LEST WE FORGET – REMEMBERING THE HUMAN IMPACT OF THECHORNOBYL DISASTER
Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace (SCRAM), 24th April 2026, https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/SCRAM-Chornobyl-press-release-.pdf
The Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace has issued a reminder of the huge
human cost of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine to mark its 40th anniversary this Sunday,
26th April. Studies indicate a result of the disaster of between 16000 and 40000 fatal cancers.
Others claim these estimates are very conservative.(1,2)
Pete Roche of SCRAM said: “The contrast between what happened 40 years ago in Ukraine
at the Chornobyl nuclear plant – and the proclamations of today’s nuclear industry that it is
not dangerous or dirty – could not be greater. Chornobyl contamination was widespread
across Europe and is estimated to result in anything between 16,000 and 40,000 fatal cancers,
possibly many more.
“Whilst we haven’t experienced a full meltdown at a UK nuclear plant to date, the industry’s
record in the UK is not a clean one. These include the serious 3-day reactor core fire at
Windscale in Cumbria in 1957 and other accidental releases of highly radioactive material
into the sea and the local environment, and in Scotland the waste shaft explosion at Dounreay
in 1977.
“Both Torness and Hunterston power stations in Scotland suffered significant cracking in
their graphite reactor cores over time, and there have been numerous shut downs over their
years of operation but thankfully did not result in the type of full scale regional emergency at
Chornobyl or in Japan at the Fukushima plant in 2011. The inherent danger is there despite
nuclear public relations efforts, and the legacy of toxic waste will be with future generations
for hundreds of years. 40 years after the disaster, it is still highly vulnerable from the conflict
in the region. Wind turbines, hydro plants and solar panels don’t carry these risks.
“After the reprocessing at Sellafield was abandoned, highly radioactive reactor fuel elements
will now be stored on UK nuclear sites well into the 2100s. No safe solution has been found
other than looking for eventual deep burial at a location yet to be determined, that will need
guarded for hundreds if not thousands of years.
“On the positive side of the debate over energy, with Scotland’s huge renewable resources,
nuclear is not needed. Scotland can power itself, and export clean, green power to other
countries – and combine that with energy storage, flexible green power and an upgraded grid
system. The revolution in renewable energy is already well underway and is globally
unstoppable. New nuclear power has no place in a clean, green energy system, and certainly
not in Scotland.”
A recent Survation poll of 2000 people, indicated that a majority of Scots preferred renewable
energy over nuclear to tackle the climate crisis and be most effective at reducing energy bills.
It also found that the nuclear industry was the least trusted to ‘tell the truth aboutits products, costs, pollutants and safety record.’ (3)
The campaign group says nuclear is not needed and is an expensive distraction that will do
nothing to tackle the climate crisis, calling instead for a 100% renewable energy system to be
committed to by the next Scottish Government after the May election.
Poll Finds Just 4 Percent of Democrats Support Increasing Military Aid to Israel
By Sharon Zhang, April 25, 2026 , https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/25/poll-finds-just-4-percent-of-democrats-support-increasing-military-aid-to-israel/
Separate polling found this week that Congress’s disapproval ratings have tied their all-time high of 86 percent.
New polling has found that just 4 percent of Democratic voters support increasing military aid to Israel, marking a massive rift with congressional Democrats at a time when other polling has found that disapproval of Congress has tied its all-time high.
The Economist/YouGov polling released this week found that only 11 percent of American adults say that the U.S. should increase military aid to Israel, including only 4 percent of people identifying themselves as Democrats — and only 23 percent of Republicans.
Meanwhile, the polling found that 56 percent of Democrats say the U.S. should decrease military aid to Israel, including 35 percent who say the practice should stop altogether. Just 19 percent said the U.S. should maintain current levels, while 20 percent said they were not sure.
This is a huge departure from the stance of Democratic leaders in Congress, who support military funding for Israel or even want to increase it.
Last week, for instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) was one of only seven Democrats to vote against the advancement of a measure to block the sale of bulldozers to Israel introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He was joined by figures like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), one of Israel’s staunchest advocates in Congress.
Even though Sanders’s resolutions didn’t pass, the vote was seen as a major shift among Democrats, with more Democrats voting to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel than ever before — even if the caucus leader disagreed.
Schumer, a longtime supporter of Israel, said in February that supporting aid to Israel is, in fact, a top priority of his.
“I have many jobs as leader … and one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs,” he said at a gathering in New York City. He bragged that, under his leadership, U.S. aid to Israel has grown more “than ever, ever before,” and said: “As long as I’m in the Senate, this program will continue to grow.”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has also stuck to its positions of backing Israel and its political apparatus in the U.S. Last year, one of its committees rejected a measure for an arms embargo on Israel, while the party also voted down a resolution to limit the influence of dark money on Democratic races, including the spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Meanwhile, approval of Congress — which has done virtually nothing to stop or stem the flow of weapons to Israel, despite public opinion — has hit record lows.
Gallup polling released this week found that the proportion of Americans who disapprove of Congress’s job performance has hit a record high of 86 percent — tying the record set in 2015. Meanwhile, Congress’s approval sits at a lowly 10 percent, just one point above its record low of 9 percent.
Is President Trump mentally unstable? (Part 2)
25 April 2026 John Lord , https://theaimn.net/is-president-trump-mentally-unstable-part-2/
In 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book edited by Dr Bandy X. Lee, presented the assessments of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals, argued that Trump’s mental condition constituted a “clear and present danger” to the nation.
However, it is important to acknowledge the ethical debate within the mental health community regarding the public diagnosis of political figures. On one side, proponents of speaking out argue that when a leader’s behaviour appears to threaten public safety or welfare, mental health professionals have a “duty to warn,” even if it means commenting without a direct evaluation.
They believe that their responsibility to the public outweighs traditional restrictions. On the other side, critics invoke the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Goldwater Rule, emphasising that publicly diagnosing a public figure without a face-to-face assessment and consent undermines professional ethics, risks personal bias, and can erode trust in the profession. This debate remains unresolved, with experts divided over what best serves ethical standards and public interest.
The APA’s Goldwater Rule cautions professionals against offering a diagnosis without a personal examination and proper authorisation. This ongoing controversy reflects broader concerns about professional ethics, public responsibility, and the challenges of analysing the mental health of high-profile leaders.
In 2021, some members of Trump’s own Cabinet, shocked by the violence at the Capitol on January 6 and his slow response, discussed whether to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office because of concerns about his mental fitness.
During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then launched into a wild and confusing rant:
“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horrible. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, and he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
These persistent displays of paranoia, his continuing ICE raids, his use of the Justice Department to target his enemies, his shameless corruption rage, volatility, delusions, vengefulness, foul-mouthed posturing, his bottomless vengeance toward Iran and the Pope and increasing detachment from reality directly undermine the expectations of mental stability and sound judgment outlined in the thesis.
As such, they provide substantial evidence that calls into question the President’s capacity to fulfil the responsibilities and demands of the office.
Why did Trump and Vance pick a fight with Pope Leo? His exchange with the Pope was unsightly, unnecessary and regrettable.
Despite all these warning signs, his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice, and his billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. Media coverage of the President’s conduct remains contested.
Some critics argue that significant portions of the media engage in “sanewashing,” thereby downplaying or rationalising the President’s erratic behaviour. Others point out that both partisan and mainstream outlets have at times foregrounded his controversial statements and actions, which suggests a level of critical scrutiny.
This divergence highlights the unevenness of media responses: while certain outlets may frame the President’s behaviour as authentic or a populist connection, others interpret it as evidence of instability and potential danger.
These framing choices shape both public opinion and elite responses by influencing how the general population perceives these actions and how policymakers justify their stances. Ultimately, this complexity in media coverage reflects deeper debates over the press’s responsibilities and the challenges of interpreting signs of instability at the highest levels of government.
