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U.S. government continues to pour $billions into the failing Small Nuclear Reactors business, in the hopes of exporting SMRs

The US Department of State and US Export-Import Bank (EXIM) have announced
a suite of financial tools to support the deployment of advanced nuclear
energy systems to help reach net-zero goals. They also announced plans to
mobilise more than USD4.2 billion of investment in enrichment and
conversion capacity through the five-nation Sapporo 5 collaboration.

 World Nuclear News 7th Dec 2023

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-takes-steps-to-jump-start-overseas-SMR-deployme

December 10, 2023 Posted by | marketing, USA | Leave a comment

Not a Penny Nor a Bullet Off the Table

Hundreds more civilians have been slaughtered since Blinken’s remarks. In other words, Israel ignored him. As long as it’s only talk, Israel can afford to. 

So far not one bullet, nor one penny has been withheld from Netanyahu’s vicious regime

The U.S. vice president, secretary of state and defense secretary are using unusually blunt language against Israel’s massacres of Palestinians. But the money and weapons keep flowing, says Joe Lauria.

By Joe Lauria / Consortium News, December 8, 2023,,

more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/08/not-a-penny-nor-a-bullet-off-the-table/

In the midst of an Old Testament-style genocide against the Palestinian people, there is a paraphrased line from the Book of Daniel that has come into full view for the Biden administration: “The writing is on the wall.” 

Everywhere in the U.S. that prominent administration officials go, they are hearing it from a public increasingly alarmed about their complicity in genocide. It is not criticism they can easily ignore.   

For one thing, if they have a shred of conscience left they cannot avoid seeing that Israel’s military campaign is “deliberately inflicting on the group [Gazans] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the supreme crime.  

But even if their hearts are stones, political warnings are scratched on the wall in a fast-approaching presidential election in which increasing numbers of Democrats are affixing “genocide” to Biden’s first name. 

Thus Biden, though not Biden himself, was spurred in the past few days to dispatch his top deputies to deliver the sternest message to Israel.

At the climate summit in Dubai on Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris told a press conference: “The United States is unequivocal: International humanitarian law must be respected. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” 

On the same day Harris spoke, in what appears to have been coordinated by the White House, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, CA, that, “I have repeatedly made clear to Israel’s leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and strategic imperative.” 

“In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” Austin said. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”   Even then, Austin couched his remarks in military and not moral terms. Still the message was clear to Israel: Stop killing so many civilians. 

Harris’s and Austin’s remarks followed by two days comments by Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his third jaunt to Jerusalem since Oct. 7. 

After meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken told the press:

“We discussed the details of Israel’s ongoing planning and I underscored the imperative for the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the South. …

As I told the prime minister, intent matters, but so does the result. … Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralising the threat posed by Hamas, while minimising harm to innocent men, women and children. …

That means taking more effective steps to protect the lives of civilians, including by clearly and precisely designating areas and places in southern and central Gaza, where they can be safe and out of the line of fire.” 

Israel responded with some maps supposedly outlining safe areas for civilians to go to. But the bombing in the south of Gaza, where 1.8 million Gazans are displaced from the north, has been among the most intense in two months of Israeli attacks. 

Hundreds more civilians have been slaughtered since Blinken’s remarks. In other words, Israel ignored him. As long as it’s only talk, Israel can afford to. 

An unconfirmed report from Israel’s Channel 12 following Blinken’s meeting with Netanyahu said the secretary of state supposedly “linked American military support to certain conditions, including proof that the I.D.F. plans to take into consideration the civilian population in Gaza, reduce civilian evacuations from their homes to a minimum, and provide more safe areas for non-combatants.” 

Leverage

On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Biden ally,  said according to the AP: “’The truth is that if asking nicely worked, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today,’ Sanders said in a floor speech. It was time for the United States to use its ‘substantial leverage’ with its ally, the Vermont senator said. ‘And we all know what that leverage is,’ he said, adding, ‘the blank-check approach must end.’”

Until such leverage is used — and Washington has let two months go by with more than 16,000 dead, 7,000 missing and 40,000 injured —  these are mere words. 

Such talk from these Biden officials and allies will not fool many people, except for fools, and will not scare Netanyahu. 

So far not one bullet, nor one penny has been withheld from Netanyahu’s vicious regime. 

This is Biden’s quandry:  continue to support Israel’s genocide and see his poll numbers continue to plummet. The dilemma he must answer is: what would damage him more, sticking with Israel through its murderous campaign or risk the Israel Lobby’s consummate skill at destroying American politicians?  

On Nov. 5, 2024, American voters will weigh Biden in the balance and, as Daniel told King Belshazzar, he may be found wanting. 

December 9, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Cancelled NuScale contract weighs heavy on new nuclear

Reuters Events, By Paul Day Dec 7, 2023

The failure of a high profile small modular reactor (SMR) contract in the United States has prompted concerns that Gen IV nuclear may be further off than expected.

NuScale, the first new nuclear company to receive a design certificate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its 77 MW Power Module SMR, said in November it was terminating its Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) with the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS).

UAMPS serves 50 community-owned power utilities in the Western United States and the CFPP, for which the Department of Energy approved $1.35 billion over 10 years subject to appropriations, was abandoned after the project failed to attract enough subscriptions.

NuScale shares tumbled 37% to less than $2 on the day of the news, Nov. 8, though that had largely been recovered by the end of the month. The early December share price of $3.1, however, is a long way from highs of nearly $15 in August 2022 just three months after going public.

The CFPP had aimed to build NuScale SMR units at a site near Idaho Falls to be operable by 2029 though concerns arose that some at UAMPS members may be unwilling to pay for power from the project after NuScale raised the target price to $89/MWh from a previous estimate of $58 MW/h in January.   

The cancellation came shortly after another advanced reactor developer, X-Energy and special purpose acquisition company Ares Acquisition Corporation, called off a $1.8-billion deal to go public citing “challenging market conditions (and) peer company trading performance.”

The work with UAMPS had helped advance NuSCale’s technology to the stage of commercial deployment, President and CEO John Hopkins said. 

However, the failure of the much-anticipated proof case for advanced nuclear alongside the X-Energy market retreat left many questioning whether next generation nuclear could live up to its promises.

“Almost all these kinds of MoUs and contracts, as we saw with the NuScale contract, are just not worth the paper they’re written on. There are so many off ramps and outs for both sides and no one’s willing to expose themselves to the downside risk of projects that go way over budget cost and take too long,” says Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus.

Nordhaus co-wrote a piece for The Breakthrough Institute, ‘Advanced Nuclear Energy is in Trouble’, a scathing criticism of policy efforts to commercialize advanced nuclear which, it says, to date have been entirely insufficient.

The nuclear industry was keen to ‘whistle past the graveyard’ of recent developments and efforts to commercialize the new generation of reactors ‘are simply not on track’, the Breakthrough piece said.

Mounting challenges

There are five areas that pose mounting challenges for the industry, according to Breakthrough; high interest rates and commodity prices, constrained supply chains, a regulatory regime that penalizes innovation, project costs versus system costs, and fuel production.

High interest rate and commodity costs in the last couple of years have hit the industry especially hard due to long project lead times. Nuclear supply chains struggle to rebuild as tight regulation forces many materials to be tracked from certified mine to certified manufacturer………………………………………………………………..

 new nuclear has not been attracting the cash it needs. That’s partly due to developers’ lack of focus on development activities, according to Fiona Reilly, CEO of energy consultancy FiRe Energy……………….

The NuScale failure with UAMPS and X-Energy’s cancelled offering are just further bad signs for the market, especially when, at the same time these projects are announcing problems, the international nuclear community is in Dubai during COP28 saying they need to triple capacity by 2050……..

“You can’t set targets like these when we’re not even building the first reactors in many countries.”   https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/cancelled-nuscale-contract-weighs-heavy-new-nuclear?utm_campaign=NEI%2007DEC23%20NEI%20Database%20A&utm_medium=email&u

December 9, 2023 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Fund for Nuclear Waste Exposure Victims in Limbo as Congress Balks at Cost

Bipartisan efforts to extend and expand a program granting compensation to victims of government-caused nuclear contamination are faltering. It is set to expire in June.

By Catie Edmondson, Reporting from the Capitol, Dec. 8, 2023,

More than two decades ago, Congress declared that victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses — including uranium miners and those exposed to radiation from Manhattan Project-era atomic tests — should receive federal compensation.

“The health of the individuals who were unwitting participants in these tests was put at risk to serve the national security interests of the United States,” read the law enacted in 1990. “The United States should recognize and assume responsibility for the harm done to these individuals.”

Now that statute, known as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, is in peril, set to expire in June without a clear path for renewal. 

And an effort to broaden it substantially beyond Cold War-era victims, to others who have been harmed by the aftereffects in the decades since, has run into a brick wall on Capitol Hill.

The Senate voted overwhelmingly in July to attach legislation renewing and expanding the program to the annual defense policy bill. But in the final version negotiated behind doors by congressional leaders, that measure, sponsored by Senators Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, was dropped………………………………………..

The original legislation was written with a narrow scope, meant to compensate those who participated in or were present for aboveground atomic bomb testing, a hallmark of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, or uranium miners who worked between 1942 and 1971.

