Exactly, don't forget LA and Seattle the IT heartland. EMP there would have the amish laughing their heads off.

If a missile was to be fired today, from any nation, it would be seen identifying that country to a counter attack and annihilation. However, satellites can be parked in orbit indefinitely and can be guided to a target the size of a continent with ease. A freighter could fire a scud just off shore of the US and by the time it detonated it would be all over.

As I have shown several nations have plans on the moon,

payload is not an issue.

The technology is out there although commercial private space flight would be limited to something like Virgin Galactic. This does not mean that a consortium of interests would not want an ace (or several hundred) in orbit. I hear France and Russia have plenty of rockets for hire.

Only one weapon needs to fire for this to work. Integration is a non-issue.



Wow an irrelevent link, your forte.



Yes, if you get highly enriched uranium you can make a bomb, will it be a small one that can be shot into space? No.



Its a conspiracy theory capable of being acted upon by two nations, Russia and the US, no one else has the technology. Their may be people who can build rockets to deliver small, and light satellites, there are people who can make weapons, the two do not combine into your fanciful doomsday scenario.







Okay so first their going to get a nuke, then they're going to steal a ballistic missile, (thats really easy because I hear the countries that have them don't really want them anymore) but not only that their going to have a silo which can be mounted into a rusting hulk of a freighter! Because after all it required so little effort to design submarines to do that.



Hrmm I wonder why it was intercepted... Could it be that the US monitors shipments coming out of north korea?



And they don't have a sea route (US, S.Korea, and Japan make sure of that) and they don't have a land route (China makes sure of that)



So an iranian military vessel, carrying a nuclear warhead the quality of a russian or US design, sets sail, then sits of the US coast unhindered, and fires one of their notoriously poor missile designs (they tend to explode accidentally) over the united states. Sounds like a really plausible scenario to me.

The massive transfer of goods and equipment once under the exclusive control of national armies into private hands released into the market products ranging from rocket launchers to SCUD missiles and nuclear designs and machinery. Moreover, governments also boosted illicit trade by criminalizing new activities. File sharing through the internet, for example, is a newly illegal activity that has added millions to the ranks of illicit traders.

Oh yeah because the US couldn't possibly find out who's ship it came from, or even, notice a Iranian Frigate heading towards the US... A US Coast Gaurd Cutter could take on all three of Irans frigates and win. You place too much credit in your doomsday scenarios.

Highly fucking unlikely.

I cannot conceive of any use that the fleet will ever have for aircraft. The Navy doesn't need airplanes. Aviation is just a lot of noise.

1st why would the US attack international freighter traffic in international waters?

2nd after they launch what good would sinking the freighters do then, the missiles are away.

3rd the target is above the US not the US itself. A German V2 and an egg timer could do the trick. It's not brain surgery we are talking here.

4th This link clearly shows that arms trade with 'rouge' states are clearly being done directly contradicting your baseless opinion of 'no one is sharing the information'.

5th Clearly you have never heard of an Arms Bazaar

Famous last words:



This is the shit-for-brains who made it US Naval policy that Japan would never attack Pearl Harbor. (The Japanese, of course, didn't get that memo.)

Why?

Because it was highly fucking unlikely.

Gee... a north korean freighter leaves port... Considering 70% of their GDP is devoted to weapons manufacture, I'd say the US has a pretty good guess about whats on that ship.

2nd after they launch what good would sinking the freighters do then, the missiles are away.

If an Iranian frigate leaves port (especially with an escallation between the US and Iran) and heads for the states then you can be assured that there will be enough US vessels keeping an eye on it to sink it if it begins to act suspiciously.

5th Clearly you have never heard of an Arms Bazaar

Considering the articles derision of the quality of all of the illegal goods take a guess at the quality of a 1950s scud missile...

THREE ILLUSIONS

Yet in the face of all the evidence, at least three grand illusions persist in the way we -- the public and the politicians in whom we place our trust -- address global illicit trade.

First is the illusion that there is nothing new. Illicit trade is age-old, a continuous facet and side effect of market economies or of commerce in general. Illicit trade's ancestor, smuggling, traces back to ancient times, and many a "thieves' market" survives in the world's commercial hubs. Therefore, skeptics would argue that since smuggling has always been more a nuisance than a scourge, it is a threat we can learn to live with as we have always done.

But this skepticism ignores the important transformations of the 1990s. Changes in political and economic life, along with revolutionary technologies in the hands of civilians, have dissolved the sealants that governments traditionally relied on to secure their national borders. At the same time, the market-oriented economic reforms that swept the world in the 1990s boosted incentives to break through these sealants -- legally or otherwise. Not only did the hold of governments on borders weaken, but the reforms amplified the rewards awaiting those who were prepared to break the rules.

Technology enlarged the market, not just geographically by lowering transport costs but also by making possible the trade in a whole range of goods that didn't exist before, such as pirated software or genetically modified marijuana. New technologies also made it possible to trade internationally products that in the past were hard or impossible to transport or hold in "inventory" -- human kidneys, for instance. Markets, of course, were also enlarged when governments deregulated previously closed or tightly controlled economies and allowed foreigners to visit, trade, and invest more freely.

The massive transfer of goods and equipment once under the exclusive control of national armies into private hands released into the market products ranging from rocket launchers to SCUD missiles and nuclear designs and machinery. Moreover, governments also boosted illicit trade by criminalizing new activities. File sharing through the internet, for example, is a newly illegal activity that has added millions to the ranks of illicit traders.

