North Korea remains a bleak place, and Melanie Kirkpatrick’s new book, Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s …
Nuclear Weapons
50 Years Later: The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Hard to believe for those of us who lived through it – or even if you merely witnessed it by watching 2000’s Thirteen Days – but the Cuban Missile Crisis turned 50 last week. That was the one time when the point of one …
Is the White House Weighing a Military Strike on Iran?
Have some members of the Obama Administration been quaffing a 10-year-old jug of Kool-Aid left in a White House basement fridge by Bush Administration officials? That’s certainly an impression conveyed by one unnamed source …
$240 million
“We believe that it will be impossible to make a rational assessment of the role of military force in any overall Iran strategy, without first carefully assessing the likely benefits and costs of military action.”
Iraq: How the CIA Says It Blew It on Saddam’s WMD
Now that we’re out of Iraq, the CIA has come clean on how it came to be bamboozled about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ferrets over at the National Security Archive (NSA) …
Institutional Post-War PTSD
When the phrase PTSD surfaces, it’s always linked to individuals – usually troops returning from a war zone with the anxiety and hyper-awareness found among those with post-traumatic stress disorder.
But there’s a …
No Fading Away For MacArthur Over Here
TOKYO – More than six decades after U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur stepped down as lord and master of Japan, he remains a towering figure of the postwar era – an enigmatic, controversial and yet revered figure who helped …
Persian Gulf Fireworks?
Lede story in Wednesday’s New York Times has the U.S. military as a confident boxer, warily eyeing Iran tucked into the far corner of the ring:
The United States has quietly moved significant military reinforcements into the
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Probably Not Vanilla Wafers
From Monday’s contract announcements:
The Boeing Co., Huntington Beach, Calif., is being awarded a $36,197,205 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to produce 12 modified wafers for the Minuteman III missile system. The location of the performance is Orange County, Md. Work is to be completed by Aug. 31, 2015.
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Stuxnet Just Died
The wily computer code has died, only weeks after the New York Times told us, not amid its birth announcements, that it was the bastard child of the U.S. and Israel.
Designed to screw up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, the software – which ultimately made its way into 130,000 computers around the world – contained a couple of …
“I were an Israeli leader, I think I’d have trouble coordinating with the United States government about something like [a military attack on Iran] for fear it would be leaked…The last thing you want to do is put your air forces in jeopardy by having it telegraphed that that’s something you’re doing. And if you tried to coordinate with this Administration, I would think that there is at least a reasonable chance that it would leak out, so I would anticipate that a responsible Israeli government, given the relationship, would very likely have to make a decision on their own and proceed.”
U.S. Admits to Waging War Against Iran
Check out this New York Times story about President Obama speeding up waves of cyber attacks against Iran. I personally have no problem with this, and prefer it to Israel’s imagined missile strikes.
But just remember this …