The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For the Prophecy sees without the element of time. For the Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be. 11:11 LLC
A Hamas official warned that the terrorist movement’s “hand is on the trigger” and that it would “soon join forces” with terrorists in the West Bank and Jerusalem, in a statement on Tuesday.
“We will not let the settlers tamper with Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque,” said Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas’s politburo, to the Hamas-affiliated Safa News Agency. “Al-Aqsa is a powder keg that will explode in the face of the occupier, our hands are on the trigger, and we will soon join forces with the resistance of the West Bank and Jerusalem.”
A new report indicates that Iran is expanding its nuclear capabilities at an underground facility and moving faster than initially anticipated.
A confidential report seen and reported on by Reuters on Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations, found that Iran is increasing its abilities to extract and enrich uranium at plants located at Natanz and Fordow.
These new technologies are more advanced than IR-1 centrifuges, the only machine Iran was permitted to use under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal reached by the Obama administration.
The U.S. withdrew from the deal under former President Trump in 2018, a move that had long been anticipated and one that reimposed strict sanctions on Tehran.
Indirect talks of reviving the deal under the Biden administration warmed at the beginning of the year but have not come to fruition.
The IAEA report to member states showed that a third cluster of IR-6 centrifuges emerged in late August at the Fuel Enrichment Plant in Natanz, bolstering Iran’s nuclear apparatus, according to Reuters.
In war, nothing is inevitable and not much is predictable. But the war in Ukraine has a direction that observers can see and that we should name. What began as a criminal Russian aggression against Ukraine has become a proxy war between Washington and Moscow. The two sides are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world. This is obviously a bold prediction and certainly an unwise one to make — in part because if I’m right, I’m unlikely to be around take credit for it.
Despite the opprobrium, not naming the danger is unlikely to reduce it. Think tank analysts prefer instead to talk in terms of “scenarios,” wherein we can bury the most likely outcome amongst a few other less likely possibilities. Such exercises are useful for planning purposes, and they appropriately reflect our general inability to predict events on the ground. But scenarios also serve to hide the relative likelihood of the various outcomes. Here I present just the central scenario of nuclear escalation. I take as a starting point that, although we may experience long periods of relative stalemate and we may never arrive at such a horrific outcome, uncontrolled escalation is the path that we are currently on.
Testing the Red Lines
No rational or even sane leader plans to start a nuclear war. And for all of the Russian regime’s risk taking, it does not show signs of suicidal tendencies. The essence of the problem is more insidious than mere insanity: Once an escalatory cycle begins, a series of individually rational steps can add up to a world-ending absurdity. In Ukraine, both sides have publicly pledged that they cannot lose this war. They hold that doing so would threaten their very way of life and the values that they hold most dear. In the Russian case particularly, a loss in Ukraine would seem to threaten regime survival and even the territorial integrity of the country.
The problem that the Russians have had in their signaling is that their decision to escalate likely revolves around the progress that the Ukrainians make on the ground, not on any discrete action (such as the provision of new weapons systems) that the West might take. The likelihood of escalation, in other words, has stemmed from developments on the battlefield, not from the crossing of some arbitrary red line. Experts on the Russian military have long suspected that Russian nuclear signaling is an elaborate bluff meant to instill fear and caution in a weak-willed Western enemy. But events in Ukraine and the possibility of a catastrophic military loss may have changed that calculation. Nobody really knows. It is likely that the Russians don’t know either.
What is clear is that both sides have consistently escalated in Ukraine when they fear that they might lose. The United States and its European partners have continually upped their military assistance to Ukraine, in both quality and quantity, regardless of red lines. Under the pressure of war, they decided to deliver weapons and intelligence that just a few months ago they believed carried too great an escalation risk to provide. They have similarly incrementally increased economic sanctions to the degree that they now appear intended to permanently weaken Russia and destroy the Russian regime, as Biden has said is necessary to end the war.
The Russians have consistently responded to battlefield setbacks with their own escalations including energy cut-offs to Europe, increased bombing of civilian targets, and recently through the formal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces and the partial mobilization of Russian manpower reserves. This last step carries obvious risks for the Russian regime, as the multiple protests against it across Russia testify, but the leadership preferred those domestic risks to losing the war.
In taking these escalatory steps, both sides have also increased the domestic and geopolitical costs of compromise, thus increasing the incentive for further escalations. Thus, for example, the Russian annexations are intended to signal to foreign and domestic audiences that the occupied parts of Ukrainian territory will now be defended as if they were Russia itself. But it is not just a signal, it also genuinely reduces Russia’s ability to back down and abandon these provinces. This is essence of an escalatory cycle — it contains a logic of its own wherein previous escalations make future ones more likely.
