(CBS)Has Kim Jong Un executed top envoys over his failed summit with Trump? Maybe, maybe not.

In the good-old-days of the Forecasting World Events intelligence crowd sourcing project, this would have been prime material. Quoting,

Friday’s report is based on a single, unidentified “source who knows about North Korea” – with no details about where that source got their information. The report so far hasn’t been matched by any major media in Seoul or confirmed by government officials, even anonymously.

It sounds like a bad way to source  intelligence, but with North Korea, it’s the norm.  My approach in the FWE program was to find a strong logic, and let it imply a conclusion, hopefully without subconscious bias, which in the case says, “ridiculous!”.

The media touts  embarrassment as the reason. The word hides too much, while the logic is painfully clear:

• North Korea is starving.
• The apparent cause is Kim’s inability to negotiate relief.
• The basis to challenge to his power is clear.

The executions serve two purposes:

• Deflect the responsibility for the state of the country onto others.
• Intimidate those who might harbor the most secret thoughts of rebellion.

The logic says the envoys were executed, not out of embarassment, which is a social term, but to reinforce “truth” as it is dictated: Kim Jong-un is never wrong. Is the logic truthful? That was the nut of the FWE game.  If so, it’s a twisted confirmation of the CIA assessment that Kim is not insane.

In many cases, when dealing with unreformed dictators, moral judgments are a distant second to the  main objective. In this case, it is highly relevant. If the lives of process negotiators have no value, then in North Korea, process has no value.

North Korea cannot be trusted to implement any form of process; it is simply alien to their leader. Secretary Pompeo, I feel for you.

Saddam Hussein was more of a hands on guy. He took a guy out of a meeting into an adjoining room, shot him dead, and continued the meeting.

(CBS) Top defense official suggests Russia violating nuclear test ban treaty. Quoting,

When pressed on the allegation by Journal reporter Michael Gordon, Ashley would only say Russia had the “capability” to conduct very low-yield nuclear tests, a capability which Russia, China and the United States have long possessed, according to the Arms Control Association. He did not say whether Russia has conducted or is conducting such tests.

In the early days, as with North Korea today, a test was conducted at the end of a zig-zag tunnel, extending  horizontally into a mountain. The zig-zags cause the tunnel to collapse with minimal leakage. At the end of a  tunnel branch is a test chamber. At a minimum, the chamber must hold the “gadget”, and the monitoring equipment.

Tunnel excavation is accomplished with mining machinery, or, as in North Korea, with slave labor. In the U.S., in the late 1950’s, tunnels were replaced by vertical boreholes, requiring far less manpower, and without  risk to life.

The test chamber of a borehole is the width of the hole itself, so a standard oil rig cannot be used. The U.S. has special large-diameter rigs for test boreholes, and prefabricated instrumentation packages to  fit. The diameter, on the order of 6 feet, allows no  extra room to cushion the seismologic signature of the explosion. Hence even very small explosions above zero yield can be distinguished.

At last inspection of the active-till-1989   Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan , Soviet underground tests were still conducted in tunnels. Lacking specialized large bore drills, this remains the Russian approach today.

A chamber inside a mountain is not subject to a fixed size. It can be excavated to whatever size is required, subject only to the load-bearing capacity of the rock. A cavern of modest size can damp explosions in the range of bunker busters, around 100 tons.

For maximal disguise, the objective of the Russians would be to create a seismologic signature that cannot be compared to preexisting data in U.S. possession. By choice of absorbent fill material, the seismologic signature can be further diffused and disguised. Fill  avoids the signature of a cavern collapse. Once you’ve heard one of those, you’ve heard them all.

The inconclusive  evidence, which cannot be dismissed, likely consists of:

• Seismological signatures that, because of lack of comparison data, cannot be definitively classified.
• Other forms of intelligence about which I will not comment.

(CNN) Navy pilots speak out on UFO sightings.

