Busting the Spin on Small Modular Reactors – the CATO Institute !
At the heart of the case for SMRs is the claim that being smaller, they will be cheaper, quicker, and easier to build and easier to site. While this argument might appear plausible, it is not supported by any evidence.
the output of the 470MW Rolls Royce SMR is about the same size as that of the Fukushima Daiichi 1 reactor that melted down in 2011.
a large PWR or BWR will create less waste than the same capacity of SMRs.
an operating reactor requires few permanent employees, and those workers typically have highly specific skills unlikely to be found among the local population. …………………..The number of factory jobs that are created is likely to be small and will mostly not be in the country buying the reactor.
The CATO Institute, Fall 2025 • Regulation
……………………………………………………………………Instead of another round of large nuclear plants, one of the focal points of the new renaissance is Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines SMRs as having an electrical output of 30MW–300MW.
Among their ostensible virtues:
- They are cheaper and easier to build and so are less prone to cost and time overruns, making them easier to finance.
- They are safer; for example, some are said to be meltdown-proof and “walk-away safe.”
- They produce less waste (per kW of capacity) than large reactors.
- Being smaller, there will be less opposition to their siting.
- They will create large numbers of new jobs.
SMR proponents give the impression that large numbers of the units are being ordered around the world. These claims are unproven or misleading or simply wrong. No current SMR design is under construction, much less operating, so these claims—notably those on cost and construction time—are unproven and no more than marketing hype. There are two SMR-sized units under construction, in China and Russia, but they are prototypes or one-offs. The true SMR project nearest to construction start (as defined by pouring of first structural concrete) is the Darlington project for Ontario, Canada, for up to four GE–Hitachi BWRX–300s (explained below). The Ontario government approved construction of the first reactor in May 2025.
No SMR design that is expected to be offered as a commercial reactor has completed a full safety review by an experienced and credible regulator. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will examine the design during the Darlington construction phase rather than before construction starts. Until a comprehensive safety review is successfully completed, it will not be known if the design is licensable or what the costs will be.
The designs most likely to progress to commercial availability are those based on the PWR and BWR designs in LWR large reactors. There are 65 years of operating experience with these types of reactors, so there is a reasonable expectation that SMR LWRs could be reliable, if not necessarily economic, sources of power.
Many designs for these units are said to be under development, but only a handful have progressed beyond the conceptual stage and are being offered by firms with the credibility to deliver a facility expected to cost several billion dollars. The main options are the GE–Hitachi BWRX–300, the Holtec SMR300, the Rolls Royce SMR, and the Westinghouse AP300. Below are overviews of these four designs, along with some other possibilities.
GE–Hitachi BWRX–300 / General Electric, along with Westinghouse, has by far the longest and most extensive experience in designing and supplying nuclear power reactors. The 300MW BWR is based on its ESBWR 1,500MW reactor design. Although the ESBWR completed US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) safety review in 2014, GE–Hitachi has won no orders, and it currently does not appear to be actively marketing the unit.
Like the ESBWR, the BWRX–300 relies heavily on passive safety features. GE–Hitachi received an order for up to four of the reactors to be built at the Darlington site. It has completed a pre-licensing review in Canada and a construction license has been given. A detailed review of the design will be carried out during construction prior to an operating license being granted.
The BWRX–300 was one of four designs shortlisted by Great British Energy–Nuclear (GBE–N), with the UK government-owned energy organization expected to choose two designs for installation in Scotland and England. But in June 2025, GBE–N announced only that it had selected the Rolls Royce SMR design, discussed below.
The UK Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) is carrying out its Generic Design Assessment (GDA) on the BWRX–300, and it completed the first of the three stages of the GDA in December 2024 (primarily information exchange). GE–Hitachi has only committed to carry out the first two stages of review, and is unlikely to undertake the third stage given that it was not selected by GBE–N.
Holtec SMR 300 / Holtec has a long history in the spent-fuel handling and plant decommissioning sectors of the nuclear power industry, but not as a reactor designer and vendor. It launched its PWR SMR design in 2010, initially proposing a 160MW reactor. The unit is designed to be housed deep underground, relying on passive safety (claimed to be “walk-away safe”). In 2023, Holtec doubled the thermal output of the plant and renamed it SMR 300. It is not willing to say when it decided to make that change or why, but the most likely explanation is to gain scale economies.
Its main sales prospect is to initially build two reactors at Holtec’s Palisades site in Michigan, adjacent to an 801MW reactor Holtec owns and is preparing to reopen after it was idled in 2022.
It was one of the four designs shortlisted by GBE–N. ONR is carrying out its GDA on the Holtec SMR 300, but like GE–Hitachi, Holtec is unlikely to carry out the third stage given that it was not selected by GBE–N.
Rolls Royce SMR / Rolls Royce has a long history of supplying nuclear submarine reactors based on US designs. It is not clear how well this equips the firm to design and supply land-based power reactors. Its design is a 470MW PWR, making it significantly larger than the top of the IAEA’s range for SMRs.
Unlike the other three designs, it is much more conventional, not relying so much on passive safety and not housed underground. Its main sales prospects are in the UK and the Czech Republic. In the UK, it submitted a Final Tender to GBE–N in April 2025 and was selected by the government. ONR is carrying out its GDA on the reactor. It completed the second of the three stages in July 2024, and the third stage is expected to be completed in 2026.
Rolls Royce signed a deal in October 2024 with the Czech utility CEZ for it to help develop the design. It expects that three initial orders will be placed for the Czech Republic, with them coming online in 2034–2037. In February 2025, there were reports of tension between Rolls Royce and CEZ—in particular, over how much local Czech content there would be in reactor orders.
Westinghouse AP300 / Westinghouse has supplied substantially more power reactors worldwide than any other vendor. Its SMR design, the AP300 PWR, was launched well after its competitors in May 2023 and is based on the AP1000 large reactor design. It relies on passive safety.
In the UK, it applied for the design to undergo a GDA. In August 2024, it passed the government’s “readiness” test and was allowed to move on to a GDA. However, by December 2024, no funding package to pay for this process (expected to be funded by the vendor) had been agreed upon, and Westinghouse asked ONR to defer the start of the GDA. By May 2025, the GDA had not started, and there is no indication whether Westinghouse expects to proceed.
