Space: the billionaires’ playground
private space companies have relied on government contracts, and particularly military funding, to make themselves both rich and indispensable to state powers. Most recently, private interests have been lining up to slake themselves at a long-dormant tap that they hope will provide a new stream of wealth: the Moon.
According to Musk, humans moving to Mars isn’t just a possibility; it’s a moral imperative. But a closer look suggests Mars is really a distraction meant to dazzle us while Musk accrues ever more money and power here on Earth.
8 July 2026, Lucian Walkowicz, https://newint.org/science-and-technology/2026/space-billionaires-playground?utm_source=ni-email-whatcounts%20&utm_medium=1%20NI%20Main%20List1%20-%20enews%20-%20International%20AND%20North%20America&utm_campaign=YYYY-MM-DD%20enews%20-%207%20August%20enews
As tycoons like Elon Musk attempt to seize space for profit, the Earth is being trashed, writes astronomer Lucian Walkowicz.
For years, the wealthy have been telling us that our salvation lies in space.
‘There is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary’, billionaire Elon Musk has said, claiming that getting to Mars will prevent human extinction, and is therefore as crucial as tackling poverty.
Meanwhile, his company’s launches from its ‘Starbase’ have trashed surrounding wildlife areas and displaced longtime residents, while the boss harps on about using its heavy-lift rockets as a high-speed, heavily polluting replacement for commercial air travel, and putting factories on the Moon.
Fellow tycoon Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, equally notorious for its own ‘humanitarian’ approach – has enthused about housing populations in orbital cylinders and protecting the Earth by taking polluting industries off planet. Meanwhile emissions from his companies’ own deliveries have soared.
These supposedly futuristic visions for space have been weaponized to justify a wide array of activities (both on our planet and beyond it), including expanding state surveillance and violence, dispossessing people of their homelands, cluttering low Earth orbit with garbage, plundering the Moon and polluting both our environment and the night sky.
While outwardly the likes of Musk and Bezos might advocate for our future in the stars, in reality they are greedily gorging themselves at the trough of profit while simultaneously creating the conditions that may bind humanity to Earth forever.
Bait and switch
Musk in particular has an outsized influence that exemplifies how space narratives have been wielded to justify a vast array of projects on Earth.
Before SpaceX had their rapid rate of rocket launches, before they were sending rafts of Starlink satellites into orbit, their main source of press coverage was Elon Musk’s mouth. Born to a wealthy white family in apartheid South Africa, this tycoon substitutes provocation for charisma by making exaggerated assertions and brushing aside details. Drawing on a long history of colonial rhetoric around space, he has managed to harness public attention with his futuristic plans to populate Mars with human settlements.
According to Musk, humans moving to Mars isn’t just a possibility; it’s a moral imperative. But a closer look suggests Mars is really a distraction meant to dazzle us while Musk accrues ever more money and power here on Earth.
Musk has conjured a litany of planet-killing bogeymen to justify his Mars ambitions – from rogue asteroids to the expansion of the sun several billion years from now – in order to argue that migration to Mars is a must.
As for what happens if people get to this radiation-baked, arid, oxidized hellscape? No problem, Musk will simply nuke the polar ice caps and melt them. No matter that most scientists and engineers cock an eyebrow at these supposed easy fixes, nor even that anyone with common sense knows that nuclear weapons do not make planets more hospitable.
Leveraging this allegedly visionary perspective, SpaceX has been able to harness not only the imaginations of the wider public, but of its workforce as well. The company offers a seductive opportunity for people who want to see a science fiction future come to reality. But few in the sector seem to think carefully about which of the many futures depicted in science fiction are actually on offer. Despite numerous reports over the years of gruelling and dangerous working conditions, as well as rampant racist and sexist harassment, SpaceX continues to attract workers with a glimmer of Mars in their eyes.
Meanwhile, by manufacturing urgency around this goal, Musk has also been able to justify the expansion of SpaceX’s business at breakneck speed. The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos infuses much of the tech industry, but paired with Musk’s pose as global saviour, SpaceX has been able to gain damaging momentum, outpacing regulatory structures around launches, orbital traffic and environmental protections. This drive has allowed Musk to tap a deep vein of wealth via military contracts, stuffing his coffers and elevating him to quasi-statesman status.
Greater good or greater greed
Take the Starlink satellite megaconstellation. Like Musk’s plans for Mars, Starlink – which first entered commercial service in 2021 – was framed as a necessary project, whose merit only the most selfish person could deny. Its purported goal was to provide internet to so-called ‘underserved’ communities.
But as Starlink began pumping hundreds of reflective satellites into orbit, astronomers promptly raised the alarm that they had begun to mar the night sky. Some also pointed out that Starlink’s service was both unneeded and priced out of reach for the places it was supposedly meant to help, pointing out the twisting of the word ‘underserved’ from its usual meaning of underresourced to ‘a place that does not have enough free market choices’.
Today there are nearly 9,500 Starlink satellites in space, meaning that this single project by a US company is now responsible for 65 per cent of satellites in low Earth orbit, a sea-change that has taken less than seven years. The massive increase in overall numbers has raised widespread alarm over the possibility of extremely high speed collisions and the potential for an escalating cascade of further collisions, known as the ‘Kessler syndrome’. The resulting ballistic debris would ultimately make entire regions of space around earth unusable.
Every time we take the extension of capitalism beyond Earth as a foregone conclusion, we disregard the myriad ways all Earth life has related to our skies.
Of course, there are also the impacts here on Earth: before Starlink satellites create light pollution in the night sky, the launches that put them there create pollution in our immediate environment. A single launch of one of SpaceX’s rockets, the Falcon 9, releases an amount of carbon into the atmosphere equivalent to driving a typical car 70 times around the world.
The satellites themselves also have a limited lifespan of a few years, after which they deorbit into our atmosphere, spreading metal pollution (including mercury) across the planet. Meanwhile, organizers in the Rio Grande Valley have raised the alarm for years about the environmental damage and gentrification driven by SpaceX’s presence in the area of its ‘Starbase’.
Regulatory frameworks have struggled to keep up with SpaceX’s impact: while there are US regulations around launches and their environmental impacts, few were really developed with space in mind, and none were equipped to deal with SpaceX’s high volume of launches. Under the most recent Trump administration, already inadequate regulation has become even looser. In February 2026 the FCC fast-tracked a proposal for SpaceX to launch a million new satellites as part of its plan to create orbital data centres to support an expansion of AI. Meanwhile other countries get no say in this company filling the skies.
We’d do well to question whether the profusion of AI into every aspect of human existence is making things better or simply drowning us in brain-rotting slop.
No matter, though: the people best positioned to profit from cramming a million new satellites into space claim orbital data centres will preserve our planet by eliminating their demands on its land, energy and water resources. However, that argument relies on people thinking of space as a realm that is separate from Earth, when it is Earth’s resources and environment that bear the consequences of this huge profusion in the number of launches required to transport satellites off the planet, as well as the vapourized metals from them reentering its atmosphere.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Starlink’s intended purpose is, or whether anyone can afford it, because individual internet users aren’t SpaceX’s target customer – the military is. Because of wide adoption of the more secure, military-grade version of Starlink, called Starshield, militaries around the world now treat Musk as a de facto statesman who has the capacity to determine which conflicts have access to the internet at which time. For example, in April 2025, SpaceX was awarded $6 billion dollars by the US military for 28 launches that year. This was just one contract.
On top of that, SpaceX is working with the US’s National Reconnaissance Office on the development of ‘Ground Moving Target Indicator’ technology, a space-based panopticon designed to better track people’s movements on Earth.
Even more recently, some have commented that SpaceX’s relatively low launch costs open the possibility of permanent weapons installations in space. ‘Imagine a strike package of thousands of 200-pound bombs, on electric grid sites, government buildings, railway crossings, border stations and road intersections – without putting planes or military personnel at risk’, gushed writer on geopolitics Michael Hochberg in the Wall Street Journal this April.
The ideological capital gained by SpaceX via Musk’s plans ‘for Mars’ has allowed him to hoard massive wealth. Meanwhile these projects pose a grave threat to human futures both in space and on Earth by enabling state surveillance and acts of war, crowding low Earth orbit with potential debris that could one day bar our access to space entirely, and raining pollution into our atmosphere, land and water.
Space is a place
There is a tendency for people to believe that space, in all its wild expansiveness, is beyond the realm of humankind. However, we are literally in and of space. There is no crisp boundary between where Earth’s atmosphere stops and space begins, and like all borders, the ‘boundary’ of space – formally called the von Kármán line – is a collective fiction that has practical utility but not material reality.
While the few humans who have crossed the von Kármán line (whether professional astronauts or celebrities who can afford a ticket) garner the most attention, their number is miniscule compared with people whose lives are enmeshed with space while remaining on Earth. Some of these people are professionals at government agencies or private companies, but most are not space workers at all.
They include anyone who uses tools that rely on space infrastructure, like GPS, but also those who are acutely impacted due to living in the vicinity of launch sites. After all, SpaceX is merely continuing a colonial legacy: near the equator, where the rotation of the Earth provides a slightly bigger boost to launching rockets, launch sites like Brazil’s Alcântara Space Center and the European Space Agency’s Guiana Space Centre, in French Guiana, have dispossessed communities from their lands and battered the surrounding ecosystems since the 1980s and 1960s, respectively.
Moreover, the money lives on Earth. The question of how to squeeze an actual profit out of space, independent of the state, has stymied many a thirsty capitalist.
The rash of asteroid mining ventures that cropped up 15 years ago have now largely shuttered or gone dormant, as no one yet knows how to lasso and plunder an asteroid without the cost outstripping the benefit. Instead, private space companies have relied on government contracts, and particularly military funding, to make themselves both rich and indispensable to state powers. Most recently, private interests have been lining up to slake themselves at a long-dormant tap that they hope will provide a new stream of wealth: the Moon.
Lunar plunder
While many governments and companies around the world have set their sights on the Moon, the US is the driving force in radically reshaping common understandings of space that have been with humanity throughout its existence. Government contracts have been a reliable source of income for private space companies since the first military surveillance satellites. What’s new is the US’s accelerating demolition of publicly funded institutions in favour of private enterprise, enabling a modern crop of companies to act with greater autonomy.
This is particularly concerning in what it might mean for the Moon. Unlike Mars or asteroids, the Moon is essentially in Earth’s backyard: while having a sustained human presence there still presents difficult challenges, getting to its surface is a solved problem. In the past few years, the space agencies of India, China, Japan and the US have all successfully landed robotic spacecraft on the Moon, often with participation from private companies profiting off government contracts. US-based company Intuitive Machines also became the first private company to land there independently.
