On Sept. 19, at this year’s World Petroleum Congress, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz announced that the Government of Alberta would invest $7 million into a study by Cenovus Energy on the potential usage of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to power future oilsands operations.
Over the past year, the government has singlehandedly picked the winners and losers in the energy transition race. Hydrogen, carbon capture and nuclear are winners. With the recent moratorium on project approvals, solar and wind are set to be the losers. But don’t we, as Albertans, deserve a say?
The government’s new interest and investment in SMR feasibility should be a call to Albertans to start asking questions about what role (if any) nuclear should play in our energy future. Most of our current conversations are tied to the future of fossil fuels. Nuclear is not even on most people’s radar. We need to get ready to ask tough questions about nuclear energy that other jurisdictions are already debating.
Here are three questions that Albertans need to ask:
Who will regulate the use of SMRs?
Currently, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) is the single regulator of energy development in our province, overseeing the process from exploration to reclamation. AER’s recent silence after a known tailings leak at Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine has prompted questioning of not only AER’s transparency but also its ability to communicate risk and generate trust with communities that house energy projects. AER’s failure to notify residents in Wood Buffalo for nearly nine months about the estimated 5.3 million litres of leaked industrial wastewater has also raised serious questions about AER’s ability to ensure public safety. We need to ask: is AER, in its current form, the best regulator to oversee the development of nuclear energy?
What will happen to SMRs after they are decommissioned and where will we store our nuclear waste?
There are serious technological challenges to managing nuclear waste. Currently, Canada’s used nuclear fuel is managed at facilities at nuclear reactor sites in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, along with limited sites in Manitoba. These are all temporary sites. The federal government is hoping to finalize a permanent nuclear repository after 15 years of planning, engagement and scientific and engineering studies. Residents of communities where nuclear storage has been proposed are worried. There are currently no nuclear waste repositories in western Canada. If SMRs are used in Alberta, how much waste will they generate? And where will it be stored? Alberta’s unimpressive track record with decommissioning and reclaiming former energy sites (such as orphan wells) means that we need to ask tough questions about the afterlife of SMRs now.
How will Albertans be consulted in the creation of the Government of Alberta’s nuclear energy strategy?
While it is commendable that the GoA is investing in studies that explore clean energy, there is currently no indication that Albertans will be consulted about nuclear energy. While SMRs would clearly have an impact on oilsands operations and aid the industry in meeting aggressive net-zero targets set by the federal government, the regulation of the nuclear energy industry will impact all Albertans. We should all have a say in determining our path forward in energy transitions. And we should be doing this through broad consultation led by an independent third party, who does not stand to benefit financially or regulatorily from the introduction of SMRs.
Albertans are supportive of energy transitions. We must begin a serious public discussion of how and if nuclear energy should be a part of it. We have an orphan well problem. Do we want an orphan reactor problem as well?
Sabrina Perić is an energy anthropologist, associate professor at the University of Calgary, and the co-director of the Energy Stories Lab.
End of the American Dream. Life As You Have Known It Will Never Be The Same Again… by Michael
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Military Industrial Complex to our society. It employs millions of people, and it brings in hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The Military Industrial Complex has always been one of the central pillars of our economy, and these days business is booming thanks to the war in Ukraine and the possibility of a war with China. Needless to say, those that run the Military Industrial Complex want the gravy train to continue, and so politicians that are pro-war are showered with campaign contributions. In both major parties, politicians that are pro-war greatly outnumber those that are anti-war, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
Smedley D. Butler fought in four major conflicts, and in 1935 he astutely observed that “war is a racket”…
“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
If the Military Industrial Complex suddenly disappeared, it would leave a giant, gaping hole in our economy that would be extremely difficult to fill. In an excellent piece that he posted earlier this week, Richard C. Cook shared some numbers about the Military Industrial Complex that are absolutely astounding…
Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.
The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.
Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.
We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.
In the entire history of the world, we have never seen anything quite like this.
And the Military Industrial Complex absolutely loves Joe Biden, because he has promised to keep the war in Ukraine going “for as long as it takes”…
It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.”