It chose not to respond to GBE–N’s Invitation to Submit Final Tenders for its project discussed above. Westinghouse has not commented on its decision not to proceed with the GDA or its decision not to submit a Final Tender to GBE–N. It may be that it has halted work until there is more concrete buyer interest in the design. If the design is not pursued, this would be the second time Westinghouse has carried out development work on an SMR design only to abandon it before it had won any orders, the previous attempt being halted in 2014.
Other possibilities / Besides those reactors, the French nuclear engineering firm Framatome began developing a design, Nuward, in 2019. It abandoned the design in the summer of 2024 in favor of a more conventional layout, and there is no timeframe for when this new design might be available.
A US firm, NuScale, has a design that has been under development since 2005. It started out as a 35MW PWR, then expanded to 40MW, 50MW, 60MW, and finally 77MW. The design, which successfully completed NRC review in May 2025, is “integrated” with all components housed within the reactor containment and would be built underground. It was designed to be built in clusters of 12 reactors, but the 77MW version is now also offered in clusters of four and six reactors. It appeared to have won an order in 2015 from Utah Associated Municipal Power (UAMPS) for a cluster of 12 reactors of 50MW, which then evolved into a cluster of six 77MW reactors, but the project was abandoned in December 2023 because of sharply escalating cost.
Arguments for SMRs / At the heart of the case for SMRs is the claim that being smaller, they will be cheaper, quicker, and easier to build and easier to site. While this argument might appear plausible, it is not supported by any evidence. The first reactors from more than 60 years ago were 150 MW or less, and reactors subsequently became larger, increasing in size 10-fold, primarily to gain scale economies. The case for this is clear: A 1,500MW reactor vessel will, all things being equal, be cheaper than ten 150MW reactor vessels. So, SMRs start with a disadvantage compared to large reactors because of the lost scale economies over large designs.
However, there is no clear evidence on why the real cost of large reactors has continuously increased over the history of nuclear power. Is it because of their size or because of how complex the designs have become? If it is complexity, why would SMRs be less complex than large reactors? The most obvious way this could happen is if not all the safety systems added to large reactors over the past 40 years were required for SMRs. Given that the SMRs on offer are not that small, this seems unlikely. For example, the output of the 470MW Rolls Royce SMR is about the same size as that of the Fukushima Daiichi 1 reactor that melted down in 2011.
The history of the Westinghouse AP design reactors illustrates the nuclear industry’s confusing position on reactor size. Its 1989 AP600 design was found to be uneconomic and was scaled up to the AP1000 in 2002, then scaled up again in 2013 to the CAP1400 and, in 2023, scaled down to the AP300.
Safety Many SMR safety claims are based on their use of passive safety measures. The intuitive impression is that because passive safety does not require the operation of an engineered system, it would be cheaper and, because it is passive, it cannot fail (Ramana 2024). Neither assumption is true. Building reactors underground appears likely to increase site work and make it more difficult and expensive. The ESBWR and AP1000 large reactor designs are both heavily reliant on passive safety, yet the ESBWR was too expensive to win any orders and the AP1000 proved very expensive to build in practice. That experience does not support the contention that passive safety will reduce costs. If all the safety systems required for large reactors are required for SMRs, this will adversely affect their economics.
Ease of production The idea that SMRs would emerge in several modules from factories and be transported to the site on the back of trucks, requiring only bolting together at the site, also has an intuitive appeal. However, in practice SMRs are substantial-sized reactors and will inevitably require considerable on-site civil works to provide the foundations and services required.
The narrative of factory production lines conjures an image of a conveyor belt producing multiple identical reactor modules, perhaps similar to automobile production lines producing thousands of cars per year. However, this is not the expected reality. Rolls Royce plans to only produce two reactors per year. Although production lines can be a cheap method of manufacture, they must constantly operate at near capacity to pay off their high fixed costs. If demand is less than planned, the high fixed costs will not be spread across many units of electricity, and if the design changes, the production line will have to be re-tooled. The AP1000 was expected to be built in factory modules, yet this did not prevent all the projects using this design from going far over time and budget.
Waste All things equal, a large PWR or BWR will create less waste than the same capacity of SMRs. Former US NRC chair Allison Macfarlane has said that SMRs would increase the volume and complexity of waste between two- and 30-fold because of such factors as greater neutron leakage.
Jobs Both politicians and nuclear power advocates like to claim a new plant will create many new jobs. But an operating reactor requires few permanent employees, and those workers typically have highly specific skills unlikely to be found among the local population. Nuclear reactors do require large numbers of workers during construction, but they too have specific skills unlikely to be found in the local area, and sometimes these workers have to be recruited from abroad. This is very disruptive to the local area, requiring a large amount of short-term accommodation and facilities.
Moreover, if the promises that SMRs will be cheaper and quicker to build than large reactors are fulfilled, they will create less work and over a shorter period. If factories with production lines are efficient, they will require fewer workers than other manufacturing methods. To minimize costs, the number of factories will have to be minimized, and factories will not be built in most export-country markets. The number of factory jobs that are created is likely to be small and will mostly not be in the country buying the reactor……………………………………………………………………………………………………https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2025/next-nuclear-renaissance#small-modular-reactors
Patrick Lawrence: The Voices of Many Jews
“Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it.”
these people speak not for the destruction of Israel but for its restoration to sanity — and, so, its salvation.
October 28, 2025, By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/10/25/patrick-lawrence-the-voices-of-many-jews/
This very welcome letter marks out the significantly worsening alienation between world Jewry and the Zionists’ defacement of the Judaic tradition.
At last, at last, Jews with powerful voices have gathered en masse — a critical mass, I would say — to condemn Israel and the savage spree of murder, starvation and terror it inflicts as we speak upon the Palestinians of Gaza and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.
You may by now be aware of the open letter signed by 450–plus American, European and Israeli Jews and made public this week. In it, this sprawling group of distinguished personages denounces the criminality of the Zionist regime and asserts “the universality of justice and the fair and equal application of international law.” The signatories also call for the international community to impose immediate sanctions on apartheid Israel.
This is very big, in my read. I say this not because of what is in this document — calls for justice of this kind are by now many — but, straight to my point, for whose names are on it.
