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Top Topics
- Will Al Qaeda attack us with nukes on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9? Probably alarmism, but I guess we'll see. Tom Tancredo says that if they do, we should nuke Mecca. WorldNetDaily has the nine cities most likely to get hit. Predictably, various people are pissed at Tancredo.
- The US has decided to make India a strategic nuclear power partner, offering the world's largest democracy expedited access to fuel supplies for heavily-guarded facilities in Mumbai and technology sharing. India may even get a role in ITER, the planned nuclear fusion reactor.
- The DoD's annual report on China's military is finally out. Required reading. It looks not only at numbers and statistics but tries to divine China's strategic intentions. Also, Asia Times Online has a report that takes a God's-eye point of view at the US-China relationship. The verdict? The honeymoon is over. China is making much hay out of the little-known story of a Chinese man who led an armada around the world hundreds of years before Columbus. In other news, China paraded new naval assets that are using AEGIS technology stolen from the United States.
Other Topics Today Include:
Italy to stay in Iraq a spell; Palestinian civil war; PDB to merge with daily terror threat report; nuclear terrorism response simulation; Kenya arrests five; Clinton prods on Mugabe; Pak nuke worries; Euro arrest warrant made toothless; UK to act on imams; Zawahiri a KGB agent and more...
THE MIDDLE EAST
AMERICAN DOMESTIC SECURITY & THE AMERICAS
- Terrorism-tainted Islamic groups CAIR and MPAC comically issued statements urging the Muslim community to be on the alert for radicals. Okay, so...they should call the FBI and complain about CAIR and MPAC?
- Vigilance in NJ hospitals is being intensified amid fears of "operational pre-surveillance" by suspicious individuals.
- Two US Navy jets collided in mid-air in California. Two crewmen have been rescued and one is still missing.
AFRICA
ASIA
EUROPE
- The EU springs into action: they want to make explosives harder to get and easier to trace. I'm sure perfume will be exempt.
- Did the KGB bomb buildings and blame it on Chechnya separatists? Take with two grains of salt.
- Abu Qatada, Binnie's right hand man, is in danger of being extradited to Jordan after the UK made a deal with the monarchy on extradition of terrorist suspects. The deal is expected to be followed by other UK bilateral deals. Funny, all it took was a bunch of terrorist bombings in London. Dodgy clerics will also face other restrictions on their activities short of outright ejection.
THE GLOBAL WAR
- A new crowd-control raygun is being criticized as unsafe. Not as unsafe as bullets, I'd wager.
- Zawahiri KGB-trained? Apparently so.
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Egyptians surround villages said to be harboring Sharm bombers.
May want to add some wierd happenings in China relating to Bird Flu. Looks like an epidemic is begining there, and the Chinese are being as forthcoming about it as they were with SARS.
Chinese Sources:
http://www.peacehall.com/news/gb/english/page1.shtml
Summary & Comment by a genetics / public health expert:
http://www.recombinomics.com/whats_new.html
The frightening thing is that Avian Flu is far more dangerous than SARS, so if they are experience. This is as much a strategic issue as any!
Oops! Sorry about my last post! (Little experience at this).
May want to add some wierd happenings in China relating to Bird Flu. Looks like an epidemic is begining there, and the Chinese are being as forthcoming about it as they were with SARS.
Chinese Sources:
Boxum 'Abundant News' Service, the first news source to break the SARS story in China, now reporting Avian Flu developments
Summary & Comment by a genetics / public health expert:
Recombinomics - News
The frightening thing is that Avian Flu is far more dangerous than SARS, so if they are experience. This is as much a strategic issue as any!
The xSoviet nukes stories, particularly the one about suitcase nukes, are ludicrous. Soviet and now Russian nukes have short shelf-lives compared to those of other countries, and all "suitcase" nukes, including ours, had very, very short shelf-lives.
At this point it is questionable whether any xSoviet nuclear weapon would produce any chain reaction, and xSoviet suitcase nukes certainly wouldn't. A chain reaction is necessary to create a messy radioactive fizzle, which is the dangerous sort of radiological device.
Most anyone willing to die horribly can make a weaponized radiological device of the cesium isotope sources used to power some medical radiological instruments, and those medical isotopes sometimes turn up in Latin American junkyards where they kill unwary people, usually children. Use of those things to make radiological weapons is not particularly effective though - mostly to scare people as in "Eeeek, a nuke!"
ITER is a research project and an international collaboration primarily run by Japan and Europe, not the US. There is no military application for it and having India join has no strategic implications.
One more point:
When an article or book starts talking about the threat of former Soviet nukes, skip to the next article or put the book down. The author doesn't know what he or she is talking about. For that matter, you can generally ignore anything else written by that author.
I've no doubt China's very active espionage agencies have targeted and stolen AEGIS-related materials (and the US has been quite blind to this activity since the 1990s - glad that's changing). I'm sure some of that found its way into China's new destroyers.
But it's very difficult to steal an entire weapons system as complicated as AEGIS (which includes a lot of software components), and if true it would be a huge spy scandal. You can't do it just by becoming a contractor, either - and that element of the story suggested to me that the reporter's understanding of these things may be limited.
Be aware, too, that the Russian Military Fire Sale™ continues apace, and so what your seeing here is more probably advanced Russian phased-array radar and fire control technology, with some modifications based on stolen AEGIS plans.
Is it reliable? Is it buggy? Will it perform at the expected level? Unless they've conducted some tests of the system, it's hard to know.
With respect to AEGIS, just because China comes up with an equivalent system doesn't mean necessarily that they stole it. The basic concepts are in the open literature, phased array radars exist in many forms from different countries including Russia.
An example is the Russian shuttle Buran, which at first glance looks very similar to our space shuttle and the Soviets/Russians were accused of espionage. But in reality, the external differences were dictated mostly by the aerodynamic principles and the internal design was not that derivative.
>>Soviet and now Russian nukes have short shelf-lives compared to those of other countries, and all "suitcase" nukes, including ours, had very, very short shelf-lives.
The portable nukes were small fission devices, yes? Which components were subject to rapid deterioration?
>>Will Al Qaeda attack us with nukes on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9?
That would be somewhat amusing, in a really sick way. Al Qaeda could surpass the USG in the "Sponsor of World's Worst Single Terrorist Atrocity" category.
I'm not sweating.
Mr. Madison: If I understand correctly, micro-nukes require neutron sources for triggers and have compression charges which are affected by age and radiation. If anything deteriorates too far, the device destroys itself but the nuclear event is a fizzle or even nothing.
and why do we care about middle east again??
Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.
Unrestricted Warfare