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Former National Security Advisor John Bolton boasts openly about USA government overturning foreign governments

The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face

Caitlin Johnstone 14 July 22

Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural.

While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, Bolton hastened to pull authority on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might not be correct about how coups work.

“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”

Places. Plural.

Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish, but did eventually follow up with a request that the former National Security Advisor elaborate.

“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”

“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied Bolton with a chuckle. 

“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.

“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton answered. “And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.” 

“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.

“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy.

Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying things that you are not supposed to admit to on television.

Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting runs counter to his comments about the US government’s failed attempt to oust President Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that bizarre operation under the Trump administration, telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”…………………..   https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-is-showing-more-and-more—

July 13, 2022 Posted by | politics international, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Agency Responsible for Securing the U.S.’s Toxic Nuclear Waste Has Its Work Cut Out For It

Gizmodo Mack DeGeurin, July 14, 2022 Scattershot budgets, lack of coordination, stalling research and development, and rapid worker turnover are threatening the Department of Energy’s ability to sufficiently store and secure the nation’s ever-growing trash bin of toxic nuclear waste.

Those were some of the top concerns outlined today by experts and lawmakers during a congressional hearing probing the country’s nuclear waste cleanup response. The hearing, carried out by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, specifically interrogated a series of Government Accountability Office reports highlighting potential deficiencies within the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM).

The DOE’s EM office is responsible for the Herculean task of securing and cleaning up the country’s still-growing excesses of radioactive nuclear waste produced as a byproduct of nuclear weapons research and production dating back to World War II. Those diverse cleanup efforts can vary from addressing contaminated ground soil and groundwater, to decommissioning contaminated facilities, and building facilities to treat radioactive waste. That’s a challenging task under the best circumstance, and the office certainly isn’t operating at its best, according to the GAO.

One of the 2021 GAO reports found growth in DOE’s environmental waste liabilities and overall costs related to addressing cleanup have outpaced how much the agency spends on cleanup. A separate GAO report released that same year found the DOE had reduced research and development funding crucial for discovering new, undiscovered ways to reduce all that nuclear waste. While throwing more funding at the agency might sound like the most obvious answer to that second problem, GAO Natural Resources, and Environment Director Nathan Anderson wasn’t so sure when probed by lawmakers. Large chunks of DOE R&D money, he said, simply aren’t trackable.

“We asked the sites, we asked the labs what [money] was spent and there was a breakdown of internal controls at that point,” Anderson said……..

Anderson was directly involved in the GAO report, which determined the DOE as a whole simply lacks a “comprehensive approach to prioritising cleanup R&D.”……………..

In some cases, waste cleanup teams handling extremely hazardous materials appeared woefully under-equipped. ………………..

Issues around nuclear waste safety don’t simply cease to exist once the dangerous materials are secured underground either. Several of the speakers Wednesday expressed concerns that escalating environmental disturbances arising from climate change could potentially force the EM to reconsider some of its models around proper waste storage. What happens, for example, when an area selected to store hazardous materials is actually unearthed and made unviable due to climate change effects? Anderson said models made accounting for weather patterns 20 years ago may not accurately reflect the realities of climate impacts today……………………………………  https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/07/the-agency-responsible-for-securing-the-u-s-s-toxic-nuclear-waste-has-its-work-cut-out-for-it/

July 13, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Biden moves US closer to confrontation with Russia

His latest step reflects his choice of war over peace — or as he might put it, his belief that peace can best be achieved through war.

For American strategic planners, this war has little to do with Ukraine. They see it as a battering ram against Russia. Since saving Ukrainian lives is not their priority, they view diplomacy as an enemy.

Negotiation would inevitably give Russia at least some of what it wants. Russia’s war with Ukraine, on the other hand, holds out the delicious prospect of bringing Russia to its knees. That’s why Congress voted to send Ukraine billions of dollars in weaponry, and why President Biden asserted when making his announcement that rather than send diplomats to the crisis zone, he prefers “stepping up” US military involvement there.

His announcement to step up military involvement in Europe reflects his choice of war over peace.

Boston Globe ,By Stephen Kinzer July 11, 2022,

The United States is sinking its flag deeper into European soil. President Biden announced late last monththat the American military will soon open a “permanent base” in Poland, deploy two squadrons of F-35 fighter jets to Britain, send more warships to our sprawling base in Spain, and increase our troop strength in Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Instead of promoting diplomacy that could lead to peace, he chose a course guaranteed to increase tensions with Russia at a moment when they are already approaching an all-time high. This brings us one step closer to direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power.

Biden and other promoters of this policy — a group that includes virtually everyone in Washington — say it is necessary to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine. In fact, it will have little effect in Ukraine. The true purpose of this American buildup is to threaten and intimidate Russia.