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
The Ukrainians are running out of warm bodies.
They have literally been grabbing men off the streets and throwing them into vans, but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our sons that were being forced to go to war.
Many Americans cheered when the Ukrainians began their ill-fated “counter-offensive”, but it turned out to be a disaster.
A senior U.S. intel official recently admitted to journalist Seymour Hersh that Ukraine has suffered approximately 75,000 casualties during this counter-offensive…
“There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter,” Hersh said.
Speaking of the Ukrainian claims of slow progress in an offensive that has lost an estimated 75,000 casualties, the official told Hersh: “It’s all lies.”
On many battlefields in Ukraine, there are unburied dead bodies just laying around all over the place.
As the anniversary of the purported Biden Regime sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline approaches Sept. 26, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh blamed a ”secret disinformation operation“ by CIA and MI-6 for misleading the public about the disastrous state of the US-led war effort.
“The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going,“ a senior US intel official told Hersh. “The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”
Where do we go from here?
The Military Industrial Complex certainly does not want this conflict to end, and Joe Biden has no intention of backing down.
So more warm bodies will be needed.
That is one of the reasons why there has been so much chatter about bringing back the draft here in the United States.
Recruitment has been way down in recent years, but our leaders desperately want to win this war with Russia and they also want to be ready to fight a war with China over Taiwan.
And so the stage is being set to draft young American boys and young American girls into military service…
The most recent edition of the US Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the US military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.
The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.
Do you want your children to be fed into a meat grinder on the other side of the globe?
If not, it is time to stand up and say something………………………………………………………………………………………
We need to pull back from the brink before it is too late.
But our leaders won’t do that.
They don’t want to upset the Military Industrial Complex.
Unfortunately, we could also soon find ourselves in a war with China……………………………………………
The Military Industrial Complex wants to make even more money, and our politicians want to keep the campaign contributions rolling in.
So we will continue to speed toward a date with the unthinkable as the fate of our society hangs in the balance.
The U.S. government has embarked upon the first comprehensive modernization of its strategic nuclear arsenal since the Cold War ended three decades ago. The Department of Defense is simultaneously developing a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
Collectively, these three systems are referred to as the strategic “triad.” Every nuclear posture review conducted by the government since the Soviet Union collapsed—there have been five counting Biden’s—has endorsed the triad as the best approach to assuring nuclear deterrence.
During the Cold War, each leg of the triad was periodically modernized. However, with the waning of the Soviet threat, improvement slowed. As a result, the nuclear arsenal has aged markedly. With great-power competition now restored to prominence in the nation’s defense strategy, the deterrent is overdue for revitalization.
The most recent authoritative estimate of nuclear-weapons costs, produced by the Congressional Budget Office in July, projects that the Department of Defense and Department of Energy will spend $247 billion during the ten years ending in 2032 to modernize the nuclear force.
An even larger amount will be allocated in subsequent years, delivering revenues to hundreds of companies. For instance, industrial conglomerate TextronTXT-1.1% will provide reentry-vehicle technology for carrying nuclear warheads, and BoeingBA-2% hopes to build a successor to the E-4B flying command post (popularly known as the Doomsday plane).
However, four companies are poised to dominate modernization of the nuclear arsenal, each of them ultimately realizing tens of billions of dollars in sales.
Northrop Grumman NOC+0.5%is the big winner in this generation’s round of competitions to rebuild the nuclear force. ……………… The company thus finds itself firmly ensconced as a key contractor on all three legs of the triad for decades to come—an unprecedented achievement in the history of the nuclear program.
General Dynamics, a Virginia-based defense and aerospace conglomerate, will build the 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines destined to carry two-thirds of U.S. strategic warheads, just as it built the existing Ohio class of strategic subs……….. Today it is the world’s leading producer of undersea warships, supporting modernization of both the U.S. and United Kingdom nuclear deterrents.
Lockheed Martin LMT-0.3%is the world’s biggest military contractor, and will play a number of roles in nuclear modernization. The Maryland-based company has built every generation of submarine-launched ballistic missile from the early Polaris weapons to today’s Trident II D5……………………………………………………………………………………..
