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Climate change matters

    by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/06/21/climate-change-matters/

Environmental laws should be adhered to not abolished, says Diane Curran

For 45 years, I have represented environmental organizations and state and local governments in US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing and enforcement proceedings, as well as in federal court. Today, more than ever, we need to talk about climate change.

I currently represent Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club in a case challenging the NRC’s refusal to consider how climate change may affect the safety and environmental integrity of nuclear reactors in initial licensing and license-renewal proceedings. The case has been briefed and argued in the D.C. Circuit, and we are awaiting a decision.

Climate change must be accounted for in reactor licensing because it challenges the NRC’s ability to ensure safe operation over the decades of a reactor’s operating license term. Weather-related hazards—including floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, derechos, wildfires, drought, and extreme heat and cold—are becoming more severe and more frequent. Assessing how those risks are likely to evolve over the operating life of a reactor is difficult, but it is essential to protecting public safety and environmental integrity. It is also essential to ensure reliability of the electricity supply.

Unfortunately, even before the Trump administration took office, the NRC has consistently declined to take a systematic approach to how climate change could affect the future safety of new and existing reactors undergoing licensing review. Instead, the agency has generally looked backward—preparing for the worst weather events in the historical record rather than assessing how climate-related risks may change over time. With respect to those prospectively changing risks, the NRC simply says that its safety oversight includes “large margins of error” and “defense-in-depth.” 

We need look no farther than Hurricane Helene to see how quickly the lessons of the past and generalizations about safety margins can evaporate in the face of the unique and severe challenges posed by extreme weather events. No hurricane with such record-breaking rainfall had passed through the Appalachian Mountains before Helene. Flooding and landslides resulted in 250 deaths and between $80 and $250 billion in damages. Two years later, the region is still recovering. 

Consider how much worse the effects of Hurricane Helene might have been had it passed about 25 miles west over of the three-reactor Oconee nuclear plant in the mountains of South Carolina. Oconee is a pump-storage plant, built into the side of an earthen dam beneath two lakes totaling about 2 million acre-feet of water. At the time the plant was built, dam failure was not viewed as a credible event warranting design features to protect safety equipment from inundation and failure. What if the effects of Hurricane Helene had included a radiological accident caused by failure of the dams above the Oconee nuclear plant? The devastation to human health and the environment would be almost unimaginable. But the NRC recently re-licensed Oconee to operate for a second license renewal term, refusing demands to consider climate change in its decision.  

What can be done to close this dangerous and expensive gap in the NRC’s regulatory process? If the Atomic Energy Act were the NRC’s only governing statute, the public would have little chance of challenging the NRC’s refusal to consider climate-related risks on the ground that it posed an unacceptable risk to public health and safety. Because the NRC is the principal agency charged with carrying out the Act’s requirements, courts generally afford it broad discretion in how and when it does so.

But the NRC is also governed by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Although NEPA and its implementing regulations have been narrowed in recent years by Congress and the NRC, its core requirement remains intact: when an NRC licensing decision could significantly affect the human environment, the NRC must evaluate the risk and consider alternatives to avoid or mitigate it. NEPA does not dictate a particular outcome, but it does require the NRC to disclose and assess relevant information. And while courts still give the NRC some discretion in identifying and evaluating significant impacts, that discretion is more constrained than under the Atomic Energy Act.

We are hopeful that the D.C. Circuit will compel the NRC to address the safety and environmental implications of climate change in reactor licensing and license-renewal proceedings. But given the Trump administration’s public position on climate change and its policy of minimizing costs to the nuclear industry, we should not assume the NRC will produce a strong environmental analysis if we prevail.  

Even so, a court victory would be significant in three important respects:

  1. It would establish the principle that climate change is real and must be addressed in reactor licensing. Members of the public could then invoke that principle with legislators, state regulators, and potential investors on specific nuclear projects.
  2. A favorable ruling would push future NRC leadership to incorporate climate change into licensing decisions.  
  3. Even if the NRC’s analysis of climate-related accident risk were weak or flawed, state and local governments would be able to independently evaluate the NRC’s claims and decide for themselves whether to support a new reactor or a license-renewal project.

The Trump administration’s tenure is a discouraging time for anyone concerned about nuclear reactor safety and climate change. But Mother Nature does not read executive orders, and she will have the last word. In the meantime, NEPA remains a meaningful tool for forcing the NRC to reckon with the reality of climate change before great harm occurs.  

Diane Curran is an attorney who litigates against the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This article is drawn from a presentation Curran made duriong a June 2nd briefing on Capitol Hill.

June 25, 2026 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

If Russia retaliated…

Third World War would be nuclear and the scale of destruction and killing could be orders of magnitude greater. This is the danger that today’s “loud little handful” could lead us toward, for their own narrow, selfish reasons. To date, we should be grateful that we’ve been spared these horrors thanks to President Putin’s restraint. Even though he’s been aware of Western involvement in attacks on Russia, he has steered clear from escalating to the point where the psychological phase transition in the West could take hold.


Before leaving 10 Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer authorized another large-scale attack on Russia. If we’re not already in a nuclear war, we only have Vladimir Putin’s restraint to thank.

Alex Krainer, Jun 23, 2026, https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/if-russia-retaliated?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1063805&post_id=203233722&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer resigned yesterday. Before he departed 10 Downing Street the last time, he authorized another strike against Russia. Ukraine, UK’s “one hundred year” ally, conducted one of the largest attacks on Russian territory to date, using air-launched cruise missiles to hit military-related facilities in Voronezh city. The facilities in question produce components for Russian Kh-101 cruse missiles, Iskander-K missiles and Pantsir-S1 air defenses.

The Ukrainians allegedly used a version of UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles and/or AGM-188A, “Rusty Dagger” cruise missile, developed under the U.S. Air Force’s Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) program to provide affordable, mass-produced long-range strike weapons for Ukraine.

Other missiles and drones were aimed at targets in the Moscow Oblast but apparently without any major damage reported. Today, President Putin gave a statement accusing the United States and Europe of directly enabling the strikes by providing satellite intelligence, targeting data, and navigation support for the long range attack and warning that such involvement signifies NATO’s direct entry into the war. Putin was telling the truth, as we know from a leaked 38-min. WebEx conversation of a group of German Generals.


