2025 December 14 « nuclear-news

Trump’s ‘End of History’ Moment

History will thankfully go on once we see the end of them and the work of repairing the mess they are making begins.

December 13, 2025 , By Patrick Lawrence, ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/13/patrick-lawrence-trumps-end-of-history-moment/

The Trumpster is not yet finished his first year back in the White House, and I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants with whom he has surrounded himself. And it occurs to me lately that neither I nor anyone else is supposed to imagine any kind of future — good, bad, in the middle — beyond Jan. 20, 2029, when President Trump will no longer be president. The future will not be the point by then. By then we are supposed to be living in an imaginary past that we won’t have to imagine because the imaginary past will be the actual present.

It is not quite three months since Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa,” the more or less fictitious “organization” of antifascists, a “domestic terrorist organization.” In the Trump White House’s rendering, antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.” To this end, it organizes and executes vast campaigns of violence. It coordinates all this across the country. It recruits and radicalizes young people, “then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”

I didn’t take the executive order containing this kind of language the least bit seriously when it was issued Sept. 22. Antifa, so far as I understand it, does not actually exist. It is a state of mind, or it signifies a shared set of political sentiments vaguely in the direction of traditional anarchism — a hyper-individualistic ultra-libertarianism when translated into the American context.

Trump’s executive order describing antifa as an organized terrorist organization reminded me of nothing so much as those flatfooted fogies back in the Cold War years who, nostalgic for a simpler time but understanding nothing, went on about “outside agitators” as the root of America’s ills.

I was wrong in one respect, maybe more, about Trump and his adjutants and what they have in mind. These people are not flatfooted. They know exactly what they are doing and they are moving swiftly to get it done. It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.

Three days after the antifa executive order, The White House made public a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM–7, as this document is known, is formally addressed to Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.

This thing picks up where the one-page executive order leaves off. It cites various assassinations and attempted assassinations — Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive, the two attempts on Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign — and fair enough, although casting political violence as terrorist violence is a sleight-of-hand too far. It is when NSPM–7 invokes recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” that you sense the trouble to come.

From the first of the document’s five sections:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.

What is required, it turns out, is an institutionalized surveillance operation that goes considerably beyond the Patriot Act. “This guidance,” Section 2 reads, “shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.”

And then NSPM–7 gets down to what the Trump regime is truly after:

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

I am not letting the liberal wing of the ruling Late–Imperial War Party, commonly known as the Democrats, off the hook in this domestic terrorism business. Joe Biden banged on about this whenever it was politically expedient the whole of his discombobulated term, and we now witness the consequences of all his loose, opportunistic talk. In effect, Biden prefaced what the Trump regime is step-by-step codifying into law.

One of the more pernicious of the many objectionable features of NSPM–7 merits immediate note. This is the vagueness of its language. Whenever I see official documents of this kind my mind goes back to imperial China, whose mandarins were highly legalistic but kept written law purposely ambiguous so as to maximize the prerogatives of imperial power. A surfeit of laws, all of them to be interpreted in whatever way suited the throne.

As of last weekend we know how Pam Bondi, Trump’s patently fascistic AG, intends to interpret NSPM–7. This is by way of a Justice Department memorandum Ken Klippenstein, the exemplary investigative journalist, reported on (but did not actually publish in full) on Saturday, Dec. 6. This is Klippenstein’s exclusive. Here is the top of the piece he published in his Substack newsletter under the headline, “FBI Making List of American ‘Extremists,’ Leaked Memo Reveals:”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism”… The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti–Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti–Christianity.”

By way of defining all these domestic terrorism threats, Klippenstein reports, the DoJ memorandum cites “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” As to enforcement, the memorandum authorizes the FBI to open a hotline by means of which ordinary Americans can report on other ordinary Americans, along with “a cash reward system” to go along with it. The agency is also to develop a legion of informants (“cooperators”); state and local governments are to be funded to develop their own programs in conformity with the DoJ’s directives. What the memorandum calls Joint Terrorism Task Forces are to “map the full network of culpable actors.”

