Global Zero
Popular Mechanics describes the marketing of treachery. Now why would there be buyers for treachery?
When Robert Hewson, of Jane’s Defence Weekly, saw the promotional video for a new missile system called Club-K, he must have known it was special. A Russian company called Morinformsistema-Agat is marketing a cruise missile that can hide inside and launch from inside a shipping container. The six-minute video depicts an invasion from a neighboring country, and the afflicted nation hiding the missile in a port setting, inside an innocuous grey shipping container. The container’s top flips open, the missile extends vertically and launches. In the video (embedded below), music blares—what sounds like the soundtrack to the Disney movie Pirates of the Caribbean—as the Club-K’s four missiles careen into the sky. The missiles take separate paths, aimed at warships, a concentration of tanks and an airfield.
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America too has new and powerful weapons. But unlike the Club-Ks, it wants the cards out in the open. In fact, according to the New York Times, the US wants to keep other great powers in the loop so that nobody gets the idea that its powerful new weapons are aimed at them. Describing a weapons system that could strike anywhere in the world within a very short time and potentially decapitate any nation, the NYT said:
The planning for Prompt Global Strike is being headed by Gen. Kevin P. Chilton of the Air Force, the top officer of the military’s Strategic Command and the man in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. In the Obama era — where every administration discussion of nuclear weapons takes note of Mr. Obama’s commitment to moving toward “Global Zero,” the elimination of the nuclear arsenal — the new part of General Chilton’s job is to talk about conventional alternatives. …
But the key to filling that gap is to make sure that Russia and China, among other nuclear powers, understand that the missile launching they see on their radar screens does not signal the start of a nuclear attack, officials said.
Under the administration’s new concept, Russia or other nations would regularly inspect the Prompt Global Strike silos to assure themselves that the weapons were nonnuclear. And they would be placed in locations far from the strategic nuclear force.
“Who knows if we would ever deploy it?” Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on unconventional weapons, said at a conference in Washington on Wednesday. But he noted that Russia was already so focused on the possibility that it insisted that any conventional weapon mounted on a missile that could reach it counted against the new limit on the American arsenal in the treaty.
Warfare — and preventing warfare — has always had a political dimension. Signaling remains an important part of keeping the peace. America doesn’t want the Russians to get the wrong idea if its radars detect something flashing through the neighborhood. But other powers long for the darkness. They gain from ambiguity, not clarity. The deployment of Scuds in Lebanon by Syria, the search for nuclear weapons by Iran are signals in the same way that the US determination to restrain itself is also a signal. But what exactly they mean is the central problem in American foreign policy.
The basic facts are well known, but the semantics — what it means — is critically dependent on the attitudes of the parties. Will Iran and North Korea see American restraint as an offer of peace or a sign of weakness. Are the actions of Syria, North Korea and Iran mere cries for help and pleas for recognition? Are Hezbollah and al-Qaeda expressions of legitimate grievance? Or do they represent a genuinely implacable strain of aggression and hostility. The decipherment of the message depends as much on the thinking of the listener as the intent of the speaker. It determines whether and how much to reach out, and whether or how much to suspect.
Treachery has been around since the days of Judas, and probably long before. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Beware, said Bela Lugosi, beware.
But some people hear nothing but their own thoughts. And they can’t imagine why anyone should think differently. Recently James Richard Sauder broke into Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota festooned with crystals. His mission in attempting to enter the missile base was to spread World Peace. “We need cooperative, mutually beneficial economic arrangements, and harmonious relations between peoples and nations on this planet. As a symbol in that regard, I have left a skein of multi-colored Red Heart yarn at the missile silo to signify that here the thread of a new, world-wide narrative begins. It is a new global narrative with heart,” he wrote. It was a sentiment that would have made many a statesman worthy of a Nobel Prize. In this case, it bought him a trip downtown. But his intentions were pure something. And to make sure of it, he brought crystals in the hope of invoking the turkey, “the natural spirit of this continent”.
“Many other large crystals adorn my headdress – from Arkansas, New York, Tibet and Brazil. The crystals represent the living Earth. The feathers in my headdress are from the Rio Grande species of the North American wild turkey. Benjamin Franklin felt that the American wild turkey should be the national bird. I agree! For me the wild turkey exemplifies the natural spirit of this continent.”
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? Who knows what lurks in the heart of shipping containers? Obama knows. Or maybe not.
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“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? Who knows what lurks in the heart of shipping containers? Obama knows. Or maybe not.”
Hope is not a basis for decision. Actions speak louder than words. O wants the world to follow his paradigm (related to the skein of yarn). It won’t.
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I thought for a while that one of the reasons for the Interstate Highway system was to form a Known Route for container-based ICBM’s. All of the intersections would be Known Points and would provide the navigation systems with start points for a retaliatory strike. All overcome by GPS now but was an intriguing thought if you were 18 and “worrying about the bomb”
With regards t
With regards to and the previous post, both excellent, the issue is not the weaponry, but the hand the aims or refuses to aim the weapon. Right now the situation is eerily similar to pre-1941, the period of the ‘phony war’, we can see that war is coming, but with the current Refuser In Chief and his crew of blind-deaf-and-dumb, we are incapable of defending ourselves let alone any allies we may still possess.
(please remove my previous comment – editor not working)
…Russia was already so focused on the possibility that it insisted that any conventional weapon mounted on a missile that could reach it counted against the new limit on the American arsenal in the treaty.
Well, of course. The Russians *know* treachery, and so know not to trust us.
The problem is that our current leader seems to be all about trust, which is strangely ironic inasmuch as we the people are increasingly distrustful of his intentions. I guess that puts us on the same page as the Russians.
Problem is, we don’t trust the Russians either. Given present realities, that’s as it should be.
I respectfully submit the bigger problem is our leader doesn’t seem to know trust is earned, not given as a birthright. Not that we can’t all just get along and pretend otherwise.
EVERYONE knows we would never launch a first strike, so…when we do, think of the extra time we have bought.
If our government lies to us (and governments have to lie), why do you believe they tell every one else the truth?
Okay. And, what happens when there’s a “stike back?” We went through this with nukes. There were enough nukes to obliterate the world. And, the ruskie’s, fearing payback, didn’t use them.
As to the “port” lidded potty missile, which could happen; would still take an expensive ship. Captain. And, crew. Who’d want money put into their swiss bank accounts.
The real deal? We may be seeing Iran trying to become Persia, again? After so many years winning American cards; and angering most of her population; you just never what could happen. By a smarter team. Who’d have Persians on their side, for once.
Which is, by the way, how the Iranians played their cards! They never put their own people IN. Just money. And, a few Revolutionary Guards. Who helped shi’a (locals), take over from the diseased sunni crap. Which, unfortunately, has about 100,000 degenerates, now. Who spend trillions bribing the UN. America’s top layer of politicians. And, Tony Blair.
A staggering amount.
While there’s enough disgust, now, with the bamster, that IF there was an attack, we’d have to attack the pentagon just to get rid of the CRAZY MONKEYS!
The beginning music, for the peace-loving Red country, is from “Born Free” — an old movie about some African lions. Somehow, it will never seem the same again.
The bit of kit that did not seem to fit in the shipping container was the satellite monitoring those nasty Blue guys, and feeding targeting information to the shipping containers with their defensive missiles.
On the other hand, if one wanted to use the shipping container as an Offensive weapon, the satellite would be quite superfluous. That would cut the total system cost quite nicely.
On more weighty matters, Russian capabilities in computer graphics are nothing short of amazing. All this for a little advert. Imagine how good Cameron’s Avatar would have looked if the Russians had been doing the computer graphics instead of the Kiwis. Of course, the Russians would never have worked with such an extreme left-winger.
We studied conventionally armed Minuteman missiles back in the 90’s. Launching from existing ICBM bases presents problems, not only including alarming the people who watch them but also dropping the first stages (and 2nd and 3rd ones in the case of a launch failure) in places in the USA that would annoy people.
Inspection of the launch sites to ensure the non-nuclear nature of the missiles would indeed have been a feature, but START requires that ballistic missiles be stored no closer than 100 km from space launch bases such as the Cape and Vandenberg, so we found a suitable place to park them. The launch rate would not be very high in terms of missiles per salvo but the ground systems would be designed for reload in a matter of hours. The newest treaty revises some restrictions relative to where you get to launch missiels from, but I don’t know if the 100km restriction is still there.
I am afraid that it makes a lot more sense to do this mission from a submarine, but that would take at least one of the USN’s FBM units off line in terms of the nuclear mission and I doubt that would be popular.
