Cia Pays Nuclear Smugglers; Just Another Day At The Office

Prince Andrew is a Special Trade Representative for Britain. He travels the world at massive expense to the taxpayer. Part of his work is to push arms sales, often to authoritarian and corrupt regimes.

••• There’s a campaign to have the Duke of York sacked for all this.

The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

What’s more, if you’re carrying an armload of hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

••• Nick Kristof makes some modest points about America’s outsize military budget.

[W]hile some businesses obviously benefit from, and lobby for, war, there are plenty more who would prefer to make money trading with putative enemies like Iran and Iraq.

••• Following Kristoff, John Quiggin tries to explain Americans’ inability to learn “from a string of military failures.”[visitor]

HELP RESEARCH MILITARY CONTRACTORS. ACCESS MORE OF THIS SITE. BANISH THESE BANNERS.

[/visitor]

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well…

••• The book behind this story will probably be worth reading.

“Adam Wayne Berg, Jeffrey Mark Harmon and Berg Bros Recycling, Inc. paid more than $110,000 to NSA employee Robert Barry Adcock,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. “In return, the conspirators stole valuable recyclable metals from NSA without paying the full value.”

••• Petty corruption at the world’s premier eavesdropping agency (pdf).

This persistent dependence on Russian arms suppliers demonstrates a central truth about the Chinese military: The bluster about the emergence of a superpower is undermined by national defense industries that can’t produce what China needs.

••• China can build your iPhone, and Photoshop with the best of them, but it can’t build a decent jet engine.

Russian defense officials insisted on having large parts of the construction done in Russian shipyards.

••• So much for job-creation: Russia buys two French warships.

Peru to receive Israeli-made tactical UAVs in 2011

••• So reports Jane’s Defence Weekly. The drones will undoubtedly prevail over the pointy sticks and rocks that menace Peru’s borders.