Israel Drops Cancer-Inducing Bombs On Gazans

IMEMC – According to Al Ray Palestinian Media Agency, Dr. Erik Fosse recently stated to Press TV that the majority of patients hospitalized in Gaza are civilians injured in attacks on their homes, and that about thirty percent of these victims are children.

Dense Inert Metal Explosive, known as DIME, is an explosive device developed to minimize damage to things that are incidental to the intended target, known as “collateral damage”.

The bombs reportedly effect a relatively small but rather significantly damaging blast radius, and are believed by medical experts to have severe biological effects on those hit with the bomb’s micro-shrapnel.

DIME munitions were developed by the US Air Force, in 2006, and have since been tested repeatedly on the people of Gaza, who, according to the Electronic Intifada, have long served as involuntary lab rats for Israel’s weapons industry.

DIME bombs contain tungsten, a cancer-causing metal which helps to produce blasts which slice through flesh and bone, often completely destroying the lower limbs of people within the blast radius.

The doctor also says that some Palestinians in the besieged enclave have been wounded by a new type of weapon which even doctors with previous experience in war zones do not recognize.

Israel has used banned weapons in the past, including depleted-uranium and white phosphorus, which is nearly impossible to extiguish and leaves its victim hideously burned and scarred, should he or she even survive such an attack.

The ground assault continues in Gaza, today, with nearly 300 reported deaths and over 2,000 wounded in Gaza, to include elderly, disabled and children not even a year old — all victims of targets which include mostly civilian homes, hospitals and municipal facilities.

Source: International Middle East Media Center

See related link: Israel DIME Weapon effect on Gaza-Article and Gallery

(Warning — graphic images)

The 5 Worst Weapons Still In Use

We've put together a list of the top five worst weapons that are still in regular legal use, today. From downright nasty technology to devastating to local civilians, many of these weapons are in the process of being banned, or have had campaigns launched to outlaw them.

Scientist Looks To Weaponize Ball Lightning

David Hambling says:

Two hundred years ago this week, the warshipHMS Warren Hastingswas struck by a weird phenomenon: "Three distinct balls of fire" fell from the heavens, striking the ship and killing two crewmen, leaving behind "a nauseous, sulfurous smell," according to the Times of London.

Ball lightning has been the subject of much scientific scrutiny over the years. And, as with many powerful natural phenomena, the question arises: "Can we turn it into a weapon?" Peculiar as it may seem, that’s exactly what some researchers are working on — even though it hasn’t even been properly replicated in the laboratory yet.

The exact cause and nature of ball lighting has yet to be determined; there may be several different types, confusing matters further. But generally it manifests as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air which may end by fizzling out or exploding.

In the mid-’60s, the U.S. military started exploring ways that the phenomenon might be weaponized. Take this 1965 Defense Technical Information Center report on Survey of Kugelblitz Theories For Electromagnetic Incendiaries, (Kugelblitz is German for ball lighting). The document summarizes and evaluates the ball lightning theories then prevalent, and recommends "a theoretical and experimental Kugelblitz program… as a means of developing the theory into a weapons application." This led to an Air Force program called Harness Cavalier, which seems to have ended without producing anything conclusive.

However, some years later scientist Dr. Paul Koloc was looking at methods of containing high-temperature plasma during nuclear fusion. There are many schemes for containing plasma in donut-shaped magnetic fields using a device called a Tokomak. Koloc’s insight was that, under the right conditions, a donut-shaped mass of moving plasma would generate the required fields for containment itself. No Tokomak would be required for this "plasmoid," which would be completely stable and self-sustaining. It is a very close equivalent of the smoke ring — another type of dynamic "vortex ring," which remains stable over a period of time, unlike an unstructured cloud of smoke.

Koloc also theorized that if a donut-shaped plasmoid was created accidentally — say, during a lightning strike — it would remain stable for a period of seconds of minutes. This he believes is the explanation for ball lightning. He has a lot of competition from other, wildly different theories of ball lightning, though, from nanobatteries to vaporized silicon to black holes. There is no scientific consensus.

In the ’80s, Koloc’s team succeeded in creating small, short-lived plasmoids from "chicken egg to softball" size in the laboratory. It was a good start, but not enough to convince the world that he’s right about ball lightning. Ultimately the work might lead to a means of containing nuclear fusion… but there were some engineering challenges to tackle. Moreover, the scientific mainstream has not bought into the concept. While giant programs to achieve controlled fusion like ITER are sucking up billions, Koloc has found it much harder to attract funding. This is not like cold fusion or bubble fusion which has been challenged on scientific grounds, but it’s been very much sidelined in favor of other "confinement concepts" for fusion power.

However, in 2002, Koloc’s company, Prometheus II, briefly obtained funding from the Missile Defence Agency. The aim was to create stable ‘magnetoplasmoids’ a foot in diameter which would last between one and five seconds. In the subsequent phase, the magnetoplasmoid would be compressed and accelerate to two hundred kilometers a second. This "encapsulated EMP bullet" would make an idea anti-missile weapon, generating an intense electromagnetic pulse on impact which would scramble the guidance system and any electronics, as well as causing thermal damage.

Koloc called the weapon "Phased Hyper-Acceleration for Shock, EMP, and Radiation" — PHASER.