Like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin contributes to my think tank.
SCHEERPOST, By Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone 1 Oct 23 “…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.
Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.
In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies. On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”
The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation, “This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”
FREELAND NURTURES MEDIA CAREER AS UNDERCOVER REGIME CHANGE AGENT IN SOVIET-ERA UKRAINE
Following his death in 1984, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below on original) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.
During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for her meteoric rise to journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.
She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.
CANADA TRAINS, PROTECTS NAZIS IN POST-MAIDAN UKRAINE
When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag. When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on February 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).
Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who declared, “the historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
AS NAZI FAMILY HISTORY SURFACES, FREELAND LIES TO THE PUBLIC
Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.
For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.
After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.
Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.
But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. ………………………………………
let’s stop and think about just what planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.
These days, despite an all too “hot” war in Ukraine in which the U.S. has, at least indirectly, faced off against the crew that replaced those Soviet cold warriors of yore, the new Cold War references are largely aimed at this country’s increasingly tense, ever more militarized relationship with China.
Its focus is both the island of Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia. Worse yet, both countries seem driven to intensify that struggle.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Joe Biden made a symbolic and much-publicized stop in Vietnam (yes, Vietnam!) while returning from the September G20 summit meeting in India. There, he insisted that he didn’t “want to contain China” or halt its rise. He also demanded that it play by “the rules of the game” (and you know just whose rules and game that was). In the process, he functionally publicized his administration’s ongoing attempt to create an anti-China coalition extending from Japan and South Korea (only recently absorbed into a far deeper military relationship with this country), all the way to, yes, India itself.
And (yes, as well!) the Biden administration has upped military aid to Japan, Taiwan (including $85 million previously meant for Egypt), Australia (including a promise to supply it with its own nuclear attack submarines), and beyond. In the process, it’s also been reinforcing the American military position in the Pacific from Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines to — yes again — Australia. Meanwhile, one four-star American general has even quite publicly predicted that a war between the U.S. and China is likely to break out by 2025, while urging his commanders to prepare for “the China fight”! Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has called China the “leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security” and the Biden foreign policy team has been hard at work encircling — the Cold War phrase would have been “containing” — China, both diplomatically and militarily.
On the Chinese side, that country’s military has been similarly ramping up its air and naval activities around and ever closer to the island of Taiwan in an ominous fashion, even as it increases its military presence in places like the South China Sea (as has the U.S.). Oh, and just in case you hadn’t noticed, with a helping hand from Russia, Beijing is also putting more money and effort into expanding its already sizable nuclear arsenal.
Yes, this latest version of a Cold War is (to my mind at least) already a little too hot to handle. And yet, despite that reality, it couldn’t be more inappropriate to use the term “new Cold War” right now on a globe where a previously unimagined version of a hot war is staring us all, including most distinctly the United States and China, in the face.
As a start, keep in mind that the two great powers facing off so ominously against each other have long faced off no less ominously against the planet itself. After all, the United States remains the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, while China is the greatest of the present moment (with the U.S. still in second place and Americans individually responsible for significantly more emissions than their Chinese counterparts). The results have been telling in both countries.
In 2023, the United States has already experienced a record 23 billion-dollar weather disasters from Hawaii to Florida with the year still months from ending. Meanwhile, China has been clobbered by staggering heat waves and stunning flooding, the heaviest rains in 1,000 years, displacing 1.2 million people in areas around its capital, Beijing. Given the past summer, this planet and all its inhabitants are no longer in anything that could pass for a cold war state.
The Freedom to Fuel?
As it happens, industrializing countries first began to, in essence, make war on our world in the late eighteenth century, but had no idea they were doing so until deep into the twentieth century. These days, however, it should be anything but a secret that humanity is all too knowingly at war — and there’s nothing “cold” about it — with and on our very own world. ……………………………………………………………….
