nuclear-news

MAGA Melts Down Over Trump Giving Qatar a Military Base in U.S.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Qatar would build an Air Force base in Idaho.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, October 11, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/post/201647/maga-donald-trump-qatar-military-air-force-base

The Trump administration’s approval of a Qatari air force base in Idaho isn’t popular with either of America’s political parties.

Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the forthcoming Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in America’s heartland Friday morning, thanking the Middle Eastern nation for playing a “core part” in negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. Mountain Home Air Force Base will host Qatari F-15 fighter jets and pilots, and allow Qatari forces alongside American troops for F-15 pilot training.

The move, which stands in stark contrast to the president’s “America first” agenda, seriously rattled some of Donald Trump’s most outspoken supporters.

“Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans,” posted far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has operated as Trump’s informal “loyalty enforcer” since August. “I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026. I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis.”

“This is where I draw the line,” she wrote.

Other conservatives were left bewildered by the seemingly nonsensical decision.

“What’s the strategic rationale for this? Either ours or Qatar’s?” posted the National Review’s Noah Rothman. “You could rattle off all the problems/risks we’re inviting easily. But I have no idea what the steelman case for this would be? I’m sure we don’t need to import any more Qatari covert assets into this country.”

And still others pointed out the inconsistent hypocrisy of the administration’s policies.

“Joe Biden was criticized for a Chinese balloon flying over our airspace,” wrote GOP consultant Mike Madrid. “They’re giving Qatar an entire f’ing air base.”

Dan Caldwell, who was forced out of the DOD during Hegseth’s Signalgate disaster, wrote on X that the joint air force operation was being blown out of proportion.

“The freak out around this is of course totally unwarranted since this is actually a pretty common practice with countries that buy and operate a lot of U.S. military aircraft. Singapore has a similar facility and detachment for its F-15 training unit at this very same airbase,” Caldwell said.

But even beyond the Air Force base, Qatar appears to have bought itself a very sweet spot in Trumpworld. Just months ago, Qatar solidified a deal with the Trump Organization to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. The tiny nation also bestowed a wildly controversial super luxury jumbo jet on to Trump, all in an apparent attempt to shore up its relationship with the U.S.’s notoriously flighty leader.

Those transactions began to pay off earlier this month, when Trump signed an executive order that pledged to give the tiny, energy-rich, non-NATO ally the same level of protection from the U.S. as some of America’s most powerful allies.

October 13, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump dreams of nuclear as he axes grid projects

By FRANCISCO “A.J.” CAMACHO , 10/06/2025, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2025/10/06/trump-dreams-of-nuclear-as-he-axes-grid-projects-00594623

The Trump administration is wiping out projects meant to ensure the reliability of the electric grid — while pinning many of its promises of energy affordability on a nuclear moonshot.

The moonshot includes a goal to make three advanced reactors go critical by July 4, 2026. A prime player is the nuclear startup Oklo, which the White House is promoting as central to its aims of powering artificial intelligence and energy-sucking data centers, as I wrote in a recent deep dive.

Meanwhile, the administration is rolling back funding for power transmission projects that energy planners call essential to grid reliability as electricity demand rises. The Department of Energy’s latest plans to cancel $8 billion in clean energy funding include more than two dozen grid improvement projects, including a $464 million grant for Minnesota to build a transmission line that would deliver 28 gigawatts of power to the Midwest, write Josh Siegel, Kelsey Tamborrino, Jessie Blaeser and James Bikales.

In short, the Trump administration is cutting support for projects based on existing technology that would get more low-cost renewables on the grid, while doubling down on expensive — even speculative — nuclear power. Nuclear is a rare exception to the Trump administration’s fealty to fossil fuels.

As Zack Colman and Catherine Allen write today, states that rely heavily on wind and solar power typically have lower power costs than the national average. Nuclear remains expensive, with small modular reactors such as the one Oklo is pursuing still unproven commercially in the U.S. Oklo’s reactor doesn’t even exist yet — federal regulators rejected its first application.

Oklo maintains that its “fast reactor” technology can be cheaper, faster and safer to deploy than existing nuclear reactors. (The technology’s fundamentals have been tested with mixed results in labs across the globe and are commercially used in Russia.) CEO Jacob DeWitte said he has not been in touch with Energy Secretary Chris Wright — who once sat on Oklo’s board — since Wright joined the Cabinet.