For complex reasons that are as much psychological as political, many Americans have come to regard Russia as a font of evil. Many in Washington dream of destroying Russia utterly and forever — stripping it of all power and then perhaps breaking it up into smaller states that would submit to American influence.

For American strategic planners, this war has little to do with Ukraine. They see it as a battering ram against Russia. Since saving Ukrainian lives is not their priority, they view diplomacy as an enemy. Negotiation would inevitably give Russia at least some of what it wants. Russia’s war with Ukraine, on the other hand, holds out the delicious prospect of bringing Russia to its knees. That’s why Congress voted to send Ukraine billions of dollars in weaponry, and why President Biden asserted when making his announcement that rather than send diplomats to the crisis zone, he prefers “stepping up” US military involvement there.

Outlines of what will probably be the peace settlement in Ukraine are already clear. Russia will withdraw its army, eastern regions of Ukraine will be guaranteed autonomy, and Ukraine will agree to keep Western troops out of its territory. Such a peace, however, would end the dream of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia. That is why many in Washington consider it anathema — and why Secretary of State Antony Blinken refused to meet his Russian counterpart when both were at a summit in Bali last week.

An obsession with crushing Russia lies behind Washington’s passionate embrace of the Ukrainian cause. But there is another, more cosmic reason. We are seeing a textbook example of what geo-strategists call the classic security dilemma. One country takes steps to secure itself, but others see those steps as preparation for war. They respond with buildups of their own. Fears, accusations, and demonizing propaganda intensify until fighting breaks out.

This syndrome has led to countless wars. World War I is just one example. Germany began strengthening its navy to protect trade routes and overseas colonies. Britain, determined to “rule the waves,” took this as a threat and began producing radically more destructive warships. Germany presumed it was the intended target of those warships, and began building its own. The competition became so intense that it took only a single spark, an assassination in Bosnia, to set off the conflagration.

The same cascade of military pride and ambition — the same inability to see things from the other side’s point of view — led to the Ukraine war. Democrats and Republicans alike insist that we only ever wanted freedom for Ukraine, that we offered to bring it into the NATO military alliance in 2008 to guarantee that freedom, that we helped depose its Russia-friendly government in 2014 because it was corrupt, and that we are sending tens of billions of dollars in weaponry to Ukraine only to help it defend itself against aggression.

Russians see things quite differently: America is fiercely dedicated to destroying Russia; it is increasing troop strength in Europe to prepare for a future assault; and if Russia doesn’t stop this tide in Ukraine, it will sooner or later find itself defending Moscow against a US-led attack.

It’s not necessary to decide which of these versions is right, only to recognize that both exist. Like many Americans, Biden sees Russia through a lens at least as distorted as the one through which Russia views us. His latest step reflects his choice of war over peace — or as he might put it, his belief that peace can best be achieved through war. That will haunt the world long after the Ukraine conflict ends.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/11/opinion/biden-moves-us-closer-confrontation-with-russia/

July 13, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media

The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face

Caitlin Johnstone14 July 22 ” ………………………………………………. an excellent new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has been hiring dozens of people who previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to help regulate what content gets seen on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the agency very recently.

The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US intelligence veterans to help teach the public what thoughts to think about the world began a few years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing it in the new media as well. 

This is part of a broader trend in which many of the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret it now does openly with the aid of propaganda spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within both new and old media institutions, you’ve got things like the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.

We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world narratives and foment discontent from behind the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly by pouring funds into narrative management operations which benefit the empire while framing it as promoting democracy and human rights.

Then you’ve got things like American officials telling the press that the US government has been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine, Biden administration officials saying the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to “weaken” Russia and that they are fine with US brinkmanship with Russia causing global recession and hunger, and western officials telling the press that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel.

What the empire has found is that you don’t need to hide as much from public visibility as long as you can manipulate what people think they’re seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized and consent has been adequately manufactured, you can get away with just proclaiming some random guy the president of a foreign country and seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world into playing along with you.

If your narrative control is strong enough, you can even keep the empire running smoothly when information gets out into the open that you’d rather stay hidden. Very often these days major stories about imperial malfeasance will come out that simply have no impact, either because the mainstream news media unite to ignore them or because they spin those revelations as coming from someone bad or not containing important information.

People tend to overrate the power of the US war machine and underrate the power of the US propaganda machine. While the US military finds itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome power of its propaganda engine has people marching in perfect alignment with the will of the oligarchic empire. ………   https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-is-showing-more-and-more

July 13, 2022 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 1 Comment

U.S. China policy: a perilous arms race instead of waging critical co-operation

U.S. belligerence will be met with more Chinese belligerence and vice versa as the perils and risk increase.
William Hartung (See, Center for International Policy) points out – a far brighter future would come from intense U.S. and China cooperation on the climate crises, averting pandemics, ocean preservation, and international arms accords including cybersecurity. Wage peace and pursue mutual self-interest as if our children and grandchildren matter.

