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.
“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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 operatingreactors 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/
When a hypothesis is at odds with data, you don’t discard the data – you modify the hypothesis.
Medical data trump hypothetical estimates of “radiation doses” that are disconnected from reality, not measured nor even measurable.
Internal exposures to alpha emitters like plutonium and pure beta emitters like tritium and carbon-14 are notoriously difficult to measure, especially when it comes to pregnant women and their developing fetuses.Too often, medical data have been mistrusted or even discarded because the estimated radiation doses were “too low” to account for the harmful effects recorded
This happened in the aftermath of the TMI nuclear accident, for example, and following the German KiKK study that found significantly increased leukaemia in children under 5 within 5 kilometres of any one of Germany’s then-operating 17 nuclear power reactors.All 17 reactors are now shut down, as Germany has completely phased out of nuclear power.
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‘Robust and consistent’ signal: Cancer mortality rates higher near nuclear power plants
By Mark Leiser, Fact checked by Heather Bile, Healio, March 16, 2026
[from Hematology/Oncology News Today]
Key Takeaways
An analysis of every U.S. county showed higher cancer mortality rates in those located closer to nuclear power plants.
The findings cannot prove causality but warrant further investigation, researchers concluded.
U.S. counties located closer to nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those located farther away, results of a national analysis showed.
The study — which accounted for environmental, socioeconomic and other factors — yielded results that remained consistent through multiple sensitivity analyses.
During the 19 year study period, researchers estimated that 115,586 cancer deaths nationwide could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
Data derived from Alwadi A, et al. Nat Commun. 2026;doi:10.1038/s41467-026-69285-4.
In light of increased attention on nuclear power as a low-carbon energy alternative, more research into its potential effects on public health is warranted, according to Yazan Alwadi, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the department of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“We want to be very clear that we cannot prove causality. However, the signal we observed is very robust and consistent, and it is surprising it has not been shown before,” Alwadi told Healio. “In my opinion, we have all the evidence we need to justify going to the next level of investigation.”
Impact of ‘normal operation’
A majority of studies that examined the effects of routine operation assessed cancer incidence or mortality in a specific region located near one or two plants. The limited setting reduces the statistical power to detect effects, he said.
Alwadi and colleagues launched their study after local public health officials in Plymouth County, Massachusetts — where the now-closed Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is located — asked them to evaluate what they considered concerning cancer patterns in the region.
“Rather than focusing on a single county, we felt it was scientifically stronger to conduct a national analysis,” Alwadi said.
The researchers used U.S. Energy Information Administration records to identify the locations and operational dates of all nuclear power plants located within 200 km — about 124 miles — from the center of any U.S. county. They obtained county-level cancer mortality data from the CDC, focusing on the period between 2000 and 2018.
Alwadi and colleagues employed what they described as a “spatially resolved, inverse distance-weighted proximity metric.”
They used statistical modeling to calculate cumulative effects of multiple nearby nuclear power plants on people aged 35 years or older, controlling for potential confounders — such as BMI, smoking prevalence, household income and educational attainment — in each county.
A positive association
The results revealed a positive association between proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer mortality.
Investigators estimated 115,586 cancer deaths (95% CI, 56,964-173,326) during the 19-year study period — or approximately 6,400 per year across the country — could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
For men and women in most age groups, results showed considerably higher relative risks when equivalent plant distance was 50 km or less, with risk curves beginning to plateau with greater distance.
Relative risk estimates were lowest among the 35-to-44 age group for both women and men, then began to increase with age.
Investigators estimated 115,586 cancer deaths (95% CI, 56,964-173,326) during the 19-year study period — or approximately 6,400 per year across the country — could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
For men and women in most age groups, results showed considerably higher relative risks when equivalent plant distance was 50 km or less, with risk curves beginning to plateau with greater distance.
Relative risk estimates were lowest among the 35-to-44 age group for both women and men, then began to increase with age.
Among women, those aged 55 to 64 years exhibited the highest relative risk (RR = 1.19), with 2.1% (95% CI, 1.3%-2.9%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Among men, those aged 65 to 74 years had the highest relative risk (RR = 1.2), with an estimated 2% (95% CI, 1.2%-2.7%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Overall results showed the highest attributable cancer mortality burden among individuals aged 65 to 84 years. Researchers estimated 4,266 deaths (95% CI, 3,000-9,112) per year among those aged 65 or older to be attributable to proximity to nuclear power plants.
Among women, those aged 55 to 64 years exhibited the highest relative risk (RR = 1.19), with 2.1% (95% CI, 1.3%-2.9%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Among men, those aged 65 to 74 years had the highest relative risk (RR = 1.2), with an estimated 2% (95% CI, 1.2%-2.7%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Overall results showed the highest attributable cancer mortality burden among individuals aged 65 to 84 years. Researchers estimated 4,266 deaths (95% CI, 3,000-9,112) per year among those aged 65 or older to be attributable to proximity to nuclear power plants.
The associations between proximity and cancer mortality persisted in multiple sensitivity analyses, Alwadi said. In one, researchers adjusted the distance from nuclear power plants to county centers, changing by increments of 10 km until it reached a 100-km radius. In another, investigators varied the average proximity window across five intervals, ranging from 2 years to 20 years.
The consistency of the results demonstrate that they “are not driven by arbitrary choices in model variables or parameters,” the researchers wrote.
The investigators acknowledged study limitations.
The analysis assumed equal impact of all nuclear power plants rather than incorporating direct radiation measurements, and it assessed all malignancies combined even though radiation sensitivities and latency periods vary by cancer type.