"It can be used for a range of purposes from stunning personnel to destroying the functionality of electronically operated devices, smaller rockets, vehicles and packages that represent an immediate threat to the United States," he wrote. "This dial-able PHASER weapon can be set on ‘Stun’ or dialed down, selecting a non-lethal level for persons needed for later interrogation… One mundane application for law enforcement would be the disruption of the engine electronics to stop vehicles that would otherwise be the target of a high-speed chase. Dialable versions of the PHASER will be available for use in civilian encounters."

Nothing seems to have resulted after the Phase I contract, so I contacted Koloc to see how his research had progressed. He confirmed that they had successfully formed plasmoids a foot in diameter, but that these could not be made sufficiently stable.

To make it work and overcome the stability problem, they need a device known as a "fast rising parallel plate transmission line." There was not enough funding for this and the company is still trying to raise funds.

"Once the re-engineered formation system becomes operational, we will proceed to form plasmoids of approximately 35 to 45 centimeters in diameter with a stable lifetime of from one to thirty seconds," says Prometheus II Vice President D. M. Cooper. "The plasmoids should be rugged and energetic, and should attain quiescence (thus becoming very stable) within two or three milliseconds of the formation pulse. The plasmoids will be useful for energy applications even if the military applications are not pursued."

So a ball lightning weapon remains tantalizingly out of reach –- or does it? As I noted in a previous article on military ball lightning, the USAF’s Phillips Laboratory examined a very similar concept in 1993. Again, this involved accelerating a donut-shaped mass of plasma to high speed as an anti-missile weapon in a project called Magnetically Accelerated Ring to Achieve Ultra-high Directed Energy and Radiation, or  MARAUDER. Based on the Air Force’s awesome Shiva Star power system, experiments spat out plasmoids at ultra-high speed that were expected to reach 3,000 kilometers a second by 1995. But nothing was published after 1993, and MARAUDER was classified, disappearing into the black world of secret programs.

Ball lighting is still mysterious 200 years later… and the next time a warship gets struck by weird fireballs they will probably be as baffled as were the sailors aboard the HMS Warren Hastings.

The Science Of Genocide

Illustration by Mr. Fish

Chris Hedges writes,

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. 

The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.

“In World War II Auschwitz and Hiroshima showed that progress through technology has escalated man’s destructive impulses into more precise and incredibly more devastating form,” Bruno Bettelheim said. “The concentration camps with their gas chambers, the first atomic bomb … confronted us with the stark reality of overwhelming death, not so much one’s own—this each of us has to face sooner or later, and however uneasily, most of us manage not to be overpowered by our fear of it—but the unnecessary and untimely death of millions. … Progress not only failed to preserve life but it deprived millions of their lives more effectively than had ever been possible before. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, after the second World War Auschwitz and Hiroshima became monuments to the incredible devastation man and technology together bring about.”

The atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral. Science and technology serve the ambitions of humankind. And few in the sciences look beyond the narrow tasks handed to them by corporations or government. They employ their dark arts, often blind to the consequences, to cement into place systems of security and surveillance, as well as systems of environmental destruction, that will result in collective enslavement and mass extermination. As we veer toward environmental collapse we will have to pit ourselves against many of these experts, scientists and technicians whose loyalty is to institutions that profit from exploitation and death.

Scientists and technicians in the United States over the last five decades built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.5 trillion. (The Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal of similar capability.) By 1963, according to the Columbia University professor Seymour Melman, the United States could overkill the 140 principal cities in the Soviet Union more than 78 times. Yet we went on manufacturing nuclear warheads. And those who publicly questioned the rationality of the massive nuclear buildup, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who at the government lab at Los Alamos, N.M., had overseen the building of the two bombs used on Japan, often were zealously persecuted on suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers. It was a war plan that called for a calculated act of enormous, criminal genocide. We built more and more bombs with the sole purpose of killing hundreds of millions of people. And those who built them, with few exceptions, never gave a thought to their suicidal creations.

“What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everyone except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” Oppenheimer asked after World War II.

Max Born, the great German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, in his memoirs made it clear he disapproved of Oppenheimer and the other physicists who built the atomic bombs. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” 

Oppenheimer wrote his old teacher back. “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.” But of course, by then, it was too late.

It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a “rational” enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species? Does it protect life?

For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction.


The 17th century Enlightenment myth of human advancement through science, reason and rationality should have been obliterated forever by the slaughter of World War I. Europeans watched the collective suicide of a generation. The darker visions of human nature embodied in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Frederick Nietzsche before the war found modern expression in the work of Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, along with atonal and dissonant composers such as Igor Stravinsky and painters such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Human progress, these artists and writers understood, was a joke. But there were many more who enthusiastically embraced new utopian visions of progress and glory peddled by fascists and communists. These belief systems defied reality. They fetishized death. They sought unattainable utopias through violence. And empowered by science and technology, they killed millions.

Human motives often are irrational and, as Freud pointed out, contain powerful yearnings for death and self-immolation. Science and technology have empowered and amplified the ancient lusts for war, violence and death. Knowledge did not free humankind from barbarism. The civilized veneer only masked the dark, inchoate longings that plague all human societies, including our own. Freud feared the destructive power of these urges. He warned in “Civilization and Its Discontents”that if we could not regulate or contain these urges, human beings would, as the Stoics predicted, consume themselves in a vast conflagration. The future of the human race depends on naming and controlling these urges. To pretend they do not exist is to fall into self-delusion.

