Russia adds four Ukrainian groups and ‘Glory to Ukraine’ salute to register of ‘fascist organizations and associated symbols’
January 19, 2024, Source: Meduza, https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/01/18/russia-adds-four-ukrainian-groups-and-glory-to-ukraine-salute-to-register-of-fascist-organizations-and-associated-symbols
Russia’s Justice Ministry has included four Ukrainian organizations in its register of groups that either collaborated with those condemned by the Nuremberg trials or deny the crimes of Nazism, reports Russian state news agency TASS.
The list appeared on the ministry’s website on January 18 and is officially called the “List of organizations specified in parts three and four of Article 6 of the federal law ‘On Commemorating the Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945’, as well as the attributes and symbols of these organizations.”
The list includes the following four organizations:
- The Ukrainian People’s Revolutionary Army (UNRA),
- The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA),
- The Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNSO),
- The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
The list also features the organizations’ slogans, including the salute “Glory to Ukraine” [Slava Ukraini] and the response “Glory to the Heroes” [Heroiam Slava].
The document also includes the organizations’ symbols, such as the Trident of Prince Volodymyr, depicted on Ukraine’s coat of arms.
An Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz – for peace in Ukraine – Jeffrey Sachs.
Economist and diplomat Jeffrey Sachs is calling on German Chancellor Merz to begin immediate talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about peace in Europe.
Jeffrey D. Sachs | May 27, 2026 | Berliner Zeitung
When I wrote an open letter to you a half year ago, I urged Germany to pursue diplomacy with Russia rather than the normalization of war. Six months later, the situation in Europe is dramatically worse. Europe and Russia are slipping into open war. And in that drift, Chancellor, your responsibility is singular. No European leader — not in Paris, not in Warsaw, not in Rome — holds the position that Germany holds, or has the power that you personally hold, to interrupt this catastrophe. Will you try for peace?
You yourself, with Prime Minister Meloni and President Macron, called in January 2026 for Europe to restart relations with Russia and described Russia as „a European country.“ Yet you did not pursue diplomacy. With the future of Europe at stake, this is an extraordinary abdication of leadership. Have you, in your months as Chancellor, attempted one substantive dialogue with President Putin? Has your foreign minister attempted one substantive dialogue with Foreign Minister Lavrov? Real conversations, the kind that ended the Cold War. The answer, as far as the public record reveals, is no. Not once. And not for want of recognizing the urgency.
The past days have brought a dangerous acceleration that should focus every European mind. Both capitals are now under sustained attack: Ukrainian long-range drones have struck deep into Moscow, including civilian sites; Russian missile and drone strikes against Kyiv have greatly intensified. Ukrainian drones have crossed into the airspace of the Baltic states, raising the immediate prospect of an incident that could pull Europe directly into the war. A horrific Ukrainian strike on a boys’ school in Lugansk has further eroded what little remains of restraint. And on May 25, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, acting on instructions from President Putin, formally notified the United States Secretary of State that the Russian Armed Forces are now launching „systematic and sustained strikes“ on facilities and decision-making centers in Kyiv, and the Russian Foreign Ministry has advised that the United States and other countries „ensure the evacuation of their diplomatic personnel and other citizens from the capital of Ukraine.“ That message is the prologue to a major escalation. Diplomacy is more urgent than ever.
The way to defend Ukraine is not continued slaughter, but peace on terms that are agreeable to all parties. Instead, we face escalation, with more deaths, more destruction, and the real prospect of a war that expands beyond Ukraine. By calling for ever more weapons, ever greater war-fighting capacity, and ever louder demonstrations of „resolve,“ and by signaling that Germany is preparing for war rather than working to end it, you have allowed Berlin to become an accelerant rather than a brake to a European-wide war.
Germany’s Responsibility: Six Particulars
Germany bears profound responsibility for the situation it now confronts. Before German policy can be reset toward peace, Germany’s record must be confronted honestly. I set out below six serious failures of German foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia since German reunification in 1990.
First — the 2+4 Treaty and NATO’s eastward expansion. On 12 September 1990, in Moscow, Germany signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany — the „2+4 Treaty“ — that completed German reunification. That treaty was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. The declassified record — including the now-public memoranda assembled by the National Security Archive of George Washington University — is unambiguous: those assurances were given and were clearly meant at the time to apply beyond the territory of the former GDR to Eastern Europe. These assurances were reaffirmed through 1990 and 1991.
The 2+4 Treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the former GDR, and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation’s security should come at the expense of another’s. Does any serious person believe that the Soviet Union cared about Western troops on the territory of the former GDR but was indifferent to NATO armies in Warsaw, Vilnius, or Kyiv? Of course not.
The matter of NATO enlargement was discussed in detail and explicit assurances of non-enlargement to the East were given by Germany to the Soviet leaders — and then were broken. Germany was the principal beneficiary of those assurances, which were the quid pro quo for Germany’s reunification. Yet as early as 1993, German leaders began to promote the violation of those assurances.
Second — Chancellor Merkel’s own testimony. In her memoirs, Angela Merkel writes with striking candor that she understood at the time of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia. She knew Russia’s red line. And yet she gave in to American pressure, accepting the compromise communiqué that Ukraine and Georgia „will become“ NATO members. That single sentence set in motion the catastrophes of 2014 and 2022. Merkel’s later candor is a gift to her successors: she has told you, plainly and in her own words, what was understood at the time. Germany should not now pretend otherwise.
Third — the betrayal of the February 21, 2014 agreement. On 21 February 2014, in Kyiv, Germany’s then–Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, together with his Polish and French counterparts, brokered an agreement between President Yanukovych and the opposition. The agreement provided for a return to the 2004 constitution, the formation of a national-unity government, and early presidential elections. President Putin was consulted; the agreement was confirmed. It was a serious diplomatic achievement under conditions of intense violence. Yet within twenty-four hours Yanukovych was forcibly overthrown by a violent coup. Germany did not insist on the agreement it had just guaranteed. Instead, following the U.S. lead, Germany backed the new government, as if there had been no agreement in place. That decision persuaded Moscow that Western signatures could not be trusted.
Fourth — Minsk II. In February 2015, Chancellor Merkel personally negotiated Minsk II in the Normandy Format and pledged Germany’s political backing through the Declaration of Support adopted in Minsk on 12 February 2015. For seven years, the key political provision — autonomy for the Donbas regions within a sovereign Ukraine — was never implemented by Kyiv. Germany did not press Kyiv to implement the autonomy provision it had championed — and Merkel later acknowledged that the agreement had been used as a holding action to allow Ukraine to rearm. President Hollande said the same. The guarantee, in other words, was not a guarantee at all. It was a stratagem — once again at Washington’s behest. Once again, the message to Moscow was that Western signatures cannot be trusted
Fifth — Nord Stream. On 7 February 2022, in the East Room of the White House, President Biden announced — with then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz standing beside him — that „if Russia invades… then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.“ Asked how, he replied, „I promise you, we will be able to do that.“ The pipelines were destroyed seven months later in an act of sabotage in the Baltic Sea. The available evidence — investigative reporting in the United States and Germany, the trail followed by the German federal prosecutor, and the public statements of former officials — points overwhelmingly to a joint Ukrainian-American operation. The German government has long known this. And yet Germany has permitted the public blame to fall on Russia, against the direct evidence, while an act of industrial sabotage against the German economy has gone unprosecuted and unanswered.
Sixth — the April 2022 Istanbul agreement that was within reach. Just weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators converged in Istanbul on the terms of a peace agreement: Ukrainian neutrality outside NATO, multilateral security guarantees, agreed troop limits, and the political resolution of the Donbas and Crimea questions over time. The agreement was within days of signature. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, one of the mediators, has confirmed publicly that the deal was close and that the West — the United States and the United Kingdom in particular — moved to block it. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s mission to Kyiv in April 2022 to instruct Ukraine not to sign is a matter of public record. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the wider European order, have paid the price for that US–UK intervention. Germany has not raised its voice on this — even though Germany, more than any other European state has borne the economic consequences.
The Second Catastrophe: Germany’s Economic Self-Destruction
Your first concern must be peace. Yesterday’s message from Moscow tells us how late the hour is. But there is a second catastrophe unfolding alongside the first: the willful destruction of the German economy, with Berlin as both author and victim.
Germany’s industrial economy was built on trade with Russia. The destruction of Nord Stream and the subsequent severance of Germany’s trade relations with Russia have left Germany buying natural gas from the United States at prices several times higher than the Russian pipeline gas it replaced. This is industrial suicide. Germany’s chemical sector, its steel sector, its glass industry, its energy-intensive manufacturers — the very foundations of the Mittelstand — are losing international competitiveness day by day. Skilled jobs are draining out of the German economy. And the German taxpayer and the German consumer are making a transfer of national wealth from Germany to American gas producers at a scale unprecedented in postwar Europe.
On top of this, the German government is now pledging an enormous defence build-up — hundreds of billions of euros over the coming decade — to arm for a war that diplomacy can easily prevent. This is a profound misallocation of national resources. The fundamental challenge facing Germany in this decade is competitiveness in the digital age. Every euro spent on tanks, missiles, and artillery shells is a euro not spent on Germany’s AI capacity, its chip-design and chip-fabrication capability, its energy infrastructure, and the high-speed digital networks that Germany needs to remain a top global economy.
The hard reality, Mr. Chancellor, is that there is no security to be bought with these arms that diplomacy cannot buy at a tiny fraction of the cost, and there is no prosperity to be had without the digital and energy investments that this arms buildup will crowd out.
My Appeal
Chancellor Merz, more than any other European leader, the question of whether Europe descends into general war, or returns to negotiation, and to economic sanity, rests with you. The hour is very late. Yesterday’s formal message from Moscow to Washington says so explicitly. Please open a dialogue with President Putin. Please send your foreign minister to Moscow or invite Russia’s Foreign Minister to Berlin. Please reopen the OSCE channels that Germany has allowed to atrophy. Please tell Kyiv to cease its strikes on civilian targets.
Most importantly, please tell the German public the truth: that a negotiated peace based on Ukrainian neutrality is the realistic path out of catastrophe, and that restoring a normal economic relationship with Russia is the realistic path out of Germany’s industrial decline.
The terms of an acceptable agreement that Germany could propose are clear. The fighting would stop on an armistice line. All sides would renounce any future resort to violence on the question of borders. Ukraine would restore its neutrality, and NATO would permanently renounce further eastward enlargement.
Europe and Russia would restore economic relations and would stop the warmongering. The OSCE would once again become the central forum for European security, with the fundamental precept that European security is indivisible, not based on military blocs dividing Europe. Alongside this peace, Germany would redirect its national resources toward the digital, AI, semiconductor, and energy investments that Germany’s economic future demands.
History will record what you do in the weeks ahead, and what you fail to do. So will the German public. So will the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Europe generally. It’s time for diplomacy, Mr. Chancellor. The choice is yours to make.
Respectfully,Jeffrey D. SachsUniversity Professor of Columbia University
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/jeffrey-sachs-an-open-letter-to-chancellor-friedrich-merz-10038768
The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safety
In the absence of an objective ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
By Frank von Hippel | Analysis | May 27, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/the-trump-administrations-reckless-attack-on-radiation-protection-will-have-long-term-consequences-for-public-safety/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Trump%20admin%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20protection&utm_campaign=20260528%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Worldwide, regulations limiting doses from the radiation emitted by nuclear fissions and decays are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. This hypothesis posits that, irrespective of whether ionizing radiation comes in a pulse or over years, the additional risk of developing cancer as a result is proportional to the cumulative amount of energy deposited per gram of tissue, with weighting risk factors for radiation type, sex, age, and specific organs.
Since 1975, the US nuclear industry has been required to limit exposures to workers and the public to “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) levels. What the ALARA level should be is determined by cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of dose reductions are compared with the benefits to workers and the public, measured in terms of reduced disease and longer life expectancy.
In May 2025, four months after taking office, the Trump administration challenged this five-decade-old regulatory approach as part of an Executive Order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC). The order claimed the “NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure,” which corresponds to the linear hypothesis. “Those models lack sound scientific basis,” the Executive Order added, before directing the NRC to “reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ [ALARA] standard, which is predicated on LNT.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had reviewed exactly this question in 2021 in response to a campaign by advocates of the radiation “hormesis” theory, which posits that low doses of ionizing radiation actually protect against cancer by stimulating the body’s DNA repair mechanism—the exact opposite of ALARA. The NRC rejected that contention, concluding that “the LNT model continues to provide a sound regulatory basis for minimizing the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure to both members of the public and radiation workers.” As a result, the commission maintained the current dose limit requirements contained in its regulations.
But President Donald Trump’s decision to bring independent regulatory agencies under White House control and to fire the NRC’s chairman ended the commission’s resistance. On July 2, 2025, an anonymous NRC spokesperson enthused in a social media post that the Executive Order reforming the NRC “gives us a chance to reconsider our radiation protection framework in support of the whole-of-government effort to safely enable the nation’s use of nuclear power.”