Also, the standard formula investigators used to calculate attributable fraction assumes a causal relationship between the outcome and exposure without accounting for potential exposure misclassification or residual confounding.
‘We need to dig deeper’
The study is the first to the authors’ knowledge that uses a continuous proximity metric to examine nuclear power plant proximity and cancer mortality on a national level.
The use of 19 years of national cancer mortality data and a 10-year average nuclear power plant proximity window allowed for a “robust temporal assessment” of proximity’s long-term effects, the researchers wrote.
However, the findings have been the subject of some public criticism.
The Breakthrough Institute — a California-based research center that seeks to identify technological solutions to environmental challenges — published a post on its website challenging the accuracy of the paper, as well as another that Alwadi’s research group previously published that showed an association between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and elevated cancer incidence among people in Massachusetts.
The Breakthrough Institute — a California-based research center that seeks to identify technological solutions to environmental challenges — published a post on its website challenging the accuracy of the paper, as well as another that Alwadi’s research group previously published that showed an association between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and elevated cancer incidence among people in Massachusetts.
“The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation,” the online post reads.
The post authors point to the lack of a control group in the Massachusetts state-level analysis and use of “an improperly sampled group” in the national study. Distance from a nuclear plant is not a substitute measure of radiation dose, they argued, noting factors such as wind direction, shielding or monitored emissions had not been taken into account. Researchers also could not demonstrate that people who live nearby receive “any incremental dose beyond natural background radiation,” they added.
Consequently, the research is “fundamentally dangerous” and increases public health risks by “fueling efforts” to close existing nuclear plants and prevent new ones from coming online, the post authors wrote, suggesting this would compound the health risks associated with fossil-fueled electricity generation.
Alwadi said he is aware of the criticisms but believes many of them result from “lack of knowledge of statistics or epidemiology.”
Many of the concerns expressed in the online post already have been acknowledged by researchers in the manuscript as study limitations or addressed in sensitivity analyses performed to answer questions raised by peer reviewers prior to publication, Alwadi said. The methodology “has been put through the wringer and checked step by step,” he added.
“Anyone can write what they want on their own website,” Alwadi said. “If they have a legitimate criticism, they can submit it to the journal. If the editors determine it is valid, we would have to respond to it. We haven’t received anything like that.
“We have, however, received emails from so many people asking to collaborate with us or to investigate this more closely in specific regions,” Alwadi added. “People are very interested in this. They want to know if there is an effect. We want to know, too.”
Alwadi and colleagues are continuing to analyze additional datasets and perform cohort analyses. They have hypotheses that they hope will serve as the foundation for exposure pathway-specific analyses. Alwadi also emphasized the need for additional research into latency effects and impacts on risks for specific malignancies.
“The best data we get comes from randomized clinical trials, but that design is not applicable to the study of environmental exposures,” Alwadi said.
“Epidemiological studies progress in stages. If you find a signal, you keep going. We certainly did not want to see an effect, but we observed a systematic association that is robust to sensitivity analyses and observed across multiple datasets and geographic aggregations.
“We acknowledge that does not establish causality,” he added. “But what if you lived in a town and noticed that everybody who drank from a specific well got sick? If you didn’t know the exact mechanism, would you still drink from that well or would you investigate it? That’s all we’re saying. We need to dig deeper.”
After several failed attempts at a “nuclear renaissance” since the mid 1970s, the current hype about nuclear power plants with low capacity, also referred to as “small modular reactors”, is yet another attempt to save an aging industry in decline
This Böll EU Brief critically assesses the prospects of small modular reactors (SMRs) in Europe. It finds that most SMR designs remain in early development, lack regulatory approval in the EU, and are unlikely to deliver electricity at scale before 2050. Technical, economic and political challenges – including high costs, unresolved waste management, proliferation risks and heterogeneous designs – undermine claims of rapid deployment and cost reductions. The authors conclude that prioritising renewables, storage and electrification is a more credible pathway for timely decarbonisation.
Key findings:
The term small modular reactors (SMR) is not standardised, and SMR concepts are not small. Instead, the capacities of many designs are comparable with nuclear reactors built in the 20th century.
Technically, most SMR concepts do not differ from existing light water reactors. Current assessments show that their reduced capacity does not automatically reduce the risk of accidents. Instead, their heterogenous nature requires specialised infrastructure for fuel production and waste management that does not exist today. SMR concepts designed to operate on high-assay uranium could even increase nuclear proliferation risks.
There is a hype around SMRs – this is problematic because of the many open questions and risks. The heterogenity of SMR concepts hinders mass production and consequently, envisioned cost reductions. Most SMR concepts remain in early design stages and are yet to receive regulatory approval or begin corresponding processes in the EU. Once these steps have concluded, additional site licensing, construction and comissioning steps would still be required. Electricity production from SMRs is unlikely to materialise at scale in the near term and remains decades away. If it occurs, it will come at very high costs.
The hopes associated with the development of SMRs became evident when in June 2025, the European Commission presented its 8th Nuclear Illustrative Programme (PINC). It called for investments exceeding EUR 240 billion until 2050 to achieve the Member States’ nuclear expansion plans.
According to the PINC, so-called SMR concepts ‘could serve as complement to renewable energy’ by ‘[helping to] achieve an integrated, secure, stable, high-efficient and resilient energy system’ via flexibility provision, co-located electricity and heat generation, and hydrogen production.1
Furthermore, claims of new SMR capacity ranging from 17 to 53 gigawatt (GWe) were made, in addition to ambitious claims of high-capacity reactor new build and lifetime extensions of existing plants.
