“Making
America Great Again” by Reducing the World to
Ashes?
By
Felicity Arbuthnot
“In the event of a
nuclear war, there will be no chances,
there will be no survivors – all will be
obliterated… nuclear devastation is not
science fiction – it is a matter of
fact. The world now stands on the brink
of the final abyss. Let us all resolve
to take all possible practical steps to
ensure that we do not, through our own
folly, go over the edge.”
Former First Sea Lord, Lord
Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979)
Strasbourg, 11 May 1979.”
April 18,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
As US
threats ratchet up towards North Korea, the
latest hinging on the accusation that the
country attempted a further ballistic missile
test on the annual Day of the Sun, the annual
national holiday holiday commemorating the birth
of the country’s founder and Kim Jong Un’s
grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
Without
the slightest proof produced by the US that such
a test was attempted, yet alone a nuclear one,
Donald Trump’s language and
that of his fiefdom have been on the level of a
bar room brawl rather than statesmanlike. The
sabre rattling, intemperate recklessness in
threatening to do “whatever it takes” with
serially verbally challenged spokesman,
Sean Spicer calling the invisible test
“an unsuccessful military attack”, is sending
shivers down governmental and national spines
across the globe.
“All
our options are on the table”, said National
Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.
The
Presidency being a family affair, Trump’s son
Eric chipped in on Fox and Friends with:
“And
you saw that quite frankly in Syria and you
saw that in Afghanistan. And he will take
action if he needs to take action.”
“You
have to have massive backbone when it comes
to dealing with awful, awful dictators who
don’t like us, don’t like our way of life.”
Straight
out of the George W. Bush
handbook:
“They
hate our way of life.” Wait for: “You are
either with us, or you are with the
terrorists.”
But again,
why no proof of North Korea’s much vaunted
threatening action? The US has: “an existing
armada of spy planes and drones on and around
the Korean Peninsula.”
Moreover:
“The Pentagon’s Space-Based Infrared System
(SBIRS) employs multiple types of satellites and
sensors to address some of these issues and
provide greater coverage. According to defense
contractor Lockheed Martin, the
constellation can watch for the heat signature
of enemy missile launches and track them in
flight, gather details about those weapons and
their capabilities …
“Closer
to earth, spy planes and drones are almost
constantly zipping around North Korea. The Air
Force and the Army have spy planes and unmanned
reconnaissance aircraft permanently deployed in
the region …
“Satellite
data links, known as Senior Span and Senior
Spur, mean the spy planes can send back some of
this information back to base while still in
flight so analyst can begin picking it apart.
The Air Force has the 694th Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group at Osan in
part to help ‘exploit’ this kind of data.”
There is
also:
“ …
the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 72, the unit
overseeing the U.S. Seventh Fleet’s aerial
patrol and reconnaissance forces. P-3C Orion
and P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft and EP-3E
Aries II spy planes rotate through
deployments to the unit’s bases at Naval Air
Stations Atsugi and Misawa Air Base in
Japan. From there, they make routine trips
to South Korea proper for training
exercises. The EP-3E Aries IIs are dedicated
intelligence gathers, but all three types
could help monitor North Korean
developments.”
Further:
“The
RC-135S Cobra Ball and RC-135U Combat Sent
have very different missions. The Air
Force’s three Cobra Balls have specialized
gear to track ballistic missile launches …
The two Combat Sents have equipment to
detect and analyze electronic emissions from
sites on the ground.” The astonishing array
of surveillance is comprehensively presented
at (1.)
It is also
worth quoting former UN weapons Inspector in
Iraq, Scott Ritter back in
2002, seven months before the illegal invasion
and destruction of Iraq (ongoing) describing
sophistication of monitoring, with warning words
on how politics can cause irreversible disaster:
“And
we had in place means to monitor – both from
vehicles and from the air – the gamma rays
that accompany attempts to enrich uranium or
plutonium. We never found anything. We can
say unequivocally that the industrial
infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce
nuclear weapons had been eliminated.”
Further:
“We eliminated the nuclear programme, and
for
Iraq to have reconstituted it would require
undertaking activities eminently detectable by
intelligence services.”Equally certain is
that North Korea’s activities are equally
detectible.
“It
is not just heat”, states Ritter,
“centrifuge facilities emit gamma radiation,
as well as many other frequencies. It is
detectable. Iraq could not get around this.”
“Our
radar detects the tests, we know what the
characteristics are, and we know there’s
nothing to be worried about.” (2)
In 2015,
Scott Ritter wrote a further detailed article
with facts which surely apply to North Korea
(3.) Arriving in Iraq their ground vehicles were
accompanied above by: “… sensor-laden
helicopters and U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance
aircraft above and high-resolution spy
satellites providing further imagery … satellite
imagery detected a still existing covert missile
force …”
He
concludes:
“ … in
Iraq … the end result was a war based on
flawed intelligence and baseless accusations
that left many thousands dead and a region
in turmoil.”
If the US
makes a nuclear attack on North Korea, the
megalomaniacal, narcissistic and seemingly
frighteningly ill informed Donald Trump – who,
in an early telephone call to President Putin
was reported as having to put his hand over the
mouthpiece and ask someone what the START Treaty
(Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, 4) was – could
trigger the unimaginable.
“In
our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets,
which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the
first great aggressive war, if it should
come, will be launched by suicidal little
madmen pressing an electronic button.
“Such
a war will not last long and none will ever
follow it. There will be no conquerors and
no conquests, but only the charred bones of
the dead on and uninhabited planet.”
Reference
William L.
Shirer (1904-1993) The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
Notes
1.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9315/this-is-how-america-keeps-watch-over-north-korea-from-the-sky
2.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/19/iraq.features11
3.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/scott-ritter/we-aint-found-shit
4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I
Copyright
© Felicity Arbuthnot
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