Of course, wars have often escalated but no war since 1945 has ended in nuclear use. Nuclear powers have at times considered their use for warfighting, notably in Korea in 1953 and in Israel in 1973, but have always stepped back from the brink. In the current situation, both sides have many more steps to take before direct confrontation: The United States has many more weapons systems to provide and many more ways to isolate the Russian economy. Russia has many more men to conscript, more brutal tactics to apply, and of course more horrible weapons to deploy short of nuclear weapons. It is likely that if the war simply bogs down into a war of attrition, that will not be enough to get to nuclear use.
Instead, escalation to nuclear weapons will require one side to feel that it is losing and that a military defeat will have catastrophic consequences for their regime and the personal safety of its leadership, and to convince itself, under the pressure of looming military defeat, that nuclear use is the way out. We have no precedent for those conditions being met in a nuclear-armed state.
Russian forces will launch a small number of tactical nuclear attacks against Ukrainian troop concentrations or NATO supply lines within Ukraine. If they can’t find any of those, they will use them against Ukrainian civilian targets. The target is not essential because the point of this attack will be to destroy Western will to continue supporting Ukraine, not to directly reverse the military situation. They would additionally put their strategic nuclear forces on alert and begin “unusual movements” of nuclear assets in an effort to warn the United States against responding to the attack.
The United States government has certainly considered this contingency, which is why both National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were recently dispatched to warn the Russians they would suffer “horrific” and “catastrophic” consequences if they used nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In the event, however, the U.S. government will struggle to find a response that reflects the gravity of the Russian use of nuclear weapons but does not represent further escalation toward direct confrontation and all-out nuclear war.
The American equivalent of the Russian genius will argue that a direct, proportionate response aimed at the attack itself will send a signal to the Russian leadership that the United States is seeking to punish the crime of nuclear use, not escalate the war or overthrow the Russian regime. They will see the Russian strategic nuclear alert as a bluff, arguing that to follow through with a strategic nuclear attack would be suicide. Lacking better options, the U.S. leadership will seize on the idea of such a finely calibrated response and launch a conventional NATO attack on Russian troop formations in Ukraine or the military base in Russia where the Russian nuclear strike originated from. As a precaution, they will also put U.S. nuclear forces on alert, put more U.S. nuclear submarines to sea and recommend to the British and French that that they also put their forces on alert — if these two independent powers had not done so already.
Unfortunately, such a subtle message is likely to be lost on a paranoid Kremlin. They will see a direct NATO attack on Russia or Russian forces as confirmation of their view that the West intends to destroy the Russian regime and kill all its leaders. For Russian leaders this is an ever-present reality: Putin reportedly obsessively watches the video of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s death after he was overthrown by NATO forces. Facing the prospect of death if they do not act to save their regime, Russian leaders will risk launching further conventional and tactical nuclear strikes on NATO troop formations and Ukrainian supply operations in bordering NATO states such as Poland and Estonia to signal that Russia is willing and able to defend itself despite the risk of strategic nuclear escalation.
The attacked NATO states will invoke Article 5 and NATO will begin a conventional operation to eliminate Russia’s offensive capability to make such attacks. Fearing that those attacks will destroy the Russian strategic nuclear capability and thus leave them defenseless against NATO conventional forces, the Russians will launch a first-strike strategic nuclear attack on the slim hope that it will weaken the Western resolve or capability to respond and save their regime. I will then have something in the order of a few minutes to send out an email to my colleagues saying, “I told you so.”
This is only a scenario. None of it is inevitable, of course. But this is the path that we are currently on and the likelihood of it coming to pass grows by the day as one side or the other becomes more desperate. The consequences of this path are deeply ruinous. It should be named.
Saleh Mohamed Al-Iraqi, a leader of the Sadr’s movement, said the influential cleric also “banned the use of weapons in all provinces except Saladin and Samarra city.”
It was not yet clear why Saladin province was not included in the ban.
The move comes amid rising tensions in Iraq over the failure of Shia political groups to agree on the formation of a new government since last year’s parliamentary elections in which Al-Sadr’s bloc won the most seats.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Russian President Vladimir Putin again threatened on Friday, as he announced the annexation of four provinces from Ukraine, to use nuclear weapons, presumably as a last resort, in his war on Ukraine.
Putin’s implication is that it would be hypocritical for the US to denounce Russia for using nukes, when Washington itself has done so twice. He is further implying that the presence of U.S. troops in allied countries is just a fig leaf for a form of occupation no different than what he has just imposed on the four provinces of Ukraine.
Putin’s analogies are screwy and you wonder if, by all that whispering back and forth with Trump on the sidelines of summits, he somehow caught whatever brain disease it is that has driven the former guy so bat shit insane.
In any case, the US would certainly depart the three countries Mr. Putin singled out if it were asked to do so. Will Putin depart all of Ukraine, as he has been asked to by Kyiv? No, I thought not.
