 1953 (operational May 1954)[14] and an accidental firing occurred in 1955 with Battery C, 36th AAA Missile Battalion. In 1962, the Army's Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 13th Air Defense Artillery Group, transferred from Meade to Homestead AFB for initial deployment of MIM-23 Hawk missiles, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 6th Battalion (HAWK), 65th Artillery at Fort Meade (a United States Strike Command unit) was deployed to the Miami/Key West area [15] (the 8th Battalion (Hawk) was at the fort in late 1964.)[16] Fort Meade bomb disposal experts were dispatched to secure nuclear bombs in the 1964 Savage Mountain B-52 crash.
Expansion[edit]
In 1977, a merger organized the fort's U.S. Army Intelligence Agency as part of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command. On 1 October 1991, a wing of the Air Force Intelligence Command transferred to Fort Meade, and the organization was replaced by[not in citation given] the 70th Operations Group on May 1, 2005.[17] In the early 1990s, 12.7 sq mi (33 km2) was transferred from the post to the Patuxent Research Refuge.[18] A planned closure of the post in the 1990s was not implemented,[when?] and the Defense Information School moved to the fort in 1995.[19] The 311th Signal Command headquarters was at Fort Meade from 1996 – September 2006. The 70th Intelligence Wing headquarters was established at Fort Meade on July 17, 2000, and the Base Realignment and Closure, 2005, designated Fort Meade to gain ˜5,700 positions making it the third largest workforce of any Army installation.[20]
Hazardous waste[edit]
After an August 27, 2007, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency order to assess the contamination at 14 hazardous waste sites on Fort Meade (e.g., ordnance disposal area, 1940s waste dump, closed sanitary landfill),[18] a September 2007 environmental impact report identified adding 2 golf courses would be a "significant threat to the biological and territorial integrity of the Patuxent Research Refuge" (the Army responded it is taking steps[specify] to limit the environmental damage.)[21]
Defense Information Systems Agency[edit]
After United States Cyber Command was established at the post in 2009; on April 15, 2011, the Defense Information Systems Agency ribbon-cutting for the move from Arlington, Virginia, was at the agency's Fort Meade complex of 95 acres (38 ha).[6]
Defense Information School[edit]
The consolidation of the Defense Information School and the Defense Visual Information School in fiscal 1996 and further consolidation with the Defense Photography School in fiscal 1998 created a single focal point in the Department of Defense for these specialties fields. Advancements in information technology and recent base realignment and closure initiatives have contributed to the evolution of the school. The result is a single school proud of its historical roots and dedicated to serving the diverse requirements for public affairs, broadcasting and visual information.[6]
Security incidents[edit]
Alleged gunman Hong Young was arrested in connection with shootings at five public places in Maryland, including an NSA building, theaters and occupied vehicles in late February 2015. No motive has been established but his estranged wife attributed his behavior to mental issues, and he told police he heard voices telling him to shoot at a random driver.[22]
On March 30, 2015, National Security Agency police officers shot and killed a person who attempted to drive an SUV through a restricted entrance to the NSA campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. A second passenger in the SUV was injured, as was an officer, and both were treated at a hospital. President Obama was briefed but the FBI determined "we do not believe it is related to terrorism."[23]
Geography[edit]
Fort Meade is bordered by the Baltimore–Washington Parkway on the west and is about 5 miles (8.0 km) east of Interstate 95. It is located between Washington, DC and Baltimore. It is located in proximity to Columbia, Jessup, Laurel, Severn, Hanover, and Seven Oaks.[1]
Museums[edit]
For the NSA-related museum outside of this post, see National Cryptologic Museum.
The Fort George G. Meade Museum exhibits the Post's historical artifacts, including uniforms, insignia and equipment.[24] The Museum also has a small collection of vehicles, including an FT-17, a MK VIII Liberty Tank, an M3A1 Stuart, an M4A3E8 Sherman, an M41 Walker Bulldog, an M47 Patton, armored personnel carriers such as an M113, M114 and M84, a Nike Ajax missile, and a UH-1H helicopter.
<<<
>>> Rex Tillerson: Pre-emptive military action against North Korea is an option <<<
(Now that would tank the stock market, and Trump is just the guy to do it..
Looking back historically (early 1990s), it was the US who actually gave North Korea their light water reactors (Pakistan also got their nuclear technology from us). The excuse given with North Korea was that it would discourage them from developing heavy water reactors, which are more easily used to produce bombs.
