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Nickel/Metals/ War – Geopolitical Flashpoints

Congo’s uranium: Rich pickings (The Economist – August 27, 2016)

http://www.economist.com/

An intriguing account of why America was so interested in Congo in the 1940s

“A HOTBED of spies”, remarked Bob Laxalt when he arrived in Léopoldville, capital of the Belgian Congo, in 1944. Why, wondered the fresh-faced young code officer for the American Consul-General, was his government so interested in this “dark corner of darkest Africa”? After all: “There’s no war here.”

Laxalt was not alone in his ignorance. America’s interest in the Congo—and, specifically, in the resource-rich south-eastern province of Katanga—was one of the best-kept secrets of the second world war. Beneath its verdant soil lay a prize that the Americans believed held the key to victory. It was the race to control this prize that brought the spooks to Léopoldville. The Germans, they feared, might be after it, too.

The prize, Susan Williams explains in “Spies in the Congo”, was uranium. Congo was by far the richest source of it in the world. As the architects of America’s nuclear programme (the “Manhattan Project”) knew, uranium was the atom bomb’s essential ingredient. But almost everybody else was kept entirely in the dark, including the spies sent to Africa to find out if the heavy metal was being smuggled out of the Congo into Nazi Germany.

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China reveals plans to ship cargo across Canada’s Northwest Passage – by Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – April 21, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

BEIJING — The Chinese government has published a lengthy Northwest Passage shipping guidebook that lays the foundation for cargo vessels to sail across the top of Canada.

Spanning 365 pages of charts and detailed information on sea ice and weather, the Chinese-language Arctic Navigation Guide (Northwest Passage) was compiled by ocean and shipping experts as a way to help the country’s mariners plan voyages through a waterway seen as a valuable shortcut between China and North America.

“There will be ships with Chinese flags sailing through this route in the future,” Liu Pengfei, a spokesman for China’s Maritime Safety Administration, which published the book, told reporters Tuesday. “Once this route is commonly used, it will directly change global maritime transportation and have a profound influence on international trade, the world economy, capital flow and resource exploitation.”

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Space Mining Is Going to Accelerate the Military Space Race – by John Knefel (Inverse.com – February 11, 2016)

https://www.inverse.com/

The U.S. military has tried for decades to put weapons in space. Russia and China are watching, and revving up.

Luxembourg made international news last week when the small European country announced its intentions to be a world leader in commercial asteroid mining. You know if Luxembourg is making big moves, the coming decades in outer space are going to be wild.

The expected boom in commercial space travel and resource extraction are going to be equal parts gold rush and space race, with all the potential for riches and conflict those entail.

For decades, the United States and Russia (including when it was part of the USSR) have tried to weaponize outer space. The Reagan-era “Star Wars” program to weaponize space became a symbol of a Pentagon completely untethered from reality or any meaningful budgetary constraints. But the first “space war” was Operation Desert Storm, when U.S. forces used GPS to rout Iraq’s army following the invasion of Kuwait.

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U.S. Squandered $488 Million on Afghan Mining Projects – by Keith Johnson (Foreign Policy – January 14, 2016)

http://foreignpolicy.com/

The United States spent five years trying to help Afghanistan tap what U.S. officials believe is a $1 trillion mother lode of minerals. In the end, U.S. taxpayers threw away half a billion dollars with almost nothing to show for it.

According to a new report by the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), efforts to help Afghanistan develop some sort of economy floundered thanks to a combination of corruption, incompetence, lack of infrastructure, and a deteriorating security environment.

Afghanistan’s ability to tap what could be vast wealth from deposits of iron, copper, and lithium is so hamstrung by lack of government oversight and a dearth of basic infrastructure that the country’s war-torn security situation is actually the least of its problems.

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North Korea Says It Has Detonated Its First Hydrogen Bomb – by David E. Sanger and Choe Sang-Hun (New York Times – January 5, 2016)

http://www.nytimes.com/

WASHINGTON — North Korea declared on Tuesday that it had detonated its first hydrogen bomb. The assertion, if true, would dramatically escalate the nuclear challenge from one of the world’s most isolated and dangerous states.

In an announcement, North Korea said that the test had been a “complete success.” But it was difficult to tell whether the statement was true. North Korea has made repeated claims about its nuclear capabilities that outside analysts have greeted with skepticism.

“This is the self-defensive measure we have to take to defend our right to live in the face of the nuclear threats and blackmail by the United States and to guarantee the security of the Korean Peninsula,” a female North Korean announcer said, reading the statement on Central Television, the state-run network.

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Has China peaked? – by Michael Auslin (National Post – November 20, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The annual Halifax International Security Forum will convene on Nov. 20, bringing together some of the finest military and strategic thinkers in the Western world for a three-day conference. In the run-up to the event, the National Post is presenting four essays that describe the challenges, and opportunities, facing the West today.

