Just weeks after passing out of training I had a draft for HMS Victorious. My work mates started calling me a terrorist robot because I remembered everything and I have a Northern Ireland accent. This reputation would have undoubtedly made it difficult for me to gather information. I needed to create distance between them, and create a knew persona; I aimed for mixture of dumbness and eagerness to learn for simple curios reasons. Within days of being on patrol I was no longer the terrorist robot, soaking up all the information for terrorist reasons. Playing dumb came easy for me, I've been doing it and been it most of life. It makes people open up and explain a lot more. If someone assumes you know something they might leave that part out of the conversation, meaning you've just lost information which might have been valuable. It also helps with getting out of certain situations. I watched a lot of Columbo when I was a kid.
On a similar armament note, from edge's "2006: What is your dangerous idea?" [0]
> "The idea that we understand plutonium"
> The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is. These pits, in the thousands, are now decades old. What is dangerous is the idea that they have retained their integrity and can be safely stored into the indefinite future.
So is iron. At various temperatures iron changes its crystal structure from body-centered cubic to face-centered and back again to BCC and the amount of carbon that dissolves varies in each crystal structure, and you can hack the system by shock cooling to control the hardness of steel over a ridiculous range. That's a one line metallurgy degree, or "this chemistry fact resulted in the industrial revolution".
Water is also unstable, I can't keep track of how many non-hexagonal ice structures exist under some weird pressure and temp diagram. 12 or so, maybe. You put ice under a couple hundred MPa and it gets all funky.
On the topic of allotropes its depressing when you think everything out there has allotropes except thankfully maybe the nobel gasses like helium and then oh God there's liquid helium-II which isn't really an allotrope but its conceptually similar.
It seems that most of learning chemistry is learning nothing is stable and nothing is as it superficially seems. Plutonium is scary creepy but for better or worse its not unusual.
Is it? This is completely unverifiable information (it's outside his area of expertise - operators are not nuclear physicists). He's extremely vague about what the danger is supposed to be (i.e. wikipedia has some notes on aging - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium%E2%80%93gallium_allo... - it's not like there's a danger of an uncontrolled nuclear detonation.)
Frankly: this is wikileaks. I'm giving it the side-eye these days.
Bernstein studied at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1951, masters in 1953, and Ph.D. in 1955, on electromagnetic properties of deuterium, under Julian Schwinger. As a theoretical physicist, he worked on elementary particle physics and cosmology. A summer spent in Los Alamos led to a position at the Institute for Advanced Study.[2] In 1962 he became a faculty member at New York University, moving to become a professor of physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1967, a position that he continues to hold as Professor Emeritus.[3] He has held adjunct or visiting positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford, the University of Islamabad, and the Ecole Polytechnique.[4]
He was also involved in Project Orion, investigating the potential for nuclear pulse propulsion for use in space travel.
Worst that could happen is a toxic leak, I guess. Nuclear reactions are hard and they're enabled by some really high-precision engineering. Anything gets out of callibration, and your city-leveler turns into a very toxic but otherwise weak explosive.
It's like an executive team discussing whether to adopt a mobile-first strategy and then someone blurts 'but Galaxy 7 phones caught fire!'.
It's more like an executive team discussing whether or not to equip the entire company with Galaxy Note 7 phones, and the CEO not mentioning the fires.
Only if your expectation is that missiles work 100% of the time - which nobody really expects an individual component of any weapons system to work 100% of the time and is explicitly allowed for in the way nuclear weapons are targeted.
I don't expect anything to work 100% of the time. I do expect a missile to fail in a way that wouldn't mean accidentally obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country though.
I would also expect a politician to mention that failure mode is a possibility when politicians are considering spending £30b on renewing it.
Personally I'm actually against the UK having nuclear weapons - but I can't get too excited about this particular incident.
Missiles will go wrong, Trident actually has a fairly reasonable level of success and probably is far more reliable than equivalent weapons from other countries.
It's a political mess not a military/technical one.