In 2022, those major G20 nations that met in India recently poured a record $1.4 trillion (yes, that is not a misprint!) into subsidizing fossil fuels in various ways, more than double the figure for 2019………………………………………………………
The results of such a — yes, warlike — approach to the planet have been painfully obvious this year. After all, the northern hemisphere just broiled through its hottest summer in recorded history and the southern hemisphere the hottest winter. Each summer month — June, July, and August — also broke its own previous global record for heat and 2023 is almost guaranteed to be the hottest year ever recorded.
In addition, in the last five months, the world’s ocean waters also broke temperature records, heating up if not literally to the boiling point, then at least to stunning levels……………………………………………………………………………….
it hardly matters where you look. Even Australia just experienced its hottest winter ever and already potentially “catastrophic” spring fire conditions are developing there. Evidence also suggests that, whatever the extremes of the present moment, the future holds far worse in store.
In that context, think about the fact that the planet’s two greatest carbon emitters, China and the United States, now fully knowledgeable about what they’re doing, can’t seem to imagine working together in any fashion to deal with a catastrophe that may prove, in the decades to come, the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war.
The New Hot War
So, a new Cold War? Don’t count on it. I mean honestly, how can anyone anywhere talk about a new cold war with a straight face on a planet where nature’s increasingly hot war is the order of the day — and where far too little is being done. Meanwhile, as of this moment, the distinctly hot war in Ukraine is only worsening, as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries emit ever more carbon, which, it turns out, is what militaries do. After all, the U.S. military is the largest institutional greenhouse emitter on the planet, larger than some countries.
………………………………………………………………………. On a planet burning up ahead of schedule — and where, no matter how you look at it, humanity is reaching beyond some of the boundaries set for life itself — isn’t it time to refocus in a major way on the new Hot War (and not the one in Ukraine) that has this planet in its grip? Isn’t it time for the American and Chinese leaderships to cut the war-like posturing and together face a world in desperate danger, for the sake, if nothing else, of all our children and grandchildren who don’t deserve the planet we’re heating up for them in such a devastatingly rapid fashion? https://tomdispatch.com/the-slow-motion-equivalent-of-a-nuclear-war/
Voltaire Network, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation by Roger Lagassé 1 Oct 23
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to the United States cleared up any remaining ambiguities. Everyone wondered about his strategy. He doesn’t seem to be trying to defend his own people, as he mobilizes all his men and sends them to die on the front line with no hope of victory. From now on, he appears to have no qualms about lying and cheating, and uses every means at his disposal to expel certain states from intergovernmental organizations. How can we not draw a parallel with Stepan Bandera, who massacred thousands of his own compatriots in the final days of the Second World War, when the defeat of the Reich was in no doubt?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attended the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations to deliver his customary speech on Russian terrorism. It was his first speech from this rostrum.
This year, four of the five permanent members of the Security Council did not send their heads of state or government: China, France, the UK and Russia. Clearly, despite the rhetoric, something has gone wrong in this institution.
Let’s summarize President Zelensky’s speech: “Russia uses food as a weapon against the rest of the world and the “game”, in its favor, of certain European countries. It also uses civilian nuclear reactors as weapons, as it is doing at Zaporijha. It has abducted “hundreds of thousands” of Ukrainian children, who are being re-educated at home in hatred of Ukraine, which constitutes “genocide”. Russia provokes a war every decade. Today, it threatens Kazakhstan and the Baltic states. Many seats in this hemicycle would be empty if Russia were to achieve its objectives through its acts of treachery. Thank God nobody has yet imagined how to use the climate as a weapon. Natural disasters kill. They happen while Moscow has decided to kill tens of thousands of people. We must unite against these challenges. We can breathe new life into the “Rules-Based World Order” by building on the Ukrainian peace formula that I will be presenting to the Security Council shortly. I invite you all to the Peace Summit we are organizing. We can’t rely on Russia’s word: ask Prigozhin if he keeps his promises! Slava Ukraini!”
All the delegations allied with the United States applauded the speech loud and clear, while the others kept a low profile.
