The clock, in use as a symbol of imminent apocalypse since 1947, now stands at six minutes to midnight. On Tuesday (Jan. 10), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) will announce whether they will nudge the minute hand forward or backward to reflect current trends in world security. The last time the clock hand moved was in 2010, when the group moved the hand from five minutes to midnight back to six. [ls]

Surge in military activity in the region comes amid threat of EU embargo on Iranian oil and possible closure of strait of Hormuz.

Tensions on the oil shipping lanes in the Gulf have escalated with the announcement of new naval exercises by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and news that Israel and the US are planning to carry out extensive joint maneuvers in the region.

The naval commander for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said the drill in February would be "different compared to previous exercises held by the IRGC". The Iranian navy finished 10 days of exercises in the Gulf on Monday, during which it tested a range of new missiles. It warned that Iran could close the strait of Hormuz, the narrowest point in the Gulf, through which a fifth of the world's traded oil passes. [guardian]

A British soldier's photo album showing at close hand the devastating aftermath of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima has emerged after 66 years.

Sapper Ronald Taylor was posted to Japan just weeks after the country surrendered following the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The British were tasked with trying to restore some of the infrastructure to the obliterated cities in the aftermath of World War II. Mr Taylor had with him his camera and took snaps of the surroundings he worked in but never revealed the haunting album to his family when he returned.

It was only after his death when his grandson Neil Watson was going through some of his wartime belongings that he found it gathering dust on top of a wardrobe. Several black and white snaps show a flattened landscape with barely a soul around and piles and piles of rubble and twisted metal lying where buildings once stood. [dm]

Newt Gingrich has been warning the nation of the danger of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - a burst of radiation created by a high-altitude nuclear explosion. This pulse would take down electrical systems over hundreds or thousands of miles, the argument goes, knocking the U.S. back to the 19th Century.

“In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he was quoted as saying by the New York Times. In Gingrich’s view, the threat of an EMP attack justifies actions such as pre-emptive strikes on the missile instillations of nations such as Iran and North Korea.

The threat of an EMP attack is real - assuming, of course, that a nation or organization develops not only nuclear weapons but intercontinental ballistic missiles and the will to deploy them. Yet the primary target of an EMP wouldn’t be ground-based power systems. It would be satellites. [sciam]

During nuclear weapons testing in the early Fifties, one of the challenges facing the U.S. government was to design a camera capable of capturing a nuclear device mid-explosion.

The result, unearthed this week by blog Damn Interesting, was the 'Rapatronic' camera - an ultra-high-speed camera that sat seven miles from the blast site and captured images at high speed - including this image of an 100-ft ball of fire, one ten-millionth of a second after detonation.

he images were taken during the Tumbler-Snapper nuclear tests in 1952. Damn Interesting wrote, 'These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds.' [dm]

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful, wants you to know that as commander in chief he is ready to confront one of the most nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the nation into a dark age.

In debates and speeches, interviews and a popular book, he is ringing alarm bells over what experts call the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP — a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age.

The idea is that if a nuclear weapon, lofted by a missile, were detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, it would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

Two incidents that occurred on Sunday - Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain - may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it. [NJ]

The threat of cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid should be dealt with by a single federal agency, not the welter of groups now charged with the electric system's security, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Monday.

While acknowledging there is no absolute insurance against such attacks, the MIT researchers said a single U.S. agency would be better able to address the problem than the disparate federal, state and local entities responsible for various aspects of safeguarding the power grid.

In a report on the future of the U.S. electric grid, through 2030, the team recommended that the federal agency should work with industry and have the appropriate regulatory authority to enhance cybersecurity preparedness, response and recovery.

Russia is facing a heightened risk of being drawn into conflicts at its borders that have the potential of turning nuclear, the nation's top military officer said Thursday.

Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, cautioned over NATO's expansion eastward and warned that the risks of Russia being pulled into local conflicts have "risen sharply."

Makarov added, according to Russian news agencies, that "under certain conditions local and regional conflicts may develop into a full-scale war involving nuclear weapons."

A steady decline in Russia's conventional forces has prompted the Kremlin to rely increasingly on its nuclear deterrent.

President Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia announced plans on Wednesday for a sustained new American military presence in Australia, a deployment of 2,500 troops aimed at signaling that the United States intends to counterbalance a rising China.

The agreement with Australia, though involving a relatively small number of troops, is nonetheless the first long-term expansion of the American military presence in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War. It comes despite budget cuts facing the Pentagon and a strong negative reaction from Chinese leaders, who have accused the United States of seeking to raise military tensions in the region. 

A retired Chinese general recently revealed that his country might be planning a surprise missile attack on the United States. The public comment of Xu Guangyu came in response to WikiLeaks revelations that last year Washington had warned its allies beforehand of China’s test of a missile interceptor.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a classified cable sent last January 9th, instructed American embassies in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand to notify those countries of upcoming Chinese launches two days later. The cable included details of the launch sites for the interceptor and the target, the models of the missiles, the purpose of the test, and the test date. [wa]

The bloodbath comes less than two weeks after Iraqi officials said they would be open to a small number of U.S. forces staying in the country past a Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline.

The blasts were coordinated to go off Monday morning and included parked car bombs, roadside bombs, a suicide bomber driving a vehicle that rammed into a police station and even bombs attached to lightpoles.

The scope of the violence -- seven explosions went off in different towns in Diyala province alone -- emphasized that insurgents are still able to carry out attacks despite repeated crackdowns by Iraqi and U.S. forces. [cns]

Amidst riots in central Europe that have now spread to London and a debt downgrade that threatens to plunge the United States into a double-dip recession, Americans’ lack of confidence in their leadership is so crippled that they are now “pre-revolutionary,” according to pollster Pat Caddell.

A new Rasmussen poll shows that just 17 per cent of Americans believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed, an all time low. This dovetails with a record low for Congress’ approval rating, which stands at a paltry 6 per cent, while 46 per cent of Americans think most members of Congress are corrupt, with just 29% believing otherwise.

“The number of voters who feel the government has the consent of the governed – a foundational principle, contained in the Declaration of Independence – is down from 23% in early May and has fallen to its lowest level measured yet,” according to Rasmussen. [infowars]

The drone strikes came just a day after the U.S. suspended $800 million of military aid to Pakistan, citing "difficulties" in the relationship.

The U.S. has complained recently about strongly suspected ties between the Pakistani military-security establishment and the same Islamic militants the U.S. has been paying Pakistan to fight.

The seventh ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council in May looked set be a mundane affair, with its focus on signing a new search-and-rescue agreement and handover of the chairmanship to Sweden.

But the atmosphere in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, was electrified by the first visit to such a forum by the United States, courtesy of the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, secretary of the interior Ken Salazar, and a host of other heavy-hitters.

The message was clear: the US is putting itself at the centre of the debate about the future of the far north at a time when a new oil and mineral "cold rush" is under way as global warming makes extraction more easy. And being the US, the soft diplomacy was backed up with a bit of symbolic hardware. A few weeks earlier two nuclear-powered submarines were sent to patrol 150 miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

The United States is warning that a cyber attack - presumably if it is devastating enough - could result in real-world military retaliation... Easier said than done.

In the wake of a significant new hacking attempt against Lockheed Martin Corp, experts say it could be extremely difficult to know fast enough with any certainty where an attack came from. Sophisticated hackers can mask their tracks and make it look like a cyber strike came from somewhere else.

There are also hard questions about the legality of such reprisals and the fact that other responses, like financial sanctions or cyber countermeasures, may be more appropriate than military action, analysts say. [ yahoo ]

Medvedev told reporters that the United States' decision to push ahead with the European shield despite Russia's objections will force Moscow "to take response measures -- something that we would very much rather not do."

"We would then be talking about developing the offensive potential of our nuclear capabilities. This would be a very bad scenario." [ yahoo ]

Israeli forces opened fire in three separate locations to prevent crowds of demonstrators from crossing frontier lines, in the deadliest such confrontation in years.

The Lebanese army on the Lebanese frontier said 10 Palestinians died when Israeli forces shot at rock-throwing protesters to prevent them from entering the Jewish State. [ dailystar ]

The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks warned that al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe which will unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" if Osama bin Laden is captured, leaked files revealed.

The terror group also planned to make a 9/11 style attack on London's Heathrow airport by crashing a hijacked airliner into one of the terminals, the files showed.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the nuclear device if the al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed, according to the classified files released by the WikiLeaks website. [ 9news ]

A considerable number of Israeli warplanes were seen at al-Asad base in Iraq, reported a source close to prominent Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sader's group.

There has long been bad blood between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but popular protests across the Middle East now threaten to turn the rivalry into a tense and dangerous regional divide.

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It's being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968.

But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn't been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes. [ WSJ ]

More than 100 bodies, some of them burned alive, have been found in the Ivory Coast in the past 24 hours, the UN said today.

About 60 were killed in one attack and about 40 people in another that appeared to have been carried out by Liberian mercenaries, said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

He added that "all the incidents appear at least partly ethnically motivated" and that there were reports of "smaller scale killings in other places that have yet to be investigated".

Some victims were burned while others were thrown down a well.