Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent…..
Tom Dispatch, JULY 30, 2023
Yes, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, would kill staggering numbers of people and be an eerily (if all too grimly) appropriate ending to the war that started with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, by August 1945, had resulted in the saturation bombing of 64 Japanese cities.
The scientist who led the team responsible for creating the bombs that destroyed those two cities (and for the initial nuclear test in New Mexico that, as we only recently learned, spread fallout over 46 states, Canada, and Mexico), the 41-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later borrow a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, to describe his mood at the time: “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” And eerily enough, the use of the weapon that would prove to be the second way humanity found to destroy our planet — the first, climate change, was already in effect but not yet known — would find all too few in the U.S. government hesitant to use it at that time. As historian John Dower would put it in his memorable book Cultures of War,
“The policy makers, scientists, and military officers who had committed themselves to becoming death… never seriously considered not using their devastating new weapon. They did not talk about turning mothers into cinders or irradiating even the unborn. They brushed aside discussion of alternative targets, despite the urging of many lower-echelon scientists that they consider this. They gave little if any serious consideration to whether there should be ample pause after using the first nuclear weapon to give Japan’s frazzled leaders time to respond before a second bomb was dropped.”
They just did it, twice, and the world changed radically. Almost 80 years later, at a moment when a global leader is once again evidently considering the possible use of what are now called “tactical nuclear weapons” (but can be several times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Oppenheimer is having his moment in the sun (or is it a blaze of atomic light?) in a film that, to the surprise of many, has hit the big time in an almost nuclear fashion. And as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung reminds us while considering that three-hour odyssey of a film, what “Oppie” began then has by now become a full-scale nuclear-industrial complex on a planet where ultimate destruction, it often seems, always lurks just around the corner. Tom
The Profiteers of Armageddon
Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”
These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”
Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”
Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.
The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war…………………..
The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”
Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.
Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.
The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
……………………………………………………. According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author ofAtomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillionfor nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.
Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.
And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.
Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby
The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.
A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.
The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. ……………………….. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.
Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.
The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.
Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.
A New Nuclear Reckoning?
Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.
Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”
On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.
In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake. https://tomdispatch.com/the-profiteers-of-armageddon/
J Robert Oppenheimer advocated for the regulation of nuclear energy after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and attempted to communicate with Jawaharlal Nehru about this in 1951.
Director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has once again put the spotlight on one of history’s most controversial figures, and by Nolan’s own estimation, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, a American endeavor which resulted in the creation of the world’s first atomic bombs.
Oppenheimer often spoke about the guilt that he feltafter two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dedicated the rest of his days to advocating for the regulation of nuclear power. He refused to participate in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and urged his government to tread very carefully. These themes are prominently explored in Nolan’s film, which ends with a guilt-ridden Oppenheimer having a vision of the world’s destruction.
And according to writer Nayantara Sahgal, Oppenheimer attempted to communicate with then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the US government’s efforts to build a weapon ‘far more deadly than the atomic bomb’, and begged Nehru to not trade all-important thorium with the Americans in exchange for the wheat that India needed at the time. In her book Nehru: Civilizing A Savage World, Sahgal, who is Nehru’s niece, reproduced a letter that received in 1951 from her mother and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was serving at the time as India’s envoy in Moscow, Washington and London.
In the letter, she told him about a conversation she had with Oppenheimer, who’d rung her up from Princeton, and told her that he had ‘something very urgent to communicate’ and was sending an emissary, Amiya Chakravarti, who brought the ‘chilling message that the United States was developing a weapon far more deadly than the atom bomb.’ For this purpose, the US needed access to India’s ‘inexhaustible supply’ of thorium, and was prepared to offer wheat in exchange. Oppenheimer begged of India not to sell any thorium to the US voluntarily or through pressure, but Nehru wouldn’t have done it either way, as he ‘abhorred nuclear weapons and strove passionately to seek their total elimination’, as Sahgal wrote.
Three Ukrainian drones have attacked Moscow in the early hours on Sunday, Russian authorities said, injuring one person and prompting a temporary closure of traffic in and out of one of four airports around the Russian capital.
