Tag Archives: United States

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT IS BEHIND MR PUTIN UNITED NATIONS ADDRESS ON THE MIDDLE EAST.

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Right I am no military general or foreign policy guru but Russia recent backing of Assad to tackle extremists and terrorists and the so-called Islamic State militants ( IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) is a recipe for a war that is going to expand and last for some considerable time.However when you look on at the inability of the free world to resolve the Middle East problems now it is not an option to turn our backs on Mr Putin latest offer because there has being a cultural shift in the Middle East sparked by West and Smart phones.

There is no doubt that Mr Putin geo-political announcements at the United Nations emphasizes the problems of a joint international coalition to confront IS. ( The reporting of which by RT.Com keeps crashing on Flip Board Cover Stories. I wonder why? http://on.rt.com/6sg4 )

Perhaps his offer should be TAKEN SERIOUSLY.    

”There is a belief that “creative destruction and chaos” in the Middle East are beneficial assets to reshaping the Middle East, creating the “New Middle East,” and furthering the Anglo-American road map in the Middle East and Central Asia:

There is no denying that now more than ever we are achieved this with a new road map by Mr Putin.

The United Nations as usual is a lame duck, (with 7.5 million children displaced and over 16 million people homes and livelihoods destroyed) all it can do is pass resolution’s that are vetoed.

WE NEED TO SCRAP THE UN TO BE REPLACED it with A NEW PROTECTION WORLD ORGANISATION THAT REPRESENTS THE WORLD – FULLY FINANCED. ( SEE PREVIOUS POSTS)

While the two world powers will now be at logger heads and the small players like France and the UK play Ludo with the situation.  ISIS continues to extend the group’s self-styled caliphate, which now stretches from Turkey’s border with Syria to south of Fallujah in Iraq, an area roughly the size of Indiana.

For nearly 70 years, Lebanon was a proxy battleground for the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

As Paul Rodriguez said ” Sometimes I think war is God’s way of teaching us geography.”

If you ask yourself how did it all get into such a hell hole you can come up with reasons that cover every aspect of Power, Greed, Religion, History, Oil,etc.

The answer however to a great part is a lot more simple.

NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS. Climate change and the issue of whether there will be enough water for a future global population double its present size is controversial and the answer to this question is of particular importance to the people’s and political leaders of the Middle East and North Africa.

It requires an inhuman level of political courage for a political leader of any country which for five thousand years has enjoyed water security to announce that water resources are no longer adequate.

To make the announcement would be political suicide.

SO BACK TO TODAY.

It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents — Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal — to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing.

The above does not apply to Mr Putin, but there are limits to what the international community and Russia can do.’’

For instance the fate of Christians in the Middle East isn’t simply a matter of religion; it is also integral to what kinds of societies will flourish as the region’s map fractures.

No matter what solution’s presents itself there will be a requirement for a buffer between Sunni and Shia.

Across the region, that conflict is now secondary to the shifting tectonic plates of the Sunni-Shia divide, which threatens terrible bloodshed. Everyone has seen the ISIS forced conversions, crucifixions and beheadings that is displacing millions.

Even if ISIS is defeated, the fate of religious minorities in Syria and Iraq remains bleak because Iraq is devolving into three regions — Sunnis, Shia and Kurds — as it is obvious that there will be a need for a fourth region for minorities. Iraq is a forced marriage between Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Christians, and it has failed with the resulting wasted lives lost.

The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

Our continuing failure to candidly depict the roots of the problems and conflicts in the contemporary Middle East has now being exposed by Mr Putin – POINTING A FINGER AT THE WEST FAILURE AND SECRETIVE TRADE DEALS.

His good news is complicated and indigestible as well as unsensational – throwing stones in a glass house is never a good idea.

The truth is that the Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is ready to explode with the right trigger, possibly the launching of Anglo-American and/or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in the Middle East could result in redrawn borders that are strategically advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.

We must think creatively about how to act on Mr Putin address to the United Nations.