This speech calls for several comments:
– The argument of using food as a weapon refers to sieges to starve populations, as in North Korea yesterday or Yemen today. This is not at all what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, where they are attacking the profits of the major US corporations (Cargill, Dupont and Monsanto) which own a third of Ukrainian crops. The use of civilian nuclear power plants as a weapon of war must be understood as having an effect only at close range. The Russians occupy the Zaporijha plant and would lose their soldiers in the event of radiation. On the contrary, it is the Ukrainian forces who are threatening them with radiation in order to expel them. Finally, Russia has never abducted Ukrainian children, but has protected them from the combat zones by moving them within its territory. The International Criminal Court’s condemnation is based exclusively on the refusal to consider the accession of Crimea, Donbass and part of Novorossia to the Russian Federation as legal.
– The argument of Russian expansionism may frighten the Kazakhs and Balts, but it’s nothing more than a trial of intent. Returning to the possible use of climate as a weapon shows an ignorance of history. The USA already used it in their war against Viet Nam, making rain for months on the Ho Chi Min trail, the Vietcong’s supply route through the Laotian jungle (Operation “Popeye”). Eventually, they signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques
– To claim, without naming them, that Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are playing into the Russians’ hands by banning the import of Ukrainian grain at knock-down prices is an insult to these countries. Poland, which, forgetting the massacre of over 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian integral nationalists during the Second World War, has nevertheless welcomed 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the start of the current war, will appreciate this.
– The call to defend the “rules-based World Order” can only be taken as a challenge to the majority of UN members who are fighting, on the contrary, for a return to International Law. The Ukrainian peace plan therefore concerns only the Western camp and aims to extend the war.
– President Zelenski’s conclusion refers to a poem by Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861). The expression “Slava Ukraini!” had become the cry of recognition of the Ukrainian integral nationalists of Dmitry Dontsov and Simon Petlioura during the war against the Soviet revolution, when they massacred the Jews and anarchists of Novorussia. Then it became the victory cry of the Ukrainian integral nationalists of Dmitry Dontsov and Stepan Bandera when they massacred Jews, Gypsies and Resistance fighters. Finally, in 1941, it became the equivalent of “Heil Hitler! Its use today, especially at the United Nations, refers back to the post-war resolutions against Nazi propaganda, which Ukraine now opposes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The debate continued with a speech by Secretary General António Guterres. He began by pointing out that some multilateral meetings, such as the one on the plan to safeguard the Sustainable Development Goals, are held efficiently. He then described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law. On the judicial front, he reported that investigative teams were continuing to gather evidence of shocking and widespread human rights violations “mainly perpetrated by the Russian Federation”, including the forced transfer of children. Finally, he welcomed the agreement on cereals and regretted that Russia had not renewed it.
The Secretary General’s position expresses only his personal opinion. In this case, it is not based on any judicial decision and does not take into account the Russian position. The trial currently underway before the International Court of Justice, i.e. the UN’s internal tribunal, will hear both sides. It will be for the Court alone to judge whether there has been a violation of the Charter, as Russia claims to have launched a special military operation to comply with Security Council Resolution 2202 (“Minsk agreements”). In any case, the Court will only rule on one question: whether or not Ukraine was massacring its own citizens before the Russian special military operation. We are talking about 20,000 citizens.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky then intervened. He began his speech by asking how a state that violates the UN Charter can sit on the Security Council? He noted that the General Assembly had recognized that Russia, not Ukraine, was responsible for the war. He then presented his 10-point peace plan. This plan, which had already been presented to the G20 in Bali, does not take Russia’s demands into account. So, strictly speaking, it’s not a peace plan, but rather Ukraine’s demands. In passing, he asked the General Assembly to adopt, by a two-thirds majority, a modification of its statutes and deprive Russia of its right of veto. Finally, he called on all States present to participate in the “peace” conference that his country was organizing.
The session chairman, Edi Rama, wondered about the current situation: a member of the Security Council is violating the UN Charter! Fortunately, despite the abusive use of its veto power, the majority of Council members ensure that its values are respected. He then gave the floor to Council members in the order of their registration.
Their speeches added nothing new. None of them dared to take up Ukraine’s call for Russia to be stripped of its veto power.
