Telegraph: Microsoft reportedly planning “Stargate”, a $100billion supercomputer to be powered by several nuclear plants
Microsoft, OpenAI Reportedly Plans $100-Billion Supercomputer Fueled by Nuclear Power
Mark Nelson @energybants 13 May 24
The era of the great uranium brains approaches.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is reportedly gearing up to construct a colossal $100 billion data center, aptly named “Stargate.” Analysts speculate that this ambitious endeavor will be powered by multiple nuclear plants, marking a significant shift in the tech industry’s approach to energy sourcing.
The almost limitless piles of cash AI companies have to spend helps. Open AI and its major investor Microsoft developing plans for the world’s biggest $100billion project code-named Stargate. Analysts at Morgan Stanley speculated last week that this would be powered by several nuclear plants
New Lines: How Washington is Weaponizing Media
New Lines Magazine purports to be an independent media organization. Yet it constantly attacks genuine alternative media who stray from Washington’s official foreign policy line, all while employing many spooks, spies and other figures at the heart of the national security state.
Worse still, its parent organization, the New Lines Institute, has recently admitted to being directly funded by the U.S. government. MintPress News takes a closer look at this shady organization acting as Washington’s attack dog.
A Slick, Well-Funded Organization
If you read the Wikipedia entries for many alternative media outlets, they are written off as fringe conspiracy websites pushing debunked foreign propaganda. MintPress News, for example, is described as a “far-left news website” which “publishes disinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” The Grayzone is similarly smeared as a “fringe” blog known for its “misleading reporting” and “sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes” such as Syria, Venezuela and China.
The evidence for these evidence-light smears comes primarily from the U.S. foreign policy journal, New Lines Magazine, a product of the New Lines Institute. New Lines is a very new organization that was established only in 2020. Despite this, it has already become a key player in setting U.S. agendas worldwide, boasting a staff of more than 50 and working with over 150 contributors. Headquartered on the prestigious Massachusetts Avenue NW (some of the most expensive real estate in the world), it sits between foreign embassies and many of America’s most prestigious think tanks, a stone’s throw – metaphorically and physically – from the White House.
New Lines describes its goal as “seeking to shape U.S. foreign policy” based on a “deep understanding of distinct regional geopolitics and value systems.” It began by focusing solely on the Middle East but quickly expanded to cover Ukraine, China, Venezuela and other political hotspots that most concern hawks in Washington. It certainly shapes public debate, and its research and experts are regularly quoted in influential outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.
A Rogue’s Gallery of U.S. Officials
New Lines presents itself as an independent organization, claiming that it is “one of the few think tanks in Washington with no foreign or local agendas.” Yet its higher ranks are packed with former state officials.
Chief amongst them is New Lines Institute founder and president Ahmed Alwani. Alwani served on the advisory board of the U.S. military’s Africa Command and influenced Washington’s Middle East positions. His New Lines biography boasts that he “met the commanding generals of Fort Jackson, Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, Naval Station Norfolk and Joint Base Andrews as well as then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his staff numerous times during the Iraq War to consult on U.S. policy” – something many might not consider a badge of honor.
Alwani also founded Fairfax University, a controversial private educational institution that Virginia state regulators considered shutting down in 2019. Auditors found that “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses,” academic quality was “patently deficient,” plagiarism was “rampant,” and students’ English levels were “abysmally poor,” making Fairfax look far more like a degree mill than a legitimate university.
New Lines’ senior director, Faysal Itani, has a similarly notable past. Before joining the organization, Itani was simultaneously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council – a NATO-funded think tank that serves as the brains of the military alliance, and an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University – a department a previous MintPress News investigation exposed as a department filled with CIA agents that functions as a training ground for the next generation of American spies.
Another senior director, Nicholas Heras, was central to U.S. actions in Iraq and Syria…………………………………………………………………………………………
Spy Games
Perhaps the most notable New Lines Institute employee, however, is non-resident fellow Elizabeth Tsurkov. Tsurkov is a Russian-born Israeli who, before joining New Lines, worked at a number of hawkish think tanks, including the Atlantic Council and Freedom House……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In a video released in November, Tsurkov stated that she was actually in Iraq on behalf of the CIA and Israeli intelligence outfit Mossad. …………………………………………..
Attacking Alternative Media
Studying their output, it is clear that New Lines has two principal targets: nations the U.S. has deemed enemy states and alternative media outlets that question the narratives that New Lines and the U.S. government are trying to establish. Indeed, New Lines has spent years investigating alternative media, promoting a narrative that opposition to U.S. foreign policy equals being in the pay of official enemy countries……………………………………………………………………………………………
State-Funded Media
Considering its output, its constant support for U.S. policy and attacks on both domestic and international opponents of Washington, speculation was rife that the U.S. government was secretly funding New Lines. But the institute had always denied this, presenting itself as a neutral, agenda-free organization. That was, at least, until late last year when it announced that it had reached a “cooperative agreement” with the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point to “jointly develop actionable recommendations for U.S. global leadership to address pressing global security challenges.” In other words, to plan out American military strategy. The New Lines Institute also noted that they would now “serve as an intellectual resource for solving military problems.”
Days later, New Lines’ “About Us” section was updated, removing all reference to being funded by the Fairfax Foundation and inserting a clause admitting U.S. government financial support, strongly suggesting that the military is now bankrolling it. It now reads (emphasis added):
Funding for The New Lines Institute is provided by the The [sic] Washington Institute for Education and Research, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization registered in Washington DC.
New Lines Institute accepts research grants and charitable donations from U.S. individuals, registered U.S. legal entities, and the U.S. Government in support of its research priorities, and only insofar as such support is in compliance with U.S. laws and regulations; aligns with the institute’s vision, mission, purpose and principles; and falls within its core areas of expertise.
The news did not come as a shock to those paying close attention. “It will come as a surprise to no-one that New Lines is funded by the U.S. government,” wrote investigative journalist Matt Kennard on Twitter. There is a certain tenor to the articles of these cut-outs that is instantly recognizable. Slightly critical—to be convincing—but only up to a point which leaves state narratives robust.”
Sizewell C nuclear station ‘absolutely not inevitable’ says campaigner – Can investors be found?
The official cost of Sizewell C has been put at £20bn by the government, but many observers expect the final bill to be much higher due to increased building costs.
who would want to invest in an expensive project which will take 12 years to build, with no guarantee of a return for many more years?
Andrew Sinclair – Political editor, BBC East, Sun, 12 May 2024 https://au.news.yahoo.com/sizewell-c-absolutely-not-inevitable-091834059.html
A leading campaigner against the Sizewell C nuclear power station has said its construction is still not inevitable.
The planned energy plant, on the Suffolk coast, has just been granted its nuclear site licence.
But Alison Downes, director of campaign group Stop Sizewell C, has questioned whether the government will be able to attract enough private investment.
Ministers, who have already contributed £2.5bn to the project, have said they remain committed to the scheme.
The decision to grant Sizewell C a nuclear site licence on 7 May was described by the project team and local business groups as a “huge milestone”.
It came just months after the government granted a Development Consent Order to Sizewell C and pledged further funding to the project. Ministers have regularly referred to Sizewell C when discussing the country’s nuclear programme.
Andrew Bowie, Minister for Nuclear and Renewables, said: “Sizewell C will be the cornerstone of the UK’s clean energy transition, supplying six million homes with green energy for decades.”
But despite plenty of signs that the project could be coming closer to reality, Alison Downes insisted on BBC Politics East that “it’s absolutely not inevitable”.
“We still don’t know who is going to pay for it. The government is trying to raise funds at the moment, but there’s no guarantee it’ll be successful,” she said.
The government agreed to take a 50% stake in the development of Sizewell C after concerns about the involvement of Chinese investors and it is looking for investors to help fund the project.
Can investors be found?
The official cost of Sizewell C has been put at £20bn by the government, but many observers expect the final bill to be much higher due to increased building costs.
The prime minister told me last year that there had already been “encouraging early interest” from people wanting to invest.
But campaigners have questioned who would want to invest in an expensive project which will take 12 years to build, with no guarantee of a return for many more years.
Ms Downes, who also has concerns about the safety of the site from rising sea levels and the project’s impact on local habitats, said: “A lot of taxpayers’ money has gone into a project that has no absolute certainty of whether or not it’s going ahead.”
The argument for nuclear
But Richard Rout, the deputy leader of Suffolk County Council, told BBC Politics East that the demand for more homegrown green energy meant that Sizewell was essential.
“I think Sizewell C is now at a point where it has to happen. We need nuclear in this country to give us energy independence,” he said.
