Below Top Secret

"...the whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost...if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?" --Dr. Strangelove

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

From Wired Magazine Issue 17-10

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
( Read more... )

Is this journal active or not...?

All I can read is ONTD Political.
What happened to the rest of the Journals here.......hundreds and hundreds of community journals..

Since researching further on Gora Konder (see previous post), I see that it is also known as Kondyor Massif, and by Googling those search terms, more information can be "mined", yet mysteries still remain.

A massif is defined in Wikipedia as "In geology, a massif is a section of a planet's crust that is demarcated by faults or flexures. In the movement of the crust, a massif tends to retain its internal structure while being displaced as a whole. The term is also used to refer to a group of mountains formed by such a structure..." Read the full article... The Teton Range in Wyoming is listed as a massif.

Gora Konder, or the Kondyor Massif, as it turns out, is indeed the site of recent (2004-present) mining operations by the Russian government for gold, platinum, and silver ores. An excerpt from the NASA Jet Propulsion website states, "This is neither an impact crater nor a volcano." The article, dated Feb. 19, 2008, goes on to say that in the previous year alone, 4 tons of platinum were mined there. Platinum is a rare precious metal which is mined in fewer than a dozen locations on earth. Read full article and view images on NASA JPL website...

What is mysterious to me is that the NASA JPL website says this is neither an impact crater nor a volcano." There are many craters throughout Russia that have been identified as impact craters, and they are all mined for rich deposits of heavy metals. Why is this one different? I'm not a trained geologist, so I must defer to those experts who study the earth, but many respected sites also state that it is still unknown whether Gora Konder is the result of an impact or something else. In fact most sites take the "unknown" position.

The crater is located at N 57°35'24", E 134°38' which is about dead center. Geographically, Gora Konder Crater is is located in a very remote region of the Republic of Yakutsk, CIS where little ground survey has been done. At least that is what the available information says.

Thanks to Panoramio User konder2378 for the ground photos. Satellite imagery is courtesy of NASA and Google Earth. If anyone knows more about this anomaly, or what activity is going on there, I think it would be of interest to all. I saw something that makes me think it could be a platinum mining operation.

Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program by Roger Guillemette, SPACE.com

CHANTILLY, Va. – Twenty-five years after their top-secret, Cold War-era missions ended, two clandestine American satellite programs were declassified Saturday (Sept. 17) with the unveiling of three of the United States' most closely guarded assets: the KH-7 GAMBIT, the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and the KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellites.

The vintage National Reconnaissance Office satellites were displayed to the public Saturday in a one-day-only exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va. The three spacecraft were the centerpiece of the NRO's invitation-only, 50th Anniversary Gala celebration held at the center last evening.

Saturday's spysat unveiling was attended by a number of jubilant NRO veterans who developed and refined the classified spacecraft and its components for decades in secret, finally able to show their wives and families what they actually did 'at the office' for so many years. Both of the newly declassified satellite systems, GAMBIT and HEXAGON, followed the U.S. military's frontrunner spy satellite system CORONA, which was declassified in 1995. [See photos of the declassified U.S. spy satellites]

See also:

Secret Spy Satellites Declassified
Goodrich Pays Tribute to Hexagon Workers
Danbury's Cold-War Secret Finally Revealed

The US Navy's Military Sealift Command operates (according to http://www.msc.navy.mil) approximately 111 ships. Most, but not all of these are owned by the U.S. Government. They do the work of combat supply & support, transportation, hospital, surveillance, oceanographic surveying, missile tracking, fleet replenishment, rescue, salvage and other military support operations. Their crews are largely non-military, and many of their ships do not display military registration numbers. Many carry MV (merchant vessel) designation numbers.

See also:

http://www.msc.navy.mil/latestnews/posters/smallposter2011.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Sealift_Command
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/sealift.htm

Hope you all had a great Christmas or whatever you may celebrate at this time of year. Time spent with loved ones is something to treasure and never take for granted. Here's to a prosperous New Year for us all too!

Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

December 20th, 2011 by Steven Aftergood

Congress last week enacted the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.

“The legislation we are approving today keeps funding for intelligence essentially flat from fiscal year 2011, representing the a meaningful reduction from the President’s request,” said Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on December 14.

Curiously, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, described the outcome somewhat differently on December 16: “The bill is significantly below the President’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 and further still below the levels authorized and appropriated in fiscal year 2011.”

In both the House and the Senate action on the bill there was a conspicuous absence of public debate on any issue of intelligence policy. No dissenting views were expressed. Nor was there any discussion of or insight into current intelligence controversies. For that, one must turn to other venues, such as “Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war” by Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post.

Editor's note: We first posted about this biosafety level 4 lab years before it was built. See our archives: Memorable BL-4 Labs Entries

Some groups suspicious of BU’s waiver request

August 17, 2011
South End News
by Kate Vander Wiede

Boston University Medical Center is hoping they will soon be able to start research in the National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory (NEIDL) later this year, explained press contact Ellen Berlin.

“The laboratory has been built and it was completed in September 2008,” she said. “We’ve thought that rather than leave the building empty … that it made sense to put lower safety level labs to use now.”

For the last nine years, since the NEIDL’s (or Biolab’s) inception, many community members have opposed the facility, which is located on Albany St., for safety reasons.

Failed risk assessments and litigation concerning the kind of research that would be done in the Biolab have delayed its use. Though the university has been barred from doing any research while the National Institute for Health (NIH) oversees a risk assessment, university administrators are hoping to get a waiver from the Federal court so that they can proceed with low safety level research.

The Biolab was created in part to perform high-tier research. Much of the controversy surrounding the Biolab has centered on the university’s plan to do “biosafety level 4″ (or BSL-4) research. Among other things, BSL-4 research is defined as research performed on or with “dangerous/exotic agents” that have a high “individual risk” of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections that are “frequently fatal,” and which have “no vaccines or treatment,” a form on the Center for Disease Control website explains.( Read more... )

Welcome vortex. Be sure to check our archived posts which go back to 2003 and are numerous. Thanks for joining.