Deceitful nuclear propaganda exposed in ”The Wretched Atom”
The Wretched Atom https://jacobdarwinhamblin.com/books/the-wretched-atom/
Coming in June 2021 from Oxford University Press
A groundbreaking narrative of how the United States offered the promise of nuclear technology to the developing world and its gamble that other nations would use it for peaceful purposes.
After the Second World War, the United States offered a new kind of atom that differed from the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This atom would cure diseases, produce new foods, make deserts bloom, and provide abundant energy for all. It was an atom destined for the formerly colonized, recently occupied, and mostly non-white parts of the world that were dubbed the “wretched of the earth” by Frantz Fanon.
The “peaceful atom” had so much propaganda potential that President Dwight Eisenhower used it to distract the world from his plan to test even bigger thermonuclear weapons. His scientists said the peaceful atom would quicken the pulse of nature, speeding nations along the path of economic development and helping them to escape the clutches of disease, famine, and energy shortfalls. That promise became one of the most misunderstood political weapons of the twentieth century. It was adopted by every subsequent US president to exert leverage over other nations’ weapons programs, to corner world markets of uranium and thorium, and to secure petroleum supplies. Other countries embraced it, building reactors and training experts. Atomic promises were embedded in Japan’s postwar recovery, Ghana’s pan-Africanism, Israel’s quest for survival, Pakistan’s brinksmanship with India, and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear independence.
As The Wretched Atom shows, promoting civilian atomic energy was an immense gamble, and it was never truly peaceful. American promises ended up exporting violence and peace in equal measure. While the United States promised peace and plenty, it planted the seeds of dependency and set in motion the creation of today’s expanded nuclear club.
January 25 Takoma Park Commemorating ‘Nuclear-Free Zone’ with Virtual Film Screening,
Takoma Park Commemorating ‘Nuclear-Free Zone’ with Virtual Film Screening, https://www.sourceofthespring.com/takoma-park/takoma-park-commemorating-nuclear-free-zone-with-virtual-film-screening/
The documentary “follows a community of peace activists, including two Catholic nuns and a Jesuit priest in their eighties, who are willing to go to prison, and even risk death, because of their deeply held conviction that nuclear weapons are immoral and violate international humanitarian law,” according to the film’s website:
Since 1980 activists in lay and religious life have undertaken dramatic Plowshares protests in an effort to raise public consciousness on the growing threat posed by the world’s nuclear weapons. Through their actions the activists seeks to invoke the biblical injunction, “They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares”. This film follows two federal criminal cases against the activists for their protests: the July 2012 break-in at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the largest U.S. stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the 2009 break-in at the Kitsap Bangor U.S. naval base near Seattle. The film follows the activists’ legal efforts to justify their actions under international law and documents efforts at the United Nations to enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and negotiate the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The City of Takoma Park passed its Nuclear-Free Zone legislation in December of 1983, and later established the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Committee: “The Act prohibits work on nuclear weapons, including transportation and storage of such weapons within the City, and prohibits the City from doing business with companies that produce nuclear weapons or their components, with very narrow exceptions.”
According to The Washington Post, in 2012 Takoma Park City Council unanimously voted to grant a waiver to purchase computers from Hewlett-Packard, the first time that a waiver was opposed by the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Committee. “Updated research indicates that Hewlett-Packard (HP) continues to conduct business with the Department of Defense and other federal agencies for cloud services capable of the development, deployment, security, and utilization of nuclear weapons,” the committee stated in its meeting minutes.
A Q&A with filmmaker Helen Young will follow the film screening, which will start at 7 p.m. on January 25th.
Military strategy relying on nuclear weapons – a dangerous myth
 The myth of nuclear power, Financial Express By: fe Features | January 10, 2021 A cogent analysis of why just mere possession of nuclear weapons does not guarantee victory; sound strategy does,…….. ” In National Security and Conventional Arms Race: Spectre of a Nuclear War, Asthana argues that there is no way the Indian military can guarantee a “solution of the Pakistan problem or the China problem” by inflicting a decisive defeat on the nuclear-armed adversaries, frenzied race to import conventional weapons notwithstanding.
Consider these lines in the opening chapter: “We might blunder into a war almost unknowingly because since the past few years, people have collectively started consuming the heady mix of a cleverly manufactured hyper-nationalism and xenophobia. This means that both the people and the rulers have been playing into the hands of populist sentiments and exploit them in turn for electoral benefits… In popular perception, shared by political as well as military leaders, no significance is attached to the fact that both Pakistan and China are nuclear powers. It demonizes them with all the attributes of an evil human being, who will not behave unless they are spanked… Under a delusion that we have somehow, magically become invincible, a large number of Indians seem to be itching for a war.”
Asthana cautions that our weapon acquisition notwithstanding, our invincibility in a nuclear neighbourhood may be a myth. He points out that nobody has so far invented a miraculous weapon anywhere in the world that could ensure a quick, decisive victory in a conventional or nuclear war. Cautioning against the growing trend of politicians exploiting enmity with Pakistan for electoral benefits, he says this has left India with a one-dimensional policy, one which is unrealistic in view of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
India’s Achilles heel, he argues, is that there is no “national war-fighting strategy”………
“In any case, the moment Pakistan feels that it is going to lose a conventional war under the weight of a bigger Indian military, they will have to go nuclear immediately. This is not 1971 and a military defeat now will become an existential crisis for Pakistan as a nation, something they cannot afford at all. A decisive victory in a conventional war, short or long, in a nuclear overhang, is therefore a treacherous fallacy, spelling nothing but doom,” he says. To win any war, Indians, as a people, he asserts will have to be prepared for suffering the horrors and devastations of war. “Our strategic planning has not prepared the people for a nuclear war. Raw valour of troops is no substitute for sound strategy and the national will essential for sustaining great destruction,” he writes. ……..
Asthana concludes that Indian citizens and the political leadership must understand that accepting the nuclear reality is not synonymous with any sign of national impotence.
National Security and Conventional Arms Race: Spectre of a Nuclear War |
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Former US defence secretary urges Biden to give up sole power to launch nuclear weapons
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Biden urged to give up sole power to launch nuclear weapons, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/biden-urged-to-give-up-sole-power-to-launch-nuclear-weapons/news-story/fc90ee663c0db888c82917606b7e685e A former US defence secretary has called on president-elect Joe Biden to reform the system that gives sole control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the president, calling it “outdated, unnecessary and extremely dangerous”.The call from William Perry came the same day House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with the nation’s top military leader about ensuring that an “unhinged” President Donald Trump not be able to launch a nuclear attack in his final days in office.
“Once in office, Biden should announce he would share authority to use nuclear weapons with a select group in congress,” said Dr Perry, who served under Bill Clinton. He was writing in Politico magazine with Tom Collina of the Ploughshares Fund, which advocates for stronger nuclear controls. They said Mr Biden, who takes office on January 20, should also declare that the US would never start a nuclear war and would use the bomb only in retaliation. The piece argues that the current system gives the president — any president — “the godlike power to deliver global destruction in an instant”, an approach the authors call “undemocratic, outdated, unnecessary and extremely dangerous”. Dr Perry, defence secretary from 1994 to 1997, calls Mr Trump “unhinged” and adds: “Do we really think that Trump is responsible enough to trust him with the power to end the world?” American presidents are accompanied at all times by a military aide who carries a briefcase known as “the football” that contains the secret codes and information needed to launch a nuclear strike. Dr Perry and Mr Collina warn that presidents possess the “absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, Trump can unleash hundreds of atomic bombs, or just one. He does not need a second opinion. The defence secretary has no say. Congress has no role.” They then ask: “Why are we taking this risk?” Such vast presidential authority, the article notes, dates from the waning days of World War II, when Harry Truman decided, after the nuclear horror unleashed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, that the power to order the use of atomic weapons should not be left in the hands of the military — that it should be up to the president alone. |
Kim Jong Un signals plans to develop new nuclear weapons
Kim Jong Un signals plans to develop new nuclear weapons. North Korea raises tensions with incoming US administration of Joe Biden. Ft.com Edward White in Seoul JANUARY 9 2021 Kim Jong Un has signalled plans to develop new nuclear weapons and described the US as North Korea’s “biggest enemy”, moves that threaten to raise tensions with US president-elect Joe Biden. The North Korean leader’s comments, made at a rare gathering of top political officials in Pyongyang, marked the dictator’s strongest broadside against Washington since Mr Biden won the presidency in November’s election.