“We are now seeing Sizewell C move forward and for me [the priority now] is about minimising the impacts on the local community and maximising the benefits.”
But Alison Downes pledged to “absolutely keep fighting” .
A final decision on whether to go ahead with the project is expected to be taken by energy company EDF towards the end of 2024.
Biden’s Shifting ‘Red Line’ Lets Israel Get Away With Murder
Biden threatened Israel with pulling military aid if it invades Rafah, but Israel is attacking anyway. It won’t face consequences so long as Biden remains vague on what amounts to sufficient grounds for suspending military aid.
with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken driving the process, the prospects for real pressure were dubious.
the report made excuses and found that, while Israeli soldiers and officers engaged in human rights abuses, they did not amount to sufficient grounds to suspend military aid.
MITCHELL PLITNICK 11 May 24 https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/12/bidens-shifting-red-line-lets-israel-get-away-with-murder/
Over the seven months of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the United States has worked vigorously to offer maximum support for Israel while trying to give the impression that it is concerned about the massive loss of Palestinian life. The performance has been difficult to maintain, as virtually every American action contradicts the occasional words of concern for the devastation being fully abetted and enabled by American policy.
In recent weeks, political pressures have forced President Joe Biden to try to take more concrete steps to deter what he considers “excessive” Israeli actions. Such Israeli actions — which apparently do not include killing over 34,000 people, wounding over 78,000 more, completely destroying the health, education, and civic infrastructure in Gaza, and a daily flow of war crimes — raise concerns in the White House that Israel’s image around the world is becoming one of a genocidal regime and that image is reflecting on its American patron.
Rafah has become the focal point of this concern. Biden was prepared to support the horrors of the past seven months, but with some 1.4 million people stuffed into Rafah (an area that was crowded when it was home to 275,000 people before Israel’s onslaught), he realizes that a full-scale ground invasion of the kind that we witnessed in most of Gaza will cause a horror show that even Americans and Europeans — most of them, anyway — will not be able to abide.
So Biden made a statement. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem.”
Those words, in typical Biden fashion, were as clear as a muddy lake and left massive amounts of wiggle room for the White House to continue to arm Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. They also provided a roadmap for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to follow if he wishes to continue his genocidal campaign and not risk harming the one aspect of Israel’s relationship with the U.S. that Netanyahu cares about: the inexhaustible supply of arms.
Biden’s words are the latest in a series of statements and actions meant less to deter Netanyahu than to deter protesters and the voters who have been abandoning him in large numbers over his genocidal policy in Gaza. As we have seen over the past seven months, these words have, at best, pressed Israel to slow its genocidal attacks just a little and occasionally relent in some small, largely symbolic way, in its staunch efforts to block humanitarian aid from reaching the people in Gaza.
Problematically, those results may give the impression that Biden is trying to rein Israel in, at least in a limited way, but actually, they help support Israel’s genocidal program. By occasionally allowing a small amount of aid in for a brief period, Israel has a tool with which to fend off half-hearted Western criticism. And, by proceeding more slowly, Israel continues to move inexorably toward its genocidal goal, but because moving slower means slightly less horrific images, or at least fewer of them, Israel again keeps a debate going over its actions rather than making defending it completely impossible.
False promises, but consistent policy from Biden
Months ago, the pressure was already starting to build. Democratic thinkers and pundits were wringing their hands over the “divisions” in the party. In the Senate, as many as 18 Democratic senators were pushing a bill that would have required all counties receiving U.S. military aid to abide by American and international law and included a regular reporting requirement.
The bill was specifically aimed at Israel, though it applied to all aid recipients, and Biden desperately wanted to avoid a vote that would show stark divisions among Democrats, even though the bill had no chance of passing into law. The man who had sold himself in 2020 as a “unifier” did not want such damning evidence of his inability to even keep his own party unified.
So, Biden issued a directive that required written assurances from recipients of U.S. military aid that they would only use the weapons in accordance with U.S. and international humanitarian law, and also included a reporting requirement. The key difference is that the White House would control this process.
We’re seeing the result of that key difference right now.
The memorandum Biden issued — National Security Memorandum 20, or NSM-20 — was greeted with some cautious optimism and a good deal of skepticism. It did nothing to actually change U.S. law regarding the use of American military aid, but the specific reporting requirement might be hoped to bring the sort of scrutiny on how that aid was used that Israel has always avoided.
But with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken driving the process, the prospects for real pressure were dubious. Israel fulfilled the first part of the memo, which was to submit written assurances about how it would use the aid. No need to tell the truth there. The proof would, ostensibly, be in its report two months later. That would be the test both for what could be done with the report politically by Israel’s critics and, more importantly, whether the White House was going to abide by its own laws regarding aid to Israel. Hopes for the latter were not high.
The report on Israel’s compliance was due to be presented to Congress on May 8. That day came and went with no report. State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said, when asked about it, “It will not be transmitted today. We continue to work to finalize the report. We expect to deliver it in the very near future, in the coming days.”
The vague timing of the report is noteworthy, considering the State Department knew from the day Biden issued NSM-20 when it would be due and they’ve been able to make definitive statements about Israeli behavior pretty consistently ever since, including some minor criticism and objections.
The delay was even more notable as the due date was the very same day that Biden decided to talk to CNN and announce that he intended to withhold certain offensive weapons if Israel launched a “full-scale” invasion of Rafah.
Finally, the report saw the light of day just after five o’clock on Friday. This is what government agencies do when they need to release something publicly but want the least possible attention drawn to it. Unsurprisingly, according to initial reports, Israel was found to have “likely” violated international law and, therefore, U.S. law in its use of American-supplied weapons; Israel was also found to have been less than forthcoming with the required information; but Israel wouldn’t be punished since “Israel does have a number of ongoing, active criminal investigations pending and there are hundreds of cases under administrative review.”
Israel routinely opens investigations but, with exceedingly rare exceptions, those cases either remain unresolved or, more usually, they are simply closed with no action taken.
Performative reports while Rafah starves
The affair feels very choreographed. Last week, Biden held up a shipment of heavy bombs of the type that Israel has routinely been using to annihilate civilian sites in Gaza. After Hamas accepted a ceasefire and hostage exchange proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up both his threats toward Rafah and his ongoing attacks there, both in the air and on the ground.
That context tends to be missing from reports about Biden threatening Israel if it should invade Rafah. Israel has already begun its invasion of Rafah, but it has not yet stepped up that invasion to the horrific levels that have been seen in other cities in Gaza. It would seem that this level of firepower, killing “only” dozens every day rather than hundreds is perfectly tolerable for Biden.
Israel has seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and shut it down, cutting the area off from its leading source of aid. It also seals in critically ill and injured patients, who can only seek the medical care that is now unavailable in Gaza by going to Egypt. Rafah is the main access point for fuel supplies and most aid for the south, where the vast majority of Gazans are packed in. In other words, Israel is escalating its killing by other means, a tactic which also has the side effect of killing people who don’t get counted in the death toll statistics.
None of this rises to the point of stopping the flow of weapons to Israel, in the estimation of the United States government. When the State Department finally revealed its report on Israeli human rights abuses, it could not avoid being damning without completely fabricating Israeli behavior, something which isn’t possible given how many State Department staff members are already furious about Biden’s policy and the administration’s refusal to listen to anyone with actual knowledge of the region.
But the Secretary and President cannot be totally ignored, and thus the report made excuses and found that, while Israeli soldiers and officers engaged in human rights abuses, they did not amount to sufficient grounds to suspend military aid.
Biden has laid out the framework, and it will work out just fine for Netanyahu. Israel’s closing of the Rafah crossing; its assault that has forced over 100,000 Palestinians, who had already been displaced, many multiple times, to flee once again; and its devastation of an already devastated area does not meet the American standard of a “major ground operation,” according to White House mouthpiece John Kirby.
That means Israel can continue these actions indefinitely as far as Biden and Blinken are concerned. This allows Netanyahu to wage a prolonged war, and, crucially, to massively increase the already considerable number of fatalities among Palestinians from curable disease, malnutrition, starvation, lack of access to medical care for chronic conditions, and other causes that are not included in death tolls.
This also illustrates the danger of the credulity of too many in the foreign policy community who were so quick to applaud Biden for changing his policy. It’s true the public pressure is having an effect, but it has not yet forced Biden to change his policy in a material way that would affect Israel’s behavior. His statement this week did not represent that shift, though it was at least an indication that sufficient pressure and enough Israeli obnoxiousness could bring it about eventually. The pressure must continue and increase, a fact that, while it may be lost on some in the DC foreign policy bubble, has not escaped those brave students and other protesters.
