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American forces struck a nuclear power plant under construction in southern Iran,

President Trump said American forces ‘hit Iran hard’ in honour of the US service members killed in Jordan on Friday

The state atomic energy
agency called the attack a “clear violation of international law”. The Atomic
Energy Organisation said that several projectiles hit the Darkhovin nuclear
power plant in Khuzestan province, but did not give details about possible
damage from the attack.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) called for restraint, adding that it was looking into the
reports. It also highlighted that the plant was in the “very early stages
of construction” and “contained no nuclear material when last visited
by the IAEA”.

 Times 20th July 2026,
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/iran-claims-us-strikes-hit-nuclear-power-plant-0kb7cpghx

July 24, 2026 Posted by | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump Killed Those US Troops In Jordan

Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 19, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-killed-those-us-troops-in-jordan?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=207612455&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

More US troops have died in Trump’s insane war of aggression against Iran, so of course we’re seeing a bunch of phony bullshit from American warmongers about what a heroic sacrifice these soldiers made in order to justify further escalations.

“Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve,” tweeted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in response to the news that two US troops were killed with one soldier missing after Iranian retaliatory strikes on a US base in Jordan.

But they weren’t “heroes”, and they did not make any “sacrifice”.

A hero is someone who risks danger taking noble action for the benefit of others. A sacrifice is when you give up your life for a higher cause.

This was neither of those things. Those soldiers were killed in response to US airstrikes on civilian infrastructure in a stupid, evil war of aggression waged by a Zionist president to please his billionaire Israeli megadonor. Those US attacks destroyed a desalination plant, cutting off an essential water supply for thousands of Iranian civilians.

They did not die defending the United States. They did not die protecting the American people. They did not die for freedom, for democracy, or for any of the other bogus reasons you’ll see imperial spinmeisters saying they died for. They died for Israel, for the military-industrial complex, and for US imperial agendas of global domination. And for nothing else.

I said this online and someone tried telling me “They died for their country and Fuck You for pissing on that.”

I told him no, they did not die for their country. The Iranians are dying for their country. The Americans are dying for Israel, for money, and for geostrategic control. Not a single American life in the United States is being protected by the actions of US service members in the middle east. They’re not defending their homeland, they’re attacking people who are defending theirs.

This isn’t worthy of praise, it’s worthy of anger and outrage.

There’s this bizarre, cultish belief among Americans that you have to play along with the idea that every US soldier killed in action died doing something heroic which benefited the American people, even when every reasonably intelligent person knows that’s objectively false. I reject this whole-heartedly. All this does is make it easier for the US military to recruit more soldiers and to manufacture consent for more depraved wars of aggression.

Those soldiers killed in Jordan did not die doin

Those soldiers weren’t killed by Iran. They were killed by Donald Trump. They were killed by the oligarchs and empire managers whose decisions sent them to die in yet another middle eastern war based on lies, and who will never lose a wink’s sleep over it.

Everyone thinking of joining the US military should refrain from doing so, and everyone who is already in the US military should do everything they possibly can to get out. Because there is nothing worse than killing and dying for rich bastards who will never give a fuck about you.g anything noble. They died meaningless, undignified deaths for an immoral and unworthy cause.

Everyone thinking of joining the US military should refrain from doing so, and everyone who is already in the US military should do everything they possibly can to get out. Because there is nothing worse than killing and dying for rich bastards who will never give a fuck about you.

July 22, 2026 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Killing Machines -Governments and Technology Obsessing Over Efficient Death

“…………………………… The NATO event looks like essentially —a trade show—except the newfangled hoopla is of a different kind. World leaders, all decked out in fine suits (nerds of a special kind), stroll the aisles admiring missiles and tanks engineered for maximum lethality. Billions are spent to make killing more efficient. While societies debate the cost of keeping one person alive in their final months, trillions flow into perfecting the technology of death. People who still think can see the terrible clarity in this inversion: when the soul recedes and the material world reigns, efficiency in killing becomes one of the highest values of our age.

Personally, I don’t think there is a better definition of insanity than the way humans delight in war and death. Yes, there was a time when killing your neighbour because they wouldn’t let you eat an apple growing on their side of the tribal fence made a tiny bit of sense. But what it has evolved into today is pure insanity. Humans are supposed to be capable of compassion. We are supposed to be able to sort out our differences with other tribes. We are supposed to care more about human life than we did in the cave days, when it was all about survival and who would or would not get the apple. What happened to all of that? For any of us to justify wholesale killing the way we do only proves we haven’t gotten anywhere in hundreds of thousands of years.