“Our external political activities going forward should be focused on suppressing and subduing the US, the basic obstacle, biggest enemy against our revolutionary development,” Mr Kim said, according to a translation by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. ………. https://www.ft.com/content/b4971c6e-8b89-43b5-93d2-9098d5f229ef
Iran will expel U.N. nuclear inspectors unless sanctions are lifted
Iran will expel U.N. nuclear inspectors unless sanctions are lifted: lawmaker
By Reuters Staff DUBAI (Reuters) 10 Jan 21, – Iran will expel United Nations nuclear watchdog inspectors unless U.S. sanctions are lifted by a Feb. 21 deadline set by the hardline-dominated parliament, a lawmaker said on Saturday.
Parliament passed a law in November that obliges the government to halt inspections of its nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased.
Iran’s Guardian Council watchdog body approved the law on Dec. 2 and the government has said it will implement it….
Nuclear power – a dubious and very costly addition in UK’s energy plan
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Renew Extra 9th Jan 2021, Dave Elliott: The White Paper on modelling UK electricity supply has some very odd things to say: it seems to see nuclear (and carbon capture) as low cost: ‘low-cost solutions at low carbon intensities can only be achieved with a combination of new nuclear and gas CCUS’.
However, it says that the use of hydrogen makes it more flexible, and it admits that ‘it is
technically possible for higher levels of hydrogen-fired generation to also replace nuclear and gas CCUS’, although it adds that ‘this is dependent on the quantity and cost of hydrogen available for generating electricity’. The White paper promised that a review of all existing energy National Policy Statements (NPSs), and presumably their cost and demand assumptions, would be carried out over the next year.
This is important since the old very dated NPSs (which were all designated by the government in 2011) have been used to justify decisions on energy. For example, the old NPSs were sometimes used to justify nuclear expansion on the basis of then expected growth in demand for electricity, whereas it’s actually fallen a lot.
It may help that the White Paper also noted that BEIS is to further upgrade its energy modelling work, going beyond its Mackay Carbon Calculator, its update of the late Prof. David Mackay’s 2011 modelling system.
There certainly are cost issues to face up to up. As far as it has panned out so far, nuclear would add even more costs (including curtailment costs) and doesn’t seem very suited to balancing variable renewables. CCS/CCSU may be similarly expensive and operationally
constrained. But although renewables have got dramatically cheaper and green hydrogen conversion for balancing may do too, there will still be system integration costs. As I noted in a recent post, they have been put, in an Imperial College London review, at €14 per MWh at up to 35%renewable penetration, right up to £30/MWh at up to 85% penetration, well below typical green generation cost. Some of there costs will fall, as the technology improves, and will be offset by efficiency savings, as energy supply and demand balancing gets better, but they are not zero.