Key points:
The Russian Defence Ministry referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime”
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the attack “insignificantly damaged” the outsides of two buildings in the Moscow city district
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force said the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned on Sunday that “war” was coming to Russia after the attack.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process,” Mr Zelenskyy said on a visit to the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
It was the fourth such attempt at a strike on the capital region this month and the third in a week, fuelling concerns about Moscow’s vulnerability to attacks as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its 18th month.
The Russian Defence Ministry referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and said three drones targeted the city.
One was shot down in the surrounding Moscow region by air defence systems and two others were jammed. Those two crashed into the Moscow business district…………………………………………………………………
Without directly acknowledging that Ukraine was behind the attack on Moscow, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force said that the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine………………………………….
Mr Ihnat also referenced a drone attack on Russian-occupied Crimea overnight.
Moscow announced on Sunday that it had shot down 16 Ukrainian drones and neutralised eight more with an electronic jamming system. There were no casualties, officials said.
In Ukraine, the air force reported that it had destroyed four Russian drones above the country’s Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The central question now is whether the US build-up is transforming Australia into a base for offensive US operations into Asia.
James Curran, Finsncial Review, International Editor, Jul 30, 2023
The AUSMIN talks over the weekend continued a trend since the late 1990s of tying Australia more tightly into both American grand strategy and war planning in Asia.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up.
The unnamed enemy is China. A London based journalist reported from Townsville that the latest exercise was occurring against a “changing security landscape in which China grows evermore belligerent”. Apparently, he didn’t see any need to give evidence for this dubious claim. The defence minister, Richard Marles said Talisman Sabre provided an opportunity to practice “high-end” warfare. Just how participants such as PNG, Tonga and Fiji can do this is not clear. In a war, their role would be to let the US operate from their territory.
During the last exercise, the ABC’s national television news each night ran a video of the spy ships across the top of the screen. It hasn’t gone that far this time, but has given extensive coverage to the spy ships without explaining what harm they might be doing.
The participants don’t seem alarmed. During the last exercise, an ABC journalist asked an American soldier on an amphibious ship if he was worried about the presence of Chinese spy ships. He replied, “No, we do it to them and they do it to us”. An Australian military spokesman said this time that it had taken the appropriate precautions to ensure the spy ships don’t cause any harm. A core reason is that all signals traffic is encrypted. The reality is that the US and its allies conduct electronic intelligence gathering on a much greater scale than China can. The Pine Gap satellite ground station in central Australia, for example, generates billions of pieces of intelligence every day. This did not stop the ABC defence correspondent Andrew Green commenting on the activities of one Chinese spy ship, “If knowledge is power, China has just become more powerful”.
The RAAF’s P8A Poseidon electronic spy planes pose an aggressive threat to China by dropping sonar buoys in the South China Sea where its submarines are based on Hainan island close to the mainland. The small buoys contain an underwater microphone to pick up the sounds from submarines and relay the data to the spy planes conducting surveillance for potential military use.
Australia’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the same as if Chinese planes dropped sonar buoys outside the Fremantle base for Australian and US submarines. But the Chinese planes don’t do this. …………………………………………………………………………………
Certainly, Australian media would consider it provocative if China developed a long-range air capability and dropped sonar buoys off the submarine base at Fremantle. Albanese portrays the co-operation between the US and Australia to conduct potentially aggressive military activities in the South China Sea as part of the struggle between autocracies and democracy. Unfortunately, the draconian nature of some of Australia’s national security laws, deprive Australia of the right to call itself a liberal democracy.
Similar problems arise with Albanese’s iron grip on the Labor party’s federal conference in Brisbane on August 17-19. Although he describes Labor as a democratic party, he has effectively banned any parliamentarians attending the conference from supporting motions in favour of scrapping the AUKUS pact or the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Albanese has also banned any parliamentarian from supporting the existing conference policy of making it a priority to recognise of Palestine as a state. https://johnmenadue.com/australian-medias-alarm-over-chinese-spy-ship-highlights-stark-double-standard/
The spectre of an international nuclear waste dump in Australia hangs over AUKUS and what this secretive agreement commits Australia to. Does it oblige us simply to dispose of spent nuclear reactors from our submarines if and when we get them? Or is there a hidden agenda whereby we also take the expired nuclear reactors from US and British submarines? If so, could it lead to Australia becoming a dump for high-level waste from civil nuclear reactors around the world?