The real reason though was to create a boogey man in Asia that would, among other things, force Japan to stay under the protection of the US' nuclear umbrella. Over the years every time Japan begins to become too friendly with China (thereby threatening the Japan-US special relationship), North Korea lobs a few missiles into the Sea of Japan, and Japan scurries back into the US fold.
But now North Korea will soon be able to miniaturize their nuclear devices sufficiently to fit on the long range missiles they have. They already have missiles that can hit the West Coast of the US. So the time is fast approaching where the US will have to neutralize the North Korean threat that we helped create) -
>>> Rex Tillerson: Pre-emptive military action against North Korea is an option
By David Caplan
Mar 17, 2017
The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/International/rex-tillerson-military-action-north-korea-option-table/story?id=46196141
Rex Tillerson: Military action against North Korea is an option 'on the table'
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says pre-emptive military action against North Korea is possible "if they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action."
"All of the options are on the table," Tillerson said when asked at a press conference Friday with South Korean foreign minister Yun Byung-se in Seoul whether he would rule out military conflict against North Korea.
His comments came after a visit to the militarized border between South Korea and North Korea and a day before the U.S. secretary of state is to arrive in Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials.
As if to underline Tillerson's remarks, President Trump later on Friday tweeted that "North Korea is behaving very badly" and that "China has done little to help."
Tillerson said in Seoul that the U.S. does not want to engage in a military conflict. "But obviously if North Korea takes actions that threatens South Korean forces or our own forces, that would be met with (an) appropriate response. If they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action that option is on the table."
Referring to how the Obama administration hoped sanctions would cripple North Korea to the point where it would renew de-nuclearization negotiations, Tillerson added, "Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended."
He also emphasized that the U.S. had no plans to curtail its military activities in the region.
"We don't believe conditions are right for talks and we have no intention of ending military exercises," he said.
<<<
>>> Masters of War
Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
___________________________
>>> 20 companies profiting the most from war
24/7 Wall St.
by Samuel Stebbins and Thomas C. Frohlich
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/20-companies-profiting-the-most-from-war/ar-AAmTAzm#page=21
1. Lockheed Martin
> Arms sales: $36.44 billion
> Total sales: $46.13 billion
> Profit: $3.61 billion
> Employees: 126,000
Maintaining its position as the world’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin's revenue from arms sales totaled $36.44 billion in 2015. The company’s reach into military and defense technology is difficult to overstate. Lockheed and its subsidiaries manufacture many of the U.S. military’s workhorses, including the F-16 and F-22 fighter jets, the Black Hawk helicopter, and the Vector Hawk unmanned drone. The company also designs and manufactures air-to-air missiles and missile defense systems.
Like many other major defense contractors, Lockheed’s biggest customer is the U.S. government -- accounting for 78% of the company’s 2015 net sales, the vast majority of which came from the DoD.
2. Boeing
> Arms sales: $27.96 billion
> Total sales: $96.11 billion
> Profit: $5.18 billion
> Employees: 161,400
Chicago-based Boeing is not nearly as dependent on federal spending as other major U.S. contractors. Less than one-third of Boeing’s 2015 revenue of $96.11 billion came from its defense, space, and security operations. The remainder was attributable to Boeing’s commercial airplane business. Of the revenue generated from defense contracts, 62% came from sales to the U.S. DoD.
Like many large U.S. manufacturing companies, including top government contractors, widely expected higher military spending under President Trump will certainly help Boeing. Favorable outcomes under Trump are not guaranteed, however. While the Air Force signed deals with Boeing last year to design parts of Air Force One, for example, Trump, citing concerns over cost, called for the deal to be cancelled.
3. BAE Systems (UK)
> Arms sales: $25.51 billion
> Total sales: $27.36 billion
> Profit: $1.46 billion
> Employees: 82,500
Some 93% of BAE Systems’ $27.36 billion in 2015 revenue came from defense contracts. The company manufactures a range of military equipment, including war ships, munitions, amphibious combat vehicles, and fighter jets. BAE is the company behind the Harrier jet, capable of take-off with a short runway, as well as vertical landings. Cyber security and intelligence services also comprise a small share of the company’s business.
