Nowhere To Hide

David Axe reports in "Wired", 

The U.S. has a vast constellation of spy satellites in orbit. But these surveillance spacecraft have traditionally only been able to gaze down on a few small areas of the planet at a time, like flashlights probing the dark. And this, only with careful advance planning by human operators on the ground. America’s satellites helped monitor and map bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, but had to be told where to look by intel agents who gleaned key information from detained terror suspects and al-Qaida couriers they were tracking.

The National Reconnaissance Office, America’s secretive spy satellite agency, wants to expand the current flashlight-like satellite deployment to a horizon-spanning, overhead spotlight that can illuminate vast swaths of the planet all at once. The agency also wants new spacecraft that can crunch the resulting data using sophisticated computer algorithms, freeing the satellites somewhat from their current reliance on human analysts.

If it works as planned, missions like the years-long hunt for bin Laden could become a lot easier for the U.S. But that’s assuming the technology can be developed on time and on cost.

A National Reconnaissance Office budget document for this fiscal year, obtained by Secrecy News’Steven Aftergood through a Freedom of Information Act request, includes references to the technologies the secretive spy agency is acquiring today, and hopes to develop in coming years. Most of the details are blacked out in the heavily redacted, 450-page document. But “it is still possible to glean at least fragmentary insight into the current state of the NRO,” Aftergood wrote. That includes the technological aspirations of the agency, which employs around 3,000 engineers, analysts and technicians around the globe.

Since 1961 the NRO, headquartered in northern Virginia, has maintained round-the-clock orbital surveillance with a classified arsenal of satellites, reportedly including Keyhole camera-sats, downward-scanning Lacrosse space radars and signals intelligence spacecraft with giant arrays for sucking up communications from Earth.

The NRO is looking for ways to expand that array in a hurry. The agency would like to rapidly launch and reposition orbital sensors to keep pace with fast-moving events on the ground. In pursuit of this “temporal responsiveness,” the NRO said it would in 2012 “analyze other innovative space lift concepts and new entrants for potential launch of NRO payloads, including reusable launch vehicles.”

The only reusable launch vehicle in U.S. service today is the Air Force’s secretive X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle. The robotic, billion-dollar X-37B, built by Boeing, launches atop an Atlas rocket, can stay in orbit 15 months at a time while frequently changing orbits using its on-board maneuvering rockets, and lands like an airplane for refit and repair. The X-37B’s pickup-bed-size payload bay is just big enough for a camera or other sensor.

According to the redacted budget plan, another NRO tech goal for 2012 is the deployment of a system able to “provide intelligence data to warfighters in the field using mobile devices.” The Army, Marines and Air Force already use handheld Rover terminals — devices like big, rugged smartphones — for downloading video from aerial drones. It’s not hard to imagine the NRO tweaking similar hardware for receiving satellite imagery relayed in near-real time from one of the NRO’s far-flung ground stations.

This year the satellite agency is also aiming to “enhance the detection and tracking of maritime vessels.” It’s a task for which today’s sensors are probably adequate, but for which computer processing could need to be upgraded. Quickly sifting through massive troves of overhead imagery to separate the telltale signatures of ships from potentially millions of square miles of uniform ocean likely requires more computing horsepower than the NRO had available before now.

The NRO’s longer-term technological ambitions are more grand. The agency wants to be able to “use multiple and different sensor types against the same target,” a goal that could require numerous satellites able to coordinate their orbits, each simultaneously pointing a different camera, radar or electronic eavesdropper at the same spot on Earth. That kind of “fusing” can “exponentially increase the value of the intelligence,” Scott Large, then-director of the NRO, said in his 2008 Congressional testimony.

But that’s no simple task, according to researchers Thomas Schetter, Mark Campbell and Derek Surka,writing in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 2003. (That might seem like a long time ago, but new satellites take years to build and launch; as a result, today’s constellation is built on yesterday’s tech.) “The key technology that will enable multiple, distributed satellites to achieve their potential … is coordinated intelligent autonomy,” the researchers wrote. In other words, the machines need to be able to communicate fluently with each other as well as with their human operators on the ground. And they need to be able to make some decisions on their own regarding where to go and when.

