ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

RIA Novosti / Igor Zarembo The IT systems of all Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles will be protected by a new team of anti-hackers, the Defense Ministry said after a year-long “hunting season” for programmers. Special units of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (SMF), responsible for the country’s nuclear weapons, will reduce the vulnerability, should it be found, in their brand-new information systems, according to the Defense Ministry’s spokesman. "The SMF is adopting digital technologies in weapon and troop control and is expanding the use of electronic document management. Therefore, SMF staff are taking preventive measures in upgrading cybersecurity: the process of creating teams responsible for sustainable combat troop control amid cyberwarfare is underway," Igor Egorov said on Thursday. Titled “Sopka”, which in Russian stands for the “System of Detection and Prevention of Computer Attacks”, the team is set to thwart global hacker attacks. Its specialists will be

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (Reuters / Jonathan Erns) US war plans against North Korea recently included the option of a nuclear strike, former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta revealed in his memoirs, triggering major controversy. Panetta described a 2010 briefing in Seoul by General Walter L. ‘Skip’ Sharp, the commander of US forces in South Korea, where it was made clear that the nuclear option was on the table if North Korean forces crossed into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the North and the South. “If North Korea moved across the border, our war plans called for the senior American general on the peninsula to take command of all US and South Korea forces and defend South Korea— including by the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary,” Panetta wrote in ‘Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace’. Panetta added that he left the briefing with “the powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote.” Panetta’s

The US military has reportedly covered up the discovery of huge numbers of chemical weapons in Iraq – stocks which now lie in the occupied lands controlled by Isis. According to an exposé published today by the New York Times , American soldiers reported finding around 5,000 chemical warheads or bombs after the invasion of Iraq and deposition of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Between 2004 and 2011 at least 17 US soldiers and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to nerve agents or mustard gas chemicals, but were encouraged by the Pentagon to downplay or under-report any injuries, the Times reported. The details of Iraq’s chemical weapons stores have only emerged now from Iraqi and US officials, redacted intelligence documents and interviews with soldiers because, the paper claimed, because of potential embarrassment for the government. George W Bush and Tony Blair President George W Bush led the US into war in Iraq on the back of assertions that Saddam Hussein had recently-built weapon

By Patrick Cockburn Iraq is descending into savage sectarian warfare as government-backed Shia militias kill, torture and hold for ransom any Sunni whom they detain. Isis is notorious for its mass killings of Shia, but retaliation by Shia militiamen means that Iraq is returning to the levels of sectarian slaughter last seen in the Sunni-Shia civil war of 2006-07 when tens of thousands were murdered. The Shia militias have become the main fighting force of the Baghdad government since the Iraqi army was defeated by Isis when it took northern Iraq in June. According to a detailed Amnesty International report published today, the militias enjoy total immunity in committing war crimes against the Sunni community, often demanding large ransoms but killing their victims even when the money is paid. The re-emergence of the Shia militias and the failure to rebuild the Iraqi army is torpedoing the US and British policy of supporting a more inclusive and less sectarian government in Baghdad. Th

A Lockheed Martin F-16 of the Turkish Air Force.(Reuters / Tobias Schwarz) Turkish warplanes have bombed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) targets near the country’s border with Iraq. The strikes highlight rising tensions in Turkey over Ankara’s perceived unwillingness to aid besieged Kurdish fighters in the Syrian town of Kobani. The Turkish General Staff dispatched F-16 and F-4 jets to the southeastern village of Daglica in Hakkari province on Monday, the Turkish daily Hurriyet reports. The daily says the airstrikes caused “heavy damage” to the PKK. The PKK's military wing, however, said in a statement on its website that its forces had not suffered casualties during the strikes, Reuters reports. Turkey says the bombings came in response to three days of attacks on the Daglıca military guard post with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. PKK insurgents for their part blamed the Turkish military of violating the ceasefire. Monday’s strikes were the first to be conducted

President Obama’s policy toward Syria is getting pulled in so many directions that it lacks any coherence, especially since the U.S.-backed Syrian “moderate” rebels are in a tacit alliance with al-Qaeda’s offshoots that are the target of the U.S. airstrikes, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes. By Paul R. Pillar The U.S. air war in Syria has not gotten off to an encouraging start. For many observers the principal indicator of that is a lack of setbacks for ISIS, as the group continues to besiege a Kurdish-held town near the Turkish border. We ought to be at least as discouraged, however, by the negative reactions to the airstrikes from the “moderate” Syrian opposition groups that the strikes are supposed to help and in whom so much hope is being placed if U.S. policy toward the Syrian conflict is to begin to make any sense. President Barack Obama in his weekly address on Sept. 13, 2014, vowing to degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (White House Ph

By Robert Fisk - Ever since the Pentagon started talking about Isis as apocalyptic, I’ve suspected that websites and blogs and YouTube are taking over from reality. I’m even wondering whether “Isis” – or Islamic State or Isil, here we go again – isn’t more real on the internet than it is on the ground. Not, of course, for the Kurds of Kobani or the Yazidis or the beheaded victims of this weird caliphate. But isn’t it time we woke up to the fact that internet addiction in politics and war is even more dangerous than hard drugs? Over and over, we have the evidence that it is not Isis that “radicalises” Muslims before they head off to Syria – and how I wish David Cameron would stop using that word – but the internet. The belief, the absolute conviction that the screen contains truth – that the “message” really is the ultimate verity – has still not been fully recognised for what it is; an extraordinary lapse in our critical consciousness that exposes us to the rawest of emotions – both