U.S. Expected to Strike Back for Iran’s Downing of Drone

President Donald Trump / Getty Images

 

Trump: ‘Iran made a big mistake’

The United States is likely to take military action against Iran in the coming days for Tehran’s downing a U.S. drone in international airspace on Wednesday near the Strait of Hormuz.

The Central Command said an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile system while operating in international airspace around 7:35 p.m. on Wednesday.

China Is Beating the US in the Rare-Earths Game

For more information regarding China and the rare earths situation, see the following previous articles:

• US defense industry over-reliant on rare earth from China
• Rare Earths Rouse Pentagon Fears
• Rare-Earth Market
• China warns of backlash if U.S. presses rare-earths case with WTO
• China Preparing for Drone Warfare
• Report: US military too reliant on foreign suppliers
• China’s Drone Swarms Rise to Challenge US Power
• China Threatens to Pull Pin on Global Economic Hand Grenade

 

 

It’s time for the administration to use its powers to preserve America’s access to vital defense materials.

How to view China’s recent threat to limit domestic production of rare earths, those 16 elements that make our cellphones and smart bombs work? It’s the latest move in a game that began before the United States realized it was even playing, that has grown more complex than U.S. leaders realize, and that is nearing a very unfortunate ending.

Your Friend and Neighbor

 

VIENNA/BERLIN (Own report) – The United Nations is protesting against the surveillance of its Vienna-based institutions conducted for years by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The Vienna International Center (“UNO City”) “expects” that member states “respect the organization’s independence as well as the inviolability of its premises.” According to recent reports, from 1999 to 2006, the BND had monitored at least 2000 communication lines in Austria including those of the Vienna Chancellery and 128 telecommunication lines of the United Nations. The BND’s espionage in Austria has been known since 2015, but never clarified, because the competent German authorities, including the German Chancellery, refused to render Vienna the necessary assistance. The BND is accused of repeatedly refusing to tell the intelligence service monitors their reasons for spying, for example, on a “public body” of an EU member state. At the time of the large-scale spying in Austria, the current German President bore the highest responsibility for BND activities.

Iran tells UN it will hike uranium enrichment capacity, possibly from Wednesday

Head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, speaks with journalists upon his arrival to Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran, July 15, 2015 (AP/Ebrahim Noroozi)

 

Tehran’s atomic agency chief says new center for producing centrifuges is about to open at Natanz, insists it doesn’t violate nuke deal

Iran has notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that it has launched a plan to increase its uranium enrichment capacity, nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday.

Khamenei: Trump will ‘Vanish from History’

(Photo Credit: http://www.Khamenei.ir via Creative Commons 4.0)

 

The Iranian Supreme Leader also vowed ‘the Americans will be defeated.’

The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed that President Donald Trump will “meet the same fate as his predecessors” and “vanish from history” in a fiery speech lashing out at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 12 requirements for a new nuclear deal.

Iran will quit nuclear deal, restart enrichment, ramp up military tension

 

Exclusive: Tehran will challenge the US by restarting nuclear fuel enrichment and ramp up its military confrontation with Israel. The Iranian leadership reached these decisions on Thursday, May 10, after Israeli warplanes smashed its military assets in the Damascus area that morning, DEBKAfile’s exclusive intelligence sources report. These steps follow the strategic plans Tehran had drawn up for the eventuality of the US quitting the 2015 nuclear pact. In the coming weeks, therefore, Tehran will choose its moment to abandon the nuclear deal and restart high level uranium enrichment, in the face of President Donald Trump’s warning that this action would meet with “very severe consequences.” In light of Iran’s strategy, the US, after quitting the nuclear deal, Thursday asked the nuclear watchdog IAEA to continue inspections of the Iranian nuclear program. Washington intends to keep independent monitors accessing Iran’s nuclear activities for as long as they are permitted.

Trump’s Three Conditions for Fixing the Iran Deal Are Now Imperative

Pictured: Two images from Iran’s secret nuclear archive, as presented publicly by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on April 30, 2018. In possibly the greatest coup in the history of espionage, Israel’s Mossad acquired over 100,000 documents from the archive of Iran’s program to create nuclear weapons. (Photo by Israel GPO)

 

• What the assorted apologists for the Iran nuclear deal have failed to grasp is a simple distinction: the difference between suspicions and confirmation. The IAEA based its assessments on “over a thousand pages” of documents; now we have a hundred thousand.
• Moreover, these are in effect a hundred thousand signed confessions of the Iranian regime that it intended to create nuclear weapons and load them on missiles manufactured by itself. The miniature minds of the apologists are simply incapable of grasping the historic magnitude of the Mossad’s discovery.

The picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing before two displays, one of file folders and one of compact discs, symbolizes possibly the greatest coup in the history of espionage: the Mossad’s acquisition of the archive of Iran’s program to create nuclear weapons. A runner up for that title might be the advance information about Operation Overlord, the Allied landing in France at the end of World War II, supplied by Elyesa Bazna from Ankara and Paul Fidrmuc from Lisbon.