Crikey.com is the latest to set speculative hares running. On 26 July it published an article by David Hardaker claiming the Albanese government had struck a secret deal under AUKUS to build a high-grade nuclear waste facility in Australia. Crikey claimed the deal has echoes that resound from 26 years ago.
Indeed it does. In December 1998, a proposal was made by Jim Voss, an American nuclear evangelist, who through his company Pangea proposed constructing an international nuclear waste repository on Billa Kalina, a pastoral lease near Roxby Downs in South Australia. Roxby Downs is a town built to service the giant BHP uranium, gold, copper and silver mine at Olympic Dam. Water for the town and the mine comes from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
As I wrote in Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions (Scribe 2003 and 2022), Voss’s proposal was leaked to the public by Friends of the Earth. Pangea was flying a kite on behalf of Anglo-American and possibly other nuclear interests. It made the unassailable observation that there is a real risk of nuclear weapons proliferation through the theft of plutonium or highly enriched uranium from nuclear power programs. Voss proposed a nuclear waste dump in Western Australia to take about a quarter of the high-level waste from the 445 commercial power reactors in 30 countries around the globe.
This, he claimed, would achieve several things – support international efforts to reduce nuclear weapons proliferation, further the objectives of nuclear disarmament, strengthen Australia’s relations with the United States, protect the global environment, and support the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations. How all this would happen he didn’t say.
Such a repository has also been a gleam in the eyes of the Australian nuclear lobby and several politicians for many years. In 2006, John Howard’s Nuclear Review sought to expand Australia’s nuclear footprint by making nuclear power ‘a practical option’ in Australia’s electricity production. He also envisioned an international nuclear waste dump somewhere in the Outback. In 2014, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, supported by then South Australian Premier Adam Giles, proposed to put a high-level nuclear waste depository at Muckaty Station north of Tennant Creek in South Australia. Hawke said the money earned would be of immense value to indigenous communities.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott had similar aspirations. So did Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2015 suggested that Australia should not just export uranium oxide (U3O8), but enrich it, process it into fuel rods, retain Australian ownership by leasing the rods abroad, and take them back as spent fuel for permanent disposal in Australia. That way, he said, Australia retained ownership of the uranium, preventing it from being diverted into clandestine weapons programs.
None of these proposals resulted in practical action. Except for qualified acceptance of the export of Australian yellowcake under safeguards to approved civil nuclear energy companies, the Australian public maintained an aversion to all things nuclear. The earlier careless disposal of nuclear tailings at Radium Hill, the contemptuous and ineffective clean-up of highly toxic plutonium in the aftermath of Britain’s nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga in the 1950s, and French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1990s, all consolidated Australians’ aversion.
Following negative public reactions to his proposal, Voss quietly closed his Pangea office In January 2002 and retreated to Europe. But several years later, he was given renewed hope.
In 2016, the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission under former South Australian governor Kevin Scarce concluded that although nuclear energy in Australia would not be economically viable for the immediate future, research should continue regarding the feasibility of an international spent fuel repository.
Voss returned to Australia in 2022, and took over the optimistically-named Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation in Melbourne. Safe disposal of nuclear waste remained on his agenda. According to Crikey, Voss reckons very deep boreholes of around three to five kilometres could safely incarcerate spent fuel from the reactors of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines for thousands of years.
Could such a storage facility attract US or British attention? Could their governments pressure Australia to take their own submarine spent fuel reactors as well as those of Australia?
They have strong motives to do so. Around 90 British spent fuel submarine reactors are said to be lying around Devonport Docks in Plymouth and the Rosyth dock in Fife, safeguarded only at huge expense. The US Navy has many more in open trenches at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. There are plans to process and store their transuranic elements somewhere permanently, but the Yukka Mountain Deep Geological repository in Nevada was de-funded in 2010, and has been subject to complex political manoeuvring ever since.
Given Albanese’s and Marles’ supine acceptance of US conditions to keep the reactors from our own submarines after their service lives, they could also easily be leant on to take US and UK used submarine reactors as well.