You might have a look at these articles, of which this is a continuation:

• (CNN) Former Pentagon UFO official: ‘We may not be alone’
• UFOs: Let’s Get Serious; Why a Program Goes “Black” Part 1
• UFOs: Let’s Get Serious; Why a Program Goes “Black” Part 2
• UFOs: Let’s Get Serious; Why a Program Goes “Black” Part 3

Since you are human, your brain is adapted to understand the world in a certain way that helps survival, but has nothing to do with science. This is why thinking about UFOs tends to the conventional, preferring solutions that represent improvements on what we already have.

The video includes objects moving with agility exceeding any physical object. Since this  is a DoD release, due diligence has been exercised to exclude:

• Hallucinations.
• “Ghost images”, also known as “lens flare”, which result from stray light bouncing around inside a lens.
• Electronic errors within the sensor or image processor.

You can share the experience with a focused flashlight in a dark room. Flick it with your wrist, and watch the spot on the wall move with a quickness that a physical object cannot. The spot on the wall could be interpreted as a physical object, except that you know otherwise.

In UFOs: Let’s Get Serious; Why a Program Goes “Black” Part 2, I wrote,

What if an alien vehicle were not physically located where it appears to be? If it was a projection through a rent in space time, could we make sense of it by our tools of observation? What if the very fact of witnessing an event does not fit our conception of logic, which goes back to Aristotle?

Part 3 offers a list of possibilities. It may be too conservative. Most of it dates to classic sci-fi, in which relativity and space-time are favorite topics, but quantum mechanics is not. Going radical,

• Fancy physics, yet in accord with material presence in our supposedly objective universe. This tends to focus on elaborate distortions of space-time, so the occupants can withstand being thrown around at thousands of gees.
• Projection into our universe, through a “rent” in space-time. Some of the physical properties are carried along while others are not.
• Hints of the physical, but with contradiction in logic as we know it.
• A complete breakdown of objective reality, a core idea of quantum mechanics.

Since government UFO investigation began in 1948, not one iota of physical evidence has been recovered, other than spots of light on film, sensors, and retinas. This could be blamed on primitive equipment. From Part 3,

Since we have no fenders that fell off UFOs, how can we get a hint of whether they are material? If you have a sick child, you touch your kid’s forehead with the back of your hand. Heat receptors in your skin detect the fever. Regardless of whether your child has a fever, your child has a temperature. All material objects have temperatures. Actors, projections on the silver screen, do not.

Part 3 discusses how common laboratory instruments provide the basis to study this question:

Do UFOs have any attributes of physical objects?

The obstacle is that laboratory instruments are not designed to fly and engage rapidly moving targets, while military imaging hardware is highly specialized. Some newer imaging equipment is  hyperspectral, but the vast majority of it is not. Yet without it, we haven’t even started. Hyperspectral data is required to address the question.

Now suppose the question is properly studied, and no evidence of physical objects emerges, or the picture is quasi-physical, such as

• Light without heat
• Heat without light
• Mass that comes and goes.
• No convergence towards objective truth.

We might then be forced to concede that the underpinning of scientific thought, that objective reality exists, is deeply flawed. The Universe could be the biggest liar of all.

The Nature article, “Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself”, describes a paradox. In the situation contrived for the experiment,  observers must disagree. Have a look at the pop article, (Futurity) Thought experiment paradox divides quantum experts.

As with the “Schrodinger’s Cat” paradox,  there is a tendency to reject the implication, that objective truth is a weak concept. The alternative is a universe with the means to lie.  But what’s the motivation?

The motivation might come from what has been cited as a most basic principle of the universe, the Principle of Least Action, which shares a motivation with the programming technique lazy evaluation: to do as little as possible. Think, perhaps, of a chess game where the pieces are not moved when they should be, but only when a discrepancy would change another piece. If you imagine that the entire universe is a computer program, lazy this-and-that economizes on the size of the computer.

So things that happen when you are not looking might follow rules different from when you are looking. Anyone with a child knows this. A lot of people, including Einstein, dislike the idea that we live in a world where magic is possible, and might be common. In the end, we are frustrated by our human selves, with brains evolved to organize the world along the lines of objective truth.