But some people on the political right, including longtime Trump supporters, have had enough.
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilisation is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Trump’s first term, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says, “he’s clearly not well.”
The public is starting to notice. Sixty-one per cent of Americans think he’s become more unpredictable as he gets older, while only 45 per cent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges.”
For the good of the country and the world, we need to face the truth. Based on his actions and words, the most powerful man in the world seems unfit for the job because of mental instability.
We are all endangered. What happens if, in a fit of rage, he presses the nuke button and “chucks a wobbly”? Is hewatching the “football” with the atomic codes in his lap? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?
It is not as though Congress doesn’t have the power to dismiss this ratbag. They could “Impeach” him now.
In conclusion, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly provides a constitutional mechanism for removing a President deemed unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. This provision underscores Congress’s responsibility to act decisively in the face of clear evidence of presidential incapacity.
However, in practice, there are significant political and procedural barriers to invoking the 25th Amendment. The process requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to agree that the President is unfit, which can be difficult to achieve given political loyalties and fear of reprisals.
Even if this initial hurdle is cleared, the President can contest the decision, and ultimately, it falls to a supermajority in Congress to resolve the dispute. These requirements make the real-world use of the 25th Amendment extremely challenging, especially in a polarised political environment.
As such, while the 25th Amendment serves as a critical safeguard for the stability of American democracy and global security, its practical application remains fraught with obstacles.
The White House Is Fast-Tracking a Near Weapons-Grade Uranium to Power Next Gen SMR Nukes
Bomb Grade Uranium For Sale
The hypocrisy is stunning. But the risks are worse because the danger posed by HALEU may be far worse than currently acknowledged.
April 22, 2026, Peter McKillop, https://www.theenergymix.com/the-white-house-is-fast-tracking-a-near-weapons-grade-uranium-to-power-next-gen-smr-nukes/
Oh, the irony. As the United States Defense Department spends billions to stop Iran from using enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is fast-tracking a Bill Gates nuclear power project that could trigger a race to create a new generation of near bomb-grade uranium fuel.
Last month, as bombs rained down on Tehran, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) unanimously approved a construction permit for TerraPower’s sodium‑cooled Natrium reactor, a fast reactor that requires High‑Assay Low‑Enriched Uranium (HALEU), a fuel experts say is significantly easier to weaponize than standard reactor fuel.
HALEU is uranium enriched between 5% and 20% uranium-235, compared to the maximum 5% used in today’s conventional reactor fleet. That higher enrichment level allows advanced reactors to achieve smaller, more compact designs that generate more power per unit of volume, run on longer operating cycles, and produce less radioactive waste. But there is an unintended consequence. Once the uranium mix is 20% and above, it is reclassified as highly enriched uranium (HEU) and is internationally recognized as being directly usable in nuclear weapons.
Despite this proliferation threat, HALEU remains central to the Energy Department’s advanced nuclear push because without it, most next-generation reactors cannot run. The DOE has now selected 11 advanced reactor designs under its Reactor Pilot Program, many of them planning to run on HALEU.
Only, the U.S. has no HALEU, only Russia does. So TerraPower has turned to South Africa to build a new enrichment facility that aims to produce roughly 15 tonnes of HALEU by 2027, enough to fuel the Natrium demonstration plant’s first core and more. And here lies the problem. By embracing HALEU, the DOE is effectively jump‑starting an international HALEU market and expanding the global circulation of material that can shorten the path to a bomb.
Nuclear safety expert Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists warns that this push “may greatly increase the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism.”
Bomb Grade Uranium For Sale
The hypocrisy is stunning. But the risks are worse because the danger posed by HALEU may be far worse than currently acknowledged. In a letter in Science, Lyman and three leading nuclear researchers—Scott Kemp of MIT, Mark Deinert of the Colorado School of Mines, and Frank von Hippel of Princeton—argue that HALEU can, in some cases, be used to make nuclear weapons without any further enrichment at all. Promoter of SMR’s, they argue, have not considered the potential proliferation and terrorism risks that the wide adoption of this fuel creates.
Opening the Gates
This has not stopped Bill Gates. As founder and chair, he is the driving force behind TerraPower. In the past year, Gates has dramatically shifted away from solar power to double down so-called ‘”innovative” nuclear power schemes.
Gates is aggressively courting the Trump administration, including DOE Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, to help secure expedited NRC safety reviews to accelerate construction permits for the Wyoming Natrium site.
Why Bother?
At first glance, what Gates is championing does not seem totally unreasonable. With new power needs and climate deadlines looming, supporters argue that only reactors can provide round‑the‑clock, low‑carbon power without devouring land or depending on fickle weather. Small modular and “advanced” designs, they say, will be cheaper, quicker to build, and safer than the behemoths of the past, complementing wind and solar rather than competing with them.
In this view, HALEU is not a bug but a feature: the key to compact, flexible reactors that can decarbonize heavy industry and data centres alike.
Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace
The problem is, we’ve seen this movie before, minus data centres and climate concerns. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration championed “Atoms for Peace” and actively helped Iran build a “peaceful” nuclear program—research reactors, fuel, training, the whole package—on the assumption that controlled access to advanced fuel cycles would lock in development and stability.
Seven decades and one revolution later, the United States and Israel are bombing that same program. It is hard to imagine a clearer warning against casually globalizing any technology that nudges civilian infrastructure closer to bomb‑grade fuel.
Bros for Bombs
But that does not seem to concern key members of America’s billionaire class. Jeff Bezos, is also a fan of SMRs and has plowed more than $1 billion into nuclear ventures that stand to benefit directly from such policies, and that the company he founded is a leading champion of nuclear power for data centres.
In this week’s edition of Climate & Capital Weekly, CCM editor Barclay Palmer teams up with former nuclear industry heavyweight-turned-watchdog Arnie Gundersen look into the nuclear influence peddlers shaping U.S. nuclear policy.
Gates and Bezos both know the economics of nuclear power are so brutal that only a government can finance its development. The last two reactors completed in the U.S.—Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia—came in at roughly $35 billion, nearly double their original budget, and were seven years behind schedule, helping drive Westinghouse into bankruptcy and nearly sinking the participating utility.
The billionaire bro partnership with Trump is a great example of how the administration operates. Today’s nuclear revival is a top‑down affair. Gates and Bezos have effectively captured the only institution large enough to bear the financial costs and political risks of nuclear construction: the federal government.
The payoff they are chasing is to fast-track the terawatt‑hours needed to feed their AI‑driven data‑centre empires, even if it means risking nuclear Armageddon.
Who Decides What Is a Just War? Imperial Violence and the Lies We Tell About Peace
The conflict between the British, European and American empires and the Ottoman empire was central to the causes and course of World War One, if often forgotten in the West. Two lingering effects of this contention are widely known: the Balfour Declaration, which made a dishonest promise of states for Israel and Palestine, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which parcelled out the ‘Middle East’ between the British and the French to defeat Arab nationalism.
But less known is that this conflict did not end in 1918, nor by the Peace of Versailles. In the years 1919 to 1923, the British Empire punched on to secure what was denied Churchill at Gallipoli. They fought to expand their empire while “a general crisis of European control was well under way across much of Asia” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 382). The extended “small wars” of World War One continued to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This “remarkable compromise” recognised Türkiye as an independent republic, defined the political geography of West Asia that is still with us, before oil was what mattered in the Middle East (the region produced 1 per cent of world output in 1920, and 5 per cent in 1939, principally from Iran)
Apr 25, 2026, Burning Archive, Jeff Rich,
Sooner or later, histories of colonisation, and decolonisation, must deal with the question of violence. So much depends, in history, on how the experience of violence is ordered collectively as war, empire, memory and resistance.
“Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,” declared Frantz Fanon. It may be right, from the beginning. As described in the climax of this month’s Book Club history, Magellan met a violent death at the hands of the resistance in the Philippines . . . and in revenge for his own unhinged violence and holy man madness.
