President Barack Obama will ask Russia to join the United States in slashing its supply of strategic nuclear warheads by about one-third, a senior administration official said.

Obama will announce the goal during a speech Wednesday in Berlin - a city rife with Cold War history.

The president will also outline his goal to reduce U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, the official said. The president hopes to work with NATO allies on proposals toward that goal.

It's all part of Obama's "vision of achieving the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," the official said.

"We will seek to negotiate these reductions with Russia to continue to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures," the official added.

Obama's speech will take place almost exactly 50 years after President John F. Kennedy delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" - or "I am a Berliner" - speech in the city that was divided by Western and Soviet occupations during the Cold War.

Declaring "the days of Rambo are over," officials announced that in a few years, women will be allowed in combat units.

Eventually, that may including the country's most elite special forces.

CNN Pentagon Correspondent Chris Lawrence explains how long the transition will take.

A potential al Qaeda plot targeting Belgium was thwarted in part by e-mail information provided by U.S. Internet providers, according to Belgian court documents and Western counterterrorism officials.

The case, which came to light in 2008, shows how U.S. intelligence capabilities can aid in disrupting plots.

On Tuesday, American counterterrorism officials revealed that more than 50 plots have been thwarted since September 11, 2001, using National Security Agency surveillance programs. Many of those plots were overseas.

The officials, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, revealed only four of those plots and promised to provide details on the others to Congress in a classified setting. The Belgium plot, though not confirmed to be one of the 50 that relied on the recently revealed secretive NSA program to monitor online messages, appears to fit the bill.

On December 11, 2008, Belgian authorities arrested an al Qaeda cell in Brussels that they feared had been planning a suicide bombing attack.

An intercepted e-mail from one of the cell members to his ex-girlfriend indicated he was about to launch a suicide attack. A defense lawyer in the case told CNN that prosecutors at trial acknowledged that the United States intercepted the communication and passed it to the Belgians.

In addition, a Western counterterrorism official told CNN that an intelligence agency from a partner country had intercepted another communication from the cell, that further suggested they may be about to launch an attack and passed the information onto the Belgians. Court documents in the case suggest this intercept was also made by U.S. intelligence.

The cell had been recruited in late 2007 to travel to Pakistan by Malika El Aroud and Moez Garsallaoui, a husband-and-wife team championing al Qaeda's cause in Europe.

El Aroud and Garsallaoui had been on the radar of Belgian authorities for many years. El Aroud was the widow of the man who assassinated Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before 9/11 on Osama bin Laden's orders.

Garsallaoui traveled with the cell to Pakistan and helped arrange for them to train in al Qaeda camps in Waziristan, according to court documents. In 2008 the NSA intercepted several e-mails sent by Garsallaoui to El Aroud in Belgium, according to two Western counterterrorism officials. Belgian officials needed the help of the Americans because the e-mails were sent via American Internet service providers, one of the officials said.

According to court documents in the subsequent trial, El Aroud and Garsallaoui had e-mail accounts administered by U.S. Internet access providers.

The documents stated that as early as December 2007, the FBI handed Belgian authorities a disc with information relating to these e-mail addresses that had been provided to the FBI by Microsoft and Yahoo.

According to court documents, e-mail information relating to the case was "provided voluntarily by the companies Microsoft and Yahoo, as authorized by the Patriot Act."

The documents stated that one of the reasons authorities grew alarmed that an attack was possibly about to be launched was that an electronic communication had been intercepted from a suspected cell member in Belgium to Garsallaoui in Pakistan on December 7, 2008.

When police moved in to make arrests four days later, they did not find evidence that a plot was imminent.

El Aroud and several others were subsequently convicted of being part of a terrorist cell. It is believed Garsallaoui was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan last October.

Bomb plots targeting the New York Stock Exchange and the city's subway were among more than 50 worldwide thwarted by top-secret surveillance programs since the 2011 al Qaeda attacks on the United States, authorities said on Tuesday.

Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director, FBI and other officials revealed startling details at a House Intelligence Committee hearing aimed at finding out more about the telephone and e-mail surveillance initiatives that came to light this month through leaks of classified information to newspapers.

It was the most comprehensive and specific defense of those methods that have come under ferocious criticism from civil liberties groups, some members of Congress and others concerned about the reach of government into the private lives of citizens in the interest of national security.

National security and law enforcement officials asserted that the leaks were egregious and carry huge consequences for national security.

Hope flickered in war-torn Afghanistan on Tuesday as national security forces formally took over security leadership and peace talks with the Taliban are now in the works.

NATO-led troops transferred security responsibility to Afghan forces. The United States and an Afghan government group dedicated to peace and reconciliation will hold talks with the Taliban militant group in Qatar.

"I wish a long-term peace in Afghanistan," Afghan President Harmid Karzai told his troops at a handover ceremony in Kabul.

But a senior U.S. official said reconciliation is likely to be "long, complex and messy" because trust between Afghans and the Taliban is extremely low.

The latest moves could portend a hopeful chapter in the long and costly Afghan conflict. What do these developments mean for Afghanistan and the United States?

Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.

More than passively eavesdropping, we're penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We're creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be "fired" against some piece of another country's electronic infrastructure on a moment's notice.

This is much worse than what we're accusing China of doing to us. We're pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren't making the Internet any safer. We're reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We're ignoring resilience in favor of offense.

Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.

Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive."

Direct mail between the United States and Cuba was suspended 50 years ago.

Now the two countries have agreed to hold talks on reestablishing that service, but U.S. officials caution the discussions "are technical in nature" and do not indicate any change in policy toward Cuba.

Representatives from the State Department and the U.S. Postal Service will meet with Cuban officials in Washington this week to discuss the matter.

"The reason we're doing this is because it's of course good for the Cuban people," she said. "This is something we feel is good for us, but it's not meant to be a signal of anything or indicate a change in policy," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

The talks come as Washington and Havana have been at odds over the fate of U.S contractor Alan Gross, who was arrested in 2009 and is serving a 15-year prison sentence for bringing Internet access equipment to Cuban Jews. The Cuban government considers that action subversive.

The last talks with Cuba on reestablishing direct mail service were in 2009.

"We're hopeful that we'll be able to move things forward," Psaki said.

The names of dozens of detainees held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released for the first time on Monday after a newspaper sued the federal government for the information.

The list identifies 46 inmates being held for “continued detention” at the facility, which President Barack Obama has vowed to close. The report was made public after a lawsuit from the Miami Herald. The Obama administration first acknowledged that detainees were being held indefinitely in Guantanamo in 2010, but didn't make their identities public until now.

Recently, more than half of the 166 current Guantanamo detainees have staged a hunger strike. They are protesting their treatment and indefinite detention, resulting in force feedings of more than 20.

The U.S. State Department said Monday it wasn't surprised that Iran's newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should stay in power until 2014.

"We have a number of differences with Iran, and the leadership there, over Syria and the path forward," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters. "We've expressed on a number of occasions our concerns about their recent aid to the regime and the influx of foreign fighters, and specifically Hezbollah."

The United States and other Western nations are working on how to help the rebels in Syria's brutal, two-year civil war as the al-Assad government receives backing from Iran and Russia.

During his election campaign, Rouhani supported more moderate policies inside Iran and constructive engagement with other countries. But in his first news conference over the weekend, he stuck by al-Assad and insisted Iran would not revive its moratorium on uranium enrichment from a decade ago, saying , "This period is over."

Psaki said the United States will not offer anything new to Iran in nuclear talks at this point, adding that the six countries negotiating with Tehran are "ready to meet with Iran when Iran is ready to respond substantively to the balanced proposal put forward by the P5+1 in Almaty (Kazakhstan)." The six countries and Iran last met in April.

"We haven't seen a substantive response yet," she added.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, she said, "holds the nuclear portfolio, and ... we have not had expectations leading up to this election that that would change."

Psaki noted that Rouhani made several promises during his election campaign but said: "The question is, what happens moving forward? And we will see."

"He does not take office until August, so it's too early to say what his policies will be. We look forward to him and are hopeful that he will fulfill the campaign promises he made to the Iranian people, such as expanding personal freedoms, releasing political prisoners and improving Iran's relations with the international community, but time will tell."

It may be another two years before women can start training for jobs in Army Ranger and Navy SEAL units under plans to be announced by the Pentagon on Tuesday, a Defense Department official familiar with the matter said.

The official declined to be named because the plans are not yet announced.

It is part of the next step in a longstanding effort to open as many combat jobs as possible to women.

The plan now is for jobs in special operations to be available to women possibly in mid-2015.

The official argued the latest development is not a delay, but is more of an acknowledgment by the military that it needs more time to study the issue.

Full implementation of women into combat positions, including infantry and armor units, is to be completed by January 2016.

The military has gradually been opening more jobs to women.

But in January, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ordered all jobs open to women unless a specific "exception" was requested by the military services.

The Pentagon since has been working on plans to implement those orders with the plans expected to be announced on Tuesday.

Baseline physical fitness requirements will continue to vary on the basis of gender and age.

The services are determining job performance standards that everyone equally will have to meet, such as the ability to reload tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons.

This had the impact of now allowing women to serve in frontline Army and Marine combat units, as well as unique jobs such as putting enlisted women on submarines.

In 2012, the Army opened over 14,000 positions to women. The latest move, to be announced Tuesday, could open approximately another 6,000 jobs to women in the Army.