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American ‘Bunker Bomb Axis’ against Iran? – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

American B-2 bombers

Israel news photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Obama administration is considering arming Qatar with huge bunker buster bombs, raising the possibility of an American-Israel-Arab attack on Iran.

The U.S. Air Force has received a shipment of 30,000-pound bombs, six times larger than those now in use, which can penetrate concrete bunkers. Iran has buried new nuclear plants in rocky mountainous areas and has buried them so deep under concrete to minimize the damage of an aerial attack, even if bunker buster bombs are used.

The Air Force began receiving the new monster bombs in September, and Boeing may build as many as 16 of the weapons, a U.S. military spokesman told Bloomberg News.

The B-2 stealth bomber will carry the bombs, which give “the war-fighter increased capability against hardened and deeply buried targets,” according to Air Force Lieutenant General James Kowalski.

Israel has received the older bunker bombs and may be armed with the new ones. Media reports, possibly trial balloons, once again brought up the possibility that Israel is planning to attack Iran’s nuclear plants. If war is necessary, neither Israel nor the United States wants to be the lone attacker.

The timing of the reports with the delivery of the new monster bunker buster may not be coincidental.

Qatar, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), also may be next in line to receive them, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Qatar is a key American ally and, along with Saudi Arabia, fears the Islamic Republic’s desire to dominate the Muslim world. Iranians are Persians and do not consider themselves Arabs.

Other Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait – have signed up with the United States to receive more than $60 billion of advanced F-15 airplanes, bombs and other weapons, including the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), which converts unguided “dumb” bombs into “smart” munitions that are guided by an integrated inertial guidance system.

The proposed sale of the new bunker buster bombs to Qatar “represents one way the Obama administration intends to keep Iran in check,” the Journal reported.

The UAE has a vested interest in diminishing the Iranian nuclear threat – the Persian country claims sovereignty over three of the UAE’s Persian Gulf islands.

Iran’s nuclear Armageddon.

By Alan Caruba

During the long years of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union faced off against each other, both having an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Only once, during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, did the prospect of a real threat to the homeland arise. After a U.S. naval blockade was imposed, the Russians took their missiles home.

The key factor was that the Russian leaders were not suicidal. They were not crazy. They fully understood what it would mean to actually use nuclear weapons or be on the receiving end of them.

The Iranian ayatollahs are a different case entirely. Over the years, they have voiced a rather nonchalant attitude toward being on the receiving end of nuclear weapons because they are a Shiite martyrdom cult. During its eight-year war with Iraq, initiated by Saddam Hussein, an estimated 500,000 Iranians died, including 100,000 children sent to clear mine fields by setting them off.

The failure to grasp the depth and insanity of the current leaders of Iran is pushing the world toward the first nuclear confrontation since A-bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II in 1945.

Yoram Ettinger, a former Israel consul general in Houston, Texas, warns that “Iran’s geostrategic goals are energized by its current Islamic zeal, viewing jihad (holy war) as the permanent state of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, while peace and cease-fire accords are tenuous.”

So, when the Israelis shared intelligence with President Obama in mid-November that the Iranians “will already have five nuclear bombs or warheads” by late March 2012, it raised the stakes for President Obama and the nation.

We already know Obama wants a reduction in nuclear arms. He signed a treaty with the Russians to achieve this. He refused to permit missiles to be based in Poland, presumably for the same reason. The surface to air missiles, however, could have deterred any missiles headed toward Europe.

I have absolutely no confidence in Obama when it comes to the preemptive action that must be taken against Iran’s nuclear and military facilities in order to end a threat that even the President acknowledged in a recemt Hawaii press conference would be directed not just at Israel, but at the United States as well.

The stakes just don’t get any higher and this President has not demonstrated any backbone except to okay the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the man behind the attack on 9/11. That was a no-brainer.

I don’t know what military assets and options we have in the Persian Gulf, but if an attack to deter an Iranian nuclear threat is undertaken either by Israel or together, we will likely need a lot of them.

Military observers have concluded that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz that provides access to and from the Persian Gulf, thus putting enormous strain on the provision of Middle East oil that flows through the Straits on a daily basis, not just from Iran, but from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq. An estimated 40% of all seaborne oil passes through the Strait, the equivalent of 20% of the total amount of oil traded worldwide. If closed, it would drive the cost of oil to stratospheric heights.

The failure of the U.S. to develop its own extensive oil reserves will prove to be a massive strategic error. The delay of a proposed Canadian oil pipeline to deliver oil to the U.S. is just one small element of this failure.

