Trump proposes nuclear deal with Russia and China to halve defense budgets
‘We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things,’ the US president said
Guardian staff and agencies in Washington, Fri 14 Feb 2025
Donald Trump said that he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent and said he hopes to gain commitments from the US adversaries to cut their own spending.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive,” Trump said.
While the US and Russia have held massive stockpiles of weapons since the cold war, Trump predicted that China would catch up in their capability to exact nuclear devastation “within five or six years”.
He said that if the weapons were ever called to use, “that’s going to be probably oblivion”.
Trump said he would look to engage in nuclear talks with the two countries once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say: ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”
Trump in his first term tried and failed to bring China into nuclear arms reduction talks when the US and Russia were negotiating an extension of a pact known as New Start. Russia suspended its participation in the treaty during the Biden administration, as the US and Russia continued on massive programs to extend the lifespans of or replace their cold war-era nuclear arsenals………………………
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/13/trump-nuclear-russia-china
Trump Promises Billions in Defense Cuts
State of the Union: Trump said that Elon Musk’s DOGE will audit the Pentagon and Department of Education.
Mason Letteau Stallings, Feb 9, 2025 more https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-promises-billions-in-defense-cuts/
Trump said that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would soon lead an audit of the Pentagon and “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
The Department of Education will be another one of Musk’s targets, Trump said. “I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education.”
Trump’s comments came during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bret Baier of Fox News.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, in a separate interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” offered that military shipbuilding should be an area of interest for DOGE. “There is plenty to look into in ship building, which is an absolute mess,” he said.
According to Waltz, the Pentagon suffers from widespread problems. “Everything seems to cost too much, take too long, and deliver too little to the soldiers,” he said, adding that “we do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
February 10, 2025 , By Michael Klare / TomDispatch
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
……………………………………………………………………………… Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. ……………………………………………………………………..
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th…………………………………………………………………….
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Michael Klare, Droning Washington
Posted on February 9, 2025
Yes, some of us still remember that the now-famous (or do I mean infamous?) phrase “the military-industrial complex” actually came from the farewell address of former World War II general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. But how often do any of us remember the all-too-painfully appropriate context in which he offered it to the American people — as a warning about a future that today is so much ours, as the budget of the Department of Defense (so it’s still called despite the many disastrous and anything but “defensive” wars the U.S. military has fought in this century) heads for the trillion-dollar mark? Here, then, to introduce military expert and TomDispatch regular Michael Klare’s eye-opening account of where the MIC (the shorthand version of that phrase) is heading in the age of the drone and artificial intelligence, is the larger context for Eisenhower’s first use of the term:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.”
And more than 60 years later, with Eisenhower’s grimly visionary statement in mind, let Klare suggest just how eerily on target he was. If you don’t believe me, note that tech giant Anduril is now setting up its first factory in the Midwest — Columbus, Ohio, to be exact — at the cost of an initial billion dollars to produce “autonomous systems and weapons,” as artificial intelligence prepares to go to war. Tom
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.
In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.
Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”
To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.
Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.
After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.
Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.
Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”
His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. …………………………
President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.
Anatomy of an AI Coup
It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It’s a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.
Tech Policy Press, Eryk Salvaggio / Feb 9, 2025
DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology for manufacturing excuses. While lacking clear definitions or tools for assessment, AI has nonetheless seized the imagination of politicians and managers across government, academia, and industry. But what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, “AI can do it.” Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place.
We are in the midst of a political coup that, if successful, would forever change the nature of American government. It is not taking place in the streets. There is no martial law. It is taking place cubicle by cubicle in federal agencies and in the mundane automation of bureaucracy. The rationale is based on a productivity myth that the goal of bureaucracy is merely what it produces (services, information, governance) and can be isolated from the process through which democracy achieves those ends: debate, deliberation, and consensus.
AI then becomes a tool for replacing politics. The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to “government waste.” However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are banking on a popular but false delusion that word prediction technologies make meaningful inferences about the world. They are using it to sidestep Congressional oversight of the budget, which is, Constitutionally, the allotment of resources to government programs through representative politics.
While discussing an AI coup may seem conspiratorial or paranoid, it’s banal. In contrast to Musk and his acolytes’ ongoing claims of “existential risk,” which envision AI taking over the world through brute force, an AI coup rises from collective decisions about how much power we hand to machines. It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It’s a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.
The Cast
We can set the stage by describing the cast. In Elon Musk’s part-time job at DOGE, he takes the lead role. His team aims to use generative AI to find budget efficiencies even as he eviscerates the civil service. The DOGE entity has already attempted to take over the Treasury Department’s computer system to distribute funds and effectively disbanded USAID. Musk hopes to deliver an “AI-first strategy” for government agencies, such as GSAi, “a custom generative AI chatbot for the US General Services Administration.”
…………………………Then there is the supporting cast. ………………………………………………………………….
The Plan
Amidst the chaos in Washington, Silicon Valley firms will continue to build their case that they are the answer…………………………………………………………………………………. The solution will be a “centralized data repository” hooked to a chatbot and a suite of promises.
………………………………………………………….. OpenAI’s ChatGPTGov is a prime example of a system that is ready to come into play. By shifting government decisions to AI systems they must know are unsuitable, these tech elites avoid a political debate they would probably lose. Instead, they create a nationwide IT crisis that they alone can fix.
Weaken the Opposition
As the technical elite embeds generative AI into hollowed-out institutions, the administration will carry on its effort to eviscerate independent research institutions. Trump campaigned in 2023 for an “American University,” an online resource presenting “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing” that “will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.” Trump proposed that American University would be funded by “taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
………………………………………….. Eventually, this would create a crisis through which higher education, with its commitments to diversity already neutered, could be starved to death. A weakened university research ecosystem would strengthen the private sector by luring scientists to their labs, diminishing independent research oversight.