Exactly what happens in the seconds after a nuclear bomb is launched
Horror warnings about the impact of a nuclear launch haven’t stopped a select few leaders from threatening to unleash armageddon.
news.com.au, Alex Blair, 12 May 24
12,500.
That is the approximate number of nuclear bombs that exist on our planet today.
Nine countries, the US, India, China, Russia, France, the UK, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, have become the major players in the most powerful arms race in history.
Officials say the build-up of nuclear weapons arsenals is purely an act of deterrence, but even the slightest of miscues, like the famous 1983 false alarm that almost rang in armageddon, could spark a butterfly effect feared ever since Hiroshima.
The horrific details over what would happen following a nuclear launch have been discussed ad nauseam by humanity’s best minds, who have warned for decades that the destruction of civilisation could be sparked by the press of a button.
But this hasn’t stopped leaders from flexing their might through words. Pundits in Russia have regularly threatened their nation’s nuclear arsenal as Vladimir Putin pushes on with his now two-year “special military campaign”………….
North Korea has similarly flexed its growing nuclear arsenal to the world, boldly defending its right to govern its citizens how the Kim dynasty sees fit, a topic that regularly flares tensions with its closest neighbours and the West.
Despite years of international scrutiny, Kim Jong-un has continued missile tests into 2024, some of which hurtling dangerously close to Japan’s sovereign territory.
Analyst Annie Jacobsen, author of the newly-released book Nuclear War: A Scenario, has broken down the current state of geopolitics and the very real risk nuclear conflict could “end the world as we know it in a matter of hours”.
While there are powerful entities like the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs collaborating information over the number of weapons held by the major nuclear players, Jacobsen warns the actual tally could be way off the official estimate.
The CIA will tell you North Korea has 50 nuclear weapons,” she said in a recent appearance on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast.
“But some non-government organisations will tell you that number is as high as 130.”
The world nuke tally peaked in 1986 at a whopping 70,000. From there, nations moved to reduce the amount of planet-destroying armaments. But it only takes one to kick things off.
There is also an issue in where the nuclear material ends up, with plants becoming immediate targets for foreign enemies in the event of conflict.
“Where does all that nuclear material go?” Jacobsen continued. “There’s a plant in Texas call Pentax, that’s where they do that. Not a lot of people know about it. But it is almost certainly on everybody’s nuclear strike target list. Because can you imagine the mayhem that would ensue if you struck that?
“There’s just so many precariously dangerous situations. Anything that touches a nuclear weapon becomes radioactive, both literally and figuratively.”
Endgame
The moment the button is pushed, a lightning speed chain reaction involving “hundreds of thousands” of officials begins.
Jacobsen describes this as “the ticking clock scenario”.
“The way it begins, interestingly, is in space,” she explains.
“That is because the US has spent trillions of dollars in the past few decades to be aware of when anyone launches a missile.” ICBM nukes are specifically designed to cross oceans and strike foreign nations. While they have never been used, the time frame from initial launch to impact is chilling.
“It takes 30 minutes in three phases,” Jacobsen explains, using a hypothetical attack on the US to explain the process.
“The first phase, boost phase, takes five minutes. Midcourse phase, 20 minutes and finally terminal phase, 100 seconds.
“That’s from a launch pad in Russia, 26 minutes and 40 seconds. From Pyongyang, it’s 33 minutes.”
“These satellite systems in space can park above an enemy nation and watch for the hot rocket exhaust on a ballistic missile launch, which it can see in less than a fraction of a second.”
She explains there are systems working around the clock specialised at interpreting the data at lightning speed before ultimately making the most dystopian of calls to the most powerful man on the planet.
“It becomes simply a matter of minutes before the President is notified about this,” she continued. “Within 150 seconds, the systems know whether the missile is directed at us or not.
“Letting the President know that very soon he has to make a decision very soon about a counterattack.”
“We don’t wait to absorb a nuclear blow. We launch. The theory is that whoever is launching at the US will try and take out the nuclear silos so we can’t respond, ’so therefore we must respond’.”………………….
US nuclear industry clamors for waiver process details as Russian uranium ban looms
companies with enriched uranium contracts with Russia can seek to continue to receive their material .
Questions were raised during the meeting about whether the names of those receiving waivers would be made public
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/051024-us-nuclear-industry-clamors-for-waiver-process-details-as-russian-uranium-ban-looms Author, Andrea Jennetta William Freebairn 10 May 24
HIGHLIGHTS
DOE plans to issue notice on process shortly after bill enactment
Utilities worried about criteria for showing inability to obtain fuel
Waiver process important to entire industry, Centrus CEO says.
US nuclear operators and nuclear fuel market participants have asked a series of questions to the US Department of Energy in a meeting last week, eager to learn details of a system of waivers being developed in connection with the passage of a ban on Russian enriched uranium late last month. DOE officials, while guarded, told the industry it would be ready for speedy and reasoned adjudication of waiver claims, according to attendees.
The Senate unanimously approved the measure April 30, following passage of a similar bill in the House of Representatives in December. The ban takes effect 90 days after President Joe Biden signs the bill into law.
Under an as-yet disclosed waiver system, companies with enriched uranium contracts with Russia can seek to continue to receive their material by demonstrating they do not have viable alternate sources of fuel or that continued deliveries are in the national interest.
Two people who attended an April 30 meeting with DOE officials said the department indicated it will be ready to publish a Federal Register notice within 30 days of enactment of the legislation outlining the process for seeking waivers.
The legislation is designed to reduce US reliance on Russian uranium for nuclear fuel following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russia supplies about 20% of US reactor operators’ enrichment needs, although most utilities have sought to reduce their dependence on Russian state nuclear company Rosatom in recent months.
However, a utility fuel buyer said there was skepticism among some participants that the department would be ready, as there are myriad complexities around the process and timetables.
“They still don’t have a lot of answers,” the fuel buyer said.
Biden has not signed the legislation, which was sent by Congress to the White House May 8, according to one meeting participant. The bill becomes law if the president does not veto it within 10 days of formal receipt from Congress, whether he signs it or not, several meeting participants said.
Questions were raised during the meeting about whether the names of those receiving waivers would be made public, whether uranium coming into the country for fabrication into fuel and export out of the US would require or receive waivers and what criteria would be used to permit utilities to receive Russian fuel, the people said. All those who spoke about the meeting did so on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting and avoid hurting their relationship with the DOE.
The rapid timeframes involved raise questions as well, the fuel buyer said. “How are they going to do this on a 90-day schedule, when there are ships literally on the water” containing enriched uranium, the person said.
A uranium producer in attendance said DOE officials indicated they would seek to act as rapidly as possible for requests on material in transit or requiring a decision regarding short-term deliveries.
An industry official who attended the meeting said DOE indicated it would take a “relaxed approach, particularly over the next couple of years,” in approving end-user waivers. Still, the department was noncommittal in its plans, the person said.
DOE plans to request detailed information on why a delivery should be allowed, with information on the impact on the national interest as well as the potential challenges in securing replacement material, the attendees said. Utilities would need to show that inventories are not sufficient to replace the imported material, one of the people said. DOE would adjudicate those claims, this person said.
The uranium producer said the passage of the legislation offered miners a better option than the potential for executive action which the White House had indicated could take place should Congress fail to act. He said DOE in its meeting seemed unaware that the legislation was about to be passed by the Senate later that day, and so some of the department’s comments were guarded because officials did not know whether an executive order barring the imports or the language of the House legislation would prevail.
Centrus preparing for waiver submittal
The applicant for the waivers must be the importer of record, one person who attended the meeting said. This would mean that in the case of re-sellers of Russian enrichment services, such as Centrus, the re-seller would apply on behalf of customers, this person said.
Centrus and its predecessor companies have for several years purchased from Russia’s state-owned Tenex an annual quantity of Russian enriched uranium under a quota set by the Russian suspension agreement, then sold the LEU to utility customers.
“We obviously have all the intentions to apply for a waiver at the first opportunity,” said Centrus President, CEO and Director Amir Vexler in a first quarter earnings call May 8. “Yes, we’ve been preparing. We’re going to make use of this process, and it is extremely important, not only to Centrus, but to the industry here in the US.”
The company could find itself in a precarious financial position without access to enriched uranium to deliver to customers……………………………….
International impact
US utilities are not the only ones affected by the ban, several people said. Any foreign utility that has Russian enriched uranium delivered to a US fuel fabricator for re-export as fuel would also need a waiver, they noted.
DOE mentioned that utilities should be aware of at least one such pending case, which two people said is likely a reference to Mexico’s Comision Federal de Electricidad, which operates two GE-supplied boiling water reactors that get fuel from the US.
