Operation Featherweight: Month 21, Week 4, Day 1.

Since the end of March fighting has resumed in northwestern Syria with the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF) coalition launching a fresh offensive. Particularly centred around Aleppo province and its capital Aleppo City.

The Army of Conquest coalition is headed by Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front (ANF). As such no group acting as part of the coalition is covered by ceasefire agreement. Syrian government forces - the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) - have belatedly begun a counter-offensive to stop the Army of Conquest in their tracks. You would expect them to be supported by the Russian Air Force in this effort.

The US though has been placing intense pressure on the Russians not to fight back and allow Al Qaeda seize control of Aleppo. On Tuesday (12/4/16) an unnamed CIA official gave an off the record briefing to reports declaring that if the Russians were to back the SAA in the battle for Aleppo then US President Barack Obama would supply Man Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) - essentially "Stinger" missiles - to Al Qaeda to allow them to shoot down Russian aircraft.

This is not the first time this threat has been issued. There has been talk of supplying MANPADS to insurgent groups to shoot down Syrian aircraft pretty much continuously over the five years of the conflict. These calls intensified in October 2015 when Russia entered the conflict. In February 2016 a similar CIA briefing led the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) to publish a story about the plan. This seems to have been done to intimidate Russia into accepting the ceasefire agreement and scaling back its air operations at the end of that month.

On Tuesday (12/4/16) shortly after the CIA had briefed reporters two unarmed Russian Su-24 jets flew within 30 metres (100ft) at an altitude of 300 metres (1000ft) of the US warship the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea. Although the aircraft were visibly unarmed this type of manoeuvre is consistent with a simulated attack on the ship.

You may remember that the Su-24 is the type of aircraft that was shot down by Turkey over Syria on November 24th 2015 (24/11/15). As such this seems intended to send the message to the US that doing something as reckless, provocative and dangerous as providing MANPADS to Al Qaeda in order to shoot down Russia aircraft would not be without consequence.

I think the Russians actually displayed great responsibility by keeping the discussion amongst highly trained military professionals rather than firing a warning shot at a civilian airliner with a MANPADS. After all that is the type of consequence we are talking about.

On Wednesday (13/4/16) US President Obama and his National Security Council (NSC) paid a visit to the CIA's headquarters. As such Tuesday's (14/4/16) CIA briefing seems intended to produce headlines that would publicly embarrass Obama over his failure to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and associated groups such as the Army of Conquest during that visit to the CIA.

Looking at the public remarks that Obama gave following his visit to the CIA it is easy to see why his strategy or complete lack thereof is giving the CIA plenty to protest about.

Obama once again attempted to justify his failure to act against ISIL and their associates on the grounds that they don't present "An existential threat to the US."

On this point Obama is quite correct because ISIL and their associates most certainly do exist and they certainly represent a real threat to the US. As such there are no existential questions to be asked about whether the US is trying to define its identity through the creation of an imaginary other.

However I suspect what Obama meant is that ISIL and their associates don't pose a threat to the complete existence of the the US. Again this is true but it completely misses the point.

During the Cold War the US did face a threat to its very existence in the form of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. During this period many calculations were made and strategies drawn up.

However it is generally understood that the US was prepared to seem up to 40 million of its population of 200 million killed in order to defeat the Soviet Union in a nuclear first-strike. In terms of the Soviets launching a first-strike the US estimated a death-toll in the region of 90-100 million until such an attack became unsurvivable for the nation as a whole.

I may be going soft in my old age but when it comes to protecting the US from terrorism I think the bar should be set a little lower than 50% of the population being wiped out before the President is prepared to take action.

Following the March 22nd (22/3/16) Brussels attacks US President Obama declined to attend a NATO summit on the attack on one of its members. He also declined to visit Belgium. Instead Obama pushed ahead with the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) which is the last Nuclear Security Summit ever to be held.

The reason why NSS2016 is to be the last Nuclear Security Summit held is because the entire thing is simply a vanity project of the Obama Presidency which comes to an end in January 2017. It began at the start of Obama's Presidency back when he thought he would rid the World of nuclear weapons, bring peace to the Middle-East, end global warming and cure racism.

However over the years the Nuclear Security Summit process has developed into a mechanism for Obama's "Pivot Towards the Pacific" policy.

