By Senior State Department Producer Elise Labott
In the 1970s thriller “The China Syndrome,” Michael Douglas plays a maverick cameraman who helps discover safety cover-ups at a nuclear plant. In doing so, he comes face to face with the worst-case scenario: a nuclear meltdown where components of a nuclear reactor melt through to the core of the earth "all the way to China."
Though it was a work of fiction, the story gave rise to a decades-long passion for disarmament. As a United Nations Messenger for Peace since 1988, Douglas has used his star power to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons and nonproliferation of small arms.
For the past nine years Douglas has been on the board of the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based think tank working on behalf of a world without nuclear weapons.
On Tuesday, he stopped by the State Department to what he called "get the lay of the land" on nuclear issues and to voice concern about new drumbeats about military action against Iran over its nuclear program. FULL POST
By Senior National Security Producer Charley Keyes
The 8-year war in Iraq is ending not with shock and awe but with clouds of dust and diesel exhaust, and the grinding gears of the big trucks pulling out hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment.
The Pentagon said Thursday that the withdrawal is on schedule and that U.S. troop levels are now below 34,000, with less than two months to get the rest out.
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By CNN National Security Producer Jennifer Rizzo
The Pentagon has painted a doomsday scenario of a percentage point increase in unemployment if further cuts are enacted by Congress, but some analysts are questioning the math.
The figure, first cited by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta back in September, assumes 1.5 million Americans would lose there jobs, adding a percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, if $1 trillion is cut from its budget.
The Defense Department is already required to cut $400 billion from its budget as part of an agreement that allowed President Barack Obama to raise the debt ceiling. The same deal created a congressional "super committee" tasked to find another $1.5 trillion in government savings over the next decade. If the commission cannot come to agreement on where the cuts should come from by the end of November, another $600 billion would automatically be axed from the defense budget. The automatic cuts are referred to as sequestration.
The numbers of jobs lost touted by Pentagon officials "seems like a high figure," says Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
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By Pam Benson
For the first time, the United States is publicly accusing China and Russia of being the top offenders in the theft of U.S. economic and technology information, according to an intelligence report released Thursday.
The two countries are "trying to build their economies" on American research and development, said Robert Bryant, the National Counterintelligence Executive whose office wrote the report.
That office is responsible for mounting an integrated national counterintelligence battle against foreign intelligence threats to the United States, according to its website, and must compile such a report every two years.
An unclassified version of the report to Congress on Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage was released Thursday and focused primarily on the exploitation of cyberspace from 2009 to 2011.
"U.S. private sector firms and cybersecurity specialists have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions that have originated in China," said the report.