nuclear-news

Manipulators Understand That Narrative Control Is Everything

Caitlin Johnstone, Apr 22, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/manipulators-understand-that-narrative?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=195035259&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Former Israeli intelligence officer Ella Kenan was seen at a recent pro-Israel conference saying she runs an online influence operation that works with “communities of over sixty thousand people around the world that make our content viral” to manipulate public discourse and “serve the narrative” of Israel.

I’ve been assured that this never happens and that it’s antisemitic to say it does, but okay sure. Let’s move on.

“We also create content for non-Jewish influencers that collaborate with us,” Kenan says in a clip I first saw circulated by Information Liberation’s Chris Menahan. She then boasted of coining the slogan “Hamas is ISIS” and circulating it with such success that Joe Biden eventually parroted it in a speech.

“I offered ‘Hamas is ISIS,’ and I offered why, and I gave a short 101 on how we can garner attention and traction around that narrative, and that worked,” Kenan explained. “So in three to four days it became the most viewed narrative online. It became viral for almost three months around the world, in some places even more, and it even got to Biden’s speech. I also, you know, I can’t show you but I have so many videos, posts of Palestinians or Hamas officials like Abu Obeida responding to that narrative, influencing them.”

Do you notice how often she repeats the word “narrative”? This is because all manipulators understand that narrative control is everything.

It reminds me of a 2024 McCain Institute conversation between then-Senator Mitt Romney and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken where they discussed the need to ban TikTok in order to control the narrative.

After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

There’s that word: narrative, narrative, narrative. That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything.

This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality.

They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans.

They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens.

They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and online influence operations like the one run by Ella Kenan. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives.

They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens.

They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and online influence operations like the one run by Ella Kenan. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives.

Spiritual maturity means moving out of our hypnotic fixation on mental narrative and bringing our attention from the babbling mind chatter to rest in the wonder of the senses, where material reality can get a word in edgewise. As humanity matures toward becoming a conscious species, we will hopefully find ourselves less transfixed by mental narrative, and therefore less easily roped in by manipulators who rely on the stickiness of human head noise to get us to buy into their stories.

April 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Sanctity Lost: Even Neocon Pantheon Declares US a ‘Rogue Superpower’

Well, it’s true: the US is a “rogue superpower”……….. because the US has abandoned even the pretext of ‘just’, righteous, or moral actions in the pursuit of outright predatory and misanthropically destructive global conquests far removed from any even remotely sensible connection to the US homeland or the interests of the American people. It is a rogue superpower because it has embraced “might is right” in a most cynical, transactional, and unapologetically unctuous way under the leadership of an unprecedented cast of unqualified (Hegseth a Field Grade, Trump a reality TV star, etc.), circus-like hucksters 

 It is a rogue superpower because it has totally abandoned the will of the people in pursuit of the financial interests of a tiny cabal of gangsters, themselves in thrall to an overseas mafia.

The era of American exceptionalism in the eyes of its most fanatic imperialists has drawn to an end.

Simplicius, Apr 03, 2026, https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sanctity-lost-even-neocon-pantheon?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1351274&post_id=192813600&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Two weeks ago we had seen arch-neocon Robert Kagan making surprising comments to fellow neocon grandee Bill Kristol about Israel essentially being a burden to the US. This came as a shocking canary-in-coalmine moment signaling a kind of revolt amongst the deep state against the excesses of the current administration.

Now Kagan himself has penned an oped in The Atlantic outright calling the US a rogue state:

We know when such figures come out in this way, it represents true alarm behind the scenes rather than any kind of genuine benevolent empathy for the rest of the world. No, these people are alarmed that their empire has overstepped its boundaries, bit off more than it can chew, and is in a precipitous downfall.

Being that these figures have built their entire lives, careers, and oeuvres on hypocrisy, greed, contradiction, and other modalities of sin and deceit, it is not surprising that in the very opening paragraph of Kagan’s polemic, we’re immediately met with a rich hypocrisy:

Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality—driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s. Even success against Iran will be hollow if it hastens the collapse of the alliance system that for eight decades has been the true source of America’s power, influence, and security.

In Kagan’s twisted neocon worldview, it is China and Russia that are the “expansionist” powers when China has not done a single thing to any country—all of its ‘imagined’ schemes against Taiwan lie in the propaganda mills of the US military-industrial-complex. The US is currently occupying dozens of nations, has invaded several in the past year alone, is openly threatening to collapse or invade others like Cuba—but it is China that is ‘expansionist’. In Russia’s case, it is expansionist NATO that—urged on by the US itself—has been gobbling up the entire post-Soviet sphere to plop itself threateningly on Russia’s border, which caused Russia to finally react in Ukraine.

