Conservative former Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced claims of wanting his “old job back” as he accused Labour of being anti nuclear. Mr Johnson urged the Energy Secretary, Grant Shapps, to “accelerate the tech selection process” as he backed the rollout of British nuclear power. His comments prompted Labour former Opposition leader, and shadow climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, to joke: “It’s important to welcome ex-party leaders to their place, but my only piece of advice is it’s important to not want your old job back.” Mr Johnson said: “I congratulate (Grant Shapps) on his continuing commitment to Great British Nuclear, but is it not vital that we reaffirm the target of 24 gigawatts by 2050 and that we also accelerate the tech selection process, so that small modular reactors whether made by Rolls Royce or anybody else (can commence operating). “I think it would be wonderful if they came from this country, are on contract with Great British Nuclear by the end of the year, so that we can get back to the nuclear tradition that this country once had and undo the baleful, luddite, Atomkraft Nein Danke legacy of the party opposite.” Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle intervened during Mr Johnson’s comments, saying: “I want to get everybody else in as well.” Mr Shapps replied: “(Mr Johnson) is of course absolutely right about this. He will know as the whole House will know that every single nuclear reactor currently operational in the UK was given permission under the Conservative Party and he is right to champion Great British nuclear and we will get the nuclear industry going again. “Indeed, I was the first energy secretary to put money, £700 million, into nuclear power since 1986.”
It’s not just Zaporizhzhia we have to worry about: There are 14 other nuclear power plants in the war zone. By Joshua Frank , TOMDISPATCH, February 28, 2023
In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein’s forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knoc
“………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. here’s the true horror story lurking behind the war in Ukraine. While a nuclear tit-for-tat between Russia and NATO — an exchange that could easily destroy much of Eastern Europe in no time at all — is a genuine, if frightening, prospect, it isn’t the most imminent radioactive peril facing the region.
Averting a Meltdown
By now, we all ought to be familiar with the worrisome Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex (ZNPP), which sits right in the middle of the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Assembled between 1980 and 1986, Zaporizhzhia is Europe’s largest nuclear-power complex, with six 950-megawatt reactors.
……………………. In September 2022, due to ongoing shelling in the area, Zaporizhzhia was taken offline and, after losing external power on several occasions, has since been sporadically relying on old diesel backup generators. (Once disconnected from the electrical grid, backup power is crucial to ensure the plant’s reactors don’t overheat, which could lead to a full-blown radioactive meltdown.)
However, relying on risk-prone backup power is a fool’s game, according to electrical engineer Josh Karpoff. A member of Science for the People who previously worked for the New York State Office of General Services where he designed electrical systems for buildings, including large standby generators, Karpoff knows how these things work in a real-world setting. He assures me that, although Zaporizhzhia is no longer getting much attention in the general rush of Ukraine news, the possibility of a major disaster there is ever more real. A backup generator, he explains, is about as reliable as a ’75 Winnebago.
“It’s really not that hard to knock out these kinds of diesel generators,” Karpoff adds. “If your standby generator starts up but says there’s a leak in a high-pressure oil line fitting, it sprays heated, aerosolized oil all over the hot motor, starting a fire. This happens to diesel motors all the time. A similar diesel engine fire in a locomotive was partly responsible for causing the Lac Megantic Rail Disaster in Quebec back in 2013.”
Sadly enough, Karpoff is on target. Just remember how the backup generators failed at the three nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. Many people believe that the 9.0 magnitude underwater earthquake caused them to melt down, but that’s not exactly the case.
It was, in fact, a horrific chain of worsening events. While the earthquake itself didn’t damage Fukushima’s reactors, it cut the facility off from the power grid, automatically switching the plant to backup generators. So even though the fission reaction had stopped, heat was still being produced by the radioactive material inside the reactor cores. A continual water supply, relying on backup power, was needed to keep those cores from melting down. Then, 30 minutes after that huge quake, a tsunami struck, knocking out the plant’s seawater pumps, which subsequently caused the generators to go down.
“The myth of the tsunami is that the tsunami destroyed the [generators] and had that not happened, everything would have been fine,” former nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “What really happened is that the tsunami destroyed the [sea] pumps right along the ocean… Without that water, the [diesel generators] will overheat, and without that water, it’s impossible to cool a nuclear core.”
With the sea pumps out of commission, 12 of the plant’s 13 generators ended up failing. Unable to cool, the reactors began to melt, leading to three hydrogen explosions that released radioactive material, carried disastrously across the region and out to sea by prevailing winds, where much of it will continue to float around and accumulate for decades.
At Zaporizhzhia, there are several scenarios that could lead to a similar failure of the standby generators. They could be directly shelled and catch fire or clog up or just run out of fuel. It’s a dicey situation, as the ongoing war edges Ukraine and the surrounding countries toward the brink of a catastrophic nuclear crisis.
“I don’t know for how long we are going to be lucky in avoiding a nuclear accident,” said Rafael Grossi, director general of the IAEA in late January, calling it a “bizarre situation: a Ukrainian facility in Russian-controlled territory, managed by Russians, but operated by Ukrainians.”
Bad Things Will Follow
Unfortunately, it’s not just Zaporizhzhia we have to worry about. Though not much attention has been given to them, there are, in fact,14 other nuclear power plants in the war zone and Russia has also seized the ruined Chernobyl plant, where there is still significant hot radioactive waste that must be kept cool.
Kate Brown, author of Plutopia, told Science for the People last April:
“Russians are apparently using these two captured nuclear installations like kings on a chessboard. They hold Chernobyl and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power reactor plants, and they are stockpiling weapons and soldiers there as safe havens. This is a new military tactic we haven’t seen before, where you use the vulnerability of these installations, as a defensive tactic. The Russians apparently figured that the Ukrainians wouldn’t shoot. The Russians noticed that when they came to the Chernobyl zone, the Ukrainian guard of the Chernobyl plant stood down because they didn’t want missiles fired at these vulnerable installations. There are twenty thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, more than half of them in basins at that plant. It’s a precarious situation. This is a new scenario for us.”