Britain fully involved since (at least) 2024

Two of the four participants were top-level German military brass: commander of the German Air Force, Lieutenant General (Generalleutnant) Ingo Gerhartz; head of Air Force Operations and Training, Brigadier General (Brigadegeneral) Frank Gräfe (also spelled Graefe) — Head of Air Force Operations and Training. They discussed providing Ukraine with the German Taurus cruise missiles in order to provide a briefing on the initiative for German Defense Minister Boris, “Slava Ukraini” Pistorius.

The other two, lower-ranked participants were Oberstleutnant Florstedt and Oberstleutnant Fenske, both from German Air Operations Center. The call, which took place more than two years ago, on 19 February 2024, revealed that Great Britain was already directly involved in conducting strikes against Russia with military personnel who did the mission planning for the Storm Shadow missile strikes and helped loading Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles onto aircraft. And the British definitely want the world to know of their involvement. This article was published on Saturday, 20 June 2026:

Yesterday’s attacks were part of the same operation. Their significance, which is not lost on the Russian people, is that they were almost certainly a calculated provocation. They were conducted on the 85th anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa when Nazi Germany assembled the largest ever invasion force. Defeating that force ultimately claimed the lives of 16 millions Russians.

All this is increasing the pressure on the President Putin to take the gloves off and strike at NATO targets. He has been careful not to escalate the war in this way. If such an escalation came to pass for whatever reason the world would find itself in a completely unpredictable and extremely dangerous new territory.


One of the most striking experiences in my life was the breakout of war in former Yugoslavia in 1991, and the reason was the almost instant change in collective psychology that took place as soon as the first artillery shells started landing in Croatia. Up until that moment, the vast majority of people – I’d venture to say, well north of 90% – believed that war was unthinkable; that it would never happen. Who could possibly want to fight a war? It seemed impossible; only a small handful of hotheads were advocating for war.

The stories circulating in Western media about the eruption of bottled-up centuries-old hatreds were utter nonsense. The peoples of former Yugoslavia were socially, economically and culturally deeply intertwined. In most cases we didn’t even know who, among our neighbors was a Serb, Croat or a Muslim and many families were mixed. However, once the war actually broke out, it took a life of its own wreaking death and destruction on large scale.

The collective psychology abruptly changed and a war psychology galvanized. It became fashionable to look at events in black and white and to wholly denounce the other side as enemies. Giving the enemy any benefit of the doubt and expressing empathy toward them suddenly became unpatriotic and suspicious.

The loud little handful

I still find it amazing that the war happened. It was clear that some people were pushing for it and that the media gave them disproportionate attention. Long ago, Mark Twain warned us about such people and about the way war psychology could creep into people’s hearts. His his words should haunt us today:

“The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for the war. The pulpit will–warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’Then the handful will shout louder.

A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as earlier–but do not dare say so.

And now the whole nation–pulpit and all–will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”


If Russia retaliated, if it responded to British or US-orchestrated attacks and struck at a NATO target, we would see this process erupt on short order. The loud little handful in our midst will be shouting for war until they managed to generate the mass-formation psychosis that would make the war not only possible, but probably inevitable and Europe would fully share Ukraine’s tragic fate. Last two World Wars resulted in large-scale devastation and tens of millions of casualties. In today’s terminology, however, they were conventional wars.

Third World War would be nuclear and the scale of destruction and killing could be orders of magnitude greater. This is the danger that today’s “loud little handful” could lead us toward, for their own narrow, selfish reasons. To date, we should be grateful that we’ve been spared these horrors thanks to President Putin’s restraint. Even though he’s been aware of Western involvement in attacks on Russia, he has steered clear from escalating to the point where the psychological phase transition in the West could take hold.

Grand Deception

In 2017 I published my second book, titled Grand Deception. I felt compelled to write it because I realized that a very powerful network in Western financial centers were busy laying the groundwork for a future great war against Russia, and I felt that their agenda needed to be exposed to the public. Of course, they felt otherwise, so my book was banned after only five weeks. It was republished a few months later by Red Pill Press under a different title, but it only survived for six weeks.

Nevertheless, the cause of defending peace must never be neglected. Making sure that such a war never comes to pass should be the top priority for any thinking person. If we sleepwalk into the third great war on European continent, most of our endeavors in life, our dreams and hopes might not matter much. The way to resist the march to war is, first and foremost, to seek the truth and dare to speak it freely and courageously. We must reject the warmongers among our leaders and call them out on the lies they use to contrive consent for war. Wars are always started with lies.

Our opposition must not be shy or deferential: it must be bold, determined and relentless. We would also do well to turn toward our Russian fellow men and women and tell them loud and clear that we want peace, not war. The German people have done so even though their own leaders are among the most aggressive warmongers of all. On Saturday, 20 June 2026, hundreds of them gathered at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to assert, “Russia is NOT our enemy,” and laid flowers at the Soviet war memorial. We need millions of people following suit.

We must start without delay to build the foundations for peace in our hearts and minds. There can be no justification for us to sleepwalk into another war. In addition to unprecedented scale of destruction and death, the economic, social and psychological damage from such a conflict would be such that it might take many generations to repair.

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Russia, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Persistence of Israel First

 SCHEERPOST, June 23, 2026,  Timothy Hopper for Foreign Policy in Focus

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the latest confrontation involving Iran, the United States, and Israel, it is the remarkably short life of Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine. Trump returned to power promising to break with Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, avoid costly overseas commitments, and place the interests of American citizens above the demands of allies and foreign governments. For a brief moment, recent tensions involving Iran appeared to support that narrative. Reports of disagreements between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, combined with signals that the White House remained open to diplomacy with Tehran, created the impression that the administration might finally be pursuing a genuinely independent Middle East policy.

That impression did not last. The sudden hardening of the White House’s tone toward Tehran, followed by the decision to authorize military action against Iran, exposed the limits of Trump’s supposed break with the old order. The strike was more than a military operation; it was a test of whether “America First” could survive a direct collision with Israel’s security priorities.

The outcome suggested that it could not. More importantly, the episode highlighted a broader pattern that extends far beyond the current crisis. The Iran strike was not an isolated departure from “America First.” It was the latest example of a recurring reality: whenever American and Israeli priorities diverge in the Middle East, Trump’s record consistently shows a preference for the latter.

The evidence stretches across both Trump administrations. One of the clearest examples was his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was far from perfect, but it imposed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program while avoiding military confrontation. European allies overwhelmingly supported preserving the agreement because they viewed it as a mechanism for regional stability. American intelligence agencies repeatedly indicated that Iran was complying with its core obligations at the time of withdrawal.