This is more than what we now call an all-of-government surveillance and enforcement program that open-and-shut outlaws a variety of Constitutional rights. It is an all-of-society operation that prompts comparisons with regimes in history I never would have imagined summoning to mind in anything like this context. “Extremist viewpoints” are to be criminalized? I am an outlaw if I am critical of orthodox Christianity, if I am “hostile” to the nuclear family, to traditional morality and so on? Just how close to thought control does the Trump regime plan to sail?

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December 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

AUKUS Caucus

The AUKUS agreement allows any party to withdraw with one year’s notice. But here’s the lethal asymmetry: Australia’s payments are subsidies, not deposits; they are not refundable, and there is no guarantee that the submarines will ever be delivered.

How the AUKUS Caucus built a cargo cult and called it strategy.

14 December 2025 David Tyler Australian Independent Media

There’s a certain kind of Australian politician who never quite grew out of childhood. You know the type: Richard Marles, Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne. Peter Pan to a man. Their eyes light up whenever a Pentagon staffer remembers their name. They sit bolt upright like kelpie pups on the back of the ute, ears pricked for master’s return. They mistake condescension for intimacy, patronage for partnership, obedience for relevance.

Marles, Pat Conroy (Defence Industry), and Brendan O’Connor (Veterans’ Affairs) along with “Rear Admiral-Albo” and Wayfinder Penny Wong make up the AUKUS Caucus: a dream team. Not bound by evidence, timelines, or arithmetic; only by faith. Faith that if Australia sends enough money, bases and deference across the Pacific, the Great Mate in the Sky will someday descend bearing nuclear submarines and strategic salvation.

Australia’s $368 billion imaginary friend.

The Cargo Cult Playbook

Cargo cults arise when isolated societies witness advanced powers arrive with miraculous technology. Locals build imitation runways; light signal fires hoping the planes will return. The AUKUS Caucus has updated the ritual for the modern age. Our runways are ports. The offerings are our sovereignty. The signal fires are AUSMIN pressers. And the planes, as ever, do not land.

Richard Marles, Labor’s embattled Defence Minister, is the cult’s high priest. Asked about implementation delays, he smiles wanly and intones the sacred words: “Full steam ahead.” Full steam ahead to where is never explained.

AUKUS is sold as strategic realism. In practice, it operates as faith: belief substituted for capacity, ritual for delivery, loyalty for leverage.

The Hegseth Problem

This week Marles and Wong flew to Washington for the annual, ceremonial abasement known as AUSMIN. Their opposite number is Pete Hegseth. Former Fox News shouter, veterans’ charity mismanager, and a chap once carried from a strip club by mates after trying to storm the stage. Now improbably directing US defence as Secretary of War.

Hegseth’s character matters because AUKUS asks us to entrust our strategic future to decision-makers whose judgment, attention span and institutional grip are already demonstrably strained. His own mother calls him as an “abuser of women” who “belittles, lies and cheats,” urging him to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”

When a nation stakes $368 billion on the judgment of a man disqualified by his own mother from trust, it has crossed from strategy into pathology.

8 December, Marles and Wong are pictured nodding earnestly as Hegseth endorses a $368 billion submarine fantasy he cannot possibly deliver. He barks approval of AUKUS as “pragmatic hard power.” Wong, cryptic as ever, merely echoes Trump’s mantra: “full steam ahead.” The boats are not coming, so who cares what fuels the boiler?

The Pragmatic Hard Power Con

Pragmatic hard power? It could be a new brand of laundry detergent. The absurdity runs deeper than performance.

Australia is trading real sovereignty for imaginary submarines.

AUKUS legislation effectively transfers operational priority and access over key Australian military bases to the US. The terminology is pure institutional dissemblance: “expanded US rotational presence” and “integrated command arrangements.” In plain English: we concede control over our own strategic assets. We slip a few lazy billion to US and British shipyards to “expedite” production; meaning we subsidise their accumulated backlogs. We bind our “defence posture” so thoroughly into US command that when Washington sneezes, Canberra catches cold.

But we do get to wave flags. Hum anthems. Pay invoices.

Each concession merits national debate. Yet, the AUKUS Caucus has sealed the deal without meaningful parliamentary inquiry, without detailed public costings, only an “oversight” committee denied subpoena power, denied independent costing, and so carefully neutered it might as well be chaired by a shredder.