Relations between major nations are shaped by momentum in one direction or another. Both U.S. political parties have chosen a militant path without an exit strategy – one that must please Lockheed Martin and the rest of the military-industrial complex.


Ralph Nader 12 July 22, Did the Biden officials know what they were doing when they announced a broad expansion of export controls on China? China is the world’s second-largest economy, which is intricately intertwined with the economy of the U.S. and other nations. This is mainly due to U.S. multinational companies exporting huge slices of our manufacturing economy to China for its cheap labor.

What is the White House and the Department of Commerce thinking? China is not Venezuela nor is it Russia, a weak and dependent economy with a GDP smaller than Italy. Do these brazen Bidenites realize the consequences of a grand list of technologies and knowhow being barred from China?
As the dominant imperial world power, the U.S. is struggling to understand how to deal with an aggressive rising power like China building spheres of influence around the world through exports, loans, development contracts, and technical assistance. It’s okay that we have military bases in over 100 countries whose leaders know the U.S. as the premier overthrower of elected governments with policies displeasing to Washington and Wall Street.
As a result, the Bidenites are unleashing export controls, arrived at through administrative secrecy, that will surely invite black markets, high-tech smuggling, and retaliation to make these controls a nightmare to enforce
Provoking China to play its own cards is not smart. China, thanks to the greed of coddled and subsidized U.S. drug companies, produce much of our pharmaceuticals. These companies have left America, for example, with no production domestically of antibiotics – certainly a national security priority!
China possesses “rare earth” minerals and produces technology crucial to our own defense and high-tech industries. Its government allows U.S. factories to be built in China on the condition of a flow of latest “technology transfers.” Ask General Motors.
How are export controls – based on asserted national security grounds – going to work, other than to accelerate a new arms race? “We need to retain technological overmatch” declared Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, adding that export controls “are at the red hot center of how we best protect our democracies.” Tell that to the mass victims of the next round of viruses from China due to our minuscule weak public health programs and early detection systems, while we spend more than 2 ½ times as much as China on our military budget having had a huge head start in past years.
The New York Times reports that U.S. officials also don’t like China’s deep surveillance of its people. It is as if surveillance capitalism (See, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Professor Shoshana Zuboff) and the NSA’s dragnet violations of the 4th amendment are chump change.
What is also well known, but not uppermost in people’s minds, is that China, Russia, and the U.S. have embedded malware in each other’s cyber worlds that if triggered could cause catastrophe. The concern about China’s tens of billions of dollars invested in U.S. Treasury bonds should also be an issue for Mr. Biden.
Another calculation underweighted is the quiet opposition to export controls by U.S. companies that salivate over the present and future profits with Chinese trade – Apple CEO Tim Cook (who, by the way, makes $833 a minute on a 40-hour week) got a special waiver treatment from Trump, continued by Biden, for importing tens of billions of dollars annually of iPhones and computers from its Chinese contractors without tariffs.
This is another way of noting that export controls invite both raw corruption and special lobbying for waivers. They were tried by the U.S. against the old USSR, which developed elaborate circumventions.
So here we go again. Of course, certain lethal products need to be embargoed by all countries protective of their people. The U.S is expanding its so-called “entity list” cutting off hundreds of foreign companies and groups from certain U.S. technologies unless U.S. suppliers get licenses to sell goods to them. Don’t these government officials know that blacklisted companies can mutate through other corporations chartered in tax havens or dictatorships abroad?
U.S. belligerence will be met with more Chinese belligerence and vice versa as the perils and risk increase.
William Hartung (See, Center for International Policy) points out – a far brighter future would come from intense U.S. and China cooperation on the climate crises, averting pandemics, ocean preservation, and international arms accords including cybersecurity. Wage peace and pursue mutual self-interest as if our children and grandchildren matter.
Where is our Department of Peace, once advanced by Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), when we need it?
Relations between major nations are shaped by momentum in one direction or another. Both U.S. political parties have chosen a militant path without an exit strategy – one that must please Lockheed Martin and the rest of the military-industrial complex.
The forces for muscular peace and cooperation must show there is an alternative path to secure the common interests of the two nations. That’s called robust diplomacy in this era of recurring pandemics, expanding ransomware, bloated military budgets, and interconnected economies.

