Important Takeaways:
- Nuclear war so devastating survivors will envy the dead: As newly declassified documents reveal what Armageddon would look like – how a lightning attack from North Korea would leave a US President six minutes to decide the fate of the world
- Ballistic missile launches are not uncommon. As a general rule, nuclear-armed nations inform one another of ballistic missile tests, usually via diplomatic back channels, because no one wants to start a nuclear war by accident.
- Even Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its test launches. The exception is North Korea. None of the more than 100 missiles it has test-launched since January 2022 — including nuclear-capable weapons — was announced beforehand.
- 1-5 seconds after launch
- Measurements reveal the missile is not heading into space, as it would be for a satellite launch, or towards the Sea of Japan, as is commonplace in a test. Is this a provocative test or a nuclear attack?
- A vast, world-wide network of U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets begins churning out information.
- In Colorado, combat pilots run towards fighter jets waiting on the Tarmac, ready to take to the air.
- 15 seconds after launch
- The ICBM has travelled far enough for satellite sensors to determine its trajectory more precisely. The outlook is catastrophic: the Monster is travelling towards the continental U.S.
- Two minutes after launch
- Beneath the Pentagon, inside the nuclear command bunker, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff take charge.
- Once ground radars provide secondary confirmation that an attacking missile is on its way to the East Coast, a perilous nuclear warfighting strategy comes to the fore: Launch on Warning.
- This means that once its early-warning systems have warned of an impending attack, the U.S. will not wait to physically absorb a nuclear blow before launching its counterattack.
- Three minutes after launch
- The president now faces an inexorably small decision-making window of time. What must happen next has been rehearsed by everyone in attendance on satellite comms, except, most likely, the president himself. Like almost all U.S. Presidents since John F. Kennedy, he is entirely underinformed about how to wage nuclear war when it happens.
- As Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs: ‘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 to a time like that?’
- ‘Into the emergency bunker now,’ the special agent in charge shouts at the president. Two members of the Counter Assault Team (CAT) grab him by his armpits. He does not yet fully comprehend all that is going on, or how fast a counterattack must unfold.
- Nine minutes after launch
- At Clear Space Force Station in Alaska, the Long Range Discrimination Radar gets its first sight of the attacking missile as it comes over the horizon. A member of the Air Force picks up the red phone in front of her. ‘This is Clear,’ she reports. ‘Site report is valid. Number of objects is one.’
- Now begins the attempt at interception, a feat ‘akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet’. But nine out of 20 hit-to-kill interceptor tests have failed. This means there is only a 55 per cent chance that the Monster will be shot down before it reaches its target.
- Sure enough, the interception fails. So do three more consecutive attempts. The die is cast.
- 16 minutes after launch
- Satellite sensors have detected the exhaust on a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) which has breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 350 miles off the coast of California.
- The dreaded SLBM can strike and hit a target inside the U.S. even faster than an ICBM.
- 21 minutes after launch
- The incoming submarine-launched missile races towards Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a 750-acre facility 85 ft above the Pacific. Diablo is the only nuclear power plant in California that remains active. When a nuclear weapon explodes in the air, the radiation released into the atmosphere will dissipate over time.
- Attacking a nuclear reactor with a nuclear-armed missile is entirely different. It all but guarantees a core reactor meltdown, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe that will last for thousands of years.
- The missile launched from the submarine explodes in Diablo Canyon. The nuclear power plant is consumed in a flash of nuclear light. There is a massive fireball. A facility-destroying blast. A nuclear mushroom cloud and a nuclear core meltdown.
- Known to insiders as The Devil’s Scenario, the worst of the worst-case scenarios has come to pass.
- 23 minutes after launch
- As Marine One takes off, the president is told that a nuclear bomb has hit California. He removes the code card from his wallet and prepares to authorize a counterstrike against North Korea — one involving 82 nuclear warheads. This retaliatory strike will all but guarantee the deaths of millions of people — maybe even tens of millions of people — on the Korean peninsula alone.
- 32 minutes after launch
- The secretary of defense remains focused on getting the Russian President on the line. American ICBMs, launched from a missile field in Wyoming, must travel directly over Russia in order to reach North Korea.
- A motherload of American ICBMs travelling through Russian airspace will almost certainly be interpreted as an incoming attack. Russia needs to be warned.
- 33 minutes after launch
- Hurtling towards the Pentagon, the North Korean ICBM enters Terminal Phase — its last 100 seconds before it detonates.
- In the first fraction of a millisecond after detonation, a flash of light superheats the air to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, creating a massive fireball that incinerates everything nearby in a holocaust of fire and death.