Fukushima should be ranked LEVEL 10 nuclear disaster (INES scale only goes up to 7) — Plant Worker: We caused the “worst kind” of accident (VIDEO)

Excerpts from Risk Analysis (pdf), Vol. 37, No. 1, 2017 (emphasis added):

…

• [T]he cost of the two largest events, Chernobyl and Fukushima (March 2011), is equal to nearly five times the sum of the 173 other events. We also document a significant runaway disaster regime in both radiation release and cost data, which we associate with the “dragon-king” phenomenon… we find that the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) is inconsistent in terms of both cost and radiation released. To be consistent with cost data, the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters would need to have between an INES level of 10 and 11, rather than the maximum of 7…

Saudi Arabia to Extract Uranium for ‘Self-Sufficient’ Nuclear Program

The Kingdom Tower stands in the night in Riyadh / REUTERS

 

ABU DHABI (Reuters) — Saudi Arabia plans to extract uranium domestically as part of its nuclear power program and sees this as a step towards “self-sufficiency” in producing atomic fuel, a senior official said on Monday.

Extracting its own uranium also makes sense from an economic point of view, said Hashim bin Abdullah Yamani, head of the Saudi government agency tasked with the nuclear plans, the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KACARE).

President Trump Takes Aim at Iran’s ‘Clandestine Nuclear Weapons Program’

 

President Donald J. Trump put the Iranian regime on notice with his speech last week: the time when the United States (U.S.) government would turn a blind eye to its decades-long drive for deliverable nuclear weapons is over. Citing a long litany of destabilizing, rogue behavior on the part of Tehran, the president announced he would not re-certify Iranian compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear deal.

How Iran cheats on nuclear deal, with no flat accusation from Trump or IAEA

 

President Donald Trump has dropped teasing hints into the hubbub, high rhetoric and suspense of the run-up to the Oct. 15 deadline, when he must either certify that Iran is in compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord or withhold certification. The former would lend the accord another 90-day lease of life; the latter could entail the re-imposition of pre-nuclear deal sanctions against Iran, if approved by Congress.

Preyed by the same uncertainty as everyone else, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday, Oct. 7: “Even 10 Trumps can’t roll back the benefits to this country of the nuclear deal. We have achieved benefits that are irreversible. If the United States violates (the nuclear deal), the entire world will condemn America, not Iran.”

Iranian Uranian Enrichment Streamlines Path to Nukes

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves during a ceremony marking the death anniversary of the founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in Tehran, Iran, June 4, 2017. Leader.ir/Handout via REUTERS

 

According to nuclear verification experts Iran’s streamlining of uranium enrichment could greatly expand their ability to reach nuclear weapons status

(VERO BEACH, FL) In a new report released on May 30th by the Institute For Science and International Security titled “Is Iran Mass Producing Advanced Gas Centrifuge Components?” authors David Albright and Olli Heinonen noted that Tehran’s recent announcement that they now mass produce advanced nuclear centrifuges capable of more quickly enriching uranium “would greatly expand Iran’s ability to sneak-out or breakout to nuclear weapons capability.”

NUCLEAR WARNING: Atomic bomb terror attack could strike ANY COUNTRY, warns UN watchdog

Yukiya Amano warned “terrorists and criminals” could strike using illegally obtained nuclear weapons (Getty)

 

EVERY single country on the planet could be attacked by nuclear-armed terrorists, the United Nation’s atomic watchdog has warned.

Yukiya Amano, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said nowhere was safe at a time when terrorists are scouring the globe for any sign of “vulnerability”.

He said: “Ensuring effective nuclear security is important for all countries, including those which possess little or no nuclear or other radioactive material.”

Iran Loses Nuclear Device, Sparks GCC Worry

 

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is concerned over a missing radioactive device from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, Saudi-owned Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported on Thursday.

Aside from the security concerns, at the forefront in the GCC’s mind is what impact the radioactive device—wherever it may be today—could have on water supplies.

According to the newspaper, the device went missing after the car transporting it was stolen. Thankfully, the vehicle was recovered, but the radioactive nuclear device was not so lucky.

Iran’s nuke program confirmed

The Obama administration is now admitting that Iran did nuclear weapons work at its military facility at Parchin, based on a December IAEA report that described two “chemically man-modified particles of natural uranium” at the site. But the evidence is too sparse to figure out what kind of work the Iranians were doing, just that they were doing some kind of nuclear weapons work:

Current and former U.S. officials asked about the uranium finding said the working assumption now is that it is tied to nuclear weapons development… “The existence of two particles of uranium there would be consistent with our understanding of the involvement of Parchin in a past weapons program, but by themselves don’t definitively prove anything,” said a senior administration official briefed on the evidence.