Free Republic

Wild video out of San Clemente shows a group of teenagers apparently assaulting a pair of military members over the weekend. The two victims, who self-identified as Marines, say they were walking along the pier when they were confronted by the group of teens, of which there appeared to be more than 15, at around 9:50 p.m. Saturday.

MELBOURNE, Australia — A paper published by the Chicago, Illinois-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has estimated that China has 350 nuclear warheads, significantly more than that estimated by the U.S. Defense Department.The report, written by Hans Kristensen, the director at the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and Matt Korda, a research associate at FAS, arrived at the number by counting both operational warheads and newer weapons “still in development.”These weapons include hypersonic missiles, silo-based and road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, and their submarine-launched equivalents, bringing the total number of nuclear warheads to more that the “low...

You gotta love Mossad. Agents snuck into a warehouse smack in the middle of Tehran last January and, in a 6 1/2-hour operation, managed to steal 100,000 documents that Israel says prove Iran was lying about their nuclear weapons program. Wall Street Journal: The Israeli team secretly reached the warehouse holding the materials and broke in during a tight time window when it knew the building would be unguarded, the officials said. To avoid drawing attention to the nondescript facility, Iran hadn’t posted full-time guards, they said, but rather relied on alarm systems that the Israeli agents disabled. The Israeli...

The United States and North Korea will focus on a proposed shipment overseas of nuclear warheads possessed by Pyongyang when the two sides hold preparatory talks for a summit between President Donald Trump and the North's leader Kim Jong Un, U.S. officials said Sunday. But it was not known if they can reach an agreement on the issue, given the North's reluctance to meet the U.S. demand that it ship an estimated up to 20 warheads overseas at an early date as part of measures to achieve a complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea. In a Twitter post,...

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has evidence that Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound. "Tonight I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied -- big time," Netanyahu said.

Border guards seized a British lorry on its way to make a delivery to the Iranian military - after discovering it was packed with radioactive material that could be used to build a dirty bomb. The lorry set off from Kent on its way to Tehran but was stopped by officials at a checkpoint on Bulgaria's northernborder with Romania after a scanner indicated radiation levels 200 times above normal. The lorry was impounded and the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NPA) was called out. On board they found ten lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iranian Ministry of Defence. Inside each box...

Russia is pressing Turkey for access to a key airbase used by the US as it tries to extend its influence in the Middle East. The American-built Incirlik base, about 65 miles from the Syrian border, is used by Nato and has about 50 US nuclear warheads stored on site. A senior Russian politician said that allowing Russian jets and bombers to use it would be a logical continuation of President Erdogan’s efforts to rebuild Turkey’s relations with the Kremlin. “It just remains to come to an agreement with Erdogan that we get the Nato base Incirlik as [our] primary…

WASHINGTON — Americans following this year's presidential campaign would never know it from mainstream media coverage, but the commander in chief we hired four years ago has set the United States on a course for unilateral disarmament. The following people hope you won't notice until after Nov. 6: Vladimir Putin, Liang Guanglie, Kim Jong-un, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, A.Q. Khan and of course, Barack Obama. The 10 individuals above share a common fascination: nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin, Russia's modern czar; Liang Guanglie, minister of national defense for...

OAK RIDGE - Four security guards at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant were fired after testing positive for steroids, a spokeswoman for Wackenhut Services Inc., the government's security contractor, confirmed Friday. The guards' union, however, is challenging two of the cases, claiming that the positive readings were linked to use of over-the-counter supplements. News of the drug firings comes just a few days after Wackenhut confirmed that three Y-12 guards had been suspended without pay for bringing electronic game devices into the inner sanctum of the high-security weapons facility. Security police officers at Y-12 are subject to regular and random...

Exploding A Nuclear Bomb In The Sky Creates An Interesting Phenomenon In 1962, during the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear weapon high above an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed Operation Starfish, this exercise was part of a larger project to evaluate the impacts of nuclear explosions in space. The missile, launched from Johnson Island, 900 miles from Hawaii, was armed with a 1.4 megaton warhead, programmed to explode at 240 miles above the earth. It detonated as expected. What was not entirely expected was the magnitude of the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

The New York Times...details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war. "From 2004 to 2011...troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule," "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads

For the first time, Russia, which is in the midst of a major strategic nuclear modernization, has more deployed nuclear warheads than the United States, according to the latest numbers released by the State Department. Russia now has 1,643 warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. The United States has 1,642, said the fact sheet released Wednesday.

It’s a confirmation of reports in June that ISIS had taken control of a site where some of Saddam’s WMD arsenal remained. Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment...

As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a new fear arose amid the rejoicing and relief: that atomic security might fail in the disintegrating Soviet Union, allowing its huge stockpile of nuclear warheads to fall into unfriendly hands. The jitters intensified in late 1991, as Moscow announced plans to store thousands of weapons from missiles and bombers in what experts viewed as decrepit bunkers, policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability. Many officials and scientists worried. Few knew what to do. That is when Thomas L. Neff, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,...

<p>KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) - Police in Jamaica say authorities have seized 3,300 missile warheads and a machine to make missiles and bullets.</p> <p>Deputy Police Superintendent Steve Brown said Friday that custom officials discovered the weapons late Thursday aboard a ship at Kingston Wharf.</p>

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is edging toward decisions that would further shrink the U.S. nuclear arsenal, possibly to between 1,000 and 1,100 warheads, reflecting new thinking on the role of nuclear weapons in an age of terror, say current and former officials. The reductions that are under consideration align with President Barack Obama's vision of trimming the nation's nuclear arsenal without harming national security in the short term, and in the longer term, eliminating nuclear weapons. The White House has yet to announce any plan for reducing the number of nuclear weapons, beyond commitments made in the recently completed...

China’s nuclear warhead stockpile is more than twice as large as U.S. intelligence estimates and could include as many as 3,000 warheads, according to a retired Russian general and former strategic forces commander. Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin, the former head of the Strategic Rocket Forces, revealed in a May 2012 article that based on estimated stocks of up to 70 tons of uranium and plutonium, Beijing has enough material for 3,600 nuclear warheads. Based on the fissile material, “there are probably 1,600 to 1,800 warheads in the Chinese nuclear arsenal,” Yesin stated. “According to assessments, 800 to 900 warheads...

On TV right now: Perez says closer to a military solution than a diplomatic solution. Calling for international community to get involved.

ISRAELI President Shimon Peres has warned that an attack on Iran was "more and more likely," ahead of tomorrow's release of a report by the UN nuclear watchdog, which is expected to say Tehran has tested nuclear triggering technology and modified ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads. Mr Peres told Israeli television's second channel: "The intelligence services of the different countries that are keeping an eye on (Iran) are worried and putting pressure on their leaders to warn that Iran is ready to obtain the nuclear weapon." "We must turn to these countries to ensure that they keep their commitments...