July 12, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA | 1 Comment

Relax folks: NYC tells us how to be OK when our city is nuclear-bombed

NYC Prepares People for ‘Big One’ With Nuclear Attack PSA Video. By Isabella Steger, July 12, 2022

The city of New York released a public service announcement video outlining the three steps that residents should take in case of a nuclear attack. 

The video, released Monday on NYC Emergency Management’s YouTube channel, says New Yorkers should do the following in the case of “the big one”: ………………………….. (subscribers only)  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-12/-the-big-one-has-hit-nyc-releases-psa-video-on-nuclear-attack#xj4y7vzkg

July 11, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA: Transportation of nuclear wastes

 State oversight activities at a nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad
received about $12 million in federal funds provided to two agencies by the
U.S. Department of Energy. The money will pay for the State of New
Mexico’s work to ensure safe operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant, a repository about 26 miles east of Carlsbad where nuclear waste is
permanently disposed of via burial in a salt deposit 2,000 feet
underground.

Transuranic (TRU) waste, made up of clothing materials and
equipment irradiated during nuclear activities, is trucked to WIPP from
sites across the U.S. To assist with transportation of waste to WIPP, the
State’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (ENMNRD) was
granted about $6.2 million by the DOE through its New Mexico Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Transportation Safety Program.

Since the facility began accepting waste in 1999, WIPP drivers covered about 15.7
million loaded miles as of July 2, per the latest records. Shipments from
Idaho National Laboratory traveled the furthest at about 9.3 million miles,
while that facility also sent the most shipments at 6,683. Idaho was
followed by the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which had about 2.5
million miles traveled for its 1,683 shipments – the third-most among
WIPP’s 13 generator sites. Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New
Mexico sent the fourth-most shipments at 1,525, but drivers from that site
only covered 521,550 miles, records show. The now-closed Rocky Flats
Environment Technology Site near Denver had the third-most distance
traveled at about 1.4 miles, and the second-most shipments at 2,045.

 Carlsbad Current Argus 8th July 2022

https://eu.currentargus.com/story/news/2022/07/08/nuclear-waste-oversight-in-new-mexico-gets-12m-from-feds/65366239007/

July 11, 2022 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

ROBERT PRICE: Kern isn’t any more welcoming of nuclear power than it was a half-century ago

Bakersfield.com, By ROBERT PRICE For The Californian, 9 July 22 Ask most any Californian to describe nuclear energy and you’ll hear adjectives like “unreliable,” “dangerous” and “volatile……….

Nuclear (and even more unlikely, natural gas) could one day receive the same energy designation as wind farms and solar fields.

……………………… Although the EU’s tentative embrace of nuclear energy might turn some heads in the U.S., however, it’s not going to change minds in Kern County.

………………………..  Kern County was one of the first places in the U.S. to unite disparate political factions and rise up against the proliferation of nuclear power.

…………………………….. Opposition to the project coalesced into an unlikely alliance of farmers, doctors and environmentalists, the likes of which the power utilities had never before seen. Could conservatives and liberals get along? In Kern County, at the height of the 1976-78 battle against the DWP, they did.

……………………… It was the first time anywhere in America that citizens had voted down a nuclear power plant. Opposition to nuclear power had moved, as Wellock noted, from the movement’s typical base — “elements of the left wing of the Democratic Party” — to “traditionally pro-nuclear blue-collar constituencies.”

………………… If and when nuclear power ever does make a comeback in California, however, Kern County will not be the place for it. Nuclear plants need water and plenty of it, and Kern County has even less of it than it did in the mid-’70s, when opponents were citing water shortages among their list of concerns…….  https://www.bakersfield.com/columnists/robert-price/robert-price-kern-isn-t-any-more-welcoming-of-nuclear-power-than-it-was-a/article_f5b32c48-ffd5-11ec-a605-172bf1ccbf72.html

July 10, 2022 Posted by | history, politics, USA | Leave a comment

America’s $1.4 Trillion So-Called “National Security” Budget Makes Us Less Safe—Not More

America and the world would be far safer places if this outrageous spending was drastically cut and those funds redirected to “moral” investments in people, society, and planetary health—not war and weapons.

Common Dreams WILLIAM HARTUNG, July 7, 2022 by TomDispatch

This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War. 

It was, in fact, an astonishing figure by any measure — more than two-and-a-half times what China spends; more, in fact, than (and hold your hats for this one!) the national security budgets of the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. And yet the weapons industry and hawks in Congress are now demanding that even more be spent. 

In recent National Defense Authorization Act proposals, which always set a marker for what Congress is willing to fork over to the Pentagon, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees both voted to increase the 2023 budget yet again — by $45 billion in the case of the Senate and $37 billion for the House. The final figure won’t be determined until later this year, but Congress is likely to add tens of billions of dollars more than even the Biden administration wanted to what will most likely be a record for the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

This lust for yet more weapons spending is especially misguided at a time when a never-ending pandemic, growing heat waves and other depredations of climate change, and racial and economic injustice are devastating the lives of millions of Americans.  Make no mistake about it: the greatest risks to our safety and our future are non-military in nature, with the exception, of course, of the threat of nuclear war, which could increase if the current budget goes through as planned.

But as TomDispatch readers know, the Pentagon is just one element in an ever more costly American national security state.  Adding other military, intelligence, and internal-security expenditures to the Pentagon’s budget brings the total upcoming “national security” budget to a mind-boggling $1.4 trillion. And note that, in June 2021, the last time my colleague Mandy Smithberger and I added up such costs to the taxpayer, that figure was almost $1.3 trillion, so the trend is obvious.

To understand how these vast sums are spent year after year, let’s take a quick tour of America’s national security budget, top to bottom.

The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which includes all of its routine expenses from personnel to weapons to the costs of operating and maintaining a 1.3 million member military force, came in at $773 billion for 2023, more than $30 billion above that of 2022. Such an increase alone is three times the discretionary budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more than three times the total allocation for the Environmental Protection Agency. 

In all, the Pentagon consumes nearly half of the discretionary budget of the whole federal government, a figure that’s come down slightly in recent years thanks to the Biden administration’s increased investment in civilian activities. That still means, however, that almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support.

And keep in mind that the proposed Biden increase in Pentagon spending comes despite the ending of 20 years of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, a move that should have meant significant reductions in the department’s budget.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that, in the wake of the Afghan disaster, the military establishment and hawks in Congress quickly shifted gears to touting — and exaggerating — challenges posed by China, Russia, and inflation as reasons for absorbing the potential savings from the Afghan War and pressing the Pentagon budget ever higher.

It’s worth looking at what America stands to receive for its $773 billion — or about $2,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. More than half of that amount goes to giant weapons contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, along with thousands of smaller arms-making firms.

The most concerning part of the new budget proposal, however, may be the administration’s support for a three-decades long, $1.7-trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles (as well, of course, as new warheads to go with them), bombers, and submarines. As the organization Global Zero has pointed out, the United States could dissuade any country from launching an atomic attack against it with far fewer weapons than are contained in its current nuclear arsenal.  There’s simply no need for a costly — and risky — nuclear weapons “modernization” plan. Sadly, it’s guaranteed to help fuel a continuing global nuclear arms race, while entrenching nuclear weapons as a mainstay of national security policy for decades to come. (Wouldn’t those decades be so much better spent working to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether?) 

The riskiest weapon in that nuclear plan is a new land-based, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).  As former Secretary of Defense William Perry once explained, ICBMs are among “the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president warned of a nuclear attack would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Not only is a new ICBM unnecessary, but the existing ones should be retired as well, as a way of reducing the potential for a world-ending nuclear conflagration……………………..

The Nuclear Budget

The average taxpayer no doubt assumes that a government agency called the Department of Energy (DOE) would be primarily concerned with developing new sources of energy, including ones that would reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels to help rein in the ravages of climate change.  Unfortunately, that assumption couldn’t be less true.

Instead of spending the bulk of its time and money on energy research and development, more than 40% of the Department of Energy’s budget for 2023 is slated to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program, principally by maintaining and developing nuclear warheads.  Work on other military activities like reactors for nuclear submarines pushes the defense share of the DOE budget even higher. The NNSA spreads its work across the country, with major locations in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Its proposed 2023 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $16.5 billion, part of a budget for defense-related projects of $29.8 billion……………………………

Our Misguided Security Budget

Spending $1.4 trillion to address a narrowly defined concept of national security should be considered budgetary malpractice on a scale so grand as to be almost unimaginable — especially at a time when the greatest risks to the safety of Americans and the rest of the world are not military in nature. After all, the Covid pandemic has already taken the lives of more than one million Americans, while the fires, floods, and heat waves caused by climate change have impacted tens of millions more. 

Yet the administration’s proposed allocation of $45 billion to address climate change in the 2023 budget would be less than 6% of the Pentagon’s proposed budget of $773 billion………………………………..  https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/07/07/americas-14-trillion-so-called-national-security-budget-makes-us-less-safe-not-more

July 7, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Test rocket carrying component for future nuclear armed ICBM explodes after takeoff

By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent, July 8, 2022, (CNN)A test rocket carrying a component for a future US nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile blew up 11 seconds after takeoff Wednesday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, according to a statement from the base…………

This was the first test of the Mk21A Reentry Vehicle (RV) the part of the weapon that would hold a nuclear warhead if the system was operational. There was no nuclear element or armed component to this test

The Mk21A is planned to be the reentry vehicle for the future LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, a new ground-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile planned to replace the current Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile as a key element of the US nuclear deterrent capability.

