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Nuclear War Is Imminent

Unless the U.S. Embraces Peace – and Soon!

by Gerry Condon, ,  https://original.antiwar.com/Gerry_Condon/2024/07/14/nuclear-war-is-imminent/

The world is headed toward nuclear war.  The horrific nightmare of global destruction that has haunted humanity ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nearly upon us. For decades, peace activists and nuclear experts have warned about the “growing danger of nuclear war.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of their Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds! How much closer can we get? Are these dire warnings being dismissed like the man with the sign shouting “The End Is Near?”

The original nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, China, France and the UK – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – never followed the commitment they made when they signed and ratified the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which required them to “begin good-faith negotiations for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.” Instead they have poured billions of dollars into “modernizing” nuclear weapons. In the meantime, four more countries have joined the nuclear club – India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance of the Soviet Union, there was an opportunity for a broad peace in Europe. NATO, an anti-Soviet military alliance led by the U.S., should have disbanded at that point. Instead, it pursued an aggressive policy against a weakened Russia, surrounding it with hostile military forces, including nuclear weapons.

In 2002, President George W. Bush unilaterally removed the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, while placing a U.S. missile base in Romania. In 2019, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that had lowered nuclear tensions in Europe, while placing another U.S. missile base in Poland. What were the Russians to think?  The U.S. is clearly seeking a dominant nuclear position.

Neoconservative war hawks – or “Neocons” – have captured the foreign policy machinery of Democratic and Republican administrations.  Given the declining economic power of the U.S. vis-à-vis a rising China, the Neocons believe the U.S. must aggressively employ its military superiority to maintain global dominance. The U.S. maintains 850 foreign military bases in over 80 countries (compared to a handful each for Russia and China).

Western politicians and pundits frequently accuse Russian president Vladimir Putin of making “nuclear threats.” Indeed, Putin keeps reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear rules of engagement. Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first if it is attacked by the superior conventional forces of NATO.  The U.S. has a similar nuclear posture – it will use nuclear weapons first, even against non-nuclear threats such as a cyber-attack. As Daniel Ellsberg reminded us, to possess nuclear weapons is to use them every day, like a gun pointed at someone’s head.

Apparently oblivious to the imminent threat of nuclear war, President Biden continues to pour billions of dollars of weapons into its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while blocking peace negotiations. The Biden administration is simultaneously sending billions in weapons to Israel as it commits a horrific and ongoing genocide in Gaza. Israel threatens other Middle Eastern countries with its U.S.-backed military, including nuclear weapons.  Can anybody now doubt that they would use them?

The Neocons are also actively preparing for a war against China. The U.S. is encouraging Taiwan’s independence from China, conducting provocative “freedom of navigation” operations in the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea, and building anti-China military alliances throughout the Pacific. One of the few foreign policy debates in Congress is which war should take precedence – the war against Russia or the war against China.  Both are nuclear powers.  Then there is the joint US/South Korean military exercises aimed at the “decapitation” of the government of North Korea, another nuclear power.  What could possibly go wrong?

The threat of nuclear war does not exist in a vacuum.  It is directly related to aggressive military competition, much of it being driven by the U.S.  Nuclear annihilation will come from a specific war, whether by miscalculation, accident or otherwise.

If we are serious about avoiding a nuclear war, we must demand that the U.S. stops sending weapons to Ukraine and Israel, and instead supports ceasefires and negotiations to stop the killing.  We must call for an end to the reckless U.S. confrontation with China and North Korea. It is critically important that these conflicts are ended as soon as possible and replaced with negotiations for peaceful co-existence.

In the longer run, as detailed in the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. must make a sea change in its foreign policy.  We must stop intervening in other countries. We must stop playing “nuclear chicken.” We must demand a peaceful U.S. foreign policy that respects the sovereignty of all nations and the human rights of all people.

The U.S. should sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and reach out to the other nuclear powers, saying “let’s all get rid of our nuclear weapons together.”  Let’s pursue the interests of all humanity by replacing competition with cooperation. Let’s stop spending precious resources on the military and take care of our peoples’ needs instead. Let’s work together to stop global warming, the other imminent existential threat. In order to avoid nuclear annihilation – and climate catastrophe too – we must abolish war once and for all.

