Could Alex Jones’s “revolution” actually happen?

Piers Morgan had it easy. Radio show host and author Alex Jones threatened the rest of us with a ”revolution” if the government decides to confiscate guns from the homes and glove compartments of law-abiding Americans. It’s almost too easy to dismiss Jones as a fringe figure, especially since fringe ideas make their way into the mainstream with (exciting? alarming?) frequency these days. So let’s take him seriously.

Let’s accept his premise. Actually, let’s dismiss it first but then turn around and accept it for the sake of argument. The government has not the means nor the mechanism nor the credibility to confiscate 100,000 guns, much less 600,000,000. And those in the government doing the confiscating would be neighbors and relatives of the confiscatory victims: police officers, national guard members, Army reservists. Of course, Jones might say that their intent is bad enough. But “they” — the Obama administration, I assume — have no such intentions, and never did.

But OK. Let’s say that the government tries to confiscate guns and “the people” attempt to revolt.  No doubt that civil disobedience can spring up rather spontaneously and even be organized very quickly, but if rioting were to somehow break out in American cities, it would be isolated and theoretically containable. Organizing a “revolt” would require extensive planning, including the massive transportation of citizens from their homes to wherever the rally points were, a communications infrastructure, and leaders. The same Open Source culture that would make it difficult for the government to plan a confiscation in secret makes it just as unlikely for citizens to plan a feasible response to that confiscation in secret.

One of Jones’s obsessions, which, I confess, I share, is the militarization of the American homeland, and he is not promulgating a conspiracy here. The military has expanded its presence on American soil, and crucially, has expanded the way it is organized to respond to mass contingency events of any kind, including natural disasters and rioting. The U.S. Northern Command does receive intelligence briefings about domestic disturbances from the FBI and DHS, so commanders would be somewhat prepared to deploy troops. Thousands would come from the standing Army, but the bulk would be drawn from state National Guard detachments. It is exceedingly difficult to picture weekend warriors following blind orders en masse to detain or harm U.S. citizens when local police resources are stretched. The government has the power of command and control, but the people have the power of fellow-feeling. The government’s response to any real revolt would probably be quite restrained. There’d be too much attention paid to every movement of every tank to act harshly. The strategy to contain any “revolt” might therefore depend on a period of people letting out their energies and then returning to their normal business. 

Ah, but what if the government controls the communication nodes?  Well, corporations do; I assume Jones would have them immediately bend to a secret executive order shutting down serves and clouds and services like Twitter, but even if corporations agreed to do this, together, it would take days to get even a fraction of the telecom infrastructure offline. Maybe the government would order a mass power outage. But that’s why so many Americans have generators in the first place!  Although government “boards” comprising major telecom and infrastructure executives do exist, the most they’ve ever contemplated doing is to shut down a narrow slice of an infected communications node. These days, they’re focused on the cyber threat.  In the early days of civil defense planning, when there were a few television networks an AT&T had its monopoly, the threat of a government takeover of TV, radio and telephones was technically feasible. Today it is not. Actually, it does not make sense. What’s turned on really cannot be turned off.

But wait. if Jones’s “revolution” is to succeed, he needs to take over the government, because he’d need to dominate communications as well, unless he assumes that his movement would be organic and immune to arguments from elected officials asking for stability and calm.

An objective of anyone who wants to take over the government would be a seizure of the Emergency Broadcast System, which allows the President to speak to the nation through almost any mechanism of communication at any time. The EBS lives at Mt. Weather, the massive FEMA bunker in Virginia, but it can be activated and controlled from at least a dozen other places, including the briefcase of the Emergency Actions officer who travels with the President.  A coordinated violent action to seize control of this key portal would require an incredible amount of prior planning.

Assuming even that the government’s response to isolated-turned-mass rioting is uneven, the President would be able to address Americans anytime he wants. In theory, Jones’s followers could try to take over every broadcast entity in America, or could try and jam the broadcasts using sophisticated electronic warfare technology available to the military, but once again, the practicalities are not possible.