The explosion comes a week after the latest test of a US hypersonic weapon failed after an “anomaly” occurred during the first test of the full system.

The test, carried out June 30 at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii, was supposed to launch the Common Hypersonic Glide Body atop a two-stage missile booster. The booster is designed to launch the system and accelerate it to hypersonic speeds in excess of Mach 5, at which point the glide body detaches and uses its speed to reach the target. It was the first time the entire system was tested, called an All Up Round test…….  https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/08/politics/test-rocket-explodes/index.html

July 7, 2022 Posted by | incidents, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear energy consumption hit new low in ‘21, EIA says

By ExchangeMonitor

United States consumption of electricity produced by nuclear power plants last year hit its lowest point in nearly a decade, the government’s independent energy auditor said last week. According to a report published Friday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration…… [subscribers only]  https://news.wisc.edu/nuclear-war-would-turn-oceans-upside-down-crash-food-web/

July 7, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a CIA front group laid the foundations for the Ukraine war

HOW CIA FRONT LAID FOUNDATIONS FOR UKRAINE WAR By Kit Klarenberg, Substack., July 5, 2022

”…………………………………………. many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).    Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation.

………………… September 2013, and Carl Gershman, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad – the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states – away from Moscow’s orbit.

Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

Writing in Consortium News earlier that month, investigative legend Robert Parry recorded how, over the previous year, NED had funded 65 projects in Ukraine totaling over $20 million. This amounted to what the late journalist dubbed “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

NED’s pivotal role in unseating Yanukovych can be considered beyond dispute,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,   NED has removed many entries from its website in the years since the coup, which amply underline its role in Yanukovych’s overthrow.

…………………………    the country remained captured by Western financial, political and ideological interests post-Maidan. It was a roadmap NED subsequently followed to the letter.

[Ed. This article gives the complex story of the role of NED and other U.S. and British agencies, in the overthrow of the popular leader  Yanukovych and the rise of the corrupt Petro Poroshenko.]

………………………   Trump’s term in office was typified by ever-escalating hostility between Washington and Moscow, the Oval Office resident going to dangerous lengths his predecessor had consistently refrained from to arm and galvanize the most reactionary and violent elements of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the notorious Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and tear up Cold War arms control treaties, much to Moscow’s chagrin…………….

 ………..Leshchenko,  [prominent corrupt politician in Kiev],  was voted out of parliamentc, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party candidate taking his seat in a landslide……

Despite no longer being part of the legislature, Leshchenko has continued to wield significant sway over the Ukrainian government, directly advising Zelensky on “Russian disinformation” to this day.

What direct influence NED still exerts over him – and Ukraine’s President by extension – isn’t certain. Although, mere days before the Russian invasion began, in an interview with The Guardian, Leshchenko referred to the Minsk Accords – which Zelensky stood on a specific platform of implementing – as “toxic”, suggesting the leader would “betray” his country by adhering to their obligations, which included granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk.

This reflects NED’s position – on February 14th this year, its Journal of Democracy published an article declaring the Accords to be “a bad idea for the West and a serious threat to Ukrainian democracy and stability,” ……….

….. an objective analysis of what actually happened and why, in which NED is completely central. Still, the organization didn’t need to rely purely on Leshchenko to keep the Minsk Accords moribund. Its extensive network of assets in the country, and Washington’s dark alliance with Ukraine’s far-right, was more than sufficient to ensure that Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular mission of restoring relations with Russia would and could never be fulfilled.

An archive of NED funding in Ukraine over 2021 – which has now been replaced with a statement “in solidarity” with Kiev – offers extensive detail on the precise projects backed by the CIA front over that pivotal 12-month period.

It points to a preponderant focus on purported Russian misdeeds in eastern Ukraine. One grant, of $58,000, was provided to the NGO Truth Hounds to “monitor, document, and spotlight human rights violations” and “war crimes” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Another, of $48,000, was provided to Ukraine’s War Childhood Museum to “educate the Ukrainian public about the consequences of the war through a series of public events.” Yet another received by charity East-SOS aimed to “raise public awareness” of “Russia’s policies of persecution and colonization in the region, and document illustrative cases,” its findings circulated to the UN Human Rights Council, European Courts of Human Rights, and International Court of Justice.

There was no suggestion this wellspring would be used to document any abuses by Ukrainian government forces. UN research indicates 2018 – 2021, over 80 percent of civilian casualties were recorded on the Donbas side. Meanwhile, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reports show that shelling of civilian areas in the breakaway regions intensified dramatically in the weeks leading up to February 24th, potentially the precursor of a full-blown military offensive.

