Tag: nuclear weapons

Latest US nuclear gravity bomb enters production

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has shown off the United States’ latest nuclear weapon as full production begins seven months ahead of schedule. The B61-13 variable-yield gravity bomb is part of a major program to modernize the American nuclear deterrent.

Nuclear weapons may seem like a relic of the Cold War that isn’t very pleasant to think about, but the are still front and center when it comes to geopolitics.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, cuts to the American and Russian arsenals have drastically reduced the number of combined warheads on alert from a high of between 8,000 and 9,000 to only about 1,800 combined, which includes both strategic and tactical weapons. However, nuclear deterrence has become much more complex as rogue states have striven to acquire atom bombs and China has gone from having an “arsenal in being” with a handful of warheads kept in storage to an estimated 24 weapons on alert as it moves to a more nuclear-centered strategy.

Because of this, the US has embarked on a program to extend the life of and to modernize its nuclear arsenal to make sure it remains safe and reliable as well as being able to counter the threats of the 21st century.

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NAT SEC ARCHIVE: Concerned About Nuclear Weapons, JFK Pushed for Inspection of Israel Nuclear Facilities

President John F Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.  Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims.  Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On 30 May 1961, Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in Manhattan to discuss the bilateral relationship and Middle East issues. However, a central (and indeed the first) issue in their meeting was the Israeli nuclear program, about which President Kennedy was most concerned.   According to a draft record of their discussion, which has never been cited, and is published here for the first time, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” and “some words were missed.”  He emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project. Nevertheless the note taker, Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot, believed that he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power” and also say that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion tacitly acknowledged that the Dimona reactor had a military potential, or so Talbot believed he had heard.  The final U.S. version of the memcon retained the sentence about plutonium but did not include the language about a “pilot” plant and  “weapons capacity.”

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US Intelligence Says Iran Is ‘Not Building a Nuclear Weapon’

US intelligence agencies have reaffirmed that there’s no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons or that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has reversed his 2003 fatwah that banned the production of weapons of mass destruction.

“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

Gabbard’s comments were based on the annual threat assessment, which is released by the ODNI with input from all US intelligence agencies. The report did note that there have been more calls inside Iran to reverse the ban on nuclear weapons, which have grown in response to Israeli aggression in the region.

“In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decisionmaking apparatus,” the report reads. “Khamenei remains the final decision maker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.”

The threat assessment comes amid increasing US sanctions and threats of military action over Iran’s nuclear program. Iranian officials have rejected the idea of talks with the US in the face of President Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign,” but have said the door is open for indirect negotiations.

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JFK advisor reveals US Navy secretly shot and retrieved ‘orb’ UFO during 1962 missile test

An ‘orb’ UFO was shot out the sky and retrieved by the US Navy during a 1962 missile test, a former top aide to four US presidents revealed. 

Harald Malmgren was a senior advisor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

The retired government official said he was briefed by top CIA and Atomic Energy Commission officials on a videotaped missile test that took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, during which the shocking UFO incident occurred.

Malmgren’s daughter, economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren, herself a former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, revealed the details of her father’s story on her blog last week, after the veteran presidential aide passed away on February 13 aged 89.

She said before his death, her father had recently decided to tell his full story ‘for the sake of history’.

Harald described a video of a missile test launch from October 25, 1962, in which a mysterious ‘white orb’ can be seen flying in circles around the rocket as it speeds through the air.

The missile was equipped with what Pippa described as ‘an X-ray machine in the nosecone’, designed to use radiation to disable an incoming enemy nuclear missile.

But the test missile’s intense X-ray burst appeared to disable the UFO too.

‘The X-rays knocked it out of the sky. The US Navy retrieved the orb out of the ocean,’ Pippa wrote in her March 18 blog post, recounting her father’s story.

And it wasn’t the first time an orb had been spotted chasing a US missile, according to Harald.

‘We called them ‘tagalongs,’ Harald said, according to the blog post. ‘We knocked a “tagalong” out of the sky.’

Pippa said her father was briefed on the incident because he was in charge of the budget for the missile testing program, as a top White House and Pentagon official.

‘Before my father recently passed away, he went on record explaining what he knew about all this because he felt it was important for the sake of history,’ she said.

Harald, who was active on social media site X even in his final months, alluded to the incident in a tweet last August.