Because there will be no revolt over gun control, because there will not be and cannot be a mass confiscation of guns, playing with these ideas is fanciful and fodder for a sequel to Seven Days in May. Heck, we haven’t even addressed the FEMA concentration camps (which don’t exist).  But that isn’t to say that nothing discussed above will ever be relevant. It is much easier to imagine a small-scale revolt, a series of pre-planned violent protests against the powers that be, perhaps because the political system seems so non-responsive to the worries of people who listen to Alex Jones.  It would not take much to make Americans nervous about the government’s ability to restore law and order. And that frission itself is probably the most unknowable of all these factors.

Patriotic citizens aren’t supposed to speculate about these extremely unlikely events, but the government certainly thinks about them. So maybe we should too.

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Sandra Bullock Honored at People's Choice Awards for New Orleans Support

By Alison Schwartz

01/09/2013 at 10:45 PM EST

Sandra Bullock at the People's Choice Awards

Jason Merritt/Getty

Sandra Bullock took home big honors for her work in the Big Easy Wednesday night.

The People's Choice Awards crowned the Oscar-winning actress the favorite humanitarian for her career-spanning philanthropic efforts, including her dedication to New Orleans's Warren Easton Charter High School

"I'm not at all being modest when I say I'm not doing anything compared to what they do on a daily basis," Bullock, 48, told the crowd gathered at Los Angeles's Nokia Theatre.

Just six months after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the actress showed her support by adopting the school, which sustained $4 million in damages during the storm. She donated hundreds of thousands of dollars for renovations, telling PEOPLE years later that she "felt such a profound need to do something for them."

Her generosity helped the charter school – the first public high school for boys in Louisiana – afford renovations, new band uniforms, athletic equipment and a new health clinic in a city that's close to her heart. After all, she adopted her son, Louis, from New Orleans in 2010 and also has a home in the Garden District.

She pointed to the tireless dedication of the school's students, teachers and tough principal. "I've seen her," she joked. "Yeah, you don't want to go into that office."

Bullock then gave a shout-out to her son, who was sick as home, she said.

"[The students] compete, but they never cut each other down," she added. "And all that happens not because it's easy, but because they do not allow themselves any other option than to succeed."

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Retooling Pap test to spot more kinds of cancer

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.

Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.

How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.

In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.

"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.

But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.

The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.

"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.

"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.

But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.

More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.

Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.

The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.

So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.

The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.

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Stock index futures point to second day of gains

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures pointed to a higher open on Wall Street on Thursday, with futures for the S&P 500, Dow Jones and Nasdaq 100 all around 0.2 percent higher at 0920 GMT.

European shares traded in sight of recent multi-month highs, with FTSEurofirst 300 <.fteu3> flat at 1,167.51 points by 0913 GMT <.eu> while Asian markets closed higher, supported by solid Chinese data <.t>.

China's export growth rebounded surprisingly sharply in December to a seven-month high, in a strong finish to the year for an economy that had slowed for seven quarters, but the spike may not herald an enduring recovery as global demand stays subdued.

U.S. stocks rose on Wednesday, rebounding from two days of losses, as investors turned their focus to the first prominent results of the earnings season. The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 61.66 points, or 0.46 percent, to 13,390.51. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 3.87 points, or 0.27 percent, to 1,461.02. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> gained 14.00 points, or 0.45 percent, to 3,105.81.

The nascent earnings season pauses, with no S&P 500 companies scheduled to report on Thursday.

Casual dining chain Ruby Tuesday Inc lowered the upper end of its full-year adjusted profit forecast after posting a wider-than-expected second-quarter loss. Shares fell after the bell.

U.S. asset manager BlackRock is to buy Swiss bank Credit Suisse's exchange-traded fund business for an undisclosed price.

A relatively thin U.S. data calendar features December trade data at 1330 GMT and budget figures at 1900 GMT.

Both the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are expected to announce on-hold policy ahead of U.S. market open, with the focus for the latter on the 1330 GMT press conference.