Two weeks later, the NRC hosted a webinar for input on the issue of the LNT hypothesis. The Nuclear Energy Institute—the US nuclear industry’s lobbying organization—recommended that the commission remove ALARA and dose minimization as regulatory requirements. Instead, the institute proposed to establish a “practical threshold”—for instance, 2 rem per year (or 20 milliGray per year for gamma rays) for workers—below which further dose reduction would not be required. (The rem is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One millirem is one-thousandth of a rem. The Gray measures the absorbed dose, which is the physical amount of radiation energy absorbed by any material or tissue. One Gray corresponds to one Joule per kilogram.)
Radiation hormesis.
Read more: The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safetyAdvocates of the theory of radiation “hormesis” do not believe the LNT hypothesis. Radiation hormesis is a fringe theory with passionate adherents who are taking advantage of the Trump administration’s skepticism about regulations of all types.
One of the most vocal hormesis advocates is Edward Calabrese, an emeritus professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He argues that the evidence for the linear no-threshold hypothesis is based on scientific fraud and, therefore, should be replaced with a model that considers the possibility of no risk—and even possible benefits—from ionizing radiation below a certain dose.
Calabrese’s arguments persuaded some recent leaders of the Health Physics Society (HPS), an association of radiation-protection professionals, to host a 22-part, 10-hour video lecture series by Calabrese on the history of the LNT model in 2021-22. John Cardarelli, the HPS president when the videos were produced, summarizes Calabrese’s argument at the end of each video. In the final one, Cardarelli declares his conclusion that the LNT model is “based on flawed research, ideological motives, deliberate misrepresentation of the research record, and political agendas.”
Although the Health Physics Society declares that “the views expressed in these videos are not intended to represent official positions,” it also advertises that its associated credentialing organization, the American Academy of Health Physics, has “preapproved 10 continuing education credits for certified health physicists watching all 22 episodes of this video series.”
Physicist-epidemiologist Jan Beyea published a critique of Calabrese’s allegations in the HPS journal Health Physics, to which both Calabrese and Cardarelli have responded with lengthy rebuttals.
The research and reports Calabrese and his supporters are trying to discredit were done more than 50 years ago. For decades, the largest human population studied for radiation effects was the survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who, depending on their proximity to the ground zeros, were exposed to whole-body doses ranging from near zero to several Gray delivered in a single burst. But the cancer statistics for the Japanese survivors were not good enough to determine with high confidence carcinogenic effects in the dose range relevant for worker radiation protection (in the tens of milliGray per year). Hormesis advocates also argue that cellular mechanisms should be more effective in repairing the damage from low-rate radiation than from a nuclear explosion’s short pulse.
The lack of data on the effect of small low-rate doses left a gap in the epidemiological confirmation of the applicability of LNT estimates of the cancer risks from low doses to radiation workers and to civilian populations exposed to radioactive releases from nuclear accidents. That gap has been partially filled, however, in more recent studies of large populations of individuals who have received low-rate doses of ionizing radiation.
A directly relevant example is the INWORKS study done by an international consortium of researchers on the excess cancer deaths among approximately 310,000 nuclear industry workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, whose radiation doses were measured and recorded throughout their decades of employment. As of 2012-16, this population had an average age of about 65, and about one third had died, with 28 percent of the deaths being due to “solid” cancers (abnormal masses of tissue arising in organs, glands, or bones), therefore excluding leukemia. Of those deaths, 5,500 to 14,000 were excess cases relative to the rate observed in a control group of 51,000 nuclear workers with near-zero occupational doses.
Figure 1 [on original]shows the rate of excess deaths from solid cancers in this population as a function of cumulative on-the-job dose 10 years before death, assuming that any solid cancer caused within the last decade of life would not have had time to become lethal. The bars show the 90-percent probability range associated with the number of deaths in each dose bin; that is, there is statistically only a 10-percent probability that, with more data, the number of excess deaths would converge outside that range (5 percent chance above and 5 percent below). The solid line is the best linear fit of the data to the LNT model.
By this measure, there are significant excess cancer deaths among nuclear workers down to cumulative doses of 30 milliGray.
Energy Department’s takeover. In addition to bringing the NRC to heel, the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy has been inviting startups promoting new-design nuclear power reactors to build prototypes on department land, including the 900-square-mile footprint of the Idaho National Laboratory, where they will not be subject to NRC safety requirements.
According to President Trump’s May 23 Executive Order, the NRC will be required “to approve reactor designs that the Defense Department or the Energy Department have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely.”
At most, the startups will only be able to demonstrate that they will not have had a serious accident or a near miss within their first few years of operation before they hope to build their reactors in large numbers across the country and export them abroad. In their efforts to compete with natural gas, photovoltaic, and wind power plants, the nuclear startups are under great economic pressure to cut safety and security requirements currently required by the NRC and other regulators around the world. Costly requirements include containment buildings that prevent the release of radioactivity to the atmosphere in case of a core meltdown accident. Regulations also include requirements that it be possible for the timely evacuation of areas around the reactors where the population could be at risk of high radiation doses from an accident, and robust around-the-clock guard forces to protect nuclear plants against potential sabotage.
By putting the Energy Department, which is pouring billions of dollars into nuclear startups, first in line in safety regulation, the Trump administration has partially undone the 1974 decision of the post-Watergate Congress to separate safety regulation from nuclear power promotion by breaking up the Atomic Energy Commission to create the NRC and Energy Department.
Even before the Trump administration, under political pressure from the nuclear industry through congressional Republicans, the NRC commissioners backed off by majority vote from requiring filtered vents for a set of US reactors designed by General Electric that were clones of the Fukushima-Daiichi reactors 1–3, whose small-volume containments released large amounts of radioactivity due to overpressure after core meltdowns. The NRC also refused to end the practice of dense-packing spent fuel pools to five times their design density despite Fukushima unit 4’s near miss of a potentially much more catastrophic spent-fuel fire because of an undetected water level drop.
The end of ALARA. After it was effectively given much of the responsibility of regulating the US nuclear industry, the Energy Department commissioned a review of the LNT hypothesis by the Idaho National Laboratory, which supports the Office of Nuclear Energy’s mission to promote new types of nuclear power reactors.
INL quickly produced a report, which cited a 2013 comparison by Mohan Doss of the LNT model against the radiation hormesis, as “[p]erhaps most significant for regulatory considerations.” Dr. Doss is a radiologist, not an epidemiologist. His article was published in the journal Dose-Reponse, which was founded in 2003 with Professor Calabrese as its editor-in-chief and focuses on hormesis advocacy. Contrary to what the INL report claims, Dr. Doss’ article is not a meta-analysis but rather an argument for radiation hormesis.
Doss starts by arguing at length that the atomic bomb survivors study would have shown a hormesis effect had it been compared with a control group that had a higher incidence of cancer. Doss even replotted the atomic bomb survivor data to show the result if such a control group were used. In fact, there are appropriate zero-dose control groups for the atomic bomb survivors study, including those who were away from the cities at the time of the bombings. When those control groups have been used in studies, they showed some non-linearity with dose for male cancers, but no hormesis effect.
At the same time, INL referenced but ignored the findings of two actual meta-analyses of low-dose studies: one by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and one by an international team of 16 cancer epidemiologists led by Michael Hauptmann and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and partly funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Energy Department.
The National Council review concluded that “no alternative dose-response relationship appears more pragmatic or prudent for radiation protection purposes than the LNT model.” Hauptmann and colleagues found that “there is evidence of cancer risks from low-dose ionizing radiation.”
INL’s “reevaluation report” was quickly cited in a memorandum by the Department’s Undersecretaries of Science and Nuclear Security recommending that the Secretary of Energy “eliminate ALARA from all Department of Energy Directives and Regulations,” which he reportedly has done.
In the absence of an objective ALARA cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently made a similar decision that it will no longer take into account the health benefits from limiting air pollution. In 2024, the Biden administration announced new limits on fine particulate pollution from coal power plants and other facilities. Those regulations were justified by an estimate that, on average, 77 dollars in health benefits would result from each dollar spent by industry on emission reductions and that the regulations would save 4,500 lives per year.
A climate reporter commented in the New York Times about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back the air-pollution regulation that, for over four decades, “different administrations have used different estimates of the monetary value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses. But until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
The damage that will result from the evisceration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not be immediate and may arguably turn out to be minor on the scale of the damage the Trump administration is doing in other policy areas. But public safety analysts and decision makers must keep track of the dismantlement of regulatory structures that have been built over generations. Hopefully, it will be possible to reconstruct some of them, with improvements where possible. In the meantime, however, the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
The Nuclear Lie at the Center of U.S. Foreign Policy
May 19, 2026, Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/19/the-nuclear-lie-at-the-center-of-u-s-foreign-policy/
“One country is sanctioned, threatened, bombed, and demonized over the fear of nuclear weapons. The other already has them — and the world is expected to look away.”
Mr. Fish’s cartoon stuck in my head because it cuts straight through the insanity of the entire conversation. One country already has nuclear weapons and the world is told not to talk about it, while another country that still doesn’t have them is treated like an immediate threat to civilization. The more I sat with the image, the more I started digging into the history underneath it — and the hypocrisy only got harder to ignore.
For decades we’ve been told to panic about the country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons while pretending not to notice the country that actually does. Iran gets sanctions, assassinations, bombings, and endless media hysteria over what it might someday build. Israel sits on an undeclared nuclear arsenal outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the political/media class acts like everyone is supposed to politely shut the hell up about it.
Mr. Fish’s cartoon cuts through that theater with a sledgehammer.
Israel has never officially acknowledged its nuclear weapons program, yet experts and watchdog groups estimate it possesses roughly 90 nuclear warheads and maintains one of the most secretive nuclear infrastructures on Earth. Unlike Iran, Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and international inspectors have never had full access to the Dimona facility believed to anchor its nuclear program.
The roots of Israel’s nuclear program stretch back decades. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1952, and its first chairman, Ernst David Bergmann, openly argued that nuclear weapons would ensure “that we shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter,” according to the Jewish Virtual Library. As with so much of Israel’s national security doctrine, the trauma and memory of the Holocaust were invoked as a central justification for building and maintaining the program.
Documents show that as far back as 1968, the CIA had already informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that Israel either possessed nuclear weapons or was on the verge of developing them. But instead of confronting the issue publicly, Washington chose silence. President Richard Nixon later struck a secret understanding with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: Israel would neither officially acknowledge nor test its nuclear arsenal, and in return, the U.S. would back off demands for inspections and oversight. From that point on, one of the world’s worst-kept secrets became official policy — don’t ask, don’t tell.
They weren’t guessing. Even reporting from the 1970s pointed to what U.S. intelligence already knew. As The New York Times later revealed, the CIA disclosed in a 1974 assessment that Israel had already developed nuclear weapons — partly using uranium obtained “by clandestine means.”
Meanwhile, Iran — despite years of sanctions, assassinations, cyberwarfare, and bombing campaigns — remains under constant international scrutiny precisely because it is formally inside the nonproliferation framework. Even members of the U.S. Congress have begun openly questioning the contradiction, warning that America’s policy of “official ambiguity” around Israel’s arsenal makes any coherent nonproliferation policy nearly impossible.
That’s the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath the mushroom cloud in Mr. Fish’s illustration: the issue has never simply been nuclear weapons. It has always been about who is allowed to have power, who is allowed to threaten annihilation, and whose violence is treated as “security” instead of extremism.
The cartoon’s suburban couple staring calmly into apocalypse captures the moral numbness at the center of the debate. Entire populations have been conditioned to panic over hypothetical weapons programs while accepting real arsenals, real occupations, and real mass death as background noise. The danger isn’t only the bomb — it’s the normalization of permanent double standards enforced through military dominance and political silence.
The Council on Foreign Relations directly undercuts the claim that Iran is an imminent nuclear threat. CFR writes that “many foreign policy experts warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Middle East and nearby regions,” and argues that Israel viewed Iran’s potential possession of nuclear weapons as a “major, perhaps existential, threat” — a fear used to justify Israel’s June 2025 attacks on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, followed by the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes in February 2026.
But even CFR acknowledges a critical fact often buried beneath the war rhetoric: Iran does not currently possess a nuclear weapon. The organization notes that while Iran has the scientific knowledge and infrastructure to potentially build one fast, there is no confirmed evidence that its leadership has decided to do so.
Adding to that reality, the claim that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat sharply conflicts with decades of U.S. intelligence assessments. The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran halted its structured nuclear weapons program in 2003. Successive American intelligence officials — including former CIA Director William Burns — have repeatedly stated that Iran had not made the decision to build a nuclear bomb. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, including former chief Mohamed ElBaradei, likewise reported finding no evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Even Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, recently contradicted the administration’s escalation narrative. In Senate testimony, Gabbard stated that Iran had not rebuilt a nuclear weapons program after the 2025 strikes — directly undercutting claims used to justify continued confrontation and military escalation.
She months later changed of position came after Donald Trump publicly claimed she was “wrong” and insisted U.S. intelligence showed Iran had amassed a “tremendous amount of material” and could build a nuclear weapon “within months.” Of course what has been stated here over and over again Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.
