In the past decade and a half, I’ve had occasion to perceive some significant trends and express concern about what they would predictably lead to. These have been specific sets of developments involving both politics and technology. They go beyond predicting human moral and societal train wrecks, although I’ve done my share of predicting those too. In some ways, the latter are easier to see. We are all expert in them at some level.
But the more specific and contingent trends, like the ones linked to the emergence of technology and its ability to fulfill motive (but not limited to that category), take more work to perceive. For some time, perhaps the chief example I had to offer was the roiling of the Middle East set in motion by Obama in 2009, which led pretty much exactly as I envisioned to what Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev called the “tectonic” perturbations of the Arab Spring.
See the links from this X/Twitter thread as well.
The spinning core of geopolitical force in that case, both centrifugal and centripetal, was Obama’s profound shift in the U.S. posture on Israel’s national security. In the political conditions of the early 2010s, with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s radical regime on the march throughout the Middle East, Obama’s effect was to lob a live grenade into a long-latent regional scramble for primacy in gaining leverage over Israel. If the U.S. perspective on Israeli security changed, all bets were suddenly off. It was time to start jockeying for position in a multi-party “race to Jerusalem,” the prelude to a race to the Islamic apocalypse.
You probably don’t believe in that apocalypse, but that doesn’t matter. Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Salafi terrorist groups do, as did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and (still do) the mullahs of Qom. The early 2010s were a heyday for them.
Obama expressed his posture shift through two basic themes: his administration’s obsessive animus against “settlements” in the West Bank, and his sometimes cringeworthy dedication to a U.S. self-abnegation before radical Islamism, an exercise he clearly prescribed for Israel as well. Besides pressing Israel to forge ahead into a very disadvantageous “two-state” scheme, part of that Obama-defined self-abnegation was rolling over for an Iranian bomb. The supreme step in that direction was Obama’s JCPOA, or “Iran deal,” which Benjamin Netanyahu accurately described as not preventing an Iranian bomb, but paving Iran’s path to a bomb.
Uranium Jerky and a “billionaire’s bomb”
It’s proper and elegant to open this two-topic victory lap with that last point. Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons intersects exactly with the dark vision of wealthy, independent actors – non-governmental actors – seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. I had trouble getting readers to see the likelihood of that, when I posted the “Uranium Jerky” series in 2020-2022. Now it turns out that the Pentagon had a very similar concern a few years before I wrote the series, and reportedly commissioned a DARPA study of its feasibility about a decade ago.
The DARPA study, according to Sharon Weinberger at the Wall Street Journal, looked into the question of an exceptionally deep-pocketed, enterprising billionaire turning nuclear weapons into a business. The study was commissioned by the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the same shadowy one-off entity in DOD that funded Stefan Halper’s participation in Spygate. But in soliciting the study done by DARPA, ONA was actually fulfilling its charter function of visionary, out-of-the-box thinking about civilizational trends and national security.
The conclusion of the study, completed in 2013, was “worrisome,” says Ms. Weinberger. Basically, it is technologically feasible for a billionaire to achieve such a goal. There would be structural impediments in the management of the nuclear weapons process. But – crucially – a billionaire could overcome those impediments, which basically involve policy, by cooperating with a rogue nation-state like Iran or North Korea.
That kind of cooperation is exactly what I foresaw and discussed at some length in the Uranium Jerky series*. My point was that a rogue nation would be pursuing its weapons program in the shadows anyway, and the accountability tether to which other nations agree to be strapped was destined to fail. Others besides the rogue nation, such as billionaires, could buy from dark alleys into the ongoing enterprise, and their financial interest and potential for circumventing rules and sanctions could set up a mutual-benefit situation.
The DARPA study doesn’t appear to have focused on that possibility, per se, as much as on a scheme in which a billionaire, or perhaps a consortium of them, managed the components of weapons production as commercial enterprises. Such a set of actors might find a way to get a weapons product out of that, through formal licenses and momentum that mightn’t be intended by the licensing authorities to facilitate nuclear weapons production, but could do so anyway.
My prediction was a bit different. It was that a group of global actors with a vision of supranational control over the levers of political power could arrange to acquire weapons they held for a political purpose of their own. Those weapons could be used to subvert the nation-state basis of international security, starting with nuclear agreements and expectations. They could be used, in short, to create a non-state, nuclear-armed entity pushing a set of global policies that was likely to be resisted by nations and their peoples.
I suspect that with today’s emerging clarity on bodies like the World Economic Forum, and a group of UN-sponsored agencies pushing transnational and supranational political agendas, more readers are mentally prepared now to see what I was getting at in the Uranium Jerky series.
It is well to remember that the idea of such an entity is by no means new. With the creation of the UN after World War II, and the emergence of nuclear weapons in its final days, there was a perfectly overt campaign at the time to bring nuclear weapons under the control of a supranational political entity. It didn’t get traction, but the idea is far from a baseless “conspiracy theory.” In fact, with the rise of a globalist perspective on politics and policy, the idea of such an entity could hardly fail to gain interest and form.
If such a vision is in play, it explains several things better than anything else.
One is the unique Goldman-Sachs enterprise, inaugurated on the remarkable date of 20 January 2009, to buy, sell, and store literal uranium, the mineral (see Uranium Jerky Part I). Not trading uranium futures (which Goldman-Sachs has continued to do), but dealing in uranium itself. If a company like Goldman-Sachs is doing that, vertical stovepiping of uranium transactions can hide quite a bit.
Congress was alarmed about that and conducted an extensive investigation of the matter in 2013 and 2014, culminating in hearings in November of 2014. Congress’s topic was commodities dealing by investment banks, which stretched beyond uranium. But the uranium activities of Goldman-Sachs were unique and of particular interest – and, coincidentally, the interest in Congress arose shortly after WSJ indicates the DARPA study was completed. In retrospect, it’s noteworthy that there’s no indication Congress knew of the DARPA study.
Another phenomenon for which a form of “rogue billionaire” involvement would be explanatory is the perpetual dynamic tension of the Iran nuclear “deal,” which is not and never has been designed to prevent development of nuclear weapons. Instead, it has functioned to allow the Iranian program to continue, as long as it nominally has yet to issue forth a bomb.
That has been puzzling for years: evidence that an open-ended condition being sustained is the actual goal, rather than bringing anything to a conclusion. The condition is “Iran working toward a bomb.” It made sense that someone besides Iran had an interest in that condition, and that the interest was what it would obviously appear to be: participating in Iran’s furtive, ill-inspected, unaccountable work toward a bomb.
For the rest of the story elements and context, I recommend the Uranium Jerky series. It’s eye-opening to do the research and uncover all the uranium- and nuclear weapons-related things our planet is a-slosh with. Those who’ve followed Russiagate know that it had its own connections to the nuclear trade, with some prominent features mapping to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation (including a network of Western dealers in uranium connected to Josepf Mifsud and his lawyer, Stephan Roh, and connections through the same pair to Russian oligarchs including Viktor Vekselberg, a Clinton Foundation donor who during Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State owned Russia’s premier centrifuge manufacturing company).
That matters specifically to Russiagate because of Hillary’s role in commissioning the Steele dossier – at the same time DOD resources were being used to fund the confidential-source enterprise of Russiagate, honchoed by Stefan Halper, that got its big kickstart from Mifsud.
Whatever readers’ opinions on the matter, the DOD interest in it, especially in light of ordering up a DARPA study around the same time Congress was probing the unique Goldman-Sachs foray into uranium dealing, tends to confirm it as a legitimate concern.
Chinese spying – and hybrid warfare – through infrastructure
On 22 February 2024, another Wall Street Journal article outlined a Biden administration plan to replace hundreds of Chinese-made cargo-handling cranes being used in American ports. The concern is that the cranes would easily be made platforms for electronic spying on, or interference with, cargo handling in our ports, for military as well as commercial uses.
According to the report, Anne Neuberger, U.S. deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, provided this comment: “We felt there was real strategic risk here … These cranes, because they are essentially moving the large-scale containers in and out of port, if they were encrypted in a criminal attack, or rented or operated by an adversary, that could have real impact on our economy’s movement of goods and our military’s movement of goods through ports.”
A week later, the House of Representatives published information from hearings on this very matter:
The security emphasis has been mostly on the potential for interference with the operation of port infrastructure. Per WSJ, “Officials also raised the concern that the software on the cranes could be manipulated by China to impede American shipping or, worse, temporarily disrupt the operation of the crane.”
That concern is very real, and goes beyond cranes as ports transition to thoroughly networked automation by which most or all port systems are interlinked. Connect to one remotely, you can affect them all. Ports are right in the middle of making that transition today.
But as I pointed out in the forwarding post at X/Twitter, it matters equally that a great deal of in-depth data on U.S. cargo throughput could be gathered from systems installed in cranes – and transmitted back to the People’s Liberation Army/CCP mothership on a continuous or regular, near-real-time basis.
Regarding military concerns, WSJ has this: “The Chinese can track the origin, destination and other data of the U.S. military’s containerized materiel to determine exactly where the military is shipping it, Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, the commander of U.S. Transportation Command, told the Journal last year.”
Ominously, the Coast Guard’s Rear Admiral John Vann made this statement at the hearings: “We have found openings, vulnerabilities [in the cranes], that are there by design.” By that, he means back-door openings that would allow Chinese operators to access the capabilities of whatever electronics are in the cranes. Some of the electronics, in fact, are being mandated by U.S. regulation because they will improve the efficiency and accountability of cargo handling. But they’ll also build a treasure trove of data, and portals for malware, for China to exploit
Although I stored a little research trove on these cranes in 2023 when I wrote about the threat of Chinese “container missiles” being deposited in U.S. and other ports, I didn’t include that element of the story in the write-up. There had to be a cut-off and it was already a long article. (The ZPMC cranes discussed at WSJ came up for U.S. and Mexican ports, among others. That is a reminder that the impact of remote interference with port ops could be felt in the U.S., from ports in Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean – where American policy is not in place to remove the cyber threat of the back-doored cranes. The big Chinese-managed port on Grand Bahama remains an important point of vulnerability in this regard. More on the related North American regional “correlation of forces” here; scroll to “U.S. assets seized in Mexico.”)
But if China is embedded in the port-automation network via cranes – and/or other systems, but the cranes would be enough of an entry gate – it would soon be easy to track and manage the progress of a missile-carrying container without even having to put personnel in its vicinity.
Wireless cargo handling is already being systematized to put data devices on containers, and be read by cranes by wireless signal. Technology from 15-20 years ago has been implemented to perform optical scanning of labels on the containers, using OCR technology or just cameras. The combined technologies create a digital store of data that can afford a comprehensive picture of everything in lading documents associated with container contents. (See, for example, here, here, here, and here.)
And with penetration of the network, a remote spy service or saboteur could not just pile up such data, but interfere with what the network thinks it “knows,” and tell it to do things American authorities would certainly not approve of. That’s something I’ve also expressed concern about in earlier articles on U.S. military use of Chinese-operated port facilities in Australia’s Port Darwin.
Cranes are an ideal system for these enterprises, because they’re really tall in comparison to the target(s) in port. That is a theme I’ve been emphasizing one way or another for some years. China has been investing heavily in locations where surveillance systems can be installed at great height, relative to local targets and local landscape. From wind turbines to skyscrapers to farmland and commercial compounds where communications towers are hosted, the CCP has been eyeing the heights above human activities.
Likewise, China’s investing in commercial drone services, which put surveillance into U.S. locations at an altitude that yields all kinds of intelligence that can’t be extracted from satellite sensors. In the 2022 episode with the balloons over North America, I pointed out that balloons with long-dwell capability at 40,000 to 60,000 feet do the same thing. Particularly in the realm of imaging, they offer a quality of intelligence that is simply not available from either a satellite or a powered-flight aircraft with severe limits on its maximum dwell time.
Before leaving this topic, I remind readers of earlier commentary on the threat posed to U.S. IT infrastructure by TikTok. Most of the focus on that threat is about how TikTok tees up content to entice, addict, and mentally undermine users. That’s an important focus, to be sure.
But it’s not as straightforward to deal with as the cybersecurity aspect of TikTok. The problem of content inevitably involves the First Amendment, and will spark a food fight that no one ever wins, because in our system, no one is supposed to.
Cybersecurity has no antagonists with legitimate arguments. TikTok puts two features in America’s IT environment that we are under no principled obligation to tolerate.
One feature is that it’s an app on over 100 million devices operating within our borders and connecting constantly to our IT grid.
The other is that it’s an app. That means when you download it, you sign up for updates to it.
Anything can come down to your device through those updates.
Meanwhile, TikTok is undoubtedly – and this means there is zero doubt – studying the state of the U.S. grid 24/265, with every contact it makes. TikTok, in the hands of content addicts, is helpfully cyber-mapping the U.S. grid for the CCP mothership, at a breathtaking level of granularity.
It has probably already planted malware in the grid. Through interaction with other apps employed by the same users, it may be storing malware in places where U.S. cyber-sentinels would seldom look. There are many possible permutations of threat connections. (One is that U.S. active measures – cyber-tools developed by CIA or NSA – are being employed in the process.)
Readers will sensibly point out that there are other applications besides TikTok that offer such vulnerabilities. That’s quite true, but few of them are directly managed by a mothership in China. As with the cranes and the port takeovers and the container-borne missiles and the drones and the land buys where tall towers roam free, TikTok is a security problem it is long past time to address.
*Links to the Uranium Jerky series, along with closely related articles that aren’t part of the series.
Uranium jerky: The strange path through a decade of peculiar developments – Part I
Uranium jerky: M/V Arctic Sea’s rogue adventure – Part II
Uranium jerky: The tale told by timing and accusations in M/V Arctic Sea saga – Part III
Uranium jerky: Coincidences with moving uranium around – Part V
Uranium jerky: Coincidences with shipping, big data, and a special niche of the industry – Part VI
Uranium jerky: Angle on Ukraine (Part VII)
Trump’s operational finale won’t be the 2020 election intel assessment
(Scroll down to “Uranium Jerk” section)
Four pings on the partially declassified Christopher Steele interview documents
(Scroll down to Ping Four)
Feature image: Processing uranium yellowcake. Orano via IAEA.
The Optimistic Conservative 