Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at US Vulnerabilities
March 2, 2018 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Comments Off
He also used the speech to reassure Russians that the military buildup was taking place even as the government was spending big sums to improve the quality of their lives.
But the main attention grabber in the speech was the weapons, which Mr. Putin described as a response to what he called the repudiation of arms control by the United States and its plans for a major weapons buildup.
The Trump administration has said that countering the world’s two other superpowers, Russia and China, was becoming its No. 1 national security mission, ahead of counterterrorism.
It has largely blamed Russia’s military modernization for that shift and has justified new work on nuclear weapons and bolstered missile defenses as the appropriate answer.
Mr. Putin may have further fueled the tension on Thursday by essentially declaring that Russia’s military brains had made America’s response obsolete.
He said a team of young, high-tech specialists had labored secretly and assiduously to develop and test the new weapons, including a nuclear-powered missile that could reach anywhere and evade interception.
“With the missile launched and a set of ground tests completed, we can now proceed with the construction of a fundamentally new type of weapon,” Mr. Putin said.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
He showed a video that illustrated the weapon flying over a mountain range, then slaloming around obstacles in the southern Atlantic before rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America and heading north toward the West Coast of the United States.
Given that deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine, questions arose about whether these weapons existed. American officials said that the nuclear cruise missile is not yet operational, despite Mr. Putin’s claims, and that it had crashed during testing in the Arctic.
The threats evoked the bombast of the Cold War. But this time they are not based on greater numbers of bombs but increased capabilities, stealth and guile.
Mr. Putin’s boasts about undersea nuclear torpedoes and earth-hugging cruise missiles emphasized the uselessness of American defenses against such weapons.
Oddly, apart from a reference to renewing the American nuclear arms enterprise in his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump has said almost nothing about the new era of competition with Mr. Putin or Russia. With multiple investigations into whether his campaign’s connections to Russians had influenced policy, he has neither protested the Russian buildup nor publicly endorsed, in any detail, his own administration’s plans to counter it.
The cruise missile was among five weapons introduced by Mr. Putin, each shown in video mock-ups on giant screens flanking him onstage. He threatened to use the weapons, as well as Russia’s older-generation nuclear arms, against the United States and Europe if Russia were attacked.
“We would consider any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies to be a nuclear attack on our country,” he said.
Mr. Putin said he could not show the actual weapons publicly, but assured his audience of Russia’s main political and prominent cultural figures that they had all been developed.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
If Mr. Putin was not bluffing, said Aleksandr M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst, then “these weapons are definitely new, absolutely new.”
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Thank you for subscribing.
An error has occurred. Please try again later.
You are already subscribed to this email.
“If we’re talking about nuclear-armed cruise missiles, that’s a technological breakthrough and a gigantic achievement,” he said in an interview. But, he added, “The question is, is this true?”
Several analysts writing on Facebook and elsewhere leaned toward the bluff theory. Given the recent history of Russian launch failures or premature crashes, the idea that Russia suddenly possessed a new generation of flying weapons strained credulity.
“The real surprise in among all of this is a nuclear-powered cruise missile,” said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It was talked about in the ’60s, but it ran into a lot of obstacles. To the extent that the Russians are seriously revisiting this is pretty interesting.”
Such technology could alter the balance of power, but Mr. Barrie questioned whether Russia was even close to deploying it.
“Does reality mean you have an item in the budget saying, ‘Develop nuclear propulsion for a missile?’” he said. “Or does it mean, ‘We’re going to have one ready to use soon’? I’d certainly want to see more evidence to believe that.”
Mr. Putin said Russia had developed the weaponry because the United States had rejected established arms control treaties and was deploying new missile defense systems in Europe and Asia.
President Barack Obama said that he was willing to negotiate cuts deeper than the 1,550 arms that Washington and Moscow are permitted to deploy under the 2010 New Start treaty, which took full effect last month. But it expires in a few years, and neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Trump has shown interest in renewing it.
The United States has also accused Russia of violating the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. After Mr. Putin’s speech, Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Putin essentially confirmed that by trumpeting the country’s development of new nuclear weapons.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Putin was correct that the United States is investing in expanding missile defenses. But those were not meant to counter Russia’s huge arsenals, but rather the launching of a few missiles by a state like North Korea.
The new Russian weapons would render such defenses obsolete, Mr. Putin gloated, and if anyone found a workaround, “our boys will think of something new.”
Other weapons the Russian leader discussed included a ballistic missile called Sarmat that could round either pole and overcome any defense system; hypersonic nuclear weaponry that fly at 20 times the speed of sound; and unmanned deepwater submarines that could go huge distances at enormous speed.
Mr. Putin said that some of the weapons were so new that they had yet to be named, and announced a naming contest on the Ministry of Defense website.
Political analysts said it was an effective campaign ploy whether the weapons existed or not. “He’s giving people the image of a desired future, of a future for Russia, and that’s appealing for his domestic audience,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.
Mr. Putin’s guns-and-butter, Russia-can-do-it-all speech came 17 days before the March 18 election. It seemed intended to reassure voters that expanded social spending would help solve the economic problems of the past four years, while sending the message that Mr. Putin was their best hope in protecting a Russia portrayed as a besieged fortress.
The reality that the country lacks the money to pay for a giant increase in social spending combined with a new generation of weapons was beside the point, Mr. Makarkin said.
“People may say Russia depends on oil, Russia doesn’t have the money, but the population at large doesn’t care about that,” he said. “They just want to know that we are a superpower.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
On the social front, Mr. Putin promised to double government spending on health care and raise pensions. He said Russia would reduce the poverty rate — official statistics indicate that around 14 million Russians live below the poverty line — by 2024.
Mr. Putin also said that life expectancy, currently at 73, a leap from when he first took office in 2000, should exceed 80 by 2030.
Critics doubt that Russia will ever have the means to deliver so much, given its stumbling economy and relatively depressed oil prices. Max Trudolyubov, a newspaper columnist and political analyst, called the speech a modern version of the Czar Cannon, a giant 16th-century piece of armament that sits on the Kremlin grounds and that legend holds never really worked.
For years, Mr. Putin has chafed at the perceived disrespect showed to him and Russia by the United States. “Nobody listened to Russia,” he said near the end of the speech, to huge applause. “Well, listen up now.”
Correction: March 1, 2018
An earlier version of this article misstated the age of the Czar Cannon. It is from the 16th century, not the 15th century.
Continue reading the main story
Share and Enjoy
Senate Intelligence Leaders Say House GOP Leaked a Senator’s Texts
March 2, 2018 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Comments Off
Fox News published the texts, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Mr. Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk to Mr. Steele.
“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch,” Mr. Trump wrote at the time. “Warner did not want a ‘paper trail’ on a ‘private’ meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame.”
“All tied into Crooked Hillary,” Mr. Trump added.
The Fox News article made prominent mention of work by Mr. Waldman’s Washington lobbying firm on behalf of Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who was once close to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s indicted former campaign chairman.
Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Mr. Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Mr. Nunes’s staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said that it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.
The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “CONFIDENTIAL: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said that the stamp was misleading and that other markings gave away their actual origin.
Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate had page numbers, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — did not.
A lawyer for Mr. Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Mr. Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the texts during a public hearing with the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies last month.
“There have been times where information has found its way out, some of it recent, where it didn’t come from us, but certainly people have portrayed it did,” he said. “And that’s O.K., because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, Jack Langer, did not dispute that the committee had leaked the messages, but called the premise of this article “absurd.”
“The New York Times, a prominent purveyor of leaks, is highlighting anonymous sources leaking information that accuses Republicans of leaking information,” he said. “I’m not sure if this coverage could possibly get more absurd.”
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, released a statement after this article was published, saying, “The speaker heard the senators on their concerns and encouraged them to take them up directly with their counterparts.”
In his meeting with the senators, Mr. Ryan told them that he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were briefed on their conclusions in recent weeks and on the meeting with Mr. Ryan.
In a joint statement, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner acknowledged the meeting with Mr. Ryan and said they had not requested that the speaker take any specific action.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Waldman, the lawyer who communicated with Mr. Warner, could not be reached for comment.
The incident makes clear just how far the two intelligence committees — generally considered secretive refuges from the politics of Capitol Hill — have diverged over the course of their Russia investigations.
In the House, Republicans and Democrats have been consumed by partisan sniping, airing grievances on television and in the press, while the pace of witness interviews has slowed to a crawl. Democrats have repeatedly accused Mr. Nunes of using his position to protect Mr. Trump from the investigation.
The House committee spent much of the last month locked in a bitter dispute over the secret Republican memorandum, which accused top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials of abusing their powers to spy on one of Mr. Trump’s former campaign advisers. Republicans released the document over the objections of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which warned in a rare public statement that it was dangerously misleading.
Democrats called the document reckless and said it was merely a political tool to tarnish the agencies investigating Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia. They eventually released their own memo, drawn from the same underlying material, rebutting it.
The Senate committee has conducted its investigation primarily in private, and Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner remained in lock step both publicly and privately. When Fox News published Mr. Warner’s texts, for example, an aide to Mr. Burr told the network that he had been aware of Mr. Warner’s contacts with Mr. Waldman, and the two senators issued a joint statement condemning the leak.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and another member of the Intelligence Committee, also defended Mr. Warner.
Sen.Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago.Has had zero impact on our work. https://t.co/bnmI2Thedt #FoxNews
—
Marco Rubio (@marcorubio)
Feb. 9, 2018
And while Mr. Nunes’s memo consumed Republicans in the House, as well as officials in the White House, Mr. Burr largely steered clear of it. He told CNN it ought not to have been released, and in private he discounted it.
In the hearing with the intelligence chiefs last month, he sought to draw a distinction between his committee’s approach and that of the House.
“I promised you when we started a year ago that the sensitive nature of that material would, in fact, be protected,” he said. “The vice chairman and I have done everything in our power to do that.”
Continue reading the main story