Is there a Global Strike Alert ?

Not Just A Last Resort? A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option

By William Arkin
Washington Post Sunday, May 15, 2005; B01

Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport (La.) Times. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson said his forces were the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and could execute an attack "in half a day or less."

In March last year at Fairford the European base for such a strike force there were 2 B-2 Stealth Bombers and two B-1B multi-role bombers spotted and photographed. The base, in rural Gloucestershire, last saw action in 2003 when B-52 bombers flew from there to bomb Iraq. It is the largest USAF bomber base in Europe and the only one with maintenance facilities for the B-2. Interesting site here that watches. KC-10 tanker pic from them.

This is what Sy Hersh - who let's face it, isn't always right, but has some very high level connections said earlier this year ...

"The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security."

Now that the surge is official policy it would be exciting to watch any air displays over rural Gloucestershire.

Probably all balls says 'er indoors pointin at this link.