The combination of the Moon’s proximity and the US’s refusal to embrace international agreements, like the Moon Treaty, that provide stricter lunar protections, has opened up the possibility of private entities being able to independently plunder the Moon for ‘space resources’, ie anything that can be excavated and sold on Earth.
The Moon is a source of helium, and particularly helium-3, an element with widespread industrial applications, of which there is a shortage. The Moon also has potential reserves of water ice, which could be used to create fuel for launching rockets from the lunar surface, or used to support a human presence.
In 2020 the United States and seven other signatories released the Artemis Accords, a set of US-driven international agreements created in anticipation of its own Artemis Program. The Accords circumvent existing international channels for space diplomacy, like the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), allowing the US to essentially bully other nations into accepting a US-centric framework for lunar exploitation.
The Artemis Accords, along with a more recent chaotic splatter of space-related Executive Orders by president Donald Trump claiming to ‘ensure American space superiority’, make explicit a shift away from viewing space as the common heritage of humanity. Rather, the Artemis programme is instead being used to paint a picture of the moon as not only a place humans can go, but one where we can extract and exploit. While until now private companies have mostly benefitted from lucrative contracts to go to space, future prospects have everyone from small space start-ups to Lockheed Martin drooling over the possibility of extended plunder and occupation of the Moon.
In the context of rising fascist tides around the globe, the US’s renewed focus on human spaceflight through Artemis functions as a kind of time machine back to a future that never was.
One of fascism’s defining characteristics is a preoccupation with national decline, paired with a promise of rebirth that can only be actualized through removal of enemies. In the fascist cosmology of today, the Apollo moon landings were the beginning of a future that died on the vine, a future that projected colonial projects and control out into the infinite, with the power to consolidate social hierarchies In the first Trump administration, then-vice president and chair of the National Space Council, Mike Pence, repeatedly said that Artemis would put ‘the first woman and the next man’ on the Moon.
A woman alone on the Moon is unthinkable, so the next man is always mentioned. In this image, the Moon and Artemis astronauts are used as a stand-in for the Garden of Eden: Artemis is literally the virgin sister of Apollo, the Moon an unsullied landscape in which a man-woman pair can be placed to restore the US to a time before the imagined invasion of the administration’s internal and external enemies.
NASA press around the Artemis programme similarly often mentions the diversity of its astronaut corps, but doubling down on American individualism cannot separate Artemis from its utility as propaganda. After all, a handful of people who are not white men leaving Earth’s atmosphere cannot conceivably be a sign of liberatory progress, at least not while squads of paramilitary police kidnap hundreds of thousands of people off the streets of US cities.
Reclaiming space
Space is and has been many things to many people: while the Moon may currently be the stage for US propaganda, it has also been a companion to all life on Earth since our planet’s earliest days. The Moon remains the most visible part of space in light-polluted cities, where most people now live. It has been at the heart of human cultures for our entire existence, not just as a practical tool and biological rhythm, but also a relative, a deity, a reminder and more.
Despite aligned campaigns of both state and capital to radically reshape and control the contours of how people imagine and relate to space, the way that space functions in the fascist imagination is not the only way. Every time we take the extension of capitalism beyond the realm of Earth as a foregone conclusion, we disregard the myriad ways that not only humans but all Earth life has related to our skies. Remember: fascism is relatively new; the cosmos has seen everything.
Space’s wealthy beneficiaries tell us that if we will all just stand aside and let them plunder the heavens, a glossy future awaits humankind. However, we need look no further than the physical realities of space industries to see these stories crack: natural sanctuaries littered with debris from launch sites, an orbit filled with trash and surveillance. The damage done to our own planet in the name of a rush to prospect beyond it is its own evidence that colonialism in space has never been anything but colonialism on Earth.
Whether it’s in the form of Mars colonies, asteroid mining, space tourism, or Moon bases, their visions are nothing but a bankrupt utopia that promises to line their pockets and leave Earth in ruins.
If the most fundamental requirement for liberation is the ability to imagine that the future contains an abundance of possibilities, we must recognize these attempts to seize space for profit and war as attempts to shrink the horizon of potential human flourishing. Can we act to reclaim space for futures that include us all? Only (space)time will tell.
An Eighty-Year Nuclear Nightmare: The U.S., Japan, and Korea
July 31, 2026, Brad Wolf
Organizing Committee of the International People’s Tribunal, https://abombtribunal.campaignus.me/34/?q=YToxOntzOjEyOiJrZXl3b3JkX3R5cGUiO3M6MzoiYWxsIjt9&bmode=view&idx=172837199&t=board
On the right corner of my desk, next to my laptop and always in eyeshot, sits a metal model of an atom bomb I assembled from a kit, a model of “Little Boy,” the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima. The model is made from aluminum alloy parts and is a 1/12th scale of the original atom bomb, about nine inches long. The ad for the bomb contained a video with dramatic music showing the model spinning through the air as it falls toward its imagined target.
“Perfect for collectors,” the ad boasted. “A must-have for history enthusiasts. Very enjoyable assembly process.”
Toward the bottom of the ad, perhaps as an afterthought, perhaps recognizing the implications of marketing such a murderous model, was the following: “By assembling this model, you can understand the history and moral issues of nuclear weapons and trigger thoughts about the future of the world.”
The kit came with a tiny screwdriver, two dozen tiny screws, a sanding rod, glue, and decals. The aluminum alloy parts were in molded plates. The model even had a metal cart to assemble that the bomb sits on so it can be pulled around your desk, pretending you’re getting ready to load it onto the Enola Gay, extinguish a city in a flash.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the real “Little Boy” exploded with a flash 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, which sits on the Ota River delta on Hiroshima Bay. The Ota River has six channels splitting Hiroshima into islets. Bomb victims staggered toward these channels to throw themselves into the water hoping to extinguish their burning bodies. The channels became so clogged with bodies that others couldn’t squeeze in. Some people, closer to the hypocenter, were vaporized, reduced to shadows seared into stone. Temperatures on the ground reached 4,000 degrees.
As we once again approach that fateful day of August 6th, it is important to recognize that not just the U.S. and Japan are intertwined in a nuclear nightmare that has lasted over eighty years, but also 70,000 Koreans who were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and for decades used Koreans as they saw fit, from Comfort Women to slave labor. The Koreans then became atomic bomb victims, despite their country not being at war with the United States. They are among the unintended victims, the forgotten victims.
This November in Seoul, South Korea, the surviving Korean bomb victims will testify at a People’s Tribunal holding the U.S. accountable for war crimes. Lawyers from around the world have been preparing legal briefs and will argue the case. The U.S. government is invited to appear as the defendant at the Tribunal. The Republic of South Korea has also been asked to appear as a witness.
Once let loose, an atomic bomb keeps on killing, generation after generation, the cancers passed down to those not even born when the bombs first exploded. The Korean atomic bomb victims, as well as the Japanese, have horrific stories testifying to this. Children of the bomb. Atomic maladies. The bomb wages war against the future.
The second atomic bomb that was dropped on August 9th incinerating another Japanese city had a different nickname. That bomb had an even bigger belly and used plutonium rather than uranium. They called it “Fat Man.” The same ad for the model of the “Little Boy” atom bomb had a second ad inducing you to buy “Fat Man.” It is another 1/12th scale model of the original, this one weighing 6.2 pounds when completed. I declined the offer to buy and build it. One was repellent enough.
The U.S. currently has 5,277 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,4490. China, approximately 600. France and the U.K have about 250 each and Israel has about 90. India, Pakistan, and North Korea bring up the rear with a few nukes each. In total there are over 12,300 nuclear warheads spanning the globe. The Korean atomic bomb victims stand as ready reminders of what happens when these things are unleashed.
Brad Wolf edited the recent book on the writings of Philip Berrigan entitled A Ministry of Risk which was published in April by Fordham University Press. He co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and is currently chair of the organizing committee of the International People’s Tribunal on the Korean Victims of the 1945 Atomic Bombings. He is executive director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Trump’s nuclear deal: a disaster for the Middle East?
No, the real reason is to gain atomic weapons to protect itself against its main foe: Iran. MbS has made no secret of his desire to build a bomb, and the deal would be a concrete step in that direction. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, it appears to permit nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil, thus enabling Riyadh to follow the likes of India, Israel and Pakistan in covertly enriching uranium to weapons-grade level
The hard truth is that the “era of non-proliferation is coming to an end”
Well, is it on or is it off? No one’s quite sure, said Al Jazeera (Doha). Two weeks ago, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a multibillion-dollar deal allowing US companies to build and operate nuclear power plants on Saudi soil over the next 30 years.
But a day later, President Trump added a new condition, via social media: Saudi Arabia must fall in line with the UAE and other Arab nations that have signed the Abraham Accords, and recognise the state of Israel.
‘Reckless’ agreement
And that may prove a deal breaker, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Riyadh had been working towards this landmark pact for almost two decades. Thanks to the savvy of its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who ensured the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would get its share of the billion-dollar nuclear licensing deals at stake, he almost got it over the line.
But now it must surely be in doubt, said Mohamad Elmasry on Middle East Eye. Riyadh has vowed it won’t normalise relations until Israel guarantees Palestinian statehood. And MbS has reportedly told US officials that hostility towards Israel is so great among Saudis in the wake of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, that to sign a normalisation treaty would probably get him assassinated.
It’s obvious why the Saudis still badly want this nuclear deal, said Joseph Cirincione on MS Now (New York). It’s not, as they claim, to diversify their energy profile: that makes no sense for a nation sitting on an ocean of oil and blessed with the ideal wind and solar conditions for generating renewable energy – a far cheaper option.
No, the real reason is to gain atomic weapons to protect itself against its main foe: Iran. MbS has made no secret of his desire to build a bomb, and the deal would be a concrete step in that direction. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, it appears to permit nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil, thus enabling Riyadh to follow the likes of India, Israel and Pakistan in covertly enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.
‘Guiding hand’
Who knows what’ll happen if this “reckless” deal goes ahead, said Mitchell Plitnick on Mondoweiss (New York). The “gold standard” nuclear-power pact that the US signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 required the UAE to forego the ability to enrich uranium, and obliged it to submit to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections: this Saudi deal has no such restrictions.
Which is why it would inevitably trigger a Middle East arms race, said Azriel Bermant in Foreign Policy. If the deal proceeds, Iran would openly seek its own nuclear deterrent, something it has so far officially forsworn. “It beggars belief that the US went to war against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon yet now acts in a way that is an open invitation for Tehran to weaponise.” And in a way that would also pour “proliferation kerosene” on Turkey and Egypt’s “smouldering nuclear ambitions”, said Matthew Kroenig and Henry Sokolski in The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s deal invites disaster.
Actually, the US is doing the right thing, said the Washington Examiner. The hard truth is that the “era of non-proliferation is coming to an end”: Pakistan and North Korea are both testing nuclear weapons. Given that sobering reality, better the US offer “a guiding hand” to the Saudis and oversee their nuclear agenda than let China or Russia fill the void.
Good or bad, the deal matters a lot to the US president, said Sharon Squassoni in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago), so rumours of its death “are premature”. After all, it’s not some “spur-of-the-moment fantasy” cooked up by Trump. The same deal was also being considered under Joe Biden, and then too enrichment was a quid pro quo for recognising Israel.
The Saudis won’t do so, of course, given recent history, but they won’t have to. Although Congress can disapprove the deal once it’s submitted, the present Congress – due to adjourn on 18 December – is much less likely to do so than any freshly elected one. So the Saudis can “call Trump’s bluff by simply sitting back” and waiting for him to succumb to the pressure of the December deadline.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki vigils are not just about the past
Simon Barrow, SCND: AS communities across Scotland gather for vigils and
local events marking the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these remembrance activities across Scotland carry
a sharp, pressing urgency.
We are not merely looking back at history. We
are staring at an existential threat of our own making which is
exponentially more disastrous than what happened in 1945. As Kyoko Gibson,
a second-generation hibakusha (survivor) from Hiroshima, starkly reminds
us: “Under that mushroom cloud, rising out of a temperature of 5000C,
some say 7000C, 70,000 people died instantly and many more afterwards.
“As we know, water boils at 100C degrees and steel melts at 1500C. Within
four months, 140,000 died and to this day people continue to die from
radiation-related illnesses.”
The National 8th Aug 2026,
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/26447180.hiroshima-nagasaki-vigils-not-just-past/
Nagasaki warns of risk of nuclear war on 81st A-bomb anniversary
Nikkei Asian Review 9th Aug 2026
Mayor calls nuclear weapons an ‘absolute evil’ that cannot coexist with humanityMayor calls nuclear weapons an ‘absolute evil’ that cannot coexist with humanity
NAGASAKI, Japan (Kyodo) — Nagasaki on Sunday warned nuclear powers and deterrence-reliant nations of the increased risk of a war using nuclear weapons, as the Japanese city marked the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing with a resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.
“Nuclear weapons are not a ‘necessary evil’ but an ‘absolute evil,’ and can never coexist with humanity,” Mayor Shiro Suzuki said in the Peace Declaration read during the annual memorial ceremony for the attack on the southwestern city, which followed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier.
Adding cadence and vocal inflection, Suzuki’s powerful voice pierced through the Peace Park as he called the concept of nuclear deterrence “extremely dangerous and fragile.”
This year’s commemoration comes amid geopolitical tensions in the wake of the Middle East conflict and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A moment of silence was held at 11:02 a.m., when the plutonium device codenamed “Fat Man” was dropped by a U.S. bomber and exploded over Nagasaki. It remains the last place to have suffered a nuclear attack.
Still, more than 12,000 nuclear warheads exist, Suzuki pointed out. He expressed concern over unpredictability in the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, where nuclear states are involved, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S.-led war on Iran.
The commemoration event at the Nagasaki park, located near the hypocenter, was attended by some 3,700 people, including representatives from 98 countries and regions, as well as the European Union.
U.S. Ambassador to Japan George Glass was not present at the ceremony, with Japan’s close security ally represented by Deputy Chief of Mission Aaron Snipe.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi delivered a speech following a brief heckle from the crowd, reiterating what she said in the Hiroshima commemoration last Thursday that Japan “is upholding” the three nonnuclear principles……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/society/nagasaki-warns-of-risk-of-nuclear-war-on-81st-a-bomb-anniversary
US War on ICC Isn’t New, Isn’t Just Coming From GOP, and Isn’t Just About Israel
SCHEERPOST, August 8, 2026, By Stephen Zunes
This is a disingenuous bipartisan effort to discredit the ICC and international humanitarian law as a whole.
The United States has launched an all-out assault on the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the past few weeks alone, the Trump administration has vowed to eradicate the top court, pressured countries to withdraw from it, and has attacked progressive political leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani who seek to carry out its mandates.
These attacks are jarring, but they are not new, are not only about Israel, and are not just coming from Republicans.
The renewed chorus of attacks began on July 13, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio renewed a U.S. attack on the court by announcing a plan to “dismantle” the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.” Rubio claimed that, without such action, U.S. police officers or border patrol agents “could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.”
This claim is utter nonsense. The ICC has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by law enforcement officers in the United States. And while Rubio claims that the U.S. has not consented to the international humanitarian law that the ICC seeks to uphold, such law is actually drawn directly from binding treaties — including the Genocide Convention as well as the Geneva Conventions and related protocols, which the U.S. government has signed, ratified, and in many cases, incorporated into its own military manuals.
More revealing is Rubio’s complaint that the United States can’t “control” international law. No country can do that, nor should they be able to. The law is the law. As Kenneth Roth, the former longtime director of Human Rights Watch, put it: “Law is meant to bind people, not be controlled by them.”
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal accompanying his official announcement from the State Department, Rubio claimed that the court is “run” by “hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.” This is also untrue. Virtually every European government is a member of the ICC. None of its 18 justices are from countries with hostile state relations with the U.S., and all but three of those countries are inarguably democracies. Of the 73 people indicted by the ICC, none of them have been Americans and only six of them have been associated with governments allied with the United States.
Rubio’s attack was followed by continued attention on the court, this time from Mamdani, who called on federal authorities to act on an ICC warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and arrest him during a planned trip to New York later this year. In response, Mamdani was falsely accused of unfairly singling out Israel, even though he explicitly stated that his position would apply to “any other war criminals.” His focus on Netanyahu was simply because no other indicted war criminal was scheduled to visit his city.
Only two Israelis have ever been indicted by the ICC. This hasn’t stopped prominent U.S. politicians like Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to insist that the court has an “anti-Israel bias.” Similarly, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) has accused the ICC of a “continued, longstanding bias against the Jewish state,” and former Rep. Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina) has criticized what she referred to as its “efforts to single out and undermine Israel.”
What actually appears to bother these lawmakers is not the baseless claim that the ICC has an anti-Israel, anti-American, or anti-Western bias, but that it refuses to make exceptions for the United States and its allies. These demonstrably false statements from lawmakers reveal a disingenuous bipartisan effort to discredit the ICC and, by extension, international humanitarian law as a whole, in the eyes of the American public…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The post-World War II international legal system upon which the International Criminal Court is based was crafted by Western nations, particularly the idealists of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. While there are some reasonable critiques of the limitations of this “rules-based international order,” it at least sent a message — however unevenly these principles may have been enforced — that the killing of civilians, torture, territorial conquest, maltreatment of prisoners of war, apartheid, and genocide are illegal, and that perpetrators of these crimes should be held accountable.
This is what Trump administration officials, members of Congress, and critics of Mamdani’s statement oppose. They are essentially rejecting the liberal international order in favor of a new system in which governments — at least the United States and its allies — are no longer bound by such principles. https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/08/us-war-on-icc-isnt-new-isnt-just-coming-from-gop-and-isnt-just-about-israel/
Press Opinion Treats US Devastation of Cuba as Reason for More Devastation
Gregory Shupak, August 6, 2026, https://fair.org/home/press-opinion-treats-us-devastation-of-cuba-as-reason-for-more-devastation/
The energy blockade that the Trump administration has imposed on Cuba is hammering the island. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk (UN News, 6/8/26) recently pointed out:
The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable. Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines…. These sanctions must be lifted immediately.
Broad swaths of the US media’s chattering class have taken a different angle, suggesting that the Cuban government is the primary—if not the sole—cause of the pain being inflicted on the country. The function of such propaganda is to justify the US’s economic warfare: If the Cuban government can’t run the country, the logic goes, then the US is right to try and bring it down.
It’s the same narrative pushed by US officials and Cubans in exile, who together constitute the large majority of sources in news coverage of Cuba from prominent US outlets, as a recent FAIR study (7/15/26) showed.
Much of the US commentariat is also pretending that the Cuban revolution’s extraordinary achievements have not occurred. Acknowledging them would, of course, get in the way of the narrative that Cuban leaders are so malign and incompetent that the US is obligated to bring about a counter revolution.
‘A golden opportunity’
At times, the punditry is explicit in its support for regime change in Cuba. In the Wall Street Journal (7/12/26), Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote:
Once South Africa ceased to be a Cold War pawn, the economic costs of sanctions imposed by countries across the globe broke the government’s resistance…. Cubans aren’t likely to escape tyranny without a similar leg up from the outside.
The South African apartheid analogy is absurd: Upon taking power, the Cuban revolution made fighting racial discrimination a priority (Black Perspectives, 3/8/16), and Cuba played a crucial part in supporting South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.
But what’s most relevant here is O’Grady’s suggestion that “the outside” is inflicting “the economic costs of sanctions” so that Cubans can “escape tyranny.” As Türk pointed out, this anti-“tyranny” plan involves killing children by depriving them of “access to essential medical supplies and medicines.”
The Washington Post’s editorial board (2/6/26) sounded impressed by the effects of Trump’s siege. “Washington’s pressure on Havana is working,” it wrote:
Cuba looks ready to implode. The island suffers from food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse. President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power has cut off the Cubans from what has historically been their main source of oil. Having successfully pressured the Mexican government to also slash oil supplies, Trump has effectively created a blockade that has brought the regime to its knees.
With such extraordinary leverage, it would be unwise to settle for anything less than dramatic change on America’s terms: economic, personal and political freedom for all Cubans.
The paper, in short, cheered the US blockade creating “food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse” so that Cuba would be forced to make “dramatic change on America’s terms.”
The editors’ assertions relied on a simplistic caricature of personal and political life in Cuba, and on what appears to be an assumption that their readers won’t notice that depriving people of food, energy and even minimal economic security—as the blockade does—also denies them economic and personal freedom. However, the more salient point is probably that the US has no right under the UN Charter to interfere in Cuba’s affairs, let alone to use food as a weapon to restore capitalism, which, as any conservative will tell you, is what “economic freedom” means.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post (2/11/26), former New York Times reporter Lizette Alvarez claimed that “Trump’s love of the deal and Cuba’s imminent collapse present a golden opportunity to finally drive meaningful change on the island.”
