Israeli Official: Without US Aid, Israel Couldn’t Sustain Gaza Operations for More Than a Few Months
The US has sent over 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel since the genocidal war began and increased shipments over the past month
by Dave DeCamp September 3, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/09/03/israeli-official-without-us-aid-israel-couldnt-sustain-gaza-operations-for-more-than-a-few-months/
A senior Israeli Air Force official has told Haaretz that without US military aid, Israel would not have been able to sustain military operations in Gaza for more than a few months, demonstrating how crucial US support is for the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.
The support is especially crucial for the Israeli Air Force. The report said the US provides the IAF with “all of its fighter planes and some of its bombs, missiles and intelligence equipment.” The US also helps Israel develop “joint weapons systems for all three layers of air defense.”
Since October 7, the US has shipped Israel over 50,000 tons of weapons and other military equipment. Weapons shipments have increased over the past month, with flight tracking data showing that August was the busiest month for US deliveries since October 2023.
President Biden also signed a bill into law that included $17 billion in additional military aid for Israel on top of the $3.8 billion it receives in annual military assistance. The administration recently approved $20 billion in new arms deals for Israel, which includes a new fleet of F-15 fighter jets.
The official speaking to Haaretz said the IAF is crafting a recommendation to increase the domestic production of bombs, missiles, and other ammunition to reduce reliance on the US. But any changes would take years to implement, meaning Israel will continue to be almost entirely reliant on US support.
Israel’s reliance on the US gives the Biden administration enormous leverage over the Israeli government. The administration has refused to use that power to force a ceasefire despite claims that US officials are working for one.
Developing a plan B for nuclear power in Washington, to cope with global heating
Modern Power Systems Tracey Honney September 3, 2024
elieving that waterways used as cooling sources for nuclear power plants could get warmer due to climate change, climate scientists and nuclear engineering specialists at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are joining forces to develop a plan B for nuclear power in Richland, Washington.
The plan is to use Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) funding from DOE to work with Energy Northwest to inform the design and selection of future nuclear reactor cooling systems and assess their impacts on electricity cost………………………………….
Vilim notes that the most economic and best source of cooling is a local, flowing waterway, such as a lake or a river, used to provide “wet” cooling. That’s the approach employed at Washington’s nuclear power plant, the Columbia generating station in Richland. The Columbia generating station provides roughly 8% of the state’s electricity. It relies on a steady, cool flow of water from the Columbia River.
However, when considering construction of future nuclear power plants, Energy Northwest thought it prudent to develop a contingency plan if the river conditions change. Despite the relatively wet climate of its most populous city, Seattle, Washington state is quite temperate and arid east of the Cascade mountain range. There, Washington state is characterised by hot summers and cool winters. If changing climate models indicate that hotter, drier days lie ahead, more aridity will affect the volume, flow and temperature of the Columbia River.
………………………………….“One of the biggest changes in the USA is going to be how precipitation like rain, snow and other precipitation events happen,” Kotamarthi said. “We may have really intense events with large amounts of rainfall in a very short time, followed by periods of no rain. These flash floods and flash droughts will make managing water a completely different task.” https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/developing-a-plan-b-for-nuclear-power-in-washington/
A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe
Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending, The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.
by Melvin Goodman, 30 Aug 24, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/30/a-looming-nuclear-catastrophe-2/
“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”
– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.
There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence. U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter. “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them. Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.
“Dr. Strangelove” remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of two saber-rattling superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. Now we have a third superpower—China—that is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and the Biden administration has approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan—the Nuclear Employment Guidance—that seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from Russia, China, and North Korea. According to David Sanger in the New York Times, the document is so highly classified that “there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
The importance of escalation dominance in the Cold War was driven by such Cold Warriors as Paul Nitze, who argued that a Soviet nuclear attack would enable the Kremlin to hold the American population hostage and to dictate the terms of peace. Nitze added that the Soviet Union’s “effective civil defense program” would keep Soviet casualties to two to four percent of their population, a cost that Moscow would be willing to pay to achieve “dominance.” These absurd notions encouraged the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to advise U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. President John F. Kennedy said the government would provide such protection for every American; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan guaranteed protection in the form of his Star Wars missile defense.
Only the United States has spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of a missile defense shield over the entire country. I wrote about this 25 years ago in a book titled “The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion.” Now, European leaders are talking about a “European Air Shield,” and the Heritage Foundation—Donald Trump’s think tank—favors a missile defense system that would destroy over 100 incoming missiles. Trump’s flawed reference to the success of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system is also illusory because it intercepts small short-range rockets fired by militants in the region and not ballistic missiles.
The next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal; Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warning about World War III; Iran’s nuclear program is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication; and North Korea reportedly has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear states that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan.
The close ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are feeding Washington’s nuclear paranoia. Washington’s failure to hold substantive discussions with these four countries makes the potential for conflict more real. Our obsession with terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons adds to the exaggeration of the threat and our distorted strategic spending. The fact that Donald Trump may return to the White House, where he once boasted about the size of his nuclear button and promised to return America’s nuclear arsenal to the “top of the pack,” adds to nuclear uncertainty
Russia and China are willing to enter discussions on nuclear matters with the United States, but only as part of a larger strategic discussion on the tensions and challenges that confront Washington’s bilateral policies with both Moscow and Beijing. President Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy. It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue. Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger. In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.
The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation. Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States. ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.
Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending, The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament. The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe. Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world. There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers. It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.