The breakdown of social and political control during periods of political and economic turmoil allows these urges to reign supreme. Our first inclination, Freud noted correctly, is not to love one another as brothers or sisters but to “satisfy [our] aggressiveness on [our fellow human being], to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.”

The war in Bosnia, with rampaging Serbian militias, rape camps, torture centers, concentration camps, razed villages and mass executions, was one of numerous examples of Freud’s wisdom. At best, Freud knew, we can learn to live with, regulate and control our inner tensions and conflicts.

The structure of civilized societies would always be fraught with this inner tension, he wrote, because “… man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this program of civilization.” The burden of civilization is worth it. The alternative, as Freud knew, is self-destruction.

A rational world, a world that will protect the ecosystem and build economies that learn to distribute wealth rather than allow a rapacious elite to hoard it, will never be handed to us by the scientists and technicians. Nearly all of them work for the enemy. Mary Shelley warned us about becoming Prometheus as we seek to defy fate and the gods in order to master life and death. Her Victor Frankenstein, when his 8-foot-tall creation made partly of body pieces from graves came to ghastly life, had the same reaction as Oppenheimer when the American scientist discovered that his bomb had incinerated Japanese schoolchildren. The scientist Victor Frankenstein watched the “dull yellow eye” of his creature open and “breathless horror and disgust” filled his heart.”

Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexican desert: “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another.” The critic Harold Bloom, in words that could be applied to Oppenheimer, called Victor Frankenstein “a moral idiot.”

All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation destroys them and us. They make the nuclear bombs. They extract oil from the tar sands. They turn the Appalachians into a wasteland to extract coal. They serve the evils of globalism and finance. 

They run the fossil fuel industry. They flood the atmosphere with carbon emissions, doom the seas, melt the polar ice caps, unleash the droughts and floods, the heat waves, the freak storms and hurricanes.


Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Via: "Truth Dig"

Did the US Cause Fallujah's Birth Defects?

As Deformities Spike In The Iraqi City, We Ask If The US Has Been Honest About Weaponry Used During The 2004 Assaults.

New research is underway on the alarming increase in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

In November 2004, the US led an assault on Fallujah - a stronghold of opposition against the US occupation, west of Baghdad. Intense bombardment left many of its buildings destroyed and displaced much of the 300,000-strong population.

Eventually, the US was forced to admit that amongst its arsenal was white phosphorus - a substance the Pentagon described as a 'chemical weapon' when it was used by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds. In addition, eyewitnesses claimed the US military used "unusual weapons".

Subsequent investigations have focused on the possible use of depleted uranium by the US for its armour-piercing qualities. The US, however, denies using such weaponry. Research has shown elevated levels of radioactivity in Fallujah and across Iraq. Iraqi physicians have also long reported a spike in cases involving severe birth defects in Fallujah since 2004. They have reported children born with multiple heads, serious brain damage, missing limbs and with extra fingers and toes.

A report published in 2011 on the level of uranium and other contaminants in hair from the parents of children with congenital anomalies in Fallujah partly concluded that:

"Whilst caution must be exercised about ruling out other possibilities, because none of the elements found in excess are reported to cause congenital diseases and cancer except uranium, these findings suggest the enriched uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases. Questions are thus raised about the characteristics and composition of weapons now being deployed in modern battlefields."

Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker reporting for the programme Fault Linesexamined the legacy of the US occupation in Iraq and described what he saw on a road trip across Iraq after the withdrawal of US troops.

"What we found by visiting the general hospital there is that there are extremely high rates of birth defects, some five times the international norm, and many of the doctors who work in those hospitals believe that this is a direct result of the kind of weapons the US forces were using in those campaigns." 

Many researchers say uranium from the shelling may be to blame. However, no conclusive proof of a link has been established. In this episode Inside Story Americas asks: Is the US being honest about the use of unconventional weapons, and the possible link with the rising incidence of birth defects in Fallujah?

Joining the discussion with presenter Shihab Rattansi are guests: Ross Caputi, a former US marine who fought in the battle for Fallujah in November 2004 and co-founder of the Justice for Fallujah Project; Dai Williams, a weapons researcher whose work focuses on community health in conflict zones associated with new types of weapons; and Raed Jarrar, an Iraq analyst and the executive director for a Washington-based global strategy firm.

"The promises at that time were that the US will go in and get rid of all the bad guys and rebuild the city, [but] that did not happen. We saw a total destruction of Fallujah and the use of so many unconventional weapons ...."

Raed Jarrar, a Middle East and North Africa expert

WHITE PHOSPHORUS IN FALLUJAH:

US forces used the chemical in the Iraqi city in November 2004, purportedly to light up the battlefield.

Its use is legal as long as civilians are not targeted.

The US has used white phosphorus in some form or another since World War I.

US officials initially denied its use in Fallujah, but in 2005 General Peter Pace confirmed it.

White phosphorus particles burn through clothes to the bone, stick to skin and cannot be relieved by water.

The substance spontaneously ignites at about 30 Celcius, and continues to burn until it is deprived of oxygen.

Depleted uranium bullets were used heavily in the second battle for Fallujah, in tank armour and to reinforce steel. They were also used in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003.

