Free Republic

A top Iranian official says his country possesses the chemical and technical abilities to produce a nuclear weapon, the Washington Free Beacon reported citing Farsi language remarks that were independently translated for the news site. The translation quoted Ahmad Khatami, a senior member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, which has close ties to the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. He noted in recent remarks that the ability to possess a nuclear missile “is vital for Iran to confront the U.S. and its allies,” as noted in Farsi language comments made over the weekend.

When I woke up this morning it briefly felt as if I’d fallen through a time warp and gone back to the 1980s. The United States had pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Then the Russians pulled out. And before you had time to process all of that, Vladimir Putin was talking about building new, hypersonic nuclear weapons. So, of course, the United States will need to invest in upgrading our own nuclear arsenal. Weren’t we supposedly done with all of this saber rattling? (NY Post) President Vladimir Putin says that Russia will abandon a centerpiece nuclear...

<p>MERCURY, Nev. (AP) — Authorities shot and killed a man who entered a secured federal site north of Las Vegas where the government used to test nuclear bombs.</p> <p>A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration says the man failed to stop at the security gate on Monday at the Nevada National Security Site. Darwin Morgan says the man drove for about 8 miles before he parked, got out of his car and approached security officials.</p>

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Iran’s testing of space-launch vehicles is really cover for the further development of nuclear-capable ICBMs. Speaking in Abu Dhabi in advance of private meetings with Gulf States to discuss Iran’s ongoing support for terrorist groups, Pompeo said U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Iran’s satellite launches are part of Tehran’s quest to continue advancing its ballistic missile technology. Such ICBM testing violates United Nations rules prohibiting such activity, Pompeo told reporters, in describing Tehran’s actions as provocative in nature. The secretary also said the Trump administration planned to rally countries in the...

AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) - UPDATE - Carson County Sheriff Department is reporting that FM 2373 is closed from I-40 north. Officials are also reporting the east side of the Pantex Plant is completely inaccessible.

...When his candidate for governor, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, fell to Gov. Rick Perry, he switched his support to Democrat Bill White. Madden is one of a number of former Hutchison supporters who have crossed parties to support the former Houston mayor, including Houstonians Matt Simmons, CEO of Simmons & Co. International, and James Flores, CEO of Plains Exploration & Production Co. In a Republican-red state like Texas, White has to lure crossover voters, big-ticket and otherwise, if he is to have any chance at all of defeating the longest-serving governor in Texas history, although wooing Republicans and independents...

Important note: this terror plot to murder thousands of American holiday shoppers was planned  by essentially the same Stalinist terror-sponsors who rule Cuba today and who receive an estimated $4 billion annually from the U.S.-- thanks mostly to Obama’s executive orders that loopholed the “Cuban embargo” half to death. For his transition team, President-elect Trump has just appointed a former Treasury Dept. official who probably ranks as the most knowledgeable American on how horribly the letter of U.S. law [the Cuban embargo] has been violated by Obama in his “opening” to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime. Consequently, nobody is better...

US President Donald Trump has warned that the United States intended to build up its arsenal of nuclear weapons to put pressure on Russia and China. Speaking to reporters, he repeated his contention that Russia had violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which he has threatened to abandon. Russia denies this. The Cold War-era treaty banned medium-range missiles, reducing the perceived Soviet threat to European nations. Mr Trump said the US would build up its arsenal "until people come to their senses". He went on: "It's a threat to whoever you want to include China and it includes...

Following his return to South Korea after a third summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, President Moon Jae-in told reporters he would like to see all countries that participated in the Korean War sign a formal peace treaty by the end of this year. Technically, the two Koreas, the United States, and China all remain at war, which began on the peninsula in June 1950 when North Korea invaded the South. An armistice — a cease-fire agreement — was signed in July 1953. To officially end it, all four countries would need to sign a treaty. In speaking to...

Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre. Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the...

Russia is planning to hold what Moscow has called the largest military exercises since 1981, to include joint training with the Chinese military and involve simulated nuclear weapons strikes, U.S. defense officials say. As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, China will send more than 3,200 People’s Liberation Army troops along with 900 pieces of military equipment and hardware and 30 combat aircraft to Russia for the exercises, which have been dubbed Vostok-18, or East-18, according to the Chinese Defense Ministry.

The Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party has decreed that North Korea will not relinquish its nuclear arsenal, which it termed a “precious legacy” of the country’s late leaders, according to local sources, despite an earlier pledge by party chairman Kim Jong Un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.Kim held historic talks with South Korea’s Moon Jae-in in April, as well as an unprecedented summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in June, and agreed—in principle—to abandoning the North’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for promises of regime security and economic prosperity.But a lack of any concrete agreement on steps to...

The journalist from US political publication The Nation disrupted the meeting holding a banner that read 'Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty' A journalist has been dragged out of the Trump-Putin press conference by Secret Service agents after protesting over America's use of nuclear weapons. Political journalist and activist Sam Husseini got into a scuffle with security forces in Helskini, Finland, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump addressed journalists. Husseini, who writes for The Nation, held up a sign saying 'Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty' as he disrupted the conference just before the two leaders were set to take...

It was in August 2014 that the real danger began, and that we heard the first warnings of war. That month, unmarked Russian troops covertly invaded eastern Ukraine, where the separatist conflict had grown out of its control. The Russian air force began harassing the neighboring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are members of NATO. The US pledged that it would uphold its commitment to defend those countries as if they were American soil, and later staged military exercises a few hundred yards from Russia's border.Both sides came to believe that the other had more drastic intentions....

This is right up there with the congressman worrying that stationing Marines on Guam could cause the island to tip over and capsize . . . On CNN this morning, Chris Cuomo expressed the concern that under a denuclearization deal with North Korea, the NORK nukes might be sent to . . . Pakistan. Panelists Jon Avlon and Gordon Chang talked poor Chris in off the ledge, assuring him that wouldn’t happen.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

North Korea has scheduled a “ceremony” to dismantle its nuclear on May 23-25 ahead of President Donald Trump’s summit with leader Kim Jong Un next month, state media said Saturday. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Saturday that all the tunnels at the country’s northeastern testing ground will be destroyed by explosion and that observation and research facilities and ground-based testing units will also be removed. The dramatic and symbolic event is part of the Hermit Kingdom’s pledge to discontinue nuclear tests.

I get being against Trump. You don’t like him. He’s dangerous. He’s sexist. He’s a racist. He’s not conservative. He’s not a Republican. There are plenty of reasons both sides don’t like this man, though he’s not any of those things. And yes, he’s not a conservative Republican. He’s a right-leaning populist that has an agenda that gives conservative Republicans most of what they want.Yet, the resist fever that’s broken out among liberal Democrats is just popcorn-worthy. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has been the face of this resist at all cost wing among progressives, which has devolved into a total...

If Chris Cuomo had been around during WWII, would he have been telling FDR and Churchill that they needed to disclose their D-Day plans? Maybe so, judging by Cuomo’s absurd questioning of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on CNN this morning. Cuomo suggested to Netanyahu that Israel needs to “come clean” and be “honest” about its nuclear weapons capabilities if it expects Iran to do the same. [snip] But the bigger point is that Israel is effectively at war with Iran and other countries in the Middle East. It is a tiny nation surrounded by hostile powers. Why would Israel, why...

In his first visit to Russia, newly appointed Chinese Defense Minister Wei Feng attended the seventh Moscow International Security Conference. Wei said that he had two major messages for Russia at a time when both nations were attempting to modernize their armed forces and strengthen their hands in global affairs in spite of U.S. fears. "I am visiting Russia as a new defense minister of China to show the world a high level of development of our bilateral relations and firm determination of our armed forces to strengthen strategic cooperation," Wei said at a meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergey...

China’s Communist Party adopted a secret plan in September to bolster the North Korean government with increased aid and military support, including new missiles, if Pyongyang halts further nuclear tests, according to an internal party document. The document, labeled “top secret” and dated Sept. 15 — just 12 days after North Korea’s latest underground nuclear blast — outlines China’s plan for dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue. It states China will allow North Korea to keep its current arsenal of nuclear weapons, contrary to Beijing’s public stance that it seeks a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. Chinese leaders also agreed to...