‘We Are Preparing for War’ With China ‘Threat’, Says US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an extremely hawkish speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2025 summit in which he demonized China as a “threat” and said, “We are preparing for war” in the Asia-Pacific region.
By Ben Norton, 5 June 25, https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/06/06/preparing-war-china-threat-us-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth/
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an extremely hawkish speech in which he demonized China as a “threat” and said, “We are preparing for war”.
“Those who long for peace, must prepare for war. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We are preparing for war, in order to deter war — to achieve peace through strength”, Hegseth stated.
The top Donald Trump administration official made these aggressive remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2025, a summit held in Singapore on 31 May.
“The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent. We hope not, but it certainly could be”, Hegseth claimed, indicating that the Pentagon was preparing for a war over Taiwan.
“Beyond our borders and beyond our neighborhood, we are reorienting toward deterring aggression by Communist China”, he stressed.
The message of Trump’s Pentagon: war is peace
The Trump administration’s Pentagon has essentially pushed the message “war is peace”.
Hegseth has incessantly reiterated the slogan “peace through strength”.
“President Trump said it himself [in May] in Riyadh – and will never hesitate to wield American power swiftly and decisively if necessary. That is re-establishing deterrence”, the defense secretary emphasized in Singapore.
Hegseth is a war hawk and a religious fundamentalist. He made his name as a former host on the conservative TV network Fox News, where Trump discovered him.
In 2020, Hegseth published a book called “American Crusade”, in which he proudly identified as a “crusader” and wrote that the US right wing is waging a “holy war” against China, the international left, and Islam.
“Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years”, he promised in the extremist book.
Trump admin pressures Asia-Pacific countries to minimize “economic cooperation with China”
In his speech in Singapore in May 2025, Pete Hegseth noted that it was his second time in his four months serving as secretary of defense that he had visited the Asia-Pacific region (which Washington has sought to rebrand as the “Indo-Pacific”).
In March, Hegseth traveled to Japan and the Philippines, where he threatened China and boasted of US “war-fighting” preparations and “real war plans”.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference, Hegseth half-jokingly threatened the Asia-Pacific region with his endless presence……………………………..
The Trump administration essentially told countries that they must choose between either the United States or China — that they can’t have good relations with both sides, because a war could be coming soon.
Hegseth said (emphasis added):
Facing these threats, we know that many countries are tempted by the idea of seeking both economic cooperation with China and defense cooperation with the United States. Now that is a geographic necessity for many. But beware the leverage that the CCP seeks with that entanglement. Economic dependence on China only deepens their malign influence and complicates our defense decision space during times of tension.
China opposes hegemony, while the US empire seeks it
Defense Secretary Hegseth claimed in his May speech in Singapore that, supposedly, “China seeks to become a hegemonic power in Asia. No doubt”.
This is false. China has consistently emphasized, over decades, that it does not seek hegemony. In fact, Beijing does not want any country to have hegemony.
Principled opposition to hegemony has been a constant since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao Zedong in 1949, through the Reform and Opening Up initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, and into the New Era launched by President Xi Jinping in 2012.
The Chinese government has always stressed what it calls its “unequivocal commitment to supporting other developing countries in their efforts to defend national sovereignty, develop national economy and fight imperialism, colonialism, and hegemonism”.
In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, Deng Xiaoping stated, “If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression, and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it, and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it”.
In fact, when the PRC normalized diplomatic relations with the United States and Japan in the 1970s, a source of diplomatic tension was China’s insistence that, in the joint statements signed by Beijing and Washington and Beijing and Tokyo, there had to be an “anti-hegemony” clause.
It is actually the United States that has consistently sought to impose its hegemony on the rest of the world.
This was spelled out clearly in a 1992 document published by the US Department of Defense, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine (because it was co-written by Paul Wolfowitz, who then served as US under secretary of defense for policy, before later returning as secretary of defense under George W. Bush).
The Pentagon’s Wolfowitz Doctrine stated (emphasis added):
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy is still consistent with much of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Although Trump has de-prioritized Western Europe and the territory of the former USSR, he has dedicated significant resources to US military operations in East Asia and Southwest Asia (also known as the Middle East).
In fact, the main theme of Hegseth’s speech was that the Pentagon will not accept China challenging US dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.
“We will not be pushed out of this critical region”, Hegseth said, in a clear message to Beijing.
This was the US empire stating clearly that it seeks to impose its hegemonic control over East Asia.
Bipartisan warmongering in Washington
This aggressive anti-China stance is bipartisan in Washington.
A former top Joe Biden administration official said he agreed with the thrust of the anti-China policy pursued by Pete Hegseth, a right-wing extremist and religious fanatic.
Ely Ratner, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs in Biden’s Pentagon, wrote approvingly on Twitter/X, “Rhetoric aside, on actual defense policy Secretary Hegseth’s speech was near total continuity with the previous administration”.
“That’s good, but we’ll need heightened urgency, attention, and resources to address the China challenge”, Ratner added.
Biden’s neoconservative Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also maintained a hardline anti-China position.
In a speech in 2022, Blinken announced what was essentially a containment policy targeting China.
“We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing”, he said.
Blinken added, “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before”.
US launches AUKUS review to ensure it meets Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda
By Brad Ryan and Emilie Gramenz in Washington DC, ABC News, 11 June 25
In short:
The US is reviewing the AUKUS security pact with Australia and the UK, which Australia is depending on to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
A US defence official said it would ensure the pact met President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, as the US struggles to build enough submarines for its own fleet.
But Defence Minister Richard Marles said he was “very confident this [AUKUS] is going to happen” and it was only natural for the new US administration to review it.
The Pentagon is reviewing the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the US and the UK to ensure it aligns with President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, a US defence official told the ABC.
But Defence Minister Richard Marles said he remained confident the pact would remain intact, and a review was a “perfectly natural” thing for a new administration to do.
The news follows US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent request for Australia to significantly boost its defence spending “as soon as possible”.
The US defence official said the review “will ensure the initiative meets … common sense, America First criteria”.
“As Secretary Hegseth has made clear, this means ensuring the highest readiness of our service members, that allies step up fully to do their part for collective defence, and that the defence industrial base is meeting our needs,” the official said.
Under the AUKUS pact, Australia would be armed with nuclear-powered submarines at a cost of more than $350 billion.
Elbridge Colby, who is the under secretary of Defense for Policy and has voiced scepticism about AUKUS, is leading the review, according to the UK’s Financial Times.
Last August, Mr Colby tweeted he was an AUKUS “agnostic”.
“In principle it’s a great idea. But I’ve been very skeptical in practice,” he wrote, but added he’d become “more inclined based on new information I’ve gleaned”.
Mr Marles told ABC Radio Melbourne he was “very confident this [AUKUS] is going to happen”.
“The meetings that we’ve had with the United States have been very positive in respect of AUKUS,” Mr Marles said. “That dates back to my most recent meeting with Pete Hegseth in Singapore.”
……………………………………………. The Australian government paid the US almost $800 million earlier this year — the first in a series of payments to help America improve its submarine manufacturing capabilities.
………… Mr Hegseth met Defence Minister Richard Marles in Singapore, and said Australia needed to lift its defence spending.
Mr Trump himself has said little publicly about the AUKUS pact, and his criticisms of America’s traditional alliances have fuelled anxieties about its future in Canberra and London.
When a reporter asked Mr Trump about AUKUS in February, he appeared to be unfamiliar with the term, replying: “What does that mean?”…………………………..
Under “Pillar I” of the two-pillar AUKUS deal, the first submarine would arrive in Australia no sooner than 2032. It would be a second-hand US Virginia-class vessel.
The US would subsequently supply Australia with between three and five submarines, before Australia began building its own in Adelaide, modelled on British designs.
Mr Albanese was expected to meet Mr Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada next week. But that’s now in limbo after the US condemned Australia and several other countries that placed sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers.
…………..Critics of the deal, including former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating, have long warned it is unfair and risky. “I’ve never done a deal as bad as this,” Mr Turnbull told Radio National earlier this year.
The Greens have proposed a “plan B” defence policy that would eventually see AUKUS cancelled.
There are also longstanding concerns around the US’s consistent failure to meet its own submarine-building targets to fully stock its military fleet…………………………………………….https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-12/aukus-pentagon-review-donald-trump-america-first/105406254
Golden Dome Idiocy
A “shield” against nuclear attack makes nuclear war more likely
Bill Astore, Jun 10, 2025, https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/golden-dome-idiocy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1156402&post_id=164965873&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare.
How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a “shield” to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden.
Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God’s creation.
Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it’s unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter.
Golden Dome and the so-called investment in America’s nuclear triad are both examples of socio-technological madness–America’s leaders are like the mutants in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” worshipping the bombs that twisted them and which can only destroy what’s left of civilization.