But, on the other hand, Gandhi preached and practised non-violence, although there were fierce debates across the Indian independence movement about the question of when is violent rebellion justified. Still, more than any single individual, Gandhi has inspired people to believe that empires can be dismantled by peaceful means.
Violence and the “small wars” or “anticolonial uprisings” of the colonial frontier will be my theme for the next two weeks in this extended Season on Decolonisation.
I am spacing my reflections out over two weeks. Why? Three reasons.
Firstly, violence is challenging to write about in this time of war and unrestrained violence in many places. I am opening up a difficult conversation here, with no intent to close it after just one week.
Secondly, there is an important history book on imperial violence that I wanted to share, but it may best be done over a couple of weeks, including through sharing this week an interview with the author, conducted by Jeffrey Sachs.
Thirdly, I did two big interviews on these themes this week—with Jamarl Thomas and Pascal Lottaz— and wanted to share my reflections, beyond the recorded talk, on these topics of violence, our world crisis as a process of likely violent decolonisation, and lessons from history about how the USA empire is disintegrating.
Coincidentally, the Anzac Day memorial prefigures all three themes.
Anzac Day and the Forgotten Treaty of Lausanne
Moreover, a coincident anniversary—25 April, Anzac Day in Australia—made me think of some eerie similarity. This central day in Australian war memorial practice marks the defeat of British imperial forces, including over 8,000 Australian deaths, at Gallipoli in 1915. Churchill ordered the amphibious assault to secure control of the Dardanelles and Turkish Straits, and knock the Ottoman Empire, which controlled what Westerners think of now as the Middle East, out of the First World War. The grandiose, reckless plan failed; perhaps like the USA’s assault on the Hormuz Strait.
The conflict between the British, European and American empires and the Ottoman empire was central to the causes and course of World War One, if often forgotten in the West. Two lingering effects of this contention are widely known: the Balfour Declaration, which made a dishonest promise of states for Israel and Palestine, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which parcelled out the ‘Middle East’ between the British and the French to defeat Arab nationalism.
But less known is that this conflict did not end in 1918, nor by the Peace of Versailles. In the years 1919 to 1923, the British Empire punched on to secure what was denied Churchill at Gallipoli. They fought to expand their empire while “a general crisis of European control was well under way across much of Asia” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 382). The extended “small wars” of World War One continued to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This “remarkable compromise” recognised Türkiye as an independent republic, defined the political geography of West Asia that is still with us, before oil was what mattered in the Middle East (the region produced 1 per cent of world output in 1920, and 5 per cent in 1939, principally from Iran). It demilitarised the Straits, which became the foundation of the 1936 Montreux Convention, which some commentators have proposed as a model to resolve the disputes over the Hormuz Strait (as I discussed in my interview with Pascal Lottaz). It set the course for the modern history of Türkiye, and new forms of imperial colonialism in Egypt, the Levant, Iraq and Iran.
This forgotten, crucial treaty came to mind this week because of those connections with the small forgotten wars of colonialism, the resolution of our contemporary wars in West Asia, and a paradox that is often overlooked when commentators make cartoon comparisons of British and US American hegemony. 1923 was the high noon of British empire, when it controlled more territory than at any other time. The British made their empire great again by making the Middle East, but before the oil wells provided much return on investment. It was a paradoxical success, an imperial Pyrrhic victory. As John Darwin wrote,
Once the brief excitement of war imperialism had passed, there was little enthusiasm for an Arab empire in either Britain or France – especially one that was going to cost money. If the Middle East’s partition was the high tide of empire, it was the tide that turned soonest, the imperial moment that was shortest.
Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 387
It was for this reason that, in my interview with Jamarl Thomas, I compared the USA’s current dark time of brutalist expansionism to this brief high tide of the British Empire.
Violence, Empire and Decolonisation
“Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,” declared Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth after years of the Algerian War of Independence. He did not live to see an alternative, but his tract still inspires believers in armed resistance to settler colonialism worldwide.
But was Fanon’s decree a rationalisation of bitter revenge? Was it a militant’s rallying cry for others to sacrifice their lives for a national cause? Was it another poet-psychiatrist’s elaborate projection of shadows, not more defensible than the ethnic cleansing of Radovan Karadzic? Did Fanon succumb to mimicry of imperial Manichean violence, as Nietzsche warned?
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Reading The Wretched of the Earth inspires many who identify as belonging to an ‘axis of resistance’ or anti-imperial struggle. But it does chill my blood. The text is haunted by the violence of Fanon’s colonial oppressors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://jeffrich.substack.com/p/who-decides-what-is-a-just-war-imperial?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=247469&post_id=195185147&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The untold race to escape Chernobyl: A nuclear disaster. Families surrounded by deadly radiation. Then one woman risked her life to save 45,000 people.
By IMOGEN GARFINKEL – SENIOR FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER and PERKIN AMALARAJ, FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER, 22 April 2026 , https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15748163/The-untold-race-escape-Chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-Families-surrounded-deadly-radiation-one-woman-risked-life-save-45-000-people.html
Radiation is an odourless, invisible killer, with the potential to surge through the body and tear it apart on a cellular level, irreversibly damaging DNA.
When reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986, debris emanated radiation at a level of 10,000 roentgens per hour – enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who stood nearby for a matter of minutes.
Firefighters made the ultimate sacrifice on April 26, absorbing unprecedented amounts of the poison as they battled to put out the enormous flames of history’s most devastating nuclear accident.
As a gigantic radioactive cloud began spreading over the world – infecting 40 per cent of Europe and even stretching into northern Africa and north America – one woman found herself in the eye of the storm.
Maria Protsenko, garbed in just a blouse, skirt and sandals, was personally responsible for orchestrating the mass evacuation of Pripyat’s 45,000 civilians, emptying the devastated Soviet city of any sign of life.
She was previously the chief architect of the city, having lovingly designed neighbourhoods for young families, but in a split second she became a kind of grim reaper, sweeping away all the civilisation she had helped to create.
Recounting the fateful day to the makers of the TV series ‘Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown’ on National Geographic, Protsenko transports herself back 40 years ago and tells of the wounds that haven’t left her.
‘For the first time in my life, I was not building a city, I was burying it forever,’ she said, reflecting on the scale of destruction. ‘This is not only a man-made disaster, it is a catastrophe that broke the lives of thousands of people.’
By 11am the day after the explosion, a mass evacuation was announced and scheduled for 2pm, but by that point it was too late.
Some of those living closest to the power plant had already received internal radiation doses in their thyroid glands of up to 3.9Gy – roughly 37,000 times the dose of a chest x-ray – after breathing radioactive material and eating contaminated food
Immediately after the accident, thyroid cancer was particularly rampant in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, with 5,000 cases diagnosed among those who were children and adolescents at the time of exposure.
Today, Pripyat is an eerie ghost town of cavernous kindergartens, abandoned houses and sports halls left to decay, having been declared too radioactively dangerous for human habitation for at least 24,000 years.
Protsenko wore no protective clothing as she led the vast evacuation operation, standing on a bridge overlooking the city while 1,500 buses picked up families district by district.
She stayed up all night designing intricate maps, allowing her to execute the mammoth task with tactical precision, not leaving anyone behind in the industrial wasteland.
‘At 2pm the first bus arrived… I was standing there in my blouse and my skirt, and I had sandals on my bare feet. I had no protective gear,’ she told the documentary.
Only thick sheets of lead or massive concrete blocks would have prevented her from being contaminated.
‘All that radioactive dust was rising and got on my bare feet and my legs. That’s why they were so itchy. Can you imagine how much radioactive dust was flying from that place, at that time?’
But at that point, no one could understood the scale of the tragedy – not yet.
Girls and boys played together in the street as they waited for their livesaving convoys, not yet grasping the fact that the evacuation wasn’t temporary and they may never see each other again.
