LIBYA NO LONGER HAS NUKES - WHOM DO WE THANK?

ORNL's Jon Kreykes briefs President Bush on Libya's nuclear weapons production equipment sent to Oak Ridge.

On July 12, 2004, President George W. Bush came to Oak Ridge for a first-hand look at gas centrifuge components and uranium processing equipment that were at the heart of Libya's secret nuclear weapons program.

The president received a briefing on these mechanical parts from Jon Kreykes, deputy director of the National Security Advanced Technology (NSAT) Division of ORNL's National Security Directorate. In a speech later that day to an ORNL audience, the president announced that Libya was "dismantling its weapons of mass destruction and long-range missile programs" as a result of "quiet diplomacy among America, Britain, and the Libyan government."

The evacuation of nuclear materials from Libya is one of the recent high-priority activities of NSAT, says division director Jim Sumner, who regards the event as an important milestone in the Laboratory's history. "We had one of our people on the ground in Libya and a cadre of people here doing the coordination and logistics support," he explains. In early 2004 the nuclear materials and equipment were flown under top security 5,000 miles from Tripoli to McGhee-Tyson Airport near Knoxville and transported by truck to Oak Ridge.

Read it HERE

Friend of STORMBRINGER Jim Wrenn has put together this brilliant analysis:

If critics the Dubya had heeded by letting Saddam remain seated in power, Saddam would now have The Bomb with likewise Qadhafi proceeding. And chances are zip, zero, none Iran would stop nuke-work begun to counter Saddam's acquiring The Bomb - Indeed, they'd blame us for his Bomb. And Gore would by now have hurled claims at Dubya which would be the same as thoseº² that Gore pushed against "Daddy" Bush for NOT having toppled Hussein. You doubt Gore would stoop to such shame? Search "WrennCom" plus "GoreOnHussein" plus "PersianGulfWar" for rantings of Gore at Bush 41 re Hussein. 'Twas after the Persian Gulf War that Candidate, Albert A. Gore, trashed Bush 41 for what left undone? Deposing Hussein in that war. Thus, Gore and the Left would now claim: "If Dubya had toppled Hussein, the folks in Iran would not want The Bomb," for which they on Bush would heap blame.

Read the rest of it HERE to include a link to his video "Victory by Any Other Name," which Jim concedes is long; if you want to view the part dealing with Libya's now-dismantled nuclear-weapons program, fast-forward 7:03 minutes into the video and then watch the rest. The page linked above also includes the entire text of the video.



Thanks, Jim. Today's Bird HERE



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NUCLEAR EXPLOSION VIDEO MONTAGE

Sorry Team - I had to pull the video; every time you clicked on STORMBRINGER it automatically played with this loud, obnoxious heavy screaming metal music. It was annoying as hell and after two complaints from loyal Team members, that was it.




Thanks for your patience. If you want to see a version of this with techno (not heavy metal) click HERE.


STORMBRINGER SENDS

NUCLEAR MISSILE SILO

This guy lives in an abandoned nuclear missile silo in Texas.

Bruce Townsley in the corrugated steel quonset hut that is one of the few above-ground structures on the site.


Head south of Abilene, Texas, cross a couple of intersections, look for a small lump in the road with mailboxes sprouting out of the ground, and you’re there. At the end of the driveway, an American flag and array of solar panels provide the only evidence of habitation.




Bruce Townsley built his house in an abandoned Atlas F missile site. During the Cold War (a.k.a. "The Good Old Days" - S.L.) Atlas missiles were stored vertically in their underground silos, with attached living quarters for the missilieers. More than 30 years after it was deactivated, Townsley bought the property in 1997 for $99,000; a 2,200 sq ft. fixer-upper.


A missile heads down the ICBM highway in central Texas on it’s way to a silo. During the early 1960s it wasn’t uncommon for motorists to pass these weapons of mass destruction on America’s interstate highways.


Construction of an Atlas missile silo. Circa 1960.


Two giant overhead silo doors cover the 185-foot hole in the ground where a missile armed with a nuclear warhead used to be. Townsley managed to get one of these massive doors up and running; with a lot of helping hands and a rented crane, he finally cracked it open.




Living in a missile silo means lots and lots of stairs:

Townsley takes the stairwell down to the first level of his house; the old crew quarters.

A set of 6,000-pound blast doors keep occupants safe during a nuclear attack. The doors curve inward to offset the vacuum effect of a blast – keeping everything inside from being sucked out:


The white “latticed” debris door is an added safety feature to keep whatever an explosion carries into the tunnels from making it to the control room.


All four of the doors are still fully functional – impressive in their size and precision, they take little more than a gentle shove to swing open.



Townsley’s living space is about 1,100 square feet and completely round. The room is essentially a concrete bubble suspended from the large column in its center.



When the site was an active missile base, this room “floated” on massive springs. This let the room move both up and down and side to side, which would absorb a bomb blast in the event that the Russians managed to get a shot off.

Every room in the structure revolves around the center pillar like a clock — kitchen, living room, office, bedroom — all separated by short partition walls built by Townsley.


Townsley has a clean aesthetic. His tastes in furnishings have a simple, feng-shui vibe.

Clutter disturbs the chi when you live in a round, totally open room.



“The hardest part was learning how to drywall on a curve.” It took some time adjusting to the subterranean lifestyle; “You have to get used to living without windows,” he says. “But I have a TV monitor [hooked up to] an aboveground video camera.” Another thing he didn’t expect was quietness. “It’s intensely quiet,” he says, “and I’m a quiet freak. But there was a time when I had to keep a fan on all day just to have some noise.”

Townsley’s James Bondian home includes a much, much larger feature – the 185 foot-deep missile silo.


To get to the silo requires navigating another set of blast doors and a corrugated steel tunnel.


When the silo was operational, this tunnel led to a fully fueled, nuclear warhead equipped Atlas F missile:

At the time it was being lowered into its silo, this Atlas F was the most advanced missile in the U.S. arsenal.

Some men tinker in the backyard shed or putter around the garage. Townsley has strung lights up in a 185-foot hole in the ground and has enough space and tools to tinker for the foreseeable future.

Seen from below, the giant silo doors give little hint that there’s a blue sky beyond. Such substantial doors required Townsley to get a little creative to prop it open:

“It’s your standard hydraulic lift,” Townsley says. “It’s just really big.”

Decades ago the lifts were a crucial part of the operation. Before the missile could be launched, the multi-ton, three-foot thick doors had to swing outward and allow an elevator to raise the missile toward the sky as quickly as possible. If an enemy attack was really underway, every second counted.

An Atlas F missile, flanked by the massive silo doors, is fully raised and ready to launch.


Concrete slabs and giant doors cover very deep holes in the ground, somber mementos of a time when many Americans felt that the end of the world as they knew it was just the push of a button away.


Many of the Atlas missiles were eventually launched, but instead of weapons for the Cold War they became tools of the space race, carrying satellites into orbit.


Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Read more about converted Cold War nuclear shelters HERE

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UP PERSICOPE

ISRAEL STATIONS NUCLEAR MISSILE SUBMARINES OFF IRAN






From The Sunday Times
May 30, 2010

Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline.

The first has been sent in response to Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, a political and military organisation in Lebanon, could hit sites in Israel, including air bases and missile launchers.

The submarines of Flotilla 7 — Dolphin, Tekuma and Leviathan — have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels.

The flotilla’s commander, identified only as “Colonel O”, told an Israeli newspaper: “We are an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders.”

Each of the submarines has a crew of 35 to 50, commanded by a colonel capable of launching a nuclear cruise missile . . .

AFGHANISTAN: ITS NOT ABOUT AFGHANISTAN

What defines victory in Afghanistan?




There is a LOT of honking going on these days throughout the media about the war in Afghanistan; General McChyrstal needs an additional 30,000 – 40,000 troops to win it while at the same time it's unwinnable. The Soviets couldn’t hold it, the British Empire couldn’t hold it, even Alexander the Great couldn’t hold it; it is the Graveyard of Empires. It’s not the same war it was eight years ago, what defines victory criteria? We need to cut our losses and get out (English translation: cut and run), etcetera, etcetera, ad infinatum ad nauseum.

I suggest that, in the war in Afghanistan; seizing, holding and stabilizing the country of Afghanistan itself does not have anything to do with victory criteria. This is because the war in Afghanistan is not about Afghanistan; Afghanistan simply happens to be a vast battlefield in a global conflict, that which until very recently was known as the Global War on Terror.








Afghanistan is a wild, rugged land, beautiful in it's own way, with a rich cultural heritage that goes back thousands of years.













View of the shell of the "Large Buddha" and surrounding caves in Bamyan. The Buddha statue in this cave as well as in another - both dating to the sixth century A.D. - were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.




We are not in Afghanistan to liberate those people from the Taliban; that is merely a side-effect of our main effort. We are in Afghanistan to find and destroy the leadership command and control element of al Qaeda. Holding Afghanistan (which of course requires stabilizing it form the forces that seek to fracture that land) is a sub-set of our effort against al Qaeda.

This is the objective, and we must never lose sight of this simple goal: find and destroy the leadership command and control element of al Qaeda.

