What Antiballistic System?

As North Korea claims missile progress, Pentagon plans ICBM interceptor test
As North Korea makes headway in developing a nuclear-armed missile capable of reaching the US mainland, the Pentagon is preparing to test its missile interceptor – which has a very inconsistent record, APA reports quoting Sputnik.
First developed during the Cold War as part of former US President Ronald Reagan’s multi-billion dollar “Star Wars” effort to counter Soviet ballistic missiles, the US missile interceptor has only had nine successful tests among the 17 conducted since 1999.
After a recent successful missile test, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said the US mainland was in “sighting range for a strike,” and claimed that they have missiles capable of carrying a large nuclear warhead, though this has not been verified.
Earlier this week, US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart warned a Senate hearing that if Pyongyang’s activities aren’t reined in, “the regime will ultimately succeed in fielding a nuclear-armed missile capable of threatening the United States homeland,” calling such an event “inevitable” if action isn’t taken.
Though the Pentagon has a number of missile defense systems, only one of them, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, is designed to counter a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This system is also the least reliable, according to critics.
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency has scheduled the test for Tuesday, when a target will be launched from the Kwajalein Atoll test range in the Pacific. The intention is that the missile will be met by an interceptor launched from an underground chamber at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Missile Defense Agency spokesman Christopher Johnson explained that the target will be custom made to resemble an ICBM, meaning it will travel at a quicker pace than test missiles used in the past.
“We conduct increasingly complex test scenarios as the program matures and advances,” Johnson said on Friday. “Testing against an ICBM-type threat is the next step in that process.”
There has been much saber rattling between Washington and Pyongyang, with the two countries trading barbs and shows of force. North Korea refuses to halt its nuclear weapons and missile testing despite international calls for denuclearization and sanctions from the United Nations.
The US has riled Pyongyang by sending a Navy carrier strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson along with the USS Michigan, a Tomahawk missile-armed nuclear powered submarine, near its waters.

Antichrist Returns Babylon’s Men (Revelation 13:18)

Iraq: Three missing Americans released into U.S. custody

 

The three contractors went missing last month and were believed to have been abducted by a Shia militia.

 

By Fred Lambert   |   Feb. 16, 2016 at 12:10 PM

BAGHDAD, Feb. 16 (UPI) — Three American contractors who went missing in Iraq’s capital last month were released Tuesday into U.S. custody, according to officials.

“They are back under U.S. control, and they will be evacuated to Landstuhl,” a U.S. military official told NBC News, referring to a U.S. military facility in Germany.

The official said the three were “fine” except for “bumps and bruises you’d expect.”

IraqiNews.com quoted a security source as saying the three were in “good health and had been handed over to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.”

The contractors, reported to be two Iraqi-Americans and one Egyptian-American, went missing on Jan. 16 in the Dora district of southern Baghdad.

At the time, Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi told reporters the men were abducted from a house in the district, which is often patrolled by Shia militias.

An Iraqi security official with knowledge of the investigation told CNN the apartment was a known brothel, and that investigators were trying to determine if they had been lured there or if the kidnapping had been a crime of opportunity.

Other reports suggested the apartment was the residence of an Iraqi interpreter working for the contractors, and separate sources said the three were taken along with their interpreter after being stopped in a car.

Last month, a senior Iraqi security official who spoke on condition of anonymity told NBC News investigators suspected the men had been abducted by one of Baghdad’s many Shia militias, including Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Hezbollah Brigades or the smaller Saraya al-Salam, which is aligned with Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sadr gained notoriety during the U.S. occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, leading his Mahdi Army militia in uprisings against U.S. troops in Najaf and the Sadr City neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

This Is Our Nuclear Defense? (Ezekiel 17)

Air Force withheld nuclear mishap from Pentagon review team

By ROBERT BURNS

Jan. 23, 2016 3:35 PM EST

FILE – This June 24, 2014, file photo, shows a patch is seen on the commander’s chair

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the spring of 2014, as a team of experts was examining what ailed the U.S. nuclear force, the Air Force withheld from them the fact that it was simultaneously investigating damage to a nuclear-armed missile in its launch silo caused by three airmen.

The Air Force on Friday gave The Associated Press the first substantive description of the accident after being questioned about it by the AP for more than a year.

The accident happened May 17, 2014, at an underground launch silo containing a Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. The silo, designated Juliet-07, is situated among wheat fields and wind turbines about 9 miles west of Peetz, Colorado. It is controlled by launch officers of the 320th Missile Squadron and administered by the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base at Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The Air Force said that while three airmen were troubleshooting the missile, a “mishap” occurred, causing $1.8 million in damage to the missile. The service declined to explain the nature of the mishap, such as whether it caused physical damage, saying the information is too sensitive to be made public.

The three airmen were immediately stripped of their certification to perform nuclear weapons duty. The missile was taken offline and removed from its silo. No one was injured and the Air Force said the accident posed no risk to public safety.