(Reporting By Toni Vorobyova; Editing by Catherine Evans)

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Activistss Convicted in Vietnam Crackdown on Dissent

BANGKOK — A Vietnamese court on Wednesday convicted 14 democracy activists of plotting to overthrow the government and sentenced them to jail terms ranging from 3 to 13 years in what human rights groups said was the largest subversion case brought in Vietnam in years.

The defendants are bloggers, writers and political and social activists who have been accused of links to a banned United States-based pro-democracy group that the government accuses of seeking to overthrow it.

Nguyen Thi Hue, a defense lawyer, told the Associated Press in Vietnam that three defendants were sentenced to 13 years during the two-day trial and that 11 others received jail terms ranging from three to eight years. One of the three-year terms was suspended.

The charges of “activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration,” of “undermining of national unity” and of participating in “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” have often been brought against dissidents in government crackdowns that have waxed and waned over the years.

Rights groups say the trial, which opened Tuesday in the central province of Nghe An, is the largest subversion case to be presented in recent years.

“This is part of an ongoing, deepening crackdown we’ve been seeing for the past year and a half or two years,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. “These people are bloggers, land activists, have attended or tried to attend dissident trials, have been involved in dissident activities including supporting poor people and people with disabilities.”

He added: “This is a message to other dissidents and bloggers that Vietnam means business.”

He said the defendants were charged after attending a training course in Bangkok run by Viet Tan, an organization that in the 1980s led a resistance movement against the Vietnamese communist government but for the past few decades has declared that it is committed to peaceful political reform, democracy and human rights in Vietnam.

Several defendants are members of the Redemptorist group in the Catholic church, which has been engaged in community service and has taken up the causes of land seizures and corruption. Redemptorist activists have become increasingly assertive in Vietnamese movements for democracy and human rights, and some churches and parishes have become centers of dissent.

Some defendants have participated in peaceful protests related to China or in support of other dissidents who were on trial.

Five of them have blogged in support of freedom of expression and of multi-party democracy, Human Rights Watch said. Before the trial, one of them, Dang Xuan Dieu, was quoted as saying: “I have done nothing contrary to my conscience” and that in punishing him the government is “trampling on the eternal good morals of the Vietnamese nation.”

As Vietnam’s economy grows fitfully and its expanding middle class becomes more lively and engaged, the government has carried out vigorous campaigns to police the Internet and curb public demonstrations.

In a new year’s address that assessed the gains and shortcomings of Vietnam’s leadership, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung restated the government’s concern that conspirators continue to threaten to undermine it.“We are regularly challenged by conspiracies to spark socio-political instability and violate our national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said.

On Tuesday, for example, as the dissident trial was getting under way in central Vietnam, the daily Vietnam News reported that a woman had been sentenced in Ho Chi Minh City to 42 months in prison for “activities against the state.”

The newspaper said the woman, Lo Thanh Thao, 36, had “scattered propaganda leaflets” and “stuck them inside several buildings” in Ho Chi Minh City. It did not report the content of the leaflets.

In the most high-profile recent conviction, a prominent Vietnamese legal scholar who had sued the prime minister and called for multiparty democracy was convicted of propaganda against the state in April 2011 and sentenced to seven years in prison and another three years under house arrest.

The conviction of the scholar, Cu Huy Ha Vu, then 53, the son of a Communist revolutionary and a well-known poet, was one of dozens involving Vietnamese lawyers and activists over recent years.

Last March, two Catholic activists were sentenced to five and three years in prison for distributing what the indictment called anti-government leaflets.

In September three prominent bloggers received long prison terms, including Nguyen Van Hai, who wrote under the name Dieu Cay, who was sent to prison for 12 years.

He was among several detained journalists mentioned by President Obama in a speech on World Press Freedom Day last May. Mr. Obama said the blogger’s first arrest in 2008, had “coincided with a mass crackdown on citizen journalism in Vietnam.”