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2021/01/hydrogen-flexibility-in-energy-white.html |
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18 Cold War-era nuclear bunkers dotted around Cambridgeshire
These are the 18 Cold War-era nuclear bunkers dotted around Cambridgeshire
The sites can be found all over the county, Cambridgeshire Live, By Harry GoldTrainee Multimedia Reporter, 9 Jan 201,
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Cambridgeshire is home to several Cold-war era nuclear bunkers, according to an online database. There are 18 of them dotted around the county, each with similar design structures. Officially called Royal Observer Corps (ROC) Monitoring Posts, they consist of a 14-foot-deep access shaft, a toilet/store and a monitoring room. The posts were constructed as a result of the Corps’ nuclear reporting role and operated by volunteers during the Cold War between 1955 and 1991. Half the posts were closed in 1968 during a reorganisation of the ROC and several others shut over the next 40 years as a result of structural difficulties. They were prone to issues such as flooding and vandalism, with the final ones decommissioned in 1991 after the break up of the Soviet Union. Here are the ones you can find in Cambridgeshire, according to online database Subterranea Britannica – along with another historic relic from the Cold war era.,,,,,,,,,,, https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/local-news/cold-war-nuclear-bunker-cambridgeshire-19590971 |
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Hitachi pulls plug on Horizon nuclear subsidiary
Hitachi pulls plug on Horizon nuclear offshoot John Collingridge, Sunday January 10 2021, The Sunday Times A project to build a huge nuclear power station in north Wales is to be wound down by the end of March, threatening hopes of its resurrection via a sale.
Japan’s Hitachi has told staff it will shut its Horizon subsidiary, which was to build a £20bn nuclear power plant at Wylfa on Anglesey, by March 31. That could scupper a sale of the site, despite interest from bidders including a US consortium of Bechtel, Southern Company and Westinghouse.
The Wylfa site is seen as one of the…… (subscribers only) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hitachi-pulls-plug-on-horizon-nuclear-offshoot-q0tp0kcpx
Creating jobs and community opportunities -Pickering City Council wants immediate dismantling of nuclear station
Clean Air Alliance (accessed) 8th Jan 2021, Ontario’s new Minister of Finance, Peter Bethlenfalvy, can create 16,000 person-years of employment in Pickering by directing Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to immediately dismantle the Pickering Nuclear Station after its operating licence expires in December 2024.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, immediate dismantling is “the
preferred decommissioning strategy” for nuclear plants. In fact, dismantling is the one area of employment growth in the nuclear industry.
Immediate dismantling will permit most of the 600-acre site to be returned to the local community by 2034 for parkland, recreational facilities, dining, entertainment, housing and other employment uses. That is among the reasons why Pickering City Council unanimously supports having the plant dismantled as “expeditiously as possible” after it is shut down.
Unfortunately, OPG wants to delay dismantling until 2054 to put off its
dismantling costs for 30 years despite the fact that it already has more
than $7.5 billion in its decommissioning and dismantling fund.
An act of love — Beyond Nuclear International
Courts threaten freedom of Russian nature protector
An act of love — Beyond Nuclear International
Lyubov Kudryashova loves nature. Now she may be jailed for defending it
By Jack Cohen-Joppa
In Russian, her name means love. And it’s true. Lyubov Kudryashova loves the broad valley of Russia’s Tobol River, where it meanders out of Kazakhstan into the Kurgan Oblast. Her grandfather is buried there, she was born there, and she’s raised three sons there. As far as she knows, her ancestors have always lived there.
There, below the southern Urals, frigid continental winters give way to spring floods that inundate a landscape of oxbow lakes, wetlands, forests and fields. The waters sustain a large aquifer that Russia recognizes as a strategic reserve of fresh water.
“We, native people of the land, are against a barbaric attitude towards nature,” she says. “But our voices are too low.”
Which is why the passion of this campaigning environmentalist and entrepreneur has been met with fabricated charges of encouraging terrorism via the internet. She’s now on trial in a military court in Yekaterinburg, six hours away from her small town.
But Lyubov Kudryashova will not be spurned. “My ecological activity is going to continue. Well, I guess till the day the unjust court could takes away my freedom.”
In 2017, the government awarded an operating license for borehole leeching of uranium to Dalur, a uranium mining subsidiary of the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom. The license to tap the Dobrovolnoye deposit around the village of Zverinogolovskoye condemned the very farmland Kudryashova’s father managed when she would accompany him as a child.
Dalur has two other leaky in-situ uranium projects in the Kurgan.