Though BAE Systems is headquartered in the U.K., deals with the British government comprise less than a quarter of the company’s annual revenue. BAE’s biggest clients are in the United States, with corporate and government contracts comprising over a third of the company’s total 2015 revenue. BAE’s other major markets include Australia and Saudi Arabia.
4. Raytheon
> Arms sales: $21.78 billion
> Total sales: $23.25 billion
> Profit: $2.07 billion
> Employees: 61,000
Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon is known for its missiles and missile defense systems. According to the company, 13 countries use primarily Raytheon air and missile defense. This January, the U.S. Navy awarded Raytheon a $235 million contract to supply missiles for Aegis cruisers and destroyers.
Raytheon purchased cybersecurity provider Websense in 2015 for $1.9 billion. The deal was an indication of the growing threat of cyberattacks, as well as Raytheon’s effort to diversify and move into commercial markets and away from dependence on defense contracts.
5. Northrop Grumman
> Arms sales: $20.06 billion
> Total sales: $23.26 billion
> Profit: $2.0 billion
> Employees: 65,000
Northrop Grumman was awarded in October 2015 the highly coveted $80 billion contract to supply the U.S. military with 100 long-range strike bombers. The deal is the biggest from the Pentagon in more than a decade. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the predecessor of the newly named B-21 Raider.
The company's 2015 arms sales, valued at $23.26 billion, included $1.8 billion for the F-35 fighter jet program, $1.1 billion for the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye early warning aircraft program, and $947 million for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of National Guard Training Support program.
6. General Dynamics
> Arms sales: $19.24 billion
> Total sales: $31.47 billion
> Profit: $2.97 billion
> Employees: 99,900
General Dynamics manufactures and sells a range of military equipment, including ammunition, amphibious vehicles, armoured vehicles, and combat tanks. In addition, General Dynamics owns Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard that is currently under contract to build the U.S. Navy’s new Zumwalt Class DDG-100 destroyer. The ship costs approximately $4 billion.
Well over half of General Dynamics’ revenue comes from arms sales, the vast majority of which are through contracts with the U.S. DoD. Only 13% of the company’s 2015 revenue came from contracts with foreign governments.
7. Airbus Group (Europe)
> Arms sales: $12.86 billion
> Total sales: $71.48 billion
> Profit: $3.0 billion
> Employees: 136,570
Europe’s largest aircraft manufacturer, Airbus Group, has three divisions: commercial, defense and space, and helicopters. The company is the largest helicopter manufacturer in the world, with a 47% market share. Most of helicopters the company sells are for military purposes. Other military related products include cybersecurity technology development as well as fighter jet and unmanned drone manufacturing.
Despite ranking among the world’s largest defense contractors, less than a fifth of Airbus’s 2015 revenue were weapons related. The company also manufactures a range of non-military satellites, and it delivered 635 commercial aircraft in 2015.
8. United Technologies
> Arms sales: $9.50 billion
> Total sales: $61.05 billion
> Profit: $4.36 billion
> Employees: 197,200
A major conglomerate with interests in a range of industries, United Technologies reported over $61 billion in sales in 2015, only 16% of which came from defense contracts. Still, the company ranks as the eighth largest defense contractor in the world. The company’s aerospace division develops and manufactures a range of military technology, from submarine stealth composites to fighter jet ejection seats. Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies subsidiary company, manufactures engines used in military aircraft worldwide, including the F-22 Raptor and F-16 fighter jets. Pratt & Whitney accounted for $4.23 billion of the company’s total 2015 sales.
United Technologies’s commercial subsidiaries include air conditioning unit manufacturer Carrier and Otis, the world’s largest elevator installer and maintainer.
9. Finmeccanica (Italy)
> Arms sales: $9.30 billion
> Total sales: $14.41 billion
> Profit: $584 million
> Employees: 47,160
Italian aerospace company Finmeccanica, after a wave of restructuring, mergers, and consolidation, was renamed Leonardo in the middle of last year. The change somewhat reflects the financial struggles of companies that depend on government spending in European countries, many of which have implemented severe austerity measures in recent years. Finmeccanica posted in 2011 a net loss of $3.0 billion, which the company attributed to ongoing corruption probes in Italy but also partially to market fluctuations across the continent. At the end of last year, the Canadian government selected Airbus Group over Leonardo for a contract to replace the country’s 19 search-and-rescue planes.
The company remains one of the largest military procurement companies in the world, and as of its latest fiscal year had returned to profitability.