Some Christians today await the apocalypse when Christ is supposed to return–but the most likely apocalypse features not the second coming of a God-man but a third world war featuring bomb-gods of thermonuclear destruction.
As Daniel Ellsberg once noted, U.S. nuclear attack plans in the early 1960s envisioned 600 million killed, or 100 Holocausts (before we knew such an attack would lead to nuclear winter). We’re lucky this insanity never came to pass. The only sane policy is to cancel Golden Dome and end “investment” in a new nuclear triad. Disarmament, not rearmament, is what’s needed.
The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has released a statement against Golden Dome that you can read here. You can add your name to the statement, as I have. Here are some bullet points released along with the statement:
- Golden Dome is financially reckless and unsustainable. Early cost estimates range from $550 billion to several trillion dollars over two decades. This dwarfs even the Pentagon’s annual budget and adds to the US’s $37 trillion national debt—a price tag that makes the project fiscally indefensible.
- Experts overwhelmingly agree that 100% effective missile interception is a fantasy, especially against complex attacks involving decoys, hypersonic missiles, and maneuverable warheads. Even Israel’s Iron Dome has been bypassed by more rudimentary drone and missile attacks.
- Golden Dome includes space-based interceptors—effectively weaponizing the Earth’s orbit and triggering an arms race. This violates the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty and pushes nations like China and Russia to accelerate space weapons development.
- By giving the illusion of first-strike survivability, it runs counter to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine that has prevented so far a nuclear holocaust and incentivizes other powers to retain or expand their nuclear arsenals, blocking disarmament efforts permanently.
- Thousands of rocket launches for satellite interceptors would further damage the ozone layer, could generate dangerous orbital debris (Kessler Syndrome), and will harm our already fragile space environment.
- The only guaranteed winners of Golden Dome are weapons giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Palantir, which stand to profit enormously regardless of the system’s effectiveness or risks.
- The trillions funneled into Golden Dome could be used for urgent domestic priorities—such as healthcare, infrastructure, climate action, and education, directly benefiting millions of Americans.
In short, Golden Dome is a massive, dangerous, and futile vanity project, cloaked in patriotism but driven by profit, politics, and illusion.
A Mar-a-Lago in the sky?
Meanwhile, as Trump is due to parade his military hardware through the streets and skies of Washington, DC this week, at a cost of $45 million to US taxpayers, we are told there is too much wasteful spending, so Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps must be slashed.
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/06/08/a-mar-a-lago-in-the-sky/
US taxpayers are about to get golden fleeced, again, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Last week we reported on the White House executive orders that would lay waste to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and put an end to any meaningful safety oversight of the US commercial nuclear sector.
Not that there was a whole lot to begin with. None of us will be standing outside the agency’s Rockville Maryland headquarters any time soon holding “Save the NRC” signs.
I mentioned last week that there were five orders affecting the nuclear sector. Technically, the fifth – Restoring Gold Standard Science — didn’t mention nuclear, but its overarching mission— to do the opposite of what its title says — will most certainly negatively affect the integrity of any evaluation of new reactor designs, with the stamp of approval given to the Department of Energy and even the Department of Defense, rather than the NRC.
The Gold Standard order served to remind us of Trump’s perennial obsession with everything gold and golden, also reflected, as it were, in his cheap bordello-style aesthetic on display at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
The wannabe king boasted during his January 20 inaugural address that “The Golden Age of America begins right now,” then reminded us six weeks later, during his March 4 Joint Address to Congress, that his Golden Age truly was coming. “Get ready for an incredible future,” he said. “The Golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”
That last part was certainly true.
As if all this golden fleecing of American taxpayers wasn’t enough, cue the next fanfare — but without any actual golden trumpeters — the Golden Dome for America!
“Golden Dome for America is a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength,” asserts its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, our first clue that the Golden Dome has nothing whatever to do with peace, as Lockheed Martin is a major player in the US nuclear weapons complex.
The Golden Dome is effectively a reboot of Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative, mockingly nicknamed Star Wars, which was supposed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. That was just the latest failed iteration of a US missile defense concept that has been in the works since the 1950s.
Reagan’s SDI arguably cost us a chance to rid the world of nuclear weapons altogether when in 1986, he and then Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev were poised to do just that. Gorbachev wanted Star Wars consigned to the laboratory. Reagan refused. The arms race continued.
Trump brags he has already picked out the architecture he likes for his Golden Dome, which makes you wonder whether he thinks it’s some sort of floating palace, a Mar-a-Lago in the sky?
The price tag for the Golden Dome is a whopping $175 billion (there’s austerity for you!) and apparently it will all be up and running before Trump’s term is out in January 2029, (assuming Trump willingly leaves office and we still have a democratic election process by then.)
That’s a timeline longtime national security and nuclear policy expert, Joe Cirincione, called “insane” in an interview with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “You probably won’t even get the architecture of the system settled by the end of his administration,” Cirincione said.
Even more insane is that, far from enhancing the safety of the US, the Golden Dome is entirely provocative and, as a nervous China has already warned, will only increase the risks of militarizing space and could even relaunch a global arms race (arguably something that is already underway).
In any case, there’s not much use in a Golden Dome unless it’s one hundred percent effective, which it has a one hundred percent probability of not being. Its predecessor certainly didn’t achieve that and was what Cirincione described as “the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense.”
If just one missile does get through, the level of destruction would be devastating, and the US would then likely retaliate after which all bets are off.
So far, US missile defense interception attempts (fortunately all tests), have had a success rate that spans a range of 41% to 88% depending on whether you accept an independent analysis, which generates the lower number, or “official” tallies, which produce the higher one. Either way, it’s not 100%.
The whole sorry saga, which began with the deployment of the earliest iterations of US missile defense in 1962, has cost at least $531 billion to date, according to Stephen Schwartz, a longtime analyst on nuclear weapons costs.
On BlueSky, Schwartz called the Golden Dome project “delusional and reckless. There’s no way to design, test, construct, and deploy a comprehensive system to reliably stop any missiles launched from land, sea, or space, and do it in ‘two-and-a-half to three years’ for $175 billion.”
The White House counters that none of this matters as the Golden Dome is meant as a deterrent to frighten off aggressors. It’s the same flawed argument that says spending billions to have our own nuclear weapons is worth it because then our adversaries will never use theirs, either. This, of course, exposes the ludicrousness of the whole deterrence myth, since clearly we could achieve the same end if we all abolished our nuclear weapons, and save a whole lot of money to boot.
But if we proceed on the basis of the White House assertion, then it means we are about to spend $175 billion on something the US would never actually use.
The Golden Dome, it turns out, is no golden ticket to survival.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Any opinions are her own.
Trump’s Nuclear Power Obsession
He failed to mention the “nuclear clause” in all homeowners insurance policies in the U.S. which states: “This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.”
Karl Grossman – Harvey Wasserman, June 6, 2025, https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/06/trumps-nuclear-power-obsession/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKxt5pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFvTWNBeXVHWThCTEtyczlZAR4Wy4zp3k26LXBFk9nJmvu3gAlxlzaxf_bLpDX3vn4MeB8PdK4OTy_hrIw0-Q_aem_GM2n7mrZ43KodEXQfa0ZsA
Donald Trump on May 23rd declared nuclear power to be “a hot industry.” Nuclear power plants are “very safe and environmental,” he said. He made the claims as he issued executive orders to quadruple nuclear energy capacity in the United States.
He failed to mention that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic accidents—such as the Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. And in routine operation, they release deadly radioactive emissions. Also, the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling, enrichment of nuclear fuel—is highly carbon-intensive.
He missed the fact that in pure economic terms they portend the largest economic debacle in human history. He omitted mention of who would pay for 300+ new nuclear plants in the U.S. to be built under his executive orders. (There are currently 94 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.)
Trump didn’t say why the nation would quadruple nuclear power capacity when renewables—primarily wind turbines and solar panels—account for more than 80% of the world’s new electric generating capacity and are coming in at up to 90% cheaper than nukes and years faster to deploy.
He failed to mention the “nuclear clause” in all homeowners insurance policies in the U.S. which states: “This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.”
That’s been the situation since 1957 when, with the insurance industry refusing to cover nuclear plant disasters, the Price-Anderson Act was enacted limiting liability in the event of a nuclear plant catastrophe. Congress passed it to jump-start the “Peaceful Atom” program of seven decades ago. The Price-Anderson Act has been extended and extended and Congress recently renewed it for another four decades to cover the untested “Small Modular Reactors” now all the rage in the latest ultra-hyped so-called “nuclear renaissance.”
Trump was surrounded at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office of The White House by executives of the nuclear power industry, including Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear power plant operator in the U.S., Jake Dewitte, CEO of Oklo Inc., and promoters, including Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main nuclear power lobbying organization in the U.S.
Also present was U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum who said: “This is a huge day for the nuclear industry.”
