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Bernanke is right in my humble opinion.
Bernanke is right in my humble opinion.
It is possible he might be early with regard to his timing prediction of a next recession but The Fed uses interest rates primarily to effect the economy and with rates at zero they no longer have that tool at their disposal. (See 1 below.)
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Monica Crowley does not believe Hillarious will be the Demwit's candidate. (See 2 below.)
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It's about time! (See 3 below.)
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Thinking about the unthinkable. (See 4 below.)
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A very powerful message. You decide what you think about it. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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Monica Crowley does not believe Hillarious will be the Demwit's candidate. (See 2 below.)
===
It's about time! (See 3 below.)
===
Thinking about the unthinkable. (See 4 below.)
===
A very powerful message. You decide what you think about it. (See 5 below.)
===
Dick
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1)Bernanke to WSJ: US Unprepared for Next Recession
Historically, the U.S. economy suffers a recession every five to eight years, so given that our recovery is more than six years old, we may face a downturn soon.
And with monetary policy already in heavy-easing mode and fiscal policy hamstrung by the government's massive debt burden, the government's tools to combat any downturn are limited."As the U.S. economic expansion ages and clouds gather overseas, policy makers worry about recession," write Wall Street Journal reporters Jon Hilsenrath and Nick Timiraos.
"Their concern isn’t that a downturn is imminent, but whether they will have firepower to fight back when one does arrive."
Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is concerned too, though he's not panicking. The government's weapons to fight the next recession will be “more limited than usual, but they’re not zero by any means,” he told the paper.
The Federal Reserve's target rate for federal funds now stands at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent. And while the central bank is expected to start raising rates soon, many economists expect the rate to top out at 2 percent, and not until late 2016 or 2017.
On the fiscal side, federal government debt has soared to 74 percent of GDP from 39 percent in 2008. That leaves little room for higher spending and/or lower taxes.
"We have very little cushion for whoever the next president is and the next congressional leaders if they had to deal, gosh, with anything," Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School and an adviser to President George W. Bush, told The Journal.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the world economy, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of The (London) Telegraph, says leading indicators and money supply data indicate growth will rise in the months ahead, at least in the United States, Europe and China, says.
He cites research from Gabriel Stein of Oxford Economics showing that real global M3 money supply growth — based on the United States, China, The European Economic and Monetary Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada — soared to a six-year high of 6.2 percent in June.
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2) Hillary Clinton is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president.
By Monica Crowley
>> Yes, the conventional wisdom is that she is still the prohibitive favorite, armed with big money, big connections, and the Big Dog, Bill.
>> But the so-called “wisdom” is “conventional” for a reason. As a result of endless sordid scandals and predictably Clintonian evasions, her poll numbers on everything from favorability to trustworthiness are in a nosedive. A battery of new polls in key swing states such as Colorado and Iowa show her losing to a number of GOP challengers.
>> She’s also taking incoming from the left, particularly from Vermont senator and socialist Bernie Sanders, who is scoring major crowds and an increasing percentage of the Democratic vote, indicating that the leftist base sees him as a viable option and not merely a vehicle to register discontent with Mrs. Clinton.
>> Polls this early in the cycle can be unreliable. But they do indicate a significant downward trend for her that must have her campaign at DEFCON 3.
>> None of this, however, is her most serious problem. Instead, it’s something much closer to home, much more insidious, much more dangerous than anything else.
>> Yes, the conventional wisdom is that she is still the prohibitive favorite, armed with big money, big connections, and the Big Dog, Bill.
>> But the so-called “wisdom” is “conventional” for a reason. As a result of endless sordid scandals and predictably Clintonian evasions, her poll numbers on everything from favorability to trustworthiness are in a nosedive. A battery of new polls in key swing states such as Colorado and Iowa show her losing to a number of GOP challengers.
