Charles R. Smith reveals China’s $1T leverage via U.S. Treasury bills shields it from retaliation while selling HN-5 missiles (helicopter/jet killers) and fuel-air munitions to the Taliban, with Iran as intermediary. A 2007 PLA general’s unpunished nuclear first-strike threat on Taiwan underscores Beijing’s willingness to escalate, including space-based EMP attacks targeting U.S. carriers. Despite "engagement" policies, China’s military tech—like the DF-31 ICBM (using U.S.-sold radiation-hardened chips) and Type 94 Jin subs—threatens global stability, with Smith warning of underestimation risks. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, prolific as they are, and each one covered like a blanket by this program, the largest of its kind in the world, Coast to Coast A.M. It is my honor and my privilege to be escorting you through the weekend, this being the second half of the weekend.
And tonight I've got an announcement that I would like to make.
And here it is.
I would like to announce tonight that for the, actually, I'm not sure how many times it is now, somebody's counting, that following tonight's broadcast, I am retiring from regular weekend programming.
Now, unlike the past, thank God, the reasons are not following some tragedy or emergency or something like that.
The reasons actually are stated by nearly everybody who ever makes such an announcement.
Only now I very clearly understand them in a very personal way.
God has blessed me with love in my life.
At a time, frankly, when I thought I had lost any reason to live following Mona's death, my wonderful wife, Erin, and now our daughter, Asia.
I really want what time the Lord has left for me to be with them.
Now, this doesn't mean that you're never going to hear my voice again in these late hours.
My association with Premier Radio Networks will continue, you know, with an occasional special of some sort or a fill-in show or what have you.
So I hope that you understand that at this stage in my life, June 17th, I became eligible for Social Security.
I really do want to spend my time with my wife and my new daughter, both of whom I love dearly.
It's rare that you get a second chance in life.
You know, I came back after Ramona passed.
I came back on the air because, well, frankly, because I had to.
Meaning, you all were the only familiar family.
You were my family, I guess, in a way.
You're my family.
You were my family at that point.
All I had left at that dark time in my life was all of you.
And I have, I do.
I'm a very public person who is very private, if that makes sense.
I understand that I've all my life been a very public person, but in my private life, I'm private.
And I have a very small, close circle of friends, and that's about it.
So when Mona left me, I had to come back.
You all were my family.
Now, it's a new stage in life.
And so this is it, folks.
And I know I've said that in the past.
This time, it's for real, though.
It's for real.
So after tonight, I will indeed retire from regular weekend duties.
But you can bet there will be very, very good voices in here, very good intellects filling the night with the same kind of material that you've become accustomed to hearing in these late hours.
And as I mentioned, my association will continue, so from time to time I'll do a fill-in show or come and talk about what's going to happen the next year or whatever it is that I do.
Let's look quickly at the world news.
Never exactly a pleasure.
British officials intensified the hunt Sunday for what they called an al-Qaeda-linked network behind three attempted terrorist attacks, announcing a fifth arrest and conducting pinpoint raids across the country on a very highest level of alert now.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, quote, it is clear that we are dealing in general terms with people who are associated with al-Qaeda.
He warned Britons the threat would be long-term and sustained and said the country would not be cowed by the plot targeting London and Glasgow's airport.
You know, and again, I want to say, it seems to me that by Al-Qaeda's standards, that, horrible as it was, wasn't much of an attack.
So maybe that's what Al-Qaeda's got left.
People who can drive individual vehicles into an airport or something, dump gasoline on themselves, and not quite 9-11, huh?
That's good news, if true.
I mean, it means Al-Qaeda obviously has spread their abilities thin, and that's good news for the world, our country in particular.
Flooding is horrible, just horrible in the middle of the country.
Sunday, across parts of Kansas and Missouri, forcing more people from their homes, and those who predict the weather say it could be days before rivers return to anything resembling normal following days of drenching rainfall on the plains.
The Kansas Guard was sent to help with a mandatory evacuation of a town of 4,600 as the overflowing creek inundated neighborhoods and workers struggling to reinforce a levee on the river.
As Saudi religious police face backlash.
Well, I would think religious police?
Yes.
As the car stopped outside a Riyadh amusement park, two bearded men dragged the driver from the wheel, took the three women on a wild ride of more than an hour, bouncing over sidewalks, finally abandoning them on a darkened street.
The women at first thought they had been kidnapped by some kind of terrorists.
The two, however, said, no, we are the religious police.
A top U.S. commander in South Korea on Monday criticized last week's missile test launches by North Korea.
Gotta remember it's Monday there, saying the country remains a threat despite its recent moves toward dismantling its nuclear program.
General B.B. Bell said he welcomed Pyongyang's efforts to live up to a February commitment to shut down its nuclear reactor, part of a program he called extremely provocative.
Pidel Castro said Sunday, the U.S. government continues to be a killing machine.
Really?
After revelations that nearly 50 years ago, it tried to use American mobsters to kill him with poisoned pills.
It's an old story.
And I understand that they also tried to cause his beard to fall off.
The Empire has created a real killing machine made up not only, he says, of the CIA and its methods.
And finally, while blogs continue to simmer with complaints from people who waited virtually months to buy an iPhone and are now experiencing problems activating it, AT ⁇ T said Sunday, the situation's improved somewhat now.
We're working on any issues on an individual basis with customers who were impacted.
Now, I don't exactly know what an iPhone is.
Maybe I haven't looked it up yet.
Usually I'm up on the very latest whatever.
But I actually don't know what an iPhone is, why everybody's rushing to get one.
Somebody perhaps can give me a bit of a capsule idea of what an iPhone actually is.
All right.
Just before we break, there is, you know, a lot of stuff comes and goes on the website, coast2coastam.com, that is kind of, well, you tend to put it in your gray box.
You go, well, you know, that's fuzzy.
Who knows?
And this one is not an exception to that, but it's really good.
I swear, I think what we've got on the website tonight is a real...
Remember that?
Longtime listeners will recall that.
Well, I'll be damned.
This is a witch.
I think it's a witch, anyway.
It's a flying human flying something, and it looks like a witch.
Pointy hat and all.
It was filmed in Mexico.
Somebody took video of it in Mexico.
All I can say is go up there, go to the link, watch the video, and you tell me.
Is that a witch or what?
I think it's a witch.
So it's definitely worth a ride up to coast2coastam.com.
Take the ride.
Let me know what you think.
All right, back in a moment with more.
All right, this is something new under the sun, and therefore it is worth noting.
A new NASA satellite has recorded the first detailed images from space of a mysterious kind of cloud called night shining or noctuCent.
I'll spell it for you.
N-O-C-I, no, N-O-C-T-I-L-U-C-E-N-T.
NoctuSent, I guess.
The clouds are on the move.
These are clouds.
They're brightening and they're creeping out of the polar regions and researchers have no idea why.
It is clear these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing, and we do not understand how, why, or what it means.
That comes from atmospheric scientist James Russell III of Hampton University in Virginia.
These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed.
It's the mesophere, I believe, and the satellite first imaged these clouds May 25th.
People on the ground began actually seeing them June 6th over northern Europe.
The clouds form 50 miles above the Earth's surface in an upper layer of the atmosphere called the mesophere.
The puffs of water vapor and crystals appear during the summer months above the northern hemisphere's pole as well as the southern hemisphere's pole in summer.
AIM will record two complete cloud seasons over both regions, effectively documenting an entire life cycle of the shiny clouds for the first time.
Researchers hope to figure out why these clouds form and how they might be related to global climate change.
So that is pretty weird stuff.
New clouds, not just seen from space, but being seen in northern Europe as well, in a portion of the atmosphere that normally does not contain clouds.
What is going?
What on earth or just above it is going on?
An international environmental organization is opposed to a plan to dump iron dust into the ocean near the Galapagos Islands, where it's going to encourage the growth of plankton, which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air.