……………………………………………….DOGE aims to replace government bureaucracy with technical infrastructure. Reversing and dismantling dependencies embedded in infrastructure is slow and difficult, especially when efforts to study systemic bias are prohibited. The ingredients for “technofascism” will be assembled.
Generating a Crisis
Eventually, the shoddy infrastructure of these automated government agencies and services will produce language or code that creates an AI-driven national crisis. Because no AI system is presently suited to the complex task of governance, failure is inevitable. Deploying that system anyway is a human decision, and humans should be held accountable.
The designers of AI have repeatedly told us that it poses a threat akin to the atomic bomb.
……………………………………….. Years of bipartisan lobbying by groups focused narrowly on AI’s “existential risks” have positioned it as a security threat controllable only by Silicon Valley’s technical elite. They now stand poised to benefit from any crisis……………………………………………….
Algorithmic Resistance
The AI coup emerged not just from the union of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is born of practices and beliefs now standard among Silicon Valley ideologues that are obscure to most Americans. However, the tech industry’s weakness is that it has never understood the emotional and social complexity of actual human beings.
…………………….Speed is essential to their work. They know they cannot create a public consensus for this effort and must move before it takes shape. By moving fast and breaking things, DOGE forces a collapse of the system where unanswered questions are met with technological solutions. Shifting the conversation to the technical is a way of locking policymakers and the public out of decisions and shifting that power to the code they write.
…………………………………..Do not fall for the trap. Democratic participation and representative politics in government are not “waste.” Nor should arguments focus on the technical limits of particular systems, as the tech elites are constantly revising expectations upward through endless promises of exponential improvements. The argument must be that no computerized system should replace the voice of voters. Do not ask if the machine can be trusted. Ask who controls them.
https://www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-an-ai-coup/
America’s nuclear gamble: The dangerous push to resume atmospheric testing
Experts warn of catastrophic fallout as calls grow to restart nuclear weapons tests abandoned since 1963.
By Karl Grossman, February 10, 2025
“The United States may need to restart explosive nuclear weapons testing,” declared Robert Peters, research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing organization close to the Trump administration, in a lengthy report last month. Issued on January 15, it was titled: “America Must Prepare to Test Nuclear Weapons.”
Peters stated that “the President may order the above-ground testing of a nuclear weapon….And while the United States leaving the [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty may not be optimal and may indeed have negative downstream effects, doing so may be necessary to stave off further adversary escalation.”
There has not been a nuclear weapon tested above-ground in the United States since 1962, Peters said. That was a year before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by the U.S., Soviet Union and United Kingdom. It prohibits nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. It allowed underground tests as long as they didn’t result in “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the state under whose jurisdiction or control” the test was conducted.
“Resuming atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons would be disastrous,” says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He cited the “lessons learned from above-ground nuclear weapons testing—the radioactive fall-out that harmed many people, especially infants and children.”
Testimony by a co-founder of the Radiation and Public Health Project, the late Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a physicist, before the then Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was instrumental in President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
As President Kennedy said in a 1963 national address: “This treaty can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He said that “over the years the number and the yield of weapons tested have rapidly increased and so have the radioactive hazards from such testing. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe.” Kennedy spoke of “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs” as a result.
The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page publication “Project 2025” is the “governing agenda” for the Trump administration, writes Susan Caskie, executive editor of the magazine The Week, in its current issue. “Many of its authors and contributors,” she noted, are now members of the administration, some appointed to “even Cabinet posts.” …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Are we, if there is a return to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, to go back to the years of radioactive fallout—and the resulting health impacts? And, as Kennedy stated, “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.” more https://www.nationofchange.org/2025/02/10/americas-nuclear-gamble-the-dangerous-push-to-resume-atmospheric-testing/
Uranium fever collides with industry’s dark past in Navajo country
by Jacob Lorinc, Phys Org, 20Jan 25
A few miles south of the Grand Canyon, thousands of tons of uranium ore, reddish-gray, blue and radioactive, are piled up high in a clearing in the forest.
They’ve been there for months, stranded by a standoff between the mining company that dug them deep out of the ground, Energy Fuels Inc., and the leader of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren.
Back in the summer, Energy Fuels had triggered an uproar when it loaded some of the ore onto a truck, slapped a “radioactive” sign over the taillights and drove it through the heart of Navajo territory. Radioactive is an alarming word anywhere, but here in Navajo country, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that powered America’s nuclear arms race with the USSR and spewed toxic waste into the land, it causes terror.
Those fears have only grown in the past couple of years as nuclear power came back in vogue and sparked a uranium rush in mining camps all across the Southwest. So when the news made it to Nygren that morning, he was furious. No one had sought his consent for the shipment. He quickly ordered dozens of police officers to throw on their sirens, fan out and intercept the truck.
The dragnet turned up nothing in the end—the truck snuck through—but the hard-line response delivered a warning, amplified over social media and ratified days later by the governor of Arizona, to the miners: Stay out of Navajo country.
Cut off from the lone processing mill in the U.S.—all the main routes cut through Navajo territory—executives at Energy Fuels stockpiled it by the entrance of the mine. When the heaps of crushed rock grew too sprawling, they pulled the miners out of the tunnels and turned the drilling machines off.
The standoff represents the ugly side of the world’s sudden re-embrace of nuclear power. Yes, there’s the promise of a steady stream of clean energy to fuel the AI boom, fight climate change and, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, replace Russian oil and gas.