The law has paid out more than $2.5 billion in benefits to more than 55,000 claimants since its creation in 1990, according to congressional researchers. Claimants, who can include children or grandchildren of those who would have benefited from the program but have since died, receive a one-time payment ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.

The updated version by Mr. Hawley and Mr. Luján would expand the number of people eligible to receive compensation, and also increase the highest payout to $150,000. The law currently restricts eligibility for “down-winders,” or people who lived near one of the test sites, to those who resided in a handful of counties in Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

“The members that worked on this policy once upon a time, they left out states like New Mexico — and not just the entire state,” Mr. Luján, who has pushed to expand eligibility to individuals in most western states, said in an interview. “They left out the entire county where the first bomb was tested. That alone shows the people have been left out.”

The bill, which President Biden has endorsed, makes the case that the federal government should compensate anyone grievously sickened by the legacy of the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

It would extend access to the federal fund for 19 years and expand eligibility to Missourians sickened by radioactive waste that was never properly disposed of — and in some cases left out in the open near a creek — in St. Louis, the home of a uranium processing site in the 1940s.

A blockbuster report by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press earlier this year found that generations of families growing up in the area have since faced “rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other mysterious illnesses they have come to believe were the result of exposure to its waters and sediment.”

It wasn’t until 2016 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised residents to avoid the creek entirely, and cleanup is expected to take until 2038.

“It is true that the Manhattan Project is in the past and the Cold War-era nuclear testing is in the past,” Mr. Hawley said in an interview. “But people are still dealing with the consequences of that.”

Unless Congress passes new legislation extending the law, the fund will shut down in June. Republican leaders in both the House and Senate objected to including it in the annual defense bill, citing a report by the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the proposed renewal would introduce $140 billion in new, mandatory spending. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/us/politics/nuclear-exposure-compensation.html

December 9, 2023 Posted by | health, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Recent Nuclear Declassifications and Denials: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good: New Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and Other Nonproliferation Issues

The Bad and the Ugly: Defense Department Denials on Dimona 1963, U.S. Aid to British SLBMs, SAC Censors Film on Airborne Command Posts

National Security Archive Washington, D.C., December 6, 2023 – Recent U.S. government decisions on the declassification of historical records on nuclear proliferation demonstrate the good, the bad and the ugly in the current national security secrecy system.

On the plus side are releases that add historically valuable information to the public record, such as the opening of documents that were reclassified after having been released at the National Archives, a newly declassified Kissinger-Nixon telcon, and U.S. embassy messages from 1980 on nuclear nonproliferation policies.

In contrast to these good releases are a number of bad and just plain ugly responses from the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force, among others, highlighting a persistent problem where government agencies—for whatever reason—try to maintain security classification restrictions even in cases where the information has already been released, sometimes decades earlier.

Some of the documents now released in full had been held up for 20 years by the review process initiated by the Kyl-Lott Amendment and related provisions, under which the Department of Energy effectively reclassified many historical records already opened to the public at the National Archives, although other organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force and some of the intelligence agencies, also got in on the act using their own authorities.

Another key document, the CIA’s own internal assessment of its intelligence failures (and successes) before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, includes details that were censored in 2012, and withholds details that the CIA published in 1992.

The ugliest cases demonstrate the Pentagon’s overreach. Defense Department objections led to the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo about the British submarine-launched missile program, a document that was declassified and published in full in the Foreign Relations of the United States series nearly ten years ago. The Pentagon also censored multiple 60-year-old documents about the Israeli nuclear program, apparently completely unaware of the huge number of declassified records already available on U.S. concerns about Israel’s nuclear intentions and the Dimona reactor in particular.

The examples included in today’s publication illustrate the deep and fundamental problems that plague the U.S. secrecy declassification system…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2023-12-06/recent-nuclear-declassifications-and-denials-good-bad-and

December 9, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

US aid to Ukraine laundered back to military-industrial complex – congressman

 https://www.rt.com/news/588617-us-ukraine-aid-congress/ 6 Dec 23

Republican representative Thomas Massie claims that the money being sent to Kiev ultimately ends up in the pockets of stockholders

The US Congress is continuing to vote in favor of sending billions of dollars to Ukraine because a lot of that money ends up being laundered back into the US military-industrial complex, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie has said.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter) published on Wednesday, the politician was asked to explain why Washington continued to push for more funding for Ukraine despite it becoming obvious that Kiev’s forces “cannot win.”

Massie, who has repeatedly voted against funding Kiev’s military operations, alleged that a lot of the funds that are sent to Ukraine ultimately end up “enriching” people within specific US districts and “stockholders, some of whom are congressmen.”

“You know, people are getting rich, so let’s do it. It’s an immoral argument, but it is one. But that’s not the argument they’re making in public,” he said, noting that those supporting the funding of Ukraine with US tax dollars are instead arguing that it is a “moral obligation” to do so.

