Saudi Press: We Must Have A Military Nuclear Program Within A Decade

Following the July 14, 2015 announcement in Vienna of the Iran-P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Saudi press featured numerous articles openly calling for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to use the coming decade – the time frame of the JCPOA – to develop their own military nuclear program, against the nuclear threat that they say Iran will constitute after the agreement expires.

There have already been calls for a clandestine Saudi nuclear program to parallel Iran’s, which were backed up by official Saudi sources. For example, the month before the announcement of the JCPOA, Saudi Ambassador to the U.K. Emir Muhammad bin Nawwaf bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Saud told the Daily Telegraph that if the upcoming nuclear agreement with Iran did not include a serious Iranian commitment to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, then as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, “all options are on the table.” He emphasized that over the years, his country had opposed the development of nuclear weapons, but that Iran’s policy on the issue “has changed the whole outlook in the region.”[1]

Iran regime said to employ 100 at nuclear weapons R&D center

LONDON — The Iranian opposition said Teheran was moving a nuclear weapons research and development center to a Defense Ministry complex.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, on the eve of nuclear talks in Geneva on Oct. 15, identified the facility as SPND and said it employs 100 researchers.

“There is a link between this transfer and the date of Geneva [talks] because the regime needed to avoid the risk of visits by inspectors,” Mehdi Abrichamtchi, who compiled the report for the opposition council, said.

Richard Clarke: All U.S. Electronics From China Could Be Infected

 

Well, it’s been pretty obvious for a while now that China’s been hacking into some  of America’s most important businesses and government agencies and stealing reams of data. We’ve heard countless reports about Pentagon info being stolen orabout critical data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being plucked from defense contractors networks — with China being the main suspect.

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Here’s what Clarke Recently told Smithsonian Magazine:

“My greatest fear,” Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China.…After a while you can’t compete.”

But Clarke’s concerns reach beyond the cost of lost intellectual property. He foresees the loss of military power. Say there was another confrontation, such as the one in 1996 when President Clinton rushed two carrier battle fleets to the Taiwan Strait to warn China against an invasion of Taiwan. Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese cyber intervention. (He cites a recent war game published in an influential military strategy journal called Orbis titled “How the U.S. Lost the Naval War of 2015.”)

Full article: Richard Clarke: All U.S. Electronics From China Could Be Infected (Defense Tech)