“Dr Strangelove” – the 50th anniversary of this iconic nuclear film
THE HALF-CENTURY ANNIVERSARY OF “DR. STRANGELOVE” New Yorker, BY DAVID DENBY 14 May 14 “Mein Führer, I can walk!” screams Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), the ex-Nazi nuclear scientist, rising from his wheelchair to salute the American President at the climax of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece is now a half century old (Film Forum will be playing a new 35-mm. print starting this Friday), and it remains as outrageously prankish, juvenile, and derisive as ever. Which, given the subject of nuclear annihilation, is exactly right. The movie is an apocalyptic sick joke: the demented general Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who thinks the Commies are using fluoridation to destroy his bodily fluids (he withholds his essence from women), dispatches a group of B-52s loaded with H-bombs to destroy Soviet targets. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) tries to recall them; he even helps the Soviet Union to destroy some of the planes. But, after all sorts of misadventures, one B-52 gets through, setting off a Soviet-built Doomsday Machine—chained nuclear explosions assembled in a stunningly beautiful montage, accompanied by Vera-Ellen singing the tender ballad “We’ll Meet Again (Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When).”……….
An arms embargo on Israel is not a radical idea — it’s the law
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest global court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza was illegal. The Court held that the regime of segregation that the Palestinian people live under—complete with separate roads, rationed access to water, and a separate legal system based on military law—amounts to apartheid. The Court ordered Israel to withdraw its settlers from the occupied Palestinian territory, pay reparations, and respect the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Halting military aid to Israel is the bare minimum the U.S. can do to stop the Gaza genocide. An arms embargo is not only supported by 80% of Democratic Party voters, it is demanded by international and U.S. law.
By Yoana Tchoukleva August 31, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/an-arms-embargo-on-israel-is-not-a-radical-idea-its-the-law/
As Israel launches its largest military assault in the West Bank in twenty years, I cannot stop thinking about the people I met in the occupied territory. I think of the mother in Jenin who was on the phone with her two sons seconds before their house was burned in an Israeli raid. I think of the wife of a man who was being held in an Israeli prison without charge or trial asking me, “Is there anything you can do? My husband is dying.” I think of the farmer who gifted me a melon even though he could barely put food on his own table and I was there only for a short period of time, traveling and volunteering with Faz3a, an international protective presence organization.
While all eyes have been on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are undergoing what many call a “slow genocide”. Every day, Israeli settlers attack Palestinian families to push them off their private land. They destroy water wells, burn houses, and assault families. Palestinians who remain on their land risk arrest. In the last 10 months, 9,000 Palestinians from the West Bank have been arrested and detained without charge or trial, many experiencing torture.
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest global court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza was illegal. The Court held that the regime of segregation that the Palestinian people live under—complete with separate roads, rationed access to water, and a separate legal system based on military law—amounts to apartheid. The Court ordered Israel to withdraw its settlers from the occupied Palestinian territory, pay reparations, and respect the Palestinian right to self-determination.
A day later, American friends of mine were violently attacked by settlers in the West Bank. They were accompanying Palestinian farmers to their olive groves when settlers from the nearby Esh Kodesh settlement descended and beat them with metal pipes. This month, another unarmed American volunteer with the international protective presence organization Faz3a was shot in the leg by the Israeli army. The U.S. State Department has remained largely silent.
As the Democratic Party vies for votes, many have demanded the U.S. impose an arms embargo on Israel as a way to signal to Prime Minister Netanyahu that he cannot continue to violate international law with impunity. What few people know is that an arms embargo is not only what 60% of Americans and nearly 80% of Democratic voters want — it is, in fact, already required by law.
U.S. federal law is clear—countries that receive U.S. military funding must meet human rights standards or risk losing their funding.
The Foreign Assistance Act holds that no assistance can be provided to a country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The Leahy Law prohibits the provision of weapons “to any unit […] of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”
Gross violations include “torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges and trial, […] and another flagrant denial of the right to life or liberty”, all acts Israel is found to have committed by the ICJ, United Nations and even Israel’s own human rights experts and courts.
Our U.S. laws, therefore, demand that we pause military funding to Israel until it remedies its human rights record by agreeing to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and complying with the ICJ order to end the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Such a pause—or an “arms embargo”—is not without precedent. In 2021, the U.S. withheld $225 million in funding from Egypt and paused the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia due to these countries’ human rights violations. So why is the U.S. enforcing its laws selectively?
On February 8, President Biden signed National Security Memorandum 20 which at least gave a nod to our federal laws. The Memorandum required the Secretary of State to obtain “credible and reliable written assurances” from foreign recipients of military aid that they are using U.S. weapons in compliance with international law. Those that fail to provide such assurances, or make claims not backed evidence, should have their aid paused.
In March, the State Department admitted there were “credible reports of alleged human rights abuses by Israeli security forces, including arbitrary or unlawful killings, enforced disappearance, torture, and serious abuses in conflict.” Still, the Department rubber-stamped Israeli government’s “assurances” and the White House continued to approve billions of dollars in weapons transfers despite recognized violations of international law.
According to a recent Israeli Defense Ministry report, the U.S. has sent over 50,000 tons of arms and military equipment to Israel since October 7, an average of 2 arms shipments per day.
All of this would crush me if it weren’t for my Palestinian friends who taught me what unwavering faith and commitment to life look like.
So I ask you, Vice President Harris—if you were elected President, will you “take care” that the laws of the United States “be faithfully executed,” as required by our Constitution? Will you consistently uphold federal laws that ban funding foreign governments that commit human rights violations, regardless of how powerful those governments or their lobbies are? Will you honor your commitment at the Democratic National Convention “to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to safety, dignity, freedom and self-determination?”
Doing so requires that we walk our walk, not just talk our talk. It requires that we change policy, not just express concerns. Pausing military funding to Israel is the bare minimum needed to stop the bombing of innocent people and to remind ourselves that we are, after all, a nation of laws.
A Return to Form: Expediting US Arms to Israel
Dr Binoy Kampmark, 1 Sept 24, https://theaimn.com/a-return-to-form-expediting-us-arms-to-israel/
Despite much grandstanding in the Biden administration about halting specific arms shipments to Israel over feigned concerns about how they might be used (inflicting death is the expected form), US military supplies have been restored with barely a murmur. In a report in Haaretz on August 29, a rush of weapons to Israel has been noticed since the end of July.
