Agni-5 2nd Test, Photos & Videos

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Agni-5 Missile, 2nd Test, 15th Sep 2013, Wheeler Island. Video © DRDO

Agni-4: Video and Pictures

Two days ago (19th September 2012) India test fired its 4,000 kms  range nuclear capable Agni-4 missile from Wheeler Island (Odisha, India). Here I am posting video of the Agni-4 missile test with its pictures.

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Agni-4 Missile Test, 19th Sep 2012 / Video Copyrights: DRDO, India

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Video & Pictures Copyrights: DRDO, India

Dead Hand : Nuclear confrontation, Excerpt–1

Two weeks ago I started reading one of the most interesting book about cold war era. Written by well known ‘David E. Hoffman’ … ‘The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy’ is fascinating story of how cold war is played between United States and Soviet Union. First three chapters is about nuclear confrontation between US and Soviet Union and believe me its scary.

All picture in this post is not from that book and its taken from various sources. Here I posting excerpt of first three chapters (Chapter –1 : At the Precipice, Chapter-2: War Games and Chapter-3: War Scare) and I am sure it will be interesting for you. I will post remaining chapters in coming weeks.

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PROLOGUE

The United States and the Soviet Union threatened each other with missiles on hair-trigger alert. The two superpowers had between them about 18,400 nuclear warheads poised to be launched from missiles in silos, on submarines hidden under the seas and from bombers. And there were many smaller, or tactical, nuclear weapons arrayed along the front lines of the Cold War confrontation in Europe. In the event of a nuclear attack, a decision whether to retaliate would have to be made in minutes, and enormous efforts were made by each superpower to gain precious time for warning. With ground-based radar alone, which could not see beyond the curvature of the Earth, the incoming missiles might not be detected until the final seven to ten minutes of their flight. But with the early-warning satellites, a launch could be spotted sooner. The Americans already had stationed their satellites to watch over the Soviet missile fields. The Soviet Union was in a hurry to catch up. They rushed to build Serpukhov-15 and launch their own satellites.

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INTRODUCTION

As a group of six Harvard professors put it in a study in 1983: “For the first time in history, nuclear weapons offer the possibility of destroying a country before one has defeated or destroyed its armed forces.” And nuclear war would certainly come faster than any war in history. It might be over in a matter of hours. It might start before leaders could rethink their decisions or change their minds. It could lead to the death of millions of people even before a false alarm was discovered to be false.

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At the outset of the Cold War, the United States threatened the Soviet Union with a single, devastating blow aimed at cities and industry. The first American nuclear weapons each weighed thousands of pounds, and were to be carried by lumbering strategic bombers that would take hours to reach their targets. By contrast, a half century later, the warhead on a missile could be delivered across oceans in thirty minutes. Rear Admiral G. P. Nanos, director of Strategic Systems Programs in the U.S. Navy, said in 1997 that if one drew a circle with a radius the length of the Trident submarine—560 feet—the warheads on a Trident II D5 missile could be accurately targeted into that circle from a distance of four thousand nautical miles.

But this achievement in power and deadly accuracy inspired a profound dread among those who might one day have to press the button launching those missiles.

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Kennedy and his defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, were uneasy with the Eisenhower-era idea of massive retaliation. They felt the threat of a single, enormous nuclear strike did not fit the more fragmented and complex competition they faced with the Soviet Union as tensions flared first over Berlin and then over Cuba.

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While Kennedy wanted to spare the cities, McNamara realized over time that it was impossible to aim at every Soviet weapon without unleashing an expensive new round of the arms race, an escalation with no end in sight. As a result, McNamara shifted to a strategy that he called “assured destruction,” which required building the number of weapons needed to destroy 20 to 25 percent of the Soviet population and 50 percent of the industrial base. McNamara capped the number of Minuteman missiles to be built at one thousand. His analysts concluded, “The main reason for stopping at 1,000 Minuteman missiles, 41 Polaris submarines and some 500 strategic bombers is that having more would not be worth the cost.” McNamara hoped that the Soviets would also reach a plateau—and stop building. A critic of McNamara proposed adding “mutual” to “assured destruction” and the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, known pointedly as MAD, was born.

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In the 1970s, the United States began to deploy a Minuteman III missile that could carry up to three warheads instead of just one. The new device was called a Multiple Independently-targetable Re-Entry Vehicle, or MIRV, and it would allow each of the three warheads to aim at separate targets, leading to a new surge in the size of the arsenals. The Soviets matched and surpassed this technology, and in the mid-1970s began the deployment of a new generation of land-based missiles. One of them, the SS-18, could carry a payload seven to eight times as large as the American missile. In fact, there were plans at one point to put as many as thirty-eight warheads atop each giant SS-18.

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On May 11, 1969, Nixon flew on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a Boeing 707 filled with communications gear, and participated in a nuclear war exercise. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary, “Pretty scary. They went through the whole intelligence and operational briefings—with interruptions, etc. to make it realistic.” Haldeman added that Nixon “asked a lot of questions about our nuclear capability and kill results. Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths.”