Of course, the hazards facing Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl would be mitigated if Putin removed his forces tomorrow, but there’s little possibility of that happening. It’s worth noting as well that Ukraine is not the only place where, in the future, such a scenario could play out. Taiwan, at the center of a potential military conflict between the U.S. and China, has several nuclear power plants. Iran operates a nuclear facility. Pakistan has six reactors at two different sites. Saudi Arabia is building a new facility. The list only goes on and on.
Even more regrettably, Russia has raised the nuclear stakes in a new way, setting a distressing precedent with its illegal occupation of Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl, turning them into tools of war. No other power-generating source operating in a war zone, even the worst of the fossil-fuel users, poses such a potentially serious and immediate threat to life as we know it on this planet.
And while hitting those Ukrainian reactors themselves is one recipe for utter disaster, there are other potentially horrific “peaceful” nuclear possibilities as well. What about a deliberate attack on nuclear-waste facilities or those unstable backup generators? You wouldn’t even have to strike the reactors directly to cause a disaster. Simply take out the power-grid supply lines, hit the generators, and terrible things will follow. With nuclear power, even the purportedly “peaceful” type, the potential for catastrophe is obvious.
The Greatest of Evils
In my new book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, I probe the horrors of the Hanford site in Washington state, one of the locations chosen to develop the first nuclear weapons for the covert Manhattan Project during World War II. For more than 40 years, that facility churned out most of the plutonium used in the vast American arsenal of atomic weapons.
Now, however, Hanford is a radioactive wasteland, as well as the largest and most expensive environmental clean-up project in history. To say that it’s a boondoggle would be an understatement. Hanford has 177 underground tanks loaded with 56 million gallons of steaming radioactive gunk. Two of those tanks are currently leaking, their waste making its way toward groundwater supplies that could eventually reach the Columbia River. High-level whistleblowers I interviewed who worked at Hanford told me they feared that a hydrogen build-up in one of those tanks, if ignited, could lead to a Chernobyl-like event here in the United States, resulting in a tragedy unlike anything this country has ever experienced.
All of this makes me fear that those old Hanford tanks could someday be possible targets for an attack. Sabotage or a missile strike on them could cause a major release of radioactive material from coast to coast. The economy would crash. Major cities would become unlivable. And there’s precedent for this: in 1957, a massive explosion occurred at Mayak, Hanford’s Cold War sister facility in the then-Soviet Union that manufactured plutonium for nukes. Largely unknown, it was the second biggest peacetime radioactive disaster ever, only “bested” by the Chernobyl accident. In Mayak’s case, a faulty cooling system gave out and the waste in one of the facility’s tanks overheated, causing a radioactive blast equivalent to the force of 70 tons of TNT, contaminating 20,000 square miles. Countless people died and whole villages were forever vacated.
All of this is to say that nuclear waste, whether on a battlefield or not, is an inherently nasty business. Nuclear facilities around the world, containing less waste than the underground silos at Hanford, have already shown us their vulnerabilities. Last August, in fact, the Russians reported that containers housing spent fuel waste at Zaporizhzhia were shelled by Ukrainian forces. “One of the guided shells hit the ground ten meters from them (containers with nuclear waste…). Others fell down slightly further — 50 and 200 meters,” alleged Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-appointed official there. “As the storage area is open, a shell or a rocket may unseal containers and kilograms, or even hundreds of kilograms of nuclear waste will be emitted into the environment and contaminate it. To put it simply, it will be a ‘dirty bomb.’”
Ukraine, in turn, blamed Russia for the strike, but regardless of which side was at fault, after Chernobyl (which some researchers believe affected upwards of 1.8 million people) both the Ukrainians and the Russians understand the grave risks of atomically-charged explosions. This is undoubtedly why the Russians are apparently constructing protective coverings over Zaporizhzhia’s waste storage tanks. An incident at the plant releasing radioactive particles would damage not just Ukraine but Russia, too.
France is building an alliance of pro-nuclear states to advocate for expanding nuclear power in the bloc.
EU energy ministers are meeting on Monday and Tuesday (27 and 28 February) to discuss issues ranging from security of supply to the upcoming electricity market reform.
But on the sidelines, French energy minister Agnes Pannier-Runache has invited 12 other countries on Tuesday to discuss a “nuclear alliance.”
“I would like to remind you that nuclear power represents 25 percent of European electricity production”, said Pannier-Runache. “It will be one of the important low-carbon energy sources next to wind and solar power that will help us achieve carbon neutrality.”
She later explained that the meeting would be an occasion to discuss “research, supply chain and nuclear waste issues.”
Countries in attendance include traditionally pro-nuclear members Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Finland. Newly-joined Croatia, plus the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden will also attend.
It is the latest move in an ongoing spat with Germany which is phasing out nuclear power and whose negotiators have stressed nuclear electricity should not be equated to electricity derived from solar and wind.
Other countries not attending the meeting include Belgium and Luxembourg, whose energy minister Claude Turmes said nuclear power “is very slow.”
“It takes 12 to 15 years to build a new nuclear facility,” he said. “If we want to win the race against climate change, we need to be fast.”
The French meeting follows intense French lobbying to include nuclear power in a recent EU Commission rules for green hydrogen, which is made with electricity derived from wind and solar but now also allows nuclear power as energy source…………. https://euobserver.com/green-economy/156759
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the possibility of reducing Europe’s energy dependence on Russian resources has been hotly debated. The fossil fuel industries received most attention as European Union leaders first introduced gradual sanctions on Russian coal and later on oil and gas, while Russia responded with supply cuts. However, Russia’s role as a major player in the global nuclear power sector has remained largely below the sanctions radar, despite dependencies on Russian nuclear technology, uranium supplies and handling of spent nuclear fuel. Here we analyse the state nuclear company Rosatom and its subsidiaries as tools of Russian energy statecraft. We map the company’s global portfolio, then categorize countries where Russia is active according to the degree and intensity of dependence. We offer a taxonomy of long-term energy dependencies, highlighting specific security risks associated with each of them. We conclude that the war and Russia’s actions in the energy sector will undermine Rosatom’s position in Europe and damage its reputation as a reliable supplier, but its global standing may remain strong.