In an August 6, 2009 Jerusalem Post article, Anne Bayefsky of EyeontheUN.org wrote, “The Iranians have already called Obama’s bluff. An Iranian newspaper referred to the American agenda on July 20 this way: ‘The Obama administration is prepared to accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran…they have no long-term plan for dealing with Iran. Their strategy consists of begging us to talk to them.”

Ultimately it will be Israel’s call if U.S. leaders fail to step up to the task and, in the judgment of the Iranians, the U.S. will not. The Israelis have no choice.

In February 2010 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, addressing a crowd celebrating the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran,said “Iran is now a nuclear state.”

The world is rapidly running out of time to prevent an Iranian Armageddon.

B-2 Bomber Gets Boeing’s New 30,000-Pound Bunker-Buster Bomb.

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Air Force has taken delivery of a new 30,000-pound bomb from Boeing Co. that’s capable of penetrating deeply buried enemy targets.

The huge bunker buster, dubbed the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, is built to fit the B-2 stealth bomber. The Air Force Global Strike Command started receiving the bombs in September, Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jack Miller said in a short statement to Bloomberg News.

The deliveries “will meet requirements for the current operational need,” he said.

The Air Force in 2009 said Boeing might build as many as 16 of the munitions. Miller yesterday had no details on how many the Air Force plans to buy. Boeing in August received a $32 million contract that included eight of the munitions.

Command head Lieutenant General James Kowalski told the annual Air Force Association conference in September the command “completed integration” of the bunker-buster bomb with the B- 2, “giving the war-fighter increased capability against hardened and deeply buried targets.”

The bomb is the U.S. military’s largest conventional penetrator. It’s six times bigger than the 5,000-pound bunker buster that the Air Force now uses to attack deeply buried nuclear, biological or chemical sites.

Chicago-based Boeing is manufacturing the bomb, which was successfully demonstrated in March 2007.

Iranian Bunkers

The B-2, developed by Falls Church, Virginia-based Northrop Grumman Corp., has a shape and skin capable of evading radar. It’s the only U.S. bomber designed to penetrate air defenses such as those believed in use by North Korea and Iran. It’s also the only aircraft currently capable of carrying the new bomb.

The B-2 has bombed targets in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Three in March flew round-trip, non-stop missions from Missouri to Libya in the opening hours of U.S. air strikes, dropping 45 bombs.

Little authoritative information has been published about the capability of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. A December 2007 story by the Air Force News Service said it has a hardened- steel casing and can reach targets as far down as 200 feet underground before exploding.

The new, 20.5-foot-long bomb carries more than 5,300 pounds of explosives and is guided by Global Positioning System satellites, according to a description on the Web site of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

The Pentagon in July 2009 formally asked Congress to shift funds in order to accelerate by three years fielding the weapon.

‘Operational Need’

Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale, in his July 8, 2009, request, said there was “an urgent operational need for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high- threat environments,” and top commanders of U.S. forces in Asia and the Middle East “recently identified the need to expedite” the bomb program.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency last week reported Iran was trying to develop an atomic bomb to fit on a missile capable of hitting Israel.

Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons facilities are dispersed over a broad area 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) and multiple countries to the east of Tel Aviv. Some are underground. Iran has repeatedly asserted that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian goals, such as power generation.

Iran is following the lead of China and Russia in protecting its Natanz and Qom nuclear facilities by moving them underground, the Defense Intelligence Agency director, Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, told a Senate panel in February.

Hardened Facilities

“Buried, hardened facilities and improved air defenses are key elements of Iran’s extensive program to protect its nuclear infrastructure from destruction,” Burgess said.

“The spread of western tunneling technology and equipment is contributing to a rise in construction by countries and organizations that have not previously used modern techniques,” he said.

Authorities in Tehran announced recently that they’re moving some uranium enrichment from a more vulnerable site at Natanz to a location at Qom that is 90 meters (295 feet) under rock, said David Albright, who is founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

US reveals its new bunker-buster bombs – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Iran might want to take the hint: Pentagon report says US Air Force has taken delivery of new 30,000-pound bomb capable of penetrating deeply buried enemy targets, built to fit B-2 stealth bomber

The US Air Force has taken delivery of a new 30,000-pound bomb from Boeing that is capable of penetrating deeply buried enemy targets.

The Bloomberg news agency reported Wednesday that based on a newly published Pentagon report, the huge bunker buster, dubbed the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), is built to fit the B-2 stealth bomber.

The Air Force Global Strike Command started receiving the bombs in September, Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jack Miller said in a short statement. He added that the deliveries “will meet requirements for the current operational need.”

The B2-bomber (Photo:AP) 

In 2009 the US Air Force said Boeing might build as many as 16 of the munitions. Miller had no details on how many the Air Force plans to buy.