White Phosphorus: The New Napalm

(Credit: AP/Nick Ut)

Forty Years After Vietnam's Most Famous Photo, Incendiary Weapons Still Kill and Injure Children

BY STEVE GOOSE AND BONNIE DOCHERTY
FRIDAY, JUN 8, 2012 11:12 AM EDT
Courtesy Of "Salon"

“Too hot! Too hot!” wailed 9-year-old Kim Phuc as sticky napalm burned through her clothes and skin. Forty years ago this week, Kim Phuc was photographed running down the road away from her burning village after a South Vietnamese plane dropped incendiary weapons.

The photograph, taken by Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut for Associated Press on June 8, 1972, became emblematic of the terrible impact on civilians of the U.S.-led bombing campaigns over Southeast Asia.

In the decade that followed, the shocking consequences that napalm inflicted on civilians in Vietnam and elsewhere became a major factor motivating adoption of a new international law restricting the use of some incendiary weapons. But that law, Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), has failed to live up to its promise.

Today, children continue to endure the devastating impacts of incendiary weapons. It is time for governments to revisit CCW Protocol III and strengthen existing law to minimize that suffering.

Napalm is the most notorious incendiary substance, but it is only one of more than 180. The harm caused by white phosphorus munitions, used in more recent conflicts, exemplifies these weapons’ humanitarian problems.

The Associated Press reported that an 8-year-old Afghan girl, Razia, was injured when a white phosphorus shell ripped through her home in the Tagab Valley of Kapisa province in June 2009. When she reached the operating room, white powder covered her skin, the oxygen mask on her face started to melt, and flames appeared when doctors attempted to scrape away the dead tissue.

White phosphorus munitions cause particularly severe injuries, including chemical burns down to the bone. Wounds contaminated by white phosphorus can reignite days later when bandages are removed, produce poisoning that leads to organ failure and death, and lead to lifetime health problems.

White phosphorus munitions are not banned. They are generally designed to be used by militaries as smokescreens to obscure their operations on the ground and to illuminate and mark targets at night. Yet in Afghanistan and elsewhere, actors ranging from high-tech military powers to non-state armed groups are using white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon to ignite fuel supplies, ammunition and other materiel.

The New York Times has documented that, as recently as October 2011, U.S. and other international forces in Afghanistan were using white phosphorus rounds against Taliban rocket positions. A U.S. military spokesperson said at the time that officials could not be certain whether it was their own round or an enemy round that hit Razia’s house.

In another recent conflict, the Israel Defense Forces used white phosphorus in densely populated areas of Gaza in 2009, killing and injuring civilians and damaging infrastructure, including a United Nations school where civilians were taking shelter. Local doctors and witnesses described to Human Rights Watch researchers injuries that burned civilians to the bone and reignited during surgery.

Stockpiling these weapons is also a cause for concern. Across Libya in 2011, weapons depots containing white phosphorus and napalm were left unsecured, endangering civilians. In Benghazi, Human Rights Watch found leaking drums of napalm powder abandoned at a military depot alongside casings and igniters for napalm bombs. It found white phosphorus and mortar shells at multiple sites as recently as March 2012.

Efforts are under way to secure Libya’s abandoned ordnance. But there hasn’t been diplomatic enthusiasm to tackle the broader problem – the loopholes and inconsistent restrictions that limit CCW Protocol III’s effectiveness.

The protocol’s definition is too narrow, encompassing only munitions “primarily designed” to set fires or cause burn injuries, and creating exceptions for those with “incidental” incendiary effects. Thus, some governments, including the U.S., believe that white phosphorus munitions are not covered by Protocol III, even when used intentionally for incendiary effects. A broader, effects-based definition of incendiary weapons should be created to encompass multipurpose munitions with incendiary effects, such as white phosphorus.

In addition, the protocol prohibits attacks in populated areas with air-dropped incendiary weapons yet permits the same kinds of attacks with ground-launched models under certain circumstances. At the least, countries should bolster the protocol’s restrictions by prohibiting the use of all incendiary weapons in civilian areas.

A complete ban on incendiary weapons would have the most humanitarian benefits and provide the strongest protection under international law.

Over the past two years, at least 20 countries that have ratified the convention have expressed concern about incendiary weapons including white phosphorus, and many have said they are willing to reexamine the protocol.

In November, diplomats will convene in Geneva for their annual review of the convention. They should discuss the incendiary weapons protocol’s humanitarian shortcomings and make a commitment to revisit and strengthen it. They owe it to Kim Phuc, Razia and other victims of these exceptionally cruel weapons.

Steve Goose is director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch. Bonnie Docherty is a senior researcher in the Arms Division and Harvard Law School lecturer.

MORE STEVE GOOSE.

MORE BONNIE DOCHERTY.

American Weapons Of Mass Destructions

Submitted By "Sayf Maslul" 

By "Press TV" 
Courtesy Of "YouTube"

US Spends $32 Million To Make Eight 30,000-Pound Bombs

By Agence France-Presse 
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 
Courtesy Of "The Raw Story"

WASHINGTON — The US Air Force has a new 30,000-pound bomb in its arsenal designed to penetrate targets buried deep underground, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The Air Force started taking delivery of the giant bomb, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator,” in September, said Lieutenant Colonel Jack Miller.

Under an August 2 contract worth $32 million, the aerospace firm Boeing is due to produce eight of the giant MOP bombs to fulfil the Air Force’s “operational needs,” according to Miller.

The Air Force could not say how many of the conventional bombs have been delivered so far, but the MOP is seen as a weapon made for going after underground bunkers and tunnels in North Korea or Iran.