Many didn’t have a chance to say goodbye before they vanished from each other’s lives forever, turning from neighbours to refugees in one simple journey.
‘We evacuated nearly 45,000 people. Without panicking and noise, we evacuated the entire city,’ Protsenko said.
She is still haunted by the memory of one woman, who watched her intensely from the bus window as she was torn away from her community.
‘She didn’t just look at me, she turned her head, following me with her stare.
‘There was something in her face, like she was screaming inside: “What is this?! Where am I going?!”‘
While she was helping the city’s inhabitants escape, Protsenko had no idea she was exposing herself to so much lethal radiation.
‘At that moment, I was not only not afraid, I did not even think about it,’ she said.
It was only after the disaster that the architect remembered how she had spent hours absorbing the toxic fallout near the Red Forest, breathing in countless particles of contaminated dust as convoys rolled past.
‘The thing is, radiation does not make noise like exploding bombs. It does not burn like a fire. It has no smell. You do not feel it immediately, it kills quietly, slowly. And there is no awareness at all that you are in danger,’ she said.
Following the evacuation, she developed a persistent cough, headaches, dryness in her mouth and intense itching in her legs – but still did not grasp that she had likely absorbed a significant dose of radiation.
Now aged 80, she’s still living with the long-term impact of the disaster.
‘I am no longer 40… my health is no longer what it used to be… all as a result of the radiation exposure I received long ago.’
She added: ‘No one would envy it.’
While some degree of exposure was inevitable to everybody in the vicinity of the accident, the Soviet authorities didn’t help matters by underplaying the tragedy in its immediate aftermath – ultimately slowing down the evacuation.
Despite the explosion in the early hours of April 26, life in the city initially continued as normal, with children outside playing and parents going about their errands, unaware that they were at the centre of a nuclear catastrophe.
‘The night was clear, warm, and quiet. The residents of the city were peacefully asleep and knew nothing yet about the disaster that had occurred,’ Protsenko said.
‘Information about the radiation situation was kept in strict secrecy.’
When she was tasked with leading the evacuation, even she hadn’t grasped the scale of the calamity, but she knew she had a job to do.
‘By 6pm… we had practically evacuated the entire population of the city,’ she said.
Within a few hours, it was done, and Pripyat would never be the same again.
By that time, she was one of the last people left in the uninhabitable wreckage of a town. ‘The city became empty… no lights were on… it felt a little eerie.’
The Chernobyl disaster isn’t contained to a single day, but went on to redefine the lives of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.
Investigations ultimately concluded that faulty protocols in the plant’s design and poorly trained personnel were responsible for the explosion, which blew the 1,000-ton steel lid off the reactor – the same weight as three 747 passenger planes.
In the weeks and months that followed the accident, scores of firefighters, engineers, military troops, police, miners, cleaners and medical personnel – collectively known as ‘liquidators’ – were sent to the destroyed power plant in an effort to control the blaze and core meltdown.
In Belarus, 40,049 liquidators were registered to have cancers by 2008 along with a further 2,833 from Russia. In Ukraine, disability among the workers soared, with 68 per cent regarded healthy in 1988, compared to 26 years when only 5.5 per cent were still in good physical condition.
As well as coping with physical sickness, Protsenko is still grappling with the day to day consequences of Russian authoritarianism.
n 2022, she was forced to flee Ukraine in a wheelchair with her daughter and their kitten, following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.
And with Putin’s callous disregard for safety, having launched a major offensive to capture the area around Chernobyl just days into his invasion – only to abandon it weeks later – only time will tell how far the long shadow the nuclear plant casts will stretch.
Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
NBC News Drops Bombshell Report on Trump War Battle Damage: ‘Far Worse’ Than Trump Team Said
Tommy Christopher Apr 25th, 2026, https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nbc-news-drops-bombshell-report-on-trump-war-battle-damage-far-worse-than-trump-team-said/
NBC News dropped a bombshell report on Saturday that multiple government officials say damage to U.S. military bases was much more extensive than President Donald Trump’s officials have publicly disclosed.
The president is preparing to speak at his first White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) in office on Saturday night, as will frequent press attackers like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and FCC Chair Brendan Carr.
Pentagon reporting has been in the administration’s crosshairs, but a parade of anonymous government sources nevertheless contributed to the reporting by NBC’s Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Mosheh Gains, and Natasha Lebedeva.
The team attributed six sources for their report, which revealed that repairs from the Iran War damage will cost billions:
American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.
The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials.
The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israeli went to war with Iran.
Read the full report here.
Epstein’s evil legacy destroys everything it touches. Everything except Palantir
f Palantir were a person, it would be a much worse person than either Peter Mandelson or the deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. And yet the Labour government continues to welcome Palantir to manage our NHS, military and financial data, spewing all our personal details into its cauldron of weaponisable knowledge.
.
Mandelson, and by extension Starmer, are tainted by proximity to the abuse scandal. But the paedophile was a close associate of Peter Thiel too. Why don’t we talk about that?
The American tech firm Palantir, which uses its data hoard to provide tech support for ICE’s violent street goons and the bombing of Iranian girls’ schools, has just issued a terse manifesto – “The Technological Republic” – basically outlining its plans to turn the world into a fascist technocracy, bent on neutralising “regressive cultures”, enfranchising right-leaning male voters at the expense of educated liberal female voters, and muttering darkly of the errors made in reining in the power of post-Nazi Germany. I thought we all agreed at the time that this was a good thing, what with the Holocaust and that? We’re all worried about antisemitism aren’t we? Did I miss the memo on this, as they say in American sitcoms?
The Palantir manifesto’s cryptically fascist reappraisal of the “postwar neutering” of Nazi Germany makes the company’s decision to appoint the perma-smirking grandson of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, Louis Mosley, as its British head look less like carelessness and more like someone holding your head under the duvet and farting in your face just because they can. Take that!
Oddly, the London listing app Time Out significantly softened a joke about Louis Mosley and Palantir in a piece I wrote for it this week, about a fun walk around Hackney, which included the site where, in 1962, Louis’s Nazi grandad Oswald Mosley and his then-fascist father Max Mosley were knocked to the ground outside Ridley Road market by Jewish and antifascist protesters. It seems Palantir’s intimidating shadow even extends to the realm of recreational historical hiking. Rest assured any Leisure Walking Route I submit to the Nerve will remain resolutely politically independent. If only one of the Hackney Jews had booted Max Mosley really hard in his Nazi nuts too, maybe Palantir wouldn’t currently have a British head of operations.
“It’s the kind of market dominance thing Apple did with making you have to buy their special plugs, but applied to missiles, snatch squads and gulags“
Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has posited, openly and unashamedly, the necessity of a warlike American surveillance state, which Palantir would essentially profit hugely from servicing with its own warlike surveillance technologies. It’s the kind of monopolised market dominance thing Apple did with making you have to buy their own special plugs, but applied to missiles, snatch squads and gulags.
And it makes Nigel Farage’s attempts to profit from the cryptocurrencies he uses his political platform to promote look rather quaint, like a child stealing some Blackjack chews from the newsagent sweet racks while Mr Knuckles arrives in a ski mask, shoots the shopkeeper in the face and makes off with the till, the choicest porn mags and all the worst fags.
If Palantir were a person, it would be a much worse person than either Peter Mandelson or the deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. And yet the Labour government continues to welcome Palantir to manage our NHS, military and financial data, spewing all our personal details into its cauldron of weaponisable knowledge. There are lonely old ladies scammed by people pretending to be down on their luck, who just need a few hundred thousand to free up their family funds, with better noses for decidedly dodgy dodginess.
And when Nigel Farage gets elected by millions of angry morons and, like Trump, starts coming for immigrants, Muslims, pro-choice campaigners, academics, journalists, teachers, cartoonists, and in the end even people your racist Facebook auntie rather likes, like that nice transgender woman over the road with the cats, Palantir will be only too happy to provide Farage’s snatch squads with all their personal details, as it already does for Farage’s best friend Donald Trump, “the bravest man” he knows.