You may know of this letter and you may not, I ought to add: The Guardian reported it in its Oct. 22 editions. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, also had the story right away. Arab News had it, too. So did Middle East Monitor, The New Indian Express, and, stateside, Common Dreams. In Britain, Jewish Voice for Liberation, J.V.L., picked it up.
But the British daily is at writing alone among major Western media to report on this momentous call for worldwide action against the Zionist state. We read nothing of it in major Western media and hear nothing from the mainstream broadcasters. I will return to this important point shortly.
“Join the Worldwide Jewish Call,” as the letter is titled, was organized and put out by an apparently ad hoc “coalition” called Jews Demand Action. The document and various appendages explaining it are here. As the Jews Demand Action website makes clear, the intent is to announce a continually engaged movement in the cause of justice — justice for Palestinians, justice for the Zionist fanatics guilty of perpetrating a genocide, a term the group uses with obvious conviction and also with obvious anger. Among much else, the letter features a form by way of which Jews can sign the petition and receive updates on actions to come.
“At last, a serious global Jewish call for sanctions on Israel,” J.V.L., the British version of Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, proclaimed in the above-noted report.
Yes, at last.
Lots of other Jews have stood publicly against the apartheid state, many for a long time. There is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, the wonderfully outspoken rabbi and author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (Bais Medrash and Primedia eLaunch, 2020), there is the aforementioned Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jewish organizations and students active on university campuses and in the streets of major cities. Unqualified praise to them and the many like them I cannot list in full.
I have no certain idea why it took these hundreds of influential people with self-evident consciences so long to join these others against the entity that insists on calling itself “the Jewish state.” To hazard a surmise, the past two years of Israel’s unspeakable barbarism have surely been a torment for the signatories of this letter, as for countless Jews the world over, as they have sought to distinguish their faith and their traditions from the conduct of the ultra-nationalist regime that is supposed to merit their allegiance but has emphatically lost it.
If I had to choose one sentence in this letter above all others for its significance and power — I would rather not but I will — it would be this: “Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it.”
After this truth comes these:
“When our sages taught that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world, they did not carve exceptions for Palestinians. We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid.”
This is the conceptual frame within which the signatories address António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, as well as “presidents, prime ministers, heads of state, [and] permanent representatives to the United Nations.” While approving of the ceasefire, or what remains of it at this point, the letter states,
“And yet there should be no doubt that this ceasefire is fragile: Israeli forces remain in Gaza, the agreement makes no reference to the West Bank, the underlying conditions of occupation, apartheid, and the denial of Palestinian rights remain unaddressed.”
“As Jews and as human beings, we declare: Not in our name,” the letter states. It then lists the four key demands the signatories advance in their names: Respect for the authority of the International Court of Justice (Yes!), a rejection of the complicity Western governments have forced upon their citizens, a full military withdrawal, the supply of aid and everything else needed to reconstruct Gaza, and, finally, “to refute false accusations of antisemitism that abusively deploy our collective history to tarnish those with whom we stand together in the pursuit of peace and justice” (Yes again times 10!).
You find some big names among the signatories (and the open letter does not give the full list): Daniel Levy, previously a “peace” negotiator for Israel and now a prominent critic; Gabor Maté, the physician-psychotherapist; Wallace Shawn, the playwright, actor, and reliable old leftie; Amy Eilberg, an American rabbi and activist; Peter Beinart (one of the organizers of Jews Demand Action), Naomi Klein, the “progressive” Canadian writer; Yuval Abraham, who co-directed No Other Land, the documentary that took an Oscar last year.
If I do not put the point too simply, these people speak not for the destruction of Israel but for its restoration to sanity — and, so, its salvation. They do not mention the two-state solution in their letter, but one gains the impression it is this for which they hope. One may differ strenuously with them on these points (as I do, emphatically), but what I will shorthand as their moderation is part of what makes their open letter so important: These are (shorthand again) mainstream Jews.
Who can say how carefully or how many presidents, prime ministers, U.N. reps, etc. will consider this letter? But this is not the salient point. This letter marks out the significantly worsening alienation between world Jewry and the state that is supposed to represent its home. And in so doing it widens and deepens the already evident isolation of the Jewish state. This latter effect may not be the intent of the open letter’s signatories, but it will prove unmistakably to be among the document’s consequences.
A Growing Consensus
We represent the growing consensus of world Jews, not the Israeli government,” the letter declares in one of its subheads. Exactly so. And as The Guardian piece cited above points out, the open letter should be read alongside some stunning numbers coming out of the most recent opinion polls. In a recent Washington Post survey, 61 percent of American Jews asked think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza; just under 40 percent stand with the open letter’s signatories: We witness a genocide.
In a poll that does not distinguish between Jews and non–Jews, The Brookings Institution finds that 45 percent of those surveyed think Israel is committing genocide. A recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University indicates 50 percent of register voters agree; among Democratic voters the number is 77 percent. On Thursday Reuters published a survey indicating that 59 percent of the Jews and non–Jews polled think the United States should recognize Palestine as a sovereign state.
I see a highly significant conflict growing ever sharper between the increasing number of outspoken Jews of conscience and those many — and they remain very many — who continue to defend the righteousness of the Israeli terror machine. Things are getting especially awkward for mainstream media such as the Zionist-supervised New York Times, wherein we find no mention of Jews Demand Action and its forthright open letter. This cannot end well for the Times and all the pilot fish that follow it.
However long the Times stays silent, however many media billionaire Zionists take over and corrupt, however many Bari Weisses they put in high places, this will do nothing other than discredit these media. They are effectively complicit in the Zionists’ defacement of the Judaic tradition. This is another way the open letter is important.
The world has long and urgently needed to hear from the “we” whose names are on this letter. Non–Jews need to learn of and make the distinction between Judaism and the frenzied Zionism that now rules Israel so they can think clearly of these questions. And as they are well aware, those Jews who reject Israel’s ultra-nationalist Zionism must make themselves heard for the sake of Judaism, too.
I do not accept that any great wave of anti–Semitism is breaking upon us — there is no “ferocious surge,” in Joe Biden’s preposterous phrase. But the potential for such a turn, given the extent of Israel’s inhumanity in combination with its claim to be “the Jewish home,” is obvious.
The Zionist hoards love the threat of anti–Semitism: How well it serves their pernicious purpose. At last this insidious ruse is countered by those whose voices count for most — the voices of Jews.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
Escalating nuclear waste disposal cost leads senior MP to demand ‘coherent’ plan.
The escalating costs of the geological disposal facility (GDF) have led the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chair to demand that the government produce a “coherent plan” to manage the country’s nuclear waste legacy
29 Oct, 2025 By Tom Pashby
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/escalating-nuclear-waste-disposal-cost-leads-senior-mp-to-demand-coherent-plan-29-10-2025/
A GDF represents a monumental undertaking, consisting of an engineered vault placed between 200m and 1km underground, covering an area of approximately 1km2 on the surface. This facility is designed to safely contain nuclear waste while allowing it to decay over thousands of years, thereby reducing its radioactivity and associated hazards.
PAC chair Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s comments were made in reaction to the revelation that the total life cost of the GDF is up to £15bn more than the sum listed in the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority’s (Nista’s) recent annual report. Nista is a government body and works with the Cabinet Office and Treasury and its August 2025 report published figures from Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), the government body responsible for the GDF, showing the GDF as having a whole life cost of from £20bn to £53.3bn.
However, Nista’s Infrastructure Pipeline dashboard lists the GDF’s CapEx (capital expenditure) range for new infrastructure in 2024/2025 prices as being from £26.2bn to £68.7bn, with the top end being slightly over £15bn higher than the figure published in the annual report.
A government source explained to NCE earlier that the discrepancy is because the figures published in Nista’s annual report was based on 2017/2018 prices, meaning the effects of long-term inflation were not accounted for.
Criticism has previously been levied at High Speed 2 (HS2) because of its use of historic pricing figures to reduce the impact of inflation on budget projects and make the total cost of the project appear to be lower than it would end up being.
Government must have coherent plan to manage nuclear waste – senior MP
The House of Commons PAC is one of the most active and powerful select committees in Parliament, able to formally request that the National Audit Office carry out investigations into government projects.
Nuclear decommissioning is a key area of focus for the Committee because of the high total costs, which will hit the public purse into the far future. Sellafield is seen as the government’s flagship project within the wider nuclear decommissioning programme.
The scale of future nuclear decommissioning is clear in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority: Annual Report and Accounts 2024 to 2025, which says: “the discounted best estimate of the future costs of the decommissioning mission of £110.1bn”. This is a £5bn increase on the previous year.
UN Human Rights Office Warns Israeli Settler Violence in West Bank Is “Surging”
The Trump administration insisted last week that it would not allow Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, October 27, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/un-human-rights-office-warns-israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-is-surging/
he UN Human Rights office for Palestine has warned that Israel is rapidly accelerating its campaign to annex the occupied West Bank, with settlers adding outposts at a pace 10 times higher than the previous average rate just in the past year.
Recent settler attacks on the olive harvest have underscored the danger faced by Palestinian communities, the office noted, with this season alone seeing 150 settler attacks so far.
This includes an attack caught on camera by a journalist last week, when a 53-year-old woman was beaten by settlers and sent to the hospital during the olive harvest; as well as an attack on a 58-year-old olive farmer in Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, on Thursday, the office said.
These attacks represent just a fraction of the settler violence faced by Palestinians as Israel escalates its annexation campaign amid its genocide in Gaza, the office said. UN officials, citing Israeli group Peace Now, said that there have been 757 settler attacks in the West Bank just in the first half of 2025, marking a 13 percent increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have created 84 new illegal outposts in the West Bank, marking a “rapid escalation” of the previous pace of eight new settlements per year on average, the office said.
The violence is “making life impossible for Palestinians in many communities across the occupied West Bank and leaving them with no genuine choice but to leave their homes.”
“These actions advance Israel’s stated policy to consolidate annexation in clear violation of international law,” the office said.
The UN statement comes just days after the Trump administration repeated its supposed opposition to annexation.
“It won’t happen,” said President Donald Trump last week when asked about annexation. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
But as the UN statement and that of other experts has underscored, Israel is already in the process of annexing the West Bank, both in policy and in practice. Top Israeli ministers have spent recent months formalizing plans for annexation, vowing to annex the West Bank in all but name or, in some cases, outright calling for the illegal policy.
The experts respond to Trump’s proposal to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”
even if China was to up the number of its warheads dramatically, that would still amount to less than a third of what the United States and Russia each already have.
By Dan Drollette Jr | October 30, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/the-experts-respond-to-trumps-proposal-to-start-testing-our-nuclear-weapons-on-an-equal-basis/
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, that he had instructed the Department of War (formerly the Defense Department) to return to “nuclear testing” — although it’s unclear whether he was referring to testing a nuclear delivery system or testing a nuclear explosive device. Those are two very different things that Trump seems to be confused about.
In the words of prominent nuclear weapons expert Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (who is one of the lead authors of the “Nuclear Notebook” column, published regularly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists): “It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.” Kristensen then goes into detail, debunking a series of Trump’s assertions in his social media post. For instance, Trump’s initial claim that “[t]he United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office…” is simply false.
As Kristensen points out, Russia has more nuclear weapons than the United States. And Trump’s assertion about a “a complete update and renovation of existing weapons” is also flatly wrong. In Kristensen’s words, “The nuke modernization program currently underway was initiated by Obama, Trump didn’t finish it, and it will continue for another two decades.”
Kristensen then proceeds for eight linked posts to correct or clarify the many other misstatements made by the president in Trump’s Truth Social post. For example, even if China was to up the number of its warheads dramatically, that would still amount to less than a third of what the United States and Russia each already have.
And as Kristensen notes, the US already tests its missiles (without nuclear payloads) to ensure that they can launch safely and correctly: “If by testing he [Trump] means nuclear explosive testing, that would be reckless, probably not possible for 18 months, would cost money that Congress would have to approve, and it would certainly trigger Russian and Chinese and likely also India/Pakistan nuclear tests. Unlike the US, all these countries would have much to gain by restarting test testing. There have been occasional rumors that Russia/China may have conducted very small-yield tests, I’m not aware of any reports that they have conducted significant nuclear test explosions.”