Could this in turn lead to Voss’s grand vision of Australia becoming a spent fuel repository for the international nuclear industry? Since we cannot even decide on the location of a repository for low-level nuclear waste from hospitals and materials testing laboratories, let alone places for intermediate and high-level waste, such an expansion seems a pipe dream. But we must not under-estimate the persistence of the Australian nuclear industry or its backers in Federal and State parliaments and in the Murdoch press.
Our first president in his farewell address warned us about three things: debt, political parties and foreign entanglements. Few now would doubt the prescient wisdom of the first two warnings, but we have also become entrapped in the third. Most notably we are forced by a declining Russia and a rising China to engage in a dangerous game of nuclear deterrence.
George Washington likely could not have envisioned a world in which his country was threatened with destruction either intentionally or accidentally by ballistic missiles launched from a foreign country thousands of miles away. Despite the new nature of the threats there may still be a measure of wisdom to be distilled from his advice. It is unlikely he would engage China in a destructive war over Taiwan although he might well provide them with the weapons to defend themselves. The problem with nuclear weapons would be more complicated and the only thing we can know for sure is that Washington would do what he perceived to be in his country’s best interest.
What is his country’s best interest? As we near the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the instant death of 150,000 people, we should take pause. United Nations general secretary Antonio Guterres warned us over a year ago that that we are one accident or miscalculation away from disaster.
The Power 5 nuclear weapon states: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States jointly stated over a year ago that “a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought.” Yet all the nuclear weapon states are renewing and trying to enhance their weapons in an ever-increasing cycle of ratcheting up that undermines stability and benefits no one. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said after the Cuban Missile Crisis “we lucked out.” Only good luck prevented a nuclear war and to depend on continued good luck, as the risks increase, is magical thinking better suited for children’s books of fairy tales, than as part of national defense policy.
We must tear down the metaphorical wall between the soothing idea of security through nuclear deterrence and the reality of the cataclysmic threat that nuclear weapons pose. The U.S. must lead the way and work with the authoritarian states, convincing them that it is in everyone’s best interest to maintain security without the ever-present threat of global annihilation.
The United Nations’ Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, TPNW, in force since January 2021, is the best hope to begin the multi-generational trust building that will allow the required rigid verification regimes. Pursuing the path to global elimination of nuclear weapons is the only way to free ourselves from this dreadful foreign entanglement.
Although the total elimination of nuclear weapons is the ultimate solution there are things that can be done right now to reduce the risk of catastrophe. There is a grassroots movement endorsed by hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and municipal and state governments. Back from the Brink — preventnuclearwar.org — has four additional actions that can reduce risk and encourage our adversaries to follow.
The U.S. should have a No First Use policy. Using nuclear weapons first against a nonnuclear weapon state would merit world condemnation; using them against a nuclear weapon state would bring devastating retaliation. The second and third actions are linked. The U.S. should take nukes off high alert status and eliminate sole presidential authority to launch. Only Congress can declare war and loitering nuclear-armed submarines virtually undetectable allow that option. Finally, many former military leaders including former Secretary of Defense William Perry have spoken against replacing the entire U.S. arsenal. The ground-based ICBMs are “sitting ducks” virtually inviting a first strike by a deranged tyrant.
It is also important to remember that the military industrial political complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about is often disingenuous touting weapon systems for profit that do not make us safer. U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 77 introduced by Representative McGovern endorses the Back from the Brink campaign and already has 34 cosponsors. A companion bill should be introduced in the senate. The grace of public pressure by “we the people” can force our government to adopt a less insane nuclear policy.
I feel that a real leader, like Washington, would have the audacity, like presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, who made great progress ending the cold war, to pursue this path.
The UK government’s ambition to more than triple Britain’s nuclear power generation capacity by 2050 badly lacks of a strategic plan to achieve it, according to a report published on Monday.
The “stretching” government target on nuclear energy is the right direction but ministers need to be clear on how they propose to get there in order to encourage investment, MPs on the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee said.
Their report is the latest criticism of the government over its progress towards meeting the UK’s net zero carbon emissions goal by 2050. The Climate Change Committee, which advises ministers, said in June that the UK’s progress on cutting emissions was “worryingly slow”.
