The five countries that could go nuclear next – and how worried we should be

Arms control deals between the great powers are breaking down. Now other nations are looking for radical security solutions

iNews 15th July 2026, Kieron Monks Foreign news and feature writer

As wars and predator states reshape the world order, fears are growing that a new nuclear arms race is already under way.

Agreements between the great powers over the control of nuclear weapons are breaking down. Middle powers, from South Korea to Saudi Arabia, are considering radical solutions to their security concerns.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which binds 190 countries to the status quo of restricting nuclear weapons to the handful of states that already possess them, has largely held for a generation. North Korea is the only new nuclear power of the 21st century.

Dr Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher into weapons of mass destruction at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), noted a rise in “magic wand thinking”, with several governments openly discussing nuclear development. “There is this idea that nuclear weapons just work automatically to protect you, when the reality is more complicated,” he said.

John Erath, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington DC, said factors such as Russia’s nuclear threats and China’s expanding nuclear arsenal made this a more dangerous era for proliferation control.

While he did not expect a country to cross the threshold in the near future, one new nuclear nation could trigger a flood. “If Iran were to build a nuclear weapon, I believe several other countries would as well,” he said.

Here are the countries that are among those most likely to join the ranks of nuclear powers…

South Korea

Seoul has lived under threat from its nuclear northern neighbour for decades within a still-unresolved frozen conflict that dates back to 1950.

In 2023, the then president Yoon Suk-yeol – now mired in legal trouble over a failed coup – warned that South Korea could rapidly develop its own nuclear weapons if Pyongyang’s threats became “more serious” – a position that reflected public opinion and the country’s capabilities.

Taehwa Hong, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the country was a “plausible candidate” to join the nuclear club, more so for the US downsizing its military presence there.

“The drivers are real,” said Hong, who is working on a book about South Korean strategy. “Public support for an independent arsenal has run at 70 to 80 per cent for over a decade, Korea has a world-class civil nuclear industry, and confidence in US extended deterrence has been eroding under America First pressures.”

“But the restraints are equally real. Weaponisation would require NPT withdrawal, expose one of the world’s most trade-dependent economies to sanctions, strain the very alliance it is meant to compensate for, and risk a proliferation cascade running through Japan.”

The most likely scenario is for Seoul to approach the nuclear threshold through peaceful enrichment of nuclear fuel without crossing it, the analyst said. But that could change if the US withdraws more forces or its “nuclear umbrella” from the country, or in a scenario of China attacking Taiwan

Poland

Poland’s President, Karol Nawrocki, said in February that he would support the development of an independent nuclear deterrent. “The path toward a Polish nuclear project, in full respect of all international regulations, is a path Poland should pursue,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by the liberal Prime Minister, Donald Tusk – usually a fierce opponent of Nawrocki. Polls have shown a majority of public opinion supports Poland having its own nuclear weapons outside the US umbrella.

Dr Jakub Bordio, a professor of political science at the University of Wroclaw, said these were unprecedented developments driven by a sense that the “international security architecture is developing, from our perspective, in the wrong direction”.

Iran …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Turkey.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Saudi Arabia ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://inews.co.uk/news/world/five-countries-go-nuclear-how-worried-4635284

July 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel And The United States Are Merging Their Militaries. Here’s Why.

“From aid to partnership”, the US and Israel are set to become even more united in genocide

While the initial bill, the “United States-Israel FUTURES Act,” failed as a standalone bill, the core provisions have been included in the NDAA. This aims to “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation” between the US and Israel, led by an “executive agent” decided by the US Defense Secretary.

This merger would integrate the United States and Israeli occupation militarily, including “data fusion”, “network integration”, research and development, weapons and bio-manufacturing, and collaboration with AI, cyber, and quantum machine learning technologies. While the Israeli occupation forces and US military are already deeply connected and share many of their genocidal tactics, this represents a significant entanglement of the two most belligerent and murderous militaries in the world.

Nuvpreet Kalra, July 15, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/15/israel-and-the-united-states-are-merging-their-militaries-heres-why/

In June 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote to Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of California, saying that “the time has now arrived [for Israel] to move from aid recipient to partner” with the United States. Yesterday, on Fox News, Netanyahu again repeated the proposal to move “from aid to partnership“.

What Netanyahu proclaims is at the core of the proposed “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, which has been included in a section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that seeks to push the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. This proposal to the annual military policy bill aims to essentially merge the Israeli and the US militaries.

In 2008, the US passed a law requiring it to protect Israel’s “military edge” against other countries in the region. The US is required to give Israel at least $3.8 billion a year in military funding until 2028. Israel has always been a major priority of the United States – this only makes that clearer.

This new integration differs from the way the US engages with its other allies. While NATO countries and partners share a degree of military integration with global weapons supply chains, intelligence sharing, military bases, and more, this removes the limitations in existence for military cooperation. Already, the US war drive through NATO has impacts across society beyond what might be recognised as purely military-related, given the military-industrial complex and integration of the US military in all aspects of life. In this case, the merger will deepen ruptures across the political, social, and economic system as the United States moves closer to its proxy. The main beneficiaries of this will be the weapons companies that profited immensely from and have made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible, as they enter into new seamless contracts.

Israel is increasingly viewed across the world, and within the United States, as a pariah state. In the US, 60% of adults have an unfavourable view of Israel. This push to further integrate with Israel puts the US on the line in an attempt to ensure the continuation and longevity of the settler colonial project. By entrenching the US military with Israel’s own, it provides a layer of protection that goes even further than the impunity that has given Israel full rein to commit a holocaust in Gaza and further colonisation of the occupied West Bank. This integration will mean that Israel is given unfettered support to carry out its genocidal trajectory for the total colonisation of Palestine, inhibiting any future presidents from changing this relationship, if that were to ever occur.

This is the US empire defending itself, as the zionist state becomes isolated, by trying to make its proxy appear more robust and independent, while maintaining its unbreakable connection to the core. This is a clear response to the massive movements that have erupted across the world for nearly three years in opposing Israel’s genocide and the role of countries in facilitating it. The US is, in a way, absorbing Israel to provide the legitimacy being chipped away at internationally and domestically, ending the narrative opposition to unlimited foreign aid to Israel, which has garnered bipartisan support.

Israel is occupying at least 60% of Gaza. Palestinians are being pushed into a shrinking concentration camp, where they are bombed every single day and refused aid during what is described as a ceasefire. For US taxpayers, this merger would put even more of our money into funding this horrific genocide.