It is all so screwed up, as is nearly everything. Nothing makes sense anymore. ……. This is the kind of arithmetic they are running through their heads while strolling the aisles at their NATO war show: “Now tell me again—how many people will this weapon kill, and how much does it cost? That’s some nice bang for the buck! I’ll take 20 of ‘em!” Insane.

I just read that Canada is deep in debt and running persistent deficits, while Ukraine sits on roughly $4 billion worth of gold reserves. So, Canada (and everyone else that can) keeps giving money to a country that already holds billions in gold, all so more people can be killed. And don’t tell me, “Russia ruthlessly attacked Ukraine! They should pay for it!” Yeah, right. If you are saying that right now, you are, unfortunately, still thinking like an ignorant caveman. That is not the whole story; in fact, it is very little of it. But Russia doesn’t get off the hook either. Grow up, people. Figure this shit out and quit acting like ten-year-olds playing in the backyard with stick guns.

…… It is astounding to think that most of us work a lifetime just so our country has the resources to kill—or help kill—thousands of other working stiffs who are simply minding their own business and trying to get through life in one piece. Almost no one fighting in these wars has any real inkling why they are out there killing other people……… It is all a game now—not for the people dying from the weapons their leaders are buying, but for the leaders themselves and the oligarchs who own the companies making all this hardware. It is their little game. And they are having a blast.

I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m blue in the face. It is all a game—a sophisticated 3D chess game. And we, the common useless eaters, are not at the table playing it. In fact, we barely even exist to the real players. Sure, they use us for kill stats. The more of us who die, the more some oligarch or world leader can claim victory and collect his chips.

Look at the actual numbers if you still doubt it. According to the latest available data from SIPRI and the International Institute for Strategic Studies:

The United States leads the world by a wide margin, spending roughly $920–950 billion a year on its military.

China follows at around $250–340 billion.

Russia is third at approximately $186–190 billion (about 7.5% of its GDP).

Germany has surged to over $100–114 billion.

India sits near $90 billion.

The United Kingdom spends close to $90 billion.

Ukraine, despite its size, is now pouring roughly $84 billion into its military—an almost unimaginable 40% of its entire GDP.

Saudi Arabia, France, Japan, and others round out the top tier with tens of billions each.

Canada, after years of lagging, has ramped up significantly and is now spending in the range of $35–40 billion (with recent announcements pushing it higher to meet NATO targets).

These are not abstract figures. These are the concrete resources extracted from ordinary people—through taxes, inflation, and delayed infrastructure, healthcare, and housing—so that a small circle of decision-makers can keep the machinery of death humming. Trillions of dollars every year, worldwide, flow into the business of preparing for, and conducting, the efficient slaughter of other human beings.

And still the game continues. The leaders meet, the contracts are signed, the missiles are ordered, the justifications are written, and the body counts are tallied. The rest of us are expected to cheer for “our side,” wave the correct flag, and never ask why the same people who claim to care so deeply about human life are so eager to spend our money perfecting the art of ending it. And nobody seems to care. As long as their game of pickleball is not disrupted, the leaders they seem to adore so much can continue to play their game to their heart’s content.

I don’t know how much longer this particular round of the game will last. I only know that as long as we keep accepting the premise—that war is inevitable, that leaders know best, that the dead on the other side somehow matter less—the players will keep dealing the cards and raking in the chips. The rest of us will keep paying the price, both in treasure and in blood.

July 21, 2026 Posted by | Religion and ethics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Autonomous Weapons: The Wave of the Future in Military Conflicts Worldwide

Thalif Deen.. UNITED NATIONS, Jul 16 2026 (IPS) –

As the international community continues to weigh the good, the bad and the deadly in artificial intelligence (AI), which is spreading far and wide with apparently no guardrails, the United Nations is taking a closer look at the impact, both positive and negative, of AI.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said last week that “the technology is heightening the danger, with sophisticated and increasingly autonomous new weaponry, including drones, able to inflict massive harm on populations.”

The new weapons, particularly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, seem to be a new wave of killing machines in recent conflicts, including the US vs. Iran, Israel vs. Palestine and Lebanon, and Russia vs. Israel, plus scores of civil wars in Africa and Asia.

Simon Adams, Professor of Human Rights at Murdoch University in Australia and former President and CEO of the Center for Victims of Torture—a leading international human rights and humanitarian NGO—told Inter Press Service no country in the world has openly admitted to deploying a weapon that is completely autonomous in the sense of killing humans without a person also being involved in the decision-making process.


“But there are already a number of powerful states—including several that sit around the table at the UN Security Council—who are increasingly dependent on drones, robots and AI systems to fight wars for them. Algorithms are choosing bombing targets and are already responsible for killing civilians in some major conflict zones.”

AI has the potential to improve the lives of billions of people on this planet. It would be a moral failing of epic proportions and a global tragedy if AI were harnessed to innovate new ways for humans to outsource the dirty work of waging war to robots, he said.

“Killer robots are a horror that belongs in science fiction. There is nothing more sinister than outsourcing killing and warfighting to emotionless, faceless machines that will select which humans get to live or die. Lethal autonomous weapons systems are ethically indefensible and should be illegal. We need a global ban before it is too late.”

Guterres has also reiterated his call to have them banned by international law, adding that some decisions must remain forever human, none more than taking a human life.


David Swanson, campaign coordinator for RootsAction, told IPS dozens of national governments have already stated their support for banning autonomous weapons, and dozens of others expressed their inclination to support such a ban.

So, a treaty could be established among those nations, on the model of the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and then work could be done to add more nations to it. The initial signers and ratifiers would be the small and medium nations with the most willingness to defy the will of the U.S. government.

This banning of a particular type of weapon would ignore, as does the TPNW, the existence of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which requires disarmament of all weapons. It would also fail to address the morally repugnant act of ordering a young person, on pain of severe punishment, to press a button that sends a missile into people thousands of miles away—an act of dubious moral superiority to setting loose fully autonomous killer robots, he declared.

“But the biggest denier of reality in all of this is the U.S. government, which pioneered drone wars, was widely warned that it would not like the results when other nations followed suit, went on to suffer huge damage from foreign drones in places like the Persian Gulf during the current war on Iran, and altered its agenda not one iota. As guns sometimes appear to have more rights within the United States than children do, all forms of weaponry seem to be treated as deserving first consideration in U.S. foreign policy’,” he said


According to the New York Times of July 13, for decades Western governments have ordered supplies like tanks, fighter jets and submarines from contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman—items that take years to deliver and are dizzyingly expensive: an F-35 jet can run to over $100 million.

“But the current trend is clear: defense technology is becoming cheaper and nimbler, with breakthroughs developed by privately funded companies rather than governments,” says an article authored by Vivienne Walt.

Of the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request by the current US administration for next year, about $55 billion is earmarked for the creation of a new unmanned, AI-powered arsenal.

Singling out a more positive non-military use of drones, the Times said last month that Sri Lanka, faced with one of the worst outbreaks of dengue fever in years, is using military drones to scan rooftops and find mosquito breeding grounds to eliminate them. The country’s air force has been routinely flying drones over high-rise buildings to identify breeding sites.

Nick Mottern, co-coordinator of the Weaponized Drone Ban Treaty Campaign, told IPS: “We are calling for a treaty to remove all weapons from drones, rather than to ban drones controlled autonomously by AI.

This is because all militaries will claim that there will always be a human in ultimate control of AI-augmented drones in spite of the fact that the drone will identify targets using AI, select weapons using AI, and present a human with all elements of the decision to kill using AI.

A treaty banning weapons on drones is the only way to stop the drone tsunami, he declared

Speaking at the First Global Dialogue on AI Governance in early July, Guterres said the world faced more than 120 conflicts in 2025.


Conflicts are becoming more protracted, more complex, and more interconnected, he pointed out. “We see widespread violations of international law and a growing sense of impunity. Technology is heightening the danger, with sophisticated — and increasingly autonomous — new weaponry, including drones, able to inflict massive harm on populations.”

“And online hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are spread and amplified in an instant. Too often, early warning signs are ignored. And responses are often a little too late.”

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

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 | 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.

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.

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.

July 19, 2026 Posted by | 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

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,

 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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