A clue to the explosion of illicit trade is the relentless rise of money laundering. Eventually, every illicit line of business generates money that needs to be laundered. And there is ample evidence that despite all the precautions and enforcement measures now in place, there is more and more dirty money floating in the international financial system now than ever before.

Yet until now, with the exception of narcotics, illicit trade has simply not been a priority in international law and treaty making, or in international police work and cooperative law enforcement. The United Nations devised common language to describe it only in the year 2000, and most countries have a long way to go in adapting their laws to international standards, let alone enforcing them. It took the advent of software piracy and the birth of "intellectual property crime" to add a fillip to international efforts against counterfeiting. And trafficking in persons -- the most morally outrageous of all the forms of illicit trade -- was defined in the 1990s only by academics and activists, and made the subject of a specific, comprehensive law in the United States in 2000. (Only seventeen other countries have done the same.)

The second illusion is that illicit trade is just about crime. It is true that criminal activities surged and became global in the 1990s. But thinking about international illicit trade as just another manifestation of criminal behavior misses a larger, more consequential point. Global criminal activities are transforming the international system, upending the rules, creating new players, and reconfiguring power in international politics and economics. The United States attacked Iraq because it feared that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction. But during the same time a stealthy network led by A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani engineer, was profiting by selling nuclear bomb-making technology to whoever could pay for it.

Throughout the twentieth century, to the extent that governments paid attention to illicit trade at all, they framed it -- to their public, and to themselves -- as the work of criminal organizations. Consciously or not, investigators around the world took the model of the American and Sicilian Mafia as their blueprint. Propelled by this mind-set, the search for traffickers -- almost always in drugs -- led to what investigators thought could be only corporate-like organizations: structured, disciplined, and hierarchical. The Colombian cartels, Chinese tongs, Hong Kong triads, Japanese yakuza, and eventually after 1989 the Russian mafiya were all approached this way: first as criminal organizations, only later as traders. In most countries, the laws employed to prosecute illicit traders remain those born of the fight against organized crime, like the racketeering and corrupt organizations (RICO) statutes in the United States.

Only recently has this mind-set began to shift. Thanks to al-Qaeda the world now knows what a network of highly motivated individuals owing allegiance to no nation and empowered by globalization can do. The problem is that the world still thinks of these networks mostly in terms of terrorism. Yet, as the pages ahead show, profit can be as powerful a motivator as God. Networks of stateless traders in illicit goods are changing the world as much as terrorists are -- probably more. But a world obsessed with terrorists has not yet taken notice.

The third illusion is the idea that illicit trade is an "underground" phenomenon. Even accepting that trafficking has grown in volume and complexity, many -- not least politicians -- seek to relegate it to a different world than that of ordinary, honest citizens and constituents. The language we use to describe illicit trade and to frame our efforts to contain it betrays the enduring power of this illusion. The word offshore -- as in offshore finance -- vividly captures this sense that illicit trade takes place somewhere else. So does black market, or the supposedly clearly distinct clean and dirty money. All signify a clarity, an ability to draw moral and economic lines and patrol their boundaries that is confounded in practice. This is the most dangerous of all these illusions, because it treads on moral grounds and arguably lulls citizens -- and hence public opinion -- into a sense of heightened righteousness and false security.

This point is not about moral relativism. A thief is a thief. But how do you describe a woman who manages to provide some material well-being to her destitute family in Albania or Nigeria by entering another country illegally and working the streets as a prostitute or as a peddler of counterfeited goods? What about bankers in Manhattan or London who take home big year-end bonuses as a reward for having stocked their bank's vaults with the deposits of "high-net worth individuals" whose only known job has been with a government in another country? Many American high-schoolers can procure a joint of marijuana more easily than they can purchase a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes, and they know they don't really run any major risk in doing so. Meanwhile honest Colombian judges or police officers are routinely gunned down in a war on drugs that the U.S. government funds to the tune of $40 billion a year. These are not just infuriating contradictions, unfair double standards, or interesting paradoxes. They are powerful clues about how age-old human mores have acquired new hues.

...

Therefore not only are illicit networks tightly intertwined with licit private sector activities, but they are also deeply embedded within the public sector and the political system. And once they have spread into licit private corporations, political parties, parliaments, local governments, media groups, the courts, the military, and the nonprofit sector, trafficking networks assume a powerful -- and in some countries unrivalled -- influence on matters of state.

And yet we have our very own Admiral Charles Benson right here on CKA.:






Did you miss the part about the freighters being al-Qaeda?

Not Iranian, not North Korean. They could be Canadian, Argentina, German, Mexican... How do you think cocaine and heroin gets to the US by the tonne?

The RIAA mentality prevalent in the US such as litigation to monopolize and then price fixing sub-par products like CDs for 20$ for 'royalties' or Microsoft (Windows/Explorer), and the FCC (frequency not shared to EMT workers because there was too much money to be made) has made the US 'quality' just as suspect.

The fact is ALL traffic is monitored air, sea and by land but you just can't be everywhere all the time and the best place to hide something is in plain sight[/url][/i].

The massive transfer of goods and equipment once under the exclusive control of national armies into private hands released into the market products ranging from rocket launchers to SCUD missiles and nuclear designs and machinery. Moreover, governments also boosted illicit trade by criminalizing new activities. File sharing through the internet, for example, is a newly illegal activity that has added millions to the ranks of illicit traders.