The lie, of course, is that Israel is not treated as a legitimate nuclear and existential threat while Iran — which still does not possess a nuclear weapon — is framed as the ultimate danger. This, of course, is the same logic that has fueled decades of endless war: the claim that Iran could build a weapon someday is treated as justification for permanent aggression today. Yet Iran still does not possess a nuclear weapon — and one reason may be obvious: countries like North Korea learned that once you do obtain one, you become untouchable, while nations without them remain at the mercy of the empire’s next target.
Within the last week, members of Congress have started asking the same question — because who can’t see what’s right in front of our faces anymore? As lawmakers pressed the State Department for transparency over Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal, the hypocrisy at the center of U.S. foreign policy became increasingly difficult to ignore.
In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Democratic lawmakers pointed directly to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran as evidence that greater clarity is urgently needed.
“Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration’s planning and contingencies for such scenarios,” the letter, signed by 30 members of Congress, stated. “We do not believe we have received that information.”
The lawmakers also warned that maintaining “official ambiguity” around one state’s nuclear capabilities while threatening war over another’s makes genuine nonproliferation impossible in the Middle East.
“A policy of official ambiguity about the nuclear capabilities of one party to this conflict makes coherent nonproliferation policy in the Middle East impossible,” the letter stated, “for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, and for every other state in the region making decisions based on their perceptions of the capabilities of their neighbours.”
“This initiative is taking place against the backdrop of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran,” said Josh Ruebner of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. “One of Trump’s goals for ending this war involves negotiations to lift sanctions against Iran in exchange for an Iranian commitment not to develop nuclear weapons.”
“Members of Congress are right to question why Israel’s development of nuclear weapons gets a free pass while we’re trying to prevent Iran from acquiring them,” Ruebner added.
Of course, throughout the 1970s and ever since, Israeli officials have maintained the same carefully worded line: “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” It’s a statement built on ambiguity — one that allowed everyone to pretend not to see what was already obvious.
But now, as the world edges closer to what increasingly feels like a third world war and the Doomsday Clock sits nearer to midnight than ever before, the real question is no longer whether these weapons exist. The question is when — and under what leadership — they could be used.
That fear becomes even more dangerous under a U.S. president whose mental fitness has become a serious public concern, and who has repeatedly used apocalyptic rhetoric about “’blown off the face of the earth’” Because if Israel is treated as an undeclared nuclear power beyond accountability, the United States remains the ultimate nuclear superpower — the empire standing behind it with the largest arsenal on Earth.
Remember how all of this started — with an Mr. Fish cartoon forcing us to stare directly at the hypocrisy and madness surrounding nuclear weapons, war, and empire. Thanks for making people think. And here’s his work: The Independent Ink Archive
Death will kill with its poisonous wings.
“This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed dead is commemorated here … nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger
by Martin McKenzie-Murray, https://www.themonthly.com.au/martin-mckenzie-murray/2026-05-08/death-will-kill-its-poisonous-wings
Very soon, likely within a few weeks, one of the world’s most interesting pieces of infrastructure will open after 22 years of construction and almost half a century of contemplation. Called Onkalo – Finnish for “cavity” – the site will be the world’s first permanent repository for nuclear waste.
By law, Finland obliges that nuclear waste produced domestically must be stored domestically. That will now occur on the island of Olkiluoto at a depth of more than 400 metres within bedrock that’s almost two billion years old. Currently, the repository area is about two square kilometres and comprised of 10 kilometres of tunnels – this number will likely quadruple before the site’s decommissioning in around 2100, when this cavern will be backfilled and sealed, creating a self-maintained nuclear sarcophagus for the approximately 100,000 years it will take for the waste’s radioactivity to have decayed to safe levels.
Perhaps by now you’re beginning to intuit a little about a) the complexity of its design, b) the richness of its semiotic implications, and c) the sobering absence of anything approaching a precedent for this. Consider: after its decommissioning, Onkalo must remain perfectly passive, requiring no active management or monitoring for 100,000 years. Second, its profound danger must be communicated so far into the future that current languages, customs – even genetic dispositions – can no longer be assumed to exist. It’s a strange and disquieting fact that the radioactivity of our nuclear waste might outlive our languages for communicating its danger. Third, no man-made structure has ever lasted anything close to the length of time that Onkalo is hoped to be preserved for.
Let’s start with the simpler facts of the site. Olkiluoto Island was chosen for its geological stability – the low-permeability of its bedrock and its low-risk of seismic tremors. In Michael Madsen’s fascinating 2010 documentary about the site’s design, Into Eternity, one project adviser explains how time down there goes slowly, while up here, on the surface, it passes very, very quickly.
In other words, the crystalline rock 450 metres below ground here looks much the same as it did 500,000 years ago. The surface of our planet, however, would look unrecognisable if we travelled back just 200 years. Our natural, political and material world changes often and quickly – the latter to the whims and passions of its human inhabitants, our creative and destructive ingenuities, and the gravity of civilisational entropy. The natural world, meanwhile, forever remains subject to the whims and passions of storms and droughts and a climate that’s being altered by us.
Currently, the world’s approximately half-a-million tonnes of nuclear waste is kept in temporary storage on the surface of our planet, and is thus subject to war, sabotage or natural calamity. Much safer to secure it deep down where time moves slowly.
There is something lusciously strange and dreamlike about the projections and assumptions Onkalo’s designers were asked to make. They did nothing less than imaginatively commune with a form of humanity far into the future.
The weirdness of this can be emphasised by offering some modest timescale. The birth of Jesus Christ was 2000 years ago. The pyramids of Giza were completed about 4500 years ago. The previous Ice Age ended almost 12,000 years ago and found the peak of its severity about 10,000 years before that. That is still nowhere near 100,000 years, the length of time into the future for which Onkalo must remain independently stable and for which the warnings we write today must travel and remain intelligible.
And so, the niche field of nuclear semiotics: how do we communicate today’s intentions to a civilisation so distant that we presume it to be almost alien and to not share our language? Preceding this question though, is another: should we even try? Can we assume that humanity will, in 80,000 years, say, possess the same curiosity we do today? That is, will they perform the same enthusiastic archaeological excavations as we do now? And, if so, will they treat the nuclear tomb as we might an Incan crypt?
Might it be that by signposting the danger, we simply encourage their curiosity? Would warnings, even if we could guarantee their future intelligibility, serve to appropriately quell curiosity or dangerously arouse it?
The questions only birth more questions. Given that Onkalo is so deeply buried, and its decommissioning would involve erasing all surface infrastructure, can it not be assumed that it would never be accidentally found? Or might some evidence of its existence survive? Physical evidence, or digital? Is it preposterous to think that any digital evidence of our civilisation today could survive so far into the future – when, between now and the safe decay of the waste, there is assumed to fall several new ice ages?
The designers answered at least one big question: they would, via ceramic tablets, leave warnings to our future selves about the site. Detailed warnings, in several languages unlikely to survive several epochs, have been suggested: “This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed dead is commemorated here … nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
Also proposed are simple pictographs that are assumed to have a universally intelligible quality: a triangle that includes the radioactive symbol, a skull and crossbones, an arrow pointing away from the danger, and a human stick-figure running in the direction it suggests.
Given the spookiness of radioactivity – and the oddity of communicating its dangers across a chasm of time to unknowable descendants – the project invited some strange proposals. One was rendering the surface above the tomb conspicuously forbidding: lightning bolt sculptures amongst forests of barbed wire. (But optimistically assuming their material survival, how can we assume that their symbolic charge would survive, and not simply invite curiosity as cryptic anachronisms?) Another proposal was made for genetically engineering cats who change colour in the proximity of radiation – a kind of bizarre Geiger counter.
In 2020, the American electronic music producer (and roboticist) Skytree, aka Evan Snyder, released a track called “Atomic Priest” written with rapper Jackson Whalan. Its lyrics were about precisely the problem of communicating danger forward through “deep time”:
This is for the humans living ten thousand years from now
With radioactive capsules, thousands of feet underground
Grabbin’ the mic to warn you of these hazardous sites
For those who lack in the sight in the black of the night
The least good that we could do is form an Atomic Priesthood
To keep the future species from going where no one should
We’ve buried the mistakes of past nuclear waste
Hidden underground for future races to face
It’s our task to leave signs for civilization to trace
But who’s to say what language these generations will embrace?
The American-Hungarian linguist Thomas Sebeok minted the term “atomic priesthood” in the early 1980s. Sebeok thought that, given that radioactivity of our waste would outlive current languages (and God knows what else), the trick to communicating our warnings about it lay in folklore. Sebeok had been commissioned by the US Department of Energy to this end. In 1980, the department had established the “Human Interference Task Force”, which was asked to “investigate the problems connected with the post-closure, final marking of a filled nuclear waste repository. The task of the HITF is to devise a method of warning future generations not to mine or drill at that site unless they are aware of the consequences of their actions.”
In 1984, Sebeok submitted his report. It was called “Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millenia”. Semiotics were everything here, Sebeok wrote, given its relevance to “the problems of human interference and message exchanges involving long periods of time, over which spoken and written languages are sure to decay to the point of incomprehensibility, making it necessary to utilize a perspective that goes well beyond linguistics”.
Here, then, is the luscious strangeness of nuclear semiotics – a field that overlaps with our formal considerations of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence, but which seems even stranger to me given that the aliens in this case are our future selves.
Sebeok suggested that the best way to ensure the survival of our warnings deep into the future was through mythology – the enactment of annual rituals and the ratification of legends that were upheld by an “atomic priesthood”. The stories would alter over time, but perhaps the core desire of the transmission – to effectively warn off future excavators – would survive. It wouldn’t matter if the sense of hazard had degraded into superstition, long untethered to science or the danger at hand. Only that a sense of fear and repulsion was maintained.
“A ritual annually renewed can be foreseen, with the legend retold year-by-year (with, presumably, slight variations),” Sebeok wrote in his government report. “The actual ‘truth’ would be entrusted exclusively to what we might call for dramatic emphasis an ‘atomic priesthood’, that is, a commission of knowledgeable physicists, experts in radiation sickness, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, semioticians, and whatever additional expertise may be called for now and in the future. Membership in this ‘priesthood’ would be self-selective over time.
“The best mechanism for embarking upon a novel tradition … is at present unclear. Folklore specialists consulted have advised that they know of no precedent, nor could they think of a parallel situation, except the well-known, but ineffectual, curses associated with the burial sites (viz., pyramids) of some Egyptian Pharaohs … which did not deter greedy grave-robbers from digging for ‘hidden treasure’.”
Here, then, is the weird world of considering future ones. In a few weeks, Onkalo will become operational, accepting the copper-encased tubes of nuclear waste into its deep tombs of crystalline rock, where things remain more stable than the conditions half a kilometre above.
The story of the cooks of Chernobyl, 40 years later
Vikram Doctor, ET BureauLast May 03, 2026,
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/the-story-of-the-cooks-of-chernobyl-40-years-later/articleshow/130728007.cms
Synopsis
Forty years ago, a nuclear disaster struck Chernobyl. Women from Rivne Nuclear Power Plant were sent to cook for clean-up crews. They faced radiation and health problems. Food meant for workers was often wasted or contaminated. Some food was smuggled out. Decades later, these women fight for promised pensions. Their experiences offer insight into the disaster’s lasting impact.
When Raya heard of a nuclear power plant accident, she turned to Ukraine’s Rivne Nuclear Power Plant close by: “We looked at our gherkin barrels — that’s what we call our power plant chimneys — and we could see there was nothing wrong with them.” But then the truth emerged: The accident was at their sister plant in Chernobyl, 180 miles east, and Raya had to go there to cook.
It has been 40 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster and so much has been written and filmed about Chernobyl. But Polish writer Witold Szablowski found a little-known story for his book What’s Cooking in the Kremlin, a history of Russia through food. Szablowski knew how, even in the worst disasters, those working to save the situation had to eat, so someone had to cook for them. He found seven women alive, out of a group of 15 sent from Rivne after the disaster.
All the women suffered health issues, though not being in the actual plant spared them a bit. Dosimeters, to measure radiation, were placed at the entrance of the canteen, and when clean-up workers came from the plant, their buzzing became frantic and continuous. “It was a dreadful sound,” recalled Valentina, the head of the group.
Finally, the dosimeters were removed. Why remind people about radiation, when nothing could be done? The countryside around Chernobyl was abandoned. Raya recalled cows “mooing pitifully, because the people had been taken away and there was no one to milk them”. The canteen had also been abandoned. An earlier group of cooks were so terrified, they fled through the forest. That act had probably sealed their death warrants since Chernobyl’s forest was one of the worstaffected areas.
Food shortages were the norm in the latter days of the Soviet Union, but a guilty state ensured Chernobyl’s workers were given the best meats, dairy and fruit from across the country. “There was a whole sea of produce there,” Luba, another cook, recalled. “Little cubes of butter, full-fat cream — it sounds funny, but in those days, under Gorbachev, that was a real delicacy.” Workers had to drink glasses of cream, perhaps in the hope that its calcium would counter the depletion in their bones ..