Many Tobol Valley residents feared environmental disaster when they learned that hundreds of exploratory wells would be drilled through the aquifer into the mineral deposit lying beneath it, without any public environmental review. Borehole leeching would eventually involve drilling thousands of wells and the injection of a million tons of sulfuric acid over 20-30 years, then withdrawing the dissolved minerals and chemically extracting the uranium.
Several times, activists tried to start a referendum and demand an independent environmental review, but met only refusals from the local officials.
Last fall, environmentalists surveyed some of Dalur’s other boreholes in Kurgan and documented much higher radiation levels than permitted. Despite the concerns, construction began on an in-situ leaching pilot plant and the huge clay-lined “mud pits” needed to receive the massive volume of toxic, acidified sludge produced in the process.
Beginning in 2017, Kudryashova was involved in the legal case against the Russian Federation over its refusal to conduct an environmental impact assessment before awarding the license to develop the mine.
That year, she also co-founded the Public Monitoring Fund for the Environmental Condition and the Population Welfare with the regional branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. One month later, a judge of the Kurgan Regional Court issued an order giving the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) authority to wiretap her telephone.
The Fund publishes information on the environmental impact of Dalur’s mining activity. Kudryashova writes, “Shortly after the completion of the case in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the registration of the environmental fund, a hidden judgment of another court was rendered that allowed the FSB to begin wiretapping my phone and, I believe, begin to look for fictitious crimes in order to stop my work.
“I guess money is more important than the radioactive contamination of land,” she observed.
So it was that on January 29, 2019, armed men led by an FSB captain broke into her family’s home and spent the day searching it. That summer the FSB got a local court to involuntarily commit Kudryashova to the Kurgan District Psychiatric Hospital for most of the month of July. She was kept from speaking with family or others outside without permission of the agency.
Then in March 2020, the FSB charged Kudryashova with 12 counts of “public justification of terrorism using the Internet” based on a specious forensic analysis of posts on the social network VKontakte, which, according to Kudryashova, never belonged to her page. The actual source of those posts remains unknown because the protocol and the DVD-R capturing those posts show evidence of fabrication and forgery. And at the most recent session of her trial in late December, a CD-R the defense had presented to the court for evidence was found to have been erased by an FSB operative.
Prosecutors say she advocated for violent overthrow of the constitutional order by re-posting memes with such seditious phrases as, “The fate of Russia is determined by each of us, what you personally or I do, then Russia will. A correct position can only be revolutionary” and “If the nation is convinced that the ruling power in the state is directed not at the development of its cultural, economic and other needs, but, on the contrary, at trampling them, then it is not only the right, but also the duty of the nation to overthrow that power and establish one corresponding to the national interests of the people.”
Kudryashova writes, “Nonviolent ecological activism, in the understanding of the rulers of my country, is a crime. That’s why prisons are full of people who wanted to protect nature, but those who harmed it are free… Ecological crimes against present and future generations are not subject to the judgement of a military court.
“I’m 55 years old and my life is not as important as the preservation of nature. My duty and responsibility are to make a small contribution in a great cause — to stop violence against nature and people. The price of atomic energy is the life of future generations.”
Her trial is in the Central District Military Court of Yekaterinburg, where the next hearing is scheduled for 28-29 January, 2021. Agora International Human Rights Group and the Memorial civil rights society in Russia have provided an attorney and other support for Kudryashova.
Letters in support of Lyubov Kudryashova and seeking dismissal of the charges against her should be addressed to the chair of the court collegium examining the case, Judge Sergei Gladkih, st. Bazhova 85, Yekaterinburg, Russia 62005, or by email to opo.covs.svd@sudrf.ru. Refer to Case №: 2-42/2020, Lyubov Kudryashova.
Jack Cohen-Joppa is the co-editor of The Nuclear Resister, the co-founder of the eponymous organization and co-winner with Felice Cohen-Joppa of the 2020 Nuclear Free Future Award in the category of Education.
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