Iran: Second Nuclear Facility

Rise of the Idiots. Like a bunch of 2-year olds circling in on burning fire or a vicious dog, world leaders try to rein in the children of the cold war again… in the news:

Iran has had a second Uranium Enrichment facility for awhile…

President Obama and the leaders of Britain and France will accuse Iran Friday of building a secret underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel, saying it has hidden the covert operation from international weapons inspectors for years, according to senior administration officials.
American officials, citing the sensitivity of their intelligence gathering on Iran, declined to say what kind of intelligence break — human spies, computer or telephone intercepts or overhead photography — led to their discovery. But parts of the computer networks belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were pierced in 2007, leading to the intelligence finding that that Iranian engineers working under Mohsen Fakrizadeh had attempted to design a nuclear weapon before the effort ended in 2003.
[nytimes]

All this on the top of the recent Zazi arrest by the FBI for attending one of the Al-Qaeda summercamps…

If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought.

While many important facts remain unknown, those allegations alone would distinguish Mr. Zazi from nearly all the other defendants in United States terrorism cases in recent years. More often than not the earlier suspects emerged as angry young men, inflamed by the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden or his associates. Some were serious in intent. More than a few seemed to be malcontents without the organization, technical skills and financing to be much of a threat. [link]

This on the heels of the recent Wired story on Perimeter..

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it’s no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then. [ link ]

Philip Taubman writes recently on Obama’s push to “get to zero”:

The new appeal of an old idea that long seemed quixotic is driven by the rise of new nuclear threats that in some ways make the nuclear equation more ominous and volatile than during the cold war, even though there are far fewer weapons now. Mr. Obama said it himself in Prague: “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

Nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a prospect so harrowing that American and Soviet leaders recognized it was untenable, even as their generals planned for Armageddon. They possessed some 70,000 nuclear warheads between them in the 1980s, but the weapons were under firm control and neither side dared risk the retaliation that a first strike would draw. The balance of terror, in effect, neutralized nuclear weapons.

The dynamic today is much less stable, and more difficult for the United States to manage, as the turbulence in Pakistan shows. As the nuclear club expands, the security of weapons and technology diminishes. Terrorists would have no compunction about using a nuclear weapon, and their target could not easily retaliate against an elusive, stateless group. [link]