Yet this food, which would normally have been the stuff of fantasies for people, was mostly wasted. Workers just wanted fruit juices and vodka. “They were burning up Witold. Burning up from inside,” Olga said. It was hard for the cooks to see such food disregarded. By habit, Luba would tell workers to take chocolate and give it to a kid, if they didn’t want it for themselves. Then she realised the food was contaminated by just being there, and no kid should have it.
Inevitably, some food was smuggled out. In Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl , one woman tells her how, in the months of fear afterwards, she only bought the most expensive meats to be safe: “Then we found out it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive, fewer people would buy it.” It is almost grimly comic how quickly the usual compromises and corruptions of life reasserted themselves.
Decades later, Valentina is fighting for the special pensions they were promised. An agent says she’ll arrange it for a thousand dollars — and tells an outraged Valentina that it’s a discount: “She charged those who hadn’t been in Chernobyl several thousand.”
Chernobyl’s 40th anniversary has been marked by articles lamenting how it set back nuclear power for decades. Sam Dumitriu, a British policy analyst, notes with some puzzlement that polls show women are far less likely to support nuc ..
“The myths of ‘Russian aggression.’”
RAND was as Cold War-ish as any think tank serving the U.S. government was bound to be during those decades, and this makes its conclusions here all the weightier. The Russians are not coming, to turn the title of the old Alan Arkin comedy upside down. They pose no military threat either to Europe or the United States and do not intend to do so. As history shows, it is essentially reactive and acts defensively. We have had this from RAND for six years.
A RAND study explodes the West’s ‘Irrussianality.’
29 APRIL—’Arte, ‘the’ Franco–German television channel, broadcast a documentary earlier this month titled L’Europe dans la main de Poutine? “Europe in Putin’s grip?” opens with a scene in the Kremlin on 18 March 2014, when President Putin announced the formal annexation of Crimea after a referendum concluded two days earlier. This film is available simultaneously with a two-part doc’y entitled “Putin’s Secret Weapons,” which purports to review the Russian Federation’s “state-directed terror,” its routine theft of Western technology, its “opaque network of spies,” its stockpiles of hypersonic missiles, and so on. “The country could strike Europe within minutes,” the film advises viewers.
Russophobic paranoia of this sort is nothing new, of course. You can go back to Czarist Russia’s 19th century modernizations and find evidence of it, and then on to the British defeat in Crimea (1853–56), the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the second Red Scare of the Cold War decades. I trace the current wave to Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he assailed the United States’ pretensions to global preeminence. Then came the cynically manipulated Russophobia Donald Trump provoked when, as he rose to political prominence in 2016, he advocated a new détente with Moscow.
What we have seen since the Biden regime intentionally provoked Russia’s February 2022 intervention in Ukraine ranks with any of these previous occasions as measured by the fear-mongering, the war-mongering, and the manufactured delusions that are now woven into daily life, as the just-noted documentaries suggest. This is especially evident in Europe, where unimaginative “centrists”—incompetent to a one, in my view—have been as deer in headlights since Trump II stepped back from Washington’s profligate support of the bottomlessly corrupt regime in Kiev during the Biden years.
French, Belgian, and British troops are just now completing three-months of “war-gaming” in the field—ground forces, armored vehicles, paratroops, underwater divers—in the most extensive such exercises since the Cold War. The three Baltic states are provocatively permitting the Ukrainians to launch drone attacks from their territory into northern Russia. Johann Wadephul has made the certainty of a Russian attack within five years—four at this point—a standard warning in his public pronouncements since Chancellor Merz named him foreign minister last year. Berlin and Paris are in talks to extend France’s nuclear deterrent to the rest of Europe. With the Merz regime in the lead, the Continent has begun dismantling its once-admirable welfare systems in favor of a cross-border military-industrial complex of its own.
Anyone paying attention can discern without much effort that the threat of “Russian aggression” in Europe is a construction with no basis whatsoever in fact. Christian Müller, a Swiss journalist with a long record as an editor and commentator, has chosen this moment to push this reality into the faces of those—including every “centrist” now in power across Europe—who cynically conjure a threat from the East that simply does not exist.
Müller now publishes and edits Global Bridge, an online journal with many distinguished contributors. (Distinguished or otherwise, I am among them.) This week he republished a piece that first appeared in 2021. It is based on a RAND Corporation study that had recently appeared under the title Russia’s Military Interventions: Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts. The full, 186–page research report is here. It is replete with graphs and tables that put Moscow’s security policies in an historical context that goes back to 1946, when the Soviets were rebuilding after the extensive sacrifices the defeat of the Reich required of them. It analyzes all the interventions with which readers may be familiar: There is Afghanistan in the 1980s, Georgia in 2008, Syria in 2015. (The Ukraine intervention, of course, was still to come.)
RAND was as Cold War-ish as any think tank serving the U.S. government was bound to be during those decades, and this makes its conclusions here all the weightier. The Russians are not coming, to turn the title of the old Alan Arkin comedy upside down. They pose no military threat either to Europe or the United States and do not intend to do so. As history shows, it is essentially reactive and acts defensively. We have had this from RAND for six years.
In the RAND report’s language:
Russia engaged in combat only when it felt the necessity to respond to a development on the ground that posed a pressing threat. Moscow sought to achieve its objectives using coercive measures short of military intervention: It undertook combat missions, judging from the two case studies, only when it felt forced by circumstances…. In short, although Russia generally seems more reactive in its decision-making about combat interventions unless its vital interests are directly threatened, Moscow might decide to be proactive in special circumstances (particularly relating to events in its neighborhood).
Given the mounting intensity of the purposely, dangerously cultivated Russophobia now spreading across Europe, Christian Müller could scarcely have chosen a more propitious moment to call our attention once again to the RAND study. Not only does the research discredit all suggestions of “Russian aggression.” The analysis also explodes the notion of “Putin’s Russia”—an egregious trope in the press coverage for many years now—as sheer (please excuse us) bullshit.
The Floutist is pleased to join Global Bridge in republishing this important piece. We are also pleased to feature the acute observations of Paul Robinson, a noted Russianist at the University of Ottawa. The piece first appeared on 6 October 2021—three months before Moscow sent draft treaties to Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels as the proposed basis of negotiations, four months before Russian forces entered Ukraine on precisely the basis the RAND report describes.
Christian Müller.
The RAND Corporation, a world-renowned U.S. research and consulting firm, boasts 1,800 employees in more than 50 countries, who collectively conduct research and communicate in more than 75 languages, and of whom over a thousand—more than half—hold doctorates or even multiple doctorates. RAND is therefore not simply one of countless so-called think tanks. And what is particularly important to note: RAND’s largest clients are the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military: the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. These government clients account for more than half of all RAND revenue.
RAND, this truly gigantic research and consulting firm, has now examined the military behavior of the Soviet Union and Russia since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The result is remarkable. RAND demonstrates that Russia’s military interventions are now marginal compared with those of the Soviet Union, and, above all, that these interventions were always linked to an imminent loss and never aimed at gaining additional territory or influence—that is, they were always used to defend the status quo.
RAND’s comparison between the Soviet Union and Russia: The military operations of present-day Russia (red) are no longer comparable to those of the Soviet Union before 1991 (blue) – Figure 3.2 on original
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in geopolitical relations and well-known in Canada and the U.S., has closely studied the 186-page RAND report on the Russian military and reviewed and commented on its content on his web portal, Irrussianality. A few of his findings are quoted below as a summary:
A few years ago, I discussed the potential relevance of prospect theory to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Prospect theory states that people are more willing to take risks to avoid loss than to gain. This corresponds to the well-known psychological tendency toward loss aversion. Losing something bothers us much more than not gaining something. In the world of international relations, this means that states are more likely to use military force when threatened with loss than when seeking to acquire something they do not yet possess. It is therefore interesting to see this confirmed in a new study by the RAND Corporation entitled Russia’s Military Interventions: Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts, which analyzes instances of Russian military intervention in the post–Soviet era. The conclusion: One of the main motivations is the prevention of loss.
Elsewhere in Robinson’s work: “In any case, according to the study, it is wrong to see Putin as primarily responsible for Russian military interventions.”
As quoted by Robinson from the RAND study:
If we examine all of Russia’s interventions that meet the threshold described in this report, it becomes clear that most took place before (!) Putin came to power…. Most importantly, there is now a broad consensus among Russian elites on foreign policy issues. There is little firsthand evidence to suggest that Putin’s personal preferences are a major driving force behind Russia’s interventions.
Paul Robinson:
Russia intervenes when it feels threatened by a loss of status, stability, or security in its immediate neighborhood. It does not intervene to pursue “aggressive” or “imperialist” goals or to distract from domestic problems. And it is not a question of Vladimir Putin. Russia will have the same interests and preferences regardless of who is in power.
And once again, Paul Robinson:
In short, all claims that Russia wants to export its authoritarian ideology, destabilize democracy, support the “Putin regime,” or that Russia’s military interventions are driven solely by Putin’s aggressive personality are false.
This graphic from the RAND study shows that military interventions were even more numerous during the time of Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) than since under Vladimir Putin’s presidency. (As a reminder, Yeltsin’s second term was only possible thanks to financial support from the US under Bill Clinton .)
Paul Robinson’s final paragraph:
The RAND report ends with a short series of recommendations for U.S. policy. Primarily, the U.S. should avoid putting Moscow in a position where it feels it is about to suffer a major loss in its near abroad. As a think tank report, this is a remarkably sober and sensible recommendation,… which I don’t have much to criticize. Essentially, it boils down to not cornering the bear. In this case, it’s clear. The RAND report contradicts the currently prevailing narrative that Russia is bent on aggression and must be reined in by any means necessary, including incursions into its near abroad. If this RAND report is correct, then the [current NATO incursion to Russia’s borders] is just about the worst thing you can do. But I doubt anyone is listening.
Is nobody listening?
Anyone closely observing current events in the EU, and especially in Germany, must conclude that it seems no one among current or future top politicians is actually listening…. A new project has just been announced: The E.U. intends to provide additional training for Ukrainian officers. Training for military deployment against which adversary? Against Russia, of course. To paraphrase Paul Robinson: Everyone—the U.S., NATO, the E.U., and Germany—is trying to corner the Russian bear, knowing that this is precisely when it will begin to fight back. And this cornering is always justified by the same argument: Russia is aggressive, Putin is an aggressor.
Let’s see if at least RAND’s best clients, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military, read RAND’s latest comprehensive study—and perhaps even take it to heart.
Trump the God
Trump’s portrayal of himself as Jesus, or anointed by Jesus, is typical of cult leaders.
Chris Hedges ScheerPost, April 21, 2026 https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/21/trump-the-god/
During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.
These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.
Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.
Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.
All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XVI-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.
Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.
The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.
Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.
Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.
Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”
These eight characteristics are:
1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.
2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.
3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.
4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.
5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.
6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.
7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.
8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.
Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.
Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.
Cults are characterized by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.
“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in “Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace.” “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children. If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”
Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”
“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:
He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.
The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralyzing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.
“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot – it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”
It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.
The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.
The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy. This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programs to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.
There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invaliding or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.
Remembering Chornobyl
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/04/19/remembering-chornobyl/
40 years on we are still asking the wrong questions and getting a lot of wrong answers, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Probably the most heinous crime, other than the avoidable accident itself and its immediate coverup, is the way that the Chornobyl (Ukrainian equivalent spelling) nuclear power disaster in Ukraine, 40 years old this week, has been used to downplay and normalize the long-lasting health impacts caused by that April 26, 1986 explosion.
Still today, the myth is repeated that “no one died” — meaning no one in the public. Instead, we are told over and over that it was only a handful of liquidators, sent in to deal with the immediate crisis, who were killed by the massive release of radiation resulting from the reactor explosion.
And still today, in part because of that myth, now so firmly cemented in the public and media narratives around the Chornobyl disaster, the true health effects of even just routine reactor operation, or the exposures suffered by communities living around active or abandoned uranium mines, or by those working in uranium enrichment or fuel fabrication facilities, are discounted and dismissed.
Worse still, we are now facing a concerted effort by the Trump administration to emasculate already weak radiation protection standards, once again ignoring females who are most vulnerable to harm, and especially pregnant women, babies and children.
Through yet another executive order accelerating nuclear power expansion while sparing the industry the costs it should incur to guarantee safety (an impossibility anyway), the White House wants to abandon the long-held Linear No Threshold (LNT) model.
LNT holds that radiation damage increases with higher exposures, and that harm is posed by all radiation exposure no matter how small. But LNT itself is already unsatisfactory, since health studies continue to indicate that more — not less — protection is needed for non-cancer impacts, and for radionuclides taken internally, than is already provided by applying LNT.
This is what makes the perpetual focus on “who died” when it comes to major nuclear accidents, fundamentally the wrong question. We will likely never know who or how many died as a result of the Chornobyl disaster. Registries and statistics weren’t kept, people moved around, and, as is so often the case, illnesses were ascribed to other causes. Certainty is hard to achieve.