This NDAA is dangerous. Through the US-Israeli integration, it would facilitate more deadly technology, more weapons for genocide, and make it nearly impossible to sever support for Israel by the US. Through the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, it would funnel money out of welfare into more war and violence across the world. For the sake of humanity, we have to dismantle this apparatus of death that is the US empire, which is in a perpetual, ever-growing state of war to maintain its system of exploitation and plunder.

Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s digital content producer. She completed a Bachelor’s in politics and sociology at the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Internet Equalities at the University of the Arts London. As a student, she was part of movements to divest and decolonize, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups. Nuvpreet joined CODEPINK as an intern in 2023 and now produces digital and social media content. In England, she organizes with groups for Palestinian liberation, abolition, and anti-imperialism.

July 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Time for all US service personnel in Middle East to disobey illegal Trump orders to wage criminal war on Iran

Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 19 July 26

Eight months ago, six US Congresspersons, all former military or intelligence community members, issued a video urging current service members to disobey illegal orders that might be issued by President Donald Trump’s administration.

They stated “threats to our Constitution are coming from right here at home,” and repeatedly urged the military to “refuse illegal orders.” “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law, or our Constitution. Know that we have your back… don’t give up the ship.” They did not specify the illegal orders referred to but it was assumed they were Trump’s illegal orders for service personnel to obliterate little unarmed boats in the Caribbean imagined to be bringing drugs into the Homeland.

But the six didn’t have current military personnel backs. The six shut up when none of the other 529 congresspersons joined them in doing the principled thing of demanding military not engage in Trump administration war crimes whether they be bombing little unarmed boats, bombing imagined bad guys in Somalia 75 times in 2026, killing over a hundred Venezuelans to snatch Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife for a show trial in America.

Worst of all, the Silent Six remained mute when Trump ordered his war fighters to launch his criminal war on Iran that may plunge the world into recession if not depression. Every bomb, every missile they drop on Iran emanates from an illegal, indeed criminal order that kills mostly civilians in America’s lost cause to destroy Iran at the behest of Israel.

After 39 days of murderous bombing that killed thousands, Trump cried ‘uncle’ knowing he’d lost, forcing his negotiated a ceasefire. He thought he could salvage victory with a blockade of Iranian ports but that failed just as spectacularly. So he ordered his war fighters to attack again, except this time their targets were civilian infrastructure, obvious war crimes to any war fighter with a functioning moral compass.

The men and women carrying out these illegal orders from war criminal Trump and his unhinged defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dishonor their uniform. They are not serving their country. They are serving the war criminals that should be in the dock at The Hague, not in the White House and the Pentagon. And the phony Silent Six and their 529 fellow congresspersons doing nothing to end America’s criminal Iran war blowing up the Middle East, the world economy, possibly even unleashing nuclear weapons, are too busy scooping up Israel Lobby and US weapons makers’ money to advise military personnel to disobey illegal, criminal orders.

We need a massive military personnel sit down strike in the Middle East to end this madness and bring Trump and Hegseth to justice.

July 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

AI and the absurdity of nuclear deterrence

July 14, 2026, https://www.icanw.org/ai_and_nuclear_deterrence?utm_campaign=trinity_anniversary_2026&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ican

What if algorithms don’t feel fear? Nuclear deterrence isn’t a military capability. It’s a means of communication, intimidating the opponent’s mind, making them feel afraid. As AI edges into nuclear systems, it exposes the paradox at the heart of nuclear deterrence.

Artificial intelligence is changing how governments approach national security. It is reshaping intelligence analysis, early-warning systems, and military decision-making. Its growing role in the nuclear realm has sparked fears of a future in which machines decide to launch nuclear weapons.

That future is not here. No government or strategist is currently advocating that AI take charge of nuclear launch decisions. There is strong international agreement that these decisions must stay under human control.

But that misses the deeper issue. AI is already being woven into nuclear-related systems. AI is used in the military domain to identify missile launches, analyse sensor data, and model escalation. These integrations expose something that has always been true, nuclear deterrence has never been stable or responsible. The idea of responsible management of a genocidal capability, has always been an illusion. Nuclear deterrence relies on fear, perception, and moral contradiction. Increasing the speed of automation in these systems does not offer stability, it makes them more dangerous.

The Creeping Integration of AI

Currently AI applications are built to assist human decision-makers, not replace them. They filter data, flag threats, and support commanders under extreme time pressure. But even when humans keep final authority, automation reshapes how decisions get made. It determines what information appears, how it gets prioritised, and how fast a response is expected.

As reaction times shrink, the risk of catastrophic miscalculation grows. In a crisis, machine-generated assessments add urgency. Humans must respond to systems they cannot fully understand or verify in real time. As more nuclear-armed states fold AI into their command, control, and intelligence networks, the risk of unpredictable interactions between competing automated systems rises. These systems are also vulnerable to hacking and hallucinating and other interference.

AI magnifies the central weakness of deterrence, that it depends on fragile assumptions about rationality, perception, and control.

The Myth of Rational Control

For decades, nuclear deterrence has been sold as rational management, a balance of terror held steady by calculated threats. In reality, it is psychological theatre. It works by trying to shape an adversary’s behaviour through fear and the threat of annihilation. The whole logic of deterrence lives in the human mind.

Artificial intelligence breaks that logic. Algorithms cannot be coerced, bluffed, or frightened into restraint. They can be manipulated, fed false data, deceived, or trained to fail. That is a serious problem in its own right. But it is a different problem. It is not the manipulation deterrence relies on: intimidating a population, or impressing a leader’s mind, through shows of nuclear force. Code has no psyche. It cannot be impressed by posturing.

We are not yet in an era of fully automated nuclear decision-making. But the trajectory is clear. As AI increasingly mediates how information is processed and framed, the psychological foundation of deterrence starts to erode. The more automation shapes perception, the less room remains for the human uncertainty that deterrence theory depends on.

Automation also sharpens the dangers already built into deterrence: overconfidence, misperception, and compressed decision-making. A commander who trusts an algorithm may act faster, or more decisively, than one who trusts their own judgment. The apparent gain in control is an illusion. AI accelerates the instability already built into the system.

Deterrence has survived on luck, not logic.

What AI reveals is not a new danger. It is an old one, made visible. Nuclear deterrence has never been rational, predictable, or safe. History shows this. Deterrence doctrine did not prevent nuclear war. Luck did, along with individual decisions to defy protocol and err on the side of caution. AI now strips away the myth of “strategic stability” and shows the system for what it is: a gamble with humanity’s survival.