Gerry Condon is a Vietnam-era veteran and war resister who serves on the Board of Directors of Veterans For Peace and coordinates its Nuclear Abolition Working Group.

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July 16, 2024 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Hundreds of Scientists Urge Biden to Cancel $100 Billion Nuclear Weapons Boondoggle

 

“There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons,” an expert said.

Edward Carver, Common Dreams. JULY 11, 2024  https://www.commondreams.org/news/scientists-end-land-based-nuclear-weapons

More than 700 scientists on Monday called for an end to the United States’ land-based nuclear weapons program that’s set to be replaced, following a Pentagon decision to approve the program despite soaring costs.

In an open letter to President Joe Biden and Congress, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) argued that the new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel, was “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”

The Department of Defense on Monday certified the continuation of the project, releasing the results of a review that was legally required when the cost estimate ballooned to “at least” $131 billion earlier this year, which drew the scrutiny of some Democrats in Congress, according toThe Hill.

The Defense review found that Sentinel was “essential to national security,” but the scientists disagreed with the assessment.

“There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons,” Tara Drozdenko, director of UCS’ global security program, said in a statement.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Barry Barish, a signatory to the letter, was also harshly critical of the Pentagon’s approach.

“It is unconscionable to continue to develop nuclear weapons, like the Sentinel program,” he said.

The soaring costs of Sentinel, which is overseen by the defense contractor Northrup Grumman, have been the subject of media attention. The program will cost an estimated $214 million per missile, far more than originally expected, Bloombergreported on Friday.

However, the cost is hardly the only reason to cancel the program, UCS scientists argue. The silos that house the nuclear missiles, which are found in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska, are vulnerable to attack—in fact, they are designed to draw enemy weapons away other U.S. targets, according toScientific American. Such an attack would expose huge swaths of the American population to radioactive fallout.

Because they are a likely target, the siloed missiles are kept on “hair-trigger” alert so the U.S. president can launch them within minutes. This “increases the risk of nuclear war” that could start from false alarms, miscalculations, or misunderstandings, the UCS letter states.

The scientists further argue that there’s no need for a land-based nuclear weapons system given the effectiveness of nuclear-armed submarines—one of the other parts of the nuclear triad, along with bomber jets. Such submarines are “hidden at sea” and “essentially invulnerable to attack,” according to the letter. Moreover, the submarine missiles are just as accurate as land-based missiles, and already have “destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively,” it states.

The submarine system is also being overhauled, as is the ‘air’ component of the nuclear triad. In total, the U.S. military plans to spend more than $1 trillion over 30 years on renewing the nuclear arsenal, according to the Arms Control Association.

The U.S. leads the way in a surge of global spending on nuclear arms, according to two studies published last month, one of which found that nearly $3,000 per second was spent in 2023.

July 16, 2024 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, USA | Leave a comment

Biden signs ADVANCE Act. Now what?

 By Dave Kraft/NEIS, Dave Kraft is the founder and director of Nuclear Energy Information Service.    https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/07/14/biden-signs-advance-act-now-what/

Congress wants to “accelerate” new reactor build, putting public safety in jeopardy

By Dave Kraft/NEIS

On Wednesday July 10th President Joe Biden signed the “ADVANCE Act,” which stands for “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy.”  

The controversial bill aggressively promotes the narrow, short-term interests of the U.S. nuclear industry in ways that threaten the long-term national environmental, climate and national/international security interests.   

Further, it functionally rewrites the mandate of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in ways that potentially cast it into the role of promoter instead of federal regulator of the controversial and moribund nuclear power industry.

To summarize, The ADVANCE Act:

  • promotes development of currently experimental, commercially non-existent “small modular nuclear reactors” (SMNRs) and allegedly “advanced” reactors, using tax dollars;
  • provides less regulatory oversight by ordering the NRC to “streamline” licensing of currently experimental SMNRs, putting the NRC in a position of becoming a quasi-promoter instead of regulator, in contradiction to its 1975 founding mandate;
  • requires development of the infrastructure needed to produce more intensely enriched radioactive fuel called “HALEU” – high-assay, low-enriched uranium — required for the SMNRs to run on. Enrichment would be just below weapons-usable; currently the only source of HALEU is Russia;
  • ignores the potential increased risk and harm from having more nuclear reactors large and small;
  • produces more high-level radioactive waste without first having a disposal method in place for either current or future reactors;
  • permits and encourages export of nuclear technology and materials internationally; and
  • for the first time, allows foreign control/ownership of nuclear facilities within the U.S.