Even before the Trump administration intensified the energy blockade at the start of the year, as UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan (11/21/25) noted, the “golden opportunity” created by the embargo had resulted in “the widespread inaccessibility of 69% of medicines to Cubans, including medicine against cancer, heart diseases, repellents, tests for dengue and other infections.”
Alvarez contended that the US “could lift the embargo,” but that “Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel would have to agree to deadline-driven reforms,” including “eliminating restrictions that hamper private investment and business.” At no point did the author spell out why she believes that the US is entitled to “drive” change in Cuba, much less deprive Cubans of medicine until they allow “private investment and business” to operate unimpeded.
‘No ring of Navy warships’
The US began to impose a blockade on Cuba in 1960 to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Rather than recognize such factors in Cuban suffering, many voices in the corporate media have embraced the political and economic equivalent of flat Earthism.
For instance, Judy Pino (USA Today, 3/10/26) euphemistically referred to Trump’s aggression against Cuba as “pressure on the regime” and said that “daily life [in Cuba] shows the cost of [the Cuban government’s] repression and chronic mismanagement.” In 2018, the UN estimated that the embargo had cost Cuba’s economy $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18)—from a country whose entire GDP, according to the World Bank, is $107 billion—but Pino wrote as though that’s not a leading cause of the challenges Cubans are facing.
A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/9/26) wrote that US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz
took apart the claim that the US blocks Cuba’s access to world markets. “If there’s an embargo, a blockade, whatever name they want to put on it, how did humanitarian aid from Belize, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the European Union, Mexico, Spain, Russia, Uruguay and the UN itself reach the country just in the last few months?” Mr. Waltz asked. “There is no ring of Navy warships sitting around this island blocking trade or humanitarian aid going into Cuba. It’s fake. It’s false. It’s a lie. Period.”
Economic blockades don’t require naval encirclements, of course. The Journal gaslit its readers, denying US subversion and writing as if allowing smatterings of aid into Cuba to mitigate the effects of that subversion is the same as permitting Cuba to participate in the global economy.
‘Facts tell a different story’
O’Grady (Wall Street Journal, 6/21/26) wrote that “the [Cuban] dictatorship’s excuse for the widespread misery is the same as it ever was: Washington’s Cuba policy. The facts tell a different story.”
The US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has marshaled quite a few facts that refute O’Grady’s view. CEPR (4/27/26) pointed out that, because the US tightened the embargo during Trump’s first term and the Biden government did next to nothing to ease it, Cuban medical importers have been unable
to obtain at affordable prices many basic medical supplies, such as syringes, inhalers, and even saline solution; more sophisticated medical equipment, such as imaging and ultrasound systems; and inputs for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. The redesignation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 2021 has made it extremely challenging to obtain financing for the purchase of these goods—at any price—or to simply execute international payments to purchase them. The end result of these multiple barriers generated by these sanctions has been massive shortages of medical goods— supplies, equipment, medicines.
Thus, CEPR concluded that “the primary cause” of an
unprecedented rise in Cuba’s [infant mortality rate], and the crisis in its once robust health care system, is almost certainly the hardening of US sanctions that began in 2017 and increased steadily in the years thereafter, with only a minor easing during the Biden administration.
In the New York Times (3/1/26), economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo asserted that
the [Cuban] leadership prioritizes political control over the needs of the population. The Cuban economy has suffered greatly for it. The country is no longer capable of producing the basic goods it needs; today it imports most of the food it consumes, despite the fertility of its lands and its long agricultural tradition.
This view ignores US sabotage, a rather significant factor. For instance, a team of UN Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts pointed out that the US’s groundless decision to classify Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” worsens problems in Cuba’s agricultural production
by exerting directly or indirectly more pressure on States and businesses trading with Cuba. In particular, access from abroad to agricultural inputs, including fertilisers, is almost completely blocked, as is the case for spare parts for the maintenance or repair of agricultural machinery and infrastructure.
Thus, the American “leadership prioritizes political control [of Cuba] over the needs of the [Cuban] population.”
Erasing Cuba’s accomplishments
Corporate media outlets rarely admit that Cuban socialism achieved a great deal despite US aggression.
The Washington Post (2/6/26) argued that Cuba’s “67-year experiment with Communism has been an abject failure.” Consider the most recent rankings from the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which measures long-term progress in three key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Based on 2023 data, Cuba was classified as having a high level of human development and ranked 97th out of 193 countries and territories. While conditions in Cuba appear to have deteriorated since the US enacted the oil blockade earlier this year, faring well on the HDI very recently makes clear that it’s absurd to say that Cuba’s last 67 years have been nothing but an “abject failure.”
Alvarez (Washington Post, 2/11/26) said Cuba has an “unworkable Communist economic system.” But it wasn’t long ago that Cuba had the same rate of infant mortality as Canada, and a better one than the United States. That suggests that it’s the US that has an unworkable capitalist economic system, particularly when one considers that Cuba successfully cared for its infants under the US embargo, and the US itself faced no such aggression.
George Will of the Post (6/24/26) claimed that “the only good [Communist Cuba’s] evil ever produced” is the memoir of Armando Valladares, an opponent of Fidel Castro’s government who later served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
For Will, it seems, it was “evil” to provide vital support to Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan after devastating earthquakes hit each of these countries (Al Jazeera, 2/16/10). It was “evil” to fight Ebola in West Africa (Time, 11/5/14) and Covid-19 in Italy (Reuters, 3/22/20) at the peak of the pandemic nightmare. Helping liberate Angola, Namibia and South Africa from colonialism, imperialism and apartheid (Warscapes, 4/11/16; Jacobin, 5/20/22)? That’s “evil” too, apparently.
‘Disastrous policies of the socialist experiment’
In the Wall Street Journal (7/7/26), Roberto González declared, “For more than six decades, Cuba has been one of the few places on Earth where the disastrous economic policies of the socialist experiment persisted.” Yet in Subalternity vs. Hegemony: Cuba’s Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959–2014 (Springer, 2016), the scholars Angelo Baracca and Rosella Franconi noted that
the Cuban government had an unusual level of commitment to scientific and technological development, and a long-term vision to support health biotechnology, despite difficult economic conditions.
Through the “crusade the [Cuban] government has carried out in favor of more education and scientific research,” the country had developed “innovative, world-class products,” Barracca and Franconi noted. By 2018, Cuba held 1,200 international biopharmaceutical patents, and sold medicine and equipment to more than 50 countries (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 3/5/18). But there’s no room for such non-disasters in Gonzalez’s narrative.
It’s easy to tell that none of these commentators sincerely wanted Cubans to overcome the challenges they’re facing. If they did, they’d call for the simplest way to quickly enable the country to build on its past successes. That, to state the painfully obvious, is to end both Trump’s energy blockade and the longer-term embargo.
Instead, they stuck to a cruel, reactionary script: simultaneously gloss over the misery that the US is subjecting Cuba to, and all the good that Cuba has done for itself and the world, to create the impression that Cuba needs to be liberated by its US torturers.
Where has all the disarmament gone?
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/08/06/where-has-all-the-disarmament-gone/
The rulers of the nine nuclear-armed nations are busily upgrading their nuclear weapons arsenals, writes Lawrence Wittner
Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19 percent increase over the preceding year. The U.S. government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.
As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “this overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance and build tools to exterminate humanity.”
Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.
The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from Vladimir Putin. But America’s Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.
Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Seldom, if ever,” reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, “has war ended leaving the victors . . . with such a realization that . . . survival is not assured.”
The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world “a barren waste, in which the survivors . . . will hide in caves.” In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had “reached the last degree of savagery,” in which nations were faced with the prospect of “collective suicide.”
As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.”
Over subsequent decades, the antinuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, antinuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.
Hard-pressed by antinuclear campaigners and public opinion, even the small number of governments that built nuclear weapons found themselves unable to resist agreement on nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not nuclear “doves” when they entered office, but, in response to popular pressure, they took significant action to curb nuclear dangers. Some government officials, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even became fervent converts to the antinuclear cause.
As the 20th century came to an end, however, progress in rolling back the nuclear menace began to unravel. Popular protest declined, and nuclear disarmament organizations dwindled in size. By contrast, conservative and militarist forces grew more assertive, blocking U.S. Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, demanding the building of new nuclear weapons, and derailing Barack Obama’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapons-free world.
Although nuclear disarmament organizations were on the defensive during the early 21st century, they retained enough strength to produce one major victory. Joining together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, they cooperated closely with officials in small, non-nuclear nations to produce a series of UN conferences on nuclear issues. Then, at the 2017 conference, the national delegates voted 122 to 1 to adopt the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which banned nuclear weapons. Entering into force in January 2021, the treaty has been signed, thus far, by 100 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.
Even so, the situation remains dire. Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war. Not surprisingly, none of them is willing to sign or even abide by the TPNW. Although the antinuclear movement continues to oppose their priorities, it remains weak and unable to halt the momentum toward nuclear catastrophe.
Thus, unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.
Admittedly, it’s possible that, when a calamitous nuclear war does occur, it will finally convince even the slow learners among government officials that the nuclear age requires new thinking about international relations. Unfortunately, that recognition will arrive too late to matter, for such a war will snuff out most life on earth.
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
This Hiroshima Day, we are closer than ever to nuclear war
Today’s Western leaders are casually confrontational, seizing ships on the high seas from nuclear-armed rivals, holding Nato competitions on how to disable targets inside Russia, the country with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.
Editorial / 5 August 2026,
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/hiroshima-day-we-are-closer-ever-nuclear-war
HIROSHIMA DAY commemorates the atomic bombing of the Japanese city by the United States 81 years ago.
The atrocity not only killed hundreds of thousands instantly and condemned many more to painful, lingering deaths. It took the world into the atomic age: one in which wars, already hugely more destructive than in previous eras thanks to industrialisation, could plausibly spell the end of human civilisation itself.
Three days after Hiroshima the US dropped a second atom bomb on Nagasaki.
That remains the last time a nuclear weapon was used in conflict. Decades of testing followed, many of which would claim their own victims through radiation poisoning and the resulting cancers, in some cases over multiple generations. But the horror of nuclear war that grew from the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has proved strong enough to prevent a repeat performance — so far.
That situation is changing. There is no room for complacency — the Doomsday Clock, standing at its closest ever, 85 seconds, to midnight, accurately reflects a world in which nuclear weapons are closer to being used than at any time since 1945.