Nevertheless, perhaps one of the most important pieces of research on the health realities of the Chornobyl aftermath was done by historian Kate Brown in her book Manual For Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. It looks like a “hefty tome”, but it is anything but. Despite being nonfiction, it reads like a page-turning thriller and some of what she uncovers is eye-stretching. And, of course, by saying “uncovers,” we immediately understand that this was indeed a cover-up, first by the then Soviet Union, and then compliantly perpetuated by the United States and other western allies eager to avoid any shocking realization by the general public that nuclear power technology is phenomenally dangerous and human beings are liable to lose control of it, with disastrous results.
This returns us to the question about the protracted harm that can be caused if something goes very badly wrong at a nuclear power plant. And it returns us to dispensing with the wrong question, which is “how many people died?”
That wrong question, a favorite of headline writers and spin doctors, sets us on a perpetual path to dispute. The health figures, especially fatalities, have become the most misrepresented statistic related to the Chornobyl disaster. But focusing only on fatalities also serves to diminish the disaster’s impact. Nuclear power plant accidents often do not kill people instantly and sometimes not at all. It can take years before fatal illnesses triggered by a nuclear accident take hold. This creates a challenge in calculating just who eventually died due to the accident and who suffered non-fatal consequences.
Exposure to ionizing radiation released by a nuclear power plant (and not just from accidents but every day) can cause serious non-fatal illnesses as well. These should not be discounted. Arguably, neither should post-accident psychological trauma. Nuclear power plant accidents can and should be prevented. The only sure way to do so is to close them all down. Otherwise we risk another Chornobyl, or Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.
In our Thunderbird newsletter of 2018, we examined some of the key myths around the impacts of the Chornobyl disaster now 40 years ago. Below, is a synopsis of some of the key points, as they bear repeating and remain perpetually true. The full document can be read here.
What happened?
On April 26, 1986, Unit 4 at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant exploded. That explosion and the resulting fire, lofted huge amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Unit 4 was relatively new, having only been in service for just over two years. The accident occurred during what should have been a routine test to see how the plant would operate if it lost power. The test involved shutting down safety systems but a series of human errors, compounded by design flaws, instead set in motion a catastrophic chain of events.
After shutting down the turbine system that provided the cooling water to the reactor, the water began boiling and workers desperately tried to re-insert control rods to slow down the nuclear reaction. But the rods jammed and control of Unit 4 was irrevocably lost. The explosion and fire — which took five months to put out — dispersed at least 200 times more radioactivity than that produced by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The fallout contaminated several million square kilometers of land in the former Soviet Union and in Europe and was also detected in the US
Soviet authorities were slow to react. The accident was first detected by monitors in Sweden. The nearby city of Pripyat was not evacuated immediately. By the time they did so, radioactivity levels were 60,000 times higher than “normal”.
The financial cost of the accident, while difficult to calculate given the many unknowns, is estimated to be in the region of $700 billion and is expected to keep rising.
The Liquidators
The Chornobyl liquidators were dispatched to the stricken nuclear plant in the immediate aftermath, as well as for at least the subsequent two years, to manage and endeavor to “clean up” the disaster. They included military as well as civilian personnel such as firefighters, nuclear plant workers and other skilled professionals.
While estimates of the number of liquidators varies, the generally accepted figure is around 800,000. However, evaluating their fate has been difficult. Only a small portion of them were subject to medical examinations.
Yet, by 1992 it was estimated that 70,000 liquidators were invalids and 13,000 had died. These estimates rose to 50,000 then to 100,000 deaths among liquidators in 2006. By 2010, Yablokov et al. estimated a death toll of 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators.
Even the Russian authorities admit findings of liquidators aging prematurely, with a higher than average number having developed various forms of cancer, leukemia, somatic and neurological problems, psychiatric illnesses and cataracts.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found a statistically significant increase of leukemia among Russian liquidators who were in service at Chernobyl in 1986 and 1987.
General populations inside and outside the former Soviet Union
As with the liquidators, tracking the health of general populations exposed to the plume pathway of Chornobyl has been problematic. Within the Soviet Union, people moved away and neither they nor many living in other affected countries were tracked or monitored. While countless numbers may have died from their Chornobyl-related illnesses, equal or even greater numbers may have survived with debilitating or chronic physical as well as mental illnesses caused by the accident.
Establishing exact numbers may never be possible. Media reports often rely on the 2003-2005 Chernobyl Forum report produced by the nuclear promoting International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency ignored its own data that indicated there would be 9,000 future fatal future cancers in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, claiming there would be no more than 4,000. Both numbers are gross underestimations. The report focused only on the most heavily exposed areas in making its predictions. It ignored the much larger populations in the affected countries as a whole, and in the rest of the world, who have been exposed to lower but chronic levels of radiation from Chornobyl.
In contrast, a comprehensive analysis by the late Soviet scientist, Alexey Yablokov and colleagues, examined more than 5,000 Russian studies. They concluded that almost a million premature deaths would result from Chornobyl. Meanwhile, the TORCH report (The Other Report on Chernobyl), by Dr. Ian Fairlie, predicts between 30,000 and 60,000 excess cancer deaths worldwide due to the accident.
More than half the Chornobyl fallout landed outside of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — in Europe, Asia and North America. Fallout from Chornobyl contaminated about 40% of Europe’s surface. Immediately after the accident, thyroid cancer was particularly rampant in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, where no prophylactic remedy in the form of potassium iodide pills was offered. Consequently, as Baverstock and Williams found in 2006, “by far, the most prominent health consequence of the accident is the increase in thyroid cancer among those exposed as children . . . particularly in children living close to the reactor.”
In contrast, Poland, where potassium iodide was distributed, experienced relatively low rates of thyroid cancers. While thyroid cancer is considered one of the more treatable kinds of cancers, this does not mean it should be viewed as an acceptable consequence of a nuclear power plant accident. Such diseases — especially among children — impact emotional, social, and physical wellbeing. In the former Soviet Union, those operated on bear a scare referred to grimly as the “Chornobyl necklace.”
Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki, a physician and geneticist, has conducted research, particularly focused on Polissia, Ukraine. There he found clear indications of altered child development patterns, or teratogenesis. Wertelecki noted birth defects and other health disturbances among not only those who were adults at the time of the Chornobyl disaster, but their children who were in utero at the time and, most disturbingly, their later offspring.
Important research has also been conducted on psychological effects. Pierre Flor-Henry and others examined some of the psychological disorders resulting from Chornobyl and found a clinical pathology related to radiation exposure. Flor-Henry found that schizophrenia and chronic fatigue syndrome among a high percentage of liquidators were accompanied by organic changes in the brain. This suggested that various neurological and psychological illnesses could be caused by exposure to radiation levels between 0.15 and 0.5 sieverts.
There are of course many other non-cancerous diseases caused by nuclear accidents that release radioactivity. A peak in Down Syndrome cases was observed in newborns born in 1987 in Belarus, one year after the Chornobyl nuclear accident. This phenomenon has been found around other nuclear sites. Abnormally high rates of Down Syndrome were found in the Dundalk, Ireland population possibly tied to the operation of the Sellafield nuclear waste reprocessing plant across the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England.
Read full Thunderbird: Chornobyl: The Facts.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. She is the author of the book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press. Any opinions are her own.
Cuba has saved millions of lives across the world – we must fight for its survival as a duty to humanity
By Mike Treen, GPJA, Global Peace and Justice, AOTEAROA, 5 April 26
Since the Cuban revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959, Cuba has initiated a medical revolution as part of the social revolution. As Wikipedia noted:
The new Cuban government stated that universal healthcare would become a priority of state planning. In 1960 revolutionary and physician Che Guevara outlined his aims for the future of Cuban healthcare in an essay entitled On Revolutionary Medicine, stating: “The work that today is entrusted to the Ministry of Health and similar organizations is to provide public health services for the greatest possible number of persons, institute a program of preventive medicine, and orient the public to the performance of hygienic practices.”[15] These aims were hampered almost immediately by an exodus of almost half of Cuba’s physicians to the United States, leaving the country with only 3,000 doctors and 16 professors in the University of Havana’s medical college.
The Cuban leaders ordered new medical schools to be built to train the doctors needed to replace those who left with doctors who adhered less to the mercenary spirit of the leavers. The doctor-resident ratio increased six-fold by the late 1990s. Cuba has three times the rate of the US, UK or New Zealand – 9 per 1000 compared to 2.5 for the US and UK and 3.5 for New Zealand.
By 2012, infant mortality had dropped to 4.8 per 1,000 live births compared to 6 for the US. Life expectancy is one year less that the US (although it exceeded the US briefly during Covid). Cuba’s GDP per capita is one tenth of the US when measured in US dollars.
UK academic and Cuban expert, Helen Yaffe writes in the March 8, 2025, Jacobin entitled “Cuba Sends Doctors, the US Sends Sanctions”:
“Since 1960, some 600,000 Cuban medical professionals have provided free health care in over 180 countries. The government of Cuba has assumed the lion’s share of the cost of its medical internationalism, a huge contribution to the Global South, particularly given the impact of the US blockade and Cuba’s own development challenges. ‘Some will wonder how it is possible that a small country with few resources can carry out a task of this magnitude in fields as decisive as education and health,’ noted Fidel Castro in 2008.”
Cuba has also helped train doctors from across the globe at no cost to the tens of thousands given scholarships. Helen Yaffe writes: “In the 1960s, it began training foreigners in their own countries when suitable facilities were available, or in Cuba when they were not. By 2016, 73,848 foreign students from eighty-five countries had graduated in Cuba while that nation was running twelve medical schools overseas, mostly in Africa, where over 54,000 students were enrolled. In 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), the world’s largest medical school, was established in Havana. By 2019, ELAM had graduated 29,000 doctors from 105 countries (including the United States) representing 100 ethnic groups. Half were women, and 75 percent from worker or campesino families.”
There are currently 20,000 Cuban doctors working in 50 countries. The US NPR reported March 24, 2026, that the U.S. also recently passed a law allowing it to impose sanctions on countries that work with Cuban doctors.
“The countries that have broken off these contracts are afraid. They are afraid of retaliation by the United States,” says William LeoGrande, a professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. “This is typical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, which is based essentially on coercive diplomacy: ‘Do it our way, or else.’ So: ‘Get rid of the Cuban doctors, or else.’ ”
Sanctions deepened in 2019 by US President Trump
The deepening of sanctions since 2019 has resulted in the first deterioration of health statistics in Cuba ever. Even during the very difficult period in the early 1990s when the Soviet Unon collapsed and Cuba lost 90% of its trade partners and GDP declined 25%, they were able to maintain progress on health care. That is not the case today. The fuel blockade has resulted in blackouts that prevent medical institutions from functioning. Infant mortality is increasing. Life expectancy is declining.
A Science Magazine report from March 30, 2026 headed “As US blockade bites, Cuba’s health care and science suffer” is very dark and worth quoting at some length:
Cuba’s downward spiral accelerated in January, after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro choked off oil from Cuba’s main benefactor. (As Science went to press, the U.S. signaled it would allow a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba this week.) The U.S. government hopes the crisis will finally dislodge the island’s Communist regime. “I do believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba,” U.S. President Donald Trump told journalists this month. Cuba’s science is collateral damage. “There’s an effort to degrade everything Cuba has achieved in education and science, and send us back to the Stone Age,” says Mitchell Valdés Sosa, director of the Cuban Neurosciences Center.
Nationwide electricity blackouts lasting 20 or more hours a day are forcing doctors to triage care and putting lives at risk. At the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana, “we receive the most complex neurosurgical cases in the country,” says neurosurgeon Marlon Manuel Ortiz Machín. “Surgeries must not stop; it’s sometimes a patient’s last chance.” Yet he’s been “caught in the dark” during complex operations. “All you can do is pray until the generator comes back on.”
Gail Reed, a volunteer for the U.S. nonprofit MEDICC who was in Havana last week, fears Cuba’s medical system is on the brink of collapse. “Hospitals are running out of supplies. It’s heartbreaking and unconscionable,” she says. With Cuba’s infant mortality rate rising, MEDICC is “trying to protect women with high-risk pregnancies” by installing solar panels in maternity homes, Reed says.
“We’re seeing malnourishment, people losing weight,” says Angela Garcia, executive director of Global Links, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit. Flying into Havana last month, she says, “the first thing I noticed was an acrid odor”—from burning mounds of trash that has gone uncollected because of fuel shortages.