But there’s also the fear—both around the nuclear reactor sites popping up across the world and in the communities surrounding mining operations in Australia, Kyrgyzstan and Navajo Nation, where the locals are still documenting cancer cases decades after the last of the Cold War-era outfits shut down.
It’s like the backlash erupting over all sorts of other mining projects crucial to the transition away from fossil fuels—lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, zinc—just with the added threat of radioactivity.”Generations and generations of my people have been hurt,” Nygren, 38, said in an interview. “Go find uranium somewhere else.”
Truth is there isn’t all that much uranium at the Energy Fuels mine, known as Pinyon Plain, or any of the other half-dozen mines that opened in the Southwest the past couple years.
In most cases, crews are simply combing through the untouched veins of mines that were closed when the 2011 Fukushima disaster scared global leaders away from nuclear power and crashed the uranium market. Pooled all together, they only hold a fraction of the hundreds of millions of pounds of ore buried in any of the top mines in Canada, Kazakhstan and Namibia.
So the rush of mining activity here serves as a testament to the magnitude of the uranium fever sweeping the globe right now. At just over $70 per pound, the price is up some 200% over the past five years—even after it gave back a chunk of its gains in 2024.
……………………………………………………….At Pinyon Plain, they’re used to setbacks. Prospectors discovered the deposit in the 1970s but by the time all the mining permits were secured a decade later, the global uranium market had collapsed. Just like in 2011, the initial trigger was a nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl meltdown. And then, a few years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the nuclear arms race was over.
Plans were hatched over the years to open the mine as uranium prices bumped higher, but the enthusiasm would die as soon as the rally faded. It took the 2022 price surge to get Chalmers, who’s been scouting out Pinyon Plain ever since he first joined Energy Fuels back in the 1980s, to finally ram it through.
Now, after a single shipment to the mill in Utah, he’s stuck again. As he sees it, routes 89 and 160 are federal highways and, as a result, subject to federal shipping laws. The company doesn’t need the Navajos’ authorization, he says. To Nygren, every single inch of Navajo territory is subject to tribal law……………………..
Animosity towards mining companies runs high on Navajo land. It’s visible everywhere. On huge roadside billboards and small office signs, in fading pinks and yellows and jet blacks, too. They read “Radioactive Pollution Kills” and “Haul No” and, along the main entrance to Cameron, a hard-scrabble village on the territory’s western edge, “No Uranium Mining.”
A few miles down the road, big mounds of sand streaked gray and blue rise, one after the other, high above the vast desert landscape. They are the tailings from some of the uranium mines that were abandoned in the territory last century.
To Ray Yellowfeather, a 50-year-old construction worker, the tailings were always the “blue hills,” just one big playground for him and his childhood friends.
“We would climb up the blue hills and slide back down,” Yellowfeather says. “Nobody told us they were dangerous.”
Years later, they would be cordoned off by the Environmental Protection Agency as it began work to clean up the mines. By then, though, the damage was done. Like many around here, Yellowfeather says he’s lost several family members to stomach cancer. The last of them was his mother in 2022
Yellowfeather admits he doesn’t know exactly what caused their cancer but, he says, “I have to think it has to do with the piles of radioactive waste all around us.” It’s in the construction material in many of the homes and buildings and in the aquifers, too. To this day, drinking water is shipped into some of the hardest-hit areas.
The U.S. government has recognized the harm its nuclear arms projects have done to communities in the Southwest. In 1990, Congress passed a law to compensate victims who contracted cancer and other diseases. It paid out some $2.5 billion over the ensuing three decades.
The EPA, meanwhile, has been in charge of the clean-up of the abandoned mines. Two decades after the program began, though, only a small percentage have been worked on at all.
This is giving mining companies an opportunity to curry favor in tribal communities by offering to take over and expedite the clean-up of some mines. Chalmers has made it a key point in negotiations with Nygren.
…………. the EPA released a detailed study on Pinyon Plain. In it, the agency found that operations at the mine could contaminate the water supply of the Havasupai, a tribe tucked in such a remote corner of the Grand Canyon that it receives mail by mule. The report emboldened Havasupai leaders to step up their opposition to the mine, adding to Chalmers’s growing list of problems.”…….. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-uranium-fever-collides-industry-dark.amp?fbclid=IwY2xjawIUwvtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHey6Nv6MJqijcV5suiJOZjDx46rSSzwyrFBVrtbA0McaSeoPu-rhCeR0zQ_aem_N06qMIWp_xVHiPlfOH7DG
Trump Says He’ll Audit the Pentagon-Will it prove to be a bridge too far?
Bill Astore, Feb 09, 2025, https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/trump-says-hell-audit-the-pentagon?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1156402&post_id=156757346&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
President Donald Trump says he’s ready to tackle the Pentagon, which has failed seven audits in a row. He says America might save “trillions” after effective audits. Will it happen?
The Pentagon budget currently sits at roughly $900 billion for this fiscal year, representing more than half of federal discretionary spending. This vast sum doesn’t include (among other things) Homeland Security, nuclear weapons covered by the Department of Energy, the VA (Veterans Administration), and interest on the national debt due to wasteful failed wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
A successful audit of the Pentagon would be a monumental victory for what’s left of American democracy. It may also prove to be a bridge too far for Trump. The National Security State is America’s unofficial fourth branch of government and arguably its most powerful. It is a colossus that hides malfeasance and corruption behind a “top secret” security classification. It deters and prevents efforts at transparency by crying that those who try to expose its crimes are endangering national security. It expects your obedience and praise, not your questions and criticism.
Presidents, of course, are supposed to serve as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. They rarely do. Not nowadays. The U.S. system may in theory rest on civilian control of the military, but the military has been out of control since at least 1947, when it rebranded itself the “Department of Defense” instead of the old War Department. Not coincidentally, every war America has fought since then has been undeclared, i.e. lacking a formal Congressional declaration of war.