This would potentially double the EU’s current capacity of 86.6 GWe to 125 GWe or even 197 GWe by 2050 (Figure 1) – despite aging fleets, limited active construction and decade-long lead times for new nuclear projects.
The ongoing enthusiasm regarding the expansion of data centres for cloud computing and AI is further fueling this hype around SMRs that they could ‘provide a source of baseload low-emissions electricity’.2
These optimistic claims stand in contrast with actual industry potential and various risks associated with nuclear power plants. At the time of writing in February 2026, no SMR concept had been granted a construction licence in the EU. The only SMR concept with ongoing construction activities outside of Russia and China, the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 reactor in Canada, is yet to begin pouring concrete for the reactor housing, and all other concepts remain in early development stages, thus owing proof of the PINC’s claims and placing their potential useage many years into the future.3 Taken together, this raises critical questions about the realistic role of SMRs in the EU’s strategy. We therefore provide a brief overview of the current state of SMR concept development and highlight some of the remaining challenges.
What are SMRs?.
Originally, the term SMR was used in the industry to designate small- and medium-sized reactors. This covered the “natural” development from research reactors and demonstrators with low power (< 100 MWe) to larger units of several hundred megawatts (MWe) to exploit economies of scale.
The term SMR was re-coined by then-US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in 2010 in an attempt to relaunch a previously failed “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Therefore, today, the term SMR usally incorporates reactors with less than 300 MWe of electrical capacity, although some concepts exceed this arbitrary limit by quite a margin, for example, the Rolls-Royce SMR with 470 MWe.4
The collective term SMR can incorporate a vast array of different reactor technologies, such as light-water reactors, high-temperature-gas-cooled reactors, reactors operating on fast neutron spectra, molten salt reactors, and more. Each of these technologies implies the use of technology-specific supply chains and fuel-cycle arrangements, as well as distinct approaches to decommissioning and waste management. Further, most concepts remain in early development stages.4-6
How close to market introduction are SMRs?
Most concepts are in early development or licensing stages. For example, the NuScale VOYGR was granted a standard design approval by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in May 2025 and is undergoing a licensing process in Romania. While a final investment decision (FID) was reportedly made in February 2026, there is currently no ongoing construction project. The Rolls-Royce SMR has reached the third and final step of the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation Generic Design Assessment (GDA). But it is still waiting for site licence approval to begin construction. Several other designs are in various stages of the GDA process. The Argentinian CAREM reactor, under construction since 2014, was abandoned in 2024, and a new design is being sought, albeit with an uncertain timeframe. The French NUWARD concept is undergoing a redesign process aimed at increasing its electrical output to around 400 MWe, requiring licensing process restarts. Outside Russia and China, whose individual SMR prototypes are operating, with, from what is known, meager performance indicators,7 the Canadian project at Darlington, Ontario, represents the most advanced case, although only one of four originally planned GEH BWRX-300 units received a construction licence in May 2025.
Figure 2 [0n original]shows some of the SMR concepts currently under development and their respective furthest regulatory process steps. Ongoing activities in respective countries are indicated by the coloured lines, such as the Joint Early Review (JER) for the NUWARD reactor. However, the JER is a non-binding communication platform between several European regulators and indicates no actual licensing activities. To conclude, most SMR concepts are yet to gain regulatory approval in the EU or even begin actual licensing processes. They are thus far away from a broad market introduction.
Major challenges for SMRs in Europe
Technical challenges Broadly speaking, the proposed SMR concepts do not represent technological breakthroughs, but the smaller size is intended to provide increased safety performance. While some concepts bank on innovative passive safety systems, like the NuScale VOYGR, the LWR technology itself does not fundamentally differ from today’s fleets, bringing similar or potentially additional safety-related risks. Regarding other reactor technologies, like high-temperature reactors or fast neutron reactors, experience with now closed prototypes is dominated by emergency shutdowns, as well as safety- and cost-related project cancellations.5
Recent expert assessments conclude that it is not possible to state that SMR concepts generally achieve a higher safety level than high-capacity reactors. These assessments indicate that, contrary to some developer claims, emergency planning zones are likely to remain necessary for SMR concepts. Furthermore, radioactive release potentials have not been fully assessed, and the implications of modulary installed reactors at a single site remain uncertain.5
A central promise of SMR concepts is the potential to benefit from industrial learning effects through serial production and standardisation. However, this presupposes the repeated deployment of a limited number of standardised designs. The current SMR landscape is instead characterised by heterogeneous reactor concepts based on different technologies and design philosophies.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s Advanced Reactor Information System lists more than 70 SMR designs, of which, according to the IAEA itself, many neither fulfil modularity requirements nor are expected to reach commercial readiness.
Implementing various nuclear technologies would require suitable and customised supply chains due to heterogeneous fuel requirements, for example, different enrichment levels for specialised fuel. Different reactor concepts would also generate different types of waste that require specialised infrastructure.5,8
There are also open questions regarding the suitability of SMRs for decarbonised industrial heat provision. Most industrial processes require temperature levels that can be easily provided by industrial scale heat pumps, or direct electrification. But only high-temperature reactor concepts could theoretically provide the heat of up to 1000°C required for steel and glass manufacturing for which low-carbon alternatives exist today–and most SMR concepts are light-water based.
Economic challenges Economically, SMRs are unlikely to become competitive with existing gigawatt-sized reactors. The economic case of SMRs centers on scalability and modularisation. In contrast to consumer technologies, like smartphones or computer chips, nuclear reactors are capital-intensive assets whose costs are dominated by construction, regulatory compliance and financing rather than component manufacturing.