10. L3 Communications
> Arms sales: $8.77 billion
> Total sales: $10.47 billion
> Profit: $282 million
> Employees: 38,000
L3 Communication divides its business into three segments: electronic systems, aerospace systems, and communication systems. Though the company has private and commercial clients, including airports worldwide that use L3’s screening technology at security checkpoints, it is primarily a defense contractor.
Defense contracts accounted for some 84% of the company’s $10.47 billion in 2015 sales. Recently, the company won a contract with the U.S. Navy to manufacture power distribution and switchgear components for Virginia Class Submarines.
11. Thales (France)
> Arms sales: $8.10 billion
> Total sales: $15.60 billion
> Profit: $897 million
> Employees: 62,190
Involved in ground transportation and communications, avionics, naval systems, and cybersecurity, Thales’ business encompasses nearly every aspect of military technology. The French company signed major defense contracts with Australia, Egypt, and Qatar in 2015, driving sales to $8.10 billion, up over $900 million from the year before.
Still, defense only accounts for about half of the Paris-based company’s business. Thales also designs and manufactures satellites and electronic aeronautic equipment for commercial and scientific use.
12. Huntington Ingalls Industries
> Arms sales: $6.74 billion
> Total sales: $7.02 billion
> Profit: $404 million
> Employees: 35,500
Though it is a private company, Huntington Ingalls Industries plays a crucial role in the U.S. defense and military strategy. The company is the sole manufacturer of aircraft carriers for the U.S. Navy and one of only two companies contracted to build nuclear-powered submarines. In addition to its headquarters, the company has manufacturing facilities in Newport News, Virginia. Huntington is one of the largest employers in Virginia and the largest shipbuilding company in the United States.
The company has a number of subsidiaries, including UniversalPegasus International, an oil and gas infrastructure project management company. Still, military contracts accounted for some 96% of the company’s 2015 sales
13. Almaz-Antey (Russia)
> Total sales: $6.97 billion
> Profit: N/A
> Employees: N/A
Russia’s national military expenditure dropped from third to fourth place in 2015, as Saudi Arabia moved up to third largest arms spender. More recently, despite tightening budgets from falling oil prices, Russia announced increased military spending in its 2017-2019 budget.
Despite the budget fluctuations, state-owned Almaz-Antey is one of several Russian defense companies to rank among the top global arms producers in recent years. Like most large defense contractors, the missile maker’s operations are heavily dependent on both government budgets and demand from governments in the region. India, which increased its military spending by 46% between 2006 and 2015, is one Almaz-Antey’s largest customers.
14. Safran (France)
> Arms sales: $5.02 billion
> Total sales: $19.31 billion
> Profit: $1.64 billion
> Employees: 70,090
In the latest move towards industry consolidation, French aerospace manufacturer Safran agreed in January to buy fellow French arms maker Zodiac Aerospace. The merged companies form one of the world’s largest aerospace suppliers by revenue.
Safran makes one of the best selling jet engines, the CFM56, used mainly in Boeing and Airbus planes. The United States -- the U.S. government and U.S. based companies -- is by far the largest player in the global arms market. As it is therefore true for most military contractors, the U.S. is a major customer of Safran. Safran helicopter engines and other parts such as wheels and brakes are used by the Coast Guard and other branches of the military
15. Harris
> Arms sales: $4.92 billion
> Total sales: $7.47 billion
> Profit: $324 million
> Employees: 21,000
Harris Corp. reported $4.92 billion in defense contracts in 2015, up from $3.11 billion the previous year. Responsible for the electronic components equipped in the F-22 and F-18 fighter jets, the company has several lucrative deals with the U.S. DoD. Harris has also worked in the increasingly relevant areas of electronic warfare and cyber security for decades.
Harris Corp. deals primarily with the U.S. government and no single foreign government accounted for more than 5% of the company’s total revenue last year. All told, defense contracts accounted for roughly a third of the company’s total sales in 2015.
16. Rolls-Royce (UK)
> Arms sales: $4.79 billion
> Total sales: $20.40 billion
> Profit: $1.65 billion
> Employees: 50,500
The Rolls-Royce brand is typically associated with luxury automobile manufacturing. However, a significant portion of the company’s business is power systems development, ranging from nuclear propulsion for naval vessels to jet engines.