Even avoiding nuclear war to date has been a chancier thing than most accounts recognise. When rival camps are armed to the teeth, suspicion and misinterpretation can be the path to catastrophe.
World War III was avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis not just because the Soviet and US governments agreed an off-ramp, but because a Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, defied the vessel’s captain and political officer, who believed depth charges dropped on it by US warships signalled the outbreak of war, and refused permission to launch a nuclear torpedo in retaliation.
Two decades later, the caution of another Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, again prevented war when the country’s early warning system malfunctioned, indicating incoming US missiles that could have prompted retaliatory strikes.
Both incidents show how close to the edge we have been.
Today, nuclear weapons stockpiles are not so large as in the cold war — but still easily large enough to kill a majority of human beings and precipitate the collapse of global agriculture and trade.
HIROSHIMA DAY commemorates the atomic bombing of the Japanese city by the United States 81 years ago.
The atrocity not only killed hundreds of thousands instantly and condemned many more to painful, lingering deaths. It took the world into the atomic age: one in which wars, already hugely more destructive than in previous eras thanks to industrialisation, could plausibly spell the end of human civilisation itself.
Three days after Hiroshima the US dropped a second atom bomb on Nagasaki.
That remains the last time a nuclear weapon was used in conflict. Decades of testing followed, many of which would claim their own victims through radiation poisoning and the resulting cancers, in some cases over multiple generations. But the horror of nuclear war that grew from the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has proved strong enough to prevent a repeat performance — so far.
That situation is changing. There is no room for complacency — the Doomsday Clock, standing at its closest ever, 85 seconds, to midnight, accurately reflects a world in which nuclear weapons are closer to being used than at any time since 1945.
Even avoiding nuclear war to date has been a chancier thing than most accounts recognise. When rival camps are armed to the teeth, suspicion and misinterpretation can be the path to catastrophe.
World War III was avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis not just because the Soviet and US governments agreed an off-ramp, but because a Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, defied the vessel’s captain and political officer, who believed depth charges dropped on it by US warships signalled the outbreak of war, and refused permission to launch a nuclear torpedo in retaliation.
Two decades later, the caution of another Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, again prevented war when the country’s early warning system malfunctioned, indicating incoming US missiles that could have prompted retaliatory strikes.
Both incidents show how close to the edge we have been.
Today, nuclear weapons stockpiles are not so large as in the cold war — but still easily large enough to kill a majority of human beings and precipitate the collapse of global agriculture and trade.
More countries possess them. Even if every nuclear-armed government were led by level-headed and responsible politicians, this would increase the number of potential flashpoints where a miscalculation could ignite the world.
In fact some are led by leaders without these qualities. India’s Narendra Modi repeatedly threatens to cut off Pakistan’s water supply, a genocidal policy. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is already waging a genocidal war against the Palestinian people and attacking countries across the region, from Iran to Lebanon and Syria. US President Donald Trump threatens war on multiple continents simultaneously; has openly threatened to destroy an entire civilisation (Iran) in one of those wars; and clearly begins wars without clear goals or an exit strategy, all risk factors for escalation. These are reckless people.
Cold War decision-makers could remember World War II, the scale of death and destruction entailed by total war between great powers. So too could their populations, who through mobilisations like the Aldermaston marches or at Greenham Common demonstrated their opposition to war.
Today’s Western leaders are casually confrontational, seizing ships on the high seas from nuclear-armed rivals, holding Nato competitions on how to disable targets inside Russia, the country with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.
Either a generation in which war is something that can be comfortably inflicted, without serious risk, on weaker countries like Yugoslavia or Iraq has bred a false sense of security — or they are as bloodthirsty as their generals’ demands that we “sacrifice our children” to the next great war suggest.
There is no leadership from our leaders, so it must come from below. We must re-learn the fear of nuclear war that previous generations understood — and we must use it to build a powerful movement for peace and disarmament.
Nuclear waste delivers a political haymaker. Five states say it can be done.
By Francisco “A.J.” Camacho, Hannah Northey | 08/05/2026, https://www.eenews.net/articles/nuclear-waste-delivers-a-political-haymaker-five-states-say-it-can-be-done/
From proposals to bury waste under the Gulf of Mexico to shooting canisters deep underground, GOP-led states mainly see economic opportunity.
Five Republican-led states are now jockeying to host nuclear technology hubs — and possibly spent nuclear fuel — in a show of heightened political interest in breaking through chronic barriers to new U.S. reactors.
Oklahoma, Louisiana, Idaho, Tennessee and Utah are in the running to host Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses — Energy Department-backed facilities that would support the full nuclear fuel cycle, from enriching uranium and fabricating fuel to reprocessing and disposing of waste.
But even as states raise their hands, and by and large view fuel enrichment and disposal as an economic opportunity, the thorny politics and financing of new long-term nuclear projects and waste disposal also remain challenges as they negotiate terms with the Trump administration.
All five finalists called for reprocessing nuclear waste into new reactor fuel, but they varied in tone and technique for ultimate disposal of nonrecycled waste.
“Oklahoma proposes to become the first U.S. state to establish a permanent disposal solution before it begins commercial nuclear deployment. No country in the world has done this,” Oklahoma officials said in the state’s proposal.
Idaho, in contrast, seems hesitant to handle waste long term, although it, alongside Utah and Oklahoma, expressed interest in drilling deep boreholes and dropping the waste hundreds of meters underground. Louisiana is eyeing underwater disposal underneath salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico. Tennessee seeks the more conventional route by mining a repository in the eastern part of the state.
“There have been some states that have been more open to this at times, and it sort of goes back and forth,” said Allison Macfarlane, a geologist and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair during the Obama administration, adding that New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming were all previously interested in hosting a repository before plans fizzled out. “It’s really important that you have an implementer that knows what it’s doing and does this carefully, because otherwise you’re looking at this going sideways yet again.”
A decade and a half ago, Congress slashed project funding and halted construction of a sole waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, in line with opposition from state residents and its elected leaders. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was a powerful critic of the Yucca solution. That left the United States with no effective long-term solution for the country’s most radioactive waste as it collected across America’s 57 nuclear power plants.
Nevada’s Democratic senators returned to the question Tuesday, introducing legislation that would change a legal framework put in place by Congress directing the federal government to identify a sole waste depository. The Jobs, Not Waste Act sponsored by Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto would prohibit future consideration of Yucca Mountain as the nation’s permanent repository.
Getting state buy-in to host a voluntary disposal site is seen as crucial to avoid Yucca’s pitfalls, and DOE has offered some carrots with the new innovation campus program. The department says it may offer technical expertise, cost-sharing or loan guarantees to develop a campus, and it claims each campus could attract up to $50 billion in capital investment, $25 billion in state and local tax revenue, and 25,000 jobs.
With midterms looming in November, POLITICO spoke with elected officials and technical experts about each state’s disposal proposal for tackling the generational scientific, regulatory and political challenge.
Oklahoma
Oklahoma proposes working with a startup company to drill boreholes in the Anadarko sedimentary basin in western Oklahoma for permanent waste disposal.
“Oklahoma does not have a nuclear background, but knows energy well,” Lake Barrett, a former DOE nuclear staffer through several administrations, told POLITICO. “Their proposal is light on specifics, but seems serious.”
While partnering with Santa Clara, California-based Oklo for fuel reprocessing, Oklahoma would also work with Berkeley, California-based Deep Isolation on borehole disposal. Deep Isolation plans to drill 18-inch-wide boreholes “hundreds of meters” underground. Once drilled, canisters of waste can be slotted down until the given hole is full.
A 2020 paper co-authored by Macfarlane found few areas of the U.S. have optimal conditions for borehole waste disposal. The Anadarko Basin has shale gas reservoirs and heightened earthquake risks poorly suited for borehole waste, according to the article.
Barrett further notes that the Anadarko Basin partially overlaps with the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground freshwater supply.
Deep Isolation agrees that the concerns identified by Macfarlane and her co-authors must be evaluated through site-specific characterization and modeling, but it argues that their article overstates the technology’s hurdles.
“Oklahoma meets all preliminary site-screening criteria in Deep Isolation’s published site evaluation framework,” Oklahoma officials said in their pitch to DOE.
Louisiana
Among the potential hubs put forth by Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R), one envisions storing waste in salt domes under the Gulf of Mexico.
Here again, there’s a long history. In 1987, then-Louisiana Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D) successfully scuttled plans to dispose of waste in his state by diverting it to Nevada and Yucca Mountain. Some liberal groups are contrasting that with Landry’s willingness to entertain disposal more than 3 miles into the Gulf of Mexico.
“Even as Louisiana was at its economic nadir, fighting for solvency, [Johnston] realized that a nuclear waste dump was not the answer; that whatever short-term economic gains and temporary construction jobs would come into the state would not be worth the long-term damage to the state’s environment and reputation,” Jan Moller, CEO of the Louisiana Budget Project, wrote in a Substack post.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who also chairs the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, voiced caution about the state’s proposal. “I need to learn a lot more about it before I’m going to be supportive of the rest of the country dumping its nuclear waste on Louisiana,” Kennedy said.
“It seems to me a nonstarter,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “I say it’s the least serious in terms of disposal of spent fuel.”
While Macfarlane noted that an underwater repository can be done safely, as Sweden plans to do one near its coast, going so far offshore is likely to raise costs dramatically.
Barrett, the former DOE nuclear expert, noted regulators have long been wary of site problems such as volcanic activity or water pathways that might be discovered after a repository is filled. That’s why they required waste to be recoverable from Yucca Mountain, a rule that might be renewed with a new site.
“Salt’s difficult because the canisters will sink in the salt. Now you say I’m going to put the canister in the salt, and I’m going to put it more than 3 miles offshore. That’s a little more challenging [to recover],” Barrett said. “Can you do it? Yeah, with money you could.”
Idaho
Idaho’s proposal would build on expertise at the Idaho National Laboratory and include everything from fuel enrichment to recycling and waste storage. What the proposal does not call for is a permanent repository, which Utah is better suited to host, according to the proposal.
“While Idaho will not consider the establishment of a deep geologic repository below the [Idaho National Laboratory] site or above the Snake River Plain Aquifer, Idaho is willing to consider additional long-term monitored storage solutions for the DOE, possibly including deep borehole storage, in exchange for significant financial consideration,” the state’s 113-page report says.
While Republicans in Idaho are embracing the proposal as an extension of the state’s long history of developing nuclear power — it’s home to the Idaho National Laboratory — Democrats voiced concerns about a lack of details.