America has fought a mind-blowing number of wasteful and illegal wars that have been sold to the people through lies, whether in Vietnam (“The Pentagon Papers”), Iraq (No WMD), Afghanistan (“The Afghan War Papers”), and elsewhere. Few things are needed more in America than an honest reckoning of Pentagon spending—and future Pentagon war plans.
Such a reckoning could very well save our lives—indeed, the world, if done honestly and transparently by true patriots. It could also prove to be a bridge too far—for any president.
Is “Bad Faith”‘s Council for National Policy the Atlas Network’s half-brother?
Ed COMMENT. I put this article up on the Australian website. You might think that it has nothing to do with Australia.
But it does! The fascist chaos now developing in the USA could spread to Australia, as the Atlas Network promotes its Australian off-shoot “Advance”. Advance will funnel $millions into Trumpian-style propaganda, to influence the coming Australian federal election.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy.
February 6, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/is-bad-faiths-council-for-national-policy-the-atlas-networks-half-brother/
The Council for National Policy is the ultra-secret body tracked in the documentary Bad Faith. Are the Mont Pelerin Society fingerprints there just by chance?
The chaos that is erupting from the people around Trump was forecast in the 900 pages of Project 2025 for those paying attention. The firehose of brutality and stupidity is coming too fast for observers to encompass. Whether it’s 25 year olds with the power to alter code in the Bureau of Fiscal Service or a Christian Nationalist-driven freeze on all public spending or trying to deport Navajo people, the whole project reeks of reckless cruelty and apparent irrationality.
Just as Ronald Reagan implemented 2/3 of the first Mandate for Leadership, Donald Trump implemented 2/3 of his first iteration. Now the Mandate is known as Project 2025 and it’s no longer just a “business republican” project. It’s a Christian Nationalist project too. And 2/3 of the first executive orders of this Trump administration came from Project 2025.
The man likely to take the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was revealed as the Christian Nationalist radical he is in this undercover sting operation last year. The chaos is intended to continue. He has said he intends to put career civil servants “in trauma.” He also intends to use the military to crush protests.
This domestic chaos will be deadly; the freeze on USAID spending will kill people sooner. These radicals around Trump do not care: their eugenicist beliefs run deep. It’s a longterm goal: this 2006 annual Atlas Network report contains an essay repeating disdain for foreign aid as a failed concept by (MPS member since 1984, erstwhile president and critical figure in the growth of Atlas and several junktanks), Leonard Liggio. There is no reflection on how many nations need foreign aid because of MPS-driven restructuring and neoliberal interventions to keep those nations impoverished and dependent.
Ronald Reagan, the first de facto Atlas Network US president said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The Trump apparatchiks are trying to make that a vicious reality.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy. They sold the mission as “freedom” in a “free market,” with “small government” staying out of the little guy’s way. That was not the real intent. Democratic projects, rights or a decent life for the individual (below enabler class) were intended by few in the project. Neofeudalism is a more apt label. You are not even to be allowed to protest your (or others’) immiseration.
People committed to the neoliberal project have a firm commitment to making government look ineffective and wasteful. It may be that government efforts to tackle the pandemic risked making people trust government. The steps towards a UBI might have stung badly for people who believe government spending should only serve the already rich. It is likely also that coercive measures like lockdowns, mask wearing and vaccine mandates triggered their socialism-alarms. There is extensive evidence of junktank partners’ investmentin pandemic disinformation and the fighting of public health measures including masking.
It’s possible that the greater inclusivity of a pluralist society might have been enough on its own to repulse the narrow-minds of this machinery; it could be that the pandemic broke them.
Either way, after the worst of the pandemic, one of the Atlas Network’s most pivotal junktanks appointed a Rad Trad Catholic extremist with connections to Opus Dei as its president, in September 2021. Kevin Roberts was an Atlas operative before this. He used to run the Atlas Texas Public Policy Foundation.
He was also however, by 2022, already on the Council for National Policy board.
The Bad Faith (2024) documentary reveals in grim detail how the Council for National Policy (CNP) was the theocratic machine that built the Moral Majority. It was the network that brought together the extremist Evangelical preachers of that movement, media organisations and funders with some of the Republican Party’s most effective strategists. The documentary is based on journalist Anne Nelson’s extensive investigations in Shadow Network.
Key figures amongst the Republican Party strategists that founded the CNP belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, just as the key operators in the Atlas Network did – and do.
(Atlas has, since it was founded in 1981, vacuumed up other junktanks and networks into its web of shared strategies and personnel connections: whether they are Atlas spawned or interlinked can be complex to disentangle. Whether CNP was in part an MPS project at its foundation is opaque. It could be that class interests of a small band of operatives led to overlaps in strategising. The two networks are, however, overtly operating in concert now with both strongly represented in the Project 2025 Advisory Board.)
Catholic zealot Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Many historic clips of Weyrich uttering his extreme beliefs are to be viewed in Bad Faith. In 1981, the CNP was founded to galvanise the 1978 undertaking to use the issue of abortion to create a Christian Republican voter bloc. (In 1978, abortion was a fringe Catholic issue, of little interest to Evangelicals.)
Weyrich’s co-founder at Heritage was Catholic Edwin Feulner, later an MPS president, but a member from 1972. He is also a CNP member.
The CNP’s Republican founders included Episcopalian (Anglican) Morton Blackwell, an MPS member from 2007, who created the Atlas Network-and-CNP’s Leadership Institute founded in 1979. It aims to increase “the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in the public policy process. More than 300,000 conservatives have become leaders through Leadership Institute training.”