The process of resuming testing would be nowhere near as swift as Trump suggests; the White House would have to direct the US Energy Department to order our national nuclear laboratories to start preparing for a nuclear warhead test. And since the United States doesn’t currently have a nuclear weapons test explosion program, Congress would have to appropriate the money.
Furthermore, Kristensen notes “[i]t would be expensive and take time: a simple explosion is 6-10 months, a fully instrumented test in 24-36 months, and a test to develop a new nuclear warhead is about 60 months.”
Just in case Trump is indeed talking about testing a nuclear explosive device, it’s probably a good time to look back at the Bulletin’s March 2024 issue, “A return to nuclear testing?”, which lays out the many negative impacts of nuclear testing. In that issue, veteran national security reporter Walter Pincus explains exactly what those who live in a place chosen for testing experience in “The horrors of nuclear weapons testing.” People today seem to have forgotten—if they ever knew—what a single nuclear weapon can do. The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, whose home was turned into a nuclear proving ground, have certainly never forgotten.
Beyond that, the reasons for preserving a ban on nuclear tests are many—even though Russia, China, and the United States have been keeping their test sites ready for a potential resumption of full-scale tests of explosive devices, just in case. Eminent researcher Pavel Podvig delves into this in detail in his Bulletin essay, “Preserving the nuclear test ban after Russia revoked its CTBT ratification.”
And one thing that seems to get overlooked is that the United States has benefited from a test ban as much as anyone else. Consequently, bringing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force would lock in an American advantage in nuclear knowledge and expertise and hinder other states from developing more sophisticated nuclear arms, as Stanford University expert Steven Pifer notes in “The logic for US ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”
Hi-Tech Holocaust: How Microsoft Aids The Gaza Genocide
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities.
Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”
Alan Macleod, Mintpress News, 28 Oct 25
Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft. From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sariel travelled to Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
The largest and most controversial organization within the Israeli military, Unit 8200 has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech spying operation. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare, and online manipulation operations. Last year, it carried out the Lebanese Pager Attack, an act that wounded thousands of civilians. Unit 8200 agents were also behind many of the most infamous international spyware and hacking cases, including the Pegasus software, that was used to surveil tens of thousands of the world’s most prominent political leaders, journalists, and human rights campaigners.
Sariel’s policy of mass surveillance changed the internal attitude at Unit 8200. “Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,” said one officer. The gargantuan trove of information compiled in Microsoft Azure amounted to a vast repository on the entire Palestinian population – a giant database of kompromat that is used to extort and blackmail the region’s indigenous people. If a person was secretly gay, or cheating on their spouse, for example, that information was readily available to Unit 8200 agents, who would then use it to turn their targets into informants. One former Unit 8200 member revealed that, as part of their training, they were made to memorize different Arabic slang words for “gay”, so that they could identify them in conversations.
The cloud database is also used to provide after-the-fact justification for arrests of innocent peoples. Off-hand, out-of-context comments made years ago can be used to portray anyone as a member of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or another armed resistance force.
“These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing,” an Israeli intelligence official who served in the West Bank said.
When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, [the Azure surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We’re now in a situation where almost no one in the [Occupied] Territories is ‘clean,’ in terms of what intelligence has on them.
Unit 8200 has also used big data to compile A.I.-generated kill lists featuring tens of thousands of people. One program gave every Gazan, even women and children, a score of between 1 and 100, based on a number of factors. If they live in the same building or are in group chats with known or suspected Hamas members, for instance, their score is increased. Once their score reached a certain threshold, all Gazans were automatically placed on a kill list that was minimally overseen by humans.
According to multiple Unit 8200 agents, Microsoft Azure’s cloud-based storage platform allowed Israel to overcome targeting bottlenecks, using all manner of data to research and identify individuals for assassination, which led to the killing of tens of thousands of people during the first weeks of its post-October 7 onslaught.
Of course, the vast majority of the deaths have been civilians – around 70% were women and children. But Israeli officials can also go back after the fact and scour their digital dragnet to justify any killing, finding connections or any other incriminating evidence. A senior Israeli military officer described the cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word.” Other officials, however, have gone so far as to raise concerns that Israel’s overreliance on Microsoft as a service is a strategic vulnerability that should be corrected.
Microsoft Sees No Evil, Only Profits
Throughout all this, Microsoft has protested its innocence – and ignorance – of Israeli crimes. “At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cell phone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned,” a spokesperson for the company stated, adding, “Any allegations about Microsoft leadership involvement and support of this project … are false.”
But leaked documents suggest Microsoft engineers understood exactly what sort of data was being stored in Azure, and what their clients hoped to achieve. “Technically, they’re not supposed to be told exactly what it is, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one engineer said. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
Others felt that the idea that Microsoft did not know that one of the world’s most notorious spying organizations might be using big data to spy on people was not credible, especially given how closely the two entities had been working together for years. “Microsoft says that it can’t figure out if their customers are committing crimes against humanity or mass surveillance, while at the same time Microsoft employees are working alongside uniformed IDF. Absurd!” Paul Biggar, the founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress.
The corporation’s claim of innocence seems even more tenuous, given the fact that Microsoft employs hundreds of former Unit 8200 agents, and recruits directly from the organization. A 2022 MintPress investigation found at least 166 former Unit 8200 operatives who went on to work for Microsoft, including many who helped design Azure itself.
Microsoft’s role in Gaza goes far beyond locking out the ICC. From cloud warfare to surveillance, it’s helping power Israel’s war machine………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Zionism: Roots in Israel’s War Economy
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities. Microsoft established its first branch in Israel in 1989, and two years later, opened a research and development center in the city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The first of its kind outside the United States, the center has continued to expand, and now directly employs an estimated 2,700 workers…………………………………………………………………
Every CEO in Microsoft’s history has flown to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including Bill Gates, who, in 2016, stated that hi-tech Israeli security was “improving the world.
In short, Microsoft is a cornerstone of Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector, which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP and more than half of its total exports. Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”…………………..
Cracking Down on Internal Resistance
A greater threat than Iran to Microsoft, however, is its own employees, hundreds of whom have organized to oppose its role in the genocide. Under the banner of No Azure for Apartheid, workers demand that: Microsoft terminates all Azure contracts with Israel; disclose all ties to the Israeli national security state; publicly call for a ceasefire, and stop persecuting employees who speak out about the genocide……………………………………………………………………..