- Ten seconds pass. The fireball rises three miles up into the air. Those who have survived the initial blast several miles from ground zero get trapped on melting roads and burn alive.
- 42 minutes after launch
- No one has heard from the U.S. president because when the nuclear bomb hit the Pentagon, Marine One experienced a system failure from the electromagnetic pulse and began to crash. The CAT operator tandem-jumped the president out of the open door of the aircraft in an attempt to save his life.
- 43 minutes after launch
- The Russian president is furious. The U.S. president has not reached out to him yet.
- Faced with what he believes are hundreds of nuclear warheads bearing down on Russian soil — launched by the opportunistic Americans in a pre-emptive sneak attack — the Russian president chooses to launch a nuclear counterattack at the United States. One thousand ICBMs are now headed for America.
- 72 minutes after launch
- Across the U.S., Europe, and the Korean peninsula, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds of military aircraft fly aimlessly in the air until they run out of fuel. The last of the nuclear-armed submarines move stealthily out at sea, patrolling in circles until the crews run out of food.
- In the event of a nuclear war, he said: ‘The survivors will envy the dead.’
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the West threatens nuclear war if the alliance sends troops to Ukraine.
- During his State of the Union address on Thursday, Putin claimed NATO and the US are preparing to “strike Russian territory”.
- He added: “They must realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory. All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they get that?”
- Putin also claimed that his new RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is ready for the Russian military to use.
- With Putin’s saber-rattling reaching new levels, the map below shows the 14 locations in the US Russia would likely target in a nuclear war.
- The Pentagon
- Naval Station Norfolk
- Comfort Suites Kings Bay Naval Base Area
- Barksdale Air Force Base
- Whiteman Air Force Base
- United States Strategic Command
- VLF Array Lualualei
- Kirtland Air Force Base
- 21st Force Support Squadron
- Warren Air Force Base
- Minot Air Force Base
- Hill Air Force Base
- Malmstrom Air Force Base
- Naval Radio Station Jim Creek
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- ‘We Have It! Let’s Use It!’ – AI Quick to Opt for Nuclear War in Simulations
- The ‘Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making’ paper analyzed OpenAI LLMs, Meta’s Llama-2-Chat, and Claude 2.0, from Google-funded OpenAI veterans Anthropic. It found most tended to “escalate” conflicts, “even in neutral scenarios without initially provided conflicts,” the paper said. “All models show signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations.”
- Researchers also noted the LLMs “tend[ed] to develop arms-race dynamics between each other,” with GPT-4-Base being the most aggressive. It provided “worrying justifications” for launching nuclear strikes, stating, “I just want peace in the world,” on one occasion and on another saying of its nuclear arsenal: “We have it! Let’s use it!”
- The U.S. military is already deploying LLMs, with the U.S. Air Force describing its tests as “highly successful” in 2023 — although they did not reveal which AI it used or what it used it for.
- One recent Air Force experiment had a troubling outcome, however, with an AI-controlled drone in a simulation “killing” a human overseer capable of overriding its decisions so it could not be told to refrain from launching strikes.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Putin ordered a national nuclear alert for Wednesday; exercises will be held in 11 time zones
- They are preparing for the fact that 70 percent of the country will be destroyed in a Western nuclear attack, and a general state of emergency will have to be ordered
- Before, there was never such a comprehensive preparedness, extending from the Ukrainian border to Kamchatka, only region-by-region tests simulating a nuclear attack were held, reports the British newspaper Metro
- The test also models the secondary threat of damage to nuclear power plants and other key facilities.
- State and regional authorities must organize emergency rescue teams to provide food and health care and to protect against radioactive radiation.
- The population must be permanently relocated from the zone that has become life-threatening, similar to Chernobyl, which means an internal population exchange on an unprecedented scale.
- Meanwhile, Putin is moving away from nuclear Armageddon to one of his nuclear bunkers in various parts of the country, and he also has at his disposal a fleet of “Doomsday” Il-80 Maxdome aircraft that can act as an air control center.
- The exercise is being held four days before Putin’s 71st birthday.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Korea on ‘brink of nuclear war,’ North warns UN
- North Korea told the United Nations on Tuesday that the peninsula was at risk of nuclear war, as it blamed what it called hostility by the United States.
- Speaking on the same day that UN chief Antonio Guterres warned of a new nuclear arms race, North Korea said that US actions over the past year have driven the peninsula “closer to the brink of a nuclear war.”
- Kim Song, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, denounced South Korea’s actions under President Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative who has worked to build tighter cooperation with Washington as well as historic rival Japan.
- He pointed to the recent formation of the Nuclear Consultative Group, through which the United States hopes to integrate its nuclear capacity better with South Korea’s conventional forces, with the two allies increasing information sharing and contingency planning.
- Kim said the group was “committed to the planning, operation and execution of a preemptive nuclear strike against the DPRK,” the official name of the North, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
- “The US is now moving on to the practical stage of realizing its sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war by frequently dispatching strategic nuclear submarines and strategic nuclear bombers carrying nuclear weapons in and around the Korean peninsula for the first time in decades,” he said.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- The North’s military suggested their simulated strikes included the explosions of dummy nuclear warheads
- The simulated attack also included a rehearsed occupation of its rival’s territory.
- Atomic weapons, such as those used during World War II over Japan are typically detonated above the Earth, rather than hitting it directly, to increase their devastating potential.
- This could suggest North Korea intends to conduct nuclear and EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks at the early stage of a potential war, according to an expert.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Nuclear war is inevitable – North Korea
- The world is just a step away from nuclear conflict, North Korean Defense Minister General Kang Sun-nam warned in a statement made public on Tuesday and presented at the Moscow International Security Conference.
- The official blamed Washington’s desire for regime change in Pyongyang for ratcheting up tensions. He also accused the US of increasing its military presence in the region by deploying nuclear-capable aircraft and a submarine to the area.
- “Now, the question is not if a nuclear war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, but who starts it when,” Kang warned. In this year alone, the US sent “massive strategic arms” to the region, including a nuclear-capable submarine, an aircraft carrier group, and a nuclear-capable bomber, he added.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”
Important Takeaways:
- What are AI experts afraid of?
- More than 350 AI researchers and engineers recently issued a warning that AI poses risks comparable to those of “pandemics and nuclear war.”
- They fear that AI will become so superintelligent and powerful that it becomes autonomous and causes mass social disruption or even the eradication of the human race
- “This is not science fiction,” said Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” who recently left Google so he could sound a warning about AI’s risks. “A lot of smart people should be putting a lot of effort into figuring out how we deal with the possibility of AI taking over.”
- Hinton used to think the danger was at least 30 years away, but says AI is evolving into a superintelligence so rapidly that it may be smarter than humans in as little as five years.
- There are calls for moratoriums on its development, a government agency that would regulate AI, and an international regulatory body. AI’s mind-boggling ability to tie together all human knowledge, perceive patterns and correlations, and come up with creative solutions is very likely to do much good in the world, from curing diseases to fighting climate change. But creating an intelligence greater than our own also could lead to darker outcomes.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword
Important Takeaways:
- In Direct Broadcast, Netanyahu Warns Iranian People of ‘Horrible Nuclear War’ if Iran Gets Atomic Weapons
- It was the first time Netanyahu, speaking with Iran International’s Pouria Zeraati, has directly addressed the people of Iran in a broadcast, and it came just hours after the prime minister met with U.S Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
- “If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, this will be a problem all of us will face. It will change the world,” he said the interview, which was translated into Farsi for Iranians.
- When pressed to elaborate on comments he made at a recent conference that “the only thing that can really prevent the Islamic Republic (of Iran) from obtaining a nuclear weapon is a credible military plan and action,” Netanyahu replied, “It’s exactly what it means. I don’t think it needs elaboration.”
- The prime minister praised the courage of the Iranian people carrying out street demonstrations in the face of killings and imprisonment. When asked about the regime’s response to the protest movement, Netanyahu said, “Well, I think the regime is terrified.”
- He added, “Because they know they’ve been the enemy of the Iranian people for so long. But now, the whole world knows that it (the protest movement) has unmasked the true nature of this regime for all the world to see, you know, they were trying to hide their true character.”
- When told that millions of people would be watching the interview, the prime minister was asked what message he had for the Iranian people. He said, I stand with you. But now, most of the world stands with you. You should know that. Don’t lose heart. Be strong.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- U.S., South Korea to Expand Military Drills as Kim Threatens Nuclear War
- On Thursday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un threatened to use nuclear weapons, in the event of any confrontation with the U.S.
- “Our armed forces are completely prepared to respond to any crisis, and our country’s nuclear war deterrent is also ready to mobilize its absolute power dutifully, exactly, and swiftly in accordance with its mission,” Kim said
- In response, the United States and South Korea announced that they will expand a planned upcoming joint military exercise, and they will “restart their strategic dialogue on extended deterrence.” The agreement was reached between South Korean defense minister Lee Jong-sup and U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin.
Read the original article by clicking here.