"probably" isn't a good enough standard when the weapon system can end hundreds of thousands of lives and is paid for by the taxpayer. And really it's the second thing that people are upset about. If renewing Trident cost a few hundreds of millions say, it'd likely be a non-issue. But it doesn't, so it isn't. That it might be unsafe is worth investigating given what's on the line.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that the missile could fail in a way that would mean "obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country"? SSBNs carry more than one missile for a reason - currently the UK sails with up to 8 missiles and 40 warheads, not every one needs to work perfectly.
It's also worth pointing out that if the UK ever needed to use Trident then the resultant nuclear fallout would probably cause that anyway.
> Is there any evidence whatsoever that the missile could fail in a way that would mean "obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country"?
Yes, in the "test" last year (that is, the missile luckily didn't carry the real nuclear bomb) the missile was launched to arrive around the coast of Africa but it flew toward Florida! There's no more obvious miss than that.
That's the very "Trident "accident" which May did not disclose to Parliament" from the top post of this thread.
And the reason we should really press all the politicians for the reduction of nuclear weapons. It's not the question of if but when and what the consequences will be of the "accidental" detonations.
The best protection is to have at least a very limited number of weapons. The balance of power can be held even with a little of them.
If you hear anything else, it's from those that don't want the balance but to "win."
And it was destroyed successfully via the fail safes built into the system, so no-one died and no-one was at risk. The test was carried out in the Atlantic in order to provide a safety zone in every direction because missiles are known to occasionally go wrong. This is literally rocket science, there is no such thing as 100% perfection and lots of safety protocols are build into the process. Your use of quotes around test and the random inclusion of it being lucky the missile wasn't armed don't serve to help your argument at all.
For some perspective the new Russian Bulava ICBM has a 50% error rate, Minuteman had a 97.1% success rate, Trident II was on 97.27% (128 successes, 5 failures) - increasing that number to 6 doesn't really alter the confidence factor that the system works.
If your concern is large rockets being fired that might hit the southern US and cause casualties then I suggest you contact NASA about Cape Canaveral.
> because missiles are known to occasionally go wrong
So how can you claim that everything is OK or that my point is inaccurate? Or that "it can't fail"? You literally asked "is there any evidence whatsoever that the missile could fail" ... "obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country." That it didn't happen during the test without the nuclear head and when there are additional safety measures is not a proof it can't once the head is in place and the "regular procedure" is followed.
The quote around the test means only that I am aware that what's for some people an "accident" is "just a test" for another, like your view.
I don't claim anything more than the public doesn't understand how brittle the whole system is, different parts of it failing all the time. I've written that once the public understands that, knowing that is "the reason we should really press all the politicians for the reduction of nuclear weapons. It's not the question of if but when and what the consequences will be of the "accidental" detonations."
I also wrote: "The best protection is to have at least a very limited number of weapons. The balance of power can be held even with a little of them." I've meant "nuclear" weapons of course, that's the whole topic. See: http://thebulletin.org/doomsday-dashboard There were 6 times more warheads in 1983 than now, and the number should be reduced much more.
> fail safes built into the system
How does that fail safe knows the rocket is wrong when the rocket decided it's right? Do you have any information about these particular fail safes? Isn't it that it existed there at all because it was a test, and it wouldn't if it hadn't been? The coverage of the "accident" that I've had an access to wasn't technical enough. It was presented as "it has to remain secret."
I think that's an argument for replacement, rather than continuing with what we have at the moment? If the failure rate becomes too high they may need replacement.
It's just the submarines that are being replaced - not the missiles. The UK draws Trident missiles from a pool owned by the US and missiles are picked at random for use in UK boats.
If the missles don't work I would argue that is pertinent information! Its all well and good discussing a strategy but if its based on a range of options where some are proven to work and some are apparently not working but its being covered up so they appear to work its subverted the entire process of oversight of government.
The question is, whether they were covering it up a real problem there, or they just wanted to avoid some idiot higher-up completely overblowing the importance of a single incident. I can somewhat understand their thinking if the latter was the case, given that overblowing stuff way beyond their importance is what politicians do as a part of their jobs.
