MOSCOW, April 30 (UPI) — The Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS, is a radio-based satellite navigation system developed by the Soviet Union and now operated for the Russian government by the national Space Force. It is the Russian counterpart of the United States’ Global Positioning System, or GPS.
GLONASS has both military and civilian applications and is a graphic example of how space technology can be put to work back on Earth.
The decision to go to war and the decisions that were made subsequently were made quickly and without a careful consideration of the landscape in which the war would be fought. The President is the one responsible for the decision to go to war without a thoroughly processed plan. He is responsible for the fact that goals were not set clearly and carefully. To all these were added severe failure with regard to a lack of judgment, responsibility and prudence.
Despite the threat reduction, however, the U.S. retains the weaponry to fight a total nuclear war: roughly 10,000 warheads and bombs. A third of these are warheads—dubbed W76—which, since 1978, have been deployed atop submarine-based ballistic missiles or stored in what is known as the Enduring Nuclear Stockpile, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS), an organization founded by the creators of the original nuclear weapon in 1945 that has been monitoring the nation’s nuclear arsenal ever since. The W76 generates 100 kilotons of explosive force when detonated, the equivalent of 100,000 tons of the chemical explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is designed to obliterate so-called “soft targets,” such as ports, garrisons, or factories.
Russian and eastern European hackers get all the glory these days, but their efforts to disrupt American financial services are a nuisance when compared to the nation-state threat that china’s cyber army, and its rogue hackers, may pose. U.S. financial institutions’ IT Security defenses aren’t capable of defending against a rising global superpower. But then again, neither are Uncle Sam’s.
Just a few hundred feet up the slope from a complex of new luxury apartment buildings, a battery of Patriot-2 missiles stands ready on five minutes notice to intercept their share of the nearly 1,000 Chinese missiles aimed at this island.
In the officers’ mess of one of Taiwan’s efficient French-built frigates, a worried admiral describes the rapid growth of China’s fleet, which will soon include its first aircraft carrier.
A few steps from the president’s office, an intelligence officer mentions his personal worry: a Chinese commando raid to kidnap Taiwan’s elected leaders and paralyze its government.
Alarmism?
After the 9/11 attacks, China pledged to play a constructive role in international counterterrorism efforts and the Bush administration pledged to pretend that the Chinese were doing so; this was perhaps the first indicator of how the administration’s strong focus on terrorism distorted overall strategy-making. Not surprisingly, relations gradually improved as the United States and China agreed on the need to cooperate on a number of security issues of mutual concern. Bush also reached out to the Chinese leadership, visiting China in February 2002 and hosting then-president Jiang Zemin at his Crawford, Texas, ranch later that year. The high-level meetings continued, culminating in President Hu Jintao’s April 2006 visit to Washington.
Characterizing it as “the greatest threat we face,” Cheney once again raised the ugly specter of nuclear terrorism against the U.S. “It’s a very real threat,” he said, “something that we have to worry about and defeat every single day.” Tying the warning to politicking over Iraq war policy, he said a precipitous withdrawal from that country by U.S. military forces would invite and encourage the terrorists to follow Americans home. “The fact is that the threat to the United States now of a Sept. 11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities, is the greatest threat we face,” he said.
This view was leaked hours before the Israeli Winograd panel published its harsh criticisms of the Olmert government’s conduct of the war Monday, April 30, in Jerusalem. It represents another of the grave setbacks Israel has suffered in the wake of its failed management of the Lebanon war. President George W. Bush’s original judgment directly after the hostilities ended was quite different: “Hizballah attacked Israel; Hizballah started the crisis and Hizballah suffered a defeat in this crisis,†he said.
