America’s Pivot to Far East: How to Make and Exploit New Enemies

by Trowbridge H. Ford

  The United States has had a long history of making enemies in seeking and controlling the world, but since the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it has slowly learned how to make new enemies, and exploit them for its strategic advantage. The process required developing new military technology, learning how to use them, developing new strategies and new forces for their use, providing new security blankets for their not being disclosed, having a flexible mentality for what is necessary when it comes to actual operations, and not being too concerned about constitutional requirements for its execution, often just dismissing it as deranged conspiracy theory. Of course, the whole change resulted in some failures, some unexpected good luck, and a lot of evil.

It really got going with the Reagan Administration’s repudiation of the strategy of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, which promised an endless struggle, and a most expensive one is keeping up. In the past the Soviet Union had managed to do so without a nuclear conflagration. and some more inventive and hopefully less expensive was sought. The strategists finally settled upon Joseph Nye’s Nuclear Ethics which called for catching the enemy by surprise which incapacitated its nuclear forces with far fewer human losses. The problems of achieving one would require new scientific breakthroughs about how to fight without nuclear weapons, more detailed intelligence to locate targets and wipe them out, provide arrangements for the necessary cleanup, and most importantly keeping the lid on what was going on.

The beginning of the new order started with a new effort by the Pentagon, headed by Admiral James ‘ Ace’ Lyons, to provoke the Soviets into a deadly response to the latest naval challenge, known also as NATO’s Able Archer exercise,, as Gregory Vistica has written in Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy. It proved so threatening that Moscow responded with Operation RYAN for fear that Washington was going to spring a first strike on the USSR. “ RYAN’s purpose,” Professor Christopher Andrew has profusely written in The Sword And The Shield,”to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union – a delusion which reflected both the KGB’s continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making of the Main Adversary and its recurrent tendency to conspiracy theory.” (p. 213)

In this context, the development of lasers, especially light and noise ones, came in most nicely. By being able to create beams 10,000 times great than those from the sun, and could shake seabeds to smithereens, satellites and then submarines offered idle vehicles for their use. In fact, the Pentagon got early involved by having its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) concentrating on weapons of war rather then what Gordon Gould, one of the laser’s inventors, wanted “ Perhaps,” Jeff Hecht has written in Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, “eventually Gould suggested, lasers could be made powerful enough to destroy a nuclear missile before it reached its target.” (p 75)

With such an endorsement, it was hardly surprising that the Reagan administration made it the center piece of its Star Wars program, only the laser satellite was given the less difficult task of stopping a Soviet ICBM on launch rather than in full flight. To better the intelligence of where the Soviets would launch, William Casey’s Central Intelligence Agency developed operation to locate such a sites. Operation Eastbound, a sensor mission to locate where the Soviets were preparing ICBMs for launch, went ahead with the Toshiba Company sending a cargo container full of them along there Trans Siberian Railroad. The CIA even bugged the central network in Moscow to see how the Soviet leadership reacted to some international surprise, reminiscent of how it had bugged these facilities In Vienna and Berlin. Also, Washington had its killer subs intrude more dangerously in Soviet waters, especially the White and Barents Seas, to be there to react to any Soviet response. See Appendix C in Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew’s Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, pp. 425-27.

All that was needed now was something to trigger a surprise, and it was provided by Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme when he stopped a shipment of 80 HAWK missile through the country from Israel to Iran in violation of Operation Stealth, a program that he was to oversee so no arms shipments went to the participants in the Iran-Iraq War. Palme was expected to approve a user certificate that the arms were for Sweden, so that Israel would be resupplied for the transfer of the essentially obsolete missiles. Iran-Contra operation leader Oliver North even went to Stockholm to get Palme to change his mind but he refused, making what had happened an impeachable offense of President Reagan if it was disclosed.

To help cover up the problem, Washington went ahead hurriedly to launch a new Lacrosse satellite on the Challenger shuttle as the first one in space had stopped functioning, and the launch failed devastatingly almost immediately. Washington, still without a laser satellite to shoot down any ICMB if Moscow reacted rashly in response to a surprise, went ahead with its planned non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War, triggered by Palme’s assassination.

Fortunately, Moscow had developed spies, particularly the Agency’s Aldrich ‘ Rick’ Ames, the Bureau’s Robert Hansen, the Mossad’s Jonathan Pollard, and several in the US Navy, so it was not caught by surprise his shooting, as the Red Navy’s killer and boomer subs were comfortably in place to launch a secondary ICBM strike if a second one proved necessary, and Moscow had 82 unknown SS-23 nuclear-armed missiles in western Russia and East Germany, as Mark Urban has explained in UK Eyes Alpha to win any war if the shooting started (p. 290), leaving what the Lacrosse satellites could accomplish an unknown until 1988 when a replacement was finally put in space while the Soviet Bloc and the USSR were going down the tubes.

The growing possible fallout from the final end of the Iran-Iraq War brought back into focus what the Lacrosse satellites could accomplish. The big question was what would Tehran do if the western allies, led by the USA, cut troublesome Saddam Hussein down to size, possibly ousting him. A shooting war with it was out of the question, and the Iraqi leader might seek sanctuary for his most valuable assets, once it started. To keep Iran on side in any conflict, Danny Stillman, a weapons designer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, recommended that the Pentagon try to cause an earthquake by hitting its qanats, underground facilities with many entrances for collecting water, with air borne lasers. The result was a big quake, northwest of Tehran, on June 21,1990.

Little wonder that GW Bush resorted to the same tactic as his father when it came time to keep Iran in December 2003 from taking advantage of the capture of Saddam after the Second Gulf War , hitting the qanat system for ancient city of Bam with laser beams, causing ultimately a deadly, 6.6 surface quake killing over 25,000 Iranians. By this time, this covert weapon had gained bipartisan presidential support. President Clinton had used it in 1999 to punish Turkey’s Bulent Ecevic in NATO for providing Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosovic with its bombing targets during the campaign to get it to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the quake in Izmit near its nuclear generating plant which started his political decline as its leader, and the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade for acting as a conduit of military information for the Serbian leader.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) which designed, and saw to the production of such missiles that it had replaced the National Security Agency aka No Such Agency as the government’s most powerful, secret organization. It had so much cash that it built a new headquarters in Vienna, Virginia without congressional knowledge or approval. It allowed the apparent murder of a too nosy, security guard, Tina Rocca, to go too unreported and rectified. It was so desirous of publicizing its accomplishments that it made a shoulder patch for NRO employees, entitled “We Own The Night”, showing black and white satellites circumventing the globe as radar and SIGINT sources of power and intelligence.

This pushing the prowess of the Air Force forced the troubled US Navy to join the fray for similar resources. In return for US aid, Iran agreed to IAEA inspection of its nuclear sites. After many weapons and personnel problems with finishing the latest attack sub, USS Jimmy Carter, it was rushed to completion. Before it had even been commissioned, it was sent off from New London by its CNO Vern Clark by a rousing speech in the fall of 2004 on an unexplained secret mission which would only end four months later. Seems that it finally reached the Auckland Islands, southwest of New Zealand, in December, and had its noise lasers trigger a quake which broke the Indian-Australian plate off from the Antarctic one just after Christmas, causing a bigger one a few days later off Indonesia’s Aceh which triggered those massive tsunamis around the Indian Ocean which Joe Vialls claimed was the result of a nuclear explosion, killing around 250,000, mostly Muslims. The USS Carter then returned, “flying the broom”, an unprecedented sign of a great victory over the enemy in wartime as it entered its home port.

This ended the revenge attacks in response to Al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings on 9/11, and covert government had to find a new rational for continuing the war. Man-made earthquakes and tsunamis, though less devastating than nuclear weapons, were still too powerful, and could not be arranged everywhere, though they still had a role to play as Robert Gate’s parting gift from the Pentagon to China demonstrated in May 2008 with that destruction of its scientific facilities in mountainous Sichuan by a most unexpected quake, and the collapse of the anti-American New Democracy government in Japan followed the Tohoku quake and tsunami led the the Fukushima disaster. Still, A more limited,controllable means was needed to fight America’s wars with its enemies.

While man-made quakes could cut down potential enemies to size, they could be made to look like they were more powerful, even existent, than they were. If quakes could be made to look like natural occurrences, they could be claimed too to be nuclear tests, especially if the perpetrator had powerful instruments to spread such propaganda while the target had little means to. Moreover, it would spread fear of nuclear annihilation among populations while getting them to go along with more covert ones to prevent them.

The outline to the pivot to Asia is contained in Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman’s The Nuclear Express where the 9/11 attacks are made out to be the precursor of now nuclear ones, especially by rogue North Korea. The source of the claims is from captured Pakistani physicist A. Q. Khan who confessed about how he helped get Iran and Libya obtain centrifuges and plans for making nuclear weapons, and North Korea is covertly going wild with the intelligence after the U. S. State Department had named them and others as “state sponsors of terrorism” in 2002, though the North had done nothing about it up until then, though there was no mention of any earthquakes at all in the book, and who and what might have been causing them.

In the book’s chronology, it makes the case that North Korea, and somewhat less its sponsor China, is the one to worry about. In 2004. Khan confessed, there was a worldwide nuclear network, managed by him, which has been selling nuclear technology to it and other rogue states (p. 379). Three years later, North Korea at the Six Power Talks suggested that it may close down its nuclear program when the previous year it had already exploded a low- grade bomb covertly. The basis for this claim was the report by seismological sources that North Korea had suffered a 4 .3 earthquake on the Richter scale on October 9, 2006 around where its nuclear test site is located.

The same conflation of quakes into tests occurred during the ones on May 25, 2009, February 12, 2013, January 6,2018, and September second the same year, and they became a a debatable bit stronger. And, of course, North Korea didn’t have a clue about what was causing the quakes, and was happy to go along claims that it was becoming nuclear stronger. It even publicly destroyed a reactor’s nuclear cooling-tower at the Yongbyon site in 2008 to show that it couldn’t be conducting underground tests without experiencing a Fukushima disaster of its own.

The Nuclear Express concluded that it was up to the next President, Obama at the time, and Trump now, to prevent it from coming off the rails without any serious explanation of why it risked happening.