That kind of coordinated autonomy does exist … in the atmosphere. Last year the Naval Research Laboratory tested computer algorithms that allowed two aerial drones carrying different sensors tosimultaneously scan the same target. The NRO could be eying a similar system for its next-gen satellites. Along those same lines, the NRO also wants future sats to “take advantage of massive data sets, multiple data sources and high-speed machine processing to identify patterns without a prior knowledge or pattern definition.” In other words, to do a form of thinking for themselves.

Computer memory and electrical power are both critical to making all this proposed on-board computer automation possible. For that reason, the NRO also wants “carbon nano-tube memory,” “third-generation, long-duration” lithium ion batteries and “next-generation, high-efficiency solar cells.”

But the agency’s tech appetite might exceed its means. The government has a poor track record of designing, budgeting for and managing its spacecraft. “Most of the Department of Defense’s large space acquisition programs have collectively experienced billions of dollars in cost increases, stretched schedules and increased technical risks,” the Government Accountability Office reported last year. And many of the military space systems that made it into orbit ultimately suffered mechanical problems. We know less about the NRO’s success rate because its systems are classified, but it’s reasonable to assume the satellite agency has fared no better.

If the stars align and the NRO does get the new gear it wants, then America’s future spy satellites could be more numerous, autonomous, maneuverable and cooperative, smarter and much, much more effective — together forming a sort of high-tech, unblinking eye in space capable of finding and tracking terrorists, insurgents, enemy ships and, well, pretty much anything else on the Earth below.

SkyNet Is On Its Way

Department Of Defense Outlines Skynet and Terminator Development

By: Matthew Humphries
Mar. 30, 2012 (8:30 pm)
Courtesy Of "Geek"

Technology is taking an ever larger role in the systems we rely on every day. The military is not immune to this, and in fact helps push forward innovation if it benefits them. Multiple projects funded by DARPA prove this.

However, we have seen a fictional take on too much reliance on where machines and automation can lead. Yes, I'm referring to Skynet as depicted in the Terminator movies. Now it seems the U.S. Department of Defense is heading in exactly that direction with its research projects and investment.

Zachary J. Lemnios holds the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the U.S. Government. Yesterday he released a letter entitled, "The Department of Defense Is Placing a big bet on big data." Through a new government website called the Defense Innovation Marketplace. It broadly outlines how new systems are being developed and brought online to "understand and interpret" the growing amount of data being gathered by military sensor.

That's not the worrying bit, though. These so-called big data projects have a budget to spend $ 250 million every year, and one of the projects underway could be named Skynet it's so close to the artificial intelligence seen in the movies.

The project does not have a name yet, but it could be multiple projects as far as we know. The aim is clear, though. The DoD wants to create a system that combines sensing, perception, and the ability to make decisions to create a "truly autonomous system" The end result? A system that wants to be "agile maneuver ... and understand their environment ... make decisions by Themselves ... know when to call upon a human."

I think they should call it the T-100 as it's a first attempt, do not you?

To Achieve this intelligent, autonomous intervention system the DoD is investing heavily in tools and techniques to analyze large amounts of data, that offer the ability to understand and react to real-world conditions, and act dynamically without human. So basically a network of machines acting on their own based on the situation and commands sent down from a central command system

There is also a call for ideas to aid the project with 20 open solicitations available. Who is going to step up and offer to develop a foolproof kill switch?


Read more at Defense Innovation Marketplace (PDF)

US Spies On Asia From Secret Australian Base

By Amy Coopes
(AFP) – 1 day ago
Courtesy Of "Google News"

SYDNEY — Deep in the silence of Australia's Outback desert an imposing American spy post set up at the height of the Cold War is now turning its attention to Asia's growing armies and arsenals.

Officially designated United States territory and manned by agents from some of America's most sensitive intelligence agencies, the Pine Gap satellite station has been involved in some of the biggest conflicts in modern times.

But its role in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, and in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, had been little recognised until one of its most senior spies broke ranks recently to pen a tell-all account.

Intelligence analyst David Rosenberg spent 18 years at the base, 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) south of Alice Springs, working with top-secret clearance for the National Security Agency (NSA), home to America's code-cracking elite.

Formally known as the "Joint Defence Space Research Facility", Pine Gap is one of Washington's biggest intelligence collection posts, intercepting weapons and communications signals via a series of satellites orbiting Earth.

