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Warfare & Defence
Local articles
News from around the world
- 92 nations sign cluster-bomb ban; US, Israel, Russia don't - An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact â€" which the United States and Russia have refused to support â€" but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib. The teen, who uses a wheelchair, met with his country's ambassador to Norway, Jawed Ludin, at a two-day signing conference in Oslo.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle [4th Dec 2008]
- U.S. OKs sale of bunker busters to Israel - The Bush administration has authorized the sale of as many as 100 large bunker-buster bombs to Israel. One expert said the move should serve as a warning to Iranians with nuclear ambitions.
Source: Associated Press [15th Sep 2008]
- DARPA Engaged in Potential Space Weapons Development - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is engaged in research related to space-based weapons development according to its fiscal year 2009 (FY 09) budget justification documents. CDI Senior Analyst Victoria Samson outlines these potential weapons programs in her analysis, "DARPA's Potential Space Weapons Programs."
Source: Center for Defense Information [5th Aug 2008]
- Designs for compact bomb found - An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also acquired blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon.That is the finding of a former top United Nations arms inspector whose report suggests the plans could have been secretly shared with any number of countries or rogue groups.Drawings recovered in 2006 from computers owned by Swiss businessmen included hundreds of pages of essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald [15th Jun 2008]
- Spy Satellite's Downing Shows a New U.S. Weapon Capability - The unprecedented downing of an errant spy satellite by a Navy missile makes it clear that the Pentagon has a new weapon in its arsenal -- an anti-satellite missile adapted from the nation's missile defense program.
Source: Washington Post [22nd Feb 2008]
- 'US officials helped Pak steal N-weapons secret' - Senior US officials helped Pakistan steal atomic weapons secrets through Turkish agents in exchange for money and other benefits, with ISI passing on the sensitive information to the now disgraced nuclear scientist A Q Khan, a media report claimed in London said.
Source: Rediff - India Abroad [6th Feb 2008]
- Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told - The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.
Source: The Guardian [22nd Jan 2008]
- Armed forces 'are running out of money' - The former head of the Army has warned that the Forces are facing a cash crisis with it becoming unlikely that the military will be able to pay for future operations. Gen Sir Mike Jackson said recent spending commitments by the Chancellor Alistair Darling were likely to prove insufficient to pay for future operations.
Source: The Telegraph [21st Nov 2007]
- US military guzzling 340,000 barrels of oil daily - The skyrocketing price of oil isn't just a burden for American drivers at the gas pump -- it's also a potentially crippling problem for the US military, the nation's number one energy consumer.
Source: The raw story [16th Nov 2007]
- Cashing In on Terror - Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
Source: Truth Dig [1st Nov 2007]
- Military action won't work in Afghanistan or other war zones, says UK armed forces chief - Political rather than military strategies are the only solutions to the turmoil in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries, the head of Britain's armed forces has said.
Source: The Scotsman [27th Oct 2007]
 Navy to mask Coronado's swastika-shaped barracks - The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air. The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees.
Source: LA Times [3rd Oct 2007]
- Russia's aggressive moves spark fears of a new Cold War - Lumbering Soviet-era bombers flying far outside Russian airspace. Harsh recriminations of U.S. expansionism. The most vigorous military modernization since the fall of communism more than 15 years ago. With his country awash in oil-generated prosperity, President Vladimir Putin is flexing Russia's muscles in a series of unsettling reminders of the Cold War that raise the question: Just what is the former KGB spy and - by extension, Russia - up to?
Source: McClatchy News [24th Sep 2007]
- The Return of the Doomsday Machine? - "The nuclear doomsday machine." It's a Cold War term that has long seemed obsolete. And even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create?the physics and mechanics of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard?but never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.
Source: Slate [15th Sep 2007]
- Russia shows off World's mother of all bombs - Russia's army on Tuesday unveiled a new seven-tonne explosive device on national television, touting the anti-terrorism bomb as four times more powerful than the strongest US explosives.
Source: Space War/AFP [12th Sep 2007]
- UK jets 'chase Russian bombers' - The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Source: BBC News 6th Sep 2007
- Northrop Grumman Begins Work To Equip B-2 Bomber With Massive Penetrator Weapon - The U.S. Air Force's B-2 stealth bomber would be able to attack and destroy an expanded set of hardened, deeply buried military targets using a new 30,000 pound-class penetrator weapon that Northrop Grumman has begun integrating on the aircraft.
Source: Prime Newswire (19th Jul 2007)
- Boeing-Developed Massive Ordnance Penetrator Successfully Completes Static Lethality Test - The Boeing-developed Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) successfully completed a static tunnel lethality test March 14 at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's (DTRA) weapons tunnel complex at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
Source: Boeing (26th Mar 2007)
Links to third-party websites
- Military Industry Today - A news service for military industry professionals.
- Global Hawk - Military fact sheet on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle.
- Burnet's Solution: The plan to poison SE Asia - World-famous microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Nobel prize winner revered as Australia's greatest medical research scientist, secretly urged the government to develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other 'overpopulated' countries of South-East Asia.
- Australian Press Council - Adjudication 1172 referring to a complaint against The Sunday Age by Ian Burnet.
A keyring-sized, remote controlled aerial vehicle designed by Lockheed Martin Corporation, intended to collect and transmit data with military and homeland security uses. Resembling the seed of a silver maple tree, the single-winged device would pack a tiny two-stage rocket thruster along with telemetry, communications, navigation, imaging sensors and a power source into a device less than 7.5cm in size and weighing less than 10g. First publicly announced during July 2006.
- NAV Program - DARPA's own details on the NAV Program.
- NSTI news - News release from the Nano Science and Technology Institute.
- EETimes - Lockheed Martin to make seed-sized spy plane.
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