It was a flip from Trump’s comments on the Joe Rogan podcast last year in which he said: “I think there’s a little danger in nuclear.” An article about this on the E&E energy website of Politico said his reservations “seem to qualify his campaign promise to ‘unleash energy production from all sources, including nuclear.’”
But it was a total nuclear advocacy declared by Trump in his executive orders.
One of the four, titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” notes that since 1978 “only two reactors have entered into commercial operation….Instead of efficiently promoting allegedly “safe, abundant nuclear energy,” the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion. The NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure. Those models lack sound scientific basis and produce irrational results.”
“Beginning today,” said this order, “my Administration will reform the NRC, including its structure, personnel, regulations, and basic operations. In so doing, we will produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market…”
The order then says: “It is the policy of the United States to: Reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy” and “Facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW [gigawatts] in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.”
To avoid a politically suicidal brush with economic reality, Trump ducked this simple calculation: the most recent new U.S. reactors, at Vogtle, Georgia, have come online seven years late, at a price of $18 billion each. (They were originally estimated to cost $7 billion each.) Meanwhile, the other two reactors, the construction of which began also this century, an expected $9.8 billion project at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant site in South Carolina, was abandoned when its estimated cost increased to $25 billion, having generated no electricity at all,
Today there are no large reactors under construction in the U.S. Based on the Vogtle/Summer experiences, to build another 300 nuclear power plants from scratch would cost a “base price” minimum of $5.4 trillion, though the historic likelihood is that they would cost at least double or triple that. Each would likely require 15 years or more to build.
A parallel and thus far theoretical fleet of the much-hyped Small Modular Reactors (“silly mythological rip-offs”) is certain to cost more. Their development has been plagued with soaring price projections, lagging production schedules and a series of cancellations. SMRs produce more radioactive waste per kilowatt-hour than the older, bigger nukes, nuclear proliferation concerns, and there are other problems.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an article last year titled “Five Things the ‘Nuclear Bros’ Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors” on its publication “The Equation” starts off with: “1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.” He said, “According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones,” and he elaborates. He further exposes other SMR issues.
Of the Trump order to “reform” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in an article published last week in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lyman wrote it “mandates that the NRC fundamentally change its mission to support the absurd and reckless goal of quadrupling of U.S. nuclear energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050—which would, if achieved, add the equivalent of 300 large nuclear plants to the U.S. fleet—by prioritizing speedy licensing over protecting public health and safety from radiation exposure. This would effectively make the NRC a promotional agency not unlike its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, thereby undoing the NRC’s 51-year history as the independent safety regulator established by the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act.” The piece was titled: “NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again.”
Another Trump executive order, specifically on “advanced reactors,” was titled “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security” and say they “have have the potential to deliver resilient, secure, and reliable power…”
The nuclear industry in recent years has been touting what it calls “advanced” nuclear power plants—which include the SMR—claiming they are safer than current designs.
However, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted extensive research on the “advanced” plants and its 140-report, authored by Lyman, a physicist, “found that they are no better—and in some respects significantly worse—than the light-water reactors in operation today.”
Another Trump order, “Reforming Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” directs “the Department of Energy, the National Laboratories, and any other entity under the [Energy] Department’s jurisdiction to significantly expedite the review, approval, and deployment of advanced reactors.”
And a fourth executive order, “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base,” states: “Swift and decisive action is required to jumpstart America’s nuclear energy industrial base and ensure or national and economic security by increasing fuel availability and production, securing civil nuclear supply chains, improving the efficiency with which advanced nuclear reactors are licensed, and preparing our workforce to establish America’s energy dominance and accelerate our path towards a more secure and independent energy future.”
A former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Gregory Jaczko, a physicist, commented that the Trump orders show that “he is committed to further lawlessness, more nuclear accidents, and less nuclear safety. This guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system will only make the country less safe, the industry less reliable, and the climate crisis more severe….The executive orders look like someone asked an AI, ‘how do we make the nuclear industry worse in this country?’”
Lyman in a statement distributed by the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “Simply put, the U.S. nuclear industry will fail if safety is not made a priority. By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release that will affect the health, safety and livelihoods of millions. Such a disaster will destroy public trust in nuclear power and cause other nations to reject U.S. nuclear technology for decades to come.”
Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said of the order on “reform” of the NRC, that it “most explicitly exposes the Trump Administration’s deliberate attack upon the public’s democratic due process regarding undisputably still hazardous nuclear power and strips away the appearance of maintaining an ‘independent’ federal regulatory agency exercising its due diligence in the interest of public health, safety, security and environmental protection.”
Gunter cited the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act, as did Lyman in his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was abolished by Congress” by the act “precisely because it could no longer maintain the façade of being both the chief promoter and regulator” of nuclear power, said Gunter. This Trump order, said Gunter, “illuminates the obvious 50-year throwback to AEC and its abolition by Congress in 1975 for its blatant ‘conflict of interest’ as simultaneously a promotional agency for atomic power and supposedly an unbiased regulator.”
Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said: “After 70 years of promoting nuclear power, it is still too expensive and produces radioactive waste that will be dangerous for over a million years. President Trump’s executive orders will not fix those problems….There is no ‘fixing’ or ‘reviving’ nuclear energy. The orders are a shortsighted, wasteful effort that will only make nuclear power less safe and more polluting. They will further weaken the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and forever sabotage its already dubious ability to protect public safety and national security.”
Judson said, “One order ignores decades of scientific findings and thousands of families’ tragic experiences with radioactivity, directing the NRC to reduce radiation protections. The National Academy of Sciences has repeatedly found that radiation increases the risk of cancer and other diseases. Only kooks and crackpots under the spell of a Dr. Strangelove-like infatuation with nuclear power say otherwise.”
“Another order,” Judson continued, “will slash the NRC’s staff and subjugate the agency to White House approval of its regulations and licensing decisions, ending even the pretense that an independent regulator will be there to protect the public health and safety. The root of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear meltdowns in 2011 was found to be the subjugation of a nuclear safety regulator to politicians and corporations. The disaster displaced over 100,000 people, shut down the whole nuclear industry, and will cost Japan up to $700 billion. President Trump’s executive orders will increase the changes that could happen here.”
And Judson, like many others, concludes: “The truth is, we can meet all of our energy needs, safely, securely, and affordably, with renewable energy sources that are ready to deploy today. In the last two years alone, the world brought online as much new wind and solar as the entire nuclear industry worldwide can generate after 60 years.”
The Trump pro-nuke executive orders have sparked immediate stock market jumps for Trump’s insider atomic cronies while promising almost incomprehensible losses for the rest of us which includes the spread of atomic machines prone to catastrophe, regularly spewing lethal radioactivity, producing unmanageable waste and this funded by trillions of public dollars.
It further will sink us all into what Forbes Magazine in 1985 described as “the largest managerial failure in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale,” in a lead article titled “Nuclear Follies.”
Meanwhile, renewables are more than ready now, safe power which we can live with. Yet while prices and production times for renewable sources plummet, Trump and his anti-green minions have been vigorously assaulting the wind, solar and other green energy technologies. Trump has attacked not only tax breaks and clean energy grants for the clean energy movement, he has also assaulted the permitting process for renewables, at the same time pushing to expedite it for nuclear power.
He has been joined by California’s “Green Democrat” Governor Gavin Newsom, who has showered subsidies on two decrepit reactors at Diablo Canyon while slashing permits and rate and tax supports for renewables and forcing California ratepayers to fork over $11 billion for the Diablo reactors which are near multiple earthquake fault lines and slated to now be closed, Diablo Canyon is the last nuclear plant running in California. Newsom has devastated the state’s once-booming rooftop solar industry, destroying at least 17,000 green jobs, while sticking California with the continental U.S.’s highest electric rates.
Democratic governors in Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois and elsewhere have also boosted nuclear power while assaulting renewables.
Led by Trump and Newsom, the corrupt corporate leadership of both political parties thus seems bound and determined to bankrupt and irradiate us all with deadly, “nuclear-clause”-covered atomic reactors that can’t compete with the otherwise vibrant, fast-evolving renewable revolution which they are so cynically aiming to kill.
Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)
To Trump, a million casualties in Ukraine war he’s enabling, is nothing more than a kids’ fistfight
Actually, it takes three to tango since the war goes on because Trump continues enabling it with billions in weapons, logistics and Intel support. Pull that away and Ukraine’s Zelensky would have to negotiate the peace he ran away from in April 2022 at America’s behest. Had he made peace then Zelensky would still control the 45,000 square miles annexed and not incurred over a million senseless casualties.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 7 June 25
The depravity of Trump’s view of catastrophic war was on full display in his White House meeting with fellow Ukraine war enabler, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump told reporters present about the million plus dead and wounded in the largely degraded Ukraine:
To Trump, a million casualties in Ukraine war he’s enabling is nothing more than a kids’ fistfight
The depravity of Trump’s view of catastrophic war was on full display in his White House meeting with fellow Ukraine war enabler, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump told reporters present about the million plus dead and wounded in the largely degraded Ukraine:
Actually, it takes three to tango since the war goes on because Trump continues enabling it with billions in weapons, logistics and Intel support. Pull that away and Ukraine’s Zelensky would have to negotiate the peace he ran away from in April 2022 at America’s behest. Had he made peace then Zelensky would still control the 45,000 square miles annexed and not incurred over a million senseless casualties.