At a dinner at the Halifax International Security Forum in 2013, a table of experts and interested participants, including former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, had a spirited discussion on an unconventional theme: “Peaking China.”

Even two years ago, the idea that China would not be forever rising was a fringe concept.

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U.S. challenges China’s sovereignty claim to artificial islands – by Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – October 28, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

BEIJING — The U.S. is pledging to sail more warships past the shores of artificial islands in the South China Sea as the world’s most powerful military seeks to strip away the expansionist claims of China and other nations in waters crucial to the global movement of goods.

Early Tuesday morning, the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen deliberately came within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, one of the places in the Spratly Islands that China has transformed into a sizable air and sea outpost from a reef that once vanished at high tide.

In so doing, the ship breached the exclusion zone that would apply to territorial waters and underscored the U.S. position that China cannot claim that exclusion around its manufactured lands. The move escalates the conflict over who controls a sea the size of India that constitutes the maritime heart of East Asia. It provoked an angry response from China, which dispatched a missile destroyer and a patrol boat to shadow and attempt to warn off the Lassen.

In Beijing, China summoned U.S. Ambassador Max Baucus over the patrol, which vice-foreign minister Zhang Yesui called “extremely irresponsible,” while other officials warned of a Chinese retaliation.

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The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? – by Graham Allison (The Atlantic – September 24, 2015)

http://www.theatlantic.com/

In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles, this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise.

And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly. When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war.

When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap.

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Hiroshima Commemorates 70th Anniversary of Atomic Bombing – by Jonathan Sobleaug (New York Times – August 6, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Every year on Aug. 6, Hiroshima becomes a city of mourning. And one full of reminders — some delivered politely, some pointedly — of the most extreme dangers of modern warfare.

Seventy years ago, the city was incinerated by an atomic bomb, its population halved by the new and terrifying American weapon nicknamed Little Boy.

On Thursday, political leaders, aging survivors and ordinary citizens gathered at 8:15 a.m. to mourn the moment when the city unwillingly became part of the world’s introduction to the nuclear age. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, together with another that hit Nagasaki three days later, killed more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians.

At a ceremony near the onetime industrial exhibition hall that has been preserved as a skeletal monument to the attack, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe renewed a longstanding Japanese pledge to seek worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. The mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, accused “selfish” nuclear powers, including the United States, of standing in the way of that goal.

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Russia says will retaliate if U.S. weapons stationed on its borders – by Gabriela Baczynska and Wiktor Szary (Reuters U.S. – June 15, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

MOSCOW/WARSAW – A plan by Washington to station tanks and heavy weapons in NATO states on Russia’s border would be the most aggressive U.S. act since the Cold War, and Moscow would retaliate by beefing up its own forces, a Russian defense official said on Monday.

The United States is offering to store military equipment on allies’ territory in eastern Europe, a proposal aimed at reassuring governments worried that after the conflict in Ukraine, they could be the Kremlin’s next target.

Poland and the Baltic states, where officials say privately they have been frustrated the NATO alliance has not taken more decisive steps to deter Russia, welcomed the decision by Washington to take the lead.

But others in the region were more cautious, fearing their countries could be caught in the middle of a new arms race between Russia and the United States.

“If heavy U.S. military equipment, including tanks, artillery batteries and other equipment really does turn up in countries in eastern Europe and the Baltics, that will be the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War,” Russian defense ministry official General Yuri Yakubov said.

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War Clouds Over South China Sea As U.S. Declares Right To Waters And U.S. Warship Arrives At Subic – by Donald Kirk (Forbes Magazine – May 30, 2015)

http://www.forbes.com/

The drumbeat of war on distant horizons is reverberating through Southeast Asia with increasingly strong declarations of U.S. determination to stop the Chinese from expanding their writ over the South China Sea, notably islands claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

While Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was in Singapore vowing that U.S. planes and ships would go wherever they wanted in international waters WAT -0.71%, the U.S. navy missile cruiser Shiloh was hoving into view at the historic Subic Bay port northwest of Manila.

Reports of Carter’s tough remarks at a gathering of defense ministers and the Shiloh’s visit to Subic Bay, the largest U.S. navy base before the Americans were forced to give it all up more than 20 years ago, were couched in euphemisms that scarcely masked the impression of spiraling tensions. “We want a peaceful resolution of all disputes,” Carter began. “A routine port call,” said a Philippine navy spokesman when asked what the Shiloh was doing at Subic Bay, in the once roaring American base town of Olongapo.

Oh sure. Those soothing assurances somehow only heightened the sense of an impending collision in the South China Sea around the Spratly Islands, where China has added about 2,000 acres to its holdings in the past year and a half by reclaiming land from the shallow waters.

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[War Plan Red-U.S. Invades Canada] Sudbury’s nickel important to Americans’ military might – by Stan Sudol (Northern Life – February 5, 2006)

http://www.northernlife.ca/

Please note that this article, was originally published in 2006.

If the Yanks went to war with the Brits in the 1920s, American troops would have tried to invade Sudbury from northern Michigan

Canada and the United States have been economic and military allies for most of the 20th century, notwithstanding the bad chemistry between our leaders from time to time. Hopefully Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be able to soon repair the damage in relations caused by the Paul Martin Liberals.

However, throughout much of American history, many influential politicians were firmly committed to the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny. This is the belief that the United States has an “inherent, natural and inevitable right” to annex all of North America.

So it should not be a huge surprise to learn that the United States military had prepared a Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan to invade Canada in the late 1920s, and updated it in 1935. The document called War Plan Red was declassified in 1974. However, the story resurfaced a short time ago in a Washington Post (Dec.30, 2005) article by journalist Peter Carlson headlined Raiding the Icebox; Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada.

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China is a global economic and political power. Soon, it will be a military one, too – by J.L. Granatstein (National Post – May 15, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

A few days ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defence in Washington issued its annual report on Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China 2015. This is a sobering document, appearing within days of a contingent of Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching past Russian leader Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping in Moscow’s huge Victory Day parade. At the same time, and for the first time, Chinese navy ships are engaging in live-fire exercises in the Mediterranean Sea alongside Russian warships.

The authoritative U.S. document notes that Beijing’s defence expenditures continue to increase by 9.5 per cent a year, as they have done for the past decade. The Defense report concludes that China remains focused on the possibility of conflict in the Taiwan Straits — it has 400,000 soldiers, sailors and air personnel in the area — and in the East and South China Seas, with substantial military buildups also continuing there.

The South China Sea archipelago of the Spratly Islands, claimed by Beijing, are undergoing extensive “land reclamation,” China creating what is now a 2,000 acre landmass out of what were hitherto essentially underwater shoals.

Naval vessels will soon be able to dock there, and an airstrip is all but certain to be constructed. As the South China Sea is thought be ripe for mineral and oil exploitation and as parts of it are claimed by several Asian nations, this is a dangerous flashpoint, an area where Beijing’s “low-intensity coercion” can be expected to increase. In response, the Philippines and Vietnam are doing “land reclamation” projects of their own.

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Advanced military technology shows need for minerals and metals supply – by Hall Quinn (The Hill – April 7, 2015)

http://thehill.com/

Quinn is the president and CEO of the National Mining Association. http://www.nma.org/

Innovation is essential for sustaining strong national defense and security. Take, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC). In June, teams representing some of the most advanced research and development organizations in the world will showcase the hardware, software, sensors and human-machine control interfaces of robots capable of aiding the U.S. military response efforts in environments that may be too dangerous or difficult for humans to navigate.

The $95 million project demonstrates the Pentagon’s commitment to innovation and the creation of state-of-the-art military technologies. But beyond the design and testing of these sophisticated systems, we must ensure that our military has secure and reliable access to the domestic raw materials needed for these systems.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) uses 750,000 tons of minerals each year in technologies that protect the very troops that protect our nation. Metals such as copper, lead and nickel are used in military gear, weapon systems and other defense technologies. Additionally, the mineral beryllium is used to reduce weight and improve guidance performance in fighter jets and NASA technologies such as the mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Poles Steel for Battle, Fearing Russia Will March on Them Next – by Rick Lyman (New York Times – March 14, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

KALISZ, Poland — For evidence of how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has jangled nerves and provoked anxiety across Eastern Europe, look no farther than the drill held the other day by the Shooters Association.

The paramilitary group, like more than 100 others in Poland, has experienced a sharp spike in membership since Mr. Putin’s forces began meddling in neighboring Ukraine last year.

Thirty students took an oath to defend Poland at all costs, joining nearly 200 other regional members of the association — young men and women, boys and girls — marching in formation around the perimeter of the dusty high school courtyard here. They crossed Polish Army Boulevard and marched into the center of town, sprawling in four long lines along the edge of St. Joseph’s Square.

Gen. Boguslaw Pacek, an adviser to the Polish defense minister and the government’s chief liaison with these paramilitary groups, marched with them. He has been making the rounds in recent months of such gatherings: student chapters like this one, as well as groups of veterans, even battle re-enactors.

One of those who took the oath in Kalisz was Bartosz Walesiak, 16, who said he had been interested in the military since playing with toy soldiers as a little boy, but had been motivated to join the Shooters Association after Russia moved into Crimea.

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