The video is fascinating on so many levels. Red vs. Blue (Red is good, right?), the contrast in music. The terrain, infrastructure, even the sky is different for each country. But–and I throw this out as feeble confirmation of Wretchard’s thesis that the decipherment of the message depends on the listener–the country that attacks has not, technically, yet been assaulted. Which to my thinking, according to the moral world here set up by the Russians, means the Israelis were right in ’67 to “launch” the fight when they did (and would have been justified using this system.)
Of course, that was then and this is now.
Big Red vs Great Blue was, fifty-years ago the color scheme universally used within Pentagon war-gaming.
Big Red ALWAYS was the first strike player… and had a vast land army with a naval side-kick.
Great Blue ALWAYS the responding power — for some reason always constrained by the need to get her forces across a vast ocean to help allies.
The mish-mash that the video creates is hence of note.
Whom ever worked the graphics has at hand very accurate portrayals of American equipment. Per the above video, America must be engaged in a civil war using Russian missiles since both Red and Blue have only American trains, trucks, tanks, planes and ships.
That ‘peaceful’ Big Red shoots first at every manner of national asset with a Pearl Harbor/Barbarosa snap assault without the writers even blinking an eye… very revealing.
After looking at the hypothetical map of Big Red: Poland just leaped into my imagination.
Lucky for the Club-K missile people that they ripped off their music from the story of Elsa the Lioness. That film was made by what is now a unit of Columbia. If they had tried to do that to the Disney organization they would be in real trouble.
The missile in a container seems like a dubious asset for a nation threatened by an aggressive neighbor to turn to. If conventionally armed it would be of little use against a sizable invading army. For countering a seaborne assault mines delivered by small merchants or small combatants would be more cost effective. Against a sophisticated foe a system dependent on a satellite link could prove vulnerable. That is a potential weakness the US also needs to consider.
Many years ago Mad Magazine, the most serious intellectual journal around in its heyday, had a parody of Kipling’s “If” that included something about “If you can hit a truck driver with your jalopy and convince him that he indeed was at fault … Then you are a man my son” accompanied by some befuddled neanderthal schmoo staring at a guy waving a pointer at a portable slide screen, this was before the computer age, covered with statistical formulas. Obama not only views the American public as a collection of rubes ripe for the plucking, an opinion that based on his success until recently he had some reason to believe and which the Iranians and many others share, but he may even think that practiced thugs like the leaders of Iran and Russia can also be easily duped.
The Chicago model of politics practiced by the Daleys and its offspring of Community Organizer shakedowns as pioneered by Jesse Jackson and Saul Alinksy and then polished by Obama depend on a productive and benign host willing to tolerate and buy off the ethnic interests. The Daleys were always very careful not to threaten the Golden Goose. Old fashioned Daley style machine politics could view itself as an essentially benign, if less than optimally efficient, part of the city’s social and economic fabric. Services were delivered, the peace was generally kept, and some sense of potential economic progress was offered to supporters seeking upward mobility. The Obama model is a failure domestically because in its unconstrained success it threatens to kill its host while achieving none of the goals at least sought by the old Democratic machine in return for preserving the wealth generating elements of society.
On an international level the Obama model has proven unable to pass the weak and uncritical inspection of the Europeans and the International Olympic Committee. That is a low standard he fails to meet since the Europeans are hoping that the Russians intend to preserve them as cash cows subject to occasional bluster and bullying, the same way the Daleys preserved the financiers and industrialists of Chicagoland. The Russians, Chinese and other serious players of power politics will look at Obama’s handful of super conventional missiles the way a school bully looks at the geeky kid demonstrating all his ninja movie kung-fu moves. They will be tempted to reach out and pound him.
If it’s of any concern, there must be something buggy about the Video since I had to re-boot my machine…
It went non-responsive shortly after viewing the little devil.
I’d have to say that Wild Turkey (bourbon) is indeed the spirit of the North American continent.
Who knew the crystal-fondlers had good taste in liquor?
For many years
‘Mid cheers and jeers
We practiced full containment
Of every threat
The Soviet
Advanced for its attainment
And now I see
That for a fee
Come missiles and a trainer
So now we must
Instead of trust
Examine each container
Wonderfully entertaining.
Yeah, this is Russian sales material. The Blue Country equipment was all US-Issue:
F/A 18 Hornet
C-5 Galaxy
M-1 Abrams
Strykers
LPD-17 San Antonio-class Gators.
Elsa would rip their faces off if she were still alive and saw this.
And now…
She’s gone…
Video must have gone anti-viral…
SVO…
You go…
You devils.
What are the chances of this being used for an EMP attack as per “One Second After?” Is that “just fiction?” Or are we truly vulnerable? I haven’t kept up with the capabilities of our missile defense system.
All hail The Turkey? I may be out of the loop.
Gary Ogletree: All hail The Turkey? I may be out of the loop.
Da bird?
Blert: She’s gone…
May’ve been an issue of copyright violation rather than FSB/SVR influence.
Salt Lick: What are the chances of this being used for an EMP attack
Very localized. A nuke is still the best EMP device. But if you were after a localized EMP effect, there may be better ways than cruise missiles. And rather “quiet” in comparison.
Salt Lick,
The Club-K is a modified submarine-launched cruise missile, repackaged for containerized launch. The flight profile is not really what you want for EMP, it’s a low-observable, low-level flight with a terminal twist, in that the turbojet engine that propels it after launch drops away and a third-stage solid-fuel rocket ignites, boosting the warhead to supersonic (Mach 3 in some estimations) before slamming into the target with a combination of kinetic energy and whatever explosive package is onboard. In theory, a nuclear warhead could be used as well as the more common conventional weapons. It’s like a shorter-ranged Tomahawk, with the extra kick of a supersonic sprint at the end to make anti-missile targeting that much more difficult.
For EMP to work, you really want to be exoatmospheric when you detonate your nuclear weapon to get good coverage. The Club doesn’t seem like the trick for that, though it’s a nasty weapon in and of itself.
If you want something to worry about, the North Koreans and their Iranian clients are pretty clearly working with the Russian SS-N-6 sub-launched liquid-fueled missile from the 1960s. Right now, it seems they’re adapting components (PDF), but the SS-N-6 was designed, like all sub-launched missiles, to be containerized. Put the missile body in one container and a fueling system in a container beside it and you have a true EMP-capable weapon system capable of being concealed on a commercial ship.
The only effective “conventional” explosives would be nanothech-enhanced ones, which don’t yet exist, except in the modest form of using nanoaluminum powder as part of the explosive mix. Unless a conventional explosive can be made at least twice as energetic as the most powerful conventional explosives now extant, we’re better off using tactical nukes in terms of sheer effectiveness (but politically untenable). The combination of nano-enhanced explosives and next generation smart (brilliant) guidance could change the equation as far as having an effective alternative to mini-nukes. But again, these explosives would have to have at least double the kinetic explosive release as the best conventional ordnance available now.
Even now, fuel-air explosives like Blu-82 and MOAB could be enhanced by adding nanoaluminum and “super kerosenes” like Quadricyclane to the slurry mix in the bombs. They’d be half again as powerful as they are now.
So the closest container ship port to Washington DC is Baltimore? That’s probably well within range.
As to the possible decapitation of the current US government, why am I not excited at the threat?
“We need cooperative, mutually beneficial economic arrangements…”
Well, then, toss the corrupt out of government and let’s get back to free market capitalism!
(Although, somehow, I doubt that’s what he meant. Despite his words, his intent is almost certainly some sort of command economy.)
Only thing they forgot is the way container ports operate.
What happens if the launcher container is on the bottom of a stack of three or four containers when the button is pushed?
“Only thing they forgot is the way container ports operate.
What happens if the launcher container is on the bottom of a stack of three or four containers when the button is pushed?”
When you ship a container you can pay extra to ensure that it is shipped only in the cargo bays belowdecks, thus reducing the risk of weather damage. Conversely, I bet it wouldn’t be hard to request that your container get shipped at the top of a stack, although the shipping line would undoubtably wonder why you’d ask to do such a thing.
This missile system seems to have little utility – IMHO terrorists will consider it an unnecessary expense. Much simpler to put a radicalized crew on board a ship that can be kamikaze’d in the harbor itself – either a container ship with NBC weapons or an LNG tanker. Thanks to reduced manning you only need a crew of about 20 men to operate a large cargo vessel – about the same number of hijackers on 9/11.
The video link points to a removed video.
Here is a working video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6dKCkv1fzs
What a cute video. It’s a cartoon of a potential launch system, not a demonstration of an actual missile system. For example the cute powered opening of the launch tube caps. Crazy, what a waste of weight and complexity, explosive lids are simpler and lighter.
The payload for each of these missiles is less than 300kg. The damage it shows at the target is totally out of proportion.
It’s a joke.
This system is useless for area defense.
The command and control problems overwhelm the cute ability to hide it in a container.
I’m a retired missile system scientist and this press release is laughable.