- Strategic Command announced yesterday it had achieved
an operational capability for rapidly striking targets around the globe
using nuclear or conventional weapons, after last month testing its capacity
for nuclear war against a fictional country believed to represent North
Korea (see GSN, Oct. 21) http://tinyurl.com/9voqr .
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- In a press release yesterday, STRATCOM www.stratcom.mil
said a new Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike
on Nov. 18 "met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational
capability."
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- The requirements were met, it said, "following
a rigorous test of integrated planning and operational execution capabilities
during Exercise Global Lightning."
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- The annual Global Lightning exercise last month tested
U.S. strategic warfare capabilities, including the so-called CONPLAN 8022
mission for a global strike, according to publicly available military documents.
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- CONPLAN 8022 is "a new strike plan that includes
[a] pre-emptive nuclear strike against weapons of mass destruction facilities
anywhere in the world," said Hans Kristensen, a consultant for the
Natural Resources Defense Council. Kristensen first published the STRATCOM
press release on his Web site, www.nukestrat.com .
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- Military analyst William Arkin, in a column http://tinyurl.com/8xugv
on the Washington Post Web site in October, wrote that the classified exercise
involved the response to a radiological "dirty bomb" attack on
Alabama by the fictional country Purple or allied terrorists. "In
the exercise, Purple is a Northeast Asian nation thinly veiled as North
Korea," according to Arkin.
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- Maj. Jeff Jones, STRATCOM spokesman, said today that
the exercise incorporated various scenarios and added, "Everything
is fictional that we put in the exercise."
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- Global Lightning employed command and control personnel,
according to the STRATCOM release.
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- Global strike attacks could be launched from U.S. long-range
bombers, nuclear submarines or land-based ballistic missiles, according
to the STRATCOM Web site www.stratcom.mil .
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- The new command was created Aug. 9 in an attempt to
integrate broad elements of U.S. military power into global strike plans
and operations.
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- That, according to an Arkin commentary http://tinyurl.com/9v9ym
in the Washington Post in May, could include anything from electronic jamming
to penetrating computer networks, to commando operations, to the use of
a nuclear earth penetrator. CONPLAN 8022 http://tinyurl.com/9v9ym , he
wrote, is intended to address two scenarios using such capabilities: preventing
a suspected imminent nuclear attack from a small state, and attacking an
adversary's suspected WMD infrastructure.
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- STRATCOM Commander Gen. James Cartwright said at an
opening ceremony that the new command would help the country convey a "new
kind of deterrence."
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- http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_12_2.html
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