…………………………………………………………Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, second-largest exporter of oil and third-largest exporter of coal8. However, media coverage and political debates have generally omitted another sector where Russia is a major player and that is vital for Russia’s global economic and diplomatic posture: nuclear energy. While the Russian shelling and takeover of Ukrainian nuclear power plants has caused an outcry, Russia’s portfolio of foreign orders, including reactor construction, fuel provision and other services, spans 54 countries and is claimed by Rosatom to be worth more than US$139 billion over a ten year period9 and has thus far not been covered by Western sanctions. Although the financial figure is in all likelihood inflated, Russia’s involvement in and use of nuclear energy as a tool of energy diplomacy deserves scrutiny.
In this Analysis, we present a dataset of all current and planned international engagements of the Russian nuclear energy supplier Rosatom and its subsidiaries AtomStroyExport and TVEL. The dataset includes information on the different types of agreement, business models, scales of investments, types of reactor being built or planned and their nameplate capacity. As a gauge of the level of dependency upon the Russian nuclear sector that is or will be brought about by these reactors, we registered their share of the future electricity supply in the countries where they are located or planned for construction. Because the degree of influence achieved through energy statecraft is conditioned by the character and level of (inter)dependence, we discuss the firmness of dependence of different client states, formulated as ‘intensity.’ Finally, we propose a categorization of dependency types (Methods).
Rosatom’s rise, expansion and comparative advantages
Rosatom—the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation—is the direct heir to the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Energy, which was established in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Reorganized as a state corporation in 2007, Rosatom is fully owned by the Russian state, and the president of the Russian Federation determines the company’s objectives10,11. Since its inception, Rosatom has become increasingly active in the international nuclear power market12,13 and has become a leading provider of key services12,14,15. Construction of as many as ten reactor units started between 2007 and 2017, and between 2009 and 2018, the company accounted for 23 of 31 orders placed and about a half of the units under construction worldwide11. Through its subsidiary TVEL, Rosatom also provides fuel supplies, controlling 38% of world’s uranium conversion and 46% of uranium enrichment capacity16,17 in addition to decommissioning and waste disposal. In sum, Russia was the supplier in around half of all international agreements on nuclear power plant construction, reactor and fuel supply, decommissioning or waste between 2000 and 2015. Its main nuclear power competitors—China, France, Japan, Korea and the United States—accounted for another 40%, combined18.
…………………………………………. Rosatom’s main advantage lies in its capacity to be a ‘one stop nuclear shop’ for all needs, the only supplier providing an ‘all-inclusive package’12. This comprises reactor construction know-how, training, support related to safety, non-proliferation regime requirements and flexible financing options, including government-sourced credit lines22. The company is also uniquely able to offload spent nuclear fuel from overseas customers.
The way Rosatom designs its projects also makes it a convenient partner for nuclear newcomers23,24. While details of contractual agreements vary from case to case, the developer takes care of the entire process until the plant is ready to use and can be handed over to local (Russian-trained) nuclear experts to operate. For that reason, nuclear energy can be considered by countries for which it was previously unattainable, especially in the Middle East25,26, sub-Saharan Africa27,28 and South America.29
Rosatom is also able to make special offers to strategically important partners, such as Turkey30,31. ………………………………….
Its comparative advantages as a supplier allowed Russia to launch a global campaign of nuclear energy diplomacy33 in which Rosatom and Russian government institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs work in tandem. This potentially gives Russia the capacity to use the broad network of international projects it is involved in34 and the direct control over reactors and strategic energy infrastructure to exert political pressure and to project power globally35.
Minin and Vlček, having studied the behaviour of Rosatom and its relationship with the Russian state, argue that the company is primarily a profit-seeking entity with a high degree of autonomy and growing self-sufficiency15. According to Thomas, whatever its grandiose expectations, Rosatom could simply be unable to deliver all the projects that it has agreed to, let alone expand further13. On the other hand, Aalto et al. observe that ‘potential foreign policy influence’ by Russia was noted by Finnish and Hungarian opponents of collaboration with Rosatom33, while Jewell and colleagues argue that some nuclear sector dependencies display more pervasive energy security impacts, long-lasting and difficult to deal with (due to lack of flexibility) than those usually analysed by energy security experts in the petroleum sector18,36.
Here we consider Rosatom’s potential as a tool for the Russian state and debate whether this constitutes a ‘nuclear energy weapon’ or simply a projection of soft-power diplomacy. We find that Russian nuclear energy statecraft can be seen as a spectrum between these two extremes, but that soft-power diplomacy creates dependencies that can be further expanded and exploited and thus should not be overlooked.
Analysing Rosatom’s international activity
Our research, gathered in the dataset available in the Supplementary Data, indicates that upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Rosatom boasted as many as 73 different projects in 29 countries. The projects were at very different stages of development from power plants in operation; through construction of reactors ongoing, contracted, ordered or planned; to involvement in tenders, invitations to partnerships or officially published proposals. On top of that, Russian companies have bilateral agreements or memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with 13 countries for services or general joint development of nuclear energy.
Rosatom’s projects and involvement have varied in ambition and cost—from India’s Tarapur nuclear power plant (NPP) (US$700 million) and Iran’s Bushehr-1 (US$850 million) to a gargantuan project in South Africa (US$76 billion) and those in Egypt (US$30 billion) and Turkey (US$20 billion). Finally, 13 countries have a variety of research-oriented agreements with Russian nuclear service providers related to nuclear research centres. Altogether, Russia’s nuclear energy diplomacy has been formalized in 54 countries.
While this is impressive, looking into the details of these agreements (particularly the NPP construction projects) reveals a more modest level of international engagement. Many of the projects have been stuck at the planning stage for several years or are merely visions laid out in non-committal MoUs………………………………………………………
However, most cooperation and plans have not been cancelled, and even EU member states Bulgaria and Hungary have, as of January 2023, not cancelled their planned nuclear plants…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and particularly after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian economic, political and energy influence has become a fundamental concern in European countries.42 In countries that plan to base their decarbonization efforts primarily or entirely on nuclear energy (that is, Hungary and Slovakia), the Russian NPP share of the electricity supply can underrepresent Russia’s influence: dependencies on nuclear fuel imports from TVEL/Rosatom (which also continues to supply Bulgaria, Czechia and Finland and Poland’s research reactor), combined with power-system inflexibility and overreliance on a single large nuclear power plant, exacerbates the vulnerability to supply disruptions…………………………………………..