A little backtracking is in order here: when the United Nations was created, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Winston Churchill of Great Britain were at odds with Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. The USA and the UK wanted to create an organization that would govern the world according to their own conceptions, while the USSR wanted it to uphold international law and prevent war. It was the Soviet conception that triumphed. The right of veto takes into account the military reality of the time. There is no such thing as a legitimate or abusive veto. Quite simply, international law cannot be respected by all if it runs counter to the interests of one of its most powerful members. The idea of depriving Russia of its veto power had never been expressed in public. Last year, however, the US State Department tested the matter with all UN member states, and it proved impossible to achieve a two-thirds majority.
After his speech, President Zelensky left the room, having no time to waste listening to the other delegations. He rushed off to Washington to address Congress, as he had already done in December 2022. However, when he arrived on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told him straight out that it was out of the question. Parliamentarians have too busy an agenda,” he said. Dejected, the Ukrainian president had to content himself with a meeting with the presidents of the two chambers and a few Democratic senators.
The time for unconditional support is over. Like all their Western counterparts, US parliamentarians have realized that: – ammunition is in short supply, and the Western arms industry cannot compete with Russia’s in either the short or medium term; – the rebellion of Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin against the Kremlin has failed; – the Ukrainian counter-offensive has been extremely deadly, with over a thousand people killed every day for the past two weeks, without achieving any significant successes.
Many would therefore like to negotiate a way out of the crisis or, at the very least, stop spending astronomical sums of money for nothing. Some Republicans have written to the Biden administration asking for a precise account of how the funds already disbursed have been used. Pending a response, they will not vote for another dollar. The Pentagon is therefore devising ways to divert equipment and continue the US commitment to Ukraine. It is hiding behind the possibility of blocking the federal budget in the event of a substantive disagreement between Capitol Hill and the White House.
To make up for the parliamentary affront, both the Secretary of Defense and President Joe Biden granted the Ukrainian president an interview. He also visited a university, the Clinton Foundation and the Atlantic Council, and chatted with the heads of financial companies. But the fact remains: everyone has observed President Zelensky’s outrages and his inability to win this war. Everyone has now been able to verify that Volodomyr Zelensky is not trying to defend his country. On the contrary, he is sending his men to die for nothing in front of the Russian defense line. He’s acting just as hard-line nationalists and Nazis always did: he doesn’t hesitate to lie to his own people, to cheat, and to use every means at his disposal to provoke a general confrontation at the cost of sacrificing his own people. https://www.voltairenet.org/article219739.html?fbclid=IwAR1_Hi_V0hQJPPSffJRKWhlqmnLKJYYprcKu1qeNRoRlUfGpX4-IVSD3nsQ
At the Sept. 21 meeting of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board, a representative for Holtec, which is decommissioning the plant on the Hudson River near Peekskill, said he was not going to discuss what options it was considering. But he did say it expects the process will take longer.
“There will be a schedule impact; I don’t think you can avoid it,” said Rich Burroni, who was attending his last oversight meeting because he was recently promoted to become Holtec’s chief nuclear officer.
No remaining options are without their opponents. Boiling the water so that it evaporates would transfer its radiation to the air. Dumping it in the ocean would violate international law. Mixing it with concrete and shipping it to the western U.S. to be buried, which other decommissioned plants have done, has been criticized as an environmental justice violation, since it passes the risks to another community………………………………………………………………………………………
Dave Lochbaum, the oversight board’s nuclear expert, noted that in 2009 a tank at Indian Point failed, leaking 10,000 gallons a day “for a while” until the leak was discovered. “The result of that is the contamination gets into places it shouldn’t be, in higher levels of contamination,” he said.
When asked why the tanks fail so often, Lochbaum said that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) policies don’t encourage the development of better tanks.
“If you’ve ever paid a nickel for an overdue library book, you’ve paid a nickel more than the NRC has ever fined anyone for spilling millions of gallons of contaminated water,” he said. “Because there’s no sanction for doing wrong, there’s no incentive for getting it right.”