So the question is not, “should we stay in Afghanistan?” or even “is Afghanistan winnable?” The simple fact of the matter is we MUST stay in Afghanistan, and every where else our presence is required to stamp out and exterminate that which is known as al Qaeda. If this takes ten, twenty, thirty or even a hundred years then that is the requirement. That is our simple objective

The reason WHY we must do this is that we must never, ever let up the pressure on al Qaeda; because THEIR objective is to do whatever it takes to make 9/11 look like a Sunday School picnic.

Asked if al Qaeda had nuclear or chemical weapons (Time magazine, December 24, 1998), bin Laden stated that “acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so.”


Osama bin Laden has a deep-rooted belief that Allah has commanded him to use WMDs to kill Christians and Jews. In the summer of 2002, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti born spokesman for al Qaeda, posted the following statement on the Internet: “Al Qaeda has the right to kill four million Americans, including one million children, displace double that figure, and injure and cripple hundreds of thousands.”



Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahd, a leading Saudi cleric, released his "Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against the Infidels” in May of 2003. This became the basis for an al Qaeda fatwa sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons against the US and permitted the killing of up to ten million Americans.



It is the stated goal of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda hierarchy, to acquire nuclear and/or chemical weapons of mass destruction, to transport them to the United States, and to kill between 4 to 10 million American men, women and children.


The day after they accomplish such an atrocity, our efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and everywhere else al Qaeda manifests itself to include Europe, Central and South America, and even North America, will look a LOT more necessary.

WOULD THEY DO IT AGAIN?

There has been much speculation over whether or not the Israelis will attempt a repeat of their bold operation in 1981 against the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor, this time against the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Operation Opera (מבצע אופרה‎, Mivtza Opera) was the surprise Israeli air strike against the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

The question of whether or not the Israelis will attempt a repeat of their successful 1981 attack is actually twofold:

WILL they do it again?

and

CAN they do it again?

Israeli Courses of Action are predicated on strategic criteria – What specific developments in Iran will “trigger” an Israeli military operation? - and whether or not such an audacious operation can be repeated, over further distances and against a more tenacious foe.

If Iran acquires certain anti-aircraft systems – such as the Russian-made S-300 air defense system (seen below), the Israel Defense Forces may be unable to mount a successful attack against any Iranian military nuclear facility.



The advanced version of S-300 (SA-20 GARGOYLE) has a range of over 150 kilometers (about 100 miles) and can intercept ballistic missiles and aircraft at low and high altitudes. This system would be an effective air defense against possible air strikes on Iran. The closest western equivalent of S-300 is the U.S. MIM-104 Patriot system or the U.S. Navy RIM-66 Standard Missile 2 (SM-2).

If unable to acquire the S-300 from Russia, Tehran may turn to China for the HongQi-9/FD-2000, a system similar to the Russian S-300 with elements “borrowed” from the US MIM-104 Patriot system.

There are also reports that Iran is buying Russian Pantsyr-S1E systems via Syria.

Challenges to Israeli operational planning include: the distance between Israeli military bases and proposed targets (almost twice the distance of the 1981 operation); the requirement to fly over hostile territory – Jordan and/or Saudi Arabia, and Iraq; and the dispersal of targets within Iran.

The distance requirement dictates an aerial refueling capability, which Israel demonstrated they possess. Israelis jets participated in a training event over Greece last summer regarded by analysts as a rehearsal for potential operations against Iran.

An option that overcomes distance limitations and overflight constraints would include sea-launched cruise missiles (from either surface or sub-surface craft). It is unknown if Israel possesses this capability.

The threat of attack from either Israel or the United States has underscored Iran’s quest for nuclear weaponry; as a countermeasure, the Iran has deliberately dispersed its nuclear program throughout their country. It is not known if Israeli intelligence has accurate intelligence on actual target locations within Iran.

The Israeli government recently stated it is not considering military operations against Iran. This may be a legitimate position. On the other hand such international diplomatic posturing may represent an attempt to achieve SURPRISE – “Deception can aid the probability of achieving surprise.” – US Army Field Manual FM-3 Military Operations.

One of the oldest dictums of War is that all other factors being equal, simplicity is to be preferred. Simplicity in this case dictates that Israel remains flexible in their military planning. In other words, any and all options remain on the table, right on up until those triggers are tripped, and the Point of No Return has been crossed.

STORMBRINGER Team mate Shepard of Northern VA assisted me in this analysis - S.L.

DID I CALL IT OR WHAT???

Aerial view of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore California

A couple weeks past I asked "What's next - the launch codes?" Well, maybe I didn't call it quite on the money but danger close:

Nuclear Sites Posted Online Accidentally

These are the same people who are going to run the auto business from now on . . .