Calculations indicate that hundreds to thousands of reactors of the same design, vendor and capacity would need to be manufactured to achieve cost levels comparable to those of current high-capacity light-water reactors;9 SMRs will thus be more costly than large reactors per unit of electricity.7 The substantial cost reduction assumptions are often included in energy modelling scenarios that result in substantial nuclear capacity expansion expectations.
In practice, current deployment trajectories provide little evidence that such manufacturing volumes are achievable. The BWRX-300 project in Canada is estimated to cost at least CAD 7.7 bn (EUR 4.76 bn or 15,870 EUR/kW) for a single reactor as of May 2025. There is substantial doubt on whether localised manufacturing facilities (and thus reduced costs) will materialise.7 Historically, the nuclear industry has tended to increase rather than reduce costs.10 Figure 3 shows current levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) for existing technologies, and the mean projected LCOE for light-water SMR concepts. These figures do not include additional costs for infrastructure expansion caused by grid integration of SMRs or flexibility measures for fluctuating renewables, or costs for nuclear waste storage.
Furthermore, the economic case for heat supply from SMRs remains weak.11 Recent studies indicate that SMRs would, at sufficiently low costs, still induce higher overall system costs than lower-cost alternatives capable of delivering the same service today, such as large-scale heat pumps or direct electrification.12
Finally, integrated energy system modelling suggests that SMR concepts will have to deliver on their cost promises to become relevant in a future European energy system.11 This is consistent with earlier research demonstrating the poor economic performance of nuclear new build in competitive electricity markets and studies highlighting the lack of economic necessity for baseload generation in mostly renewable power systems.10
Political challenges The heterogeneity of SMR concepts will complicate their implementation in Europe, given the necessity of tailored regulation for different technologies and use cases, for example, emergency planning zones. Such requirements complicate siting decisions and regulatory coordination across Member States and could also hinder data centre or industrial co-siting as well as district heating.
Further challenges lie in the necessity of specialised waste management infrastructure. Given the lack of adequate waste repositories for Europe’s existing spent fuel from currently operating reactors, this issue must be resolved before implementing SMR fleets with heterogeneous waste streams.13 This raises questions of legitimacy, public acceptance and institutional credibility. Uncertainty regarding future disposal concepts, responsibilities, and long-term commitments constitutes a governance risk, particulary where repository strategies were developed for existing (light-water) fleets.
Additionally, specialised fuel requirements, such as designs relying on high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, could increase proliferation risks and raise concerns about fuel supply security and international oversight.14 Many EU policymakers currently perceive SMRs as an additional promising option that could contribute to the EU’s emission reduction targets. However, even under very optimistic assumptions for the speed of market introduction of SMRs, they will likely not contribute to these political objectives before the 2050 climate neutrality benchmark. Thus, betting on near-term SMR deployment for decarbonisation binds limited political and administrative resources at EU and Member State level that could be better applied to existing cost-competitive technologies, namely, renewables and storage, to supply clean and affordable energy instead of waiting for a technology whose feasibility remains highly uncertain.4
Conclusions and policy recommendations
After several failed attempts at a “nuclear renaissance” since the mid 1970s, the current hype about nuclear power plants with low capacity, also referred to as “small modular reactors”, is yet another attempt to save an aging industry in decline.
Based on current evidence and development status, SMRs are unlikely to provide a meaningful contribution to European energy system decarbonisation within a relevant timeframe. Instead, continued attention towards their potential benefits will decellerate the necessary transformation of the energy system even further. New designs do not fundamentally mitigate the inherent challenges associated with nuclear power, namely waste management, proliferation risks and high cost.
Furthermore, the heterogeneous nature of proposed SMR concepts creates regulatory, industrial and governmental complexities that increase the uncertainty regarding future cost reductions and large-scale deployment, while requiring the implementation of customised infrastructure for fuel supply, waste management and so on. Consequently, current capacity projections based on SMR deployment are highly unlikely. The EU should not wait until first SMR concept prototypes are built and – perhaps eventually – brought to scale..
EU policymakers should instead prioritise policy frameworks that accelerate the deployment of mature, cost-effective low-carbon technologies. This includes facilitating efficient grid utilisation, strengthening system flexibility and demand-side management, supporting decentralised renewable generation, and advancing electricifation of energy demand. Given binding climate targets and rising electricity demand, decarbonisation efforts must deliver measurable results within the current decade. In this context, relying on technologies that remain at early stages of development and require substantial scaling before delivering system-level impacts at very high costs entails signficant strategic risk and should be avoided.
Without historical context, which is buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand the war in Ukraine. Historians will tell the story, but journalists are cut short for trying to tell it now.
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, and the rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians today write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded the same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997 :: The only thing that could provoke a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response would be needless NATO Expansion Far East right till the border of Russia – Sen. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hRW47hLL5y
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
August 15, 2025: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska for the first face-to-face meeting between U.S. and Russian leaders in more than four years. The Russians left believing Trump had thoroughly understood their position against a ceasefire and instead their desire to reach a comprehensive solution to the war that addressed the “root causes” and Russian security concerns, which have been outlined in this timeline. A series of follow-up diplomatic meetings have failed to advance that goal and the conflict continues to be decided on the battlefield with Russian gains as well as an increase in missiles being fired into each nations territory.
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 1560 (2026) , 23 February 2026 [Excellent graphics and tables]
Abstract
Understanding the potential health implications of living near nuclear power plants is important given the renewed interest in nuclear energy as a low-carbon power source. Here we show that U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those farther away.
Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64. While our findings cannot establish causality, they highlight the need for further research into potential exposure pathways, latency effects, and cancer-specific risks, emphasizing the importance of addressing these potentially substantial but overlooked risks to public health.
…………………………………………………………….Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination1. Populations residing near nuclear power plants may experience low-level chronic exposure to ionizing radiation via environmental release pathways. While our study does not include dosimetry, ionizing radiation is a well-established carcinogen2,3,4,5,6,7 and thus motivates investigation into proximity-based exposure patterns.
………………………Despite the importance and prevalence of nuclear power plants in the U.S., epidemiologic research regarding their health impacts remains rare. Most U.S. studies have focused on individual plants or limited regions, with only a few national assessments to date – many of which relied on fixed distance cutoffs to classify exposed populations8,9,11,12,19,21,22,23,24,25. These studies often focus on a single facility and its surrounding communities, which restricts their statistical power to detect effects and ability to capture broader exposure patterns. Furthermore, differences in study design, exposure assessment methods, and geographic scope make it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions.
In this work, we assess the association between county-level proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer mortality across the United States from 2000 to 2018. We find that counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates, with stronger associations observed among older adults. These associations remain consistent across multiple sensitivity analyses and proximity definitions. The results highlight spatial patterns of cancer risk in relation to nuclear power generation and emphasize the importance of evaluating potential long-term health implications of nuclear energy infrastructure in population-scale studies…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Nuclear plant worker Hisashi Ouchi suffered the highest radiation dose in history after 1999 Japan accident, enduring 83 agonising days before death.
Hisashi Ouchi, a 35‑year‑old nuclear plant worker, survived a 1999 criticality accident that delivered the highest recorded radiation dose to a human, enduring 83 days of severe medical complications before dying of multiple organ failure. A government probe later blamed inadequate supervision, safety culture, and training, leading to negligence charges against six plant officials.
Key points:
On September 30, 1999, a criticality accident at a Japanese nuclear fuel processing plant exposed worker Hisashi Ouchi to an estimated 17,000 millisieverts of radiation.
The dose Ouchi received was about 850 times the annual occupational limit for nuclear workers and roughly 140 times higher than the exposure of residents near Chernobyl.
Ouchi was hospitalized at the University of Tokyo Hospital, where he underwent experimental treatments for 83 days, during which his skin sloughed off, his eyelids fell off, and his digestive system collapsed.
Medical staff administered up to ten blood transfusions daily, and painkillers were reported to be ineffective; Ouchi reportedly said, “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.”
He died on December 21, 1999, and the official cause of death was recorded as multiple organ failure
A nuclear facility worker suffered what many consider to be the most agonising death ever recorded after a routine procedure went catastrophically wrong.
Hisashi Ouchi, 35, was exposed to an incomprehensible level of radiation when colleagues accidentally added excessive uranium to a processing vessel, sparking an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction on September 30, 1999.
The unfortunate Ouchi was positioned nearest to the vessel, consequently subjecting him to 17,000 millisieverts of radiation – equivalent to 200,000 X-rays.
The exposure he received was 850 times the safe yearly limit for nuclear facility workers, 140 times greater than what Chernobyl residents experienced after the 1986 catastrophe, and the most severe dose ever documented in human history.
Within seconds and minutes of his exposure, Ouchi became violently sick. Whilst most individuals subjected to such levels would die within days, Ouchi survived, reports the Mirror.
He was taken to hospital alert but in critical condition, as his white blood cell count had been virtually eliminated, leaving him completely without an immune system.
Medical staff moved him to the University of Tokyo Hospital, where they tried various experimental procedures in a frantic bid to preserve his life.
What ensued was 83 days of torment for the nuclear facility worker.
Radiation had completely obliterated Ouchi’s capacity to heal and regenerate cells, causing his skin to gradually slough away, his blood vessels to fail, and his eyelids to fall off.
Fluids seeped relentlessly from his ravaged flesh and accumulated in his lungs, compelling medics to maintain him on life support.
Making his ordeal even more harrowing, his digestive system collapsed entirely, inflicting excruciating agony and causing litres of fluid to drain from his body daily. Despite numerous skin grafts and stem cell treatments, his body remained unable to recover.
Breathing became impossible without mechanical assistance, and nourishment could only be administered via feeding tube.
The agony became so unbearable that, two months into his treatment, Ouchi’s heart ceased beating, yet medical staff chose to revive him.
His wife reportedly held onto hope that he would survive until at least January 1, 2000, so they could welcome the new millennium together.
During lucid moments, he remained fully aware of his deteriorating condition.
According to accounts, Ouchi eventually reached breaking point and spoke six chilling words to hospital staff: “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.”
Medical professionals were compelled to administer up to ten blood transfusions daily merely to sustain his life. Painkillers appeared utterly ineffective, and at one stage, he reportedly pleaded for the treatment to cease.
Ouchi passed away on December 21, 1999, from multiple organ failure, nearly three months following the incident. Multiple organ failure was recorded as the official cause of death.
Four months afterwards, in April 2000, his colleague Shinohara also died from multiple organ failure at the age of 40.
Supervisor Yokokawa, who had been seated at his workstation when the criticality incident unfolded, managed to survive.
A probe by the Japanese government determined that the accident was due to a lack of regulatory supervision, a deficient safety culture, and insufficient training for employees.
Six officials from the company running the plant were subsequently charged with professional negligence and breaches of nuclear safety laws. In 2003, they received suspended prison sentences for their deadly neglect.