Yet one government had long viewed the agreement as unacceptable regardless of compliance: Israel. Netanyahu devoted years to opposing the deal and publicly pressured Washington to abandon it. Trump ultimately did exactly that. The result was not greater American security but the collapse of diplomatic constraints, heightened regional tensions, and a path that eventually led toward direct military confrontation.

The same pattern appeared in Trump’s 2017 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate the U.S. embassy. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike avoided such a move because they feared it would inflame regional tensions and undermine Washington’s ability to act as a mediator. The decision delivered a major symbolic and political victory to Israel while generating little measurable strategic benefit for the United States. It weakened America’s diplomatic position across much of the Arab and Muslim world without producing progress toward regional peace.

Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019 followed a similar logic. No urgent American national-security interest required the move. The decision did not reduce threats to the U.S. homeland, strengthen the American economy, or improve the lives of American citizens. It did, however, fulfill a longstanding Israeli objective and further aligned U.S. policy with Israeli territorial preferences. Once again, Washington absorbed diplomatic costs while Israel obtained a strategic gain………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….  the Iran episode carries significance beyond the immediate military confrontation. It forces a reconsideration of the meaning of “America First” itself. If the doctrine can be suspended whenever Israeli security concerns become central to a crisis, then its practical limitations are far greater than its supporters acknowledged. The issue is not whether Trump supports Israel. Many American presidents have done so. The issue is whether support for Israel has become so deeply embedded within Washington’s political structure that even presidents elected on promises of strategic independence find themselves unable—or unwilling—to depart from it.

The most important question raised by the recent confrontation is therefore not about Iran. It is about the nature of American power and decision-making. Can American foreign policy in the Middle East be defined independently of Israeli preferences when significant disagreements emerge? Or has support for Israel become such a foundational principle that it overrides alternative conceptions of national interest regardless of who occupies the White House?

Trump’s record provides a revealing answer. From the nuclear deal to Jerusalem, from the Golan Heights to the recent strike on Iran, the pattern is difficult to ignore. The slogan “America First” may have transformed American political rhetoric, but when confronted with the most consequential Middle Eastern decisions, Washington repeatedly returned to a familiar reality. The durability of “Israel First” has proven far greater than the lifespan of the doctrine that promised to replace it. https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/23/the-persistence-of-israel-first/

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Congress Quietly Moves to Merge U.S. and Israeli Militaries

In the end, the fight over Section 224 is about far more than a single provision in a single defense bill. It is a test of whether the United States will continue drifting toward a model of permanent, opaque military integration with a foreign power — one that bypasses public debate, weakens congressional authority, and embeds private industry interests deep inside national security decision‑making.

 June 23, 2026, Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/23/congress-quietly-moves-to-merge-u-s-and-israeli-militaries/

As public support for Israel continues to erode amid the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, a little-noticed provision buried inside the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act could fundamentally reshape the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv. Critics warn that Section 224—the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”—would move beyond annual military aid and toward full military-industrial integration, creating a permanent infrastructure that binds the two countries’ defense sectors together while reducing transparency, congressional oversight, and public accountability.

On this week’s Clearing the FOG, Margaret Flowers speaks with Quincy Institute foreign policy expert Ben Freeman about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly calls “my plan”—a proposal that would establish a Pentagon official dedicated to integrating U.S. and Israeli military systems, supply chains, intelligence networks, artificial intelligence programs, cybersecurity operations, and weapons production. Freeman argues that the measure would make future efforts to limit U.S. support for Israel far more difficult, while opening the door to potentially unlimited taxpayer-funded contracts for Israeli defense firms.

Highlights From the Interview

A Shift From Aid to Permanent Integration

Freeman explains that the proposal represents a major strategic shift. Rather than relying on periodic aid packages that require congressional approval, the new framework would weave Israeli defense interests directly into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Once Israeli firms become embedded in American supply chains, he argues, disentangling the relationship becomes politically and economically difficult.Highlights From the Interview

A Shift From Aid to Permanent Integration

Freeman explains that the proposal represents a major strategic shift. Rather than relying on periodic aid packages that require congressional approval, the new framework would weave Israeli defense interests directly into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Once Israeli firms become embedded in American supply chains, he argues, disentangling the relationship becomes politically and economically difficult.

An Executive Agent With Little Oversight

At the center of the proposal is a new Pentagon “executive agent” tasked with expanding military cooperation across a broad range of technologies, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, drones, quantum computing, data sharing, and network integration. According to Freeman, this position would report to the Secretary of Defense rather than Congress, significantly reducing legislative oversight of U.S.-Israel military cooperation.

Unlimited Funding Potential

Unlike the Obama-era Memorandum of Understanding, which capped military assistance at $3.8 billion annually, Freeman warns that the new arrangement contains no meaningful financial ceiling. Israeli defense firms could potentially gain access to massive Pentagon programs—including missile defense initiatives such as the proposed “Golden Dome”—creating a new stream of taxpayer-funded contracts that could exceed current aid levels.

Expanding the Reach of the Israel Lobby

Freeman argues that military integration would provide another avenue for political influence. By placing Israeli-linked defense projects and jobs in congressional districts across the country, lawmakers could face increasing pressure to support Israeli interests regardless of public opinion. He describes the proposal as potentially putting “the Israel lobby on steroids” by adding Pentagon-linked economic leverage to existing lobbying and campaign-finance networks.

Intelligence Sharing Raises Additional Concerns

The discussion also highlights a separate provision moving through Congress that would expand intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel. Critics argue the measure could compel U.S. agencies to provide intelligence with minimal restrictions while limiting oversight over how that information is ultimately used or distributed.

What Can Be Done?

Despite the bill’s progress, Freeman says public pressure is already having an impact. Congressional offices have reportedly received significant constituent feedback opposing the measure, and some lawmakers are reconsidering their positions. He urges listeners to contact their representatives and senators and demand that Section 224 be removed before the NDAA reaches final passage.

The Bigger Picture

The conversation concludes by placing the proposal within the broader context of U.S. foreign policy and military spending. Freeman argues that Washington increasingly relies on military solutions while neglecting diplomacy and development. With annual U.S. military and national security expenditures approaching unprecedented levels, he contends that deeper military integration with Israel would further entrench a foreign policy driven by militarism rather than democratic accountability.

Listen to the full interview with Ben Freeman and Margaret Flowers to learn how Section 224 could transform the U.S.-Israel relationship—and why critics believe the measure deserves far more public scrutiny before becoming law.