Australia has had joint leadership at the post and access to all intercepted material since 1980, but the base's history is not without controversy.

Former prime minister Gough Whitlam was sensationally sacked by the British monarchy -- allegedly at American urging -- not long after he threatened to close Pine Gap in 1975, although other domestic political issues were also involved in his removal.

Its futuristic domes were originally built as a weapon in America's spy war with Russia, officially starting operations in 1970, but Rosenberg says it is now targeting the US-led "war on terror" and Asia's military boom.

"There's a large segment of the world that are weapons-producing countries who have programmes that the United States and Australia are interested in, and obviously a lot of Asia encompasses that area," Rosenberg told AFP.

The career spy is under a lifetime secrecy agreement with the NSA, meaning he cannot reveal classified information and is limited in what he can say about his time at Pine Gap, but said North Korea and China were among its targets.

"I think any country that has a large military, is a large weapons producer, is always going to be a focus for the intelligence community and China of course is growing and it's growing rapidly," he said.

"There are developments there that we are looking at."

India and Pakistan were also "very much of a concern", he added, with a surprise nuclear test by New Delhi in 1998 catching Pine Gap's analysts "blind".

The latter half of his time at the mysterious station known to locals as the "Space Base" was dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an intense focus on Al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Rosenberg recalls that day as his most sombre in the job, with analysts scouring the region for clues on what was going to happen next, knowing instantly that Al-Qaeda was responsible and fearing they would strike again.

"While these attacks were happening we of course were thinking how many other simultaneous or near-simultaneous actions are going to happen?" he said.

"We didn't know how many other attacks had been planned that day."

It was also a huge wake-up call to the fragmented spy community, he added, who soon realised all the signs had been there of an impending attack but they had failed to piece them together to perhaps prevent 9/11.

Delays also allowed Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders to escape into hiding, a "significant intelligence failure" which left agents with a 10-year hunt Rosenberg was not around to see completed -- one of his few regrets.

It was "certainly possible" that Pine Gap was involved in the US mission which ultimately saw Bin Laden killed in Pakistan in May, he added.

He sees "cyber-warfare" such as state-endorsed hacking and increasingly portable technology allowing, for example, the remote detonation of a bomb with a mobile phone, as the next big front for the intelligence community.

Rosenberg's book offers a rare insight into the mysterious world of military espionage, discussing widespread doubts amongst spies about the since-debunked claims of weapons of mass destruction that presaged the invasion of Iraq.

It was screened 16 times before publication by four intelligence agencies -- three American and one Australian -- and has been altered or blacked out in sections through an arduous censorship process which saw him, at one point, taken into a vault in Canberra for interrogation.

Defence officials were also due to seize and destroy his computer hard-drive to ensure classified elements of the original manuscript were wiped out.

But the self-confessed "Mission: Impossible" fan said he had no regrets about telling his story.

"Imagine being in a job where secrecy surrounds everything you did for 23 years -- it's kind of like letting the cork out of a champagne bottle, all the secrets come flowing out," he said.

"It was quite a liberating experience for me."

Massive Cold War Spy Satellite

Hidden From The World Until Now

By Sam Biddle, Gizmodo.com
September 19, 2011 | 3:06 pm
Courtesy Of "Wired Magazine"


The HEXAGON satellite spied on America’s Cold War foes for over a decade, taking extremely detailed (film!) photographs from space. It was 60 feet long—bigger than a bus. And the public never, ever saw it. We did.

To celebrate its 50th birthday, the top secret satellite operators at the National Reconnaissance Office gave the public a little present: full access to a real life HEXAGON at National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia — filled largely with nostalgic old spies and space engineers. So of course we checked it out. The enormity of the thing is stunning, as is its complexity.

In the 70s, flying a plane over the Soviet Union and China wasn’t like hopping on Jet Blue — especially one loaded with American spy gear. So the Pentagon cooked up HEXAGON — the most sophisticated space eyeball among the first generation of spy sats. Beginning in 1971, each HEXAGON was pushed up into space by a Titan III rocket, whereupon it would snap humungous panoramic views of Russian turf with its giant camera, which boasted a focal length of 77 inches, a 20-inch aperture, and the ability to capture detail down to two or three feet. But how’d it get the film down to Earth? With a lot of balls.

