North Korea Preparing For Next Nuke (Dan 7)

North Korea digging tunnel at nuclear test site, possibly for future test: report
Reuters
SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea is digging a new tunnel at its nuclear test site with an eye to conducting more tests of atomic devices in the future, a South Korean news report said on Friday, two days before the leaders of the South, Japan and China meet in Seoul.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter also makes a separate visit on Sunday to discuss response to the North’s missile and nuclear threat with South Korean defense officials.
The site is on North Korea’s east coast where three previous nuclear tests were conducted, and there’s an active movement of workers and vehicles working on a new tunnel, Yonhap news agency quoted an unnamed government source as saying.
“The fact that they are constructing a new tunnel indicates the intention is to conduct a nuclear test at some point,” the source was quoted as saying. There was no evidence to conclude the preparation was for an imminent test, the source added.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee declined to confirm the report but said the country and the United States are closely watching for any nuclear activity by the North.
The report comes as the leaders of South Korea, Japan and China are scheduled to meet in Seoul on Sunday where reigning in the North’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is likely to be discussed.
North Korea has been steadily working on its nuclear program, but a fourth nuclear test was not see as imminent, particularly after it agreed with South Korea in August to work toward easing tensions on the peninsula and improve ties.
The North has conducted three nuclear tests, the last in 2013, drawing international condemnation including from China, its main diplomatic ally, and is under U.N. sanctions that ban trade that can fund its arms programs.

Truth Of The Iranian Nuclear Horn (Daniel 7)

Former Iranian President Rafsanjani Admits Iran Has Always Sought To Build Nuclear Weapon


The interview with Rafsanjani was conducted in Farsi and was translated and distributed by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a dissident group in Iran.

Yochanan Visser

During an interview with the Iran Republic News Agency (IRNA), former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani admitted that Iran has sought to obtain nuclear weapons ever since it launched its covert nuclear program.

The interview with Rafsanjani was conducted in Farsi and was translated and distributed by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a dissident group in Iran.

The former Iranian president told IRNA that the decision to build a nuclear bomb was related to the war with Iraq in the 1980s and Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear program.

“At the time that we started, we were at war, and we were looking to have this capability (a nuclear weapon) for the day that our enemy would want to resort to the nuclear bomb,” Rafsanjani reportedly told IRNA.

“Those years, we were all thinking that we should arm ourselves with deterrent elements since the war was not about to end and in our defensive policies we had the word of Imam (Ayatollah Khomeini) in mind that the war may last 20 years.

“Our basic doctrine was peaceful usage of the nuclear technology although we never abandoned the idea that if one day we are threatened and it is imperative, we would have the capability for going the other path (to a nuclear weapon) as well,” Rafsanjani added.

Rafsanjani also told IRNA that both he and current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continued the project to acquire a nuclear bomb. The former Iranian president admitted that the Iranian nuclear program had covert elements such as secret nuclear facilities, uranium enrichment facilities, the construction of a heavy water reactor and centrifuge development.

Rafsanjani’s admission is consistent with what Israeli intelligence services always have said about Iran’s nuclear program: Khamenei ordered the production of nuclear weapons in 1987.

Israeli Iran expert Ronen Bergman wrote in his book, The Secret War with Iran:

During a secret meeting of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran that year, Khamenei said the following: “Our nation has always been subject to external threats. The little we can do to stand up to this danger is to make our enemies aware that we can defend ourselves. Accordingly, any step that we take here will serve the defense of our nation and your revolution. With this aim in mind, you must work hard and fast.”

Khamenei Plays With Obama (Daniel 8:4)

 
How Khamenei exploits Obama through the nuclear deal

Friday, 30 October 2015
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has masterfully sniffed out the weaknesses of President Obama and his administration, and the revelation of his new conditions on the nuclear deal suggests that Khamenei is ready to milk the administration more and obtain more concessions.

A flimsy deal has been signed by six world powers and Iran. Two prominent institutions, the U.S. congress and the Islamic Republic’s parliament (Majlis) ratified the deal as well.

Khamenei is now fully invested in his political game of playing with President Obama.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Hence, one would imagine that the agreement is considered to be a 100 percent done-deal. Also, one would assume that Khamenei would now back away after the Majlis ratified the deal under his indirect order and after being assured that his power grip is no longer threatened by Western economic sanctions.

Khamenei’s New and Post-Nuclear Deal Conditions

According to a new guideline sent to the President Rowhani and posted on Khamenei’s website, the Supreme Leader is demanding the United States and other European countries guarantee and provide “solid and sufficient” proof that all economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic are lifted before Iran fulfills its part and complies with the terms of the nuclear agreement.

Therefore, all the months which were spent deliberating over Iran’s nuclear program and the actual signing of it have apparently amounted to a joke. The Supreme Leader’s new condition of lifting sanctions before Tehran’s compliance to the terms seemingly violates the deal that was reached.
An additional condition that the Supreme Leader presented is to rule out any “snap-back”
option with regards to the sanctions. First he wants sanctions to be lifted at the outset, then he wants to make sure that the international community will not have any mechanism through which it can re-impose sanctions in the very likely scenario that Iran decides to pull out of the nuclear agreement and go full speed ahead on uranium enrichment.

But wait, that’s not all, there is another condition to be met as well. After Khamenei had his president and nuclear team add the condition of the removal of an arms embargo to the nuclear agreement in the eleventh hour, he is now adding the removal of all sanctions (including the ones linked to Iran’s terrorism and human rights violations) to the already-done nuclear deal.

The intriguing aspect of this power struggle is that on the one hand, Iran did not allow the West to bring any issues to the negotiating table other than Iran’s nuclear program– not even Tehran’s ballistic program. But on the other hand, Iranian leaders obtained numerous concessions which were not related to the nuclear program; lifting the arms embargo, lifting sanctions related to terrorism and human rights abuses, lifting sanctions against military leaders, as well as many more items.
Since the nuclear agreement appears to be a flimsy throw-away deal, Khamenei’s confidence has been bolstered and he will continue to exploit the United States and play with the Obama administration’s weakness. That is why after the deal, Iran tested its ballistic missiles in “clear violation” of the U.N. Security Council resolution.

Khamenei positions himself above the law

Khamenei is positioning himself in a very comfortable area; he demonstrates that he is above the law when it comes to any matter including the nuclear deal. This allows him to enact new rules and breach or bypass existing ones at his will.

As I mentioned few months ago, Khamenei was not going to approve or disapprove of the nuclear deal publicly for two major reasons. First of all, he does not desire to hold responsibility or accountability for the outcome of the deal. Secondly, he would like to have the luxury of pulling out of the deal at any time he wishes for any reason that he deems worthy (preferably after economic sanctions are fully lifted).

But there is another reason that he remained neutral as Khamenei was aiming to obtain additional concessions after the nuclear deal was signed and after President Rowhani and his nuclear team had already secured numerous concessions during the nuclear talks.

When it comes to detecting the weakness of other countries and their leaders, Khamenei can be characterized as one of the shrewdest politicians in the region. After all, he has reigned as Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1980, which makes him the second-longest serving autocrat in the Middle East.

Khamenei is now fully invested in his political game of playing with President Obama. Other European members of the United Nations Security Council (Britain and France) plus Germany followed in the footsteps of the Obama administration in the nuclear talks and also gave concessions to Tehran.

Khamenei knows that Obama is in a position of surrender, and the president will have no other option than to continue giving in to the Supreme Leader’s demands or intentionally refuse to address the real issues until he leaves the White House and delegates the problematic deal to the next U.S. president. This will ultimately complicate the prospect of a true nuclear deal.
______________
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is an Iranian-American scholar, author and U.S. foreign policy specialist. Rafizadeh is the president of the International American Council. He serves on the board of Harvard International Review at Harvard University and Harvard International Relations Council. He is a member of the Gulf 2000 Project at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. Previously he served as ambassador to the National Iranian-American Council based in Washington DC. He can be contacted at: Dr.Rafizadeh@post.harvard.edu, or on Twitter: @MajidRafizadeh

The New Nuclear War (Revelation 15:2)

Pakistan may deploy low yield nuclear weapons

The Moderate Voice

In an extraordinary first, a top Pakistani official has said his country will use tactical nuclear weapons as a routine defensive measure against a conventional military attack by the Indian army.

This portends new headaches for President Barack Obama’s difficult relationship with Islamabad, which is already fraught with deep suspicions about the Pakistani army’s use for terrorists as proxies in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

“Pakistan has built an infrastructure near border areas to launch a quickest response to Indian aggression… Usage of such low-yield nuclear weapons would make it difficult for India to launch a war against Pakistan,” top foreign ministry official Aizaz Chaudhury said.

He spoke to media in Pakistan on October 22, the day that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif met President Obama at the White House.

The infrastructure Chaudhury referred to involves small missiles with a 40-mile range launched from heavy trucks. They are equipped with low yield nuclear warheads capable of explosions much larger than any conventional bomb but unlikely to spread nuclear radiation over hundreds of miles.

This is sinister because stocks of such missiles and small warheads will be hard to protect. The current chaos inside Pakistan is deep enough for outsiders to believe that extremist Islamic terrorists might succeed in bribing their way to obtaining a few or simply stealing them.

Saudi Arabia is a major bankroller and religious mentor for high-level military and political operatives in Pakistani. The Saudis would certainly want some of those weapons without Washington’s knowledge. Iran will not sit on its hands if Pakistan does become a supplier.
Worse, India and China would develop similar nuclear weapons if they do not already have them. Delhi may assert a similar tactical first strike doctrine to match Islamabad. China would not be far behind.

This would lead to a new kind of proliferation of nuclear weapons without having to build them indigenously. The headache for Obama and subsequent American presidents is obvious. It would also open windows for Iran to buy such weapons covertly to deter Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies.
India has often threatened but never deployed a conventional attack strategy described by military planners as “cold start”. It would be used to respond to terrorist attacks in India aided by the Pakistani military, which, according to US intelligence findings, regularly provides planning and training for such cross border attacks.

The Indo-Pak border in Kashmir is an informal delineation called the Line of Control. Making it a permanent frontier is a major disagreement in on-off peace negotiations between Islamabad and Delhi.

Fears have increased in Pakistan that India will temporarily occupy small territories just across the border to increase the costs for Islamabad of proxy terrorism. It would use a cold start doctrine, which involves land, air and cyber warfare to conduct lightning strikes to occupy small territories quickly.
The tactical nuclear weapons would deter such strikes and certainly stop their advance effectively.
Pakistan now has the distinction of being the first to threaten use of nuclear warheads to halt conventional attacks, instead of turning to nuclear missiles only as a last resort to avoid a final defeat.
In military jargon, this change is one from “minimum credible deterrence” to “full spectrum deterrence.” It raises serious issues for the already fraught US-Pakistan relationship.

After the Obama-Sharif talks, a White House statement said, “The two leaders expressed their conviction that a resilient U.S.-Pakistan partnership is vital to regional and global peace and security and reaffirmed their commitment to address evolving threats in South Asia.”

This seems sanguine if the Pakistani military, which operates outside civilian control, has decided to change its nuclear deterrence doctrine. Chaudhury’s assertion suggests that the Sharif government either agrees with the military on this threat of nuclear warfare or has no say.

The US pays nearly $500 million a year to the Pakistan military for help in fighting terrorists using Pakistani safe havens to conduct attacks in Afghanistan. It has given over $20 billion over the past 14 years, which the military spends with no oversight from the civilian government in Islamabad or the Pentagon. Thus, it is a major financier of the Pakistan military’s programs.

Several senior analysts, including Bruce Riedel an author of the Obama administration’s Afghan-Pakistan policy, suggest that the military aid should be halted if the military does not stop supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. That is unlikely.

Analyses published earlier this week suggest that Pakistan’s nuclear warheads could rise to 250 in 10 years from 130 currently. The yet uncounted tactical low yield nuclear weapons mentioned by Chaudhury must be added to those.

Washington’s intense focus on the wars in Syria and Iraq has pushed the likelihood of much more devastating nuclear war between Pakistan and India to the far backburner.

That is imprudent because a major terrorist strike inside India is all it might take the next time, especially if it is traced to Pakistani military planning.

Facing The Russian Nuclear Horn (Daniel 7:7)

Meeting Russia’s new nuclear challenge

By Dov S. Zakheim – – Thursday, October 29, 2015

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Even as the Obama administration continues to ponder just how it might respond to the turn of events in Syria in light of Russia’s ongoing intervention there, it has studiously avoided addressing a second, far more significant challenge that Russia is posing to the West, that of its nuclear weapons posture. Concurrent with Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Moscow has increased the number of its strategic nuclear exercises, dispatched Bear bombers to test NATO defenses, and expanded its conventional force exercises, which incorporate escalation to the use tactical nuclear weapons. In addition, Russian officials, from President Putin on down, have engaged in overheated nuclear rhetoric, including the assertion by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Moscow has the right to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea.

Moscow formally adheres to the 2010 New START treaty, which reduces strategic nuclear launchers by 50 percent, and imposes lower sublimits on launchers, bombers and missiles. Yet the State Department has recently acknowledged that Russia is currently about one hundred warheads above New START levels. Moreover, Russia is modernizing its strategic nuclear forces far more quickly than the United States, whose efforts in this regard will not bear fruit until after the end of the current decade.

More ominous still is Moscow’s increasingly blatant disregard of the 1987 INF (intermediate nuclear forces) Treaty. Last year, and again reportedly last month, Russia tested a ground launched cruise missile in violation of the treaty. Reports also abound that Russia may be moving nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad, which borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania. It is noteworthy that, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates latterly testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in 2007 Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov approached him about entirely doing away with the treaty. Gates rebuffed the Russian’s request, but Moscow’s recent behavior indicates that it has unilaterally chosen to ignore the treaty.

Moscow’s defenders argue that the threat is overblown; that NATO has been provocative by expanding to include Russia’s immediate neighbors; that it can deploy nuclear weapons to Crimea because it considers the peninsula to be an integral part of its territory. These apologists also contend that Russia’s apparent violations of the INF Treaty are no worse that the deployment and development of long-range drones and missile interceptors that, in its view also constitute treaty violations. Finally, Russia continues to argue that the United States withdraw its anti-ballistic missile capabilities from Europe, even though these have been significantly scaled back from the original Bush administration plan for a “Third Site” in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Moscow’s explanations notwithstanding, its military exercises and deployments, its publicly stated nuclear policies, no doubt buttressed by classified plans, and not least, its rhetoric, should be a major cause of American and NATO concern. In this regard, the Obama administration, while prepared to call out bad Russian behavior, and after years of delay, finally agreeing to support nuclear weapons and delivery systems modernization, has yet to take a firm stand against Moscow’s threatening language and behavior. No doubt it has seen the wisdom of avoiding to draw any more “red lines” like those in Syria that Russia might cross even more easily than has Bashar Assad. Yet at the same time, its silence in the face of a clearly more aggressive Russian political exploitation of its strategic and tactical nuclear prowess serves only to encourage Moscow to push even further against the bounds of NATO’s resolve.

The passive, head-in-the-sand attitude that has characterized so much of the administration’s foreign policy simply cannot be applied to Russo-American nuclear relations. Just as it pushed hard to negotiate New Start and then obtain Senate ratification, the administration should undertake a major effort to respond to Moscow’s nuclear diplomacy. Such an effort should be multipronged. The administration should forge ahead with modernizing both its tactical and strategic weapons and launch systems, and, in particular, fully fund and proceed apace with the Navy’s successor to the Trident submarine and the Air Force’s successor to the B-2 bomber. Moreover, the Pentagon should at least study options for dealing with possible Russian tactical nuclear strikes.

At the same time, Washington should open a new dialogue with Moscow, perhaps building on the modest agreement that the two countries recently reached regarding deconfliction over Syrian airspace. Such a new dialogue would not be another “reset,” in that it would be accompanied by a clear and credible determination to confront Moscow with a new more capable deterrent and with plans to use it, if necessary. Nevertheless, such a dialogue could help cool the increasingly tense relationship between the two countries and exploit the common ground that they share across an array of issues. These issues include fear of the Islamic State and radical Islam, the need for stability in the Middle East and the maintenance of the all-too-fragile nuclear non-proliferation regime. Most importantly, a dialogue should focus and underscore the recognition that both countries still share, that it remains in their common interest to ensue that what once was called “the delicate balance of terror” remains as stable as it has ever been.

• Dov S. Zakheim was undersecretary of defense in the first George W. Bush administration and is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Conclusion to Economic Consequences of the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:15)

Scenario Earthquakes for Urban Areas Along the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States: Conclusions

NYCEM.org

New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation

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The current efforts in the eastern U.S., including New York City, to start the enforcement of seismic building codes for new constructions are important first steps in the right direction. Similarly, the emerging efforts to include seismic rehabilitation strategies in the generally needed overhaul of the cities’ aged infrastructures such as bridges, water, sewer, power and transportation is commendable and needs to be pursued with diligence and persistence. But at the current pace of new construction replacing older buildings and lifelines, it will take many decades or a century before a major fraction of the stock of built assets will become seismically more resilient than the current inventory is. For some time, this leaves society exposed to very high seismic risks. The only consolation is that seismicity on average is low, and, hence with some luck, the earthquakes will not outpace any ongoing efforts to make eastern cities more earthquake resilient gradually. Nevertheless, M = 5 to M = 6 earthquakes at distances of tens of km must be considered a credible risk at almost any time for cities like Boston, New York or Philadelphia. M = 7 events, while possible, are much less likely; and in many respects, even if building codes will have affected the resilience of a future improved building stock, M = 7 events would cause virtually unmanageable situations. Given these bleak prospects, it will be necessary to focus on crucial elements such as maintaining access to cities by strengthening critical bridges, improving the structural and nonstructural performance of hospitals, and having a nationally supported plan how to assist a devastated region in case of a truly severe earthquake. No realistic and coordinated planning of this sort exists at this time for most eastern cities.

The current efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) via the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to provide a standard methodology (RMS, 1994) and planning tools for making systematic, computerized loss estimates for annualized probabilistic calculations as well as for individual scenario events, is commendable. But these new tools provide only a shell with little regional data content. What is needed are the detailed data bases on inventory of buildings and lifelines with their locally specific seismic fragility properties. Similar data are needed for hospitals, shelters, firehouses, police stations and other emergency service providers. Moreover, the soil and rock conditions which control the shaking and soil liquefaction properties for any given event, need to be systematically compiled into Geographical Information System (GIS) data bases so they can be combined with the inventory of built assets for quantitative loss and impact estimates. Even under the best of conceivable funding conditions, it will take years before such data bases can be established so they will be sufficiently reliable and detailed to perform realistic and credible loss scenarios. Without such planning tools, society will remain in the dark as to what it may encounter from a future major eastern earthquake. Given these uncertainties, and despite them, both the public and private sector must develop at least some basic concepts for contingency plans. For instance, the New York City financial service industry, from banks to the stock and bond markets and beyond, ought to consider operational contingency planning, first in terms of strengthening their operational facilities, but also for temporary backup operations until operations in the designated facilities can return to some measure of normalcy. The Federal Reserve in its oversight function for this industry needs to take a hard look at this situation.

A society, whose economy depends increasingly so crucially on rapid exchange of vast quantities of information must become concerned with strengthening its communication facilities together with the facilities into which the information is channeled. In principle, the availability of satellite communication (especially if self-powered) with direct up and down links, provides here an opportunity that is potentially a great advantage over distributed buried networks. Distributed networks for transportation, power, gas, water, sewer and cabled communication will be expensive to harden (or restore after an event).

In all future instances of major capital spending on buildings and urban infrastructures, the incorporation of seismically resilient design principles at all stages of realization will be the most effective way to reduce society’s exposure to high seismic risks. To achieve this, all levels of government need to utilize legislative and regulatory options; insurance industries need to build economic incentives for seismic safety features into their insurance policy offerings; and the private sector, through trade and professional organizations’ planning efforts, needs to develop a healthy self-protective stand. Also, the insurance industry needs to invest more aggressively into broadly based research activities with the objective to quantify the seismic hazards, the exposed assets and their seismic fragilities much more accurately than currently possible. Only together these combined measures may first help to quantify and then reduce our currently untenably large seismic risk exposures in the virtually unprepared eastern cities. Given the low-probability/high-impact situation in this part of the country, seismic safety planning needs to be woven into both the regular capital spending and daily operational procedures. Without it we must be prepared to see little progress. Unless we succeed to build seismic safety considerations into everyday decision making as a normal procedure of doing business, society will lose the race against the unstoppable forces of nature. While we never can entirely win this race, we can succeed in converting unmitigated catastrophes into manageable disasters, or better, tolerable natural events.

The Scarlet Woman Shows Her True Colors (Rev 17:4)

 
Clinton didn’t learn from Iraq

First Posted: 11:28 am – October 28th, 2015 – 264 Views
Medea Benjamin – Contributing Columnist

As the first Democratic presidential debate drew to a close, moderator Anderson Cooper posed a question to Hillary Clinton: How might her presidency differ from Barack Obama’s?

Clinton smiled. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious,” she replied to rapturous applause. “Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had.”

Indeed, a Hillary Clinton presidency would shatter the glass ceiling for women in the United States. But it would also leave intact the old boys’ military-industrial complex that’s kept our nation in a perpetual state of war for decades.

Clinton, it seems, failed to learn anything after supporting the disastrous Iraq War, which plunged a huge swath of the Middle East into chaos and cost her the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Instead of embracing diplomacy, she continued to champion ill-conceived military interventions as secretary of state.

In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration’s most forceful advocate for intervening to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief first appointed by George W. Bush who was less than enthusiastic about going to war in Libya.

Ironically, the political grief Clinton has suffered over the subsequent attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, might never have occurred if Clinton had opted against intervening in Libya’s civil war.

While House Republicans recently spent 11 hours relentlessly drilling Clinton about Benghazi and her personal email account, the larger disaster by far is the postwar chaos that’s left Libya without a functioning government, overrun by feuding warlords and extremist militants.

Clinton favors greater military intervention in Syria’s civil war, too. In her presidential bid, she’s joined hawkish Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham in supporting the creation of a no-fly zone over the country.

That puts her at odds not only with President Barack Obama, but also with her Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders, who warned that it could “get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region.”

Clinton did end up supporting the administration’s Iran nuclear deal, but her support came with a history of bellicose baggage.

Back in 2008, for example, she warned that Washington could “totally obliterate“ Iran. During that presidential campaign, she chided Obama as “naïve” and “irresponsible” for wanting to engage the country diplomatically.

Even after the nuclear agreement was sealed, she struck a bullying tone: “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement,” Clinton insisted. “Iran is the subject of the agreement.” She added that she “won’t hesitate to take military action” if it falls through.

Contrast Clinton with the more moderate Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s no wonder Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba — came after Clinton left.

There was a very telling moment about Clinton’s attitude during the debate when Cooper asked, “Which enemy are you most proud of?”

Alongside the NRA, Republicans, and health insurance companies, Clinton listed “the Iranians” — which could mean either the Iranian government or the nation’s 78 million people. In either case, it wasn’t a very diplomatic thing to say while her successor and former colleagues are trying to chart a new, more cooperative relationship with Iran.

When it comes to war and peace, it might not matter too much if a Republican or Hillary Clinton wins the White House. In either case, the winner will be the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about.

Another Warning Of The New York Quake (Rev 6:12)

 
Earthquake shakes Upstate NY; no damage or injuries reported

Allie Healy | ahealy@syracuse.com By Allie Healy | ahealy@syracuse.com
on October 28, 2015 at 10:06 PM, updated October 28, 2015 at 10:07 PM

Some in a town near Albany felt the ground shaking on Wednesday afternoon.

A 2.5-magnitude earthquake was measured at 4:42 p.m. northwest of Gloversville, N.Y., the U.S. Geological Survey reports.

The Albany Times Union says the earthquake occurred in the town of Johnstown, located about 42 miles northwest of Albany.

The quake had a depth of about two miles and was felt in Broadalbin, Gloversville and Mayfield. Residents in Fulton, Montgomery and Saratoga counties also reported feeling it, WNYT says.
A Fulton County sheriff’s department dispatcher tells the Times Union that there were no reports of damage or injury. Thirty-three people called in reports of “shaking,” with strength ranging from “light” to “weak.”

The U.S. Geological Survey says the Adirondack region is one of the most seismically active parts of the northeastern U.S., the Times Union notes. The most recent earthquake to occur in New York State was on Sept. 27 recorded east northeast of Stamford in Delaware County, registering a 3.0 magnitude.

No Close Calls This Time (Revelation 15:2)

 
Revealed: US almost launched nuclear weapons during Cuban Missile Crisis

Published time: 28 Oct, 2015 22:11
Edited time: 28 Oct, 2015 22:14

During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an Air Force airman says that his unit was ordered to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. His captain’s use of common sense over 50 years ago may have saved the world from a nuclear apocalypse.

An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists paints a picture of John Bordne, an Air Force airman who was stationed at one of four secret US missile sites in Japan during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the US Air Force has not come out and verified the claims, Bordne’s account is that, in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962, his unit of 32 Mace B cruise missiles inexplicably received launch orders.

Each Mace B cruise missile had an enormous payload 70 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within strike range were various communist countries: the capital cities of Hanoi, Vietnam; Beijing, China; and Pyongyang, North Korea, as well as the Soviet military facilities in Vladivostok.

Bordne says that a few hours before his shift began, the commander at the Missile Operations Center on Okinawa began a routine radio transmission to the missile sites, giving a string of characters that normally did not match the ones that the crews had. But this time was different: For the first time in history, the codes matched.

The fate of the entire world hung in the balance when US Air Force Captain William Bassett had clearance to open his pouch to see if his personal string of characters matched the last part of the code that was transmitted. They did. This authorized him to open an envelope to read his site’s launch instructions, but the captain declined to fulfill the order of launching a nuclear strike.

Bassett then saw that three of his four targets described in the envelope were not located in the Soviet Union. This was a fact that was corroborated over telephone correspondence with an officer at a different site. Indeed, the fact that they were only at DEFCON 2 added to the incredulousness of the orders: If they were actually supposed to launch their nuclear missiles and kick off World War III, they should have gone to DEFCON 1, the maximum possible level of alert, which is necessary for such a strike to occur.

The crew, with their fingers on the button, were ready to launch the nukes, but Bassett stalled them, as Bordne recalls, and ordered two armed airmen to “shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.”

“If this is a screw up and we do not launch, we get no recognition, and this never happened,” Bordne recalled the captain saying.

And the fiasco turned out to be a screw up indeed, one of a magnitude only a few notches away from nuclear war.

“None of us will discuss anything that happened here tonight, and I mean anything. No discussions at the barracks, in a bar, or even here at the launch site. You do not even write home about this. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this subject?” Bassett reportedly told his men after the crisis had passed.

Bassett died in 2011, and during his lifetime, the crew faithfully kept to his orders, with the public remaining oblivious to crisis until now.

But not even those stationed at the secret bases on Okinawa could have known that the Soviet Union was facing its own brush with starting World War III.

On October 27, 1962, just a day before Bordne’s experience occurred, Soviet Navy officer Vasili Arkhipov also saved the world from destruction in the middle of the Cold War’s tensest moment. He was the second-in-command of a B-59 submarine when American destroyers began to drop depth charges on it, trying to force the Soviet vessel to surface.

The submarine’s captain assumed that the Americans were trying to destroy his nuclear-armed submarine and that a catastrophic war had broken out. He ordered the B-59’s ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to prepare for firing on an enemy aircraft carrier that was leading the American task force near Cuba. The  launch of the B-59’s torpedo required the authorization of all three senior officers aboard the submarine, and Arkhipov was alone in denying permission. His level head, like Bassett’s, may have saved the human species.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, best known for its Doomsday clock, is now calling on the Air Force to release details on the harrowing Okinawa event. Other organizations have attempted to uncover this information through Freedom of Information Act requests, but the Bulletin notes that these requests could take years, if they are successful at all.

Khan and Iran: The Nuclear Horns (Daniel 8:8)

Iran’s nuke ambitions confirmed: Former president reveals meetings with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan

Special to WorldTribune.com

Iran has long intended to attain nuclear weapons capability, going so far as to enlist the help of rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said.
In an interview with state-run IRNA news agency, Rafsanjani said Iran’s nuclear ambitions became clear amid the Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 and ended in 1988.

“At the time that we started, we were at war and we were looking to have this capability [the nuclear bomb] for the day that our enemy would want to resort to the nuclear bomb,” Rafsanjani said.
The Persian-language interview was translated by Iranian opposition group the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Rafsanjani, Iran’s president from 1989-1997, said in the interview that Iran’s “basic doctrine was peaceful usage of the nuclear technology,” but added “we never abandoned the idea that if one day we are threatened and it is imperative, we would have the capability for going the other path [to nuclear weapon] as well.”

Rafsanjani also admitted that Teheran had sought the assistance of Khan. The former president said that he, along with current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then a senior official in Ayatollah Khomenei’s regime, traveled to Pakistan to meet with Khan, who is believed to have sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

“There were some talks with the Pakistanis. There was a nuclear scientist called Abdul Qadeer Khan in Pakistan… In a trip to Pakistan, I asked to see him. They did not show him to me,” he said.
Though he did not meet with Khan, Rafsanjani said that “it seemed that Mr. Abdul Qadeer Khan himself believed that the Islamic World should have the nuclear bomb. He believed in this and it was he who built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb although it took time to build the bomb. In any case, they agreed to help us a bit.

“We implemented part of our nuclear activity when we were still at war and Iraq was close to securing enrichment when Israel destroyed all of it,” he said, referring to Israel’s daring raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility which destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.

“Those years, we were all thinking that we should arm ourselves with deterrent elements since the war was not about to end and in our defensive policies we had the word of Imam [Khomeini] in mind that the war may last 20 years,” Rafsanjani said in what the NCRI believes is an admission of the “regime’s intentions to acquire (a) nuclear weapon.”