In the end, the fight over Section 224 is about far more than a single provision in a single defense bill. It is a test of whether the United States will continue drifting toward a model of permanent, opaque military integration with a foreign power — one that bypasses public debate, weakens congressional authority, and embeds private industry interests deep inside national security decision‑making. As Ben Freeman warns, once these pipelines of technology, intelligence, and weapons production are fused, they will be extraordinarily difficult to unwind, no matter how sharply public opinion turns or how grave the humanitarian consequences become.

At a moment when Americans are increasingly questioning endless war, rising military budgets, and the political influence of defense contractors, Section 224 would lock in precisely the opposite trajectory. It would expand the reach of the military‑industrial complex, supercharge the political leverage of the Israel lobby, and commit U.S. taxpayers to an open‑ended stream of contracts and joint programs with little transparency and even less accountability.

Whether this provision survives the final NDAA will depend on how much pressure lawmakers feel from the people they represent. If the public remains silent, the Pentagon and its partners will move forward with an unprecedented integration project that reshapes U.S. foreign policy for a generation. If voters speak up, Congress may yet be forced to reconsider a measure that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

The stakes are simple: a democratic decision about whether the United States deepens its entanglement in a widening regional war, or whether it reasserts civilian oversight and a foreign policy grounded in accountability rather than automatic militarism.

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Taking a sledgehammer to the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

The Iranian proliferation quandary. In 2011, the IAEA concluded that, prior to 2003, Iran had a nuclear weapon development program. In 2003, then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni published a religious edict that weapons of mass destruction are “haram” (religiously forbidden). The force of this edict has been debated, but the most recent Congressional Research Service report on Iran’s nuclear-weapon program states, “According to official U.S. assessments, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and has not resumed it.”

Bulletin, By Frank von Hippel, Seyed Hossein Mousavian | Analysis | April 18, 2026

The current crisis over Iran’s nuclear program has reached an extraordinary level, climaxing shockingly with President Trump’s April 7 threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” if it did not comply with his demands—a barely veiled threat of a massive nuclear attack on Iran’s cities. Any country faced with such a threat would want its own nuclear deterrent.

More broadly, the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—the expression of a global near consensus that the world would be better off without nuclear weapons and that, in the interim, the fewer fingers on nuclear triggers the better—is fraying.

In the NPT, the “P5” (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States; the Soviet Union, succeeded by Russia; the United Kingdom; France; and China— committed to eliminate their nuclear arsenals if the non-weapon states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor their use of nuclear material to make sure that none was diverted to weapons use.

Surprisingly few countries have acquired nuclear weapons. In 1995, the negotiators of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty judged 44 countries to be technologically capable of making nuclear weapons. But, in the 56 years since the NPT came into force, only three countries—Israel, India, and Pakistan—decided to acquire nuclear weapons outside the NPT and only one, North Korea, defected after it joined the NPT.

The nonweapon states initially agreed to membership in the NPT for 25 years. In 1995, when the 25 years were up, the Cold War had just ended and US and Russian nuclear warheads were being dismantled at a combined rate of 3,000 per year. Nuclear disarmament seemed in sight, and the NPT was made permanent. Unfortunately, during the past decade, the shrinkage of the global warhead stockpile stopped, with about 10,000 warheads still in existence, and it has begun to grow again as China builds up.

The 190 parties to the NPT that are to meet at the UN during May to review the state of compliance with the treaty have failed to reach consensus in the previous two reviews since 2010.

And then there is Iran.

The Iranian proliferation quandary. In 2011, the IAEA concluded that, prior to 2003, Iran had a nuclear weapon development program. In 2003, then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni published a religious edict that weapons of mass destruction are “haram” (religiously forbidden). The force of this edict has been debated, but the most recent Congressional Research Service report on Iran’s nuclear-weapon program states, “According to official U.S. assessments, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and has not resumed it.”

In 2018, President Trump capriciously withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama Administration, in which Iran had agreed to strong limits on different parts of its nuclear program for 15 years or longer. To force Iran to give him a “better deal” than it had given Obama, Trump reinstated crushing primary and secondary sanctions on Iran’s economy. Neither the UN Security Council nor the IAEA Board of Governors said anything, but UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres did:

“I am deeply concerned by today’s announcement that the United States will be withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and will begin reinstating US sanctions… I have consistently reiterated that the JCPOA represents a major achievement in nuclear non-proliferation and diplomacy and has contributed to regional and international peace and security.”

Given the widespread opposition to the JCPOA in Congress, the Biden administration did not give a high priority to negotiating its revival. Since President Trump’s reelection, the situation has rapidly deteriorated.

On June 12, 2025, the IAEA’s Board of Governors found that “Iran has failed to co-operate fully with the Agency, as required by its Safeguards Agreement.” The focus of the board’s complaint was Iran’s inadequate explanations of the activities it had carried out during the period ending in 2003. Those were issues that the IAEA had declared closed after it summarized its conclusions in its December 2015 “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Programme,” just before the JCPOA came into force in January 2016.

The day after the IAEA Board’s statement, while the United States was negotiating with Iran, Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites. President Trump ordered US forces to join in and bomb Iran’s buried centrifuge halls with massive bunker busters.

Again, on February 27, in a pause in a second US negotiation with Iran, the foreign minister of Oman, who was mediating the talks, reported in a “Face the Nation” interview that the negotiators had made “substantial progress” toward a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program and that Iran was willing to end its production of highly enriched uranium and blend down its existing stock. The next day, Israel attacked and killed Iran’s supreme leader and much of its military leadership, and Trump again ordered US forces to join in the intense follow-on bombing of Iran.

The UN Security Council has not condemned these attacks on Iran but has condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks on its US-allied Persian Gulf neighbors and for its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The IAEA also has not condemned Israeli and US attacks on facilities it safeguarded, even though the result has been Iran’s decision to block IAEA access to Iran’s bombed sites (presumably out of fear that IAEA inspections could be used by the US and Israel for targeting intelligence).

US negotiations with Iran. The key sticking point in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program since it became public in 2003 has been uranium enrichment. Iran claims it has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, uranium enrichment provides a route to nuclear weapons.

Our own view is that there is no economic justification for a small enrichment program like Iran’s. The four big suppliers: Russia; URENCO (a firm jointly owned by Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK); China; and France have more than enough capacity to supply the world’s nuclear power reactors at lower cost. Even the United States, with the world’s largest nuclear-power capacity—one quarter of the global total—has bought enrichment services from these suppliers since 2013 when it shut down the last of the three energy-inefficient enrichment plants it built to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons during the Cold War.