As physics  grapples with the unknown and possibly unknowable, the concept of objective truth may end up in the trash. UFO research of substantial technical means, going beyond the search for sheet-metal wonders, could play an important role.

The most radical form of illusion was proposed by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1896.

(Reuters) U.S. deploys more troops to Middle East, blames Iran for tanker attacks. Quoting,

[Rear Admiral Gilday] “The attack against the shipping in Fujairah, we attribute it to the IRGC,” Gilday said, explaining that the Pentagon attributed limpet mines used in the attack directly to the IRGC.

This was foreshadowed on 5/13, in Iran Fires the First Shot in New Tanker War. Quoting,

For a possible solution, we must reach back to the U.S. Civil War, when the modern self-propelled “torpedo” did not yet exist. The spar torpedo was an explosive charge on the end of a stick.  It was rammed into the target ship, and exploded not instantly, but shortly after the attackers got away. Just before World War II, the Brits invented the limpet mine, which holds fast to the target with a magnet.

These are examples of weapons which leave behind little in the form of traceable scrap metal. Both are historically associated with midget (or littoral) submarines such as the Ghadir.

The hypothesis of execution directly by the IRGC  was initially contradicted  by the “proxy hypothesis”, while the limpets were challenged (5/18, Insurer says Iran’s Guards likely to have organized tanker attacks) by underwater drones.

Underwater drones  had/has the attraction of support from forensic analysis, which may have been faulty. The proxy hypothesis seemed weak. Where would they shove off from? Quoting,

The nearest port, Al Mukalia, is 2160 miles, but it’s under UAE control….The Houthis don’t need a port to mount the attacks. They could have shoved off from a beach, and slowly motored their way 1600 miles. But the choice to label the IRGC as the enabler, as opposed to the attacker, appears to be an unsupported complication.

If the proxies were based in Iran, armed with Iranian weapons, and guided by Iranian radar, are they proxies in any sense of the word? How would their nationality be known, by other than HUMINT, which can be very unreliable?

Now we’re back to limpets, while the proxy hypothesis appears to be fading a little. Further forensic examination may not have supported the drone hypothesis, which requires more foreign debris than limpets. Execution by proxies may have been challenged  by additional intelligence that cannot be revealed.

While Occam’s Razor is never a fact, it fosters reexamination of complexities. Sometimes a simplification pops out of the jumble.

On the other hand, this could be Groundhog Day.

(Reuters) Ex-U.S. marine held in Russia on spying charge says he’s being threatened: TASS. That’s (ABC) Paul Whelan‘s statement to the court.

Why would TASS, which is owned by the government of Russia, report prisoner abuse?

It’s an invitation to trade. Trades have been done many times in the past, but the TASS mention suggests they want to expedite.

Who have we got? Maria Butina, comes to mind.

Some readers in undecided countries may require visceral evidence of the Huawei hazard. While hacking a website is old news, China is a  corporate state where hacking is a tool generally employed. The hacks documented below have limited effect, because, with the exception noted by Bloomberg, China has not infiltrated U.S. server infrastructure at the hardware level. Quoting (Bloomberg) New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom,

A major U.S. telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network and removed it in August, fresh evidence of tampering in China of critical technology components bound for the U.S., according to a security expert working…

There are many ways to hack a website. Since the security of commercial servers is professionally maintained, the softer target is the client software hosted on a server, as exhibited below. It originated today from IP 116.255.165.22, which by reverse-DNS lookup, resolves to “CHINA UNICOM China169 Backbone, Beijing.” Although there are many kinds of attacks, this typifies  the thousands of occasions in the website log  of hacking attempts.

China hackers of Intel9 showed little interest in geopolitics. The intensity of attacks seen by Intel9 spiked in reaction to technical content. Conversely, Russian interest correlates more with their refined approach to HUMINT.

Each line below represents an attempt, this morning, to access a nonpublic file at the core of a WordPress installation. The location of the file is on the left. The result code, “404” indicates that the  attacker failed to access the file.

//x.php www.intel9.us                                      404             05-21-19 11:56 am
//lx.php www.intel9.us                                    404              05-21-19 11:56 am
//plus/mybak.php www.intel9.us               404             05-21-19 11:56 am
//data/cache/flye.php www.intel9.us      404             05-21-19 11:56 am
//plus/read.php www.intel9.us                   404              05-21-19 11:56 am
//plus/lucas.php www.intel9.us                  404             05-21-19 11:55 am
//data/cache/asd.php www.intel9.us       404             05-21-19 11:55 am
//plus/laobiao.php www.intel9.us             404             05-21-19 11:55 am
//fdgq.php www.intel9.us                               404             05-21-19 11:55 am
//Config_Shell.php www.intel9.us              404            05-21-19 11:55 am

The attacks failed, in large part because China has not, at least on a  large scale, infiltrated server hardware. Such infiltration embodies the Huawei threat.

(Reuters) Exclusive: Insurer says Iran’s Guards likely to have organized tanker attacks. Quoting,

– The similarity of shrapnel found on the Norwegian tanker to shrapnel from drone boats used off Yemen by Houthis, even though the craft previously used by the Houthis were surface boats rather than the underwater drones likely to have been deployed in Fujairah.

This is an attractive idea.  The insurer, Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association, may have noticed a lot of boat-building material, such as fiberglass; the glass fibers resist vaporization. A limpet mine would leave very little alien material, as it is a small charge in a simple package that gains destructive power from intimate contact with the hull.

The choice of attribution is puzzling: “Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) are “highly likely” to have facilitated…” as  opposed to “IRGC are likely to be responsible…”

Iran has provided the Houthis with weapons of this kind. But the eastern border of Yemen, which is starkly empty of habitation, is 1600 miles by sea from Fujairah. The nearest port, Al Mukalia, is 2160 miles, but it’s under UAE control.

The Houthis don’t need a port to mount the attacks. They could have shoved off from a beach, and  slowly motored their way 1600 miles. But the choice to label the IRGC as the enabler, as opposed to the attacker, appears to be an unsupported complication.

Factoring in the Houthis may be supported by other intelligence that cannot be revealed.  But some technical collections may be circumvented by Iranian fall-backs to primitive forms of communication, and use of deception games.

The sophistication of Iran  implies that a complex deception game, artificially involving Houthis, cannot be ruled out.

You played the board game, which demonstrated an odd fact. By making random sideways movements, the red checker “evaded”  your black checker, which you attempted to guide with your purposeful hand. How could the brainless strategy of the red checker outwit your intelligent black checker?

There will be no math in this post, which continues to emphasize accessibility to the audience. It must remain rough, since the performance figures for Russian and Chinese hypersonic vehicles are not available to open source.  I’m hesitant to introduce the concepts of kinetic and potential energy. There are some interesting twists that go a little beyond freshman physics.

The game imitates the situation of the First Gulf War, when Patriot PAC-2 missiles failed to intercept — or failed to destroy, Iraqi Scud missiles that spontaneously disintegrated into pieces, tumbling through the atmosphere in complex paths. It was  noticed that  interception and destruction are practical distinctions, with much damage caused by still-incendiary boosters landing on soft targets, even if the warheads did not detonate.

The above is offered partly as a lesson in confusion. It includes issues that are barely related to intercepting hypersonic vehicles. Confusion typifies the subject, because missile defense is not one problem. It consists of at least four problem-regimes, some separated by mere seconds, as the aggressor missile transitions from one regime to the next. Each requires a different counter-weapon. These regimes were understood to be constants of the problem, because in the formative period of ABM theory,  only two kinds of missiles were subject to strategic consideration: ballistic, and cruise. The ability of subsonic cruise missiles to evade, even in the current day, could have been a show-stopper, but imagination has no limits. Hence, Star Wars.

The problem  was based on a missile that is thrown like a stone. After a few minutes of powered flight, the missile is going about 15000 miles/hour, arching over the atmosphere with no opportunity to change direction. Above the atmosphere, the warhead separates from the booster, and proceeds like a thrown stone to the target.  At the cost of some additional weight and complexity, the simple warhead can be replaced by a steerable “bus”, which makes modest adjustments in speed and direction to drop off its passengers, MIRVs, (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles).

Each MIRV is a thin cone, designed to withstand the incredible heat of reentry, with small rockets, “thrusters”, to keep the pointy end forward.  In fact, a MIRV vehicle could be steered a little when it descends far enough into the atmosphere, but it wasn’t thought worthwhile, as it would add weight. As early as 1963, a  U.S.  experiment with a surplus Thor warhead showed that steering is quite feasible.

The ability of a reentry vehicle to convert forward speed into sideways movement is critical to the problem. When the MIRVs, or MIRVs attached to the bus, are above the atmosphere, they proceed like stones. When they enter the upper atmosphere, the path becomes a little complicated. This is why it’s preferable to intercept a warhead in the vacuum of space.

You may note with pride that the ancestral hypersonic vehicle, the source of current frustration, was an American innovation, the Pershing II. It was designed to fly low, in a “flat trajectory”, with a single programmed “jink” as it entered the atmosphere.  Modern hypersonic vehicles greatly extend this idea, replacing predictable flight with the unpredictable.

The  problem of ballistic flight resembles the bull and the matador. The bull has more energy, the matador has more agility. The matador dodges the bull, whereas the interceptor gets in front of the bull, but otherwise, the analogy is strong. But what if the bull has the agility of the matador, as well as its speed?

The buzzword “hypersonic” is a detour to understanding. Speed is an issue in some cases, such as anti-ship, but a hypersonic missile  is slower than an ICBM. To note that a hypersonic missile “flies through the atmosphere” doesn’t quite nail it. So let’s nail.

The antimissile, as it exists today, launches a payload, the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle.  The EKV does not “fly in air” With very small, precise rockets, it places itself with extreme precision in the path of the red checker. Like  the matador, the EKV has no forward energy of its own, but  agility of lateral movement. In the vacuum of space, the MIRV “red checker” proceeds unalterably to its doom.

A strategic hypersonic warhead/missile has energy of forward motion. Flying  in the atmosphere, it is designed to have “lift”.  By banking, it converts a significant part of forward energy into sideways motion.  An airplane does this more efficiently, but the hypersonic missile is going very fast, so it has much more to start with. This forward energy is like a “battery” that the missile can drain to make changes in direction. It obtains a large initial velocity from a  booster stage. The Russian Avangard has an integral scramjet that allows it to exceed the performance of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.

The rocket equation is cruel to the EKV.  Take a look at a picture of one of the EKV designs. There are other pictures around the web you may wish to examine. The weight of the EKV is variously stated to be 120 or 140 pounds. It appears to have two propellant tanks  and two oxidizer tanks. The amount is not critical to the argument, so assume  50 pounds total, of which 15 is propellant.  This is not a lot of energy; it’s much less than a car tank of gas. It can’t match the amount of forward energy the adversary can convert into sideways motion.

As originally conceived, it didn’t have to. The EKV has a very high forward velocity/energy, provided by the Ground Based Interceptor. But it cannot convert any of that forward energy into lateral movement. It is specialized to operate in space, and is protected by a shroud until it gets there. Lateral movement must come from the amount of fuel you could fit in a Jerry can. And unlike the Avangard ramjet, it cannot escape the rocket equation.

Takeaway: The bright child of U.S. antimissile efforts, and hypersonic adversary missiles, are so different, never the twain shall meet.

Next: Conceptual Thinking.

(CNN) Trump’s irritation with top aides grows over Iran strategy.

Here’s a Sun-Tzu style list of aphorisms. Something to to chew on:

• To think one correctly identifies the adversary’s most important self-interest, and that it will act according to that interest, is usually wrong. (Sanctions.)
• Don’t blow up a political  system, however odious, unless you have the means and will to replace it. Consider: Responses to Syrian use of poison gas, overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
• Any power, no matter how strong, needs allies.
• Make your alliances before the battle.
• An untested ally is likely to be imaginary.
• Keep your friends closer than your enemies (Yes, the opposite.)  Cherish them.
• Always offer the adversary a compromise to your absolute demands. He might take it.
• Distinguish between the evil you can live with, and what you cannot abide.
• Act as if you are signing the deployment orders and condolence letters.
• Don’t start wars. Finish them.

You got to know when to hold them know when to fold them.

(Reuters) U.S. pulls staff from Iraq, says Iran gave ‘blessing’ for tanker attacks. Quoting,

A U.S. government source said American security experts believe Iran gave its “blessing” to tanker attacks…The source said the United States believes Iran’s role was one of actively encouraging militants but indicated the United States does not now have evidence that Iranian personnel played any direct operational role.

This quote, as meaningless as a diplomatic handshake photo,

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has called the tanker attacks “worrisome and dreadful” and called for an investigation.

suggests in context that  that Iran may not have been  fully complicit in the attacks, that they might have been the inspiration of a faction. While technical collections can rule out sophisticated underwater attacks, reliable assessment of the extent of Iran’s involvement requires HUMINT, which may have been used. Technical intelligence works best with an adversary using technology, but loses the race to the technological  bottom.  The Kremlin uses typewriters for the most secret communications.

There is another aspect of a society, not easily quantifiable, that is a source of my genial doubt. Iran’s society is highly structured. There are no free agents. An Iranian belongs to one or more groups, arrayed in hierarchies, with lateral connections.  This results in a unique situation of  multiple constituted governments, and centers of power that transcend the Western meanings of the terms.

In one of these hierarchies, the ultimate legitimization of power, even more than money, is found in the production of theological literature. The centrality of what we might call the impractical extends to the aesthetic domain in the form of poetry.  In the West, particularly after the Industrial Revolution, poetry  is viewed by “practical” people as the obfuscation of meaning in preference to some kind of spiritual truth.

This is an obstacle to figuring out what is going on. Iranian “idea production”, reaching Henry Ford levels, naturally obfuscates everything except for the cold facts of industry, such as how many centrifuges are spinning. It makes incomprehensible the  wanderings of the  bag-man, whose satchel may contain cash, quid-pro-quos, or brownie points.

The ability of societies to execute the underhanded has historically differed.  The Abwehr was terrible;  MI-6 was very good; the KGB the best before Mossad; the U.S. somewhere in between. The innate ability  comes from understanding the adversary on the very personal level, and an ideological passion for the work.  Hezbollah, Iran’s appendage in Lebanon , has been an active adversary  for many years. Those who have had the occasion to lose conclude they run with the best.

The  Shiite intelligence establishment, though loathing the West, understand us very well, enabling complex manipulations that may not be understood as such.  Quoting,

The attack on the tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world’s oil consumption flows, appeared designed to test the resolve of the United States and its Sunni Muslim allies without triggering a war, analysts said.

A perfectly deniable attack does not serve well as a test. A provocation requires that you  know who provoked you. Perhaps the word  is what you have to give the press. As an sole hypothesis,  it  is a fruitless simplification, denying  all extrapolations save  “Will they let us get away with this?” The attacks were a manipulation,  part of a strategy. Can we get  elements of that strategy from the event? Consider this short list:

• The start of an attrition that denies the adversary a symmetric response.
• Exploit political division in the West.
• Provoke escalation, a subject in itself.
• A step of desensitization to conflict, elevating the threshold of response.
• Inspire the militias.
• A dry warning: This is what it’s going to cost us.
• An opportunistic approach, varying with developments. To taste a TV dinner, you have to thaw it first.
• A test. Of all the possibilities, the choice not to respond  to a test encourages more and worse.

All of these may be under consideration by the intelligence community. Letting Iran partially off the hook is justifiable spin, provided it doesn’t actually imply simplified thinking. To assert that Iran is responsible for attacks where deniability cannot be publicly, or even privately refuted, risks appearance of impotence.

Unless one seriously respects the crocodile tears of Iran’s foreign ministry, the challenge to the intelligence community is now to deliver the goods in actionable form.