"WMR reporting from Nevada -- U.S. and Iranian diplomats may be meeting in seven-party talks over Iran's nuclear weapons program, all the while hoping for a diplomatic solution to end the controversy over the Iranian program. However, here is the high desert of Nevada, which one senior official referred to as "looking like the Middle East."
Because of the similarity in the terrain of the Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site and Iran, U.S. Special Operations forces are training at a facility at the test site that officials say "doesn't actually exist." However, this editor saw where the facility is located, butting up against a mountain range half-way between the Frenchman Flats atomic bomb test site and the Sedan Crater, the site of the largest underground thermonuclear test conducted by the United States. The "non-existent" facility is where Special Forces teams are specifically training for "counter-nuclear proliferation" operations in Iran. The Nevada Test Site has a number of underground facilities that fell into disuse after the United States adopted a nuclear testing moratorium in 1992.
Specifically, U.S. Special Forces team are training in what is called a "realistic environment" at the test sit and are using the facility's tunnel system to test the results of the use of bunker buster bombs. The training is highly classified but it appears that some of the costs are being laundered through the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
WMR has also learned that the Predator and Reaper remotely-piloted vehicles used by the Air Force are soon to undergo a major refitting, allowing the Predator to carry more than the two Hellfire missiles it currently can carry, and the Reaper to carry additional specialized weapons in addition to its current weapons complement, which can match that carried by any F-16 manned fighter plane.
Sitting just south of the Nevada Test Site is Creech Air Force Base, the location of the training program for Predator and Reaper Air Force pilots and sensor personnel. However, WMR has learned from a Department of Energy source that the Nevada Test Site also possesses a Predator aircraft that had been outfitted with a "black box" sensor array that is capable of detecting telltale signs of nuclear weapons development, including traces of enriched uranium, plutonium, and tritium, and can be flown clandestinely into Iran to surveill Iranian nuclear installations......
The National Nuclear Security Administration also operates the "Red Storm" Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) system that is a high-performance computer operating at 280 teraflops. Red Storm is one of the world's fastest twelve computers and is used for conducting nuclear simulation tests on Iran and North Korean nuclear programs and, in the process of doing so, evaluates the quality of intelligence provided by certain intelligence sources not always considered reliable, including Israel. [ . . . ]"
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