As such, NED’s expurgation of records exposing its role in fomenting and precipitating the horror now unfolding in southeast Ukraine not only protects de facto CIA agents on the ground. It also reinforces and legitimizes the Biden administration’s sprawling, fraudulent narrative, endlessly and uncritically reiterated in Western media, that Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked and groundless.

Ukrainians now live with the mephitic legacy of that reckless, unadmitted meddling in the most brutal manner imaginable. They may well do so for many years to come. Meanwhile, the men and women who orchestrated it rest comfortably in Washington DC, insulated from any scrutiny or consequence whatsoever, every day cooking up fresh schemes to undermine and topple troublesome foreign leaders, hailed as champions of liberty by the mainstream press every step of the way.  https://popularresistance.org/how-cia-front-laid-foundations-for-ukraine-war/

July 7, 2022 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA causing tensions and uncertainty with its expanding militarism in the Pacific, targeting China

Wshington should stop playing dangerous games https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202207/04/WS62c225a5a310fd2b29e6a123.html By Martin Sieff | CHINA DAILY , 6 Jul 22

US President Joe Biden has taken a vague approach on an understanding with Beijing over the Taiwan question negotiated in 1972 by then president Richard Nixon that has ensured peace and mutual prosperity in the Pacific for half a century.

The US-led West continues to push NATO’s eastward expansion and build NATO-like military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region such as AUKUS, the much-touted Australia-United Kingdom－United States strategic alliance. Now the Western powers with some other countries are holding RIMPAC 2022, or Rim of the Pacific, military exercises, the largest in the program’s history, which will further increase uncertainties in the Asia-Pacific.

The alleged reason the West cites for trying to brainwash the prosperous and, left to themselves, peaceful and well-meaning populations of those and other countries is that China, Russia and some other countries present some hideous threat to the rest of the world like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and therefore must be resisted.

Yet the Joe Biden administration, oblivious to the ageless teachings, remains consistent in holding on to the extraordinary irony and blasphemy that its own political values and ideology－which it so manifestly fails to live up to in its own domestic policies and society－must nevertheless be imposed as the inevitable and unavoidable destiny on the rest of the world. Such ridiculous hubris, or arrogance according to the classical Greek view of life, must inevitably generate an annihilating nemesis: total destruction.

How else can one explain the determination of the US administration, pulling its Pacific allies in tow, to provoke a full-scale confrontation, threatening no holds barred confrontation with China over the Taiwan question?

US President Joe Biden has taken a vague approach on an understanding with Beijing over the Taiwan question negotiated in 1972 by then president Richard Nixon that has ensured peace and mutual prosperity in the Pacific for half a century. Biden is also continuing to arm Ukraine to the teeth so Kyiv can keep fighting a bloody conflict it cannot possibly win against Moscow.

What possible sanity can lie behind provoking a war and openly threatening the world’s two other leading strategic and nuclear-armed powers with destabilization and destruction at the same time?

Now, the next step on this march of folly to an extended war has also been taken. Following the recently concluded G7 summit which was apparently targeted at both Russia and China, the Biden administration has dragooned its Pacific allies of New Zealand, Australia and (maybe a reluctant) Japan into the latest RIMPAC exercises specifically aimed at targeting Beijing and bullying it into accepting Washington’s diktat over Taiwan.

Neither Biden nor any of his national security team of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Under Secretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland shows the slightest realization that all their policies are certain to bring about the very Armageddon they claim to be determined to deter.

In fact, in his first face-to-face meeting with Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 10, Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe made clear that any move, encouraged or manipulated by the US, to get Taiwan to declare independence would be immediately taken by Beijing as a casus belli.

This would be an insane risk for the US administration to take even if it was to secure peace with the rest of the world, and at no risk of a full-scale war with Russia, another catastrophe which Biden has been assiduously courting.


Far from deterring China, the announcement of the latest RIMPAC exercises, as well as the provocative, hostile and contemptuous language in which that statement was made, can only lock the US even further into its suicidal leap of the Gadarene swine off the edge of a gigantic cliff from which there can be no return or recovery.

Only about 25 people are reported to have survived trying to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco since it was completed in 1937 out of the 1,700 who have tried. Every one of those survivors has testified that they realized they had made a terrible mistake as soon as they jumped the 67 meters into San Francisco Bay.


Will Biden, Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland experience a similar far-too-late moment of clarity when the catastrophe they have worked so ceaselessly to provoke finally explodes on their country and its allies? By that point, it will not matter: the damned cannot escape their inevitable destruction. One can only weep for the hundreds of millions they will take with them.

The author is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow.

July 7, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Congress poised to shoot down Biden’s nuclear rollback

The White House wants to cancel a nuclear cruise missile, but Democrats have joined Republicans to try to save it.

