nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Ukraine must have nukes or NATO – Zelensky

 https://www.rt.com/russia/605856-zelensky-nuclear-nato-trump/ 16 Oct 24

The leader has described his conversation with former US President Donald Trump as he promotes his ‘victory plan’ to Western backers.

Ukraine can protect itself either by becoming a nuclear state or a member of NATO, Vladimir Zelensky said on Thursday, claiming that he had offered the same line of reasoning to former US President Donald Trump.

Speaking at a press conference after promoting his ‘victory plan’ for the conflict with Russia to European officials, Zelensky suggested that Ukraine would need nuclear weapons, should it not be granted NATO membership.

“Which of the big nations, the nuclear nations, suffered? Everyone? No, just Ukraine,” he stated, referring to the signatories of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The document involved the US, UK, and Russia extending security assurances to Kiev in return for the removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Ukraine.

“Speaking to Donald Trump, I told him: ‘What is the way out for us?’ Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and they will serve as protection, or we need to be in some kind of an alliance. We don’t know any effective alliances except NATO,” Zelensky added.

Ukraine’s choice is to become a NATO member, Zelensky said, claiming that Trump had found his reasoning justified.

Ukraine has never controlled nuclear weapons, but claims it was formerly among the major atomic powers before agreeing to relinquish them. In February 2022, weeks before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, Zelensky expressed regret at the decision in a speech at the International Security Conference in Munich, suggesting that his country had “every right” to reverse it.

Zelensky confirmed this week that an immediate invitation for Ukraine to join NATO was on his list of requests to Western donors. The secretary general of the US-led bloc, Mark Rutte, said on Thursday that Ukraine may not even be the next nation to become a member.

October 21, 2024 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Video. Gordon Edwards on Nuclear Fuel Waste Abandonment (South Bruce)

Canada’s nuclear waste producers want to bury and eventually abandon all of their high-level radioactive waste (used nuclear fuel) in a Deep Geological Repository (DGR). For this purpose they need to find a “willing host community” that will accept the waste. Accordingly, in 2005 the waste producers created a Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) that has given many millions of dollars to a small number of “candidate communities” over the last 14 years, in addition to meeting on a monthly basis with the members of a Citizens’ Liaison Committee (CLC) chosen for each candidate community, in a program called “Learn More”.

The idea is that each community would learn about how safe the management, transport, packaging and burial of this intensely radioactive material will be, so that they are “fully informed” about the proposed project. Now NWMO has narrowed down the original list of 22 candidate communities to just two: one near Revell Lake north of Lake Superior, between the Ontario towns of Ignace and Dryden, and the other near Teeswater, South Bruce, a small farming community a few kilometres west of Lake Huron. 

Unfortunately, NWMO withheld information about the individual radioactive constituents of used nuclear fuel (like radioactive iodine, radioactive caesium, radioactive strontium, and plutonium) and the biomedical dangers they pose. NWMO also erroneously affirmed that the used fuel pellets are solid ceramics that can not leak, which is untrue. Until recently, NWMO neglected to tell the communities that the used fuel will have to be “repackaged” before burial, an elaborate and potentially dangerous operation. In addition NWMO withheld information about the specific risks associated with “reprocessing” – the option of extraction of plutonium from the used fuel before burial, which requires the destruction of the nuclear fuel matrix, thereby releasing a very large quantity of radioactive solids, vapours and gases that are difficult to contain.

The Ignace town council has already signed an agreement with NWMO to proceed, and we are awaiting the decision of Wabigoon Lake First Nation – one of the closest indigenous communities to the Revell Lake site. The citizens of South Bruce will be voting in a referendum near the end of October whether or not to give their approval, after which the nearby Saugeen Ojibway First Nation will render its decision whether or not to support the project. In both cases, the decision of the indigenous peoples will be of great importance. Canada has accepted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a fundamental component of federal decision-making. UNDRIP asserts that no toxic waste shall be stored or disposed of o indigenous lands without the Free, Prior, Informed Consent of those indigenous rights-holders.

