This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations
As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.
The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.
Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail.
Jeffrey D. SachsSybil Fares, Mar 02, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/united-nations-israel-us-attack-iran
On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51. They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.
At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.
The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.
We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population. The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.
Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress. Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace. The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.
The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.
It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other fourteen Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom. These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.
As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.
As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.
The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation. Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.
When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.
The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime. The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings—notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US —are also complicit in this war crime.
This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience. For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world—in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others—honoring the true multipolarity of our world.
Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).
The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs. The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.
Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China. US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.
The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure..
A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.
The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine. Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.
These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.
Year 4: The Timeline That Tells the Tale
Without historical context, which is buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand the war in Ukraine. Historians will tell the story, but journalists are cut short for trying to tell it now.
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, February 24, 2026
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, and the rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians today write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded the same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997 :: The only thing that could provoke a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response would be needless NATO Expansion Far East right till the border of Russia – Sen. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hRW47hLL5y
— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) June 17, 2022
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
August 15, 2025: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska for the first face-to-face meeting between U.S. and Russian leaders in more than four years. The Russians left believing Trump had thoroughly understood their position against a ceasefire and instead their desire to reach a comprehensive solution to the war that addressed the “root causes” and Russian security concerns, which have been outlined in this timeline. A series of follow-up diplomatic meetings have failed to advance that goal and the conflict continues to be decided on the battlefield with Russian gains as well as an increase in missiles being fired into each nations territory.
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
Golden pipedreams – UK Advanced Nuclear plan
Not everyone is convinced that these new SMR/AMR/MMR projects will be viable technologically or economically,
To progress all this, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says it is setting up a ‘UK Advanced Nuclear Pipeline’, a new government managed process through which private sector projects submit detailed plans across 5 core areas: technology & supply chain; developer capability; finance/funding/investment; siting; and operator/end user arrangements. DESNZ and GBE N will conduct eligibility checks /Project Readiness Assessment, with successful projects then being invited to join the Pipeline, subject to ministerial approval.
February 28, 2026, https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2026/02/golden-dreams-uk-advanced-nuclear-plan.html
The UK government is looking to ‘a new golden age of nuclear’, committing £17 billion to ‘the most ambitious programme of new plants for a generation’. As its new Advanced Nuclear Frameworks plan says, in the 2025 Spending Review, it committed £14.2 billion to Sizewell C and over £2.5 billion to the Great British Energy – Nuclear (GBE N) Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project at Wylfa. And it says ‘together with Hinkley Point C, these projects will add almost 8 GW of capacity in the 2030s’.
However, it also wants to do more, with plans for advanced nuclear, some based on US Advanced Modular Reactor (AMR) developments. As it notes, some major commercial deals have been concluded between UK and US companies, including ‘plans for X-Energy and Centrica to build 12 advanced modular reactors in Hartlepool, supporting 2,500 jobs, as well as plans for Holtec, EDF, and Tritax to build small modular reactors at the former coal-fired power station Cottam in Nottinghamshire, providing clean, secure power to data centres on the site’.
Meanwhile it says ‘TerraPower is working with engineering firm KBR to explore the potential deployment of its Natrium advanced reactor technology in the UK & beyond’. It also noted that ‘Last Energy & DP World intend to create one of the world’s first micro modular nuclear plants at London Gateway, backed by £80m in private money’. These MMRs are meant to be under 20MW.
Not everyone is convinced that these new SMR/AMR/MMR projects will be viable technologically or economically, but DESNZ is optimistic: ‘Britain could see some of the world’s first advanced nuclear power stations powering factories and AI data centres, as part of the government’s “golden age” of nuclear to support jobs, drive growth & protect billpayers with homegrown clean energy’.
To help with that, it is investing in ‘fuel cycle capabilities such as High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU)’ which some of the new plants will need- if they go forward. HALEU is enriched to below 20%, compared to under 5% for the uranium used in most conventional plants and DESNZ says that it ‘is essential for fuelling AMRs’. But the UK doesn’t have a plant for making it. £300m has been allocated for one, with the aim being to establish a UK domestic HALEU capability that ‘reduces global reliance on Russian supply chains, which currently dominate the global market, and mitigates strategic vulnerabilities for the UK and its allies. By investing early, the UK is ready to be a trusted supplier of HALEU to international partners’ this also ensuring ‘uninterrupted fuel supply for domestic AMR deployment’.
To progress all this, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says it is setting up a ‘UK Advanced Nuclear Pipeline’, a new government managed process through which private sector projects submit detailed plans across 5 core areas: technology & supply chain; developer capability; finance/funding/investment; siting; and operator/end user arrangements. DESNZ and GBE N will conduct eligibility checks /Project Readiness Assessment, with successful projects then being invited to join the Pipeline, subject to ministerial approval.
DESNZ says ‘Pipeline projects may engage with DESNZ on potential revenue support, e.g., a Contracts for Difference (CfD) style mechanism that stabilises future revenues, and High Impact, Low Probability (HILP) risk protections where private markets cannot efficiently bear residual risks.’ It adds ‘In parallel, all companies can approach the National Wealth Fund (NWF), who bring £27.8 billion of capital, a dedicated nuclear team, and a full suite of debt, equity and hybrid instruments, to explore investment opportunities aligned with strategic priorities’. DESNZ also look at the ‘wider enablers that the government is putting in place to support nuclear deployment, reforming the planning system, grid connection process, and regulatory process, to ease and accelerate deployment of new plants’.