>> She’s also taking incoming from the left, particularly from Vermont senator and socialist Bernie Sanders, who is scoring major crowds and an increasing percentage of the Democratic vote, indicating that the leftist base sees him as a viable option and not merely a vehicle to register discontent with Mrs. Clinton.
>> Polls this early in the cycle can be unreliable. But they do indicate a significant downward trend for her that must have her campaign at DEFCON 3.
>> None of this, however, is her most serious problem. Instead, it’s something much closer to home, much more insidious, much more dangerous than anything else.
>> It’s President Barack Obama. And he just made his move.
>> Here’s how it’s likely going down:
>> The Clintons and the Obamas have a long history of bad blood, dating to the 2008 primary race. After Mr. Obama creamed her, he offered her the plum gig of Secretary of State. Friends close, enemies closer. She tried to get her dirty tricks consigliere, Sidney Blumenthal, a top position in the State Department, which Mr. Obama pointedly denied (because of dirty tricks against BHO in 2008).
>> So she hired him anyway through the Clinton Foundation.
>> Through Mr. Blumenthal, she was fed all kinds of intelligence on global hotpots such as Libya, much of it inaccurate, as she circumvented traditional and required government communication chains via her private email server. What was she hiding from Mr. Obama? And why did she hide it from him? Perhaps it was because she trusted Mr. Obama about as much as she trusted Bill.
>> Mr. Obama didn’t trust her, either. In a recently disclosed email, Mrs. Clinton complained that she heard “on the radio” that there was a “Cabinet meeting” that morning and wondered if she could attend. The Secretary of State — fourth in line to the presidency — was frozen out, so she then set up her own fiefdom.
>> Mr. Obama needs a successor whom he can control to ensure that the “fundamental transformation of the nation” continues. He cannot control either of the Clintons. In a revealing “tell” this week, he said, “In 18 months, I’m turning over the keys. I want to make sure I’m turning over the keys to somebody who is serious about the serious problems that the country faces and the world faces.”
>> He will therefore back the one person he knows will do his bidding: his Vice President, Joe Biden, whom he summons to his side for every critical photo op, including the announcement of the Iran deal. There’s more going on there than just symbolism.
>> So here’s the likely plan: Mr. Biden will announce that he is running for president (which was the recent dying wish of his late son, Beau). After a respectable amount of time, Mr. Obama will announce that while he admires all of the Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden has earned his particular loyalty.
>> Following his presidential endorsement, Mr. Obama will then support Mr. Biden with the full weight of the White House, including the sophisticated technical infrastructure his campaigns used to win in 2008 and 2012. For years, Mrs. Clinton has begged Mr. Obama to turn it over to her, and he refused. He’s been saving it for
someone else.
>> Mr. Obama will also use his considerable influence with black and Latino voters to support Mr. Biden, which may be enough to help him significantly.
>> But Mrs. Clinton is a survivor, they will say. The media protects her. True. But it will be a much different situation if she’s under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, or worse, crippled by a Special Prosecutor or even an indictment
>> Don’t think Mr. Obama will go there? He already has. Last week, the New York Times reported that two inspectors general from his administration recommended that the Justice Department open a “criminal” inquiry into her handling of classified material. The leak to the Times came from a “senior administration official,” which some have speculated was Mr. Obama’s own consigliere, Valerie Jarrett. The Times walked back some of the details, but the damage was done. If Mr. Obama did not want a DOJ criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton to go forward, he would not have let it go this far.
>> He wants the investigation, he wants her nailed, and he wants her out. And he’s doing it, slowly, steadily.
>> The Clintons used to be champion Machiavellians. But in Mr. Obama, the Clinton team looks like they are being outmaneuvered — again — by the ultimate take-no-prisoners master.
>> Hillary is being given the Judas kiss by her former boss, a man loyal to no one but himself.
>> He wants the investigation, he wants her nailed, and he wants her out. And he’s doing it, slowly, steadily.