What the media does not acknowledge or inform us about is the fact that almost all major conflicts afflicting the Middle East are the consequence of overlapping Anglo-American-Israeli agendas.

Many of the other problems affecting the contemporary Middle East are the result of the deliberate aggravation of pre-existing regional tensions.

Among the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy which U.S. and British foreign policy has actually been deliberately obstructing.

The United States has deliberately blocked or displaced genuine democratic movements in the Middle East from Iran in 1953 (where a U.S./U.K. sponsored coup was staged against the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh) to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the Arab Sheikdoms, and Jordan where the Anglo-American alliance supports military control, absolutists, and dictators in one form or another. The latest example of this is Palestine.

Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic.

Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.

Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West?

How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor. Modern industrial production would inevitably depress the living standards of the proletariat, they believed, but also, in the end, increase their power. Having created a form of slavery, capitalism would be overthrown by its slaves. The proletarian masses would become the dictators.

This did not happen.

But now the West see itself as prisoners of the system that they helped to create.

I am no alarmist, and no one should worry that I have become a late convert to Marxism. Marx’s prescriptions were mostly wrong, and his spirit was intolerant and coercive. He did not understand markets or respect political institutions, and he thought liberty was a sham.

However, Sectarian division, ethnic tension and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States and Britain in various parts of the globe including Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.

Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle East Western-style “Democracy” has been a requirement only for those Middle Eastern states which do not conform to Washington’s political demands.

Invariably, it constitutes a pretext for confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are examples of undemocratic states that the United States has no problems with because they are firmly alligned within the Anglo-American orbit or sphere.

Also we need to support Iran as a bulwark against Sunni extremism.

Additionally,

Turkey and Iran, the two most powerful states of the “Eurasian Balkans,” located on its southern tier, are “potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts [balkanization],” and that, “If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.

In the end it all comes down who is willing to receive body bags.

Rest assured that the striking images of body bags depict the physical residue of war and time. Yet even more horrific than the physical scars of the war is the sense of sorrow and loss, floating in their expressions like ghosts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can the United States trust itself not to start a nuclear war.

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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U.S. nuclear advantage is a major problem in the Club.

Why do I say this?

Because Nuclear weapons are still the most potent military tools on Earth, and they will remain central to geopolitical competition into the Future. There are far from Relics of the Cold War.

Great-power political competition is heating up once again, and as it does, nuclear weapons will once again take center stage.

The writing is already on the wall. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are modernizing or expanding their nuclear arsenals, and Iran is vigorously pursuing its own nuclear capability. As Yale University political scientist Paul Bracken notes, we are entering a “second nuclear age” in which “the whole complexion of global power politics is changing because of the reemergence of nuclear weapons as a vital element of statecraft and power politics.”

Competition between nuclear powers is like a game of chicken, and in a game of chicken, we should expect the smaller car to swerve first, not so these days.

Let’s look at the United States. The Inventor of Atom Bomb/ Nuclear Power.

There is little point in examining the History other than to remind ourselves that the opening for signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — occurred in 1968, at nearly the peak of the U.S. arsenal’s size. And, remember, 177 countries have never pursued nuclear weapons at any point, including when the United States possessed more than 30,000 warheads.

So I am going to concentrate on the present day.

Nuclear weapons have not been central to America’s national security for the past two decades because its primary foes — Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and al Qaeda — did not have them.

To day the number of countries believed to host U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons are Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

A report released in January by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) – The United States has a total inventory of 4,650 nuclear weapons, including nearly 2,000 actively deployed warheads. Russia has roughly the equivalent. In contrast, China possesses an estimated 300 nuclear weapons, or roughly 6 percent of the U.S. stockpile.

A recent estimated put the cost of the modernization plan for the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, including operating costs, life extension programs for nuclear weapons and procurement of new delivery systems to replace aging elements of the strategic triad is estimated to be ( over the next three decades at roughly $900 billion a decade)  $1.1 trillion.

This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy.

Remember The Nobel committee, citing his disarmament efforts, announced it would award Mr. Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. ( 13/DEC/2009)

The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad, details the administration’s plans to spend at least $100 billion for 100 new long-range strategic manned bombers, and a further $30-40 billion to build the nuclear bombs and cruise missiles to arm them.

These weapons are irrelevant to the most urgent security challenges the United States and its allies face in the 21st century, including cyber threats, weak and failing states, global pandemics such as Ebola, climate change, terrorism and more.

On the other hand it could be said that the number and role of nuclear weapons  in U.S. security although reduced still provide important security benefits to the United States and its allies. The prospects for moving to lower levels than those in New START now appear limited.

The big question is:  Can the United States trust itself not to start a nuclear war, it doesn’t want to make a Russian or Chinese leader feel the need to “use ‘em or lose ‘em.”

According to a Department of Defense report, there have been at least 32 “accidents involving nuclear weapons.”  And the report only counts US accidents which occurred before 1980.

These “nuclear accidents” –which the report defines as  “unexpected event[s] involving nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons components”–  have occurred over the Pacific Ocean (twice), over the Atlantic Ocean (twice), and over the Mediterranean Sea;  they’ve happened on the territory of their allies in Spain, Greenland, England, Morocco, an another undetermined overseas base;

Here are a few declassified accounts that occurred between 1950 and 1968 of aircraft-related incidents in which nuclear weapons were lost, accidentally dropped, jettisoned for safety reasons or on board planes that crashed.

In 1957 a nuclear bomb fell through the bomb bay doors of a B-36 bomber near Kirkland Air Force Base, New Mexico.  The bomb fell 1,700 feet to the ground and its high explosives detonated, showering fragments as far as one mile from the impact point.

In 1958 a B-47 “accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon” which fell and detonated on a garden owned by the Gregg family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

In 1960 a 47-foot-long BOMARC air defense missile (which could be readied to launch within minutes) caught fire at McGuire Air Force Base near Trenton, New Jersey.  According to the New York Times, the missile “melted under an intense blaze fed by its 100-pound detonator of TNT… The atomic warhead apparently dropped into the molten mass that was left of the missile, which burned for forty-five minutes.”

Two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs that were accidentally released in 1961 from a U.S. Air Force B-52  broke up in midair over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Neither bomb detonated, but each had a yield of 3.8 megatons; the detonation of one would have been some 260 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.

Only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of these two 24 megaton device.

In 1966 a B-52 carrying four nuclear weapons crashed into a KC-135 aircraft over Palomares, Spain.  Two of the bombs did not explode and were eventually recovered after a search described as “the most expensive, intensive, harrowing and feverish underwater search for a man-made object in world history.” Two of the bombs’ high explosive material exploded on impact with the ground.  The explosion –though conventional– released substantial amounts of radioactive materials. 1400 tons of soil and vegetation were eventually removed and transported to the United States.

On September the 19th 1980 during a routine maintenance in a Titan silo an Air force repairman dropped a heavy wrench socket. The socket struck the missile causing a leaf from a pressurized fuel tank. Eight and a half hours later the vapors within the silo ignited and exploded, with the loss of one life which could have been thousands.

 

This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place.  It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an “accident.

And as If you are not already horrified the Warheads in the nation’s stockpile are an average of 27 years old.

After recent training failures, at least 82 missile launch officers are facing disciplinary action for cheating when examined on launching procedure.

Combine this with security missteps, leadership lapses, moral problems and stunning breakdowns in discipline it is no wonder that it prompted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to demand action to restore public confidence in the nuclear force.

The above Nuclear plant ( The Kansas City Plant) was built-in World War II to produce aircraft engines and went nuclear in 1949, making the mechanical and electrical parts for warheads.  ( Its computer systems are so out of date they that here is hardly anyone left who knows how to operate them.)
 
So where does all of this leave us:

As Iran’s leaders decide whether to push forward with, or put limits on, their nuclear program the exact number of nuclear weapons in global arsenals is not known.