DESNZ says that while ‘the Framework aims to support private projects that use advanced nuclear technologies for civil energy purposes,’ with the focus on electricity, it also includes ‘projects that supply energy as heat and/or electricity & where the energy is supplied to the National Grid and/or to private energy users.’ But it adds, given possibly unique regulatory, legal, safety, and/or strategic challenges, the new framework ‘specifically excludes offshore or floating nuclear platforms, civil nuclear propulsion, space based reactors and transportable nuclear solutions.’
Even so, it still feels quite breath-takingly pro-nuclear, a very big shift from earlier Labour and indeed Tory views on nuclear as economically unattractive. And the government seems keen to go even further, with revamps to basic regulatory approaches to nuclear safety – to speed thing up and, presumably, try to improve its economics. The new approach could have significant undesirable impacts and has not gone unopposed. But the nuclear lobby is clearly keen to press ahead, with a new perspective on risks being pushed: ‘Routine reactor emissions, both activated material (made radioactive by neutron bombardment) and fission by-products, pose no meaningful health risk.
Even if some vanishingly small effect existed, it would be statistically indistinguishable from the background cancer rate and would be lost in the noise of lifestyle, environmental, and biological risk factors.’ So said two pro-nuclear Breakthrough campaign members in a recent edition of the usually very critical Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. No risk? Really? There is no shortage of contrary evidence on human health impacts, both occupational and residential, including a recent US national study, although there are still debates on their overall significance and implications.
However, while debates like that, and also on waste costs, continue, DESNZ seems keen to press ahead with nuclear expansion. And they are pretty ‘gung ho’ about that, backing a ‘Destination Nuclear’ staff recruitment campaign, part of their Nuclear Skills plan, which aims to support both civil and defence related nuclear jobs. DESNZ says that nearly 3,500 early careers starters entered the sector in 24/25, with ‘73 new nuclear fission PhDs added in academic years 24/25 and 25/26’.
Is all this wise? Can we really have a golden nuclear future? Well, the latest update from the World Nuclear Industry Status team says that, in Jan 2026 ‘404 nuclear power reactors were operating in the world – 5 units less than one year earlier – maintaining however a stable combined operating capacity. Construction of new nuclear plants was underway in 11countries, five fewer host nations than just two years earlier’. It noted that 2025 saw the lowest number of new start-ups since 2017, while 7 plants totalling 2.8 GW were closed – 3 each in Belgium & Russia, and 1 in Taiwan, completing its nuclear phaseout. So it doesn’t sound too sure about overall nuclear growth- indeed some portray nuclear as fizzling out .
That may be overstating the case, depending on location, but the renewables by contrast are really booming globally – led by China. Indeed Stanford University’s Prof Mark Jacobson says China could reach 100% renewable energy (nearly all power, heat & transport) by 2050. While, he notes that sadly, at the current rate of progress, the USA would only reach that point roughly 100 years later. China may still end having a little fossil and nuclear by 2050/60, but mostly, DNV suggests, it will be green energy. Is the USA’s big fossil and nuclear emphasis really the way to go for anyone? The UK is doing well on replacing fossil with low cost renewables, but, after having its financial fingers burnt by EDF’s high cost EPRs, it still seems strangely locked into uncertain and likely to be high cost new nuclear, increasingly from the USA.…
Stop Trump’s New Mass-Murder Spree
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 28, 2026, https://worldbeyondwar.org/stop-trumps-new-mass-murder-spree/
The latest location where Trump has given the orders to murder people is Iran.
Remember a couple of months back when establishment U.S. lawyers and human rights groups were admitting that Trump’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific were nothing other than murder?
Murder doesn’t cease being murder because it’s further away or grander or provokes a more dramatic response or targets victims who speak a different language.
By all means hunt in the Epstein files for evidence of Trump raping or murdering, but don’t pretend we don’t already know.
Did Trump have no choice but to start slaughtering people? The mediator said a deal was within reach.
The deal was a solution in search of a problem to begin with, given the absolute lack of evidence of the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and the openly admitted possession of nuclear weapons by numerous other nations not being bombed, including the one currently sending missiles into schools in Iran.
Didn’t Trump need to murder people to prevent the Iranian government from murdering them? Hmm. Is more murder or more high-tech murder or more distant murder better? Should we pretend the people have not been protesting economic hardship largely created by illegal and murderous U.S. sanctions? Must we all conspire to act as if nonviolent activism does not exist? Are we really going to pretend Israel hasn’t demanded this crime — and provided a rotating selection of ludicrous excuses and frauds to justify it — for decades?
Public pressure helped prevent a U.S. war on Iran several times in recent decades, and helped create public opinion in the U.S. that as of the start of this war was more against such a war than ever, and more against such a war than against almost any other evil thing ever asked about in opinion polls.
So why did a war happen now?
One reason is of course that Trump is a psychopath with no qualms about acting on the most horrific advice given to him most recently.
A second reason is that there is no opposition party in Washington. Schumer and Jeffries, the “leaders” of the Democrats, actually prevented votes prior to the start of this crime on the War Powers Resolution ritual of redundantly declaring that this crime would be a crime.
A third reason is that there is almost no opposition among the governments of wealthy nations or in the United Nations.
A fourth reason is — depending on how you want to look at it — either the onslaught of numerous threats and crises from the Trumpoctopus wrecking ball targeting of Venezuela, Mexico, Minneapolis, Greenland, Canada, Russia, the natural environment, healthcare, etc., etc., or the established pattern of the people of the United States, their local governments, their state governments, the Congress, the media, and the two corporate political parties in the U.S. Congress failing to effectively stand up to any of these things with votes, impeachments, prosecutions, sit-ins, boycotts, or truth commissions.