Damage to Cuba’s vaunted biotech sector could have an outsize impact on health and the economy. The 51 enterprises that make up BioCubaFarma, a government entity, produce scores of drugs, vaccines, and reagents, many of which are exported to 77 countries. One high-profile compound is CIMAvax-EGF, an immunotherapy against lung cancer that had positive results in early clinical trials in the U.S., done in partnership with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Cuba’s role fighting the Ebola crisis………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Cuba’s role in training doctors for Timor Leste and many Pacific Islands
Unknown to most of us in this part of the world, Cuba is also providing doctors and training locals in most of the Pacific Island states in a special medical school in Cuba, The Latin American School of Medicine. The Australian Development Policy Centre blog reported in February 2012: (https://devpolicy.org/cuba-in-the-pacific-more-than-rum-and-coke-2-20120224/):………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Cuba has also run a programme over the last two decades that has cured millions of people of functional blindness. It is very similar to great programme established by the late New Zealand doctor Professor Fred Hollows who was a renowned New Zealand-born eye surgeon who dedicated his life to restoring sight. A good socialist himself, he was horrified at the neglect that Aboriginal Australians in particur were forced to endure. The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ continues his legacy by fighting to end avoidable blindness in the Pacific region, training local eye care specialists, and conducting thousands of sight-restoring surgeries.
Set in motion on July 8, 2004, Operation Miracle took shape within the context of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – otherwise known as ALBA – which Cuba and Venezuela established that year also.
By 2019, over four million people in 34 countries had been cured of their ailments through a similar but far larger programme run by Cuban doctors dubbed Operation Milagro. One recipient in 2007 was a pensioned sergeant from the Bolivian Army who had captured and executed the great Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967………………………………………………………………………
In 2019, Cuba was itself hit by the Covid crisis and had to invent three vaccines to treat itself and achieved the same 90% effectiveness as the Western drugs they were not allowed to get. Cuba has also developed advanced medical sciences and hundreds of patented drugs that we can’t access. This includes treatments for Dementia, Cancer, and Polio that would be very welcome in our own communities which suffer significantly from these ailments. My own brother has dementia and look at what Cuba has achieved here. U.S. Citizens in Cuba for New Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Treatment
But the lockdowns saw a collapse in tourism to Cuba, which was their main foreign currency earner. The newly elected US President Trump also imposed new extreme sanctions, which were maintained by President Biden despite promises to remove them during the election period. When Trump returned in 2025, Cuba was subjected to a renewed and even more extreme embargo from the US empire (including fuel). This has led to very harsh conditions in Cuba and a collapse in their ability to deliver the same medical internationalism as before, including for the Pacific.
Working people worldwide need to take our own lessons from the Ebola, Covid, and similar health crises facing the world. Public health should be promoted and available to everyone on Earth. Ebola and Covid demonstrated that neglect of the Earth and its people anywhere will ultimately be a threat to human survival everywhere. Putting profits before people is a dead end, literally. The monopoly control over drugs and other aspects of medical research by the drug companies needs to be broken. Finding an alternative way of running this world which puts people and the planet before profit also must involve defending Cuba and its revolutionary example.
The world owes a giant debt to Cuba. The Nuestra America solidarity convoys are an example of what needs to be done until Cuba is free of all threats. What we can be sure of is that Cuba will not surrender despite the hardship they face. Hundreds of thousands will fight if invaded. Cuba’s most famous singer, 79-year-old Silvio Rodriguez, volunteered to fight and demanded an AK47 which was delivered by the Cuban President. This week, fuel has arrived on a Russian ship despite threats. More will come as the world increasingly wins its freedom from the US empire and its domination. That empire is declining and nations are asserting their independence as best they can. Some (like Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela) are fighting for their survival and we must fight side by side with them for the future of humanity and the planet. The empire’s alternative is permanent war and economic collapse. Peace with justice comes when we defeat that empire once and for all. https://gpja.org.nz/2026/04/05/cuba-has-saved-millions-of-lives-across-the-world-we-must-fight-for-its-survival-as-a-duty-to-humanity/
The unforeseen consequences of Iranian resistance
Thierry Meyssan, Voltairenet.com, Tue, 17 Mar 2026, https://www.sott.net/article/505569-The-unforeseen-consequences-of-Iranian-resistance
By resisting the illegal attack on their country by Israel and the United States, the Iranians brought the “paper tiger” to its knees. In a matter of days, they demonstrated that the Pentagon’s sophisticated and expensive weapons were ill-suited to their highly economical approach to warfare. They disrupted the global oil market, which underpins the US dollar. Finally, they provided a new model that all opponents of Anglo-Saxon dominance are now considering. It has already led China to completely revise its defense plans in the event of a US attack on Taiwan.
The war against Iran is unlike any other. For the first time, the targets destroyed are of little importance. The protagonists are focused on the economic consequences of their actions. This experience is revolutionizing the way wars are waged and has already led the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to revise its battle plans.
A Shaheh drone costs approximately $35,000. To shoot it down, the United States would need to launch two Patriot missiles, each worth $3.3 million. If they allow the Shaheh drone to hit any target, it would be assumed that they are incapable of defending themselves or their allies. By launching a drone, Iran is guaranteed to force the United States to spend $6.6 million, roughly 188 times their initial investment.
The United States does possess the Merops anti-drone system. However, these systems have only been in the testing phase for the past year and a half in Ukraine. They are also deployed along the Polish and Romanian borders. The Pentagon has decided to reduce its troop presence on NATO’s eastern front in order to deploy its Merops systems to the Gulf.
“We received a specific request from the United States for protection” against Iranian drone systems, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 12. Ukrainian officers immediately joined the mission in the Gulf.
Furthermore, the United States has been experimenting with anti-drone lasers for years. It’s a highly economical solution, but currently, we don’t know how to use these weapons, let alone how to mass-produce them. It will be many years before the Pentagon uses them on the battlefield.
Furthermore, Patriot missile stocks are dwindling rapidly. While the Pentagon maintains secrecy regarding available stockpiles, it is diverting resources from all other fronts to deliver Patriots to the Middle East. All that is known is that the US military-industrial complex cannot produce more than 700 per year, while Iran has already launched several thousand Shahed missiles.
We are only concerned here with the destruction of Shahed drones. The defense of the United States and Israel against long-range missiles is not only a financial problem, but also, in the very short term, the depletion of THAAD interceptor missiles, of which only about ten can be manufactured per week . [ 1 ]
In any case, the United States officially spent $5.6 billion on munitions in the first two days of its illegal war against Iran [ 2 ] . This amount rose to $11.3 billion, according to a Pentagon statement to Congress on March 10. With 1,444 Iranians killed as of March 12, according to the Iranian Ministry of Health [ 3 ] , this works out to a cost of approximately $8 million per life! The most expensive war in history.
By comparison, Iranians have experienced two major traumas: World War I — which claimed more lives in Iran than in Germany and France — killed approximately 6 million people.The war imposed by Iraqkilled at least 500,000 Iranians. It is therefore understandable that the few hundred deaths recently will not sway the country.
Another Iranian innovation is the retaliation Tehran has launched against its neighbors. Invoking international law and statements by Israeli and American leaders, Iran has attacked US military bases in the Gulf and the Levant. I am not referring here to attacks by the Lebanese Hezbollah (the Party of God) or the Iraqi Saraya Awliya al-Dam (the Guardians of Blood Brigade), but solely to Iranian attacks.
Iran, stunned, reminded the West of Resolution 3314 (XXIX), dated December 14, 1974 [ 4 ] . Adopted without a vote by the United Nations General Assembly, it clarifies the concept of aggression to which the Charter of San Francisco refers. The international press, dominated by Anglo-Saxon media, has become convinced that international law prohibits entry into another country’s territory. It was on the basis of this prejudice that the General Assembly condemned the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Iran has resurrected this forgotten text.
This text authorizes the use of force to assist “peoples subjected to colonial or racist regimes,” as is the case with Russian aid to the Donbas republics (Article 7). It prohibits not only aggression against Iran by Israel and the United States, but also third-party states hosting Israeli or US military bases participating in the aggression (Article 3) from doing the same.
Consequently, Iran has the right to retaliate against the territories of the Gulf States and the Levant.
We observe that these states are reeling from the Iranian response and that their economies are paralyzed. These states, primarily those in the Gulf, are major oil producers. They are therefore attempting to break free from Israel and the United States, which until now guaranteed their security but are now responsible for their misfortunes. If their desire for independence were to lead them to sell their oil not in US dollars, but in other currencies, the value of the dollar would collapse. Indeed, its value is not guaranteed by the US GDP, but by the international hydrocarbon market. During the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, we emphasized that the United States was not seeking to seize the country’s considerable oil reserves, but to re-establish oil trading in dollars. What succeeded in Venezuela could fail in the Middle East and mark the beginning of the end for the United States.
What is happening today in the Middle East is suddenly inspiring all the states that complain about US domination. Starting with China:
Beijing is preparing for a conflict with the United States and Japan over its Taiwan region. It’s important to remember that China has no intention of invading the island, but considers any attempt to grant it independence an act of aggression. From its perspective, Chiang Kai-shek had no right to secede, and Taiwan remains a Chinese region. The Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s successor party, agrees with this view; only the very small Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of President Lai Ching-te seeks independence. This issue only arises because the United States is raising it.
Beijing has just realized that international law allows it, in the event of US aggression, to retaliate against US military bases in the Asia-Pacific region. In the blink of an eye, the People’s Liberation Army has completely revised its plans [ 5 ] . It has redirected its missiles, no longer towards Taiwan, but to target the 24 US military bases in the region.
This shift is being followed by all states hosting US military bases, which are now anticipating the difficulties faced by the Gulf and Levant countries. Undoubtedly, they will soon reconsider their presence.
Beyond the Iranian conflict, it now appears that Iran’s model of resistance is compelling for all those who anticipate a military conflict with Washington and that it is revolutionizing the way we understand the balance of power.
It is important to understand that the United States allowed itself to be manipulated by its own propaganda. It convinced itself that the events following the collapse of Ayandeh Bank resulted in over 40,000 deaths, all attributable to the Revolutionary Guards. This is obviously grossly false. Most of the victims were attributable to ISIS attacks and the panic created by snipers positioned on rooftops, killing both protesters and police officers. As for the actual number, it is at least six times lower.
Similarly, they convinced themselves that all these protesters were “anti-regime,” assuming that those demanding the return of their bank deposits were necessarily against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In doing so, they lumped together economic protesters, those opposed to religious totalitarianism, and those who aspired to Western-style governance. They are now discovering that one can be ruined by the banking system, resent the mullahs, be captivated by American series broadcast in Persian by some forty Western television channels, and still defend one’s country.
This miscalculation, comparable to the one that led them to organize the departure of the shah, Reza Pahlavi, and the return of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, led them to military defeat, or even their own downfall.
References:
[ 1 ] ” US Military Operations Against Iran: Munitions and Missile Defense “, Hannah D. Dennis & Daniel M. Gettinger, Congressional Research Service , March 12, 2026.
[ 2 ] ” Early Iran strikes cost $5.6 billion in munitions, Pentagon estimates” , Noah Robertson, The Washington Post , March 9, 2026.
[ 3 ] ” US’s Hegseth claims new Iran Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei injured “, Al-Jazeera, March 13, 2026.
[ 4 ] ” Definition of aggression “, Voltaire Network , December 14, 1974.
[ 5 ] ” How Iran’s strikes on US bases could offer a preview for the Asia-Pacific “, Amber Wang, South China Morning Post , March 11, 2026.
US War Machine Is Built on Decades of Lies. The Assault on Iran Is No Exception.
militarism and the warfare state are sustained by lies which stretch over decades. The ideology of American exceptionalism is driven by the myth that U.S. intervention plays a unique role in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. Keeping the public uninformed and miseducated has been a key tactic to tamp down dissent.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory.
Trump’s endless falsehoods about the Iran war build on a long history of US military mythmaking.
By Scott Kurashige ,Truthout, April 5, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/us-war-machine-is-built-on-decades-of-lies-the-assault-on-iran-is-no-exception/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=a2177ce48d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_04_05_04_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-a2177ce48d-650192793
The first casualty of war is the truth.
This truism — understandably repeated at the outset of each new U.S. war — is proving itself once again.
With all evidence pointing toward U.S. responsibility for the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, President Trump claimed that the attack “was done by Iran.” In spreading this blatant misinformation, Trump was not in fact shattering presidential norms — rather, he was continuing a White House tradition.
Back in 1945, in a public statement announcing the U.S.’s atomic bomb strike on Japan, President Harry Truman falsely described the city of Hiroshima as “an important Japanese Army base.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians. The bomb targeted thousands of schoolchildren, including nearly 6,000 who died as part of a service patrol near the center of Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, more than 1,400 students and teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School were killed.
But like most students attending U.S. schools after World War II, I was taught that dropping the atomic bombs saved lives.
Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars. A jingoistic fervor following an explosion on the battleship USS Maine prompted the Spanish-American War in 1898. In 1964, LBJ cited a “phantom battle” to push the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing military intervention in Vietnam.
Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war. In his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, he retroactively offered his first attempt to justify the war, claiming without evidence that Obama’s nuclear deal made Iran a greater threat and that Iran was on the cusp of aiming missiles at “the American homeland.”
Calling truth a casualty of war may imply, however, that truth survives between wars. But the reality is that militarism and the warfare state are sustained by lies which stretch over decades. The ideology of American exceptionalism is driven by the myth that U.S. intervention plays a unique role in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. Keeping the public uninformed and miseducated has been a key tactic to tamp down dissent.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory. This record of erasure has proven so effective that many of those speaking out against war crimes do not seem to understand the degree to which they, too, have been miseducated. Chastising the Trump administration’s response to the school bombing, The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells recoiled at the notion of a mass civilian massacre being “treated by U.S. officials as the normal cost of waging war.”
That civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history has apparently been lost on Wallace-Wells and countless others. Racism and xenophobia play a crucial role in this erasure, as they are used to rally support for war while devaluing the millions of nonwhite lives lost in pursuit of U.S. interests. As General William Westmoreland said bluntly during the Vietnam War, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.”
In this way, war-related lies have been integral to the formation of our national identity.
This is particularly true for the series of wars stretching across East, Central, and West Asia since the late 19th century that I researched for my book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of “the white man’s burden” in his 1899 call for the U.S. to colonize the Philippines was unmistakably racist. But in its time, it was meant to be instructive: Waging the “savage wars of peace” required Americans to shed their “childish” innocence and embrace the brutish nature of imperial power.
The message was sadly taken to heart by U.S. troops in the Philippines, where lynching, torture, concentration camps, and mass murder became all too common. Some atrocities continued long after the U.S. declared an end to combat. In 1906, American troops on Jolo Island in the southern Philippines killed 1,000 Moro people in what the U.S. recorded as a great military victory over Muslim fanatics in the “Battle of Bud Dajo.” Recounted by historian Kim A. Wagner, it was a horrific massacre, whose victims included women and children, as well as outgunned or unarmed men attempting to surrender.
Regarding the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, Robert McNamara admitted, “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.” After WWII, McNamara served as secretary of defense, overseeing the escalation of the Vietnam War that resulted in over 3 million deaths. The My Lai massacre, which was marked by wanton slaughter and sexual assault — was initially recorded as a successful defeat of “enemy” combatants in March 1968, but more accurate news about it finally broke through decades of silence on U.S. war crimes. Most Americans quickly bracketed it off, a horrific exception rather than the culmination of a pattern.
But My Lai was a near replay of tragedies from the Korean War that the U.S. military systematically covered up. South Koreans had long memorialized the hundreds of unarmed and defenseless civilians, from babies to elders, massacred by U.S. soldiers at No Gun Ri. It was only brought to the attention of the U.S. public, however, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning team of Associated Press reporters nearly a half-century later. Even today, mainstream histories largely ignore U.S. military involvement in the brutal partition and occupation of Korea.
And My Lai was far from the only civilian massacre in Vietnam. Indeed, on the same day, dozens of Vietnamese civilians in My Khe were killed by U.S. troops. American soldiers commonly used the most vile, racist epithets and dehumanizing stereotypes to characterize Vietnamese people — both combatants and civilians, friends and foes alike. “Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, [and] imprisonment without due process,” as author Nick Turse documented in Kill Anything That Moves, “were virtually a daily fact of life” for Vietnamese people.
Although the U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused veterans like Colin Powell to adopt a more protective approach to the deployment of U.S. troops, the pattern of civilian massacres continued. On February 13, 1991, over 400 Iraqi civilians taking refuge in a shelter were killed in Amiriyah by two laser-guided “smart bombs” in the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Though in this case U.S. officials did acknowledge the civilian deaths, they were largely dismissed as “collateral damage” from a strike on a military target.
Amnesty International investigated 10 incidents involving at least 140 civilians, including at least 50 children, killed in the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan, for which there were no war crimes prosecutions of any kind. Retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the former deputy national security advisor, acknowledged, “We virtually never held anyone accountable for civilian casualties.”
Whether actively or passively, our culture — just as it fails to value all American lives equally — has internalized the lies that elevate the value of American lives far above those who look like the enemy.
None of this is meant to imply that the U.S. always targets civilians deliberately or to deny that America’s enemies have committed atrocious crimes against humanity. Lies and dehumanization are a common tactic that all parties use in war. But with America’s unrivaled post-WWII military and economic superpower has come the concordant privilege to act with impunity, to disregard what the rest of the world thinks of us, and to dismiss the suffering of others.
When the Tokyo Trials were set up after World War II to prosecute Japanese war crimes, the U.S. ensured that the conduct of its military was barred from review, setting in motion a chain of disregard for equitable governance under international law. Since 2002, the U.S. has failed to endorse the International Criminal Court. The Trump administration has gone much further, attacking and placing sanctions on its judges, while waging war on Iran with Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest by the ICC for war crimes in Gaza.
The incremental steps our own government has taken have been rapidly reversed, as well. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” bombastically declared that “We negotiate with bombs,” while expressing disdain for “stupid rules of engagement.” Signaling this intent last year, he dismantled Pentagon programs intended to mitigate civilian harm. Such actions complement the misinformation campaign to eliminate “controversial” and “unpatriotic” topics from our public schools and national monuments.
But as the latest wrongheaded war reveals another layer of the United States’s limitations and declining power, those imperial privileges are waning. Trump’s threat to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should be opposed because it is a war crime in the making against innocent people and because such attacks could boomerang into a global economic meltdown, intensifying suffering at home and abroad.
Holding the individuals responsible for these decisions accountable — at the ballot box and under international law — is just the first step that people in the U.S. can take to become responsible citizens of a global community and stop the next atrocities before they occur. But we cannot wait for change to come from those at the top.
Historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has chronicled the diverse U.S. activists who built transnational and multiracial solidarity through travels to Vietnam while it was under siege from the U.S. Since the 1990s, the International Women’s Network Against Militarism has brought U.S. educators, artists, and activists together with women in many of the places most impacted by war and the negative effects of permanent overseas U.S bases. Their multifaceted efforts to overcome militarism advance a decolonial model of solidarity crossing Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean.
More recently, the humanitarian aid flotillas acting to alleviate starvation and death in Gaza and Cuba owing to Israel’s and the U.S.’s respective illegal blockades serve as important examples of the people-to-people relations necessary to break the chain of the lies that have torn us apart for too long. Reckoning with the legacy of empire ultimately requires a level of awareness that can best be achieved through these forms of solidarity from below.
US/Israel War against International Law
24 March 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Dr Dan Steinbock, https://theaimn.net/us-israel-war-against-international-law/
As the US/Israeli strikes against Iran violate the foundations of international law, the economic and human costs will soar.
After three weeks of effective war, the hostilities have caused severe regional spillovers, thousands of deaths, displacements of millions and a massive global energy crisis that continues to expand. If the implications are global, what’s the status of the US/Israeli strikes from the standpoint of international law?
The modern legal order is based on United Nations Charter (1945), Geneva Conventions, Rome Statute (1998) and Customary law from the Nuremberg Trials. The key rules include the prohibition of aggressive war, protection of civilians, individual criminal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Force is allowed only in the case of self-defense and UN Security Council authorization.
The US/Israeli strikes have already violated most of these rules.
War of aggression
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits UN member states from threatening or using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. It was violated on February 28, when US/Israel launched their joint strikes against Iran.
Typically, the war was launched precisely when and because the peace talks in Oman were advancing toward a successful conclusion.
In the absence of strategic objectives and exit strategy, the U.S. has framed the actions as a campaign to dismantle “the Iranian regime’s security apparatus.”
These efforts go back to the US/Israel 12-Day War against Iran in July 2025, when Masoud Pezeshkian, the new reform-minded Iran president, sought talks to end the conflict with the US and Israel. That was not in line with the “new Middle East” envisioned by PM Netanyahu and his Messianic far-right cabinet.
The UN Charter’s prohibition against force is not absolute, with key exceptions being self-defense (Article 51) and actions approved by the Security Council.
Yet, no such threat existed prior to the US/Israel strikes. And on March 17, 2026, Joe Kent, the Director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his position in protest of the ongoing U.S.-led war in Iran. Kent said in no uncertain terms that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
This is an illegal war of aggression, instigated by leaders who have been, like Prime Minister Netanyahu, (or should be) charged for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Preemptive war doctrine
To legitimize the unjustifiable, Washington has resorted to preemptive justifications. In this regard, the US/Israel war against Iran is just the latest link in the 25-year-long effort to sanctify power politics with preventive wars.
Since the Bush Jr. 2002 security doctrine, US administrations have stressed preemption as a central strategic instrument. While Democratic leaders (Obama, Biden) have been more moderate in rhetoric, they have coopted the same ideas.
Relying on force to prevent future threats, preventive war doctrines are often cited as violating international law because they bypass the strict legal requirements for the use of force established in the UN Charter.
Unilateral preventive war is a threat to the principle of state sovereignty, as it allows one nation to judge the “intentions” of another, without objective proof of an upcoming attack. Setting a dangerous precedent, it incentivizes other nations to use similar pretexts for their “preventive” attacks, potentially leading to global instability.
International law allows for preemptive strikes in cases of “imminent” danger. But US strategy improperly expands this to include preventive wars against threats that are not yet fully formed or do not exist – as in the cases of the 2003 Iraq War and the 2025 and 2026 Iran Wars.
Targeted assassinations
The targeted assassination of Iranian leaders is a serious violation of international law, especially when conducted outside of an active, declared war zone. Targeted killings violate the prohibition on the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity and political independence.
Outside of active hostilities, international human rights law (IHRL) applies. Under IHRL, arbitrary deprivation of life is prohibited. Targeted killings are extrajudicial killings for which the acting state is responsible.
In the context of conflict, targeted killings can violate International Humanitarian Law (IHL) principles, including distinction (targeting civilians) and proportionality. Assassinations of state officials often violate the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Persons Under International Protection.
Precedents feature the killing of the famous Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the right-hand man of the supreme leader of Iran, the late Ali Khamenei. Soleimani was assassinated in a targeted drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, ordered by President Trump.
From the standpoint of international law, it was an unlawful attack, as was pointed out by Ben Ferencz, the US prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials and pioneer of international law. After Soleimani’s killing, the New York Times printed Ferencz’s letter denouncing the assassination, unnamed in the letter, as an “immoral action [and] a clear violation of national and international law.”
In their first joint strikes against Iran, US and Israel assassinated the 87-year-old Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. Demonized in the West, Khamenei supported Iran’s nuclear program for civilian use. Already in the mid-1990s, he famously issuing a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.
The assassination of Khamenei was still another blatant violation of international law. It was also part of the Israeli strategy to eliminate moderate leaders, whose absence is then used as an excuse for replacing peaceful diplomacy with brutal obliteration campaigns.
Crimes against humanity, forced displacement
These crimes are defined in Rome Statute Article 7, as widespread or systematic attack on civilians. Allegations are typical when strikes include targeting civilian infrastructure, economic strangulation, mass displacement, and siege conditions.
A continuity argument – “what we first see in Gaza is now spreading to Iran and, due to spillovers, into the region” – exists because similar patterns can be identified via blockade, disproportionate force, and collective punishment.
The stated efforts at regime change to undermine Iran and fragment the Shi’a state suggest that the boundary between cultural genocide targeting a broad ethnic-religious group and full destabilization is a line drawn in waters.
Allegations of ethnic cleansing, relying on deliberate forced displacement are likely over time. While ethnic cleansing is not a formal treaty crime, it is recognized in jurisprudence. It rests on forced population removal, which is the net effect of the strikes against Iran and a deliberate intention in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Israel’s rapidly expanding buffer zone in southern Lebanon, extending roughly 3 to 14 kilometers north of the Blue Line demarcation, is premised on demographic engineering. In Iran, the objective to fragment the state, instigate inter-ethnic polarization and regional divides is also predicated on identity
At first sight, allegations of ethnic cleansing seemed to be more relevant to Gaza and the West Bank. But with shifting objectives, forced displacement is now an overwhelming reality. The US/Israel strikes have caused displacement of 3.5 million people in Iran and over 1 million in Lebanon, with up to 22,000 killed or wounded in the former and another 3,600 in the latter.
Collective punishment, economic warfare
Combined with illicit strikes, Washington’s decades-long sanctions against Iran, most of which are unilateral, and the underlying warfare is reminiscent of economic warfare premised at collective punishment.
Combinations of economic sanctions and military strikes, particularly when invalid from the standpoint of international law, raise serious issues under humanitarian law and human rights law. In Gaza and in Iran, unilateral sanctions have caused unwarranted mass suffering violating international law.
Ever since the early 1970s, when Beirut was still called the “Paris of the Middle East,” Israel’s wars against Palestinians have destabilized Lebanon’s fragile ethnic mosaic pushing the country to the edge of default. That’s the fate PM Netanyahu would like Iran to share.
In this regard, there is a clear continuity from the Gaza War, carried out by Israel with arms and financing by the US-led West, ICJ provisional measures and ICC arrest warrant debates, to the US/Israel strikes against Iran.
The common denominators feature an inflated self-defense doctrine, weak enforcement of humanitarian law, selective application of international law and ultimately the inevitable US veto in the Security Council.
The more these violations of international law are permitted, the greater will be the costs in economic terms, the more brutal the military destruction and the more lethal the human devastation.
That’s why multilateral cooperation – across all political differences – and the enforcement of international law is so desperately needed today, before it’s too late.