The DNA damage from ionizing radiation (IR) erupting from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is showing up in the children of those originally exposed, researchers have found – the first time such a transgenerational link has been clearly established.
Previous studies have been inconclusive about whether this genetic damage could be passed from parent to child, but here the researchers – led by a team from the University of Bonn in Germany – looked for something slightly different.
Rather than picking out new DNA mutations in the next generation, they looked for what are known as clustered de novo mutations (cDNMs): two or more mutations in close proximity, found in the children but not the parents. These would be mutations resulting from breaks in the parental DNA caused by radiation exposure.
“We found a significant increase in the cDNM count in offspring of irradiated parents, and a potential association between the dose estimations and the number of cDNMs in the respective offspring,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“Despite uncertainty concerning the precise nature and quantity of the IR involved, the present study is the first to provide evidence for the existence of a transgenerational effect of prolonged paternal exposure to low-dose IR on the human genome.”
The findings are based on whole genome sequencing scans of 130 offspring of Chernobyl cleanup workers, 110 offspring of German military radar operators who were likely exposed to stray radiation, and 1,275 offspring of parents unexposed to radiation, used as controls.
On average, the researchers found 2.65 cDNMs per child in the Chernobyl group, 1.48 per child in the German radar group, and 0.88 per child in the control group. The researchers say those numbers are likely to be overestimates due to noise in the data, but even after making statistical adjustments, the difference was still significant.
What’s more, a higher radiation dose for the parent tended to mean a higher number of clusters in the child. This fits with the idea that radiation creates molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which are able to break DNA strands – breaks which can leave behind the clusters described in this study, if repaired imperfectly.
The good news is that the risk to health should be relatively small: children of exposed parents weren’t found to have any higher risk of disease. This is partly because a lot of the cDNMs likely fall in ‘non-coding’ DNA, rather than in genes that directly encode proteins.
“Given the low overall increase in cDNMs following paternal exposure to ionizing radiation and the low proportion of the genome that is protein coding, the likelihood that a disease occurring in the offspring of exposed parents is triggered by a cDNM is minimal,” the researchers write.
To put this in perspective, we know that older dads are more likely to pass on more DNA mutations to their children. The subsequent risk of disease associated with parental age at the time of conception is higher than the potential risks from radiation exposure examined here, the researchers report.
There are some limitations to note. As the initial radiation exposure happened decades ago, the researchers had to estimate people’s exposure using historical records and decades-old devices.
Participation in the study was also voluntary, which may have introduced some bias, as those who suspected they’d been exposed to radiation may have been more likely to enrol.
Even with those limitations, we now know that with prolonged exposure, ionizing radiation can leave subtle traces in the DNA of the generations to come – emphasizing the need for safety precautions and careful monitoring for those at risk.
“The potential of transmission of radiation-induced genetic alterations to the next generation is of particular concern for parents who may have been exposed to higher doses of IR and potentially for longer periods of time than considered safe,” write the researchers.
18 December 2025, Springer Nature, Volume 24, article number 92, (2025)
“………………………………………. Results
Proximity to plants significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining by distance. At 2 km, females showed RRs of 1.52 (95% CI: 1.20–1.94) for ages 55–64, 2.00 (1.59–2.52) for 65–74, and 2.53 (1.98–3.22) for 75 + . Males showed RRs of 1.97 (1.57–2.48), 1.75 (1.42–2.16), and 1.63 (1.29–2.06), respectively. Cancer site-specific analyses showed significant associations for lung, prostate, breast, colorectal, bladder, melanoma, leukemia, thyroid, uterine, kidney, laryngeal, pancreatic, oral, esophageal, and Hodgkin lymphoma, with variation by sex and age. We estimated 10,815 female and 9,803 male cancer cases attributable to proximity, corresponding to attributable fractions of 4.1% (95% CI: 2.4–5.7%) and 3.5% (95% CI: 1.8–5.2%).
Conclusions
Residential proximity to nuclear plants in Massachusetts is associated with elevated cancer risks, particularly among older adults, underscoring the need for continued epidemiologic monitoring amid renewed interest in nuclear energy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-025-01248-6
In May, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that, in part, require the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider dramatically weakening its radiation protection standard. If federal radiation limits are gutted in the manner urged by the president, the new standard could allow four out of five people exposed over a 70-year lifetime to develop a cancer they would not otherwise get.
Contesting the scientific consensus. Section 5(b) of the executive order—formally titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”—directs the NRC to issue a proposed “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents,” including reconsideration of the agency’s “reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure.” The LNT model maintains that risk from radiation exposure is proportional to the dose: Even a tiny amount of radiation causes some small but real increased risk of cancer, and that risk goes up linearly as the dose increases.
While most Americans have doubtless never heard of the LNT model, it has been the bedrock of radiation exposure risk analysis for decades and forms the basis of public health protection from radiation. The LNT model is scientifically robust, supported by the longstanding and repeatedly affirmed determinations on low-dose radiation by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the NRC itself.
Despite the LNT model’s long track record and the well-established body of scientific evidence upon which it is built, President Trump has unilaterally issued a presidential finding that this scientific consensus is wrong. His order could lead to LNT’s complete abandonment in a matter of months, posing a serious increase in the amount of radiation that industries and government agencies would be allowed to inflict upon the public.
If the NRC goes along with Trump’s assertion, the weakening of radiation protection standards would likely be extreme. Advocates of abandoning LNT have often asserted that low-dose radiation is harmless or even beneficial, and therefore, that the public health radiation limits should be hugely increased. In 2015, three petitions for rulemaking to the NRC proposed doing away with the LNT model and increasing allowable radiation exposures for everyone—including children and pregnant women—to 10 rem. (The Roentgen equivalent man (rem) is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One rem is equal to 0.01 Sievert in the international system of units.)