And cruel, clueless, delusional Trump sits back pretending he’s still concerned about ending a catastrophic war he’s enabled for the past 137 days.
US Vice President JD Vance announces new strategy of blatant imperialism, aimed at China
So now, the Trump administration is redirecting US foreign policy to prepare for potential war on China.
“when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind”.
Vance indicated that the US empire will continue to wage wars, and will try to win those wars through the use of “overwhelming force”. However, this will no longer be done in the name of “democracy” or “human rights”.
US Vice President JD Vance revealed the Trump administration’s “generational shift in [foreign] policy”, emphasizing “great power competition” and preparation for war with China. They’re abandoning soft power and focusing on “hard power” and “overwhelming force”, in a return to blatant, 19th century-style imperialism.
Geopolitical Economy, By Ben Norton, 2 June 25
US Vice President JD Vance has announced what he calls a “new era” in military strategy.
“What we are seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in [foreign] policy”, he claimed.
The Donald Trump administration is abandoning the US government’s previous emphasis on soft power, Vance explained, and is instead focusing on “hard power” and “overwhelming force”, in a return to blatant, 19th century-style imperialism.
According to Vance, Washington’s top priority is now “great power competition”, and preparation for potential war with China.
The vice president laid this out in a speech at the commissioning ceremony of the US Naval Academy on 23 May.
The “era of uncontested US dominance is over”
JD Vance lamented the fact that the US empire has lost its unipolar dominance, as the world has become more multipolar.
“In the wake of the Cold War, America enjoyed a mostly unchallenged command of the commons, airspace, sea, space and cyberspace”, Vance recalled.
“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, our policymakers assumed that American primacy on the world stage was guaranteed. For a brief time, we were a superpower without any peer, nor did we believe any foreign nation could possibly rise to compete with the United States of America”, he added.
“But the era of uncontested US dominance is over”, Vance warned. “Today we face serious threats in China, Russia, and other nations, determined to beat us in every single domain.
Preparing for war on China
The US vice president complained that, in the past, “our leaders traded hard power for soft power”. He argued that this was an error, and that the US empire should have focused on containing China.
“Instead of devoting our energies to responding to the rise of near-peer competitors like China, our leaders pursued what they assumed would be easy jobs for the world’s preeminent superpower”, Vance said.
“Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition and preparing to take on a peer adversary, and instead, we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks, like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up far away regimes”, he added.
The vice president argued that it was a mistake to think that, by deepening economic integration and trade with China, the US could pressure Beijing to change its socialist system.
“Too many of us believed that economic integration would naturally lead to peace by making countries like the People’s Republic of China more like the United States”, he lamented.
In other words, Vance was acknowledging that many officials in Washington wanted China to become an obedient proxy, like Japan. They thought they could pressure Beijing to subordinate itself to the US, but they ultimately failed.
So now, the Trump administration is redirecting US foreign policy to prepare for potential war on China.
A return to a more blatant form of imperialism
Some Trump supporters have taken Vance’s comments out of context to claim that the Trump administration is supposedly moving away from a hyper-interventionist foreign policy and toward a more restrained, isolationist one. But that is not what is happening.
Vance’s speech made it clear that the Trump administration wants to return to a more overt, traditional form of imperialism.
What is changing is that the Trump administration is dropping the cynical propaganda narrative that US foreign policy is supposedly motivated by “democracy promotion” or “human rights”.
Vance indicated that the US empire will continue to wage wars, and will try to win those wars through the use of “overwhelming force”. However, this will no longer be done in the name of “democracy” or “human rights”.
Vance warned US Naval Academy graduates that they are in a “very dangerous era”, and will have a new “mission”.
The vice president stated openly that US troops will be sent to more wars, and that it is not a matter of if, but rather when.
“We’re returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests”, Vance said. “Now this doesn’t mean that we ignore threats, but it means that we approach them with discipline, and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind”.
Trump admin’s military strategy: “Overwhelming force” and $1 trillion budget
As an example of the new Trump Doctrine, Vance proudly pointed to the Pentagon’s bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in West Asia.
Vance boasted that the Trump administration used “overwhelming force against Houthi military targets”. This was a reference to the so-called “Houthis”, the armed group officially known as Ansarallah that governs northern Yemen.
Trump’s war on Yemen was “how military power should be used: decisively, with a clear objective”, Vance said.
“We ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch, but when we throw a punch, we throw a punch hard, and we do it decisively, and that’s exactly what we may ask you to do“, he told the Naval Academy graduates.
Vance added, “With the Trump administration, our adversaries now know when the United States sets a red line, it will be enforced, and when we engage, we do so with purpose, with superior force, with superior weapons, and with the best people anywhere in the world”.
In fact, instead of promoting isolationism and opposing interventionism, the Trump administration is boosting the US military budget to more than $1 trillion per year.
“I’ll be supporting a record-setting $1 trillion investment in our national defense”, Trump said in a speech at a US military base in April. “We’re going to go $1 trillion, the largest in the world, the largest ever in our country”.
“No other country has invested that much”, Trump bragged. “We have a $1 trillion budget for military this year, and we have tremendous plans”.
US ideological crusades
In one of the most hypocritical parts of his speech at the US Naval Academy graduation ceremony, JD Vance claimed that the Trump administration is carrying out a “shift in thinking, from ideological crusades to a principled foreign policy”.
This was deeply ironic, because Trump’s extremely hawkish secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is a self-declared “crusader”.
In his 2020 book “American Crusade”, Hegseth — a former Fox News host — wrote with pride that the US right wing is waging a “holy war” against China, the international left, and Islam.
Hegseth, an ardent hawk, has sought to rebrand US soldiers as “warfighters”, constantly using the term in his public remarks.
In his speech at the Naval Academy, Vance did the same, repeatedly praising US soldiers as “warfighters”.
Marco Rubio: China is the main target of the US government
Top officials in the Trump administration have made it clear that the main target of the US empire is China.
JD Vance conveyed this in his speech at the US Naval Academy.
It has also been repeatedly emphasized by Marco Rubio, a lifelong neoconservative war hawk, who is serving simultaneously as Trump’s secretary of state and national security advisor (making him only the second person in US history to hold both positions at the same time, following Henry Kissinger).
In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Rubio stressed that this entire century will be built on Washington’s new cold war against China……………………………….https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/31/us-vp-jd-vance-strategy-imperialism-china/
Global Network Statement on Golden Dome
Golden Dome would create a dangerous arms race in space. It is an offensive, not defensive program……. it will embolden the US to launch a first-strike attack and attempt to pick off any retaliatory strike.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris and SpaceX would likely be the prime beneficiaries along with Republican megadonor Peter Thiel’s Palantir and venture capital-backed startup Anduril.
Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ proposal is a continuation of Ronald Reagan’s SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), the Star Wars system of early 1980’s.
Trump calls it a ‘layered defense shield, safeguarding the American homeland with unwavering precision, ensuring the security and resilience of our nation’. Trump shared few specifics in the May 20 news conference, saying “Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.”
Early cost estimates from Congressional sources range from $550 billion to trillions over 20 years. Trump wants a $25 billion down payment for the program in 2025. Canada is being brought into Golden Dome likely to help pay for it. We should expect that NATO members will also be hit up to help cover the massive costs.
There are already extensive missile defense programs, such as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GBMD); the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) program; the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Satellite Tracking Layer program; the ‘Space Based Infra-Red System’ (SBIRS) of missile detection and tracking satellites and its replacement the ‘Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infra-Red’ (Next Gen OPIR) satellites. The aim of Golden Dome is to combine these with new components, such as space-based interceptors aimed at intercepting missiles soon after launch.
The price tag is bound to be the Achilles Heel of the Golden Dome program. Already, over the past 70 years, the US has spent more than $500 billion on missile defense, according to an American Physical Society (APS) report. Golden Dome would be a colossal waste of resources when the US has $37 trillion in debt. Merely replicating Israel’s Iron Dome over the US — multiplying it out to cover nearly four million square miles — would require 24,000 Iron Dome batteries at $100 million each. Development cost of Golden Dome would be more than we spend on the Pentagon budget in one year.
Golden Dome would create a dangerous arms race in space. It is an offensive, not defensive program. It is extremely unlikely to be able to provide the claimed 100% effective shield against an all-out attack from thousands of missiles incorporating countermeasures such as multiple decoy warheads or the ability to maneuver in the final stages of their trajectory. However, it will embolden the US to launch a first-strike attack and attempt to pick off any retaliatory strike.
The US and Canada land mass is so vast that Golden Dome could never successfully cover it all. Golden Dome just won’t work. It simply encourages other nations to expand hypersonics development, mass drone swarms, advanced cruise missiles and other technologies to overwhelm the US system.
Israel’s similar Iron Dome proved not to be effective when Iran launched missiles and drones that evaded that system. “Intercepting even a single, nuclear-armed intercontinental-range ballistic missile or its warheads … is extremely challenging,” physicist Frederick Lamb of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said at an APS meeting in March. “The ability of any missile defense system to do this reliably has not been demonstrated.”
Ensuring protection from just one ‘enemy’ ICBM launch site would require more than 1,000 interceptors in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), the APS report finds. Protection from ten ICBMs might demand over 30,000 interceptors, depending on missile types. For comparison, there are currently about 12,000 active satellites in orbit around Earth, most in SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Scientists at China’s Zhejiang University have created a composite, multi-layered, heat-absorbing stealth material they say can evade detection by infrared and microwave systems at long ranges. It operates at temperatures up to 700 °C, meaning it can be potentially used in an array of military and space applications.
That’s bad news for Golden Dome, which will rely on ground and space-based early warning, tracking, fire control and radars to detect and track threats. Without help from its sensor-based eyes and ears, Golden Dome’s interceptors would be essentially useless and firing blind in the event of a crisis.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris and SpaceX would likely be the prime beneficiaries along with Republican megadonor Peter Thiel’s Palantir and venture capital-backed startup Anduril.
Any war in space would lead to the Kessler Syndrome – masses of orbiting debris – making it virtually impossible to utilize orbits that are becoming dangerously congested like Lower Earth Orbit (LEO). There are currently more than 1,550 Starlink satellites in LEO with thousands more planned.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are launched from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force bases. All space launches today have major environmental impacts – particularly exhaust products trapped for long periods in the upper atmosphere that are further damaging the ozone layer. Space is an environment that must be protected. Golden Dome’s huge number of launches would be the stake in the heart of planet Earth.
Deployment of Golden Dome would also doom any hopes for nuclear disarmament as China, Russia, North Korea and others could not afford to get rid of their nuclear retaliatory capabilities. No other nation will surrender to US becoming the Master of Space.
The Pentagon (Space Force) has long been planning to control the pathway from the Earth to the Moon and beyond. Plans for space-based orbiting battle stations, used to ‘police’ the Earth-Moon gravity well to ensure US and allies ‘control and domination’ of space, are called for in the 1997 US Space Command document ‘Vision for 2020’.
The US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia in 2002. From 1972 until 2002 the Treaty bound the US and Russia to very limited missile defense systems in order to maintain the deadly nuclear balance. What is needed now is a new global ABM Treaty that all states can sign up to and ensure that no state, or group of states, can hold the threat of a nuclear first strike over others.
If the US truly wishes to protect the US and Canada, then it should honor the spirit of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It should agree to negotiate and sign a treaty at the United Nations to ban all weapons in space. China and Russia have been annually introducing a space weapons ban treaty for more than 30 years but the US and Israel have been blocking its development.
We, the undersigned, call upon the US Congress, the White House, and the Canadian government to abandon plans for the creation of the Golden Dome. Rather than wasting massive amounts of tax dollars on a new space arms race those funds should be used for human needs, environmental protection, education, health care and long neglected infrastructure repair. The US and Canada should lead a global initiative to protect our global commons and keep space for peace.
List in formation: (long list of the undersigned): ………………………………………………………………………………………………. To add your name to this statement, email globalnet@mindspring.com. https://space4peace.org/global-network-statement-on-golden-dome/
US vetoes Gaza ceasefire again, due to concerns it could save Palestinian lives
Thank god for AIPAC…
Laura and Normal Island News, Jun 05, 2025, https://www.normalisland.co.uk/p/us-vetoes-gaza-ceasefire-again-due?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1407757&post_id=165255653&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The US has vetoed a draft resolution at the UN Security Council that called for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and unrestricted entry of humanitarian aid, basically all the things Netanyahu doesn’t want.
The resolution was co-sponsored by the Hamas-controlled countries of Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Somalia who are collectively called the E-10 (presumably the “E” stand for evil).
Horrifyingly, the resolution received 14 votes in favour, with no abstentions, and only one against. Even the UK and France sided with the Evil 10. History will not be kind to them. Thank god the US representative proudly raised a hand that was dripping with Palestinian blood. One day her grandkids are going to look back at this moment with pride.
The US has now single-handedly vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza for the fifth time to avoid the risk of saving Palestinian lives.
If you didn’t know, the veto power was introduced for the US to protect Israel, no matter how many international laws it breaks. If the entire world objects to Israel’s actions, Israel can simply overrule them through its proxy. Isn’t that nice?
Reassuringly, more than half of the vetoes the US has ever used have been to protect Israel. Just imagine what might have happened if AIPAC had not purchased so many members of congress. It doesn’t bear thinking about…
If the resolution was accepted, it would mean that Hamas could quickly rearm with medicines and baby food. No wonder the US called it a “performative resolution” and made it clear Palestinians will not be spared until Hamas has been removed from Gaza.
Just don’t mention that Hamas offered to release all hostages, disarm and leave Gaza in return for a permanent ceasefire, and Netanyahu said “no” because he wants to do ethnic cleansing. The last thing we need is people noticing the hypocrisy .
Kremlin and Trump aides raise nuclear war fears after Ukraine drone strike
Vladimir Putin has warned Russia will respond to Kyiv’s attacks on nuclear-capable aircraft at airfields
Andrew Roth in Washington, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/04/ukraine-russia-nuclear-war-fears
As Vladimir Putin pledges to retaliate against Ukraine for last weekend’s unprecedented drone attack, Kremlin advisers and figures around Donald Trump have told the US president that the risk of a nuclear confrontation is growing, in an attempt to pressure him to further reduce US support for Ukraine.
Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and an important intermediary between the Kremlin and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, called the Ukrainian drone strike an attack on “Russian nuclear assets”, and echoed remarks from Maga-friendly figures warning of the potential for a third world war.
“Clear communication is urgent – to grasp reality and the rising risks before it’s too late,” Dmitriev wrote, adding a dove emoji.
Ukraine claimed that the strike damaged more than 40 Russian planes, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M heavy bombers that have been used to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities throughout the war, killing thousands and damaging crucial infrastructure that delivers heat and electricity to millions more.
But those planes can also carry weapons armed with nuclear warheads, and are part of a nuclear triad along with submarine and silo-based missiles that form the basis for a system of deterrence between Russia and the United States.
After a phone call between the two leaders on Wednesday, Trump said: “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”
Ukraine voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, in return for security assurances from the US, the UK and Russia.
Those skeptical of US support for Ukraine are seizing on the risks of a nuclear confrontation to argue that the conflict could possibly spin out of control.
Maga (Make America great again) influencers such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk have openly condemned the drone attack, with Bannon likening the strike to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Kirk writing: “Most people aren’t paying attention, but we’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since this began in 2022.”
But more centrist advisers within the Trump camp – including some who have closer links to Ukraine – are also warning that the risks of a nuclear conflict are growing as they seek to maintain Trump’s interest in brokering a peace.
“The risk levels are going way up,” Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told Fox News. “When you attack an opponent’s part of their [nuclear] triad, your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do. And that’s what they did.”
Kellogg also repeated rumours that Ukraine had struck the Russian nuclear fleet at Severomorsk, although reports of an explosion there have not been confirmed. He said the US was “trying to avoid” an escalation.
Other current and former members of the administration skeptical of US support for Ukraine have also vocally opposed the drone strikes.
“It is not in America’s interest for Ukraine to be attacking Russia’s strategic nuclear forces the day before another round of peace talks,” said Dan Caldwell, an influential foreign policy adviser who was a senior aide to Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon until he was purged amid a leaking scandal last month.
“This has the potential to be highly escalatory and raises the risk of direct confrontation between Russia and Nato,” he said. “US should not only distance itself from this attack but end any support that could directly or indirectly enable attacks against Russian strategic nuclear forces.”
It is not the first time that concerns over Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon have been used to try to temper US support for Ukraine.
As Moscow’s forces were routed near Kharkiv and in the south at Kherson in September 2022, Russian officials sent signals that the Kremlin was considering using a battlefield nuclear weapon, senior Biden officials have said.
National security officials said they believed that if the Russian lines collapsed and left open the potential for a Ukrainian attack on Crimea, then there was a 50% chance that Russia would use a nuclear weapon as a result.
Ukrainian officials have responded by saying that Russia has embellished its threats of a nuclear attack in order to blackmail the US from giving greater support to Ukraine.