Dr Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
Trump’s $200 billion Iran spending request reveals scale of US war plans.
In reality, the administration is planning the most endless of all endless wars—an open-ended invasion aimed at subjugating or destroying a country of 90 million people.
The $200 billion is a supplemental—on top of the $839 billion defense bill Congress already passed for fiscal year 2026, the largest military budget in American history. If approved, direct military spending this year will exceed $1 trillion. US President Donald Trump has called for a $1.5 trillion military budget for fiscal year 2027—a 50 percent increase.
Andre Damon, 19 March 2026, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/20/iuck-m20.html
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Trump administration is seeking more than $200 billion to fund the war against Iran.
At a press briefing Thursday, a reporter asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “why a package this large is necessary?” Hegseth not only confirmed the $200 billion figure but suggested it could grow. “I think that number could move,” he said. “It takes money to kill bad guys. So we’re going back to Congress to ensure that we’re properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future.”
And what, exactly, are these unspecified things the administration “may have to do”?
In 2003, when 150,000 American soldiers invaded and occupied Iraq, Congress appropriated $51 billion—a quarter of what the Trump administration is requesting before a single ground soldier has entered Iran. At the height of the 2007-2008 surge, when nearly 170,000 American soldiers occupied the country, the war cost roughly $144 billion a year.
In reality, the $200 billion is not about “what we may have to do in the future” but about what the White House is actively conspiring to do in the present. The budget request comes as the administration prepares a ground invasion of Iran, deploying 5,000 Marines from the Pacific to the Middle East amid demands by the Wall Street Journal and leading Republicans for the seizure of Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz.
Reuters reported Wednesday that the Trump administration has discussed sending ground forces to seize Kharg Island, the hub for 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, and has separately discussed deploying US forces to secure Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium. They are operational plans for the invasion and occupation of Iranian territory—and they explain why the administration is demanding more money than was appropriated for any single year of the Iraq invasion.
Just as with the months and years of planning that preceded the US-Israeli attack on Iran, the ground invasion is being prepared behind the backs of the American people, who overwhelmingly oppose the war. Trump called the war an “excursion.” Vice President JD Vance promised it would not become a “quagmire.” At the same briefing where he confirmed the $200 billion request, Hegseth told reporters: “The media wants you to think, just 19 days into this conflict, that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a Forever War or a quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In reality, the administration is planning the most endless of all endless wars—an open-ended invasion aimed at subjugating or destroying a country of 90 million people.
The administration sees the Iran war as a prelude to an effort to subjugate China, the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity. As former Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry put it on ABC’s This Week, the wars in Venezuela and Iran are “targets of opportunity to reshape the world.” He added: “Venezuela was in service to American energy dominance. The issue with Iran was a target of opportunity… The results here will mean that, with China, the president’s hand will be enhanced.”
The $200 billion is a supplemental—on top of the $839 billion defense bill Congress already passed for fiscal year 2026, the largest military budget in American history. If approved, direct military spending this year will exceed $1 trillion. US President Donald Trump has called for a $1.5 trillion military budget for fiscal year 2027—a 50 percent increase.
And $200 billion is only what the administration will admit to. In 2002, Bush’s chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was fired for estimating the Iraq war would cost $100 to $200 billion. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the figure at “something under $50 billion.” When told outside estimates ran to $300 billion, Rumsfeld replied: “Baloney.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for reconstruction. The actual cost, including veterans’ care, disability payments and interest on the debt, is now estimated by Brown University’s Costs of War Project at more than $8 trillion.
The waging of continuous wars, combined with the 2008 and 2020 bank bailouts, has produced an explosion of US debt. In 2000, before the Iraq war, the national debt stood at $5.7 trillion. By 2010, after the Iraq surge and the $700 billion TARP bank bailout, it had reached $12.3 trillion. By 2020, after $4.6 trillion in COVID bailouts, it hit $27 trillion. It now stands at $39 trillion—nearly seven times what it was a quarter century ago.
The United States credit rating has been downgraded three times—by Standard & Poor’s in 2011, Fitch in 2023 and Moody’s in 2025—each time because of military spending and the refusal of either party to cut the military budget. The Vietnam War destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and produced the inflation of the 1970s, which the ruling class broke through the Volcker shock—mass unemployment to crush wages. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were waged alongside tax cuts for the wealthy and the gutting of public services.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed last July, imposed $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade, $536 billion in cuts to Medicare and $186 billion in cuts to food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the largest cut to food aid in American history. The fiscal year 2026 budget slashed domestic spending by 22.6 percent—cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by 44 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by 44 percent and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $18 billion—while increasing the military budget by 13 percent.
Within 24 hours of the administration confirming it is seeking $200 billion for the war, the Postmaster General testified to Congress that the United States Postal Service (USPS) could run out of cash as soon as October—with just $8.2 billion in reserves, enough to cover 33 days of operations. The USPS employs more than 500,000 workers and holds billions in pension and retirement obligations. The manufactured insolvency is a pretext for raiding those funds—taking workers’ pension money and spending it on the war.
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security represent trillions more. The ruling class sees these programs as money to be seized. The administration does not see pensions and healthcare as social programs. It sees them as collateral.
Trump has promised the economic pain will be a temporary “blip.” This will not pass in weeks. It will mean a permanent reduction in working-class living standards, just as the Iraq war did.
The struggle to defend Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, pensions and public services cannot be separated from the struggle against war. They are the same struggle. The $200 billion the administration demands is money taken from the programs working people depend on to survive.
The Democrats have systematically enabled Trump’s wars. In January, as Trump declared that a massive armada was steaming toward Iran, every leading Democrat in Congress voted for the $839 billion military budget—Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Whip Dick Durbin all voted in favor. Their criticism of the war has centered on procedural issues, along with demands that US imperialism direct its fire at Russia and China.
Opposition must come from below—from workers in the United States, in Iran, across the Middle East and around the world—organized independently of both capitalist parties, armed with a socialist and internationalist program, and fighting to build the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as the revolutionary leadership of the working class. The fight against imperialist war is the fight against the capitalist system that produces it.
The Nightmare of Fukushima 15 Years Later
SCHEERPOST, By Joshua Frank, March 20, 2026
“…………………………………………………………………………………… The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, built by General Electric (GE) in the mid-1960s, was designed to withstand natural disasters, but its creators never foresaw an earthquake like that. When the plant’s sensors detected the quake, its reactors automatically shut down. That emergency shutdown (or scram) halted its fission process, triggering backup power to keep cold seawater flowing through the reactors and spent-fuel containers to prevent overheating. Things at Fukushima were going according to plan until that massive tsunami battered the plant, washing away transmission towers and damaging electrical systems. There were backup generators in the basement, but those, too, had been inundated by waves of seawater, and an already bad situation was about to get far worse.
A power outage at a nuclear power plant is known as a “station blackout.” As you might imagine, it’s one of the worst scenarios any nuclear facility could possibly experience. If all electricity is lost, that means water is no longer being pumped into the reactor’s scalding-hot core to cool it down. And if that core isn’t constantly being cooled, one thing is certain: disaster will ensue. The fission process itself may be complicated, but that’s basic physics. To make matters worse, there were three operating reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Luckily, three others had already been shut down for maintenance. If power wasn’t restored in short order, that would mean that all three of Fukushima’s reactors were in very big trouble.
We would later learn that no one — not at TEPCO, GE, or among Japanese regulators — had ever considered the possibility that all the reactors might lose electricity at once. They had only drawn up plans for one reactor to go down, in which case the others could keep the plant running. But all of them offline, and every generator out of commission? There was no precedent or playbook for that.
The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime. The fact that there’s a term for this should make you anxious.
Meltdowns and Fallout
Over the next several days, the emergency at Fukushima Daiichi only worsened. Every effort to restore power to its reactors hit a dead end. On-site radiation-detection equipment, which would have triggered warnings and guided evacuation efforts for those in danger, was no longer functioning. Plans to pump water into the reactors to cool them had faltered. Their cores kept overheating, and the boiling pools of spent fuel were at risk of drying out, potentially triggering a massive fire that would release extreme amounts of radiation.
Within three days, following a series of fires, hydrogen explosions, and panic among those aware of what was happening, Fukushima’s Units 1, 2, and 3 experienced full-scale core meltdowns. Over 150,000 people within an 18-mile radius had already been forced to evacuate, and radiation plumes would take two weeks to spread across the northern hemisphere, although the Japanese government wouldn’t admit publicly that any meltdown had occurred until June 2011, three months later.
The only good news for the 13 million people living 150 miles south in Tokyo was that, during and immediately after the meltdowns, prevailing winds carried much of Fukushima’s radioactive material away from the smoldering reactors and out to sea. It’s estimated that 80% of the fallout from Fukushima ended up in the ocean, meaning most of it headed east rather than toward population centers to the south and west. The other fortunate news was that the spent fuel containers had somehow survived it all. If their water levels in the pools had been drained, far more radiation would have been released.
But Tokyo wasn’t completely spared. After years of research, scientists discovered that cesium-rich microparticles had blanketed the greater Tokyo area, an unpopular discovery that drew backlash and threats of academic censorship. Areas around the Fukushima exclusion zones recorded the highest radiation levels. Japanese government officials continually downplayed the dangers of the accident and were reluctant to even classify the event as a Level 7 nuclear disaster, the highest rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which would have placed it on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Japanese officials have also failed to conduct long-term epidemiological studies that would include baseline measurements of cancer rates, which has cast doubt on thyroid screenings that found troubling incidents of cancer far higher than researchers expected.
Radioactive Fish
Prior to the earthquake, the ocean’s cesium-137 levels near Fukushima were 2 Becquerels (a unit of radioactivity) per cubic meter, well below the recommended drinking water threshold of 10,000 Becquerels. Just after March 11, 2011, cesium-137 levels there spiked to fifty million before decreasing as sea currents dispersed the radioactive particles away from the coast. The ocean, however, had been poisoned.
In the years that followed the Fukushima nuclear disaster, researchers documented a frightening, yet predictable trend. Radioactive isotopes in seawater were taken up by marine plants (phytoplankton), which then moved up the food chain into tiny marine animals (zooplankton) and, eventually, to fish.
Cesium-137 consumed by fish can reside in their bodies for months, while Strontium-90 remains in their bones for years. If humans then eat such fish, they will also be exposed to those radioactive particles. The more contaminated fish they eat, the greater the radioactive buildup will be.
In 2023, over a decade after the incident, radiation levels remained sky-high in black rockfish caught off the Fukushima coast. Other bottom-dwelling species have been found to be laden with radioactivity, too, including eel and rock trout. Further concerns have been raised about the treated radioactive water that TEPCO continued to release into the ocean, prompting China to suspend seafood imports from Japan. Aside from those findings, there have been very few studies examining the effects of Fukushima’s radiation on ecosystems or on the people of Japan.
“Japan has clamped down on scientific efforts to study the nuclear catastrophe,” claims pediatrician Alex Rosen of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “There is hardly any literature, any publicized research, on the health effects on humans, and those that are published come from a small group of researchers at Fukushima Medical University.”
Recognizing such levels of radiation, even if confined to the waters near Fukushima, would cast the country’s nuclear industry as a significant threat — not only to Japan but globally. Any admission that Fukushima’s radiation is linked to increased cancer rates would raise broader concerns about nuclear power’s future viability. Radiation exposure is cumulative and, although Fukushima didn’t immediately cause mass casualties, it wasn’t a benign accident either. It took decades before it was accepted that Chernobyl had caused tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths. It may take even longer to completely understand Fukushima’s full effects. In the meantime, the still ongoing cleanup of the burned-out facilities may cost as much as 80 trillion yen ($500 billion).
It’s been 15 years since Fukushima’s reactors experienced those meltdowns and we still don’t fully understand their long-term repercussions. Nuclear power advocates will argue that Fukushima wasn’t a serious incident and that nuclear technology is still safe. They’ll minimize radiation threats, remain optimistic that new reactor designs will never falter, dismiss the fact that there’s simply no permanent solution for radioactive waste, and overlook the inseparable connection between nuclear power and atomic weapons. After all, among other things, we’ll undoubtedly need nuclear energy to help power the artificial intelligence craze, right?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. With nine nuclear-armed nations and roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet, worries about nuclear war are unavoidable. However, the danger of a nuclear disaster at a seemingly “peaceful” nuclear facility is often ignored. The future of atomic energy remains uncertain, but it is our duty to eliminate this hazardous energy source before another Fukushima triggers a war-like catastrophe all its own.mhttps://scheerpost.com/2026/03/20/searching-for-solace-in-a-nuclearized-world/
Joshua Frank, a TomDispatch regular, is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming Bad Energy: AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books.
1 This Month
22 June – Virtual Event –Climate Change: New Data, New Debate
Monday, June 22, 2026 2:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. CT
YouTube. Register here
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25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
Thursday, June 25, 2026
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5
From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
26 June – Radiation Trainwreck at the NRC / Join the Protect Better Campaign – https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4ZlZ5_qLSHGiLSCg8FF6Bg#/registration
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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