Although it is true that the US did use nuclear weapons against Japan to end the Pacific War, the current US nuclear posture is that the US would not under any circumstance use, or even threaten to use, nuclear weapons “against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”
Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, and in fact quite responsibly gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994, so it would not be the sort of country against which the US would use nukes even if Washington went to war with Ukraine.
Kyiv had had the third largest such stockpile in the world! In response to this step, the Budapest Memorandum signed by the Russian Federation, the U.K. and the U.S. pledged these powers to respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine.
Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum the first time in 2014 with its invasion of Crimea, and now again in 2022 with its war on Ukraine. The current US and UK military supplies to Ukraine are in accordance with their obligations under the Memorandum.
Both Iraq, which also gave up a not-very-advanced nuclear weapons program in the 1990s, and Ukraine, which relinquished its nukes in 1994, have been invaded. Already, the optics are very bad for nuclear proliferation. If you were Iran, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, what would you be thinking? Wouldn’t you notice that North Korea, which went hell bent for leather in developing a nuclear stockpile, has not been invaded?
If Ukraine were not only invaded but also nuked, that would convey to the world the message that a country without nuclear weapons is a sitting duck before any country that does possess that capability. So far, the US, Britain, France, China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan all have nuclear weapons.
We have nine nuclear states in part because of inter-state rivalry. Once the US had a nuclear bomb, Russia had to have one, since the two superpowers were then locked in global struggle for dominance. Once Russia and the US had a bomb, China had to have one, since it had tense relations at many points with both the superpowers. Israel wanted the bomb to forestall any further pan-Arab attempt to push it into the sea, and also as an implied threat to Arab rivals. In 2003 as the US invaded Iraq, the Israelis warned Iraq not to retaliate against US ally Israel with rockets with poison gas in their noses, threatening to nuke Baghdad if it did so. Once India had a bomb, its primary rival Pakistan had to have one, too. North Korea’s bomb was a response to the nuclear umbrella the US military had extended over South Korea and Japan.
One of the reasons US officials typically give for not wanting to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon is that they fear if Tehran had one, Saudi Arabia would insist on having one, as well. Washington manages to ignore that Israel is the country that kicked off the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and that Iraq’s feeble experiments in that direction were a response to the Israeli bomb and the forms of hegemony it gave Israel in the region.
If simple rivalries can impel countries to go nuclear, rivalries plus real-world examples of how dangerous it is to be without a nuke would turbocharge this tendency.
A nuclear strike on Kyiv would make Ukraine’s 1994 leadership look like complete and utter fools for giving up the protection of their own nuclear arsenal. Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine if it had remained a nuclear state.
But it could also make countries like Iran, South Africa, and Argentina, which have had the scientific expertise to create a nuclear weapon but who have chosen not to, reconsider.
Iran’s clerical Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has given numerous fatwas that forbid the creating, making and stockpiling of nuclear weapons as contrary to Islamic law. Classical Islamic law forbids the killing of noncombatants in war.
No one in the US takes Khamenei’s fatwas on the subject seriously but they should. Iran only has a civilian nuclear enrichment program and not a military one precisely because of the anti-nuke fatwas of the ayatollah. Those in Iran’s military and scientific establishment who want a bomb have to content themselves with acquiring the know-how to make one without actually starting up a nuclear weapons program. Gaining capabilities without actually going for a weapon is called the “Japan option” or “nuclear latency,” and it has some benefits for deterrence. Getting up an invasion of a country that could have a bomb by the time your troops landed on its soil would obviously be unwise.
Khamenei, however, is old and allegedly ill or very frail. A new leadership is emerging. They may feel differently about at least making and stockpiling nuclear weapons than did the older generation of ayatollahs, who excoriated them as works of the devil.
It isn’t just Iran, though. Any country with a major enemy that fears invasion may take a lesson from Putin’s use of nukes that they would rather be pariahs like North Korea than victims like Ukraine. If Iran got a nuke, Saudi Arabia would certainly want one, and Riyadh is in a position just to buy the scientists to make one. Southeast Asian countries afraid of an increasingly assertive China would be in the same boat.
The use of nuclear weapons is not only a threat because such explosions would kill hundreds of thousands or nowadays even millions of people. The journal Science points out that they would set forests and buildings on fire, putting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Ironically, they could put so much particulate matter into the atmosphere that they could cause a nuclear winter, killing off all plant life by plunging the earth into two or three years of darkness, and perhaps killing off most large mammals as well. (Hint: humans are large mammals.) That nuclear winter would be a cold spell, but when the earth came out of it and the atmosphere cleared up, it would immediately go tropically hot because the CO2 and methane would still be up there, from all the forest and other fires. A nuclear winter followed by a rapid melting of the ice sheets at the poles and hot surface temperatures in the ocean, producing devastating mega-storms that will make Ian look like a kitten, would await anyone who survived the nuclear winter.
