According to documents found by IASEA inspectors in Iran and leaked to the Associated Press, Iran is planning to build a nuclear bomb with at least triple the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. According to the AP, the documents were leaked by officials critical of the way the West has been handling the Iran issue.

The diagrams discovered by the IAEA show Iranian scientists calculating the desired "nuclear explosive yield" in a device they were apparently working on. Unnamed senior officials working with the Geneva-based UN organization confirmed that the diagrams were legitimate.

Unnamed experts have said diagrams showed a scientific calculation of the expected yield of a nuclear device with a maximum force of 50 kilotons and that there was no possibility that the diagrams referred to a process other than construction of a nuclear weapon.

The diagram has a caption in Farsi which reads: "Changes in output and in energy released as a function of time through power pulse." The number "5" is part of the title, suggesting it is part of a series.

If Iran is indeed designing a nuclear weapon with a 50 kiloton yield, it will be significantly stronger than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the yields for which were only 15 kilotons. Nuclear weapons held by the U.S., Russia, and other countries are significantly stronger than a 50 kiloton yield.

For instance, the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which encompasses a myriad of designs and delivery methods, has nuclear weapons such as the B61 currently deployed with the capability of a variable yield (affectionately known in the business as 'Dial a Yield', or DAY) of between 300 tons and 350 kilotons.

China successfully launch and landed a fighter jet on its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which entered service only two months ago. According to the Chinese Xinhua News Agency, the launch and landing exercise marked the debut of the J-15 fighter jet, a carrier-based fighter-bomber developed by China but based on Russia's Su-33 design. The J-15 is reportedly able to carry anti-ship, air-to-air, air-to-ground missiles well as precision-guided bombs.

Editors Notes:

America's first foray into naval aviation began on Nov 14, 1910 when 24 YO Eugene Ely, a civilian pilot, took off in a 50-hp. Curtiss plane from a wooden platform built over the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham. Since that time naval aviation has played a key role in U.S. military operations and is an essential tool for U.S. foreign policy and force projection.

China purchased the former Soviet navy's unfinished carrier from Ukraine in 1998 under the auspices of turning it into a floating amusement park. The vessel was towed halfway around the world and then immediately put into a program of refurbishment and completion. Concurrent to those efforts the Chinese navy received extensive training assistance from a number of countries in order to begin closing the capabilities gap.

While China has a steep learning curve ahead in order to effectively integrate naval aviation into their military doctrine, they are certainly making progress quickly. No one in the West is under the illusion that China plans to use of this particular platform for anything beyond training, or perhaps as a means of regional force projection. Even China themselves admits the same. In fact, one of the little secrets making its way around defense circles is that China has at least 4 domestically produced carriers currently under construction.

And just as the U.S. and some NATO allies, China is also rapidly moving in the direction of UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles to include unmanned naval aviation units. They see the same benefits as we do and have benefited significantly from stolen (or intentionally supplied) U.S. technology. A visit to any major arms show will make clear as day the similarities between Chinese-produced UAVs and those produced by U.S. defense contractors.

The Liaoning is yet another example of China's ambitions to be a leading Asian naval power. While at the moment their capabilities are easily overshadowed by that of the U.S., this gap is closing and will speed up even more as the U.S. is certain to be drastically reducing defense spending at least over the next 4 year, if not beyond.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300 million Americans - especially when those Americans decline to take risks on new technologies. America's great economic strength, namely its capacity to innovate, exists mainly in memory four years after the 2008 economic crisis.

Two years ago the Obama administration was proceeding with a novel way to finance trillion-dollar budget deficits by forcing IRA and 401(k) holders to buy Treasury bonds by mandating the placement of government-structured annuities in their retirement accounts.

Remarkably, those financial professionals specializing in private retirement savings and the U.S. citizens investing in private retirement plans now face the possibility the Obama administration and its allies on the political left will impose rules and regulations that effectively abolish the private retirement savings and investment markets.

Recent evidence suggests government officials continue to eye the multi-trillion dollar private retirement savings market, including IRAs and 401(k) plans, eyeing the opportunity to redistribute private retirement savings to less affluent Americans and to force the retirement savings out of the private market and into government-controlled programs investing in government-issued debt.