If countries insist on building uneconomic enrichment plants, we have advocated that those plants be under multinational control, as is the case with URENCO, which was founded in 1971 when there was still some concern that West Germany might seek nuclear weapons. Iran has expressed a willingness to put its enrichment program under multinational control but is unwilling to have it relocated to a neutral country as we recommended…………………………….

An inconsistent nonproliferation policy. Despite going to war over Iran’s uranium enrichment program, President Trump has inconsistently given both South Korea and Saudi Arabia his blessing to acquire uranium-enrichment and spent-fuel-reprocessing programs. “Reprocessing” is a chemical process used to separate plutonium, another nuclear-weapons material, from irradiated uranium fuel.

……………………………….President Trump made these agreements with the leaders of South Korea and Saudi Arabia in his usual transactional style. Rules, he apparently believes, need not be followed if a government is willing to pay enough.

President’s Trump’s disdain for the rules is endangering world order in many ways. We cannot leave defense of the nonproliferation regime for later, however. If we do, we may find ourselves in a nuclear-armed crowd. https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/taking-a-sledgehammer-to-the-nuclear-nonproliferation-regime/

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Iran, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

IAEA produces global mapping tool of used nuclear fuel

WNN, Monday, 22 June 2026

The global total of used nuclear fuel produced by nuclear power plants is about 448,000 tonnes of heavy metal, with three quarters in storage and one quarter reprocessed, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s first interactive tool showing how much used nuclear fuel the world has – and where it is stored – by country.

The agency says that 41% of used nuclear fuel is in wet storage, “mainly the pools that cool … [it] after it leaves the reactor and other centralised pools. Another 31% is in dry storage which are the casks, buildings, and modular systems used for keeping spent fuel under dry conditions”.

The figures for the interactive map – which allows people to look by country, by region and by storage type – comes from the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention, which is “the principal international legal instrument to address the safety of spent fuel and radioactive waste management on a global scale”. It is the second edition of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Global Spent Nuclear Fuel Inventory.………………………………… You can find the IAEA’s Global Spent Nuclear Fuel Inventory here. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/iaea-produces-global-mapping%20tool-of-used-nuclear-fuel

June 25, 2026 Posted by | wastes | Leave a comment

Israel’s Suicidal Rupture with the U.S.

The failure by the U.S. to continue to subjugate its interests to those of Israel, even at the cost of economic suicide, is, in the eyes of entitled Zionists, unforgiveable. Israel expects the Zionist billionaire class and the Israel lobby in the U.S., as in the past, to bend to its will.

 June 23, 2026, Chris Hedges , ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/23/israels-suicidal-rupture-with-the-u-s/

Israel is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south. It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza.

Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence. It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority. It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests. It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use.

It is a menace to the region. It is a menace to itself. And it is a menace to us.

The first round of a quadrilateral meeting between the United States, Iran and Pakistani and Qatari mediators in Switzerland on Sunday — where the Iranian delegation refused to take part in a planned handshake and joint photo with its U.S. counterparts — focused on the U.S. implementing commitments set in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a preliminary 60-day period.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — following Israeli attacks on Lebanon — disrupted the talks. The closure sent Trump into another one of his habitual tantrums, when he reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “[Y]ou won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

When told that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian continues to assert Iran’s right to enrich uranium — a right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which the U.S. co-founded — Trump reportedly said “[President Pezeshkian] better watch his mouth. He better shape up or we’ll take over the rest of the country.”

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in LebanoThe first round of a quadrilateral meeting between the United States, Iran and Pakistani and Qatari mediators in Switzerland on Sunday — where the Iranian delegation refused to take part in a planned handshake and joint photo with its U.S. counterparts — focused on the U.S. implementing commitments set in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a preliminary 60-day period.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — following Israeli attacks on Lebanon — disrupted the talks. The closure sent Trump into another one of his habitual tantrums, when he reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “[Y]ou won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

When told that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian continues to assert Iran’s right to enrich uranium — a right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which the U.S. co-founded — Trump reportedly said “[President Pezeshkian] better watch his mouth. He better shape up or we’ll take over the rest of the country.”

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump added in a post on Truth Social, referring to Hezbollah. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Trump’s threats prompted the Iranian delegation to depart the Swiss venue, while Ghalibaf dismissed Trump’s tirades in a post on X. “Don’t they ever stop to think that if their threats had worked, they wouldn’t have reached today’s desperation? We give the Americans’ threats no weight whatsoever,” he said.

The meeting concluded with “agreeing on a 60-day roadmap toward a final agreement and establishing mechanisms to advance technical negotiations” under the MoU, according to IRNA News Agency.

Israel’s vision of a “Greater Israel,” designed to ensure Israel’s military dominance throughout the Middle East, depends on harnessing the wealth and military power of the U.S.

Over two-thirds of the major arms and munitions Israel imports — without which it could not carry out its genocide of the Palestinians, turn southern Lebanon into a moonscape and bomb Iran, Syria and Qatar — are manufactured and provided by the U.S. And because the Israel lobby, for decades, has owned Congress, because its Zionists allies police and control the media, because it is able to siphon tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to sustain its military adventurism, Israel is blind to its own limitations. It is willing to inflict harm on its allies, including the U.S., in service to itself.

And that is what it now intends to do. Even the obtuse administration of Donald Trump — which has spent over $34 billion on the war with Iran and which WarCosts estimates at over $214 billion when wider economic costs are factored in — has figured this out.

Israel is apoplectic about the MoU, which was signed virtually on Wednesday, that leaves the disposition of Iranian stockpiled enriched nuclear materials to later negotiations, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, releases frozen Iranian assets and issues waivers to allow Iranian oil sales.

The MoU declares an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” It proposes a 60-day negotiation period before reaching a final deal, a $300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran’s periphery and the termination of all international and unilateral sanctions.

The rhetoric unleashed by Israeli politicians and pundits about Trump and those in his administration over the MoU — reportedly arranged without Israeli participation — is venomous. No one in the Trump administration is immune. Trump’s hapless special envoys and unapologetic Zionist assets, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were castigated as “two little Jews” by Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member-turned-pundit who is close to Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump is a “loser.” Vice President JD Vance is “scum.” “Israel Hayom” — the Israeli newspaper owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson, one of Trump’s biggest financial donors — in an op-ed accused Trump of betraying Israel.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance retorted.