A Sadr statement said, “Intimidation and coercion of civilians … is forbidden and prohibited and internal strife is not allowed.”
Friday 07/10/2022
Members of Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigade), the military wing affiliated with Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, withdraw from Baghdad’s Green Zone, August 30, 2022. (AFP)
BAGHDAD –
Shai cleric and leader of the Sadrist movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, ordered on Thursday the freezing of all armed factions, including Saraya al-Salam (the Peace Brigades), in all provinces, except for Samarra district in the Salah al-Din governorate in northern Iraq.
The decision came after renewed confrontations on Wednesday evening between gunmen belonging to Saraya al-Salam and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, led by former dissident Qais al-Khazali.
Sadr said, in a statement signed by Saleh Muhammad al-Iraqi, nicknamed ‘Sadr’s Minister’, “To prevent sedition in Basra province, we announce the freezing of all armed factions, if found, including the Peace Forces and the ban on the use of weapons in all provinces except for Salah al-Din, (Samarra and its surroundings) or as directed by the current commander-in-chief of the armed forces.”
The statement added, “Intimidation and coercion of civilians … is forbidden and prohibited and internal strife is not allowed.”
The statement called on Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to “rein in the insolent militias of Qais and their ilk, as they know only terrorism, money and power.”
Saraya al-Salam, an armed Shia group affiliated with the Sadrist movement, was formed after the Islamic State took control of Nineveh province and parts of Salah al-Din, Kirkuk, Anbar and Diyala provinces in 2014.
Sadr did not explain the reason for excluding the Samarra district in Salah al-Din governorate from the freeze, but the Peace Brigades in Samarra are protecting the Shrine of the Shia Askari Imams, which was targeted on February 22, 2006.
The attack at the time led to violent confrontation between Sunnis and Shias, killing people and displacing thousands of Iraqis.
Some Iraqi provinces have recently witnessed tensions between Sadrists and gunmen belonging to factions loyal to the Coordination Framework, an umbrella bloc of Iraqi Shia parties united mostly by their opposition to the Sadrist movement. Among these factions is Asaib Ahl al-Haq.
Observers attribute these tensions, which could spill over into other provinces, to the political crisis that the country has been experiencing for nearly a year.
The differences between the Sadrist movement and the Iran-backed Coordination Framework have prevented the election of a president and the formation of a new government, since the elections that were held on October 10, 2021.
A view of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant 250 km (155 miles) south of the Iranian capital Tehran, March 30, 2005. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/File Photo
VIENNA, Oct 10 (Reuters) – (This Oct. 10 story has been refiled to clarify last inspection mentioned in quarterly report was on Sept. 6 (not Aug. 31), and the third IR-6 cascade had come online then)
Iran is rapidly expanding its ability to enrich uranium with advanced centrifuges at its underground plant at Natanz and now intends to go further than previously planned, a confidential U.N. nuclear watchdog report seen by Reuters showed on Monday.
While indirect talks between Iran and the United States on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have stalled, Tehran has brought onstream an ever larger number of advanced centrifuges the deal bans it from using to produce enriched uranium.
These machines are far more efficient than the first-generation IR-1, the only centrifuge that the deal lets Iran use to grow its stock of enriched uranium. Iran has been adding them particularly at two underground sites at Natanz and Fordowthat may be designed to withstand potential aerial bombardment.
At the underground Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz, Monday’s ad hoc report to member states showed Iran has quickly completed the installation of seven cascades, or clusters, of advanced centrifuges that were either not finished or at a very early stage of installation according to the last quarterly International Atomic Energy Agency report issued on Sept. 7.
Those seven cascades, one of IR-4 centrifuges and six of IR-2m machines, were fully installed but not yet enriching, Monday’s report said.
Iran has also informed the IAEA it plans to add an extra three cascades of IR-2m machines at the FEP, on top of the 12 already announced and now installed, the report showed.
Of those three extra IR-2m cascades, installation has already started on two of them, the report said.
The last inspection mentioned in the quarterly report was Sept. 6, when the IAEA verified that the third IR-6 cascade was enriching. Monday’s report said all three were still enriching.
The report showed all the centrifuges enriching at Natanz were still producing uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas enriched to up to 5% but now they were being fed with natural UF6. That contrasted to the quarterly report that said they were being fed with UF6 enriched to up to 2%. It did not explain the change.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran deal and re-imposed sanctions against Iran that the deal had lifted. Iran responded by breaching the restrictions on its nuclear activities imposed by the deal.
If the deal is revived Iran will have to put its advanced centrifuges into storage, diplomats say.
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