Each payload of recon negatives was launched in its own landing vehicle, met by a spy plane that would literally snatch it out of the air like a butterfly net. These photos were used to, of course, see what the dastardly commies were up to, and plan for an eventual war against them. Of course, none of this was ever needed, as they weren’t really up to that much. But the HEXAGON marked a profound shift for warfare — even cold warfare. For the first time, space was a battlefield. America began to think that to control space was to control what sat underneath it — the vacuum was militarized. And this giant hulk helped make it that way — a process that’ll never, ever be reversed. [NRO]

Photo: Nicko Margolies

SEE ALSO:

• Gallery: America’s Secret Space Arsenal
• Spy Satellite Agency Shot Down, Stripped of Power
• Did Two Profs Find Osama From Space? Nope, Sorry.
• Death of a Satellite
• Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion

CENTCOM's Spy Satellite To Beam Images From War Zones

The ORS-1 satellite photographed during environmental testing last year at the Goodrich Corp's Danbury, Ct., facility.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GOODRICH CORP.

Illustration of the ORS-1 satellite, an operational prototype, scheduled for a one- to two-year mission.

U.S. AIR FORCE

By CHRIS CARROLL
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 25, 2011
Courtesy Of "Stars and Stripes"

WASHINGTON — Commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq will soon be able to track the enemy with their own spy satellite.

ORS-1, developed by the Pentagon’s Operationally Responsive Space Office and launched June 29, is the first satellite dedicated to a single combatant command. It’s scheduled to start beaming back tactical imagery in August after a check of the satellite’s systems is completed in orbit.

“What it does for CENTCOM is it gives us direct command over the tasking of this particular satellite,” said Col. Laura Berry, chief of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division for Central Command. “For all the others out there, we have to compete with the rest of the intelligence community”

The satellite adds a layer to CENTCOM’s arsenal of intelligence tools, Berry said. Requests from combat commanders for overhead imagery that might have previously been handled by a slow-moving drone could be assigned to the satellite orbiting earth at more than 17,000 mph.

Though Berry said ORS-1 will be able to do everything that CENTCOM commanders ask of it, there’s no doubt it’s a modest satellite, said Peter Wegner, head of the Pentagon’s ORS Office.

At about $200 million, it’s a relative bargain — developed and launched at a fraction of the cost of a typical orbiting surveillance platform.

“We’re exploring the low end of what we can do in space,” Wegner said. “If you compare it to the air domain, it’s like the difference between and F-22 fighter and a UAV,” or unmanned aerial vehicle.

The 900-pound, dishwasher-sized satellite will survey the battlefield from orbit 280 miles high, using the same camera as the U-2 spy plane or Global Hawk drone –- attached to a telescope that makes the satellite look similar to a tiny Hubble Space Telescope tilted toward the Earth.

An orbit that carries it over the CENTCOM region every 90 minutes will let OSR-1 train its camera on any given spot for about 10 minutes, Wegner said. It will be able to survey many locations across a broad area very quickly, he said, and commanders can dispatch a drone to linger over areas identified by the satellite that need more in-depth coverage.

The quality of the images is comparable to those from a drone, Wegner said -- not razor sharp, but good enough to do the job. The main objective is to get the satellite aloft quickly enough for commanders to use it in the current conflicts in the CENTCOM region.

Larger, more complex spy satellites can take more than a decade to develop and launch, he said. With anti-terrorism efforts increasingly focusing on far-flung parts of the globe that might be out of reach for UAVs, the United States can gain a decisive edge by learning to put cheap but effective satellites into orbit quickly, he said.

“From the time we got authority to proceed from the secretary of the Air Force to the time we launched was about 32 months,” Wegner said. “In a space acquisition context that’s lightning speed.”

The Afghanistan War Gets UltraViolent

Most Dangerous Year Ever, From Secret Spaceships To Killer Drones

By Noah Shachtman
December 31, 2010 | 7:00 am
Courtesy Of "Wired's Danger Zone"

For the first half of this year, the American strategy in Afghanistan was to try to kill as few people as possible. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal's team ran their mouths in front of a Rolling Stone reporter, and everything changed.

Gen. David Petraeus took over. He dispatched special operations forces to take out thousands of militants. Petraeus' generals relied on massive surface-to-surface missiles to clear the Taliban out of Kandahar, and ordered tanks to help crush opponents in Helmand province. Air strikes — once a tool of last resort — hit their highest levels since the American invasion: 1,000 air attacks in one month alone. By November, one U.S. military official was boasting about America’s "awe, shock and firepower."

Taliban and other insurgent groups embraced the ultraviolence, too. Their bombs killed or wounded a thousand more troops in 2010 than they did in the previous year. The militants built more improvised explosives in November than in any month ever before.

To corral the insurgency, U.S. commanders unveiled a plan to scan millions of Afghan irises. They flewsecret fertilizer bomb sniffers.

They handed out sensors to see through walls, and told their intelligence officers to start acting more like journalists. The military even briefly flirted with the idea of zapping Afghans with a microwave pain ray.

Some things stayed the same. America continued to supersize its mega-bases, and build new HQs for its special forces. Troops wondered out loud WTF they were doing there.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai remained our uneasy ally, despite the corruption, and despite the shaky leadership. "There is no plan B," Adm. Mike Mullen told Danger Room.

The ticket out of Afghanistan is supposed to be a newly trained Afghan army and police force. But first, the dudes need to learn to read. Which means that planned 2011 drawdown of U.S. forces in 2011 is more likely to happen in 2014. Or never.

—Noah Shachtman

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Militarizing Space

America's Grand Strategy

By STEPHEN LENDMAN
September 8, 2010
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

On January 3, 2001, the UN General Assembly's Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space Resolution A/55/32 said:

"The exploration and use of outer space....shall be for peaceful purposes and be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. (The) prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security."

Over 140 nations agreed. Only two declined support, both abstaining - America and Israel.

On August 9, 1996, in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, then Commander-in-Chief US Space Command, Joseph W. Ashy asserted:

"It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but - absolutely - we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space. That's why the US has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets someday - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space."

On April 18, 2002, the Center for Defense Information's Theresa Hitchens headlined, "Weapons in Space: Silver Bullet or Russian Roulette," saying: Weaponizing space "could actually undermine, rather than enhance, (America's) national security....There is nothing to be gained, and potentially much to be lost, by (pursuing) a momentous change in US space policy."

Co-founder and coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Bruce Gagnon warned: "If the US is allowed to move the arms race into space, there will be no return. We have this one chance, this one moment in history, to stop the weaponization of space from happening. The peace movement must move quickly, boldly, and publicly," which so far hasn't happened, most people mindless to the danger.

First revealed in the 1998 US Space Command document, Vision for 2020, it was later released in 2000 as DOD Joint Vision 2020 calling for "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to wage and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively, ultimately from space, America wanting unchallenged control.

The Pentagon's Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) plans an array of sophisticated weapons to achieve it, some operational, others being tested, and new ones under development for its Operations Plan (OPLAN) 8010-08 Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike use, the US Strategic Command's (STRATCOM) Strategic War Plan.

Since at least WW II, America's strategy has been permanent war, a topic discussed earlier, accessed through the following link.

On June 17, Space.com's Jeremy Hsu headlined, "Air Force Sees Hypersonic Weapons and Spaceships in Future," saying: "A recent (Air Force) scramjet test has hinted at a future where hypersonic vehicles," traveling five times the speed of sound, fly around the world and in space, an "experimental X-51A Waverider," achieving the longest ever Mach 5 flight on May 26, using a rocket booster and air-breathing scramjet.

Charles Brink, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory's X-51 program envisions future hypersonic weapons flying "600 nautical miles in 10 minutes," including in space. NASA's James Pittman, principal investigator of its hypersonics project, hopes to have "large vehicles for access to space using air-breathing propulsion."

Earlier X-43A hypersonic scramjet test flights reached Mach 6.8 in March 2004 and Mach 9.6 in November that year - about 7,000 MPH. The X-51A project uses a more sophisticated scramjet engine, but hasn't yet matched or broken the X-43A's record, nor can it reach orbit, a goal Boeing Phantom Works/Defense hypersonics director Joseph Vogel hopes to achieve in the next 15 - 20 years, saying he expects the technology will be able to fly missions not possible today, the X-51A showing early promise.