A fifth reason is that you get what you pay for, and the institutions and television viewers of much of the world have collectively hallucinated military spending as a public good to be maximized at the expense of all that is useful or decent in the world.
Is all hopeless? Of course not.
What’s needed is obvious. But we have to be willing to do it. We have to stop picking which type of people to care about. We have to stop worrying about the risks. We have to all stand up together, no matter whom we’ve voted for or against, no matter what myths we’ve believed in the past, no matter what corner of the planet we live in, and work every nonviolent educational and media and activist angle to effectively demand NO MORE.
New Addition to List of Nuclear Near Catastrophes
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 23, 2026, https://worldbeyondwar.org/new-addition-to-list-of-nuclear-near-catastrophes/
There are many lists of nuclear close calls. We have a new one to add.
On Monday I visited a site in Caracas, Venezuela, where, very early in the morning on January 3, two powerful missiles slammed into the top of a hill, several feet apart, both beneath a tall telecommunications tower. The tower is largely gone. Debris flew for great distances — many times the distance of 270 meters to a nuclear reactor (white in the background in the photo above on original) and nuclear storage facility. The Earth shook. Buildings a great distance away were damaged and glass windows broken. A building adjacent to the nuclear reactor had rooms most significantly damaged. Electricity was cut off to a wide area, including to the nuclear reactor.
Any use of force whatsoever on any target at all is excessive when attacking someone’s country with violence, but it’s likely that much less force than two massive missiles could have sufficed for the crime of depriving people of electricity and communications. It’s also possible that something could have gone slightly wrong, resulting in a need to evacuate millions of men, women, children, and infants.
Does this bode well for the crime, threatened yet again, of attacking Iran? Will care be taken to avoid nuclear disasters, or in fact will such care be strictly avoided?
Or if Trump loses interest in Iran, could worse be in store for Venezuela?
The site of this nearly nuclear attack was the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, a non-military facility. The nuclear reactor is for medical purposes, and nuclear materials are returned to this site from hospitals for storage.
The missiles were reportedly fired from perhaps a kilometer away by an F-35 — a wonderful airplane with its own long list of horrors and disasters.
The attack put a halt to research at the institute, and — according to people who had worked there for 30 years — was the first crime of any kind committed on the campus.
Workers were able to use generators and then to restore some power to the reactor in 4 days and full power in 10 days. There is talk of rebuilding the tower. There has also been a proposal to build a memorial on the site.
Visiting this location was part of the fourth day of a peace delegation to Venezuela. See reports on the first three days here:
US-Israeli War on Iran is NOT About Nuclear Weapons- It’s About Imperialism
March 1, 2026 By Ben Norton for Geopolitical Economy Report, https://scheerpost.com/2026/03/01/us-israeli-war-on-iran-is-not-about-nuclear-weapons-its-about-imperialism/
The United States and Israel are waging a war of aggression against Iran. This is not about nuclear weapons; it’s about imperialism.
Trump published a video on social media early on the morning of February 28, announcing, “The United States military began major combat operations in Iran”.
As the US and Israel brutally bombed Tehran, Donald Trump admitted that they want regime change.
Trump ordered members of Iran’s military to “lay down your weapons”, or “face certain death”.
The US president then called on Iranian opposition supporters to “take over your government”, claiming, “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war would overthrow the government in Tehran, to “cast off the yoke of tyranny and bring freedom and peace-loving values to Iran”. (Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces an ongoing arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, due to the genocidal crimes against humanity he committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with steadfast US support.)
Iran immediately retaliated, launching strikes in self-defense against multiple US military bases in Qatar, Bahran, Kuwait, and the UAE. The Pentagon’s largest base in the region, Al-Udeid in Qatar, was hit.
The absurd narrative that Washington and Tel Aviv are promoting is that they had to carry out “preemptive” attacks (which are illegal under international law), because Tehran supposedly seeks nuclear weapons.
This is nonsense. Iran signed the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2015, in which it agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons in return for the US and European countries lifting their illegal unilateral sanctions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) admitted that Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal. Nevertheless, Trump unilaterally tore it up in 2018, during his first term as US president, in flagrant violation of international law (given that the JCPOA had been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which even the US had voted for, under Obama).
Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is ironically a reformist who sought to negotiate another deal with the same US aggressors who sabotaged the previous one just a few years before.
When Trump entered office for his second term, in 2025, he oversaw several rounds of bad-faith “negotiations” with Iran. Then, during those talks, the US and Israel suddenly bombed Iran in June 2025. The Wall Street Journal admitted: “In Twist, U.S. Diplomacy Served as Cover for Israeli Surprise Attack”.
The same thing happened in February 2026. The Trump administration participated in fake “negotiations” with Iran.
On February 27, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who moderated the talks, said they had made “substantial progress”, and a “peace deal is within our reach”.
Mere hours later, Trump and Netanyahu launched a massive bombing campaign in Iran.
The reality is that the US and Israel do not want peace.
The goal of this war of aggression is clear: Washington seeks to topple Iran’s independent government and finally overturn the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which removed one of the pillars of the US empire’s “twin pillars” strategy in West Asia.
The US empire, and more specifically the large US corporations that it represents, want to control the plentiful resources not only in Iran, but in the entire region, which is home to the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, as well as critical minerals and other important commodities.
Washington also hopes to cut off China’s access to its top energy providers.
Wesley Clark, a former top US general and NATO commander, revealed more than two decades ago that, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, imperial strategists at the Pentagon made plans to overthrow the governments of seven countries in West Asia and North Africa.