August proved to be the second busiest month for US arms deliveries to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase since the October 2023 attacks by Hamas. This has taken place alongside an increased concentration of US forces in the region since Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at the end of last month. Two aircraft carriers, a guided missile submarine, and deployments of advanced F-22 stealth aircraft in Qatar, have featured in a show intended to deter Tehran from any retaliatory strikes.
After examining open-source aviation data from the end of July, Haaretz concluded that the issue of delayed shipments of US weapons had “been solved.” Dozens of flights by US military transport planes, along with civilian and military Israeli cargo planes, mostly from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, had been noted. Demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his July 24 speech to Congress that US military aid be “dramatically” expedited to “end the war in Gaza and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East,” had been heeded.
On August 26, Israel received its 500th aerial shipment of weapons and military supplies from the United States since the latest war’s commencement. The 500 flights have also been supplemented by 107 sea shipments, altogether facilitating the transfer of 50,000 tons of military equipmentin an initiativebetween the US military, Israel’s Defence Ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement and Mission to the United States, the IDF’s planning Directorate and the Israeli Air Force.
During the same month, the Democratic National Convention, which saw no debate about the candidature of Kamala Harris as its choice for presidential candidate, had tepidly promised some agitation on continued arms to Israel. Ahead of the event, the Uncommitted movement’s 30 delegates, picked by voters alarmed by US support for Israel’s war machine in Gaza, were hoping to convince the 4,000 pledged delegates Harris had captured to add an arms embargo to its campaign in order to induce a ceasefire.
A petition by the group sought two outcomes: the adding of language to both the party and campaign platform “that unequivocally supports a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a cessation of supplying weapons for Israel’s assault and occupation against Palestinians.”
These wishes proved much too salty for the apparatchiks and party managers. The Democratic Party’s 2024 national platform ironically enough begins with an effusive “land acknowledgment” to “the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations” but plays it safe regarding an ally very much the product of territorial seizure, violence and occupation. Despite mutterings in the party room about a split between moderate and progressive members on Israel’s conduct of the war, the topic of a ceasefire never made it to the committee hearings when the document was drafted.
In firmly insisting on continued US support for Israel in its war against Hamas, much is made in the platform about US efforts to forge a way that will see a release of the hostages, “a durable ceasefire”, the easing of “humanitarian suffering in Gaza” and the “possible normalization between Israel and key Arab states, together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people.” The language is instructive: the Palestinians are objects of pitiful charity, at the mercy of Israel, the US, and various Arab states. Like toddlers, they are to be managed, steered, guided, their political choices forever mediated through the wishes of other powers.
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With Israel remaining Washington’s paramount ally in the Middle East, that process of steering and managing the unruly Palestinians has been, thus far, lethal. During her first interview given after the convention (she has an aversion to them), Harris scotched any suggestions on going wobbly on Israel. “I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defence and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” she told CNN’s Dana Bush. In what has become a standard refrain, Harris lamented that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” while acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence.
When asked whether she would alter President Biden’s policy on furnishing military assistance to Israel, “No” came the reply. “We have to get a deal done. The war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
This middle-management lingo says much about Harris’s worldview; in wishing to “get the ceasefire done”, she is encouraging a range of factors that will make sure nothing of the sort will be achieved. The Netanyahu formula has worked its usual black magic. Hence, the lack of an arms embargo, and the continued, generous supply to the IDF from their largest military benefactor.
Ukrainian defense chief visits Pentagon
“Ukraine has been given carte blanche for operations in Russian regions. “
https://www.rt.com/news/603337-ukraine-defense-minister-meets-austin/ 1 Sept 24
Politico reported earlier that Rustem Umerov would try to persuade the US to lift its restrictions on long-range strikes against Russia
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov has met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to discuss additional military aid. The visit came amid renewed requests by Kiev for Washington to lift its restrictions on the use of US-supplied weapons for long-range strikes deep inside Russia.
Earlier this week, Politico claimed, citing anonymous sources, that Umerov and Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak would attempt to persuade their American backers to change their minds.
On Friday, the Pentagon’s Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh announced that “Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III held bilateral talks with Ukrainian Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov today regarding Ukraine’s ongoing operations [and] security assistance priorities.”
The latter include air defense systems, artillery and armored vehicles needed to help Ukraine “build additional combat power.”
Another topic high on the officials’ agenda was the upcoming meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on September 6. The gathering will see more than 50 of the countries which support Kiev congregate in Ramstein, Germany to deliberate over plans for more military supplies for Ukraine, in order to cover both its immediate and long-term needs.
Austin pledged to “continue to build on the strategic partnership between” the US and Ukraine, Singh concluded.
On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Major-General Patrick Ryder clarified that Washington’s “policy has not changed,” meaning that Ukraine is allowed to use US-supplied weapons to defend against cross-border attacks, but not for “deep strikes” into what the US recognizes as Russian territory.
Meanwhile, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that Washington “will keep the conversations with the Ukrainians going [on the issue], but we are going to keep them private.”
That same day, Zelensky insisted that “there should be no restrictions on the range of weapons for Ukraine.”
Commenting on Kirby’s statement on Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that it indicated that “Ukraine has been given carte blanche for operations in Russian regions.”
“The administration of [US President] Joe Biden is obviously getting ready to make new concessions to Zelensky and give him a free hand to use virtually any type of American weapons, including [for attacks] deep into Russian territory,” the diplomat alleged, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
Her remarks echoed those made on Tuesday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who insisted that the “West does not want to avoid escalation.”
The minister warned that Kiev’s backers would be “playing with fire” if they were to allow Ukraine to use their weapons to conduct long-range strikes deep inside Russia.
