Nothing like an arms race to bring back those Cold War memories, when the Red Dawn seemed eminent even if we had the Iron Eagle, rock music blaring through his Walkman, to protect us. Nowadays it’s Google Earth, not Hollywood and Reagan, scaring everybody to death.
Well, Google Earth and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a group that’s been giving us the jitters since they invented the atomic bomb more than half a century ago. FAS blogger Hans Kristensen located a new Chinese Jin-class SSBN nuclear submarine in dock using Google’s controversial Earth program.
Luckily, it’s pictured at a dock in China, and not out and about. But it has been six months or so since the picture was taken…
“A commercial satellite image appears to have captured China’s new nuclear ballistic missile submarine,” writes Kristensen. “The new class, known as the Jin-class or Type 094, is expected to replace the unsuccessful Xia-class (Type 092) of a single boat built in the early 1980s.
“The new submarine was photographed by the commercial Quickbird satellite in late 2006 and the image is freely available on the Google Earth web site.”
The US has been in an arms race with China since the Korean War, news sources say, so it makes a lot of sense that the country is so eager to do business there to help them fund their side of it. And after all, the products they ship over are of such high quality, finely put together with the precision only a child’s fingers could accomplish.
Oh well, even if the much of the world is just now learning these things via satellite imagery on the Internet, you can bet the new sub (and other things we’ve helped fund) are no surprise military intelligence officials.