Fellow CNP founder was Evangelical? Edwin Meese III who worked with Atlas’s Ronald Reagan from 1966, and was later one of his attorney-generals. Meese was involved with Heritage from 1988. A third was Catholic Richard Viguerie who invented the direct mail scam that fostered the demonising of Democrats to scare grannies out of their pittance.
Both Atlas and the CNP receive funding from Charles Koch and his circle including the Bradleys. On the CNP leaked membership list, Lawson Bader is identified. He is an MPS member and has been president and CEO of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund since 2015. Donors Trust is known as the “dark money ATM of the right.” The Mercer family, that funded Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, is also listed as a CNP donor. The united Devos and Prince families are key donors. Betsy DeVos has roles at several Atlas junktanks. Peter Thiel, tech plutocrat, is now a significant funder of Donors Trust.
Boeing, Coors, Cinemark, Forbes media and Morgan Stanley all have senior figures affiliated with CNP. (Coors money was central to the Heritage Foundation’s funding, with Joseph Coors, Evangelical and white supremacist, a co-founder.)
Currently the CNP and Atlas share several critical partner organisations apart from Heritage and Leadership such as the Federalist Society which has been described as creating the imperial juristocracy around Donald Trump’s second presidency. Another is the American Legislative Exchange (ALEC) that produces reactionary and anti-labour model bills for state legislatures to reproduce. A thirdis Americans For Tax Reform, which Grover Norquist (CNP member) founded at Ronald Reagan’s “request.”
The Acton Institute, Media Research Center, Capital Research Center, Buckeye Institute, National Center for Public Policy Research, Center for Security Policy, Young America’s Foundation, American Conservative Union (parent of CPAC), Discovery Institute and Americans for Prosperity are other joint members. Tea Party Patriots is a CNP member that is spawned as an astroturf outfit out of Atlas’s Freedomworks.
The CNP’s members include the Club for Growth, which is another Koch-supported entity. It funds Republican candidates who fight labour rights. The farce of fighting for the working man that Trump’s campaign feigns is exposed by the many junktanks here strategising to suppress workers.(1)
The CNP is a particularly ugly partner for the Atlas Network which advertises itself as “strengthening the worldwide freedom movement.” It unites the NRA with Turning Point USA with a range of hate groups promoting Islamophobia and homophobia. Its Christofascist members fight rights for women as well.
A key member is the Alliance Defending Freedom which the SPLC summarises as having supported “the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.” Not much freedom there.
The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) founded by Senator Jim DeMint, former Heritage Foundation president, in 2017, is a CNP member since 2020. This sub-network has spawned a range of extreme election denial and reactionary policy junktanks. One notable CPI entity is America First Legal, white supremacist Stephen Miller’s critical creation. It is largely funded by Bradley donations.
One of the significant names on the CNP list is Steve Bannon. He has been fighting for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” for years. His esoteric traditionalist beliefs call for the destruction of the age of slaves (democracy) to be replaced by the age of priests. His ally Curtis Yarvin, inspiration of many of the tech-fascist oligarchs, argues a CEO-monarch should replace the democratic experiment. It looks like Elon Musk thinks that should be him.
Many of the Christofascist organisations and individuals in the CNP are anti-democratic, believing that a theocracy is the answer to America’s ills. There is, at minimum, no freedom of religion allowed.
The destruction around Trump is a genuine threat to American’s democratic experiment.
That Reagan’s Mandate for Leadership should have become Project 2025 is startling on its own. The linking of Atlas’s ostensible campaign for freedom with the CNP’s campaign for theocratic coercion illustrates starkly that the freedom is only for a few.
* * * * *
Mont Pelerin is a secretive, invitation only organisation, but some of its leaked members can be found here. The Council for National Policy is ultra-secretive but its leaked members can be found here.
(1) (Business donors who had captured former Democrat Kirsten Sinema years back seem to have sent her back from early retirement to vote down Biden’s choice for a Labor Relations Board that might have been able to protect workers’ rights into the Trump era.)
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
State Dept. Plans New $7 Billion Arms Sale to Israel
This comes as President Trump talks up an ethnic cleansing plan for the Gaza Strip
by Connor Freeman February 8, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/08/state-dept-plans-new-7-billion-arms-sale-to-israel/
The State Department has formally notified Congress of its plans for a massive arms sale to Israel worth over $7 billion, including thousands of missiles and bombs, the Associated Press reported on Friday. This follows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC this week and Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will “own” Gaza after it is ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Palestinian population.
Per the State Department, Congress was notified of two separate sales, one is worth $6.75 billion. This first sale includes 2,800 500-pound bombs and 166 small-diameter bombs, along with thousands of guidance kits, fuses, bomb components, and other equipment. Deliveries of these bombs would begin later this year. The other package, worth $660 million, includes 3,000 Hellfire missiles and related equipment. Deliveries for this second arms sale are expected to take place by 2028. According to the AP, the use of these missiles will require the IDF to receive supplemental training by the US military.
Officials from the Joe Biden administration informally made Congress aware of the sale last month, at the time they said some of the weapons could be sent from current Pentagon stockpiles but most of the arms would take at least a year, or more likely several years, to deliver.
This comes as a fragile ceasefire in Gaza is still holding, despite the IDF killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza since it was implemented and amid hostage exchanges on both sides. Israeli officials indicate that the increased military aid and arms sales are meant to compel Netanyahu to see the ceasefire deal through to its second and third phases, following the current 42-day truce. Last month, Trump released a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs that the previous administration had paused over a dispute regarding the Israeli invasion of Rafah last year.
Earlier this week, Trump asked leaders in Congress to approve another $1 billion arms transfer, financed with US military aid, that includes 4,700 1,000-pound bombs worth over $700 million and $300 million worth of armored bulldozers. The bulldozers are infamously used to carry out violent assaults and home demolitions in the occupied West Bank.
The news of the additional arms sales comes as Trump is talking up his plan for Gaza to be ethnically cleansed before the US takes over the Strip and begins a huge real estate development project there. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered the IDF to prepare for the “voluntary departure” of the Palestinians from Gaza in accordance with Trump’s plan. He said the Palestinians should be sent to Western countries like Ireland, Norway, and Spain which have recognized the state of Palestine and been highly critical of Tel Aviv’s genocidal onslaught.
Initially, Trump had insisted that nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza could be sent to Egypt and Jordan but the proposal was sharply rejected by Cairo and Amman along with the Palestinians themselves.
Therefore, in order to pursue this forced displacement plan, the Israelis will have to restart their genocidal campaign in Gaza where, according to a recent study in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 70,000 people have been killed as result of Israeli military action.
Scores of American doctors, nurses, and surgeons, who have spent hundreds of weeks combined volunteering in Gaza, wrote in an open letter to the White House last fall that tens of thousands more Palestinians had been starved to death as a result of the US-backed siege and Israel’s consistent blocking of vital humanitarian aid.
Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on the Conflicts of Interest podcast. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on Liberty Weekly, Around the Empire, and Parallax Views. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96.
Top Pentagon contractors poised for gains as Trump pushes missile shield expansion
The proposed “Iron Dome for America” system is heavily reliant on space-based sensors and potentially controversial space-based interceptors
Space News, by Sandra Erwin, February 3, 2025
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top defense contractors are positioning themselves to capitalize on a new missile defense initiative announced by the Trump administration. Executives from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris told Wall Street analysts last week that they are well-equipped to support the administration’s push for a “next-generation missile defense shield.”
President Donald Trump’s executive order, titled “The Iron Dome for America,” directs the Department of Defense to accelerate the development and deployment of an advanced missile defense system. The order calls for a multi-layered approach capable of countering a range of threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, with a heavy reliance on space-based sensors and potentially controversial space-based interceptors.
“We welcome the urgency that the Trump administration is placing on protecting the homeland from escalating global missile threats,” said Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden during a fourth-quarter earnings call. The company has contracts for satellite-based missile detection and hypersonic weapon interceptors under development.
………..Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris are prime contractors in key missile defense programs that could expand under the initiative. L3Harris CEO Christopher Kubasik highlighted his company’s role in producing missile-defense tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer program, a network of satellites designed to detect and track hypersonic threats from low Earth orbit………………………………………………………………………………………..
The administration has yet to provide a cost estimate for the ambitious Iron Dome initiative. The Pentagon’s missile defense efforts are currently funded through a complex web of programs. The Missile Defense Agency receives approximately $10 billion annually, while the Space Development Agency operates with a budget of about $4 billion. The U.S. Space Force maintains additional multi-billion dollar funding streams for missile-warning and missile-detection satellites. https://spacenews.com/top-pentagon-contractors-poised-for-gains-as-trump-pushes-missile-shield-expansion/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Contractors%20prep%20for%20%20Iron%20Dome%20for%20America&utm_campaign=FIRST%20UP%202025-02-04
As China and the U.S. Race Toward A.I. Armageddon, Does It Matter Who Wins?
it doesn’t matter if the U.S. has no real enemies. The military industrial complex must continue to unceasingly grow, according to the logic of the Megamachine. It will invent enemies in order to justify that growth. That’s why we now have thousands of nuclear bombs and a sprawling, AI-driven, globally networked satellite and base infrastructure that encases the Earth like an iron maiden.
Koohan Paik-Mander CounterPunch , 7 Feb 25
A longstanding Sinophobia in the U.S. goes back to the 19th century, with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the tax on Chinese miners during the Gold Rush, and the exclusion from being able to testify in court.
Evidence of this entrenched history lingers today, in the trade sanctions against China, belligerent rhetoric from both Republicans and Democrats that led to a rash of violence against elderly Asian-Americans on American streets, as well as billions of dollars spent to fortify overseas bases in preparation for a U.S.-China war.
And the refusal to cooperate meaningfully with China on anything. As a result, the U.S. is thick in the midst of an AI arms race with China that is predicated on both nations’ dangerous faith in techno-salvation.
Thanks to the legacy of Sinophobia, it takes a whole lot to elicit an overwhelming embrace of China from average Americans, even if temporarily. But that’s what’s happened twice in the last month. The first time was the TikTok fiasco, when millions of distraught TikTok users had had their favorite platform snatched from them like a pacifier from a baby’s mouth. They found solace not in Meta nor X (as had been the plan), but rather, in the Chinese social media platform, Xiaohongshu, also known as “RedNote.”
The second instance was the debut of DeepSeek AI, which came on the heels of one of the most pompous pageants of delusional grandeur ever seen. It was Trump’s inauguration ceremony for his second term. Shortly thereafter, a press conference was held. Three tech oligarchs and the president bloviated about their Stargate AI project. It would cost $500 billion. That’s what they say is needed to stay ahead of the Chinese. (For some reason, the excuse of “staying ahead of the Chinese” seems to justify any astronomical expense.)
In the mean time, thousands of people have been left homeless due to wild fires in L.A., flooding in North Carolina, and even to this day, people from Lahaina, Maui are still without a place to call home. But none of these Americans got a press conference.
Instead, it was the oligarchs who took the stage. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son of Starbank, and Open AI founder Sam Altman described Stargate’s plans to build clusters of gigantic data centers across the country from sea to shining sea, each one bigger than any Walmart Superstore. It’s Manifest Destiny for data.
No one at the press conference mentioned that many of the data centers would be built on federal lands, would collectively use as much power as small European nations, require massive volumes of water, or would require a network of nuclear reactors. They did make the dubious promise their AI would cure cancer and heart disease. I think the guys who got wampum for Manhattan got a better deal.
A few days afterward, as if on cue, a Chinese company called DeepSeek that no one had ever heard of dropped their bombshell. The Chinese firm had released its own AI that was open-source, used fifty times less energy, performed on par with all the American AIs, and cost a gazillion times less to produce. Suddenly, the mirage of Silicon Valley’s invincibility faded away to reveal an overvalued industry that had gotten too fat, lazy and full of itself to innovate anything except marketing promises to investors. The very next day, a veritable trillion dollars peeled like a banana off the U.S. stock exchange tech sector. The story everywhere was that Chinese AI had officially “caught up” with the U.S.
When people cheered the scrappy Chinese underdog, it was as much a middle finger to the overblown hubris of the tech oligarchs as it was an embrace of Chinese innovation. It was motivated largely by the same class anger that rose up to lionize Luigi Mangione for killing a health insurance CEO with three inscribed bullets. People had been galled by the consolidated display of the broligarchy on the dais at the Trump inauguration, similar to the royals waving at the minions from the balcony at Buckingham Palace. Their message was unequivocal: We own you.
DeepSeek has been described as a Robin Hood of tech, taking from the rich to give AI to the poor. Sentiments of class anger buoyed admiration for the unknown company from China. They disregarded, for once, the stubborn stains of Sinophobia.
What was also overlooked in the midst of DeepSeek’s dazzling display of stock market disruption was responsible restraint around technology. As both China and the U.S. go hurtling ever faster toward Armageddon in the race to dominate in AI, they have both bought into techno-utopian ideologies, lock, stock and barrel………………………………………………………………….
China and the U.S. are entangled in a geopolitical rivalry, with existential stakes. Sure, it’s satisfying to enjoy the smarting blow that newcomer DeepSeek landed to the capitalist Goliath — China one, U.S. zero. But it’s not a boxing match. Such narrow framing loses sight of the fact that the race for accessible AI is a race for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………The weapons industry wouldn’t tolerate the thought of degrowth, just like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon et al. can’t bear it today. The war industry dealt with it by instead aggressively manufacturing enemies and reasons for war faster than it could manufacture more weapons. Now, forty years after the end of the Cold War with Russia, the war budget has increased every year and is now up to one trillion dollars, Los Alamos has begun manufacturing nukes for the first time in decades last year, we’ve got 800 bases around the world, rocket launchpads in wilderness areas, and thousands of satellites in the heavens.
It’s hard to get one’s bearings, especially in the midst of the engineered political maelstrom of the current moment. Fortunately, the books haven’t been burned (yet), so we can turn to the thinkers of the recent past for guidance.
The technology critics of the 20th century, such as Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Chellis Glendinning, urged us to conceptualize technology not just as a single artifact, such as a laptop, or just AI, or just a satellite, or just a nuclear weapon, but rather, as a whole way of thinking, a way of organizing society, our institutions, a way of being. Technology is not a one-off. It is systemic. Lewis Mumford called all of our technological society the Megamachine.
Every project, technology, organization, and endeavor is an expression of the Megamachine where the economic-growth imperative reigns supreme. It is all of a piece. It doesn’t matter if DeepSeek uses less energy. The growth imperative must be met……
Likewise, it doesn’t matter if the U.S. has no real enemies. The military industrial complex must continue to unceasingly grow, according to the logic of the Megamachine. It will invent enemies in order to justify that growth. That’s why we now have thousands of nuclear bombs and a sprawling, AI-driven, globally networked satellite and base infrastructure that encases the Earth like an iron maiden.
The poster child for the Megamachine in the digital age is Amazon. Former chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan’s seminal essay “Amazon’s Anti-trust Paradox,” tracks the logic of the behemoth’s growth over its history. She brilliantly unravels how Amazon decisively prioritized sheer growth over profit for its first eight years. The goal was to entrench a broad-spanning networked infrastructure that would guarantee a monopoly and continue to consolidate market dominion. They forwent profits for almost a decade expressly in order to monopolize the market. Again, the imperative for growth and global domination trumps decent common sense.
Former chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan’s seminal essay “Amazon’s Anti-trust Paradox,” tracks the logic of the behemoth’s growth over its history. She brilliantly unravels how Amazon decisively prioritized sheer growth over profit for its first eight years. The goal was to entrench a broad-spanning networked infrastructure that would guarantee a monopoly and continue to consolidate market dominion. They forwent profits for almost a decade expressly in order to monopolize the market. Again, the imperative for growth and global domination trumps decent common sense.
……………………………………………………………The sooner that the U.S. and China treat one another as fellow members of humankind, rather than adversaries, the real work of cooperation can begin. Both nations are home to millions of indigenous peoples who carry the know-how for surviving and thriving for generations into the future. Their wisdom is more precious than any AI. There’s no shortage of problems that our combined brilliance can improve if not solve: climate, nuclear weapons, species extinction, toxic waste clean-up, housing, microplastics, and last but not least, dangerous unregulated technologies. None of these colossal crises can be addressed as long as we are pointing fingers while locked in the downward spiral of a competition for global hegemony that the U.S. can never win.
Some of us remember the shining moment in history when the U.S. and Soviet Union built trust and signed a raft of nuclear arms control agreements. They modeled what ratcheting down tensions and the path to peace looks like. It would behoove the U.S. and China to follow their lead today, not only with nukes but also with AI and other emerging technologies. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/07/as-china-and-the-u-s-race-toward-a-i-armageddon-does-it-matter-who-wins/
If DOGE Goes Nuclear
The risk of messing with the wrong computer system,
The Atlantic By Ross Andersen, 6 Feb 25
You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.
As recently as yesterday morning, Musk made clear that DOGE will go line by line through the government’s books looking for fat targets for budget-cutting, including those that are classified—especially those that are classified. DOGE employees are bound to notice NNSA, a 1,800-person organization that sits inside the Department of Energy and burns through $20 billion every year, much of it on classified work. But as they set out to discover exactly how the money is spent, they should proceed with care. Musk’s incursions into other agencies have reportedly risked exposing sensitive information to unqualified personnel, and obstructing people’s access to lifesaving medicine. According to several nuclear-security experts and a former senior department official, taking this same approach at the NNSA could make nuclear material at home and abroad less safe.
The NNSA was created by Congress in 1999 in order to consolidate several Department of Energy functions under one bureaucratic roof: acquiring fissile material, manufacturing nuclear weapons, and preventing America’s nuclear technology from leaking. It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors that power Navy ships and submarines. Even the Australian Navy, which has purchased some of these submarines, is not privy to their precise inner workings, James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. more https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-nuclear-weapons/681581/?fbclid=IwY2xjawISvTBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUrPZFLfiJr2WzSs_b18hBjw_kfvMiryvsRp7oWFDJKwab_ymjGYJOpnww_aem_tGIEBzt9c5Ia-phQtt1Nvw
Elon Musk Can Find His $2-Trillion Federal Spending Cut in Nuclear Weapons
DOGE’s Elon Musk should turn his $2-trillion hatchet to wasteful and perilous U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plans
Scientific American, By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanna Bryner, 5 Feb 25
Famously fortunate, Elon Musk now faces a rare opportunity—delivering on one of his signature overblown promises. From his newly created White House cost-cutting desk, all Musk must do is recommend ending one of the most misguided, wasteful and dangerous programs contemplated by the U.S. government, one that Scientific American has pushed for elimination.
Last November Musk set an ambitious target for his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the meme-coin-joke name for his cost-cutting office, his reward for bankrolling Trump’s campaign. Under DOGE, Musk said he would trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a hefty sum even for the space mogul now regarded as the $400-billion-worth wealthiest man on Earth. (Musk subsequently downplayed $2 trillion as a “best-case outcome.”)
Luckily for him, there is one big, fat target with just that price tag, already sitting in Uncle Sam’s shopping cart, and it’s ripe for cutting: nuclear weapons. In 2010 Trump’s nemesis, then president Barack Obama, first proposed “modernizing” the U.S. triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons over more than three decades. Almost unnoticed outside of national security circles, the initiative’s $1-trillion sticker price has nearly doubled and, as American University national security scholar Sharon Weiner wrote last year, “is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.”
Conveniently enough for Musk, his new boss, Trump, called in January for talks on reducing nuclear weapons with China and Russia, while speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump said. “It’s too depressing.”……………………. more https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musk-can-find-his-usd2-trillion-federal-spending-cut-in-nuclear-weapons/
The national missile defense fantasy—again
Bulletin, By Joe Cirincione | February 4, 2025
National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.
This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.
President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”
But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.
An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”
“We consider this as another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.
The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.
Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.
It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.
“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.
Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.
Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.
While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.
In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.
Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.
Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.
None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work………………………………………
As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.
Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:
- the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
- the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
- the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
- the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
- the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.
……………………………………………………………………“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”
As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse. https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/the-national-missile-defense-fantasy-again/
Google deletes policy against using AI for weapons or surveillance
The pledge had been in place since 2018.
Mashable By Amanda Yeo on February 5, 2025
Google has quietly deleted its pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance, a promise that had been in place since 2018.
First spotted by Bloomberg, Google has updated its AI Principles to remove an entire section on artificial intelligence applications it pledged not to pursue. Significantly, Google’s policy had previously stated that it would not design nor deploy AI technology for use in weapons, or in surveillance technology which violates “internationally accepted norms.”
Now it seems that such use cases might not be entirely off the table.
“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” read Google’s blog post on Tuesday. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights. And we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”
While Google’s post did concern its AI Principles update, it did not explicitly mention the deletion of its prohibition on AI weapons or surveillance. ……………………..
Google first published its AI Principles in 2018, following significant employee protests against its work with the U.S. Department of Defense. (The company had already infamously removed “don’t be evil” from its Code of Conduct that same year.) Project Maven aimed to use AI to improve weapon targeting systems, interpreting video information to increase military drones’ accuracy.
In an open letter that April, thousands of employees expressed a belief that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and requested that the company “draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
The company’s AI Principles were the result, with Google ultimately not renewing its contract with the Pentagon in 2019. However, it looks as though the tech giant’s attitude toward AI weapons technology may now be changing.
Google’s new attitude toward AI weapons could be an effort to keep up with competitors. Last January, OpenAI amended its own policy to remove a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm,” including “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” In a statement to Mashable at the time, an OpenAI spokesperson clarified that this change was to provide clarity concerning “national security use cases.”
“It was not clear whether these beneficial use cases would have been allowed under ‘military’ in our previous policies,” said the spokesperson……………
Now Google’s revised policy has consolidated this list to just three principles, merely stating that its approach to AI is grounded in “bold innovation,” “responsible development and deployment,” and “collaborative process, together.” The company does specify that this includes adhering to “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” Still, any mention of weapons or surveillance is now conspicuously absent. https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-weapons-surveillance-policy
1 This Month
1 June Webinar – The High Cost of Nuclear Power – Register
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- May 2026 (262)
- April 2026 (356)
- 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)
-
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 