And when Nigel Farage gets elected by millions of angry morons and, like Trump, starts coming for immigrants, Muslims, pro-choice campaigners, academics, journalists, teachers, cartoonists, and in the end even people your racist Facebook auntie rather likes, l
And when Nigel Farage gets elected by millions of angry morons and, like Trump, starts coming for immigrants, Muslims, pro-choice campaigners, academics, journalists, teachers, cartoonists, and in the end even people your racist Facebook auntie rather likes, like that nice transgender woman over the road with the cats, Palantir will be only too happy to provide Farage’s snatch squads with all their personal details, as it already does for Farage’s best friend Donald Trump, “the bravest man” he knows.
But Palantir is fine, apparently, despite the fact that its founder Peter Thiel met Epstein many times after his child sex trafficking conviction and invested heavily in his venture capital company, in a deal which netted the dead paedophile $130m, none of which was included in the sum divided into restitutive payments to his victims. Perhaps Palantir’s Peter Thiel can top the paedo payments up with some of his personal wealth of $29.3bn.
Thiel’s $29.3bn is a sum which makes you realise managing the NHS for pocket money can’t really be about the cash. Palantir’s fascist vision of the future doesn’t need to be funded by turning the British public health system upside down like a sleeping tramp and shaking the loose change from its threadbare pockets into a top hat. But the data it provides is worth its digital weight in digital gold if you are aiming to TAKE OVER THE FUCKING WORLD!!!
And Farage is fine as well, of course, despite the fact that he and his American mentor Steve Bannon both appear in the Epstein files because Bannon was working with Epstein on how to fund his pan-European fascist aggregator, The Movement. Never mind. Protect our women and girls!!! But only from brown people. Bernard Manning! Bernard Manning!! Bernard Manning!!!
Proximity to Mandelson or Epstein can prove politically toxic, ending careers and ruining reputations. But not for everyone. It seems there’s one law for Epstein-adjacent people and institutions on the left and quite another for everyone else. Double standards anyone? We’ve got loads!
Years ago now, the TV dramatist Graham Duff told me that Mark E Smith, the now late lead singer of enduring Manchester post-punk thing the Fall, had asked him to help him write a play. Its working title? The Death of Standards. How I would love to have seen that play – the name alone makes me laugh out loud – though suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so apposite, and we look back on the early noughties, when Smith proposed this project, as a golden age of determinable ethical values.
Contrary to popular belief, reports of the death of standards (as they were regarding Mark Twain, Rock Family Trees cartographer Pete Frame and one of the fiddle players from Fairport Convention) are greatly exaggerated. Standards aren’t dead. They are just in a perpetual state of flux. To say we live in a world of double standards is an understatement. Post-Trump, post-Epstein and post-Brexit, there are so many different standards in operation simultaneously that trying to judge any action by a commonly understood yardstick of ethical value makes about as much sense as trying to knit fog or make a hat out of soup.
Can we put an end to this? By all means, allow Keir Starmer’s proximity to Epstein, via his cheerleader Peter Mandelson, to bring him down, although let it be noted he kept us relatively clear of an Iranian quagmire Farage and Kemi Badenoch were only too keen to bathe in, like a pair of horrible hippos. But to condemn Starmer by association with Epstein, and yet to allow Palantir to continue to cherry-pick the ripest fruit from the data we are happy for it to traffick into its lair makes no sense. And it is far more damaging for the country than the outgoing PM’s once unanimously praised realpolitik decision to appoint an arsehole ambassador to deal with an even bigger arsehole president.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart is talking to the director Mark Jenkin at a screening of his new film, Rose of Nevada, at Hackney Picture House on 26 April, and hosting an evening of imaginary horror film soundtracks by Graham Reynolds and Mike Lindsay at Hackney’s Moth Club on 30 April. He is also co-hosting a screening of the rockumentary King Rocker, with director Michael Cumming and star Robert Lloyd, and launching his new podcast, Joking Apart, at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival on 2 May
CHERNOBYL + 40: NUCLEAR POWER’S DEFERRED DEATH SENTENCE
April 24, 2026, https://jonathonporritt.com/chernobyl-40-nuclear-power-decline/
When the definitive history of the demise of nuclear power is written sometime in the 2020s, 26th April 1986 will be seen as the first peal of its death knell.
At that time, the industry had seen off any reputational damage from the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, and was producing about 16% of total global electricity, with steady prospects ahead. But the Chernobyl disaster transformed the ‘tone’ of energy discussion; the industry’s brash arrogance was gone; safety was the No.1 issue. By 2015, its contribution was down to 11%; today it’s just 9% – at least as much because of the 2011 Fukushima disaster as Chernobyl.
Nuclear power is the industry that has refused to die. We find ourselves, today, all over again, engulfed in a tsunami of massively overblown nuclear propaganda. It’s almost all bollocks, for so many reasons. But given this is a short anniversary blog (I was Director of Friends the Earth in 1986, so 26th April is one of those few dates I remember unprompted!), let’s just touch on two of these reasons.
1. NUCLEAR’S REDUNDANCY
China has just announced that its solar exports in March (the first month’s figures since Trump decided to blow up both Iran and the global economy) surpassed its previous best month (August 2025) by a staggering 49%. 50 different countries set all-time records for solar imports from China, including India (up 141 %), Malaysia (391 %) and Nigeria (519 %).
This is primarily a response to the Trump-driven fossil fuel crisis. But even nuclear renaissance groupies should be able to work this out: you get new solar capacity ordered, installed and generating precious electrons in months (instead of an average of eight years for nuclear), at a cheaper price per MWh than any fossil option (let alone ludicrously expensive nuclear power!), giving your grid operators greater flexibility and contributing immediately to increased energy security.
There is nothing nuclear can do to counter that.
2. NUCLEAR’S VULNERABILITY
In February 2025, a Russian Geran-2 drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the roof of the protective shield preventing radiation leaks from the Chernobyl plant, ripping out a 15m2 hole. A fortnight ago, a dramatic report from Greenpeace highlighted the risks arising from this insanely irresponsible Russian attack — emphasising that it’s still impossible to carry out the repairs that are so urgently needed because of the constant threat of further attacks.
You won’t have heard much about this. Every single country with nuclear facilities wants to keep a lid on any discussion; compliant nuclear-friendly media toe the line. The International Atomic Energy Agency holds its increasingly laboured breath, just hoping that Russia decides to keep the vast nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia off its target list – on the grounds that it still hopes to switch it back on one day as a 100% Russian-controlled asset.
Again, work it out: every single Defence Department in every country with nuclear power stations is urgently revising its risk register after the attack on Chernobyl – given everything we now know about drone warfare from Ukraine.
Forget the reactors themselves (theoretically engineered to withstand a Twin Towers-style attack); think used but still highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods stored in situ at hundreds of reactors. Barely protected, let alone hard engineered.
REDUNDANCY + VULNERABILITY = DECLINE AND DEMISE.
How utterly appropriate, therefore, that the grandiosely-styled Policy Exchange Nuclear Enterprise Commission should choose this moment to release a new report, ‘The Nuclear State’, to turn all today’s bombastic rhetoric about a ‘nuclear renaissance’ into solid ‘anti-drift mechanisms and hard-wired institutional reforms’. Bless!
Sorry to have to repeat the obvious for anybody extolling the wonders of a nuclear renaissance on the 40th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, but the truth about zombies is that they are actually dead. They may still be walking around, often quite scarily, but they are – definitively – dead.
Debt, Delays, Dependencies -Why Public Banks Should Not Support Nuclear Power
Prof. Claudia Kemfert; Merete Looft; Ute Koczy; Vladimir Slivyak; Prof. Steve Thomas; Dr. Alexander Wimmers; Prof. M. V. Ramana; Dr. Paul Dorfman
Report, 2026
Herausgeber: Urgewald; Ecodefense, 25 April 26, https://www.urgewald.org/en/debt-delays-dependencies-nuclear
The world does not need new nuclear power. Yet institutions like the World Bank, the ADB and other development banks are stubbornly marching towards an economic disaster that creates toxic waste and exacerbates the climate crisis by redirecting scarce resources away from technologies that have long proven themselves cheaper, faster, cleaner and more effective.
There are many solid arguments against this waste of taxpayer money. This report serves as a compilation of science-based theses against the renaissance of nuclear power. In five thematic articles, four renowned scientists and an expert on Russian nuclear policy provide key facts and figures on the topic.
Urgewald and Ecodefense – Debt, Delays, Dependencies (April 2026) (7.51 MB)
For US Commentators on Iran, Mass Murder Is Magic
Gregory Shupak, April 24, 2026, https://fair.org/home/for-us-commentators-on-iran-mass-murder-is-magic/
In the wake of the temporary US/Iran ceasefire, hawkish commentary in leading American newspapers advanced the premise that the US can dictate terms to Iran in negotiations, with a faith in the power of Washington’s military might that was hard to justify by the previous course of the war.
A Washington Post editorial (4/8/26) contended:
Despite the massive damage inflicted upon the country by the US in recent weeks, the regime acts like it holds the cards. Its leaders are demanding the US pull all troops out of the Middle East and accept Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. The question is why Trump would bend over backward to keep obviously unserious talks on track.
Whether the Post likes it or not, Iran has a decent hand to play. For instance, Iranian drones cost just $20,000 to produce, and the US uses missiles that cost $4 million each to try and destroy them (Bloomberg, 3/2/26). Less than three weeks into the war, the US was already estimated to have spent more than $18 billion attacking Iran (Guardian, 3/19/26). The longer Iran can hold out, the more it financially bleeds the US.
The majority of Americans already consistently oppose the war (NBC News, 4/1/26) and, as costs spiral, domestic opposition to the US’s assault is likely to grow. In this context, the paper may need to revise its definition of seriousness to include accepting that Iran has the power to resist US bullying and bluster.
‘More work to degrade’
The Washington Post editorial also said that there “is still more work to be done to degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities and its capacity to rebuild them.” “Offensive” here is a propaganda term, as Iran has not launched an aggressive war in nearly two centuries—unlike the United States and Israel, which have attacked Iran twice in the last year.
By reversing victim and offender, the Post was transparently calling for the US to resume bombing Iran; after all, it’s through war that one country “degrades” another’s military capacity. But it’s not that the US and Israel didn’t try to destroy Iranian capabilities; rather, they tried and have not succeeded.
Less than a week before the ceasefire, a CNN report (4/2/26) said US intelligence had assessed that
roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal, despite the daily pounding by US and Israeli strikes against military targets over the past five weeks….
The intelligence, compiled in recent days, also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, the sources said, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets, though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran retained that capacity despite the US hitting more than 12,300 targets in Iran, according to US Central Command. Israel, for its part, said it had dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran since February 28 (Jerusalem Post, 3/25/26).
The Post offered no insight into why it believes the US/Israeli assault will suddenly become more effective.
‘Finish the job’
A Wall Street Journal editorial (4/8/26) echoed the Post, writing that “the Iranian regime remains a threat in the Strait of Hormuz and the job is far from finished.” The Journal insisted that the US should restart the war if it doesn’t get its way:
The next test for Mr. Trump will be whether he takes his two-week ceasefire deadline seriously. If he does, and Iran plays its usual games, then he really will have to “finish the job.”
Such calls overlook the limits to US war-making capacity. Analysts at Colorado’s Payne Institute for Public Policy, cited by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (4/1/26), “assessed that the US had lost nearly 46% of its Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS),” one of the US’s main tactical ballistic weapons. Likewise, they estimated that
supplies of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems, used by the US and its partners in the region to defend against Iranian missiles, were also dropping significantly. Projections showed the THAAD interceptors could run out by mid-April.
The US also burned through 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the war’s first four weeks, “a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials” (Washington Post, 3/27/26). Meanwhile, the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors that Israel used against Iran’s longer-range missiles “were also projected to be exhausted by the end of March” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 4/1/26). Unlike the Journal’s lust for violence, the US/Israeli arsenal is finite.
‘Circle of death’
Nor did these constraints prevent the Washington Post‘s Marc A. Thiessen (4/8/26) from calling on Trump to create a “circle of death” around any former nuclear sites in Iran, and enforce it by “killing any Iranian who enters that circle.” He also suggested another round of assassinations, “eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations,” so that the country’s leaders understand that if they fail to reach “a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking…they will be killed.”
Murderous fantasies about the US imposing total domination over Iran are perhaps a symptom of the US being unable to do so in reality. As Thiessen’s own paper (4/3/26) reported, despite the US/Israeli assassinations of high-ranking Iranian officials,
Iran has continued to launch retaliatory attacks, often hitting high-value targets, demonstrating sustained command and control beyond the conflict’s initial days when units largely operated on autopilot under Iran’s “mosaic” defense strategy, which emphasizes decentralized autonomy. In recent weeks, Iranian attacks have struck critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, industrial and energy sites in Israel, and key US military installations, including a direct strike on an advanced US spy plane.
In other words, decapitating the Iranian government hasn’t caused it to capitulate or prevented it from responding to US/Israeli attacks, but Thiessen—for reasons he did not explain—thinks that doing the same thing again will produce a different result.
Thiessen also said that the US should
develop and implement a covert action plan to support the Iranian opposition…. Such a plan could involve supplying the Iranian opposition with weapons, much as the US once provided arms to anti-Communist “freedom fighters” across the world.
The overriding goal should be to help the Iranian people, over time, bring down this murderous regime.
Set aside that this plan would violate the UN Charter’s principle of nonintervention and that the US has zero right to shape who governs Iran. In reality, multiple US intelligence reports conclude that Iran’s government “is not in danger” of falling (Reuters, 3/11/26). Israeli officials also think that Iran’s government “isn’t likely to fall soon” (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/26).
While there’s little reason to believe that Thiessen’s proposal would produce regime change in Iran, we can be fairly confident that flooding Iran with weapons will have the same outcome that flooding countries with arms generally has—namely, a devastating bloodbath for its inhabitants (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17; Jacobin, 9/11/21).
‘The easiest method’
Bret Stephens of the New York Times (4/14/26) likewise wrote from an alternate reality where the war showed that the US can impose its will on Iran. Stephens opened by quoting his own piece (4/7/26) from the previous week :
“The easiest method for the United States to reopen Hormuz,” I wrote last Tuesday, “is to start seizing tankers carrying Iranian crude once they reach the Arabian Sea.”
It’s not clear why Stephens thought seizing Iranian ships would cause Iran to back down. After all, assassinating many of the country’s leaders, attacking Iranian health facilities (Al Jazeera, 4/3/26) and vital civilian infrastructure (BBC, 3/19/26), and mass-murdering Iranian school girls (Guardian, 3/3/26) did not compel the country to stop defending itself.
Stephens went on to contend:
Trump should put Iran’s regime to a fundamental choice: It can have an economy. Or the regime can attempt to have a nuclear program while trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. But it can’t have both.
This quote suggests Stephens was unwilling to seriously grapple with Iran’s retaliatory power. For example, Iran has consistently responded to US aggression by attacking the empire’s regional nodes, killing Israelis (BBC, 3/1/26; Reuters, 4/6/26) and badly damaging Israeli infrastructure (Al Jazeera, 3/21/26).
Iranian countermeasures have likewise hit energy infrastructure in the US’s client states in the Gulf, leading—for example—to fires at Kuwaiti oil and petrochemical facilities, at a petrochemical plant in the UAE and at a storage tank in Bahrain (AFP, 4/5/26). In other words, Iran has illustrated that it has a multitude of options for raising the costs of US violence, indicating it would likely continue exercising these in the scenario Stephens advocates.