On the US empire’s target list was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Washington succeeded in destabilizing governments in six of those seven. Iran is the last one standing.
With its war, the United States hopes to install in Tehran a puppet, like the son of the former shah, the murderous monarch who came to power following a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
A Fox News correspondent reported that the CIA-linked US state media outlet VOA Persian is broadcasting propaganda in Iran in support of the so-called “exiled crown prince”, Reza Pahlavi, who has spent much of his life living in the US, and whose dictatorial father terrorized Iran, with staunch US backing, until the 1979 revolution.
Top US officials have been secretly meeting with the so-called “exiled crown prince”, the former Israeli intelligence officer Barak Ravid reported in January. On Twitter, Reza Pahlavi heaped praise on Trump, claimed “the Islamic Republic is collapsing”, and called for the Iranian people to help put him in power.
US imperial strategists believe the Iranian government is weak at this moment, and they are going for the jugular.
In doing so, the billionaire supposed “populist” Trump is fulfilling the dreams of the most ardent neoconservative hawks — even as he calls himself a “peace president”.
Australian Greens say no war with Iran as Albanese’s Labor issues support of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal attacks.
Last night, US President Trump launched a new illegal bombing campaign against Iran. The Australian Government’s support for Trump’s latest illegal war is a clear breach of international law and the prohibition on wars of aggression.
The Iranian people deserve to be free from persecution and domination, both from the current regime and from foreign powers. History shows, and the world knows, that US military attacks and Donald Trump’s kidnappings and assassinations do not produce peace and do not produce justice.
While US bombs and missiles rain down on Iran, there is every likelihood that they are being targeted with the direct or indirect assistance of “joint” US-Australian military facilities at Pine Gap and North West Cape.
The Greens have consistently and clearly condemned the Iranian Regime’s violent response to recent protests and long history of oppression, and we have backed the Woman Life Freedom movement. We know that the people of Iran who have been the victims of the regime will be the same people who are right now being killed, injured and driven into further poverty and fear by US bombing.
Senator Waters, Leader of the Australian Greens, said:
Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal attacks last night have unleashed chaos across the Middle East.
“This war will not bring safety to the brave Iranian people who are fighting for liberation from the brutal regime. Innocent people have already been massacred, including at least 60 children in Southern Iran killed by US and Israeli strikes on an elementary school last night. Our hearts ache for their families. This war will see homes and cities razed to the ground and countless innocent lives lost.
“The Greens condemn these illegal, abhorrent and unilateral attacks. Australians do not want to be dragged into another US-Israeli war.
“Australia’s support of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal attack last night was disgraceful.
“We cannot bomb our way to peace.
“The Labor government must immediately rule out Australian support for Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war. No resources. No intelligence. No more cover.
“The Labor government must also confirm to the Australian people that no intelligence from Pine Gap or other US bases in Australia was used last night, and rule out allowing these bases to be used in this illegal war going forward.
“End AUKUS. Australia must be a force for peace and diplomacy across the world.”
Senator Shoebridge, Greens spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, said:
“No one seriously believes that Donald Trump cares about the rights or lives of people in Iran. Just like other US wars that Australia has supported in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the talk is about freedom and democracy but the reality is killing and destruction. Already, we are seeing reports of schools being destroyed and children killed in airstrikes.
“With barely a moment’s pause the Albanese Government has backed Trump and another US-led war in the Middle East. This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Labor has outsourced Australian foreign policy to Washington.
“Labor has made Australia a part of this war by allowing Pine Gap and other US military bases here to be used to gather intelligence and target US bombs and missiles. People see through Labor when it says it believes in international law and then repeatedly backs the US and its illegal wars.
“Time and time again the US has betrayed the people it was claiming to protect, leaving bloodshed in its wake while serving its own corporate and military interests. Trump is no different, even if he is more blatant.
“The Greens are the only anti-war party in the Federal Parliament and we will not shift from that stance, having seen the horrifying scale of killing and displacement that war has visited on the world.
“The world has been watching the bravery of the Iranian people pushing back against a brutal regime and calling for liberation and freedom. The Greens know that a Trump-led military assault on Iran is not a pathway to freedom or a pathway to a democratic regime that is supported by the Iranian people. This attack, like the last, is a pathway to chaos and more killing in Iran.
“There is more Australia can do for the people of Iran, starting with offering safety to those who have fled the regime, especially those already in Australia who are trapped in an unfair refugee process.”
Complaint to the Editor of the Narwhal
SMRs are not small, and they are not modular. No one is building SMR components in a factory – please check the spin OPG gives you. They are still enormous, although a lot of the bulk is hidden underground. What OPG has done to try to cut construction costs and time is cut some safety systems (see the Canadian Environmental Law Associations submission on this).
Angela Bischoff, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, 28 Feb 26
Hello Narwhal Editor,
We just read Fatima Syed’s recent piece on SMRs and we’re shocked. This piece demonstrates zero effort to come to terms with what SMRs really are, or their impacts. Instead, we get a bunch of puffery from Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and the Ontario government.
SMRs are not small, and they are not modular. No one is building SMR components in a factory – please check the spin OPG gives you. They are still enormous, although a lot of the bulk is hidden underground. What OPG has done to try to cut construction costs and time is cut some safety systems (see the Canadian Environmental Law Associations submission on this).
There are a few reasons SMRs are all talk and little action. In most cases, it is old technology repackaged into a slightly smaller size at the expense of much lower energy output per dollar spent. Many of the companies touting “new” SMR technology are trying to reboot old ideas (molten salt, breeder reactors) that were discarded long ago as unworkable. In most cases, these companies lack the capital or the expertise to get their projects off the ground, as New Brunswick has discovered at significant public cost.
To make these reactors “modular” we would have to be building thousands every year. That’s just not about to happen with the cost and complexity of nuclear technology. They are never going to be “Lego kits” no matter what nuclear PR people tell you – it’s just embarrassing that you would take that statement at face value. That idea has been thoroughly debunked even by promoters of nuclear energy, many of whom would prefer to keep the focus on large reactors
Of course, manufacturing at scale has already happened with solar, wind and batteries because these components really can be produced at mega factory scale (actual factories exist!). Nuclear reactors remain hand crafted projects like a custom-made suit and are equally expensive (and hard to fix) because of that. It’s no surprise to us that the Darlington rebuild is running 25% over budget due to the discovery of worn-out components that OPG didn’t anticipate needing to fix.
As the 2025 World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) notes “The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term ‘Potemkin village’ as ‘an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.’ The state of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) today might well be described as a Potemkin Village. Even as the evidence for the high costs and the long timelines for potential future construction becomes clearer, and what is most on display are numerous announcements about future SMRs, usually held out for some time in the 2030s, the industry, politicians, investors, and, last but not least, the media continue to portray SMRs as an indispensable and sure way to solve the climate emergency crisis…”
The WNISR goes on to thoroughly debunk the notion that SMRs are a viable energy or climate solution and provides an in-depth explanation of why renewables plus storage are now simply unbeatable on costs, speed, climate, and reliability. Please read and report on it.
The Narwhal has been a valuable source of in-depth reporting on key environmental issues, so it is mystifying why it would choose to publish what is essentially an “advertorial” promoting Ontario’s misguided enthusiasm for nuclear technology and particularly SMRs. Not speaking to anyone who could address the myths being put forward by OPG and the Ontario government is simply shocking. Taking their statements at face value without making any effort to verify information, even more so. There are many credible nuclear critics in Ontario and Canada that could give counter arguments to OPG’s corporate spin, yet you included none.
We have come to expect a much more thoughtful approach to journalism than this from your publication.
Thanks for your attention.
Angela Bischoff, Director, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, CleanAirAlliance.org
France arrests activists blocking ship over alleged Russia uranium links
Police arrested four Greenpeace activists on Monday for blocking a cargo ship in France that they alleged was transporting uranium from Russia for the country’s nuclear power plants.
By:RFI, 02/03/2026 ,
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260302-france-arrests-activists-blocking-ship-over-alleged-russia-uranium-links-ukraine-war
Around 20 protestors carrying signs reading “Stop toxic contracts” and “Solidarity with Ukrainians”, blockaded the Mikhail Dudin at the northern port of Dunkirk early on Monday morning, to prevent it from unloading its cargo, a journalist from French news agency AFP observed.
French authorities then arrested four individuals, Dunkirk police told AFP, adding that the blockade was lifted around 9am local time.
Greenpeace has repeatedly accused France of maintaining ties with Russia’s state-owned energy company, Rosatom, despite President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Activists, some on kayaks, had impeded the ship while a large banner stretched across the lock read, “Uranium: EDF loves Putin” – a jab at the French state-owned energy giant.
In 2018, France’s EDF signed a 600-million-euro deal with a Rosatom subsidiary, Tenex, for reprocessed uranium from French nuclear power plants to be sent to Russia to be converted and then re-enriched before being reused in power production.
Rosatom has the only facility in the world – in Seversk in Siberia – capable of carrying out key parts of the conversion of reprocessed uranium to enriched reprocessed uranium.
“This trade, which indirectly fuels Putin’s war, must stop,” said Pauline Boyer, an energy campaigner for Greenpeace France on Monday.
The environment group alleges it has “on numerous occasions” observed the Mikhail Dudin unloading Russian natural and enriched uranium in France.
An AFP analysis of Global Fishing Watch tracking data shows the Mikhail Dudin has made more than 20 round trips between Dunkirk and the Russian ports of Vistino, Ust-Luga and Saint Petersburg since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February, 2022.
The Baltiyskiy-202 – another vessel that Greenpeace alleges has transported uranium between France and Russia – has completed more than 15 round trips during the same period.
Both sail under the Panamanian flag and are owned by companies registered in Hong Kong, according to the International Maritime Organisation’s register.
EDF did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
In 2022, France ordered EDF to halt its uranium trade with Rosatom when Greenpeace first revealed the contracts in the wake of Russia’s invasion.
But in March 2024, Jean-Michel Quilichini, head of the nuclear fuel division at EDF, said the company planned to continue to “honour” its 2018 contract.
France in March 2024 said it was “seriously” looking at the possibility of building its own conversion facility to produce enriched reprocessed uranium.
AFP analysis of French customs data shows that in 2025, France imported at least 112 tonnes of enriched uranium and its compounds from Russia, accounting for a quarter of total purchases by volume – a level stable compared to 2024.
These imports however fell significantly between 2022 and 2024.
Nuclear flashpoints to fallout
Devonport doesn’t just work on operational nuclear submarines, it is also a ‘graveyard’ for retired ones. Twelve out of the 16 decommissioned submarines at Devonport are still carrying their fuel – effectively a stockpile of nuclear waste.
New Internationalist 1st Jan 2026
Could the threat of nuclear war be closer than ever? Amy Hall explores how we got here and the pathways out of the crisis.
If you want to get a nuclear-powered submarine refitted, repaired or refuelled in Britain, there is only one place to go – Devonport dockyard in Plymouth, the biggest naval base in Western Europe.
Running across more than six kilometres of waterfront, the dockyard has been part of the landscape for generations. It dominates the western edge of the South West England city, encased by high fenced walls, security cameras and warning signs about police dogs and potential arrest for ‘unauthorized activity’.
The main refit and maintenance area is owned and operated by British defence company Babcock International, which in 2024 made $1,273 million in revenue from nuclear weapons work. In 2025, it celebrated a 51 per cent surge in profit.
But Plymouth itself has not seen the same boost. ‘Most of the money generated goes out of the city,’ says local campaigner Tony Staunton, who is also the vice chair of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Authorities say that Devonport generates around 10 per cent of Plymouth’s income, but neighbourhoods next to the dockyard remain among the poorest five per cent in the country.
Devonport doesn’t just work on operational nuclear submarines, it is also a ‘graveyard’ for retired ones. Twelve out of the 16 decommissioned submarines at Devonport are still carrying their fuel – effectively a stockpile of nuclear waste.
Over the last 30 years, at least 10 serious radioactive leaks have been documented at Devonport, and chemicals like plutonium, americium and tritium have been found on the Plymouth coastline, including at a wildlife reserve close to the dockyard. Staunton says he has met former dockworkers with cancer who are convinced that their illnesses date back to the time they worked at Devonport, but a ‘culture of secrecy’ about any negative impact of the docks pervades over this military city.
Local authorities have taken steps to prepare for a serious radiation leak at the dockyard, which is within a residential area. An investigation by Declassified UK found that in 2018 the Ministry of Defence distributed 60,900 iodine tablets to schools, emergency services and healthcare settings in local areas.
Nuclear-powered submarines are not only able to carry warheads; they are an essential part of the nuclear warfare infrastructure. And, as the British government jumps with both feet into the nuclear arms race, Devonport is key. The facility is set to receive £4.4 billion (just over $5 billion) in government investment over the next 10 years.
In 2024 the UK spent a larger percentage of its military budget (13 per cent) on nuclear weapons than any other country. The 2025 Strategic Defence Review described them as ‘the bedrock of the UK’s defence and the cornerstone of its commitment to NATO and global security’.
The race is on
As the world becomes more insecure, nuclear-armed states are reaffirming commitments to the most destructive weapons humans have developed. During the first six months of 2025, five nuclear-armed countries were engaged in military hostilities or outright war. And, after decades of decline, the trend of more retired nuclear warheads being dismantled than new ones being deployed looks set to be reversed.
Nearly all of the nine nuclear-armed states (US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) have been busy modernizing and growing their arsenal. Over the past five years global spending on nuclear weapons increased by just over 32 per cent, with the US and UK’s spending rising by 45 and 43 per cent respectively between 2019 and 2023. One year of global nuclear weapons spending could feed 45 million people in danger of famine for 13 years…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered ‘low-yield’ by modern standards. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) estimates that casualties from a major nuclear war between the US and Russia would reach hundreds of millions. The use of less than one per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenal could disrupt the climate and threaten two billion people with starvation.
Escalations in global conflict continue despite the existence of nuclear weapons. ‘This concept of nuclear deterrence is really a faith belief system – that having nuclear weapons is necessary to make sure they’re not used,’ says Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator at ICAN. ‘As long as this theory continues to hold value within the political establishment of nuclear armed states, it’s not possible to get rid of nuclear weapons.’……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Today, as the British government itself admits, ‘the future of strategic arms control … does not look promising’. But civil society has got behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which makes acquiring, proliferating, deploying, testing, transferring, using and threatening to use nukes illegal.
‘TPNW is really significant,’ explains Sanders-Zakre. A nuclear-armed state joining it must agree to a time-bound programme for eliminating its arsenal https://newint.org/arms/2026/nuclear-flashpoints-fallout
Labour panned as nuclear project ‘to cost more than Scotland’s block grant’
THE SNP have hit out at the projected costs for the Labour Government’s
flagship nuclear project. It comes after EDF pushed back the start-up of
the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant again, pushing up the final bill.
The French state energy company said the plant was now expected to cost £35bn
in 2015 prices — or almost £49bn at today’s prices. The project was
costed in 2016 at £18bn at the then-current prices. The SNP have now hit
out at Labour and the party’s push for more nuclear, highlighting that
the Scottish Government’s block grant from Westminster was £47.6 billion
in 2025/2026 – less than the new projected cost.
The SNP have opposed the
creation of new nuclear plants and are able to use planning policy to block
developments, despite energy policy being largely reserved to Westminster.
The Scottish Government instead wishes to focus on renewable developments,
with Scotland’s last nuclear plant, Torness, set to be decommissioned in
2030.
The National 2nd March 2026, https://www.thenational.scot/news/25900166.labour-nuclear-project-to-cost-scotlands-block-grant/
Mendacious Rationales: The Lies Behind Operation Lion’s Roar
The difference here is that neither the US nor Israel are willing to commit ground forces. They will kill key leaders and figures across the Iranian regime, leaving an inchoate resistance against the clerics to seize the day. I
1 March 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/mendacious-rationales-the-lies-behind-operation-lions-roar/
Many in the United States would scarcely identify the difference between Iran and Iraq, both countries based on ancient civilisations so chronologically distant as to be fiction. If not Marvel, it’s not marvellous. But another fiction came into play towards the end of February as the United States and Israel reprised their role as world rogues and crockery breakers by attacking Iran for a second time in less than a year in a joint campaign called Operation Lion’s Roar and Epic Fury. Following the vulgar playbook on regime change used against Iraq in 2003 by the US-led forces, a variation of the same theme is being used against Iran.
The difference here is that neither the US nor Israel are willing to commit ground forces. They will kill key leaders and figures across the Iranian regime, leaving an inchoate resistance against the clerics to seize the day. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has apparently been killed, with US President Donald J. Trump calling him “one of the most evil people in history.” Israel also claims that the opening strikes killed seven senior defence and intelligence officials, including Khamenei’s top security advisor Ali Shamkhani, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and the chief of Iranian military intelligence Saleh Asadi.
The February 28 statement from Trump posted on Truth Social as an 8-minute video declared that the objective of the attack was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This was curious given the previous US-Israeli attacks in June 2025 that had apparently “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.” Then efforts were supposedly made on his part to seek a deal to prevent Iran ever pursuing nuclear weapons. “We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to.”
In this haze of confusion, Trump had concluded that Tehran had, after all, decided to “rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.” Their missile industry would be razed, the navy annihilated, the proxies crippled. Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard would receive total immunity if they laid down their weapons, “or you will face certain death.” As for the unspecified “great proud people of Iran,” they should stay sheltered as the bombing continued. When done, the government “will be yours to take.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement also confirmed the objective of ending “the threat of the Ayatollah regime in Iran.” That regime had domestically repressed its citizens, “instilled fear in the peoples of the region,” created a global terror network, “invested enormous resources to develop atomic bombs and tens of thousands of missiles intended, as it defined it, to erase Israel from the map of the world.” They armed “terrorist proxies.”
Even more stridently, and fanatically than Trump, Netanyahu restated those themes of existential threat and untrustworthiness so characteristic of the wicked Persian. Despite “a decisive blow” being struck against the regime and its proxies last June, “the wounded predator has not ceased its attempts to recover, for the same purpose, to destroy us.” (Evidently not that decisive, then.) Having stated every year for years that Iran would develop the means to destroy Israel within a short time, he came up with another fictional twist: not only were the tyrants “plotting to rebuild their nuclear and missile capabilities,” they were also placing them “underground, where we cannot reach them. If we do not stop them now, they will become invulnerable.”
The tissues of lies in both statements are impressive and incorrigible. Operation Midnight Hammer had seemingly not obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities, suggesting they had been ineffectual, indulgent or incompetent. And why bother keeping the US-Iranian dialogue on Teheran’s nuclear program going if a military solution proved inevitable? For a President who boasts about his ability to make deals, few are being brokered of late.
Both Israel and the US used the same verbal formulae as before: exaggerate the capabilities of Iran to build consensus for an illegal war; exaggerate a military prowess of such biblical force that simply does not exist. Again, there are too many chilling parallels to the pattern followed by the George W. Bush administration leading up to the pre-emptive attack on Iraq in March 2003. Imminent threats were very much part of the hysterical argot then in justifying the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Needing justifications plucked out of thin air, the US government sought propping evidence from the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Tony Blair duly supplied the infamous 2002 dossier with the chilling claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of being ordered to do so. (This nicely supplemented the fabricated claim that Saddam Hussein was also pursuing a nuclear weapons program with the purchase of 500 tonnes of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger.) The key official behind the dossier, the diligent arms expert David Kelly, committed suicide in despairing disgust, having been ordered to include the 45-minute claim. No such weapons were ever found, and a central rationale of the invasion collapsed. The United States, UK, Australia and a motley crew of coalition members were found to be brigands.
There will, no doubt, be some cheer within Iran at these strikes, notably from the young who have suffered at the hands of a clerical, authoritarian regime. Washington’s allies will snivel with coerced approval citing the brutality of Iran’s regime while ignoring breaches of international law they are condoning. (Australia’s response was particularly despicable.) The Shia-Sunni division will be tested, with various US bases and military assets already struck in the Gulf States by a regime trying to survive. The United Nations will continue being treated like a bed-ridden dowager whose influence was from another day, conduct more contemptible even than 2003 when many Western states did, at the very least, show solidarity in rejecting the use of force by the United States and its allies in the absence of a Security Council resolution. In the meantime, American diplomats who open their frontier-stretched mouths claiming interest for peace and negotiations should make everyone reach for the gun.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Own Testimony Resurfaces as Iran War Narrative Escalates
the public record now contains two different emphases from the same official — one under oath, the other amid mounting calls for confrontation.
February 28, 2026 by Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/28/tulsi-gabbards-own-testimony-resurfaces-as-iran-war-narrative-escalates/
As Washington intensifies rhetoric around Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, past sworn testimony from Tulsi Gabbard is resurfacing — and raising uncomfortable questions.
According to a recent Newsweek report, Gabbard testified under oath before Congress in March 2025:
“Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program Khamenei suspended in 2003.”
That statement directly contradicts the renewed claims now circulating in Washington and Tel Aviv suggesting Tehran is on the verge of weaponization.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern amplified the contradiction in a pointed public message addressed to Gabbard:
“Dear Tulsi Gabbard: You testified under oath in March 2025: ‘Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program Khamenei suspended in 2003.’ By your silence now you let yourself become just another female being used.”
The comment underscores growing frustration among critics who argue that intelligence assessments are being selectively interpreted — or politically repurposed — amid escalating U.S.–Israel military action against Iran.
Gabbard later claimed her March testimony was “taken out of context” — though how a direct, sworn statement before Congress could be misinterpreted remains unclear. The words were unambiguous: Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and had not reauthorized the program suspended in 2003.