In August Boeing received a $32 million contract that included eight of the munitions which had “completed integration” of the bunker-buster bomb with the B- 2, “giving the war-fighter increased capability against hardened and deeply buried targets.”

According to the report, the bomb is the US military’s largest conventional penetrator. It is six times bigger than the 5,000-pound bunker buster that the Air Force now uses to attack deeply buried nuclear, biological or chemical sites.

Pressure on Iran

The B-2 has a shape and skin capable of evading radar. It is the only US bomber designed to penetrate air defenses such as those believed in use by North Korea and Iran. It is also the only aircraft currently capable of carrying the new bomb.

The B-2 has bombed targets in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In March three flew round-trip, non-stop missions from Missouri to Libya in the opening hours of US air strikes, dropping 45 bombs.

Little authoritative information has been published about the capability of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. A December 2007 report stated that it has a hardened- steel casing and can reach targets as far down as 200 feet underground before exploding.

The nuclear facility near Iranian city of Qom (Photo: AP) 

The new, 20.5-foot-long bomb carries more than 5,300 pounds of explosives and is guided by Global Positioning System satellites.

The bomb delivery report comes at a time when the international community is trying to increase its efforts to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program while reports on Israel’s plans to carry out a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities are increasing.

The efforts have gone in to overdrive following the publication of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency report last week stating that Iran was trying to develop an atomic bomb to fit on a missile capable of hitting Israel.

Iran has two underground nuclear weapons facilities that are known to the west – one underground near the city of Natanz and the other on a mountainside near the city of Qom.

Duqu, son of Stuxnet, a pre-cursor to another cyber-weapon | Firstpost.

Over the summer, the threat of cyberwar thundered from the front pages of newspapers across the world. Most of the threats weren’t war, just sophisticated espionage, apart from one attack, Stuxnet, and computer security experts believe that the recent Duqu threat might be a pre-cursor to another Stuxnet attack.

Most of the malware floating around steals information or turns your computer into a tool of the hacker. It doesn’t physically affect your computer or anything else in the physical world.

Stuxnet was dramatically different. It was an extremely sophisticated, extremely targeted attack that was aimed at delaying the Iranian nuclear programme by causing the centrifuges that enriched uranium to spin out of control.

Also most malware is a blunt instrument. Distributed denial of service (DOS) attack trade in networks of compromised computers, botnets, to take websites down. Phishing scams send out millions of malware-laden messages because it costs nothing and the gullible will still number in the thousands.

Some phishing scams are targeted, and security researchers refer to them as spear phishing. Spear phishing attacks are often used in state and corporate espionage. It’s so common the Lotta Danielsson-Murphy, the vice president of the US-Taiwan Business Council, has created a Tumblr blog collecting all of the spear phishing emails targeting “China/Taiwan analyst community in Washington, DC.”

Stuxnet’s dark activities from beginning to dramatic end were cleverly masked. AFP

Stuxnet used sophisticated ways to spread via infected USB sticks and shared printers on a network, and after some analysis by security firm Symantec, it was found that computers in Iran were overwhelmingly infected. The creators of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organisations that they thought would deliver the malware to its target.

The target was an industrial controller built by German industrial giant Siemens, and Siemens warned that its supervisory control and data acquisition” (SCADA) management systems were vulnerable to the worm, The Economist reported. Cybersecurity have long been worried about SCADA attacks because the systems control all manner of industrial systems. However, they are not usually connected to the internet due to the critical nature of their operations. Stuxnet found a way to infect them via a Windows programme that wrote code for the controllers.

The very sophisticated code was targeted controllers used on the centrifuges that Iran was using to enrich uranium. Centrifuges run by the infected controllers would literally spin themselves apart. However, Stuxnet’s dark activities from beginning to dramatic end were cleverly masked.

Stuxnet has often been described as the world’s sophisticated cyberweapon. It was so complex and targeted that it was almost definitely written by a state security organisation, although which organisation is still a mystery. Most of the fingers point to Israel, possibly with US help. The New York Times reported that the Israelis tested Stuxnet at its Dimona nuclear complex.

Duqu, a pre-cursor to another attack?

The Stuxnet attack was years in the making, and security researchers think that Duqu is a sign that the writers of Stuxnet are building another weapon.

Both Stuxnet and Duqu are zero-day exploits. Most malware is based on existing known exploits, but zero-day exploits are threats unknown to software and security makers. As Kim Zetter of Wired says, zero-day exploits are extremely rare. When analysing Stuxnet, she said, “Out of more than 12 million pieces of malware that antivirus researchers discover each year, fewer than a dozen use a zero-day exploit.” This is quite literally the secret weapon in a hacker’s arsenal.

Both Stuxnet and Duqu have used stolen security certificates so that they pass initial checks. The first phase of Stuxnet stole industrial information that could later be used to attack Siemens’ SCADA systems. It is worried that Duqu is just the precursor to another attack, collecting the information needed to create another cyberweapon.

Researchers at Symantec say:

“Duqu’s purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party.”

Symantec researchers say that Duqu shares a great deal of code with Stuxnet and add, “The creators of Duqu had access to the source code of Stuxnet, not just the Stuxnet binaries.”

The real mystery is who the son of Stuxnet might be targeting. Will the next worm strike another blow against Iran, or do the writers have a new target in mind? At the moment, the malware has just been discovered on computers in Europe, and it’s unclear what information has been passed back to its creators. Duqu tried to export compromised data via dummy jpeg image files, but what those files contained remains a mystery.

The Associated Press: Syrian army defectors attack base near Damascus.

By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian army defectors said they launched several attacks Wednesday on President Bashar Assad’s military bases near the capital Damascus, including one on a Syrian intelligence facility — the latest in stepped-up assaults by the renegade troops targeting the regime’s forces.

The Free Syrian Army said in a statement that its main attack in the early hours Wednesday targeted a compound run by the Air Force Intelligence in the Damascus suburb of Harasta. The renegade group said the other attacks targeted military checkpoints in the Damascus suburbs of Douma, Qaboun and Arabeen and Saqba.

The claim of the attacks could not be independently confirmed and the Free Syrian Army released no details about the fighting or possible casualties.

The Syrian government has largely sealed off the country, barring most foreign journalists and preventing independent reporting. But details gathered by activist groups and witnesses, along with the amateur videos, have become key channels of information.

The attacks near Damascus are rare, and clashes between defectors and troops have in the past been concentrated in the northwestern province of Idlib and central region of Homs and the southern province of Daraa.

The attacks come two days after defectors killed 34 of Assad’s soldiers and members of the security in Daraa, on what was one of the bloodiest days of the 8-month-old uprising.

The U.N. says that more than 3,500 people have been killed since Assad launched a crackdown on the protesters in mid-March.

A Syrian opposition figure said the attack in Harasta was carried out by defectors who broke into three groups and attacked the compound from three sides with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled-grenades. He added that the administrative building was damaged and the attackers made sure not to hit a nearby building where detainees were being held.

The opposition figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations, said all the defectors’ troops returned safely to their point of origin. He quoted residents in the area as saying that ambulances rushed to the military compound after the attack.

Also Wednesday, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said four people, including three defectors, were killed in the central province of Hama after they were ambushed by troops loyal to Assad.

The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group said three people have been so far killed on Wednesday, two in Idlib and one in the Damascus suburb of Zabadani.

Bassem Mroue can be reached on http://twitter.com/bmroue

Iranian official: Israeli attack… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    NEW YORK – A senior Iranian official said on Tuesday he did not believe an Israeli military strike on Iran was imminent despite fresh Israeli media speculation the Jewish state might be considering one.

Israel has long refused to rule out a military response to Iran’s nuclear program, which it believes aims at producing an atomic weapon. Tehran says the program is simply intended to generate nuclear power.

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Israel attacked a suspected Syrian nuclear site in 2007 and, in 1981, destroyed a nuclear reactor in Iraq before it was set to start operating.

Tension has risen since last week, when the UN nuclear watchdog reported Tehran appeared to have worked on designing a bomb and may still be conducting secret research to that end.

Asked if he was concerned about a possible Israeli strike, Mohammad Javad Larijani, a foreign affairs adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said: “If you mean that I think (a) military attack on Iran is imminent, definitely no.”

“If you mean that we should be on guard against any … possible military attack on our land, yes,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Iran “learned that … the hard way” after being invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1980, Larijani said, adding it was the duty of Iranians to be ready.

“But if you are asking me … if any military action against Iran is imminent from … any side, I don’t anticipate that,” he said.

Larijani, also head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, is visiting New York before a planned vote by a UN General Assembly committee on a resolution condemning the human rights situation in Iran.

Speculation in Israel about an attack on Iran has been fueled by Israel’s recent test-launching of a long-range missile and comments by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Tehran’s nuclear program posed a “direct and heavy threat.”

But Defense Minister Ehud Barak last week played down the speculation, saying no decision had been made on embarking on a military operation.

Iranian officials have responded to the speculation mainly with defiance. Khamenei warned Israel and the United States last week that any attack would be met “with strong slaps and iron fists.”