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NRA, video game makers to meet with Biden gun task force this week

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, is slated to meet with Vice President Joe Biden as he considers recommendations on how to respond to a mass shooting last month in Newtown, Connecticut, the White House said on Tuesday.

After the Newtown school shooting, which President Barack Obama called the worst day of his presidency, he asked Biden to come up with a broad range of ideas to curb gun violence – ideas he will unveil in his annual State of the Union address, traditionally given in late January.

Obama has said he wants new gun control measures passed during the first year of his second term, but gun control is a divisive issue in the United States where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution.

Biden’s task force is examining legislation that would ban assault rifles, but is also looking at the role of violent movies and videogames in mass shootings and whether there is adequate access to mental health services.

Biden and his task force are slated to hold meeting this week with victims of gun violence, gun safety groups, hunting groups, and gun owners, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

“His group will also meet with representatives of the entertainment and video-game industries,” Carney said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will meet with mental health and disability advocates, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is slated to meet with parent, teacher and education groups, Carney said.

The NRA has proposed armed guards in schools, an idea about which Obama has expressed skepticism.

The group’s top lobbyist, James J. Baker, will attend the task force meeting on Thursday, an NRA spokesman said.

“We are sending a representative to hear what they have to say,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said in an e-mailed statement.

(Additional reporting by David Ingram; Editing by Sandra Maler and Jackie Frank)

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Brrr! Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds Bundle Up for N.Y.C. Date Night

Caught in the Act

01/09/2013 at 06:00 AM EST

Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively

Splash News Online

Baby, it's cold outside!

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds bundled up for dinner out at New York's Nobu 57 on Monday evening.

The couple – who live just outside the city in quaint Bedford, N.Y. – headed for the Robert De Niro co-owned restaurant) wearing their winter best.

"They were both dressed casually. [Ryan] had a knit had on and a few days worth of facial hair," an onlooker tells PEOPLE.

Upon entering the restaurant, Lively, who wore a "cute bright green puffer jacket," was "doing something with her phone," the source adds.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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Global shares buoyed by Alcoa earnings, dollar gains on yen

LONDON (Reuters) - World shares staged a modest recovery from two days of losses on Wednesday after aluminum giant Alcoa opened the U.S. earnings season with an optimistic outlook for world demand.

However, with European and British central banks due to hold policy meetings on Thursday, the same day Spain will test demand for its debt and China releases its latest trade data, investors were in a cautious mood.

Alcoa, the largest aluminum producer in the United States, rose 1.3 percent in after-hours trade after it reported a fourth-quarter profit in line with Wall Street expectations and revenues that beat forecasts.

The results lifted Asian stock markets and pushed Europe's FTSE Eurofirst 300 index <.fteu3> up around 0.2 percent in early trade, leaving the MSCI world equity index <.miwd00000pus> up 0.1 percent. London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> were flat to 0.2 percent higher.

U.S. stock futures were up 0.15 percent, suggesting a firmer start on Wall Street. <.l><.eu><.n/>

Corporate profits are expected to be higher than the third quarter's lackluster results, but analysts' estimates are down sharply from where they were in October.

"Expectations are quite low going into the earnings season as we saw a lot of downward guidance in the past few months. There is potential for an upside surprise to come through," said Robert Parkes, equity strategist at HSBC Securities.

SOVEREIGN DEBT TEST

In European fixed income markets German Bund prices dipped slightly as investors prepared for the government's auction of 5 billion euros' worth of new five-year bonds following successful debt sales in Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland on Tuesday.

Investors were also looking ahead to Spanish and Italian bond auctions on Thursday for the new year's first test of market appetite for peripheral euro zone debt.

The Spanish auction could also provide clues on the timing of a much anticipated request by Madrid for fresh financial aid from the ECB. [ID:nL5E9C46KK]

The dollar meanwhile climbed against the yen, moving back towards a 2-1/2 year high hit last week, on expectations of a much bolder monetary easing from the Bank of Japan at its next meeting later this month.

