2008: Rumors continue to come out of China that the DF-21 ballistic missile is being equipped with a high-explosive warhead and a guidance system that can find and hit a aircraft carrier at sea. The DF-21 has a range of 1800 kilometers and normally hauls a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead. It’s a two stage, 15 ton, solid fuel rocket that could carry a half ton penetrating, high-explosive warhead, along with the special guidance system (a radar and image recognition system).

As the remainder of the article explains, it’s more complicated than just firing off the missile … there are countermeasures, and the carriers are still hard to find.

Figure 1. The historical context of the Spanish and Portugese Age of Discovery. The Cambridge Modern History Atlas edited by Sir Adolphus William Ward, G.W. Prothero, Sir Stanley Mordaunt Leathes, and E.A. Benians. Cambridge University Press; London. 1912.

Figure 2. Cuba. Joan Vickeboons, 1639 (Library of Congress).

Figure 3. A new chart of the seas surrounding the island of Cuba with the soundings, currents, ships, courses &c. and a map of the island itself lately made by an officer in the Navy. From The London magazine, or, Gentleman's monthly intelligencer. Oct. 1762, v. 21.

Figure 4. Cuba during the Spanish-American War, 1898.

Figure 5. The location of the Bay of Pigs (1961).

Figure 6. The Bay of Pigs in Atlas Nacional de Cuba (Moscow 1970) via Cryptome.org.

Figure 7. CIA briefing board for JFK showing range of Soviet MRBMs stationed in Cuba (CIA 1962, via the National Security Archive, George Washington University).

Figure 8. Sugar in Cuba (US 1977).

Figure 9. Land Utilization in Cuba (US 1977).

Figure 10. Economic Activity in Cuba (US 1977).

Figure 11. Population Density (US 1977).

Figure 12. Political map of Cuba (CIA 1994).

Figure 13. Havana (CIA).

Figure 14. Detailed topographic map of Guantanamo Bay (NIMA, 1996).

Figure 15. Camp Delta at Guantanamo (Department of Defense, 2003). Our bad.

Figure 16. A beautiful MODIS image of Florida, the Bahamas, and Cuba (NASA 2001).

Figure 17. Another spectacular MODIS image (NASA 2004).

Figure 18. Coral reefs of Cuba (NOAA).

Figure 19. Coral reefs off western Cuba (Landsat 2001).

Figure 20. Land cover (MODIS IGBP, NASA, 2007). Red is urban, dark green is forest, pale green is grassy.

Figure 21. Vegetation map of Cuba (USGS & the Nature Conservancy).

Figure 22. Elevation and depth of Cuba and its surrounding waters (SRTM, NASA, 2007).

Figure 23. Coastal and Marine Geology (USGS).

Figure 24. Capitalists will find this USGS map of Cuba’s mineral resources handy. Not dated, but note the nuclear power plant near Cienfuegos on the west side of the island. Elements are identified via their scientific abbreviation (e.g. Cu for copper).

Figure 25. Population density (SEDAC, 2004). After Fidel and his brother depart, the people of Cuba will remain.

Figure 26. Almost every area of Cuba has been touched by human activity. Reds are substantial impact, green is low impact. (SEDAC Human Footprint V2, 2007).

Figure 27. Night lights over Florida and Cuba (DMSP, 2007). Observe the difference between the vibrant lights of Florida and the scattered lights of Cuba.

I wish I had been able to find a Godfather III map of organized crime activity in Cuba before 1960, and I would have liked to find a map that showed something of the restrictions on freedom under the Castro regime.  If you have any ideas for more Cool Maps of Cuba, by all means send them to me!

In the meantime, let's be glad that Castro is finally on the way out, and hope that this authoritarian regime will soon loosen its grip on the people of Cuba.  Surely, at the very least, they deserve to live less like North Korea and more like China.

Sincerely yours,

Fred Zimmerman

Publisher, Nimble Books LLC

The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.”

Let’s try this story again and replace Lynne Cheney with …

Marilyn Quayle?
Betty Ford?
Tipper Gore?
Mrs. Spiro Agnew?

So many of these problems trace back to Bush allowing his Vice President to be more than a figurehead. Here’s hoping that future Presidents will go back to the days of selecting powerless, amiable lightweights for Vice President and keeping them on a very short leash.

Technorati Tags: China. Lynne Cheney, James Fallows

That being said, I am not entirely satisfied with the book — I have a nagging feeling that it’s written at the wrong level of resolution. By which I mean it is focused on providing narrative accounts of the activities of a relatively few high-level managers and Washington bureaucrats, rather than providing a detailed operational assessment of the CIA’s effectiveness.