In April, after years of development, the Air Force successfully launched the X-37B, its robot space shuttle, a reusable spacecraft traveling like an aircraft at Mach 5 - perhaps another future space weapon. Global Security.org's John Pike told Space.com that projects like the X-37B may "represent the tip of a space weapons program hidden within the Pentagon's secret 'black budget,' or they might be nothing more than smoke and mirrors," intended to deceive America's rivals, fueling a space arms race, hoping they'll "waste money chasing down dead ends."

For its part, the Air Force denies wanting the X-37B for an orbital weapons delivery system or for surveillance. Others disagree, journalist Sharon Weinberger saying "the most daring job of a space plane, and the one least discussed, is (its) role (as) a bomber, (letting it) fly over targets within an hour of launch to release cone-shaped re-entry vehicles that would both protect and guide weapons through the atmosphere."

It would also be able to "carry 1000 or 2000-pound re-entry vehicles armed with precision munitions like bunker-busting penetrators or small-diameter bombs (including mini-nukes more powerful than the atom bombs destroying Hiroshima or Nagasaki), or simply use the explosive impact of kinetic rods cratering at hypersonic speeds to destroy targets."

On the other hand, the X37B's main function may be a test platform, perhaps for developing even more destructive space weapons, part of America's permanent war strategy, waging future ones from space, using technologies adversaries can't match.

OPLAN-08 - The Pentagon's Strategic War Plan

OPLAN 8010-08 is a "family of plans" against six or more potential adversaries, including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and other "terrorist" states. In 2002, the Bush administration asserted the right to:

"do whatever is necessary to deter the use of (undefined) weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its allies, and its interests. If a weapon of mass destruction is used against the United States or its allies, (or it such use is imminent or threatened), we will not rule out any specific type military response," including first-strike nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

Under Obama, the policy remains in force. His May National Security Strategy "reserve(s) he right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," ones pursuing unchallenged global and space hegemony, ruling it by intimidation and war.

OPLAN 8010-08 - Updating SIOP

Unlike the Cold War's Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), OPLAN 8010-08 contains "more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies." It includes conventional strike options, but it's mostly nuclear, custom designed for each potential adversary.

The nuclear options include the Emergency Response Options (ERO), Selective Attack Options (SAO), Basic Attack Options (BAO), and Directed/Adaptive Planning Capability (DPO/APO) options, specific details, of course, highly classified.

Options range from limited ones to massive "shock and awe" strikes against many targets, by manned and drone aircraft, ICBMs, and from attack submarines and surface ships, using hundreds of strategically located warheads.

The Pentagon's National Target Base includes four categories - military forces, WMD infrastructure, military and national leadership, and war supporting infrastructure - a post Cold War strategy to deter all so-called WMDs, the Bush administration saying America:

"has made it clear for many years that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, our people, our forces and our friends and allies. Additionally, the United States will hold any state, terrorist group, or other non-state actor fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction, whether by facilitating, financing, or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts."

The policy remains unchanged under Obama, OPLAN 8010-08 for preventive or retaliatory "strategic deterrence" and preemptive "global strike." STRATCOM describes the former as its "first line of operation....that includes nuclear force operations." The latter expands national and theater operations globally, the terms Prompt Global Strike and Global Strike used interchangeably, whether with conventional or nuclear weapons, or if prompt or deliberate.

The Air Force's nuclear/conventional command is called Global Strike Command, using America's full attack capabilities to destroy targets, including WMDs preemptively, STRATCOM's counterproliferation strategy designed to destroy all WMDs "before they can be used....(a) preemptive....counterforce....or offensively reactive" strategy.

While claiming to "put an end to Cold War thinking (by) reduc(ing) the role and number of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy," Obama's National Security Strategy puts old wine in new bottles, rebranding it to appear softer while keeping hardline policies in place, backed by a growing arsenal of globally positioned sophisticated weapons, asserting the right to use them preemptively against perceived threats.

During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance," meaning destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target another.

With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it's reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."

Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it.

In their joint July 1955 Manifesto, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell put the nuclear threat bluntly: "Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? (The) best authorities are unanimous that a war with H-bombs (or today's arsenal) might possibly put an end to the human race." For some, it will be instant, but "the majority (will experience) a slow torture of disease and disintegration."

It's our choice. So far we've made it badly.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.