Egypt, Iran and Turkey are all nuclear newcomers, energy hungry and populous (with between 82 and 100 million inhabitants each). Such states are lucrative markets for low-carbon electricity development…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The big question for the future is whether non-Western countries will also turn away from Russian nuclear power. Currently, many developing countries take a positive view of Russia and tilt towards its view of the conflict in Ukraine. Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, seven of the 14 countries with high- or medium-cooperation levels in our analysis did not approve United Nations Resolution ES 11/1 condemning Russian aggression, and several of these (for example, Bangladesh, China, India, Iran) were categorized as ‘neutral or Russia-leaning’ shortly after the war began58. Over time, however, the interruption of energy supplies to the European Union may undermine the reputation of Russian energy companies as primarily economic actors independent of national security politics, also outside Europe. Non-Western perspectives on the war in Ukraine and the reliability of Russia and Russian technology may also change over time……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01228-5
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has warned Americans to keep supporting Kiev or risk geopolitical irrelevance, during a press conference on the anniversary of Russia’s military operation in the country. Should it stop funding the war effort, the US will “lose the leadership position that they are enjoying in the world,” the Ukrainian leader declared on Friday.
“If they do not change their opinion…they will lose NATO, they will lose the clout of the United States, they will lose the leadership position they are enjoying in the world,” Zelensky declared, following a speech in which he declared 2023 the “Year of Invincibility” and vowed to unite the world against Russia.
The warning was a response to a reporter asking what Zelensky would tell the “growing number of Americans” who believe their country is giving too much money and support to Ukraine. The president made sure to thank his American supporters – a group he hinted included not just Congress and President Joe Biden but also “the TV channels” and “the journalists” – before threatening those who held the “dangerous” opinion that the US should “give up” on Kiev………………………………………….
The Republican Party regained control of the House of Representatives in last year’s midterm elections in part on a promise to curtail the Biden administration’s blank check to Kiev. While Congress has not yet passed any legislation to rein in spending on the conflict, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) promised earlier this week to introduce a bill to force an audit of the Ukraine aid program and the House Oversight Committee demanded the administration turn over documents proving the military and economic aid being sent to Ukraine was not being lost to “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Ukraine is readying an offensive to try and seize Russia’s Crimean peninsula, President Vladimir Zelensky said on Friday at a press conference. Kiev is forming new units specifically for the task, with servicemen undergoing training abroad, he revealed.
“We’re taking military steps, we are preparing for them. We are mentally prepared already. We prepare technically, with weapons, forces, we form new brigades, we form offensive units of various kinds and types, we are sending people for training not only in Ukraine, you know, but also in other countries,” Zelensky stated.
The president, as well as other top officials, has repeatedly pledged to re-capture all of the former Ukrainian territories from Russia, including Crimea. The peninsula broke away from the country back in 2014 in the aftermath of the Maidan coup in Kiev, joining Russia after a landslide referendum.
Four other formerly-Ukrainian territories, namely the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions, were incorporated into Russia after the overwhelming majority of their populations voted in favor of the idea last September.
Neither reunification with Crimea, nor the latest incorporations of other regions got Western recognition, with Kiev and its backers considering these lands part of Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly warned Kiev against plotting an assault on Crimea. Early in February, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as Deputy Chair of the Security Council, said that any attack on Crimea would be interpreted as a direct attack on the country itself and would be “met with inevitable retaliation using weapons of any kind.”
the exalted version of Zelensky promoted to NATO state audiences today is a sharp contrast to the pro-peace candidate that Ukrainians overwhelmingly elected four years ago.
it is no wonder that the same US political establishment that sabotaged Zelensky’s peace mandate now holds him up as a hero.
In October 2019, as he took steps to implement Minsk in the face of far-right protests and US hostility, Zelensky assured Ukrainians that he was “the president of peace,” and that “ending this war is of utmost importance to me.” He added: “I, the president, am not ready to sacrifice our people. And that is why I choose diplomacy.”
Elected in 2019 to bring peace to Ukraine, a Zelensky aide now declares that “there is no peace with Russia, and Ukraine must arm itself to the teeth.”
Volodymyr Zelensky marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by rejecting any negotiations with the Kremlin.
“There is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk about over there,” Zelensky declared.
The Ukrainian President delivered the message just two weeks after his French and German counterparts urged him, at a meeting in Paris, “to start considering peace talks with Moscow,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
But as an adviser explained to the New York Times, Zelensky is now “more at peace with himself,” and therefore has no need to entertain the possibility of peace with his neighbor.
He has a clear understanding what Ukraine should do,” the adviser said. “There is no ambiguity: There is no peace with Russia, and Ukraine must arm itself to the teeth.”
Zelensky’s “clear understanding” of the need to reject peace with Russia and turn his country into a NATO arms depot is a resounding victory for the Ukrainian far-right and its US government allies. As I wrote here last year, these two powerful forces, aligned by their converging interests in prolonging the post-2014 war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, sabotaged the peace platform that Zelensky was elected on in April 2019. As Adam Schiff put it, the US has used Ukraine’s civil war “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
The commemoration of the first anniversary of Russia’s cross-border invasion to end Schiff’s bipartisan “fight” has yielded more insight into how the US, in concert with its ideological allies in Ukraine’s powerful far-right, helped convert Zelensky from pro-peace candidate to “no peace” president.
In a fawning profile, the Washington Post approvingly recounts how Zelensky shifted from naively “thinking peace with Putin was possible” to now believing that “victory is the only answer.” Although the Post attempts to cast Zelensky’s “transformation” as the result of “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat,” the details tell a different story.