The same fears troubled Soviet leaders. In 1972, the General Staff presented to the leadership results of a study of a possible nuclear war after a first strike by the United States. They reported: the military had been reduced to one-thousandth of its strength; 80 million citizens were dead; 85 percent of Soviet industry was in ruins. Brezhnev and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin were visibly terrified by what they heard, according to Adrian Danilevich, a general who took part. Next, three launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles with dummy warheads were planned. Brezhnev was provided a button in the exercise and he was to push it at the proper moment. Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was standing next to Brezhnev, and Danilevich next to Grechko. “When the time came to push the button,” Danilevich recalled, “Brezhnev was visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled and he asked Grechko several times for assurances that the action would not have any real world consequences.” Brezhnev turned to Grechko and asked, “‘Are you sure this is just an exercise?’”

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By 1982, the combined strategic arsenals of the superpowers held the explosive power of approximately 1 million Hiroshimas. Even with their huge arsenal, Soviet leaders feared they could perish in a decapitating missile attack before they had a chance to respond. They drew up plans for a system to guarantee a retaliatory strike. They envisioned a fully automatic system, known as the Dead Hand, in which a computer alone would issue the order to launch. But they had second thoughts, and instead created a modified system in which the decision to launch all the land-based missiles would be made by a small crew of duty officers surviving deep underground in a globe-shaped concrete bunker. The system was fully tested in November 1984 and placed on duty a few months later. At the climax of mistrust between the superpowers, one of them had built a Doomsday Machine.

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PART 1

Chapter 1 - At the Precipice

... Anderson recalled. “The discussion continued, and we pressed the issue of what would really happen if the Soviets were to fire just one nuclear missile at a U.S. city.” Hill replied that “we would pick it up right after it was launched, but by the time the officials of the city could be alerted that a nuclear bomb would hit them, there would be only ten or fifteen minutes left. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”
 

On the flight back to Los Angeles, Reagan was deeply concerned. “He couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles,” Anderson recalled. Reagan slowly shook his head and said, “We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.”

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... Reagan held radical notions about nuclear weapons: he dreamed of abolishing them. Personally, he recoiled from the concept of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Reagan also intensely disliked the idea that he, as president, would have to make decisions about nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden crisis. He worried that a nuclear explosion would lead to the end of the Earth and expressed belief in the biblical story of Armageddon. “I swear I believe Armageddon is near,” he wrote in his diary on the day Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

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After surviving an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan began to think about what he could do to end the arms race. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared,” he recalled later.

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Oil and gas equipment was at the top of the Soviet wish list, and the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems to automate the valves, compressors and storage facilities for a huge new pipeline to Europe. When the pipeline technology could not be purchased in the United States, the KGB shopped it from a Canadian firm. However, tipped by Vetrov, the CIA rigged the software sold from Canada to go haywire after a while, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to create pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. One day, the system exploded. “The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” Reed recalled. The blast was starting to trigger worried looks in the U.S. government that day, he recalled, when, at the National Security Council, “Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry.” The explosion had been one of the first fruits of the Reagan confrontation.

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The GRU was responsible for monitoring any Western military preparations for a first strike on the Soviet Union, while the KGB’s task was to look for advance warning of an attack decision by the United States and its NATO allies.

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When he was president, Reagan carried no wallet, no money, no driver’s license, “no keys in my pockets—only secret codes that were capable of bringing about the annihilation of much of the world as we knew it,” he said in his memoir. He carried a small, plastic-coated card in his coat which “listed the codes I would issue to the Pentagon confirming that it was actually the president of the United States who was ordering the unleashing of our nuclear weapons.” In an emergency, Reagan would have to choose options for responding to nuclear attack. “But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis,” he said. “The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”

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This fear of decapitation of the leadership was just one sign of the immense tensions building at the time between Moscow and Washington. With rapid advances in weapons technology, a lightning strike could wipe out either party within minutes. The Americans worried about Soviet submarines carrying nuclear missiles off the East Coast, or surfacing in the Arctic. The Soviets were fearful of American missiles in Europe reaching the Kremlin. In the early summer of 1982, the Pentagon circulated a 125- page, five-year defense plan that called on U.S. forces to be ready to fight a protracted nuclear war, and to decapitate the Soviet leadership. The document asserted that American forces must be able to “render ineffective the total Soviet (and Soviet-allied) military and political power structure.”

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... The formal exercise, code-named Ivy League, began on Monday March 1, 1982, in the White House Situation Room. Former Secretary of State William P. Rogers played the role of president. The reason for a stand-in was to make sure the real president didn’t tip his hand, revealing how he might react in an actual crisis.

... “Before the President could sip his coffee, the map was a sea of red,” Reed said. “All the urban centers and military installations in the U.S. were gone. And then, while he looked on in stunned disbelief, he learned that the Soviet air force and the second round of missile launches were on their way in. For the next half hour more red dots wiped out the survivors and filled in the few holes in the sea of red.”

... Reagan was gripping his coffee mug, surprised at the suddenness of the destruction.27 “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear,” Reed recalled, adding: “I have no doubt that on that Monday in March, Ronald Reagan came to understand exactly what a Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. would be like.”

... Reagan was given a full and careful briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the secret nuclear war plan. The briefing was about the precise steps Reagan would have to take. According to Reed, Reagan didn’t know much about it, although he was first briefed on it after the 1980 election. “The SIOP briefing was as scary as the earlier presentation on the Soviet attack,” Reed said. “It made clear to Reagan that with but a nod of his head all the glories of imperial Russia, all the hopes and dreams of the peasants in Ukraine, and all the pioneering settlements in Kazakhstan would vanish. Tens of millions of women and children who had done nothing to harm American citizens would be burned to a crisp.”

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In early 1982, Reagan embarked on a radical plan to confront the Soviet Union from within. In the years of Cold War containment, no administration before had tried to exploit the Soviet Union’s internal tensions with a hope of toppling the regime or forcing it into dramatic change.

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Reagan had struck a confrontational approach to the Soviet Union from the outset of his presidency, from his first words about lying and cheating, to his rearmament program, and with the CIA’s covert actions in Afghanistan and Central America.

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At the same time, Reed, the National Security Council official, was growing more worried about the lack of a serious plan for the president’s command and control in the event of a nuclear alert. No one wanted to advertise it, but while the United States was spending billions to modernize strategic weapons, the means to command these forces was, in the words of one official, “the weakest link in the chain.” ...

On June 19, 1982, Reed got Reagan’s approval for a new effort. The result was a plan that, in the event of attack, would preserve the presidency as an institution, instead of the president himself. On September 14, Reagan signed a top-secret directive, titled “Enduring National Leadership.” Instead of running for the helicopter, the president would remain in the Oval Office, ready to make decisions, order retaliation or negotiate, while his potential successors would vanish to distant and safe locations. ...

As Reed put it, “Our contribution was to survive the presidency, not the president.”

After World War II, large underground installations were built outside of the capital. One was Mount Weather in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, seventy miles from Washington, and another was at Raven Rock Mountain, six miles north of Camp David on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Both could serve as military command posts in the event of war. But the Reagan planners realized that a president might not make it to these bunkers in time. They devised a plan to dispatch three teams from Washington to separate, secure locations around the United States. Each team had to be prepared to proclaim a new American “president” and assume command of the country, according to author James Mann. If the Soviet Union was able to hit one team with a nuclear weapon, the next one would be ready.

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... By 1982, the Soviet missile force had grown to fourteen hundred launchers carrying over five thousand warheads. The U.S. missile force had 1,047 launchers and about 2,150 warheads.45 The fear was that in a first strike, just a portion of the Soviet force could wipe out nearly all the American missiles still sitting in their silos. Reagan struggled—as had Presidents Ford and Carter—to respond to the Soviet buildup with the development of a new-generation American super weapon, the MX, or Missile Experimental. The 100-ton MX would be three times more accurate than the Minuteman III, and carry ten warheads, each independently targetable. Under the original plan to deploy two hundred MX missiles, the Soviets would face the prospect of two thousand warheads raining down on their silos.

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In the final months of 1982 and then early 1983, Reagan embraced a grand dream: to build a massive globe-straddling shield that would protect populations against ballistic missiles and make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The missile defense was never constructed. It was nothing more than a ghost invention. But the concept preoccupied and puzzled the Soviet Union for years to come.

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Chapter 2 - War Games

Starting in the late 1970s, under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had deployed the Pioneer missile, known in the West as the SS-20, with 243 missiles aimed at Western Europe and 108 targeted on Asia. The Pioneer had a maximum range of 3,100 miles, more than enough to hit Paris and London, but it was classified as medium or intermediate range, less than the big intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov said “astronomical amounts of money were spent” on the Pioneer. But, he added, “The short-sighted Soviet strategists had handed the Americans a knife with which to cut the Soviet throat.” In response to the Pioneer deployments, NATO decided in 1979 to station 108 single-warhead Pershing II and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe, in range of the Soviet Union, as a counterweight while seeking to negotiate. Reagan had proposed in 1981 to eliminate this entire class of medium-range missiles, but the Soviets refused and negotiations went nowhere.

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Andropov’s fear of the Pershing II missiles ran through his instructions to the KGB to keep watch for signs of a nuclear attack. The February document that Gordievsky had leaked to the British described, in an attachment, how advance knowledge of a possible attack would give the Kremlin precious minutes to ready retaliation. The instructions said, “For instance, noting the launching of strategic missiles from the continental part of the USA and taking into account the time required for determining the direction of their flight in fact leaves roughly 20 minutes reaction time. This period will be considerably curtailed after deployment of the ‘Pershing 2’ missile in the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany], for which the flying time to reach long-range targets in the Soviet Union is calculated at 4–6 minutes.”

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The Soviet quest for intelligence about a possible attack also extended to East Germany. The KGB assigned a major role in the operation to East German intelligence under Markus Wolf. By the early 1980s, Wolf said in his memoirs, “with the U.S. rearmament program and the advent of the aggressive Reagan administration, our Soviet partners had become obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack…”

... In 1983, the East Germans completed five years of construction on project 17/5001, an underground bunker near the village of Prenden, outside of Berlin, to house the leadership in the event of nuclear war. The bunker was a sealed mini-town that would have protected four hundred people for two weeks after a nuclear attack.

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Ever since the previous autumn, as Andropov’s paranoia deepened about a possible nuclear missile attack from Western Europe, there had also been ominous new threats on the Pacific horizon. The United States carried out extensive war games, realistic and provocative, off the Soviet coast in the Far East. In late September 1982, two U.S. aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Midway, sailed within three hundred miles of the Soviet Union’s major Pacific Fleet base at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

... Later in the autumn, while in the Indian Ocean, the Enterprise happened upon a Soviet aircraft carrier, the Kiev. The commander decided to use the ship to carry out “a practice long-range strike against the surface force.” The Enterprise sent several aircraft on a mock attack against the Soviet ship. A navy intelligence official said the planes flew “seven hundred nautical miles toward the Kiev, made contact, visual contact, with the Kiev and then came back.”

... The exercises reflected the “forward strategy” of the navy secretary, John Lehman, to confront the Soviets in waters close to home. Lehman said his “forward strategy” meant always “keeping the Soviets concerned with threats all around their periphery.” Lehman sought to build a six-hundred-ship navy, including fifteen carrier battle groups, and the navy had been a major beneficiary of Reagan’s rearmament program.

Reagan had also secretly approved psychological operations against the Soviets. The point was to show the United States could deploy aircraft carrier battle groups close to sensitive Soviet military and industrial sites, apparently without being detected or challenged early on. In the Pacific, the U.S. forces charged toward Soviet bastions to see how they would react. As one intelligence official put it, they wanted to go up Ivan’s nose.

In the weeks after Reagan’s speech on strategic defense, the United States ratcheted up the pressure. In April and May 1983, the U.S. Pacific Fleet conducted its largest exercises since World War II in the North Pacific, off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Forty ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups, participated in a massive exercise code-named FLEETEX 83-1. ...

On April 4, the Americans flew up Ivan’s nose. According to author Seymour M. Hersh, the Midway slipped away from the other carriers after shutting off all electronic equipment that could be monitored by the Soviets. The Midway steamed south toward the Kurils and the Soviets did not track it. A group of at least six navy planes from the Midway and the Enterprise violated Soviet borders by flying over the island of Zelyony in the Kuril archipelago, which stretches between Kamchatka and Japan. Hersh described it as “a flagrant and almost inevitable error, triggered by the aggressive fleet exercise and the demand of senior officers for secret maneuvers and surprise activities.”

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In the spring of 1983, Soviet pilots were haggard from the war of nerves with the Americans. They were constantly chasing and responding to spy planes that buzzed the Soviet borders. Osipovich had flown more than one thousand missions to intercept them.

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After the exercise, however, the Soviets learned much more about what the Americans were doing. The ship had sent 57,000 messages and received more than 243,000 during the year; encrypted electronic communications were the backbone of the navy’s system of command. In the communications room, some of the sensitive paper messages were quietly spirited away by Jerry Whitworth, forty-four, the senior chief radioman, a lanky, bearded sailor who had served more than twenty years. He hid the messages in his locker. Whitworth had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1976 as part of a ring led by another navy veteran, John Walker.

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At a time of profound worry about nuclear war, the Kremlin had been given an original, firsthand look at U.S. war games. Vitaly Yurchenko, a top KGB official who defected to the United States in 1985, told U.S. officials that the Walker spy ring was “the most important operation in the KGB’s history,” and had led the Soviets to decipher more than one million encrypted messages. Whitworth provided the Soviets with a full year of operational message traffic from the U.S.S. Enterprise, some of it top secret, and compromised the operations order for FLEETEX 83-1, a navy damage assessment later discovered. Among other things, Whitworth compromised the plans for “primary, secondary and emergency communications” to be used by the president to link up with military forces. The damage assessment found the information given the Soviets by the Walker spy ring would “give the Soviets an ability to make almost real-time tactical decisions because they knew the true strength of our forces, their plans for combat, the details of our logistic support and the tactical doctrine under which our forces operated.”