In 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson announced that the government wanted the UK to have about 24 gigawatts of nuclear power generation capacity by 2050 — supplying about a quarter of the country’s electricity. That compares to less than 7GW now.
………………………..It highlighted continuing uncertainty over, among other things, what mix of nuclear technologies the government intends to meet the target and the shape of state support
The MPs said: “Witnesses to our inquiry characterised the government’s energy security strategy, published in April 2022, as more of a ‘wish list’ than a strategy to achieve those ambitions.” The committee called on government to develop a “comprehensive nuclear strategic plan” by the end of this parliament. …………………..
The energy department highlighted this month’s launch of Great British Nuclear, a government body to oversee nuclear development “which will help generate billions for the UK economy and support thousands of jobs”. It added: “We have already made clear we will publish a nuclear road map . . . https://www.ft.com/content/c76a1d8b-248e-4bbb-9802-5a99bb8139c5
The space race has been revived, but this time, the goal post has been shifted much further – to Mars. As recent technological advancements promise to open new horizons of exploration, NASA plans to cut the travel time to Mars with a nuclear-powered spacecraft.
A trip to Mars currently takes approximately seven months, covering a staggering 300-million-mile journey. NASA, in collaboration with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now proposes an ambitious plan that hinges on the promise of nuclear thermal propulsion technology to reduce this duration significantly.
DRACO spacecraft is nuclear-powered
NASA aims to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft, known as DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), into Earth’s orbit either by late 2025 or early 2026. The spacecraft, under construction by Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense company, will serve as a testbed for this groundbreaking technology.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that this technology “would allow humans to travel in deep space at record speed.” However, it remains unclear by how much the nuclear thermal propulsion technology can decrease the travel time.
…………………………………………………………………. The history of NASA’s interest in nuclear propulsion dates back over six decades. The concept was first explored in the 1960s when Wernher von Braun, a pioneer of rocket technology, advocated for a Mars mission utilizing a nuclear propulsion system. Unfortunately, budgetary constraints and shifting priorities resulted in the abandonment of this vision in 1972
But with the dawn of the new space age, NASA’s pursuit of the Red Planet has been rekindled. In collaboration with the US government, the space agency aims to expedite progress with the DRACO nuclear thermal rocket program.
“The ability to accomplish leap-ahead advances in space technology through the DRACO nuclear thermal rocket program will be essential for more efficiently and quickly transporting material to the Moon and eventually, people to Mars,” commented Dr Stefanie Tompkins, director at DARPA………………………………………………………………………………………………
More about Mars…………………….
Size
Mars is about half the size of Earth but has the same amount of dry land. It is much colder than Earth, with temperatures ranging from -195 degrees F in winter at the poles to 70 degrees F in summer near the equator. Mars has the largest dust storms in the solar system, capable of covering the entire planet and lasting for months.
Atmosphere
The planet’s atmosphere is very thin, composed mainly of carbon dioxide (95%), with traces of nitrogen and argon. It lacks a magnetic field, which on Earth serves to protect us from harmful solar radiation. As a result, the surface of Mars is exposed to higher levels of radiation, which can be a challenge for human exploration and potential colonization.
………………………….... Potential for life on Mars
The possibility of liquid water in the past, and thus the potential for life, has made Mars a prime target for future human exploration. The planned missions to Mars, such as NASA’s Artemis program and SpaceX’s Starship project, aim not only to land humans on Mars but also to establish a sustainable colony, marking a significant leap in our exploration of the cosmos. https://www.earth.com/news/could-a-nuclear-powered-spacecraft-shorten-the-trip-to-mars/
The Biden administration announced a $345 million weapons package for Taiwan on Friday, the first tranche in a total of $1 billion the U.S. has allotted to be transferred directly from Pentagon stockpiles to the island this year.
The move is sure to anger China as Washington has been trying to rebuild relations with Beijing. Senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, recently visited China, but the outreach has done little to quell tensions over a range of issues, from U.S. support to Taiwan to Beijing’s spy balloon program…………………..
The package marks the first time the U.S. has used new authority from Congress to transfer military equipment directly from Pentagon inventory to Taiwan. The transfer is done under the Presidential Drawdown Authority, the same mechanism Washington uses to send weapons to Ukraine………………………………………..
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers in May that a presidential drawdown package was in the works for Taiwan, but it’s taken weeks of additional work before the aid could be officially announced. Among other challenges, DOD had to work through an “accounting error” that forced officials finalizing packages for Ukraine and Taiwan to recalculate the value of equipment that was being sent………….. more https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/u-s-300million-weapons-taiwan-00108811
What folly! Just as a dam necessary for cooling nuclear waste at Europe’s biggest nuclear power complex is blown up, members of the Connecticut legislature pass a bill that includes promotion of dangerous outmoded nuclear power.
Senate Bill 7 creates a “Council for Advancing Nuclear Energy Development” specifically packed with six positions for people who work in the nuclear energy industry. Their mission will be to discuss “advancements that are occurring in nuclear energy development.” They’ll study “small modular reactors, advanced nuclear reactors, [and] fusion energy facilities.”
Rather than seek “advancement,” we should be figuring out how to phase out this technology. We see by the Ukraine example that parties at war do not respect what one would think would be totally obvious, the need to do nothing to harm the safety of nuclear power plants. Not that we expect warfare to break out in the U.S., but this country should lead in best practices so that countries where war is a lot more likely won’t go down the nuclear path and risk huge releases of nuclear contamination that spread world-wide.
Realize that the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 led to thousands of fatalities. In Ukraine alone 35,000 women have received compensation for spouses who died because of the disaster. And that’s only the numbers from Ukraine. High levels of radiation covered southern Belarus too, but the government there has never released its statistics.
Another section of the Connecticut bill would classify nuclear power as a “Class 1 renewable energy source.” That would allow the owner of a new nuclear facility to sell renewable “energy credits,” another dubious idea. Rather than limit the use of polluting fuels, the idea is for “the market” to take care of things. Grand, let’s rely on the same market whose mindless profit seeking got us hooked on fossil fuels in the first place.
The new council will study ways to “promote nuclear energy development, expansion and research” in Connecticut. What won’t be studied is the problem of importation of Russian uranium that is used to generate nuclear power. Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by U.S. companies to buy raw and enriched uranium from Russia. Presumably Connecticut nuclear power companies are no different.
Reuters reports that the U.S. power industry relies on Russia and its allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for roughly half of the uranium powering its nuclear power plants. Why not respond to a petition about this and study how to stop relying on a fuel that enriches the Russian dictator?
On May 19 the Mirror published Jan Ellen Spiegel’s piece headlined, “Advocates searching for any kind of legislative win on environment.” Obviously, some things moved forward this session, but is there anything that’s going to have a major impact on the immense problem of our climate emergency?
On June 6 it was noted that last month carbon dioxide levels measured at the federal government’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii reached concentrations of 424 parts per million. That’s far, far higher than the 350 ppm that climate scientists believe necessary for long term functioning of human civilization. Sure it was probably at 424 ppm before, but that was 4 million years ago!
Governor Lamont should veto SB 7. Then call a special session to pass a revised SB 7 clean of plans for more nuclear power. After doing that stay in session and spend time passing blockbuster legislation that will provide leadership for a country teetering on a climate precipice.
Sir John Rose, the former chief executive of Rolls-Royce, is calling on the Government to back British nuclear technology developed by the engineering giant. Rolls is spearheading a project to design a fleet of mini power plants – known as SMRs or small modular reactors – which have become a key part of the UK’s long-term energy strategy. Ministers have already put more than £200 million of public money into the project.
But, rather than backing Rolls, the Government has launched a competition to select a provider, which will pit the FTSE 100 flagship against foreign rivals. Sir John, who led the company from 1996 to 2011, has described the move as ‘depressing’. He warned that by not throwing its support behind Rolls-Royce, Ministers risked killing off a potentially valuable stream of export income and missing out on highly skilled jobs. Rolls has previously said that if it won the contract, it could create 40,000 UK jobs by 2050 and boost the economy by £52 billion. A deal would also benefit suppliers and potentially turn the country into a global hub for nuclear technology. Rose described the competition as ‘a good example’ of Government failure to provide the support British business needs. ‘The probability of achieving export success is vanishingly small if the producer is not supported by its Government,’ he said.
J. Robert Oppenheimer—now the subject of a Christopher Nolan-directed biopic—shaped the modern world. The American scientist helped usher in the nuclear age, along with all the destruction it wrought. In this edition of Flash Points, we revisit the legacy of the “father of the atomic bomb.”—Chloe Hadavas
There’s a scene in the hit movie “Oppenheimer” that has a hidden St. Louis connection.
As J. Robert Oppenheimer gathers his group of Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, he lets them in on a secret. They don’t have enough uranium or plutonium to test a potential atomic bomb, even if they figure out how to create one.
Sitting on the desk in front of him are two glass containers — a large fish bowl and a smaller brandy snifter. One by one, Oppenheimer drops marbles into the glass — plink, plink, plink — marking the growth in processing the deadly elements.
The character doesn’t mention St. Louis in the movie. But the city is where some of that initial uranium was developed. And after World War II, St. Louis became a major source of the uranium processing for missiles during the Cold War arms race.
In the Christopher Nolan-directed movie, the scientists celebrate when the final marble plinks into the glass bowl to show they have enough uranium for their task, much as they celebrate when the bomb test is successful. They celebrate again when the bomb is dropped, first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and ending the war.
The celebrations are muted, at least for Oppenheimer and many of the scientists, once they realize the impact of what they — and the politicians they serve — have done.
The story reverberates today.
Once every generation, it seems, members of Congress realize all over again that the people of our region — the workers who toiled at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works plants, and the folks who grew up in areas where some of that nuclear waste was buried, such as along Coldwater Creek in north St. Louis County — suffered serious maladies for their role in the war effort.
Three generations of activists — Kay Drey, Denise Brock and the co-founders of Just Moms STL, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel — have sounded alarm bells about the damage that the processing of nuclear material and its waste had on people.
Like the story of Oppenheimer, it’s one that has to be told over and over again because the legacy of the Manhattan Project is ongoing. It’s a story of patriotism and death; of moral ambiguity and the pain of unintended consequences.
So it was in late May, when I was at the Weldon Spring Interpretive Center for the rededication of a memorial that honors workers who died from maladies related to the processing of nuclear materials. The remodeled museum sits beside a massive pile of gray stone, piled high like so many marbles in a glass jar, protecting future generations from the nuclear waste buried there.
Veterans who attended the memorial were thanked for their service. Family members of the workers waved American flags. But the Rev. Gerry Kleba, a Catholic priest, also reminded folks of the somber reason for the occasion. He recounted the estimated 200,000 deaths in Japan, and the local deaths from various illnesses. He repeated the quote that haunted Oppenheimer and was repeated in the recent movie: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
This month, there was another event at Weldon Spring, this one with the Just Moms STL crowd. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, pushed for a bill — also supported by Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat — to create a new flow of compensation for St. Louis families who have suffered because of the city’s connection to the nuclear weapons program. The push comes on the heels of recent reporting from The Missouri Independent, The Associated Press, and MuckRock, reinforcing what Drey has argued for more than a generation: the government knew it was poisoning the Earth, and workers and residents, in its rush to build weapons.
Who pays the price?
That’s a question that tortured Oppenheimer. It’s the question before Congress again and a new generation of St. Louisans, learning about the city’s past, buried under a pile of rocks that sits as a monument to the past.
FORTUNE, BY STEPHANIE COOKE, July 29, 2023 Since the turn of the millennium, at least $50 billion has been spent on a frantic effort to create a new Golden Age for nuclear energy in the U.S. Billions more are being lavished on an even more desperate effort to launch small reactors as supposedly safer, cheaper alternatives to yesteryear’s elephant-sized versions. Most of the money comes from ratepayers and taxpayers, accompanied by an avalanche of public relations that rivals the 1950s “Atoms for Peace” campaign with its claims of “too cheap to meter” electricity.
So far, the effort has produced little in tangible assets: roughly one gigawatt of capacity from the Watts Bar-2 reactor completed after decades of on-and-off-again construction and the promise of 2 GW from the long-delayed Plant Vogtle in Georgia. So far, not a single molecule of CO2 emissions has been avoided by a new reactor, and the primary beneficiaries are not the people who paid but publicly-owned utilities, reactor design companies, and PR and law firms. They are part of a chorus of advocacy groups and government agencies, led by the Department of Energy (DOE), advancing the idea that low-carbon nuclear is essential to any long-term climate change solution.
The story is selling well but the push for more and more money—in direct subsidies, ratepayer financing, and government grants or loans–has a dark side. To cite just a few examples, former state officials and utility executives in Illinois and Ohio face lengthy prison terms for bribery schemes linked to subsidies for unprofitable nuclear plants. In South Carolina, two former Scana executives received prison sentences after pleading guilty to criminal charges in 2020 and 2021 over a nuclear project that ultimately collapsed. Two Westinghouse executives also charged are facing a similar fate, with one still awaiting trial in October.
When it comes to costs and schedules, the lack of honesty surrounding nuclear projects is often breathtaking. In Georgia, where two Westinghouse reactors at Vogtle have been under construction since 2009, only one is completed and is now struggling to achieve commercial operation after multiple unplanned reactor and turbine trips, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission staff testimony. That testimony also included allegations that utility executives have been providing “materially inaccurate” cost estimates over the project’s life. Vogtle’s estimated total $33 billion cost, as outlined in the testimony, versus $13.3 billion originally estimated makes it the most expensive power plant ever built in the United States. Most of the tab is being footed by ratepayers, with the US taxpayer, via DOE, providing $12 billion in loans.
And still, the messaging that nuclear is a must for reducing emissions goes on at a fever pitch. But the message is distorted: The industry cannot deliver what is needed. The U.S. lost its industrial base, including heavy forging capacity, decades ago–and the costs of a major nuclear buildout could now be in the trillions.
Moreover, the billions currently being spent on nuclear are crowding out viable, less costly solutions for decarbonizing the power sector (not only renewables such as wind and power but also high-voltage direct current transmission lines to deliver them to where they’re needed), thus slowing the transition. A surfeit of renewables projects is seeking grid access, enough to meet 90% of the Biden administration’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, according to a Berkeley Lab report, but the country’s Balkanized electricity market system, monopolistic utilities, and lack of adequate transmission capacity will likely prevent most of it from succeeding.
The transmission capacity needed for renewables will require anywhere from $30 billion to $90 billion to meet demand by 2030, with the figures rising to $200 billion to $600 billion between 2030 and 2050, according to a study by the Brattle Group. Squandering such sums on nuclear should be out of the question.
Our current fleet of 92 reactors generates about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, but most of the plants are slated for permanent closure by 2050, assuming they operate well beyond their 40-year design life. The DOE admits that such “life extensions” put operators in uncharted waters because there is no actual experience to support 60- or 80-year reactor lifetimes.
The problem of where to put used nuclear fuel (radioactive waste) remains after funding was withdrawn for an estimated $100 billion underground repository project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Proposed privately-owned interim storage sites in New Mexico and Texas, though licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, face intense local and state opposition as well as political obstacles at the federal level.
Industry officials privately acknowledge these challenges. Even so, nuclear is receiving the most favorable media coverage since the 1950s, and the latest annual Gallup poll on nuclear, released in April, showed the highest level of support in a decade for nuclear power among the American public–at 55%. Nuclear opponents in Congress are now silent on the issue or even hinting at changed views, and bipartisan support in Congress has over the past couple of years resulted in billions in tax incentives and other forms of support for both existing and planned nuclear plants.
But public opinion is fickle–and no guarantee for the future. Since Gallup began polling on nuclear in 1994, support peaked at 62% in 2010, a year before the triple meltdowns at Fukushima. After that, it went steadily down, to a low of 44% in 2016. Nor is popular opinion an indicator of whether nuclear’s formidable technical, financial, environmental, and geopolitical challenges can be overcome.
The primary aims of today’s promoters are to prevent aging, uneconomic reactors from closing, and to secure funding for small modular reactors (SMRs) and “advanced” reactors (and associated fuels).
The push for smaller reactors appears to have been an act of desperation by a nuclear-centric energy agency–the DOE (which also oversees the country’s nuclear weapons programs)—after its failed attempt to create a nuclear “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Although that project generated interest (utilities filed plans for 28 large-scale reactors), only the two at Vogtle were ever built………………………………………………………………………………………
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