Policy Implications

Keeping nuclear launch authority under human control is important, and widely supported. But human control alone cannot make nuclear weapons safe. Nuclear history is full of near-catastrophic accidents, long before AI entered the picture. Transparency about how AI is used in nuclear systems is urgently needed. International dialogue should continue including at the UN General Assembly.

The goal should not be to make deterrence “AI-proof.” It should be to confront the fact that deterrence has always been technically unmanageable, strategically overestimated, and morally indefensible. Its risks cannot be automated away, because they are built into the system itself.

AI does not offer a new path to stability. Even committed defenders of deterrence would concede that much. What it offers instead is a stark reminder: the stability deterrence promised was illusory from the start. The only reliable way to prevent nuclear catastrophe, AI-driven or human-driven, is to eliminate these weapons, in line with international law and humanitarian principles.

This is why the humanitarian argument at the heart of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) matters more, not less, in the age of AI. The catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear detonation do not change because a machine helped trigger it. No AI system can contain radiation, feed a starving population after a nuclear famine, or undo the collapse of a climate. The case for prohibition was never about how a weapon might be launched. It was, and remains, about what happens after. States should treat AI integration not as a reason to modernise deterrence, but as further evidence that security strategies must rely less on nuclear weapons, not more. That means investing in disarmament, not automation; in verification and transparency, not faster decision cycles; and in the TPNW’s normative and legal framework as the route out of a system that was never under control to begin with.

AI makes visible what has always been true

Artificial intelligence does more than raise the risk of nuclear use. It acts as a mirror, reflecting the instability and moral absurdity of a system built on the threat of annihilation.

Deterrence operates in the adversary’s mind. Even its most faithful advocates must admit that its logic collapses the moment that mind becomes a machine. AI makes visible what has always been true: there can be no psychological deterrence without psychology, and no responsible way to manage weapons designed for mass extinction.

The response to the AI-nuclear weapons debate should not be new layers of technical control. It should be to question whether these weapons can ever be controlled at all. The danger is not only a future where machines decide to launch nuclear weapons. It is a present where anyone still can.

July 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US industrial base is becoming stronger for wartime production, study finds

By Michael Peck, 13 July 26, https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/07/13/us-industrial-base-is-becoming-stronger-for-wartime-production-study-finds/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=c4-overmatch

As recent conflicts consume weapons at a ferocious rate, America’s defense industrial base is becoming more prepared to sustain a major war, according to a new report.

“The trends are moving in the right direction,” Jerry McGinn, who co-authored the study for the Center for Strategic and International Analysis think tank, told Defense News.

However, the study — described as a progress report on reforms to the defense manufacturing and acquisition system — still found numerous problems with ramping up and sustaining wartime production.

For example, “according to several measures — manufacturing lead times, critical munitions and materials stockpiles, and supply chain security — the U.S. industrial base has a long way to go to achieve resilience,” warned the analysis by CSIS’s Center for the Industrial Base.

CSIS did find measurable improvements since November 2025, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to “transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing.”

Hegseth also promised to “inspire American industry to become a wartime industrial base that focuses on speed and volume.”

Most striking is the number of new companies in the defense field.

“Roughly 10,000 new firms have entered the market in the past two years and nontraditional companies received over $120 billion in contract obligations in FY 2025, adding competition and innovation to the sector,” CSIS noted. “Munitions contract obligations have risen 330 percent since FY 2010. Spurred by this increased demand and depleted inventories, the Pentagon is signing multiyear agreements with munitions producers and suppliers on a historic scale.”

The military is also responding to depleted stockpiles of expensive guided weapons that have been rapidly consumed by the Iran and Ukraine wars.

The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request for munitions allocated 49% to low-cost munitions — defined as costing less than $600,000 apiece — rising to 70% by 2031.

The U.S. is also strengthening its defense supply chain, such as “multiyear procurement agreements, direct-to-supplier investments, and leaner acquisition pathways,” as well as investing in defense companies such as L3Harris Missile Solutions, according to CSIS.

However, while this signals government commitment to defense production, it “also complicates competitive dynamics within the industry as new entrants and established suppliers alike seek to meet rapidly growing demand for munitions at scale.”

Also notable is federal investment in rare earths, which has seen production soar from 95 tons in 2022, to 8,900 tons in 2025. Nonetheless, “the erosion of domestic rare earth manufacturing capacity and the rise of Chinese control took decades to unfold, however, and it will take several years of enduring effort for the United States and its allies to build, scale, and sustain the production capacity of these key defense inputs.”

Exports of U.S. arms, or cooperative multinational projects such as the F-35 fighter, have also become a pillar of America’s defense industry. Foreign Military Sales, or FMS, have more than tripled, from less than $20 billion in 2015 to more than $80 billion in 2025.

The Trump administration wants to take this further with the “America First Arms Transfer Strategy,” launched in February 2026.

“The United States will use foreign purchases and capital to support domestic reindustrialization, expand production capacity, and improve the resilience of the United States defense industrial base,” the White House executive order declared.

Ultimately, the federal government can control defense production through the products it demands, the prices it is willing to pay, and the incentives it offers.

“It’s a monopsony,” McGinn said. “Government sets the market. Government can regulate the market. So, if the government wants different outcomes, it changes how it buys.”

July 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

CALLING THE ODDS ON DOOMSDAY

Jonathon Porritt 14 July 2026, https://jonathonporritt.com/existential-risks-climate-nuclear-ai/

I got roundly ticked off the other day for claiming that the climate crisis was “in a league of its own” when it comes to contemplating causes for the possible extinction of the human race – or, at least, “human civilization”, as we mistakenly refer to the current world order. (‘Existential’ means, in this context, ‘pertaining to existence or the end of existence’).

My reprimand went something like this: “You’re so obsessed with the climate crisis that you’re ignoring equally important threats. Like all-in nuclear warfare. Or AI”.

Well, in my defence, I plead not guilty on ignoring the threat of nuclear war. By contrast, I plead 100%, reprehensibly guilty on the AI charge.

Let me go one by one. Nuclear first.

I remember to this day the talk we were given at school in 1963 about a possible nuclear attack on the UK. This was at the height of the Cold War and shortly after the Cuba missile crisis. It scared the shit out of me.

A few years after that, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and later became obsessed with what are called ‘broken arrows’ – when things go badly wrong in terms of ‘lost’ nuclear warheads, accidents in nuclear facilities, near misses, communication breakdowns and so on. It’s acknowledged that there have been at least 32 of these major incidents — and these are just the ones that we know about!

Every nuclear-armed country will have its own ‘broken arrows’ portfolio. The Nuclear Information Service here in the UK tracks as many of these incidents as it can; back in 2017, its ‘Playing with Fire’ report detailed 127 accidents, near misses and “dangerous occurrences” on UK soil and in its coastal waters since the 1960s. And we know that thousands of cyber-attacks are launched against the Ministry of Defence and its contractors every day. Hair-raising really doesn’t cut it!

So, I guess I’ve been living in a state of measured, back-of-mind nuclear dread for a long time — with the front of my mind increasingly taken up with dread at the thought of the climate apocalypse bearing down on us! But however bad that gets, it would be nothing in comparison to an all-out nuclear war.

So, I’m finding it really painful to see how the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction (the crazy idea that lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence theory) is being gradually ‘re-normalised’. Ideas such as ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ or ‘limited nuclear strikes’ (particularly in terms of the war in Ukraine) pop up all over the place, even as the all-important 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) lurks unregarded in the margins of this new nuclear discourse.

The fact that Article Six (of the NPT) enjoins all 191 signatories to the Treaty ‘to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith’ is studiously ignored. In fact, exactly the opposite is going on. Today’s nine nuclear-armed nations already lay claim to tens of thousands of ‘Hiroshima bomb equivalents’, and yet this is increasingly seen as insufficient.

China is increasing its arsenal of warheads by around 100 every year. Russia is known to be expanding its capabilities in many different areas. President Trump is already committed to prioritising nuclear weapons programmes over other security programmes, based on $25 billion of additional investment in nuclear weapons every year, with an ambition of reaching $2 trillion on total arms expenditure over 30 years — including massive new expenditure on his so-called ‘Golden Dome’ defensive shield — which essentially undermines the rationale behind any nuclear deterrence theory.

Which brings me to AI.

I enter this territory with massive trepidation. Until recently, when asked about it, I burbled on about the massive energy and water footprint of AI, relying on a basic instinct to cover off the rest of it: that anything emerging from and under the total control of the techno-fascists in California just had to be wrong. Simple as that. Follow the money. Track the track records of these evil mind-fuckers.

Such an approach obviously only takes one so far. Which means I’ve recently been doing some rather more serious work on AI, to which I will no doubt return at some point in the future.

However, for the purposes of this little exercise, I’ve come to the conclusion (from an existential risk perspective) that AI is right up there with both the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear warfare.

Ever since I came across AI’s so-called ‘evolution of capability and complexity’, I’ve been sunk deep in the whole reversible/irreversible dynamic: at what point does a rapidly evolving change process cease to be reversible as it ‘tips over’ into a sequence of irreversible effects?

Climate wonks live with that dynamic every waking moment of their working lives: feedback loops; sensitivity calculations; tipping points – 40 years of brilliant climate science has given us an eloquent lexicon of how to avoid the apocalypse. We approach it via ‘average temperature increase’, average concentrations in the atmosphere, potential tipping points for critical ecosystems etc, etc. Tragically, this seems to have had zero impact on our fossil-fuel-addicted political leaders. Suffice to say, it’s not looking good.

So, is there an analogy for AI? Sort of. As AIs evolve from bog-standard LLMs (Large Language Models) to ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) to CASI (Conscious Artificial Superintelligence), one is bound to ask: at what point is that forward momentum still reversible?

This was the point at which I discovered the whole wondrous literature about the so-called ‘X risk’ – which, happily, has nothing to do with the world’s first totalitarian trillionaire. I quote from a fascinating article by David Rollo:

“Consider that Geoffrey Hinton (the so-called ‘godfather of AI’) gives a 10 to 50% chance that AI would result in extinction – the ‘ X risk. Yoshua Bengio, the most cited AI researcher and most cited living scientist, gives an X risk of 20% .

Eliezer Yudkowsky (co-author of the bestseller ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’, a title relating directly to AGI), and Roman Yampolskiy give an X risk of over 95%, while Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, gives an X risk of 10 to 25%”.

Given the single-minded, profit-obsessed drive of the so-called ‘frontier AI companies’ (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and XAI), there would appear to be no political regulatory constraints on them cracking the AGI challenge. Does that turn out to be the not-so-far-off point of irreversibility? On our unstoppable way to the equivalent of all-out nuclear conflagration?

Which makes me think about how things might look in this existential league table – keeping nuclear conflagration in the mix, as it truly deserves to be, even before we start thinking about that deranged, psychopathic narcissist in the White House with his finger on the button.

So, my question for all readers who’ve stuck with my strange apocalyptic speculation so far: where would you locate the point of irreversibility for each of these three domains of existential risk?

And how does that make you feel?

July 18, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Faslane set for £15bn upgrade to ‘future-proof it for war-fighting’

15th July, By Gregor Young

MORE than £15 billion will be spent transforming Faslane over the next decade, the UK Government has announced.

HMNB Clyde, which houses the UK’s nuclear
submarines, will receive £15.1bn in a move expected to support thousands of
jobs. It is part of the £26bn Project Royal Oak investment programme into
critical UK naval bases which defence minister Luke Pollard said will
increase the “readiness, availability and lethality” of the Royal Navy.
On a visit to Faslane on Tuesday, he said it is the biggest upgrade of the
UK’s naval bases since the end of the Cold War.

The National 14th July 2026,
https://www.thenational.scot/news/26280622.faslane-set-15bn-upgrade-future-proof-war-fighting/

July 18, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

How Israel planned the Gaza genocide decades ago

Jonathon Cook, 12 June 2026

In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war – often referred to as the Six-Day War – not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza – levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population – is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” – the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Starvation policy

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” – or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state.

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants.

Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said.

Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” Israel was imposing there.

The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested, by depriving the population of essentials like water. “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”

In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment.

They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court.

Targeting innocents

The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.

Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.

As the paper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”

Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task – as in 1948 – was to prevent their return.

Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.

Here is one soldier’s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography:

We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children.

In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.

Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Erasing context

As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

Which is precisely why western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present – in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.

Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response – and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that – to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.

An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Prisons of complicity

Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2026-06-12/israel-gaza-genocide-planned/

July 17, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, history, Israel | Leave a comment

Dennis Kucinich Warns Congress Is Quietly Merging the U.S. and Israeli War Machines

SCHEERPOST, July 13, 2026

The former congressman tells Robert Scheer that a provision buried in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act could integrate the United States and Israel at the highest levels of military technology—without meaningful public debate or congressional scrutiny.

Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has spent decades warning about the machinery of permanent war. But in a new conversation with Robert Scheer, he argues that Congress is now on the verge of crossing a line without precedent in American military history.

At the center of Kucinich’s warning is Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a provision he says would formally integrate key areas of U.S. and Israeli military development, including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, quantum sensing, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, missile defense, drones and directed-energy systems.

“They call it integration, but I call it a merger,” Kucinich tells Scheer.

The implications, he argues, go far beyond traditional military aid or weapons sales. Kucinich warns that the provision could create new counterintelligence risks, deepen U.S. dependence on Israel’s military infrastructure and technology, blur questions of war powers and further entangle Washington in Israel’s expanding regional conflicts.

Even more alarming, Kucinich says, is how little debate the proposal has received. Rather than being considered through a separate treaty or subjected to extensive congressional hearings, the provision has been folded into a massive defense authorization bill that lawmakers will face enormous political pressure to support.

“This provision has been smuggled into the bill,” Kucinich argues. “There’s never been any debate.”

For Scheer, the contradiction is impossible to ignore. At the moment the United States marks 250 years since declaring its independence, Washington may be moving toward an unprecedented military dependence on another state—one whose conduct in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon has placed it at the center of international accusations of genocide and grave violations of international law.

In this urgent edition of Scheer Intelligence, Scheer and Kucinich examine what Section 219 could mean for American sovereignty, constitutional government and the future of war—and why a provision of such consequence has received so little attention from Congress, the Democratic opposition and the mainstream press.

The Secret U.S.-Israel Military Merger Hidden in Congress’ $1.5 Trillion War Bill

“They call it integration, but I call it a merger,” Kucinich tells Scheer. “Why do corporations have mergers? They have them to eliminate duplications, to be able to integrate operations. This is exactly what’s happening here.”

The provision, according to Kucinich, would deepen cooperation between the United States and Israel in artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, quantum sensing, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, missile and air defense, drones and directed-energy technology.

“We’re not only sharing now military potential with this legislation,” Kucinich warns. “We’re also integrating values with the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces.”

For Scheer, the implications are staggering. U.S. support for Israel is hardly new. Washington has supplied Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance, weapons and diplomatic protection for decades. But Scheer repeatedly presses Kucinich on what makes Section 219 different.

“Do we have mergers with other countries?” Scheer asks. “Why Israel?”

Kucinich’s answer is unequivocal.

“The United States has never had this kind of an agreement with one other nation where they’ve merged the defensive and offensive capabilities,” he says. “Never.”

‘This Provision Has Been Smuggled Into the Bill’

Perhaps most disturbing to Kucinich is not simply what Section 219 proposes, but how he says it has moved through Congress.

“I would argue that this provision has been smuggled into the bill because there’s never been any debate,” Kucinich says. “There’s been no separate committee hearings on this. It just landed in a bill of about a thousand pages.”

Kucinich argues that an agreement of this magnitude more closely resembles a treaty—something that traditionally requires Senate approval.

“Treaties have to be approved by the Senate,” he tells Scheer. “But they’re just trying to slip this through—an unprecedented merging of function. It doesn’t exist. We’ve never done this with any other country.”

The political mechanism is familiar. The NDAA is a massive piece of legislation that lawmakers face enormous pressure to support. Voting against it can quickly be portrayed as voting against American troops or national defense.

Scheer calls the maneuver “treacherous.”

“You have to buy the whole package,” Scheer says. By burying the provision inside a sprawling defense bill, he argues, lawmakers who object to Section 219 risk being accused of refusing to “support the people protecting our country.”

Kucinich notes that Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have attempted to force greater congressional consideration of the issue. But, he says, Section 219 has been “streamlined and expedited” inside the broader legislation.

A ‘Strategic Entrapment Into Forever Wars’

The risks Kucinich outlines are extensive………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/13/dennis-kucinich-warns-congress-is-quietly-merging-the-u-s-and-israeli-war-machines/

July 17, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why is Britain spending huge amounts on nuclear militarism?

11th July, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) By Samuel Rafanell-Williams

NATO outspends Russia 10 to one on nuclear weapons, yet this has seemingly not bought adequate “security” for the nuclear alliance

One mightexpect this to prompt a serious discussion and re-imagination of what
“security” means in the 21st century, and what role nuclear weapons
actually play in international affairs.

Nevertheless, “deterrence”
ideology still has firm purchase within the mind of the British political
and military establishment. This was confirmed by Keir Starmer’s Defence
Investment Plan (DIP), in which nuclear weapons spending was central.
Indeed, the Prime Minister announced the Defence Nuclear Enterprise would
receive a staggering £62 billion over the next four years. The investment
required in sustaining and renewing Britain’s nuclear programme is
enormous.

The National 11th July 2026, https://www.thenational.scot/politics/26271804.britain-investing-huge-amounts-nuclear-militarism/

July 17, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A Budget of the Pentagon, By the Congress and For the War Profiteers

All of these forces benefit by exaggerating threats to our national security which justify a huge U.S. “defense” budget, larger than the next eight nations (most of whom are allies) in the world combined, while American citizens lack health care, childcare and other basic needs.

America’s Dilemma at 250

Eisenhower Media Network, Jul 14, 2026, https://eisenhowermedianetwork.substack.com/p/a-budget-of-the-pentagon-by-the-congress?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4240478&post_id=206466445&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4ds0bd&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

By: Major General Dennis Laich, US Army, (ret.) Executive Director, Eisenhower Media Network

The first sentence of Thomas Paine’s classic 1776 essay, Common Sense, urged the American people to challenge the legitimacy of the English Crown, something that had never been challenged before. He wrote:

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them a great favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Two hundred and fifty years later, time and reason strongly suggest that the U.S. “defense” budget is out of control, unsustainable and absent of accountability.

Only the American people can rein it in.

The “defense of custom” in this case will come from the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) of which President Eisenhower warned us in 1961 in his farewell address, and drove home the consequences of in his famous “Cross of Iron” speech in 1953. In his address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower said the following:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

All of these forces benefit by exaggerating threats to our national security which justify a huge U.S. “defense” budget, larger than the next eight nations (most of whom are allies) in the world combined, while American citizens lack health care, childcare and other basic needs.

The defense industry’s lobbyists team up with U.S. politicians, who receive campaign financing from the industry, to draft the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which sets military policy, the expensive weaponry to be purchased, and the overall military budget. The industry takes the ensuing windfall and puts it toward stock buybacks, which increase the share price, making the rich richer; dividend payments for shareholders; eight-figure annual compensation packages for corporate executives; and the continual political graft (campaign contributions and lobbyists) that keeps the wheel spinning. Incredibly, some contracts stipulate that only the contractor may repair and maintain equipment.

The most embarrassing example of this practice is the F-35 Stealth Fighter, which is grossly over budget, behind schedule and is only 25% fully mission capable.

The principal beneficiaries of the MICC’s practice of vastly overstating foreign threats are the Pentagon and the invertebrate senior uniformed bureaucrats who occupy it and secure lucrative post-retirement employment with the MICC. The massive Pentagon budget provides the Pentagon with a premier position within both the government and society. Money talks in America, but few members of Congress choose to talk about the $39 trillion national debt to which military spending is a major contributor.

Unfortunately, the uniformed bureaucrats lack the courage to stand up against a draft dodger and a Rambo-wannabe in order to protect their profession or the institution of the military. Government employees, including military officials, are fired for specious reasons and no one, not even those who were fired, dare speak up regarding the negative impact on morale, discipline and readiness. Nor do they speak up when the U.S. supports genocide in Gaza, extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, or attacks the Uniformed Code of Military Justice

These recent developments will serve to accelerate a decline in the U.S. military’s performance. Since WWII, the U.S. has won one war (the first Gulf War), lost four (Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran) and tied one (Korea. Iran may be as much an embarrassment as a loss. The United States has failed to achieve its stated objectives in any recent war, despite having a military budget larger than the next eight countries combined and being easily the most defensible of any peer nation (with two friendly, stable nations to its north and south and oceans on its east and west). What football coach could keep his job with a 1-4-1 record?

Additionally, the Pentagon cannot tell the American taxpayer where the money went, since it is unable to pass a financial audit as required by law – something every other department of the federal government is able to do. Now, they are requesting a 50% increase in the defense budget to S1.5 trillion. This is equivalent to your child asking for more money a day after receiving his/her allowance. When you ask what happened to the money he/she received yesterday, the child can’t answer the question, but you give him/her more money regardless.

This represents a level of arrogance and incompetence that the American people should not be asked to tolerate. Thomas Paine understood something that seemed impossible in 1776. On paper, the American colonies had no chance against the greatest empire on Earth. Britain possessed the world’s most powerful military, immense wealth, and overwhelming resources. The colonies had none of those advantages. What Paine recognized as “common sense” was that wars are not won by budgets alone. They are won by legitimacy, purpose, and the willingness of a free people to defend their own liberty.

The $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request represents more than S9,000 per individual taxpayer. If we Americans are tired of seeing our tax dollars spent on endless wars, bombing campaigns, and military excess while our own communities struggle with the costs of health care, child care, education, and infrastructure, then the time has come to do what Thomas Paine asked Americans to do 250 years ago: challenge the assumptions that have become accepted simply because they are old. The courage required today is not to defeat an empire abroad, but to confront one at home — the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex — and reclaim a government that serves the American people rather than the interests of perpetual war.

The Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) comprises former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials who offer independent analysis based on decades of real-world experience, study, and scholarship. EMN aims to reach broad, cross-partisan audiences in diverse media outlets and among the American people, who increasingly sense that US foreign policy today is not making them, or the world, safer.

July 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump says US will ‘take out’ Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility

:by Ellen Mitchell – 07/13/26, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5966603-trump-threatens-pickaxe-mountain-iran/

President Trump on Monday said the U.S. could soon attack Pickaxe Mountain in Iran as American forces launched a new round of strikes against the country.

“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” Trump said in an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” Monday afternoon. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready.”

Trump added that while the U.S. sees “no activity” at the heavily fortified site that hosts two deeply buried tunnel complexes, Washington will “probably give Pickaxe a shot relatively soon.”

Located near Iran’s damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility in the Zagros Mountains, Pickaxe was not among the three nuclear sites targeted by the U.S. military in June 2025. But Trump told show host Hugh Hewitt that the U.S. has “a lot of eyes” on it.

Experts ⁠have assessed, however, that the depth of the facility means America’s most powerful bunker buster bombs are unlikely to penetrate it. The site is buried up to 2,000 feet below granite and is suspected to be housing uranium enrichment capabilities and stockpiles.

Trump’s threat comes as American forces launched a new round of strikes against Iran at 4:45 p.m. EDT on Monday and hours after the president declared the U.S. Navy would reinstate the naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

“These strikes will continue imposing a heavy cost on Iranian forces and degrade their ability to attack innocent civilians and commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

The strikes mark the third consecutive day of U.S. attacks against Iran, with forces last week conducting four separate rounds of strikes against Tehran in what U.S. officials characterized as retaliation for Iran’s targeting of commercial vessels attempting to transit the vital shipping lane.

“We’re going to ⁠hit them very hard tonight, and we’re going to hit them hard tomorrow. And there’s not a damn thing ⁠they can do about it,” Trump told Hewitt.

July 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Is London shifting from nuclear deterrence to war-fighting?

The deployment of high-precision, variable-yield counter-force weapons signals a willingness to carry out retaliatory or pre-emptive nuclear strikes on an adversary.

Bulletin, By S.M. Amadae, Tom Stevenson | Analysis | July 10, 2026

For most of the past three decades, one might almost have said the United Kingdom had a glowing record on nuclear non-proliferation: Britain was the only major nuclear power to operate a minimum deterrent based on a single delivery system; it supported international non-proliferation initiatives; and the UK government had spent 30 years reducing its nuclear stockpile. No more. Instead, London now builds momentum supporting a new wave of nuclear proliferation under the auspices of NATO’s nuclear sharing.

In the last five years, Britain has quietly moved to increase the maximum size of its nuclear stockpile and revise its nuclear doctrine, and it is now acquiring an additional nuclear capability. In concert with the United States, the UK government is expanding the deployment of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons in a way that could destabilize the strategic balance in Europe.

In doing so, London is reversing decades of gradual progress on disarmament without serious analysis of the strategic implications or public consultation, and at a time when there is less support for nuclear diplomacy than at any point in recent history.

New systems and more weapons. In June 2025, the United Kingdom announced plans to acquire Lockheed Martin F-35As that are the first stealth fighter jets certified to carry variable-yield thermonuclear B61-12 gravity bombs. The 12 F-35As would be ordered in place of F-35B fighter jets, which are designed for use on aircraft carriers but are not nuclear-capable. At the Hague summit last year, the United Kingdom then announced it would be joining NATO’s air-launched nuclear mission and putting those planes to work carrying US nuclear bombs. Though it has still not been officially confirmed, US B61-12s were almost certainly moved to RAF Lakenheath in July 2025.^[1] Media briefings at the time suggested the UK government was also in talks with Washington on acquiring non-strategic B61-12 bombs of its own, but no such agreement has publicly emerged yet.

On the surface, the United Kingdom’s decision to acquire tactical nuclear capability appeared to be part of a natural evolution in European strategic planning prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But London’s acquisition of F-35As and the deployment of US B61-12s are just the latest examples of a longer trend in the United Kingdom’s nuclear posture. In 2022, RAF Lakenheath had already undergone infrastructure modernization necessary for the return of US nuclear weapons.

Before that, in 2021, the UK government decided to raise the maximum cap on the number of warheads in its arsenal by more than 40 percent. In 2010, the UK government stated that it would continue to reduce its warhead stockpile—at the time numbering 225 warheads—and cap its future arsenal at a maximum of 180 warheads. But in 2021, it suddenly raised the cap to 260 warheads. Despite being a reversal of decades of gradual reductions in the United Kingdom’s projected nuclear stockpile, that decision was slipped onto page 76 of the government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development, and Foreign Policy.

Policy implications. The United Kingdom has also made a quiet change to its nuclear doctrine, introducing a “right to review” the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states under certain circumstances. Together with the decision to raise the warhead cap, this constituted a dramatic strategic change for which there was no discernible democratic mandate and no public discussion.

At the time, even the best-informed commentators on UK nuclear affairs were unaware of the motivation. One argument, put forward by nuclear historian Lawrence Freedman, was that a larger stockpile of 260 warheads might allow the United Kingdom to have two fully armed nuclear submarines (each potentially carrying a maximum of 128 warheads on 16 missiles) on patrol at once. That the increase in stockpile size was motivated by plans for the United Kingdom to have the option of acquiring a non-strategic nuclear capability only emerged later.

The decision to station B61-12s on UK soil amounts to a de facto settlement of the long‑running debate over adopting a doctrine of no‑first‑use or sole‑purpose, and over the future of tactical nuclear weapons in NATO. The deployment of high-precision, variable-yield counter-force weapons signals a willingness to carry out retaliatory or pre-emptive nuclear strikes on an adversary.

Due to their enhanced guidance systems, B61-12 bombs, coupled with the dual-capable stealth F-35A, also have the potential to alter the geopolitical balance in Europe. The UK B61-12 adoption paves the way for further proliferation of these weapons throughout Europe, cements the normalization of nuclear weapons, and challenges the guaranteed second-strike survivability of adversaries’ nuclear command and control and strategic weapons systems.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and, by extension, NATO have become, in the words of the now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, “accustomed to escalation dominance,” the strategic objective of achieving battlefield superiority on all rungs of escalation. This aim relies on maintaining asymmetrical advantage, which is not a sound doctrine against a nuclear peer competitor: It is destabilizing and stokes further arms races.

The combination of F-35A fighter jets and B61-12 bombs gives NATO a stealth-enabled, precision counterforce tool designed to deter by denial by holding Russian nuclear and nuclear command and control assets at credible risk. In theory, they provide limited escalation-control options, such as pre-emptive or tit-for-tat strikes at tailored yield. These technological developments make Russian nuclear forces and command systems both more vulnerable in crisis and less certain for guaranteeing second-strike capability.

From arms control hero to nuclear war fighter. Until recently, UK efforts on exemplary disarmament were comparatively good. The United Kingdom was the only major nuclear state that had limited itself to a single deterrence system (the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile). The UK government had made incremental reductions in its nuclear stockpile since 1980. With US B61s having returned to the United Kingdom, that record has now been overturned…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

No rationale, real danger. The strategic need for the United Kingdom to operate air-launched tactical nuclear weapons has not been clearly presented either by US officials or the UK government. In addition, these weapons arguably increase the United Kingdom’s reliance on US weapons platforms at a time of transatlantic political divergence…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The UK government and the United States should carefully revisit the assumptions that led to this point. There is no justifiable reason for the United Kingdom and NATO to expand non-strategic capabilities while also maintaining a no-first-use doctrine unless they are planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike deep into Russian territory, or the territory of another nuclear weapons state, or against a non-nuclear weapons state. NATO member states, like Finland and Poland, are promoting their participation in nuclear sharing and planning. Both understandably perceive an existential threat from Russia, and they are now also considering hosting US nuclear weapons and joining France’s forward deterrence initiative. But with the United Kingdom having already made that choice, it has the dubious distinction of leading the way in normalizing more first-use tactical nuclear capabilities in Europe without comprehensive analysis of the strategic implications. This nuclear brinkmanship, directly pertinent to the Ukraine war, offers the false promise of security for some at the cost of dooming security for all. https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/is-london-shifting-from-nuclear-deterrence-to-war-fighting/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Is%20London%20shifting%20from%20nuclear%20deterrence%20to%20war-fighting%3F&utm_campaign=20260709%20Thursday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29

July 15, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The hidden military pressures behind the new push for small nuclear reactors

The neglected factor is the military dependence on civil nuclear industries.

By funding civil nuclear projects, taxpayers and consumers cover military uses of nuclear power in subsidies and higher bills – without the added spending appearing in defence budgets

October 28, 2025, Phil Johnstone, Visiting Fellow, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex; University of Tartu; Utrecht University, Andy Stirling, Professor of Science & Technology Policy, SPRU, University of Sussex Business School, University of Sussex, https://theconversation.com/the-hidden-military-pressures-behind-the-new-push-for-small-nuclear-reactors-266301

Donald Trump’s recent visit to the UK saw a so-called “landmark partnership” on nuclear energy. London and Washington announced plans to build 20 small modular reactors and also develop microreactor technology – despite the fact no such plants have yet been built commercially anywhere in the world.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, promised these plans will deliver a “golden age” of nuclear energy that will also “drive down bills”. Yet the history of nuclear power has been decades of overhype, soaring costs and constant delays. Around the world, the trends point the wrong way.

So why the renewed excitement about going nuclear? The real reasons have less to do with energy security, or climate change – and far more to do with military power.

At first sight, the case may seem obvious. Nuclear supporters frame small modular reactors, or SMRs, as vital for cutting emissions, meeting rising demand for electricity from cars and data centres. With large nuclear plants now prohibitively expensive, smaller reactors are billed as an exciting new alternative.

But these days even the most optimistic industry analyses concede that nuclear – even SMRs – is unlikely to compete with renewables. One analysis in New Civil Engineer published earlier this year concluded that SMRs are “the most expensive source per kilowatt of electricity generated when compared with natural gas, traditional nuclear and renewables”.

Independent assessments – for instance by the formerly pro-nuclear Royal Society – find that 100% renewable systems outperform any energy system including nuclear on cost, flexibility and security. This helps explain why worldwide statistical analysis shows nuclear power is not generally linked to carbon emissions reductions, while renewables are.

Partly, the enthusiasm for SMRs can be explained by the loudest institutional voices tending to have formal pro-nuclear remits or interests: they include the industry itself and its suppliers, nuclear agencies, and governments with entrenched military nuclear programmes. For these interests, the only question is which kinds of nuclear reactors to develop, and how fast. They don’t wonder if we should build reactors in the first place: the need is seen as self-evident.

At least big nuclear reactors have benefited from economies of scale and decades of technological optimisation. Many SMR designs are just “powerpoint reactors”, existing only in slides and feasibility studies. Claims these unbuilt designs “will cost less” are speculative at best.

Investment markets know this. While financiers see SMR hype as a way to profit from billions in government subsidies, their own analyses are less enthusiastic about the technology itself.

So why then, all this attention to nuclear in general and smaller reactors in particular? There is clearly more to this than meets the eye.

The hidden link

The neglected factor is the military dependence on civil nuclear industries. Maintaining a nuclear armed navy or weapons programme requires constant access to generic reactor technologies, skilled workers and special materials. Without a civilian nuclear industry, military nuclear capabilities are significantly more challenging and costly to sustain.

Nuclear submarines are especially important here as they would very likely require national reactor industries and their supply chains even if there was no civil nuclear power. Barely affordable even vessel by vessel, nuclear submarines become even more expensive when the costs of this “submarine industrial base” is factored in.

Rolls-Royce is an important link here, as it already builds the UK’s submarine reactors and is set to build the newly announced civil SMRs. The company said openly in 2017 that a civil SMR programme would “relieve the Ministry of Defence of the burden of developing and retaining skills and capability”.

Here, as emphasised by Nuclear Intelligence Weekly in 2020, the Rolls-Royce SMR programme has an important “symbiosis with UK military needs”. It is this dependency that allows military costs (in the words of a former executive with submarine builders BAE Systems), to be “masked” behind civilian programmes.

By funding civil nuclear projects, taxpayers and consumers cover military uses of nuclear power in subsidies and higher bills – without the added spending appearing in defence budgets.

When the UK government funded us to investigate the value of this transfer, we put it at around £5 billion per year in the UK alone. These costs are masked from public view, covered by revenues from higher electricity prices and the budgets of supposedly civilian government agencies.

This is not a conspiracy but a kind of political gravitational field. Once governments see nuclear weapons as a marker of global status, the funding and political support becomes self-perpetuating.

The result is a strange sort of circularity: nuclear power is justified by energy security and cost arguments that don’t stand up, but is in reality sustained for strategic reasons that remain unacknowledged.

A global pattern

The UK is not unique, though other nuclear powers are much more candid. US energy secretary Chris Wright described the US-UK nuclear deal as important for “securing nuclear supply chains across the Atlantic”. Around US$25 billion a year (£18.7 billion) flows from civil to military nuclear activity in the US.

Russia and China are both quite open about their own inseparable civil-military links. French president Emmanuel Macron put it clearly: “Without civilian nuclear, no military nuclear, without military nuclear, no civilian nuclear.”

Across these states, military nuclear capabilities are seen as a way to stay at the world’s “top table”. An end to their civilian programme would threaten not just jobs and energy, but their great power status.

The next frontier

Beyond submarines, the development of “microreactors” is opening up new military uses for nuclear power. Microreactors are even smaller and more experimental than SMRs. Though they can make profits by milking military procurement budgets, they make no sense from a commercial energy standpoint.

However, microreactors are seen as essential in US plans for battlefield power, space infrastructure and new “high energy” anti-drone and missile weaponry. Prepare to see them become ever more prominent in “civil” debates – precisely because they serve military goals.

Whatever view is taken of these military developments, it makes no sense to pretend they are unrelated to the civil nuclear sector. The real drivers of the recent US-UK nuclear agreement lie in military projection of force, not civilian power production. Yet this remains absent from most discussions of energy policy.

It is a crucial matter of democracy that there be honesty about what is really going on.

July 15, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Eight NATO allies to create new satellite mega-constellation

The network will involve Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey.

Breakig Defense, By Theresa Hitchens on July 08,

WASHINGTON ― Eight NATO countries plan to link their military satellites into a “mega-constellation” to enable “high-speed communications, intelligence and missile tracking,” the alliance announced on Tuesday at its Summit Defence Industry Forum in Ankara, in a move that joins a number of other a new initiatives aimed at improving NATO space capabilities.

Connecting multiple national satellites will “overcome the cost, time and coverage limitations of single-nation satellite fleets,” a NATO press release said.

The new network, called the Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space (HALO), initially will involve Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey, a NATO official told Breaking Defense today.

“But we expect more to come,” the official added, explaining that NATO is “in the early stages of the initiative.”………………………………………………………………….

APSS, created in 2023 and formally integrated into NATO in 2024, includes a”virtual” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) constellation, called Aquila that initially involved 17 allies. Member nations also have pledged to jointly fund commercial imagery and ISR products such as 3D maps.

APSS is supported by the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), which provides program management, digital infrastructure, data integration and a user interface for allies. Data collected from the network further is funneled into NATO Headquarters via the NATO Intelligence Enterprise. APSS achieved initial operational capability last December…………………………………

Finally, the NATO press release stated that Canada became the 15th member of NATO’s Starlift multinational initiative, “which explores ways to develop a network of launch capabilities that will help Allies launch assets at short notice from spaceports across the Alliance. This will boost NATO’s ability to react more quickly to threats from space.”

Starlift was launched in October 2024 by 14 allies: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/eight-nato-allies-to-create-new-satellite-mega-constellation/

July 15, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | space travel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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