Yet by June, her tone had shifted.
In subsequent remarks, Gabbard suggested Iran’s nuclear advances posed a growing threat and emphasized enrichment levels and regional escalation rather than the absence of an active weapons program. The pivot — subtle but significant — mirrored the broader shift in Washington’s messaging as tensions intensified.
Whether this reflects new intelligence, political pressure, or strategic recalibration is anyone’s guess. What is clear is that the public record now contains two different emphases from the same official — one under oath, the other amid mounting calls for confrontation.
The 2003 Suspension
The reference in Gabbard’s testimony points to Iran’s halt of its structured nuclear weapons program in 2003, a conclusion long reflected in U.S. intelligence assessments. Even at the height of tensions during prior administrations, intelligence agencies maintained that while Iran expanded uranium enrichment, there was no conclusive evidence of an active weapons program.
That distinction — between enrichment capacity and weaponization intent — has historically marked the dividing line between diplomatic engagement and military confrontation.
Silence Amid Escalation
Gabbard’s earlier statement now stands in tension with the current political climate. Critics argue that if intelligence conclusions have not fundamentally changed, then public silence from officials who previously acknowledged those assessments contributes to a dangerous narrative drift toward war.
Supporters of a harder line against Tehran counter that Iran’s enrichment levels and regional posture justify aggressive containment regardless of formal weaponization status.
But the broader question remains: if sworn testimony established that Iran was not actively building a bomb, what has changed?
As bombs fall and rhetoric sharpens, that question may prove more consequential than any single tweet.
5 March -Online – Reversing nuclearization:
Reversing nuclearization:
From nuclear weapons in Belarus and NATO host countries to a European-Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone
Online: Thursday March 5
11am-12:30pm Eastern Time USA / 5pm-6:30pm CET
Commemorating the anniversaries of the 1954 Bravo nuclear test (Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day) and of Belarus’s 2022 decision to rescind its nuclear-weapon-free status.
Event outline:
The risks of a nuclear war by accident, miscalculation or intent have increased with various escalatory actions, including the US-Israel attack on Iran, deployment by Russia of nuclear weapons to Belarus, announcement by the U.S. President of a possible resumption of nuclear testing, expiration of the New START agreement and various provocative statements regarding possible use of nuclear weapons in current conflicts including in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Human Rights Committee affirmed in October 2018 that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is “incompatible with respect for the right to life” (under the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights) and “may amount to a crime under international law”, and that “all States must refrain from developing, producing, testing, acquiring, stockpiling, selling, transferring and using nuclear weapons.”
This has opened the door to raising the issue of human rights and nuclear weapons policies of specific countries in the Human Rights Council. A number of submissions to the Council on this issue have proposed the establishment of regional nuclear-weapon free zones in the Arctic, Europe and North-East Asia as common security approaches to the issue. These include a submission on Belarus’ nuclear policies.
March 1 is the anniversary of the Bravo Test – the most destructive nuclear weapons test ever conducted by the United States (in 1954). February 27 is the anniversary of the date in 2022 that the Belarus government changed the constitution of Belarus, rescinding its status as a nuclear-weapon-free country.
The March 5 event marks these two days, and revives the proposal originally made by Belarus in 1990 for the establishment of a European Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. This was similar to other proposals for a European NWFZ (see A Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in Europe Concept – Problems – Chances).
Iran Demands Emergency United Nations Action Amid ‘Criminal Aggression’ by US, Israel
February 28, 2026 By Jake Johnson for Common Dreams, https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/28/iran-demands-emergency-united-nations-action-amid-criminal-aggression-by-us-israel/
As US and Israeli bombs fell on Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Ministry on Saturday vowed that the country would defend itself against “criminal aggression” and implored the United Nations Security Council to take emergency action.
The ministry said in a lengthy statement that Saturday’s attacks, which US President Donald Trump characterized as the start of a massive military operation aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government, represent “a violation of Article 2, Paragraph 4, of the United Nations Charter and a clear armed aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“The Islamic Republic of Iran notes the grave duty of the United Nations and its Security Council to take immediate action to confront the violation of international peace and security,” reads the ministry’s statement, which noted that the US and Israeli assault began “in the midst of a diplomatic process.”
“The Iranian people are now proud that they did everything they could to prevent war,” the statement continues. “Now is the time to defend the homeland and confront the enemy’s military aggression. Just as we were ready for negotiations, we are more ready than ever for defense. The armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will respond to the aggressors with authority.”
Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, condemned US-Israeli “aggression against Iran” in a social media post, calling the assault a “violation of the most fundamental rule of international law—the ban on the use of force.”
“All responsible governments should condemn this lawlessness from two countries who excel in shredding the international order,” Saul added.
1 This Month
5 March -Online – Reversing nuclearization:
From nuclear weapons in Belarus and NATO host countries to a European-Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone
11am-12:30pm Eastern Time USA / 5pm-6:30pm CET
of the week – Advocating for a
nuclear free beach – https://www.samuellawrencefoundation.org/
The Samuel Lawrence Foundation advocates for a Nuclear Waste Free Beach at San Onofre, join us and take action!
10 March A LIVE WEBINAR THE REAL EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR POWER
What the Industry Isn’t Telling Us
1:00 PM Mountain, 2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern. Live on the Keepers of the Water Facebook page
18 March Webinar @ 1 PM EST: An Assessment of SMR Projects: The Case of Canada
register for the zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o8BIIOUvQ2ONJR1nta65DQ#/registration
of the week – STOP SMALL MODULAR REACTORS IN CANADA
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