Exactly - the point of a nuclear deterrant is to be credible, but never used. In a situation you need to launch, whether all the missiles work properly is irrelevant - you just need the majority of them to be assured to.
The test had intended to fire the missile towards the Atlantic. After launch, it turned around and flew the other way towards Florida. From the sibling posts's response I made:
According to the Sunday Times, the unarmed Trident II D5 missile was intended to be fired 5,600 miles (9,012 km) from the coast of Florida to a sea target off the west coast of Africa - but veered towards the US.
I am impressed how quickly they tried to spin it by claiming a successful test of the submarine and the crew. considering that the UK has four of these subs of which only one is on deployment it does beg the question, what is the point of such a fleet half or more is not in usable condition?
Because you need to be able to have one boat in repair/refurbishment, one en route to deployment or returning from, and another being replenished and preparing for its next deployment. Four is a minimum to get by and as you increase the number of boats you still only get an on-station percentage less than 50%.
Specifically this part describing how May dodged the question multiple times. The 'vote' being the vote by Parliament on whether to renew funding for the Trident system:
Questioned by the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday, Prime Minister Theresa May refused four times to say if she had known about the test firing ahead of the vote.
Mrs May said: "I have absolute faith in our Trident missiles. When I made that speech in the House of Commons, what we were talking about was whether or not we should renew our Trident."
Reminiscent on NASA and the two shuttle losses. Many near misses which were monitored over the years (of the problem that ultimately doomed them), but no action to eliminate the near misses.
I was asked the impossible, to write a complex piece of software with no ability to test it and it had to work first time without defects, and I had no specification, no one to talk to about it and no idea what hardware it would even run on. There is the impossible and then there is just the "are you even serious" type of impossible, they were serious although I still think its funny because its obvious insane to spin up a team of hundreds of engineers on that basis but that is what they did!
The moment passed because I chose to leave. I took the easy route to solving the problem for me, but its still costing people billions.
I'm wondering what this software did, or what sector this was in. Obviously I'm just curious for curiosity's sake, but I guess the actionable bit of what I'm asking is whether what you experienced was endemic to the industry it was in, or if (more broadly) there's anything I can file away (other than the major red flags you described) to help me know whether I'm on a path that will lead to this type of insanity.
We've run too quick, too far, trying to maintain systems with, in HN jargon, too much technical debt. There are not enough people with solid knowledge, not enough people with solid principles, not enough people willing, to maintain the systems people in power have insisted on building. Frankly it's a miracle and a true testament to human greatness and luck that things aren't as bad as they very well could be. Over the long run however things usually end poorly, and history is littered with such shipwrecks. We need to slow down, refactor what we can, rewrite what we cannot, the costs will be huge but the consequences of not doing it worse.
>...not enough people willing, to maintain the systems people in power have insisted on building.
>We need to slow down, refactor what we can, rewrite what we cannot, the costs will be huge but the consequences of not doing it worse.
What's this "we" business? Are you volunteering for the job? There's not many people willing to work on such systems because there's obvious moral problems with them, and this means that the people you can get to work on them are probably not the most competent people around. I don't really see a solution for this. Either you force the "best and brightest" to leave Silicon Valley and go to someplace they don't want to live and work on WMDs that they are morally opposed to (doesn't sound like a recipe for quality work to me), or you have not-so-competent people working on them (also not a recipe for quality work). Maybe we should be rethinking our use of these things. Of course, that's not going to happen; our leaders insist on having them (and now want many more of them apparently), and the half of the population that voted for these leaders want them too (even though they're not smart enough to build them themselves).
For what it's worth the general sentiment on UK military sites and forums is that the guy hasn't got a fucking clue what he's talking about and most seem to reckon someone's upset him or he's been passed up for promotion or something and is retaliating by writing sensationalised shite that makes the Navy look bad.
Nuclear warheads have multiple safeguards against detonating without intention.
While there are actually quite a few not specifically mentioned this article is a good start.
Even in the event of fire, explosion, etc warheads are
unlikely to detonate unintended. Missle failures are quite
common and a few have happened during atmospheric nuke
tests and no detonation occured and many of these test
weapons had few of the safeguards on duty weapons have.
The only reason to have nuclear weapons is a deterrent, but how do we modernize our nuclear systems for Safety and Security without escalating tensions?
The testimony of the leaker is full of references to the Americans supposedly doing things better and more professionally. If true, that is surely a funding issue.
An American officer isn't really allowed to blow off concerns (at least from a nuke) like they did in that rant. They actually can't if they want to keep their job.
This rant pretty much falls into what every sailor that hates their job dreams about doing. Though they normally end up sadding out before it gets to this point (using real or fake psychological issues to disqualify themselves).
I put a good amount of thought to think of a direct comparison to the IT world.
As it stands right now "everyone knows" that IT companies are skirting and breaking the law(s) when it comes to data collection and retention. It's just that it's such a huge and intentionally opaque subject that it's impossible to make good laws or even enforce them. Now let's say you have an almost senior person at one of the big 3 (or whatever number it's at now) that decides they're going give to high ranking elected officials every bit of data the company has them, their spouse, and their children (say Germany since their laws are pretty strict and have cultural history behind their laws) who that data has been sold to, how it's used, and similar. Then further more gives hints that there is knowledge inside that the company knew it was/might have breaking/broke x laws.
The first thoughts are going to be fanboy/hate, there are better ways to do this, why are they even keeping that job, and similar.
Also seeing how IT people react to sexual harassment claims I expect attacks that are just attacks. Rather than answering what can be of the question, and attempting* to satisfy some curiosity (which I attempted to do).
*rather horribly now that you've pointed it out. And sadly falling into other bad practices to explain what I see in the link for this post .
"they would deviate from set procedures because the procedures can be “long and winding.” He said “sometimes you just know that you can adjust a valve slightly and that would solve the problem. Following the procedures might take you down a long and winding path.” You might think that's no big deal, just an engineer using his engineering skills; if he was caught doing this kind of action on an American submarine it would cost him his job and possibly his freedom. If you work on the Strategic Weapon System you must follow the procedures, mistakes can be catastrophic."
What I read is just that he doesn't understand the issues. The engineers make something and make the consoles sounding "alarm" for many various reasons. They also make the documents of the "standard procedures" to follow.
Now some alarms are in use observed to happen too often. That's a clear problem in how the thing was designed. The cleanest response would be to redesign the devices, or at least the documents of the standard procedures to include the "shortcut checks."
But in his specific case it's just the people on duty that passed their knowledge from one to another. Maybe they even tried to initiate change in the documents or even asked for the redesign and failed.
So they are not wrong for doing what they are doing, it's just that the system doesn't care enough for the feedback from "the trenches."
Which happens everywhere.
In that light, all non-engineers or people not being "in the trenches" with the technical equipment really have too idealized understanding that the things "just work." No they don't, everything fails all the time.
Which is why we really should press the politicians to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Sooner or later there will be some very nasty failure, an unintended accident, and it's a big difference if that failure doesn't destroy the whole civilization at once.
That's what I gathered from this. Now, I wouldn't put it past the UK to have some over-the-top rules and regulations (I work regularly with one of their largest agencies and it is a nightmare of a bureaucracy), but these seem like the complaints of a relatively low-ranking, non-technical person.
Still, there are very interesting details in his text, one just needs enough patience to read through. Pity that he, wanted to "leak" fast, hasn't had somebody more capable of presenting his info. There are nice examples of how brittle the systems he worked on were, and the broader public surely does need a "disillusionment" about them.
He personally seems to have expected everything to function like in the movies, and it can be clearly seen how he is always surprised it isn't so, up to the point that they could have all died in the submarine just because of the fire that started due to the toilet paper!
I think it's a question of numbers: if you're building a bunch of new ones and keeping the old ones, your absolute number of deployed weapons goes up, and raises tensions. But if you build a bunch of new ones and simultaneous retire, and remove from service, a bunch of old ones, so that your deployed number is the same, that shouldn't raise tensions at all. It's hard to imagine how other nations could object to "we're replacing a bunch of old and possibly dangerous weapons with new ones that are much safer so we don't have to worry about having a horrible accident".
Trump gets the blame for saying idiotic things about it ("Russia's not going into Ukraine") and laying out the red carpet for Russia to do similar things to our NATO allies, not for the Crimean occupation itself.
The people that usually push that line. They are mostly blaming Trump for Obama not stating WWIII. I dunno what they really expect.
There is a huge pile of problems anybody must settle before the US can demand Russia to free the Crimea (and one of them is actually establishing that Crimea wants to be freed).
The Russians built the largest nucleur weapon of all time just a year or two ago. Its hardly an escalation when other countries are doing the same thing.
That's minor PR event which likely purpose is to send some message to the West, while also delivering some "good news" to the audience of state TV. If you'll ask anyone in Russia, noone will remember it. Meanwhile, RS-28 is real and Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces do perform the upgrade of the whole triade at this moment.
I agree- weapons that actually exist are of far greater significance to this discussion. I just thought this was a better fit to the GP's original comment than the other suggestions posted.
> The navy described his dossier as “subjective and unsubstantiated” and launched an inquiry that concluded by dismissing his allegations as “factually incorrect or the result of misunderstanding or partial understanding”...He was discharged “on the claim that my sole aim was to discredit their public image”, he says.
> He was discharged “on the claim that my sole aim was to discredit their public image”, he says.
I mean, I don't know what he expected...
Part of me wonders if WikiLeaks is the modern-day Blighty wound: want to leave, can't leave for X months, make something up, get discharged for discrediting public image.
Please don't be put off by this being on Wikileaks. This is not just some disgruntled British soldier dumping a few hundred secret documents. This is a single, very thorough report he wrote himself, describing in detail all the horrible lapses in security and safety he personally witnessed around Britain's nuclear deterrent.
He has censored some of the most sensitive information for security reasons.
This is not about "I have a right to know", this is about the risk of a nuclear accident or terrorist attack because of gross negligence, and the chain of command attempting to silence it.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was not an actual failure but a warning, and the public is just getting fed the "it *veered" line. Never forget that GB opposed US naval supremecy and as recently as post WW2 we have come close to war for similar reasons, but due to the 47UKUS agreement most people but old sailors and generals have forgotten it all and now were permabestfriends.
Can you give sources for such a surprising statement? I mean I am aware of war plan red, but there are a great number of such plans for each major power, it doesn't mean that it is deemed in any way likely
Ok, so this is a sensitive subject for a variety of reasons, not the last of which the fact that Americans in particular have such a short attention span when it comes to history in general, and in geostrategy in particular. Nevertheless, you asked genuinely for response so I am giving it.
To much of the US and even the UK, have this idea of the monarchy as vestigle forms of the state required only for ceremonious pomp and ceremony, but I would venture to say this is not much more than a well placed propaganda myth. I say this because understanding the history of relations between the US and the UK, I propose, can never be understood properly until one gets past this first point.
To review a timeline of relations between the two countries, allow me to refresh your memory of times in which then GB opposed the US. Of course, the revolutionary war, and the war of 1812 with the burning of the whitehouse and the capitol, but the one I feel most misunderstood and mistaught in schools is the civil war, in which Britain openly sponsored the confederate states in an effort to undermine it's traditional enemy. After this is where the "mainstream history" goes off the rails and, due to WW1/2, pretends there was little animosty remaining due to the great alliance needed to defeat the enemy.
King Edward VII, often mistold in the histories as a gallavanting playboy, was actually instrumental in establishing the encircling alliances leading up to the first (and hence the second) world war. Through Sir Edward Grey (Yes, the tea), who controlled Edward House, Woodrow Wilson was pushed into the war despite the fact he had campaigned on not doing so. Of course after WW1 the issue of naval supremecy was a primary pain for both, which is why in naval parlance the Paris Peace conference is referred to as the Naval Battle of Paris. Admiral Benson of the US, during a meeting in which a British Sea Lord was found proding a secretary for information about the US's postwar naval building plans, said of Britains desire to maintain naval supremecy; “[...]it will mean but one thing[...] war between Great Britain and the United States.”[1] Of course, you mention war plan red, but the mistake is to dismiss it as a dusty old plan never intended for use. It was very much part of a real potential response to the entangled alliances developing. It was worked on up to 1936, by none other than Douglass McArthur.
As for WW2, the propaganda primarily centerred around anglo-american unity centered on the Atlantic Charter and it's four freedoms, even though Churchill later said the four freedoms did not apply to the British Empire, or even outside of Europe. This is where it gets more complicated, because it's mostly all about old war plan maps and the military pushback of the US against plans laid out by the UK. Only a handful of generals were able to comprehend the game GB was playing at manipulating how bloody the pacific campaign would be in order to influence the post war balance of power. McArthur was one of them, and his initial pushback against the proposed Brisbane line was only the first in many such political-strategic military moves to counter the traps set by Churchill. This pushback is what moved the lines of battle into New Guinea and the Owen Stanely mountain range. I come from a long line of military men, and a great uncle of mine was wounded on Guadalcanal and later died on the second push of Iwo Jima. Gudalcanal was an essential defensive victory which helped in reversing the Japanese "invincibility" by defeating them in the Battle of the Coral Sea. McArthur also avoided Churchills plan of full frontal assault of each fortified island by conducting leapfrogging instead, gaining control of lightly held islands to establish air bases and supply routes, which allowed him to get all the way to Tokyo with less than 90,000 casualties. The point of me droning on about this is that Churchill was most defenitly not a true ally of the United States, and the hero worship of him I see in modern media disgusts me. If he had his way the US would have bled out people for many more years than happened, and he was a scoundrel for it and more.
After WW2, the British plans for Pacific balance of power were shattered because of this, which is why they supported Mao Tse-tung inssurection as a counter against the American friendly Chiang Kai-Shek’ nationalists and their allies in the inner areas that were against the British colonialism. In order to reinforce this move, they used the Harriman (from which the Bush dynasty emerged) faction, including General Marshall and eventually Henry Kissinger, internally in the US against those resisting it. One of the telling moves was that after Mao's march in 49, the British were extremely quick to recognize his government and supply him with strategic goods through Hong Kong. As a matter of fact my old Marine Corps unit to this day still has symbols on the unit logo from it's China Marines days. To further restore the balance, they entangled the US in Korea, and it was McArthurs brilliance that created victory with inferior numbers and supplies, stunning the British, as they expected a different outcome. Since that play had backfired, the triple-agents in waiting were activated (though some had been used already during Korea), including Kim Philby, Guy Burges, Donald Mcclean, Anthony Blunt, Lester Pearson, and Victor Rothschild. They were triples because at first glance they were British agents, at the second layer they were recruited by the KGB (the Cambridge 6, yes, that's right, 6, not 5) but behind it all, they were ultimately loyal to the British monarchy. Plausible deniability you see. Eventually, the Harriman faction pushed Truman to finally get rid of McArthur for being such a pain in the imperialsts ass.
Now we get to Vietnam. After Diems assasination, the best option for the US would have been to stay out of that war, but a Saigon military advisor by the name of Sir Robert Thompson was at the time billed as the number one expert in counterinsurgency (shades of Patreaus anyone?), and later Robert Macnamaras book, the Pentagon Papers, et al, showed that it was his influence that was used to get LB Johnson to "take the plunge" in Vietnam once JFK was no longer around to veto it. It was Thompson who pushed for COIN operations in the south via US divisions in the Mekong delta doing nation building, despite the fact that the south Vietnamese defense minister had a superior plan in cutting off the Ho Chi Minh in the north near Laos with just a few US divisions by building a wall, and if the NVA tried to amass and attack, an amphibious assault from the rear would destroy them, and the nation building in the south would be left up to the Vietnamese themselves.
I took too long so I stopped being able to edit,comment continued here:
In the end, 18 NVA divisions took over the south anyway. So, the postulation is that Sir Thompson, friend of Kissinger, did this on deliberatly, once again, to maintain the "balance of power".
Now, last but not least, we get to my war, the Global War on Terrorism. I have spent years since I got out trying to understand what happened there, so I will give you my terse summary. GWOT, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and including Africa in Libya, Somalia and Sudan, is all about the coming resource wars and prepositioning the, you guessed it, "balance of power". It wasn't about Saddam, (well, maybe a bit for ol Bushy Jr to go along with his masters Rumsfeld and Cheney), nor about Al Queda (which we had down to <100 in Afghanistan years and years ago. It wasn't even about the oil for the west to have. It was about the resources in aggregate, including the oil, to control. It's a distinction that needs to be made to the leftists who just repeat the war for oil slogan. Who did we learn this from? You guessed it, the British.
It was the British who first invaded Baghdad in 1917 for the same reasons, to prevent a new arab-europe rail-line that would threaten their inherently naval trading supremecy. It was the British MI6 and London's WallStreet cronies who taught and formed the OSS/CIA. It was the British who helped the CIA conduct it's first coup in Iran in 53, and tought the vicious SAVAK/SAVAMA their tricks of the trade. The blowblack of that one is still something felt to this very day. It was the British who established the Baathist party in the first place and propped Saddam up!
It's hard to find the sources, but I highly suspect the common understanding of the UKUS relationship in the middle-east is much different than most realize, and that the US was pushed into war by Tony Blair, as the Chilcot report helps verify, for very similar reasons as all the above wars I mention. This includes the Iraq-Iran war in which the UK and US supplied weapons to Saddam, and the first gulf war.
I could go on and on, but this matter still needs more research on my part. Suffice it to say, that after reading enough Carroll Quigley, and of Cecil Rhodes, and the resulting myriad of round-table think tanks and their influence on US policy, I have come to the conclusion that the British monarchy and oligarchy has never forgiven the US for the original revolution, which Christopher Hitchens called "the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success", that they have been involved in entangling the US in war after war, and that it continues to seek, as Cecil Rhodes put it, "the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire".
Despite the pretend friendship on a superficial level, the disdain for Americans by the British elite was palpable to me on a recent visit, and I think the UKUS 47 agreement is the primary legislative method that will be used to usher in the totalitarian surveillance state in the US, and I highly suspect that the UK has been playing the US as a fall guy in the upcoming move to global governance. I half expect a new Neuremberg to pop up sooner or later.
That sir, is why I say, not only have we been near war multiple times in the past, but I would venture to say the British Empire, carefully disguised as the commonwealth, has never ceased being at economic and political war with the United States of America since its inception.
Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I agree with some of your points, especially on Churchill. I have generally found that the more I learn about what he actually did the less I like about him. I also suppose some of the earlier naval threat came from fears over some kind of a resurgence of the Anglo-Japanese alliance that was only a couple decades before around the time of ww2
My pleasure, and you are right about to Anglo-Japanese alliance. As a matter of fact I have heard it said the formerly German controlled southeast Asian islands were given to Japan at the behest of Britain as a sort of WW2 preprogramming, but thankfully MacArthur saw through it. I also think it was Warren Harding who pushed for the 5-5-3 American British Japanese fleet ratio in some agreement or other that delayed WW2.
Just weeks after passing out of training I had a draft for HMS Victorious. My work mates started calling me a terrorist robot because I remembered everything and I have a Northern Ireland accent. This reputation would have undoubtedly made it difficult for me to gather information. I needed to create distance between them, and create a knew persona; I aimed for mixture of dumbness and eagerness to learn for simple curios reasons. Within days of being on patrol I was no longer the terrorist robot, soaking up all the information for terrorist reasons. Playing dumb came easy for me, I've been doing it and been it most of life. It makes people open up and explain a lot more. If someone assumes you know something they might leave that part out of the conversation, meaning you've just lost information which might have been valuable. It also helps with getting out of certain situations. I watched a lot of Columbo when I was a kid.
On a similar armament note, from edge's "2006: What is your dangerous idea?" [0]
> "The idea that we understand plutonium"
> The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is. These pits, in the thousands, are now decades old. What is dangerous is the idea that they have retained their integrity and can be safely stored into the indefinite future.
[0] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10660