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Chapter 3 - War Scare

... “If anything,” Reagan recalled in his memoirs, “the KAL incident demonstrated how close the world had come to the precipice and how much we needed nuclear arms control: If, as some people speculated, the Soviet pilots simply mistook the airliner for a military plane, what kind of imagination did it take to think of a Soviet military man with his finger close to a nuclear push button making an even more tragic mistake?”

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On September 27 in Washington, Gates, the deputy CIA director, delivered to Shultz an intelligence assessment that said relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were as “pervasively bleak” as at any time since Stalin’s death in 1953. Gates said the Soviet leaders feared Reagan’s administration more than any in history.

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In the autumn, a wave of fear about nuclear war—a war scare—gripped both the Soviet Union and the United States. Soviet attacks on Reagan reached a fever pitch. According to Elizabeth Teague, a Soviet domestic affairs analyst at Radio Liberty, Soviet media in the years before 1983 had refrained from making personally abusive remarks about Western leaders. But after the Korean airliner was shot down, Soviet press portrayals of Reagan reached an unusually bitter level.

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The Soviet media repeated over and over again that the danger of nuclear war was higher than at any time since World War II. ...

... Svetlana Savranskaya, a university student in Moscow that autumn, recalled the war scare was very real, especially for older people. They were taken into shelters once a week for civil defense lessons. They were told they would have only eleven minutes to find shelter before the bombs would arrive from Europe. “I remember going home and looking up at a map and asking, how long would it take the missiles to hit from the United States?” she said.

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In October, Reagan was given a fresh briefing on the ultra-secret SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the procedures for nuclear war. This was the sixth generation of the war plan, known as SIOP-6, which took effect on October 1, 1983. The new plan reflected the desire to give the president options to fight a protracted nuclear war. ...

Reflecting later in his memoirs, Reagan recalled, “In several ways, the sequence of events described in the briefings paralleled those in the ABC movie. Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable.’ I thought they were crazy. Worse, it appeared there were also Soviet generals who thought in terms of winning a nuclear war.”

Shultz told Reagan in mid-October all the recent arms control proposals had gone nowhere. “If things get hotter and hotter, and arms control remains an issue,” Reagan told Shultz, “maybe I should go see Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.” Shultz reminded him that it wasn’t likely Andropov would give up nuclear weapons. “Without an arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Soviets are not a superpower.”

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Driven by fears of a nuclear attack, in November 1983, construction crews were furiously excavating a deep underground bunker in the Ural Mountains for a new top-secret command center for the Strategic Rocket Forces. When complete, from this sheltered burrow the commanders could manage a nuclear war. ...

... The code name for the bunker was Grot, or grotto in Russian. The excavation at Grot, and the extensive underground bunkers for the leadership in Moscow, provoked worry and puzzlement among the American intelligence analysts. ...

Soviet paranoia reached a zenith at the time of a planned NATO exercise in Europe scheduled for November 2–11. The exercise, Able Archer ’83, was designed to practice the procedures for a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons in a European conflict. The Soviets had long feared that training exercises could be used as a disguise for a real attack; their own war plans envisioned the same deception. ...

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“During my first years in Washington,” Reagan said, “I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with the Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike; because of this, and perhaps because of a sense of insecurity and paranoia with roots reaching back to the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, they had aimed a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons at us.”

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In the address, which was broadcast also to Europe, Reagan did not refer once to an “evil empire” nor to communism falling into the dustbin of history. He did not talk about changing the Soviet system from within. Rather, he declared, “We do not threaten the Soviet Union.” He stressed “dialogue,” “constructive cooperation” and “peaceful competition.” And he declared, “My dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”

Then Reagan delivered the ending he had written himself:

... people don’t make wars. People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war. They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistence that make life worth living. They want to work at some craft, trade or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of worth. Their common interests cross all borders.

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On January 2, 1984, Fritz W. Ermarth became the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, taking up a key position attempting to synthesize intelligence from many different sources to guide policy makers. Ermarth had previously worked on Soviet issues at the CIA and the White House National Security Council. Almost immediately, the deputy director for intelligence, Gates, gave him an urgent assignment: to write a Special National Intelligence Estimate on the tense situation with the Soviet Union. ...

Ermarth’s report was finished May 18, 1984. He concluded that the war scare did not lead the Soviets to fear nuclear attack. ...

Ermarth’s report declared at the outset: “We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States.” Ermarth said that there were plenty of other explanations for Soviet behavior, including a propaganda campaign. The Kremlin may have been seeking ways to raise anxiety about the deployment of the Pershing II missiles and encourage the antinuclear movement in Western Europe. ...

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Gates concluded that, in retrospect, the CIA had missed an important turning point. “After going through the experience at the time, then through the post-mortems, and now through the documents, I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf,” he wrote in his memoirs. He added of the Soviets, “They may not have believed a NATO attack was imminent in November 1983, but they did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous. And U.S. intelligence had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.” Although it remains classified, a review of the CIA’s performance on the war scare came to a similar conclusion in 1990.

The war scare was real.

Another blow to Iran's nuclear program

Another bomb explosion in Iran.., Another  Iranian nuclear scientists died.., Another blow to Iran's nuclear program.., Everything happening like Hollywood movie. Here I am posting article from guardian’s website, writer is Julian Borger.

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Published: 11 January 2012

Tittle + Link of the original article: Goading a regime on the brink

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The car belonging to Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan is lifted at the site of an explosion outside a university in northern Tehran.

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Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was not the first Iranian nuclear scientist to be killed like this. In November 2010, not very far from the scene of today's assassination there were two identical attacks, in which a motorcycle drew up alongside the victim's car while it was in traffic and the riders stuck a magnetic bomb on the door. The bombs detonated as the assassins rode off.

One of those bombs killed Majid Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran who was working on research projects with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). The other slightly wounded Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the subject of UN sanctions and widely suspected in the West of involvement in nuclear weapon design.

In a reflection of his importance in the Iranian programme, Abbasi-Davani was made the head of the AEOI a few months later. Both he and Shahriari were big fish, like the first victim of the assassination campaign, a senior physicist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, killed in January 2010 when a bomb on a parked motorcycle exploded as he walked to his car.

Ahmadi-Roshan, who was killed in today's blast, is reported to have held the position of deputy director at the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, one of the most controversial parts of the programme. Iran is the subject of a string of UN Security Council resolutions and four sets of sanctions calling for it to suspend enrichment.

Not all the victims have been so senior. In July last year, gunmen on motorbikes shot dead July 2011, Darioush Rezaeinejad, an electronics student who was according to some accounts working on high-voltage switches, a component of nuclear weapons among other things.

The killers are clearly using loose criteria in choosing their victims. Any connection to any part of the nuclear programme seems to be enough to be selected as a target of opportunity.

Iranian officials have been quick to blame Israel, and the Israelis have not been going out of their way to avoid suspicion. On Tuesday, the head of the Israeli Defence Force, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz was quoted as telling a parliamentary panel that 2012 would be a "critical year" for Iran in which it would be subject to "unnatural" events.

The Israeli military establishment have a motive to claim successes in the covert war on Iran, because they are under political pressure to start an overt one. The generals, however, know that Israeli air strikes would unleash a war without accomplishing their goal of destroying the Iranian nuclear programme.

A covert war, based on assassinations and sabotage, may appear a better alternative. Individual killings may not seriously hinder a large, wide-ranging programme, but they would certainly deter young Iranians from taking that line of work.

But such a campaign is not without huge risks for the region. The regime in Iran has clearly tried to hold its nerve, avoiding overt reprisals that might in turn provoke a military response. But elements of the establishment do seem to be lashing out in frustration.

Last October's bomb plot against the Saudi ambassador and Israeli diplomats in Washington, alleged to be the work of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was both amateurish and extremely reckless. If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target, the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.

Likewise, the storming of the British embassy, on the anniversary of Shahriari's assassination, appeared to have gone much further than the leadership had intended, and significantly deepened Tehran's isolation.

"The old guys at the top are losing control of the situation," a senior western diplomat observed, the day before this latest killing. The fragmentation of the regime will have unpredictable, and possibly very violent outcomes. The pressure of sanctions is building. There is a lot of military hardware in the Gulf right now, some of belonging to the regularly Iranian navy and some to the Revolutionary Guards, who have their own agenda. Whoever is killing Iran's scientists is clearly willing to risk catastrophic consequences that could engulf the region.

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Copyrights: © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Secret war against Iran's nuclear program

Came across another interesting article about  Iran’s nuclear program and ongoing secret war to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bomb. Published in haaretz website today, writer is Yossi Melman. When world is watching things every development very closely  there is already secret war going on. 

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Article title + Link: The war against Iran's nuclear program has already arrived

Author: Yossi Melman

Copyrights: Haaretz.com

Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad / Photo: Alon Gaash

 

Explosions, deadly computer viruses and other sorts of 'accidents' - someone is targeting Iran's nuclear project: either the Western intelligence agencies, internal opposition groups, or both.

   

The war is under way, though no one declared it and no one will confirm it. This is the secret war against Iran's nuclear project. It did not start this week or last month. It has been under way for years, but only faint echoes have reached the public.

In June 2010, the press reported that the computer system operating the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz had been infected with a virus. A deadly worm, known as Stuxnet, had infiltrated the controllers, manufactured by Siemens.

Two weeks ago, a huge blast ripped through a Revolutionary Guards military base 40 kilometers west of Tehran. The explosion could be heard as far away as the capital. Dozens of people were killed, including the head of Iran's missile development project, General Hassan Tehrani Moqaddam. This week, there was a powerful explosion in Isfahan, Iran's third-largest city, which has a uranium conversion plant on its outskirts. It is not yet clear what was damaged in the blast.

These incidents involved three key elements of Iran's nuclear program. The first is uranium conversion (which comes after the mineral has been mined), the second is enrichment, and the third is the delivery means.

Coupled with other incidents, including the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists, these events have worried the ayatollahs' regime, causing reactions ranging from embarrassment to anger. The public response usually follows a pattern: first a sweeping denial, then a limp and stuttering admission that "something happened," and finally the claim that it was an "accident." This shows that the regime does not know exactly what to say, and that its voice is not uniform. It also reflects the fierce dispute within the regime's top ranks. The leadership is divided, and the reactions come from a range of ministries, rival organizations and competing media outlets.

The kind of sabotage used in Iran requires sophistication, financial and technological resources, agents and precise intelligence. Someone, for example, had to know that General Moqaddam would be at the base that day to supervise a test, apparently of a new missile engine.

Infecting the computers required access to them: A person with a flash drive had to have plugged it into the system. The prevailing assumption is that foreign intelligence agencies are initiating, managing and executing the secret operations.

The Iranians, and international media outlets, believe these operations are the work of Israel's Mossad and possibly also a Western partner such as the CIA or Britain's MI6.

The Mossad's campaign to assassinate the Black September members behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre was code-named "Wrath of God." This week, when asked whether God had carried out the recent operations in Iran, former Mossad head Meir Dagan smilingly said yes. Dagan is known to be an ardent supporter of secret operations, as he told Yedioth Ahronoth explicitly this week. He believes it will be at least two years until Iran can assemble a functioning nuclear weapon. This assessment may be based on past secret operations and on Dagan's faith that future actions can indeed disrupt Iran's progress.

A senior American official went even farther. President Barack Obama's special assistant and coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, proliferation and terrorism, Gary Samore, said in May 2011, "I'm glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated." Do we need any clearer statement that humans are behind the "hand of God"?

Even if the Mossad or the CIA are not involved in these incidents, the speculation that they are serves Western intelligence bodies by enhancing their image as "omnipotent," and heightening the Iranian leadership's fear. This is known as psychological warfare.

Still, with all due respect for Western intelligence's great efforts - including what is probably unprecedented operational coordination - it is unlikely these operations could have succeeded without inside support, meaning from individuals or groups ready to help sabotage the ayatollahs' regime. It should be remembered that Iran is a mosaic of ethnic minorities, and almost all have reasons for disliking the regime; some have their own underground armed militias.

The theory about inside-help gains traction given that, in addition to the military targets, other sites - including oil facilities, gas pipelines, trains and military bases - were also damaged over the past year. Last year there was a considerable increase, of at least 10 percent, in "breakdowns" and "accidents" at Iran's strategic infrastructure sites. Some were caused by poor maintenance, due in part to the international sanctions, but the volume of these incidents may also indicate the "hand of God" was involved. If this is the case, then it's possible that internal Iranian opposition groups (as opposed to exiles) are stronger and even better organized than generally thought.

It is almost certain that Tehran's patience is about to run out. This was evidenced by the student mob's "conquest" of the British embassy this week. This was not spontaneous rage: It was a warning from a regime that realizes someone has declared war on it without leaving marks or fingerprints.

Sooner or later, the ayatollahs' regime will decide to react and will order its secret intelligence and operational units to retaliate. If and when this happens, Iran will take steps to conceal its involvement in such activities. However, past experience proves that despite the caution and sophistication of the Iranian secret services, they have often failed in obscuring their fingerprints.

What does IAEA’s new report says about Iran’s Nuclear intentions?

What does IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) new report says about Iran's nuclear program's intentions. Here is excerpts of IAEA’s report on IRAN's nuclear activities:

This report addresses developments since the last report (GOV/2011/54, 2 September 2011), as well as issues of longer standing, and, in line with the Director General’s opening remarks to the Board of Governors on 12 September 2011, contains an Annex setting out in more detail the basis for the Agency’s concerns about possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.

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Under its Safeguards Agreement, Iran has declared to the Agency 15 nuclear facilities and nine locations outside facilities where nuclear material is customarily used (LOFs).

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Since 2002, the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency has regularly received new information.

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The information indicates that Iran has carried out the following activities that are relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device:

• Efforts, some successful, to procure nuclear related and dual use equipment and materials by military related individuals and entities (Annex, Sections C.1 and C.2);
• Efforts to develop undeclared pathways for the production of nuclear material (Annex, Section C.3);
• The acquisition of nuclear weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear supply network (Annex, Section C.4); and
• Work on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components (Annex, Sections C.5–C.12).

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While some of the activities identified in the Annex have civilian as well as military applications, others are specific to nuclear weapons.

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The information indicates that prior to the end of 2003 the above activities took place under a structured programme. There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing.

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Contrary to the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, Iran is not implementing its Additional Protocol. The Agency will not be in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran unless and until Iran provides the necessary cooperation with the Agency, including by implementing its Additional Protocol.