More than a year later the three airmen were recertified and returned to duty.

At the time of the accident, a group of nuclear weapons experts was nearing the end of a three-month independent review of the entire U.S. nuclear force, an examination prompted in part by a series of AP stories on troubles within the force. The experts were operating on orders from then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who asked them to begin their review in March. They reported their results to him June 2.

The AP asked Lt. Col. John Sheets, spokesman for the Air Force Global Strike Command, which is responsible for the ICBM force, whether the May 17 accident had been reported to the Hagel-appointed review group. The experts were looking at a range of issues, including shortcomings in training, equipment, morale and leadership.

“No. The accident was going through the investigative process when” the review teams made their visits to ICBM bases, Sheets said. Pressed further, he said he could say no more and referred questions about this to the Pentagon, which did not immediately comment.

The Accident Investigation Board did not begin its work until Aug. 25, more than three months after the mishap. A safety investigation was begun sometime earlier. The Air Force denied an AP request for the accident investigation report in 2015 under the Freedom of Information Act.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said Saturday the fact that the Hagel review group was not told about the accident “raises questions about what other accidents and incidents may have been overlooked by that investigation.”

On Friday evening, the AP was given a brief summary of the report. It said the Minuteman 3 missile “became nonoperational” during a diagnostic test on the evening of May 16, 2014. The next morning a “mishap crew” chief, who was not identified, “did not correctly adhere to technical guidance” during troubleshooting efforts, “subsequently damaging the missile.” No further details about the damage or errors were disclosed.

The investigation report summary said there were four contributing factors to the accident, and two were identified. One was the mishap chief’s failure to follow technical guidance. The other was that the mishap chief “lacked the necessary proficiency level” to anticipate the consequences of his actions during the troubleshooting.

In seeming contradiction of that second point, the Air Force said in its separate statement to the AP that the mishap team chief was properly trained for the task he was performing.

Sheets said it is possible that some or all of the three could still face disciplinary action.

The summary said the central cause of the mishap was established by “clear and convincing evidence,” but the Air Force would not disclose the cause or the evidence. It said the cause is cited in the investigation report. The Air Force refused to make that public, saying the report is classified, even though the service’s own policy requires the public release of accident board reports.

The amount of damage to the missile — $1.8 million,according to the Air Force — suggests that the airmen’s errors might have caused physical damage, Kristensen said. If so, he said, it could have been categorized by the Air Force as a “Bent Spear” event, which is an official reporting code word for a significant nuclear weapon incident. The Air Force refused to reveal how it categorized the Juliet-07 accident.

“By keeping the details of the accident secret and providing only vague responses, the Air Force behaves as if it has something to hide and undermines public confidence in the safety of the ICBM mission,” Kristensen said.

Sheets, the Global Strike Command spokesman, said Pentagon leaders were briefed on the results of the accident investigation in December. Members of Congress also were briefed, he said.

Climate Leading To The Nuclear War Is Nothing Compared To The Climate Change After (Rev 16)

Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’: scientists

Source: Dawn.com

WASHINGTON: Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday.

“It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as the group moved its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” two minutes forward.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947. It has changed 18 times since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.

The clock has been at five minutes to midnight since 2012 and the last time it was three minutes to midnight was in 1983, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,” Benedict said.

“And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.” The scientists called on people to demand action from their leaders to curb fossil fuel pollution and to stop developing ever more modern nuclear weapons that are endangering the planet.

“We are not saying it is too late to take action, but the window for action is closing rapidly. The world needs to be awakened from its lethargy and start making changes,” Benedict said.

Such actions should cap greenhouse gas emissions at levels sufficient to keep average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the group said.

“Efforts at reducing global emissions of heat-trapping gases have so far been entirely insufficient,” said Richard Somerville, a member of the Science and Security Board, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

“Unless much greater emissions reductions occur very soon, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform the Earth’s climate,” he said, noting that 2014 was the hottest on record and that the tipping point of ice loss in west Antarctica has been reached, meaning the melt is now unstoppable.

The climate changes that human are driving “will harm millions of people and will threaten many key ecological systems on which civilization relies”, he said.

Nuclear cuts

The scientists also called for dramatically reduced spending on nuclear weapons modernization programs, and a renewed focus on disarmament.

Benedict said that the world has about 16,300 nuclear weapons, which she described as “far too many”.

While the United States and Russia have far fewer weapons today than they did during the Cold War, the disarmament process has “ground to a halt”, said Sharon Squassoni, member, Science and Security Board, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, the United States has invested big money in modernizing its nuclear weapons systems, with some $355 billion planned for the next decade, and Russia is also upgrading its nuclear weapons, Squassoni said.

The United Kingdom has halved its nuclear arsenal stockpile since 2010 but continues to support its nuclear submarine program.

France is also building a next generation air-to-ground nuclear missile, while China is developing a new class of ballistic missile submarines, she said.

India has plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet and Pakistan has started a third plutonium reactor and is developing a new short-range nuclear missile.

“Israel reportedly is also modernizing some of its undeclared nuclear forces and North Korea as we all know continues its nuclear program without any of the restraints previously applied under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” she told reporters.

She said that any post-nuclear optimism that arose at the end of Cold War “has essentially evaporated”.

Expert Is Correct: Babylon the Great Will Lose World War III (Revelation 17)

World War 3: America Will Lose Nuclear War To China And Russia, U.S. ‘Expert’ Predicts On Iranian TV

 

The United States is deliberately provoking Russia and China into World War 3, but when it comes to a nuclear war, the result will not be the total mutual annihilation that is usually assumed to be the inevitable result of all-out nuclear World War 3.
Instead, the United States will lose.

That extreme, and extremely grim, World War 3 forecast came from an American retired university professor interviewed Monday on the English-language Iranian TV network Press TV.

James Henry Fetzer, 73, who lists himself as a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and currently sits on the editorial board of the online publication Veterans Today, is a frequent guest on the Tehran, Iran-based 24-hour news channel — though in the U.S. he is generally considered a fringe conspiracy theorist for his opinions that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the U.S. government and that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was the work of Israeli death squads with U.S. government cooperation among other, similar beliefs.

After Fetzer, a former U.S. Marine, published a 2013 article containing his Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, the University of Minnesota criticized him for using his affiliation with the university as well as his UM email address in connection with the article.

Fetzer published his latest Sandy Hook article, calling the tragic mass shooting a “hoax” on the  Veterans Today site September 19. The web publication has also recently published articles on UFOs and “The Geopolitics of World War 3.”

But Fetzer’s opinions are often sought out by the Iranian news channel, and on Monday, Fetzer gave the network some of his most dire viewpoints yet — viewpoints which predicted an inevitable World War 3, one which Fetzer says the United States will lose.

Fetzer accused the United States of “attempting to encircle Russia with a series of anti-missile batteries ostensibly directed toward Iran because of its ‘nuclear weapons program’ when Americans and Russians and most of the world know that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.”

Fetzer also told Press TV that the current U.S. bombing raids in Syria were not directed at ISIS but instead were intended to deliberately destroy Syria’s infrastructure.

He told the Iranian news operation — whose CEO is appointed directly by Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni — that the U.S. airstrikes were “an act of treachery and duplicity,” and “one of the most disgraceful actions ever undertaken by the United States in any situation whatsoever.”

The U.S actions in Syria, as well as those in regard to Russia and China, give those two nuclear superpowers “every right to exercise or display their military power, which in my opinion is actually capable of defeating the United States in a nuclear exchange,” Fetzer told Press TV.

Fetzer concluded by calling for the United States to “back down,” presumably in order to avoid World War 3.

Syria Will Be A Catalyst For Global Jihad

Iraqi Minister Sees Syria as A US-Israeli Scenario for All Muslim States

The Poisoning of Syrian Children

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iraq’s transportation minister warned that the US and Israeli scenario for the Muslim and Arab countries will not come to an end in Syria and it will spread to other countries as well.

“The Zionists and Americans want to destroy the armies of the Arab countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen,” Iraqi Transportation Minister Hadi Farhan al-Amiri said, addressing the 7th General Assembly Meeting of the Islamic Radios and Televisions Union on Sunday.

He noted that the armies of Egypt, Libya and Yemen are confused because they do not know how to fight against the terrorists, and added, “This bewilderment is part of the West–Zionist scenario for those countries.”

Yet, the Iraqi minister saw the Syrian crisis as a strategic miscalculation for the US, saying, “The United States’ miscalculated scenario in Syria is a repetition of its earlier strategic mistake in Afghanistan.”

In relevant remarks in April, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei warned against the plots hatched by the enemies to create rift among different Muslim sects.

“The goal of the enemy is to bring Islam to its knees and prevent the Shiite community from becoming a role-model,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, addressing a group of eulogists on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Hazrat Fatemeh (AS), the beloved daughter of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), the wife of Shiite Islam’s first Imam and the mother of Shiites’ second and third Imams.

The Supreme Leader underlined that the Shiism has access to unique possibilities and tools to confront the enemy’s plots.

Ayatollah Khamenei pointed to the attempts made by the enemies to harm Muslim unity and sow discord between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and said, “Creating rifts among Muslims is like a sword in the hands of the enemies of Islam …”

Iran has always attached crucial importance to paving the way for the enhancement of interaction and cooperation among Muslim nations in a bid to strengthen Muslim unity throughout the world.

In June 2013, Ayatollah Khamenei asked Muslim nations to grow united against the arrogant powers, warning that gaps in the Muslim community will create an opportunity for the Zionist regime to implement its plots against them.

“Unity and companionship among Muslims is an urgent obligation,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in Tehran at the time.

He pointed out that massacre, bloodshed, blind terrorism and its related catastrophes as well as the opportunities created for the occupying Zionist regime are all outcomes of division and difference in the Islamic Ummah.