The MOP bomb, with more than 5,000 pounds (or nearly 2.5 tons) of explosives, is supposed to fit on a B-2 stealth bomber to strike at underground sites hiding weapons of mass destruction.

About 20 feet (six meters) long, the GPS-guided bomb “will defeat our adversaries’ WMD before they leave the ground,” according to an official description posted on the website of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and US Strategic Command.

The United States, which suspects Iran and North Korea have built nuclear facilities deep underground to thwart any possible air raids, has been developing the MOP bomb since about 2007.

The weapon, made to penetrate up to 200 feet of reinforced concrete before exploding, is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, the BLU-109.

The new MOP is also twice as heavy as the “daisy cutter” bomb employed in Vietnam and in Tora Bora at the outset of the war in Afghanistan.

The “daisy cutter” has since been retired and replaced with the MOAB, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb or “the Mother of All Bombs,” which weighs less than the MOP bomb but contains more explosive power.

DIME Bomb For Perfect Crowd Control

Voila! No Crowd

By Bob Nichols
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 2, 2010, 00:11
Courtesy Of "The Online Journal"

SAN FRANCISCO -- A true Cancer Bomb is the Holy Grail of the US Military. Bingo! The Dense Inert Metal Explosive bomb with a carbon fiber shell is a real contender for the coveted military title of The Cancer Bomb.

The carbon fiber shell turns to dust, though, it is still deadly. It does not add sharp irregular pieces of metal or plastic shrapnel to the blast.

Boeing GBU-39

The DIME innards, or ballast, are the contribution of the US Air Force Research Labs and the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab (the Lab.) They have been on the hunt for an ill-defined Cancer Bomb for 65 years.

The DIME bomb results look like a “Bingo” for the Air Force and the Lab. It will do what it is supposed to do -- kill a lot of people -- and take the international spotlight/PR heat off of the always useful, long acting, population destroying uranium oxide based munitions.

The DIME bomb or Cancer Bomb’s claim to fame is a near universal development of cancer, the Big C, by those civilians exposed to the tungsten, nickel, cobalt, iron and any “Magic Metal” ingredients in the on-board ballast. Of course, any grunts who might come in contact with the GBU-39s insides are high cancer probables, too.

The utterly spectacular result from the Bomb Innards Study is that all, as in 100 percent of the exposed rats, developed a fast growing, aggressive cancer in their muscles with a long, hard to pronounce name called “rhabdomyosarcomas.” The doctors tell us that it is detectable as a hard knot in muscle tissue. It’s aggressive and it kills you.

This is no small thing. A finding of 100 percent cancer in the studied rat population is rare indeed. If any grunts reading this were at or near any points where the GBU-39s were used, you or your honey had better be checking you out for hard knots in your muscles. Yea, it could be anywhere.

Of special note is the simple fact that the study’s authors did not say “no other cancers were found in the target population of rats.” Maybe there were, maybe there were not. We’ll try to find out and report back to you in another article to follow up this one.

DIME Bomb Questions

The big time research questions are: What other cancers does this stuff cause? What happens to human cells when the 100 percent Cancer Bomb’s guts are mixed with radiation from tiny vitrificated uranium oxide particles?

Or, F344 rat’s cells?

As the WWII RW Committee (Radiation Warfare, formerly the WWI Poison Gas Committee) member said of irradiated South Pacific Islanders: “ . . . humans are better than lab rats [for subjects] . . .” . . . grunts count, too.

Abstract:

Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats

John F. Kalinich1, Christy A. Emond1, Thomas K. Dalton1, Steven R. Mog2, Gary D. Coleman3, Jessica E. Kordell1, Alexandra C. Miller1, David E. McClain1

1 Heavy Metals Research Team and, 2 Veterinary Sciences Department, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, 3 Division of Veterinary Pathology, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

Continuing concern regarding the potential health and environmental effects of depleted uranium and lead has resulted in many countries adding tungsten alloy (WA)-based munitions to their battlefield arsenals as replacements for these metals. Because the alloys used in many munitions are relatively recent additions to the list of militarily relevant metals, very little is known about the health effects of these metals after internalization as embedded shrapnel. Previous work in this laboratory developed a rodent model system that mimicked shrapnel loads seen in wounded personnel from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In the present study, we used that system and male F344 rats, implanted intramuscularly with pellets (1 mm × 2 mm cylinders) of weapons-grade WA, to simulate shrapnel wounds. Rats were implanted with 4 (low dose) or 20 pellets (high dose) of WA. Tantalum (20 pellets) and nickel (20 pellets) served as negative and positive controls, respectively.

The high-dose WA-implanted rats (n = 46) developed extremely aggressive tumors surrounding the pellets within 4–5 months after implantation. The low-dose WA-implanted rats (n = 46) and nickel-implanted rats (n = 36) also developed tumors surrounding the pellets but at a slower rate. Rats implanted with tantalum (n = 46), an inert control metal, did not develop tumors. Tumor yield was 100 percent in both the low- and high-dose WA groups. The tumors, characterized as high-grade pleomorphic rhabdomyosarcomas by histopathology and immunohistochemical examination, rapidly metastasized to the lung and necessitated euthanasia of the animal.