“This is an opportunity to build on that legacy, bringing new investment, new jobs, and new technology to Idaho while helping restore America’s leadership in the full nuclear fuel cycle,” Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke (R) said in a statement.
But state Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, a Democrat, said that while she supports exploring a federal program, she’s concerned about the state “taking on as much as one-third of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, especially while major questions about long-term storage, safety and responsibility remain unanswered.”
“I cannot support a proposal without clear answers, binding protections, and full accountability,” said Wintrow. “No promise of federal funding or economic development is worth risking the health and safety of Idahoans or the future of our land and water.”
Tennessee
Tennessee’s proposal is centered on Oak Ridge, a major hub of nuclear military, energy and medical technologies for eight decades. The state says a repository could be mined somewhere between 25 and 75 miles west of the city on the Cumberland Plateau.
Barrett says Tennessee’s existing ecosystem of nuclear fuel cycle companies makes it an especially strong contender for the campus program and a repository.
“One thing Oak Ridge has done is they have made deals with Radiant Nuclear for microreactor manufacturing and Oklo for fuel recycling,” Barrett noted. “They’ve made deals on enrichment.”
An Orano uranium enrichment facility planned for Oak Ridge would be a major new nuclear investment if the French company commits to the plan.
DOE had planned a fuel storage facility at Oak Ridge in the 1980s, but it was rejected by state officials. Yet political support for the nuclear industry writ-large seems on the rise in the state.
“Tennessee leads the nation in nuclear energy, which is why our state was selected as a finalist to host [DOE’s] Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus,” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn wrote on X.
“There is no better place to innovate,” she wrote.
Utah
Utah identifies Tooele County just west of Salt Lake City for possible deep boreholes and, as a secondary preference, a mined repository.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, did not comment on whether he supported the state’s disposal options as presented in Gov. Spencer Cox’s (R) proposal for the program, but he expressed interest in formally taking Nevada’s Yucca Mountain off the table as the nation’s sole repository.
The top Republican and Democrat in the Utah Senate also weighed in.
If selected, the campus would strengthen America’s domestic nuclear supply chain, create thousands of high-paying jobs and help secure our nation’s energy future,” said state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, a Republican.
State Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla chastised the Trump administration for failing to address the uncertain future of the Great Salt Lake. “The federal government should help protect the Great Salt Lake because it is in the national interest to do so, not because Utah agrees to take on additional nuclear waste,” Escamilla said.
Macfarlane’s research suggests the earthquake risk in western Utah makes it inappropriate for the borehole approach, but she said Utah could be a good location for a deep geologic repository.
The state’s submission lists salt domes in Millard County as a possible location for a repository, which Barrett considers a good option at face value.
“Salt is a good geologic medium for high-activity nuclear waste disposal,” he said.
Activities related to nuclear weapons and nuclear power have created a vast archipelago of contamination.
Can it be remediated? With what effect?
The report is blunt about the limits of any remediation fix: “No solution exists for very long term risks, which extend out to hundreds of thousands of years and beyond.”
Can it be remediated? With what effect?
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power production have created a vast, global archipelago of contaminated sites that have endangered health and the environment and will continue to do so.
The sources of risk include 10 to 20 billion metric tons of radioactive uranium mine waste, on the order of a billion tons of radioactive mill tailings, over 150 metric tons of separated plutonium (enough for roughly twenty thousand Nagasaki-type bombs) that is now waste, and millions of terabecquerels of fission and activation products dispersed in air, soil, and water bodies due to nuclear weapons testing.
Remediation can mitigate the risks in the short- and medium-term in many cases. The other side of the remediation coin is radioactive waste and its disposal. That too can reduce risk relative to no remediation. However, waste disposal also creates new risks, especially from long-lived radionuclides. As a result, some safety, health, and proliferation risks will remain essentially forever.
This is the finding at the center of a new report the Nuclear Truth Project commissioned from Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).
Whilst the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) addresses harm from the use and testing of nuclear weapons, as the report clearly states in its preface, the Treaty “does not deal with the upstream harms from nuclear weapons production, which start with uranium mining and milling.”
Those harms “have been inflicted on many countries, starting with Congo, whose mines, exploited by its Belgian rulers of the time, were the source of most of the uranium for the Manhattan Project.”
The chain begins in Congo
Shinkolobwe was the richest mine in the world– with over 60 percent uranium in its ore. This extremely rich ore was shipped to the United States by the Belgian imperialists who colonised Congo; it became the material foundation of the Manhattan Project, including the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bomb tested in New Mexico, on 16 July 1945.
Congo, like many other countries that have supplied uranium to nuclear weapons or power states, has never had nuclear weapons or nuclear power. Yet, they are all left with the radioactive mine waste from uranium mining.
The scale of the waste
“Each step starting with mining, creates radioactive waste and radioactive contamination.”
The report shows that global uranium mine waste is likely to be between 10 billion and 20 billion metric tons, this is enough to “cover 1.4 million to 2.8 million soccer (football) pitches to a depth of one meter, or fill four million to eight million two-meter deep Olympic-size swimming pools”.
In addition to this, there are about one billion metric tons of mill tailings and over 150 metric tons of excess separated plutonium – enough for “roughly twenty thousand Nagasaki-type bombs.”
The globally dispersed pollution includes “millions of terabecquerels of fission and activation products dispersed in air, soil, and water bodies due to nuclear weapons testing.”
Nuclear Injustice: The case of the Marshall Islands
A member of a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission advisory committee described the Marshallese, in 1956, as people the U.S. could study “closer to us than the [experimental] mice.” This decision to study them as experimental subjects arose from the contamination of their land and waters due to the 67 nuclear weapons that the United States tested on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands.
Despite the U.S. government undertaking a ‘cleanup’ at Enewetak Atoll that resulted in over 70,000 cubic meters of waste, the operation only recovered 0.25 kilograms of plutonium, less than 1% of the estimated 30 kilograms on Enewetak Atoll and its lagoon. Other radionuclides were not part of the remediation plan.
Remediation standard
Setting remediation standards requires setting dose limits for people far into the future. Enforcement is not practical to ensure the standard will be met. Modeling is therefore required, which in turn necessitates a choice of who will be exposed at at the remediated site far into the future. A resident farmer family has been a traditional, and reasonable choice. But this is not enough. Diets need to be modeled too. For adults, the default has been ‘Reference Man’ who is defined as a young, male Caucasian who is “Western European or North American in habitat and custom.”
The report notes that this is “an unsatisfactory generalization”; for instance the ‘Reference Man’ diet would not reflect the traditional diet of the people of the Marshall Islands, besides not taking into account the differences between men and women’s diets.
Moreover, as the report notes, No radiation standard explicitly protects the embryo and fetus of pregnant members of the public, present or future.”
Uranium mine remediation
Large numbers of uranium mine sites remain unremediated. Some remediation proposals, like the ablation of mine wastes to concentrate uranium proposed in the United States would make contamination worse. Some sites in France have been remediated; many await remediation. The report also notes that
“Remediation in Australia is largely similar to that in France. In the United States, plans for the remediation of the Quivira mine site in the Navajo Nation mine site involved their removal from the Nation’s land and disposal in a special cell in a New Mexico State landfill used for municipal waste.”
and that
“The best examples of remediation among those reviewed in this report (which is not a comprehensive review) are the remediation of the Ranger mine in Australia and the remediation after German reunification of various mines in the former East Germany.” In the case of the Ranger mine, it was the resistance of the Mirarr people that led to stringent remediation standards and a commitment to end mining in the area.
Why this matters for the TPNW
“Remediation should be understood as risk reduction because there is always a residual risk… Much of the process is a transfer of some of the risk from future generations who would suffer harm from unremediated places to the present and near future.”
The TPNW’s Articles 6 and 7 commit states parties to victim assistance and environmental remediation. Importantly this report makes the case for extending that same accountability upstream: to the mines and mills, and to the countries and communities that have carried this burden since long before any weapon was tested.
The report’s preface notes that “A part of the reluctance to address upstream issues may stem from the fact that is that there is a large overlap in upstream processes with nuclear power, which needs the same source material – uranium.” It also notes that that the costs can and should be parsed between the two, enabling the proper assignment of responsibility for the harm.
The report is blunt about the limits of any remediation fix: “No solution exists for very long term risks, which extend out to hundreds of thousands of years and beyond.”
Government ‘continues to ignore warnings’ as wildfire rages near Sizewell B.
The group has urged the new
Labour administration to “re-evaluate Sizewell C’s climate resilience
against worst-case scenarios”.
“Proceeding with a project vulnerable to
extreme weather events betrays future generations,”
Blaze ‘highlights the vulnerabilities of nuclear infrastructure
to the impacts of climate change’, a campaign group has claimed.
A wildfire
near Sizewell B has stoked concerns around climate-related planning for
nuclear power stations. The heathland fire in Dunwich Heath, near the town
of Sizewell in Suffolk, broke out on 29 July and has continued to spread
across more than 100 hectares of land. Residents were evacuated, but there
were no reported injuries.
Local campaign group Together Against Sizewell C
(TASC) raised concerns that climate resilience is not sufficiently factored
into planning for nuclear power stations. “The fire’s close
proximity—just a few miles from Sizewell B and the Sizewell C development
—highlights the vulnerabilities of nuclear infrastructure to the impacts
of climate change,” the group’s spokesman Chris Wilson told Energy
Voice.
“In the case of emergencies, such as wildfires, affecting the
Sizewell nuclear cluster, the authorities need to ensure that the Emergency
Plan can cope with an influx of 8,500 workers on the Sizewell C
construction site, a thousand extra contractors at Sizewell B during
outages, as well as tourists and residents.”
The group has urged the new
Labour administration to “re-evaluate Sizewell C’s climate resilience
against worst-case scenarios”. “Proceeding with a project vulnerable to
extreme weather events betrays future generations,” Wilson said.
The group has warned of the “risk of severe coastal threats, including
sea-level rise, increased storm surges, and rapid erosion”, and “raised
sea and air temperatures” which, Wilson said, “can affect the plant’s
ability to operate safely”. “Our real key concern now is the project as
approved in the DCO is not resilient to climate change,” he added.
Sizewell C flood barriers. The campaign group took Sizewell C to court in
2025, after energy secretary Ed Miliband allegedly refused to amend
the development consent order to include raised flood barriers for the
project adjacent to the existing Suffolk facility. The case was quashed.
That project would be “located in a severely water-stressed area in the
UK’s driest region and is presently in drought”, the group warned.
They raised the alarm around a rip current that broke nearby banks in January.
“Located on one of Europe’s most vulnerable coastlines, the area
directly in front of the northern development boundary has already
sustained damage,” the spokesman for TASC said. “Consequently, beach
replenishment may be required before the Sizewell C build is complete.
“The project currently relies on an average of 18 tankers of potable
water a day, sourced from the Anglian region, for construction and is yet
to secure a guaranteed sustainable supply for the 2.2 million litres of
potable water per day it needs to operate.”
Energy Voice 5th Aug 2026, https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/nuclear/601983/government-continues-to-ignore-warnings-as-wildfire-rages-near-sizewell-b/
The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred “maidens”
Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein | Article, Feature | August 6, 2026
On May 7, 1955, 25 young Japanese women arrived by airplane at Travis Airfield in California. They had flown there from Iwakuni Airbase in Tokyo a few days prior, with a layover in Honolulu. In California, a crowd greeted their arrival by showering them with flowers—and four women who, to the discomfort of many involved, used the opportunity to give a speech about the dangers of the hydrogen bomb.1
All of the women had been schoolchildren in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the city. Many of them had been at work building firebreaks at the time of the bombing, and had all been severely burned by the attack. They were known in the press as the “Hiroshima Maidens,” and they were part of a trip, organized by a Japanese reverend and an American journalist, and with the hesitant blessing of the US State Department, to bring the women to the United States, so their scars might be healed through the power of American plastic surgery. The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.
Keloid scars are raised, thick, and irregular slabs of collagen. They can form after any injury, and can appear long after the injury itself. They generally do not hurt, but they can itch. They can also constrain muscle movement, decreasing mobility dramatically, depending on where they have formed. And they are disfiguring. For reasons that are apparently still not well-understood, such scars are more prone to develop in people of Asian, African, and Hispanic descent than in other peoples, and their heighted incidence among survivors of the atomic bombs has suggested that radiation exposure may increase the chances of their forming.
Photographs of the scarred bodies of atomic bomb victims are a common, if still controversial, accompaniment to discussions of the atomic attacks today. But in the immediate years after the end of World War II, they were much rarer. While an October 1945 story in LIFE magazine did feature two photographs of atomic victims, nearly all other popular photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s featured only photographs of the ruined buildings, not ruined bodies.
Less popularly, the bodies of victims were visible in official, technical publications on the “medical effects” of the bombs, with photographs of the victims months or even years after the bombings. These photographs were meant to display, cleanly and clinically, the effects of atomic bombs. They were not intended to provoke a sense of guilt, or even empathy, except as relates to how their audience might be interested in “effects data” for planning for the possible use of atomic bombs against themselves in the future.
Information about the survivors was tightly controlled within Japan by the occupation authorities, who feared that widespread discussion of the atomic bomb could lead to anti-American and pro-Communist sentiment.2
John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as a full-issue of The New Yorker in August 1946, was the first publication to really give international audiences a view of what the atomic bombings were like from the perspective of the bombed. One of the six survivors that Hersey profiled was an American-educated Methodist reverend, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto’s account is gripping, and prominently features his inability to render the help to others that he wished that he could:
After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.
Hersey’s account showed Tanimoto trying to help whom he could, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming. Tanimoto himself suffered from a bout of radiation sickness, but recovered.
At the time of Hersey’s book, there was no agreed-upon term to use for those people who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings but who had not died. The term “survivor” was common in English usage, but the Japanese have tended to shy away from their equivalent (seizonshai), apparently finding it to contain a bit of guilt or blame in its focus on those who did not die. Conversely, the term “victim” appears to have been used more commonly in Japanese (higaisha) than in English, perhaps again because of its apparent connotation that the violence done to the Japanese was unjust. It is not clear exactly when the term hibakusha—“explosion-affected person”—became the preferred term; it seems like it was used in Japan by the mid-to-late 1950s, and became well-known in English only in the early 1960s.3
In the months after the bombing, his church destroyed, Tanimoto worked as a street preacher in Hiroshima. His message was both theological and political: Looking for someone to blame for the atomic bombing—whether the Americans who had dropped the bomb, or the Japanese military leaders who had started the war—was futile. Seek salvation through God alone. With parishioners, he began the work of rebuilding the church building, but the work was slow, for there was no money and few resources available. In 1948, he traveled to the United States to meet with an old classmate of his, in an effort to raise funds for a new church. While on the ship to San Francisco, he had an idea: He could dedicate his life to peace, and the rebuilding of his ruined Hiroshima would be the focal point for that. Without consulting anyone back home, he began to give sermons around the United States, taking up a collection for Hiroshima’s rebirth. By the end of 1949, he had visited over 250 American cities, and raised about $10,000 for the church.4
Tanimoto ultimately made a connection with the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, who enthusiastically supported his plea, and ran an editorial proposing the creation of a World Peace Center in Hiroshima. Although the article claimed to be in the name of the inhabitants of Hiroshima, no one but Tanimoto was ever consulted. A Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation was set up in New York by Cousins, in order to receive American donations.5
A few years later, as part of his peace center efforts, Tanimoto began a Bible study class for a group of women that he apparently called his “Keloid girls.” He had offered other classes to victims of the bombing; the Keloid girls were special because their deformity and their sex was seen to demand a level of social exclusion that went beyond that of other Hiroshima victims. He would eventually petition the Hiroshima government for funds to give them plastic surgery, but was rejected. He then went to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the American-run effort to study the medical effects of the atomic bombings, but he was told that this was outside the commission’s scope. The commission was not in the business of “treatment,” and keloids were not unique radiation effects.6
Eventually, Tanimoto received some funding for surgery on the Keloid Girls within Japan, bringing a group of them to Tokyo in the spring of 1952, just after the end of the American occupation. There was also one male victim in the group, Kiyoshi Kikkawa. The Japanese press, to the surprise of Kikkawa, became completely focused on the women, dubbing them the Genbaku Otome: “Atomic Bomb Maidens.” The women were attractive because of their symbolism of peaceful Japanese resilience. Kikkawa quickly felt it was going too far: At one point in their trip, the “maidens” were taken to tour a prison that held Japanese war criminals, and two of the “maidens” chosen as delegates proclaimed that while they had once held grudges against the Japanese militarists, they now saw them as being in the same situation as the survivors.7
The surgeries were at least somewhat successful. Tanimoto had been in touch with Cousins about the “maidens” ideas, and with this pilot project completed—and its publicity value proven in at least the Japanese context—Cousins was ready to push for an American side of it. This would be larger and grander: more “maidens” (no men, this time), and the surgeries would be done in the United States, where plastic surgery was state-of-the-art. Cousins is credited for transforming their name: Having changed from “Keloid Girls” to “Atomic Bomb Maidens,” they were now the “Hiroshima Maidens.”8
For six months, Cousins sought funding for the project from foundations. It would be expensive: the transportation and lodging alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the operations would drive the cost into the hundreds of thousands. He saw little success, apparently because the foundations blanched at the possible negative publicity that might attach to the project.9………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. , the actual surgeries began. Over the next year, a team of surgeons at Mount Sinai, led by Barsky, performed over 140 operations on the women. When not in surgery, the women lived with host families. The operations were difficult. In some cases, there were dramatic improvements in mobility and appearance. One of the women, Tomako Nakabayashi, age 26, died of a heart attack during her third operation—a point that American newspapers made little of, but led Japanese newspapers to accuse the Americans of treating the women as guinea pigs.17
By the June 1956, 10 of the women were deemed ready to return home. The rest returned in late October 1956. The surgeries involving the women who survived were considered successful, although the reactions of people seeing them for the first time would often be to focus on the scarring that was still visible. But the women appear to have found the physical transformations a great boon, even if, as one later said, “there are lingering wounds in our hearts that have not healed.”18
The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which has been told many times over the years, comes in two distinct modes. The “original” mode is optimistic and, perhaps, a bit naïve. It is the version of the story pushed by Tanimoto and Cousins and most of the press who eagerly covered the women once they arrived in the United States in May 1955. This version is one of rebirth: just as Hiroshima, the city, was in the process of rebuilding after the atomic bomb, so could Hiroshima’s inhabitants rebuild their lives, even their very flesh.
City organizers in Hiroshima embraced their own version of the narrative of the city’s rebirth. Starting in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, they emphasized that the destruction at Hiroshima would be not its end, but its new beginning. There was a tactical element to this: They needed to attract resources for development and rebuilding, and leveraging their status and fame was a potent part of this appeal. It was not an approach that denied that the past destruction had occurred, obviously, for this could not be denied. The “rebirth” narrative would be a way to lean into that story and change its trajectory. Among the hibakusha, there were understandably mixed feelings about the approach. The famous “Atomic Bomb Dome”—the ruin of the former industrial exhibition hall near ground zero—ended up being the only preserved “monument” to the destruction, serving a focal point for Hiroshima’s peaceful rebirth activities, but its preservation was contentious.19
There is a more cynical read on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the rebirth mode of talking about the bombings. For one, this version of the story almost exclusively focuses on Hiroshima, at the expense Nagasaki, even though the case for the use of the second atomic bomb, only three days after the first, has always seemed much weaker than the case for the use of the first.