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The Agency has serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme. After assessing carefully and critically the extensive information available to it, the Agency finds the information to be, overall, credible. The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information also indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme, and that some activities may still be ongoing.

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The Agency has continued to receive, collect and evaluate information relevant to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme. As additional information has become available to the Agency, the Agency has been able, notwithstanding Iran’s lack of engagement, to refine its analysis of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.

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According to the Agency’s assessment of the information contained in that documentation, the green salt project (identified as Project 5.13) was part of a larger project (identified as Project 5) to provide a source of uranium suitable for use in an undisclosed enrichment programme. The product of this programme would be converted into metal for use in the new warhead which was the subject of the missile re-entry vehicle studies (identified as Project 111). As of May 2008, the Agency was not in a position to demonstrate to Iran the connection between Project 5 and Project 111. However, subsequently, the Agency was shown documents which established a connection between Project 5 and Project 111, and hence a link between nuclear material and a new payload development programme.

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Under the AMAD Plan, Iran’s efforts to procure goods and services allegedly involved a number of ostensibly private companies which were able to provide cover for the real purpose of the procurements.

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In addition, throughout the entire timeline, instances of procurement and attempted procurement by individuals associated with the AMAD Plan of equipment, materials and services which, although having other civilian applications, would be useful in the development of a nuclear explosive device, have either been uncovered by the Agency itself or been made known to it.

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However, ... , information contained in the alleged studies documentation suggests that Iran was working on a project to secure a source of uranium suitable for use in an undisclosed enrichment programme, the product of which would be converted into metal for use in the new warhead which was the subject of the missile re-entry vehicle studies.

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The uranium metal document is known to have been available to the clandestine nuclear supply network that provided Iran with assistance in developing its centrifuge enrichment capability, and is also known to be part of a larger package of information which includes elements of a nuclear explosive design. A similar package of information, which surfaced in 2003, was provided by the same network to Libya.

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In an interview in 2007 with a member of the clandestine nuclear supply network, the Agency was told that Iran had been provided with nuclear explosive design information. From information provided to the Agency during that interview, the Agency is concerned that Iran may have obtained more advanced design information than the information identified in 2004 as having been provided to Libya by the nuclear supply network.

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As the conversion of HEU compounds into metal and the fabrication of HEU metal components suitable in size and quality are steps in the development of an HEU nuclear explosive device, clarification by Iran is needed in connection with the above.

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Information which the Agency has been provided by Member States, some of which the Agency has been able to examine directly, indicates that Iran has manufactured simulated nuclear explosive components using high density materials such as tungsten.

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The Agency has information provided by a Member State that Iran may have planned and undertaken preparatory experimentation which would be useful were Iran to carry out a test of a nuclear explosive device. In particular, the Agency has information that Iran has conducted a number of practical tests to see whether its EBW firing equipment would function satisfactorily over long distances between a firing point and a test device located down a deep shaft. Additionally, among the alleged studies documentation provided by that Member State, is a document, in Farsi, which relates directly to the logistics and safety arrangements that would be necessary for conducting a nuclear test. The Agency has been informed by a different Member State that these arrangements directly reflect those which have been used in nuclear tests conducted by nuclear-weapon States.

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The alleged studies documentation contains extensive information regarding work which is alleged to have been conducted by Iran during the period 2002 to 2003 under what was known as Project 111. From that information, the project appears to have consisted of a structured and comprehensive programme of engineering studies to examine how to integrate a new spherical payload into the existing payload chamber which would be mounted in the re-entry vehicle of the Shahab 3 missile.

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While the activities described as those of Project 111 may be relevant to the development of a non-nuclear payload, they are highly relevant to a nuclear weapon programme.

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Full Report can be accessed from below links:

Link 1: IAEA report on IRAN's nuclear activities, November 2011

Link 2: IAEA report on IRAN's nuclear activities, November 2011

Note: Both the links is of same report.

Stuxnet… Most sophisticated cyber weapon ever deployed

Today I read very interesting article on The New York Times webite. Below is some parts of that article. Hope you will like it.

Iran's Nuclear Facilities

Stuxnet is the name given to a computer worm, or malicious computer program, that began to spread in mid-2009. It may the most sophisticated cyber weapon ever deployed.

Stuxnet turned up in industrial programs around the world. But experts dissecting it soon determined that it had been precisely calibrated in a way that would send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control, adding to suspicions that it was meant to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

It appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms. After its spread, intelligence officials began to talk of setbacks in Iran's program that could delay the day it is able to produce a nuclear weapon.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence, many of which suggest that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

Stuxnet at natanz

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

Dimona Nuclear Facility

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert, the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, became a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the computer worm, a critical step in honing its effectiveness.

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. Several obscure hints hidden deep within its code suggest a possible Israeli origin -- or an attempt to deceive investigators.

Article copyrights:  The New York Times
Pictures copyrights: Various Sources