The State Department Violates OPSEC Concerning Nuclear Weapons
BY Herschel Smith
2 years, 6 months ago
News.
In a reversal of Trump administration policy, the State Department on Tuesday disclosed the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. It said this will aid global efforts to control the spread of such weapons.
The number of U.S. weapons, including those in active status as well as those in long-term storage, stood at 3,750 as of September 2020, the department said. That is down from 3,805 a year earlier and 3,785 in 2018.
As recently as 2003, the U.S. nuclear weapon total was slightly above 10,000. It peaked at 31,255 in 1967.
The last time the U.S. government released its stockpile number was in March 2018, when it said the total was 3,822 as of September 2017. That was early in the Trump administration, which subsequently kept updated numbers secret and denied a request by the Federation of American Scientists to declassified them.
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At the Conference on Disarmament last February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “President Biden has made it clear: the U.S. has a national security imperative and a moral responsibility to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.”
Find any infographic depiction of the number of deaths from conventional war through the centuries, and see where the graphic bottoms out to see the effects for peace brought about by nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the greatest contributor to world peace in human history.
But Biden and his ilk believe that the entire world is populated by folks with master’s degrees in social work from Ivy League schools who want nothing more than world peace, and are willing to divulge sensitive information about U.S. defense capabilities in order to join the club.
This follows a pattern of divulging OPSEC information, one of which I called out concerning Biden’s plan to share sensitive naval nuclear technology with Australia, whose commitment to protecting that technology will live no longer than the current administration.
It does no good to claim that it was all approve by Biden. The State Department should not have done that, and Biden should not have approved it.
So after watching the debacle in Afghanistan, and then telling the world the status of our most important defensive capabilities, if you were actively trying to destroy the defense capabilities of America, what would you do any different than the administration?
By the way, a well connected source with the Navy SEALs tells me that morale among SEALs has tanked. It couldn’t get much worse.
On October 6, 2021 at 10:51 pm, BRVTVS said:
George W. Bush took the MX out of service to save money, leaving the aging minuteman as our only land based deterrent. The rot runs deep.
On October 6, 2021 at 11:19 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
Re: “So after watching the debacle in Afghanistan, and then telling the world the status of our most important defensive capabilities, if you were actively trying to destroy the defense capabilities of America, what would you do any different than the administration?”
I was reminded again of this famous quote:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero 106-43 BC
On October 7, 2021 at 9:13 am, Fred said:
Perhaps nation state against nation state deaths by war have been reduced but death by government has skyrocketed. Correlation is not causation but it would seem that nukes in the hands of government has greatly consolidated their grip on power globally, or from country to country. What I’m saying is that it’s a stretch to say that nukes have resulted in peacefulness on earth. That’s simply not true. The manner of warfare may have changed but the killing in no way has been reduced, but grown by leaps and bounds.
The doctrine of MAD ( mutually assured destruction ) has only kept the post WWII order more or less. But the nonsense I was fed by gov that nukes save lives and preserve our way of life was just that, nonsensical government propaganda. Our way of life is over, ruined at the same hands of those who touted peace through strength.
And it doesn’t much matter what weapons America has or how many of what variety when tranny rights are the most important national security issue in the dod. America can’t field any manner of warfare effectively anyway because the soldier has been turned social experiment for the global orders amusement.
On October 7, 2021 at 5:03 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Herschel
Re: “Find any infographic depiction of the number of deaths from conventional war through the centuries, and see where the graphic bottoms out to see the effects for peace brought about by nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the greatest contributor to world peace in human history.”
You will hear the term bandied about by various national security types that such-and-such new idea or technology will result in a “revolution in military affairs,” but the invention of atomic weapons by the U.S. (with the aid of Great Britain and expatriate scientists from all over occupied and unoccupied Europe) in the early-mid 1940s was the genuine article. A watershed dividing warfare prior to that time before warfare after that time.
Once atomic weapons were possessed by both sides during the Cold War – and the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, Klaus Fuchs, et al. saw to that – large-scale conventional wars between major nation states were rendered obsolete or very nearly so. It became too-dangerous for members of the nuclear club to engage in large-scale conventional wars with one another because of the risk of escalation into a nuclear exchange.
The Korean War, 1950-1953, would seem to deviate from this pattern, but in the end it did not. The conflict was initially fought via proxies, i.e., North and South Korea, but once the U.S.-UN on one side and the Chi-Coms on the other, were fully-committed, a stalemate was reached. General and Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, exclaimed famously that “There is no substitute for victory,” whereupon he asked for the authority to strike over the Yalu River into China proper. President Truman denied him, and also relieved the legendary general of his command.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 showed the U.S. and USSR – and the world – the dangers of brinksmanship during the nuclear age. On that occasion, both nations backed away from the brink, but it would not be the last “close shave” of its kind during the nearly-half-century long Cold War.
War-by-proxy became the new model by which major nation-states waged conflict, as Vietnam again showed. Just as “limited” or “small” wars became common, alongside the anti-colonial and guerilla wars already seen in that era.
The major wars were then fought by mid-level powers, nations which were not yet members of the nuclear club: The various Arab-Israeli Wars, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Indo-Pakistani Wars, and so on.
@ Fred
Re: “What I’m saying is that it’s a stretch to say that nukes have resulted in peacefulness on earth. That’s simply not true. The manner of warfare may have changed but the killing in no way has been reduced, but grown by leaps and bounds.”
The trouble with the nuclear age, where nations like the U.S.A. are concerned, is that it has – in some cases – forced our foes and would-be adversaries to evolve new and heretofore unfamiliar forms of conflict with which to fight the leviathan. Methods which sit alongside older and more-established forms of warfare. Guerilla warfare; asymmetrical/unconventional warfare; insurgency/counter-insurgency; digital age conflict or “net-war;” 4GW; political violence and terrorism; unrestricted warfare, just to name a few.
The U.S. has mastered conventional warfare and atomic warfare to such a degree that no one wants to take us on in those particular arenas. Deterrence in action. That’s the good news. The bad news is that human conflict hasn’t disappeared, it has merely assumed a new form. And we – meaning the U.S. government – are not nearly so adept at these newer forms of conflict as is claimed by our military-national security establishment. Indeed, our won-loss record since 1945 is rather mediocre.
It is also a great problem insofar as the population at large is playing catch-up with these developments. Expecting wars to look like what grandpa did in WWII or Korea, they fail to apprehend that we are at war right now with various asymmetric enemies, and have been for quite some time. These enemies ranging from the Chi-Coms to the Muslims to fifth-columnists within our own countries.