Proliferated

Saudia Arabia working on secret nuclear program with Pakistan help - report - Forbes.com
Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

…

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.

Not a huge surprise to readers of Proliferated.

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com

Do we really believe that the U.S. military thinks that Russia had a spy in the middle of American war planning for Iraq or that Russia broke some American code and listened in on U.S. war preparations in 2003?

And do we really think that Secretary of State and former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice first heard of this on Friday, as she made believe she did yesterday in television interviews?

The answer to both questions is no.

Welcome to the self-perpetuating world of spy vs. spy.

The nutshell summary of William H. Arkin’s article about the Russia spying disclosures is that Arkin’s mental filters are so finely tuned that they screen out all new information.

Why aren’t these documents headline news?

ABC News: Did Russian Ambassador Give Saddam the U.S. War Plan?
March 23, 2006 — Following are the ABC News Investigative Unit’s summaries of seven documents from Saddam Hussein’s government, which the U.S. government has released.

The documents discuss Osama bin Laden, weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda and more.

The full documents can be found on the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office Web site: http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm.

For example:

The first document (CMPC-2003-001950) is a handwritten account of a meeting with the Russian ambassador that details his description of the composition, size, location and type of U.S. military forces arrayed in the Gulf and Jordan. The document includes the exact numbers of tanks, armored vehicles, different types of aircraft, missiles, helicopters, aircraft carriers, and other forces, and also includes their exact locations. The ambassador also described the positions of two Special Forces units.

Document dated March 25, 2003

The second document (CMPC-2004-001117) is a typed account, signed by Deputy Foreign Minister Hammam Abdel Khaleq, that states that the Russian ambassador has told the Iraqis that the United States was planning to deploy its force into Iraq from Basra in the South and up the Euphrates, and would avoid entering major cities on the way to Baghdad, which is, in fact what happened. The documents also state “Americans are also planning on taking control of the oil fields in Kirkuk.” The information was obtained by the Russians from “sources at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar,” according to the document.

U.S. Intelligence and the French Nuclear Weapons Program
The U.S. Intelligence Community devoted significant effort to the collection and analysis of intelligence concerning the French nuclear weapons program beginning in the early days of the Cold War through the mid-1970s, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and archival research and posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

[Well, duh. No story here: they were doing their job.]

The documents also indicate that new technological improvements in U.S. nuclear intelligence gathering were used to closely monitor the French program. The collection effort included the use of overhead reconnaissance systems (including satellites and U-2 aircraft), drones, communications intercepts systems, aircraft to gather debris and signatures from French nuclear tests, and specially-equipped ships stationed near the French Pacific test site.

[Now this is more interesting. Off the top of my head, I wouldn't have guessed that the French program was a technology driver for us.]

CNN.com - Cheney: Iran must not have nuclear weapons - Mar 7, 2006
He said the United States joins “other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Until Jan. 20, 2009?

There’s a race against time between forces for “regime change” in both countries. Will a new US administration take an “oh well” stance, or will Iranian moderates pull the country away from its nuclear ambitions? If I had to bet, I’d guess we blink first. The question is whether Bush & Cheney are ballsy enough to take that option away from the next administration.

After losing my job ats a product consultant at LexisNexis in December 2002, I switched gears to writing and publishing books. Nimble Books LLC has been in operation since June 2004. It’s been a great experience and I’ve learned a lot about being a publisher. But enough time has gone by for certain trends to become apparent, and it is now time for a strategy refresh.

• A strategy is a coherent series of choices that leads to victory.
• Victory, in this case, is financial independence. I’m lucky enough to have a real job that I thoroughly enjoy, but the weight of my financial responsibilities to my family is something that never leaves my shoulders. I want to have “no worries.”

Here are the macro facts of the Nimble Books situation.

• As currently configured, Nimble Books is approximately a $15K/year business.
• About 75% of the revenue comes from our series of Harry Potter books.
• The lifecyle of the Harry Potter books is finite, but we can probably maintain revenue at more or less the same level by doing incremental products and addressing less lucrative enthusiast markets.
• The Nimble Books website covers its hosting costs via Google AdSense, Google Book Search, and Amazon Associates, but doesn’t do much more. After 20 months of detailed daily monitoring, there is no reason to believe that these revenue streams will ever do anything more than show linear growth.
• $15K/year is enough to help pay off debts and to help with Kelsey’s college, but it’s nowhere near enough to live on.

The Nimble Books strategy going forward:

• Maintain the franchise by keeping products up to date.
• Devote no resources to product development on the website; its primary function is personal expression.
• Focus energies on developing a portfolio of new products; specifically, novels. Follow the Charlie Stross strategy of starting several series in different genres so that once one sells, they all sell.
• Realistically, I can hope to write about one novel every six months.

Schedule:

• Finish up current obligations (AFFC book, website) by June 30.
• 4Q2006: complete PROLIFERATED.
• 2Q2007: complete NOVEL IN FLAMES.
• 4Q2007: complete comic mystery.

Stretch goal: complete and sell ten novels by the time I am 50 (five years from March 18, 2006). (I would be perfectly happy with one!)

I’ve been getting a lot of searches looking for the first flight of the enormous Airbus 380.

The Airbus 380 is not going to look so cool when the first one crashes. The 800-passenger capacity runs directly counter to one of the central precepts of living in a Proliferated world, which is that all assets must be diversified.

Back to Google Image Search.

DEBKAfile -
Russian FM Sergei Lavrov put this information before the five permanent UN Security Council and Germany, which Tuesday night, Jan. 30, agreed for the first time to haul Iran before the UN body over its nuclear program. Until then, Moscow and Beijing had stood out against the UN nuclear watchdog’ referring the Iran dossier to the Security Council. Tehran hit back Wednesday by saying the decision was unconstructive and the end of diplomacy

According to Lavrov, Russian intelligence estimates that Iran is now capable of detonating this non-weaponized nuclear device - or in other words carrying out its first nuclear test.

DEBKAfile sources add: This estimate which Russian president Vladimir Putin passed to President George Bush some weeks ago is challenged by US and Israeli nuclear experts, who do not believe Iran is up to the stage of a nuclear device. However, on Jan. 21, the opposition FDI claimed Iran would carry out its first nuclear test before the Iranian new year, which falls on March 20.

Let’s see what happens.

DEBKAfile -
At a news conference in Moscow, attended by more than a thousand pressmen, Russian president Vladmir Putin reported that last year Russia tested missile systems that no one in the world has and won’t have for a long time. “They are hypersonic and capable of changing their flight path.”

Last year, he showed the working principles of the system to French president Jacques Chirac during a visit to a Russian military facility. Live Russian television coverage of the Putin press conference was cut off before the last sentence.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add: For many years, Russian missile experts have been working on a hypersonic ballistic surface missile able to change its flight path and potentially outwit any anti-missile system in the United States and the West. However American and other Western experts strongly doubt if the Russian system has attained operational capability. Aside from last year’s test launch of a prototype, no further tests have been reported and they doubt the Russians have financial resources for bringing the system to completion.

New Scientist News - Doomsday vault to avert world famine:

WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity.

The room is a “doomsday vault” designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. It is being built to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. “If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet,” says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.

New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but “the mountains are patrolled by polar bears”, says Fowler.

Excellent idea. But after THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, won’t Spitzbergen be under about 100 feet of ice? Or, after the Antarctic Ice Shelf melts, won’t it be under about 100 feet of water?

Good start, anyway. Remember, though: in a proliferated world, all assets must be distributed assets.