DOE officials reminded participants in the meeting that any process and all waivers will still have to comply with US sanctions requirements, one attendee said, and that waiver requests will have to take into account the availability of the American Assured Fuel Reserve, a stockpile of government-owned enriched uranium designed to protect nuclear operators from a disruption of nuclear fuel availability.
DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Energy Revolutions – time for a change
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2024/05/energy-revolutions-time-for-change.html
In this uncompromisingly radical Pluto book entitled Energy Revolutions, with the graphic subtitle Profiteering versus democracy, Dr David Toke argues that the energy crisis is an inevitable result of an industry run by and for corporate profit. He says ‘energy policy was never meant to favour sustainability or energy security – for decades, it has been shaped by corporate interests while hampering renewable alternatives. Now we suffer the cascading consequences’. He says there is an urgent need to radically increase state intervention, including public ownership, and deploy ‘energy democracy’ for the public interest.
However, he is not against market competition as such- it can speed change and help reduce costs. Thus, in his account of the early days of renewables, he says that, as a result of the adoption of Feed In Tariffs in the late 2000’s in Germany and elsewhere, markets were created that ‘meant that the wind and solar industries grew quickly. The costs of renewable energy plummeted, and today renewable energy is much cheaper than either fossil fuels or nuclear power. If things had been left as the anti-renewable incentive campaigners wanted, then of course the renewables industry would never have taken off. The world would be in a parlous position in terms of surviving the fossil fuel price spirals that we see in cycles (in both oil & natural gas price crises). Our ability to deal with the climate crisis would be almost destroyed’.
Toke though says that when markets are used to create monopolies, in pursuit of corporate profits and control, things go seriously awry- as we saw in 2022 and subsequently, with record profits being made by oil and gas companies. With energy prices escalating, Exxon made $55 bn, Shell $40 bn, Chevron $36.5 bn and Equinor $55 bn. Wind-fall taxes can claw back a tiny bit of this profiteering, but it is insignificant when you realise that, as Toke quotes an economist as saying ‘the oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years’. What’s needed is system change.
That of course is the familiar call of most radicals. Toke says, at present ‘the wealthy, who own the shares, get richer at the expense of ordinary people.’ In response, he says, while we can’t simply nationalise oil to solve this problem, since the compensation required would be huge, we can change the way the market works. Crucially, he says, ‘as the renewable energy revolution gathers pace, we need state intervention to ensure that the benefits of lower-cost green energy supplies go to the consumer & not the energy corporations’. In particular, ‘we need to extend government intervention & elements of state ownership of the retail energy supply sector to ensure that the consumer, not the big corporations, benefits from cheap renewable energy.’
The focus on ‘retail supply’ is linked to a proposed decentral shift away from seeing consumers as passive to one in which consumers may also be energy producers (via PV) and/or may also take an active role in managing their energy use (via DSM). Toke also sees them playing more of a role in shaping the system via an expansion of democratic participation, enabled by local energy co-ops, municipal projects & nationalisation of some of the energy systems. He says that public ownership ‘has an important role in delivering services in parts of energy systems where competition is itself either impossible or inefficient. It may be especially relevant to the retail electricity supply sector’. He adds ‘bringing in retail energy supply into public ownership should be cheap for the state to achieve since the companies involved have few tangible assets.’ But, he also looks to boosting competition ‘by the establishment of state companies to develop renewable energy alongside existing private companies’.
Some of this it may sound utopian or even naive, but Toke reminds us that the ‘alternative energy’ activists in the 1970s and 1980s ‘were seen as fringe oddballs by the energy mainstream. Today their vital role in developing niche renewable energy technologies and markets is airbrushed out of history since it contradicts the idea that big capitalism solves the big problems.’ Well yes, and now we live in a world in which renewables will soon dominate – supplying up to 100% of all global energy by 2050. However, as Toke says, it has to be done right. He provides us with, if not a blueprint of what to do, then at least a rough guide to the key political issues, with some very good insights on the situation in the UK, EU and USA. For example, it is amazing how expensive PV cells are in the US and how far France is behind on renewables due to its obsession with, now failing, nuclear.
In terms of technology choice, Toke backs most renewables strongly, though not all biomass, and seems convinced that domestic heat pumps are the best bet for using green power for home heating- whereas he says that green hydrogen, produced using renewable power, ‘needs to be used only for essential purposes, for example for storing renewable energy or for some industrial purposes for which electricity is not desirable. It should not be squandered in the provision of heating or cooling services’.
That’s now a common view: electric powered heat pumps are seen as much more efficient. Even if it does seem odd to abandon gas boilers and the existing gas pipeline system, which some wanted to repurpose for zero carbon green hydrogen use. Of course, some wanted to use fossil-derived blue hydrogen, a very different and very dire thing. But Toke notes that ‘the German coalition was divided when it came to debating a heating law about phasing out gas boilers in existing buildings. As part of a compromise, municipal authorities have been given the task of making plans for heat networks to be powered by large-scale heat pumps’. Well yes, as Toke admits, large heat pumps are more efficient. Although, dare I say, Combined Heat and Power plants, feeding heat nets and heat stores, can be even better and can help with grid balancing.
We can of course debate the pros and cons of each option and Toke takes us through some of the issues including, inevitably, nuclear, which he is clearly not fond of- not least since it is expensive and inflexible. Although his assertion that ‘once the current spurt of labour-intensive industrialism peters out in China, their drive in building nuclear power will fade, leaving nuclear in decline’, is maybe a bit too optimistic. Overall through, pronouncements like this aside, this is a good book if you want to get to grips with some of the key political and economic issues facing renewable energy and green politics- in a fast changing world.
The United States Is Expected to Announce a New $400 Million Package of Weapons for Ukraine
Associated Press | By Lolita C. Baldor and Matthew Lee, May 10, 2024, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/05/10/united-states-expected-announce-new-400-million-package-of-weapons-ukraine.html
WASHINGTON — The U.S. is expected to announce a new $400 million package of military aid for Ukraine on Friday, U.S. officials said, as Kyiv struggles to hold off advances by Russian troops in the northeast Kharkiv region.
This is the third tranche of aid for Ukraine since Congress passed supplemental funding in late April after months of gridlock. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had warned Thursday that his country was facing “a really difficult situation” in the east, but said a new supply of U.S. weapons was coming and “we will be able to stop them.”
According to officials, the package includes High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and rockets for them, as well as artillery, air defense and anti-tank munitions, armored vehicles and other weapons and equipment. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been announced. It will be provided through presidential drawdown authority, which pulls systems and munitions from existing U.S. stockpiles so they can be sent quickly to the war front.
Almost immediately after President Joe Biden signed the $95 billion foreign aid package, the Pentagon announced it was sending $1 billion in weapons through that drawdown authority,. And just days later the Biden administration announced a $6 billion package funded through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays for longer-term contracts with the defense industry and means that the weapons could take many months or years to arrive.
Russia has sought to exploit Ukraine’s shortages of ammunition and manpower as the flow of Western supplies since the outbreak of the war petered out while Congress struggled to pass the bill. Moscow has assembled large troop concentrations in the east as well as in the north and has been gaining an edge on the battlefield, Zelenskyy said.
Officials did not say if the latest package includes more of the long-range ballistic missiles — known as the Army Tactical Missile System — that Ukraine has repeatedly requested. The U.S. secretly sent a number of the missiles to Ukraine for the first time this spring and the White House has said it would send more. In one case, Ukraine used them to bomb a Russian military airfield in Crimea.
The new missiles give Ukraine nearly double the striking distance — up to 300 kilometers (190 miles) — than it had with the mid-range version of the weapon that it received from the U.S. in October.
China and the U.S. Are Numb to the Real Risk of War.
Like China, the United States is mired in jingoism and confusion. Like China, it has no idea what it would do if things go wrong.
With the 2024 U.S. presidential election heating up, the one thing every candidate, Democrat or Republican, has done is to show how tough they could get on China.
Like China, the United States is mired in jingoism and confusion. Like China, it has no idea what it would do if things go wrong. With the 2024 U.S. presidential election heating up, the one thing every candidate, Democrat or Republican, has done is to show how tough they could get on China.
The pair are dangerously close to the edge of nuclear war over Taiwan—again.
May 12, 2024, By Sulmaan Wasif Khan, the Denison chair of international history and diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/12/china-us-taiwan-strait-war-nuclear-weapons-military-biden-xi-history/
On the morning of April 5, 2023, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, met with then-U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Simi Valley, California. This was a meeting Beijing had warned against in the strictest of terms. It was therefore a meeting that both sides found necessary to have. China had to be shown that it could not dictate whom either Taiwan or the United States met with. On this, both Taipei and Washington were agreed.