How the U.S. Enabled Netanyahu to Sabotage a Gaza Ceasefire
Drop Site, Jeremy Scahill, Sep 01, 2024
After the bodies of six more Israeli hostages of Hamas were found in the Gaza Strip, pressure in Israel is mounting on the government to secure a ceasefire deal and free the remaining hostages and soldiers taken captive on October 7. The announcement Sunday that the captives, including a dual citizen of the U.S., were discovered in a tunnel in Rafah has further fueled the rage toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly from the families of those held in Gaza. They have accused the prime minister of sabotaging deals to free their loved ones, saying “their blood is on his hands.”
Senior Israeli officials, most prominently the defense minister, have joined the public demands for Netanyahu to stop obstructing ceasefire negotiations, while Hamas has said they will not participate in any process until the U.S. convinces Israel to accept a negotiating framework Hamas agreed to in early July. Both Hamas and the families of Israeli captives still held in Gaza have stated that Netanyahu bears responsibility for continuing the war and preventing the exchange of prisoners.
The White House clearly hopes the events of the past 24 hours alter the current course. After being briefed on Saturday evening on the hostages found in Rafah, President Joe Biden, who is vacationing in Delaware, said, “I think we’re on the verge of having an agreement,” adding, “We think we can close the deal, they’ve all said they agree on the principles.”
By Sunday afternoon, street protests were staged throughout parts of Israel and the mayor of Tel Aviv announced a municipal strike for Monday. “[W]e will allow all employees to go out and support the families’ struggle,” he wrote on Twitter/X.
Following a meeting Sunday with an association of family members of Israeli captives, the head of the Histadrut labor federation, Israel’s largest trade union, announced a general strike. If that action extends beyond a symbolic strike of one or two days, it could cascade into a formidable crisis for Netanyahu. “Netanyahu abandoned the hostages. This is now a fact,” the family association said in a statement. “We call on the public to prepare. We will bring the country to a halt. The abandonment is over.”
Vice President Kamala Harris released a statement endorsing Israel’s version of events on the captives discovered in Rafah and echoed Netanyahu’s pledge to eliminate Hamas. ……………………………..
Hamas has not yet offered a detailed response to Israel’s accusation that Hamas fighters murdered the six captives, but blamed Israel for their deaths.
……………………………..as U.S. negotiators have worked to placate Netanyahu, the Israeli leader has waged a relentless two-month campaign aimed at thwarting a deal and Hamas has denounced the process and asserted that the U.S. framework it agreed to in early July should be respected.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. A Hamas official involved with the ceasefire negotiations told Drop Site News that the vice president and other U.S. officials have deliberately misled the public about the process out of concerns that the Gaza war will hurt the Democrats’ chances of victory in November.
“Kamala Harris is now obsessed with how to defeat Trump, how to win the election, and she knows that the genocide in Gaza and these massacres are a crucial element in the campaign,” said Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau. “She wants to create a delusional image that there is something in process, which is not right.”
In an interview, Naim said that while the U.S.—for political purposes—wants to achieve a temporary truce that facilitates the release of Israelis held captive in Gaza and allows aid to reach the besieged Strip, it has given no indication it would insist on Israel ending its war against the Palestinians of Gaza.
“They are looking for a ceasefire, but they are not for ending the war permanently,” Naim said………………………………..
Establishing a Framework
In May, Biden laid out what he characterized as “a roadmap to an enduring ceasefire and the release of all hostages” that had been proposed by Israel itself. “This is truly a decisive moment. Israel has made their proposal,” Biden said on May 31. “Hamas says it wants a ceasefire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it. Hamas needs to take the deal.”
On June 10, the UN Security Council approved a resolution affirming the framework. On July 2, Hamas announced that it had agreed to restart ceasefire talks based on the framework. “We are ready for negotiations that achieve a cessation of aggression and a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” said senior negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya, a deputy of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “We are ready for genuine negotiations if Netanyahu adheres to the principles outlined by President Biden.”
…………………..Drop Site News has reviewed internal documents from the negotiations showing that on July 2 Hamas formally informed international mediators that it had accepted the framework, which Hamas says it was told had been amended by the U.S. and approved by Israel on June 24. This amendment removed language Hamas had previously insisted on that called for negotiations no later than 14 days into the first phase of a deal on the “necessary arrangements for the return of a sustainable calm (permanent ceasefire),” according to a draft seen by Drop Site News. Hamas believed this compromise was strong evidence of their desire to reach a deal.
………………………………..Netanyahu’s “Coup” Against His Own Ceasefire Proposal
Since early July, Netanyahu has intensified Israel’s attacks in Gaza, repeatedly added new terms to the framework, and assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader and its lead negotiator, in Tehran. Among the new demands put forward by Netanyahu is the right to continue occupying the Philadelphi corridor along the border with Egypt, to maintain control of the Rafah border crossing and to position Israeli troops in central Gaza along the Netzarim axis where IDF forces would establish checkpoints to search Palestinians seeking to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
……………………………………………………………………..Rather than insisting on upholding what Biden said was Israel’s own proposal in May, the U.S. has appeased Netanyahu’s efforts to allow an indefinite presence of Israeli forces in Gaza and an open-ended campaign of military attacks.
………………………………………………………….more https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/netanyahu-sabotage-ceasefire-hamas?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2510348&post_id=148340330&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=cqey&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Biden’s ‘new’ nuclear strategy and the super-fuse that sets it off.
Although any technically accurate assessment of the physical consequences of the large-scale use of nuclear weapons instantly shows that “winning” a nuclear war has no meaning, the United States has strenuously emphasized the development of nuclear weapons technologies that could only make sense if their intended purpose is for fighting and winning nuclear wars.
The super-fuze is exactly that kind of technology.
The military is already upgrading warheads capable of fighting a war with both China and Russia simultaneously
Theodore Postol, Aug 29, 2024, Responsible Statecraft,
The New York Timesreported last week that President Biden has approved a secret nuclear strategy refocusing on Chinese and Russian nuclear forces.