Lochbaum also had harsh words for the NRC when making a presentation on how the dry casks that store the spent fuel itself are inspected. Almost all of Indian Point’s spent nuclear fuel has been loaded into metal canisters, which are lowered into concrete hulls to protect them until they can be shipped to a yet-to-be-built permanent facility. The casks are supposed to be inspected on a regular basis to make sure they aren’t leaking or in danger of cracking.
But an audit by the NRC released this year found that for the past 20 years, nuclear power plants in the Southeast weren’t being inspected nearly as often or as robustly as they should have been. And inspectors weren’t qualified. Lochbaum said that in some cases, the inspectors didn’t even enter the fenced areas where the dry casks were located.
“They walked around the outside of the fence,” Lochbaum said. “That’s probably not adequate inspections.”
He also took issue with the fact that the NRC only spot-checks casks, rather than inspecting them all. At the same time, inspecting all of the casks properly is impractical because the process exposes inspectors to a low dose of radiation.
Public records indicate that the casks at Indian Point have been inspected more often and more thoroughly than those in the Southeast, but Lochbaum said that it’s still not clear if the inspectors are qualified or how many hours were spent.
War on the rocks, JAMES JOHNSON, SEPTEMBER 28, 2023
Russian nuclear saber-rattling and coercion have loomed large throughout the Russo-Ukrainian War. This dangerous rhetoric has been amplified and radicalized by AI-powered technology — “false-flag” cyber operations, fake news, and deepfakes. Throughout the war, both sides have invoked the specter of nuclear catastrophe, including false Russian claims that Ukraine was building a “dirty bomb” and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s allegation that Russia had planted explosives to cause a nuclear disaster at a Ukrainian power plant. The world is once again forced to grapple with the psychological effects of the most destructive weapons the world has ever known in a new era of nuclear brinkmanship.
Rapid AI technological maturity raises the issue of delegating the launch authority of nuclear weapons to AI (or non–human-in-the-loop nuclear command and control systems), viewed simultaneously as dangerous and potentially stabilizing. This potential delegation is dangerous because weapons could be launched accidentally.
It is potentially stabilizing because of the lower likelihood that a nuclear strike would be contemplated if retaliation was known to benefit from autonomy, machine speed, and precision. For now, at least, there is a consensus amongst nuclear-armed powers that the devastating outcome of an accidental nuclear exchange obviates any potential benefits of automating the retaliatory launch of nuclear weapons.
Regardless, it is important to grapple with a question: How might AI-enabled warfare affect human psychology during nuclear crises?………………………………………………………………………….
In the digital age, the confluence of increased speed, truncated decision-making, dual-use technology, reduced levels of human agency, critical network vulnerabilities, and dis/misinformation injects more randomness, uncertainty, and chance into crises. This creates new pathways for unintentional (accidental, inadvertent, and catalytic) escalation to a nuclear level of conflict. New vulnerabilities and threats (perceived or otherwise) to states’ nuclear deterrence architecture in the digital era will become novel generators of accidental risk — mechanical failure, human error, false alarms, and unauthorized launches.
These vulnerabilities will make current and future crises (Russia-Ukraine, India-Pakistan, the Taiwan Straits, the Korean Peninsula, the South China Seas, etc.) resemble a multiplayer game of chicken,…………………………………………..
Doomsday Machine: Schelling’s “Little Black Box”
How might different nuclear command, control, and communication structures affect the tradeoff between chance and control? Research suggests that chance is affected by the failure of both the positive control (features and procedures that enable nuclear forces to be released when the proper authority commands it) and negative control (features that inhibit their use otherwise) of nuclear weapons…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The reason why America meddled in this election is because it fears both the substance and symbolism of a hitherto stalwart NATO vassal defecting from the bloc’s anti-Russian proxy war coalition.
The “Direction-Social Democracy” (SMER) party of former Prime Minister Robert Fico emerged victorious after Slovakia’s latest elections on Saturday in spite of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) warning before the vote that the US will go to any lengths to prevent that outcome. Nobody should have been surprised by that since CNN’s reporting made it obvious that Washington wanted him to lose. Here are three of their articles fearmongering about his democratically driven return to office:
The reason why America meddled in this election is because it fears both the substance and symbolism of a hitherto stalwart NATO vassal defecting from the bloc’s anti-Russian proxy war coalition.Fico previously condemned the West’s role in provoking and perpetuating this conflict exactly as neighboring Hungarian leader Viktor Orban has done since the get-go. Just like him, Fico is also against arming Ukraine and could prevent others’ weapons from transiting across his country as well.
He’ll still need to form a governing coalition in order to make good on his promises, but few doubt that he’ll be able to. Assuming that’ll happen, then Slovakia will join Hungary in creating a center of anti-war gravity in the heart of both the EU and NATO, which complements Poland’s newly cautious stance towards this proxy conflict brought about by its dispute with Ukraine. These three could then form an influential force if the latter’s ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party wins re-election on 15 October.
Poland remains much more committed to this conflict than Hungary and post-election Slovakia, but there’s also no denying that the Polish people are incredibly offended at Ukraine’s ungratefulness. A critical mass of them might therefore vote for the anti-establishmentConfederation party to protest PiS’ prior appeasement of Kiev up until recently despite that regime’s glorification of those who genocided Poles. If enough do so, then PiS might be compelled to form a coalition government with Confederation.
In that case, Poland might move closer towards Hungary and Slovakia’s position, which could inspire average Europeans to follow these countries’ lead during their own upcoming elections. The demonstration effect that was set into motion by Slovakia and which might soon manifest itself in Poland is therefore regarded by the US as a strategic challenge for good reason. That doesn’t justify its failed meddling in the latest Slovak elections, but simply places its motives into the appropriate context.
The fact that the CIA still failed to prevent Fico’s re-election dispels three popular myths, first and foremost that agency’s omnipotence. The second is foreign voters’ alleged inability to defy the American government’s will, the false perception of which has been exploited to suppress anti-establishment turnout. And finally, the Ukrainian Conflict is truly unpopular in some countries despite the media’s claims to the contrary and its crazed efforts to artificially manufacture support for this proxy war there.
With these symbolic outcomes in mind as well as the substantive changes to Slovak policy that are likely to follow its latest election, not to mention their possible impact on Poland in the coming future and the rest of Europe after that, the failure of America’s meddling campaign is a major development. It’s premature to describe it as a game-changer, but it still suggests a potentially impending inflection point in the Ukrainian Conflict, provided of course that the CIA doesn’t successfully sabotage related trends
North Korea on Monday criticized the UN nuclear watchdog, calling it a “paid trumpeter” for the US.
Accusing International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi of “taking lead in creating the atmosphere of pressurizing” Pyongyang, North Korea’s Ministry of Nuclear Power Industry said he was “spreading a false story about imminent 7th nuclear test” by North Korea.
Pyongyang was responding to a resolution adopted on Sept. 29 at the IAEA general conference that calls on North Korea to curb its nuclear programs.
“If the IAEA wants to avoid international criticism as a paid trumpeter of the US, it would be well advised to devote itself to tackling the difficulties facing the international community such as the US nuclear proliferation through ‘AUKUS’, Japan’s discharge of nuclear-polluted water and the US expansion of nuclear test ground,” a ministry statement said.
…………………..“We vehemently denounce and reject the abnormal behavior of the IAEA which has been completely reduced to a reptile organization that serves the US away from its elementary mission as an international organization to maintain impartiality,” the statement added.
………………….“We clarify once again our principled stand to the director-general (of IAEA) who behaves like a US State Department official, forgetful of his duty as director of an international organization.
1 July WEBINAR: Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction webinar, Understanding the New Nuclear Arms Race: Views from Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
Monday, July 1, 2024 from 10 am to 11:30 am Mountain Time
Speakers include: Sharon Weiner, Associate Professor, American University; Dr. Timur Kadyshev, Senior Researcher, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy; Dr. Tong Zhao, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Dr. Zia Mian (moderator), Princeton Program on Science and Global Security.
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