With little exception, each of the nine countries with nuclear weapons guards these numbers as closely held national secrets. What is known, however, is that more than a decade and a half after the Cold War ended, the world’s combined stockpile of nuclear warheads remain at unacceptably high levels estimated to be 16,000.

The American nuclear umbrella over nations in Asia and the Middle East, which has instilled a sense of military security and kept many from building their own arsenals is now useless.

Few people differentiate between having 10 million dead, 50 million dead, or 100 million dead. It all seems too horrible. However, it does not take much imagination to see that there is a difference.

This video below sum up the danger of the USA Nuclear Weapons.

Not all nuclear weapons are omnipotent. Let’s look at North Korea

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

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One Warhead gives birth to others.

The subject of these series of post is to EXAM THE PRESENT DAY NEED FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

In doing so I have decided to exam the eight countries that make up the so-called Nuclear Club ( Sovereign states that have successfully detonated a Nuclear Weapon.)  It is not my purpose here to condone or oppose but to show what I think is the reasons why they are maintaining a nuclear deterrent that can never be used without causing self-destruction. The posts give a brief outline on each country reasons for doing so.

Let’s look at North Korea: Officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

North Korea and Finland are separated by one country.

North Korea has long been vilified and condemned by the Western press as bellicose, provocative and unpredictable, it’s difficult to cut through the fog of vituperation that obscures any kind of dispassionate understanding of the country to grasp that the DPRK represents something praiseworthy.

The North represents the traditions of struggle against foreign domination, both political and economic, while the South represents the tradition of submission to and collaboration with a foreign hegemony. Significantly, there are no foreign troops stationed in North Korea, but are in South Korea.

No nation in the world has been exposed to the nuclear threat so directly and for so long as the Koreans both North and South.

North Korea’s regime is often casually dismissed as “crazy.” Indeed, the existence of a hermetically sealed state — a combination of communism and national fascism — so closed-off to the outside world that the Internet does not exist except for a privileged few, strikes outside observers as beyond belief.

Many aspects of North Korean totalitarianism, especially the personality cult surrounding its leader, Kim Jong Un, and trade and agricultural policies that cause widespread shortages, may border on the insane. But in one key aspect, in particular, there is nothing insane about its nuclear weapons program. North Korea’s nuclear program makes perfect sense it would be  crazy to give up its nuclear capability.

Why?

The reason is simple.

No country exploits the political utility of nuclear weapons as vigorously as the United States does.

In pursuing its foreign policy goals, Washington threatened other countries with nuclear attack on 25 separate occasions between 1970 and 2010, and 14 occasions between 1990 and 2010. On six of these occasions, the United States threatened the DPRK.  (The United States’ record of issuing threats of nuclear attack against other countries over this period is: Iraq, 7; China, 4; the USSR, 4; Libya, 2; Iran, 1; Syria.  Significantly, all these countries, like the DPRK, were under communist or economically nationalist governance when the threats were made.)

Since early in the 1950s, the US has turned South Korea into the biggest nuclear arsenal in the Far East, gravely threatening the DPRK through ceaseless manoeuvres for a nuclear war.  It has worked hard to deprive the DPRK of its sovereignty and its right to exist and develop….thereby doing tremendous damage to its socialist economic construction and the improvement of the standard of people’s living.”

The breadth and depth of US economic warfare against North Korea can be summed up in two sentences:

• North Korea is “the most sanctioned nation in the world” — George W. Bush.

• ”There are few sanctions left to apply.” – The New York Times.

You could ask why is it incumbent on North Korea alone to disarm? Why not the United States too?

From a North Korean point of view its nuclear arsenal does not increase the chances of war—it reduces the likelihood that the United States and its South Korean marionette will attempt to bring down the communist government in Pyongyang by force.

This is to be welcomed by anyone who opposes imperialist military interventions and supports the right of people to organize its affairs free from foreign domination; and has an interest in the survival of one of the few top-to-bottom, actually existing, alternatives to the global capitalist system of oppression, exploitation, and foreign domination.