October 21, 2024 Posted by | Canada, wastes | Leave a comment

Widening the War: The US Sends Troops to Israel

October 20, 2024,  Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/widening-the-war-the-us-sends-troops-to-israel/

The dangers should be plastered on every wall in every office occupied by a military and political advisor. Israel’s attempt to reshape the Middle East, far from giving it enduring security, will merely serve to make it more vulnerable and unstable than ever. In that mix and mess will be its greatest sponsor and guardian, the United States, a giant of almost blind antiquity in all matters concerning the Jewish state.

In a measure that should have garnered bold headlines, the Biden administration has announced the deployment of some 100 US soldiers to Israel who will be responsible for operating the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. They are being sent to a conflict that resembles a train travelling at high speed, with no risk of stopping. As Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised in the aftermath of Iran’s October 1 missile assault on his country, “Our strike will be powerful, precise, and above all – surprising.” It would be of such a nature that “They will not understand what happened and how it happened.”

In an October 16 meeting between the Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Gallant, the deployment of a mobile THAAD battery was seen “as an operational example of the United States’ ironclad support to the defense of Israel.” Largely meaningless bits of advice were offered to Gallant: that Israel “continue taking steps to address the dire humanitarian situation” and take “all necessary measures to ensure the safety and security” of UN peacekeepers operating in  Lebanon’s south.

The charade continued the next day in a conversation between Austin and Gallant discussing the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. THAAD was again mentioned as essential for Israel’s “right to defence itself” while representing the “United States’ unwavering, enduring, and ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.” (“Ironclad” would seem to be the word of the moment, neatly accompanying Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system.)

A statement from the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, was a fatuous effort in minimising the dangers of the deployment. The battery would merely “augment Israel’s integrated air defense system,” affirm the ongoing commitment to Israel’s defence and “defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks from Iran.”

The very public presence of US troops, working alongside their Israeli counterparts in anticipation of broadening conflict, does not merely suggest Washington’s failure to contain their ally. It entails a promise of ceaseless supply, bolstering and emboldening. Furthermore, it will involve placing US troops in harm’s way, a quixotic invitation if ever there was one.

As things stand, the US is already imperilling its troops by deploying them in a series of bases in Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Iran’s armed affiliates have been making their presence felt, harrying the stationed troops with increasing regularity since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7 last year. A gradual, attritive toll is registering, featuring such attacks as those on the Tower 22 base in northern Jordan in January that left three US soldiers dead.

Writing in August for The Guardian, former US army major Harrison Mann eventually realised an awful truth about the mounting assaults on these sandy outposts of the US imperium: “there was no real plan to protect US troops beyond leaving them in their small, isolated bases while local militants, emboldened and agitated by US support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, used them for target practice.” To send more aircraft and warships to the Middle East also served to encourage “reckless escalation towards a wider war,” providing insurance to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could be protected “from the consequences of his actions.”

Daniel Davis, a military expert at Defense Priorities, is firmly logical on the point of enlisting US personnel in the Israeli cause. “Naturally, if Americans are killed in the execution of their duties, there will be howls from the pro-war hawks in the West ‘demanding’ the president ‘protect our troops’ by firing back on Iran.” It was “exactly the sort of thing that gets nations sucked into war they have no interest in fighting.”

Polling, insofar as that measure counts, suggests that enthusiasm for enrolling US troops in Israel’s defence is far from warm. In results from a survey published by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in August, some four in ten polled would favour sending US troops to defend Israel if it was attacked by Iran. Of the sample, 53% of Republicans would favour defending Israel in that context, along with four in 10 independents (42%), and a third of Democrats (34%).

There have also been some mutterings from the Pentagon itself about Israel’s burgeoning military effort, in particular against the  Lebanese Iran-backed militia, Hezbollah. In a report from The New York Times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., is said to be worried about the widening US presence in the region, a fact that would hamper overall “readiness” of the US in other conflicts. Being worried is just the start of it.

October 21, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Councillors raise concerns over fish populations at Hinkley C

Forty-four tonnes of fish could die every year once the site is running

 South Gloucestershire Council have raised concerns over the potential loss
of wildlife at Hinkley Point C as bosses propose installing saltmarsh land
in parts of North Somerset and Gloucestershire. EDF energy, who run the
nuclear power station at Hinkley C, are planning to build the habitat to
compensate for the 44 tonnes of fish that could die every year once the
site is running. But land owners and councillors in South Gloucestershire
have raised concern about the loss of wildlife and the health of the
region’s rivers.

