China

Source: CNN

Torrential flooding across much of the nation has left 701 dead and hundreds missing, China's vice minister of water resources said.

At least 347 people are missing, Liu Ning told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday.

Ninety-percent of the casualties were caused by mountain floods, mudslides and landslides triggered by heavy downpours. About 645,500 houses had collapsed, he said.

More than 230 rivers were above warning levels; 25 of them saw their highest levels ever, he said.

More than 100 cities flooded, he said.

Liu cited torrential downpours between June 13 and June 27, and heavy rain on July 8 in southern China as particularly damaging.

"In southern China, the rainfall is 30 to 100 percent higher than the historical average," he said.

The Three Gorges Dam saw its biggest peak runoff and the rains resulted in "various disasters hitting many regions," he said.

The floods have affected 117 million people in 27 provinces and seven cities.

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Source: Yahoo/AP

China's largest reported oil spill emptied beaches along the Yellow Sea as its size doubled Wednesday, while cleanup efforts included straw mats and frazzled workers with little more than rubber gloves.

An official warned the spill posed a "severe threat" to sea life and water quality as China's latest environmental crisis spread off the shores of Dalian, once named China's most livable city.

One cleanup worker has drowned, his body coated in crude.

"I've been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil," said Zhong Yu with environmental group Greenpeace China, who spent the day on a boat inspecting the spill.

"The oil is half-solid and half liquid and is as sticky as asphalt," she told The Associated Press by telephone.

The oil had spread over 165 square miles (430 square kilometers) of water five days since a pipeline at the busy northeastern port exploded, hurting oil shipments from part of China's strategic oil reserves to the rest of the country. Shipments remained reduced Wednesday.

State media has said no more oil is leaking into the sea, but the total amount of oil spilled is not yet clear.

Greenpeace China released photos Wednesday of inky beaches and of straw mats about 2 square meters (21 square feet) in size scattered on the sea, meant to absorb the oil.

Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned through the end of August, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

"The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals, and water quality, and the sea birds," Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the city's Maritime Safety Administration, told Dragon TV.

At least one person died during cleanup efforts. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel, Xinhua reported.

Officials, oil company workers and volunteers were turning out by the hundreds to clean blackened beaches.

"We don't have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks," an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, in apparent exasperation.

"This kind of inefficiency means the oil will keep coming to shore. ... This stretch of oil is really difficult to clean up in the short term."

But 40 oil-skimming boats and about 800 fishing boats were also deployed to clean up the spill, and Xinhua said more than 15 kilometers (9 miles) of oil barriers had been set up to keep the slick from spreading.

China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 400,000 gallons (1,500,000 liters) — as compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

China's State Oceanic Administration released the latest size of the contaminated area in a statement Tuesday.

The cause of the explosion that started the spill was still not clear. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia's biggest oil and gas producer by volume.

Friday's images of 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) flames at China's second largest port for crude oil imports drew the immediate attention of President Hu Jintao and other top leaders. Now the challenge is cleaning up the greasy plume.

"Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters," Dalian's vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

But an official with the State Oceanic Administration has warned the spill will be difficult to clean up even in twice that amount of time.

Some locals said the area's economy was already hurting.

"Let's wait and see how well they deal with the oil until Sept. 1, if the oil can't be cleaned up by then, the seafood products will all be ruined," an unnamed fisherman told Dragon TV. "No one will buy them in the market because of the smell of the oil."

Source: CBC

For the first time in more than a century, a country other than the United States consumed more energy than any other nation, as China grabbed the top spot last year.

Citing data from the International Energy Agency, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that China was the world's most voracious consumer of energy in 2009.

China consumed 2,252 million tonnes of "oil equivalent" last year, topping the U.S. tally of 2,170 tonnes by roughly four per cent.

Oil equivalent is the term the IEA uses to bring all forms of energy into a comparable form, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydroelectricity, wind and solar power.

China was forecast to overtake the U.S. at some point over the next decade. But the global recession appears to have sped up the process as its economy continued to expand at a double-digit pace while the U.S. economy declined and oil consumption flatlined.

Only 10 years ago, China's energy consumption was half that of the United States.

"The fact that China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest energy consumer symbolizes the start of a new age in the history of energy," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol was quoted as saying.

China had already passed the United States as the world's largest polluter several years ago.

With a population of a little over 300 million, the United States remains the world's largest energy consumer per capita.

In terms of the use of oil itself, the IEA says the United States remains well out in the lead, consuming some 19 million barrels per day. But China's economy relies on coal for much of its electricity generation, and its crude consumption is also climbing from its current level of just over nine million barrels per day.

China's electricity demand is forecast to increase by 1,000 gigawatts over the next 15 years — equivalent to the U.S.'s total electricity output at the moment.

Source: Bloomberg

A U.S. geologist was sentenced to eight years in prison by a Chinese court after being convicted of violating the state secrets law by selling a database on the country’s oil industry.

The U.S. said it was “dismayed” by the sentence given to Xue Feng and remains concerned about his rights to due process under Chinese law. Xue was also fined 200,000 yuan ($29,550) yesterday by a Beijing court at a hearing that was attended by U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, Richard Buangan, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy said. Calls to Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court and the Foreign Ministry weren’t answered yesterday.

...

State Secrets

State secrets include information that may damage the nation in fields ranging from defense and diplomacy to “national, economic and development projects” and technology. The government also has the power to label anything else a state secret, according to the amendments passed in April.

Three Chinese nationals were sentenced with Xue yesterday. Li Yongbo, a manager at Beijing Licheng Zhongyou Oil Technology Development Co., was sentenced to eight years and fined 200,000 yuan, AP reported, citing Xue’s lawyer Tong Wei. Chen Mengjin and Li Dongxu, who worked at a research institute affiliated with PetroChina Co., were each given 2 1/2 year sentences and fined 50,000 yuan, according to AP.

...

“These kinds of cases have been linked to international politics as a weapon of retaliation in the Chinese government’s arsenal,” Hank Wang, a Beijing-based lawyer at Garvey Schubert Barer and co-chairman of the legal committee at the American Chamber of Commerce in the People’s Republic of China, said in an e-mail. “As the U.S. and China have reopened talks on human rights issues, this should be included in the agenda.”

The database that Xue arranged to sell contained detailed information on the state of the Chinese oil industry, AP reported. China’s three biggest oil companies are all state- owned.

China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, has been dipping into $2.4 trillion of foreign currency reserves to buy stakes in oil and natural-gas fields and has spent at least $21 billion on overseas resources in the past year. China Petrochemical Corp. bought a stake in a Canadian oil sands project for $4.65 billion in April.

Related Post - China to Accelerate South-North Water Project


Source: The Telegraph

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Internet Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

Recent media reports tell of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.

Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. Its rationale covered irrigation and flood control in the lower Yangtse plain, hydroelectric power generation, which sounds sensible: but objections were bulldozed in the tense political atmosphere of the late 1980s, when the final decisions were made. The dam was the pet project of then prime minister Li Peng, who was involved in the party split which led to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, in which he was the triumphant prime mover. In this context he was not going to back down on the dam, and the debate was closed down.

So the construction was forced through without even what passes in China for proper debate. The number of local people who had to be relocated came to 1.4 million – equivalent to the obliteration of Birmingham. Now it looks like another 300,000 will have to be shifted – add Coventry to that. This, in China, means getting a few weeks’ notice to quit and putting up with wherever the authorities see fit to put you. On top of that a large number of historic sites from one of the most ancient cradles of Chinese civilisation had to go. Yes, China has vast numbers of people to feed and cannot afford sentimentality, but perhaps a bit more care might have been taken to ensure that the costs and benefits had been properly calculated.

But even three years ago, with Li Peng and his family safely out of the way, official Chinese sources were admitting that things had gone horribly wrong. In the official media references were made to landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae. The Chinese aren’t unworldly and irresponsible greenies. When they point things like this out it’s because it’s causing real damage.

Source: The Guardian

North Korea today hit back at Seoul by announcing it would sever all links, escalating the standoff over accusations that the North sank a South's warship.

North Korea's state news agency KCNA also reported that Pyongyang would expel all South Koreans from a joint-industrial zone in Kaesong, near the border.

The announcement, leaves relations at their worst point for years. It came as a monitoring group in Seoul reported that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, last week ordered his military to prepare for war in case the South attacks. Military officials in Seoul were unable to confirm the report, and said they had detected no unusual troop movements.

The North's statement followed and announcement by South Korea's president, Lee Myong-bak, that Seoul would suspend trade, ban Northern ships from its waters and take Pyongyang to the UN security council. This, he announced that Seoul would redesignate the North as its "main enemy" – a term it dropped six years ago, when relations were thawing.

Citing the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, KCNA said Pyongyang would engage in no dialogue or contact while Lee was in power; he is due to leave office in 2013.

Relations on the divided peninsula deteriorated sharply after he became president last year, ending his predecessor's "sunshine policy" of free-flowing aid to the North.

KCNA described the retaliation as a response to Seoul's "smear campaign" – the accusation, based on a report by an international team, that a Northern torpedo caused the sinking in March of the Cheonan, which killed 46 people. Pyongyang denies any involvement.

...

Professor Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at Cranfield University, said: "Wars sometimes happen by accident, or because you have escalation and no one can control it. It's a very dangerous position that everyone is in. .

"With all the communications channels being closed down, there is a lot of room for escalation by default."

...

Experts said the announcement appeared to mean Southern NGOs would no longer be able to work in the North, spelling an end to low-level economic and, in some cases, government links.

It also spells an end to hopes of reviving cross-border reunions between families split by the border at the end of the 1950-53 war.

...

The South's military resumed propaganda radio broadcasts across the border this morning after a six-year hiatus, with programmes airing news, western music and comparisons of the political and economic situations on the two parts of the peninsula.

The psychological warfare will enrage the North, which has warned it will fire at any propaganda facilities in the demilitarised zone.

Source: New York Times

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

...

Versions of the human-flesh search have taken place in other countries..... But China is the only place in the world with a nearly universal recognition (among Internet users) of the concept.

...

The online diary, “Migratory Bird Going North,” was more than just a reflection on her adulterous husband and a record of her despair; it was Yan’s countdown to suicide, prompted by the discovery that her husband was cheating on her. The first entry reads: “Two months from now is the day I leave . . . for a place no one knows me, that is new to me. There I won’t need phone, computer or Internet. No one can find me.”

A person who read Yan’s blog decided to repost it, 46 short entries in all, on a popular Chinese online bulletin board called Tianya. Hong posted a reply, expressing sadness over her sister’s death and detailing the ways she thought Yan had helped her husband: supporting him through school, paying for his designer clothes and helping him land a good job. Now, she wrote, Wang wouldn’t even sign his wife’s death certificate until he could come to an agreement with her family about how much he needed to pay them in damages.

...

The search crossed over to other Web sites, then to the mainstream media — so far a crucial multiplier in every major human-flesh search — and Wang Fei became one of China’s most infamous and reviled husbands. Most of Wang’s private information was revealed: cellphone number, student ID, work contacts, even his brother’s license-plate number. One site posted an interactive map charting the locations of everything from Wang’s house to his mistress’s family’s laundry business. “Pay attention when you walk on the street,” wrote Hypocritical Human. “If you ever meet these two, tear their skin off.”

Wang is still in hiding and was unwilling to meet me, but his lawyer, Zhang Yanfeng, told me not long ago: “The human-flesh search has unimaginable power. First it was a lot of phone calls every day. Then people painted red characters on his parents’ front door, which said things like, ‘You caused your wife’s suicide, so you should pay.’ ”

Wang and his mistress, Dong Fang, both worked for the multinational advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Soon after Netizens revealed this, Saatchi & Saatchi issued a statement reporting that Wang Fei and Dong Fang had voluntarily resigned. Wang’s lawyer says Saatchi pushed the couple out. “All the media have the wrong report,” he says. “[Wang Fei] never quit. He told me that the company fired him.” (Representatives for Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing refused to comment.) Netizens were happy with this outcome but remained vigilant. One Mop user wrote, “To all employers: Never offer Wang Fei or Dong Fang jobs, otherwise Moppers will human-flesh-search you.”

"While ballistic missiles move at speeds of about 4,000 miles [6,500 km] per hour, they are no match for a superheated, high-energy laser beam racing towards it at 670 million mph.”

The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency was no less enthusiastic about the results, stating “The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defence, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometres….” - The Intelligence Daily


There's more going on than meets the eye. Consider the story of the Russian and U.S. satellites that collided a year ago. The article from Yahoo states:

"The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said."

A statement from Iridium read:

"While this is an extremely unusual, very low-probability event, the
Iridium constellation is uniquely designed to withstand such an event,
and the company is taking the necessary steps to replace the lost
satellite with one of its in-orbit spare satellites,"

If the functional status of the Russian satellite is itself unknown, or 'believed to be' something or other, how can it than be determined that the satellite was 'out of control'? In later reports Russian officials confirm that the satellite was indeed 'defunct', going off-line only two years after launch. However, everything orbiting near earth is tracked and satellites (that can still be communicated with) are moved into a retirement orbit (radioactive space junk depot) or brought back into the earths atmosphere at or around their 'best before date'. Therefore I find it hard to envision that a known defunct (non-communicable) satellite, that apparently had no orbital adjustment capabilities, which had moved into an orbit shared by an American based satellite (that had maneuver capabilities) and that was being used by U.S. government officials, didn't elicit a warning regarding an impending collision. The following is from the BBC:

Mr Johnson said that at the beginning of this year about 17,000 manmade pieces of debris were orbiting Earth.

The items, some as small as 10cm (four inches), are tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network - sending information to help spacecraft operators avoid the debris.

Of the 6,000 satellites sent into orbit since 1957, about 3,000 remain in operation, according to Nasa.

Europe has just initiated its own space surveillance programme. One of its main weather satellites had a near miss in December with a Chinese object. The Europeans knew nothing about the threat until the Americans contacted the European Space Agency to inform it of the danger. - BBC

Consider also China's anti-satellite ballistic missile program. Even more curious is the story surrounding the shuttle Columbia, which blew up over Texas from what was determined to be excessive heat which penetrated the shuttle body. One report describes an anomalous lightening flash before the actual mid air explosion of the shuttle.

Based on NASA's own investigation the shuttle Columbia failed due to a heat breach caused by a faulty shielding panel that fell away. The nature of the fault might not have been from a heat shield malfunction however, but from a focused laser beam directed from a ground station in New Mexico.

"Over the past five years, various NMB-related technologies have been tested. While world attention has been diverted to far less successful BMD programs involving the Patriot Advanced capability-3 (Pac-3 and the Israeli Arrow 2) missile system, the more promising technologies have been kept under wraps and given a low profile.

Successfully tested technologies include Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL), a joint project between the U.S. and Israel. Successful THEL tests were conducted from New Mexico's White Sands missile range in 2000/2001, where it shot down Katyusha rockets and incoming artillery projectiles.

The THEL system uses a high-energy, deuterium fluoride chemical invisible beam. The laser produces and amplifies light of a particular wavelength, or color, which is then directed at a target with great accuracy.

In a typical engagement scenario, when a missile is launched, upon detection by the THEL fire control, the radar establishes trajectory information about the incoming missile, then passes the target to the pointer-tracker subsystem (PTS), which includes the beam director. The PTS tracks the target optically, then begins a "fine tracking" process for THEL's beam director, which targets THEL's high-energy laser. The energy of the laser heats the target, which causes it to explode.

If the laser is powerful enough, it can generate very high temperatures where the light falls, melting or vaporizing the target.

A study completed in 2001 concluded that the missile interceptor has "lots of promise" and further development should be pursued, primarily in enabling system's air transportability, including the type of transport aircraft it should fit on (C-130, C-17 or C-5).

In early 2002, military scientists were trying to develop the laser with a greater range, that can follow and hit fast-moving objects at distances ranging from tens of kilometers.

At the same time last year, the US Air Force and Missile Defense Agency were poised to begin flying the first Airborne Laser (ABL) test aircraft. Loitering at altitudes around 40,000 feet, the ABL system is designed to destroy boosting ballistic missiles with a multi-megawatt laser beam that travels at light speed over great distances. Its high-energy beam (about the diameter of a basketball) will heat a missile's side until it fails structurally, then tumbles to earth. - Weekly Universe"

And so we have the widespread deployment of PAC-3's, and the unveiling of the once secret star wars program. In essence we are in the midst of yet another arms race, where technological superiority such that definite victory is assured will remain ever elusive. The U.S. strategy - overwhelm through sheer force. Deploy PAC-3's with ever greater range, and support them with air based, land based, and satellite based laser weapons. The U.S. knows full well they will lose a portion of their capability during an exchange, the goal is to have more hardware than the adversary. The continuation of this race will end badly for everyone, we are currently on the road to ruin without some drastic international agreement to halt all space based weapons, including restrictions on the deployment of a new generation of ballistic missiles.

But wait, the Alex Jonesians, and the even more far right, will scream bloody 'world government' at the tune of this solution, as they will at every other international agreement that sets limits or restrictions on the individual right to insanity.

The real question in all this is, why do we choose such a seriously mangled dream as an experience? We need to contemplate that question, the seed of our solution lies in that type of question.



Source: The Intelligence Daily

The provocative decisions by the U.S. on missile deployments in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria since the expiration of the START last December lead to no other conclusion than the White House and the Pentagon intend the indefinite postponement if not the aborting of any comprehensive agreement to limit and reduce nuclear arms.

Russia’s permanent representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has recently voiced the concern that the U.S. still plans to base anti-ballistic missile facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic [16] in spite of statements by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last September 17 that previous plans for both countries are being replaced by “stronger, smarter, and swifter” deployments.

The U.S. has not substituted the missile encirclement of Russia with that of China. It is conducting both simultaneously.

As it is doing so, the Pentagon announced on February 12, 2010 that “A U.S. high-powered airborne laser weapon shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said….” [17]

A Reuters report of the test launched from a base in California over the Pacific Ocean, one which has been touted as finally realizing the Ronald Reagan administration’s plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, described its purpose: “The airborne laser weapon is aimed at…providing the U.S. military with the ability to engage all classes of ballistic missiles at the speed of light while they are in the boost phase of flight.” [18]

One of weapon’s manufacturers, the Boeing Company, issued a press release for the occasion which said in part: “This experiment marks the first time a laser weapon has engaged and destroyed an in-flight ballistic missile, and the first time that any system has accomplished it in the missile’s boost phase of flight….The laser is the most powerful ever installed on an aircraft….” [19]

Northrop Grumman, another partner in the project (Lockheed Martin being the third), added: “While ballistic missiles like the one ALTB [Airborne Laser Testbed] destroyed move at speeds of about 4,000 miles [6,500 km] per hour, they are no match for a superheated, high-energy laser beam racing towards it at 670 million mph [one billion kph].” [20]

The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency was no less enthusiastic about the results, stating “The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defence, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometres….” [21]

The airborne laser weapon is mounted on a modified Boeing 747 commercial airliner. Its potential range is global.

Ten days later it was reported by the U.S. Army that the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico will receive a new laser weapon and “The Army may soon blast missiles out of the sky with a laser beam.” The weapon contains “100-kilowatt lasers that can rapidly heat a target, causing catastrophic events such as warhead explosions or airframe failures.”

Pentagon officials said it has “successfully worked in the laboratory and on the battlefield and now they want to begin shooting down missiles with it.” [22]

Airborne laser anti-missile weapons will join the full spectrum of land, sea, air and space interceptor missile components to envelope the world with a system to neutralize other nations’ deterrence capacities and prepare the way for conventional and nuclear first strikes.

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