Nuclear ‘meme stock’?

Former Obama-era Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Allison Macfarlane has called Oklo’s regulatory record “extremely frustrating,” adding that regulators “asked [Oklo] questions over and over. They never got answers.”

Even so, Oklo executives have secured federal pilot project awards, stood beside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and broken ground on a would-be reactor on DOE land in Idaho. (They may even get access to plutonium fuel reprocessed from the nation’s weapons stockpile, as Zack wrote last week.) That’s a level of White House backing that other companies with plentiful regulatory approvals and proven commercial deliverables aren’t getting. Democrats have pointed to Oklo’s ties to Wright as one potential explanation.

Some financial analysts and industry observers compare Oklo’s $138 share price to meme stock, saying it has gone viral regardless of its fundamental value.

The grid’s nuts and bolts

All of this is happening as grid operators warn of a widening gap between available power and surging electricity demand from AI.

Trump agencies have eliminated tens of billions of dollars in clean energy and climate funding in total, write Zack and Catherine, echoing investor and industry anxieties from the 2024 election cycle. In July, DOE canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for a transmission line that would bring 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy in the Midwest to dense population centers in the East.

The clawbacks could add up to higher utility bills, said Rob Gramlich, president of the consulting firm Grid Strategies.

“Whether one loves or hates wind and solar, they are what most utilities are relying on to provide large amounts of low-cost power and some amount of firm capacity for the next few years,” Gramlich said.

October 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The U.S. is now a fascist state. What Trump’s new order on domestic terrorism really means.

Richard J Murphy, 3 Oct 2025

Fascists mean what they say. Donald Trump has now issued NSPM-7, a presidential order that redefines dissent as terrorism and authorises the state to treat opponents as enemies. From Stalin’s Article 58 to the Nazi Malicious Practices Act, history shows what happens when repression becomes law. We need to face facts: the US is very rapidly sliding into full-blown fascism — and the UK could follow.

And that future is dystopian. Dissent is recast as terrorism in Trump’s world. This order makes that idea law, and terrorists are now to be eliminated by the US military, as he told them  in a conference when he assembled 700 or more generals and declared that they would now be fighting terrorism in the cities of the USA.

In effect, Trump is saying that there is a civil war to be waged in the USA now against what he calls the domestic terrorist threat, but which doesn’t exist.

The truth is that the USA is now a fascist authoritarian state, and we need to take seriously what he’s saying because, as Chris Hedges put it, “Fascists mean what they say”.

This memo, this order, signed by Trump, starts with the words  ’Heinous assassinations and other acts have dramatically increased’. He lists Charlie Kirk’s murder, an attack on the Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 and recent attacks on ICE,  the Customs Enforcement Agency in the USA, that is expelling people from the country.

He claims that these are the basis for the terror that he is talking about. But in a country where, frankly, violence is normalised, and death on the streets is not uncommon, to pretend that this is the case is just wrong. He’s trying to build a highly selective, distorted, and self-serving story about left-wing terror, for which there is almost no evidence whatsoever. But as a consequence, he’s criminalising dissent.

Anti-fascism is now defined as terrorism.

Opposition to expulsions by ICE and opposition to patriarchy, or to his idea of empire, is defined as violent revolution.  Anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and campaigns for gender equality – all these are branded as extremist. And truth becomes whatever he, as the arbiter of power, declares it to be.

In this situation, the law is inverted.  Instead of being a mechanism that defends our freedoms, the law becomes a weapon of repression. This order dictates that the Department of Justice seek to prosecute people who oppose what Trump is trying to do with maximum charges.

There is an instruction that the  Internal Revenue Service of the USA, the equivalent of HM Revenue and Customs in the UK, should strip the tax status of suspected groups, and that would include NGOs of the sort that campaign in the UK with regard to human rights,  or even universities that teach courses that suggest that people have the right to dissent.

The agencies of the USA are authorised to interrogate and detain people just because they don’t agree with Trump.

Justice in this world becomes a means of persecution, and we’ve been here before, of course. There are massive historical parallels to what Trump is now doing.

Stalin had Article 58 in his penal code. It was a catchall for counter-revolutionary activity, and literally millions of people died as a result of being prosecuted under Article 58. Any form of dissent basically gave rise to their execution.

The same thing happened in  Nazi Germany. There was the Malicious Practices Act of 1933, the very first act right at the beginning of the Nazi era that made it illegal to criticise the Nazi government, its leaders or its policies, and which allowed for punishment by arrest and internment in concentration camps like  Dachau, which was in suburban Munich.

Trump’s memo – his order – fits exactly the same pattern. It’s vague and sweeping, and it’s designed to criminalise opposition, but without precisely saying what anybody will have done wrong, except to offer dissent.

This is, in effect, a declaration of preemptive war. What the order says is that a new organisation,  the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, or the JTTF for short, must disrupt and dismantle networks of opposition to what Trump is trying to achieve.  That’s not based on evidence of crimes, but on the basis of people’s associations or their free speech or their ideas. Financial networks, NGOs and universities are all specifically targeted by this. This is the policing of thought.

And behind  all this, there is a very obvious ideology. A Christian nationalist worldview drives this agenda.

Those who support LGBTQ+ rights or who are indeed members of the LGBTQ+ community, people who are secular humanists or immigrants, all of them are labelled as deviants. Science and reason are replaced by biblical dogma, and patriotism is twisted into theocratic authoritarianism.

This has a paranoia behind it. Indeed, there is a paranoia that is gripping the elite in America. Narcissists and conspiracists are imagining that there are enemies everywhere to what Trump is proposing to do and what they wish to happen.

Pseudo-democracy is being created. Pseudo-courts, pseudo-media, pseudo-citizens, people who will, in fact,  support the lies that maintain the Trump regime, and I rightly call it a regime and not an administration, and these lies replace facts.

Loyalty is replacing law.

Liberal institutions are being hollowed out.

Rights are being reduced to privileges and are being revoked at will, and hope and silence will ensure that the repression spreads.

And all of this happens whilst we try to look the other way. And that is the big threat of this moment.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “Universal innocence gives rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you. Maybe it will all blow over”, he said.

But it won’t. This is real. Fascists should lay out in advance what they intend to do, and then they do it, and that is what is happening in the USA.

This will happen. People will disappear. This is not a future danger. It’s here and now, and the decree that puts it into place already exists.  The bars to freedom are being literally built before our own eyes at this moment, and democracy can’t survive if the opposition to it is redefined as terrorism.

So, where are we? Let’s face the facts.  Fascism cannot be reasoned with. It must be confronted. And hope is most definitely not enough. And silence is complicity.

Solidarity and resistance are essential, even though that does inevitably involve risk. Making this video involves risk. If these measures become the norm in the UK as well, I will, of course, be identified as one of the threats.

But we have to defend civil liberties, truth and institutions now and challenge our government to act to do so, or we will follow the path of the USA and head down the direct route to both fascism and everything that  follows from it, including the internment camps, which I am sure will be sprouting up soon in the USA and not just for those who are scheduled for deportation because they come from an ethnic minority.

We have to isolate the USA.

We have to call out what’s happening.

We have to say we object.

Our governments must decide whether they can any longer align with a country which is so openly fascist.

We need to come to the point where we say, “This is not acceptable.”

We need to say, “This is a country now built on lies, peddling myths and untruths and oppressing what is real.”

We need to support independent journalism, which there still is in the USA, but which is under enormous threat.

And we need to support those who will stand up for democracy.

We need to demand accountability.

And we need to stand up for what was put in place after World War II,  which was the structure of human rights, which our mainstream political parties in the UK, including the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, both now question, even though this structure was put in place as a result of the influence of Winston Churchill, who wanted to make sure that never again would human rights be threatened by fascists. But they are, and our politicians are letting that happen.

We have to take action before the iron bars of fascism slam the door shut. That’s the risk that we face, and our politicians have to rise to the challenge, or we’re all in very deep trouble. The US is already a fascist state. We could be too. That’s what we’re up against.

What do you think? There’s a poll below. Do you think the US has now moved into fascism? Do you think that the UK could follow in the same way? Are you willing to take a stand? Or will you stand by the wayside? We are at a point where we have to decide.

Please think about what you are going to do.