“You’re a bad person if you’re against this,” he complained, referring to a statement recently made by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who suggested that failing to support “the fight for freedom in Ukraine” meant letting Russian President Vladimir Putin “prevail.”

“But no one mentions that we have abetted the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainian men that will not be replaced. To fight a war that they cannot win,” Massie noted.

In order to support the US government’s proposals on Ukraine aid, the congressman claimed, a person has to be “economically illiterate and morally deficient.”

Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden has hit out against Republicans like Massie, who have opposed aid packages for Ukraine, calling the failure to support Kiev “absolutely crazy” and “against US interests.” The US leader has repeatedly pledged that Washington would support Kiev for “as long as it takes” in its conflict with Russia.

Congress is currently in the midst of a debate around accepting a $111 billion ‘national security supplemental request,’ which includes funding for Ukraine, as well as Israel. Republicans have said they would not let the bill pass unless Washington first boosts spending on the US-Mexico border, tightens immigration controls, revises asylum and parole laws in immigration proceedings.

Last week, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also stated that Washington’s continued support for Ukraine had nothing to do with defending “democracy” or battling Russia, but instead boiled down to making a profit and modernizing the US military-industrial complex.

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The catastrophic danger to nuclear weapons complexes, of climate change’s extreme weather

December 7, 2023 Posted by | climate change, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

95 Democrats and 216 Republicans Support Resolution Conflating Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

“This extreme and cynical Republican resolution does nothing to combat antisemitism,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, stressing the importance of “legitimate criticism” of the Israeli government and its war on Gaza.

By Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams, 6 Dec 23,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/06/95-democrats-and-216-republicans-support-resolution-conflating-anti-zionism-and-antisemitism/

As Israel continued to wage what critics are calling a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, just 13 U.S. House Democrats and one Republican on Tuesday voted against a GOP resolution that conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

House Resolution 894 passed with support from 95 Democrats and 216 Republicans, including its sponsors, Reps. David Kustoff (Tenn.) and Max Miller (Ohio), who are both Jewish. Almost as many Democrats—92—voted present.

The resolution, which embraces the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial working definition of antisemitism, was widely condemned by progressive and Jewish groups this week ahead of the vote.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (Ky.) joined the 13 Democrats who opposed H.Res. 894: Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), Cori Bush (Mo.), Gerry Connolly (Va.), Jesús “Chuy” García (Ill.), Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).

“This extreme and cynical Republican resolution does nothing to combat antisemitism, relies on a definition that conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, paints critics of the Israeli government as antisemites, and falsely states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Omar said in a statement about her vote. “We must stand against any attempt to define legitimate criticism of this war and the government perpetrating it as antisemitism.”

According to The Hill, Bowman said after the vote that while he “strongly condemn[s] antisemitism and hate in all of its forms,” he voted against H.Res. 894 because “it fuels division and violence, conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and ignores one of the greatest threats to the Jewish community, white nationalism.”

Bowman and Omar are among the House progressives facing serious primary challenges for the next cycle, in part because of their criticism of the Israeli government and its war on Gaza that has killed nearly 16,000 Palestinians in under two months.

They joined with Bush, Lee, Massie, Ocasio-Cortez, Ramirez, Tlaib, and Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.) and Al Green (D-Texas) in October to oppose a bipartisan resolution, which declared that the House unconditionally “stands with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists,” and did not mention Palestinian suffering.

December 7, 2023 Posted by | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

US Defense Secretary Austin should resign over scurrilous attack on peace community

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 6 Dec 23

President Biden, struggling to gain support for his $105 billion weapons boondoggle to further US wars against Russia and Gaza, sent out his chief advocate for perpetual war, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to hammer away at advocates for a sane, peaceful US foreign policy.

Austin told the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, actually a forum for perpetual war, that Americans for peace are “Americans who prefer isolation to engagement…try to pull up the drawbridge. They try to kick loose the cornerstone of American leadership. The’re Americans trying to undermine the security architecture that has produced decades of prosperity without great-power war. And you’ll hear some people try to brand an American retreat from responsibility as bold new leadership. So when you hear that, make no mistake: It is not bold. It is not new. And it is not leadership,”

Austin, shilling for his Commander in Chief Biden, seeks to keep funneling endless billions to support America’s proxy war that’s enabled hundreds of thousands of deaths in Ukraine. He’s also ensuring the genocidal ethnic cleansing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza that could not happen without US weapons and immoral support.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin should resign forthwith. So should his boss, President Biden, who appears bent on destroying Gaza and Ukraine for reasons having nothing to do with American national security interests. Their replacements might realize perpetual war is utterly self destructive to the individuals promoting it, America; indeed, the world. It might just inspire them to pivot to peace before they get drawn into the same vortex of defeat as their predecessors.

December 7, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Air Force expanding review of cancers for members who worked on nuclear missiles

The Air Force is expanding its study of whether service members who worked with nuclear missiles have had unusually high rates of cancer after a preliminary review determined that a deeper examination is needed

abc news, ByTARA COPP Associated Press, December 5, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Air Force is expanding its study of whether service members who worked with nuclear missiles have had unusually high rates of cancer after a preliminary review determined that a deeper examination is needed.

The initial study was launched in response to reports that many who served are now ill. The Air Force isn’t making its initial findings of cancer numbers public for a month or so, but released its initial assessment Monday that more review is necessary.

“We’ve determined that additional study is warranted” based on preliminary analyses of the data, said Lt. Col. Keith Beam, one of several Air Force medical officers who updated reporters on the service’s missile community cancer review.

The findings are part of a sweeping review undertaken by the Air Force earlier this year to determine if missileers — the launch officers who worked underground to operate the nation’s silo-launched nuclear missiles — were exposed to unsafe contaminants. The review began after scores of those current or former missile launch officers came forward this year to report they have been diagnosed with cancer.

In response, medical teams went out to each nuclear missile base to conduct thousands of tests of the air, water, soil and surface areas inside and around each of its three nuclear missile bases; Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

The full Air Force study will look not just at the missileers but at the whole missile community, to include all who supported the ICBM mission……………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/air-force-expanding-review-cancers-service-members-worked-105361384

December 6, 2023 Posted by | health, USA | Leave a comment

B-2 Spirit stealth plane cleared to use B61-12 nuclear bombs

This is the first warplane that has been cleared, with the F-35 aircraft likely to be cleared next in a move that will benefit NATO allies.

Interesting Engineering Ameya Paleja, 5 Dec 23,

The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber aircraft has become the first U.S. warplane to be cleared to carry the B61-12, the newest nuclear bomb on the block. The clearance featured in the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP) for Fiscal year 2024 was unclassified by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last week.

The B61 series is one of the longest-serving weapons in the US stockpile, the first iteration having debuted in the 1960s. The B61-3, -4, and -7 continue to be part of the nuclear lineup available with the U.S., even as plans are afoot to phase them out. Details of the phase-out plan remain unknown for now……………………………………………………

The 825-pound (lb), or ~374 kilograms (kg) bomb project is being undertaken at a cost of nearly $8.3 billion, with experts suggesting that costs could rise to $10 billion, Popular Mechanics reported. Around 480 of these bombs are expected to be made using the B61-4 bombs. The effective cost of making these bombs exceeded the cost of their weight in gold…………………………………..

The US Air Force has plans to equip its F-35, F-15, and F-16s with the B61-12, even though the timeline for these clearances remains unknown for now. The availability of F-35s with NATO allies also means that the B61-12 could also serve US allies in the future, and earlier this month, the Royal Netherlands Air Force confirmed that its F-35As had received an initial certification for the weapon with the German and Italian Tornado fighter bombers also in the queue to use the B61-12…………………………..  https://interestingengineering.com/culture/b2-spirit-b61-12-nuclear-bombs

December 6, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

US warns it will ‘run out’ of Ukraine aid funds by end of year

Financial Times, Mon, 04 Dec 2023

The White House has issued a blunt warning that the US is set to run out of funds to aid Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that a failure by Congress to approve new support would “kneecap” Kyiv.

The alert from Shalanda Young, the White House budget director, in a letter to congressional leaders on Monday, represented the most specific assessment yet of Washington’s waning financial and military support for Ukraine.

“Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks,” Young wrote to political leaders of both parties.

“There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money — and nearly out of time,” she said.

President Joe Biden’s request for $106bn in emergency funding for his biggest foreign policy priorities, including Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, remains mired in stalemate on Capitol Hill, driven by mounting Republican opposition to helping Kyiv.

Some lawmakers — especially in the Senate, where backing for Ukraine runs deeper — are trying to negotiate a bipartisan deal that would contain aid for Kyiv alongside new immigration and asylum procedures to reduce the number of undocumented people arriving in the US through its southern border.

Even if an agreement is reached in the Senate, however, it is unclear if it can pass the Republican-led House, whose new speaker Mike Johnson has been sceptical of funding for Ukraine.

“Cutting off the flow of US weapons and equipment will kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories,” Young wrote to Congress.

“Already, our packages of security assistance have become smaller and the deliveries of aid have become more limited . . . while our allies around the world have stepped up to do more, US support is critical and cannot be replicated by others,” she added.

The White House warning comes as EU member states are struggling to reach a budget deal in Brussels that would send €50bn to Ukraine, people close to the discussions told the Financial Times.

Young said Ukraine also needed economic support, which is in danger of stalling.

“If Ukraine’s economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop,” she wrote. “Putin understands this well, which is why Russia has made destroying Ukraine’s economy central to its strategy — which you can see in its attacks against Ukraine’s grain exports and energy infrastructure,” she added.

Young also said money for Ukraine would bring benefits to the US economy. Sincethe start of Russia’s full invasion in February 2022, Washington has approved $111bn in aid to Kyiv.

“While we cannot predict exactly which US companies will be awarded new contracts, we do know the funding will be used to acquire advanced capabilities to defend against attacks on civilians in Israel and Ukraine — for example, air defense systems built in Alabama, Texas, and Georgia and vital subcomponents sourced from nearly all 50 states,” she said………  https://www.ft.com/content/ca16e42d-fda9-4c1d-b2c9-410d764745b7

December 6, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Apocalypse Then: 40 Years Ago, A TV Movie Saved the World from Nuclear Annihilation

ABC’s 1983 film ‘The Day After’ — the subject of a new documentary as well as a book —not only blew America’s (and Ronald Reagan’s) mind, but it may also have changed the course of human history.

Hollywood Reporter, BY BENJAMIN SVETKEY, 5 Dec 23

“………………………………… Next to the moon landing, it’s hard to think of a TV moment that had a bigger impact on the collective psyche than The Day After, ABC’s white-knuckle drama depicting the aftermath of a nuclear strike on the United States. Its airing 40 years ago — which is being commemorated on Dec. 4 with a new PBS documentary, Television Event, as well as a just-published book about the film, Apocalypse Television — didn’t just terrify the nation. It may have also altered the course of human destiny, which at that time, the red-hot height of the Cold War, seemed to be barreling towards an inevitable atomic showdown……………

“I’ve come to believe that’s true,” says Nicholas Meyer, 77, who directed the three-hour film. “The movie may have indeed helped prevent a nuclear war. It certainly changed one person’s mind on the subject, and that person just happened to be the President of the United States. Ronald Reagan wrote about watching the movie in his memoir. His biographer, who spent three years in the White House, said the only time he ever saw Reagan flip out was after seeing the movie. Ultimately, it sent Reagan into such a tailspin, he signed the Intermediate Missile Range Treaty, the only treaty that ever resulted in the physical dismantling of nuclear weapons.”

The brains behind The Day After, the one who deserves most of the credit not only for conceiving the concept but also strong-arming a reluctant ABC into putting it on the air, was the late Brandon Stoddard, then the network exec in charge of ABC’s made-for-TV movies. 

“Brandon was stunned by Three Mile Island,” recalls Meyer. “And that’s how he came up with The Day After. ‘What if we showed a nuclear exchange and what would happen to regular people if they got nuked?’”

Unsurprisingly, ABC’s top executives were not entirely onboard with Stoddard’s vision…………………………………

For one thing, there was considerable political pushback. Conservative groups went on the warpath against the network, claiming the movie was Soviet propaganda designed to undermine America’s nuclear deterrent (even though Hume’s script never identified who launched the strike against the U.S. or why). For another, the subject matter of atomic war was, predictably, radioactive to advertisers. They began pulling out in droves………………………………………………………… https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-the-day-after-saved-the-world-12357

December 5, 2023 Posted by | media, USA | 1 Comment

How Are U.S. Warships Supporting Israel’s Genocide In Gaza?

Wherever you’re located, get out in the streets to demand an end to genocide in Gaza

LISA SAVAGE, DEC 4, 2023

Gaza has been under military blockade since 2006. Its one harbor, in Gaza City, was heavily bombed by Israel recently. Repeated attempts to reach Gaza with boats carrying humanitarian supplies have been thwarted by Israel with U.S. backing and we’ve seen activists beaten and even killed for trying to deliver cargo like medical supplies.

Bringing this question closer to home, How is the genocide in Gaza supported by General Dynamics and Bath Iron Works?

General Dynamics is the world’s fourth largest weapons manufacturer and Bath Iron Works (BIW) is one of its many locations for building weapon delivery systems. In this location in Maine shipbuilders historically profited from building slave ships.

Today, both destroyers and cruisers are built to be nuclear-capable meaning they are designed to be able to deliver first-strike attack nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-3 ‘missile defense’ interceptors which would take out an enemy’s defenses following a first strike by the U.S.

Currently there are multiple Bath-built warships in the vicinity of Gaza including the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. The USS Kearny, an Aegis destroyer built at BIW, is deployed there as is the USS Mason, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer which on 27 November engaged in a firefight with Yemeni forces on behalf of an Israeli merchant ship it was sent to rescue. U.S. ships have been reported as routinely shooting down drones launched from Yemen that target ships in the vicinity.

On 15 November Aljazeera published a video report, “What does the Western naval build-up in the Middle East look like?” with this comment: “The Middle East is witnessing a Western naval build-up that hasn’t been seen there for decades: aircraft carriers, destroyers, missile cruisers, amphibious assault ships, a nuclear-powered submarine, and many more.”

U.S. warships are deployed to deter resistance forces in the region — such as Hezbollah — from intervening to stop genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. So far they’ve been apparently unsuccessful, however, their presence increases the likelihood of escalation as in the case of the USS Mason fighting Yemen on behalf of Israel.

Since the resumption of Israel’s bombing of Gaza on December 1, these confrontations have indeed escalated.

Treating U.S. warships as inherently different from Israeli warships is mythology. The two nation states have never been in closer lock step as they do the bidding of their corporate overlords.

Israel has been described as “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier” but the U.S. and Israel have never been so reviled in world opinion as they are today. Their collective reputation is sinking like a warship that’s taking on water.

Join us in Bath this Friday if you’re able. Help us communicate to workers that we know Bath Iron Works only has one customer — the U.S. Navy — but it wasn’t always like that. So many useful things could be built there and even more good union jobs generated, like hospital ships to provide relief for the bombed out children of Gaza.

If you have the courage, watch or read: “A harrowing video shows decomposing babies in a Gaza hospital after they had to be abandoned amid Israeli attacks.”

Then, wherever you’re located, get out in the streets to demand an end to genocide in Gaza and to the military blockade that supports it.

December 5, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

URANIUM WARHEAD POISONING IS THE SPECIALTY OF US AGAINST RUSSIANS, ISRAEL AGAINST PALESTINIANS

by John Helmer, Moscow , December 2023
  @bears_with

Long before the British intelligence agency MI6  invented the story that Russian military agents had carried the nerve agent weapon Novichok into England, fired it at two Russians, and left it in a dustbin for a local scavenger to find, take home and kill his girlfriend, there was depleted uranium poisoning.

This is a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

In the past thirty years it has been used by the US, British, and Israeli armies in their wars against Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Gaza), Serbia, and recently against the Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield. As a US invention, however, depleted uranium dispersal as a gas to contaminate terrain for enemy soldiers has been acknowledged in secret since 1943.   

In the official military manuals, depleted uranium rounds are used because their metal concentration and intense heat burn their way through armour plate. In practice, they vaporise high concentrations of radioactive particles to cover large swathes of territory, civilian and military.

The US Department of Homeland Security defines a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) as “a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, or other device that is intended to harm a large number of people.” DU harms a relatively small number of soldiers on a battlefield operating in tanks, other armoured vehicles, self-propelled artillery and reinforced  bunkers. DU  strikes a much larger number of people through the release of radiation downwind of the battlefield by penetrating their bodies, attacking their genetic codes, and triggering cancers, birth defects, miscarriages of the unborn, and premature death of adults.  

According to Homeland Security, it “works every day to prevent terrorists and other threat actors from using these weapons to harm Americans.” But when the US supplies its DU weapons to the Israeli and Ukrainian armies, it intends to cause this mass destruction by not caring for the harm they do — in fact concealing this harm, and publicly pretending DU ordnance is not what it is.

DU is a WMD by stealth. The US knows this because US and British soldiers who participated in the first battlefield use of DU shells and bombs, the war against Iraq in 1991, have been the long-term victims of their own weapons.

When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fire their DU shells and bombs into the buildings of Gaza, they are not aiming at Hamas tanks, armoured personnel carriers, or howitzer units – the Palestinian forces have none of those. Instead, the Israelis are aiming at the mass destruction of the Palestinian people, including those still unborn. The supply chain for this WMD includes the Cypriot, Greek, German and British governments.

In Gaza, and in the Ukraine, they are all witting participants in targeting a race of people for extermination, now and for the future.

According to US Government publications, the use of depleted uranium (DU) as a super-burning, heavy-metal weapon began in the US in the 1970s.  

“Naturally occurring uranium ore is abundant in nature and contains several forms of uranium called isotopes. All uranium isotopes are radioactive; however, only one of these isotopes, Uranium-235 (U-235), provides the fuel used to produce both nuclear power and the powerful explosions used in nuclear weapons… In nature, U-235 only makes up a very small part of the uranium ore. Given its importance for nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology, U-235 is often removed from the natural uranium ore and concentrated through a process called uranium enrichment. Depleted uranium hexafluoride, also known as DU, is the material left behind after enrichment. Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation.”  …………………………………………………………………………….

US nuclear bomb designers describe the DU artillery shell or bomb as a “dirty radiation weapon” because of its uncontrollable dispersal on wind, rain, and through the soil targeting civilian populations far from the battlefield targets; indeed, the very civilian populations supporting and paying for the use of DU munitions against their purported enemies.  “Some of the uranium used with DU weapons vaporises into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain. As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain. AFP asked Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab, if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb. ‘That’s exactly what they are,’ Falk said. ‘They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.’”

According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact. ‘The larger the bang the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere,’ Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the micron size or smaller, he said.”      

One of the leading nuclear physicists in Europe to have researched the long-range dispersal of DU biochemical damage is Christopher Busby. Here is his report, published in 2011, of the long-term poisoning of Iraqi civilians following the US and British use of DU ammunition during the fighting at Fallujah in 2004. The data on which Busby and his colleagues based their findings came from soil and water sampling, as well as from spectrometric analysis of the hair of civilian children, fathers and mothers in Iraq. The abnormally high concentrations of uranium were traced to the use by US and UK forces of artillery shells, ground-fired missiles, and air-fired rockets, missiles and bombs. According to Busby, “US forces also used Fallujah to combat-test prototypes of at least two new types of thermobaric weapons – Thermobaric Hellfire missiles – AGM-114N [54]- and a new thermobaric RPG called SMAW-NE (Shoulder-fired, Multi-purpose Assault Weapon – Novel Explosive).”

Testing new radiation weapons in civilian areas of Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan has been standard practice for the US, the British, and the Israelis over more than thirty years.  

The conclusion of Busby’s Fallujah study of September 2011 was that “we found significant levels of Uranium, a material which has been associated with weapons employed in Iraq and in the Balkans since 1991 and also with genotoxicity. These levels were significantly higher than those expected on the basis of published control group data from various studies and particularly from Southern Israel. Further, the pattern of contamination with regard to hair length indicated a major contamination event in the past. The levels of Uranium could not be explained by any local Uranium deposits in the soil since measurements made of soil Uranium showed only modest concentrations though the Uranium was slightly enriched…Since none of the other elements found in excess in the parents were genotoxic except Uranium we conclude that these results support the belief that the effects in Fallujah follow the deployment of a Uranium-based weapon or weapons of some unknown type.”  

Other research studies by Busby and others have produced the evidence of Israeli use of DU air-dropped bombs and artillery fired shells against Arab targets in Gaza and Lebanon since 2006.     Independent research has been undertaken by Arab experts of late miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects for pregnant Palestinian women at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “These data suggests a causative/favouring role of acute exposure of parents to the weapons-associated contaminants, and/or of their chronic exposure from their persistence in the environment on the embryonic development of their children.”   

In a research paper published in December 2021, Arab scientists from Egypt and Gaza, with a Japanese colleague, and collaboration from a German institute in Munich, reported that uranium weapon contamination was found in sand, stone, concrete, demolition and other building materials in Gaza as well as in Egyptian Sinai. “The past and ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip has led to a severe shortage of building materials since 2007. Many houses, buildings and infrastructure were destroyed and produced huge amounts of demolition debris after the war in the Gaza Strip in 2008. As a result, re-use of the degraded building materials has been required in the past and present. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the amount of demolition debris in the Gaza Strip, produced from 2008 through 2009, was estimated to be 600,000 tonnes. The demolition debris was crushed, sieved and re-used as recycled building materials.”  

In other words, the Israeli-American DU attacks on Gaza make the recycling of the current destruction hazardous for rebuilding. The findings indicate that long before the present war began last month,  it has been Israeli state policy, backed and supplied by the US, to make Gaza uninhabitable for the future. This is genocide, using genotoxic weapons. For the first attempt at documenting the wind dispersal of DU radioactive particles fired by the IDF since October 7 to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel itself, click on this.    

In time Busby and Arab scientists will report the evidence of DU health damage among the Gazans who survive direct destruction by Israeli attack.

On November 25, Busby has reported new research documenting the bioch

Busby has now updated the earlier findings in a research paper issued on November 25. Because the standard European and US academic publishers are so far refusing to report the evidence, Busby’s report is published here in full.    

The Khmelnitsky Ukraine Uranium explosion revisited.
The calculated source term is approximately 50 tons.
Public health implications for Poland and Western Ukraine.
By Christopher Busby, PhD………………………………………………………………………………more https://johnhelmer.net/biochemical-weapon-for-race-war-uranium-warhead-poisoning-is-the-specialty-of-us-against-russians-israel-against-palestinians/?fbclid=IwAR2H2vUD6Fw26z_-MTk2qEOyRLXTmRK4vUCjw8Bs8N_QIYxMgg3OcAgCDnY

December 5, 2023 Posted by | depleted uranium, USA | Leave a comment

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