Politico, By LAWRENCE UKENYE and CONNOR O’BRIEN, 07/06/2022 ,

Progressives were already disappointed with President Joe Biden’s plans for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Now they’re poised to lose one of the few things about the White House’s blueprint that they liked.

In recent weeks, Democrats have joined Republicans in adding money back into the Pentagon budget to continue developing a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile that former President Donald Trump initiated in 2018. Biden proposed canceling the missile, which arms control advocates say is redundant, costly and potentially destabilizing……………………..

The Pentagon’s still-classified Nuclear Posture Review, which lays out a long-term roadmap for the nuclear arsenal, spurred the decision to zero out funding for the missile in Biden’s most recent budget. The public split between top civilians and military commanders amounted to a “green light” for Democrats to hedge on the program, according to Tom Collina, policy director at Ploughshares Fund.

…………………… The situation marks a retreat from the campaign pledges of then-candidate Biden, who long advocated for reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, only to turn around and dedicate tens of billions of dollars to the modernization of all three legs of the triad for two years in a row. Arms control advocates also called on him to establish a “no first use” policy and cancel two weapons added on by the Trump administration: the cruise missile and a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already entered the fleet.

Biden’s nuclear plans, outlined in a brief summary released in March, omit a “no first use” policy. The low-yield warhead introduced during the Trump years remains a part of the arsenal.

As for the cruise missile, now that both the House and Senate Armed Services committees have authorized funding, albeit with differing conditions, Congress will likely send Biden a compromise defense policy bill this year that foils his plan to cancel the program.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said in a statement that the administration “stands by the President’s budget submission, which canceled the SLCM-N,” which refers to the sea-launched cruise missile-nuclear. The spokesperson noted the decision to kill the missile “was based on the findings and recommendations” of the Nuclear Posture Review.

Biden’s fiscal 2023 defense budget proposes spending $50.9 billion on nuclear weapons programs across the Defense and Energy Departments, while also attempting to cancel the SLCM and retire the aging inventory of B83 gravity bombs. The latter system is also in play in defense talks.

Senate Armed Services voted to place limits on the retirement of the B83 by requiring a study on striking hardened and deeply buried targets before any of the bombs could be scrapped.

Both versions of the National Defense Authorization Act greenlight $25 million for the Navy’s research and development efforts on the cruise missile and another $20 million for the National Nuclear Security Administration to continue research on the W80-4 warhead to be used on the missile. But the House version restricts a portion of the $45 million from being spent until the Navy and NNSA deliver several reports, including analyses outlining the cost of the warhead and delivery system as well as the possible limitations of the vessels that carry the missile………………………………….

The debate won’t end with the Armed Services Committees, as Congress must still appropriate money to continue the program.

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee sided with Biden and allocated no money for the missile or its warhead in their versions of annual defense and energy spending bills. But Armed Services’ action is likely to put pressure on appropriators in their talks over a spending compromise………………….  https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/06/congress-biden-nuclear-rollback-00044344
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July 7, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Would you trust nuclear environmental research funded by the USA Department of Energy? (I wouldn’t)

UW researchers to study potential environmental injustices surrounding nuclear development at Kemmerer, Wyoming Public Radio | By Caitlin Tan, July 6, 2022 

As Wyoming sets its sights on nuclear development, a team of University of Wyoming researchers will study how one project impacts environmental justice.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded the team an $800,000 grant to span the course of three years. This is the first time the DOE is funding a study that looks at how nuclear energy affects environmental justice. The grant will focus on these effects on the TerraPower nuclear project in Kemmerer. The goal is to take a proactive approach and identify potential environmental injustices before they happen.

Lead researcher Rachael Budowle said environmental justice means that specific populations should not experience inequalities because of development – this can include things like, water and air quality, and even access to economic opportunities.

“So, nuclear energy in particular, has historically presented a range of social, environmental and ethical challenges that also warrant exploration, around public perception, safety, trust, and industry and government responsibility for waste and accidents,” Budowle said.

Lead researcher Rachael Budowle said environmental justice means that specific populations should not experience inequalities because of development – this can include things like, water and air quality, and even access to economic opportunities.

“So, nuclear energy in particular, has historically presented a range of social, environmental and ethical challenges that also warrant exploration, around public perception, safety, trust, and industry and government responsibility for waste and accidents,” Budowle said………..

In the second year, researchers will interview a wide range of stakeholders and then provide recommendations to the state and TerraPower.  https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/natural-resources-energy/2022-07-06/uw-researchers-to-study-potential-environmental-injustices-surrounding-nuclear-development-at-kemmerer

July 7, 2022 Posted by | spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

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