The author is clearly aware that such assessments exist — he draws on them extensively in early chapters, for example in the discussion of the suicidal (and rather provocative from today’s perspective!) missions to paradrop hundreds if not thousands agents into the Soviet Union, China, and Korea during the 1950s.

I found myself hungering for some synthesis tables — a list, perhaps, of publicly documented CIA projects in the 50s and 60s, and their outcomes. In essence, I am wishing that this book was written by a worldly academic rather than a journalist. This is an "inside the Beltway" Woodward-style story, rather than an operational history. I can’t blame the author for this choice, since in all likelihood the audience for a Woodward-style book is at least 10x the audience for an operational history, but it does mean that the book has a hard time living up to its advance billing as a complete history of the CIA.

More later, as I read on.”
Doubleday (2007), Hardcover, 720 pages
tags: First edition, intelligence, CIA

In 34 of the 37 countries where data from the Pew 2007 Global Attitudes survey are available, the United States is named by a majority or a clear plurality as the country that is “hurting the world’s environment the most”–even a third of Americans rate their own country as the world’s biggest polluter, more than point to any other single country. (Respondents were asked to name a country from a list that included India, Germany, China, Brazil, Japan, United States and Russia.)

This is a striking poll result. My instinct is to say that it is a profoundly wrong-headed result … if you subtract the U.S. contribution to the world environmental situation in the last forty-five years (since, say, the publication of Silent Spring, you have a significantly dirtier world. But the perception can’t be dismissed so easily.

Technorati Tags: Pew Research

As we look at the terminations of these two great global struggles with Versailles in mind, one crucial difference becomes apparent: there was no treaty to end the Cold War. It simply ended, marked perhaps most clearly by three events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the success of the American-led coalition that reversed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States in December 1991. To be sure, it’s not at all clear that the absence of a treaty is a bad thing. Many historians have blamed World War II on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles.

I take a more austere view; I believe corporate and individual responsibility are rightly allocated to the agents who made irrevocable choices for direct action, namely, the German people and Hitler. To say “the nasty peace terms made them do it” is to blame the victim … just as to say that “American policy made Osama blow up the World Trade Towers” is to blame the victim.

If we look at what’s happening in today’s Russia, it tends to argue against the historical argument that a more lenient set of terms at Versailles would have prevented the resurgence of German nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Even with an avalanche of international good will and a far more favorable financial situation than the Germans enjoyed, the “revanchist” forces in Russia still aren’t happy about losing the Cold War! Leaving his merits aside, Putin does seem to command a solid national consensus that supports his earnest efforts to re-establish Russia’s role as a great power. It is easy to imagine a “Weimar Putin” who might have led Germany in a similar direction.

The other major difference between Versailles and 1991, of course, is that the Treaty of Versailles did include most of the major powers who had participated in the global struggle. I learned while researching this book that China was the only country which opted out of Versailles – could that have happened in 1991? Could that happen today? In a word, no … which is a backhanded compliment to the life’s work of someone that Americans don’t like to praise, namely, Mao Tse-Tung, the bloody-handed nation-builder of the People’s Republic of China, which hasn’t taken much crap from the international community since November 1950.

The “settlement” terms reached in 1991 essentially called for a much-weakened and territorially shrunken Russia, not unlike post-WWI Russia, with America as the sole hegemon of the New World Order, extending its military reach throughout the globe, including the Middle East and the heart of Islam. It has now become apparent, of course, that a major weakness of the 1991 settlement was that it utterly failed to address the concerns of a politically significant and militarily capable group of players: Islamic terrorists. Indeed, one might say that America is so self-absorbed that we outdid even the “vindictive” French at Versailles: we imposed harsh peace terms on an enemy without even being aware that we were doing it! For it is well documented that the mere presence of American soldiers on Saudi, and now Iraqi, soil is one of the most inflammatory issues to the other side in the global “war” that we are now engaged in.

(more TK)

Environmental campaigners, however, played down the agreement, saying it does not fundamentally alter the Bush administration’s refusal to accept binding targets for reducing emissions.
…
Specifically, Mrs. Merkel was pressing the Group of 8 to adopt the plan to cut emissions in half by 2050 and to limit the rise in global temperature to two degrees Celsius — terms the president’s chief environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, said Wednesday the United States was not prepared to accept.

Instead, he said, the final communiqué approved by the Group of 8 nations — the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan — would probably reflect a merging of Mrs. Merkel’s plan with a proposal by Mr. Bush. In a major speech on climate change last week, the president spelled out his plan to convene major polluting nations, including China and India, in a series of meetings aimed at setting long-term goals by the end of 2008.

this complaining is just stupid. environmentalists are getting what they have wanted.