The Legal Trap

And yes, the legal architecture is exactly what critics feared. Under the agreement, Australia provides $4.7 billion (with more coming) to US and UK submarine builders, and according to questioning in Senate Estimates, there is no clawback provision; Australia does not get its money back if the US fails to transfer nuclear submarines.

The US and UK can walk away at any time. They keep the cash, the upgrades, the expanded industrial bases and the sovereign right to prioritise their own needs. Which, as serious countries, they will do.

Australia, meanwhile, is padlocked like a rental fridge in a share-house. Jiggle the handle all you like, but the thing won’t open unless the bloke with the key decides you’ve paid up.

A Big Perhaps

At some point, the more unsettling explanation has to be entertained. Perhaps the submarines are not delayed. Perhaps they are not even expected. Perhaps AUKUS is not failing at all, but performing exactly as intended. The money flows early and without clawback. The bases open. Command structures integrate. Strategic dependency is formalised. The submarines remain permanently over the horizon, always promised, never required. If this were a ruse designed to secure American basing access and regional posture while outsourcing the political pain to future governments, it would be hard to design it differently. Whether Australia’s political class believes its own story, or merely finds it convenient, becomes almost beside the point. The outcome is the same.

And whatever the truth of the submarines, Defence needs a bit of a rescue.

Defence’s House of Horrors

Marles’ predicament worsens when you look at Defence itself: a moral, administrative and institutional nightmare he inherited and, like his predecessors, Linda Reynolds and Peter Dutton, has failed to master. Could anyone? Australia’s predicament worsens also.

The Brereton inquiry exposed 39 unlawful killings in Afghanistan. The stain remains. Atop this moral wreckage sits administrative farce: a Defence official leaked confidential information before walking straight into a job with a private weapons contractor.

The Hunter class frigates tell the broader story. What began life as a $45 million per ship concept has metastasised into $2.6 billion per ship, with hundreds of millions in variations already locked in, and the program at least 18 months late due to design immaturity.

When Labor took office, 28 major Defence projects were running a combined 97 years behind schedule, with roughly a quarter of procurement unfunded. Over it all looms $368 billion we’ve agreed to throw at AUKUS, as a $60 billion annual defence budget swells toward $100 billion by 2034, absorbing failure without correcting it. (AUKUS costs are a guess, announced without consulting Treasury, Parliament or any other authority.)

What Do We Actually Get?

And what does Australia receive for this tithe?

Not submarines.
Not even capability.
A promise.

Five SSN AUKUS boats to be built in Adelaide at some conveniently indeterminate date. Early 2040s if all goes well. If Britain remembers how to build submarines at scale. If the US has spare industrial capacity. If history pauses politely to accommodate our fantasy.

The BAE Systems Track Record

BAE Systems, cast as AUKUS’s industrial saviour, spent two decades struggling to deliver the UK’s Astute class submarines……………………………………………………..

The Pillar Two Mirage

When reality intrudes, the faithful point to Pillar Two, the sideshow of defence tech collaboration; AI, cyber and hypersonics; meant to suggest strategic depth where there is only debt. Scott Morrison dubbed it “AUKUS in Space,” as if adding a preposition and some stars transformed a lopsided submarine purchase into visionary strategy.

But the real achievement is rhetorical: substituting buzz-words for credible policy. In this sense, AUKUS is Scott Morrison’s most enduring legacy.

The Question Marles Won’t Answer

No-one likes a smart-arse but the pitiful Richard Marles still cannot explain why nuclear submarines are worth this ruinous spend when modern diesel-electric boats exist.

Modern diesel-electric submarines provide maximum range, endurance and stealth, operating underwater before having to resurface to snorkel and recharge batteries. Australia’s own Collins-class diesel submarines demonstrated during 2003 multinational exercises that they were comparable in underwater warfare to US Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarines, trading roles and achieving , successful attacks despite being smaller and less powerful……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The Runway at Dusk

For $368 billion, AUKUS is not a procurement program. It is a wager on dependency.