Congress cannot be absolved from its role in uncritically swallowing the gaslit promises of nuclear power.  The House previously passed its version of the legislation by a margin of 393-13 before sending it to the Senate.  There, it stalled, but was procedurally resurrected by attaching the 93-page nuclear Christmas-wish list to a three-page, must pass fire safety bill – S.870, the Fire Grants and Safety Act.  It passed in the Senate 88-2, with only Senators Ed Markey (MA) and Bernie Sanders (VT) recognizing the imminent threat it posed to energy, environmental, and international security interests.

Critics of nuclear power and opponents of the ADVANCE Act fail to see:

  • how the Act fights climate disruption, when SMNRs are only experimental, may not work at all, and if they work will not be available in sufficient quantities for commercialization before the mid-2030s, according the nuclear industry itself.  It is the carbon we remove and keep out of the atmosphere between NOW and the mid-2030s that will determine if we can meet climate goals;
  • how SMNRs will enhance currently threatened system reliability and power availability, when they will not be available – assuming they even work – before the mid-2030s;
  • how exporting SMNR technology and ~19+% enriched (just below weapons useable) HALEU reactor fuel worldwide improves international security in a world dominated by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and potentially in southeast Asia; poorly controlled non-state actors; and well-known corrupt business entities.  Equally baffling is how allowing foreign ownership of nuclear facilities in the U.S. proper makes our energy systems safer, more secure, and insulated from economic instability or foreign interference;
  • how mandating the NRC to “expedite” SMNR licensing – potentially at the expense of its original and official mandate to “adequately” protect public health and safety and the environment – makes nuclear power and the nation safer.  This regulatory approach has demonstrably failed with Boeing; failed with Norfolk Southern in East Palestine; failed with PIMSA in Sartortia; and doubly-failed at Fukushima.  NRC is supposed to oversee and regulate an industry that in the past five years has repeatedly displayed corporate and legislative corruption at the highest levels resulting in FBI indictments, convictions and guilty pleas, millions of dollars in fines, and enormous cost overruns born by ratepayers; and
  • why viable alternatives to nuclear expansion like renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy storage, and transmission improvements are not prioritized over nuclear expansion, since ALL are cheaper, quicker to implement, reduce carbon emissions, produce no radioactive wastes, have no meltdown potential, create no nuclear proliferation issues, and, most importantly – ALREADY EXIST.  Nothing more needs to be invented; just implemented.

For example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) stated in December, 2023 that roughly 2,600 giga-watts (GW) of electric power projects await grid connection – over twice the entire current electrical output of the US, and roughly 27 times the entire output of all current US reactors combined.  The large majority of this backlog are renewable energy projects awaiting connection access to the aging transmission grid.  

New EXISTING transmission technologies like reconductoring and improved grid resiliency solutions could double the capacity of the grid in much shorter time and with far greater certainty than chasing speculative nuclear promises, creating greater ease of access for renewables and storage.

By signing the ADVANCE Act, the President and an accomplice Congress have placed the nation’s energy future, climate goals, and even international security at grave risk. Clearly, placing short term, ego-invested interests over the long-term best interests of the nation seem to be a problem extending beyond re-election. As Napoleon once observed, never ascribe anything to malice when there is the least suspicion of incompetence.  Perhaps, but in the end, the results are the same.

Dave Kraft is the founder and director of Nuclear Energy Information Service.

July 16, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Campaigners against Sizewell C hopeful new MPs will take their concerns to parliament

The campaign group Stop Sizewell C says it’s heard from several MPs already

Jasmine Oak, 10th Jul 2024,  https://hellorayo.co.uk/greatest-hits/west-norfolk/news/stop-sizewell-c-campaigners-new-mp-hopes/

Campaigners are calling on the new Government to consider scrapping plans to build a nuclear power plant on the Suffolk Coast

Once up and running, it’s thought Sizewell C will power up to six million homes, but activists say it’s going to devastate our countryside

Alison Downes is from ‘Stop Sizewell C’ group – and says Sir Kier Starmer needs to listen to their concerns: “The priority needs to be preventing there being any more unnecessary damage to the local environment.

“We have already seen a fair amount of damage, but that’s nothing compared with what’s to come…

“The government needs to resist any pressure from the nuclear industry for a hasty decision, especially as Sizewell C is going to take a long time, and a lot of money, to build.”

Alison’s hoping the local area’s new MPs will voice their concerns in Parliament: “Our new MP has publicly said that Stop Sizewell C was the first group she met with when she was elected.

“We also have the co-leader of the Green Party, Adrian Ramsay, in Waveney Valley. He’s been very vocal against Sizewell C.”

A spokesperson for EDF Energy has previously told us: “Our proposals for Sizewell C will see the creation of a 3.2 gigawatt power station that will create low-carbon electricity that will supply 6 million homes.

“This will be delivering clean, reliable, and affordable power for generations.”

July 16, 2024 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Exposing the Myth of the ‘Good War’

BY NICKY REID, CounterPunch 12 July 24

America has a problem but don’t worry, because we can stop anytime we want. I speak of course of America’s bottomless appetite for warfare, the fact that we can’t seem to go fifteen minutes without lighting up a third world country like a fucking spliff. But this doesn’t make us addicts, we just like to fuck around and blow shit up once in a while to let off some steam after a long day. I mean, we quit Afghanistan after like twenty years and we kind of quit Iraq. We could totally go cold turkey and put America first if we wanted too.

But let’s just send a few more bombs to Ukraine first. And maybe just one more drone strike in Somalia, you know, for old times’ sake. And then maybe just a quick invasion of Haiti and another freedom of navigation drill in the South China Sea and a few more sanctions on North Korea and a couple more NATO members and another base in Okinawa and a quick quagmire in Yemen and a few more child soldiers in Rojava and just one goddamn holocaust in the Holy Land, maybe two, or three, or five, or fuck it, give us World War Three!

OK, so maybe America has a tiny little addiction. Oh, let’s just face it, we’re fucking war junkies, Sid and Nancy grade shit, sucking off Raytheon behind the missile silo for just one last fix. But as long as we’re having this moment of clarity here, why don’t we just put it all on the table right now. We may be an empire of fiends who crave war crimes like a baby craves tits, but this is far from a new condition, and we are all infected. Even your average marching pacifist in this country seems to view America’s appetite for destruction as little more than an aberration in an otherwise stoic national history and every so-called non-interventionist seems to carry room in their heart for at least one exception that proves the rule. That one good war, you know, the one where we played the good guys for real and saved the day for just one bright shining moment.

But this is all bullshit. Every single American war has been bullshit. They all come with different excuses and some of them are pretty goddamn convincing but every major conflict that this country has ever engaged in has been motivated by greed and power, and every single war we’ve fought has ended the exact same way, with piles of bodies, fewer civil rights, and a growing thirst for more.

Even our so-called Revolution, which so many otherwise peaceful libertarians hold in such high regard, was little more than another blood thirsty power grab. Let me be frank here, even I can get behind a good old-fashioned grass roots revolution as an act of societal self-defense, but the idea that you can have any kind of real revolution on illegally occupied territory is absurd. The American Revolution was really more of a colonial mutiny. A bunch of slave-trading Indian killers got tired of kicking up to the Crown and after catching wind that the British were making moves to curtail some of their slave trading and Indian killing, they went all Colonel Kurtz on their ass and declared their encampment to be a sovereign nation…………………………………………………………………………………………….

And then of course we have our sainted World Wars, where America the indispensable saved humanity from fascism in the name of world peace and global democracy. Yeah, sorry progressives, but that’s just more imperial bullshit. The First World War was a senseless imperial clusterfuck with a bunch of antiquated empires like France, Germany, Russia, and the UK clawing each other’s eyes out over their dwindling spheres of influence. After about three years of this shit, everybody involved was pretty much ready to call it quits and negotiate a settlement. Then Woodrow Wilson jumped into the mosh pit to keep the bloodbath running so he could achieve his dream of establishing America as a progressive global superpower and use his massive new war powers to reorganize the economy beneath a cartel of massive corporations while simultaneously reorganizing the Constitution beneath an engorged police state.

That white devil also set the stage for the next World War by putting all the debt from the first one on Germany with the Treaty of Versailles. But wasn’t America attacked at Pearl Harbor? Technically, yes, but FDR and his thugs went out of their way to make this attack inevitable, goading the Japanese with a crippling oil embargo, shaming their Diet when they visited Washington to negotiate, and placing the US Pacific Fleet on their doorstep by relocating it to the recently colonized territory of Hawaii. Germany never would have declared war on the US if it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor. Hitler had already basically lost the war in Stalingrad and was actually pretty committed to avoiding stretching himself any thinner in the Atlantic.

But the US wanted to finish what Wilson started. So, once again, we jumped into another imperial bloodbath between dueling monsters at the last minute to cravenly poach the spoils of war and we did so with a campaign of shocking terrorist attacks designed to send a message to the world that we were the Nazis now. Entire cities were torched to the ground in massive napalm attacks. 100,000 people in Tokyo, another 600,000 in Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne. By 1945, Japan was begging for a peace deal, but we dropped two nuclear bombs on them anyway just to make sure that Stalin got the message.

Sound like a pretty good fucking war to you?

Over the decades, the battlefields and the boogeymen kept changing but the results were always the same. Another 4 million people burnt alive in Korea, another 5 million in Vietnam, dictators and death squads and mujahadeen armed to the teeth and trained in butchery, all in the name of fighting the evils of communism. But then communism falls, and we start more wars with those same dictators and death squads and mujahadeen. The so-called War on Terror creates another killing field for another 4.7 million bodies and America gets bigger, our corporations get richer, and our police state becomes more severe.

Enough! Enough bullshit wars already. America needs to end this demented addiction before it ends us all in a nuclear overdose. The first step isn’t just admitting that we have a problem. The first step is ripping up the toxic mythology of the good war and admitting that we’ve always had a fucking problem, that war itself is the problem. The only good excuse for violence is self-defense and you can’t defend yourself when you are constantly crashing someone else’s property. It’s time for a different kind of intervention. It’s time for dope-sick Americans to join the rest of the world in defending ourselves from the disease of American imperialism. And it all starts with us finally admitting that every American war is bullshit.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/12/exposing-the-myth-of-the-good-war/

July 16, 2024 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Anti-nuclear weapons activists to camp outside RAF base for ten days

“We call on the Labour government to explicitly refuse any US request to station their weapons of mass destruction here.”

 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/anti-nuclear-weapons-activists-camp-outside-raf-base-ten-days 14 July 24

PEACE activists will camp outside RAF Lakenheath for 10 days as the Suffolk air base prepares for an “upcoming nuclear mission.”

Up to 50 members of Lakenheath Alliance for Peace set out on a three-day walk from Norwich to the United States Air Force base on Saturday and will set up camp there tomorrow until July 25 in their protest against nuclear weapons.

CND general secretary Kate Hudson said: “CND is a proud part of the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace and calls on everyone across Britain to get involved with this campaign.

“The return of US nuclear weapons to Lakenheath greatly increases the nuclear risk already faced by this country as it puts the whole of Britain on the nuclear front line.

“We call on the Labour government to explicitly refuse any US request to station their weapons of mass destruction here.”

The group aims to arrive at nearby Brandon and head to RAF Lakenheath at 1pm to pitch camp, with vigils, protests and workshops planned. The group will hand-deliver a letter to the base commander tomorrow.

Their action comes after a document came to light stating that work was under way in preparation for Lakenheath’s “upcoming nuclear mission.”

RAF Lakenheath is the largest US Air Force operated base in England.

Neither the US Air Force nor the Ministry of Defence have commented on plans for stationing nuclear weapons there.

The ministry said it would neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any given location, per long-standing British and Nato policy.

An RAF Lakenheath spokesman said the base was aware of the planned event and respected the right to protest peacefully.

Suffolk Police said the force has prepared a “proportionate lawful and effective policing response.”

July 16, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Kiev missile attack. What happened? [i]

Cruise missile or stray air defense missile

Black Mountain Analysis MIKE MIHAJLOVIC, JUL 14, 2024

Coincidence or not, every time NATO has a high-level meeting, something terrible happens in Ukraine. After that, there is a frenzy of accusations about war crimes, indiscriminate targeting of civilians, and insults in both mainstream media and social media. There are “experts” that pop up like mushrooms after rain and an uncontrollable flood of speculations. What is missing is someone who puts a brake on emotional comments and starts to look at the issue from different angles: what may be evident from one side may be completely different when looked at from the other side.

This article is not an attempt to investigate the recent explosion that damaged the children’s hospital in Kiev, nor to finger point at anyone, but rather to establish the facts that may point to some conclusion if one expends the effort.

FACTS

The warhead

On July 8, Russia unleashed a barrage of cruise missiles at strategically important locations such as the Artyom Plant, which is a well-known manufacturer of equipment for the Ukrainian military. This target was carefully selected, and selection was based on careful and long surveillance, meaning that drones, satellites, field operatives, etc., were involved. The target for the specific day was not chosen randomly but after careful analysis, and the decision to strike was made after many pieces of the intelligence puzzle were acquired and placed to reveal a clear picture.

The target was very important, so the targeteers decided to engage it with multiple cruise missiles. Mathematically, it is clear that the probability of destruction is much higher with multiple missiles. The weapon chosen was not by chance: a cruise missile with a 450 kg warhead (the optimal choice for this type of target) guarantees destruction on a large scale, even if it is not a pinpoint hit. Several warheads of this size will obliterate the designated target(s).

Ukrainians are not naïve; more often than not, valuable equipment is relocated to predetermined places. Because of the machinery and other equipment, moving the manufacturing facilities is harder but not entirely impossible. Moving the VIPs is much easier, but one precise hit can virtually destroy the command structure or decision-makers.  

In this case, as seen in several videos, the target mentioned was the Artyom Plant—a series of sequential hits by Kh-101 missiles achieved desirable results. What happened with the hospital is highly debatable

Firstly, there is a video clip showing a flying object, a missile, in a steep dive hitting the area. What is very important to say is that the missile didn’t hit the hospital directly, and the damage on the facade, which is evident in some photos, is caused by secondary effects such as blasts and shrapnel.

[excellent photos on original]

……………………………………………………………………………………………… Let’s do a brief investigation backward, starting from the position of the hit and working toward the missile. In almost every analysis flooding the media, everyone talks about the missile, and there are two streams: those who categorically say that the missile is indeed a Russian cruise missile and the other that argues for the stray Ukrainian AD missile. More on the hierarchy line in the political world, more acquisitions and this is especially on the pro-Ukrainian side. 

The first step is to determine the level of damage and the impact point and compare it with the equivalent damage that can be produced with a high explosive charge.

The damaged building, a Soviet-built brick structure, has one corner collapsed, while the substation also shows damage from blasts and shrapnel. The hospital is not damaged except for shrapnel (that may be from the flying debris, not from the warhead fragments), broken windows, and other minor consequences of the blast…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. [many photos]……………….

What is the next?

Based on what was previously said, all factors must be involved in the investigation: the estimated size of the warhead, two “best” candidates for the perpetrator based on the video evidence, and something that both sides, including the whole pact for one side, are not willing to share—radar records and surveillance satellite records………………………………………………………………………………………………

Conclusion

The hospital was not the intended target. The damaged building is likely not the intended target as well.

The explosive was not heavy and is likely not from the typical cruise missile charge, even with the activation of unburned motor propellant. This does not exclude cruise missiles because they may be decoys or have some modified charge, another stream that may be explored.

The visual records are of low quality and prone to heavy editing, so the validity of the comparison is questionable, and the investigation can’t be judged solely on that.

AD units in the area were active. It is not publicly known how many missiles were launched and from where.

Hypotheses like that there was a secret meeting in the building or that the target was actually a Ministry of Infrastructure meeting may be considered. Still, there is no evidence to support this.

Sabotage and some heavily modified third types of missiles are in the domain of conspiracy theories and should stay there.

As usual, the blame game will continue until something else happens, and everything starts from the beginning.

In any case, the reader should conduct further research and, if possible, try to stay unbiased if that is possible.

1

I. Balagansky: Damaging Effects of Weapons and Ammunition, 3.5 Evaluation of the Damaging Effect of Shock Waves on Various Objects.

2

Ibid

3

High Explosive-Fragmentation

[i] Edited by Piquet (editPiquet@gmail.com)  https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/kiev-missile-attack-what-happened?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1105422&post_id=146522183&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email—

July 16, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster, Ukraine | Leave a comment