Significant hematologic changes, indicative of polycythemia, were also observed in the high-dose WA-implanted rats. These changes were apparent as early as 1 month postimplantation in the high-dose WA rats, well before any overt signs of tumor development. These results point out the need for further studies investigating the health effects of tungsten and tungsten-based alloys.

Keywords: cobalt, embedded fragment, nickel, rat, rhabdomyosarcoma, tungsten, tungsten alloy.

Citation: Kalinich JF, Emond CA, Dalton TK, Mog SR, Coleman GD, Kordell JE, et al. 2005. Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats. Environ Health Perspect 113:729-734. doi:10.1289/ehp.7791

Received: 24 November 2004; Accepted: 14 February 2005; Online: 15 February 2005

Address correspondence to J. F. Kalinich, Heavy Metals Research Team, AFRRI, 8901 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD 20889-5603 USA. Telephone: (301) 295-9242. Fax: (301) 295-0292. E-mail: kalinich@afrri.usuhs.mil

This work was supported in part by U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command grant DAMD17-01-1-0821.

The views and opinions expressed in this report are strictly those of the authors and should not be construed as official U.S. Department of Defense policy.

The authors declare they have no competing financial interests.

Notes:

Ecological Development Biology: Intergrating Epigenetics, Medicine and Evolution Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel, December 2008, 459 pages, 182 illustrations, Sinauer

Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats

Kalinich JF, Emond CA, Dalton TK, Mog SR, Coleman GD, et al. 2005 Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats. Environ Health Perspect 113(6): doi:10.1289/ehp.7791

Small Diameter Bomb pictures from Defense Industry Daily dot com.

Copyright © 2010 Bob Nichols. Feel free to distribute with attribution and Notes and Sources.

Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winner, a staff writer for Veterans Today, a correspondent for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and a frequent contributor to various online publications. He reports on war, politics and the two nuclear weapons labs in the Bay Area. Nichols is writing a book based on 20 years of nuclear war in Central Asia. He is a former employee of an Army Ammunition Plant. You are encouraged to write Nichols at duweapons@gmail.com. 

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Top-Secret Assassination Tech

PopSci Investigation: What Kind Of Top-Secret Assassination Tech Does $58 Billion Buy?


Not since the end of the Cold War has the Pentagon spent so much to develop and deploy secret weapons. But now military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals

By Sharon Weinberger
Posted 09.09.2010 at 12:43 pm
Courtesy Of "Popular Science"

Under Cover The Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, an unmanned reconnaissance drone, is the most recent aircraft to emerge from the military's "black" budget. Nick Kaloterakis

Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billion—enough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

Where does the money go? Tracking the black budget has always been a challenge. Constantly shifting project names that seem to be randomly generated by computers—Tractor Cage, Tractor Card, Tractor Dirt, Tractor Hike and Tractor Hip are all real examples—make linking dollar amounts to technologies impossible for outsiders. But there are clues.

According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the CSBA, the allocations for classified operations in the 2011 federal budget include $19.4 billion for research and development across all four branches of the military (funding for the CIA, including its drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is contained within the Defense Department black budget), another $16.9 billion for procurement, and $14.6 billion for “operations and maintenance.” This latter category, Harrison notes, has been expanding quickly. This may suggest that many classified technologies are now moving from the laboratory to the battlefield.

In fact, the rise in classified defense spending accompanies a fundamental change in American military strategy. After the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon began a shift away from its late Cold War–era “two-war strategy,” premised on maintaining the ability to conduct two major military operations simultaneously, and began to focus instead on irregular warfare against individuals and groups. That strategic shift most likely coincides with an investment shift, away from technology that enables large-scale, possibly nuclear, war against superpower states and toward technology that helps military planners hunt and kill individuals. Each branch of the military uses different language to describe this process. Pentagon officials have spoken openly about their desire to use advanced technology to “reduce sensor-to-shooter time” in situations involving “time-sensitive targets.” The head of U.S. Special Operations Command talks about “high-tech manhunting,” while Air Force officials describe plans to compress the “kill chain.”

Even inside the Pentagon, few people know the precise details of the black budget. But by combining what is known about Pentagon goals and what is known about the most recent advances in military technology, we can begin to sketch its general contours.

Satellites On Demand: The Pentagon’s desire for pervasive battlefield surveillance doesn’t end with drones. Another goal is reconnaissance satellites that can be launched within a few days of a request, a drastic abbreviation of a process that today takes one to two years. Satellites have at least two significant advantages over drones: They can stay in the air 365 days a year, and they’re exempt from concerns about international airspace. Conducting drone-quality surveillance from a satellite requires advanced imaging technology like that found on an experimental satellite the Air Force launched last year, TacSat-3. TacSat-3 is equipped with hyperspectral sensors, which capture electromagnetic radiation across such a wide spectrum that they can detect the disturbed earth covering a buried roadside bomb. It’s an early step toward satellites that could find and identify individual people.  Jon Proctor

The first link in the kill chain: finding the person to hunt. Particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this type of intelligence gathering is increasingly done using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to the New America Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, the U.S. conducted 45 drone strikes in Pakistan in the first six months of this year. The centrality of unmanned aircraft to such missions suggests that the black budget is almost certainly already funding next-generation drones.

In April 2009, a French magazine published a photograph of one recent product of that funding—a slender-winged aircraft that had previously been spotted in southern Afghanistan and that aerospace experts had begun calling the Beast of Kandahar. After another photograph surfaced, this one a clear shot of the craft on the runway in Kandahar, the Air Force issued a statement that finally gave the Beast a formal identity: the RQ-170 Sentinel.

Manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the RQ-170 is a tailless flying wing with the telltale shape and surface contours of a stealth aircraft. Black-plane watchers immediately noticed similarities between the RQ-170 and Lockheed’s unmanned Polecat aircraft, which UAV observers had long speculated was being developed in secret and which was finally made public at the Farnborough International Airshow in England in 2006. The Air Force says that the Sentinel is a reconnaissance drone, a claim supported by the aircraft’s lack of visible armaments, by the sensors that appear to be embedded in its wings, and by its “RQ” designation.

But much about the RQ-170 is puzzling. Why would the Air Force need a stealth aircraft in Afghanistan, a country with no radar defense system? It wouldn’t, according to those familiar with the drone. The RQ-170 was developed with a more sophisticated enemy, perhaps China, in mind. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be adapted for current conflicts, however. Unlike the relatively easy-to-spot Predator and Reaper drones, the RQ-170’s stealth could allow it to conduct missions that those aircraft cannot, such as clandestine tracking, or slipping unnoticed across Afghanistan’s border into Iran or Pakistan to spy on their nuclear programs.

Aircraft like the RQ-170, the Predator and the Reaper can get only so close to their targets, of course, which is why the Pentagon is developing micro-drones designed to investigate dangerous terrain undetected. In April the Washington Post reported that the CIA was using pizza-platter-size micro-drones to find insurgents in Pakistan. And the 2010 Pentagon budget contains a brief unclassified reference to Project Anubis, a micro-drone developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The Air Force won’t talk about that specific vehicle, but a more general 2008 marketing video released by the lab did suggest that future micro-UAVs might be equipped with “incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads, or even explosives for precision targeting capability.” The video depicts an explosives-laden drone dive-bombing and killing a sniper. Budget documents indicate that Project Anubis (named for the ancient Egyptian god of the dead) is now complete, which means a lethal micro-drone could already be in the field.

The Pentagon is forging the next link in the kill chain—following an individual—with at least one high-priority research program. The Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating initiative (abbreviated both as CTTL and TTL), which was conceived in 2003, is slated to get about $210 million in unclassified funding between 2008 and 2013 and may receive more than that from the black budget. “The global war on terrorism cannot be won without a Manhattan Project–like TTL program,” was how officials from the Defense Science Board, a civilian committee that advises the Pentagon, described the situation in a 2004 presentation, adding that “cost is not the issue.”

In a 2007 briefing, Doug Richardson, an official working in the Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Exploitation program in Special Operations Command, said that the Pentagon wanted to use 14 different technologies for tagging and tracking targets such as people and vehicles. Tagging could involve marking targets with invisible biological paints or micromechanical sensors; tracking would mean monitoring those markers from a distance. Other schemes entailed capturing a person’s “thermal fingerprint” and then tracking him or her, perhaps from aircraft equipped with infrared sensors.

Tagging and Tracking: The U.S. military may already be surreptitiously “tagging” enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan with chemicals, sensors or bioreactive agents and then tracking them from a distance. It may also be using wireless-enabled sensors smaller than a grain of rice, each complete with a minuscule computer chip, to do the same thing. Kris Pister, a researcher who conducted early work on “smart dust”—tiny tracking devices that can be showered onto people or vehicles—says that scattering sensors onto targets from drones is “straightforward.”  Jon Proctor

More details can be found in proposals from companies and scientists seeking Pentagon contracts. One such proposal, from a University of Florida researcher, uses insect pheromones encoded with unique identifiers that could be tracked from miles away. Other plans employ biodegradable fluorescent “taggants” that can be scattered by UAVs. Voxtel, a private firm in Oregon, has already made available a product called NightMarks, a nanocrystal that can be seen through night-vision goggles and can be hidden in anything from glass cleaner to petroleum jelly.

Perhaps the most advanced tagging concept is “smart dust,” clouds of “motes,” tiny micro-electromechanical sensors that can attach themselves to people or vehicles. Thousands of these sensors would be scattered at a time to increase the chance of at least one of them reaching its target. Kris Pister, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s R&D branch, more than a decade ago to work on smart dust and was able to create sensors the size of rice grains. In the beginning, he now says, he and his colleagues imagined “smart burrs” that could attach to a target’s clothing as he or she brushed by, or “smart fleas” that could jump onto their targets. Pister says that this kind of autonomous microsensor is probably still not feasible. In 2001, however, his group succeeded in scattering more-primitive smart-dust motes from a small aerial drone and using them to track vehicles. A single UAV could easily carry thousands of tags, he says.

Citing security concerns, the Pentagon declined to elaborate on its research on clandestine tracking. (When I asked Zachary Lemnios, the agency’s chief technology officer, about advances in tagging, tracking and locating, he mentioned only “recent successes” and “state-of-the-art results.”) Yet in the same 2007 briefing in which Richardson delivered the Pentagon’s wish list of tagging technologies, he said he expected some or all of them to go into service by 2009. Shortly before 2009 arrived, the Los Angeles Times reported that soldiers in Pakistan were using sensors mounted on Predator drones that could track individual combatants even inside buildings—a report that, if accurate, suggests that tagging technologies may now be deployed overseas.

