Free Republic

Viewed from above, the fields surrounding Büchel air base stretch out like a greenish-brown patchwork quilt, punctuated by the small villages and woodlands that make up the Eifel region in western Germany. Take a closer look at satellite imagery, and you can make out several dozen camouflaged airplane hangars. Hidden deep below them lies a carefully guarded secret: underground vaults housing American nuclear bombs that date back to the Cold War. […] In March 2010, Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, passed a cross-party resolution urging the government to “emphatically” work towards getting its American allies to withdraw all nuclear weapons from...

The US conducted a military exercise last week which simulated a “limited” nuclear exchange with Russia, a senior Pentagon official has confirmed. The war game is notable because of the defence department’s highly unusual decision to brief journalists about the details and because it embodied the controversial notion that it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out world-ending conflict.

The United Arab Emirates has issued an operating licence for the Arab world's first nuclear power plant, a senior official at the nuclear regulator said on Monday, paving the way for it to start production later this year.

Over the past two decades, China's People's Liberation Army has transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable, modern military. Although China continues to lag the United States in terms of aggregate military hardware and operational skills, it has improved its relative capabilities in many critical areas. To advance the public debate, RAND used open, unclassified sources to compile The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power. This comprehensive report examines U.S. and Chinese military capabilities in ten operational areas, and presents a "scorecard" for each.Each scorecard assesses the relative advantage or disadvantage...

The US Defense Department announced Tuesday that it has deployed a submarine carrying a new long-range missile with a relatively small nuclear warhead, saying it is in response to Russian tests of similar weapons.

Two Mississauga, Ont., men have been indicted for allegedly helping to run an international procurement network over a five-year period to traffic materials such as aircraft parts and satellite communications equipment to support Pakistan’s nuclear program. Father and son Muhammad Ahsan Wali, 48, and Haji Wali Muhammad Sheikh, 82, are among five men accused of being associated with an alleged front company called Business World, based in Rawalpindi, a city in northern Pakistan, according to the United States Department of Justice. The other three charged include another one of Sheikh’s sons in Pakistan, as well as one man in Hong...

Video Link

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday vowed to continue developing his country’s nuclear deterrent and introduce a “new strategic weapon” in 2020. In his annual New Year’s address, Kim said there was “no ground” for Pyongyang to maintain the moratorium on missile tests, with the country set to continue developing strategic weapons unless the US gave up its hostile approach. He also threatened that the US would "suffer helplessly" if there continued to be delays in talks aimed at dismantling his country’s nuclear and missile programs. Kim’s comments came after the US missed his deadline of December 31...

Reconnaissance of a North Korean launch site indicates that Kim Jong-Un may be preparing to test a long-range ballistic missile, three U.S. intelligence officials who monitor North Korea in different agencies tell TIME. The intelligence comes ahead of a fast-approaching self-declared year-end deadline that Kim set in an April 12 speech for a nuclear deal with the U.S. In recent weeks, North Korea has reopened its Sohae Satellite Launching Station and resumed testing what U.S. intelligence officials and private experts suspect may be a solid fuel rocket engine that could be used in an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching...

SEOUL, Dec. 13 (Yonhap) -- Fresh satellite imagery showed a 10-meter-long truck and a possible crane at North Korea's satellite launching site, U.S. experts said, amid concerns the communist nation could launch a long-range rocket from the site. Jack Liu, an expert on North Korea's missile program, and Peter Makowsky, an imagery analysis expert, said in an analysis on the website 38 North that continued activity was captured on satellite imagery taken Wednesday of the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground, better known as the Dongchang-ri site. (Please see full article for details)

Iran has been taking advantage of recent political unrest in Iraq by secretly stockpiling short-range missiles inside the country, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The buildup is part of Iran's widening effort to assert dominance in the Middle East and could pose a threat to American troops as well as allies in the region such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, U.S. sources told the Times. Both Iraq and Iran have been gripped by deadly protests in recent months, with more than 1,000 people reported dead as a result of protests in Iran. But public unrest has not seemed to...

Bush Aides Gave One-Sided View of Iraqi Data -- NYT October 2, 2004 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, gave a one-sided view of the case for believing Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arms program that ignored the doubts of their own experts, the New York Times said on Saturday. The newspaper made the charge in an article about thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes ordered by Iraq that leading administration officials said were intended for use in uranium centrifuges. "As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of (Saddam's) revived...

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas visited Hiroshima on Friday to commemorate victims of the 1945 nuclear attack and promote a nuclear-weapon-free world. “One day living in a nuclear-weapon-free world has to remain our goal,” he said. “Even though that will not be easy and may take a long time.” However, the foreign minister said he was against a unilateral German withdrawal of nuclear weapons. “It’s no use if nuclear weapons are just moved from one country to another. If they are to disappear then they should disappear everywhere,” he said. “As far as nuclear disarmament is concerned, we need agreements...

Mao Zedong moves to Wuhan , Lin Biao to Suzhou and the general staff to a nuclear bombproof bunker in the western hills outside Beijing. The country's warplanes are scattered around northern China, runways at the main airports blocked and workers given weapons to shoot Soviet airmen when they land. It is October 1969: China is preparing for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Lin, second to Mao, orders 940,000 soldiers, 4,000 planes and 600 vessels to scatter from their bases and the transfer of major archives from Beijing to the southwest. Then US president Richard Nixon intervenes. Secretary...

It's 2025, and Vladimir Putin (yup, he's still in power) wakes up in a historically bad mood. He decides—and everyone around him agrees—that it's time to launch an all-out nuclear assault on the United States. This is the nightmare scenario laid out in the latest Nuclear Defense Posture Review. It’s also the war envisioned by Putin himself. Last week he took the stage before the Russian Parliament and rattled off a litany of new nuclear weapons to be delivered by silo, submarine, and aircraft—weapons he claimed to be unstoppable.... imagine what Russia’s arsenal could do in a real first strike...

“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in April said he would give the U.S. until the end of the year to become more flexible on nuclear talks. Since then, he's launched 12 missiles to back up that warning, including a launch on Thursday. So far, though, there is no evidence the U.S. is changing its stance, meaning the situation could soon get much more volatile, as VOA’s Bill Gallo reports from Seoul”...(sound file at link)

By Yi Whan-woo, Kim Yoo-chul As nuclear negotiations between North Korea and the United States remain in a stalemate after no "substantial outcome" from their recent encounter in Sweden, the lack of visible progress in the denuclearization dialogue is raising concerns that the North is "buying time" for its military and nuclear advancement. During an Asan Institute for Policy Studies security forum held in Seoul, Tuesday, Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Washington-based RAND Corporation, claimed that despite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's promise to end his nuclear program, Pyongyang has not taken any meaningful measures toward this....

...snip... And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials. Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago. “I think this is...

Why risk it? Even if NATO wants the nukes in Europe, Erdogan’s unstable regime is 68 miles from Syria, the hottest conflict zone on earth. When President Donald Trump and other heads of state meet at this week’s NATO Summit it might be a good time to discuss the wisdom of keeping 50 U.S. thermonuclear weapons in Turkey, just 70 miles from Syria, the most intense combat zone on the planet. Each of the B61 gravity bombs stored at Incirlik Air Base, 68 miles from the Syrian border have a maximum yield of 170 kilotons, or 10 times more powerful...

WASHINGTON: Ousted National Security Advisor John Bolton said Kim Jong Un “will never give up” nuclear weapons voluntarily — an implicit warning to his former boss. Bolton was restating a consensus view of the Intelligence Community, one that runs counter to President Trump’s faith that the North Korean dynast can be wheedled and cajoled. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies today, Bolton attracted a forest of TV cameras hoping for some fireworks. They probably thought they were getting something hot when Bolton made his comment about North Korea but, as Breaking D readers know, the Intelligence Community’s...