Officials said the Israel Army has been conducting exercises in preparation for a two-front war. They said the military envisions fighting along the southern Israeli frontier with the Gaza Strip as well as with Lebanon and Syria.
Israel simulation prepares for two-front war with Hamas and Hizbullah

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Saudi Arabia would obtain nuclear weapons within a “few months” as part of a broader Middle East arms race if Iran develops nuclear weapons, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said today.
A nuclear-armed Iran would result in “an intensive nuclear wave in the Middle East,” Barak said on CNN’s “Amanpour” program. Turkey and Egypt would probably [...]

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Ahmad Khatami, an influential cleric and mentor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently said publicly that the United States has to “regard Iran as a great power in the political sphere. The people of Iran have realized there is nothing you can do to us.”
The statement is part bravado, but it also offers an important [...]

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TAIPEI, Taiwan — Early last year, a Chinese company placed an order with a Taiwanese agent for 108 nuclear-related pressure gauges. But something happened along the way. Paperwork was backdated. Plans were rerouted, orders reconfigured, shipping redirected.
And the gauges ended up in a very different place: Iran.
AP Enterprise: How nuclear equipment reached Iran – [...]

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“If an enemy dares to attack us, that’s lucky for us,” an unsmiling Taniguchi said. “Once they are within range, it is our opportunity, not theirs.”
Taniguchi’s confidence in Japan’s ability to defend itself rests on the weapons under his command – an American-designed, Japanese-built Patriot PAC-3 missile battery, attached to one of the six ballistic [...]

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China should build the world’s strongest military and move swiftly to topple the United States as the global “champion,” a senior Chinese PLA officer says in a new book reflecting swelling nationalist ambitions.
China PLA officer urges challenging U.S. dominance | Reuters

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Individuals, as always, may be tempted to make their own financial bets, too. Last time, they bought overpriced homes with too much borrowed money. Next time, who knows what the bubble will be? And that’s the problem, as it always is. How do you identify the next thing that will pop? Is it China? Or [...]

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The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high [...]

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Conventional for conventional, and nonconventional for nonconventional – as in bombs. A country attacked with chemical weapons may respond with nuclear weapons – nonconventional for nonconventional.
Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons [...]

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Goldman Sachs’ VaR models and risk models started to show little cracks or discrepancies. They were small, but they shouldn’t have been there. Rather than ignore these discrepancies, Goldman Sachs tried to understand what was going on. When it couldn’t figure out what was going on they bailed out of mortgage-backed securities.
How then do we [...]

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