October 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The Ultimate Test of Allegiance

3 October 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Peter Brown, https://theaimn.net/the-ultimate-test-of-allegiance/

Watching American politics from afar, it’s often easy to get lost in the noise and drama. But sometimes, a fundamental issue cuts through the static – one that should alarm every citizen and international onlooker alike. What I see now is a direct challenge to one of the most sacred principles of their republic. To see that foundational principle now being tested is, frankly, chilling.

The bedrock principle of the American military is its oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” This sacred commitment is deliberately to an idea, a set of laws, and a nation – not to a person. Yet, they now face the unsettling prospect of a commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, who has consistently demonstrated that his primary demand is personal loyalty.

This creates a terrifying binary choice for the armed forces, with monumental repercussions for the republic.

Scenario One: They Pledge Loyalty to Him

If the military and its leadership were to prioritise loyalty to the president over loyalty to the Constitution, the very foundation of their democracy would crack. The armed forces would be transformed from a guardian of the state into a potential tool of a single leader. Orders that test constitutional boundaries would go unchallenged. The principle of civilian control of the military would remain in letter, but be utterly corrupted in spirit, becoming personal control of the military. The chain of command would exist not to execute the law, but to execute the will of one man.

Scenario Two: They Refuse

If the military holds fast to its constitutional oath, the result would be a crisis of a different kind. A president demanding personal fealty would inevitably view any constitutional resistance as disloyalty. We could see the politically charged dismissal of principled military leaders, creating a “Saturday Night Massacre” scenario within the Pentagon. This would shatter morale, politicise the most respected institution in the country, and create a dangerous rift between a president and the very forces tasked with protecting the nation.

This is not a partisan issue; it is a foundational one. The immense power of the U.S. military must never be contingent on a personality. The terrifying truth of the current moment is that they are forced to contemplate a scenario where the ultimate check and balance – the military’s refusal to follow an unlawful order – could be triggered, with consequences that would ripple through history.

The men and women in uniform swear an oath that ends with “So help me God.” The question they must all ask is: what happens if their commander-in-chief asks them to break it?

October 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Theatre of the absurd

Roswell, 2 Oct 25 https://theaimn.net/theatre-of-the-absurd/

The headliner, of course, was the Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump. But this was not a presidential address; it was a campaign rally in search of an enemy. Instead of a coherent strategy, the assembled warriors were treated to the familiar Trumpian symphony of digressions, personal boasts, and factual free-association. While the apocryphal tale of a president explaining the melting point of aluminum is a perfect metaphor, the reality was often just as bewildering. This is the man who once claimed that fallen soldiers were “suckers” and “losers” – an hallucination that surely left the Army Chief of Staff staring blankly at his shoes.

The spectacle of the world’s most powerful military being led by a man who treats complex briefings like open-mic night is comedy enough. But every great act needs a sidekick. Enter Pete Hegseth, the cable news warrior turned unofficial advisor, who stepped in to provide the second act of this two-part farce.

If Trump was the master of ceremonial confusion, Hegseth was the sergeant of petty discipline. His message to these titans of modern warfare? Shave.

Yes, shave. While the world smoldered, the sage counsel from the sidelines was that the solution to modern warfare’s challenges lay not in advanced cyber strategy or diplomatic finesse, but in a closer shave. Draped in the language of “warrior culture” and a fight against “wokeness,” Hegseth’s prescription was the ultimate reduction of military virtue to a matter of grooming. It was a disrespect so profound it looped back into comedy. These are men and women who have borne the unimaginable weight of sending troops into battle; to imply they lacked the basic discipline to manage their own facial hair was not just an insult – it was a joke.

The true comedy of this entire spectacle was not in any single gaffe or ridiculous order. It was in the devastating contrast. It was the sight of a room filled with the heirs to Patton and Nimitz being lectured on reality by a man who seemed to have learned his history from a cereal box, and then being scolded on personal hygiene by a commentator playing soldier.

They were called to Washington to confront the nation’s enemies, only to find that the real absurdity was already in the room. The mission, it turned out, wasn’t in some distant desert or contested sea lane. The mission was to survive an administration that confused the Situation Room for a green room and treated its most decorated leaders like unruly recruits. It wasn’t just a failure of policy; it was a masterpiece of political theatre, a comedy of errors where the stakes just happened to be the security of a nation.

(Meanwhile, on another planet):

“The generals in the audience today praised my speech and said they haven’t heard anything better since General Patton, but said mine was more inspiring”

October 2, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment