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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reoriented Germany away from Russia and toward the United States. Expanded economic ties are just one area of renewed cooperation. But could Germany get burned like the British did?
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Even in the post 9-11 world, relations between the U.S. and Canada are continuously strained over the war on Terror. FSM Editor Susan MacAllen tells why we need to be concerned about Canada’s lax security and overwhelmingly anti-American public mood.
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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 [...]

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After years of talking about it, Japan’s governing party has moved ahead this month with plans to revise the country’s constitution. The changes would expand the role of Japan’s military - a significant break from its post-World war II pacifist era. And as Catherine Makino reports from Tokyo, that is giving rise to fear that [...]

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It’s difficult to avoid the impression that with Russia, we may be gravitating toward a new cold war. Flush with cash as a result of soaring energy prices, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin behaves like a man who is utterly unconstrained by “world opinion” (however defined), or the possibility of incurring Washington’s wrath. We see [...]

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Almost every Arab regime in the Mideast has been gripped with nuclear fever. Suddenly, despite the immense oil and gas reserves beneath many of them, they must have nuclear power plants.
Egypt, for instance, says that it might build a nuclear plant on the Mediterranean coast within 10 years. Jordan says that the kingdom intends to [...]

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The twenty-first century will not belong to China.
But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, [...]

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THE SOURCES OF RUSSIAN CONDUCT
Yet, for every step forward that Russia has taken over the course of Putin’s second term, it has taken a step backward. Greater state control of the economy — especially in the energy industry, where, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the state’s share of oil production [...]

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Guy Roberts told a Moscow nonproliferation conference that 18 months ago, a father and son built a small unmanned airplane in Vermont, U.S., which flew nonstop from New Hampshire to the U.K. with a five-kg load, eventually landing 10 meters from the target place.
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As President Vladimir Putin enters the last year of his presidency, he has become more defiant of international pressure and more willing to challenge both Europe and the United States.
Some analysts say Russia’s stability and growing wealth have given it the confidence to confront the West, and to try to reassert its proper influence as [...]

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The April 12 test firing of an Agni-3 ballistic missile has bolstered India’s confidence that it can develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, scientists said.
The chief of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), M. Natarajan, told a press conference here April 15 that it would require just “three years” to prepare a limited-range ICBM for [...]

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When Vladimir Putin made his hard-line speech at the February 10 Munich conference on security, the Turkish public got truly excited. Many saw in the speech the makings of a new Cold War, and this time around instead of fearing a rising Russia the sentiment was favorable towards Moscow – as a counterbalance to an [...]

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Conventional wisdom has it that China’s expanding military capabilities, and Beijing’s growing regional ambitions, will one day soon pose a challenge to the United States in Asia. Likewise, Russia under Vladimir Putin has shed any ambiguity about its post-Cold war direction, become increasingly assertive, powerful and anti-American.
Yet perhaps the greatest threat to U.S. interests and [...]

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Violence in the Horn of Africa is not unusual. Somalia has witnessed almost constant skirmishes between rival warlords in the sixteen years since it last had a functioning government. In neighboring Ethiopia and Eritrea, lingering resentment over a 1990s border dispute has left the two countries perpetually at each other’s throats. Thus, when the United [...]

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