The Post describes a summer 2019 exchange between the then-rookie president and the top US diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor. At the time, Zelensky was “expressing curiosity” about the Steinmeier Formula, a German-led effort to revive the stalled Minsk Accords. Minsk, reached in 2015, called for granting limited autonomy to the rebellious Donbas regions in eastern Ukraine in exchange for their demilitarization. Ukraine’s far-right, the driving force behind the 2014 Maidan coup that triggered the ensuing Donbas war, had opposed Minsk’s implementation at every turn.
Zelensky, Taylor recalls, “hoped” that the Steinmeier initiative “might lead to a deal with the Kremlin.” The Ukrainian president “pointed to a document explaining the formulation, thinking that somewhere in the details of the legalese a workable compromise with Moscow might be found.”
But Washington knew better: no compromise with Moscow could be allowed. “No one knows what it is,” Taylor told Zelensky of the German plan. “Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is… It’s a terrible idea.”
The Steinmeier plan was in fact a simple idea, and a welcome one to anyone interested in bringing peace to Ukraine. For his part, Taylor was never shy about advocating war. In a December 2014 letter to TheWashington Post, Taylor denounced an opinion article that had opposed sending US arms to Ukraine and advocated an agreement between NATO and Russia to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. Backers of such steps, Taylor wrote, are “advocating that the West appease Russia.… Now is not the time for appeasement.”
This explains why Taylor was similarly hostile to the “terrible” plan named after former German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The Steinmeier Formula called for holding local elections in the rebel-held Donbas areas under Ukrainian law and international supervision. If OSCE monitors certified the results, then Ukraine would regain control of its eastern border and enact a special status law granting the rebellious Donbas regions limited autonomy.
But this road map, along with a similar initiative from French diplomat Pierre Morel, “got nowhere because of opposition in Ukraine,” former UK diplomat Duncan Allan observed for the UK government-funded think tank Chatham House. When Zelensky tried to revive it in late 2019, Allan added, “[a]nother sharp reaction in Ukraine forced him to back down.” As the New York Times now notes in passing, “a backlash at home — with street protesters in Kyiv accusing him of treason for surrendering land — steered the Ukrainian president to a political formula in which he rejected concessions” with Russia.
Specifically, that “backlash” in Ukraine included not only violent protests but outright threats to Zelensky’s life.
“Zelenskyy said he was ready to lose his ratings, popularity, position,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Yarosh, commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army and former senior Ukrainian military advisor, said shortly after Zelensky’s May 2019 inauguration. “No he would lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the [Maidan] Revolution and the [Donbas] War.” (Two years after threatening to hang the president from a tree, Yarosh was given a repeat appointment as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian military subsequently claimed that the appointment was withdrawn).
Despite the internal and external opposition, Zelensky departed a meeting with Putin in December 2019 feeling “hopeful”, the Post reports. “Within weeks, Russia agreed to a broader prisoner exchange and offered Ukraine a $3 billion gas arbitration settlement as well as a new gas transit deal.”
But on top of the far-right backlash at home, Zelensky’s peace initiative faced direct hostility from Ukraine’s patron in Washington. After warning Zelensky against pursuing a “terrible” European-brokered peace plan, William Taylor soon became a hero of Trump’s first impeachment over Ukraine. At the impeachment proceedings, which kicked off in October 2019 just as Zelensky was trying to follow through on his peace mandate, Taylor was summoned to assure Congress and a Russiagate-crazed media class that Trump’s pause on weapons subsidies for the Ukrainian fight against the Russia-backed Donbas rebels endangered “our national security.” (For his services, the New York Times lauded Taylor as “a septuagenarian Vietnam veteran with a chiseled face and reassuring gray hair,” while the Washington Post declared him to be a “meticulous note taker.”)
The prevailing imperative to use Ukraine “to fight Russia over there” (Schiff) meant that Zelensky had no chance to pursue the “terrible” Minsk agreement that Taylor and other influential proxy warriors opposed.
“The reality is that Ukraine depends on political, diplomatic, economic and military support from the West, and particularly from the United States,” Samuel Charap of the Pentagon-tied RAND Corporation wrote in November 2021. Up to that point, “Ukraine has shown little desire” to “[implement] its obligations under the Minsk II agreement,” and the US had “not yet used its influence to push for progress on the Donbas conflict.” If the Ukrainian government could be pushed “toward complying”, Charap noted, that “might actually invite de-escalation from Russia” while saving Ukraine “from calamity.”
But by then, Zelensky had decided to side with the forces that had sabotaged him. According to the Post’s account, citing David Arakhamia, the leader of Zelensky’s faction in parliament: “By early 2021, Zelensky believed that negotiations wouldn’t work and that Ukraine would need to retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions ‘either through a political or military path.’” As a result, “[t]he Kremlin disengaged.”
Zelensky’s early 2021 decision that “negotiations wouldn’t work” explains why, in early 2022, he shunned all opportunities to prevent Russia’s looming invasion. At the final talks on implement Minsk, a “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” When Germany proposed a last-minute deal in which Ukraine would “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” Zelensky turned it down, according to the Wall Street Journal. After rejecting diplomacy, Zelensky’s government then significantly increased its shelling of the Donbas, a potential step toward trying to “retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” via the “military path” that the Washington Post has newly confirmed.
As a result, the exalted version of Zelensky promoted to NATO state audiences today is a sharp contrast to the pro-peace candidate that Ukrainians overwhelmingly elected four years ago.
In October 2019, as he took steps to implement Minsk in the face of far-right protests and US hostility, Zelensky assured Ukrainians that he was “the president of peace,” and that “ending this war is of utmost importance to me.” He added: “I, the president, am not ready to sacrifice our people. And that is why I choose diplomacy.”
By now choosing to reject diplomacy, President Zelensky has shown that he is more than willing to sacrifice his people for the sake of his NATO state patrons’ desired proxy war against Russia. Accordingly, one year into the catastrophic Russian invasion that it helped provoke, it is no wonder that the same US political establishment that sabotaged Zelensky’s peace mandate now holds him up as a hero.
People in Berlin take part in a protest against the delivery of weapons to Ukraine.
Protesters in Paris and Berlin capitals have rallied to demand peace in Ukraine, a day after the anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
Thousands of people protested in the Germany capital on Saturday to condemn the government’s supply of arms to Ukraine and call for peace talks to end the war.
The organisers were criticised before the protest for downplaying Ukraine’s right to defend its territory from Russian aggression and failing to distance themselves from the far right and far left, where pro-Russia views are common.
One of the organisers, opposition lawmaker Sahra Wagenknecht of the ex-communist Left party, said that there was no place for neo-Nazis at the rally, but that anyone who wanted peace “with an honest heart” was welcome.
While most placards at the protest reflected traditional left-wing positions, some participants bore banners with the slogan “Americans go home” and the logo of a far-right magazine. Some waved Russian flags.
Wagenknecht accused the German government of seeking to “ruin Russia,” and said that Moscow should be made an “offer” in order to resume peace talks.
Another of the organisers, prominent feminist author Alice Schwarzer, said it was time to look beyond left and right.
The two women have also launched a petition which claims to have gathered more than 645,000 signatures.
Protesters jeered whenever she and Wagenknecht mentioned the name of German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, who has strongly backed the delivery of arms to Ukraine.
Police said that about 13,000 people took part in the rally at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, while organisers claimed that 50,000 people participated.
One attendee was Konstantin Schneider, an academic from Berlin, who said he understood that countries in Eastern Europe were afraid of Russia.
“Of course [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is an idiot to attack Ukraine,” he said. “But we still need to find new solutions [to the war] instead of sweepingly saying there’s nothing to negotiate.”
There were several small counter-demonstrations. On Friday, thousands of protesters across Europe marched against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine…………………………………….
Over 3000GW of renewables are already in place globally, compared to only 394 GW of nuclear, with wind and solar now romping further ahead around the world. By 2050, the BNEF says the global power system will be dominated by wind and solar (75% of production), with nuclear at just 9%, down from 10% now. If it makes it to 24% nuclear by then, the UK will be a bit of an outlier.
“……………………………….Graham Stuart, now a Minister of State at the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero…..- ‘what I can say is that we are absolutely committed to nuclear as a significant share of our electricity because we need that baseload and are committed to driving it forward.’
So that’s a positive ‘go’ signal, although funding is still a major problem, and, despite much talk, progress on the proposed ‘24 GW of nuclear by 2050’ programme seems to have slipped behind.
As NuClear News 141 reported, at the end of November last year, the Government was said to be about to announce proposals to set up a new body called Great British Nuclear (GBN), which would develop a network of small modular reactors (SMRs), as well as promote new large reactors. Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, was due to make the announcement on 29th November. But it was delayed because of a row with the Treasury over funding.
And by January, The Times was reporting that a deal on SMR funding was unlikely to materialise for at least another 12 months. A senior government source said the Treasury would not sign off on any orders or significant funding for SMR work until the technology had approval from the Nuclear Regulators Generic Design Assessment, which was not expected, until 2024.
In addition to the proposed Rolls Royce SMRs, four of which are planned initially, several other SMRs are also now in the race for UK deployment, some from overseas. They include GE Hitachi’s 300MW boiling water reactor, and Holtec’s 160MWe pressurised water reactor, developed in collaboration with Mitsubishi and Hyundai. The USA’s NuScale, the most advanced project so far, has also expressed interest in UK sites for its mini PWR.
Potential UK sites for new SMRs include Trawsfynydd in Wales and Heysham and Oldbury in England, but, given the funding issues, it will evidently be a while before anything happens on SMRs, or indeed, in terms of new larger projects, after Sizewell C. Though some help with funding may yet be on hand. According to the Telegraph, nuclear projects may soon to be classed as ‘green’ or ’sustainable’ investments, clearing a way for more institutional investors and environment-focused funds to back them. The Telegraph says there are also hopes that use can be made of the Government’s green gilts green savings bonds.
Is nuclear really green? Not many greens think so, and given the risks, costs and delays associated with it, nuclear is often not popular with investors. There have been some delays with the only currently live new projects in the UK, the Hinkley Point C EPR being built by EdF, although nothing so far on the decade-long delays with the ongoing EPR projects in France and Finland. EDF now say the Hinkley EPR should start up in 2027. However, to be on the safe side, the deadline for starting up its major CfD payment (after which, under the contract rules, it would not be eligible for CfD payments) has been extended to 2036 from 2033.
…………………….. EDF has recently admitted that Hinkley Point C final cost is likely to be £31-32bn, up from the £18 bn estimated initially. Sizewell ought to benefit from construction lessons learned from Hinkley, but, although RAB pushes the financial risks onto consumers, there are still many investment uncertainties about the project.
Finance may be a key issue for EDF in the UK, but it is if anything even more of an issue for it in France, where it is facing major problems, with a huge repair bill and loss of income as plants are shut for safety checks and power has to be imported. As a result, with energy security being a key issue these days, nuclear no longer looks reliable. ………………………
With a handful of other nuclear projects being considered around the world, including some SMRs, and Russia and China also pressing ahead with larger plants, the UK isn’t the only country with ambitions for nuclear expansion. However, globally, the likely scale of nuclear expansion is relatively small in total, compared with the vast scale and rapid pace of renewables expansion.
Over 3000GW of renewables are already in place globally, compared to only 394 GW of nuclear, with wind and solar now romping further ahead around the world. By 2050, the BNEF says the global power system will be dominated by wind and solar (75% of production), with nuclear at just 9%, down from 10% now. If it makes it to 24% nuclear by then, the UK will be a bit of an outlier. https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2023/02/uk-nuclear-news.html
President Vladimir Putin has cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people — and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.
Key points:
February 24 marked the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Mr Putin says he believes the future of Russia is in peril
The interview was aired on Sunday on Russian state television
A year since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Mr Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history — and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril…………………………………………
Mr Putin said the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US and European military assistance to Ukraine showed that Russia was now facing off NATO itself — the Cold War nightmare of both Soviet and Western leaders.
Ukraine says it will not rest until every last Russian soldier is ejected from Ukraine, including from Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014………………….
Russia’s official nuclear doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons if they — or other types of weapons of mass destruction — are used against it, or if conventional weapons are used, which endanger “the very existence of the state”………………………………..
EDF continues its programme of eco-vandalism. TASC calls on SoS for Defra to intervene. Despite an EDF statement on 18th January, claiming that, “[Its] Advance [preparatory] works [for Sizewell C] are reversible in the unlikely event Sizewell C will not proceed to a Final Investment Decision and full construction”, TASC is shocked and disgusted to discover that EDF will renege on that promise when, on 1st March, EDF begins to destroy wet woodland, a legally protected priority ‘Biodiversity Action Plan’ habitat, located in Sizewell Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Despite EDF knowing full well that we are now entering the bird, bat and reptile breeding season, it has already begun felling woodland in Goose Hill, as part of its plan to clear over 40 hectares – including the felling of some ancient trees – to make way for Sizewell C’s car park.
TASC’s Chair, Jenny Kirtley said “These actions create permanent and irreversible environmental loss to East Suffolk’s Heritage Coastal biodiversity and is in direct contradiction of the government’s ‘green agenda’. Despite EDF’s claim, it is not possible to reverse such losses and represents further eco-vandalism which goes hand-in-glove with the construction of a redundant and unnecessary nuclear plant which may never commence construction.
Sizewell C has yet to make a Final Investment Decision, does not have a site licence from the Office for Nuclear Regulation, nor three outstanding environmental permits needed from the Environment Agency. Furthermore, the project’s DCO approval is subject to TASC’s judicial review proceedings scheduled to take place in the High Court on 22nd and 23rd March.
We have asked the Secretary of State for Defra and the MP for Suffolk Coastal to intervene and to stop the work at least until these uncertainties around Sizewell C’s various authorisations have been granted.’.
Russia launched an uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft on Friday for a NASA astronaut and two cosmonauts after their original ride back to Earth was damaged by a micrometeoroid impact while parked at the International Space Station in December.
The rescue plan was announced last month. The empty rescue capsule, Soyuz MS-23, blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Friday morning and is set to dock at the orbiting lab on Sunday.
Courting disaster — Beyond Nuclear International Embroiled in a year-long war, Ukraine’s reactors face new threats By Linda Pentz Gunter A year ago, we warned of the significant and unacceptable risks to Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors, should they become caught up in a war zone as a consequence of an invasion by Russia. A year later, as we outlined in a Beyond Nuclear press release, those risks have become a reality. And in recent days, the scares and close calls have ramped up again.
Just last week, cruise missiles flew dangerously low over the South Ukraine nuclear power plant in the country’s western region. Then alarms were raised as observers noticed an alarming drop in the water level of the Kakhovka Reservoir, on which the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant depends for its essential cooling water supply.
A missile strike or loss of cooling water are just two of the many scenarios that could lead to a nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine. Others include loss of electricity supply, human error or sabotage. The conditions of war just make any and all of these outcomes far more likely.
Indeed, these latest close calls and others prompted a recent statement by the head of Germany’s Federal Office for Radiation Protection, Inge Paulini, who warned that an incident at one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants would have, “far-reaching consequences as long as the war continues.” And yet, she pointed out, “this danger already seems to be receding into the background of public awareness.”
Indeed, it has been a consistent pattern in the press not to take nuclear power risks seriously. Instead, the media publishes story after story, planted there by a well-orchestrated worldwide nuclear industry campaign, about the benefits of expanding nuclear power.
The Ukrainian energy ministry would seem to agree. Even in the midst of this devastating war, it has just made a deal with the American company, Westinghouse, to purchase two new AP1000 reactors. It is of course unrealistic to envisage these actually being built during a war and, if ever operational, they would simply become additional lethal targets.
In Ukraine, we have seen Russia routinely attack the electric grid, leading to periodic loss of offsite power at all four of Ukraine’s nuclear power plant sites. Zaporizhzhia, in the contested southeastern part of the country, has experienced multiple disconnections from the grid. So far, the diesel generators have functioned until offsite power was restored. But they are reliant on a steady replenishment of fuel, which could be impeded were the plant to come under siege.
A ready supply of cooling water is also essential so the drain down of the Kakhovka Reservoir is a serious concern. Why this is happening is unclear, but it is thought to be a possible Russian military tactic to flood strategic areas, making them impassable to advancing Ukrainian troops.
The unimaginable stress that continues to be experienced by the depleted workforce at Zaporizhzhia adds to the possibility of a fatal human error. Human error was at the root of both the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in the United States and the 1986 Chornobyl Unit 4 explosion in Ukraine, without the contributing stress factor of war conditions.
The proximity of cruise missiles to nuclear plants is a nightmarish disaster waiting to happen, even if they are on their way to other targets, for now. But whether deliberate or accidental, a serious assault would release potentially enormous amounts of dangerous radioactive isotopes into the environment.
The reason damage from a nuclear power plant disaster is so serious is in part due to the longevity of the radioactive isotopes released and also because the fallout deposits these into the food chain by contaminating water, soil, crops and livestock.
Some of the enduring health outcomes include thyroid cancer, birth defects, still births, neonatal deaths, leukemias — especially among children — cancers and cardiovascular disorders. However, it should be noted that studies have also found elevated rates of leukemia in children living close to routinely operating nuclear power plants.
The international response so far has come mainly from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has called for safe zones around Ukraine’s nuclear power plants but so far has been unsuccessful in instituting these. And safe zones, while an essential first step, only prevent disaster resulting from a direct hit but are ineffective against loss of grid access or human error. Indeed, the IAEA has been struggling for more than two weeks simply to get a shift change of its observers at Zaporizhzhia accomplished. So far, conditions have remained too dangerous to allow this. “The Agency is doing everything it can to conduct the safe rotation of our staff there as soon as possible,” IAEA director, Rafael Grossi said.
Apart from being pre-deployed radiological weapons, nuclear power plants must, for safety reasons, be shut down when embroiled in a war. In Ukraine, where 50% of the country’s electricity is supplied by nuclear power, this means plunging an already terrified population into greater misery in the midst of winter. The lesson learned is that nuclear power, due to its inherent dangers, cannot serve as a reliable energy source. We must reject it as we do nuclear weapons and turn to other, more benign and renewable ways of supplying electricity.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.
Headline photo of Rocket in Kupiansk city (Kharkiv region of Ukraine) after Russian shelling. February 2023 by Олексій Мазепа / АрміяInform/Wikimedia Commons.
We’re not allowing Russian inspectors to come and inspect us while demanding that we go inspect Russia.
Unfortunately, we have people today in Washington, D.C., that believe in American nuclear superiority or American nuclear supremacy, and they don’t believe in arms control. And we need to replace them. We need to get rid of them. We need to bring in people who recognize that arms control is the only way to save the human race.”
Leaving aside the “theater of the absurd” and “bluster” of Joe Biden’s rhetoric during his trips to Ukraine and Poland this week, the consequences of the US effort to strategically weaken and destroy Russia are far more serious than anyone in Washington seems to realize, ex-UN weapons inspector and retired US Marine major Scott Ritter fear
“There’s nothing covert about this. It was theater. Theater of the absurd,” Ritter said of Biden’s visit to Kiev on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking to Sputnik’s Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon on The Critical Hour radio show.
“So absurd that while Biden was there, Zelensky arranged to have air raid sirens sound to make it look as if Biden was under attack….Then Biden goes to Poland, where he issues a speech. I was in the middle of a webinar earlier, so I don’t know the totality of the speech. I saw the beginning of it, but it just seems to be a regurgitation of more of the same – ‘unity against Russia, support for Ukraine’, etc., etc. Bluster, bluster, bluster,” Ritter added.
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the suspension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the US, citing Washington’s efforts to “inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia and help Ukraine launch drone attacks against Russia’s strategic deterrent while “absurdly” calling for more nuclear inspections.
“Meanwhile, the consequences of the American-led effort to attack Russia, to weaken Russia, to destroy Russia, to be honest, are playing out. Putin’s suspending Russian participation in the last remaining arms control treaty between our two nations. And anybody who doesn’t understand how serious this is probably doesn’t appreciate life. Without arms control agreements, there will be a nuclear arms race at a time when technology far outpaces that of the last arms race, which was the unfettered arms race in the late 1960s or early 1970s,” Ritter said.
Ritter knows a thing or two about arms control, serving as an inspector implementing the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – a late Cold War agreement which eliminated an entire class of US and Soviet ground-based nuclear missile systems in the 500-5,500 km range. Today, he fears, radical advances in technology make effective arms control all the more crucial to saving the world from nuclear Armageddon.
“Today, we’re talking about missiles with greater speed, greater accuracy, hypersonic maneuvering warheads that can’t be shot down by missile defense. So, so deadly, so accurate, so fast that any error, any mistake, any miscalculation has to be assumed that it’s going to have dire consequences. So you must respond. In the past, we dodged a bullet because we had time enough for people to say [to the other side] ‘this launch of American missiles against Russia was, in fact, not a launch. It was a mistake.’
Today, if they detect a launch, they have to respond because they don’t have time. They don’t have the luxury of time to say, wait a minute, let’s just wait to get more data.
. With this treaty going away, an arms race will occur and there will be nothing that is capable of putting that genie back in the bottle. And this could be fatal, probably will be fatal to everybody here. So we need to pray that the United States gets over its Ukraine fixation and gets into how do we stop the world from dying in a nuclear holocaust to which we will be singularly responsible for initiating,” Ritter urged.
President Putin and other Russian officials have addressed the lack of response time issue repeatedly in recent years, going back to when Washington decided to deploy Tomahawk-capable anti-missile defense systems in Poland and Romania, and threatened to incorporate Ukraine into NATO and station nuclear-capable missiles there.
“I have already said – they’ll put missile systems in Ukraine, 4-5 minutes’ flight time to Moscow. Where can we move? They have simply driven us into such a state that we have to tell them: stop,” Putin said in December 2021, after Moscow handed Washington and NATO a pair of comprehensive security proposals meant to dramatically reduce tensions between Russia and the Western bloc.
The West rejected the draft treaties in January 2022, reiterating that NATO’s eastward expansion was nonnegotiable. A month later, escalated attacks on the Donbass by Kiev sparked a Russian military operation in Ukraine.
“The problem is the concept of meaningful arms control was developed during the time of the Cold War, when the United States actually respected and feared its opponent, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States no longer respected or feared Russia. And we used arms control as a means of furthering our strategic advantage,” Ritter explained. “And then when we found arms control treaties to be inconvenient, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, we withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which I played a major role in. We withdrew from Open Skies, and now we’re cheating on the last remaining treaty, New START. We’re not allowing Russian inspectors to come and inspect us while demanding that we go inspect Russia. And so the Russians have suspended this. This is all a power play by the United States to further what we believe to be our strategic advantage over Russia.”
Today, the former weapons inspector warned, “Russia is no longer a defeated, compliant state. The Russians have nuclear superiority over us today. Their missiles are better than anything we have. We don’t have a missile defense system worthy of the name. And so if there was a nuclear conflict, we would be annihilated. Now the good chance is we would annihilate them, too. Which brings us back to the situation that we existed in the 1960s, where we suddenly realized that this concept of mutually assured destruction wasn’t a bad concept because it sort of put the brakes on nuclear conflict.
Unfortunately, we have people today in Washington, D.C., that believe in American nuclear superiority or American nuclear supremacy, and they don’t believe in arms control. And we need to replace them. We need to get rid of them. We need to bring in people who recognize that arms control is the only way to save the human race.”
The Unit 2 reactor at the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant — built to showcase Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom’s AES-2006 reactor design in a foreign setting — has not yet been put into operation and work on it is far behind schedule. The Unit 1 reactor at the station is unstable and has been idle for almost half the time since its grand opening in November of 2020. Against this backdrop, President Alexander Lukashenko and his Ministry of Energy have declared their intention to build a second nuclear plant amid Western sanctions and the Belarusian regime’s support for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
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