Australia is paying staggering sums for submarines that do not yet exist, to be built by industries in chronic difficulty, on timelines that belong to fantasy, while ceding real autonomy over real assets in the present. In return, we receive reassurance. Access. Attention. The comforting sense that someone larger, louder and more heavily armed is standing somewhere behind us………………………………………………………………………………

History will not ask whether the submarines eventually arrived. It will ask why a nation willingly surrendered so much, so early, for so little certainty in return. And it will judge us not by the promises we believed, but by the choices we made when the risks were already plain. https://theaimn.net/aukus-caucus/

December 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Revelation that UK’s Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) could be robotic prompts question over employment.

11 Dec 25 https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/revelation-that-gdf-could-be-robotic-prompts-question-over-employment/

Where are the jobs? A question surely prompted by the revelation by New CivilEngineeri that NWS chief technical officer John Corderoy recently claimed that the organisation might build a future Geological Disposal Facility operated solely by an army of robots.

Due to become operational by the late 2050s, but this is a moveable feast, the GDF will be the final repository for Britain’s high-level legacy and future radioactive waste. Three Areas of
Focus in West Cumbria are currently being examined by Nuclear Waste Services as prospective locations for an approximately 1km2 surface facility to receive waste shipments prior to their being taken below ground and out through tunnels to engineered vaults deep under the Irish Sea bed.

Advocates for the GDF have raised as an economic benefit the generational employment that the facility might provide for local people over its (possibly) 150-year lifespan, but in his speech to the Nuclear Industry Association annual conference last week, Mr Corderoy conceded that with the advancement in robotics it might be possible to build a facility ‘that’s fully automated and run by robots on the ground’.

This also makes the NFLAs wonder if that would include dispensing with a human armed police force to patrol the perimeter and check entrants in favour of an AI version, as we presaged in our article of 16 October 2024:

Although, as Mr Corderoy rightly indicated, such a plan would mean ‘we don’t have to put humans in harm’s way deep underground’, for Nuclear Waste Services it would also mean a
workforce which toils without payment and without any expectation of a workplace pension, and which does not require catering, medical or welfare facilities, carparking, protective clothing, lit or heated workspaces, holidays, maternity or paternity leave, or time off for
sickness (aside from an occasional recharge, oil or parts change, or annual MOT). All representing significant cost savings for NWS.

Nor would robots be discovered leaving work
early or engaging in toxic workplace behaviour, nor would they become embroiled in an industrial dispute with their employer; things that cannot be said about some of the human
workforce at Sellafield in recent years.

The industry trades unions will also be horrified; for not only would it mean that their members, facing redundancy after the closure of storage facilities at Sellafield, would not be
able to access alternate operational jobs at the GDF site, but it would mean a loss of income to help sustain the salaries of officials as robots do not pay union subs.

December 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | employment, UK | Leave a comment

Disappointing news from the High Court, to Together Against Sizewell C (TASC)

Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) are extremely disappointed to advise of today’s decision by the judge, to refuse permission for a judicial review in relation to Sizewell C’s secret additional sea defences. In TASC’s view, it is immoral to proceed with Sizewell C in the knowledge that the project, as approved in the development consent order, is not resilient to an extreme sea level rise scenario. This will result in future generations having to pick up the pieces from ill-thought out decisions made today.
Future generations need government to move forward with sustainable development, not questionable climate change solutions, such as Sizewell C, which come with hidden risks that have been denied public scrutiny, assessment and full consideration of alternatives.

TASC 12th Dec 2025, https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/sizewell-c-legal-challenge/

December 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, UK | Leave a comment

Fire safety failings hit Hinkley Point.

Nuclear Engineering International 10th Dec 2025

Improvements must be in place by June 2026, ahead of bulk installation of mechanical and electrical systems at unit 1.

The UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has served a fire enforcement notice on Bylor JV (a joint venture of Laing O’Rourke and Bouygues Travaux Publics) after identifying significant fire safety shortfalls at the Hinkley Point C (HPC) nuclear construction site in Somerset.

ONR inspectors identified that Bylor had failed to implement appropriate arrangements for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of preventive and protective measures following a focused fire safety intervention.

Bylor is delivering HPC’s main civil engineering works. ONR said many of the Bylor buildings on the site are currently at an advanced stage of construction and these shortfalls resulted in inadequate general fire precautions, including a lack of an adequate emergency lighting system………………….https://www.neimagazine.com/news/fire-safety-failings-hit-hinkley-point/?cf-view

December 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK | Leave a comment