The U.S. currency was up 0.7 percent at 87.61 yen, above a near one-week low of 86.82 hit earlier in Tokyo.

"No one is going to want to be short yen going into the BOJ meeting," said Derek Halpenny, European head of FX research at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

Sources familiar with the BOJ's thinking told Reuters the central bank was likely to adopt a 2 percent inflation target at the meeting, double its current goal, and issue a statement with the government pledging to pursue bold monetary easing steps.

The BOJ will also consider easing monetary policy again this month, probably through a further increase in its 101 trillion yen ($1.2 trillion) asset buying and lending programme, the sources said.

The euro held steady against the dollar at $1.3080, with most analysts forecasting the European Central Bank will keep interest rates on hold on Thursday, though some believe rates will be cut later this year.

CHINA DEMAND EYED

Brent crude oil slipped around 0.3 percent to below $112 per barrel as the market awaited the latest trade data from China, the world's biggest energy consumer, due on Thursday.

"What we're seeing in the oil markets is the cautious sentiment playing up ahead of some key economic events this week," said Ker Chung Yang, senior investment analyst at Phillips Futures in Singapore.

However, iron ore jumped to its highest since October 2011, stretching a rally that has lifted prices by more than a third since December as China replenished stockpiles and as supply in the spot market remained limited.

Iron ore, a raw material used to make steel, has now risen 83 percent since falling to below $87 in September.

(Additional reporting by Nia Williams and Atul Prakash; Editing by Will Waterman)

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Chemical Weapons Showdown With Syria Led to Rare Accord

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

The violence in Syria continued on Monday. Above, Syrians went to the aid of a man who was wounded when a missile hit the al-Mashhad district of Aleppo.

WASHINGTON — In the last days of November, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.

Within hours President Obama was notified, and the alarm grew over the weekend, as the munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases. In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria’s increasingly desperate president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.

What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

But concern remains that Mr. Assad could now use the weapons produced that week at any moment. American and European officials say that while a crisis was averted in that week from late November to early December, they are by no means resting easy.

“I think the Russians understood this is the one thing that could get us to intervene in the war,” one senior defense official said last week. “What Assad understood, and whether that understanding changes if he gets cornered in the next few months, that’s anyone’s guess.”

While chemical weapons are technically considered a “weapon of mass destruction” — along with biological and nuclear weapons — in fact they are hard to use and hard to deliver. Whether an attack is effective can depend on the winds and the terrain. Sometimes attacks are hard to detect, even after the fact. Syrian forces could employ them in a village or a neighborhood, some officials say, and it would take time for the outside world to know.

But the scare a month ago has renewed debate about whether the West should help the Syrian opposition destroy Mr. Assad’s air force, which he would need to deliver those 500-pound bombs.

The chemical munitions are still in storage areas that are near or on Syrian air bases, ready for deployment on short notice, officials said.

The Obama administration and other governments have said little in public about the chemical weapons movements, in part because of concern about compromising sources of intelligence about the activities of Mr. Assad’s forces. This account is based on interviews with more than half a dozen military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the intelligence matters involved.

The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, warned in a confidential assessment last month that the weapons could now be deployed four to six hours after orders were issued, and that Mr. Assad had a special adviser at his side who oversaw control of the weapons, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported. Some American and other allied officials, however, said in interviews that the sarin-laden bombs could be loaded on planes and airborne in less than two hours.

“Let’s just say right now, it would be a relatively easy thing to load this quickly onto aircraft,” said one Western diplomat.

How the United States and Israel, along with Arab states, would respond remains a mystery. American and allied officials have talked vaguely of having developed “contingency plans” in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require upward of 75,000 troops. But there have been no evident signs of preparations for any such effort.

The United States military has quietly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there, among other things, prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to have traveled to Jordan in recent weeks, and the Israeli news media have said the topic of discussion was how to deal with Syrian weapons if it appeared that they could be transferred to Lebanon, where Hezbollah could lob them over the border to Israel. But the plans, to the extent they exist, remain secret.

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