If territories aren’t voluntarily opened to capital penetration through trade and investment agreements, their doors are battered down by the Pentagon, the enforcer of last resort of a world economic order supporting, as its first commitment, the profit-making interests of the US ruling class.

Its attitude can be summed up one word: Libya.

American behavior toward Libya over the past decade may have convinced North Korea’s ruling elite never to negotiate away its nukes. And that is true no matter what the Iranians may do.

In 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II, Korea was divided into two occupied zones, with the north occupied by the Soviet Union and the south by the United States. The two countries remain officially at war because a formal peace treaty was never signed. Both states were accepted into the United Nations in 1991. The tradition of struggle against oppression and foreign domination, rooted in the experience of a majority of Koreans dating back to the end of WWII and the period of Japanese colonial rule.

Korea as a divided half-state is a relatively recent invention.

For the North Korean elite, the goal isn’t necessarily a North Korea kept alive through Western investment — it is a unified Korea under the North’s leadership. But opening up the regime would likely lead to the reverse: the collapse of the North’s elite and the absorption by the South.

North Korea conducted its first underground test of a nuclear weapon in 2006.

It has fewer than 10 functional nuclear devices — compared to the more than 7,650 warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

North Korea’s main priority is its military, which it spends an inordinate amount of money on, disproportionate to its GDP.

A February 21, 2013 comment by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (“Nuclear test part of DPRK’s substantial countermeasures to defend its sovereignty”) noted that, “The tragic consequences in those countries which abandoned halfway their nuclear programs, yielding to the high-handed practices and pressure of the U.S. in recent years, clearly prove that the DPRK was very far-sighted and just when it made the option. They also teach the truth that the U.S. nuclear blackmail should be countered with substantial countermeasures, not with compromise or retreat.”

It’s also possible that much of Pyongyang’s rhetoric is meaningless, or a blustery show meant for domestic consumption. Considering, however, that just yesterday a top North Korean military official threatened a nuclear strike on the White House, it might be a bit too early to be so complacent, especially with U.S. foreign policy in so many difficult binds across the globe.

For Kim Jong Un is clear: that while his safety with nuclear weapons is clearly uncertain, he would be even less safe if he gave them up. The best chance that Koreans in the north have for preserving their sovereignty is to build nuclear weapons to deter an US military conquest.

Whether Pyongyang has or doesn’t have nuclear weapons makes little difference to US national security. Since the threat to the United States of a nuclear-armed North Korea is about the same as a disarmed North Korea—approximately zero.

Since a North Korean first-strike would be suicidal (and this is not lost on the North Korean leadership), North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability is a defensive threat alone. U.S. strategy is outdated and overstates the risk from North Korea. The United States is not threatened by North Korea.

However North Korea remains the only nation with which China maintains a defense treaty which requires assistance if Pyongyang comes under “armed attack from any state.

It is the world’s most militarized society, with a total of 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel. Its active duty army of 1.21 million is the 4th largest in the world, after China, the U.S., and India. It is a nuclear-weapons state and has an active space program. As a result of its isolation, it is sometimes known as the “hermit kingdom”. All images of the country depict the whole peninsula, what today is North and South Korea combined. In their view, they are proud Koreans, living in Korea, the south half of which is unfortunately currently occupied by the Imperialist Americans.

It’s not cool to call North Korea “North Korea.” The correct term is, “Korea.”

A report from the United Nations details human rights atrocities taking place in North Korea. Though the North Korean government denies it, nearly 200,000 political prisoners are reportedly held in camps against their will and without trial.

2013-11-11-170387569.jpg

These days we all like to think that gone are the days when some deranged idiot might presses the button.

Welcome to life as we know it.

The disarming of countries that deny the US ruling class access to markets, natural resources, and investment opportunities, in order to use these for their own development, doesn’t reduce the risk of wars of conquest—it makes them all the more certain.

The elimination of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq didn’t reduce the chances of US military intervention in that country—it increased them.  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s voluntary elimination of his WMD didn’t prevent a NATO assault on Libya—it cleared the way for it.