According to the paper, the new nuclear guidance “reorients America’s deterrent strategy” to meet “the need to deter Russia, the PRC (China) and North Korea simultaneously.”
However, Biden’s approval of this strategy is no more than a tacit acknowledgment of a two-decade-long U.S. technical program that has been more than just a “slight modernization” of weapons components, but a dramatic step towards the capability to fight and win nuclear wars with both China and Russia. In other words, there is nothing really “new” here at all, save the very public nature of the strategy’s acknowledgement.
In the face of all of this, Chinese and Russian leaders will have no choice but to implement countermeasures that further increase the already dangerously high readiness of their nuclear forces. This includes intensified worst-case planning that will increase the chances of nuclear responses to false warnings of attack.
The technical source of this vast improvement in U.S. nuclear firepower is a relatively new super fuse or “super fuze” that is already being fitted onto all U.S. strategic ballistic missiles. This fuse more than doubles the ability of the Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) carrying W-76 100kt warheads to destroy Chinese and Russian nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in hardened silos.
The currently (not fully loaded) U.S. Trident Submarine force carries about 890 W-76 100kt and 400 W-88 475kt warheads. The 400 W-88 warheads have been outfitted with the super-fuze and were originally supposed to have the combination of accuracy and yield to destroy Russian silo-based ICBMs before they are launched. But there are not enough W-88s to attack both Russian and Chinese silo-based ICBMs before they can be launched.
So, with the fuse upgrade of W-76s, the W-88 warheads are no longer needed for this job. Numerous upgraded W-76 warheads can instead be used for planned missions against silo-based missiles in Russia and China.
Although 890 W-76s are currently on Trident II submarines, the U.S. has 1600 in total, making the W-76 the most numerous warhead in the American arsenal today. In the eventuality that arms control limitations no longer constrain the size of U.S. nuclear forces, these warheads could readily be added to and carried by the already available at-sea Trident II ballistic missiles, each of which can carry up to 12 W-76 warheads.
With such an “uploading,” there would still be more than enough remaining Trident II ballistic missiles on submarines to carry all of the 400 available 475kt W-88 “heavy” warheads as well.
But let’s talk more about the secret super-fuze or Burst Height Compensating Fuse.
Figure 1 [above on original] illustrates how the super-fuze drastically increases the “killing power” of a ballistic missile delivered warhead…………………………………………………………………………..
The super-fuze achieves its fantastic increase in killing efficiency by measuring its altitude at a chosen time while it is still outside the atmosphere but relatively close to its target. …………………………………………………………………………….
The military implications of this “technically sweet” added capability to U.S. ballistic missile warheads has major implications for the war-fighting capabilities of the United States.
Although any technically accurate assessment of the physical consequences of the large-scale use of nuclear weapons instantly shows that “winning” a nuclear war has no meaning, the United States has strenuously emphasized the development of nuclear weapons technologies that could only make sense if their intended purpose is for fighting and winning nuclear wars.
The super-fuze is exactly that kind of technology.
………………………………….Couching the development and deployment of these kinds of preemptive strike technologies in misleading terms like “enhancing deterrence,” does not fool the military and political leadership of Russia and China. It instead leaves them no choice but to consider ways of deterring a dangerous U.S. preemption-oriented nuclear-weaponized nation that is constantly striving for better ways to “disarm” large parts of their nuclear forces.
It is no accident that Russian President Vladimir Putin himself approved the development and revealed the existence of the ultimate doomsday weapon — the Poseidon robot submarine, which can carry a 100Mt warhead into the harbors of U.S., European, and east Asian cities — capable of destroying urban areas to ranges beyond 50 miles (80 km) from its underwater detonation point.
The deployment of the Poseidon system by Russia serves as a warning to those who think they can fight and win nuclear wars by preemptively destroying significant parts of China and Russia’s nuclear retaliation forces. No matter how successful a planned preemptive nuclear attack might look like on paper, the reality of a nuclear war initiated with the delusional belief it could be won will be global destruction so great in scale that the very end of human civilization cannot be ruled out.
This is the real bequest of Biden’s new nuclear strategy and the super-fuze. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-nuclear-strategy/
That time when Canada cancelled its nuclear submarine order
The decision to cut the Australian community out altogether — except where we will be called upon to service the US military as it builds its base in WA — puts us in the relationship of a vassal state, existing only to do the bidding of our powerful friend.
By Julie Macken and Michael Walker, Aug 30, 2024, https://johnmenadue.com/that-time-when-canada-cancelled-its-nuclear-submarine-order/
Back in 1987, when no one knew that the Cold War was just about to end, the Canadian Government signed up to build 10 nuclear-powered submarines. That submarine program lasted for all of two years before being cancelled in 1989. No nuclear Canadian sub ever even began construction, let alone getting put in the water.
There is a very real sense of déjà vu when we look at the Canadian experience and the current Australian experience of AUKUS. The good news is that it is not too late to learn the lessons the Canadians learnt for us.
One of the reasons for the Canadian cancellation was the $8 billion price tag, or about $19 billion in today’s money. Two billion dollars per submarine now sounds like a bargain compared to the astronomical $45 billion per submarine under AUKUS. Canada decided it had other priorities where that money could be put to better use.
But before the contract was cancelled in Canada, the ministries involved in its construction became embroiled in conflict, the Government itself was in a cost-of-living-crisis with immediate, real-world needs pressing and the hasty and secretive choice of vessel design came under withering criticism from the Treasury department for poor procurement with the cost expected to blow out to $30 billion ($70 billion today). And finally, media support eroded, with 71% of the population opposed to the project.
Déjà vu much?
On 12 June, the US Congressional Research Document service produced a research and advice document called the Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress.
The document points out the AUKUS deal was a three-step process. The first was to establish a US-UK rotational submarine force in Western Australia. The second was that the US would sell us three or five Virginia nuclear powered submarines and the third would be that the UK assists us in building our own AUKUS class nuclear submarines.
But the Congressional report outlines when comparing the “potential benefits, costs, and risks” of the three stage plan, it might just be better for the US to operate more of its own boats out of WA. That is, “procuring up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs that would be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the US and UK SSNs”.
That’s right, why bother with the whole step two and three when the US is best served by simply operating its nuclear-powered attack submarines out of WA?
This is an extraordinary development and one that demands more attention than has been given previously because a number of issues flow from this kind of thinking.
First, this potentially frees up $400 billion that could be put to far better use on a national housing construction program or high-speed rail network running the entire east coast of Australia or other large and much-needed nation-building projects. But not so fast.
The US Congressional Research Document suggests that “those funds (the $400 billion) could be invested in other military capabilities”, such as long-range missiles and bombers, “so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States”.
The decision to cut the Australian community out altogether — except where we will be called upon to service the US military as it builds its base in WA — puts us in the relationship of a vassal state, existing only to do the bidding of our powerful friend.
The fact that the document only referenced the “potential benefits, costs, and risks” from the US perspective, without any attempt to imagine how Australia may view becoming a life support for a US submarine base, makes the nature of our relationship pretty clear.
Australia’s Government may not consider it necessary to have done its due diligence on AUKUS but the Americans are happy to do that for us and, you guessed it, even though they quietly have doubts about the SSN project, they’ve already thought of plenty of other ways to spend our money on their own defence objectives. Spending it on the well-being and prosperity of our own people didn’t even rate a mention.
‘No,’ Kamala Harris Says to Withholding Arms From Israel
“Harris is saying she will reject 77% of Democrats, 61% of Americans, international law, domestic U.S. law, and basic humanity to continue the flow of weapons to Israel while it stands accused of genocide,” said one analyst.
Common Dreams. Jake Johnson, Aug 30, 2024
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said in a CNN interview that aired late Thursday that, if elected in November, she would not change the Biden administration’s policy of steadfast military support for Israel, rejecting widespread calls for an arms embargo to help bring about an end to the devastating assault on Gaza.
“I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not gonna change,” said Harris, recounting the horrors of the Hamas-led October 7 attack. “Israel had a right, has a right to defend itself.”
Acknowledging that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” the vice president responded “no” when CNN‘s Dana Bash asked whether a Harris administration would implement a “change in policy in terms of arms” and withhold even “some” weapons shipments to Israel………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
“Poll after poll after poll tells us that a majority of Americans and even more key Democratic constituencies want the US to stop giving arms to Israel that it’s using to kill and displace Palestinian families,” Lieberman added. “Not sending bombs to Israel is politically expedient and—quite obviously!—the morally correct thing to do for anyone reading the daily headlines of Israeli massacres being done with U.S. weapons.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said in a CNN interview that aired late Thursday that, if elected in November, she would not change the Biden administration’s policy of steadfast military support for Israel, rejecting widespread calls for an arms embargo to help bring about an end to the devastating assault on Gaza.
“I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not gonna change,” said Harris, recounting the horrors of the Hamas-led October 7 attack. “Israel had a right, has a right to defend itself.”
Acknowledging that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” the vice president responded “no” when CNN‘s Dana Bash asked whether a Harris administration would implement a “change in policy in terms of arms” and withhold even “some” weapons shipments to Israel.
Watch:
The CNN appearance marked Harris’ first major television interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, a change at the top of the party’s 2024 ticket that Palestinian rights advocates hoped would open the door to a fundamental shift away from the Biden administration’s Gaza policy—which has been to arm Israel to the teeth while tepidly pressuring the country’s far-right government to protect civilians and agree to a cease-fire deal.
“The vice president’s statement was morally indefensible and politically shortsighted as the lack of American consequences for Netanyahu’s horrific assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza has emboldened Israel to now invade the West Bank,” Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh, co-founders of the Uncommitted National Movement, said in a statement Friday. “Vice President Harris must turn the page from one of the most glaring foreign policy failures of our time by aligning with the American majority that opposes sending weapons to Israel’s assault on Gaza.”
Despite Bash’s characterization of calls for an arms embargo against Israel as a demand from the “progressive left,” survey data has shown that a majority of U.S. voters oppose sending weapons to Israel as it commits appalling war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Since October, the U.S. has sent Israel over 50,000 tons of weaponry.
“Harris is saying she will reject 77% of Democrats, 61% of Americans, international law, domestic U.S. law, and basic humanity to continue the flow of weapons to Israel while it stands accused of genocide,” Middle East scholar Assal Rad said late Thursday, citing the results of a recent CBS News/YouGov poll.
A separate poll commissioned by the IMEU Policy Project suggested that voters in key U.S. battleground states would be more likely to vote for a Democratic nominee who pledged to withhold weapons from Israel.
The CNN interview aired as Israel continued its multi-day assault on the West Bank, a deadly military campaign that the head of the United Nations and others warned could become an extension of the nearly 11-month war on Gaza, during which Israel has killed more than 40,600 people, displaced 90% of the enclave’s population, and sparked famine across the territory.
On Thursday, Israel’s military killed five Palestinians in an airstrike on a vehicle convoy of the Washington, D.C.-based American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) agency. It is a violation of U.S. law to provide weaponry to a country obstructing the delivery of American humanitarian aid.
The attack on the ANERA convoy came a day after Israeli forces opened fire on a World Food Program vehicle, forcing the U.N. agency to suspend employee movement in Gaza.
Harris’ refusal to express openness to an arms embargo against a military that has repeatedly targeted aid and healthcare workers, journalists, and other civilians sparked immediate backlash from Palestinian rights advocates, including at least one member of Congress.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American in the U.S. Congress, said Harris’ answer signaled that “war crimes and genocide will continue.”
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, called the Democratic nominee’s answer on Gaza “terrible” and “out of touch with voters, especially those in key battleground states who Harris needs to feel motivated to go to the polls.”
“Poll after poll after poll tells us that a majority of Americans and even more key Democratic constituencies want the US to stop giving arms to Israel that it’s using to kill and displace Palestinian families,” Lieberman added. “Not sending bombs to Israel is politically expedient and—quite obviously!—the morally correct thing to do for anyone reading the daily headlines of Israeli massacres being done with U.S. weapons.”
In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Friday, RootsAction national director Norman Solomon warned that “time is running out for Kamala Harris to distance herself from U.S. policies that enable Israel to continue with mass murder and genocide in Gaza.”
“Polling shows that a pivot toward moral decency would improve her chances of defeating Donald Trump,” Solomon wrote. “But during her CNN interview Thursday night, Harris remained in lockstep with President Biden’s unconditional arming of Israel.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/kamala-harris-arms-embargo
Last Energy nabs $40M to realize vision of super-small nuclear reactors
These investors are joining the wave in public and private financing of nuclear energy that has swelled to $14 billion so far this year — double last year’s total, according to Axios. Investment in new fission technologies, such as microreactors, has increased tenfold from 2023.
The startup wants to mass-manufacture 20MW nuclear reactors that can be built and shipped within 24 months. It’s looking to get its first reactor online in Europe.
By Eric Wesoff, 29 August 2024
A startup looking to build really small nuclear reactors just announced a big new funding round.
Last Energy, a Washington, D.C.–based next-generation nuclear company, announced that it closed a $40 million Series B funding round, a move that will add more financial and human capital to the reinvigorated nuclear sector.
The startup aims to eventually deploy thousands of its modular microreactors, though to date it has not brought any online. The first reactor might appear in Europe as soon as 2026, assuming Last Energy manages to meet its extremely aggressive construction, financial, and regulatory timelines — not a common occurrence in the nuclear industry. Venture capital heavyweight Gigafund led the round, which closed early this year but was revealed only today. The startup has raised a total of $64 million since its 2019 founding.
Last Energy is part of a cohort of companies betting that small, replicable, and mass-produced reactors will overcome the economic challenges associated with building emissions-free baseload nuclear power — and restore the moribund U.S. nuclear industry to its former glory. But the microreactor dream has yet to be realized; few of these small modular reactors (SMRs) have been built worldwide. None have been completed in the U.S., though one design from long-in-the-tooth startup NuScale Power has gotten regulatory approval.
The 20-megawatt size of Last Energy’s microreactor stands in stark contrast to that of a conventional nuclear reactor like the recently commissioned Vogtle units in Georgia, which each generate about 1,100 megawatts. A Last Energy microreactor, the size of about 75 shipping containers, might power a small factory, while a Vogtle unit can power a city.
Instead of the cathedral-style stick-built construction of modern large reactors, SMRs and microreactors are meant to be manufactured at scale in factories, transported to the site, and assembled on location. Rather than develop an advanced reactor design with exotic fuels — an approach taken by other SMR hopefuls, including the Bill Gates–backed TerraPower — Last Energy chose to scale down the well-established light-water reactor technology that powers America’s 94 existing nuclear reactors.
“We came to the conclusion that using the existing, off-the-shelf technology was the way to scale,” CEO Bret Kugelmass said in a 2022 interview with Canary Media. “We don’t innovate at all when it comes to the nuclear process or components — we do systems integration and business-model innovation.”
The startup claims that its microreactor is designed to be fabricated, transported, and built within 24 months, and is the right size to serve industrial clients. Under its business model, Last Energy aims to build, own, and operate its power plant at the customer’s site, avoiding the yearslong wait times to plug a new generation project into the power grid.
Like an independent power producer, Last Energy doesn’t sell power plants; instead, it sells electricity to customers through long-term power-purchase contracts.
“Data centers and heavy industry are trying to grapple with a very complex set of energy challenges, and Last Energy has seen them realize that micro-nuclear is the only capable solution,” said Kugelmass, who claims in today’s press release that the startup has inked commercial agreements for 80 units — with 39 of those units destined to serve power-hungry data center customers.
Last Energy isn’t the only microreactor company attracting venture funding. There are several other examples from this month alone: Aalo Atomics raised $27 million from 50Y, Valor Equity Partners, Harpoon Ventures, Crosscut, SNR, Alumni Ventures, Preston Werner, Earth Venture, Garage Capital, Wayfinder, Jeff Dean, and Nucleation Capital to scale up a 85-kilowatt design from the U.S. Department of Energy’s MARVEL program. While Deep Fission, a startup aiming to bury arrays of microreactors 1 mile underground, just raised $4 million led by 8VC, a venture firm founded by Joe Lonsdale.
These investors are joining the wave in public and private financing of nuclear energy that has swelled to $14 billion so far this year — double last year’s total, according to Axios. Investment in new fission technologies, such as microreactors, has increased tenfold from 2023.
Investors happen to be backing startups in a heavily subsidized market. Tens of billions of dollars from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the U.S. DOE’s Loan Programs Office, and the Inflation Reduction Act support the development of a non-Russian supply of enriched uranium; the IRA also introduced a ridiculously generous $15-per-megawatt-hour production tax credit, meant to keep today’s existing nuclear fleet competitive with gas and renewables, as well as a similarly charitable investment tax credit to incentivize new plant construction.
The flood of funding comes as nuclear power enjoys the most public support it has had in years. Nuclear now has a favorable public opinion, with the majority of Americans supporting atomic energy and its record of safety and performance. And nuclear energy is one of the few topics that Democrat and Republican politicians have been able to agree on in recent memory.
Still, despite the rising financial, political, and public support, the U.S. nuclear industry remains frozen, plagued by a legacy of cost and timeline overruns for conventional reactors and regulatory challenges around new designs. It’s unclear when the country will get another nuclear reactor online — as of last year, the leading contender was an SMR project from NuScale, but that fell apart due to cost. In all likelihood, the next reactor to plug into the grid will be the mothballed Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, which won government support for an unprecedented effort to recommission the plant by the end of next year.
For its part, Last Energy is not banking on the U.S. to lead the charge; it’s targeting industrial customers in Poland, Romania, and the U.K. for its initial sites, in the hopes that it will find a more favorable regulatory and financial environment.
Ryan McEntush of investment firm a16z suggests in an essay that “the success of nuclear power is much more about project management, financing, and policy than it is cutting-edge engineering or safety.”
That’s Last Energy’s philosophy too — and it’s going to need more money and more years to prove it’s the right one.
The US presidential candidates are not confronting the nuclear threat that haunts the world
Bulletin, By Robert Jay Lifton | August 29, 2024
The candidates in the coming election in the United States have said little, certainly nothing coherently, about nuclear weapons. Yet those weapons continue to haunt us, even as they move in and out of our conscious awareness.
We are reminded of this disconnect by the recent revelation of a shift in the American strategy of “nuclear deterrence” to give greater emphasis to China because of evidence of its rapid build-up of the weapons.1 That strategy change suggests China has been granted the dubious status of player in the game of bringing an end to humanity.
This “nuclear end,” as we came to call it in the antinuclear movement, was oddly treated in the recent Musk interview of Trump. Trump spoke vaguely of “nuclear warming,” though he has constantly dismissed the danger of climate change. Musk referred to the relatively rapid rebuilding of Nagasaki as a thriving city, failing to recognize that reconstruction was possible only because of the existence of an outside world to bring the necessary energy and know-how for such rebuilding. The use of contemporary nuclear weapons would allow for no such outside world. And the statement also ignores the residual pain and nuclear fear brought on by the atomic bombing of that city.2
And in her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, Kamala Harris committed herself to a military that “always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”3 We do not know whether she had nuclear weapons in mind.
What are the nuclear truths that are still rarely taken into account?
Nuclear weapons represent a revolution in the human capacity for destructiveness. Whether it begins with battlefield use of relatively small nuclear weapons or with larger ones, a nuclear war is likely to bring about a “nuclear winter”—the blocking of the sun’s rays by soot and other debris blown into the stratosphere—bringing about the lowering of Earth’s temperature to an extent that agriculture and human life could no longer be sustained. There is also more recent research suggesting that even a “limited” nuclear war could bring about worldwide starvation, affecting hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
From this standpoint, Robert Oppenheimer’s brilliant success in guiding his fellow scientists at Los Alamos to the creation of nuclear weapons was his also tragedy. He could never decide whether to go along with the society’s rendering him a hero or to insist on his guilt, as he did when he told President Harry Truman, “I have blood on my hands.”
The larger US society has the same conflict. It is unable to decide whether the weapons are crucial to keeping the peace and even keeping the world going—the US addition to what I call nuclearism—or whether their very existence, not just their use but their stockpiling, is what threatens our future. The latter idea is central to the treaty put forward by the United Nations banning the “use, possession, testing, and transfer of nuclear weapons under international law.”4 Recently 150 medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and the British Medical Journal made a joint call for the elimination of nuclear weapons with an editorial statement: “The nuclear arms states must eliminate their nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us.”5
That reasonable advocacy of nuclear abolition could not of course abolish our capacity to rebuild the weapons. But such re-creation would be highly demanding, and abolition would make the world a much safer place even if the possibility of building new nuclear weapons existed………………………………………………………………………………..more https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/the-us-presidential-candidates-are-not-confronting-the-nuclear-threat-that-haunts-the-world/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter08292024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_LiftonNuclear_082024
US Rushes Weapons Shipments To Israel
According to flight data, there’s been a spike in US arms deliveries to Israel since the end of July
by Dave DeCamp August 29, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/08/29/us-rushes-weapons-shipments-to-israel/
The US has been rushing weapons shipments to Israel since the end of July, Haaretz reported on Thursday, citing open-sourced aviation data.
The report said that the spike in arms shipments made August the second busiest month at Israel’s Nevatim Airbase for US deliveries since Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza began back in October 2023 following the Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Dozens of US military transport flights, as well as Israeli civilian and military and cargo planes, have landed at the base, mainly traveling from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The Haaretz report appeared to attribute the rush in arms shipments to US preparations for a potential Iranian attack. The US has deployed additional fighter jets and warships to the region and is vowing to defend Israel from Iran’s response to the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian territory. Following a major exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah on Sunday, the US is still expecting a reprisal attack from Iran.
Besides helping Israel prepare for a potential attack from Iran, the US weapons shipments also help fuel the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s operations in the West Bank, which significantly escalated on Wednesday. Israeli forces launched their largest attack on the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
The rush in arms shipments also shows strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been working to prevent a ceasefire deal with Hamas, and shows President Biden and Vice President Harris are not serious about ending the slaughter in Gaza.
The Israeli Defense Ministry said on Monday that the US had delivered over 50,000 tons of weapons and other military equipment since October 7. The ministry said the US support was “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
Popular US park as radioactive as Chernobyl, says expert: ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it’
By Matthew Phelan For Dailymail.Com and Associated Press, 29 August 2024
A scenic hiking trail has been discovered to be dangerously contaminated with radiation.
New tests have discovered that Acid Canyon — a popular hiking and biking trail near the birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos, New Mexico — is still radioactive today at level’s akin to the site of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The shocking contamination data, collected in an effort led by biochemist Michael Ketterer, has galvanized public calls for posting official warnings across the trail…………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13788759/Popular-hiking-trail-radioactive-Chernobyl-nuclear.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawE99R1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVP-28QfZ-nxj8mjOk5A9fM4TyF-EOzzzKA2-rHdbbAFhrQEr4LY-M8GsA_aem_XVLP4cUbyyPBXNd03zrK4g
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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