Targeting Enemies
Company employees are far from the only target of Microsoft’s wrath, however. In May, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced that Microsoft had locked him out of his official ICC email account, just as he was formalizing charges against Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders. For many, the timing was not a coincidence, but rather a message……………………………………………………………..https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
Trump to reduce tariffs on Beijing amid resumed US nuclear weapons testing order
ABC News. 30 Oct 25
In short:
Donald Trump says he has struck a deal with China’s Xi Jinping to reduce tariffs on Beijing in exchange for resumed US soybean purchases.
The meeting came shortly after Mr Trump ordered the Department of Defense to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons.
US President Donald Trump says he has struck a deal with China’s Xi Jinping to reduce tariffs on Beijing in exchange for resumed US soybean purchases, shortly after saying he would order the resumption of US nuclear weapons testing.
His remarks after the face-to-face talks with Mr Xi in the South Korean city of Busan — their first since 2019 — marked the finale of Mr Trump’s whirlwind Asia trip on which he also touted trade breakthroughs with South Korea, Japan and South-East Asia nations.
“I thought it was an amazing meeting,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One shortly after he departed Busan, adding that tariffs imposed on Chinese imports would be cut to 47 per cent from 57 per cent.
Mr Trump also told reporters the pair would work to keep rare earths exports flowing and crack down on the illicit trade of fentanyl………………………………………………………..
Ahead of the meeting, Mr Trump ordered the Department of Defense to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons on an “equal basis” with other nuclear powers.
“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately,” Mr Trump said on Truth Social.
President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday Russia had successfully tested a Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo that military analysts say is capable of devastating coastal regions by triggering vast radioactive ocean swells.
As Mr Trump has toughened both his rhetoric and his stance on Russia, Mr Putin has publicly flexed his nuclear muscles with the test of a new Burevestnik cruise missile on October 21 and nuclear launch drills on October 22.
The US last tested a nuclear weapon in 1992.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr Trump was referring to nuclear-explosive testing, which would be carried out by the National Nuclear Safety Administration, or flight testing of nuclear-capable missiles……………………………………………….. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-30/trump-orders-resumption-of-nuclear-weapons-testing/105951930
US President Donald Trump says South Korea has approval to build nuclear-powered submarine
30 Oct 25, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-30/south-korea-permission-to-build-nuclear-submarines/105951210
In short:
Korea has been given permission by Donald Trump to build a nuclear powered submarine.
The permission is a dramatic move that would admit South Korea to a small group of nations that possess this type of vessel.
The US president met with leader on his ongoing tour of Asia.
US President Donald Trump says he has given South Korea approval to build a nuclear-powered submarine, a dramatic move that would admit Seoul to a small club of nations possessing such vessels.
Mr Trump, who has been meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and other regional leaders during his visit, also said Seoul had agreed to buy vast quantities of US oil and gas.
The submarine will be built in a Philadelphia shipyard, where South Korean firms have increased investment, Mr Trump wrote on social media.
Mr Trump and Mr Lee finalised details of a fraught trade deal at a summit in South Korea on Wednesday.
Mr Lee had also been seeking US permission for South Korea to reprocess nuclear fuel.
Nuclear restrictions easing?
Seoul is barred from reprocessing without US consent, under a pact between the countries.
“I have given them approval to build a nuclear-powered submarine, rather than the old-fashioned and far less nimble, diesel-powered submarines that they have now,” Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
South Korea’s Industry Ministry said its officials had not been involved in any detailed discussions about building the submarines in Philadelphia.
While South Korea has a sophisticated shipbuilding industry, Mr Trump did not spell out where the propulsion technology would come from for a nuclear-powered submarine, which only a handful of countries possess.
The US has been working with Australia and Britain on a project for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, involving technology transfers from the United States.
The US has so far only shared that technology with Britain, back in the 1950s.
Mr Lee said when he met Mr Trump on Wednesday that allowing South Korea to build several nuclear-powered submarines equipped with conventional weapons would significantly reduce the burden on the US military.
He also asked for Mr Trump’s support to make substantial progress on South Korea being allowed to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, or on uranium enrichment.
This is not allowed under the nuclear agreement between the two countries, even though South Korea possesses nuclear reactors to generate power.
Approval raises questions
Mr Lee’s predecessors had wanted to build nuclear-powered submarines, but the US had opposed this idea for decades.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said the issue of South Korea acquiring such submarines “raises all sorts of questions.”
“As with the AUKUS deal, (South Korea) is probably looking for nuclear propulsion services suitable for subs, including the fuel, from the US,” he said.
Mr Kimball said such submarines usually involved the use of highly-enriched uranium and would “require a very complex new regime of safeguards” by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has a key role in implementing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
“It remains technically and militarily unnecessary for South Korea to acquire the technology to extract weapons-usable plutonium from spent fuel or to acquire uranium enrichment capabilities, which can also be used to produce nuclear weapons,” he said.
“If the United States seeks to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide, the Trump administration should resist such overtures from allies as strongly as it works to deny adversary access to these dual-use technologies.”
Jenny Town, who heads 38 North, a Korea-focused research group in Washington, said it was inevitable that South Korean demands for US cooperation on nuclear issues would grow, given recent allegations about Russian technical cooperation to help nuclear-armed North Korea make progress towards acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.
Kim Dong-yup, a North Korea studies professor at Kyungnam University, said the Lee-Trump summit had formalised a “transaction scheme of security guarantees and economic contributions” for maintaining the extended deterrence and alliance in exchange for South Korea’s increased defence spending and nuclear-powered subs and US investments.
“In the end, this South Korea-US summit can be summarised in one word: the commercialisation of the alliance and the commodification of peace,” he said.
“The problem is that the balance of that deal was to maximise American interests rather than the autonomy of the Korean Peninsula.”
Trump backs renewed Israeli strikes in Gaza
The US president denied that the resumption of hostilities was “jeopardizing” the ceasefire
US and China to ‘work together’ on Ukraine settlement – Trump
29 Oct, 2025
US President Donald Trump has defended Israel’s renewed strikes in Gaza nearly three weeks into a ceasefire he helped broker.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “immediate and powerful strikes” on Tuesday evening, citing Hamas attacks on Israeli soldiers still holding parts of the Palestinian enclave. At least 30 Palestinians were killed in the action, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run government.
“As I understand it, they took out an Israeli soldier,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday en route from Japan to South Korea. “They killed an Israeli soldier. So the Israelis hit back – and they should hit back. When that happens, they should hit back,” he added.
US Vice President J.D. Vance earlier said the ceasefire was holding despite “little skirmishes here and there.” Axios cited unnamed senior US officials as saying the White House had urged Israel not to take “radical measures” that could collapse the truce.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), last week two of its soldiers were attacked and killed by Hamas in Rafah, southern Gaza, and more soldiers came under fire in the same area on Tuesday. Hamas denied involvement in both incidents, accusing Israel of “a blatant ceasefire violation.”
The Palestinian armed group warned that the escalation “will lead to a delay” in recovering and returning the bodies of the 13 remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Israeli officials earlier accused Hamas of dragging its feet in handing over all the remains, as agreed under the ceasefire mediated by the US, Egypt, Qatar, and Türkiye, which took effect on October 10.
Is a worldwide nuclear holocaust closer than ever?
A new history of the bomb paints a grim picture of global geopolitics, with only a slender thread between peace and catastrophe
In 1961, the philosopher Bertrand Russell published a short book called
Has Man a Future? He was writing about the nuclear threat, which, with the
arrival of the H-bomb, he feared might mark the final chapter of the story
of humanity.
We have in fact survived that threat, so far, for more than 70
years, but it has been, according to Serhii Plokhy’s sombre account in
The Nuclear Age, a close-run thing. Plokhy is best known for his excellent
studies of the Cuban missile crisis and the meltdown at Chernobyl.
Here he broadens his canvas, taking in the whole history of nuclear weapons, from futuristic early 20th-century predictions of atomic warfare to the threat of nuclear war made regularly today by Putin and his cronies. Plokhy thinks that the risk of such a conflict is greater now than ever before, with at least nine nuclear-armed powers and no effective international framework for limiting the threat (now that many of the earlier agreements have been overturned).
It’s possible, he claims, that up to 20 other states are
prepared to go nuclear if necessary, perhaps as many as 40. This is a grim,
albeit unverifiable, conclusion.
Telegraph 30th Oct 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/nuclear-age-serhii-plokhy-review/
Members of Congress object to plutonium giveaway
October 26, 2025, https://beyondnuclear.org/senators-object-to-plutonium-giveaway/
On December 31, the Trump White House will start revealing which lucky startup companies will receive free plutonium needed for their new reactor fuel. Trump will give away between 20-25 tons, according to reports, going against US energy policy that has long avoided the transfer of nuclear weapons-usable materials into the commercial sector. One likely recipient is Oklo, on whose board Trump’s present energy secretary, Chris Wright, once sat, raising serious conflict of interest issues.
Several Members of Congress have already written to Trump expressing their concerns. In the letter sent by Senator Ed Markey and Reps. Don Beyer and John Garamendi, all Democrats, they pointed out that dishing out plutonium “to private industry for commercial energy use,” crossed a line that “goes against long-standing, bipartisan US nuclear security policy. It raises serious weapons proliferation concerns, makes little economic sense, and may adversely affect the nation’s defense posture.” They also pointed out that the amount of plutonium Trump is preparing to move into the commercial sector “is enough for at least 2,000 nuclear bombs.”
And they also took care to remind Trump that “commercial nuclear energy does not require separated plutonium, and today there is no global demand for plutonium to make civilian nuclear reactor fuel. Nuclear power reactors instead rely on uranium fuel, which is safer and cheaper to process.”
Golden Dome funding lags as industry partners line up
By John T. Seward – The Washington Times – Tuesday, October 28, 2025
The head of President Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense program gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that described the secretive architecture of the project, The Washington Times has learned.
U.S. Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, who was tapped earlier this year by Mr. Trump to lead the design of Golden Dome, told committee members about key target dates for the project’s delivery.
Gen. Guetlein also outlined how the project will integrate missile detection capabilities and early warning systems, said two sources familiar with the briefing who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss aspects of the classified meeting.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, Alaska Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, confirmed the meeting to The Times but declined to comment on specifics because of the classified nature of the planned Golden Dome architecture.
Mr. Sullivan, who is routinely involved with the military’s missile defense programs because of his state’s strategic geographic location, said he was impressed with Gen. Guetlein’s presentation.
“He just has a really good sense of how he wants to layer it and put it together,” the senator said. “He’s got a plan, you know, it’s got like 30-day, 60-day, 120-day, and I thought it was good.”
Speculation about the specific architecture of the Golden Dome is rampant among defense industry insiders. So is unease over the status of some $24.5 billion in funding that Congress approved this year for the missile shield’s development.
Multiple sources have told The Times that none of the money has been allocated for contracts and that White House Office of Management and Budget is holding the funds.
Some defense strategy analysts say Congress’ approval of the money was unprecedented.
The initial $24.5 billion was included in the passage of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in July. At the time, Mr. Trump touted the money as an initial down payment for the Golden Dome.
“Congress pre-appropriated $24.5 billion without a program plan, scheduled requirements — nothing,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Never have we seen that much money appropriated in advance of a program actually starting,” Mr. Harrison said during a virtual panel discussion last week.
The discussion, hosted by the Center for New American Security, was titled: “Stuck in the Cul-de-Sac: How U.S. Defense Spending Prioritizes Innovation over Deterrence.”
Mr. Harrison said the Pentagon and the Trump administration have not publicly defined Golden Dome’s capability goals.
Analysts estimate the missile shield will be a multidecade program costing hundreds of billions of dollars for space-based and other futuristic missile defense capabilities that will continue to evolve technically over time.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, initial funding was made available for the next four years, with spending flexibility baked into the law that could make congressional oversight difficult.
There is consensus among many in the national security community that Golden Dome is urgently needed amid rising nuclear and ballistic missile threats from U.S. adversaries, most notably Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Mr. Harrison said the potential exists for the systems involved in the project to be focused on every threat, from small drones fulfilling a counter small uncrewed systems (C-sUAS) role to protecting against things “like a strategic nuclear strike from Russia or China, or both of them simultaneously, or a rogue missile from North Korea.”
Such concerns didn’t stop the initial funding for Golden Dome from being approved by law, a situation that has drawn criticism from some Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, has called the $24.5 billion for Golden Dome a “slush fund” and said the Trump administration may try to use the funds however it sees fit.
“We’re still waiting for really detailed plans,” Mr. Reed said. “It’s such a comprehensive program, but there’s nothing there yet. What is the priority?”………………………………… https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/28/golden-dome-funding-lags-industry-partners-line/
Nuclear power in Scotland would have same problems as fossil fuels
NUCLEAR power has the “same fundamental challenges” as fossil fuels, international experts have said, as they criticised the UK Government’s embrace of the nuclear industry.
Four academics, from the UK and the US,
argued that costs for nuclear power are “huge” and “rising” and
that “significant delays” in getting projects online are the norm.
They also described how in the space of a year nuclear “adds as much net
global power capacity as renewables add every two days”, and criticised
the drive by Labour ministers to deregulate the industry. The group of
academics includes Amory Lovins and Professor Mark Jacobsen, from the
University of Stanford, Professor Stephen Thomas, from the University of
Greenwich, and Dr Paul Dorfman, Bennett Scholar at the University of
Sussex.
In a joint statement, published in The National, they say that Ed
Miliband’s plans to assess Scottish sites for nuclear projects and Keir
Starmer’s plans to usher in a “golden age of nuclear” with Donald
Trump are hampered by a “few awkward facts”. They said: “The reason
is simple. Nuclear costs are huge, rising, and significant delays are the
norm.
The National 29th Oct 2025,
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25579222.nuclear-power-scotland-problems-fossil-fuels/
How North Korea outsmarts US intelligence agencies—and what they should do to adapt
Bulletin, By Lauren Cho | October 27, 2025
In the summer of 2017, the United States learned a humbling lesson. For years, American intelligence agencies had assessed that North Korea would need several more years—until 2020 or even 2022—before it could field a missile capable of striking the continental United States. Then, on July 4, Pyongyang launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that reached deep space and re-entered at high velocity.
By that September, North Korea had detonated a hydrogen bomb more than 15 times stronger than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. The Central Intelligence Agency and its sister agencies had anticipated that this day would eventually come. But their inability to predict the rapid pace of advancement remains one of the starkest intelligence failures of recent decades. It was not simply a matter of bad luck or faulty technical analysis. It was the result of two forces that intersect again and again in the history of US assessments of North Korea’s nuclear program: Pyongyang’s deliberate use of strategic deception, and the institutional inertia of the US intelligence community.
From the first suspicions of a clandestine weapons program in the 1980s through the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework, the inconclusive Six-Party Talks, and the dramatic summits of 2018–2019, a familiar cycle has emerged: Washington enters negotiations determined to halt or roll back North Korea’s program. North Korea agrees on paper but continues developing weapons in secret, denying violations and then unveiling new capabilities with a missile test or nuclear detonation. The agreement collapses, and Washington returns to the negotiating table with hopes of restoring momentum toward denuclearization.
Each turn of this cycle reveals a recurring blind spot. American analysts focus on observable indicators and static assumptions, while North Korea manipulates visual evidence and creates ambiguity to gain time.
Defining intelligence. To the public and political leaders, any unpleasant surprise is an intelligence failure. Scholars define it more precisely. Richard K. Betts, an American political scientist who is one of the leading thinkers on this issue, has argued that failures are not rare anomalies but inevitable outcomes of systemic, cognitive, and organizational barriers. Intelligence agencies must operate under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguous evidence. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the influence of preexisting beliefs.
In the case of North Korea, ambiguity is not simply an accident involving limited information. It is a condition carefully constructed by the regime.
Strategic deception—deliberate manipulation of information to influence an adversary’s perceptions—has become a central component of North Korea’s nuclear armament strategy. American intelligence agencies have repeatedly struggled to adapt to this strategy, because they are weighed down by bureaucratic norms that prize continuity over change and reactivity over anticipation.
Strategic deception is most effective when the target already wants to believe a certain narrative……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rethinking US intelligence on North Korea. What, then, is to be done? Absolute accuracy in intelligence is unattainable, but incremental improvement is possible. The patterns seen in previous US-North Korean relations suggest several possible reforms. First, intelligence organizations must build for adaptability, not stability. They must prioritize agility, encourage analysts to test assumptions, reward dissenting perspectives, and treat ambiguity as a strategic variable. Rather than forcing ambiguous evidence into existing frameworks, agencies must recognize that adversaries actively manipulate ambiguity.
Also, analysts need more than satellite imagery and signals intercepts. They need linguistic, cultural, and psychological expertise to decode the narratives that adversaries craft. Deception is a cognitive process, not just a technical one. Countering it requires cognitive tools. Intelligence that is accurate but ignored is still a failure.
Finally, agencies must improve communication with policy makers, making uncertainty clear and resisting the urge to present false precision. The goal is not to eliminate ambiguity but to help decision makers understand it and prepare for multiple scenarios……………………………. https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/how-north-korea-outsmarts-us-intelligence-agencies-and-what-they-should-do-to-adapt/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=How%20North%20Korea%20outsmarts%20US%20intelligence&utm_campaign=20251024%20Monday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29
Why Scotland’s energy future shouldn’t be about nuclear
29th October By Amory Lovins, Professor Stephen Thomas, Professor Mark Jacobsen and Dr Paul Dorfman.
ED Miliband has asked GB Energy to assess Scottish sites it believes could be used to host new nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s partnership
with Donald Trump ushers in “a golden age of nuclear”. But a few
awkward facts intrude. The main problem being that last year the world
added a record 582 GW of renewable energy generation capacity. That’s
more than 91% of all new power, with nuclear nowhere. In fact, each year,
nuclear adds as much net global power capacity as renewables add every two days. The reason is simple.
The National 29th Oct 2025. https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25579226.scotlands-energy-future-shouldnt-nuclear/
1 This Month.
Let’s keep radioactive waste away from our river!
Nuclear Power? -Never again
(Switzerland –https://www.greenpeace.ch/de/handeln/atomkraft-nie-wieder/+)
PETITION – Close Down the Monticello Nuclear Reactor on the Mississippi River!
Now until to February 10, 2026 Radioactive waste storage in France: the debate is finally open! How to participate?
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