China delivered on its promised forceful response by engaging in military drills and sending warships and planes scudding around Taiwan. The median line and Taiwan’s air defense identification zone were breached. One aircraft carrier, the Shandong, entered the waters just south of Japan. Violations of the “One China” principle, Beijing had to make clear, were not going to be taken quietly. And in seeking to make that clear, it deepened the risk of war.
This article is adapted from The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between by Sulmaan Wasif Khan,
Commentators dismissed Beijing’s response to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting as less intense than the one that had attended then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022. But the dismissal itself highlighted the gravity of the problem. A certain level of military activity had become normalized. It was as though the world now took for granted the presence of missiles and aircraft carriers, the shows of force that demanded a response in kind. The week after the meeting in California, the United States and the Philippines launched their largest joint military exercise to date. It was a way of showing China that there were other militaries that could operate in the region. The new normal meant more ships and planes operating in close proximity to one another, mutual recrimination, and mutual suspicion.
Beijing and Washington have become desensitized to the risk these circumstances pose. But in the militarization of foreign policy and the failure to grasp the full significance of that militarization, the pair are one accident and a bad decision removed from a catastrophic war. Mathematicians speak of the “edge of chaos”: the final point separating order from doom. A system operating at this edge has no room for error. This is where the accumulated weight of the past has brought the United States, China, and Taiwan. They walked right up to the edge of a war that could go nuclear several times in the past: in 1954-55, 1958, and 1996. Now, they seem to be living on that edge permanently.
In recent years, China’s policy has alienated Taiwan completely. As China has bullied, threatened, and displayed force at home and abroad, it has made unification unacceptable to much of the Taiwanese electorate. And it has enjoyed only mixed success in trying to isolate Taiwan diplomatically. It has managed to buy off many of Taiwan’s erstwhile allies, but its conduct over COVID-19 and support for Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine have cost it friends, too—and those former friends have turned to the island across the strait.
Since at least 2021, Taiwan has had a seemingly endless parade of visitors, from Germany’s education minister to Liz Truss, the former U.K. prime minister. In November 2021, the European Parliament sent its first official delegation to the island; the head of the delegation, Raphaël Glucksmann, told Tsai, “We in Europe are also confronted with interference from authoritarian regimes and we came here to learn from you.” In October 2022, Tsai received lawmakers from Lithuania and Ukraine; the former had recently established a representative office in Taiwan despite Beijing’s anger, while the latter was making a gesture of solidarity with a country that, unlike China, had been sharp in its criticism of Moscow. A Japanese parliamentary delegation that arrived in December 2022spoke glowingly of Tsai’s defense plans and emphasized Japan’s own determination to keep the status quo in the region from being “changed by force or unilaterally.” China has warned against or condemned many of these visits.
Beijing has only itself to blame for Taiwan’s strengthened diplomatic position. Its wolf warrior nationalism and reluctance to break with Moscow have cost it European support. If visits from foreign politicians were to translate into condemnation of China at the United Nations, Beijing could veto a Security Council resolution. In this case, like Russia, China would find itself a pariah state—and unlike Russia, China cares about how it is seen by the world. China’s own corrosive nationalism has eaten into its body politic, too It has not torn itself apart in a bout of political bloodletting, but it has certainly let loose the kind of jingoism that would allow that to happen. What it will decide to do in a crisis is uncertain. Beijing itself does not know.
The United States, meanwhile, seems intent on reviving a defense treaty with Taipei that it once spent more than a decade trying to break. Taiwan has become a means of showing China just how tough the United States can get. Washington is not clear on how getting tough will alter Beijing’s conduct, but “deterrence” is the concept invoked most often. A show of force, the thinking goes, will deter China from aggression. But what if deterrence fails? What if the show of force backs China into a corner from which it feels it has no option but to lash out? To this, Washington has few answers beyond preparing for war.
Some U.S. pundits have waxed lyrical about how they would fight a war with China. Taiwan, they opined, will be turned into a “porcupine” with hardened defenses. One former defense official suggested the use of “low-yield tactical nuclear weapons” in the event of a conflict with China. (The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki qualify as low yield.) The possibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin using such weapons sent shock waves of horror through the world, but the idea of employing them in a war with China became normal in some circles. There was no guarantee that, once the nuclear taboo was breached, the weapons would stay “low yield.” But the question of what would happen if the two powers escalated to higher-yield arms and plunged the world into nuclear holocaust has been left unresolved.
It is as though the United States is being haunted by all the ghosts of its long past with China and Taiwan, forcing it to relive questions it had once thought resolved. U.S. military leader Douglas MacArthur wanted to wage war against China in 1950. President Dwight D. Eisenhower considered using nuclear weapons against China in 1955 and 1958. Today, Washington abides by the “One China” principle, but it wants Taiwan to enjoy “self-determination.” It vows that it does not dispute the formulation that Taiwan is a part of China, but it will help Taiwan resist Chinese coercion. It wishes to promote Taiwan’s presence in international organizations, but it remains unwilling to recognize Taiwan itself. The United States has shifted from pure ambiguity to ambiguity with a tilt in favor of Taiwan—and it has done so because it decided China is an enemy.
Like China, the United States is mired in jingoism and confusion. Like China, it has no idea what it would do if things go wrong. With the 2024 U.S. presidential election heating up, the one thing every candidate, Democrat or Republican, has done is to show how tough they could get on China. Republicans vying for the nomination got in on the act early; former President Donald Trump has denounced French President Emmanuel Macron for “kissing Xi’s ass,” referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Joe Biden, with the power of the incumbent, has not stopped at rhetoric. Whether supporting a TikTok ban unless the app is sold or calling for increased tariffs on Chinese goods, his policies are calibrated to demonstrate toughness on China.
Taiwan’s own presidential elections, held on Jan. 13, showed just how deeply the island’s electorate had turned against unification. At first, William Lai, the candidate from Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), vowed not to alter the status quo, though he accused Beijing of doing so. Taiwan, he argued, was already sovereign. There was no need to change what worked. But his caution soon vanished. While campaigning, Lai defined success for Taiwan as its leaders being able to visit the White House. This was a gauntlet thrown down—Taiwanese officials are blocked from visiting Washington. The Biden administration immediately demanded an explanation. This was not, U.S. officials made clear, how the relationship worked. Where Tsai had been prudent, Lai was willing to push his luck.
The Kuomintang (KMT), the main opposition party, was not leaning toward Beijing, either. Its nominee, Hou You-yi, the mayor of New Taipei City, said that he would reject both “one country, two systems” and a formal move for independence, but that if Taiwan were attacked, he would face the challenge. Taiwan, according to Hou, needed to be ready to defend itself. On the crucial question of how to deal with China, there was little difference between the policies Lai and Hou espoused.
A third candidate, Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party, was calculatedly vague on China policy. His campaign made clear that he was depending on votes from traditional KMT supporters: those who would have favored a closer relationship with China. He claimed that he would find the middle ground between the KMT’s appeasement of China and the DPP’s provocation of it; he would make Taiwan a bridge for Sino-American communication rather than a front in a Sino-American war. How he proposed to do all this was left undefined.
Lai eventually won the presidency, but it was not the ringing triumph Tsai had won four years earlier. Lai scraped through with a mere 40 percent of the vote, his victory made easier by the fact that Hou and Ko had failed to join forces. As he prepares to take office on May 20, Lai faces a deeply divided, volatile populace and a legislature in which the DPP is bereft of a majority.
This is a point China has been quick to underline. The DPP, it huffed after the election, is not representative of “majority public opinion.” What is lost on Beijing is that the other candidates made clear that unification was not something they were willing to countenance either. Hou had made a point of not inviting Ma Ying-jeou, the last KMT member to serve as Taiwan’s president, to his rallies; he knew that to associate himself with Ma’s embrace of China would have doomed his candidacy. Beijing still does not understand Taiwan. Meanwhile, the United States continues to disavow support for Taiwanese independence while making plans for further delegations to the island. With the U.S. presidential election going into fifth gear, the risk of miscalculation will only rise.
At the edge of chaos, a single choice can make the difference between order and catastrophe. More than 80 years on from the Cairo Declaration, which held that Taiwan would be “restored to the Republic of China” at the end of World War II, we can see that there were myriad moments that could have yielded different outcomes, for better or for worse. If President Franklin D. Roosevelt had insisted on self-determination for Taiwan after World War II, if the Korean War had not happened, if Beijing had made “one country, two systems” work, if Taiwan had developed a nuclear weapon, if Pelosi’s plane had indeed been shot at—if someone had made a different decision at any of those moments, the world would be a radically different place.
When deterrence, toughness, and pride drive policy, the room for error diminishes to virtually nil. China, Taiwan, and the United States are at a point where the choices they make could spell the difference between peace and nuclear holocaust. Those choices are best made with the historical record—and all its unrealized possibilities—firmly in mind.
United States nuclear weapons, 2024
The current strategic nuclear war plan—OPLAN 8010–12—consists of “a family of plans” directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
Just like previous NPRs, the Biden administration’s NPR said the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners” and rejected policies of nuclear “no-first-use” or “sole purpose” (US Department of Defense 2022a, 9)
Bulletin, By Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight | May 7, 2024
The United States has embarked on a wide-ranging nuclear modernization program that will ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades. In this issue of the Nuclear Notebook, we estimate that the United States maintains a stockpile of approximately 3,708 warheads—an unchanged estimate from the previous year. Of these, only about 1,770 warheads are deployed, while approximately 1,938 are held in reserve. Additionally, approximately 1,336 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, giving a total inventory of approximately 5,044 nuclear warheads. Of the approximately 1,770 warheads that are deployed, 400 are on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, roughly 970 are on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 300 are at bomber bases in the United States, and approximately 100 tactical bombs are at European bases. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: director Hans M. Kristensen, senior research fellow Matt Korda, research associate Eliana Johns, and program associate Mackenzie Knight.
In May 2024, the US Department of Defense maintained an estimated stockpile of approximately 3,708 nuclear warheads for delivery by ballistic missiles and aircraft. Most of the warheads in the stockpile are not deployed but rather stored for potential upload onto missiles and aircraft as necessary. We estimate that approximately 1,770 warheads are currently deployed, of which roughly 1,370 strategic warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles and another 300 at strategic bomber bases in the United States. An additional 100 tactical bombs are deployed at air bases in Europe. The remaining warheads—approximately 1,938—are in storage as a so-called “hedge” against technical or geopolitical surprises. Several hundred of those warheads are scheduled to be retired before 2030 (see Table 1 on original).
While the majority of the United States’ warheads comprises the Department of Defense’s military stockpile, retired warheads under the custody of the Department of Energy awaiting dismantlement constitute a “significant fraction” of the United States’ total warhead inventory (US Department of Energy 2023b). Dismantlement operations include the disassembly of retired weapons into component parts that are then assigned for reuse, storage, surveillance, or for additional disassembly and subsequent disposition (US Department of Energy 2023b, 2–11). The pace of warhead dismantlement has slowed significantly in recent years: While the United States dismantled on average more than 1,000 warheads per year during the 1990s, in 2020 it dismantled only 184 warheads (US State Department 2021). According to the Department of Energy, “[d]ismantlement rates are affected by many factors, including appropriated program funding, logistics, legislation, policy, directives, weapon system complexity, and the availability of qualified personnel, equipment, and facilities” ……………………………………..
…………….. we estimate that the United States possesses approximately 1,336 retired—but still intact—warheads awaiting dismantlement, giving a total estimated US inventory of approximately 5,044 warheads.
Between 2010 and 2018, the US government publicly disclosed the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; however, in 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration rejected requests from the Federation of American Scientists to declassify the latest stockpile numbers (Aftergood 2019; Kristensen 2019a, 2020b). In 2021, the Biden administration restored the United States’ previous transparency levels by declassifying both numbers for the entire history of the US nuclear arsenal until September 2020—including the missing years of the Trump administration. . This effort revealed that the United States’ nuclear stockpile consisted of 3,750 warheads in September 2020—only 72 warheads fewer than the last number made available in September 2017 before the Trump administration reduced the US government’s transparency efforts (US State Department 2021). We estimate that the stockpile will continue to decline over the next decade as modernization programs consolidate the remaining warheads.
Following the Biden administration’s initial declassification in 2021, it has since denied successive annual requests from the Federation of American Scientists to disclose the stockpile numbers for 2021, 2022, or 2023 (Kristensen 2023d). A decision to no longer declassify these numbers not only contradicts the Biden administration’s own recent practices, but also represents a return to Trump-era levels of nuclear opacity. Such increased nuclear secrecy undermines US calls for Russia and China to increase transparency of their nuclear forces.
The US nuclear weapons are thought to be stored at an estimated 24 geographical locations in 11 US states and five European countries (Kristensen and Korda 2019, 124). The number of locations will increase over the next decade as nuclear storage capacity is added to three bomber bases. The location with the most nuclear weapons by far is the large Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Most of the weapons in this location are retired weapons awaiting dismantlement at the Pantex Plant in Texas. The state with the second-largest inventory is Washington, which is home to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific and the ballistic missile submarines at Naval Submarine Base Kitsap. The submarines operating from this base carry more deployed nuclear weapons than any other base in the United States.
Implementing the New START treaty
The United States appears to be in compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits. Although Russia “suspended” its participation in New START in February 2023, the United States publicly declared in May 2023 that it had 1,419 warheads attributed to 662 deployed ballistic missiles and heavy bombers as of March 1st, 2023 (US State Department 2023a). The United States initially said that it voluntarily released the numbers “[i]n the interest of transparency and the US commitment to responsible nuclear conduct.” However, the United States did not continue this practice beyond that initial exchange and has not published any aggregate numbers since May 2023 (US State Department 2023a)
The United States contends that Russia’s “suspension” of New START implementation is “legally invalid” (US State Department 2023c). In response, the United States adopted four countermeasures in 2023 that it claimed were fully consistent with international law 1) no longer providing biannual data updates to Russia; 2) withholding from Russia notifications regarding treaty-accountable items (i.e. missiles and launchers) required under the treaty; 3) refraining from facilitating inspection activities on US territory; and 4) not providing Russia with telemetric information on US ICBM and SLBM launches (US State Department 2023c).
The New START warhead numbers reported by the US State Department differ from the estimates presented in this Nuclear Notebook, though there are reasons for this. …………………..
Since the treaty entered into force in February 2011, the biannual aggregate data show the United States has cut its arsenal by a total of 324 strategic launchers, reduced deployed launchers by 220 and the warheads attributed to them by 381 (US State Department 2011). The warhead reduction is modest, only equivalent to about 10 percent of the 3,708 warheads remaining in the US stockpile. ………….
As of March 2023, the United States had 38 launchers and 131 warheads less than the treaty limit for deployed strategic weapons but had 119 deployed launchers more than Russia—a significant gap that is just under the size of an entire US Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) wing. So far Russia has not sought to reduce this gap by deploying more strategic launchers but instead has increased the portion of its missiles that can carry multiple warheads.
The New START treaty has proven useful so far in keeping a lid on both countries’ deployed strategic forces. But it expires in February 2026 and if it is not followed by a new agreement, both the United States and Russia could potentially increase their deployed nuclear arsenals by uploading several hundred of stored reserve warheads onto their launchers.
Nuclear Posture Reviews and nuclear modernization programs
The Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) was broadly consistent with the Trump administration’s 2018 NPR…………………………………
Just like previous NPRs, the Biden administration’s NPR said the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners” and rejected policies of nuclear “no-first-use” or “sole purpose” (US Department of Defense 2022a, 9)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In 2023, multiple governmental advisory commissions published reports intended to influence US nuclear posture. The Congressionally-mandated report on “America’s Strategic Posture,” published in October 2023, included a broad range of recommendations for the United States to prepare to increase the number of deployed warheads, as well as to scale up its production capacity of bombers, air-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear forces, and warheads (US Strategic Posture Commission 2023). It also called for the United States to deploy multiple warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal…………………………………. the Strategic Posture Commission report’s status as a bipartisan document has been particularly useful for nuclear advocates to push for additional nuclear weapons (Heritage 2023; Hudson Institute 2023; Thropp 2023).
While additional modernization programs are being discussed, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, delivered in 2023 more than 200 modernized nuclear weapons (B61–12 bombs and W88 Alt 370 warheads) to the Department of Defense (US Department of Energy 2024).
Nuclear planning and nuclear exercises
In addition to the Nuclear Posture Review, the nuclear arsenal and the role it plays is shaped by plans and exercises that create the strike plans and practice how to carry them out.
The current strategic nuclear war plan—OPLAN 8010–12—consists of “a family of plans” directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Known as “Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment,” OPLAN 8010–12 first entered into effect in July 2012 in response to operational order Global Citadel. ………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………. changes are evident in the types of increasingly provocative bomber operations over Europe, in some cases very close to the Russian border (Kristensen 2022a). In October 2023, for example, a B-52 bomber from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana participated in NATO’s annual nuclear exercise Steadfast Noon, and in March 2023 a nuclear-capable B-52 cut south only a few kilometers from the Russian sea border and then flew south near Kaliningrad (Kristensen 2023a; NATO 2023).