The objective of this policy is to contain the growing power of China by building the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK/North) into a nuclear bogeyman to the region. In order to get US protection to this existential threat South-East Asian nations must open themselves up to freetrade agreements with the US.

At the same time this places China in a difficult position because if the block US sanctions on the DPRK they risk looking like a threat to their neighbours. However is they support those sanctions they risk the economic collapse of the DPRK triggering a flood of refugees across the land border the two nations share that would make the current European refugee crisis look tame in comparison.

So in order to assess the success or failure of the US' policy on the DPRK's nuclear program you don't need to look at what type of warheads they're building or what type of rockets they're launching.

Instead you need to look at the fate of Chinese manufacturing firms who are being forced to outsource to nations like Vietnam and Cambodia in order to keep wages low. China's entire economic/political model is based on creating ever more, better paid jobs in order to stave off social unrest.

In order to justify pressing ahead with NSS2016 rather than meeting with NATO in response to the Brussels attacks the Obama administration was keen to play up the work it could do to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of groups like ISIL who would want to build a so-called "Dirty Bomb."

Building a dirty bomb has long been an aspiration of various Islamist terror groups and something that ISIL seem very keen to do. Amongst the intelligence collected in the aftermath of the Brussels attack was evidence that the terror network had been researching various nuclear sites across Europe. However it must be said that the attraction of dirty bombs to terrorists comes not from their ability to cause largescale death and destruction but because of the fear they create.

A dirty bomb is simply a conventional bomb that disperses radioactive material across a wide area. As such how dangerous a particular dirty bomb is depends very much on the type of nuclear material it disperses. If it is something like granite that is used in most buildings then the terrorists would be better off just setting off a larger conventional bomb.

However even if a dirty bomb were to contain a powerful beta/gamma emitter such as Caesium-137 which is produced through the fission of Uranium-235 in a nuclear reactor it is unlikely it would immediately cause more deaths than the initial explosion.

About 9 months to a year after the attack though you would start to see birth defects emerging. Then 4-5 years later you would start to see a spike in childhood cancers. 20-30 years you would also see an spike in adult cancers. During this time the explosion site would have to be sealed off to humans much like the areas around the Chernobyl nuclear plant or the Fukashima nuclear plant.

Terrorists and Islamist terrorists such as ISIL in particular are very motivated by what is known as; "The Propaganda of the Deed." This means they want the fear and frankly terror off their attacks to echo far beyond the people who were actually caught up in them. By rendering parts or all of a major city uninhabitable for many years along with this generational fear of health problems such as cancer a dirty bomb represents a huge propaganda victory for terrorists.

However if ISIL and their associates just wanted to kill large numbers of people they would simply continue their work on chemical weapons which they are already using in both Syria and Iraq.

Probably the most potent chemical weapon is a nerve agent known simply as "VX."

This was developed by a civilian chemical company in, I think, the 1920's who were working on a pesticide. However they discovered that the compound they'd developed was so lethal they immediately stopped work on it. Britain resumed work on VX in the 1940/50's specifically to use it as a chemical weapon. The technology was traded with the US it return for the atom bomb because as a weapon it is equivalent to a nuclear bomb.

Assuming professional grade gas properly dispersed into the atmosphere as little as 10grams (0.3oz) of VX released in a major city could rapidly kill in the region of 70-80,000 people. This is equivalent to the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. A very sticky substance VX is also notoriously hard to clean up meaning that it would be a lenghty and expensive process to decomaninate the affected area.

As with the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki twin VX attacks on two major US cities would not on their own before enough to wipe America out of existence. However I think Obama or any President would have a very hard time justifying the 160,000 civilians deaths let alone the long term economic impacts.

What is particularly worrying about VX is that the base substance it is synthesised from is an industrial grade Organophosphate pesticide. Although their use was largely discontinued in the 1990's there is still rather a lot of it still in circulation and if you've got the skill you can certainly synthesise your own Organophosphate from widely available base chemicals.

Even below the threat of VX there are still much less potent nerve agents such as Sarin that are even easier to manufacture. Even a Sulphur Mustard Gas attack on a crowded area such as a sports stadium would still be pretty nasty.

So I don't think that Obama has, in any way, grasped the threat posed by groups like ISIL let alone the need to eliminate them before these doomsday scenarios start becoming a reality.

15:35 on 16/4/16 (UK date).