Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

The math demands it!

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Reality always wins in the end.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

This fight is for everything.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

This really is a full service blog.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

The revolution will be supervised.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

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Rofer on International Relations

Trump Buddy Tom Barrack Indicted As Foreign Agent

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Tom Barrack was the chair of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. He had been a Trump confidant and financial backer for some time, and thus not surprising he would get a job like that. Today he was arrested for acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates and trying to influence the President in their favor.

From the Department of Justice press release:

According to court documents, between April and November 2016, Barrack served as an informal advisor to the campaign of the candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Between November 2016 and January 2017, Barrack served as Chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Beginning in January 2017, Barrack informally advised senior U.S. government officials on issues related to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Barrack also sought appointment to a senior role in the U.S. government, including the role of Special Envoy to the Middle East. Barrack served as the Executive Chairman of a global investment management firm headquartered in Los Angeles, and Grimes was employed at the firm and reported directly to Barrack. During the relevant time period, Alshahhi worked as an agent of the UAE and was in frequent contact with Barrack and Grimes, including numerous in-person meetings in the United States and the UAE.

As alleged in the indictment, the defendants used Barrack’s status as a senior outside advisor to the campaign and, subsequently, to senior U.S. government officials, to advance the interests of and provide intelligence to the UAE while simultaneously failing to notify the Attorney General that their actions were taken at the direction of senior UAE officials. Barrack – directly and through Alshahhi and Grimes – was regularly and repeatedly in contact with the senior leadership of the UAE government. On multiple occasions, Barrack referred to Alshahhi as the UAE’s “secret weapon” to advance its foreign policy agenda in the United States.

Alshahhi and Grimes were also indicted. Grimes was also arrested, and Alshahhi remains at large. Barrack also made a big mistake:

On June 20, 2019, Barrack voluntarily met with FBI special agents. During the interview, Barrack allegedly made numerous false statements, including falsely denying that Alshahhi had ever requested that he take any actions on behalf of the UAE.

Barrack’s company, Colony Northstar, laid out plans to influence the government in a document. They expected to make a lot of money.

Back when Barrack was trying to influence Trump in favor of the UAE before and after the 2016 election, a lot was going on. Mike Flynn was working for Turkey and trying to set up something with Russia. Flynn was also working with Barrack on other deals. We are likely to see more come out about that as Barrack’s prosecution proceeds.

This is a big deal.

Coverage:

Daily Beast

CNN

CNBC

NPR

New York Times

Washington Post

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Chinese Nuclear Silos

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Someone – Goku? germy? – wanted me to see that China has built 120 new missile silos in their western desert.

[Disclosure: Jeffrey Lewis has been a friend for years, and we have consulted each other on many things. Our political views are similar, but he has a punchier way of expressing them.]

There’s a lot that can be said about this discovery and the current state of relations with China, but I don’t have time right now, so a few highlights only.

That China is increasing its nuclear capabilities is not surprising. Both Russia and the United States, which have several thousand nuclear weapons each, are modernizing their nuclear forces. China has 200 to 300 nuclear weapons.

China has stated that they regard their nuclear force primarily as a deterrent. These new silos add to that deterrent. Because China doesn’t have enough plutonium to make weapons to fill all those silos, speculation is that China will move missiles from one silo to another to provide a changing target.

A summer intern, Decker Eveleth, found the silo field by looking at overhead photos. This is a specialty of Lewis’s and his students, who have refined the technique. They prepared a media strategy to announce the find, because they wanted to shape how it was received. There is currently a fair bit of agitating against China by people who seem to be itching for a war. Finding a new capability could stoke their agitating.

They announced the discovery to Joby Warrick at the Washington Post, who wrote a story about it. James Acton, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an analysis, as did Lewis. Wonkier parts can be found here and in a podcast.

The Washington Post Editoral Board called for arms control talks with China, in response to the find. China does not want arms talks until the US and Russia take their numbers much further down, or perhaps until their numbers are higher.

Open source intelligence continues to be played down by government professionals, but this find illustrates that it has the potential to affect policy. Did government analysts find this field but not say anything about it? Does its revelation by a non-governmental organization with its own spin make a difference in policy and public perception?

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Anniversary

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Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. World War I began a month later.

I’ve thought a lot about this and the bloody first half of the twentieth century. It was those two world wars that made the atomic bomb seem necessary.

In a way, those two wars were the last major wars fought on the basis that wars had always been fought – over disputed territory, or insults to the ruling class. The wars that followed have been more limited and more civil wars of who is to rule a country.

From Twitter:

I know, not particularly cheerful. But I think we’ve learned some things from that bloody half-century. Now we need not to forget them.

Like that first tweet – we’re beginning to learn that sometimes the locals may need to be offended.

Open thread!

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The Biden-Putin Summit

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What can we expect from the summit meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin?

Nothing.

That is the expectation that Biden is setting. There will be no grand pronouncements, no reset, maybe not even a perfunctory statement of agreement on a minor point. That is part of the reason that Biden plans to hold a press conference by himself. The other part, of course, is in contrast with Donald Trump’s disastrous showing at Helsinki.

But the meeting is necessary and important. Russia is a major country, with a nuclear arsenal equivalent to America’s. Russia is adjacent to our allies in Europe and supplies energy to many of them. It has a long land border across which untoward things can happen. Those are reason enough for the leaders to meet.

The meeting is important because tensions between the two countries have increased during the 21st century. The United States has pulled out of treaties that stabilized the relationship rather than try to resolve problems. Russia has acted as an international spoiler. Both sides need to show reliability in their actions. That can only be done through meetings.

Many issues might be discussed – the situation with those treaties and how to go forward, the situation in Ukraine, American sanctions on Russia, Russia’s attacks on dissidents inside and outside Russia, the situation in Syria, America’s return to the Iran nuclear agreement, relations with China, the uses of the Arctic, and more. Both men have their own lists of priorities. It’s likely that their aides have exchanged those lists and are working to pare them down to fit in the time available.

Those aides have also been gaming out something like a SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. I’ll do a bit of that here. Obviously, I’m coming at it from an Americentric viewpoint.

The real strength internationally today is in dealing with the pandemic. The pandemic hinders economies and military strength. Biden understands this and has made controlling the pandemic his first priority, with some success. In contrast, Russia is going into another wave of disease. Its people are more reluctant than Americans to be vaccinated, and its vaccine may be less effective than others. Brazil and Slovakia have raised questions about quality control in its manufacture.

Russia’s willingness to take risks to upend other countries’ expectations in terms of invading its neighbors and willingness to kill individuals seen as dissidents both inside and outside Russia is a strength. It keeps opponents off guard and makes the most of capabilities that are weaker than others’.

Russia’s role as a supplier of natural gas to Europe is a strength in dealing with Europe, to be used as leverage against the formal alliances of NATO and the EU. Both of those alliances are strengths, emphasized during Biden’s visits these two weeks.

Both countries have weaknesses in their domestic political situations. America has a major political party that is sympathetic to and influenced by Russian organizations. Russia’s poor economic situation and repression of dissidents have led to demonstrations, which repression may damp down. Putin is not grooming a successor, which is not a problem now but will become one at some point. America’s last president contines to try to undermine the succession.

The summit itself is an opportunity for Putin personally. He wants Russia to be seen as an equal to America, and a summit provides favorable optics. But that doesn’t improve Russia’s economy or pandemic status. And Russia is an equal in nuclear destructive power.

The opportunity for both is to feel the other out, understand him better, try out approaches. The personal relationship is far from the whole thing, but it’s not unimportant.

The biggest policy opportunity is likely to be in the area of the now defunct nuclear treaties. Both sides understand that nuclear war or accident is the greatest danger facing them. Additionally, both sides are looking at very expensive plans for modernizing their nuclear forces. In the economic crunch of the pandemic, sizing those plans down would be significant. Communication of actions that might look like war is important. Bringing China into discussions of limiting numbers of nuclear weapons is worth thinking about. The most that might be achieved in this meeting would be agreement to hold working meetings on these topics.

Biden will bring up Ukraine, and Putin will bring up sanctions. The most that will be mentioned of these subjects in any communiqué will be that they were discussed. Maybe some positive words can be ginned up about the Arctic.  It is possible that there will not be a joint communiqué.

Threats to a chummy outcome with roses and unicorns are pretty much everything about the relationship, which is why Biden is damping down expectations, and Putin isn’t saying much either.

In the leadup to the summit, both sides are making gestures of strength and perhaps signaling ways forward. They are predictable and not very significant.

One that I find significant is that NATO made a statement that it will not deploy new land-based missiles to Europe. It wasn’t planning to, but Russia has deployed potentially nuclear cruise missiles in the area. It was these missiles that were the proximate cause of the American withdrawal from the INF Treaty. Russia says it is willing to come back to an INF-style treaty in Europe, but it will be a long way. The activity around this issue suggests it will be discussed, although the best we can expect is the formation of a working group.

Biden will have his own interpreter and note-taker with him. He may also have Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken along. Putin will have a similar complement of his people. The summit will take place, and we will move along to the next thing.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner

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Quick Open Thread

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I plan to write a post on what to expect from the Biden-Putin summit, but here’s a foretaste. Last week I finally said on Twitter, in plain English, what I’ve thought for some time: that nuclear weapons are unusable unless we want to destroy the Earth, so we should say that and explicitly move toward that goal. I didn’t emphasize, but will here, that I am not calling for instant destruction of all nukes, but rather stating elimination as the goal and taking steps in that direction.

So today I was very pleased to see this

And I had to gloat a little.

Open thread!

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Rolling The Credulous

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There’s a lot of shouting right now about whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the more partisan shouting is that Donald Trump and his minions were right last year to “consider” a lab leak. They were right last year in the sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yes, they mentioned that possibility, embedded in claims that the virus was a bioweapon and the overwhelming motivation to blame China to take the focus off Trump’s inability to deal with the pandemic.

The virologists I follow have kept a lab leak as a possibility all along. I haven’t followed this story closely until now because

  1. The most important story has been dealing with the spread of the pandemic and
  2. We are not likely to know how the virus got into humans for a long time.

The probability that most scientists (including me) assigned to the possible origins was bioweapon 0%, once the genome was analyzed and showed no telltale signs of human-caused rearrangements; transmission from animals to humans, most likely because that’s how we’ve gotten most of our diseases; and lab leak possible but unlikely because accidents happen but people handling viruses take precautions against leaks.

Far too much of the shouting comes from people who have no experience in the field or have been discredited in other ways. Jonathan Chait is loud and decidedly not a virologist. His home magazine published a long article by Nicholson Baker, who writes novels about such things. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a long piece by science writer Nicholas Wade, who also published, a few years back, a book detailing his genetic theories about why Chinese are good at business and Jews at money. That should have discredited him from being taken seriously on anything relating to genetics again.

Then there are the reporters. Some are doing a reasonable job. Last night a tweet reminded me that Michael Gordon, who reported a Wall Street Journal article with the unconfirmed claim that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute had been hospitalized in November 2019, also coauthored with Judith Miller the infamous New York Times article saying erroneously that the US Intelligence community found that Saddam Hussein’s aluminum tubes were suitable for centrifuges.

I have a strong emotional reaction to that error. It helped to precipitate the Iraq war, for which people in the Middle East and the rest of us will continue to pay for a very long time. More personally, I was watching the Times carefully for that article. An intelligence finding was expected to be released. I had had professional interactions with the group at Oak Ridge who design centrifuges. I knew that they would be involved in the evaluation of those aluminum tubes. My own sense was that the aluminum was not of the quality needed for centrifuges, but I knew those folks would know.

Eighteen  intelligence agencies make up the US Intelligence Community. The Department of Energy includes one of them, and that is where the Oak Ridge people would have input. I was surprised when the Miller-Gordon article said that the intelligence community assessed that the tubes were appropriate for centrifuges. I scoured the article to see what the DOE said, but that wasn’t made explicit. I reluctantly accepted the finding and the likelihood of war.

Years later, we learned that a CIA analyst, who had no particular knowledge of centrifuges or materials, drove the assessment. The DOE and the Department of State’s INR bureau dissented.

The Times later evaluated their coverage of the runup to the Iraq war, and found this article wanting. Editorial decisions around the article – placement of the article and corrections to it – were also problematic. Gordon continued at the Times until 2017, when he moved to the Wall Street Journal. Miller was forced to resign from the Times in 2005, largely for her coverage of the Iraq war.

There are subsidiary issues that this history brings up. The overwhelming urge to give white men second chances, for one. We see this with Nicholas Wade being rehabilitated to push the lab-leak theory. Miller’s fate was more appropriate. There is no shortage of capable reporters to replace those tho mess up badly.

The motivation behind the big push on the possibility of a lab leak. Far too many people tweet about it with NO – repeat NO – background to evaluate it in any way. They are “following the logic” or other excuses to push their names out in the hope that they will be the lucky clock on which the correct answer stops. But we are unlikely to know how the virus jumped to humans for many years; that has been the case with other diseases.

Three big science stories now surrounded with misinformation. Microwave directed-energy weapons (Havana Syndrome), the lab leak, and UFOs. The zone is flooding with shit. Is it that too many people don’t understand science, that we’re looking for excitement after a year of grim science news, or disinformation? They all have a political side, mostly justifying war against China or Russia if they turn out to be responsible. Good grief, haven’t we been here before?

I might as well add that there is a crappy lab-leak article in Vanity Fair that is not worth your time to read. Not linking.

And the Times, back in 2004, had the integrity to look back at what went wrong with their reporting which helped to precipitate a national disaster. It’s almost five years now, and they haven’t bothered to look into how Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers reported “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” on the eve of 2016’s disastrous election.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Where Is The Weapon?

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State Department and intelligence personnel have reported neurological symptoms since 2016 that have been attributed to a “directed microwave” weapon. The first reports were from State Department personnel in Havana, Cuba, and the symptoms have been named the Havana Syndrome.

No cause of this syndrome has been identified, but it has been attributed to the effects of a directed microwave weapon. But nobody has shown 1) that microwaves cause such symptoms or 2) that such a weapon exists, or what it might look like.

At one point in my career, I did some research that bears some similarities to the discussions that have been going on. So I wrote about that.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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