THE POWER GROUP L. Fletcher Prouty L. Fletcher Prouty is a retired Air Force Colonel. He was a member of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and of the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after having served five years with the Plans Directorate, Headquarters, U.S. AirForce. During World War II, he was on an assignment directed by Allen Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence. The last nine years of Prouty's service, ending in December of 1963, were spent in the Pentagon as the official Focal Point Office, first for the Air Force and then for the entire Department of Defense with the CIA. All CIA military activities were channeled through him. Once a missile is launched, even if by accident, there is no way of stopping it. And by the time a missile is launched, a counter force has already been put in motion. The war has begun before the first nuclear warhead has been detonated; that's the setup. A mere 50 missiles targeted to 50 major cities would mean the end of the US or the USSR. However, once a single nuclear warhead is detonated, all nuclear warheads, from their many launching sites throughout the world, would be detonated. It's like throwing a ping-pong ball into a room full of mousetraps: when the ball hits one trap, all the others will snap. Thus, the idea of a "limited" or "strategic" or "conventional't nuclear war is an absolute myth. The military understands this, yet somehow, Congress does not. The way the power group consolidates its wealth and power is by keeping the munitions industry in full gear. To keep it in full gear, weapons that are produced must be consumed in battle, so from time to time, there must be wars in one part of the globe or another. The power group knows that nuclear war will totally destroy all major countries involved and at least make the entire northern hemisphere of the earth uninhabitable for generations, with the radioactive fallout from the thousands of nuclear explosions. Yet, it is in the financial interests of the power group, which reaps immense profit from munitions, to keep on producing such weapons. There is too much money in the game of war, too much to be gained by it. With the numbers of deadly weapons we produce, someday, accidentally or on purpose, they're going to be used. Armageddon

TERRORIST LAUNCH Morton Mintz The cold war is long over, and the United States and Russia are at peace. Yet together they have approximately 4,000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert – weapons with a combined destructive power nearly 100,000 times that of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima are armed and fueled at all times. Their targets – Washington and New York, Moscow and St. Petersburg – have been programmed by internal computers. In the U.S., they will launch on receiving three computer-delivered messages. Launch crews – on duty 24-7 – will send the messages on receipt of a single computer-delivered command. Bruce G. Blair, who heads the World Security Institute and is widely considered the nation's foremost authority on nuclear command and control, and others at the institute have warned frequently that ready-to-fire nuclear weapons are susceptible to unauthorized launch by heavily armed terrorists, who might either capture a missile or electronically hack into a missile launch control system. In 2002, for example, Blair cited a super-secret Pentagon study that concluded that terrorists could hack the U.S. submarine communications network and "actually transmit a launch order to the Trident fleet." Armageddon

CYBER TERRORISM Bruce G. Blair Another specter concerns terrorists spoofing radar or satellite sensors, or cyber-terrorists hacking into early warning networks. Could sophisticated terrorists generate false indications of an enemy attack that results in a mistaken launch of nuclear rockets in 'retaliation?' False alarms have been frequent enough on both sides under the best of conditions. False warning poses an acute danger as long as Russian and U.S. nuclear commanders are allowed, as they still are today, only several pressure-packed minutes to determine whether an enemy attack is underway and decide whether to retaliate. Russia's deteriorating early warning network coupled to terrorist plotting against it only heightens the risks. Armageddon

HAIR TRIGGER ALERT Mohamed ElBaradei - Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1997 More than 15 years after the end of the Cold War, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert. Despite some disarmament, the existence of 27,000 nuclear warheads in various hands around the world still hold the prospect of the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes. Feelings of insecurity and humiliation, exaggerated by the nuclear imbalance, are behind the spread of bomb-development programs at the national level. No less dangerous are the presumed efforts of extremist groups to acquire nuclear materials. Armageddon