Iran Warns Of Possible Faceoff With U.S.

I keep telling myself,
current events have nothing to do with Nostradamus, et al.

Iran Warns Of Possible Faceoff With U.S.
TEHRAN, Iran, Jan. 22, 2007
(CBS/AP) Iran conducted missile tests Monday as its leadership stepped up warnings of possible military confrontation with the United States. Hard-liners said an American attack would spark "hell" for the United States and Israel, with some threatening suicide attacks against U.S. forces. The drum-beating suggests Iran does not intend to back down as tensions mount on both fronts of its confrontation with the United States and the West — the nuclear issue and the turmoil in neighboring Iraq. In another defiant move, Iranian officials on Monday said Tehran had rejected 38 U.N. nuclear inspectors from a list of potential inspectors — apparently in retaliation for a Security Council resolution last month imposing limited sanctions on the country. Others on the list would be allowed to enter the country, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, without giving the reasons for the bans. Iran's leaders have increasingly touted the possibility of a U.S. attack since President George W. Bush announced on Jan. 9 the deployment of a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf region, a move U.S. officials have said is a show of strength directed at Iran. The leadership's warnings could aim to rally the public behind the government and silence increasingly bold criticism of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at home. Iranian reformers and conservatives have accused him of hurting Iran with his virulent anti-U.S. rhetoric in the nuclear standoff with the West, while failing to repair Iran's weakening economy. "Iran is ratcheting up the pressure and showing its defiance of U.N. sanctions by conducting missile tests and blocking inspectors," says CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "but Ahmadinejad is beginning to feel the heat at home." "The Security Council gave Iran 60 days to comply back in December," said Falk, "and is now discussing next steps, ones that will take more of a toll on Iran's economy." In a significant move, a paper close to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday joined the voices threatening retaliation for any U.S. military action — suggesting the highest levels are involved in ringing the alarm over the American deployment. The top editor of the Keyhan daily warned that Iran will turn the Middle East into "hell" if America takes military action against Iran. "The U.S. military is within our range both on the east and the west," Hossein Shariatmadari wrote. "With missiles fired from Iran, Israel will turn into a scorching hell for the Zionists." Shariatmadari, who was named to his post by Khamenei, also warned that Iran could block oil through the strategic Hormuz Strait at the mouth of the Gulf if the United States initiates a war. The Iranian military on Monday began five days of maneuvers near the northern city of Garmsar, about 62 miles southeast of Tehran, state television reported. The military tested its Zalzal-1 and Fajr-5 missiles, the TV reported. The Zalzal-1, able to carry a 1,200-pound payload, has a range of 200 miles, making it able to hit anywhere in Iraq or U.S. bases in the Gulf as well as into eastern Saudi Arabia. The Fajr-5, with a 1,800-pound payload, has a range of 35 miles. Neither could reach Israel, but Iran is known to have missiles that can. It is not known if either missile tested Monday is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The Iranian show of strength came as the American aircraft carrier USS Stennis was heading toward the Gulf region, joining the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in a beefed-up American military presence. The Stennis is expected to arrive in late February. The United States is also deploying Patriot missiles and nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf and F16 fighter planes to the Incirlik base in neighboring Turkey. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the buildup aimed to impress on Iran that the four-year war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable. The United States accuses Iran of backing militants fueling Iraq's violence and has vowed to cut off its support. Washington and its allies also accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, an allegation Tehran denies, insisting it only wants to produce energy. In Iran, the U.S. buildup has sparked loud warnings from officials that the United States will attack. U.S. officials have long refused to rule out any options in the faceoff with Tehran, but say military action would be a last resort. On Thursday, Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, appeared on state television saying the Americans "have made their decision to attack Iran" — possibly in late February or early March. Iran's military has been put on high alert in reaction to the possibility of a U.S. attack, a military official told the Associated Press. The official did not elaborate on what high alert entails. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the press. The hardline daily newspaper Hezbollah warned of suicide attacks against American targets if the United States attacks. "We have tens of thousands of volunteers who have registered for martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) ... We have to organize our partisan attacks as of now," it said in a commentary Saturday. The chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, was quoted on a Web site close to the force as saying Monday that Iran had "full intelligence dominance" over U.S. forces and that Iran will "suppress invaders" if it is attacked. Ahmadinejad said last week that Iran is "ready for anything" in its confrontation with the United States — at the same time that he soundly rejected criticism at home over his policies. Rising prices have fueled anger against Ahmadinejad — from both reformists and conservatives who were once his allies. Iran's most senior dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, joined the criticism, saying the president's provocation "only creates problems for the country." "One has to deal with the enemy with wisdom, not provoke it," he told a group of reformists and opponents of Ahmadinejad on Friday in the holy city of Qom, 80 miles south of Tehran.
CBS Interactive Inc.