Though Kagan calls the US a ‘rogue superpower’, he does not actually liken its faults to those of Russia’s or China’s, which in his mind are far more pernicious. In reality, throughout the piece you realize he’s framing the term ‘rogue’ not to mean something particularly bad or unjust, but simply a state acting against the interests of the global deep state as represented by NATO and other US “allies”. In short, Kagan is arguing for the continuation of the Western Hegemonic Order and his critiques of the US amount to surface-level disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy, rather than the true deprecations aimed at the ‘bad guy’ states of Russia and China.

At least beneath the obligatory bias, Kagan remains lucid on the purely mechanical breakdown of the conflict thus far:

Some analysts have suggested that Russia and China have failed to come to Iran’s defense, and that this somehow constitutes a defeat for them, because Iran was their ally. But the Russians are helping Iran by providing satellite imagery and advanced drone capabilities to strike more effectively at U.S. military and support installations. And China has not suffered a loss in Iran insofar as Iran has granted safe passage to its oil shipments.

But he again quickly demonstrates the blatant hypocrisy his ilk have hung their hats on for generations:

More important, in Russia and China’s hierarchy of interests, defending Iran is of distinctly secondary importance; their primary goal is to expand their regional hegemony. For Putin, Ukraine is the big prize that will immeasurably strengthen Russia’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. For China, the primary goal is to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, and anything that degrades America’s ability to project force in the region is a benefit. Indeed, the longer American attention and resources are tied up in the Middle East, the better for both Russia and China. Neither Moscow nor Beijing can be unhappy to see the war drive deep and perhaps permanent wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

The real showstopper, however, comes in the next few paragraphs, wherein Kagan effectively reveals the true secret reason behind the US’s perennial aggression against Iran, and again implies—as he did last time—that Israel is at the center of it:

The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled.

Read that last part again because his point is not immediately clear without clarification: The only reason the US has terrorized Iran in the hopes of stopping it from developing nuclear weapons is not because those weapons would pose a threat to the US itself, but because a nuclear Iran would have credible deterrence in stopping the US and Israel from engaging in unprovoked aggression against Iran, the likes of which they are presently carrying out.

Can you say ‘Wow’?

Let’s read that again to make sure we’re not going crazy.

“What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled.”

But it gets worse.

April 8, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

The “Nuclear Energy Paradox”- Investigating nuclear imaginaries in energy projections

Science Direct,
Energy Research & Social Science

Volume 135, May 2026, 104676

Fanny Böse ^ab,  Alexander Wimmers ^bc, Björn Steigerwald ^bc, Christian von Hirschhausen ^bc

Highlights

• •Decades of high-growth projections for nuclear power from (inter-)national agencies and from academia can be observed
• •Actual development shows divergence between projections and reality
• •A recurring pattern of overestimation can be identified, which we call the “nuclear energy paradox”
• •The paradox is rooted in nuclear imaginaries like the plutonium economy and/or hopes of mass production of, e.g., SMRs
• •Recent energy scenarios are still driven by narratives that are based on certain nuclear imaginaries

Abstract

Current energy projections often envision an expansion of nuclear capacities to decarbonize future energy systems. However, this contrasts with the historic and current status of the nuclear industry, marked by techno-economic challenges for both light-water and non-light-water reactor technologies.

Regardless, projections of strong nuclear growth have persisted since the 1970s. This paper investigates the “nuclear energy paradox” which shows the recurring divergence between historical projections and actual developments.

A data compilation of long-term energy projections from international organizations such as the IAEA and the IEA as well as energy system models like GCAM and MESSAGE, as used in the IPCC, reveal a recurring pattern of high-growth projections for nuclear power. Such projections often rest on techno-economic assumptions such as substantial cost reductions.

We propose the concept of nuclear imaginaries to show that these assumptions are embedded into techno-economic visions of nuclear power development, which shape model assumptions and narratives. The historic perspective helps to show that nuclear imaginaries may never materialize and remain in a hypothetical state for decades. Our findings support decision-makers in making more informed decisions and urge for caution when interpreting energy scenarios and projections, especially for nuclear power.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6. Conclusion

Our analysis reveals that the “nuclear energy paradox” exists, meaning that throughout history, strong nuclear growth projections and accompanying imaginaries of nuclear futures have been published across different international bodies (e.g., IAEA, IEA, and IIASA), seemingly disconnected from socio-technical realities.

………………………………………..originate from authors who had assumed technological progress in favor of nuclear and were skeptical regarding the cost development of renewables, thereby implicitly supporting a vision of a plutonium economy with a vast expansion of fast reactors ………………..

Overall, the historic analysis of energy projections and scenarios shows that envisioned nuclear futures may never materialize. The nuclear energy paradox illustrates how technological expectations remain unmet, even on a recurring pattern, across several organizations. Recent scenarios with high-nuclear futures are still created, although historical development and actual trends strongly contrast them. Also, national agencies, in particular the US DOE, promote nuclear expansion similarly to the 1970s to advocate for the tripling of nuclear capacity. However, the nuclear energy paradox shows the hypothetical state of nuclear power in energy projections…………………………

negotiations about energy futures can be observed, in which nuclear is promoted by certain actors, and energy scenarios are used for scientific justification. The paradox shows that nuclear imaginaries have not materialized for decades and thus should be treated with caution. ……………………….https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626001477

April 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

On lost Iran war Trump mimicking Hitler at end of WWII

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glen Ellyn IL 26 Mar 26

Listening to President Trump on his Iran war achievements brought to mind the ravings of Hitler hunkered down in his Berlin bunker as the Soviets closed in. He demanded his generals move imaginary armies to crush the invaders to stave off defeat and achieve victory.

Trump lost his war on Iran in the first week when the 90 million Iranians did not overthrow their Islamic government in capitation to the US, Israeli attackers. Dropping thousands of bombs on them had the opposite effect…they coalesced around their leaders to support a ferocious counteroffensive. US bases in the region are being decimated along with Israel from an endless supply of missiles and drones stockpiled for years in preparation for inevitable criminal war from America and Israel.

Trump declared on war day 25 Tuesday “We’ve won this. This war has been won.” He also said Iranian leaders have given him “a very significant prize related to the Strait of Hormuz.” Speculation is that Iran’s ‘prize’ was simply letting one Iraqi oil tanker pass thru the closed Strait of Hormuz. But that rumor Trump trumpeted has not been confirmed and likely never occurred. A third bizarre Trump statement is that Iran called him to negotiate the war’s end…presumably on Trump’s terms.

One has to go back 81 years to Hitler’s Berlin bunker ravings to hear such delusional statements from a world leader trying to imagine away his loss in a war only an unhinged leader would have started.

Where is the 25th Amendment when we desperately need it?

March 31, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

The Innate and Inseparable Ties Between Nuclear Weapons and Energy

Why are these statements significant? Because there is a long track record of attempts by the nuclear industry and advocates for nuclear power to erase or at least camouflage the connection between the technologies used to develop nuclear energy and the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

Understanding these connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy helps explain why governments around the world continue to support nuclear power despite the multiple problems associated with nuclear power. On top of huge amounts of funding, ultimately from the public, that is made available to nuclear enterprises, the linkage with nuclear weapons is also used to control information flows and exclude outsiders from policy discussions, thus weakening democracy

M.V. Ramana, February 24, 2026, https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/24/the-innate-and-inseparable-ties-between-nuclear-weapons-and-energy/

What do Canada’s retired general Wayne Eyre and Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman share in common? Answer: In their own ways, both have inadvertently warned the public about the deep relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

The former’s warning came earlier this month, when the retired general told a conference in Ottawa that when it came to acquiring nuclear weapons, Canada should keep its “options open,” pointing out that Canada had “a good nuclear enterprise” including “the civilian infrastructure” and “the scientists.” Eyre, who served as Canada’s chief of the Defence Staff from 2021 to 2024, argued, “Let’s just have the conditions in place so that if we decide to go that way, we can do it in shorter order than some other countries who have no nuclear enterprise. It’s all about hedging\.” Part of the strategy he recommended was to invest in aerospace and missile technology.

Canadian government officials were quick to state that the country remained opposed to acquiring nuclear weapons, and others pointed out that such acquisition wouldn’t be so simple. But Eyre was pointing to a deep truth—Canada’s nuclear energy program would facilitate the building of nuclear weapons, should the country decide to do so. Indeed, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, highlighted this fact in its editorial (“The strong civilian nuclear industry could provide a springboard if ever Ottawa chose to go that way”) even as it argued against Canada building nuclear weapons.

This fact is equally applicable to all countries that acquire the technology to generate nuclear power: they would be closer to having the capacity to make nuclear weapons than if they had not built nuclear plants.

The last time this connection was so prominently broadcast was back in March 2018, when Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS News about Saudi Arabia’s equivalent hedging strategy. Earlier, the country had announced that it was interested in deploying nuclear power plants for “peaceful purposes,” but during the interview, MBS pointed to the possibility that Iran might develop a nuclear bomb, and declared that Saudi Arabia “will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Effacement Efforts

Why are these statements significant? Because there is a long track record of attempts by the nuclear industry and advocates for nuclear power to erase or at least camouflage the connection between the technologies used to develop nuclear energy and the capacity to build nuclear weapons. An early example of the attempt to make the two pursuits seem unrelated was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which the President announced at the United Nations General Assembly in December 1953 with the stated aim of hastening “the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of the people and the governments of the East and West.”

The Atoms for Peace speech came just seven years after the 1946 Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy that explicitly warned that “the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.” The intervening years witnessed a dramatic shift in the policy of the United States to build a larger and more destructive nuclear arsenal, including hydrogen bombs, and, simultaneously, a growing movement for nuclear disarmament and peace. The US government was also involved in an effort to induce private companies to build nuclear plants, in part to advance military capabilities. Eisenhower’s speech is an attempt to paper over the contradiction between a claimed interest in peace while developing nuclear capabilities.

In subsequent decades, the nuclear industry and its supporters have resorted to simply denying any connection between nuclear power and weapons. For example, Ted Nordhaus, who recently praised Trump’s policies to promote nuclear energy in the Washington Post, exhorted people to “stop confusing nuclear weapons with nuclear power.”

Overlaps

There are five overlaps between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons: technical, historical, geographical, personnel and institutional.

Let us start with the technical. The greatest challenge to developing a nuclear arsenal is obtaining the necessary fissile materials, namely highly enriched uranium or plutonium. These materials are “the key ingredients in nuclear weapons.” Neither is found in nature.

Uranium occurs naturally in two main varieties, called isotopes, the heavier uranium-238 and the lighter uranium-235.The latter is the one that can sustain a chain reaction, which is the basis of both nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs. But the concentration of uranium-235 in nature is usually too low for such a chain reaction to occur. Whether it is to make nuclear weapons or to use as nuclear fuel in most common nuclear power plants, the uranium-235 concentration must be “enriched,” from 0.7 percent to 3 to 5 percent for most nuclear power plants and ideally around 90 percent for nuclear weapons. One technical overlap between the processes used to produce nuclear weapons and generate energy is that the facilities used to produce low-enriched uranium fueling nuclear power plants can be modified to produce weapons-useable highly enriched uranium, a technical detail that is at the heart of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

Plutonium, too, is not found in nature but is produced when uranium fuel is irradiated in a nuclear reactor. In order for this plutonium to be used either as nuclear reactor fuel or in nuclear weapons, it must first be separated from uranium and other chemicals in the irradiated fuel through a chemical process called reprocessing.

Historically, many countries built their first nuclear reactors to produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. The United States, for example, built reactors in Hanford to produce plutonium, and the first uses for the plutonium thus produced were the nuclear weapon tested in New Mexico in July 1945 and the bomb dropped over Nagasaki.

There are some countries, such as Israel, that only operate nuclear reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. That is rare. Which points to the geographical connection between nuclear weapons and energy: a significant overlap between the countries that have built nuclear power plants and those that have nuclear weapons. If one looks at the 413 nuclear reactors listed as operational by the International Atomic Energy Agency as of February 2026, 279 of them are in countries with nuclear weapons. If one adds countries that are part of military alliances with nuclear-weapon states, such as members of the NATO alliance, then the overlap is overwhelming.

There is also an overlap in the training needed to have personnel who can design and operate nuclear power plants and who can produce fisile material for nuclear weapons. Examples include Pakistan and Iran, both of which received training for scientists and engineers from the United States.

Munir Ahmed Khan, who was responsible for launching Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, explained it thus:

“The Pakistani higher education system is so poor, I have no place from which to draw talented scientists and engineers to work in our nuclear establishment. We don’t have [a] training system for the kind of cadre we need. But, if we can get France or somebody else to come and create a broad nuclear infrastructure, and build these plants and these laboratories, I will train hundreds of my people in ways that otherwise they would never be able to be trained. And with that training, and with the blueprints and the other things that we’d get along the way, then we could set up separate plants that would not be under safeguards, that would not be built with direct foreign assistance, but I would now have the people who could do that. If I don’t get the cooperation, I can’t train the people to run a weapons program.”

Finally, there is a deep connection between institutions that oversee nuclear energy and weapons programs, as exemplified in the United States by the Department of Energy (DOE). The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a semi-autonomous agency within DOE that is responsible for maintaining the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the United States and for “modernizing” it (namely, to make new weapons). The DOE also promotes nuclear energy through multiple funding mechanisms. There is also a significant overlap between the private corporations involved in building nuclear power plants and servicing the nuclear weapons industry.

Significance

Understanding these connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy helps explain why governments around the world continue to support nuclear power despite the multiple problems associated with nuclear power. On top of huge amounts of funding, ultimately from the public, that is made available to nuclear enterprises, the linkage with nuclear weapons is also used to control information flows and exclude outsiders from policy discussions, thus weakening democracy.

The expansion of nuclear energy also thwarts efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons. It will not be possible to eliminate nuclear weapons without policies and resource-allocation decisions that are grounded in the reality that nuclear energy cannot be separated from nuclear weapons.

M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia and the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India.

February 27, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment