Global SITREP A7-13

13 April 2013: UPDATE --  Because of this current untenable situation, it looks to me like the new paradigm I offered a glimpse of in Global SITREP A5-13 may take an unprecedented step forward. This unprecedented step will be one in which the People's Republic of China, acting on behalf of the community of nations represented and empowered by the authority of the United Nations, will act to seize control of North Korea's nuclear facilities and its missile forces. As we take leaps and bounds towards the 70th Week and the WMD wars that will precede it, an unprecedented step like this is not hard for someone like myself to conceive of as an imminent probability.

Prophecy will fulfill in this modern world exactly as it did in the ancient world; fulfilled Bible prophecy on this scale has always been a literal fulfillment due to the action of great nations wielding great power. The 'kings of the East' are integral to future prophetic fulfillments, and just as everything in the West is moving forward toward prophetic ends, so too are the things which must take place in the East moving forward toward those prophetic ends. The way forward is being prepared for the 'kings of the East.'


11 April 2013: At a public House Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. just a very short time ago (within the past hour) Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) revealed the unclassified portion of a brand new Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) intelligence assessment that North Korea has developed the capability to arm a ballistic missile with a miniaturized nuclear warhead. The new assessment holds this capability to be true at a level of "moderate confidence."

The only question held back on was the reliability of the warhead to survive re-entry and work as designed. That would hold true for long-range ICBMs; but the assessment would have a higher confidence level for intermediate and short range ballistic missiles.

If North Korea has achieved this capability, then so has Iran, and this is of great strategic significance, especially to Israel.

UPDATE: In order to understand the present situation we need to look at what I had written in the past as the Associate Director of the Northeast Intelligence Network in March 2005 and July 2008. The following is the blog version of the July 2008 article:

Terrorist Nuclear Weaponry: A Digitized Nightmare

In March 2005 I wrote an article entitled “Smoking Gun: Iran Already Nuclear Armed"  which dealt with the 2001 Iranian acquisition of six Russian-made KH-55 nuclear-capable cruise missiles from the inventory of the former Soviet Union. It was Colonel Hryhoriy Omelchenko of the Ukrainian State Secret Services (SBU) within the newly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s government that alerted the world. Details of the illegal transfer were confirmed by the middleman in the transfer, Dr. Sarfraz Haider, who was found murdered in Cyprus in 2004. An autopsy of Dr. Haider revealed that his neck had been broken and his aorta split. Dr. Haider was quoted in a February 2005 article in the Australian Herald-Sun newspaper as having stated prior to his murder, "What's the use of the missiles without them [warheads]?" The KH-55 cruise missiles were designed to carry a 200kT nuclear warhead to a target more than 1,860 miles away.

On Sunday we learned from the International Herald-Tribune that an advanced nuclear warhead design was discovered by American and IAEA investigators resident in the global network of computers belonging to Pakistani nuclear proliferation network engineer AQ Khan. The advanced design was verified as operational in tests conducted by Pakistan during May of 1998. Most disturbing about this discovery is the unknown number of copies which were made and distributed to any number of governments or terrorist organizations. It is also known that this advanced design included the digital coding necessary for automated machining of the parts for the warhead. All that is missing from this proven weapon design is the fissionable HEU (highly enriched uranium) core of the warhead. And what has the Islamic Republic of Iran been so relentlessly enriching in the clandestine nuclear weapons facilities in the face of feckless Western negotiations and ineffectual regime of sanctions? The fissionable HEU core for this nuclear warhead, of course.
Recall the brouhaha over the November 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on Iranian nuclear progress. The big issue at the time was that Iran had halted its work on how to design and build a nuclear warhead way back in 2003. No wonder. The Iranian’s already had six KH-55 delivery systems to reverse engineer and upgrade and they very probably had AQ Khan’s proven, mass-production ready warhead design. What else could the Iranian’s possibly need?

Time.

All that Iran needed was time to manufacture the weapon delivery systems, the warheads and enriched HEU. That time has been provided them in abundance as the West failed to act in any meaningful way. Remember, we’re talking about an Iran which is the preeminent terrorist sponsoring state on the planet, an Iran whose Shi’a zealots desire an Armageddon scenario to hasten the arrival of their well-dwelling al-Mahdi, an Iran which has on more than one occasion pledged to annihilate Western civilization beginning with the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

Is there any question what hard assessment America and its allies must arrive at in very short order to preempt this digitized nuclear nightmare? We should hope not.

FACTS:

Any nation that has developed the capability to place a satellite in orbit has achieved the technical capability to hit another nation anywhere on the face of the earth with a nuclear weapon.

Iran and North Korea have both placed satellites into orbit. North Korea's KMS 3-2 satellite (NORAD Number 39026) is currently in a polar earth orbit at an altitude of approximately 513 miles as of this morning. Iran has been placing indigenous satellites into earth orbits since the Omid telecommunications and data processing satellite was launched February 2009.




Here's the bottom line as I pieced it together last evening during more research and dot-connecting:

• The miniaturized warhead referenced by the DIA assessment is almost certainly the same warhead that was proliferated to both Libya and IRAN by the AQ Khan Network via digitized blueprints and data sets.

• The warhead is a 2nd Generation Chinese HEU nuclear device which was covertly given to Pakistan in the late 1990s. Pakistan built and tested and validated the Chinese design in 1998; the warhead now sits on top of Pakistani ballistic missiles aimed at India.

• AQ Khan gave the design in digital blueprint form to Iran and Iran passed it to North Korea. They have obviously jointly produced the same Chinese warhead. This HEU warhead was successfully tested in North Korea on 12 FEB 2013, which is the start date for the current crisis.
  

What this means for Israel, as well as for South Korea, Japan and the US should be very obvious