US needs ‘offensive weapons in space’ for self-defense, Mattis claims

Dominance in space is vital for the American way of life and the Pentagon must be prepared for deployment and usage of offensive weapons there, in order to protect US interests, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said.

The Pentagon is looking at a two-pronged strategy in space, Mattis told an audience at the US Institute of Peace in Washington on Tuesday. In addition to making US assets in orbit more difficult to destroy and easier to replace, offensive capabilities are under consideration, he said.

“We are going to have to be prepared to use offensive weapons in space should someone decide to militarize it and go on the offensive,” said the retired Marine who took over the Pentagon in January 2017.

In any competitive sport in the world, “you cannot simply play defense and win,” Mattis added. “This is not an area that we want to be second-place in.”

Space is “critical to our economy, it’s critical to our way of life, we’ve grown reliant on it,” Mattis said. In addition to the surveillance and military intelligence roles, US satellites are used for navigation, communication, commerce, and banking.

The idea behind President Donald Trump’s recent instruction to create a US Space Force was not to establish a new bureaucracy at the Pentagon, but to create actual operational capabilities to fight a war in orbit if necessary, Mattis added.

Trump has argued that the US basically had no other choice but create its Space Force because other major powers have allegedly already begun to militarize space.

“Russia has already started, China has already started,” he told a rally in Richmond, Kentucky earlier this month. “They've got a start, but we have the greatest people in the world, we make the greatest equipment in the world, we make the greatest rockets, and missiles, and tanks and ships in the world.”

The president’s critics have met the Space Force proposal with derision, treating it as an expensive joke, but Mattis’s remarks suggest that the administration is deadly serious about it.

One major obstacle to the militarization of space is the Outer Space Treaty, to which the US has been party since 1967. It prohibits the deployment of any weapons of mass destruction to the Earth’s orbit. It also bans states from testing any weapons in outer space as well as from establishing military bases on the Moon and other celestial bodies.

Since coming into office, however, Trump has unilaterally withdrawn from a number of treaties and agreements, from the 2016 Paris Accords on climate change and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, to the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty limiting US and Soviet cruise missiles in Europe.

https://www.rt.com/usa/442697-mattis-space-offensive-weapons/

Yellowstone volcano reaffirmed as ‘high threat’…but only 21st most dangerous in US

Those looking for something new to fear are in luck – the US Geological Survey has again classified the Yellowstone supervolcano as a “high threat” on its rarely-updated volcano threat assessments list.

Though trailing at number 21 behind more formidable rivals, the much-discussed supervolcano has nonetheless held its own in the rankings since 2005, the last time the threat assessment was issued.

Kilauea in Hawaii, which has been erupting all year, was number one on the list, which also saw Mount Rainier and Mount Shasta prominently featured. Eleven of the 18 volcanoes classed as a “very high threat” are located in the Pacific Northwest, where the presence of snow and ice combined with the proximity of densely-populated areas compounds the damage, and five are in Alaska.

Volcanoes are ranked for more than their likelihood of imminent eruption. Frequency and intensity of past eruptions are also taken into account, as is impact on aviation, infrastructure, and nearby population centers. The rankings are primarily used to allocate research funds lest seismologists be caught with their scientific pants down in the event of another Mount St Helens.

The Yellowstone volcano was believed to be fed by an enormous magma plume from deep within the earth, although recent research indicates that tectonic activity might be the cause of its extreme heat.

An eruption at Yellowstone could render most of the US unlivable, but such eruptions are rare, having occurred only three times in the last two billion years. That hasn’t stopped armchair seismologists from predicting our doom at its hands – there’s something irresistible about the idea of the planet taking fiery revenge on the species that has abused it. Still, says Ben Andrews of the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program, “I want to emphasize this in bold, underlined, blinking text: We are in no way overdue for an eruption in Yellowstone.”

https://www.rt.com/usa/442696-yellowstone-volcano-high-threat-usgs/

US would be history if Russia nukes Yellowstone volcano with mega-bombs’ – expert

Russia must develop the capability to destroy the US in a single swift blow if it wants to persuade the Americans to end the nuclear arms race and return to the negotiating table, military expert Konstantin Sivkov said.

In order to curb the aggression from the West, Moscow shouldn’t compete with Washington in number of nukes, Sivkov wrote in a new article. The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems believes that an “asymmetrical response” would work much better for Russia, as it is able to produce nuclear weapons with a yield of more than 100 megatons.

If “areas with critically dangerous geophysical conditions in the US (like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or the San Andreas Fault)” are targeted by those warheads, “such an attack guarantees the destruction of the US as a state and the entire transnational elite,” he said.

The production of around 40 or 50 such mega-warheads for ICBMs or extra-long-range torpedoes would make sure that at least a few of them reach their target no matter how a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia develops, the expert said.

Such scenario “again makes a large-scale nuclear war irrational and reduces the chances of its breakout to zero,” Sivkov said.

>>3671624

I hope Russia is not pushed to do so. But he tremors are warnings.