The tiny sea creatures known as plankton are the main food consumed by whales, and they're considered to be the bottom rung in the marine food chain.
Now, the dumping would be done as a test by a company called Planktos Inc., which is obviously conducting this test in hopes of being hired to do similar iron dumps in the future.
In Livescience.com, Andrea Thompson quotes Laura Hansen of the World Wildlife Fund as saying, there are much safer and much better proven ways of preventing or lowering carbon dioxide levels than dumping iron in the ocean.
This kind of experimentation with disregard for marine life and the lives of people who rely on the sea is unacceptable.
Special concern is the fact that the Galapagos are home to species which are found nowhere else on the earth, but this may be because the ocean area around the islands already are filled with iron, which comes from the islands themselves.
Four years ago, this comes from Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country, it was reported that taking too many vitamins might be bad for you.
Now, scientists are saying that taking certain vitamins may indeed shorten your lifespan, may even make you more likely to get cancer.
Oh, God.
BBC News reports that a study in Denmark reveals that antioxidant vitamins like A, E, and C may actually increase the risk of early death.
Beta-carotene produced an approximate 7% increased risk of health.
Death, rather, health.
Death.
Unbelievable.
Vitamin E, a 4% increase.
Vitamin A, a 16% increase.
Now, considering that 10 to 20% of the adult population in Europe and North America may consume the supplements, the public health consequences may be pretty big.
Now, one day something is good for you, and the next day, it kills you.
That's what I love about science.
One day, everything is just spiffy, and whatever it is is great for you.
Drink it, eat it, or avoid it.
Live longer.
But then the next day, whatever it was is going to kill you.
The government has announced it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching and has reiterated that it sees no place for either one on the science curriculum.
It has also defined intelligent design, the idea that life is simply too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of greater intelligence, as a religion, along with creationism.
Now, why?
What's the matter with intelligent design?
I would say a good portion of this audience probably at least considers the possibility, don't you, that we were intelligently designed by God or by extraterrestrials.
Somebody may have come down.
There may have been a sphere, as in the movie.
Who knows?
But why do they want to rule out the possibility of intelligent design by somebody?
A commercial airline pilot has reported seeing two unidentified objects near the sky in Guernsey.
A bright yellow flat disk shape estimated to be twice the size of a Boeing 737 spotted on Monday, 12 to 15 miles northeast of the island.
Captain Ray Boyer was flying a plane from Southampton to Alray when he saw the objects through binoculars.
Mr. Boyer said he was pretty shaken up by the sighting.
Quote, this is not something you see every day of the week.
It was pretty scary, said he at first.
He thought it was the sun simply reflecting off greenhouses in Guernsey.
He said the objects were bright like the sun, but did not hurt his eyes when he looked at them.
The stationary objects were also observed by other aircraft and other passengers on the plane.
So there you have it, yet another big UFO sighting.
Unless kind of like the scientists they interview, this is in Spanish, mind you, on Spanish TV.
But there's subtitles, and they interview a scientist who puts on a silly little hat and makes fun of the whole thing.
But I don't think you can watch that video and make fun of it.
Whatever it is, it doesn't belong flying in those skies.
All right, listen, we're going to go to unscreened open line calls in just a very few moments here.
Let me give you the numbers.
If you're west of the Rockies, 800-618-8255.
Anywhere east of the Rockies, 800-825-5033.
That's 800-825-5033.
If you're actually on the Rockies, I have no idea what you do.
First-time callers, area code 818-501-4721.
That's 818-501-4721.
Wildcard line, we've got a lot of those.
Area code 818-501-4109.
Once again, area code 818-501-4109.
The international line.
Simply call your operator, if you're outside the U.S., your international operator, and tell her you want to call a toll-free international number.
It is toll-free.
800-893-0903.
That's 800-893-0903.
Just a word, Quick word about last night's program.
I thought it was spectacular.
And I thought I made it clear last night, but if I didn't, let me make it clear now.
And you can go back and clear it up by listening.
I said it was breaking news, and it certainly was.
And what I said was, it was breaking around the world.
And that is to say, we got an article from Australia.
Within the hour, we received two more articles from Great Britain.
And by the time I'd gone off the air last night, it was beginning to hit the press here in the U.S. And my guess is that if you watch very carefully and listen very carefully to the U.S. media over the next week, you're going to hear that story breaking all over the place.
That's strangely the way the media in this country works.
Even after an event, months after an event, boom, boom, boom.
It's like somebody threw a switch.
We'll be right back.
And here's a little bit of perhaps good news.
You all heard, I'm sure, that the autism numbers in human beings had alarmingly risen.
Indeed, it has something like 101 in every 171 children now.
Well, this is not a cure, but it's on the way.
Symptoms of mental retardation and autism have been reversed for the first time in a laboratory in mice.
U.S. scientists created mice that showed symptoms of fragile X syndrome, the leading cause of mental retardation and autism in humans.
Then, they reverse symptoms of the condition by inhibiting the action of an enzyme, enzyme rather, in the brain.
The study by MIT appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This implies that future treatment may still be effective even after symptoms are already pronounced.
Fratele X syndrome is linked to a mutation in a gene carried on the X chromosome called the FMR1.
It can cause symptoms ranging from mild learning disabilities to severe autism.
The researchers based at MIT's Institute for Learning and Memory targeted an enzyme called PAC, PAK, which affects the number, size, and shape of connection between brain cells.
They found that by inhibiting the enzyme, stopped mice with fragile X syndrome behaving in erratic ways.
Prior to treatment, they showed signs of hyperactivity, not having purpose, repetitive movements, abnormalities were corrected.
Further analysis showed that not only were structural abnormalities in connection between brain cells righted, but proper electronic communication was restored between the cells.
So maybe there is hope.
We'll be right back.
Top of the coming hour, Charles R. Smith, who has written a book called Deception.
And it's going to be about the state of the world right now and what we face and the whole world is facing, as you know, as they're experiencing in England right now.
I suspect we're eventually going to have that kind of terrorism here.
I suppose you can have missing time and simply not look at a watch and not be aware of the fact that you've missed time.
Wonder how many people have ever thought about that one.
You could have missing time unless you had a reference.
You know, if you're having a fairly laid-back day, your time could just go and you wouldn't even know it.
But no, to the best of my knowledge, we did not.
We stood there and watched the damn thing float out across the valley, and I mean float, and then got In the car and came home in kind of a state of shock.
Now, there was that.
We were in a state of shock for a while.
You cannot see something like that that close.
It wasn't a close encounter of the third kind, but it was very close to it.
As I mentioned, my connection with the network will continue to the degree that, you know, every now and then I'll come fill in or something of that order.
I must say, last night's program was cinched the whole thing for me.
If it was in my grey basket before, it isn't anymore.
I absolutely, I don't for one second think that this man wrote all of this, held on to the information during his entire life, and only upon his death would release it.
I don't believe that's a bogus story for one second.
unidentified
Well, Combshutter was in his 80s and had absolutely no agenda when he was speaking about it.
And we got off on the subject because I had mentioned that my brother and I had seen an unidentified flying object when we were kids.
We ended up hiding under the bed for hours.
It freaked us out so bad.
And then, of course, he and I swore death pack never to tell anybody because they wouldn't have believed that, but they would have believed we were out on the roof.
No, but I'm just saying that having spoken with Combshutter and listening to him chronicle his experience as a young man out there and what happened, it was very believable, very honest guy.
I mean, no agenda, not trying to make a buck, not trying to impress some kid like myself at the time.
And they, when I see people that have gotten better, not gotten better, and I hate to say this, but I've watched people not being healthy by not doing the right thing.
And when I hear reports about people saying that you cannot get better or you cannot flourish and be better by having not just a healthy lifestyle, but having the vitamins in you, you can do it.
And my complaint is, what the hell is the right thing?
One day vitamins are good for you.
The next day, they're shortening your life.
Come on.
unidentified
That's the thing is that people have a tendency to overdo.
And then when it overdoes, then you can get too much vitamin A, too much vitamin D, and then it overshadows how good things are when those things are good for you.
So you shouldn't, I think what's happening is that people overdo the vitamins, and then it overshadows the goodness of what regular vitamins and the happy medium can do for you.
It seems that, in my opinion, and I'm not trying to diss America or anything, but it seems in my opinion that the London terrorist group, MI5, and everything, they have a better handle on things sometimes, it seems.
Well, look, things have been pretty quiet since 9-11, if you're talking about this country.
And I said this not long ago.
You know, Homeland Security deserves a little bit of credit.
FBI, CIA, whoever, whatever the numbered letter agencies are, nothing awful.
I'll say it won't happen, but nothing awful has happened.
Now, many times the authorities stop something, and for reasons of not disclosing technology we have that might have been involved in stopping it, we don't make those claims.
So you don't find out the good things that are done by these agencies.
You only hear, and boy, do you hear about the failures.
Okay, this is Shane from New Orleans, and I just want to thank you for the five years of service that I've been devoted.
And I also want to thank you personally for making such momentous decisions in your life regarding other people, you know, like moving your family back from the, you know, to New Mexico and also.
Cyber war columnist Charles R. Smith is one of America's leading experts on cyber technology and its implications for war, terrorism, privacy, and every way technology actually interacts rather with our lives.
He's an exclusive columnist for NewsMax.com as its cyber war expert and is currently president and CEO of SoftWar, his own consulting company.
He currently provides security software for medical information services and hospitals, encryption software for secure email, direct communications, electronic commerce, and internet website services.
So it should be a very interesting interview ahead indeed.
In a moment, Charles Smith, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
We've seen the various groups, individuals, as well as organized sex pick this up.
We'll probably see terrorism for the next 40 or 50 years.
I would say at very least.
Think of it as an insurgent kind of war at all fronts.
Terrorism is not a winning combination.
It has to be combined with a political and an informational type of warfare in order to make it a success.
And I think a very good example would be the PLO was probably one of the first to take terrorism and combine it with a political and propaganda war to eventually become viewed as a legitimate political force.
At the moment, the Chinese are selling some fairly advanced equipment to the Taliban.
One good piece of equipment is the HN-5.
This is a manned, portable, surface-to-air missile, very similar to the Russian SA-7 GRAIL.
It has some improvements that have been modified by the Chinese, of course, in a classic format.
The Chinese are very well known for taking weapon systems that are reliable, upgrading them, modifying them, and, of course, selling them without a license.
The HN5 is quite capable of bringing down helicopters, small transport aircraft, even going after combat aircraft such as jet fighters.
So there is some worry.
We already know that they have supplied a large number of these manned portable surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban in addition to some fairly low-tech type of equipment like the RPG-7, which they have improved.
There is some indication that they may have also supplied the Taliban with what is referred to as a fuel-air munition.
There is a shoulder-launched version of this fuel-air munition.
Basically, instead of a standardized explosive, the device is designed to shoot a shell into a room or bunker or facility, release very quickly an explosive mist, and detonate it.
The fuel air munition type of system, of course, is quite capable of leveling an entire building in comparison.
It was something on the order of 6,000 to 7,000 pounds, better known as the cheeseburger in the military vernacular, used during the Vietnam War actually not to knock out enemy locations, but more or less to level whole areas of jungle so they could turn them into landing zones.
The BLU unit, better also known as Big Blue, was generally rolled out the rear end of a C-130 on a pallet with a parachute, would detonate itself at a relatively low altitude above a target.
And of course, it was an extremely large explosive.
Well, the fuel air munition has actually been improved with electronics and miniaturized into the form of a hand-portable type of system, very similar to an RPG-7.
It's a large extended kind of rocket.
And instead of exploding on contact, It's designed to be shot through a window or through a fragile area into a building where the mist is therefore dispersed inside a confined space and then detonated.
The Chinese actually were one of the main suppliers to the Taliban, and I think we probably should have taken a warning.
After the invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban government had been ejected, the Taliban foreign minister and their defense minister ended up in Beijing.
There were a number of publications with the PRC's foreign minister and the Taliban foreign minister making statements.
The Chinese, in essence, view our presence in Central Asia as competition, and therefore it's kind of a natural political reaction for them to supply weapon systems to an insurgency that they see where they could pin us down.
The flip side to that is, of course, as you well pointed out, the Chinese military, you can think of it as PLA Inc., the People's Liberation Army, Inc., it's pretty hard for them to turn down good money.
The Taliban does have good money in the form of extensive opium trade, so they can actually come forward with multi-million dollar purchases.
And that's, again, not too unusual for the Chinese Army Incorporated to step forward and say, okay, we'll supply you.
They actually approached the Chinese originally and made the request that the Taliban were in desperate need of some more advanced equipment to face off with the Western and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The Chinese not only agreed to supply some of this equipment, but they've actually gone so far as to directly fly in shipments into Afghanistan, into Taliban-controlled areas.
Well, you would think, and the reality is it's dead silence at Foggy Bottom.
You won't hear any reaction out of the White House.
There have been statements accusing the Iranians of supplying weapons, but when it came to talking about the Chinese, it was, well, we're not sure or we can't make any comment or no, we're not aware of anything in particular.
I think it's more along the lines of certain commercial interests are stepping on the administration to make sure to emphasize the peaceful nature of our relationship with Beijing.
If you look at how much is made, not just stuff you buy at Walmart, but almost all the way across the U.S., if you look carefully at labels, you'll find it comes from China.
Most disturbingly, many of the organizations, the companies that we're dealing with in China, are exactly the same firms that are selling these weapons.
That's one of the things that kind of bothers a lot of our national security analysts.
They do recognize very clearly that the Chinese military owns a large number of factories.
Many of them are weapons-producing facilities, but at the same time, they also produce a wide line of commercial goods for sale here in the United States.
I think part of the administration's hope is that China's kind of in a, I don't know, transitional period, it would seem, certainly economically, and perhaps even eventually politically.
And I think the administration is hoping that the economic gains will turn into political change eventually.
They haven't been any less belligerent in the world stage.
In fact, more so.
They have not dedicated any less money towards their military.
In fact, they've actually dedicated more.
The growing Chinese middle class is very anti-U.S.
and extremely anti-freedom from the point of view of democracy.
They certainly do not see at all any advantage to going to a democracy simply because that would undercut any sort of profit or motive that they've got.
So the net result of the policies that we're looking at are we've actually seen it go in the exact opposite direction.
China is definitely not getting any nicer.
For example, the supplying of weapons to the Taliban in an overt fashion is just simply one area in a global context.
And at the same time, we have to look at it in the form of, well, okay, if we trade with them, maybe they'll become more democratic because they certainly have become more capitalistic.
Well, instead, what we've seen is this wonderful mix of Marxism, one-party totalitarian rule, and of course, a good dab of capitalism under those restrictions.
For those of us who are familiar with history, we actually see the same system, historically speaking, existing in fascist Germany and fascist Italy prior to World War II.
So you can say China has morphed itself from this agrarian peasant communist state into a modern fascist socialist state.
Freedom is certainly not an issue that we're going to be dealing with when we look at the upcoming Olympics.
If anything, what we've seen is a crackdown on dissidents, a wide effort to remove people who could possibly interfere in any form, way, or format, even by happening to live in the wrong spot.
The most recent example of the crackdown in Tibet, don't think that we're the only ones that are reaping the global benefits of our engagement policy here.
The Chinese have been extremely belligerent with India, with Japan, with Korea, and with Taiwan as well.
With the Japanese, we've seen a Chinese nuclear submarine literally incur into their national waters.
But aside from Cuba, we pretty much control everything within our realm.
And there are some people who would say that China, being a world power, and it is a world power, may indeed, in effect, have a right to control their sphere of influence.
And I don't know if there's a hell of a lot we can or should do about that.
First and foremost, Taiwan is centrally located to control all the oil that would go towards Korea and Japan.
We're not the only ones with a lot at stake here.
Obviously, slinging ballistic missiles or putting a naval blockade around Taiwan would bump directly into Japanese self-interests, and that bumps into U.S. self-interests.
We also have a written agreement with the Taiwanese.
Granted, if they wanted to peacefully rejoin with the mainland, that's one thing.
On the other hand, if they wish to declare independence, we've been telling them, no, you should not do that, which is, of course, an ultimate irony.
Here we are fighting a war in Iraq, allowing people to vote and touting as if that is some sort of gigantic achievement.
Keep in mind, the straits of Taiwan are not necessarily an easy transit.
As one submariner once said to me very recently, you know, they may have a million-man army, but how long can you tread water?
The reality of the situation is that a blockade by the Chinese Navy would be a futile effort.
The Navy that they have is minuscule.
It would be devastating to their naval forces.
Remember, China is the People's Liberation Army controls all of the military.
It is known as the People's Liberation Army Navy.
That's the exact acronym, the PLAN.
The reality of the situation is they'd probably start flinging ballistic missiles.
What would Americans do if innocent people are dying simply because somebody's sitting on the other side of a very short street of water hurling missiles at them in a la scud style, except much more accurate and much more deadly.
We've already caught two guys last year as part of an operation.
It was essentially designed, initially designed to catch people who were working with the North Koreans to smuggle in counterfeit $100 bills, and it suddenly expanded very rapidly into a nightmarish story of advanced surface-to-air missiles and terrorism.
The corporation known as Smoking Dragon got two guys who were using these counterfeit $100 bills and the funding that they were going to obtain from this to purchase probably the most sophisticated manned portable system that the Chinese developed, quite capable of bringing down an airliner.
They were lured into a deal by American law enforcement into believing that they were selling these systems to a terrorist organization here in the U.S. who would use them to shoot down airliners.
And these guys made it very clear that they had connections not only at the highest level, they even put the agents in contact, direct contact with a Chinese general who would supply them with the weapons.
And they were planning on selling some of the most sophisticated surface-to-air systems, man-portable surface-to-air systems, available.
They were going to bribe an intermediary, essentially a foreign country, and a couple of officials were going to allow the missiles to be trans-shipped through their country, remarked as machine parts, and be brought in in regular shipping containers here into the U.S. to be supplied directly to U.S. agents who were posing as terrorists who wished to shoot down American airliners.
That's the point I was trying to make a little bit earlier.
Nothing awful has happened in the country since 9-11.
Now, one would have expected they would have followed up after 9-11 with quite a bit.
I'm trying to give some credit to some of these agencies that really have prevented terrorism from occurring in the U.S. since 9-11.
I think they've been doing a reasonably decent job, but they don't get credit, nor do they even really announce many times when they do catch something underway for intelligence reasons.
And so they don't get credit for the good stuff they do.
The other half of this, of course, is they try to keep it quiet because we're implicating members of the Chinese government directly in terrorist operations.
And therefore, that would certainly hurt someone's bottom line, especially when they want to cut a major deal in China.
The Chinese, they can't afford to go too far, particularly with something that would end up being a domestic catastrophe in the U.S., because then we would implement trade sanctions.
We'd have no choice politically, and they'd be cutting off their own Chinese nose despite the face, right?
And it's also extremely devastating from the point of view that if you look very carefully here, last year we catched two guys peddling the Kuo Wei-2, which is better than any Stinger we've ever developed because it's a modern missile.
There's a Chinese general involved in this.
He's an unindicted co-conspirator.
Our government would not release his name, and the Chinese government never prosecuted anyone.
Well, again, my point, though, I can see how far they would go, and then I can also see that if they went past a certain point, they would trigger what would hurt them.
There's no doubt about that, but they don't believe that we would ever do it.
They hold $1 trillion in Treasury bills.
They know full well that if we start playing these little games with let's dance around the maypole and what can we cut off today, all they have to do is start dumping treasury bills.
So at their highest level, they certainly do not believe at any one point, and we're not reinforcing any sort of strong message back to them.
Well, once again, you have to keep in mind one of the reasons why we got involved in the Korean War was because of a misperception on both parts.
We did not anticipate that the Chinese would have the capability of flying the MiG-15, then the most sophisticated aircraft in the world, and it came as a rude shock that they were quite capable of dealing at a high-tech level.
Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate their capabilities or a determination.
They would quite willingly sacrifice at a 9 or 10 to 1 ratio if they could bring, say, 50 to 100,000 casualties.
They do not, and this is right out of the OCMC, that's the Office of Military Command in TLA Headquarter Doctrine.
They do not believe that we have the guts to take that kind of loss without walking away.
They've witnessed us more than once do that.
So do you think we would absorb 50,000 casualties, especially in, say, a three to six month period?
Well, I think that the 10 or 20 to 1 or 100 to 1 ratio that you say they can absorb, they would be absorbing that and more if they let it escalate too far.
You know, I'm pointing out that in an endgame, there are no competition.
This is where, again, we have to be very careful about what is their capabilities.
Keep in mind, the Chinese are fielding the DF-31, which is a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile.
We also have the wonderful event that followed 1996, where General Xiong Kai, then the number two commander of the PLA, said, basically, you would not want to lose Los Angeles if you get into a scrap with us over.
Well, that's why when we're looking at the kind of weapon systems that they're buying and building with the kind of money that we've been giving them that we've had so much concern inside the Pentagon.
These are the kind of plans for a delivery device that you can build in a sophisticated format for either air or missile delivery type of systems.
This is the kind of thing that Pakistan built for themselves, which is one of the reasons why You're seeing India looking at the United States these days in a much more favorable eye.
They know where the Pakistani inventory came from.
They know where the technology came from.
The same thing applies to the North Koreans.
The North Korean plans, they didn't get them from Japan.
Kim Jong-il, I like to refer to him as still crazy after all these years.
The Chinese do worry that if his government collapses, they're going to have to step over the border.
The South Koreans are definitely afraid that his government is going to collapse because they know how much money they would have to spend in order to bring North Korea back into civilization.
They have the same fear that the West Germans had when East Germany collapsed.
They were going to go bankrupt, trying to reformat it.
These companies are owned by a foreign entity that is a foreign government.
But a lot of foreign countries own or entities in the countries own businesses here in the U.S. Right now, there's a law on the books that states that the government is supposed to identify in the Federal Register the Chinese Army-owned companies operating here in the U.S. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration have followed the law.
There has never been a publication of those entities.
We might not be able to cut a deal for Chrysler or Ford or, gosh, golly, you know, we may not be able to buy our iPods or iPhones because of the chips or something that they're being made over there.
And keep in mind, the guy who threatened to fry L.A., what did they do to him?
They promoted him after he made the statement.
That sort of gives you a hint of how they feel about this.
And what do you think would happen, Charles, if they, as you put it, fried L.A. The gut reaction of the United States is to retaliate in a massive format.
No, actually, all it would do would be kill several hundred million Chinese uselessly, but the Chinese government and their missiles would pretty much remain.
The only deterrent right now, when you're looking at the Chinese government, is not we'll fry your cities with all your people in them, is we will fry you, your pets, your family personally.
Listen, if they were to set off a nuclear weapon, if the Chinese government set off a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles by whatever means, I can assure you their infrastructure would be gone, their government would be gone, many of their important cities would be gone.
It would be suicide.
And I do not believe the Chinese are suicidal, Charles.
Let's go back Through this, once again, when you're talking about a totalitarian regime, you cannot relate to it in the same form that you and I feel about how our government operates.
The only way that we've been able to deter them hasn't been to threaten their population, it's been to threaten the leadership.
It's the same thing that we applied when we looked at Saddam Hussein.
What I am saying is that much like the Russians, much like the Soviet bloc, what kept us all from going to war and ending the world was a mutual disinterest in suicide.
And I think that that's true of the Chinese as well.
We'll be right back.
Here I am.
My guest is Charles R. Smith.
And we'll try and get this straighten away here in a moment.
I think we have a fundamental, perhaps have a fundamental area of agreement and a fundamental area of disagreement.
So Charles R. Smith, back in a moment.
All right, Charles.
Let's see if we can straighten this out a little bit.
I agree with you that China certainly does not have our best interests at heart by a long shot.
However, I think my area of concern is more, and you can straighten me out if I'm wrong, but I'm very concerned about them selling high-tech weapons to people who are willing to commit suicide to deliver them to U.S. targets or friends of ours.
However, I don't for one second think the Chinese would ever really consider any sort of nuclear strike against any U.S. city.
And the reason I believe that is that they're not suicidal.
They're kind of like the Russians in that regard.
They're not the Taliban.
They're not al-Qaeda.
They are the Chinese.
And they don't want to virtually disappear from the face of the earth.
I could fundamentally agree that they and their military policy is certainly not designed to fight us in a one-on-one thermonuclear toe-to-toe type of experience, quoting your classic Doctor Strange love.
No, they're not going to do that.
On the other hand, what is disturbing is statements made by their hierarchy at the highest level that indicates that if given the opportunity or in a situation that they feel it would be necessary, they certainly would not hesitate.
And we have seen that come out of the general staff.
Last year, we had the commander, one of the top PLA generals, he was in charge of the equivalent of their West Point, publicly state that China would be very willing to use nuclear weapons in a first strike if they felt that there would be a conflict over Taiwan.
And he meant first strike against the continental United States.
Well, let's put this into the actual context of where combat would take place.
Would we, on the other hand, strike at one of their cities if they, say, detonated a nuclear weapon in low-altitude space, say, over one of our carrier battle groups in the Pacific?
The problem with doing that is, again, when we're looking at things like the DF-31, we helped them design and build that by selling them advanced U.S. technology, radiation-hardened computer chip technology in the 1990s.
If we retaliate to destroy mainland targets with nuclear weapons, they will be left with no alternative but to fire what they've got, use it or lose it.
In their case, one of their tactical doctrine, this is right out of the PLA headquarters, directly from a conflict combat simulation.
One of the alternatives for them to prevent an A carrier battle group from reinforcing Taiwan is to detonate a nuclear weapon in space above the battle group.
You would not be destroying anything, but the EMP pulse certainly would knock out a lot of things.
Assassin's Mace is essentially: let's use some proxies, let's distribute some technology.
A good example would be let's sell ballistic missile technology through our proxies to, say, Iran.
The current upper stages of the Iranian version of the Nodong missile, which they purchased from the North Koreans, which they know as the Shahab-3, the current upper stages are designed and built by China Great Wall Industries and China North Industries.
Those two upper stages have extended the range and provided the Iranians with the capability of either a chemical or nuclear warhead with great accuracy, which is, let's compare that to the difference of flinging one where maybe we can hit a city to now flinging one to the point where we can pick the building where we want to hit.
Engagement is the firm belief by those who are currently in power that by engaging in trade with China and therefore forcing them into a capitalist mode, that China will become less belligerent and more democratic.
Well, first and foremost, we can see, for example, the proliferation, as you refer to it, intentional proliferation.
The Chinese policies also in regards to their borders.
We can talk about Taiwan.
We can talk about the India border.
Things that don't necessarily directly reflect upon us, but we can see how, for example, the relationship between America and India has improved rather dramatically, and we can say we can actually put that at the feet of Beijing because they've actually gotten more belligerent, not less.
We can also look at the fact that the expansion of trade with China has enabled them to literally triple over the period of time their defense budget and are now basically purchasing state-of-the-art weapon systems.
So in essence, we are building the military-industrial complex that's facing us with our own cash.
Then we could actually go into, let's see, is it actually making them politically nicer?
Well, what we've done is we've built a fairly narrow middle class, which is directly dependent upon the exploitation of some 700 to 800 million very impoverished people that they use essentially as low-cost labor.
The net result of that is would this narrow middle class want a democratic or a liberty-based government?
Well, the answer, of course, is no.
So in essence, what we've built is a fairly technical middle class that is actually dedicated to totalitarian one-party rule.
They don't necessarily have to be members of the party, but they have reaped the benefits to the point where they have a vested interest in that format.
So not only are we building a military, political, and economic competitor, we're also building a generation of Chinese who look upon us as the enemy.
I'm looking at the middle class and the ruling class.
That would be the middle and uppers.
When you go beyond the 50 to 80 million middle class citizens and you look at the rest of the 2.5 or 1.5 billion that reside there, now I can agree, and you can find right down at the grassroots level a lot of people who still love the United States.
But the counter to that, for example, is just last year we've had a number of conflicts in the format where the Chinese government was putting out an extensive amount of propaganda, especially in reference to the U.S. and Japan, and therefore there were organized protests.
When you look at the hierarchy, the controlling elements, they are not very fond of the United States.
They make it very clear in their military and political documentation that the United States, we are the enemy.
The MTV revolution, which was frankly one of the real reasons why the Soviet Union fell, was an informational-based revolution.
The problem when we look at China is, for example, Google and Yahoo, people who are allowing their systems to be manipulated and used in an informational context to reinforce the propaganda, if that information is twisted, is used in a totalitarian regime, it is actually worse, not better.
We're actually creating the venue that is allowing them to put electronic chains on their own society.
McConnell warned about when I interviewed him back in the 1990s.
He's currently the head of the national intelligence.
And I have a great deal of respect for Admiral McConnell.
He was very clear about what was going on and how the Chinese are using our own technology in very much the same fashion that we could say South Africa was applying technology to control their citizens before apartheid.
When you're referring to the Chinese society and the Chinese hierarchy, the leadership realm, in order to continue to retain power, would they not start a war?
That's exactly what Galtieri did in Argentina.
That was exactly what the Falklands War was all about.
He knew that they would potentially lose, but the idea was in the loss, he would retain power.
The two alternatives are either explosion or implosion.
We prefer the implosion, which in essence is the Chinese government would collapse and a new state would be formed out of this.
Of course, the problem with that is, remember, once again, we're dealing with a totalitarian regime with nuclear weapons.
You could think of it in these terms.
Whatever party is in power puts their troops in charge, their personal troops in charge of the nuclear weapons.
Right now, the Politburo controls all nukes in China, Politburo troops.
So one of the reasons why we can tell when they're really deadly serious is when the Politburo troops start mobilizing.
The same thing applies when you're looking at their organizational structure.
If you want to watch what's going on, watch the People's Armed Police and the Politburo troops.
We've seen them recently, because of the high level of the Olympics, move in and around Beijing.
What do I see them doing?
Do I see them going into a toe-to-toe nuke with us?
No.
What I do see them do is, all right, one day, let's go ahead and declare a blockade around China, around Taiwan, and go ahead, make our day.
Bring it on.
We'll take your Navy on.
We're not going to fry an American city, but we're going to do battle with you close to the mainland with ballistic missiles aimed at your systems coming to threaten us.
Well, we're also looking at other aspects of this.
The low-level war is going to continue.
You're going to see another just a little notch up in the maneuver of its sophisticated weapons being distributed, sometimes through third parties, to terrorists and government.
The aspect here is to spread us a little thinner, to make us think about places like Somalia and Sudan and put personnel that would be dedicated towards those things to pin us down.
You're also going to see some additional operations here in the U.S., just like the one that we uncovered when we picked up those two Chinese guys last year pedaling surface-to-air missiles.
That's happened before.
We got 2,000 fully automatic AK-47s back in 96.
That was in LA.
And the two guys that were pedaling that were direct representatives of Polytechnologies and China North Industries, companies owned by the Chinese Army.
And they made it very clear that this was just a taste that they could give the agents who were running the deal, they could give them access to much more sophisticated weapons, such as surface-to-air missiles and RPG-7s.
And when we get back, we'll kind of turn in that direction and see what Charles knows about what we've got on the drawing boards or beyond.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning.
In the middle of the night, Charles R. Smith is my guest.
And I've had a lot of emails from people.
In fact, a couple of photographs that were quite convincing.
Contrails in the sky.
And normally you would expect to be able to look at the origin point of a developing contrail and see an aircraft.
But you know what?
A lot of people have been taking photographs of contrails being formed by things you can't see.
Are we developing an invisible to the eye aircraft?
We'll ask in a moment.
Listen, I want to remind everybody that even though I am retiring, my emails will remain the same.
That would be artbell at mindspring.com, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com, or artbell at A-O-L.com.
Either way, it'll get to me.
All right, Charles, I have had, interestingly, a lot of emails from people who claim that they're observing invisible planes by seeing contrails, then looking with some sort of magnification and not finding a plane at the lead of the contrail.
The original project, as a lot of most of this technology, dates back to World War II, to a project called Yahoo.
I know that sounds pretty strange, but yes, it was called Yahoo, run by the U.S. Navy.
They discovered very quickly during the early portion of the Second World War that it was quite easy for German U-boats to dive and get away from our very slow patrol planes.
Basically, the U-boat could spot them and dive and disappear long before the patrol plane could arrive on the scene.
So what they experimented with was, let's put an array of lights along the leading edge in the propeller hubs of the patrol bombers and use a measuring device to give you the approximate background luminescence and change those lights to match that background and therefore mask the patrol bomber until it came right on top of the U-boat.
Yehudi was actually mounted on some B-24, better known as a PBY-4, patrol bombers operating in the Atlantic Ocean.
They were very successful.
Of course, airborne radar made the play immediately after that, and Yahoo went away because with radar, you could track a submarine from a much greater distance to sneak up on them at a different angle.
Isoluminescence has been taken forward into light-emitting panels or arrays, very much, very similar to an LED.
The light-emitting panels can be mounted on the sides, literally in a conformal array around an aircraft, and you can turn the lighting, in essence, to match the background.
Literally, from 1,000 feet, it will mask the airplane.
Inside 1,000 feet, you would actually see something, pretty much a lighted or outlined version.
But outside of that, for all practical purposes, it's part of the background sky.
And they're actually, at the moment, they're probably operating unmanned vehicles that make utilization of this.
We had the episode with the Mexican patrol plane that ran into five, what they referred to as UFOs.
They could not see them with the naked eye, but they accidentally picked them up with a forward-looking infrared.
And interestingly enough, the material was immediately made available to a UFO journalist in Mexico who, of course, pronounced that Marvin the Martian was visiting the Netherlands, or in this case, out by the Yucatan Peninsula, where there's virtually nothing.
Well, the reality was a number of aircraft that we use perform in and around the Gulf area because we're talking about white sands.
If you lose one, you probably would want to do it over a watered-based area so nobody can go out and recover it.
There are those who say that, and you might want to comment on this, that as we move toward unmanned aircraft, unmanned battle vehicles, and unmanned weapons, period, we're doing something immoral.
There are people who say that, look, we're going to have machines doing battle with human beings.
Even right down at the battlefield level now, where we're seeing the utilization of robots, ground crawlers, small flyers, all sorts of things that give our soldiers an immense advantage.
Well, that's one of those little things that not a lot of people pay attention to until you start looking at where the budget is.
The guys over at Northrop Grumman have come up with a launch vehicle.
Think of it as just kind of like a conventionally armed ICBM.
Except that this ICBM, once you let it go, it doesn't have a nuclear warhead.
It actually has a smart submunition warhead that can range all the way on the other side of the planet and release a shower or array of miniature robots, each one of them armed with its own personal explosive.
The basic idea here is instead of worrying about sending a battle group in to cut off a Chinese invasion of, say, Taiwan, I could sit on the mainland here and launch a couple of these things, and each one of those submunitions would hunt out either a small ship or a landing craft and destroy them in 30 minutes or less.
Think of it as like pizza delivery, it's still hot at the other end.
There are a number of different munitions that they're designing for this.
One munition, frankly, has no explosive warhead at all.
It's nothing but a gigantic block of concrete.
And again, the idea here is I want to destroy a bunker or an underground tunnel.
Let's say Osama is, we found him in his tunnel in Afghanistan.
We know he's going to be there for, say, the next 30 minutes, but that's it.
You pop one of these out.
It re-enters at about 15,000 miles an hour and dives straight down into the side of the mountain.
And, of course, with brilliant accuracy, plus or minus three feet right there.
One, their computers, if they see it, along with their radar, will probably know where the target is within the first 15 minutes because once you get to the apex of the ballistic flight, it's pretty much a done deal.
So they'll know, A, this isn't heading for downtown Moscow.
Two, they're not going to be coming from the regular ICBM sites.
So you're not going to be seeing a thousand minutemen climbing into the air.
Well, in this case, he was looking at the Norwegians sent a sounding rocket Up and it had a very similar flight profile to a submarine-launched ballistic missile.
It was coming from the right area, and it was heading basically in the right direction.
The Russian missile defense picked it up.
They ran to Yeltsin, who was drunk as a skunk at the time.
He jumped to conclusions, grabbed the Russian version of the football, and turned the key.
And they were within two minutes of launching a retaliatory strike when one of the guys from the foreign ministry came in and said, you know, the Norwegians notified us about this about three weeks ago that they were going to launch this thing.
We just forgot to tell you.
So everybody got to stand down at that point.
Quite a story.
The flip to that is if we're aiming one at the Taiwan Straits or if we're aiming it at downtown Islamabad or if we're aiming it in Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran, you're not likely to see the Chinese or the Russians do something.
And what makes them even more nervous these days is our ballistic missile defense.
Well, I can say the Navy guys are having a pretty good string.
They've got 9 out of 11, and the two that missed, I think there was one early on and then one about two years ago.
The SM-3, better known as the Standard Missile 3, is performing very well.
This last test was not just against your regular ballistic missile.
It was against a separated warhead with countermeasures.
And the SM-3 interceptor was able to take it out at 100 miles up with no problem.
And that's the reason why the Japanese are joining in on the program, because they've actually added some of their wonderful technology to the interceptor.
I've seen the Japanese SM-3 interceptor in action.
Yeah, and one of the debates going on in Japan right at the moment is what would they do if they saw a missile being flung out of either China or North Korea, but it wasn't headed towards Japan, but to the United States.
And the debate going on is should we shoot it down or not?
And I have a feeling that they're going to come to the conclusion, yes, we should.
The JDF and the U.S. military do have separate command structures that's as per law, Japanese law, not U.S. law.
But on the other hand, our sharing in operations date back all the way through the Cold War.
So despite those little minor economic tiffs that we had with each other, we were still watching the Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreans quite intently side by side.
The Japanese are in the National Missile Defense Program at the highest levels because they are contributing some very, very advanced technology.
The SM-3 interceptor is a very good example of exactly that.
What I'm seeing, especially out of the Navy guys, is a very capable system already being mounted on cruisers and destroyers.
This last intercept was performed by a destroyer, by the way.
Actually, if there is any answer to it, it's very highly classified.
Keep in mind, the Patriot 1, at that point, had never been tested against a ballistic missile because we were scared to death that we were going to break the ABM treaty with the Russians.
So we'd never tested it against a ballistic missile.
The Patriot 1 was never designed to intercept a ballistic missile.
It was the best we had that we could press into play.
The Russians, the Russian mentality towards this is not necessarily the same kind of global domination that we see coming out of Beijing with the good old hierarchy.
The Russians fully recognize they don't have the funding to deal with these kinds of things.
What we've seen coming out of their systems and their deployment, and remember, I'm an old Cold Warrior.
When we get back, I'm going to open the lines for the audience to ask you questions.
I've got a couple more myself, so all of that coming up.
Remember, nothing is as it seems.
Good morning, everybody.
Charles R. Smith is here, and he's discussing, well, I don't know, things, military generally, China, but it's gone way beyond that.
So we've got the lines open, and we'll get you on with Charles in a moment.
Well, okay, this is very interesting.
We have somebody claiming to be calling from China on their own nickel, and apparently claiming to be calling from the Chinese government.
I have my doubts, but Jeff, you're on the air with Charles Smith.
unidentified
Well, thank you very much, Art.
It is my nickel, and I'm calling from the Beijing Olympic Committee, and good afternoon.
I've worked for the government of China for the last nine years, and I'm the only American working in senior management for the Olympic Committee, so I think I know what I'm talking about.
About half of what he's telling you is true.
I don't disregard anything regarding the military, but when it comes to what's happening and the changes of China, you really need to have a guest on who's been here.
Well, I'm sure you have, Art, since you've been close here in the Philippines.
Here's my point.
What you're not talking about is the radical impact of what capitalism and free markets have done here in China.
It's just not a veneer.
It has made radical, complete, overhaul changes in the financial system and the way people are doing business here and the overall attitude of the Chinese people.
And you are right, Art, as you said earlier in your show, it is generational.
You're not looking at the long term like the Chinese do.
We look at things in quarters.
The Chinese look at things over a 10-year span.
So what I'm saying is the changes are here.
The government is going to change over time, and they believe they have democracy.
I can point out, ask one question, and I can also point out one other thing.
You've got a vested interest.
And I can ask, if they've made such magnificent changes, why do we have accusations right now that there are child labor being used to make Olympic materials?
And believe me, I understand the IOC and its operations.
And I also fully understand that there is an opposition group saying right now, because of what's happening in Sudan, maybe a boycott might be in order.
That might not exactly suit your caller very much, but I'm sure that when we're talking about people in Darfur who are looking at Chinese warplanes with Chinese-trained pilots dropping Chinese-made bombs, that might be a different story.
unidentified
No, it isn't.
No, it isn't.
If that was the case, why don't we just boycott the NBA here in China because the United States goes ahead and starts a war against someone who never did anything against us in Iraq?
Makes no sense.
Listen, you don't understand the changes that are here.
Little things such as child labor happens every day.
It happens in countries like Thailand where we buy thousands of goods, Mexico as well.
Here's the point, and I think I'd like you to talk about this, and I'll get off the air.
If you wanted to start, or if there was a conflict over Taiwan, what would the United States do?
The biggest weapon we have is our economy.
If I was president of the United States and I got into a real contest with the Chinese over Taiwan, I would declare an executive order, read Tom Clancy's book, perfect example, I would declare that all U.S. government agencies and all U.S. businesses to cancel every contract with China.
You would suck out how many trillions of dollars out of this economy and create a potential civil war.
The Chinese don't want it.
We don't want it.
That's the biggest weapon we have, not dropping bombs on each other.
When you talk about freedom, just three months ago, we had a Tibetan nun fleeing for her life, trying to get across the Himalayan mountains, shot in the back at 100 yards by Chinese soldiers.
The foreign ministry declared that that nun was attacking the PLA guys.
They got it on video.
It wasn't a U.S. citizen.
It was a Romanian citizen who shot the video, who shows this poor woman fleeing for her life.
Did they prosecute?
No.
What are we doing today with Iraq?
We just heard today that there were three guys who have been, who are under prosecution for murder.
And the reason is that when we have the evidence, you will prosecute.
In the case of the PLA, that soldier was probably given a medal for shooting because he was able to pick someone off in the snow at 100 yards.
Before I ask my question, Charles, regarding the caller that just called Beijing, just tonight I happened to be coming across the International Herald Tribune, which is a mostly liberal newspaper connected New York Times.
It had two op-ed pieces dealing with the effects of the Chinese economy on the populace, and it was very scoring, you know, very, very negative on the effects of the Chinese economy.
For the last several weeks now, and you brought this up with Dale Brown last week when you interviewed him, a lot of people are expecting war soon between the United States and Iran.
And I was wanting to ask Charles, does he think the likelihood of war with Iran is coming?
And does he expect a general worldwide war very soon?
A lot of people think that we're just one step away, a major terrorist incident, a major military incident, from just having an international confrontation, not only in the Middle East, but perhaps around the world.
A lot of chest thumping on all sides, but no action.
Keep in mind, if you really wanted to hurt the Iranians, you'd only have to have one airstrike at a place where there's virtually no people, Karg Island.
You'd shut off literally all of their oil exports.
Almost 90% of all the oil that leaves Iran goes out of Karg Island.
The reverse is already in the case for the Iranians, and we've even seen some protests just recently.
The Iranians are on a short fuse internally, and the ruling mullahs know that.
Because of the way that they've treated their economy, they're going to be going from an oil-exporting nation to an oil-importing nation probably in the next four to five years.
There have been some major cutbacks in its funding.
The current Congress does not view ABL or the ballistic missile defense with much favor, so they actually sliced out a pretty good chunk of ABL's budget.
See them delayed probably to 2009 for the first test.
Space Fighter, we've probably already had it, and it very well may have been retired.
That was a nice article done by the boys at Aviation Week and Space Technology.
The cost of The thing was just enormous.
It was probably a follow-on project after Aurora.
And they basically did have, according to Aviation Week, at least two of these vehicles in operation.
That's why we're kind of stepping back to the sun of SR-71.
We've seen the advances in unmanned systems push us to the point where we'll be able to do things like put an unmanned aircraft, say from an aircraft carrier, leaving Hawaii, and in 30 hours it'll be over the Taiwan Straits, and it could remain on station for 48 hours and then return.
So that's the kind of things that we're looking at.
And really enjoyed the Roswell show from a couple of nights ago.
That was outstanding.
Thank you.
Hey, I'm a defense and science journalist and a combat aviation air-to-air cameraman.
I work for Combat Aircraft Magazine and string for Associated Press and Aviation Week and do stuff for other people.
And just wanted to kind of bring you up the data on a couple of the anti-ballistic missile programs that you had asked for.
And number one, we never did get a warhead-to-warhead kill of any of the Scuds in Desert Storm.
There wasn't a single one.
There were a couple intercepts on fuel tanks and the ends of the fins, but we never did get a warhead-to-warhead strike.
The airborne laser, which I'm pretty much the only journalist that's ever been allowed inside the thing, I did a big cover story for Popular Science a couple of years ago on it.
It seems, you know, through fits and spurts and money problems like Charles was talking about, is going to go ahead, look at, probably start shooting at missiles in the air probably end of 08, beginning of 09, and they've got money for their second one.
There's also some other interesting stuff that's going on with taking the Lockheed's Patriot Pack 3 missile and adapting them and arming them onto F-15Cs.
This will be put in the far west Pacific because what you can do then, you know, the missile is about 17 feet.
They hang a couple underneath the wings of the Eagle.
And when you get some inkling that short-ranged intermediate continental ballistic missiles are getting ready to be launched, you would send the Eagles in and shoot them in the boost phase as the missiles were just coming up.
We can do that now with the AMRAM air-to-air missile to an extent, but it's only a 60-mile range.
And with putting the PAC-3 on there, we'll get a little greater reach.
Yeah, I was looking to come back and just let you know that we've got 20 interceptors on the ground up here now in Alaska, each with single-kill vehicles for intercepting re-entry vehicles in space, and we've got four in California.
But the question to Charles is that you should go to China.
I've written several stories that the Chinese military never did like and then was able to work things out to go there and had some quite interesting and deep access with the Chinese military.
And our military is working directly with the Chinese military and hotlines and visits.
They just had the first visit of a Chinese naval vessel into Tokyo Bay.
So there's some very interesting things that are going on.
And as a journalist and a guy who likes to keep on China, I would really like to put the question to you to go to consider to go to China at some point.
I wrote a huge cover story on the Chinese military back in 96.
I was the first guy to come up with the fact that they were going to use their short-range missiles, not only ballistic missiles, to point attack facilities in Taiwan, but also to go after our aircraft carriers.
And I'd found a few other things out, and they didn't like that.
They didn't allow me in on my first attempt.
But my second attempt, there are five different journalist visas, and I wound up with a very special sixth one.
And I was treated very well.
I was monitored all the time.
I mean, there was guys in black suits watching the guys in black suits doing stuff.
I found guys in my room in black suits doing stuff during the day.
They would say they were opening up the curtains for me, but of course we know what they were doing.
But it was very safe.
They were very welcoming, and they actually responded to the kind of questions that I know Charles could ask.
So I would heartily recommend trying to go to China at some point.
Unfortunately, because of the exploits I had during the 1990s where I've actually uncovered PLA Intel ops here in the U.S., published them, posted information about Chinese generals who were meeting with people like Ron Brown, the head of Loral, Bernard Schwartz, the wonderful stuff of C. Michael Armstrong, who was running Hughes at the time.
Last year, about October, following the DOD website, specifically, to be more specific, the Navy, they had dropped Down to where they only had to come up with 8,000 recruits in a year.
Then by the 1st of December, it had jumped up to 48,000 when it had been declining.
And then they put out kind of an email kind of a thing saying they wanted at least 40,000 prior service Navy to come back in, and they're still continuing to push quite heavily.
Phil in Torrance, California, you're on with Charles R. Smith.
unidentified
Oh, hi there, Art.
Hi.
Well, after listening and all this talk about missiles, I don't really think that would be the way it would happen.
I'm here in the Los Angeles area, and we have a huge harbor, and every day thousands and thousands of giant containers come in from China and that part of the world.
And it wouldn't take much to slip a nuke in a 45-foot container and bring it in and either do it in the harbor or distribute it one at a time throughout the trains and trucking system throughout the country.
And if something was to go off, there'd be no incoming missile to track the origin of, and nobody would know where it came from.
So who do you retaliate against?
So the threat of mutually assured destruction isn't there because we don't have the other end.
Keep in mind, it was the Costco ship, I believe it was the Princess in L.A. Harbor that had a container full of 2,000
AK-47s brought over with the blessing at the highest levels, and it was sold to an undercover agent who said they were going to be distributed to L.A. street gangs.
These were fully automatic machine guns.
And the guys who were offering the money, excuse me, who were offering the weapons were offering surface-to-air missiles, RPG-7s, and hand grenades, and anything else in the arsenal that these guys could buy.
Charles, I appreciate the things you're saying, sir.
The first time I went to China, it was during the early 50s, the United States Navy.
I was part of the Destroyer Division.
We patrolled the Formosa Straits.
And through the years, the Chinese I met, and all I can tell you is that the Chinese people, they don't hate us and we don't hate them.
And it's about how you split up the pie.
And the two superpowers today are China and the U.S. And regardless of the saber rattling, I truly believe that we're going to work things out, remain strong.
And I don't think there's going to be nuclear holocaust.
They'll control their segments in dealing with the terrorists as we will control other things.
But thanks for tonight and the statements you made.
And you're a true patriot.
And I appreciate the gentleman who called from China.
And all I can tell him is that the American people love the Chinese people.
I read the Cox report years ago or the 70% you're allowed to read, and it was quite shocking.
And the idea that there's 30% Americans cannot read is beyond belief.
The Chinese are all about aggression.
They're all about the military, their entire economy, their plans, their long-range plans.
There's an incredible naivete afoot among people who think the Chinese will be nice if we just give them our blue jeans and McDonald's.
I find this whole conversation incredible outside the context of this Cox report, a unanimous report by Congress that showed they've stolen most of nuclear treasures under the Clinton administration.
And the whole culture of the Chinese is all about aggression.
The Chinese people, I'm going to agree with the other caller, they love America.
The problem is the ruling class, they don't.
And the Communist Party is dedicated to a totalitarian socialist regime.
That's the CCP and the PLA.
Those have been the people that I have been fighting against for a good near 20 years now.
And that's one of the reasons why I'd love to visit China.
But of course, the Military Intelligence Department, the 2nd and the 4th Department of the PLA, would probably like to cut me to ribbons.
One of the reasons why you got to read the Cox report was because I took some people to court and got the bios of General Ding Hang Gao and General Shen, who got most of that nuclear missile technology from us.
And my question is, sir, have you contemplated at all the word of God concerning Iran and China over the conflicts that are evidently coming very, very quickly?
I can agree with you about China and its mindset, but do you not understand that Iran has a mindset that's given to it from a beast authority to where it will push a button because it's looking for its Messiah to return, and that's the way they believe it's going to happen?
Biblical issues aside, the Iranians have been the number one leaders when it comes to terrorism.
You and I both know that.
And they and the Chinese are hip-to-hip in many cases with weapons systems and development.
And it is very disturbing when I read about companies like Zeebo Kemet sending spray dryers to Iran, which of course are being put into biological and chemical weapons development.
I was going to ask you about where to get Pizza Punch, but we're out of time.
I'll have to email you on that.
I bought a video and a video camera made in China.
I put the software in my computer.
And then from that point on, my computer demanded a new password.
The websites I visited demanded new passwords.
And it just dawned on me that although we always suspect the Internet, how easy it would be, since we import so much from China and so much of it includes software, that if any foreign country like that ever wanted to sort of sabotage us, that there'd be just a whole lot of things that they could do through software.
That's really my question.
I just figured that your guests would probably have a lot of ideas on that.
The U.S. Air Force Red Team based in South Carolina ran an exercise two years ago where they were able to penetrate into the power grid of the West Coast and the entire satellite communications network for the military.
And they were able to do this in 72 hours.
So if you can think of a professional team in China doing the same thing, yes, you can.
I actually published the 305th and the 301st of the 2nd division in PLA Military Intelligence Department.
That's one of the reasons why they don't like me is I happen to name names.
Right now, their unmanned vehicles and UAV programs are fairly early on, but they have been able to make dramatic improvements in both the range and size of their systems.
I would still say that we're a good 10 years, 15 years ahead of them.
Stephen, Orange County, you're on with Charles and not a lot of time.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
Congratulations.
The best wishes to you always, obviously, I have your email address.
What I'd like to mention, I live half the year in San Diego and half the year in Orange County.
And at the beginning of June, one of our local network affiliate TV stations in San Diego had a homeland security story on UAVs.
And over Lindbergh Field, where they're first going to launch these, and then a half dozen other major airports around the country, O'Hare, etc., they're going to have UAVs and, quote-unquote, from the news story with a particle-type weapon.
And I just wanted to bring that up because it all touches on what we're talking about this morning.
And I haven't heard any, it was on one day and never heard anything about it after that.
Possible, but I'm actually betting on the AESA technology currently fielded in the F-22, F-18.
In essence, a super-powered radar system that can be both used for information warfare, meaning you can get into computers and start planting viruses with it by a good distance without ever remoting actually being connected.