Rolls-Royce manufactures a dozen engines that power military helicopters and fighter jets, as well as the U.S. Air Force’s C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft. Defense contracts accounted for over one-fifth of the company’s total 2015 revenue. The London-based company is the second largest defense contractor in the U.K.
17. United Aircraft (Russia)
> Arms sales: $4.61 billion
> Total sales: $5.77 billion
> Profit: -$1.79 billion
> Employees: N/A
United Aircraft Corp. is one of three Russian companies to report at least $4 billion in annual weapons sales. Despite lucrative military contracts, the company is in the red, posing a $1.79 billion loss in 2015. United Aircraft has lost money in each of the four prior years as well. The company attributed its losses to its emphasis on long-term investment and growth, and anticipates profitability by 2025.
United Aircraft manufactures a range of civil and transport aircraft. However, weapons and military aircraft, including the iconic MiG fighter jet, account for some 80% of the company’s sales.
18. Bechtel
Instead of seeing red, Pentagon audit managers saw business as usual after being told that Bechtel failed to open all its books for review.
> Arms sales: $4.60 billion
> Total sales: $32.30 billion
> Profit: N/A
> Employees: 53,000
Bechtel is a private engineering firm that builds critical infrastructure, provides environmental cleanup and management services, operates dozens of mining operations, and serves as defense contractor in 160 countries. Defense contracts accounted for 14% of the company’s 2015 sales, a relatively low share compared with other major defense companies.
The company has contracts with both the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense, developing nuclear propulsion systems for submarines and aircraft carriers and disassembling retired chemical weapons.
19. United Shipbuilding (Russia)
Arms sales: $4.51 billion
> Total sales: $5.20 billion
> Profit: $230 million
> Employees: 80,000+
United Shipbuilding Corp. is one of three Russian companies to report more than $4 billion in revenue from arms deals alone in 2015. Total weapons sales at the company, Russia’s largest shipbuilder, were up $159 million from 2014. The company manufactures more than two dozen different military submarines and warships for the Russian Navy and customers abroad, in addition to several vessels for commercial use.
The company was established in early 2007 in accordance with a decree issued by President Vladimir Putin.
20. Booz Allen Hamilton
> Arms sales: $3.90 billion
> Total sales: $5.40 billion
> Profit: $294 million
> Employees: 22,600
Management, technology, consulting, and engineering company Booz Allen Hamilton has worked closely with U.S. defense agencies since WWII. It is one of the top military equipment contractors in the world. According to the company, $2.6 billion of its fiscal 2016 revenue came from defense clients, roughly half of total revenue. SIPRI pegs total arms sales from Booz Allen at $3.9 billion in 2015.
A significant portion of Booz Allen Hamilton’s military-related procurements is related to cybersecurity. Based on analysis from the company, cybersecurity threats will continue to increase in the United States and around the world.
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Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Raytheon Technologies Corp | RTX | 7.13% |
Lockheed Martin Corp | LMT | 6.91% |
Boeing Co | BA | 6.62% |
Honeywell International Inc | HON | 5.32% |
General Dynamics Corp | GD | 5.29% |
Northrop Grumman Corp | NOC | 4.92% |
L3Harris Technologies Inc | LHX | 4.86% |
Textron Inc | TXT | 4.55% |
TransDigm Group Inc | TDG | 4.14% |
Axon Enterprise Inc | AXON | 3.97% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Raytheon Technologies Corp | RTX | 19.71% |
Boeing Co | BA | 18.63% |
Lockheed Martin Corp | LMT | 5.55% |
Teledyne Technologies Inc | TDY | 5.01% |
L3Harris Technologies Inc | LHX | 4.83% |
General Dynamics Corp | GD | 4.73% |
Northrop Grumman Corp | NOC | 4.51% |
TransDigm Group Inc | TDG | 4.47% |
Textron Inc | TXT | 4.26% |
Howmet Aerospace Inc | HWM | 3.51% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc Shs A | SPCE | 4.94% |
Axon Enterprise Inc | AXON | 4.23% |
Maxar Technologies Inc | MAXR | 4.17% |
Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Inc | KTOS | 4.10% |
Hexcel Corp | HXL | 3.80% |
Textron Inc | TXT | 3.79% |
Mercury Systems Inc | MRCY | 3.73% |
Teledyne Technologies Inc | TDY | 3.72% |
General Dynamics Corp | GD | 3.71% |
TransDigm Group Inc | TDG | 3.69% |
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