14 DAY TRIAL // Google Earth is an interesting tool for looking at various places in the world that you haven't visited yet. It's true that some pictures are clearer than others, depending on the country and frankly, nobody would expect to see a picture of a village in Somalia as clear as the one of the Eiffel Tower.
But nobody would expect to see what a policy analyst discovered one day while making his regular checks of the maps: a top secret Chinese nuclear submarine. The Jin-class submarine is the largest and most recent development in the Chinese navy and it's still a classified project.
Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project made the discovery and the picture was taken by DigitalGlobe's Quickbird satellite, while looking at China's Xiaopingdao submarine base near Dalian.
He confirmed that China has made important progresses with this project, which has the ultimate goal of developing a stealth nuclear-powered submarine and admits that commercial satellite imagery is an important aspect in international security.
Now don't expect the Pentagon to be using Google Earth to track down enemy or friendly military forces - which category does China belong to, these days? - since the secret submarine most likely wasn't a secret to them.
Lyle Goldstein, a specialist on Chinese maritime development and nuclear strategy at the Naval War College, explained that in his opinion, US intelligence agencies surely had extensive knowledge of this project long before these pictures were accidentally(?!) made public.
"Any photo that Google Earth has, I'm sure the Pentagon already had a long time ago. ... The Department of Defense has much better capability," he said to Alan Boyle, an MSNBC journalist.
However, for most people not involved with the US military, this is an interesting opportunity, since anyone can zoom in on the sub by starting from this interesting view of the submarine base, with the actual submarine being located at the end of an artificial peninsula that sticks out from the shoreline.
Can you find it?