 Rayo 18th Oct 2024,
https://hellorayo.co.uk/greatest-hits/bristol/news/hinkley-south-gloucestershire-letter/

October 21, 2024 Posted by | environment, UK | Leave a comment

“Goodbye Lebanon” – High Israeli Official. Biden Says OK, So Far.

By Ralph Nader / Nader.org, October 18, 2024

Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands – whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque – and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”

Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political Party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.

No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met – such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.

Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”

The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”

Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel government can do no wrong” Lobby in the U.S. – to which he has been indentured for his entire fifty-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.

Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.

That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both Parties. The power structure – the corporate state – or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”

Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.

These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.

President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”

October 21, 2024 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

How to build a nuclear tomb to last millennia

These enthusiastic articles about nuclear technology!

The writers never for a moment consider the thought of also just stopping making the foul stuff!

A promising site may turn out to be too close to vital aquifers that supply fresh water to local communities, or to the side of a valley, which in 10,000 years’ time may mean it’s at risk from an advancing glacier, and the hunt has to start again.

Then there is the nature and volume of the waste, and the amount of heat it generates. Intermediate waste produces less heat and so it can be stored safely, with containers stacked relatively close together in large vaults. High-level nuclear waste produces a great deal more heat, and must be stored in small amounts, far apart.

There is also the need for physical barriers to stop radiation from escaping from the GDF, which can range from the design of the containers to the type of rock that surrounds it. But critics fear these barriers may fail over time.

 Nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a
storage facility that will keep it safely buried for millennia? How do you
go about designing, building and operating structures that take decades to
plan and even longer to build, that operate over centuries and must survive
for 100,000 years, and that contain some of the most dangerous materials on
the planet?

Four hours’ drive east of Paris, the 2.4km (1.5 miles) of
tunnels are home to countless scientific experiments, construction
technique testing and technological innovations. France’s National
Radioactive Waste Agency (Andra) needs these to demonstrate to the
regulators if it is to be awarded a licence to build a geological disposal
facility (GDF) next to the tunnels.

Geological disposal facilities for
nuclear waste are, or will be, some of the largest underground structures
humanity has ever built. They are planned, in development, about to start
construction or about to open in the UK, France, Sweden, Finland and around
20 other countries.

 BBC 19th Oct 2024,
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241018-how-to-build-a-nuclear-tomb-to-last-millennia

October 21, 2024 Posted by | wastes | Leave a comment

Some Types of Pollution Are More Equal than Others

There is a BIG taboo around Radioactive Pollution. We published a report last June into acid mine pollution alongside radioactive pollution in Whitehaven Harbour – so far ignored by mainstream media.

Marianne Birkby, Oct 20, 2024  https://radiationfreelakeland.substack.com/p/some-types-of-pollution-are-more?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2706406&post_id=150473856&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Whitehaven Mine Pollution- Report by Radiation Free Lakeland – evidence to inform Authorities in future mitigation/prevention regarding mine pollution

The Westmorland Gazette and other local press have today published a feel good article about beach cleans in Cumbria. So far so good but the beaches contain far more insidious and long lived pollution than plastic, in the form of radioactive wastes from decades of Sellafield’s operations. In Whitehaven Harbour these radioactive wastes are literally magnified by the presence of the ongoing acid mine pollution pouring into the harbour. Instead of addressing this ongoing pollution event the local MP Josh MacAlister is greenwashing the ongoing devastation by bigging up Whitehaven as the West Coast Riviera and fizzingly pushing for a ferry service while boats are understandably leaving because of the visible acid mine pollution.

Less visible is the “historic” radioactive pollution still pouring out of Sellafield with more radioactive waste arriving almost daily.