Four years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960), and China (1964) followed.

Nuclear weapons also have political utility for countries menaced by nuclear and other military threats. They raise the stakes for countries seeking to use their militaries for conquest, and therefore reduce the chances of military intervention.

There is little doubt that the US military intervention in Iraq and NATO intervention in Libya would not have been carried out had the targets not disarmed and cleared the way for outside forces to intervene with impunity.

These radical views locates the cause of wars of conquest since the rise of capitalism in the drive for profits. This compulsion chases the goods, services and capital of corporate-dominated societies over the face of the globe to settle everywhere, nestle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere, irrespective of the wishes, interests, development needs and welfare of the natives.

Where does leave us on our Journey of the so-called Nuclear Club?

The two superpowers – China and the United States – that could put pressure on North Korea have done virtually nothing to bring about a change.

The Cold War–style stand-off, peaceful as it has largely been, cannot last indefinitely. Meanwhile, the inhuman suffering of North Koreans continues.

Nuclear weapons constitute an indelible part of the legacy of both Kims.   There is no evidence that there are forces within the country prepared to envision a future without a nuclear identity. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were determined to build and sustain, no matter what the costs and consequences. North Korea’s history is the history of the Kim dynasty.

If the United States has the ability to take a more calculated and dispassionate look at North Korea’s future. A soft landing involving a gradual liberalization of the North Korean economy along with the creation of some personal freedoms until it peacefully reunifies with the South is

It is the least visited country in the world, but it can’t remain hidden in an increasingly interconnected world. Google Earth spotted a Mosque.

I may have glosses over some important historical details, some disturbing history but I am sure you get the gist.

They are the constant, painful reminders of North Korea’s profound alienation from the international system.  All in the name of a regime that with formidable nuclear arsenals and the means of delivering warheads that remains the Genie in the Nuclear Club.

Nuclear weapons can be used to extort political concessions from non-nuclear-armed states through terror and intimidation, but the removal of World Inequalities can get rid of the need to have them in the first place.

 

 

THE COST: HERE A FEW MIND BLOWING VALUE FOR MONEY DETAILS THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK.

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

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To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion.

Get a globe and spin it. Jab your finger down at random and, without doubt, you will have located a spot entangled in war, revolution, rebellion, terrorism, famine, plague, drought, dictatorship, poverty and/or illiteracy.

If I told you the year was 1810, you wouldn’t be surprised. Tragically if I told you the year was 2014, you wouldn’t be surprised, either.

So are we getting value for money.  CAN WE AFFORD IT!  HAVE A LOOK:

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:

The cost of the International Space Station, including development, assembly and running costs over 10 years, comes to €100 billion.

The good news is that it comes cheaper than you might think.

That €100 billion figure is shared over a period of almost 30 years between all participants: the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 10 of the 20 European nations who are part of ESA.

The European share, at around €8 billion spread over the whole program, amounts to just one Euro spent by every European every year: less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities. NOT BAD

CERN:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that’s consistent with that of the Higgs boson.

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson.

CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN – about $286 million annually.

Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year.

The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.

 

TRIDENT:

The combined cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as £130bn,

MOON LANDING:

The Apollo moon landings are considered the greatest achievement in human history and the beginning of humanity’s expansion into the universe. At its height over 400,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in the project. But what was the cost?

Apollo Spacecraft – $5.3 Billion
Saturn Rockets – $8.7 Billion
Other Costs – $11.4 Billion
The Total Estimated Cost in 1969 Dollars is $25.4 Billion and $145 Billion in 2007 Dollars.

Human costs: The lives of 3 astronauts: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The US spent $20 to $25 billion US (in 1969 dollars) to fund all of the Apollo program activities.

IRAQ WAR:

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest. 

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it.

The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said.

Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud.

IRAQ AFGHANISTAN WARS COMBINED:

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach as high as $6 trillion dollars – or $75,000 for every household in America – a new study from Harvard University has found.