‘Broke the petrodollar’
None of these commentators acknowledge what is likely the strongest blow that Iran has landed against the US. The Islamic Republic has undermined what’s called the petrodollar regime, a system in which the US promises to militarily protect the Gulf monarchies in exchange for these states putting money they earn from oil sales into US assets—most notably Treasury bonds. The arrangement, which has been in place since 1974, subsidizes US borrowing costs and keeps the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency.
Bloomberg (4/6/26) reports that the war on Iran “broke the petrodollar,” because the conflict is “categorically different” from other political, military and economic crises of the post-1974 period:
Gulf producers can’t get their oil out. The Strait of Hormuz closure has stranded their barrels along with everyone else’s.
Gulf states including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively cut production by at least 10 million barrels per day in March. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can export reduced volumes through alternative pipelines. But those routes handle only about a quarter of normal Strait throughput at full capacity, and they are under active Iranian drone and missile threat. Qatar declared force majeure on exports of liquified natural gas after strikes on its Ras Laffan facility.
Thus, Iran has shown that it can hinder, and possibly destroy, a central plank in the architecture of the US empire. Stephens, Thiessen and the editorial boards of the Journal and the Post appear to be deluding themselves about the gravity of this development. Iran has successfully resisted subjugation, largely by jeopardizing a key instrument of US global hegemony, but these authors have gone on writing as if Washington were in a position to force Iran to surrender to its diktats.
These observers traffic in illusions about a virtually omnipotent US that can indefinitely control the world through force of arms, consequence-free. Op-ed writing is supposed to be persuasive. In that regard, these authors have failed spectacularly.
The Impact of the Middle East Crisis on Women and Girls
CAIRO, Egypt, Apr 23 2026 (IPS) – Six weeks into the 2026 Middle East military escalation, UNFPA Arab States Regional Office warns that its impact on 161 million women and girls living in conflict-affected areas across the region remain largely invisible in conflict analysis, humanitarian response, and funding priorities.
A new Call to Action, Regional Analysis of the Socio-Economic Impact of the 2026 Middle East Conflict on Women and Girls published by UNFPA, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency, highlights that current response mechanisms remain overwhelmingly gender-blind, treating gender-based violence (GBV) and maternal health as secondary concerns rather than life-saving priorities.
“The omission is not merely analytical – it is structural,” the report states. Without sex-disaggregated data and gender perspectives, the international community is conducting incomplete risk assessments, misaligning interventions, and missing critical opportunities for stabilization and peace.
The conflict is projected to cost regional economies $120–194 billion – equivalent to 3.7 to 6 percent of collective GDP. Four million additional people are estimated to be pushed into poverty and 3.64 million jobs may be lost. Women – overrepresented in informal employment – face disproportionate livelihood collapse while shouldering increased unpaid care work.
Supply chain shocks through the Strait of Hormuz threaten to delay lifesaving humanitarian supplies by up to six months. Across Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen, more than 260 health facilities and 14 mobile medical units have already shut down. Food insecurity is intensifying, with documented patterns showing women and girls eat last and least.
The report also highlights a surge in GBV risks driven by hyper-displacement, while sanctions and financial “de-risking” are crippling the ability of women-led organizations to deliver essential services. These organizations—often the first responders in crises—are being cut off from the very funding streams meant to sustain them
UNFPA is calling on national governments, UN agencies, donors, and civil society to:
Integrate gender systematically into all conflict analysis and response frameworks
Protect and fund GBV and sexual and reproductive health services as core, lifesaving interventions.
Finance and empower local women-led organizations, removing barriers to their access and participation.
Ensure women’s leadership in recovery, peacebuilding, and decision-making processes.
“Making women and girls visible is not optional,” the report concludes. “It is fundamental to effective humanitarian action, sustainable recovery, and lasting peace.”
UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
IPS UN Bureau
Amid an energy crisis, the renewables juggernaut gathers pace
The continuing collapse in the cost of renewables offers a stark contrast to
skyrocketing fossil fuel prices – and a cause for optimism. As emissions
continue to rise and governments fail to respond with anything like the
urgency required, it’s tempting to conclude that the prospects for a
liveable planet are growing dim.
But as spring arrives, there is one
striking spark of light. Sunlight, to be precise – captured on solar
panels and pumping out electrons down the wires, on a scale unimaginable
even a decade ago.The amount of solar installed worldwide doubled between
2022 and 2024 alone. In the first three quarters of 2025, it accounted for
83% of all new electricity-generating capacity. Key to this is the
continuing collapse in costs, which have fallen by close to 90% per kWh in
just the last decade.
Crucially, the cost of batteries – essential for
storing the power generated – has plunged by a similar amount in that
time. In his new book, Here Comes the Sun, veteran environmentalist Bill
McKibben highlights some of the consequences of this double whammy in price
and pace. In Pakistan alone, to give one example, enough solar has been
installed in the last 18 months to account for one-third of the country’s
current grid capacity.
Positive News 25th March 2026, https://www.positive.news/environment/energy/amid-an-energy-crisis-the-renewables-juggernaut-gathers-pace/
Britain’s Nuclear Subservience
Norman Dombey, 2 April 2026, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/april/britain-s-nuclear-subservience
In a brief exchange during Prime Minister’s Questions last month, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, asked Keir Starmer about Trident replacement. ‘We have to make a choice now,’ Davey said: ‘lease new missiles from the United States, accepting whatever terms the president gives us, or build our own here in the United Kingdom.’ The prime minister replied that Davey was ‘advocating a plan without knowing how much it would cost and how it would work’. The discussion moved on.
Both men spoke of Britain’s ‘independent nuclear deterrent’. But the UK’s nuclear weapons capability is dependent on the US. Not only does Britain rent its Trident missiles from America, but the British-built warhead designed to be carried by those missiles, the Holbrook, is closely based on the American W76. The Los Alamos National Laboratory announced last year that a replacement for the W76 is going ahead: the W93 should be ready by 2034.
There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so. No one in Britain played any part in choosing the parameters of the W93.
George Robertson, the former Labour minister of defence and Nato secretary-general who now works for the Cohen Group, has said that the UK’s military dependence on the US is ‘no longer tenable’.
Britain’s nuclear subservience to the US dates from the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) between Washington and London:
Each party will exchange with the other party other classified information concerning atomic weapons when, after consultation with the other party, the communicating party determines that the communication of such information is necessary to improve the recipient’s atomic weapon design, development and fabrication capability.
The minutes of the first meeting of nuclear scientists from both sides in 1958, which seem to have been declassified by the US by mistake, show that the US provided ‘details of size, weight, shape, yield, amount of special nuclear material’. Several weapons were described. Britain’s nuclear bombs have been built at Aldermaston to an American design ever since.
President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan met at Nassau in the Bahamas in 1962 and agreed that the UK could use American Polaris missiles in its submarines. Charles de Gaulle was offered the same deal but declined. He said that the US could not be trusted and insisted that France had to take nuclear decisions for itself. British nuclear warheads are all carried by US-dependent submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). France builds its own SLBMs and its own warheads
David Manning was Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 2003 to 2007. ‘It is very difficult to imagine,’ he told the International Relations and Defence Committee last year, ‘what we will do to defend ourselves if, for example – this is very hypothetical – the Trump Administration decide that they will end our nuclear co‑operation deal, or Trump moves out of Nato, or even becomes just so equivocal about Nato that the Article 5 guarantee is no longer plausible.’
Trump and his war on Iran have given new urgency to Anglo-French nuclear co-operation, which should replace the ‘special nuclear relationship’ with the US before Britain needlessly commits itself to the US-dependent modernisation of its nuclear weapon system. If Britain were to join France, its first action should be to extract itself from its agreement to buy the W93 from the US. Aldermaston can make its own warheads or make them to a French rather than a US design.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was drafted by the UK and US to forbid weapon-state signatories from helping non-weapon states to develop nuclear weapons. But they are not forbidden from helping one another: the MDA and Polaris Treaties between the UK and US are not affected by the NPT. A similar agreement between the UK and France would also be allowed by the treaty. France delivers its weapons on SLBMs, cruise missiles and aircraft and could share information with Britain in these fields (as it already does in some of them).
In any case the NPT may well be obsolete. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all have nuclear weapons. Faced with a hostile Russia, it might be sensible for Germany and Poland to have them too. It certainly makes sense for the UK to decouple its nuclear weapons programme from the US.
UK named worst violator of anti-nuclear weapons treaty
by Tom Pashby, 22 April 2026, https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026/04/22/uk-worst-violator-nuclear-weapons-treaty/
The UK has been named as the worst violator of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor 2026, a report by Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA).
Its ranking as the worst state in terms of “non-compatibility” with the treaty is, in part, due to the UK having its own nuclear weapons, as well as being understood to have started hosting nukes for Trump’s USA.
A damning report
The report explained why it focuses on the TPNW:
It tracks progress towards a world without nuclear weapons and highlights activities that stand between the international community and the fulfilment of the long-standing goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons.
In measuring this progress, the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor uses the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) as the primary yardstick, because this treaty codifies norms and actions that are needed to create and maintain a world free of nuclear weapons.
The TPNW is the only legally binding global treaty that outlaws nuclear weapons. It was adopted on 7 July 2017 and entered into force on 22 January 2021. The impact of the TPNW will be built gradually and will depend on how it is welcomed and used by each and every State.
The TPNW is supported by 99 of the world’s 197 states, with 74 joining as parties and 25 as signatories that have not yet ratified the treaty.
Political pressure
No nuclear-armed states have joined the treaty, but the Ban Monitor said:
Every non-nuclear-armed State that joins strengthens political pressure for nuclear disarmament.
Adding:
With ratification processes advancing in several signatory States, further progress in expansion of the treaty membership appears likely in 2026.
The report took aim at the poor record of European states on eliminating nuclear weapons, saying “support for the TPNW is strong across all regions of the world except Europe,” and warned:
The UK was singled out as having the most policies or practices in 2025 that were viewed by the report’s authors as being “non-compatible with, or of concern in relation to, one or more of the TPNW’s prohibitions”.
It was singled out alongside 44 other states found to have non-compatibilities with the TPNW. Most were not compatible with the TPNW’s “Prohibition on assisting, encouraging or inducing prohibited activity”.
The UK, meanwhile, was identified as being non-compatible with a total of six prohibitions:
- on “development, production, manufacture, or other acquisition”;
- on “possession or stockpiling”; on “receiving transfer or control”;
- on “assisting; encouraging or inducing prohibited activity”;
- on “seeking or receiving assistance to engage in prohibited activity”;
- and on “allowing stationing, installation or deployment” of nuclear weapons.
The next least compatible country was the US, which had five prohibitions it was not compatible with.
‘Evidence suggests’ UK received US nukes and is expanding its own stockpile
ICAN head of communications Alistair Burnett told the Canary:
The Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor reports annually on the size and composition of the arsenals of the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries and it also assesses how compatible each country is with the provisions of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Of the nine nuclear-armed states, Britain violates more articles of the treaty than any other because it not only has its own nuclear weapons, it may have also started hosting US nuclear weapons on its soil again after a break of 18 years.
In 2008, US nuclear weapons that were held at US air bases in Britain were quietly withdrawn, but last year evidence suggests the US may have returned upgraded nuclear bombs (the B61-12) to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.
Neither country shares any information publicly on this, but research by the Federation of American Scientists revealed new facilities to store these weapons were being built at Lakenheath and flights by the US planes that ferry nuclear weapons around the world have been monitored arriving there.
The United Kingdom also engages in assistance and encouragement of banned nuclear activities under the TPNW in its nuclear cooperation with France, and the United States.
In 2021, the UK also removed the cap on the number of warheads it has and stopped releasing information on nuclear warhead numbers.
UK faces becoming ‘more and more isolated diplomatically’
Burnett went on to explain how the UK’s failure to support the TPNW is likely to make it increasingly diplomatically isolated, and recommended how the government could work towards a nuclear weapons-free future.
He said:
The TPNW came into force in 2021 and a majority of the world’s states have already either signed or ratified the treaty (74 have ratified and a further 25 have signed it and are working on ratification). As more and more countries join it, Britain and the other nuclear-armed countries become more and more isolated diplomatically
The TPNW provides a fair and verifiable pathway to eliminating nuclear weapons, and Britain – which committed to getting rid of its weapons when it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 – should engage with the TPNW and work towards joining that treaty as well in order to fulfil the disarmament commitments it has made and also to help reduce the nuclear threat that continues to menace the whole world.
It is impossible to envisage any use of nuclear weapons in conflict that would be consistent with international law, of which the British Government claims to be a champion.
A first step would be for the UK to stop voting against annual UN General Assembly resolutions on the TPNW and the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. In 2024, the UK, alone with Russia and France, even voted against setting up an independent scientific panel to update our understanding of the impact of the use of nuclear weapons in 2024.
In addition this year, the UK Government, at a minimum, should also observe the first Review Conference of the TPNW that is being held at the UN in New York in late November and early December.
The Canary approached the Ministry of Defence (MOD) for comment on the government’s shaming in the report. An MOD spokesperson deferred to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The FCDO did not respond to a request for comment.
UK Government urged to end its ‘nuclear hypocrisy’ and engage with TPNW
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) general secretary Sophie Bolt told the Canary:
It’s little surprise Britain is the worst violator of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons for 2026. It’s ploughing ahead with the multi-billion pound modernisation of its nuclear-armed submarines, update and expansion of its nuclear warhead stockpile, hosting of US nuclear weapons on British soil, and giving the RAF a nuclear role for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
The Canary reported earlier in April that campaigners were demanding that the UK stops hosting Trump’s nuclear weapons, in response to his veiled threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
Bolt continued:
As the government is facing increased pressure to enforce more austerity to fund major military spending hikes, a quarter of the MoD’s budget is blown on nuclear weapons.
What’s more, these nuclear projects are facing delays and ballooning costs with diminishing oversight. Nuclear dangers have never been higher but having nuclear weapons doesn’t increase security. Britain needs to end the nuclear hypocrisy and finally engage with the TPNW.
Nuclear deterrence is ‘naïve idealism’ – professor
University of Sussex emeritus professor Andy Stirling reacted to the report by telling the Canary:
Recent events show more than ever, that notions of ‘nuclear deterrence’ are a delusion that only lasts so long. Now more than ever, time is running out.
As with the same claims made in the past for explosives, machine guns and aircraft, nuclear weapons are not – and never can be – technologies to end war. Nuclear deterrence is naïve idealism.
With impacts of global war now more existential than ever, the security of each country must be viewed with reason, not sentimental nationalist blinkers or militaristic ideology.
Even where only a few countries claim exclusive national rights to make nuclear threats against others, the inevitable result will be nuclear war.
The only rational way to reduce the threat of nuclear war is to address security globally. As in the playground … or in gangland … the only realistic way to abolish nuclear threats for all is for each to stop making them against others.
Those who make nuclear threats lower their own security by adding to risks of surprise nuclear attacks against them.
It is too often forgotten that even a small nuclear attack by any one country will (even if it is not retaliated against), cause devastation in that country as well through nuclear winter. In that way too, nuclear threats are a suicide vest.
In a debate on ‘Civil Preparedness for War’ in the House of Lords on 20 April, MOD minister of state Lord Coaker confirmed that the government does still support the NPT and representatives would be attending the NPT review conference in New York later in April.
This could be seen as a thin sliver of hope for the UK eventually working to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
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