’60+ years ago I was provided highest level classifications to lead DOD [Department of Defense] work on nuclear weapons and antimissile defense,’ he wrote.

‘Informally briefed on “otherworld technologies” by CIA’s Richard Bissell (who had been in charge of Skunkworks, Area 51, Los Alamos, etc.) but sworn to secrecy.

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NSA REPORT: The NUMEC Affair and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Nearly seventy years have gone by since Israel embarked on its nuclear program, and almost sixty years have passed since it achieved nuclear weapons capability. However, the narrative of Israel’s nuclear history remains largely unarticulated. The country has not produced an official and sanctioned account of its nuclear development, nor have any insiders been permitted to share their perspectives.

In 1966, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) performed a security inspection at the NUMEC uranium facility located in Apollo, Pennsylvania. During this inspection, the inspector suspected that some of the missing uranium had been transported to France before ultimately reaching Israel. Zalman Shapiro, one of NUMEC’s founders, had established a dubious new enterprise in collaboration with a French organization known as Société D’Applications de la Physique (SAIP). This new venture was named NUMEC Instruments and Controls Corporation (NUMINCO) and was located in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. In 1957, as France was advancing its nuclear program, it initiated a nuclear agreement with Israel, sending engineers to assist in the construction of the nuclear reactor at Dimona, Israel. However, to facilitate the development of nuclear weapons, the newly established state required a plutonium separation facility, which was secretly built by the French company “Saint Gobain.” Shimon Peres, who passed away on September 28, 2016, was a protégé of David Ben-Gurion and played a key role in shaping Israel’s clandestine nuclear program, a program that was developed with French assistance – but whose existence is still officially denied to this day.

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NSA Waltz Demands Iran Give Up Entire Nuclear Program, Including Civilian Enrichment

While continuing to closely tie the recent US attacks on the Houthis in Yemen to Iran, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz confirmed that the Trump Administration is demanding “full dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, including its capacity to enrich uranium for civilian use.

Waltz made the comments on CBS’ Face the Nation, and when asked what full dismantlement meant and to clarify the distinction between it and the verification deal the US had with Iran before President Trump pulled out of it in 2018, he made it clear this is far broader, covering everything, including enrichment, “weaponization,” and strategic missile programs.

Iran’s enrichment program, which is under IAEA monitoring, has no military component in the first place. Enrichment was purely for making fuel rods for the Bushehr nuclear power plant along Iran’s coast and for making somewhat higher enriched fuel for its medical isotope reactor. Iran has a long history of having a substantial nuclear medicine program, and supplied its own isotopes for that.

The long-abandoned nuclear deal was meant to give Iran a design to produce isotopes without 20% enriched uranium through a heavy-water reactor. Like most of the promises to Iran under the deal this was never honored, and Iran is left with the old research reactor. Higher levels of enrichment were also done to try to encourage new negotiations, though Iran promised the IAEA that they would not go above 60% levels, and weapons-grade uranium is a minimum of 90%.

Waltz’ new demand is not that Iran goes back down to 20% or anything, it’s to stop enrichment entirely. It’s unclear in the context if Iran is even allowed to keep it’s power plant, though without the ability to enrich uranium to make their own fuel, it would be effectively useless in fairly short order.

Beyond that, Waltz demanded Iran scrap its “weaponization” program, which will be a challenge because Iran does not have one, and US intelligence assessments have repeatedly said Iran hasn’t decided to try to make such a weapon though such assessments never seem to inform the content of US demands.

He also demanded Iran get rid of its entire strategic missile program, which sense they haven’t even attempted to create nuclear warheads would exclusively impact conventional weapons in Iran’s arsenal. Though presented as something to do with nuclear dismantlement, it is effectively unrelated in the case of these missiles.

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Macron Unveils Major Nuclear Expansion By 2035

France has talked a big, hawkish anti-Russia game of late, but this week President Macron has actually backed up the rhetoric with action, but which brings Europe another step closer to nuclear escalation with Moscow.

France unveiled earlier this week plans to establish a new nuclear-capable air base, which will be its fourth, also to be home to two squadrons of the latest version of its domestic-made Dassault Rafale multirole fighter.

France plans to invest around 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) to establish the new nuke-capable installation. A moment, the three air bases equipped with secure weapons storage for nuclear missiles are: Saint-Dizier, Istres, and Avord.

Speaking of the location of what will become the next base to play nuclear host, Macron said, “The Luxeuil air base is about to be upgraded in an unprecedented way and regain its full role in France’s nuclear deterrent,” describing that it will need “massive investment” to be modernized.

“Announcing the storage of modern nuclear missiles on an air base less than 200 kilometers from the German border is strategic signaling,” Politico has commented. “It also comes after Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz said he wanted to hold talks about France’s nuclear deterrent as fears grow of a U.S. retreat from the continent.”

“If we are to avoid war, our country and our continent must continue to defend, equip and prepare themselves,” Macron said.

Storing ASN4G air-launched hypersonic nuclear missiles there will require the permanent staff to double to at least 2,000 people. The French President set a bar of preparing Luxeuil to host an expansion of next-generation Rafale fighter jets and their hypersonic nuclear missiles by the year 2035.

The double-engine Rafale is capable of flying supersonic speeds and can depart runways as short as 400 meters. Produced by Dassault Aviation, it has been a central fighter of the French Air Force since 2000.

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Declassified JFK Files: Transcript Reveals Israeli Scientists and US Experts May Have Played Roles in Transfer of Nuclear Intelligence to Israel

The newly declassified JFK file revealed that former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton testified under oath in an executive session before the Church Committee in 1975 about deep intelligence ties between the United States and Israel.

The testimony, given in a top-secret executive session, was part of the Senate Select Committee’s broader investigation into intelligence operations.

Though much of the session was focused on Cold War espionage and Soviet defections, one line of questioning zeroed in on allegations that U.S. intelligence may have assisted Israel’s covert nuclear program.

Angleton, who served from the agency’s founding until late 1974, confirmed a formal, albeit unwritten, intelligence-sharing agreement between the CIA and Israeli operatives beginning in 1951, one reportedly brokered between Angleton and Reuven Shiloah, Israel’s first Mossad director, noting that the relationship operated on a fiduciary basis and avoided documentation.

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Massive Explosion at Russian Nuclear Bomb Base Following Ukrainian Drone Strike

On Thursday Ukraine carried out a drone-bombing attack against a Russian nuclear weapons base 450-miles outside of Moscow resulting in a massive explosion and numerous fires which spread to neighboring cottages.

The base, Engels airfield, hosts a number of Russia’s nuclear-capable heavy bombers and cruise missiles.

A state of emergency has been declared in the area.

Ukrainian Dictator Vladimir Zelensky carried out the attack as a ceasefire agreement is underway.

Notably Ukraine carried out a drone strike on sleeping Russian civilians in Moscow the last time they came to the ‘peace’ table.

France is preparing for nuclear war, according to statements by French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron.

A hospital in the region was also hit as well.

“A hospital in the central Russian city of Engels has sustained damage in the largest ever Ukrainian drone raid on the area, local officials have reported. The nearby regional capital, Saratov, was also targeted,” RT said Thursday.

On Monday representatives from Moscow and Washington will meet in Saudi Arabia for further peace negotiations.

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France To Expand Its Nuclear Deterrent With New Air Base

France has said it will establish another nuclear-capable air base — its fourth — that will be equipped with two squadrons of the latest version of the homegrown Dassault Rafale multirole fighter. The change in fortunes for the base, Luxeuil Air Base in eastern France — once threatened with closure — comes as European NATO members, including France, look at bolstering their nuclear deterrence capabilities independent of the United States.

The announcements were made today by French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Luxeuil — locally known as Base Aérienne 116. As a nuclear-capable base, Luxeuil is planned to host the new ASN4G hypersonic missile by 2035. The weapon will arm two squadrons of the most advanced F5-standard Rafales — a total of 40 aircraft. All in all, France will invest around 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) into the installation.

Pointing to the fact that the war in Ukraine “has changed the situation,” Cédric Perrin, the senator for the region in which the air base is located, confirmed that the first Rafale squadron will touch down at Luxeuil in 2032, becoming operational the following year. The second squadron will become operational in 2036.

It appears that these 40 advanced versions of the Rafale will be in addition to the 42 examples ordered earlier this year. As well as being compatible with the ASN4G missile, the F5-standard Rafales will also be able to work in conjunction with ‘loyal wingman’-type drones.

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