Kerry: A Clear and Present Danger

In Thursday's debate Sen. Kerry forcefully stated a position which will put America at significant risk, potentially resulting in the complete devastation of our way of life as we know it today. The facts to support this are available, as I'll document. And there can be no disputing them. You may read them and draw your own conclusions. I assure you, I am no alarmist.

HT to Beldar for his post Why the U.S.S. Zeilin prompts me to oppose Sen. Kerry's position on nuclear bunker busters. He includes an interesting military / family historical narrative bringing his opposition to a critical and dangerous Kerry position closer to home. It led me to HobbsOnline, which neatly details the history and need of our Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) program, which Kerry clearly stated he would "abandon immediately."

If you're like me, yours eyes and ears easily glaze over when people start talking weapon systems. At this point in our history, the RNEP system is of crucial significance. You might recall all the press attention given to Saddam's great underground capabilities when we were preparing to invade Iraq - the tunnels and expanses all linked in one huge configuration which American forces wound up discovering and exploring. They were and are real.

Plans for a Baghdad subway were used instead to build underground tunnels to hide Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, says one of the Iraqi dictator’s former top scientists. Dr. Hussein Shahristani, once Iraq’s top nuclear scientist ...

And just last year Russia announced it will

"increase the overall length of its underground systems by 60% by 2015." As a Rosbalt correspondent reports, this was announced by Chairman of the Russian State Construction Department Nikolai Koshman today.

The fact is there is a wealth of information available on subterranean construction going on around the globe. Some of it is new and some makes best use of large existing cavern structures. Additionally,

On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported on a mysterious military base being constructed in Russia: "In a secret project reminiscent of the chilliest days of the Cold War, Russia is building a mammoth underground military complex in the Ural Mountains, Western officials and Russian witnesses say. Hidden inside Yamantau mountain in the Beloretsk area of the southern Urals, the project involved the creation of a huge complex, served by a railroad,a highway, and thousands of workers."

And yes the US has documented structures and facilities of this type.

Few Americans--indeed, few Congressional reps--are aware of the existence of Mount Weather, a mysterious underground military base carved deep inside a mountain near the sleepy rural town of Bluemont, Virginia, just 46 miles from Washington DC. Mount Weather --also known as the Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations--is buried not just in hard granite, but in secrecy as well.

Mount Weather is virtually an underground city, according to former personnel interviewed by Pollock. Buried deep inside the earth, Mount Weather was equipped with such amenities as: - private apartments and dormitories - streets and sidewalks - cafeterias and hospitals - a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings - a small lake fed by fresh water from underground springs - a transit system - a TV communication system

And you may remember this curious item recently reported in the MSM:

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. ... Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

More on general underground development can be found here. So, what is the point? For starters, as Hobbs states:

"Iran and North Korea continue their programs to develop nuclear weapons - and do so in facilities intelligence experts and defense analysts routinely describe as "hardened" against an airstrike. Without such weapons (RNEP), the United States will have no way to preemptively destroy an enemy's nuclear weapons or other WMD or WMD production facilities stored below ground in such hardened bunkers."

We know Iraq had this underground capability. Is there any real reason to believe the same is not true for Pakistan, Iran and others?

All one need do is combine this information with other facts we also know. Pakistan has nuclear capabilities and an unstable population closely linked to Islamofascism. Libya, various Russian Republics, the list goes on and on. Imagine a revolution that brought an Islamofascist regime to power in any one of several potential flashpoints. Would an ideology committed to global domination and capable of televised beheadings, suicide bombings, 9/11 and the burning of the bodies of dead American service men hesitate to use a nuclear capability if they came to control it? Would they care if only a handful or so of their most ardent diehard followers survived in hardened bunkers deep below the surface?

The fact is there are madmen with large followings in the world and they are far from the funny evil to be seen in an old James Bond flick. And in more and more locations throughout the globe they are actively pulling at the strings of power struggling to control entire nations. How long before they might succeed? If it happens just once we could find ourselves completely open to an attack of a catastrophic nature we have not imagined since the end of the cold war.

We must face the fact that while Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) helped stave off a confrontation with the Soviet Union, no such paradigm exists in a confrontation with an enemy that does not value life as the does the West. That enemy has already displayed the ability to sacrifice lives purely for the purpose of taking other lives.

True, we would regroup and respond. In all likelihood we would soon crush that opposition. But how many hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of American lives from just one well placed strike would we sacrifice in the balance? Now, with the Bush administration supporting development of the very weapon system we would need to pre-empt the threat of the wrong weapons falling into the wrong hands, we also have a far left liberal candidate preening himself in front of 65 Million Americans while declaring that he would immediately and unequivocally deny us of that very system. And as it would only be one more in a long line of critical defense systems the candidate has opposed throughout his career, there is absolutely no reason to trust his judgment in this case.

Is that the marking of a "war time" president who fully comprehends the dangers of Islamofascism and global terror? Or is it the prideful preening of an all too left leaning dove who can't wait to get his hands on the levers of power so as to render them weak and ineffective? If you put together John Kerry's consistent commitment to weaken American defense, his consistent deference to outside nations in legitimizing American policy and actions, and his obvious misunderstanding of the greatest threat from global terrorists - you have what can only be described as a clear and present danger to America's national security.

Comments

[Jokes]

The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all of the background checks, interviews, and testing were done there were three finalists - two men and one woman. For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.

"We must know that you will follow your instructions, no matter what the circumstances. Inside this room you will find your wife sitting in a chair. You have to kill her." The first man said. "You cant be serious. I could never shoot my wife!"The agent replies, "Then you?re not the right man for this job."

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. Then the agent came out with tears in his eyes. "I tried, but I cant kill my wife." The agent replies, "You dont have what it takes. Take your wife and go home."

Finally, it was the womans turn. Only she was told to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one shot after another. They heard screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said, "You guys didnt tell me the gun was loaded with blanks. So I had to beat him to death with the chair."