The focus on “maidens” also creates additional places for critique. There were married and divorced hibakusha who were rejected from Tanimoto’s project, and after the pilot project’s single male hibakusha, the rest were all women. The exact reasons for this have not been articulated by the players involved, but it seems that Cousins and Tanimoto felt the maidens made for more sympathetic figures and gave the project more of an apolitical appearance.20 As Robert Jacobs has put it, the “Hiroshima Maidens” were:
…generally depicted as childlike, innocent and grateful. They were uniformly spoken of as being “almost pathologically shy,” and then “blossoming in the warmth they shared in the homes of American ‘parents.’” […] The use of the term “maiden” reveals the focus on the lack of romantic prospects for the women while reinforcing the image of their innocence and childlike nature. […] The Japanese women were all students when they suffered the atomic attack, thus sparing them of any complicity in the Japanese war effort, and casting them as victims themselves of Japanese military aggression.21
While the “Hiroshima Maidens” project was being planned, the discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan radically shifted. In early March 1954, the United States tested its first deliverable thermonuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The detonation resulted in a massive plume of radioactive fallout that contaminated thousands of square miles of ocean and islands downwind of the test site and exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, which had inadvertently strayed close to the test site. After they returned to Tokyo, the crew began showing the symptoms of radiation sickness, but not before their tuna catch was offloaded in Tokyo fish markets. Thus followed a tuna boycott and massive global attention to the issue of nuclear fallout. One of the crew would eventually die. Within Japan, this Bravo test became a major focal point for an emerging anti-nuclear political activism and generally led to an opening up of long-suppressed public discourse about Japan’s status as a “nuclear victim.”22
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23
After their surgeries, few of the “maidens” sought additional attention. In the 1980s, Shigeko Sasamori lent her voice and authority as a hibakusha to a growing anti-nuclear movement. But most appear to have sought privacy after their period having their bodies and identities subjected to extreme focus, both positive and negative.27
The hibakusha, as the psychologist Robert Lifton observed in his in-depth study of them, have a complicated relationship with their status as victims. It is a no-win situation: If their victimhood is remarked upon or treated as special, they fear that any assistance rendered is inauthentic and confirms that they carry a stigma. If, on the other hand, they are ignored, they feel abandoned.28
Barsky, the plastic surgeon, continued his own kind of ministry. In 1969, he organized a clinic in Vietnam to operate on Vietnamese and Cambodian children who had been horribly burned by American munitions. The clinic operated on over a thousand children, including Kim Phuc, the famous “napalm girl.” After American surgeons fled during the fall of Saigon, the hospital was kept running, and still operates to this day.29
Scars are a sort of archive of a body’s experiences. They fade, and they can sometimes be healed. Scars in the mind are harder to see. But the scars of history, as played out in politics and attitudes and cultural creations, can outlive the people who experienced them firsthand. What does it mean to remove scars, or to preserve them? What story do the scars of history tell?
Most of the “Hiroshima Maidens” seem to have truly desired to be apolitical, which in this case seems primarily to mean non-controversial. This desire was, of course, impossible to fulfill. Their bodies were, by virtue of where they had been on the morning of August 6, 1945, inherently political. Plastic surgery could hide some of the scars. But being hibakusha appears to have thrust survivors of the bombings into a political position: One’s existence is some kind of statement about power, and so an object for others to use in making their own kinds of political statements. To gaze upon the body of a hibakusha is a political act—but so, also, is looking away.
Notes,………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/the-political-implications-of-hiroshimas-scarred-maidens/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20%22Hiroshima%20maidens%22&utm_campaign=20260806%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Walt Zlotow – No Attaboy for Uncle Sam…he just ran out of ATACMS ( Army Tactical Missile System).
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glemn Ellyn IL,6 Aug 26
Back in 2022 the US was all in throwing tens of billions in US weapons to Ukraine to fuel the US proxy war against Russia.
At the time the US had plenty of tactical surface to surface missiles known as ATACMS to lavish on Ukraine to clobber the hated Russians. The US was just fine using Ukraine as a Trojan horse to weaken if not destroy Russia as long as Ukraine did all the dying while Americans shed not a drop of blood.
Four had a half years on Ukraine is a shattered land on life support. Millions dead, fled, injured. A fifth of its land gone forever. It’s access to the Black Sea port kaput. It’s military near collapse.
And the US not faring so well either. Just a week after the four year anniversary of the proxy war President Biden provoked, his successor Trump launched a deranged, criminal ear on Iran at the behest of Israel that was lost on day one. Trump bombed Iran furiously for 39 days then stopped abruptly.
Why? He was informed that the missile cupboard of offensive ATACMS and the newer Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) were nearly depleted, in part from squandering them on the lost cause of the Ukraine proxy war.
Adding to America’s offensive missile woes, it has depleted over 60 % of Patriot defensive interceptors and half of its THAAD interceptors. No wonder Iran has decimated every one of America’s 18 Gulf State bases. No wonder Trump dare not attack Iran again in force least Iran wipe out Gulf State oil infrastructure sending the world economy into collapse.
America under the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again war machine does well against small powerless states like Serbia, Libya, Somalia and Venezuela. But try to defeat formidable foes like Russia and Iran? America’s trillion dollar war machine collapses into chaos. No attaboy for the murderous American military bombing 7 or more countries worldwide for no reason at all.
NATO is being installed into Ukraine’s military
European factories, NATO software, and defense companies are now built into Kiev’s war effort
Rt, By Dmitry Kornev, 5 Aug, 2026
Throughout the conflict, Western governments have described their role in Ukraine in relatively simple terms: supplying weapons, providing financial assistance, and helping Kiev to stand against Russia.
The reality has gradually become more complicated.
The discussion is no longer limited to deliveries of tanks, missiles, or artillery shells. Increasingly, Western companies are participating in the design, production, financing, and technological integration of weapons that are formally presented as Ukrainian. Assembly lines are moving beyond Ukraine’s borders, European manufacturers are becoming part of production chains, and NATO standards are being built directly into Ukraine’s military infrastructure.
This raises a broader question. At what point does military aid become military integration? The answer matters because it changes how the conflict itself should be understood.
Something more than a helping hand
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) remain on the strategic defensive against Russian forces, which enjoy advantages in manpower and conventional firepower. Despite persistent personnel shortages and an arsenal assembled from equipment supplied by dozens of countries, the Ukrainian military has continued to field new weapons and maintain combat effectiveness.
One explanation lies in drones, precision weapons, and sufficient stocks of tactical ammunition. But these capabilities require a constant flow of increasingly sophisticated systems – systems that Ukraine can no longer produce entirely on its own.
Russian long-range strikes have made large-scale weapons manufacturing inside Ukraine increasingly difficult. Protecting production therefore requires more than additional air defenses. It requires relocating key elements of the defense industry itself.
This is precisely the direction in which Ukraine’s military-industrial complex has been evolving.
Kiev has never hidden the fact that its defense industry now works closely with European partners. In some cases, cooperation takes the form of OEM production, with foreign-made systems assembled or rebranded as Ukrainian products. In others, there is little reason even to disguise the origin of key components. Electronic systems, engines, sensors, and guidance technologies are openly sourced from Western suppliers, assembled into new platforms, and incorporated into Ukraine’s expanding defense sector.
The result is a model that differs significantly from the one that existed at the beginning of the conflict. The issue is no longer simply which countries supply weapons to Ukraine. Increasingly, the question is how much of what is described as a Ukrainian weapon is produced through an international industrial network that extends well beyond Ukraine itself.
Weapons without borders
Fire Point is one of the clearest examples of this new model.
The Ukrainian defense startup is developing the FP-5 cruise missile, the FP-7 ballistic missile, and a future air-defense system. Yet the company cannot independently manufacture these systems in full. At best, it can perform final assembly while relying on foreign components and technologies for critical elements of the project.
This is especially visible in the proposed anti-aircraft version of the FP-7. Fire Point CEO Denis Shtilerman has openly stated that the missile will use a seeker developed and manufactured by Germany’s Diehl Defence. The wider air-defense system is expected to use European radar and command technologies, including Sweden’s SAAB Giraffe, France’s Ground Master 400, Germany’s TRML-4D, and Norway’s Kongsberg Fire Distribution Center.
Pushkin once wrote, “All flags will come to us.” Fire Point’s project increasingly resembles a military version of that idea: a Ukrainian-labeled system assembled from technologies developed across Europe.
The same logic can be seen in drone production.
Ukraine’s Linza strike and reconnaissance drone is a product of Quantum Frontline Industries, a joint venture between Germany’s Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics. The project is funded through the German government’s ‘Build with Ukraine’ program. Ukraine contributes combat experience, software algorithms, and a design tested at the front. German industry provides automated serial production at a plant near Munich, allowing output of up to 10,000 drones per year without the risk of Russian missiles striking the facility. The first batch was delivered to the AFU in the spring of 2026.
Artillery follows a similar pattern.
The Ukrainian Bohdan self-propelled howitzer is now produced in Poland by PK MIL SA, a joint Polish-Ukrainian company created specifically to manufacture the system outside Ukraine. The project is based on cooperation between the Kramatorsk Heavy Machine Tool Plant and the Polish engineering company Ponar Wadowice S.A. The Polish side holds a controlling stake and is responsible for mechanical production and final assembly. The project is being implemented as part of the EU’s ReArm Europe initiative.
These projects differ in technology, scale, and purpose. Fire Point works on missiles, Quantum Frontline Industries on drones, and PK MIL SA on artillery. Yet all three are built around the same principle: Ukrainian designs, battlefield experience, or branding are combined with European production, components, financing, and industrial protection.
It is a production model in which Western companies are becoming part of Ukraine’s military capability itself.
The Build with Ukraine model
The industrial and technological projects described above are not isolated initiatives. They form part of the broader Build with Ukraine program, which provides a framework for cooperation between Ukrainian defense companies and European industry.
The model is built on a relatively simple division of roles.
European partners contribute financing, production capacity, industrial technologies, and access to advanced components. Ukraine contributes battlefield experience, operational data, software solutions, and engineers working under wartime conditions. Together, these resources make it possible to develop and manufacture systems that neither side could produce in quite the same way on its own.
For European defense companies, the attraction is clear. Ukraine offers an opportunity to evaluate new technologies under real combat conditions, refine them using operational feedback, and shorten the path from development to serial production. At the same time, manufacturing remains on European territory, beyond the reach of Russian long-range strikes.
Ukraine’s incentives are different.
Participation in joint projects provides access to technologies, engineering expertise, industrial practices, and software that would otherwise take years to develop independently. It also allows Ukrainian engineers to work alongside established Western defense companies, gaining experience that is likely to remain valuable long after the current conflict ends.
The results are already becoming visible.
Ukrspecsystems has opened a drone-interceptor production facility in the United Kingdom. Fire Point is already operating in Denmark and plans to launch fuel production for its ballistic and surface-to-air missile programs there.
Fire Point also illustrates another feature of this model………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Western governments continue to describe their role primarily in terms of military assistance to Ukraine. Yet the examples above suggest that the relationship is becoming considerably more complex. European companies are participating in weapons development and manufacturing. Production is being relocated beyond Ukraine’s borders. NATO communications standards are being incorporated into Ukrainian command systems. Joint ventures are creating long-term industrial links that extend well beyond wartime procurement.
Taken individually, these developments may appear to be separate initiatives. Together, they point to a gradual shift from external support toward a much deeper level of military-industrial integration…………………………………………
The debate is no longer limited to how many tanks, missiles, or drones Western countries are prepared to deliver to Ukraine. Increasingly, it concerns the emergence of a military-industrial network in which Ukrainian companies, European manufacturers, and NATO technological standards are becoming interconnected.
Pandora’s box, as the saying goes, is far easier to open than to close.
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