It is more than ironic that Israel would push Trump — who gives the word bribery a bad name — into opposing Israel. But Israel has overplayed its hand. The Arab and Muslim world and the Global South detests Washington for its backing of the genocide and betrayal of the Palestinians. Israel and its Zionist supporters goaded the U.S. into made-for-Israel wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and then, another war with Iran. The alliance and military debacles have turned Israel and the U.S. into pariah states.

Now, Israel is turning on the only ally it has left.

The failure by the U.S. to continue to subjugate its interests to those of Israel, even at the cost of economic suicide, is, in the eyes of entitled Zionists, unforgiveable. Israel expects the Zionist billionaire class and the Israel lobby in the U.S., as in the past, to bend to its will.

The Obama White House signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 with Israel pledging $3.8 billion per year in military aid from 2019-2028. Congress authorized an additional $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide.

Between 1946 and 2024, the U.S. is estimated to have provided Israel with over $300 billion in military and economic assistance, adjusted for inflation.

The cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are estimated, by Brown University, to be between $4 to $6 trillion, with much of that to be paid in the coming decades in the form of medical and disability payments to war veterans and their families.

This time the price is too high.

The defeat of Israel and the U.S. in the war on Iran has dealt a mortal blow to the project of “Greater Israel” and the Abraham Accords. It has crippled the Trump presidency, driving up inflation, plunging Trump’s approval rating to dismal levels, paralyzing the economies of Gulf allies and threatening Republican control of the House and the Senate in the November elections.

Israel has no intention of catering to Trump. It could not care less what happens to him, his administration or the effects of the looming economic catastrophe. But Trump, who always has been and always will be out for Trump alone, is not going to sacrifice himself for someone else’s benefit or airy ideals.

Israeli leaders are so out of touch with reality they are threatening to go to war with Iran without the U.S. Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister and current leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has called for Israel to build a ballistic missile force and said that if he was in charge, he would direct the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government.

Israel has no intention of leaving southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights — and other areas of Syria it began occupying following the overthrow of Assad — Gaza — where it occupies 70 percent of the land — or halting its savage ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. It intends to find some place on the globe to ship the two million de facto prisoners of concentration camp Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are still being slaughtered — over 1,000 have been killed by Israel since the supposed ceasefire went into effect last October — and huddle in overcrowded tent cities without adequate food, clean water or medical care.

These goals may be achievable in the short term, but in the long term they signal the demise of the Zionist state. Democrats are increasingly shedding the albatross of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. “America First” Republicans and the right wing are retreating into their traditional antisemitism.

The genocide ripped the veil off Israel and exposed its dark and murderous visage to the global community. The war on Iran, which Netanyahu sold as an easy win, exposed Israel’s cynical manipulation of the U.S. to the Trump White House.

Israelis, intoxicated by the fantasy of being the chosen people, do not have friends. They do not have allies. They have those they use and those they slaughter.

“No more insane aid with no conditions, but a condition attached to every dollar and every missile,” the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes.

Behave or pay the price. You can no longer do as you please: assassinate, abuse, violate national sovereignty and international law with impunity. In such an atmosphere, Israel will no longer be able to continue to thumb its nose at the international community, for which there is no more unifying issue than opposition to the occupation.

Whether it wants to or not, Israel will have to take this into consideration. The first cracks have already appeared, and how: a deal made with Iran while entirely disregarding Israel, which for years disregarded the United States and the entire world. This is only the beginning: A world that was horrified by what Israel did in the Gaza Strip will want a reckoning. A genocidal state can no longer be the darling of the Western world. A state whose citizens carry out pogroms daily, with the cooperation of its military, will not be a part of the family of nations. The dream is starting to come true. It will be a nightmare.

The game is up. The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end. Israel’s inability to read U.S. and global opinion — or its own population, where over 90 percent believe Israel lost its war against Iran — along with its stubborn belief that its old levers of power can still work, illustrate a leadership that has rendered itself deaf, dumb and blind. It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself.

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

Australia’s coal and gas exports violate our human rights, group says in new UN case

Lana LamSydney, 23 June 26, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8q5nx6jw6o

A group of Australians have accused the government of violating their human rights by continuing to export coal and gas and are asking the UN to take action.

The group say their lives have been harmed due to extreme weather in Australia – bushfires, floods, heatwaves, rising sea levels and toxic algal blooms – and the government’s support of fossil fuel companies is to blame.

It is the first legal claim taken to an international body or court since 2025’s ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that countries can be sued over climate change.

Any decision by the UN is not legally binding but Australia – one of the world’s largest coal and gas exporters – would be expected to respond.

The BBC has contacted Environment Minister Murray Watt for comment.

Dr Barry Traill, a wildlife ecologist and volunteer firefighter, is one of the ten litigants.

In 2009, several of his friends died during the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, despite being prepared and experienced, he said.

“That deeply changed me,” Traill said, and “it became clear that the old rules around fires and survival no longer applied”.

In 2019, he was on the frontlines battling severe blazes in Queensland during the so-called Black Summer fires where he saw that climate change was not a future problem.

“It is already killing people and hurting lives, landscapes and communities across Australia,” he said.

“Continuing to allow coal and gas companies to increase pollution, while people face worsening disasters, is a profound failure of responsibility.”

Brendon Donohue has also joined the legal claim, describing how he was trapped in his home for 10 days in 2022 when floods in Brisbane damaged the power supply of his apartment block, meaning the lifts, intercom and exits were not accessible.

“Because I live with blindness and mobility challenges, climate impacts affect me differently and can make everyday life much harder to navigate safely,” he said.

Another case is that of Prof Anne Poelina, an Indigenous woman from the Kimberley region in Western Australia, who describes being displaced from the area around the Fitzroy River, one of the state’s most important waterways, because of catastrophic flooding.

“When the river is healthy, our people are healthy,” she said, and “when the river suffers, our people suffer.”

“What concerns me most is the intergenerational loss of cultural knowledge,” she added as “so much of our knowledge is not written down”, but passed on by being physically present on the land.

“They are asking the United Nations Human Rights Committee to declare that it’s unlawful for Australia to continue approving and subsidising coal and gas for export without a plan to protect people from dangerous climate change,” said Hannah White, senior lawyer with Environmental Justice Australia.

Last July, the ICJ – considered the world’s highest court with global jurisdiction – ruled that countries can sue each other for climate change, including over historic emissions of planet-warming gases.One of the lawyers helping the group with their claim said that “climate harm caused by Australia’s coal and gas doesn’t stop at a border, and neither does Australia’s responsibility for it”.