One petition to the NRC went so far as to ask, “Why deprive the public of the benefits of low-dose radiation?” The NRC strongly rejected the petitions in 2021, citing the conclusions of numerous scientific bodies that “[c]onvincing evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a threshold.
Low-level, or “low-dose,” radiation is generally defined as a dose range of 10 rem and below. However, “low dose” is something of a misnomer, as 10 rem is still relatively high. Even when doses are low, they nonetheless cause substantial harm when spread across a large population over time, especially for sensitive groups like children.
Raising radiation exposure limits. If President Trump’s executive order results in a new public radiation exposure limit of around 10 rem—the level LNT opponents often advocate—the increased health risks would be extraordinary. Longstanding radiation protection limits for members of the public are in the range of 10 to 100 millirem (0.01 to 0.1 rem) per year. A 10-rem limit would increase allowed exposures to radiation by factors of 100 to 1000—and so would increase the risk of cancer.
A single chest X-ray is about 2 millirem (0.002 rem) of radiation exposure. An annual limit of 10 rem would correspond to a person receiving a dose equivalent to 5,000 chest X-rays each year, from conception to death. Current official radiation risk estimates—adopted by EPA from the National Academies’ BEIR VII study on the health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation—indicate that receiving 10 rem per year over a 70-year lifetime would result in about four out of every five people exposed getting a cancer they would not get otherwise.
Despite what opponents of the LNT model claim, there is no threshold at 10 rem below which there is no measurable health harm. A substantial body of scientific work has demonstrated significant negative health impacts well below 10 rem. Beginning in the 1950s, pioneering Oxford researcher Alice Stewart demonstrated that a single fetal X-ray with a dose of 200 millirem (0.2 rem) was associated with a measurable increase in the risk of that child dying of cancer. The radiation establishment fought Stewart’s findings vigorously, but her research has long since been vindicated.
More recently, a major study covering an international cohort of over 300,000 nuclear facility workers has found that annual doses well below 1 rem create measurable increases in the risk of developing a variety of cancers, and that, as NRC put it, “even tiny doses slightly boost the risk of leukemia.” A second massive study of nearly one million European children found that those who received a CT scan, at an average dose of 800 millirem (0.8 rem), suffered a measurable increase in their risk of getting cancer.
Standards already weak. Radiation protection standards should be tightened, not weakened. The US government has a long history of underestimating radiation risks. The more scientists have learned about low-dose radiation, the more their estimates of the risk per unit dose have tended to increase. Yet the NRC has not updated in step with the science.
The NRC protection limit for workers of 5 rem per year was set in the early 1960s and has not changed since, despite decades of increasing official estimates of radiation risk. The current best estimate, from the National Academies’ BEIR VII, indicates that one out of every five workers receiving the NRC’s allowable dose each year from ages 18 to 65 would develop a cancer.
NRC’s radiation exposure limits for the public have not been updated in 35 years. Despite a requirement to employ EPA’s more conservative radiation risk standards, the NRC has long ignored it and instead continues to use 100 millirem per year—100 times lower than what Trump’s executive order could lead to. Current risk figures from the National Academies and the EPA indicate that 70 years of exposure at that level would result in nearly one in 100 people getting cancer from that exposure. That is 100 to 10,000 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable risk range. As the former director of EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air said years ago, “To put it bluntly, radiation should not be treated as a privileged pollutant. You and I should not be exposed to higher risks from radiation sites than we should be from sites which had contained any other environmental pollutant.”
The NRC held a webinar in July to gather public feedback on implementing President Trump’s executive order on abolishing the LNT model. Many presenters—including representatives from the National Council on Radiation Protection and the Union of Concerned Scientists—gave a vigorous defense of the LNT model, as did many of the comments from the public. Yet the NRC, despite itself having strongly reaffirmed this standard only 4 years ago, seemed to minimize low-dose radiation risks and suggested that all radiation cancer risk models be treated equally (including the long-discredited view that low-dose radiation has health benefits). More concerning, the NRC has put its thumb on the scale, giving special treatment to LNT opposition by posting among the general meeting materials a link to one presenter’s paper, which suggests that an annual dose of 10 rem is acceptably safe.
At a time when radiation protection should be strengthened, President Trump has directed action to weaken it markedly. If the NRC implements the executive order, the potential outcome would be a new, deeply flawed radiation standard as much as a thousand times weaker than the current standard, resulting in a massive increase in radiation-related health hazards across the American population.
The term “Zionism,” the modern political ideology advocating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is often analysed through the lenses of history, politics, and conflict. However, to understand its full potency and impact – to see it as a “political pathogen” – we must first dissect the linguistic and cultural DNA from which it was synthesised. This paper posits that Zionism is a European ideological construct, born of a specific historical moment, which instrumentalised ancient religious and cultural symbols to forge a modern nationalist movement. Its power and subsequent global impact stem from this fusion of the ancient and the modern, a fusion that has proven both resilient and, in the view of its critics, deeply destructive.
I. The Etymological Core: From Sacred Hill to Nationalist Ideology
The linguistic root of “Zionism” is the Hebrew word “Zion” (Ṣîyyôn), originally referring to a specific hill in Jerusalem. Over millennia, particularly following the Babylonian Exile, “Zion” transformed from a geographic location into a potent synecdoche and poetic symbol for the entire Land of Israel and the Jewish people’s spiritual yearning for return. This meaning was deeply embedded in Jewish messianic belief, envisioning a future redemption.