Not planning a second war in the Middle East!

I wonder, Science Evolution Wisdom Understanding: ..... if the universe will even notice when life on earth, or the earth itself, disappears through a combination of "smart" nuclear resource wars and global warming.

Are the foundational problems in physics so massive that our only comprehension of conflict resolution and survival has reverted backwards to the kill stage?


White House softens Iran tone
The administration tries to assure the public and lawmakers that it isn't planning a second war in the Middle East.
By Julian E. Barnes and Solomon Moore LA Times Staff Writers January 13, 2007 WASHINGTON —

The Bush administration sought to assure lawmakers and the public Friday that despite harsh new rhetoric, it did not intend to go to war with Iran, even as U.S. sources charged that Iranians captured in Irbil, Iraq, were suspected members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.President Bush accused Iran in a speech this week of helping launch attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. His remarks were followed by combative comments from his top war advisors, new moves by U.S. naval forces and a raid Thursday in the Kurdish-controlled city of Irbil.The administration moved Friday to defuse concerns that it was planning or inviting a confrontation with Tehran. At a news conference, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow dismissed as an "urban legend" suggestions that the United States was preparing for another war. Similar denials were issued by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.But other U.S. officials pressed the case that the Islamic Republic was helping foment violence in neighboring Iraq.One Western official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, charged that the Iranians captured in Irbil were suspected members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and were suspected of involvement in bomb smuggling.The raid followed another U.S. operation last month in Baghdad that netted several high-level members of the Quds Force, an elite intelligence and special operations group within the Revolutionary Guards, who were involved in transferring Iranian explosives to Shiite militias in Iraq, the source said.Iraqi officials say the building raided Thursday was a long-standing Iranian liaison office. The Kurdistan government said it was a consulate and called for the U.S. to immediately release the detainees, who it said were protected by the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.But Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. Army spokesman, said that it was not an accredited consulate and that the officials did not identify themselves as diplomats or have diplomatic credentials when detained. Although witnesses reported gunfire, Garver said the soldiers used only nonlethal concussion grenades to force the Iranians from the building. They surrendered without incident, he said."The operation was conducted without a single shot," Garver said.He declined to say where in Iraq the Iranians were being held.U.S. officials said both raids were intended to disrupt Iranian interference in Iraq. The Revolutionary Guards have been linked to transfers of Iranian-made bombs that are designed to focus a cone of concussive force so powerful that it can punch through a tank.Increasing numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq are being killed by the bombs, particularly in Diyala, Kirkuk, Baghdad and other areas where Shiite militias have a strong presence, commanders say.U.S. officials believe the Quds Force is in control of elements of two powerful Shiite paramilitary organizations, the Badr Brigade and the Al Mahdi army.In his national address Wednesday, Bush accused Iran of providing "material support" for attacks against U.S. troops. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," he said. "We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."His comments were part of his new strategy on Iraq, a plan to add 21,500 U.S. troops that was unveiled to widespread opposition. He announced he was moving a second aircraft carrier group into the Persian Gulf and pledged to stop the attacks and Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq. Military officials also had announced plans to send Patriot missile batteries to the gulf region.At a hearing Thursday in Washington, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whether Bush "has plans to cross the Syrian and-or Iranian border."Rice did not answer directly. "Obviously, the president isn't going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq," she told Biden.Speaking to reporters Friday on her plane at the beginning of a trip to the Middle East and Europe, Rice said Friday that the United States would find ways to "adjust over time" to any difficulties in its new plan for Iraq.Aides said during a fuel stop in Shannon, Ireland, that the raids against Iranian targets were not separately authorized by the president but were authorized under a decision made several months ago about how to approach Iranian influence in Iraq.Congress showed concern over what could happen."Now we see the specter of a new war front in Iran," said Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said an administration move against Iran would be reminiscent of the secretive U.S. incursion into Cambodia in 1970 under the Nixon administration.After the criticism, Snow tried to temper the administration's rhetoric by emphasizing that war preparations were not underway for Iran or Syria.At a meeting Friday of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) evoked Vietnam and again asked whether U.S. forces intended to cross into Iran in pursuit of the Iranian networks.Gates and Pace said U.S. military forces in Iraq would not enter Iranian territory.But both Gates and Pace emphasized that they believed Iranians were responsible for the deaths of American troops.
julian.barnes@latimes.commoore1@latimes.com

U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design for Warheads

After WWII, recognition that primitive modes of behavior between nations and nuclear tools does not mix, was understood to be globally terminal. How diseased is our Science of Understanding in Energy and Survival Fundamentals (Five Foundational Problems of Theoretical Physics) - see Evolution Blog

NYT January 7, 2007
U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design for Warheads
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
This article is by William J. Broad, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. It will propose elements of competing designs from two weapons laboratories in an approach that some experts argue is untested and risky.
The announcement, to be made by the interagency Nuclear Weapons Council, avoids making a choice between two competing designs for a new weapon, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which at first would be mounted on submarine-launched missiles. The effort, if approved by President Bush and financed by Congress, would require a huge refurbishment of the nation’s complex for nuclear design and manufacturing, with the overall bill estimated at more than $100 billion.
But the council’s decision to seek a hybrid design, combining well-tested elements from an older design with new safety and security elements from a more novel approach, could delay the production of the weapon. It also raises the question of whether the United States will ultimately be forced to end its moratorium on underground nuclear testing to make sure the new design works.
On Friday, Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Energy Department, said the government would not proceed with the Reliable Replacement Warhead “if it is determined that testing is needed.” But other officials in the administration, including Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, have said that the White House should make no commitment on testing.
Congress authorized exploratory research for the weapon three years ago, and has financed it at relatively low levels since. But now the costs will begin to increase.
If Mr. Bush decides to deploy the new design, he could touch off a debate in a Democrat-controlled Congress and among allies and adversaries abroad. While proponents of the new weapon said that it would replace older weapons that could deteriorate over time, and reduce the chances of a detonation if weapons fell into the wrong hands, critics have long argued that this is the wrong moment for Washington to produce a new nuclear warhead of any kind.
At a time when the administration is trying to convince the world to put sanctions on North Korea and Iran to halt their nuclear programs, those critics argue, any move to improve the American arsenal will be seen as hypocritical, an effort by the United States to extend its nuclear lead over other countries. Should the United States decide to conduct a test, officials said, China and Russia — which have their own nuclear modernization programs under way — would feel free to do the same. North Korea was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council for conducting its first test on Oct. 9, and it may be preparing for more, experts said.
Both administration officials and military officers like Gen. James E. Cartwright, head of the Strategic Command, which controls the nation’s nuclear arsenal, argue that because the United States provides a nuclear umbrella for so many allies, it is critical that its stockpile must be as reliable as possible.
“We will not ‘un-invent’ nuclear weapons, and we will not walk away from the world,” General Cartwright said in a recent interview. “Right now, it is not the nation’s position that zero is the answer to the size of our inventory.”
He added: “So, if you are going to have these weapons, they should be safe, they should be able to be secured, and they should be reliable if used,” General Cartwright said during an interview conducted before the Department of Energy’s decision was announced.
The current schedule, which is subject to change, would call for the president to make a decision in a year or two and, if approved, to begin engineering development by fiscal year 2010 and produce the weapon by 2012.
The two teams competing to design the weapon, one at Los Alamos in New Mexico and the other at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, approached the problem with very different philosophies, nuclear officials and experts said. Livermore drew on a single, robust design that, before the testing moratorium, was detonated in the 1980s under a desolate patch of Nevada desert. The weapon, however, never entered the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