June 25, 2026 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, climate change | Leave a comment

U.S. Military Bases Around the World Are Facing Growing Protest From an Emboldened Antiwar Movement

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Jun 23, 2026

Previously published at CovertAction Magazine

In early April, an unidentified Irish man climbed onto the roof of a U.S. C-130 Hercules military transport vehicle parked at Shannon Airport in County Claire, Ireland, and sabotaged its wing and fuselage using a hatchet, causing $75 million in damage.

The heroic action was part of a wave of protests at Shannon Airport, which has functioned since the end of the Cold War as a transport hub for U.S. troops and refueling and transit spot for CIA and U.S. military planes, including ones that transported prisoners to Guantánamo Bay under the infamous rendition program.

Edward Hogan is a a regular participant in the protests at the Shannon Airport who was a featured speaker at a June 6 webinar hosted by Global Women for Peace—United Against NATO, which aimed to raise awareness about the widening protests against U.S. military bases in Europe and around the world.

A former member of the Irish defense force and UN peacekeeper, Hogan said that he has been arrested eight times in protests outside Shannon Airport, which are growing in scale because of popular anger at Ireland’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Iran War—along with previous illegal U.S. and NATO wars like in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s.

Hogan emphasized that, by allowing the U.S. military to use Shannon Airport, it has violated a neutrality policy that was signed into law by the Irish government in 1939.

Since 2002, more than three million U.S. troops have passed through Shannon Airport, many through flights classified as “civilian,” though most troop carriers are operated by Omni Air International, which the Irish government acknowledges has been allowed to carry weapons on board.

Additionally, the Irish Foreign Minister has granted permission for U.S. Navy and Air Force planes to land at Shannon—in violation of Irish law.

Hogan was followed up in his remarks by Ilse Terheggen, a Dutch punk rock musician and activist, who spoke about growing protests she is involved in outside the Leeuwarden Air Base in Friesland near Leiden………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

At the end of the webinar, a woman from Sweden came on to highlight the Pentagon’s push for the expansion of military bases in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway) from which the U.S. can launch direct attacks on Russia.

When the woman asked why Swedish anti-war activism was not featured in the webinar, others said they would have liked to but that, unfortunately, there was not much anti-war activism there except for some small actions.

The woman agreed that, unfortunately, this was true and lamented that the entire Swedish parliament had supported an agreement that would allow the U.S. to use Sweden’s 17 military bases to attack Russia.

Despite a conservative political climate reminiscent of the Cold War and insane war escalations being carried out in Washington and Tel Aviv, the June 6 Global Women for Peace—United Against NATO webinar made clear that there is a growing grass-roots opposition across Europe and parts of Southeast Asia, which is beginning to make some political headway.

Many speakers emphasized a widening coalition at anti-base and anti-war protests involving pro-Palestinian groups, climate change activists, trade union activists, feminists and pacifists, along with a growing number of young people who are experiencing a political awakening.

If they continue to expand, these networks may threaten the hold on power of ruling classes whose war-mongering and fealty to U.S. imperial designs have put them on the wrong side of history. https://jeremykuzmarov.substack.com/p/us-military-bases-around-the-world?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2091638&post_id=203170903&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rq1nt&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

June 25, 2026 Posted by | opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment

Even If the Strait of Hormuz is Open, it Ain’t Open

22 June 2026 by Larry C. Johnson , https://sonar21.com/even-if-the-strait-of-hormuz-is-open-it-aint-open/

It is open. Nope, it is closed. Wait… It is open. What? Closed again? If you are following the media reports on the Strait of Hormuz you are probably dizzy from hearing about the changing status of the Strait of Hormuz. If you think that getting a firm agreement between Iran and the US to open the Strait of Hormuz will result in an instant solution to restoring global oil reserves, think again.

Even if Iran agrees to a 60-day moratorium on charging ships entering and leaving the Persian Gulf a “usage fee” (Trump calls it a “toll”), and the moratorium starts this week, the world still faces some serious economic shocks from the disruption of Crude Oil and LNG. Crude Oil and LNG production will take time to ramp back up to the pre-Ramadan War levels. We still do not have a full assessment of the damage to the Oil and LNG infrastructure in the Gulf nations. Even if all those systems are intact and functioning — they are not — there is still the problem of having the tankers that carry the Black Gold ready to take the shipments.

The tankers, aka ships, that have been sitting idle in the warm, salty waters of the Persian Gulf for four months face months of the maintenance recovery cycle before they will be ready to get back to the task of hauling oil and LNG. An expert in this field explained it to me this way:

Oil tankers are likely to lose weeks to months depending on fouling, coating condition, and drydock access. LNG carriers are likely to lose longer because the hull problem is coupled to cargo-system and gas-management reliability.

For planning, assume crude/product tankers lose 1-3 months in the median case and 3-6 months in the heavy case. Assume newer LNG carriers lose 2-4 months and older/system-stressed LNG carriers lose 4-9+ months. Some vessels will be faster, but the market should plan for a long tail of slow, disputed, or yard-bound tonnage.

The global perspective is clear: physical movement will recover first; commercial availability will recover second; fleet efficiency will recover third. The market will separate clean, documented, charter-ready tonnage from vessels that are merely moving. The maintenance backlog will be the next bottleneck after Hormuz.

Besides the delay in getting tankers back on the high seas, there is the problem of the Middle-Distillate Inflection Point. What the hell is that? As you can see in the image at the top of this article, a barrel of oil is not like a can of Coca Cola, i.e., a consistent liquid from the top to the bottom of the can. A barrel of Oil consists of segments, with the middle-distillate portion of the barrel providing the raw material from which both diesel and jet fuel are derived. That segment is the critical fuel for the real economy because diesel runs freight, rail, agriculture, construction, and distribution, while jet fuel supports both civil aviation and military air operations.

The structural constraint at the heart of the current energy crunch is the refinery barrel itself. Military jet fuel (JP-8) and civilian diesel are not refined from separate barrels — they compete for the same distillate cut from every barrel processed. So if Trump orders the Pentagon to start bombing Iran again, that will trigger draw downs on stocks — assuming the ops tempo in the Gulf is sustained — and refiners will face pressure to tilt output toward JP-8, which directly squeezes the supply of diesel and civil aviation fuel. In other words, there is no free barrel; every gallon of military fuel is a gallon not available to a trucking company, a farmer, or an airline.

Of all the downstream effects, diesel tightness is the most economically dangerous and the fastest-moving. Unlike gasoline, which is a consumer cost, diesel is an input cost — embedded in every freight shipment, every food delivery, every industrial process. When diesel tightens, the price increase doesn’t stop at the pump; it cascades through supply chains and lands simultaneously on freight rates, grocery prices, manufacturing margins, and retail costs. That kind of broad-based input inflation is one of the more reliable causes of recession, because it compresses margins economy-wide while simultaneously suppressing consumer purchasing power.

This helps explain why Donald Trump pivoted so quick to support the MoU with Iran. The real allocation question is not whether to release the SPR or whether to jawbone OPEC into producing more — it is how hard to run the war. Every incremental increase in operational intensity consumes distillate that the domestic economy cannot easily replace, tightening a transmission belt that runs directly from the Strait of Hormuz into Main Street prices. The tradeoff between war intensity and economic stability is not an abstract strategic concern; it is a daily refinery scheduling decision with macroeconomic consequences

Here is the problem: currently, the US has approximately a 30-day supply of diesel. It is estimated that somewhere between 8% (VLCC class alone) and a figure approaching 15–20% of the broader crude and product tanker fleet is either stranded or effectively withdrawn from global circulation — a supply shock to shipping capacity that compounds the underlying oil supply disruption. This means there is no ready, quick solution to fill that gap in 30 days. In fact, the delay to restore the US supply of diesel could last as long as 60 days. In short, oil is not going to flow fast enough globally to meet existing demand, which probably accounts for Trump sudden decision last week to sign the MoU with Iran. A knowledgeable expert who provided me with this information believes that we will hit the wall of diesel shortage in July.

How’s that for cheery news?

June 25, 2026 Posted by | ENERGY, MIDDLE EAST | Leave a comment

Israel takes perverse pleasure in torturing, raping, and murdering Palestinian hostages

In August 2024, Israeli human rights advocacy group, B’Tselem, published a report highlighting the systematic torture, abuse, and rape of Palestinian prisoners. The spokesperson for B’Tselem said,

“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.”

Palestinians abducted, imprisoned, starved, electrocuted, tortured, raped, and even subjected to simulated burial. This is the reality of Palestinian hostages tortured by Israel

Eva Karene Bartlett, Jun 23, 2026

In late 2023, Israeli soldiers abducted and imprisoned a Palestinian man (among many abducted at the same time) from a school in Jabaliya, Gaza, which he and other displaced Palestinians had been sheltering in. He was held hostage in Israeli prisons for nearly two years, during which time he was severely tortured by repeated and prolonged electrocution (including multiple times a day). His Israeli torturers at some point locked him in coffin-like box for two weeks in their attempt to psychologically break him.

According to Imad Nabhan, he refused to act as an informant for Israel. The Israeli soldiers first attempted to bribe him into collaboration, then defaulted to Israel’s (now well-documented) norm of brutal physical and psychological torture of Palestinian captives.

Nabhan’s release in October 2025 saw Imad so physically debilitated by the electric shock torture that he fell unconscious into violent seizures numerous times daily.

At the end of May, he spoke about the torture he endured in Israeli prisons, including his “coffin torture”. He reported that he had been held in “an iron container with a wooden box inside it,” where his hands and feet were tied, fed through a tube in a small hole, just enough to keep him alive.

“It seemed they wanted to make me feel like I was dead so they could get whatever information they wanted. I stayed inside that coffin for 15 days. I felt like I was alive in a dead body.”

In October 2025, while a journalist in Gaza was attempting to interview Nabhan after his release, Imad fell into one of his seizures, his whole body writhing and convulsing, his head repeatedly banging against the ground.

This lasted for 30 seconds, and started again a minute later as his father tried to shield his son’s head from hitting the ground. He spoke of Imad’s torture, showing the marks left on his legs from the repeated electric shocks.

His father had said until his release, he’d thought his son was dead. “We thought he’d been martyred, because there was information they shot people and were running over their bodies with tanks. So after two years, we were surprised that was alive in prison and was released.”

The Israeli torture and abuse meted out to Imad Nabhan is not unique, it is the norm, and in recent years there have been increasingly numerous accounts from former prisoners of the torture, rape, abuse, starvation, and denied medical care they endured in Israeli captivity, in violation of all international norms…………………………………………..


Living Hell: Israeli torture prisons

Among the more horrific instances (known to the public) of Israeli soldiers’ raping of Palestinian prisoners was the July 2024 gang rape of a Palestinian man from Gaza in the notorious Sde Teiman prison (dubbed the Israeli Guantanamo).

Hiding their faces with their shields, Israeli soldiers took turns raping the prisoner so severely he was hospitalized unable to walk, with “a torn rectum, damaged lungs, and broken ribs.” [Note: Many Palestinians who have testified about their severe torture in Israeli prisons were not given medical care afterward.]

Astonishingly (to normal people), after a video of the rape was leaked and aired on Israeli television, not only was the Israeli public reaction not disgust or horror, but Israelis, members of the Knesset, and Israeli ministers protested the detention of soldiers accused of the gang-rape. None of the soldiers were charged.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called their brief detention “shameful”, saying the rapists were “our best heroes”.

In August 2024, Israeli human rights advocacy group, B’Tselem, published a report highlighting the systematic torture, abuse, and rape of Palestinian prisoners. The spokesperson for B’Tselem said,

“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. When the issue of Palestinian hostages tortured in Israeli prisons is reported these days, the focus is often only on Palestinians from Gaza. But on a near daily basis throughout the West Bank, Palestinian men, women and children are abducted, arrested and held imprisoned, without charges, many of them repeatedly so. It is clearly not about crimes committed but about trying to break Palestinians psychologically, by the same means of torture, starvation, sexual abuse, and physical abuse.

Israel added to UN sexual violence blacklist

The United Nations put Israel on its annual blacklist of entities “credibly suspected of committing widespread sexual violence in conflict zones.” Victims include 31 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including 14 men, seven women, nine boys, and one girl.

Violations included, “rape, including with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals.” Nine in the report were raped, including gang rape, some repeatedly.

………………………………………………………………………………………………….. That Israel faces no consequences nor any pressure to stop such torture, what is described as a systematic top-down policy, highlights yet again the death of international law and the meaningless of UN designations. As I’ve argued many times over the years, what’s the point of listing Israel as a serial murdered and rapist if no international body will actually stop Israel from continuing to abduct, torture and rape Palestinians?…………………………………………………………………… https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/israel-takes-perverse-pleasure-in?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=202287735&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

June 25, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment