‘Historic, But So, So Late’: Israel Added to UN’s Child-Killing ‘List of Shame’
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” said one Palestinian observer.
Brett Wilkins, 7 June 24, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-killing-children-2668478068
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres informed Israel on Friday that, for the first time, it is being added to the so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts, a decision that infuriated Israeli officials but was welcomed by human rights defenders as long overdue.
The Secretary-General Office’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report—which is likely to be released publicly later this month—has included countries and militant groups such as Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Iraq, Islamic State, Myanmar, Russia, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. This is believed to be the first time the list has included a nation hailed by Western governments as a democracy.
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh said on social media. “Arms embargo NOW!”
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the U.N. has put itself on the blacklist of history today when it joined the supporters of the Hamas murderers.”
“The IDF is the most moral army in the world and no delusional decision by the U.N. will change that,” added the prime minister, who International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking to arrest along with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes including extermination.
This year’s 2024 List of Shame will also include Hamas, which led the October 7 attack that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead, including 38 children. Around 30 minors were also kidnapped by Hamas, all of whom are believed to have been freed. Khan wants to arrest three leaders of Hamas, whose members are accused of extermination, rape, and other crimes.
In retaliation, Israel launched an assault and siege on theGaza Strip—now on its 244th day—killing more than 36,700 Palestinians including at least 15,000 minors, according to Palestinian and international agencies. Some children have allegedly been sexually abused and executedby Israeli troops.
More children were killed in Gaza in the first four months of the war than in four years of conflict worldwide, in what Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called a “war on children… their childhood, and their future.”
There are also tens of thousands of children among the more than 83,000 Palestinians wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and invasion, but there’s no safe place for them to go.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza and obliteration of its healthcare infrastructure have exacerbated what the U.N.’s top food official has called a “full-blown famine” in the north and widespread starvation throughout the strip. Dozens of children have starved to death.
Israel’s conduct in the war is under investigation by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a genocide case brought by South Africa and supported by more than 30 other nations and regional blocs.
The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world for children. The perils are not only physical; the annihilation of Gaza has also wrought tremendous psychological damage upon its children, many of whom have survived multiple Israeli campaigns.
According to UNICEF, more than 17,000 Gazan children are now orphans, with some having lost their entire families to Israeli attacks. International medical workers have coined a new acronym for these children: WCNSF, or, wounded child, no surviving family.
The omnicidal and unnecessary Nuclear Triad
the U.S. military no longer needs nuclear strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs in order to threaten to destroy the planet.
that triad of potentially ultimate nuclear death had become so sacrosanct that it was untouchable
Even as the nuclear clock ticks ever closer to midnight, nobody is ducking and covering in America’s classrooms anymore (except against mass shooters).
Ending My Thermonuclear Odyssey
WILLIAM J. ASTORE, JUN 6, 2024, https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/ending-my-thermonuclear-odyssey
As a late-stage baby boomer, a child of the 1960s, I grew up dreaming about America’s nuclear triad. You may remember that it consisted of strategic bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) like the Minuteman, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) like the Poseidon, all delivery systems for what we then called “the Bomb.” I took it for granted that we needed all three “legs” — yes, that was also the term of the time — of that triad to ward off the Soviet Union (aka the “evil empire”).
It took me some time to realize that the triad was anything but the trinity, that it was instead a product of historical contingency. Certainly, my mind was clouded because two legs of that triad were the prerogative of the U.S. Air Force, my chosen branch of service. When I was a teenager, the Air Force had 1,054 ICBMs (mainly Minutemen missiles) in silos in rural states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, along with hundreds of strategic bombers kept on constant alert against the Soviet menace. They represented enormous power not just in destructive force measured in megatonnage but in budgetary authority for the Air Force. The final leg of that triad, the most “survivable” one in case of a nuclear war, was (and remains) the Navy’s SLBMs on nuclear submarines. (Back in the day, the Army was so jealous that it, too, tried to go atomic, but its nuclear artillery shells and tactical missiles were child’s play compared to the potentially holocaust-producing arsenals of the Air Force and Navy.)
When I said that the triad wasn’t the trinity, what I meant (the obvious aside) was this: the U.S. military no longer needs nuclear strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs in order to threaten to destroy the planet. As a retired Air Force officer who worked in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt, during the tail end of the first Cold War, and as a historian who once upon a time taught courses on the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy, I have some knowledge and experience here. Those two “legs” of the nuclear triad, bombers and ICBMs, have long been redundant, obsolete, a total waste of taxpayer money — leaving aside, of course, that they would prove genocidal in an unprecedented fashion were they ever to be used.
Nevertheless, such thoughts have no effect on our military. Instead, the Air Force is pushing ahead with plans to field — yes! — a new strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, and — yes, again! — a new ICBM, the Sentinel, whose combined price tag will likely exceed $500 billion. The first thing any sane commander-in-chief with an urge to help this country would do is cancel those new nuclear delivery systems tomorrow. Instead of rearming, America should begin disarming, but don’t hold your breath on that one.
A Brief History of America’s Nuclear Triad
It all started with atomic bombs and bombers. In August 1945, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by two atomic bombs carried by B-29 bombers, ending World War II. However, in the years that followed, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union heated up, the only “delivery system” the military had for its growing thermonuclear arsenal was the strategic bomber. Those were the glory days of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, whose motto (believe it or not) was “Peace Is Our Profession” — the “peace” of a mass nuclear grave, had those hydrogen bombs ever been dropped on their intended targets in the Soviet Union and China.
However, as this country’s weapons makers produced ever more powerful hydrogen bombs and strategic bombers, a revolution was afoot in missile technology. By the late 1950s, missiles tipped with nuclear warheads became a practical reality. By the 1960s, the Air Force was already lobbying for 10,000 ICBMs, even if my old service had to settle for a mere thousand or so of them during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, the Navy was maneuvering its way into the act by demonstrating that it was indeed possible for mobile, difficult-to-detect submarines to carry nuclear-tipped missiles.
By the late 1960s, that triad of potentially ultimate nuclear death had become so sacrosanct that it was untouchable. More than half a century later, America’s nuclear triad has endured and, all too sadly, is likely to do so far longer than you or me (if not, of course, used).
You might wonder why that should be so. It’s not for any sensible military or strategic reason. By the 1980s, if not before, bombers and ICBMs were obsolete. That was why President Jimmy Carter canceled the B-1 bomber in 1977 (though it would be revived under President Ronald Reagan, with the Air Force buying 100 of those expensive, essentially useless aircraft). That was why the Air Force developed the “peacekeeper” MX ICBM, which was supposed to be mobile (shuffled around by rail) or hidden via an elaborate shell game. Such notions were soon abandoned, though not the missiles themselves, which were stuffed for a time into fixed silos. The endurance of such weapons systems owes everything to Air Force stubbornness and the lobbying power of the industrial side of the military-industrial complex, as well as to members of Congress loath to give up ICBM and bomber bases in their districts, no matter how costly, unnecessary, and omnicidal they may be.
In that light, consider the Navy’s current force of highly capable Ohio-class nuclear submarines. There are 14 of them, each armed with up to 20 Trident II missiles, each with up to eight warheads. We’re talking, in other words, about at least 160 potentially devastating nuclear explosions, each roughly five to 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, from a single sub. In fact, it’s possible that just one of those submarines has an arsenal with enough destructive power not just to kill millions of us humans, but to tip the earth into a nuclear winter in which billions more of us could starve to death. And America has 14 of them!
Why, then, does the Air Force argue that it, too, “needs” new strategic bombers and ICBMs? The traditional arguments go like this: bombers can be launched as a show of resolve and, unlike missiles, recalled. They are also, allegedly, more flexible. In Air Force jargon, they can be rerouted against “targets of opportunity” in a future nuclear war. Of course, generals can always produce a scenario, however world-ending, to justify any weapons system, based on what an enemy might or might not do or discover. Nonetheless, strategic bombers were already nearing obsolescence when Stanley Kubrick made his classic antinuclear satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), so prominently featuring them.
And what about land-based ICBMs? Once, the claim was that they had more “throw-weight” (bigger warheads) than SLBMs and were also more accurate (being launched from fixed silos rather than a mobile platform like a submarine). But with GPS and other advances in technology, submarine-launched missiles are now as accurate as land-based ones and “throw-weight” (sheer megatonnage) always mattered far less than accuracy.
Worse yet, land-based ICBMs in fixed silos are theoretically more vulnerable to an enemy “sneak” attack and so more escalatory in nature. The U.S. currently has 400 Minuteman III ICBMs sitting in silos. If possible incoming enemy nuclear missiles were detected, an American president might have less than 30 minutes — and possibly only 10 or so — to decide whether to launch this country’s ICBM force or risk losing it entirely.
That’s not much time to determine the all-too-literal fate of the planet, is it, especially given the risk that the enemy attack might prove to be a “false alarm“? Just before I arrived at Cheyenne Mountain, there were two such alarms (one stemming from a technical failure, the other from human error when a simulation tape was loaded into computers without any notification that it was just a “war game”). Until they were found to be false alarms, both led to elevated DEFCONs (defense readiness conditions) in preparation for possible nuclear war.
New ICBMs will only add “use them or lose them” pressure to the global situation. Mobile, elusive, and difficult to detect, the Navy’s submarine force is more than sufficient to deter any possible enemy from launching a nuclear attack on the United States. Strategic bombers and ICBMs add plenty of bang and bucks but only to the Air Force budget and the profits of the merchants of mass nuclear death who make them.
A Sane Path Forward for America’s Nuclear Force
I still remember the nuclear freeze movement, the stunningly popular antinuclear protest of the early 1980s. I also remember when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in 1986 and seriously discussed total nuclear disarmament. I remember Barack Obama, as a 2008 presidential candidate, being joined by old Cold War stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn in calling for the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
Today, we’re not supposed to recall any of that. Instead, we’re told to focus on the way a developing “new cold war” with Russia and China is driving a “requirement” for a “modernized” U.S. nuclear triad that could cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. Meanwhile, we’re discouraged from thinking too much about the actual risks of nuclear war. The Biden administration, for example, professes little concern about the possibility that arming Ukraine with weaponry capable of hitting deep inside Russia could lead to destabilization and the possible use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield (something Vladimir Putin has threatened to do). Nor are we to fret about surrounding China with ever more U.S. military bases and sending ever more weaponry to Taiwan, while the Chinese are enlarging their own force of ICBMs; or, for that matter, about the fact that the last nuclear agreement limiting the size of the American and Russian arsenals will run out in less than 1,000 days.
To such issues, the only response America’s “best and brightest” ever have is this one: give us more/newer strategic bombers, more/newer ICBMs, and more/newer nuclear submarines (whatever the cost)! To those men, it’s as if nuclear war were a theoretical (and distinctly money-making) chess match—and yes, they are indeed still mostly men!—a challenging game whose only components are profits, jobs, money, and power. Yet when the only story to be told is one featuring more nuclear warheads and more delivery systems, it’s hard not to conclude that, in some horrific fashion, nuclear Armageddon is indeed us (or at least them).
And though few spend much time thinking about it anymore, that’s madness personified. What’s needed instead is a new conviction that a nuclear Armageddon must not be our fate and, to make that so, we must act to eliminate all ICBMs, cancel the B-21 bomber, retire the B-1s and B-2s, work on global nuclear disarmament, start thinking about how to get rid of those nuclear subs, and begin to imagine what it would be like to invest the money saved in rebuilding America. It sure beats destroying the world.
And again, in the most practical terms possible, if we’re set on preserving Armageddon, America’s existing force of Ohio-class nuclear submarines is more than enough both to do so and undoubtedly to “deter” any possible opponent.
There was a time, in the early stages of the first Cold War, when America’s leaders professed fears of “bomber” and “missile” gaps vis-à-vis the Soviet Union — gaps that existed only in their minds; or rather only in the reverse sense, since the U.S. was ahead of the Soviets in both technologies. Today, the bomber and missile “gaps” are, in fact, gaps in logic wielded by a Pentagon that insists strategic bombers and ICBMs remain a “must” for this country’s safety and security.
It’s all such nonsense, and I’m disgusted by it. I want my personal thermonuclear odyssey to come to an end. As a kid in the 1970s, I built a model of the B-1 bomber. As a ROTC cadet in the early 1980s, I made a presentation on the U.S./Soviet nuclear balance. As a young Air Force officer, I hunkered down in Cheyenne Mountain, awaiting a nuclear attack that fortunately never came. When I visited Los Alamos and the Trinity Test Site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1992, I saw what J. Robert Oppenheimer’s original atomic “gadget” had done to the tower from which it had been suspended. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I genuinely hoped that this country’s (and the world’s) long nuclear nightmare might finally be coming to an end.
Tragically, it was not to be. The gloomy Los Alamos of 1992, faced with serious cuts to its nuclear-weapons-producing budget, is once again an ebullient boom town. Lots of new plutonium pits are being dug. Lots more money is flooding in to give birth to a new generation of nuclear weapons. Of course, it’s madness, sheer madness, yet this time, it’s all happening so quietly.
U.S. Considers Expanded Nuclear Arsenal, a Reversal of Decades of Cuts.
By Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, Reporting from Washington, June 7, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/politics/us-nuclear-russia-china.html
A senior Biden administration official warned on Friday that “absent a change” in nuclear strategy by China and Russia, the United States may be forced to expand its nuclear arsenal, after decades of cutting back through now largely abandoned arms control agreements.
The comments on Friday from Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, were the most explicit public warning yet that the United States was prepared to shift from simply modernizing its arsenal to expanding it. They were also a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about the likely U.S. reaction if the last major nuclear arms control agreement, called New START, expires in February 2026 with no replacement.
Mr. Vaddi, speaking at the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, a group that advocates limits on nuclear weapons, confirmed what officials have been saying in private conversations and closed congressional testimony for more than a year. It is the inevitable outgrowth, they have argued, of China’s rapid nuclear expansion and Russia’s repeated threats to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
But it would be an epochal shift, and one fraught with dangers that many Americans thought they had left behind at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Fifteen years ago, President Barack Obama outlined a vision of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons, and he took steps to reduce their role in American strategy and defenses. While the nation’s nuclear complexes were improved and made safer, and old weapons were swapped out for more reliable or updated versions, the United States insisted it was only “modernizing” its arsenal, not expanding it.
As vice president in the Obama administration, President Biden became the spokesman for this strategy.
At the time, China was still maintaining its “minimum deterrent” policy, which dates back to its first nuclear test in 1964, and Mr. Putin appeared to have little interest in fiscally ruinous arms races. That has now changed.
China is on a path to match the number of American and Russian deployed nuclear weapons by 2035, according to the Pentagon’s public estimates. Mr. Putin has fixated on unusual weapons, including an undersea nuclear torpedo that could be launched across the Pacific to destroy the West Coast of the United States. And the United States has warned in recent months that Russia has a program underway to put a nuclear bomb into orbit.
There have been no discussions with Russia since it invaded Ukraine about negotiating a replacement for New START, which limits each country to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons, the kind that can be launched from one continent to another.
China has been unwilling to engage in deep nuclear talks with the United States, making it clear that it is not interested in arms control until its own arsenal is comparable to that of the two biggest nuclear powers. (Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all have arsenals of their own, though with much smaller numbers.)
While the Biden administration has not abandoned its rhetorical support of a world without nuclear weapons, officials have acknowledged that the prospects of new arms control deals are now so remote that they have to think about new strategies.
“Absent a change in the trajectory of the adversary arsenal, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required, and we need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision,” he said.
The United States remains ready to pursue arms control agreements to reduce nuclear threats by “limiting and shaping” adversaries’ nuclear forces, Mr. Vaddi said. And citing the history of separate diplomatic tracks for such agreements, he suggested Russia’s war in Ukraine would not be a barrier to a discussion.
But he said Russia’s rejection of talks to a successor agreement to New Start has “cast a shadow” over diplomatic issues.
“At least in the near term, the prospects for strategic arms control are dim,” he said.
A year ago, at the same conference, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, pledged a renewed effort to bring China into arms control talks. Since that speech, the United States has tried to engage the Chinese on nuclear safety issues and recently conducted the first talks, in Geneva, to address whether it would be possible to reach an accord that artificial intelligence should never control nuclear weapons, among other limitations.
That meeting was preliminary, and it is unclear if others are to follow. While China has urged the United States to adopt what it calls its “no first use” policy for employing nuclear weapons, it has not engaged substantively with the American proposals.
One of the complications of the current nuclear environment, administration officials say, is the potential that Russia and China may coordinate their nuclear policies, part of the “partnership without limits” that Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, announced in 2022.
The failure of Russia and China to engage in meaningful negotiations, Mr. Vaddi said, was “forcing the United States and our close allies and partners to prepare for a world where nuclear competition occurs without numerical constraints.”
Modernizing the American nuclear arsenal, he argued, will give both Russia and China an incentive to go back to the negotiating table and put Washington at a stronger place in those talks.
“We need to persuade our adversaries that managing rivalry through arms control is preferable to unrestrained competition,” he said.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
US Bombs Used in Israeli Massacre of 40 in Gaza Refugee Camp
By Sharon Zhang / Truthout June 7, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/06/07/us-bombs-used-in-israeli-massacre-of-40-in-gaza-refugee-camp/
The targeting of the UN school-turned-shelter is a “blatant” violation of international law, one UN official said.
n Israeli bombing that killed 40 Palestinians and wounded 74 sheltering in a UN school-turned-shelter in a refugee camp in central Gaza on Thursday was carried out using U.S.-made weapons, an analysis finds.
Fragments of at least two U.S.-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs were found at the scene of the bombing on the Nuseirat refugee camp, CNN found in a review that concluded they were used in the devastating overnight strike.
The bombing, which Gaza officials say killed at least 14 children and wounded 23, is a “blatant” violation of international law, human rights groups have said. International law prohibits targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in war.
“Attacking, targeting or using UN buildings for military purposes are a blatant disregard of International Humanitarian law,” said UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini. “UNRWA shares the coordinates of all its facilities (including this school) with the Israeli Army and other parties to the conflict. Targeting UN premises or using them for military purposes cannot become the new norm.”
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said that the attack is a “suspected war crime.”
If these assessments are correct, this represents direct evidence that U.S. military assistance is being used by Israeli forces to commit war crimes. U.S. weapons have been used in many war crimes committed by Israeli forces in recent months, previous reports have found.
These assessments run contrary to a recent report released by the State Department concluding that it’s “reasonable to assess” that U.S. weapons have been used in violation of international law, but that there is not enough direct evidence of Israel’s culpability in slaughtering civilians en masse. If that report had directly concluded that U.S. weapons are being used to commit Israeli war crimes, it would have spurred the U.S. to consider withholding military aid to Israel in accordance with U.S. and international law.
The conclusions of the report raised an uproar. A U.S. State Department official who quit after the release of the report said that its conclusions were fabricated by higher ups in the department to provide cover for U.S. officials working to send Israel yet more aid to be used to commit atrocities against Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses say the attack on the Nuseirat school was horrific, with Israeli forces releasing two bombs on the building that was sheltering 6,000 Palestinians who had been displaced multiple times over the course of Israel’s genocide. At the site of the attack, the smell of blood hangs heavy in the air, reported Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary.
“We were inside the school and suddenly we were bombed, people here turned to pieces on a harsh night … this building housed families and young people, and the shelling took place without warning,” survivor Anas al-Dahouk told Al Jazeera.
The school is one of the many UNRWA facilities that have been targeted by Israeli forces since October. According to Lazzarini, 180 UNRWA buildings have been attacked, killing at least 450 Palestinians in UN facilities alone.
According to the official death toll, Israel’s genocidal assault has killed at least 36,600 Palestinians. But the true death toll is likely far higher, as thousands more Palestinians are missing and presumed to be dead under the rubble of buildings bombed by Israel. The count also doesn’t include those who have died for reasons like starvation or illness outside of health facilities in the region.
Russia doesn’t need nuclear weapons to succeed: Putin
Canberra Times. June 8 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin says there is no need to use nuclear weapons to deliver victory for Moscow in Ukraine, the strongest signal yet from the Kremlin chief that there will not be a nuclear strike.
Putin, whose forces have been making advances in eastern Ukraine in recent months, said on Friday he did not see the conditions for the use of such weapons and requested that people stop discussing the nuclear topic.
However Putin, who leads the world’s biggest nuclear power, said he did not rule out changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which sets out the conditions under which such weapons could be used.
He also said that if necessary Russia could test a nuclear weapon, though he saw no need to do so at the present time……………………………………….
Russia’s published 2020 nuclear doctrine sets out the conditions under which a Russian president would consider using a nuclear weapon: broadly as a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or to the use of conventional weapons against Russia “when the very existence of the state is put under threat”.
“If necessary, we will conduct tests. So far, there is no need for this either, since our information and computer capabilities allow us to produce everything in its current form.”……………………………….. more https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8656114/russia-doesnt-need-nuclear-weapons-to-succeed-putin/
The weapons potential of high-assay low-enriched uranium
Recent promotion of new reactor technologies appears to disregard decades-old concerns about nuclear proliferation
R. SCOTT KEMP , EDWIN S. LYMAN, MARK R. DEINERT, RICHARD L. GARWIN, AND FRANK N. VON HIPPEL, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8693 6 June 24
Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been a major thrust of international policymaking for more than 70 years. Now, an explosion of interest in a nuclear reactor fuel called high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), spurred by billions of dollars in US government funding, threatens to undermine that system of control.
HALEU contains between 10 and 20% of the isotope uranium-235. At 20% 235U and above, the isotopic mixture is called highly enriched uranium (HEU) and is internationally recognized as being directly usable in nuclear weapons. However, the practical limit for weapons lies below the 20% HALEU-HEU threshold. Governments and others promoting the use of HALEU have not carefully considered the potential proliferation and terrorism risks that the wide adoption of this fuel creates.
France to give fighter jets to Ukraine – Macron
The French president also reiterated that Kiev can carry out long-range missile strikes on Russian soil
French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that France will supply Kiev with Mirage 2000 fighter jets and train Ukrainian pilots on the jets. However, Macron did not specify how many planes would be provided, or when they would arrive.
“Tomorrow we will launch a new cooperation and announce the transfer of Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets to Ukraine, made by French manufacturer Dassault, and train their Ukrainian pilots in France,” Macron told France’s TF1 broadcaster on Thursday.
Alongside US-made F-16 fighters, Kiev has long requested Mirage 2000 warplanes. In a post on social media in January, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force said that these jets – roughly comparable to the F-16 but considered more maneuverable – could “increase the combat potential” of Ukraine’s Soviet-era fleet.
France has around 26 Mirage 2000-5 and 65 older Mirage 2000-D aircraft in active service, according to Flight International’s World Air Forces rankings. It is unclear whether Macron intends to spare any of the French Air Force’s active duty fleet, or whether out-of-service jets will be recommissioned for Kiev.
Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway have all pledged to supply Ukraine with F-16 fighters, although none have actually been delivered. Last month, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky announced that Belgium would supply 30 1980s-built F-16s, bringing to 85 the number pledged in total.
At the outset of the Ukraine conflict, Macron positioned himself as a voice of caution, warning other NATO member states that sending heavy weapons to Kiev could be too escalatory a move. However, he has since emerged as one of the most pro-interventionist NATO leaders, declaring earlier this year that the idea of sending Western ground troops into combat against Russia “could not be ruled out.”
Ukrainian army chief Aleksandr Syrsky said last week that French military instructors would soon be deployed in Ukraine. While the Ukrainian defense ministry quickly walked back these claims, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said that the question of sending French instructors to the country was “not taboo.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said that there are “numerous facts” indicating that French instructors are already working in Ukraine and warned that these operatives represent an “absolutely legitimate target” for Russia’s armed forces.
Macron told TF1 that he is not worried about escalating the conflict. The French president then announced that he would back the formation of a 4,500-strong “French brigade” of French-trained and equipped Ukrainian soldiers, and repeated his announcement last week that Ukraine can use French missiles for long-range strikes on Russian soil.
“We stand with the Ukrainians. Ukraine is allowed to strike targets where missiles have been fired [from],” he told the network, adding that “we forbid hitting civilians with our weapons.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow would consider arming the enemies of Western nations who give Ukraine the means to carry out these strikes. “This is a recipe for very serious problems,” he warned.
European Nuclear Deterrent a Harebrained Illegal Proposal
Putin actually tabled a proposed agreement two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, promising not to take action if Ukraine remained neutral and was not accepted into NATO.
By Alice Slater, NEW YORK, Jun 6 2024 (IPS) https://www.ipsnews.net/2024/06/european-nuclear-deterrent-harebrained-illegal-proposal/ –
It is quite astonishing and clearly insane, that Manfred Weber, the German leader of the European Union’s center-right European People’s Party, now expected to come in first in the European Parliament election scheduled on June 6-9th, is calling for the EU’s own nuclear “deterrent”—arguing that the US-stationed nuclear weapons in five NATO states, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherland, and Turkey, may be inadequate protection for Europe’s security should Trump, that great friend of Russia, be elected!
There is a total disconnect from reality in the western world. It is driven by what has been described as an expansion of the warning of former General Eisenhower, commander of US World War II forces that worked with Russia to defeat the Nazi onslaught, which happened to kill the astounding number of 27 million Russians, in his outgoing presidential address.
Eisenhower warned against the undue influence of the Military Industrial Complex–which has been described by Ray McGovern, former CIA agent and founder of VIPS (Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) as the MICIMATT– the Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank complex! They are all making a killing on killing!
The US, leading this doomsday machine, is hurtling us towards destruction based on a flouting of all the laws and treaties that have been painfully negotiated and put in place to avoid WWIII, for what it calls its “rules-based order”.
This was the alibi it used when it bombed Kosovo over Russia’s UN Security Council veto, despite its UN treaty obligation not to commit any war of aggression without Security Council approval unless under “imminent threat of attack”, which could hardly be rationally expected to come from Kosovo!
Although the US violated no treaty, it’s steady expansion of NATO eastward, despite well documented promises to Gorbachev, when he miraculously dissolved the Warsaw pact, without a shot, and expressed his apprehension at the Nazi slaughter Russia had suffered with a hope that a unified Germany would not be part of NATO.
Reassurances were given to him that we would never allow Germany to commit aggression again and that we would not expand NATO one inch to the east. At one point, Russia was so threatened by the expansion of NATO that Putin proposed to Clinton that Russia be invited to join. The US turned him down.
And of course, Putin actually tabled a proposed agreement two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, promising not to take action if Ukraine remained neutral and was not accepted into NATO. Bush walked out of the 1972 ABM Treaty we had with the USSR to stop the proliferation of anti-ballistic missiles, and the US put missile bases in Romania and Poland.
Russia (as well as China-the other enemy we are creating to keep the war machine going) has been very forthcoming in seeking nuclear disarmament and peace. After the devastating destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin asked Truman to turn the bomb over to the UN which we jointly founded “to end the scourge of war” and the US turned him down. So, Russia got the bomb!
Gorbachev, after the wall came down, asked Reagan to join the USSR in eliminating nuclear weapons, provided the US gave up its Star Wars policy to “dominate and control the military use of space”. Reagan turned him down. Russia and China both tabled treaties for a space weapons ban at the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva where consensus is required to discuss negotiations.
The US vetoed it, refusing even any discussion in 2008, and again in 2014. Putin proposed to Clinton that we cut our nuclear arsenals to 1,000 bombs each and call the six other nuclear armed countries to the table for a treaty to abolish them. The US turned him down.
When the US and Israel boasted about their use of the Stuxnet virus to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment plant, Putin approached Obama to negotiate a cyberwar ban treaty. The US turned him down.
The demonization of Russia and Putin and now China as well, is a major project of the MICIMATT! The EU has bought the brainwashing caused by the manufacture of a false narrative to keep the war machine going.
In the words of Pogo Possum, a Walt Kelly cartoon character during the first Red Scare, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. She is the UN NGO Representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and on the Advisory Board of Nuclear Ban U.S. in support of the 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
IPS UN Bureau
Report: Vast Majority of Children Under 5 in Gaza Going Full Days Without Food
Since Israel began its Rafah invasion, the amount of aid entering the region has dropped by two-thirds.
By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT, June 4, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/report-vast-majority-of-children-under-5-in-gaza-going-full-days-without-food/
The vast majority of children under the age of 5 in Gaza are regularly forced to go at least one full day without eating as Israel’s manufactured famine has intensified in recent weeks, aid groups have reported.
According to a food survey conducted by humanitarian aid groups in May, 85 percent of children under 5 were deprived of food at least one day over a three day period. Official death counts reported by Gaza’s government do not include deaths by starvation; at least 30 children have been recorded starving to death in Gaza so far.
Israel’s starvation campaign has resulted in the rapid spread of famine across the region, which aid groups are warning is worsening by the day as Israel continues its near-total humanitarian aid blockade. According to an Oxfam report released Monday, the risk of famine in Gaza is higher than ever as Israel’s relentless assault and obstruction of aid has made it “virtually impossible” for groups to carry out an aid response.
The UN has reported that, since Israel began its Rafah invasion, the amount of aid entering the region has dropped by two-thirds from the already famine-inducing levels prior to May.
Since May 6, when Israel seized and closed the main humanitarian aid crossing into Gaza, only about eight trucks of aid have entered on average each day — or about 1 percent of the 500 to 600 trucks that the UN has said need to enter each day in order to meet Palestinians’ needs.
On top of the blockade, Israeli forces recently lifted a ban on commercial food deliveries entering Gaza, meaning that commercial deliveries from Israel and the West Bank are now squeezing out aid trucks attempting to enter border crossings.
The food and other supplies, like tents, entering from commercial trucks are then sold for extremely high prices, putting them out of reach for Palestinians already struggling to keep their families alive after months of price gouging and destruction. The Guardian reports that far more commercial trucks are entering because they can pay more to Israeli security guards to enter than groups operating aid trucks.
Two weeks ago, the UN reported that its food and tent storage warehouses in Gaza are empty because of Israel’s blockade; now, families are reporting having to pay $700 just for a basic tent that they would then have to pitch in cemeteries due to overcrowding.
“By the time a famine is declared, it will be too late. When hunger claims many more lives, nobody will be able to deny the horrifying impact of Israel’s deliberate, illegal and cruel obstruction of aid,” said Sally Abi Khalil, Middle East and North Africa director for Oxfam, in a statement. “Obstructing tonnes of food for a malnourished population while waving through caffeine-laced drinks and chocolate is sickening.”
Over a million people have fled Rafah as Israel carries out its invasion, fleeing to nearby Khan Younis, Al-Mawasi and Deir al-Balah, Oxfam reports. As a result, two-thirds of Gaza’s population, or 1.7 million people, have now been forced into an area that’s less than one-fifth of the area of the Gaza strip — an area that Israeli forces have been bombing anyway, despite declaring it to be a safe zone.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza is leading to extremely unsanitary and dangerous conditions. In Al-Mawasi, there are only 121 toilets for over 500,000 people, Oxfam says, meaning that there are roughly 4,130 people to each toilet.
Israel is carrying out its blockade and Rafah assault despite the International Court of Justice ordering an end to Israel’s siege of Rafah and an immediate influx of humanitarian aid to Gaza in May in order to stave off the spread of famine and save countless Palestinian lives.
As Ukraine Disintegrates – Hedging Bets Begins in Italy
New Eastern Outlook, 05.06.2024 Author: Phil Butler
The remarkable news that Italy’s Defence Minister is calling for the West to make a concerted effort to end the conflict in Ukraine may give some people hope. Guido Crosetto recently told the daily Il Messaggero that negotiation with Vladimir Putin is the only way to end the bloodshed. However, doublespeak statements from Italian politicians and business people mirror the EU’s and NATO’s rudderless single mindedness. Indecision is spelling the end of Ukraine as a nation.
Crosetto, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, has also criticized Western sanctions against Russia as ineffective. As one of the founders of the national-conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI), he has also pointed out the overestimation of the Western order’s economic influence by American and European leadership. He believes that arming Ukraine could expedite the conditions for a truce and ultimately peace. In other words, the solution lies in a strategic approach that leads to peace, not in a perpetual state of conflict.
Conflicts of Interest and Financial Motivations
It is worth mentioning here that Italy’s Defense Minister is also involved in the arms industry, building corvettes, frigates and aircraft carriers via Orizzonte Sistemi Navali, a joint venture between Fincantieri and Leonardo S.p.A. In true deadly sidewinder fashion, Crosetto now says he advised Ukraine’s Zelensky against the counter-offensive aimed at the Russian lines, but that Zelensky did not take his advice seriously. So, an Italian politician and tycoon who changes parties as often as he does his underwear seek to ride the fence on Ukraine no
If the Russian military continues its slow offensive moves westward, no degree of arms or monetary support will prevent the inevitable. The Ukraine side will soon have too few soldiers to use new tranches of weapons, and money laundering schemes will dry up as fast as Zelensky’s cabal exits the country. However, the recent Crosetto fence riding has more to do with making billions off of arms sales to NATO and non-Nato countries. A multi-billion euro deal between Abu Dhabi-based defense contractors EDGE Group and Shipbuilding Giant Fincantieri. At the time of the agreement, Crosetto was quoted thus:………………………………………………………………………….. more https://journal-neo.su/2024/06/05/as-ukraine-disintegrates-hedging-bets-begins-in-italy/
Stockpiling nuclear weapons? That will do nothing for national security, Keir Starmer
Until the UK and other nuclear states are brave enough to disarm, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking towards midnight.
Until the UK and other nuclear states are brave enough to disarm, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking towards midnight
Jeremy Corbyn, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/05/stockpiling-nuclear-weapons-national-security-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn
Seventy-seven years ago, a group of scientists created a symbolic Doomsday Clock to measure humanity’s proximity to self-destruction, or “midnight”. The hands move closer to – or further away from – midnight, depending on what existential threats exist at that particular time. Addressing the UN general assembly last year, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, announced that the clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight, declaring that humanity was perilously close to catastrophe. “This is the closest the clock has ever stood to humanity’s darkest hour,” he said. “We need to wake up – and get to work.” Guterres named three perilous challenges. One, extreme poverty. Two, an accelerating climate crisis. And three, global nuclear war.
“Lie flat in a ditch and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands.” In 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s government published a pamphlet, Protect and Survive, advising people what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. In what was in essence a DIY handbook, people were instructed to hide under a table, place bodies of dead relatives in another room or, if outside, lie on the floor and hope for the best. Adopting an optimistic attitude toward our extinction, the 32-page booklet was ridiculed by a population that knew there was no survival kit for nuclear annihilation.
The government no longer distributes booklets that advise us how to survive nuclear war. Instead, it buries its head in the sand entirely, turning a blind eye to the fact that we are getting closer and closer to midnight. After a period of gradual decline that followed the end of the cold war, the number of operational nuclear weapons has risen again. There are now more than 12,500 warheads around the world, with 90% belonging to Russia and the United States alone.
Which brings us to Keir Starmer’s most recent speech. “National security will always come first,” he said, as he pledged to increase defence spending and update Britain’s nuclear arsenal. He is right that security is important, but endless escalation is not the answer. What about standing up to the fossil-fuel giants jeopardising the security of our planet? Or abolishing the two-child benefits cap to end atrocious levels of food insecurity across our country? If he really cared about global insecurity, he would defend a foreign policy of peace and human rights, to ensure we get on with our neighbours in pursuit of a more stable world.
Ever since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many of us have warned of the rising risk of nuclear escalation – a risk that was heightened last year when Russia announced plans to halt participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US. In a recent worrying development, Kyiv intelligence sources have reported that a Ukrainian drone has targeted a long-range radar deep inside Russia, the primary function of which is to alert the security forces of a nuclear attack.
It is estimated that a nuclear war between Russia and the US could kill 200 million people in the near term. The former defence secretary Ben Wallace has previously said he expects the UK to be at war by the end of this decade, which is used as a basis for a continued increase in our already bloated defence budget. The Labour party has also signalled it will raise defence spending. But why can’t our media ask politicians some simple questions: what are you doing to prevent the descent into a protracted, all-out-war with Russia? Why can’t you learn from Latin American and African countries and establish zones of peace?
Meanwhile, nuclear threats have loomed over the Middle East because our political leaders lack the ability and willingness to facilitate de-escalation and diplomacy. Our government could have called for a ceasefire in Gaza from the very beginning. They instead ignored warnings from the anti-war movement for de-escalation – and came far too close to an all-out conflict with Iran. Even without the involvement of more global players with nuclear capabilities, the human consequences of such a war would have been catastrophic for the entire world. Remember, doomsday need not be nuclear for it to be an extinction-level event; the first two months of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza produced more greenhouse gases than the annual emissions of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries combined. The only winners are the arms companies making huge profits from death and destruction.
Many justify their entertainment of the prospect of mass extinction with the myth of nuclear deterrence. There are several examples that show the threat of nuclear retaliation has failed to deter an invasion. And there are several factors to explain why, when war has been averted, it was not the threat of destruction that got people to the negotiating table. Ultimately, we should not have to debate the failures of deterrence theory. Just speaking to the descendants of the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – known as the hibakusha – should be enough to dissuade our political class from their red-button grandstanding.
Some may say that war is a bad time to talk about nuclear disarmament. In reality, there is no better time to do so. If the next government wants to be a global leader, it would advance the cause for nuclear disarmament by signing the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which bans the development, production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons. Currently, it cannot even honour the treaties it has already signed. Our government claims it is still committed to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (signed by Harold Wilson in 1968), but its stockpiles speak louder than words.
Security is not the ability to threaten and destroy your neighbour. Security is getting on with your neighbour. It’s giving children a habitable future. It’s ensuring people have a roof over their head. And it’s when everybody has enough resources to live a happy and healthy life. A report from 2020 calculated that the government spent £8,300 every minute on nuclear weapons that year. Imagine if we instead spent that money on renewable energy, social housing, public healthcare, schools and lifting children out of poverty?
Many of us grew up with the real and terrifying threat of nuclear destruction during the cold war. I don’t want our children learning how to duck and cover in preparation for its return. Those who beat their chests in the name of national security must know that, in the event of a nuclear war, nobody wins. If our politicians care about the legacy they leave behind, they may want to consider the following possibility: if they carry on down this path, there may not be anybody around to remember them at all.
- Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour party from 2015 to 2020
Jeremy Corbyn was smeared for rejecting the use of nuclear weapons – but he was right,
Corbyn was smeared for rejecting the use of nuclear weapons – but he was right https://leftfootforward.org/2020/01/corbyn-was-smeared-for-rejecting-the-use-of-nuclear-weapons-but-he-was-right/, Kate Hudson
– It’s time to smash the narrative that using nuclear weapons is ‘patriotic,
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A recurrent trope in the post-election analysis has been Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed lack of patriotism. It’s worth examining. Rather than arriving at this conclusion by demonstrating that Corbyn doesn’t love his country – for which there is no evidence whatsoever – it seems largely to be based on his unwillingness to commit to killing millions of innocent civilians at the touch of a button. The media seemed hell-bent on pushing this approach during the election (and it’s resurfacing in the leadership debate). Fortunately others in the public eye, footballer Gary Lineker for one, have more common sense. ‘Nuclear thing is bonkers’ he tweeted, ‘We’re all f**ked if they’re ever used.’ Quite so. And he went on to say – in a twitter debate with TV presenter Piers Morgan – that Trident should be scrapped. Morgan tried to assert the strange logic that because we had them they hadn’t been used. Lineker quite sensibly pointed out that nuclear weapons would not have been used if there were no nuclear weapons. This is a point we have been making for some time. It reminds me of a debating point made by some pro-nuclear advocates that ‘we have them in order not to use them’. Clearly a silly approach – we could save ourselves £205 billion by not having them in order not to use them! But having blighted the election with a knee-jerk prime ministerial virility test this is now resurfacing during the Labour leadership contest. Candidates – most notably and recently, Rebecca Long Bailey on Tuesday’s Today programme – are again being asked their position on the use of nukes. Because willingness to press the button has come to falsely symbolise strong leadership, patriotism and a commitment to Britain’s status in the world, who is going to say no? Nothing could show more clearly the urgent need to have a genuine debate about nuclear weapons, what they are and what their use would mean. We also need politicians to realise that nuclear weapons are not something to posture wildly about – they are indeed weapons of mass destruction. There will be no life worthy of the name after their use. Survivors will envy the dead. Most concerning is the fact that unquestioning attachment to a totemic but anachronistic weapons system prevents a real assessment of what is needed to meet our security needs in the 21st century – and what we need to spend our defence budget on. It is an open secret that the MoD is overcommitted on ‘big ticket’ projects. Yet no one seems to dare to question Trident, presumably on the grounds that they would be immediately characterised as a lily-livered traitor. National security strategies since 2010 have identified cyber warfare, terrorism, climate change, pandemics and organised crime as some of the key contemporary threats we face. Nuclear threats have actually been downgraded in risk level but nevertheless Trident replacement is proceeding – with significant opportunity cost to other higher level defence priorities. Even former advocates of nuclear weapons, like Lord Des Browne, are speaking out. He was the Defence Secretary who pushed the decision on Trident replacement through parliament in the Blair years. Now he has raised serious concerns about the impact of new technology on Trident and its replacement. When Trident was launched in the 1990s it was the gold standard of nuclear weapons, undetectable under the waters, 24/7. Now, he states, the replacement will be obsolete before it’s launched: the rapid development of underwater drone technology will render subs fully detectable and advanced hacking skills will jeopardise the security of targeting and missile use. So this is the problem with reducing serious questions about our national security to the level of a ‘will they/won’t they press the button?’ game show, trapping politicians in a ridiculous zero-sum game where actually everyone loses. Our real security needs are ignored and underfunded. It’s time for change – rethinking our security is well overdue. Kate Hudson is General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. |
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NATO plans Europe-wide escalation of war against Russia
Alex Lantier
© Daily MailSince the failure last year of the Ukrainian army’s “counteroffensive” against Russia, NATO countries have relentlessly escalated their war with Russia in Ukraine, authorizing the Kiev regime to launch missile strikes on Russia and pledging to send their own troops to Ukraine. An interview with top NATO officials published yesterday in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, titled “NATO land corridors could rush US troops to front line in event of European war,” highlights that NATO plans to escalate the war from Ukraine across Europe.
Examining the Telegraph article puts paid to arguments that NATO’s escalation against Russia aims to defend Ukraine’s borders or European democracy. NATO is preparing a continental war, sending hundreds of thousands of troops for operations along Russia’s entire western border, from Finland to the Balkans. Even if the implementation of NATO’s plans did not immediately trigger nuclear war, which is a very real danger, it would plunge Europe into mass slaughter on a scale unseen since World War II.
Lt. General Alexander Sollfrank of NATO’s Logistics Command told the Telegraph that NATO plans to take over Europe’s port and ground transport infrastructure in order to send US troops arriving in Europe’s Atlantic ports across the continent to Russia. In these transport corridors, which NATO expects would face devastating air attacks, local laws would be suspended.
The Telegraph published a diagram of planned “transport corridors” across Europe. Initial NATO plans call for US troops to land in Rotterdam or Hamburg, in northwestern Europe. However, they can also arrive at the western Italian ports of Genoa or La Spezia; in Athens; in the Norwegian port of Bergen; or in Turkish ports. NATO military officers would take over key road and rail infrastructure to send US troops across Europe to the Russian border. The Telegraph wrote:
NATO is developing multiple ‘land corridors’ to rush US troops and armour to the front lines in the event of a major European ground war with Russia. American soldiers would land at one of five ports and be channelled along pre-planned logistical routes to confront a possible attack by Moscow, officials told The Telegraph. … But arrangements are also being made behind the scenes to expand the routes to other ports to ensure the ground line of communications cannot be severed by Moscow’s forces.
“In these corridors, national militaries will not be restricted by local regulation,” the Telegraph added, “and will be free to transport consignments without normal restrictions.”
These plans for military rule and war are the outcome of Ukraine war planning that has gone on for at least a year, behind the backs of the people. The Telegraph noted:
Logistical routes have become a key priority since NATO leaders agreed to prepare 300,000 troops to be kept in a state of high readiness to defend the alliance at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, last year.
Russia has thousands of high-precision ballistic missiles with nuclear or conventional warheads, and NATO expects its “land corridors” would be under relentless attack. “NATO only has 5 percent of the necessary air defences to cover its eastern flank,” the Telegraph stated. Indeed, Sollfrank told the Telegraph that the task of defending Europe’s major ports and transport hubs is all but hopeless.
“With regards to air defence, it’s always scarce. I cannot imagine a situation that you have enough air defence,” he said.
Observing and assessing the Russian war in Ukraine, we have observed Russia has attacked Ukraine’s logistics bases. That must lead to the conclusion that it is clear that huge logistics bases, as we know them from Afghanistan and Iraq, are no longer possible, because they will be attacked and destroyed very early on in a conflict situation.
NATO therefore plans to disperse US troops across other, unidentified European ports, even before the main ports are destroyed. Given the likelihood that “NATO forces entering from the Netherlands are hit by Russian bombardment, or northern European ports are destroyed,” the Telegraph said, “arrangements are also being made behind the scenes to expand the routes to other ports to ensure the ground line of communications cannot be severed by Moscow’s forces.”
These lines in the Telegraph reveal the mood of criminal recklessness that is spreading over the entire political and media establishment in the NATO countries. The firebombing of Rotterdam by the Nazis and Hamburg by the British air force were horrific imperialist war crimes of World War II. Yet the Telegraph casually mentions these ports’ destruction, without asking the cost in lives, the catastrophic impact this would have on Europe’s economy — or, above all, what could be done to avert an escalation towards such an outcome……………………………………………………………………..more https://www.sott.net/article/491990-NATO-plans-Europe-wide-escalation-of-war-against-Russia
What’s Next for Battlefield America? Israel’s High-Tech Military Tactics Point the Way
“I did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face. [But Israel has] been watching us for years from the sky with their drones. They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”—Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet
If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.
Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.
We’ve already seen many of these military tactics and technologies deployed on American soil and used against the populace, especially along the border regions, a testament to the heavy influence Israel’s military-industrial complex has had on U.S. policing.
Indeed, Israel has become one of the largest developers and exporters of military weapons and technologies of oppression worldwide.
Journalist Antony Loewenstein has warned that Pegasus, one of Israel’s most invasive pieces of spyware, which allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone and get all the information from that phone, has become a favorite tool of oppressive regimes around the world. The FBI and NYPD have also been recipients of the surveillance technology which promises to turn any “target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”
Yet it’s not just military weapons that Israel is exporting. They’re also helping to transform local police agencies into extensions of the military.
According to The Intercept, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, “one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here,” as part of an ongoing exchange program that largely flies under the radar of public scrutiny.
A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”
“At the very least,” notes journalist Matthew Petti, “visits to Israel have helped American police justify more snooping on citizens and stricter secrecy. Critics also assert that Israeli training encourages excessive force.”
Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”
That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.
As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”
This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.
In Minority Report, police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs in order to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
While Blomkamp’s Elysium acts as a vehicle to raise concerns about immigration, access to healthcare, worker’s rights, and socioeconomic stratification, what was most striking was its eerie depiction of how the government will employ technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace, especially dissidents.
With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.
For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.
Facial Recognition
Fiction: One of the most jarring scenes in Elysium occurs towards the beginning of the film, when the protagonist Max Da Costa waits to board a bus on his way to work. While standing in line, Max is approached by two large robotic police officers, who quickly scan Max’s biometrics, cross-check his data against government files, and identify him as a former convict in need of close inspection. They demand to search his bag, a request which Max resists, insisting that there is nothing for them to see. The robotic cops respond by manhandling Max, throwing him to the ground, and breaking his arm with a police baton. After determining that Max poses no threat, they leave him on the ground and continue their patrol. Likewise, in Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens and preemptively target suspects for interrogation and containment.
Fact: We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers. This is exactly how Palestinian poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha found himself, within minutes of passing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza with his wife and children in tow, asked to step out line, only to be blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, then imprisoned in an Israeli detention center for two days, beaten and further interrogated. Toha was finally released in what Israeli soldiers chalked up to a “mistake,” yet there was no mistaking the AI-powered facial recognition technology that was used to pull him out of line, identify him, and label him (erroneously) as a person of interest.
Drones
Fiction: In another Elysium scene, Max is hunted by four drones while attempting to elude the authorities. The drones, equipped with x-ray cameras, biometric readers, scanners and weapons, are able to scan whole neighborhoods, identify individuals from a distance—even through buildings, report their findings back to police handlers, pursue a suspect, and target them with tasers and an array of lethal weapons.
Fact: Drones, some deceptively small and yet powerful enough to capture the facial expressions of people hundreds of feet below them, have ushered in a new age of surveillance. Not even those indoors, in the privacy of their homes, will be safe from these aerial spies, which can be equipped with technology capable of peering through walls. In addition to their surveillance capabilities, drones can also be equipped with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, tear gas, and tasers.
Biometric scanners and national IDs
Fiction: Throughout Elysium, citizens are identified, sorted and dealt with by way of various scanning devices that read their biometrics—irises, DNA, etc.—as well as their national ID numbers, imprinted by a laser into their skin. In this way, citizens are tracked, counted, and classified. Likewise, in Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on a suspected would-be criminal, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database. The end result is that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide to escape the government’s all-seeing eyes.
Fact: Given the vast troves of data that various world governments, including Israel and the U.S., is collecting on its citizens and non-citizens alike, we are not far from a future where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In fact, between the facial recognition technology being handed out to law enforcement, license plate readers being installed on police cruisers, local police creating DNA databases by extracting DNA from non-criminals, including the victims of crimes, and police collecting more and more biometric data such as iris scans, we are approaching the end of anonymity. It won’t be long before police officers will be able to pull up a full biography on any given person instantaneously, including their family and medical history, bank accounts, and personal peccadilloes. It’s already moving in that direction in more authoritarian regimes.
Predictive Policing
Fiction: In Minority Report, John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime, finds himself identified as the next would-be criminal and targeted for preemptive measures by the very technology that he relies on for his predictive policing. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
Fact: Precrime, which aims to prevent crimes before they happen, has justified the use of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and snitch programs. As political science professor Anwar Mhajne documents, Israel has used all of these tools in its military engagements with Palestine: deploying AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories; utilizing facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians; subjecting Palestinians to facial recognition scans at checkpoints, with a color-coded mechanism to dictate who should be allowed to proceed, subjected to further questioning, or detained.
Making the Leap from Fiction to Reality
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.
Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.
Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.
What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we may not be an occupied territory, but that does not make the electronic concentration camp being erected around us any less of a prison.
A Detectable Subservience – Australia’s ill-fated nuclear submarine deal?
All of this leaves one wondering about just what due diligence was done before Morrison, and the 24-hour copycat decision-maker Albanese, committed us to the folly of paying $A368 billion to purchase a subservient position embedded within the US war machine by means of a soon-to-be fully detectable and therefore likely to be destroyed fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.
June 6, 2024 by: The AIM Network, By Michael Willis, https://theaimn.com/a-detectable-subservience/
The first operational outcome of the Pillar 2 AUKUS arrangement between the US, UK and Australia has just been announced.
The three countries will share data from their submarine-hunting PA-8 Poseidon aircraft, manufactured by the troubled Boeing Corporation.
This was announced on May 29 in an “exclusive interview” given to US online website Breaking Defense by Michael Horowitz, whose office serves as the Pentagon’s day-to-day lead on AUKUS issues.
(In a deliciously ironic slip, the website referred to the United Kingdom as the “Untied Kingdom”, true of the political cohesion of both the UK and the US at this time.)
All three AUKUS nations:
“… operate the Boeing-made maritime surveillance aircraft; the US operates 120, Australia 12, and the United Kingdom nine. A key part of the P-8 is its collection of sonobuoys, which are dropped into the water to hunt down submarines. (“Sonobuoys” is the preferred US-spelling of the English language “sonar buoys”.)
According to Horowitz, the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities, a new “trilateral algorithm” will allow them to share information from P-8 sonar buoys between each other.
According to Breaking Defense, the trilateral algorithm requires a high level of trust between the three countries.
“Even among Five Eyes partners,” it says, “sonobuoy information is highly sensitive, as sharing that data not only makes clear what each country has the ability to gather and where those buoys are deployed, but because it clearly reveals what and where each country is tracking.”
Pillar 2 arrangements build on those of Pillar 1 which are solely concerned with Australia’s acquisition of the hugely expensive nuclear-powered submarines.
At a cost averaged out at $A33 million a day over 35 years, we are promised a fleet of 8 submarines with the apparent advantages of extended range and endurance, higher speed, increased payload capacity, and reduced refuelling needs.
But given our own use of sonar buoys and knowing that our own all-but-at-war with “enemy”, China, has the same or superior detection technologies, it is the claim that SSNs (nuclear-powered submarines) have greater stealth and reduced detectability that is the major sales pitch justifying our $368 billion spend.
SSNs are claimed to have reduced noise and to be able to operate at greater depths, thus making them harder to detect.
Reduced noise will affect passive sonar buoys which listen for sounds generated by submarines. These sounds can include engine noise, propeller cavitation, or other mechanical noises.
Greater depth will affect active sonar buoys, those that send out a sound wave which then bounces off the submarine, allowing the buoy to detect the “ping” that travels back to the buoy. That ping is weaker the greater distance it has to travel.
Former Senator and submariner Rex Patrick was critical of the AUKUS decision for Australia to begin its SSN acquisition with the purchase of three second-hand Virginia Class SSNs from the US.
“The first highly noticeable issue with the Virginia class is a problem that has surfaced with the submarine’s acoustic coating that’s designed to reduce the ‘target strength’ of the submarine (how much sound energy from an enemy active sonar bounces off the submarine, back to the enemy),” he said.
“The coating is prone to peeling off at high-speed leaving loose cladding that slaps against the hull, making dangerous noise, and causes turbulent water flow, which also causes dangerous hull resonance (where the hull sings at its resonant frequency, like a tuning fork) and extra propulsion noise. I know a bit about this as a former underwater acoustics specialist.”
Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) is another method of detection. MAD detects disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the metal hull of a submarine. MAD sensors are typically deployed on aircraft and can detect submarines at relatively close ranges. The signals weaken with distance.
However, the Chinese are developing the ability to detect extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic signal produced by speeding subs.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter found an ultra-sensitive magnetic detector could pick up traces of the most advanced submarine from long distances away.
The researchers calculated that the extremely low frequency (ELF) signal produced by a submarine’s bubbles could be stronger than the sensitivities of advanced magnetic anomaly detectors by three to six orders of magnitude.
The bubbles are an inevitable consequence of the submarine’s cruising speed, which causes the water flowing around the hull to move faster as its kinetic energy increases and its potential energy – expressed as pressure – decreases. When the pressure decreases sufficiently, small bubbles form on the surface of the hull as some of the water vaporises. This process causes turbulence and can produce an electromagnetic signature, in a phenomenon known as the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effect.
Though faint, ELF signals can travel great distances, thanks to their ability to penetrate the water and reach the ionosphere, where they are reflected back to the Earth’s surface.
Detection by ELF turns the advantage of an SSNs higher speed into its opposite, namely the disadvantage of higher detectability.
This ability of science to increase the detection of SSNs led even the pro-US Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) to publish a warning that “the oceans of tomorrow may become ‘transparent’. The submarine era could follow the battleship era and fade into history.”
It titled its article on a study of submarine detection by Australian scientists and academics “Advances in detection technology could render AUKUS submarines useless by 2050.”
According to the authors:
“The results should ring alarm bells for the AUKUS program to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. Our assessment suggests that there will only be a brief window of time between the deployment of the first SSN AUKUS boats and the onset of transparent oceans.”
However, it is the expanding frontier of quantum computing that may be the ultimate nail in the AUKUS submarines coffin.
Quantum computing is the sexy new kid on the block – witness the Australian government’s investment of almost a billion dollars in a bid to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer in Brisbane. It’s bound to make the shareholders of US company PsiQuantum very happy, including notorious corporate investors such as Black Rock.
In July 2016, the Australia government awarded a contract to local company Q-CTRL to develop a quantum navigation system can use the motions of a single atom to precisely determine the course and position of a submarine and maintain accuracy to a remarkable degree. This overcomes two disadvantages of navigation by GPS: GPS is vulnerable to jamming by an adversary, and its signals cannot penetrate sea water to any appreciable depth.
That’s the good news story.
The bad news is that China has already funded its multi-billion-dollar National Quantum Laboratories to develop quantum-based technology applications for “immediate use to the Chinese armed forces”, possibly including targeting stealthy submarines.
According to Zhu Jin in The Conversation:
“New quantum sensing systems offer more sensitive detection and measurement of the physical environment. Existing stealth systems, including the latest generation of warplanes and ultra-quiet nuclear submarines, may no longer be so hard to spot.”
Using devices that measure and analyse the gravitational pull exercised by the mass of a submarine on the movement of sub-atomic particles in a sensor would overcome the disadvantages of sonar buoys and magnetometers, rendering any otherwise undetectable object with mass detectable.
The other area in which China is more advanced than its competitors is the use of quantum computing for encryption and decryption of communications.
In a 2022 paper on Quantum Computing and Cryptography, the authors that:
“China has set the pace for creating secure quantum communications that cannot be intercepted or manipulated. Further advances in Chinese quantum communication networks, especially networks designed for military use, will put the Navy at increased risk when deployed to the Indo-Pacific. If Chinese communications are virtually unbreakable and U.S. Navy communications can be exploited by Chinese quantum code-breaking technology, it will quickly lose its ability to safely operate among PLAN forces.”
All of this leaves one wondering about just what due diligence was done before Morrison, and the 24-hour copycat decision-maker Albanese, committed us to the folly of paying $A368 billion to purchase a subservient position embedded within the US war machine by means of a soon-to-be fully detectable and therefore likely to be destroyed fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.
Michael Williss is a member of the Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition (AAAC) and the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN).
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