The transformation into a modern political “-ism” occurred in late 19th-century Europe. The term “Zionism” (Zionismus) is first credibly attributed to the Austrian Jewish intellectual Nathan Birnbaum in an 1890 article. It was coined in reference to the activities of the Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), proto-Zionist groups that promoted Jewish agricultural settlement in Ottoman Palestine. The movement was catapulted onto the world stage by Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and the subsequent founding of the Zionist Organization in 1897 popularised the term and defined its political objectives. The choice of “Zion” was deliberate: it grafted the new secular nationalist project onto the deep-rooted, sacred longings of Jewish tradition, providing an immediate and powerful historical legitimacy.
II. The European Crucible: Birth of an Ideology
Zionism did not emerge in a vacuum. It was a direct product of, and reaction to, the specific conditions of European society in the 19th century.
The “Jewish Question” in Europe: Zionism arose as one answer to the pervasive “Jewish Question” – the problem of how Jews, perceived as an unassimilable minority, could exist within European nation-states defined by ethnic homogeneity. Faced with persistent antisemitism, from violent pogroms in Eastern Europe to institutional discrimination in the West, thinkers like Herzl concluded that assimilation was impossible and that Jews constituted a distinct nation requiring sovereignty in their own land.
The Influence of European Nationalism: Zionism was fundamentally shaped by the Romantic nationalist movements sweeping Europe, which argued that every “people” or “nation” (Volk) required a state for its full expression. Zionists applied this model to Jews, asserting their right to national self-determination. The movement also internalised contemporary colonial and racial thinking, with early leaders at times explicitly framing a Jewish state in Palestine as a European outpost or “colonial” endeavour that would bring progress to the region.
Internal Jewish Debates: It is critical to note that Zionism was a contested ideology from its inception. Significant Jewish movements, most notably the socialist Bund in Eastern Europe, vehemently opposed it. These anti-Zionists argued that fleeing antisemitism validated the persecutors’ logic, that the diaspora was a legitimate and rich Jewish homeland, and that the future lay in fighting for socialist revolution and equality within Europe.
III. The Ideological Structure: Core Tenets and Internal Divergence
While unified by the core goal of a Jewish homeland, Zionism was never monolithic. Its internal structure comprised several competing strands:
Political Zionism (Herzl): Focused on achieving a Jewish state through high-level diplomacy and international legal charters.
Practical Zionism: Emphasized the “conquest of land” through immediate agricultural settlement in Palestine.
Labor Zionism: Merged socialist principles with nation-building, promoting collective enterprises like the kibbutz and forming the ideological backbone of Israel’s early leadership.
Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky): Advocated for a more militant, maximalist approach to establishing a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River, emphasizing military strength and capitalist development.
Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha’am): Prioritised the creation of a new Jewish spiritual and cultural center in Palestine over immediate political sovereignty.
Religious Zionism: Fused Jewish religious messianism with nationalist politics, viewing the Zionist project as the beginning of divine redemption.
Despite these differences, a critical consensus emerged across most Zionist thought: the necessity of establishing a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine. This demographic imperative, confronting the reality of a majority Arab population, led to the conceptualisation of “transfer” – a euphemism for the removal or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – as a logical, if debated, solution within mainstream Zionist discourse from the movement’s early decades.
IV. The “Pathogen” Metaphor: Mechanisms of Global Impact
Viewing Zionism through the lens of a “political pathogen” requires examining its replication and impact beyond Palestine/Israel. Its global influence operates through several key mechanisms:
The Logic of Domination: Scholar Vincent Lloyd reframes Zionism’s outcome as a transition from a movement seeking liberation from European domination to one that institutes a new structure of domination over Palestinians. This system is maintained through military occupation, legal discrimination, and the systemic denial of Palestinian dignity and political rights.
Christian Zionist Symbiosis: A critical vector for the ideology’s spread is Christian Zionism, particularly within Protestant evangelicalism. This theology supports Jewish return to Israel not out of solidarity with Jews, but as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ, after which non-converted Jews are often envisioned to be destroyed. This creates a powerful, theologically motivated political lobby (especially in the United States) that reinforces Israeli state policy.
Global Export of “Security” Models: Israel has leveraged its experience controlling Palestinian populations to become a leading global exporter of surveillance technology, weapons, and counter-insurgency tactics. This “laboratory” of repression markets its products to other states and regimes, embedding Zionist-derived models of population control into global security infrastructures.
Conflating Critique with Antisemitism: A potent defensive mechanism has been the strategic effort to equate criticism of Zionism or Israeli state policy with antisemitism, as seen in debates over definitions like the IHRA working definition. This conflation seeks to immunise the ideology from political critique by framing opposition as a form of racial or religious hatred.
Conclusion: A Tale That Found a Home
Zionism is indeed “a tale that found a home.” It is a modern European nationalist tale, constructed from the ancient lexicon of Jewish prophecy and the contemporary grammar of 19th-century racial and colonial thought. It found a home through a deliberate and violent process of settlement and state-building, necessitating the displacement and continued subjugation of another people.
Its “pathogenic” quality lies in its resilience and adaptability – its ability to graft itself onto different host ideologies, from socialist pioneering to evangelical Christian millennialism, and to replicate its core logic of ethnic dominance in new contexts. The language that shaped it provided a bridge between deep history and political modernity, creating an ideology of immense persuasive power and tragic consequence. To understand the ongoing conflict and its global resonances, one must first understand this foundational synthesis of word, idea, and power.
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