>> The Clintons used to be champion Machiavellians. But in Mr. Obama, the Clinton team looks like they are being outmaneuvered — again — by the ultimate take-no-prisoners master.
>> Hillary is being given the Judas kiss by her former boss, a man loyal to no one but himself.
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3)
Jews are turning to the right
Jewish voters — and more importantly, Jewish campaign contributors — are abandoning political parties of the left
Jews have historically been leftists, over the last century consistently voting for left-leaning, liberal parties in Canada, the U.S. and Europe in higher proportion than any other religious group. Those liberal, left-leaning Jews are about to experience a political sea change as they turn massively to the right.
The West’s political parties will also feel the effects – not directly at the ballot box, where the Jewish vote is generally too small to decide an election but indirectly, in their coffers, where the Jewish tilt in campaign giving has often meant the difference between victory and defeat. As one example, the U.S. Democratic Party typically receives between half and two-thirds of its funding from Jews, the Republican Party more like a quarter.
But now it is the left that has become the standard-bearer for anti-Semitism, with liberals seen as winking at if not encouraging a hateful atmosphere toward Jews. On campuses, this is seen in the boycott movement against Israel and discrimination against Jewish students as well as faculty members, who are increasingly harassed, assaulted and intimidated. At UCLA and Stanford, Jews running for office faced accusations that their “strong Jewish identity” made them unfit to run for student government. According to a 2013-14 survey by the Louis D. Brandeis Center in Washington, “more than half of Jewish American college students [have] personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.” Jewish parents, most of whom aspire to send their children to top schools, virtually all of which are left-leaning, are understandably concerned.
America’s Jews are also understandably concerned at the Democratic Party’s increasingly anti-Israel positions, and the nature of Obama’s attack on American Jews who question his Iran deal. America’s liberal Jewish press and liberal Jewish leaders protest that “Obama is using a dog whistle. He is hinting broadly at anti-Semitic conceits — like dual loyalties, moneyed interests, Jewish lobby.” They have characterized such attacks as “Jew-baiting,” “blatant and retrograde forms of racial and ethnic prejudice,” as stereotyping Jews as warmongers and of raising the “crock of dual loyalty.” A New York Post editorial, entitled “The anti-Semitic drive to silence Schumer on Iran deal,” listed attacks by Daily Kos, The New York Times, MoveOn and other paragons of the left wing establishment on Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, a Jew who opposes the Iran deal.
Now it is the left that has become the standard-bearer for anti-Semitism
The Jewish shift away from the Democratic party, in fact, may have already begun. According to a Pew Forum analysis of presidential votes, the Jewish vote for Obama dropped nine percentage points in the 2012 election, and Jewish funding may have dropped even more – an earlier poll found that only 64 per cent of Jews who had donated to Obama’s 2008 campaign planned to support him again. Given the increasing influence and vociferousness of the anti-Israel left in the Democratic Party, Jewish support for Democrats is likely to drop further and further in subsequent election cycles, until this era’s anti-Semitism runs its course.
In the U.K., the plot lines are similar. An article in the Independent prior to the last general election in May entitled “Labour funding crisis: Jewish donors drop ‘toxic’ Ed Miliband” explained how lifelong “Jewish backers are deserting the party in droves over what community leaders perceive to be a new, aggressive pro-Palestine policy.” What was expected to be a close election between Millband’s Labour Party and David Cameron’s Conservatives turned into a rout, with the Conservative Party winning a majority government, its first in more than a decade. The Jews’ abandonment of the Labour Party will only accelerate with the expected election of Miliband’s successor, Jeremy Corbyn, who has praised Hezbollah and Hamas, supported a radical Islamist visiting the U.K., defended a conspiracy theorist who blamed Jews for the attacks of 9/11, and is associated with Holocaust deniers. Former Labour leader and three-time prime minister Tony Blair, a major past beneficiary of Jewish support, predicts Corbyn’s leadership could lead to the “annihilation” of the Labour Party.
Canada, where until 2000 the Liberal Party had a lock on Jewish support, provides a longer-lived example of how Jews react when they perceive their government to tolerate, if not encourage, anti-Semitism. After the Liberal government in 2001 decided to participate in Durban, the overtly anti-Semitic UN conference on racism, after the Liberal government in 2002 decided to allow Hezbollah to fundraise in Canada and Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien gave a speech in Lebanon with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah honoured with a front row seat, and after Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in 2002 was prevented from speaking at Montreal’s Concordia University amid a violent, anti-Semitic melee, Jewish support for Liberals began to evaporate. The Liberal government – once seen as Canada’s “natural governing party” – soon lost its majority, then lost the 2006 election to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have been in power ever since.
The historic attraction of Jews to left-leaning, liberal causes is often explained as Jews’ support for the underdog, and the governments that protect them. This explanation holds, too, during times of anti-Semitism, when the Jews become the underdog, and need a government to protect them.
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4)
Thinking About the Unthinkable: An Israel-Iran Nuclear War
Now retired, John Bosma draws on a 40-year background in nuclear war-gaming and strategic arms control (SALT 1 and 2, Soviet arms-racing and SALT violations, US force upgrades) at Boeing Aerospace (1977-1980); congressional staff and White House experience (1981-1983) in organizing the “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense (BMD) program and proposing its “defense-enforced strategic reductions” arms-control model adopted by the Reagan State Department; military space journalism (1984-1987); and technology scouting in conventional strategic warfare, rapid (1-2 hours) posture change in space, novel BMD engagement geometries with miniature air-launched interceptors, counter-WMD/terrorism, naval BMD and undersea warfare. Clients included DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Missile Defense Agency, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, the Navy and the He follows Israeli forces and BMD and has studied Iran's nuclear R&D programs. All of his work is open-source
By John Bosma
The signing of a Munich-class agreement with Iran that hands it more than it ever hoped to pull off represents a shocking, craven American capitulation to an apocalyptic crazy state: a North Korea with oil. Nothing in Western history remotely approaches it, not even Neville Chamberlain's storied appeasement of another antisemitic negotiating partner.
But it also augurs the possibility of a nuclear war coming far sooner than one could have imagined under conventional wisdom worst-case scenarios. Following the US's betrayal of Israel and its de facto detente with Iran, we cannot expect Israel to copy longstanding US doctrines of no-first-nuclear-use and preferences for conventional-weapons-only war plans. After all, both were premised (especially after the USSR's 1991 collapse) on decades of US nuclear and conventional supremacy. If there ever were an unassailable case for a small, frighteningly vulnerable nation to pre-emptively use nuclear weapons to shock, economically paralyze, and decapitate am enemy sworn to its destruction, Israel has arrived at that circumstance.
Why? Because Israel has no choice, given the radical new alignment against it that now includes the US, given reported Obama threats in 2014 to shoot down Israeli attack planes, his disclosure of Israel's nuclear secrets and its Central Asian strike-force recovery bases, and above all his agreement to help Iran protect its enrichment facilities from terrorists and cyberwarfare – i.e., from the very special-operations and cyber forces that Israel would use in desperate attempts to halt Iran's bomb. Thus Israel is being forced, more rapidly and irreversibly than we appreciate, into a bet-the-nation decision where it has only one forceful, game-changing choice -- early nuclear pre-emption – to wrest back control of its survival and to dictate the aftermath of such a survival strike.
Would this involve many nuclear weapons? No – probably fewer than 10-15, although their yields must be sufficiently large to maximize ground shock. Would it produce Iranian civilian casualties? Yes but not as many as one might suppose, as it would avoid cities. Most casualties would be radiological, like Chernobyl, rather than thermal and blast casualties. Would it spur a larger catalytic nuclear war? No. Would it subsequently impel Russia, China and new proliferators to normalize nuclear weapons in their own war planning? Or would the massive global panic over the first nuclear use in anger in 70 years, one that would draw saturation media coverage, panic their publics into urgent demands for ballistic missile self-defense systems? Probably the latter.
The Iranian elite's ideology and controlling political psychology is inherently preferential towards nukes and direct population targeting as a way to implement Shi'ite messianism and end-times extremism. Iran is a newly nuclear apocalyptic Shi'ite regime that ranks as the most blatantly genocidal government since the Khmer Rouge's Sorbonne-educated leaders took over Cambodia in April, 1975. Senior Iranian officials have periodically tied nuclear war to the return of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi, which Iran's previous president anticipated within several years. This reflects not just the triumphalist enthusiasm of a new arriviste nuclear power that just won more at the table than it dared to dream. It also reflects a self-amplifying, autarchic end-days theology that is immune to both reality testing and to Western liberal/progressive tenets about prim and proper nuclear behavior.
Admittedly, Iranian leaders have lately resorted to envisioning Israel's collapse in more restrained terms through Palestinian demographic takeover of the Israeli state and asymmetric warfare. Still there remains a lurid history of Iranian officials urging the elimination of Israel and its people, of allocating their nukes to Israeli territory to maximize Jewish fatalities, of Iranian officials leading crowds in chants of “Death to Israel!” Iran's government also released a video game allowing players to target various kinds of Iranian ballistic missiles against Israeli cities – this as part of intensive propaganda drumming up hatred of Jews. A more recent video game envisions a massive Iranian ground army marching to liberate Jerusalem. In all, Iran's official stoking of genocidal Jew hatred is far beyond what Hitler’s government dared to advocate before the 1939 outbreak of World War 2.
The deliberate American silence over Iran's genocidal intentionality sends an unmistakable signal to Israel that the US no longer recognizes a primordial, civilizational moral obligation to protect it from the most explicit threats imaginable. It is truly on its own, with the US in an all-but-overt alliance with its worst enemy. The shock to Israel's leaders of this abrupt American lurch into tacitly accepting this Iranian intentionality cannot be understated. Iran is violating the core tenets of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a US initiative after the Tokyo and Nuremberg war-crimes trials to codify genocide as a crime against humanity. Now the US is silent.
But this shift is also recent. Every US government prior to President Obama would have fore sworn nuclear talks with such a psychopathic regime or would have walked out in a rage upon such utterances. Yet Iran's genocidal threats have had no discernible effect on Obama's canine eagerness for a deal. It's as if 75 years ago a US president had cheerfully engaged in peace talks with Hitler and his SS entourage despite learning the details of the Nazis' secret Wannsee Conference where Hitler signed off on the Final Solution for the Jews. But whereas Hitler had the sense in that era to keep that conclave secret, Iran's Wannsee intentionality toward Israel and world Jewry has for years been flamboyantly rude-and-crude and in-your-face. That this Iranian advocacy of a second Holocaust drew no objection from the US negotiators of this deal should make moral pariahs out of every one of them – including our president and Secretary of State.
These two factors alone, especially the abrupt evaporation of the US's ultimate existential bargain with Israel through Obama's de facto alliance with the mullahs, would drive Israel to the one attack option it can unilaterally use without running short of munitions and experiencing the massive US coercion embedded in that dependence. But there are other reasons why early Israeli nuclear pre-emption is not only justified but almost mandatory.
First, it is too late to stop Iran's bomb-making momentum with conventional weapons or sanctions. That nation's science and technology base is robust and improving. It has learned to domestically produce high-performance gas centrifuges whose uranium gas output is such that smaller numbers of them are needed for breakout. The US spent decades and many billions at labs like Oak Ridge National Laboratory on composites, software-controlled magnetic bearings, gas flow separations, thermal controls and ultra-precision manufacturing for these thin-wall, very-high-speed devices. Yet Iran has come up the centrifuge learning curve with surprising speed. Its metallurgists are familiar with a novel aluminum forging method that may yield nanophase aluminum shells so strong that they approach the centrifugal strength usually associated with more demanding composite-shell gas centrifuges. Also, Iran's bomb engineering and physics can tap the sophisticated bomb designs and re-entry vehicle (RV) skills of North Korea, which is reducing the weight and mass of its H-bombs to fit on ballistic missiles and whose collaboration with Iran reportedly included Iranian technicians at North Korean bomb tests.
Other technology sources in the Nuclear Bombs R Us cartel for wannabe proliferators set up by rogue nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan of Pakistan include China, Russia and Pakistan. Worst of all, under the US-Iran deal, Iran's ballistic missiles can improve their reliability, accuracy, throw-weight and their post-boost RV-release thrusters.
Second, Iran's underground nuclear targets are likely harder than American and Israeli hard-target munition (HTM) developers have assumed. Why? Because Iranian engineers have perfected the world's toughest concrete, developing mixtures using geopolymers, quartz powders (called fume) and metal and ceramic fibers. The result is hardness levels reportedly up to 50,000-60,000 psi in experimental samples. This means that even shallow “cut and cover” hard targets like the Natanz centrifuge enrichment plant, an armored complex in an excavated pit that is then covered, can resist destruction by the US's most lethal hard-target bomb: the 30,000-lb “Massive Ordnance Penetrator.” Only the B-2 and the B-52 can carry the MOP. Yet while the MOP can penetrate ~200 ft into 5000-psi targets, it only reaches 25 feet into 10,000-psi concrete – and Iranian cement for new or up-armored underground bunkers has likely progressed well beyond that.
US and Israeli HTM alternatives include staged-warhead penetrators and – high on the wish list – novel energetic chemistries with orders-of-magnitude more power than current HTMs. Tactical HTMs with up to four sequential warheads use precursor warheads to blast an initial opening for larger follow-through charges to destroy tanks, fortifications and bridge piers. But these impact at slow speeds compared to what's needed to kill deep hard targets. The latter need super hard casings (probably single-crystal metals) and packaging to keep their sequenced charges intact during violent impacts of thousands of feet/second (fps). One benchmark is the Department of Energy's Sandia lab's success years ago in firing a simulated hard-target RV into rock at 4400 fps. Similarly, reactive-material (RM) munitions and next-generation HEDM (high-energy-density material) explosives and energetic chemistries with orders-of-magnitude more power look promising for the future. But these require years of iterative fly-redesign-fly testing to assure they'll survive impact with their deep targets.
Bottom line: with even the US's best non-nuclear HTMs marginal against Iran's critical deep targets, Israel's HTMs probably wouldn't do the job either, being lower in kinetic energy on target. Alternatives like using HTMs to destroy entrances to such targets and ventilation shafts may work – but unless Iranian military power and recovery are set back months or years, this damage would be repaired or worked round. Moreover, nuclear facilities tunneled into mountains would be almost impossible to destroy with conventionals.
Still, the brains behind Iran's nuclear bomb, missile and WMD is concentrated in soft targets like the Iranian universities run by the IRGC (Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps), custodian of the bomb program). These can be hit by conventionals under a Peenemunde targeting strategy to kill as many weapon scientists and technicians as possible. (This recalls Prime Minister Winston Churchill's directive for British bombers to target the residential housing on the small Baltic island where Hitler had sited his V-2 rocket program.) Alternatively, conventional or nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) or HPM (high-power microwave) weapons could destroy for months all the computers and communications that support university-hosted bomb work. This would keep these scientists and surrounding urban populations alive.
Third, Obama's decision to provide Iran “training courses and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to prevent, protect and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, to nuclear facilities and systems as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems” is the clearest indicator that this accord is aimed squarely at Israel. Why? It eliminates the sole option Israel has left now that it lacks the US-supplied conventional HTMs to destroy unexpectedly hard deep targets, forcing it at best into a slow-motion conventionals-only campaign. This would expose it to brutal political and military blowback by Iran and its Chinese, Russian and European suppliers – and by an enraged American president. In essence, it appears that the Obama regime has under the accord deliberately stripped Israel of every option except nuclear pre-emption – which Obama, in typically liberal-progressive fashion, assumes would never happen. Ergo, Israel would be forced to accommodate Iranian military supremacy.
Fourth, what may drive an early Israeli nuclear attack are two considerations: (a) Russian S-300 ATBM/SAMs (anti-tactical ballistic missile/surface-to-air missile) in Iranian hands; and (b) Hezb’allah's thousands of missiles. Russia's agreement to supply Iran four batteries of its fearsome S-300 by late August for defending priority targets would make it very difficult for Israel to mount the complex precision bombing strategies needed for tough targets. The S-300, the world's best, can knock down high-speed aircraft from near ground level to almost 100,000 feet. It can also engage some ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, Hezb’allah's arsenal of more than 60,000 rockets (by some estimates) is a much greater threat to Israel, especially its air force, than is appreciated. Hezb’allah has retrofitted an unknown fraction of these missiles, whose range now covers almost all of Israel, with GPS and precision guidance, allowing them to hit critical targets. Unfortunately, Israel's Iron Dome and David’s Sling interceptors were designed on the assumption that most incoming missiles would be inaccurate and so the interceptors could be saved only for those approaching critical targets. The result? Hezb’allah rocket campaigns targeting Israeli airbases and other military targets could quickly run Israel out of interceptors. Iran could easily order such a campaign to throw Israel off balance as it focuses on the deadly US-abetted nuclear threat from Iran.
An Israeli nuclear pre-emption is thus eminently thinkable. Every other option has been stripped away by Obama's decision, concealed from Israel, Congress and our allies until it was too late to challenge, to let Iranian bomb-making R&D run free and to harden Iran's bomb-making infrastructure against Israel – while imposing lethal restrictions on Israeli countermeasures and forswearing any US and allied military attacks, such as B-2's and B-52's dropping MOP bombs.
The die is now cast. Nuclear pre-emption becomes attractive to a nation in extremis, where Israel is now:
...Israel needs to impart a powerful, disorganizing shock to the Iranian regime that accomplishes realistic military objectives: digging out its expensive underground enrichment plants, destroying its Arak plutonium reactor and maybe Bushehr in the bargain, killing its bomb and missile professionals, scientists and technicians, IRGC bases, its oil production sites, oil export terminals and the leaders of the regime where they can be found.
...its initial strike must move very fast and be conclusive within 1-2 hours, like the Israeli air attack opening the 1967 Six-Day War. The goal is to so stun the regime that Israel controls the first and subsequent phases of the war and its ending. This means that Israel must hit enough critical targets with maximum shock – and be willing to revisit or expand its targets – so as to control blow back and retaliation from Iran's allies. In essence, this involves a very fast-paced Israeli redesign of the Middle East in the course of a nuclear war for survival.
...what is poorly appreciated is that nuclear weapons from 10 to 300 kilotons (KT) – depending on accuracy – can destroy deep hard targets to 200+ meters depth by ground coupling if they penetrate merely 3 meters into the ground (Effects of Nuclear Earth Penetrators and Other Weapons: National Research Council / National Academy Press, 2005, pp. 30-51). Israel could lower bomb yields or achieve deeper target kills by its reported tests of two-plane nuclear attacks in which the first plane drops a conventional HTM like a GBU-28 to open up a channel; the second plane drops its tactical nuclear bomb into that 'soft' channel for greater depth before bursting. This unavoidably would produce fallout on cities downwind. Fortunately, the same medical countermeasures used for radiological accidents (Chernobyl accidents, etc.) – potassium iodide pills (available domestically from www.ki4u.com) – can be airdropped for use by exposed urbanites.