…………………US strategy has changed in response to deteriorating East-West relations and the new “great power competition” and “strategic competition” strategy promoted by the Trump and Biden administrations, respectively. They also illustrate a growing integration of nuclear and conventional capabilities, as reflected in the new strategic war plan. B-52 Bomber Task Force deployments typically include a mix of nuclear-capable aircraft and aircraft that have been converted to conventional-only missions. With Sweden joining NATO, US strategic bombers now routinely operate over Swedish territory: In August 2022, for example, two B-52s—one version that is nuclear-capable and one that is de-nuclearized—overflew Sweden, the first overflight since it applied for NATO membership in May 2022 (Kristensen 2022c)…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Land-based ballistic missiles
The US Air Force (USAF) operates 400 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs and keeps “warm” another 50 silos to load stored missiles if necessary, for a total of 450 silos. Land-based missile silos are divided into three wings: the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming; the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; and the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Each wing has three squadrons, each with 50 Minuteman III silos collectively controlled by five launch control centers. We estimate there are up to 800 warheads assigned to the ICBM force, of which about half are deployed (see Table 1, on original).
The 400 deployed Minuteman IIIs carry one warhead each, either a 300-kiloton W87/Mk21 or a 335-kiloton W78/Mk12A. ICBMs equipped with the W78/Mk12A, however, could technically be uploaded to carry two or three independently targetable warheads each, for a total of 800 warheads available for the ICBM force……………………………………………………………………………………….
Part of the ongoing ICBM modernization program involves upgrades to the Mk21 reentry vehicles’ arming, fuzing, and firing system at a total cost of nearly $1 billion (US Department of Defense 2023c, 32). The publicly stated purpose of this refurbishment is to extend the vehicles’ service lives, but the effort appears to also involve adding a “burst height compensation” to enhance the targeting effectiveness of the warheads (Postol 2014)………………………………………………………………………………. As part of the Mk21A program, Lockheed Martin was awarded a sole source contract in October 2023 amounting to just under $1 billion for the engineering and manufacturing of the new reentry vehicle (US Department of Defense 2023b). These modernization efforts complement a similar fuze upgrade underway to the Navy’s W76–1/Mk4A warhead.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The Air Force’s FY24 budget for ICBM Reentry Vehicles Research Development, Test & Evaluation Programs increased significantly from the previous President’s Budget……………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………….Non-governmental experts, including those conducting Department of Defense-sponsored research, have questioned the Pentagon’s procurement process and lack of transparency regarding its decision to pursue the Sentinel option over other potential deployment and basing options (Dalton et al. 2022, 4). Moreover, it is unclear why an enhancement of ICBM capabilities would be necessary for the United States. For instance, any such enhancements would not mitigate the inherent challenges associated with launch-on-warning, risky territorial overflights, or silo vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophes or conventional counterforce strikes (Korda 2021). Additionally, even if adversarial missile defenses improved significantly, the ability to evade missile defenses lies with the payload—not the missile itself. ………………………………………..
……………………………………………….The development of the Sentinel has also been marked by a series of controversial industry contracts, starting with the awarding of a $13.3 billion sole-source contract to Northrop Grumman in 2020 to complete the engineering and manufacturing development stage
…………………………………………..in early 2024, the Air Force notified Congress of a two-year delay in the schedule and an estimated 37-percent increase from the current cost target to at least $125 billion (Tirpak 2024). These amounts do not include the costs for the new Sentinel warhead—the W87–1—which is projected to cost up to $14.8 billion, or the plutonium pit production that the US Air Force and US Strategic Command say is needed to build the warheads (Government Accountability Office 2020).
…………………………………………The schedule and extreme cost overruns for the Sentinel program incurred a critical breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to conduct a root-cause analysis and renewed cost assessment before providing a certification to Congress that verifies the necessity and viability of the program no later than 60 days after a Selected Acquisition
…………………………………………………..Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics clarified that while the cost of the missile itself has increased, challenges with supporting infrastructure is the significant driver of schedule overrun, which also further impacts the overall cost (Tirpak 2024). In addition to an entirely new missile, the Sentinel program includes launch facility replacement and modifications (since the Sentinel may require a larger silo), new missile alert facilities, and new command and control facilities and systems—not to mention new training and curriculum for USAF personnel. Many of these delays are results of staffing shortfalls, clearance delays, IT infrastructure challenges, and trouble with supply chains on the part of Northrop Grumman (Government Accountability Office 2023a, 88)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines
The US Navy operates a fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), of which eight operate in the Pacific from their base near Bangor, Washington, and six operate in the Atlantic from their base at Kings Bay, Georgia……………………………………………………………………………………………..
Each submarine can carry up to 20 Trident II D5 sea-launched ballistic missiles
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Design of the next generation of ballistic missile submarines, known as the Columbia-class, is well underway.
………………………………………..the Navy’s fiscal 2024 budget submission estimated the procurement cost of the first Columbia-class SSBN—the USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826)—at approximately $15.2 billion, followed by $9.3 billion for the second boat (Congressional Research Service 2024, 9). A $5.1 billion development contract was awarded to General Dynamics Electric Boat in September 2017, and construction of the first boat began on October 1, 2020—the first day of FY 2021………………………………………………………..
…………………According to a June 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, “the program remains behind on producing design products—in particular, work instructions that detail how to build the submarine—because of ongoing challenges using a software-based design tool. These, in turn, contributed to delays in construction of the lead submarine” (Government Accountability Office 2023a, 160). The Navy is working to mitigate additional delays, but these constraints mean that the program is at significant risk of cost overgrowth and is very likely to suffer further setbacks………………………………………………………………………………..
Strategic bombers
The US Air Force currently operates a fleet of 20 B-2A bombers (all of which are nuclear-capable) and 76 B-52 H bombers (46 of which are nuclear-capable)……………………………………………………………Each B-2 can carry up to 16 nuclear bombs (the B61–7, B61–11, B61–12, and B83–1 gravity bombs)…………..An estimated 788 nuclear weapons, including approximately 500 air-launched cruise missiles, are assigned to the bombers, but only about 300 weapons are thought to be deployed at bomber bases (see Table 1). The estimated remaining 488 bomber weapons are thought to be in central storage at the large Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex outside Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The United States is modernizing its nuclear bomber force by upgrading nuclear command-and-control capabilities on existing bombers, developing enhanced nuclear weapons (the B61–12, B61–13, and the new AGM-181 Long-Range Standoff Weapon or LRSO), and designing a new heavy bomber (the B-21 Raider).
Upgrades to the nuclear command-and-control systems that the bombers use to plan and conduct nuclear strikes include the Global Aircrew Strategic Network Terminal (ASNT)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The United States was initially expected to produce approximately 480 B61–12 bombs, but in 2023 it announced that a small number of them instead will be produced as the B61–13, a gravity bomb with a much larger yield (US Department of Defense 2023e………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Air Force is also developing a new nuclear air-launched cruise missile known as the AGM-181 LRSO……………………………………………………. The LRSO will arm both the 46 nuclear-capable B-52Hs and the new B-21, the first time a US stealth bomber will carry a nuclear cruise missile. A $250 million contract was awarded to Boeing in March 2019
…………………………………………….It is expected that the Air Force will procure at least 100 (possibly as many as 145) of the B-21, with the latest service costs estimated at approximately $203 billion …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Nonstrategic nuclear weapons
The United States has only one type of nonstrategic nuclear weapon in its stockpile: the B61 gravity bomb. But it exists in several versions: ……………………………………………………. About 100 of these (versions −3 and − 4) are thought to be deployed at six bases in five European countries: Aviano and Ghedi in Italy; Büchel in Germany; Incirlik in Turkey; Kleine Brogel in Belgium; and Volkel in the Netherlands…………………………………………………………………
The Belgian, Dutch, German, and Italian air forces are currently assigned an active nuclear strike role with US nuclear weapons. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The United States withdrew nuclear weapons from the United Kingdom around 2007 after storing them at Royal Air Force (RAF) Lakenheath for several decades (Kristensen 2008). But increasing evidence over the past two to three years suggests that the United States may be returning its nuclear mission to UK soil (Korda and Kristensen 2023) (see Figure 3 on original)
……………………………………………………………In addition to the modernization of weapons, aircraft, and bases, NATO also appears to be increasing the profile of the dual-capable aircraft posture. NATO is now publicly announcing its annual Steadfast Noon tactical nuclear weapons exercise. For example, NATO described in 2023 that the exercise involved the participation of 13 countries and 60 aircraft including fighter jets and US B-52 bombers (NATO 2023)………………………………………………………………………………………………
This research was carried out with generous contributions from the New-Land Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, Longview Philanthropy, Ploughshares Fund, and individual donors.
References…………………………………………….. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-05/united-states-nuclear-weapons-2024/
South Korean state energy monopoly in talks to build new UK nuclear plant.
Kepco has held early-stage discussions with British officials over
mothballed Wylfa site. South Korea’s state energy monopoly is in talks
with the UK government about building a new nuclear power station off the
coast of Wales, in what could be a big boost to Britain’s plans for a new
nuclear fleet.
Kepco has held early-stage discussions with British
officials about a new facility at the Wylfa site in Anglesey, and a
ministerial meeting is expected this coming week, according to people
briefed on the matter.
In his March Budget, chancellor Jeremy Hunt
announced the government would buy the mothballed site and another from
Hitachi for £160mn. In 2019, the Japanese industrial group scrapped its
plans to develop a nuclear project at Wylfa, writing off £2.1bn in the
process.
Hunt’s move was designed to facilitate a fresh deal with a new
private sector partner to build a power station at Wylfa, which could boost
the government’s plans to replace Britain’s current ageing fleet of
nuclear power stations.
A consortium including US construction group
Bechtel and US nuclear company Westinghouse has already proposed building a
new plant on the Wylfa site using Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor
technology.
Another industry figure said Wylfa’s future would depend on a
decision by GB Nuclear, the government quango which now owns the site. GBN
could give the go-ahead for a large reactor or reactors at Wylfa or judge
that it is a suitable site for building a cluster of new “small modular
reactors”.
Supporters of SMRs claim their modular design would make them
relatively quick and cheap to build. “Wylfa is now the next priority site
for the UK so it makes sense that Kepco are interested, but they just need
GBN to make a decision soon about whether they do want a traditional
nuclear power station there,” the figure said.
One senior Korean
government official struck a cautious note about the prospect of Kepco
buying the site, saying that building nuclear power stations in the UK was
“difficult”.
FT 12th May 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/3404a203-158e-4fe1-9f5d-f5fb64032ffc
Fixation on UK nuclear power may not help to solve climate crisis
Waste and cost among drawbacks, as researchers say renewables could power UK entirely
Paul Brown 10 May 24, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/fixation-on-nuclear-power-in-uk-may-not-help-to-solve-climate-crisis
In the battle to prevent the climate overheating, wind and solar are making impressive inroads into the once dominant market share of coal. Even investors in gas plants are increasingly seen as taking a gamble.
With researchers at Oxford and elsewhere agreeing that the UK could easily become entirely powered by wind and solar – with no fossil fuels required – it seems an anomaly that nuclear power is still getting the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies to keep the ailing industry alive.
Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are backing as yet unproven small modular reactors (SMRs) as an indispensable part of the answer to the climate crisis and are running competitions to get this industry started. These reactors, from tiny ones of the type that power nuclear submarines, to scaled-up versions that can, in theory, be factory produced and built in relays to provide steady power, are all still in the design stage.
As the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States points out, whichever model is chosen they have all the drawbacks of existing nuclear power stations; expensive, even without cost overruns, and the still unsolved waste problem. The biggest disadvantage, the group says, is that even if the technology worked it would be too little, too late, to keep the climate safe.
Nano Nuclear wants to reinvent the nuclear power business—but it could take a while.
The company is trying to not only reinvent reactors but also reinvent fuel production and transportation. It’ll take several years yet before we know if it works.
Fast Company, BY TIERNAN RAY 10 May 24
“…….. This week, a two-year-old company, Nano Nuclear Energy, is expected to go public on Nasdaq with a plan to solve what ails the nuclear power business.
The company, officially based on the 30th floor of an office building in New York’s Times Square, is a “distributed” company, meaning, its 27 staff members live and work here and there. The company is run by CEO James Walker, a physicist who was previously a nuclear engineer at Rolls-Royce.
Walker has gathered a mish-mash of engineering talent and former bankers to build what’s called a “microreactor,” also known as a “small modular nuclear reactor,” which can be hitched to a tractor trailer and driven around the country to wherever it is needed—be it a remote mining site that needs power, or an AI data center.
Walker has also assembled a star-studded advisory board that includes former U.S. presidential candidate and NATO commander Wesley Clark, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who hold stock options in the company.
The premise of Nano Nuclear is the same that propels competitors such as privately held Terrapower and X-Energy: conventional nuclear energy is too costly…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Nano Nuclear and competitors have jumped on the DOE’s effort to make “advanced” reactors, things so compact they can ride around on a semitruck and be parked where needed. They produce far less energy, on the scale of tens of megawatts, but also can cost far less, claims the DOE, and they can be run with minimal safety oversight because of their advanced design.
Just about every company in nuclear power is working on such innovation, including Westinghouse, Terrapower, X-Energy, and publicly traded NuScale of Portland, Oregon. Walker and team contend, however, that those companies are going about it all wrong. They haven’t done enough to solve the main limiting factor of small reactors, adequate fuel supply, the enriched uranium that creates the nuclear chain reaction.
“Large SMR companies have raised billions of dollars for development but have been stalled by the lag in developing or acquiring the fuel necessary to advance their reactors,” states Nano Nuclear’s IPO prospectus. The fuel is critical because small reactors need uranium with more of the uranium isotope U235 in order to be so compact. It’s the density of power per unit of volume of fuel that lets microreactors be made very small.
The DOE has been fostering collaboration among many parties on what’s called “High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium,” or, HALEU, which is uranium enriched more than the 5% standard in the industry, as high as 20%. Without enough HALEU, many of the advanced reactors being developed “do not have the fuel supply infrastructure necessary to succeed,” claims Nano Nuclear.
To secure HALEU, Nano Nuclear has started two subsidiaries, one to produce HALEU uranium, HALEU Energy Fuel Inc., and another to transport it in large quantities, Advanced Fuel Transportation, Inc. The company even has a subsidiary to mine for uranium.
You could say Nano Nuclear has formed a vertically integrated nuclear firm, going from uranium mining through fuel production and trucking to supplying the finished reactor.
Will it work? We won’t know for some time. The company’s two proposals for microreactors, “Zeus” and “Odin,” are not even built. The company has no revenue at present. Nano Nuclear hopes to have one of the reactors in production by 2030. The company apparently hasn’t begun the licensing process with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency, which can take several years. The fuel manufacturing, moreover, is not expected to be operational until 2027……………………….
Nano Nuclear nabbed almost ten million dollars with the IPO, but it expects to need “a significant infusion of additional capital for successful deployment, even following this offering.” Just the Zeus and Odin reactors alone are expected to cost four million dollars to develop. That means potential dilution of investors by lots of follow-on stock offerings.
The tiny staff of 27 is not entirely full-time. All the senior executives, including Walker and CFO Jaisun Garcha, are working as independent contractors, and they all have jobs running other companies.
You can’t scrutinize Nano Nuclear’s technology plans to know if they make sense because Nano Nuclear has filed no patent applications, instead preferring to keep its intellectual property secret.
The rest of this year, Nano Nuclear expects to use its IPO money to buy another company in order to get into the nuclear consulting business. The idea is to get some paying work in order to subsidize Zeus and Odin.
For a long time, then, Nano Nuclear is destined to be a far-less-interesting kind of company that simply has a great idea for the revival of the nuclear industry. https://www.fastcompany.com/91122128/nano-nuclear-reinventing-nuclear-power-business
Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest
media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.
As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.
The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful
The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed
JONATHAN COOK, MAY 10, 2024, First published by Middle East Eye
As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.
The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.
Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.
This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US.
According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police.
In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”
One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.
The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man.
Yes, Joe Biden.
Law-breaking Biden
The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged.
Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there.
Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.
The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.
Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes.
Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law.
At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank.
There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.
Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.
Protest quicksand
In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq.
And it is all happening in a presidential election year.
The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.
The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month.
When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.
The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah.
The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.
But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.
Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.
Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.
The head of Unicef pointed out last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”
A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years.
As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.
The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.
Feeling ‘unsafe’
The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval.
Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/bidens-war-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=144499809&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
1.This Month
Small Nuclear Reactors Education Task Force: https://stop-smrs.weebly.com/bulletins.ht
24 May. The Vow from Hiroshima film is coming on PBS, this month https://www.thevowfromhiroshima.com/
3 June – FILM. SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy
6-7 July A summit and a rally in Washington D.C. https://nonatoyespeace.org/
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