Europe’s Rosetta comet-chaser satellite. 

On Jan. 20 awakened itself on schedule after a 31-month hibernation and began preparations for a spring rendezvous with a comet and a fall attempt to attach a probe to it. Rosetta cost ESA and its participating member states some 1.3 billion euros ($1.75 billion), a figure that includes the Airbus Defence and Space-built satellite, the Philae lander, launch aboard a European Ariane rocket and its planned operations.

THE COST OF 9/11.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. The House and Senate are now considering an additional request for $33 billion in supplemental funding for the remainder of FY2010, and the Administration has also requested $159 billion to cover costs of overseas operations in FY2011.

In the face of these substantial and growing sums, a recurring question has been how the mounting costs of the nation’s current wars compare to the costs of earlier conflicts.

 

HERE IS THE COST TO USA IN getting involved in recent Wars. (Not the two world wars and all of its own wars since it founders.) 

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

 

COST OF USA SUPPORT OF ISRAEL 

All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and While it is commonly reported that Israel officially receives some $3 billion every year in the form of economic aid from the U.S. government, this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are many billions of dollars more in hidden costs and economic losses lurking beneath the surface.

A recently published economic analysis has concluded that U.S. support for the state of Israel has cost American taxpayers nearly $3 trillion ($3 million millions) in 2002 dollars.

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $121 billion (adjusting for inflation, $233.7 billion as of March 2013), and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3.1 billion per year this amounted to $8.5 million every single day.

MIND BOGGLING TO SAY THE LEAST.
This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world. The military budget in the USA is about $680 billion per year.

THE UN:

VALUE FOR MONEY The UN hasn’t done enough good, and has caused enough damage for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of its future.

A full legal argument against the UN. would make a formidable document.

A snapshot of its failures will more than suffice.

Going back to its own charter, we see that the mission of the UN is split between peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts.

The cost of running the United Nations is substantial. According to its own data, “The UN system spends some $15 billion a year, taking into account the United Nations, UN peacekeeping operations, the programmes and funds, and the specialized agencies, but excluding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Around half of this amount comes from voluntary contributions from Member States, the rest from mandatory assessments on those States.

That comes out to a little more than $2 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Cost of running THE UK Parliament:

Houses of Parliament.

The cost of running the Houses of Parliament fell by more than £30m last year to just under £500m. The cost of the House of Commons increased by more than £12m,

MPs’ wages and pensions were the biggest single outgoing which came to £157.2m this figures include wages for members and staff, building expenses, security and other administration.

The amount spent on MPs’ salaries and pensions rose by almost £6m.

The overall expense for taxpayers in 2008/9 came to £498.4m, down from £531.8m the previous year.

However the good news is that the cost of running the House of Lords was reduced by £46m.

The reason for this was that the amount spent on what is listed as “other administration costs” went down from £89.8m to £39.8m. However, the total cost of keeping the Commons going increased from £379.2m to £391.8m.
In 2008/9 the cost of running the Lords fell from £152.5m to £106.5m. A Lords spokesman said that the 2007/8 accounts included a final payment of £26m towards the purchase of 1 Millbank, a new addition to the Parliamentary estate.

They also included a £23m loss, following a revaluation of the entire Parliamentary estate, a process which is carried out every five years.

VALUE FOR MONEY? YOU TELL ME.

BELOW A FEW PICTURES TO REMIND YOU OF WHO YOU WALK BYE EVERY DAY.

 

This post I feel needs a personal statement.

“ As much as I appreciate that all of the above keep people off the street and that the landing on a moon or meteorite with or without the Higgs Boson advances mankind knowledge and brings benefits of all sort yet to be seen.

The whole lot seems to me to be useless until we put our own house in order.”

WITH 80% OF HUMANITY LIVING ON LESS THAN $10 DOLLARS A DAY AND 22,000 CHILD DEATHS EACH AND EVERY DAY SURELY IT IS TIME TO COP ON.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.