The Los Alamos team drew on aspects of many weapons from the stockpile and pulled them together in a novel design that has never undergone testing.
A winner of the competition was to have been announced in November. But federal officials said they had a hard time choosing between the two designs, calling both excellent.
The question now, arms experts said, is whether a mix-and-match approach that combines the two will produce a clever hybrid or a mediocre and possibly a dud. They said the nuclear laboratories, bitter rivals for many decades, have never before shared responsibility for designing a weapon.
“There has not been what I would consider a real partnership,” said Philip E. Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for Livermore. “In some respects, it’s unprecedented.”
Ray E. Kidder, a senior Livermore scientist who pioneered early arms designs, said the hybrid approach appeared to be based more on the politics of survival for the laboratories than on technical merit.
“It’s spreading the wealth,” he said. Federal officials, Dr. Kidder added, “tend to do that fairly rigorously so as to keep the labs alive. To foreclose the possibility of closure, they try to divide the work load.”
General Cartwright cast that problem differently, saying that it is critical to keep America’s “intellectual capital” in producing weapons alive. “We are starting to get to the point where the people who actually have experience designing a weapon are reaching that point at which they will start to leave the industry,” he said. “And are we able to attract the minds that we will need to sustain this activity?”
Nonetheless, several nuclear experts expressed doubts about the wisdom of using a design that has never undergone testing, saying future presidents might lose confidence in the arsenal’s potency and be tempted to conduct test explosions.
“It’s one thing to have all the components working and another to have them all working together,” said Raymond Jeanloz, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises the government on nuclear arms. “To me, that’s the key technical issue that has yet to be resolved.”
In the few years since its debut, the reliability program has grown from a fringe effort at the nation’s nuclear arms laboratories into a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy. The new weapon would replace the nation’s existing arsenal of aging warheads, with a new generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft by terrorists.
Advocates say a generation of more reliable arms would give military commanders the confidence to abandon the current philosophy of holding onto huge inventories of old weapons, and could speed a shrinkage of the American arsenal from some 6,000 warheads to perhaps 2,000 or less.
Critics say a main justification for the program vanished in November when a secretive federal panel known as Jason found that the plutonium “pits” at the heart of many nuclear warheads aged far better than expected, with most able to work reliability for a century or more.
“This research eliminates a major rationale,” Lisbeth Gronlund, a nuclear arms specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group based in Cambridge, Mass., said in a November statement.
Since that study was revealed, the administration has emphasized other reasons to build a new warhead, especially new, highly classified technologies to make the weapons virtually impossible to use if they fall into unfriendly hands. Other objectives are to simplify manufacturing, reduce toxic byproducts and improve safety of triggering devices.
As a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States and other nuclear weapons states have committed, at least on paper, to the ultimate goal of “the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles” of weapons. But General Cartwright cautioned that much of the criticism of the program was cast in terms of achieving that disarmament, and he said the government’s policy, and that of the new warhead program, was to maintain a nuclear stockpile “that would be the smallest practical to maintain its credibility.”
He described the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile as “an artifact of the cold war — cold war both in its delivery systems and its characteristics and certainly in its technology.”