It’s possible that intelligence officials were exaggerating capabilities in order to intimidate insurgents. But there are other clues that the Pentagon may have deployed more-advanced tracking technology than it has disclosed. Last year, the U.K. Guardian reported that the CIA had given Pakistani tribesmen “chips” to plant in the homes of insurgents, who would later be killed by CIA drone strikes. A subsequent report by NBC News revealed a videotaped confession of one tribesman who claimed to have placed the tiny chips in exchange for cash payments from the U.S.

Microwave Weapons: The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars developing directed-energy weapons that can disarm or disable individuals, including the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), an effort (unclassified but based on research conducted in secret) to develop a UAV-mounted microwave weapon to fry enemy electronics. Another example is the Active Denial System, a truck-mounted less-than-lethal weapon that uses microwaves to heat the top layer of a person’s skin. These programs are almost certainly just the beginning. In late spring, Pentagon officials told USA Today that the U.S. was attempting to deploy an energy-beam weapon in Afghanistan that could detonate hidden explosives from a distance. An industry source who has worked for years on counter-IED technology says it’s probably a system called Max Power, which blasts microwaves to mimic the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear explosion.  Jon Proctor

In 1998, U.S. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at a number of training camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding. The missiles travel at about 550 mph, roughly the same speed as a commercial jetliner. They took more than an hour to reach their targets. If bin Laden had been in one of those camps, he had left by the time the missiles hit.

Such failures have inspired Pentagon planners to examine options that would allow them to strike precisely anywhere in the world in less than an hour, even if no drones, bombers, ships or troops were anywhere near the target. The Pentagon calls the initiative Prompt Global Strike, and in an April interview on Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates may have admitted that the U.S. already possessed this capability. “We have, in addition to the nuclear deterrent today, a couple of things we didn’t have in the Soviet days,” he said. In addition to missile defense, he continued, “we have Prompt Global Strike, affording us some conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn’t have before.” The Pentagon answered follow-up questions with silence.

Prompt Global Strike: The intercontinental ballistic missile is the only publicly acknowledged weapon capable of striking any point on the planet in less than an hour. Yet because Russia possesses defenses that would perceive the launch of an ICBM as the beginning of a nuclear war, launching even a non-nuclear ICBM is inadvisable. An alternative: hypersonic cruise missiles, which could travel at several times the speed of sound without appearing on radar as an existential threat. The Pentagon has at least five active hypersonic programs today. One of them, the rocket-launched HTV-2, is designed to break Mach 20; it was test-launched in April.  Jon Proctor

Technologically, the precise, one-hour capability is not inconceivable. By leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and traveling at 15,000 mph, an intercontinental ballistic missile can reach any point in the world within 30 minutes. Take the nuclear warhead off, and it becomes a conventionally armed Prompt Global Strike weapon. But it’s not that simple. This solution places the Pentagon’s current emphasis on killing individuals in direct conflict with its previous emphasis on fighting large military powers: Russian defense systems are designed to immediately detect the launch of an ICBM anywhere in the world; the government must then decide within minutes whether to retaliate. As a result, until Washington and Moscow find a way to distinguish conventionally armed ICBMs from nuclear ones, firing an ICBM at Afghanistan with the intention of killing even just one person could trigger a nuclear war.

To counter concerns that such an ICBM is heading for Russia, Pentagon officials have said that these weapons could be launched from California, where there are no nuclear-tipped missiles. (Since the placement of ICBMs is regulated by treaty and subject to inspection and verification, this system would, in theory, ensure that Moscow knows whether a missile is armed with a conventional warhead or a nuclear one. But this plan relies on Russia’s trust.)

An alternative to the conventionally armed land-based ICBM is a hypersonic weapon, essentially a cruise missile capable of traveling at many times the speed of sound—faster than anything in today’s conventional arsenal. These missiles would not have to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and would have very different trajectories from ICBMs, so Russia would be less likely to mistake them for nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon has mentioned two non-ICBM candidates for Prompt Global Strike, one from the Army and one from Darpa. Both of these weapons would be boosted into the atmosphere by rockets and then glide back to Earth at hypersonic speeds. In addition to these official Prompt Global Strike options, the Pentagon is conducting at least three other hypersonic or near-hypersonic research efforts: the Air Force’s X-51 WaveRider, which used a scramjet engine to accelerate to Mach 6 in May; the Navy’s Revolutionary Approach to Time-Critical Long-Range Strike project, known as RATTLRS; and the Darpa-sponsored HyFly, a dual-combustion ramjet. (Ramjets and scramjets achieve rocket-like speeds without the heavy burden of liquid oxygen by mixing jet fuel with compressed air that enters the engine from the atmosphere.)

The proliferation of hypersonic research may mean that the Pentagon has faith in the technology. But it also makes black-budget watchers like John Pike, the director of the military information Web site GlobalSecurity.org, suspicious. Pike believes the military’s hypersonic programs may just be a cover for yet another black project. What kind, though, he has no idea.

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“Have you ever tried to get to the bottom of the American hypersonics program?” Pike asked me rhetorically. “You know, I tried to about five years ago, and it made no sense. There were just too many programs.” Although this could just be typical Pentagon duplication, Pike sees something more suspicious. “If I was building a cover for something, I would either reduce the signal or increase the noise,” he says. “I think they’re increasing the noise.”

Sharon Weinberger is a national-security reporter in Washington, D.C.