...the more important objective, however, is decapitation and economic paralysis by EMP and HPM effects that destroy all electronic, electrical and electromechanical devices on Iranian territory. While a high-altitude nuclear burst would affect most of Iran's territory, it may not be necessary if smaller, lower-altitude weapons are used.
...A small number of nuclear weapons (10-15?) may suffice: one each for known underground hard targets, with one held in reserve pending bomb-damage assessments; several low-yield bombs for above-ground bomb-related depots; and low-yield neutron weapons to hit IRGC and regime targets while avoiding blast and fallout. Reactors can be hit with conventional HPM pulse weapons to burn out electrical, electronic and electromechanical systems for later reactor destruction by Special Forces. A targeting priority (using antipersonnel conventionals) would be university-hosted bomb/missile scientists.
...Israeli F-15s and F-16s provide the most accurate delivery for the initial phase – assuming that the S-300 batteries can be decoyed, jammed or destroyed (where Israeli air force experience is unmatched). The small stock of Jericho-2 ballistic missiles probably would be held in reserve. They can't be used against buried targets unless their re-entry vehicles (RVs) are fitted with penetrator casings and decelerators like ribbon parachutes (used to slow down US test RVs for shallow-water recovery at Pacific atolls) to avoid disintegrating on impact. (Both methods require flight-testing, which is detectable.) Israel's Dolphin subs in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean can launch nuclear or (probably) conventional cruise missiles with cluster munitions for IRGC targets.
The final issue is how Israeli and US leaders would operate in these conditions. An Israeli decision to go nuclear would be the most tightly held decision in history, given the prospect of out-of-control blow back by our current president if that was leaked. Still, Israel sees itself being driven into a Second Holocaust corner, possibly within weeks as the S-300s begin deploying around Iran's nuclear targets. Once it decides nukes are its only way out, it would simulate and map out all possible event chains and surprises once it launches. Unavoidably, it would also have to decide what to do if it learns the US is feeding its pre-launch mobilization information to Iran, using its electronic listening posts and missile-defense radars in the region. It may have to jam or destroy those US sites.
For the US, however, this no-warning nuclear war would land like a thunderbolt on an unprepared White House that would likely panic and lash out as Obama's loudly touted “legacy” goes up in smoke. The characteristic signatures of nuclear bursts would be captured and geolocated by US satellite. The commander of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs would call the White House on the famous red phone. (As one of the few civilians who sat through a red phone alert at NORAD in July 1982, after a Soviet missile sub launched two test missiles off the Kamchatk Peninsulaa, I can testify it is a frightening experience for which nothing prepares you.) Given the psychology of our current president and his emotional investment in his Iran deal, what might follow could challenge the military chain of command with orders that previously were unthinkable.
Now retired, John Bosma draws on a 40-year background in nuclear war-gaming and strategic arms control (SALT 1 and 2, Soviet arms-racing and SALT violations, US force upgrades) at Boeing Aerospace (1977-1980); congressional staff and White House experience (1981-1983) in organizing the “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense (BMD) program and proposing its “defense-enforced strategic reductions” arms-control model adopted by the Reagan State Department; military space journalism (1984-1987); and technology scouting in conventional strategic warfare, rapid (1-2 hours) posture change in space, novel BMD engagement geometries with miniature air-launched interceptors, counter-WMD/terrorism, naval BMD and undersea warfare. Clients included DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Missile Defense Agency, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, the Navy and the He follows Israeli forces and BMD and has studied Iran's nuclear R&D programs. All of his work is open-source
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5)
Subj: The Black Dilemma - .FROM THE BALTIMORE SUN“The Baltimore Sun” is definitely not known as a Conservative newspaper, and this very well written assessment of the situation in the USA comes as something of a surprise. This will obviously be called racist, and will upset liberals, but they should really think about the message and this interesting point of view …
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