A Missile Defense System Is Taking Shape in Alaska

We are ready!

December 10, 2006
A Missile Defense System Is Taking Shape in Alaska
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
FORT GREELY, Alaska, Dec. 4 — Snow fences help keep drifts from piling up on the missile silos. Heat-sensing security devices that monitor the edges of this 800-acre installation are sometimes set off by wayward moose.
And the soldiers here, members of the 3-year-old 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard, were just selected to help field test for the Army the third generation of the Extended Cold Weather Clothing System, seven layers of synthetic meant to resist the brutal winds that rip past the snow-clad peaks of the Alaska Range.
Four years after President Bush ordered a limited missile defense system to be built and nearly a quarter century after Ronald Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, this sub-Arctic outpost, once a cold war training site and still a cold-weather training site, is where progress on the long-embattled missile system is perhaps most evident, military officials say.
Eleven interceptor missiles are installed in underground silos here, buried beneath the snow and a former forest of black spruce. This summer, when North Korea signaled that it planned to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile, Fort Greely, which has never fired a test missile, was put on alert status, ostensibly ready to respond if necessary.
After the test either failed or was aborted, “there was a little bit of a letdown” at the base, said Lt. Col Edward E. Hildreth III, commander of the 49th, “because we were prepared.”
That assertion, echoed by other commanders at Fort Greely during a limited tour of the base this week, comes a little more than three months after Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Fort Greely and expressed caution about the program’s readiness. Critics have noted that tests on some parts of the system have failed and a recent successful missile test — in California, shortly after Mr. Rumsfeld’s visit to Fort Greely — lacked decoys and was unrealistic.
Even as questions persist about capability, the missile defense program is pushing forward at a cost of at least $9 billion a year. About a third of that goes to the kind of operation that is based at Fort Greely, called Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, which is intended to shoot down enemy missiles while they travel through space. Vandenberg Air Force Base in California also houses two interceptors, but military experts say Fort Greely is better situated to interrupt the likely flight path of a missile from Asia or the Middle East.
Just a few years after being shut down, Fort Greely, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, is now the destination of about 1,700 people, including some 200 soldiers, and the rest defense contractors and family members. The base’s Brownie troop is at 16 girls and growing — Monday night they made root beer floats — just as the number of interceptors installed at the base is expected to expand to as many as 38.
Now, in a region with barely four hours of daylight in December, there is a new espresso shop on base and an expanded PX that sells flat-screen televisions.
Sgt. Jack W. Carlson III, an intelligence analyst, said he was assigned to Fort Greely before the Pentagon officials created the 49th Missile Defense Battalion. “We didn’t have a name,” Sergeant Carlson said. “We didn’t have patches. We just called ourselves G.M.D.,” for Ground-Based Midcourse Defense.
Sergeant Carlson married another soldier and has bought a house in nearby Delta Junction, population 840. He said he heated his house mostly with wood salvaged from the spruce left after a wildfire.
Before Fort Greely, he had been stationed in the Virgin Islands. He learned of openings in the missile defense program through an online posting, he said. “I’d been on the beach all my life, and it was time to see the snow.”
Alaska has been crucial to American military interests since long before it became a state in 1959. Now, Adak, in the Aleutian Islands, is scheduled to become the home port of the Sea-Based X-band Radar, a long-delayed system built on a converted oil rig that is critical to the ground-based system’s ability to track enemy missiles.
While the 49th is an Alaska National Guard unit, Colonel Hildreth reports to Col. Michael L. Yowell, commander of the 100th Missile Defense Brigade, based in Colorado.
Colonel Hildreth said he was well aware of criticism that missile defense was far from a perfected program. He said Fort Greely operated in a balance between operational mode and construction.
“We build a little, test a little,” he said. “It’s fluid.”
A 12th interceptor will be installed this month. Last summer, however, when American intelligence learned that North Korea might be preparing to launch an intercontinental missile, much of the bustle of contractors on the site stopped. Fort Greely went on alert. The system that had struggled through tests faced the possibility of firing a live missile.
“It got quiet,” said Col. Thomas M. Besch, director of Ground-Based Midcourse Defense for the Missile Defense Agency. “And all of a sudden no developmental activity occurred. You could feel in the atmosphere that people were on edge and ready. You were kind of waiting for something to happen, and it didn’t.

Russia To Deliver Arms to Iran

Russia To Deliver Arms to Iran
Defense Official: Russia Has Begun Air Defense Missile System Deliveries to Iran
By JUDITH INGRAM
ABC News - The Associated Press 11/25/06
MOSCOW - Russia has begun delivery of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems to Iran, a Defense Ministry official said Friday, confirming that Moscow would proceed with arms deals with Tehran in spite of Western criticism.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue, declined to specify when the deliveries had been made and how many systems had been delivered.
Ministry officials have previously said Moscow would supply 29 of the sophisticated missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract signed in December, according to Russian media reports.
The United States called on all countries last spring to stop all arms exports to Iran, as well as ending all nuclear cooperation with it to put pressure on Tehran to halt uranium enrichment activities. Israel, too, has severely criticized arms deals with Iran.
Tehran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the United States and its allies suspect Iran is trying to develop weapons.
The U.N. Security Council, where Russia is a veto-wielding permanent member, is currently stalemated on the severity of sanctions on Iran for defying its demand to cease enrichment.
The Tor-M1 deal, involving conventional weapons, does not violate any international agreements.
Russian officials say the missiles are purely defensive weapons with a limited range.
According to the Interfax news agency, the Tor-M1 system can identify up to 48 targets and fire at two targets simultaneously at a height of up to 20,000 feet.
Russian media have reported previously that Moscow had conducted talks on selling even more powerful long-range S-300 air defense missiles, but Russian officials have denied that.
ABC News Internet Vent, The Associated Press 11/25/06 .