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“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The loans would go to the fund maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that insure depositors when banks fail, said one industry and one government official familiar with the FDIC board’s thinking, who requested anonymity because the plans are still evolving.

Regulators also are considering levying a special emergency fee on all banks, charging regular fees early or tapping a $100 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury, the officials said.

The fund, which insures deposit accounts up to $250,000, is at its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. Ongoing losses on commercial real estate and other loans continue to cause multiple bank failures each week.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair wants to avoid tapping the Treasury credit line, and Treasury officials insist that the strongest big banks have enough extra capital to operate, the officials said. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who is a voting member of the FDIC board, has said he doesn’t want to levy another fee on banks while the industry is still recovering.

The loans would give big, healthy banks a safe harbor for their money and would limit their risk-taking, said Daniel Alpert, managing director of the investment bank Westwood Capital LLC in New York.

It also would allow the industry’s strongest players — which still rely on FDIC loan guarantees and other emergency subsidies — to help weaker banks avoid paying another fee, he said.

“Lots of banks are going to require more capital, and (Bair is) trying to rob from the rich and give to the poor,” said Alpert, who supports the plan as a creative way to avoid another bailout.

“If you see another quarter, then I think owners have to do something,” Jensen said by phone today. “We are subsidizing oil companies.”

The USAF does not know how or why operators lost control of the MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aircraft System. “We do not speculate on the cause of an aircraft mishap,” Captain Frank Hartnett, a spokesman for the Air Force, told Security Management. An investigation, however, will be conducted to find an answer, he said.

The Reaper was flying a combat mission when operators lost “positive control” of the UAV, or the ability to establish connections and send control inputs to the remote-controlled aircraft. When operators noticed the UAV was bound to exit Afghani airspace and all efforts to reestablish communication with the machine failed, the Air Force deployed an F-15E Strike Eagle to destroy it.

The fighter jet fired one Sidewinder missile at the Reaper, causing the UAV to crash into a mountain side. There was no report of civilian casualties or damage to civilian property, according to a USAF statement.

Harnett said the USAF has no knowledge of any similar incidents happening before. “This is the first MQ-9 Reaper crash that was due to loss of control,” he said.

The announcement follows last month’s indictment of Nemazee, head of a private equity firm and an Iranian American Political Action Committee board member, on one count of defrauding Citigroup’s Citibank.

The new indictment adds allegations that he defrauded two other banks, Bank of America and HSBC Bank USA, in a similar fashion by falsifying documents and signatures to purportedly show he had hundreds of millions worth of collateral.

The office of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the FBI said he used the proceeds of his scheme to make donations to election campaigns of federal, state and local candidates, donations to political action committees and charities.

He bought property in Italy and paid for maintenance on two properties in New York.

His lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

As of August 2009 Nemazee owed Bank of America about $142 million and owed Citibank about $74.9 million, the indictment said. He drew on a line of credit he fraudulently obtained from HSBC to pay the Citibank loan.

Nemazee, 59, typically donates more than $100,000 annually to Democratic political candidates. He is listed as one of the top “bundlers” of contributions to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics research group.

“For more than 10 years, Hassan Nemazee projected the illusion of wealth, stealing more than $290 million so that he could lead a lavish lifestyle and play the part of heavyweight political fundraiser,” United States Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said in a statement.

Nemazee was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on August 23 as he was checking in for a flight to Italy, according to court papers. He was released on bail.

If convicted on three counts of bank fraud, Nemazee faces up to 30 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. He is also charged with identity theft.

It was inevitable that weapons manufacturers and dealers would weigh in. Now one has. Imagine an aquatic drone, an unmanned boat that could patrol the waters off eastern Africa and allow threats to be assessed and engaged by remote control.

This is an idea proposed by Timothy P. Sheridan, an American arms dealer who has been providing equipment to the Pentagon for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Sheridan, among other things, has arranged the shipment of tens of thousands of small arms for distribution to Iraqi security forces.)

His latest venture is called Maritime Defense Systems International, LLC., which offers an automated counterpiracy system, as he calls it, that could be outfitted to a vessel and set loose on patrol. The system contains a forward-looking infrared radar for surveillance and target detection, an automated machine gun on a rotating mount and a satellite video uplink that would let a remote operator run the craft from on shore or a work station on a distant ship.

Think, Roboboat. Now think Roboboat run by a trained naval officer, much as Air Force pilots fly Predator and Reaper drones.

In the next several weeks, Sheridan will be testing a preliminary version, which combines several off-the-shelf products, on a GB-12 patrol craft from Radix Marine, a boat manufacturer in Yakima, Wash. The first tests will be on manned vessels, with the system operated by joystick by the crew from within.