Trump’s huge military budget will accelerate U.S. economic decay
May 30, 2025 Gary Wilson, Struggle La Lucha
President Donald Trump delivered a rally-style commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on May 24, aggressively promoting militarism, nationalism, and his ongoing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as well as transgender rights.
Addressing the graduating cadets, Trump glorified the U.S. military as “the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known,” claiming personal credit for its expansion during his first term.
“I rebuilt the army and the military like nobody has ever rebuilt it before,” Trump boasted, putting military power at the center of U.S. global dominance.
Trump intensified his militaristic agenda: “We’re getting rid of the distractions and focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies, and defending our great American flag.”
Trump said that’s why the U.S. will invest in new tanks, planes, drones, ships, and missiles. In addition, the U.S. will build the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield, which has been described as a $175 billion fantasy and a boondoggle for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
He also praised recent reactionary policies designed to dismantle DEI programs in the armed forces.
The Trump administration has moved to ban trans troops from the military — a decision the Supreme Court upheld earlier this month. Trump’s policies have reintroduced a discriminatory ban on transgender military personnel and imposed new uniform physical standards aimed at severely limiting women’s participation in combat roles.
Unprecedented military expansion
On May 2, Trump released his budget request for 2026, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Over 75% of Trump’s budget is allocated for the military and police.
In the budget proposal, military spending is $1.01 trillion, accounting for approximately 60% of the total requested. For the non-military Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Veterans Affairs, the request is $272.2 billion.
Funding for departments whose primary purpose isn’t military, military-adjacent, or policing is $409 billion, or only 24% of the budget.
The proposal includes $163 billion in federal spending cuts, all of which target non-defense programs. For a breakdown of the cuts, see: Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more.
Military Keynesianism
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have argued that increased military spending and the production of armaments will reindustrialize the country and create jobs, using this rationale to justify historically large Pentagon budgets. And completely ignoring that military expansion is not, in any way, shape, or form, reindustrialization.
Trump has explicitly said it would provide unmatched military strength and support job creation through the purchase of new equipment and capabilities, mirroring the arguments made by Democrats, including Biden, about the economic benefits of Pentagon budgets.
The Biden administration promoted the jobs argument, especially when seeking support for military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Biden described the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy,” emphasizing the economic benefits to states involved in weapons production.
Military Keynesianism is an economic policy approach that advocates for sustained, high levels of military spending as a primary tool for government stimulus and economic growth, based on the core principles of Keynesian economics………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/05/30/trumps-big-beautiful-budget-military-spending-soars-accelerating-u-s-economic-decay/
A superhighway to nuclear hell
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/06/02/a-superhighway-to-nuclear-hell/
Trump’s reckless and accelerated nuclear orders would destroy safety oversight and endanger the public, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
On May 23rd, with several strokes of his pen, President Trump issued orders that would roll back US energy policy about 50 years.
On that day, Trump signed five Executive Orders (EOs): Restoring Gold Standard Science; Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base; Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy; and Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security. (This page keeps a running tally of all the White House executive orders.
All of this madness was announced in a press release headlined “President Trump Signs Executive Orders to Usher in a Nuclear Renaissance, Restore Gold Standard Science.” Just in case there was any confusion about what this meant, the press release included an explanation that read: “Gold Standard Science is just that—science that meets the Gold Standard.”
Collectively, the four orders that focused on the nuclear sector would: reduce and undermine the already inadequate safety oversight authority of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); fast-track unproven new reactor projects without regard for safety, health or environmental impacts; curtail or possibly even end public intervention; weaken already insufficient radiation exposure standards; and reopen the pathway between the civil and military sectors, all while “unleashing” (Trump’s favorite verb) nuclear power expansion on a dangerous and utterly unrealistic accelerated timeline.
The precursive warning shot to all this had been fired on February 5th with Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s own Executive Order: Unleashing the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance, ‘dominance’ being another of Trump’s favorite big beautiful words, along with ‘big’ and ‘beautiful’ (—see his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.) “It’s time for nuclear, and we’re going to do it very big,” Trump told industry executives when he signed the orders.
Perhaps it’s no surprise to find that ‘dominance’ appears 35 times in the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 handbook, Authoritarianism for Dummies, officially known as Project 2025. Variations on the word ‘unleash’ appear 19 times. ‘Tremendous’ shows up 11 times. So does ‘gold standard’.
Which brings us to the fifth executive order of May 23, Restoring Gold Standard Science. While it does not specifically reference nuclear power, the order determines a hierarchy that will put political appointees in charge of specialized federal agencies, including the NRC. The order also itemizes a set of requirements on how scientific research and activities must be conducted, including “without conflicts of interest.”
But guess whose stocks soared after the release of Trump’s nuclear Executive Orders? Answer: Oklo, the company attempting to deliver the first US micro-reactors. Guess who was on the board of Oklo before his appointment as Trump’s Energy Secretary? Yes, Chris Wright.
Uranium mining company Centrus Energy and the U.S. Navy’s main nuclear reactor supplier, BWX Technologies, also saw their stock prices soar after Trump’s executive orders were released.
An Oklo executive, Jacob DeWitte, who was present at the signing, brought along a golf ball to help Trump understand just how little uranium is needed for the lifetime needs of a single human being (an entirely irrelevant statistic given the lethality contained in that glowing little golf ball.) Trump called the golf ball show-and-tell “very exciting” before teeing up another order that will not only muzzle but actually persecute scientists for any findings with which the Trump hive don’t agree.
The definition of ‘sound science’, under Trump’s ‘gold standard’, is simply anything happening now or under the previous Trump administration. Anything that happened under the Biden administration is “politicized science”.
Among the enforcers who will police and punish the NRC, along with other federal agencies who stray from Trump’s “science” script, is the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, one Michael Kratsios.
Kratsios is the former chief of staff to AI entrepreneur, venture capitalist and nuclear promoter, Peter Thiel. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, supported nuclear fuel start-up General Matter, in contention to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for advanced nuclear reactors. One of the executive orders will “seek voluntary agreements pursuant to section 708 of the DPA with domestic nuclear energy companies that could deliver HALEU fuel.”
Kratsios is already sharpening his knives to go after the NRC, viewed as an obstacle to fast-tracking the new nuclear projects that Kratisios’s former boss, among others, will be pushing.
“Today’s executive orders are the most significant nuclear regulatory reform actions taken in decades,” said Kratsios on May 23. “We are restoring a strong American nuclear industrial base, rebuilding a secure and sovereign domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and leading the world towards a future fueled by American nuclear energy. These actions are critical to American energy independence and continued dominance in AI and other emerging technologies.”
There has already been some pushback against allowing a political appointee to be the arbiter of scientific integrity. “Putting that power in the hands of a political appointee who doesn’t need to consult with scientific experts before making a decision is very troubling,” Kris West of COGR, an association of research universities, affiliated medical centers, and independent research institutes, told Science.
A group of scientists has written an open letter, retitling the order “Fool’s Gold Standard Science,” declaring that it “would not strengthen science, but instead would introduce stifling limits on intellectual freedom in our Nation’s laboratories and federal funding agencies”.
Part of the “regulatory reform” outlined as “gold standard science” and that Kratsios will oversee, is gutting the NRC, which, complains the White House, “charges applicants by the hour to process license applications with prolonged timelines that maximize fees while throttling nuclear power development.”
Somehow, “throttling nuclear power development” is not what springs to mind when reviewing the record of an agency that consistently favors the financial needs of the nuclear industry over the interests of public safety and the environment.
Furthermore, charges the White House, the NRC “has failed to license new reactors even as technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”
Trump, who seems to treat executive orders like a Nike slogan (“just do it”), has commanded that the US quadruple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. This will be achieved not only by stripping the NRC of its power to scrutinize the safety assurances for new, primarily small modular reactors, but by expediting their licensing while keeping current reactors running longer and hotter and even reopening permanently closed ones.
Licensing timeframes will be slashed to “a deadline of no more than 18 months” for final decisions on construction and operating license applications for new reactors, and to just one year “for final decision in an application to continue operating an existing reactor of any type.”
The Trump order will also require “the reactivation of prematurely shuttered to partially completed nuclear facilities.” The former refers to Palisades, Three Mile Island and Duane Arnold so far. The latter is about the abandoned two-reactor Westinghouse AP 1000 project at V.C. Summer in South Carolina.
Currently operating reactors will be expected to add “5 gigawatts of power uprates”, which comes with its own set of safety concerns given the age of the US nuclear reactor fleet.
Everything has been put on a superhighway to nuclear hell, unhinged from the very real obstacles to fast-tracking nuclear expansion, most notably the cost and risks.
“A pilot program for reactor construction and operation outside the National Laboratories,” will require the Energy Secretary to “approve at least three reactors pursuant to this pilot program with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026,” one order said.
An astonishing “10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030,” is another aspirational command.
The Secretary of Energy must also designate at least one site for advanced reactor technologies within three months of the order, and ensure that it will host a fully operational reactor there “no later than 30 months from the date of this order.”
None of these timelines share any precedent with the track record of nuclear power plant construction, and bullying or handcuffing the NRC won’t change that.
That’s because, as Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace point out in their recent column in The Hill: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not presented the key obstacle to nuclear development in the U.S.” The orders, they said “underestimate the addition of time to market due to limitations on workforce availability, supply chain, financing, specialty fuels and community buy-in.”
The Carnegie authors also criticized the way the orders treat nuclear power as if it is similar to any other form of energy. “The orders downplay or ignore the special magnitude of nuclear risks, the series of traumatic accidents suffered by leading nuclear power nations and the unique environmental and multi-generational footprint of nuclear waste and spent fuel,” they wrote.
What reining in the NRC will achieve is an even greater reduction in confidence over the safe operation of current and future nuclear reactors.
“This push by the Trump administration to usurp much of the agency’s autonomy as they seek to fast-track the construction of nuclear plants will weaken critical, independent oversight of the U.S. nuclear industry and poses significant safety and security risks to the public,” said Ed Lyman, a physicist and Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
To set all this right, the DOGE kids will soon be paying a visit to the NRC to fire people. DOGE, says the Reform the NRC order, will “reorganize the NRC to promote the expeditious processing of licensing applications and the adoption of innovative technology. The NRC shall undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization, though certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”
But “reorganizing” the NRC will have the reverse effect, argues Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) a longtime nuclear watchdog on Capitol Hill, including during his earlier years in the US House of Representatives. “It will be impossible for NRC to maintain a commitment to safety and oversight with staffing levels slashed and expertise gone,”Markey said.
“Allowing DOGE to blindly fire staff at the NRC does nothing to make it easier to permit or regulate nuclear power plants, but it will increase the risk of an accident,” said ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who called the orders “dangerous.”
But then the Trump administration doesn’t actually consider nuclear power itself to be dangerous, and instead accuses the NRC of being overly cautious, saying: “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion.”
Consequently, it’s no surprise to find a clause in the order that reads: “The personnel and functions of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) shall be reduced to the minimum necessary”. The ACRS panel is composed of cream-of-the-crop scientists from the national laboratories, universities and other areas of academia. Its mandate, ironically and in place for decades, has been precisely to uphold “Gold Standard Science” in the nuclear power sector.
Like everything else Trump does, all of this constitutes another accident waiting to happen. “If you aren’t independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident,” confirmed former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane of efforts to undermine her former agency.
The orders are a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system”, another former NRC chair Greg Jaczko told the Los Angeles Times.
Also guillotined is any pretense about protecting the public from the harm caused by exposure to the ionizing radiation released by the nuclear power sector.
No longer must we adhere to the standard, endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, that exposure to any amount of radiation, no matter how small, could be harmful to human health. (This is especially true if it involves consistent and chronic longterm exposure even to what might be considered “low” doses.)
Instead, say Trump’s orders, “the NRC shall reconsider reliance on the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard, which is predicated on LNT.” Those models, says the White House, are “flawed.”
This will of course open the door to the hormesis advocates who, without any firm basis in actual science, insist that a little radiation is good for all of us.
It’s time to set the record straight on radiation and the damage it causes, particularly to pregnancy, children and women,” responded Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “Contrary to what Trump’s recent EO claims, abundant and largely officially ignored scientific evidence demonstrates that childhood cancers increase around normally operating nuclear facilities, with indications that these cancers begin during pregnancy. The uranium mining needed to produce fuel for reactors, is associated with a number of health impacts. Even already existing background radiation is associated with childhood cancers.”
The already flimsy separation between the civil and military nuclear sectors is all but erased in the new EOs, most notably in the emphasis on a return to the reprocessing of irradiated reactor fuel. This operation separates out the uranium and plutonium while producing a vast amount of so-called low- and intermediate-level liquid and gaseous wastes that are routinely released into the air and sea.
Reprocessing was rejected in the US by the Ford and Carter administrations as too proliferation risky, given that plutonium is the trigger component of a nuclear weapon. It is still carried out in France — and until recently in the UK — where radioactive isotopes released by these operations have been found as far away as the Arctic Circle. The UK reprocessing activities at Sellafield rendered the Irish Sea the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world.
But, wrote the White House in the Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies EO: “Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy shall identify all useful uranium and plutonium material within the Department of Energy’s inventories that may be recycled or processed into nuclear fuel for reactors in the United States.” That sounds like a return to mixed oxide fuel, or MOX, another program that was abandoned, but not until after a protracted opposition campaign launched by our movement — Nix MOX — finally prevailed.
Another order directs “The Secretary of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army” to “commence the operation of a nuclear reactor, regulated by the United States Army, at a domestic military base or installation no later than September 30, 2028.”
Some of those closed civil nuclear power plants could find themselves repurposed by the Department of Defense, serving as “energy hubs for military microgrid support.” Advanced nuclear reactor technologies will also be expected to power AI datacenters “within the 48 contiguous States and the District of Columbia, in whole or in part, that are located at or operated in coordination with Department of Energy facilities, including as support for national security missions, as critical defense facilities, where appropriate.”
Pronounced Kratsios in the May 23 press release: “We are recommitting ourselves to scientific best practices and empowering America’s researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries.”
Until they come and arrest you for telling the truth.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International.
The NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again
If the NRC complies with them and reduces itself to a rubber-stamp, the public will be increasingly at risk.
Perhaps recognizing that this NRC “reform” will likely render the agency non-functional for the foreseeable future, the administration hedged its bets by issuing two other orders that would bypass NRC licensing altogether.
The NRC has been given a new mission to facilitate nuclear power at the expense of public health and environmental protection.
By Edwin S. Lyman | May 29, 2025
In early May, drafts of presidential executive orders surfaced that would “reform” (e.g., dismantle) the long-established independent safety and security framework under which the United States regulates commercial nuclear power. For those who held out hope that the leaked orders were trial balloons and would be shot down by stakeholders who value regulatory stability and clarity—such as nuclear power plant operators—disappointment loomed. On May 23, President Donald Trump signed the orders, which in some respects had gotten even more extreme than originally advertised.
One order mandates that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) fundamentally change its mission to support the absurd and reckless goal of quadrupling of US nuclear energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050—which would, if achieved, add the equivalent of 300 large nuclear plants to the US fleet—by prioritizing speedy licensing over protecting public health and safety from radiation exposure. This would effectively make the NRC a promotional agency not unlike its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, thereby undoing the NRC’s 51-year history as the independent safety regulator established by the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act. Congress considered but ultimately watered down a legislative provision to do just that last year. Now President Trump wants to finish the job by requiring the NRC to “facilitate nuclear power” in addition to “ensuring nuclear safety.”
The order requires that the agency undertake “a wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents” and produce draft and final versions of the new rules within nine and 18 months, respectively. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this massive body of regulatory detail—refined over decades of increasing technical knowledge, facility operating experience (including the 1979 Three Mile Island and 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accidents), and often impassioned debate about “how safe is safe”—surely knows this is a nigh impossible task. The challenge is compounded by the vague criteria provided to guide the revision, which invoke subjective terms that are the bane of regulators, such as “reduce unnecessary burdens” and “focus on credible, realistic risks.”
This exercise in busywork on a massive scale will only serve as a disruptive distraction from the NRC’s important work overseeing the operating fleet of US nuclear reactors, likely leading to regulatory paralysis and delays.
Specifically, even though the NRC has already been working to shorten approval timelines under pressure from Congress, the order directs the commission to establish fixed, 18-month deadlines for approving applications for new reactors of any type, providing no leeway except for “instances of applicant failure.” Imposing such a rigid schedule may appease arrogant vendors of new nuclear designs who resent the scrutiny of regulators, but such a dictat is terrible for nuclear safety. New nuclear reactors in the licensing pipeline are mostly experimental in design; they have had little to no operating experience and introduce novel safety concerns that require painstaking and time-consuming experiments and analyses to resolve. Forcing technical reviewers to paper over such gaps in knowledge to meet arbitrary deadlines may lead to faster approvals, but it is sure to create implementation headaches and serious safety problems for anyone who tries to build and operate these first-of-a-kind reactors. And dedicated safety professionals at the NRC are not likely to remain in an environment where they are compelled to compromise their integrity, depleting the workforce needed to process a growing number of applications.
NRC reviews often uncover safety issues that reactor applicants miss. A case in point is the NuScale small modular reactor. During the review of the original NuScale design, NRC staff identified a mechanism that could cause the reactor to become critical and melt down following an emergency shutdown, leading the company to make last-minute design changes.
In the anti-science push that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the order also deems well-established models of the risks of low-level radiation exposure to “lack sound scientific basis.” It directs the agency to “specifically consider adopting determinate radiation limits”—that is, to accept the view of a small minority that there is a “safe” level of radiation and incorporate it into its regulations—despite an actual lack of sound scientific basis supporting such a claim. The NRC recently affirmed in a unanimous vote that the “linear no-threshold model” (the principle that any level of radiation is harmful, but the cancer risk is proportional to the dose), which is the foundation of international radiation protection standards, remains an effective basis for the NRC’s regulatory framework. Compelling the NRC to rewrite its regulations based not on the current state of scientific knowledge but on pseudoscience will only create chaos and ultimately put the public at unnecessary risk.
Perhaps recognizing that this NRC “reform” will likely render the agency non-functional for the foreseeable future, the administration hedged its bets by issuing two other orders that would bypass NRC licensing altogether. Those orders encourage approval of reactors within the purview of the Defense Department and the Energy Department. This would have a detrimental impact on nuclear safety in both cases: Defense lacks the expertise to conduct such reviews (as it hasn’t approved its own nuclear reactors in decades); and Energy’s self-regulation of nuclear plants would be tainted by conflicts of interest, as the agency would directly benefit from approval of these projects. One order calls for deploying reactors to power artificial intelligence data centers at Energy Department sites, even if they are privately owned and operated. Whether this order actually expands Energy Department authority to approve reactors for commercial purposes is a complicated question best left for the lawyers. But there is clear intent to sideline the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the relatively high level of public engagement and transparency that the agency offers compared to the Defense and Energy departments.
Another goal of the orders is to “promote American nuclear exports.” But what the administration doesn’t realize is that the NRC’s image (deserved or not) as the world’s “gold standard” nuclear safety regulator is a critical selling point for the US brand and US nuclear vendors. This is especially true for countries new to nuclear power that lack their own regulatory expertise and put their faith in NRC licensing. Yet nearly every action in the orders will undermine global confidence that the NRC is continuing to make independent safety judgments about new reactor designs and isn’t merely doling out seals of approval to Trump’s preferred cronies of the moment. Also, adopting radiation protection standards that violate international norms is not likely to bolster confidence in US designs around the world.
The NRC has been given a new mission to facilitate nuclear power at the expense of public health and environmental protection. But it doesn’t have to choose to accept it. It’s no surprise that an administration that embraces conflicts of interest would not care about preserving NRC’s non-promotional status. But unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, it is far from clear that independent agencies are obligated to follow executive orders—and as an independent agency, the NRC would be well justified in rejecting any attempt to negate Congress’ chief rationale for creating it in 1974. Chairman David Wright often says that safety is the NRC’s “North Star.” Now he can show that he means what he says by rebuffing President Trump’s crude and possibly illegal attempt to effectively destroy the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and undermine its authority to protect the public from potentially disastrous corner-cutting by the nuclear industry.
For decades, the nuclear industry has blamed overregulation for the cost overruns and delays that have plagued new projects and caused it to lose the confidence of investors. Now, these dangerous executive orders call the bluff. If the NRC complies with them and reduces itself to a rubber-stamp, the public will be increasingly at risk. Only time will tell if the industry, even without needed oversight and reasonable regulation, can build nuclear plants on schedule and on budget, or if it will finally have to grapple with the real root causes of its failure to thrive.
The Nuclear Gambit: Trump just handed the atom to the highest bidder
NJ Today News, 2 June 25, https://njtoday.news/2025/05/31/the-nuclear-gambit-trump-just-handed-the-atom-to-the-highest-bidder/
The air in America reeks of uranium and unchecked ambition as the Trump administration, in a move that can be described as arson, signed a series of executive orders designed to gut the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—the last line of defense between corporate nuclear profiteers and the American public.
This was no mere policy shift.
This was a full-scale sabotage of oversight, a calculated demolition of the very safeguards that have kept Three Mile Island from becoming a recurring nightmare. With the stroke of a pen, Trump has effectively turned the NRC into a rubber-stamp factory, slashing staff, silencing public input, and fast-tracking reactor approvals with all the caution of a drunk gambler doubling down on a losing hand.
The Death of Independent Regulation
The NRC was created for one reason: to keep nuclear power from killing people. But in Trump’s America, profit margins matter more than containment walls. His executive order, dripping with disdain for “overregulation,” directs the NRC to stop worrying about “trivial risks”—as if radiation exposure were a mere nuisance, like a parking ticket.
Meanwhile, the newly christened Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a bureaucratic black hole designed to strangle federal agencies—will “streamline” the NRC by cutting staff and kneecapping its ability to conduct rigorous safety reviews.
Senator Ed Markey, one of the few voices in Washington still screaming into the void, put it bluntly: “Trump wants to turn this critical regulatory agency into the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear energy without safeguards and despite the law that states the NRC has no role in promoting the expansion of nuclear activity. This executive order is a giveaway to the nuclear industry, which has a track record that includes mismanaging for 15 years and at a $35 billion price tag, building just one nuclear power plant in Georgia. That is the very definition of waste.”
The Corporate Handshake
Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. Standing beside Trump at the signing ceremony was Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S. Constellation has big plans—like restarting Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 reactor, the same site where a partial meltdown in 1979 nearly turned Pennsylvania into a no-go zone.
Dominguez, ever the corporate evangelist, whined about “silly questions” slowing down permits—as if nuclear safety were some bureaucratic prank rather than a matter of life and death.
And why the rush? Because AI needs power.
That’s right—the same tech bros who brought us algorithmic chaos now demand 24/7 nuclear juice to fuel their data centers.
Never mind that the last two reactors built in the U.S. were seven years late and $18 billion over budget. Never mind that small modular reactors (SMRs), the industry’s latest pipe dream, are financial black holes propped up by taxpayer subsidies. The grift must go on.
The Ghosts of Uranium Past
But the darkest specter looming over this radioactive power grab is uranium mining—an industry with a legacy of death and environmental ruin.
The Navajo Nation still bears the scars of decades of exploitation, with poisoned water, cancer clusters, and abandoned mines littering their land. Now, with Trump’s orders expanding domestic uranium production, those horrors may return under the banner of “energy dominance.”
Amber Reimondo of the Grand Canyon Trust put it best: “They’re repeating history, pretending the lessons were never learned.”
The Fallout
What does this all mean? It means fewer safety checks. It means rushed reactor designs. It means communities silenced in the name of “efficiency.” And, most of all, it means a windfall for nuclear executives while taxpayers foot the bill for their inevitable disasters.
Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists put it bluntly: “This is a recipe for catastrophe.”
But in Trump’s America, catastrophe is just another business opportunity.
Welcome to the atomic age, version 2.0—where the only thing more unstable than the reactors is the maniac in charge of them.
Trump Says New Iran Deal Must Allow US To ‘Blow Up Whatever We Want’
A senior Iranian adviser said the proposal would amount to “submission and surrender”
by Will Porter May 30, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/05/30/trump-says-new-iran-deal-must-allow-us-to-blow-up-whatever-we-want/
President Donald Trump argued that any revived nuclear accord with Iran should permit the United States to destroy the country’s nuclear infrastructure and send inspectors to Iranian facilities at any time.
The president outlined his vision for a new agreement during a White House presser on Wednesday, calling for a “very strong document” that would effectively give Washington carte blanche over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
“I want it very strong – where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but [with] nobody getting killed,” he told reporters. “We can blow up a lab, but nobody is gonna be in the lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up.”
He did not elaborate on those remarks, however, leaving it unclear whether Washington had actually pushed for such major concessions at the negotiating table. The Islamic Republic would be unlikely to accept a deal under those terms.
Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, later denounced Trump’s comments in a social media post, suggesting his proposal would cross Tehran’s “red lines.”
“Efforts to reach Iran’s nuclear plants and ‘blow up their facilities’ have been a dream of previous US presidents,” he wrote. “Iran is an independent state with a strong defense structure, a resilient people, and clear red lines. Negotiations are a means to progress and preserve national interests and honor, not submission and surrender.”
During the same news conference on Wednesday, Trump said he had urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from military action against Iran amid the ongoing nuclear talks, arguing the move would be “inappropriate” as the two sides were “very close to a solution.” He went on to claim that a new agreement could be reached with Tehran in “a couple weeks,” though his previous assessments have proven overly optimistic.
The threat of an Israeli attack has loomed large over the US-Iran negotiations, as Tel Aviv continues to accuse Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons despite repeated American intelligence assessments to the contrary.
During a visit to Iran last month, Saudi Arabia’s defense chief reportedly warned top Iranian officials that failure to “quickly” reach a deal with the US could prompt airstrikes by Israel. The Saudi minister added that Trump had “little patience for drawn-out negotiations,” and suggested that a new conflict with Tel Aviv would destabilize the region, according to sources cited by Reuters.
Will Porter is assistant news editor and book editor at the Libertarian Institute, and a regular contributor at Antiwar.com. Find more of his work at Consortium News and ZeroHedge.
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- April 2026 (317)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 