October 21, 2024 Posted by | environment, UK | Leave a comment

Zelensky Once More Puts Allies Under Nuclear Shadow

Simplicius, Oct 19, 2024

A new central flashpoint around the issue of Ukraine obtaining nuclear weapons has suddenly taken hold of the narrative after Zelensky appeared to imply that Ukraine’s future can only be secured either via NATO or nuclear weapons. In fact, he said that’s what he explained to Trump and may be the real root kernel of his ‘Victory Plan’

Julian Roepcke at BILD went on to report that some high-ranking Ukrainian official disclosed that if given the order, Ukraine can build a nuke “within a matter of weeks”:

The Official specializing in weapons procurement, said in a closed round: “We have the Material, we have the Knowledge. If there is, the arrangement, we need only a few weeks until the first bomb.“

The West should be “less about Russia’s red lines, instead of thinking a lot more about our red lines,” the warning of the Official.

He was forced to defend himself after another round of backlash

However, after the report caused a firestorm, Zelensky’s press office was forced to issue an official refutation of Roepcke’s statements:

The Office of the President of Ukraine denied reports of the tabalid Bild that the Ukrainian authorities are allegedly seriously considering the possibility of restoring nuclear stockpiles.………………………

Interestingly, the above publication also notes the following, insinuating that as a last desperate line of defense Ukraine would rapidly obtain nukes if Russia were to assault Kiev again:

According to Bild analyst Julian Röpke, Zelensky’s statement came as a “shock” to Western journalists. He claims that a few months ago, a senior Ukrainian official allegedly told the publication and other members of a narrow circle of politicians and officials that Ukraine would not accept a second Russian army offensive on Kyiv.

“We have materials, we have knowledge. If there is an order, it will take us only a few weeks to get the first bomb. The West should “think less about Russia’s red lines and much more about our red lines,” the Ukrainian official said, according to the journalist.

Zelensky himself immediately began to walk back his statements after realizing the hot-water he may have landed himself in with his sponsors:

First a couple quick obligatory clarifications. Zelensky himself continues to spout the debunked lie that Ukraine “gave up its nuclear weapons” during the Budapest Memorandum.

Here’s the truth again:

First a couple quick obligatory clarifications. Zelensky himself continues to spout the debunked lie that Ukraine “gave up its nuclear weapons” during the Budapest Memorandum.

Here’s the truth again:

Ukraine never had control over those nukes. Secondly, it was revealed that it was actually the US itself rather than Russia that forced Ukraine to give up its nukes during that period, not wanting live nukes to fall into the hands of some failed state. Sure, Ukraine would not have been able to launch them, but could have potentially cracked them open and sold the enriched plutonium to bad actors on the black market………………………

October 21, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Is it worse to have no climate solutions – or to have them but refuse to use them?

Rebecca Solnit, 16 Oct 2024 ,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/16/climate-crisis-technology-ai

Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist.

When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love.’

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season’s weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse.

At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that “[w]e’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it” and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it’s prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to “solve” climate, saying: “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

Eventually is not good enough. A distinguished group of scientists said in a paper published on 8 October: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need to pull back from that brink, but Schmidt is arguing for plunging over it, because guys like him are excited about AI. This is like arguing we should jettison the lifeboats and hang out on the sinking ship because what if there was eventually a totally awesome, new kind of lifeboat we can’t even imagine right now?

We have the lifeboats now – we have the solutions, and we have had them for a while, and they keep getting better, as in better-designed, more efficient, more affordable and adaptable. We just need to implement them, but they’re just not the solutions a lot of the rich and powerful like. Proposing we go for some false or nonexistent solution has become an excuse constantly deployed as an excuse for not supporting the solutions we have.

Delay is the new denial” became a slogan in the climate movement a few years ago, and maybe “decoy is the new denial” should be added to it, by which I mean proposing we ignore workable present-day solutions in favor of unworkable and nonexistent ones while continuing to burn fossil fuel.

One might think that Schmidt, whose net worth is estimated at around $23bn, would devote some time and resources to organizing us to reach our climate goals rather than excuse himself from acting with his dismissive defeatism. But overall billionaires and the very rich are part of the problem, with their outsized power and the dismal ways most of them use it. And their climate impact is obscene – the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.

Scientists and engineers have been telling us for a very long time what we need to do and how to do it, and most of us already know that what we need to do is make a swift transition away from burning fossil fuels. Protecting forests and other natural systems and redesigning how we live, travel and produce and consume also matter, but phasing out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is the big one. Schmidt lives in California, where we’ve been getting more than 100% of our electricity needs met many days this year by sun, wind and water, and storing the surplus in immense battery systems. Obviously not everything in California runs on electricity, but this is a nice demonstration model of how rapidly a renewable system can scale up.

When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions – that we should consume less, which means we can produce less, and make this energy transition to a renewable-powered world – is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love. (Though solar and wind technologies are pretty amazing, particularly if you know how rapidly their design has improved, their cost has plummeted and their implementation has spread.) It is in many ways a social solution in which lots of us adjust how we live and how we power our devices, not a grand centralized invention that is super profitable for a few.

I do not know if it would be worse to live in a world in which we genuinely did not have the solutions, or to live in one where we have them but are not implementing them on the speed and scale we know we need to. But I know we have the solutions.

  • Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

October 20, 2024 Posted by | climate change, technology | Leave a comment

The Irony of Powering AI on Atomic Energy

the irony of reviving a dying and dangerous 20th century technology to power a 21st century technology that also promises miracles and has high environmental and human costs.

Should the U.S. revive nuclear power to satisfy the growing electricity demands of artificial intelligence?

UNDARK, By Stephanie Palazzo, 10.17.2024

The former visitor center for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, or TMI, was overrun by greenery when I conducted an interview there in 2020 for my graduate research. The ivy had climbed to the second-story observation deck, once a carefully crafted vantage point for visitors to look across the street at the power plant and onto the atomic future it heralded. 

On March 28, 1979, TMI’s Unit 2 reactor suffered a catastrophic loss of coolant, resulting in a partial meltdown that shook public confidence in the growing nuclear power industry. In 2019, the remaining Unit 1 reactor began its 60-year decommissioning. But on Sept. 20, 2024, Microsoft announced its deal with Constellation Energy, the current owner of the plant, to restart Unit 1 by 2028 to power the technology giant’s data centers, many of which are devoted to artificial intelligence.

On the surface, nuclear power offers a seemingly reliable, carbon-free energy source to support AI’s voracious energy demands. But belying that proposed solution is the irony of reviving a dying and dangerous 20th century technology to power a 21st century technology that also promises miracles and has high environmental and human costs.

……………………………………In his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations General Assembly that year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower rhetorically transformed the atom from a global weapon of war into an abundant source of energy. But Eisenhower and other experts believed the atom’s potential extended beyond the energy sector. In 1957 at the ratification of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Eisenhower declared that “the splitting of the atom may lead to the unifying of the entire divided world.”

Its mid-century proponents described atomic power with almost breathless excitement. In a 1970 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, chemist Glenn Seaborg, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, started by describing a hypothetical speech taking place in 1995. In this imagined future, he wrote that “the atom’s energy used in infinite variety is the lifeblood of our society,” enabling technological miracles in medicine and space travel.

Seaborg had foreseen an atomic utopia just within Americans’ grasp. But seared into many minds in the post-war era were images of nuclear apocalypse. To “reeducate” the American public on atomic energy in the service of peace and prosperity, the U.S. coordinated a mid-century propaganda program.

As the starting point for tours, TMI’s visitor center played a key role in this rebranding. Tours were not only educational. They were a public relations tool, designed to convince a concerned public that nuclear technology was safe — especially after the plant’s 1979 accident.

In 2023, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman underwent a public relations tour of another kind. Traveling across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, Altman discussed the political and economic consequences of AI with heads of state as well as with AI users………………Altman believes that AI can be used “to benefit humanity.” Bill Gates has spoken of the technology’s ability to democratize education and medicine across the world. Microsoft was one of the first major companies to invest in OpenAI, pouring in $13 billion over the past five years.

But neither Microsoft nor OpenAI has provided satisfying answers to increasingly unsettling questions about the technology’s less virtuous capabilities, from generating deepfakes to bioterrorist attacks. At the same time, chilling statistics lay out how AI may impact the global economy and the planet. The Pew Research Center found that 19 percent of workers were in jobs most vulnerable to AI, and a Wells Fargo analysis projected a 20 percent increase in U.S. electricity demand by 2030, in part fueled by the AI boom.

Given the reality of AI’s energy demands on an ever-warming planet, proponents of nuclear power see it as a carbon-free solution. But the mining, milling, and production of nuclear fuel, as well as the construction and decommissioning of nuclear plants, emit greenhouse gases at levels ranging from 10 to 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of power — lower than fossil fuels but higher than wind and hydroelectricity (and roughly on par with solar).

Papering over these economic and environmental realities, Altman and Gates, like Eisenhower and Seaborg, foresee a future in which American technology will create a better, more unified world — the same scientific optimism that powered the peaceful atom. But particularly at TMI, there is another way to remember “Atoms for Peace”: as a cautionary tale of technology outpacing expertise.

…………………..The 12-year cleanup of TMI cost $973 million. Grainy black-and-white images from cameras sent into the damaged reactor revealed shocking information: Up to two-thirds of the reactor had been exposed, 45 percent of the uranium fuel had melted, and 19 tons of it had dropped to the reactor floor — all evidence that the accident was closer to nuclear catastrophe than the experts had initially realized.

The people living in the small town that once welcomed TMI as a source of revenue and jobs complained of a metallic taste, burns on their skins, stillbirths among their farm animals, mutated plants, and, decades later, clusters of cancers.

The accident exposed the faults in Eisenhower’s careful distinction between the power plant and the bomb, and the fledgling industry never recovered. When 1995 did arrive, it did not offer the atomic utopia that Seaborg prophesized. Rather than the “lifeblood of society,” the atom seemed almost irrelevant, replaced by lower cost fossil fuels.

The U.S. is only in the beginning stages of its half-century project to decommission roughly 20 American nuclear plants and dispose of over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from commercial nuclear power reactors, the highest amount of any country in the world. These efforts are underway while regulations loosen over decommissioning plants that continue to house radioactive waste on-site.

Now TMI, in the process of decommissioning, is being revived. What sort of vision of the future would the power plant’s visitor center present to the public in 2028?

Three Mile Island has become a symbol of the U.S. nuclear industry’s overconfidence in its early expertise and of its ultimate failure to deliver on its promises. The irony of it being used to power AI — a technology already notorious for surprising and outpacing its experts — is unavoidable. But there is something even more dangerously ironic about powering the future with the stubborn optimism of the past. Rather than how to meet AI’s voracious energy demands, Three Mile Island might provide a historical vantage to consider whether to power this future at all.

Stephanie Palazzo, Ph.D., is a sociocultural anthropologist and teacher. She is currently writing a book on Three Mile Island’s 1979 accident and present decommissioning. https://undark.org/2024/10/17/opinion-irony-of-powering-ai-on-atomic-energy/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=a71e329248-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

October 20, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Years after nuclear fiasco soaked ratepayers, leaders look at restarting VC Summer project .

The State, BY SAMMY FRETWELL OCTOBER 15, 2024

Seven years after two power companies abandoned a failing nuclear construction project, a report has concluded that the equipment and existing buildings on the site are in “excellent’’ condition — and it would be worth a look at restarting construction.

A Sep. 16 report by two members of the Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council said partially completed buildings show “no degradation, corrosion’’ or chipped concrete at the V.C. Summer site northwest of Columbia. The report, discussed Tuesday at the council’s quarterly meeting, said nuclear parts that had already been installed showed some surface rust, but that was not unexpected or a substantial problem.

The V.C. Summer nuclear expansion project marked what many consider the biggest construction failure in South Carolina history. The project to build two reactors to complement an existing one cost $9 billion, soaked ratepayers with higher utility bills and left thousands of employees out of work. Utilities walked away from the project in 2017 because of excessive costs and delays.

But there has been renewed talk of restarting the effort to meet growing energy needs, and the Advisory Council report examined what kind of shape the buildings and equipment were in………………….

The reality of restarting the project is unknown without more study and finding a way to pay for it. Doing so would make for an additional cost, beyond the more than the $9 billion Santee Cooper and SCE&G spent on the V.C. Summer project before it was shelved seven years ago.

Lee and Little’s report recommended a more extensive study of the equipment, buildings and possibility of finishing the project.

Considering the costs to customers — many are still paying for the failed project as part of their monthly energy bills — beginning work on the abandoned reactors could be unpopular with the public, said Tom Clements, a nuclear safety watchdog and critic of the V.C. Summer expansion. As of late last year, ratepayers were still being charged more than 5 percent on their Dominion energy bills for the failed project.

At the same time, SCE&G, which was acquired by Dominion Energy, terminated the federal license to build the plant. Getting a new one for the work could be an extensive process, taking possibly years to complete, he said. “It would take a tremendous amount of effort and financial resources that would make restart of the project highly impractical,’’ Clements said………………………………………………………………

Meanwhile, Santee Cooper is not interested in owning or operating nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer, if they were completed, a spokeswoman said. A Dominion spokesman offered similar comments. The Virginia-headquartered power company “has no plans to restart construction of additional units at V.C. Summer,’’ spokeswoman Rhonda O’Banion said in an email…………………………………………………………

Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, also has mentioned that the infamous Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania was under consideration for restart of a nuclear reactor. Davis suggested Lee and Little put together the report discussed Tuesday at the council meeting. Efforts are underway to crank up a unit that shut down in 2019 so that the plant can accommodate a Microsoft data center, Reuters reported. Data centers are tremendous users of energy. The Three-Mile Island site is home to what’s considered the nation’s worst nuclear accident, a meltdown in the 1970s. The reactor to be restarted is not the one in which the 1979 accident occurred.

……………………………………………………………………… Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper jointly own the V.C. Summer property, but Santee and Westinghouse own the equipment. When the V.C. Summer expansion project shut down, SCE&G ratepayers had been charged more than $1 billion for the construction, prompting a public and political outcry. Top utility executives were accused of withholding information about the project’s problems, charged criminally for their actions and sentenced to prison……………………….  https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article293978684.html

October 20, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

Mint Press News, October 16th, 2024, Alan Macleod

ne year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.


White House Insider

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.

Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

An Infamous Spy Agency

Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.

Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.

Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.

Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.

It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.

Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.

Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.

The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.

In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.

This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”

Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?

News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel

Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.

Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day.  Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.

The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.

Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.

MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.

Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress……………………………………

Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship

When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.

Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.

This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top.  A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.

CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. ………………………………………………………………………………

Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?

Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this.  https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-israel-unit-8200-spies-american-media/288457/

October 20, 2024 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

US wants Ukraine to send teenagers into the chopper mill of lost proxy war against Russia.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 18 Oct 24

After 32 months of failure, one might conclude the US is ready to toss in the towel in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Over $150 billion in war material has done nothing to achieve stalemate, much less victory. Russia is advancing steadily to cut off Ukraine’s ability to remain in the fight both provoked and extended for over 2 years by the Biden administration.

Ukraine’s young men ore fleeing conscription in droves. To keep the conveyor belt of cannon fodder flowing, President Zelensky lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 last April. He was responding to criticism from supreme US war promoter Sen. Lindsay Graham, who visited Zelensky to offer “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27. You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.” At the beginning of this lost war Graham gloated that “Ukraine should fight to the last person”…as long as billions in US weapons keep flowing.

The Biden administration is now suggesting Ukraine should toss teenagers into the war by lowering the draft age to 18 to fill the ranks of near empty brigades. If asked again about Ukraine’s dire situation, Graham would likely amend his earlier comment to state that ‘Ukraine should fight to the last teenager.’

October 20, 2024 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what it means for the planet

 The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what
it means for the planet. Scientists are concerned that the Atlantic
Ocean’s system of currents may be about to reach a tipping point. If it
does, it’ll have severe consequences for all of us.

 BBC Science Focus 13th Oct 2024
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/atlantic-current-collapse

October 20, 2024 Posted by | climate change, oceans | Leave a comment

Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war. “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so

October 18, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/nuclear-fever-war-mongering-on-iran/

The recent string of exaggerated military successes – or at least as they are understood to be – places Israel in a situation it has been previously used to: prowess in war. Such prowess promises much: redrawing boundaries; overthrowing governments; destroying the capabilities of adversaries and enemies. Nothing, in this equation, contemplates peace, let alone diplomatic resolution. It’s playground pugilism that rarely gets out of the sandpit.

In Washington, a fever has struck regarding Israel’s advances. The outbreak has stirred much enthusiasm in a doctrine that has been shown, time and again, to be wretchedly uncertain and grossly dangerous. With no concrete evidence of imminent harm to US interests, it featured in the highest policy planning circles that oiled an invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the stated objective was the disarming of Saddam Hussein’s regime for having Weapons of Mass Destruction it turned out not to have, the logic was one of pre-emptive strike: we attack the madman in Baghdad before he goes nuclear and loses it.

The establishment wonk on empire and espionage at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, offers a fairly meaningless assessment in terms of claimed Israeli dominance over Iran and its proxies. After a year of conflict, Israel had “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’.” The implication: a decisive attack on Iran is imminent.

The point here (at this juncture, the mind lost seeks sanctuary in a mental asylum of lunatic reassurances), is that attacking Iran in toto will not result in much by way of retaliatory detriment. Some bruising, surely, but hardly lingering flesh wounds. Israel has, it would seem, been working some magic, spreading its own view that Iran has a gruesome plan in its military vault: eliminating Israel by 2040.

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war. “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing. The reason for such an attack lies in a presumption. Yet again, the doctrine of pre-emption, one hostile to international law and the UN Charter, plays out its feeble rationale. Evidence, in such cases, is almost always scanty. Kroenig, however, is certain. Iran will secure one bomb’s worth of weapon-grade material within a matter of weeks. The rest is obvious. No evidence is offered, nor does it even matter, given Kroenig’s longstanding zeal in wishing to rid Iran of its nuclear facilities.

The Atlantic Council has also suggested a policy that what is good for the goose of Christian-Jewish freedom is not good for the gander of Persian Shia ambition. It is exactly this full-fledged hypocrisy that the despots of the secular tyranny in North Korea realised in dealing with Washington. Beware the nostrums against nuclear armament.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Instead of resisting belligerent chatter, the authors suggest that the US threaten Iran through announcing “yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program

Kroenig shows his usual stuffing. Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so. (The Sunni powers, for their own reasons, agree.) This form of perennial idiocy could apply to all the powers that have nuclear weapons, including Israel itself. At one point, no state should have had that relic of sadism’s folly. Then they came in succession after the United States: the Soviet bomb, the Britannic bomb, the Gallic bomb. Throw in China, India, Pakistan, Israel. Plucky, deranged North Korea, was wise to note the trend, showing lunacy to be eternally divisible.

It is precisely that sort of logic that has drawn such comments as this from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a May interview: “Iran’s level of deterrence will be different if the existence of Iran is threatened. We have no decision to produce a nuclear bomb, but we will have to change our nuclear doctrine if such threats occur.” This month, almost 40 legislators penned a letter to the Supreme National Security Council calling for a reconsideration of current nuclear doctrine. The greater the fanatic’s desire to remove a perceived threat, the more likely an opponent will give basis to that threat.

For all the faux restraint being officially aired in Washington regarding Israel’s next round of military assaults, there is enormous sympathy, even affection, for the view that wrongs shall be righted, and the mullahs punished. Bedding for a more hostile response to Iran also features in the inane airings of the presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview with 60 minutes, remarked that, “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” In making that claim, she suggested that Tehran was somehow Washington’s greatest adversary.

In response to this fatuous remark, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute offers an ice-cold bath of reason: “This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940.” The path to dominating the Middle East hardly involves such tools as propaganda, proxy operations and psychological warfare “much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.”

The nuclear option is now available to governments that should never have had them. But acquiring the dangerously untenable followed. To assume that brutal, amputation loving theocrats in Tehran should not have them defies the trajectory of a certain moronic consistency. The Persian bomb is probably imminent, and it is incumbent on the murderous fantasists in Israel and the United States to chew over that fact. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the fetish against acquisition risks expanding a conventional conflict through testing the will and means of a power that, while wounded, hardly counts as defeated.

October 20, 2024 Posted by | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »