Heat, water shortages, jellyfish: nuclear energy is becoming uncontrollable
while a reactor needs water to dissipate its heat, it cannot turn rivers into scalding baths.
What technological advancements are needed to secure water supplies when a river runs dry ?
What will the state of the Danube be in 2050, 2070, or even 2100 ?
Heatwaves, droughts, rivers that are too hot or too low: since June, European nuclear power plants have been experiencing numerous power reductions and shutdowns. One question is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid: is nuclear power still manageable in a warming world ?
By
Laure Noualhat, August 14, 2026 , https://reporterre.net/Le-climat-met-le-nucleaire-europeen-a-sec-Le-nucleaire-rattrape-par-la-question-du
On August 12, shortly before 10 a.m., a fifth of France’s nuclear power plants were offline. Exactly 20.4 % of their production capacity was unavailable due to ”
environmental constraints “ or ” external environmental causes , “ a record since 2015, calculated by AFP using data from EDF .
Thirteen reactors were affected: eight completely shut down, and five operating at reduced capacity. On one hand, rivers were either too hot or too low after five heat waves ; on the other, at Gravelines (Nord), several tons of jellyfish had clogged the water intakes of Western Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be controlled, certainly, but it still needs to be cooled.
In Golfech, on the banks of a sweltering Garonne River, the situation has taken on the air of a summer ritual. On August 8, at 9 p.m.,
EDF once again shut down reactor number 2. The Garonne threatened to reach 28°C the following day, the threshold beyond which the power plant must reduce its production or shut down to comply with environmental regulations and avoid harming aquatic life. Since reactor number 1 was already undergoing maintenance, the plant was no longer producing any electricity. The same scenario, to varying degrees, played out at Bugey (Ain), Saint-Alban (Isère), and Tricastin (Drôme), where the Rhône River’s waters, having become too warm, led EDF to adjust its production.
Because while a reactor needs water to dissipate its heat, it cannot turn rivers into scalding baths. Discharges from power plants are regulated by the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority (
ASNR ), which sets, for each site, limits on the temperature increase of the watercourse between upstream and downstream, as well as a maximum temperature that must not be exceeded.
What uses will be prioritized as droughts occur ?
This summer, the Bugey nuclear power plant
was the only French plant to request a temporary modification of its thermal regulations , the ASNR ( French Nuclear Safety Authority) told Reporterre . The Rhône River was already very hot upstream, while RTE (the Frenchelectricity transmission network operator) demanded that a minimum power output be maintained to guarantee grid security. The Authority therefore agreed to temporarily raise certain limits, but only between July
10 and 20. This compromise aptly summarizes the dilemma ahead: protecting a river already suffering from the heatwave while preventing the electrical grid from overheating as well.
In Chooz, in the Ardennes region, the problem isn’t the temperature but the amount of water. The Meuse River’s flow rate dropped drastically at the beginning of August. The two reactors were shut down, not because there wasn’t enough water to safely cool the facilities, but to comply with the Franco-Belgian agreement guaranteeing a minimum flow for the various river users. Thus, nuclear power is confronted with a question already familiar to farmers, industrialists, and river conservationists: who has the right to water when it becomes scarce ? Which uses will be prioritized as droughts continue to occur ?
Controllable… but not climate-insensitive
Taken separately, each of these episodes seems almost commonplace.
EDF has long adjusted its power plants’ output during heat waves. In 2003, the utility even sprayed the Fessenheim reactor building with water jets!
But their repetition, and especially their simultaneity, changes the landscape. Up to 7.3 gigawatts of French nuclear power were unavailable on August 12 or constrained by the heat and low flow rates. ” This is a record peak in environmental unavailability ,
“ according to AFP . At the same time, there was a lack of wind in Germany, and air conditioners were running more frequently, which drove up electricity prices.
However, it would be wrong to claim that the nuclear fleet is faltering; it’s simply overheating. It’s actually producing significantly more than during the major crisis of 2022 when 32 reactors were unavailable due to stress corrosion cracking. The real issue lies elsewhere. A nuclear power plant is an enormous thermal machine that must dissipate some of its heat. It can produce electricity without wind or sun, but not without cold water. And this resource, too, is caught up in the whirlwind of climate change.
The Danube is offering a much more stark demonstration this summer. In Hungary, the Paks power plant, which supplies nearly half of the country’s electricity, saw
its production plummet in early August due to the river’s exceptionally low water level.
“A temporary rise in water levels then allowed for the recovery of some production, but the government has announced its intention to re-examine the cooling requirements of the Paks
II project ,” explains András Kéri of the climate policy institute Energiaklub. ”
A power plant built today will only be operating at full capacity in the second half of this century…
“ What will the state of the Danube be in 2050, 2070, or even 2100 ?
It’s difficult to say.
Further downstream, Romania faces an even more critical situation. The country will shut down its only nuclear power plant on August 13th, for the first time since the 2003 drought, as the Danube’s flow has dropped too low. As early as July 28th, the operator of the Cernavodă site shut down Unit 1 due to a Danube level described as ” very low and unprecedented” .
The intake canal had to be dredged and the riprap blasted to redirect the flow. When the river needs to be reshaped locally to maintain electricity production, climate adaptation is no longer just a chapter in an annual report. Switzerland also experienced this very real future firsthand by reducing the two reactors at Beznau to 50% of their capacity when the Aare River reached the critical temperature of 25°C.
In France and Switzerland, most of these power reductions do not signal a loss of safety and are precisely intended to comply with environmental regulations. In Hungary and Romania, the extreme low water level of the Danube more directly impacts operating conditions. But for the electrical grid, the result is comparable: megawatts considered readily available on demand become slightly less so at the very moment when heat increases certain needs.
And as the Anthropocene knows how to keep things interesting, the Gravelines nuclear power plant has added jellyfish to the mix. On August 10, their massive arrival in the water intakes triggered the automatic shutdown of 3 of the 6 reactors. EDF insisted there was no safety issue . And besides, is this becoming a regular occurrence ? A similar incident had already happened in August 2025 .
European nuclear power is therefore not collapsing under the heatwave. But this summer is challenging a simplistic way of speaking: ” controllable “ nuclear power does not mean ” insensitive to climate . “ It depends on it, like everything else.
What about EPR2s
The issue becomes considerably more serious when we look at the reactors currently in the design phase. EDF asserts that it has sized the future EPR2 reactors ” with regard to heatwave risks “ by taking into account the IPCC climate scenarios for 2070 and 2100, ASNR told Reporterre . EDF has allocated €8.7 billion by 2040 to adapt its nuclear, hydroelectric, and island activities to climate change , notably through the Adapt project, which aims to assess, plant by plant, their vulnerability to rising temperatures, droughts, and changes in water resources.
In 2023, the Court of Auditors still estimated investments directly attributable to climate adaptation of the nuclear fleet at around €600 million for the following fifteen years. Going from €600 million to €8.7 billion in three years is a gigantic leap !
The ASNR (French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management) emphasizes the need to maintain ” margins , “ as tomorrow’s climate may diverge fromprojections. Every ten years,” safety standards must therefore be reassessed,
“ and facilities may need to be adapted to higher temperatures. But how, specifically ?
What technological advancements are needed to secure water supplies when a river runs dry ?
No one is saying.
To date, nuclear power plants evaporate 833 million cubic meters
of fresh water per year. While this water is reintroduced into the water cycle, it remains unavailable for other needs (domestic consumption, agriculture, industry, etc.). With the future EPR2 reactors —particularly those located along rivers—this will increase the amount of water drawn from rivers to
1,232 million cubic meters per year and from the seas to 575 million cubic meters
per year, according to figures from Global Chance.
If you’re already afraid, just wait until you hear about Manhattan Project 2.0.
The nuclear startups receiving special dispensation from the DOE are part of a pilot program established under Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.” The DOE selected Oklo Inc. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright formerly served on its board of directors), Aalo Atomics Inc., Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc. and Valar Atomics Inc. as the companies whose experimental reactor designs will be tested at locations in Texas, Kansas, Utah and Tennessee (Oak Ridge). In another attempt to dodge NRC oversight, these companies are considered DOE contractors whose reactors are subject to DOE rules no matter their location
Analysis, Kristen Thomason | August 10, 2026, https://baptistnews.com/article/if-youre-already-afraid-just-wait-until-you-hear-about-manhattan-project-2-0/
Summers spent at my grandparents’ house in Tennessee were hot and humid. With enough cousins piled into the porch swing, you could stir up a bit of a breeze. But when that was no longer effective, we would retreat to the air-conditioned splendor of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge and stroll through exhibits like “Wildcatting for Oil” and “Atoms for Autos.”
Among these varied installations, however, pride of place was given to documenting Oak Ridge’s role as the secret headquarters for the Manhattan Project and source of the Hiroshima bomb’s enriched uranium. Most of the 30,000 covert workers on that project only discovered the truth of what they had been helping to build on Aug. 6, 1945, when they awoke to the headline “Oak Ridge Attacks Japan.”
Eighty years later, on May 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders to further the Department of Energy’s “Manhattan Project 2.0.” And just like the original, the second iteration of the Manhattan Project has plenty of secrets of its own.
The executive orders came at the behest of tech giants like Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft, who want cheap, abundant nuclear power to run their AI data centers. And according to the United Nations, these data centers will have doubled their voracious consumption of electricity and water by 2030.
Benefiting from a second Atomic Age
Nuclear industry executives who stand to benefit from a second atomic age had advance access and offered edits to the executive orders, which maximize risk-taking and profit-making over the safety of nuclear employees and the public. They stood behind Trump as he signed Executive Order 14299, “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security,” which paves the way for private companies to construct commercially owned and operated experimental nuclear reactors on Department of Defense properties and at the DOE’s national laboratories.
The original Manhattan Project granted the military sweeping authority to bypass regulations and red tape when developing the atom bomb. Likewise, situating these new reactors on federal land allows companies to skip environmental requirements and skirt the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent bipartisan body charged with granting licenses and regulating the safety of commercial nuclear reactors.
However, to achieve their goal of mass-producing portable nuclear reactors they can deploy via semi-truck to datacenters, hospitals and industrial facilities, they’ll eventually need to pass the NRC’s stringent public safety and environmental standards. That is why Trump next signed Executive Order 14300, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” to overhaul the “structure, personnel, regulations and basic operations” of the NRC.
In 1974, Congress, weary of the Atomic Energy Commission’s reckless experimentation with atomic power at the expense of public safety, divided it into the DOE, which promotes nuclear power, and the NRC, which regulates it. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory were thus forced to abandon a plan to carve a second canal through Panama using 250 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Executive Order 14300 is a return to the wild pre-1974 days.
The order first directs the NRC to rubber stamp approval for those reactors developed under the auspices of the DOE and DOD without any additional testing. It then reduces the responsibilities and size of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an independent group that once provided technical guidance about reactor safety to the NRC but now can only voice concerns when specifically asked. The president also replaced Democrat and NRC Chair Christopher Hanson and installed a steering board staffed by DOE officials to oversee the NRC reforms.
Next, Executive Order 14300 loosens radiation exposure restrictions for nuclear workers and the general public. To implement this order, on July 1, the NRC proposed a series of changes including limiting use of the linear no-threshold model, which affirms there is no threshold below which radiation is safe. The public has 45 days to comment on the changes.
Raising doubts about the dangers
The linear no-threshold model is the industry gold standard and guiding principle for radiation safety around the world. However, in a move akin to its approach to vaccines, the administration raises doubts about the science behind the model despite the myriad studies and decades’ worth of radiation data on nuclear workers that undergird it.
The 2023 International Nuclear Workers Study examined the dosimeters worn by 309,932 nuclear workers in France, the United Kingdom and the U.S. and tracked their incidents of cancer for an average of 35 years. Scientists confirmed that the greater the exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear fission, even at low occupational levels, the greater the likelihood of death from a cancerous tumor, which often only appeared decades after exposure.
UNC Chapel Hill conducted a similar study focusing on the 22,000 workers hired at the ORNL from the early days of the Manhattan Project through the mid-1980s and found results similar to INWORKS for salaried workers and even higher rates of cancer for hourly workers. These men worked construction, laundered radioactive uniforms or, like my grandfather, laid railroad track to allow for the removal of “legacy waste” from the Manhattan Project without any protection or knowledge that they were being exposed.
Therefore, when it comes to ionizing radiation, which is invisible and difficult to measure accurately, the ethical approach is to keep the exposure level “as low as reasonably achievable,” or what is known as the ALARA standard. This might mean minimizing the time employees spend with radioactive materials, requiring protective gear or, in the case of the public, keeping radioactive emissions below legal limits.
However, protecting people doesn’t fit with the “move fast and break things” methods of tech moguls who want nuclear energy ASAP to power their AI databases. So, in its new proposed rules, the NRC is acknowledging linear no-threshold but dispensing with the ALARA standard in favor of a graded approach where safety is determined by situation with little accountability. Nuclear investors and Trump donors Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen have been lobbying for the abolition of ALARA from the NRC, also a recommendation of Project 2025.
More DOE changes
The DOE began secretly eliminating ALARA from its own radiation protection framework in August 2025 without officially informing employees or the public until January 2026, although it did notify nuclear executives. To justify the end of ALARA, the DOE cited a report they themselves commissioned from the Idaho National Laboratory. That report said that to reduce “unnecessary economic burdens,” companies could now expose workers to five REM a year.
Roentgen Equivalent Man measures the biological effect and risk of radiation exposure to human tissue. According to the National Academies of Sciences, an exposure of five REM a year could cause cancer in one out of five career nuclear employees. The INL report proposes a future increase to 10 REM a year, which would raise the cancer rate to four out of five.
New DOE rules also double the radiation exposure level that would trigger an official investigation from two times to four times the legal limit. When Seth Cohen, the DOGE employee tasked with removing government “barriers” for nuclear companies, was asked if they should establish a fund for such workplace accidents, he said, “When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up.” Andreessen called Cohen “An American hero” on X.
In addition, nuclear contractors for the DOE, including the start-up companies, now can ignore what’s known as Appendix A to Part 851 on Worker Safety and Health Functional Areas. As a result, precautions such as informing employees of possible hazards, procedures regarding possible carcinogens, requiring respiratory protection equipment or providing “comprehensive occupational medicine services” are no longer mandatory. This rule change does not apply to contractors working with other forms of energy.
Without occupational medical services to track and document radiation exposure and any subsequent disease, it will be difficult for employees to later obtain the care and compensation they’re owed in the event of an accident or overexposure. Such was the case for victims of the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island, who had no way to prove in a court of law that they had received excessive doses of radiation.
The nuclear startups receiving special dispensation from the DOE are part of a pilot program established under Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.” The DOE selected Oklo Inc. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright formerly served on its board of directors), Aalo Atomics Inc., Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc. and Valar Atomics Inc. as the companies whose experimental reactor designs will be tested at locations in Texas, Kansas, Utah and Tennessee (Oak Ridge). In another attempt to dodge NRC oversight, these companies are considered DOE contractors whose reactors are subject to DOE rules no matter their location.
Participants in the Reactor Pilot Program will be testing Small Modular Reactor prototypes and experimenting with new sources of fuel which, without the necessary regulations, have the potential to jeopardize public safety. The most expensive element to build in a nuclear power plant is the lead-and-concrete containment shield designed to keep radioactive vapors from escaping in the event of a nuclear meltdown. Shielding is what failed 40 years ago during the 1986 Chernobyl Unit 4 power plant disaster in Ukraine and what held when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.
Supporters of SMR say their new high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel called TRISO is so safe that physical containment isn’t necessary. But X-energy, a nuclear reactor and fuel company funded by Amazon, released an accident analysis that said TRISO could exceed safe temperatures by several hundred degrees Celsius.
“The problem is that, with new reactors, they introduce new safety concerns and new technical issues,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Every design I have looked at has potential safety and security vulnerabilities, which are not being addressed to the extent that they need to be.” The DOE also has jettisoned the requirement to have a cognizant system engineer monitoring each of the reactor’s safety systems, calling it an “unnecessary burden.”
Yet, new types of fuel produce new types of nuclear waste. Every few years, a traditional nuclear power plant removes the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, which are now a mixture of uranium and plutonium, and leaves them to cool in pools of water before they’re sealed in concrete casks for what is supposed to be interim storage. Today, 100,000 metric tons of spent fuel are sitting in limbo because the federal government has failed to find a permanent storage solution for high-level nuclear waste.
Unbeknownst to most, fully one third of all Americans live within 50 miles of nuclear waste storage.
The waste problem
SMRs face the same long-term waste disposal conundrum, only they produce a more chemically and physically reactive waste and two to 30 times more of it than traditional reactors. This waste is not compatible with current nuclear waste disposal technologies, so engineers are experimenting with ways to manage the output and radiation. In response, the DOE replaced its former 59-page waste removal manual with 25 pages of bullet points.
Entirely missing from the abridged version are the sections on waste packaging and monitoring. Last July, Trump dismissed all but one member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency charged with reviewing the science behind the DOE actions regarding spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.
Executive Order 14301 also orders the DOE to “reform its rules” regarding the National Environmental Policy Act by excluding SMRs from a full environmental assessment or environmental impact statement. Previously, nuclear reactors had to address their potential impact on water, air and ecosystems at specific locations.
Now, in a possible violation of the Clean Water Act, the DOE says the release of radioactive water and steam into the environment should be “avoided” but is not strictly prohibited. Companies no longer “must” protect groundwater from radioactive contamination. “Avoiding” or “minimizing” is sufficient. Monitoring for contamination is optional.
But because cleaning up radioactive spills is expensive, the INL report also recommends abandoning the ALARA standard for the public. Both the NRC and the DOE are following this directive. However, the NRC has decided not to change the .1 REM public exposure limit, while the DOE is raising the limit from .1 REM to .5 REM.
This is in addition to the average .62 REM of “background radiation” Americans receive from sources like the sun and air travel. The DOE increase will be the equivalent of 50 X-rays a year per person, which will result in one in 57 people who live near a DOE nuclear facility developing a fatal cancer. Women and children, especially girls, will feel the effects even more severely.
When exposed to radiation within the current legal limit, women are 50% more likely to die of radiation-induced cancer than men, and girls are seven times as likely as men and twice as likely as boys of the same age to develop cancer. The DOE also has cut the Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, the agency’s internal team of health experts who study radiation safety, so it’s unclear who would monitor for this potential danger.
And yet another danger
Executive Order 14302, “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base”, further endangers the safety of nuclear workers and the wider public by providing the nuclear industry with Cold War-era plutonium-239 harvested from dismantled nuclear warheads. Because the U.S. doesn’t currently have enough uranium for Manhattan Project 2.0, Oklo, Standard Nuclear, Exodys Energy, SHINE Technologies and Flibe Energy plan to convert plutonium into SMR fuel.
Plutonium is highly toxic if inhaled and requires special ventilation to handle. Other countries that have attempted to use plutonium have found converting it not worth the expense. It’s also highly sought after for bomb-making and requires heightened security measures. With a half-life of more than 24,000 years, managing plutonium is not a short-term commitment. And yet, because companies complained about the cost of security, the DOE jettisoned hundreds of pages of security regulations for reactors, including specifications for storage and requirements for firearms training and emergency drills.
Instead, Executive Order14302 encourages the reprocessing of nuclear waste, a practice discontinued during the Carter administration because it produces excess plutonium. In February, the Trump administration awarded $19 million to five companies that will experiment with nuclear fuel “recycling,” which is a misleading moniker. The reprocessing of spent fuel creates its own high-level radioactive waste, albeit with a half-life of a thousand years rather than tens of thousands of years.
Enabling these changes to the country’s nuclear regulations is Executive Order 14303 “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” which is less about rigorous science than it is about “doubt science,” the strategy utilized by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the dangers of smoking and dodge regulation. MAGA officials and DOGE staffers are cherry-picking data that supports their agenda and discarding evidence that does not.
They are quite fond of citing fringe scientist Edward Calabrese, who, from his work with fruit flies, thinks a little radiation might be beneficial for people. My great, great, great grandfather said something similar while hawking “Dr. Kister’s Radium Charged Water” in the 1900s, until the government ordered him to cease and desist.
Who should we trust?
Industry executives promise their new SMR technology is safe, but Trump has disbanded the independent boards that might hold them accountable. Furthermore, given the disregard Amazon has shown to warehouse worker safety in the name of profit, why would anyone believe that Amazon-owned X-energy would be any more considerate to its nuclear employees or the general public?
The DOE also has a horrific history when it comes to protecting people and the environment from nuclear waste and ionizing radiation. In 2005, radioactive contaminants from deteriorating waste disposal facilities at the Oak Ridge nuclear plant infiltrated the Clinch River, a source of drinking water in East Tennessee.
Summer in Tennessee is demonstrably hotter than it was 40 years ago. Even folks who deny the reality of climate change can’t ignore that tomato planting time is earlier than ever. Some experts say nuclear energy must be a part of America’s renewable energy portfolio if we are to cut carbon emissions and reduce global warming. China, our stated AI nemesis in the Manhattan Project 2.0, also has developed SMR but is relying heavily on solar and wind farms to power its data centers.
The Biden administration also had a plan in place to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which called for adding staff to the NRC to speed up licensing, rather than repealing safety regulations. Following the lead of Canada and Finland, they sought to build trust with local communities through a multi-year consent-based process.
In contrast, Trump vows to quadruple the country’s nuclear capacity, enticing states to volunteer sites as “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.” Selected cities will enrich uranium, create fuel, generate nuclear power, reprocess spent fuel and store nuclear waste all in one location, although without the local buy-in, trust building or necessary geological prescreening present in the Biden plan.
Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee applied to make Oak Ridge one of these nuclear campuses, although with 230 nuclear lifecycle companies operating between Oak Ridge and Knoxville, plus ORNL and the secretive Y-12 National Security Complex, it’s practically one already.
One of the joys of those summer visits to Tennessee as a child was seeing my uncle who worked at Y-12 as a chemist. When asked about his latest classified projects, he would sigh, fold his hands across the bib of his overalls and say, “Well, if I told ya, I’d have to kill ya,” and we kids would laugh. But the serious, sobering truth is the total impact of the radiation from these facilities is itself a secret. It’s been called the “perfect crime” because low doses of ionizing radiation can inflict cell damage and cause cancer decades after exposure.
Remnants of the original Manhattan Project are still around in Oak Ridge, whispering about its secret past. The impact of ionizing radiation lingers like the abandoned guard towers at the edge of town. Residents of Oak Ridge and the surrounding rural towns have more incidents of cancer than the national average due to exposure from this radiation.
On July 4, four of the pilot program SMRs had achieved nuclear criticality. No doubt the relaxation of safety and environmental regulations helped make this possible. This achievement marks a significant milestone in the Manhattan Project 2.0’s quest for cheap electricity to power Silicon Valley’s data centers.
However, just like the original Manhattan Project, America won’t know the full cost for at least another generation. Thanks to Trump’s deregulation spree, that cost to the health and well-being of Americans could be high indeed.
Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer and journalist living outside Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. She has produced educational and promotional media for national and international religious organizations and public television. Kristen also worked with local churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto, Canada. With a master’s degree in communication and undergraduate degrees in media studies and classics, she is interested in the intersection of politics, religion, history and the arts.
The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred “maidens”
Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein | Article, Feature | August 6, 2026
On May 7, 1955, 25 young Japanese women arrived by airplane at Travis Airfield in California. They had flown there from Iwakuni Airbase in Tokyo a few days prior, with a layover in Honolulu. In California, a crowd greeted their arrival by showering them with flowers—and four women who, to the discomfort of many involved, used the opportunity to give a speech about the dangers of the hydrogen bomb.1
All of the women had been schoolchildren in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the city. Many of them had been at work building firebreaks at the time of the bombing, and had all been severely burned by the attack. They were known in the press as the “Hiroshima Maidens,” and they were part of a trip, organized by a Japanese reverend and an American journalist, and with the hesitant blessing of the US State Department, to bring the women to the United States, so their scars might be healed through the power of American plastic surgery. The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.
Keloid scars are raised, thick, and irregular slabs of collagen. They can form after any injury, and can appear long after the injury itself. They generally do not hurt, but they can itch. They can also constrain muscle movement, decreasing mobility dramatically, depending on where they have formed. And they are disfiguring. For reasons that are apparently still not well-understood, such scars are more prone to develop in people of Asian, African, and Hispanic descent than in other peoples, and their heighted incidence among survivors of the atomic bombs has suggested that radiation exposure may increase the chances of their forming.
Photographs of the scarred bodies of atomic bomb victims are a common, if still controversial, accompaniment to discussions of the atomic attacks today. But in the immediate years after the end of World War II, they were much rarer. While an October 1945 story in LIFE magazine did feature two photographs of atomic victims, nearly all other popular photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s featured only photographs of the ruined buildings, not ruined bodies.
Less popularly, the bodies of victims were visible in official, technical publications on the “medical effects” of the bombs, with photographs of the victims months or even years after the bombings. These photographs were meant to display, cleanly and clinically, the effects of atomic bombs. They were not intended to provoke a sense of guilt, or even empathy, except as relates to how their audience might be interested in “effects data” for planning for the possible use of atomic bombs against themselves in the future.
Information about the survivors was tightly controlled within Japan by the occupation authorities, who feared that widespread discussion of the atomic bomb could lead to anti-American and pro-Communist sentiment.2
John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as a full-issue of The New Yorker in August 1946, was the first publication to really give international audiences a view of what the atomic bombings were like from the perspective of the bombed. One of the six survivors that Hersey profiled was an American-educated Methodist reverend, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto’s account is gripping, and prominently features his inability to render the help to others that he wished that he could:
After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.
Hersey’s account showed Tanimoto trying to help whom he could, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming. Tanimoto himself suffered from a bout of radiation sickness, but recovered.
At the time of Hersey’s book, there was no agreed-upon term to use for those people who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings but who had not died. The term “survivor” was common in English usage, but the Japanese have tended to shy away from their equivalent (seizonshai), apparently finding it to contain a bit of guilt or blame in its focus on those who did not die. Conversely, the term “victim” appears to have been used more commonly in Japanese (higaisha) than in English, perhaps again because of its apparent connotation that the violence done to the Japanese was unjust. It is not clear exactly when the term hibakusha—“explosion-affected person”—became the preferred term; it seems like it was used in Japan by the mid-to-late 1950s, and became well-known in English only in the early 1960s.3
In the months after the bombing, his church destroyed, Tanimoto worked as a street preacher in Hiroshima. His message was both theological and political: Looking for someone to blame for the atomic bombing—whether the Americans who had dropped the bomb, or the Japanese military leaders who had started the war—was futile. Seek salvation through God alone. With parishioners, he began the work of rebuilding the church building, but the work was slow, for there was no money and few resources available. In 1948, he traveled to the United States to meet with an old classmate of his, in an effort to raise funds for a new church. While on the ship to San Francisco, he had an idea: He could dedicate his life to peace, and the rebuilding of his ruined Hiroshima would be the focal point for that. Without consulting anyone back home, he began to give sermons around the United States, taking up a collection for Hiroshima’s rebirth. By the end of 1949, he had visited over 250 American cities, and raised about $10,000 for the church.4
Tanimoto ultimately made a connection with the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, who enthusiastically supported his plea, and ran an editorial proposing the creation of a World Peace Center in Hiroshima. Although the article claimed to be in the name of the inhabitants of Hiroshima, no one but Tanimoto was ever consulted. A Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation was set up in New York by Cousins, in order to receive American donations.5
A few years later, as part of his peace center efforts, Tanimoto began a Bible study class for a group of women that he apparently called his “Keloid girls.” He had offered other classes to victims of the bombing; the Keloid girls were special because their deformity and their sex was seen to demand a level of social exclusion that went beyond that of other Hiroshima victims. He would eventually petition the Hiroshima government for funds to give them plastic surgery, but was rejected. He then went to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the American-run effort to study the medical effects of the atomic bombings, but he was told that this was outside the commission’s scope. The commission was not in the business of “treatment,” and keloids were not unique radiation effects.6
Eventually, Tanimoto received some funding for surgery on the Keloid Girls within Japan, bringing a group of them to Tokyo in the spring of 1952, just after the end of the American occupation. There was also one male victim in the group, Kiyoshi Kikkawa. The Japanese press, to the surprise of Kikkawa, became completely focused on the women, dubbing them the Genbaku Otome: “Atomic Bomb Maidens.” The women were attractive because of their symbolism of peaceful Japanese resilience. Kikkawa quickly felt it was going too far: At one point in their trip, the “maidens” were taken to tour a prison that held Japanese war criminals, and two of the “maidens” chosen as delegates proclaimed that while they had once held grudges against the Japanese militarists, they now saw them as being in the same situation as the survivors.7
The surgeries were at least somewhat successful. Tanimoto had been in touch with Cousins about the “maidens” ideas, and with this pilot project completed—and its publicity value proven in at least the Japanese context—Cousins was ready to push for an American side of it. This would be larger and grander: more “maidens” (no men, this time), and the surgeries would be done in the United States, where plastic surgery was state-of-the-art. Cousins is credited for transforming their name: Having changed from “Keloid Girls” to “Atomic Bomb Maidens,” they were now the “Hiroshima Maidens.”8
For six months, Cousins sought funding for the project from foundations. It would be expensive: the transportation and lodging alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the operations would drive the cost into the hundreds of thousands. He saw little success, apparently because the foundations blanched at the possible negative publicity that might attach to the project.9………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. , the actual surgeries began. Over the next year, a team of surgeons at Mount Sinai, led by Barsky, performed over 140 operations on the women. When not in surgery, the women lived with host families. The operations were difficult. In some cases, there were dramatic improvements in mobility and appearance. One of the women, Tomako Nakabayashi, age 26, died of a heart attack during her third operation—a point that American newspapers made little of, but led Japanese newspapers to accuse the Americans of treating the women as guinea pigs.17
By the June 1956, 10 of the women were deemed ready to return home. The rest returned in late October 1956. The surgeries involving the women who survived were considered successful, although the reactions of people seeing them for the first time would often be to focus on the scarring that was still visible. But the women appear to have found the physical transformations a great boon, even if, as one later said, “there are lingering wounds in our hearts that have not healed.”18
The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which has been told many times over the years, comes in two distinct modes. The “original” mode is optimistic and, perhaps, a bit naïve. It is the version of the story pushed by Tanimoto and Cousins and most of the press who eagerly covered the women once they arrived in the United States in May 1955. This version is one of rebirth: just as Hiroshima, the city, was in the process of rebuilding after the atomic bomb, so could Hiroshima’s inhabitants rebuild their lives, even their very flesh.
City organizers in Hiroshima embraced their own version of the narrative of the city’s rebirth. Starting in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, they emphasized that the destruction at Hiroshima would be not its end, but its new beginning. There was a tactical element to this: They needed to attract resources for development and rebuilding, and leveraging their status and fame was a potent part of this appeal. It was not an approach that denied that the past destruction had occurred, obviously, for this could not be denied. The “rebirth” narrative would be a way to lean into that story and change its trajectory. Among the hibakusha, there were understandably mixed feelings about the approach. The famous “Atomic Bomb Dome”—the ruin of the former industrial exhibition hall near ground zero—ended up being the only preserved “monument” to the destruction, serving a focal point for Hiroshima’s peaceful rebirth activities, but its preservation was contentious.19
There is a more cynical read on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the rebirth mode of talking about the bombings. For one, this version of the story almost exclusively focuses on Hiroshima, at the expense Nagasaki, even though the case for the use of the second atomic bomb, only three days after the first, has always seemed much weaker than the case for the use of the first.
The focus on “maidens” also creates additional places for critique. There were married and divorced hibakusha who were rejected from Tanimoto’s project, and after the pilot project’s single male hibakusha, the rest were all women. The exact reasons for this have not been articulated by the players involved, but it seems that Cousins and Tanimoto felt the maidens made for more sympathetic figures and gave the project more of an apolitical appearance.20 As Robert Jacobs has put it, the “Hiroshima Maidens” were:
…generally depicted as childlike, innocent and grateful. They were uniformly spoken of as being “almost pathologically shy,” and then “blossoming in the warmth they shared in the homes of American ‘parents.’” […] The use of the term “maiden” reveals the focus on the lack of romantic prospects for the women while reinforcing the image of their innocence and childlike nature. […] The Japanese women were all students when they suffered the atomic attack, thus sparing them of any complicity in the Japanese war effort, and casting them as victims themselves of Japanese military aggression.21
While the “Hiroshima Maidens” project was being planned, the discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan radically shifted. In early March 1954, the United States tested its first deliverable thermonuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The detonation resulted in a massive plume of radioactive fallout that contaminated thousands of square miles of ocean and islands downwind of the test site and exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, which had inadvertently strayed close to the test site. After they returned to Tokyo, the crew began showing the symptoms of radiation sickness, but not before their tuna catch was offloaded in Tokyo fish markets. Thus followed a tuna boycott and massive global attention to the issue of nuclear fallout. One of the crew would eventually die. Within Japan, this Bravo test became a major focal point for an emerging anti-nuclear political activism and generally led to an opening up of long-suppressed public discourse about Japan’s status as a “nuclear victim.”22
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23
After their surgeries, few of the “maidens” sought additional attention. In the 1980s, Shigeko Sasamori lent her voice and authority as a hibakusha to a growing anti-nuclear movement. But most appear to have sought privacy after their period having their bodies and identities subjected to extreme focus, both positive and negative.27
The hibakusha, as the psychologist Robert Lifton observed in his in-depth study of them, have a complicated relationship with their status as victims. It is a no-win situation: If their victimhood is remarked upon or treated as special, they fear that any assistance rendered is inauthentic and confirms that they carry a stigma. If, on the other hand, they are ignored, they feel abandoned.28
Barsky, the plastic surgeon, continued his own kind of ministry. In 1969, he organized a clinic in Vietnam to operate on Vietnamese and Cambodian children who had been horribly burned by American munitions. The clinic operated on over a thousand children, including Kim Phuc, the famous “napalm girl.” After American surgeons fled during the fall of Saigon, the hospital was kept running, and still operates to this day.29
Scars are a sort of archive of a body’s experiences. They fade, and they can sometimes be healed. Scars in the mind are harder to see. But the scars of history, as played out in politics and attitudes and cultural creations, can outlive the people who experienced them firsthand. What does it mean to remove scars, or to preserve them? What story do the scars of history tell?
Most of the “Hiroshima Maidens” seem to have truly desired to be apolitical, which in this case seems primarily to mean non-controversial. This desire was, of course, impossible to fulfill. Their bodies were, by virtue of where they had been on the morning of August 6, 1945, inherently political. Plastic surgery could hide some of the scars. But being hibakusha appears to have thrust survivors of the bombings into a political position: One’s existence is some kind of statement about power, and so an object for others to use in making their own kinds of political statements. To gaze upon the body of a hibakusha is a political act—but so, also, is looking away.
Notes,………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/the-political-implications-of-hiroshimas-scarred-maidens/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20%22Hiroshima%20maidens%22&utm_campaign=20260806%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Climate Change Is Rewriting Europe’s Nuclear Cooling Assumptions
Romania used explosives to clear the way for redirecting Danube water toward Cernavodă as heat and drought cut nuclear output when cooling demand peaked.
Michael Barnard, Aug 04, 2026,
https://briefing.tfie.io/p/climate-change-europe-nuclear-cooling
On 3 August, Romanian naval engineers used 180 kilograms of explosives to remove a rock outcrop in the Bala Canal, a branch of the Danube. The controlled blast cleared the way for construction of a temporary dam intended to direct more water into the river channel serving the Cernavodă nuclear plant. One of Romania’s two reactors had already stopped as Danube flow fell to about 1,500 cubic metres per second, less than one-third of the normal July level, leaving the country trying to preserve the remaining unit through emergency river engineering.
The intervention made a normally hidden dependency visible. Nuclear reactors produce heat continuously and require somewhere to reject the larger quantity of waste heat that does not become electricity. Fuel supply may be largely insulated from weather, but the cooling systems, intake structures and environmental permits of river-cooled plants are tied to local hydrology. Much of Europe’s existing nuclear fleet was designed around historical ranges of water temperature and flow that are becoming less dependable.
The national consequences are much larger than a Europe-wide fleet percentage suggests. The most severe documented exposure is in Hungary, where the four-reactor Paks plant normally supplies 45.2% of national generation. By the morning of 4 August, the plant had been reduced from 1,916 MW to one 240 MW turbine, leaving nuclear capacity equivalent to approximately 39.5% of Hungary’s normal annual generation unavailable. A complete stop would expose the full 45.2% nuclear share.
Romania’s loss of one 650 MW Cernavodă unit represented about 10.3% of normal national generation on the same annual-equivalent basis. France reached a similar national figure through a much larger absolute reduction in July, when heat constrained more than 9 GW across 12 of its 57 reactors. The reduction was 14.6% of French nuclear capacity, equivalent to about 10% of normal national generation given France’s 68.1% nuclear share. Both Beznau units in Switzerland were shut during the July heatwave when the Aare reached 25°C, representing approximately 6.7% of normal Swiss generation.
Those figures [on table on original] are comparison indicators, not synchronized measurements of electricity actually lost. Hungary and Romania reflect conditions on 3–4 August, while France and Switzerland reflect their July peaks. Each value multiplies the country’s 2025 nuclear generation share by the proportion of nuclear capacity constrained at that snapshot. The method is intentionally simple, but it shows why a moderate continental effect can become a national emergency when a country depends heavily on one plant or river.
Two mechanisms are operating. France and Switzerland primarily faced hot-water constraints. Cooling water returned to an already warm river can push downstream temperatures above environmental limits, so plant operators reduce output or stop reactors to protect river ecosystems. Axpo reduced and subsequently shut the Beznau units when the Aare reached 25°C, while French plants along several rivers reduced production as temperatures crossed site-specific limits.
Hungary and Romania faced insufficient river flow as well as heat. Paks and Cernavodă require adequate water level and flow at their intake systems to operate at power. Record-low Danube levels forced Paks down to just over 10% of capacity and removed half of Cernavodă’s nuclear fleet. The reactors were shut or reduced safely; the power-system problem was that safe operation still removed large blocks of electricity during peak cooling demand.
Human-caused warming is clearly present in the heat component. World Weather Attribution found that the June western European heatwave was about 3.5°C hotter during the day than the same circulation pattern would have produced in the 1976 climate, and about 2°C hotter than a comparable event in 2003. No attribution study has calculated exactly how many megawatt-hours of the French or Swiss nuclear reductions would have remained available without climate change, but the water-temperature thresholds were being crossed in a heat regime substantially intensified by fossil-fuel emissions.
Attribution of the Danube’s low flow is less direct. Eastern Europe entered 2026 with persistent rainfall deficits, but the observed six-month precipitation trend was not statistically robust enough to assign the missing rainfall primarily to climate change. Warming had a much clearer influence on the rate at which the atmosphere pulled moisture from vegetation and soils. The January-to-June eastern European soil-moisture drought became about 11 times more probable because of human-induced climate change, while the extreme potential evapotranspiration became about 40 times more likely and about 8% more intense. Conditions of similar rarity in a climate 1.4°C cooler would have produced moderate rather than extreme drought in eastern Europe.
The defensible interpretation is that natural variability contributed much of the initial rainfall deficit while climate change materially deepened the resulting drought. That does not establish an anthropogenic percentage of the Danube’s missing cubic metres. It does establish that a dry period now loses more water to heat, reaches severe soil-moisture deficits more readily and is more likely to push river-dependent infrastructure across operating thresholds.
The electricity-system problem is the correlation among impacts. Extreme heat raises demand for air conditioning while warming cooling water, increasing evaporation and reducing river flow. Hydropower production falls with depleted rivers, gas turbines lose some output in hotter air, and persistent high-pressure weather can bring weak wind. Reuters reported European summer electricity prices reaching levels usually associated with winter stress as cooling demand increased and French nuclear output was reduced by more than 9 GW.
Air conditioning cannot be treated as a uniformly disposable load during a severe heatwave. Hospitals, care homes, cooling centres and vulnerable households require reliable electricity precisely because the heat is dangerous. The more useful flexibility is found first in industrial production, commercial loads that can be rescheduled, storage, imports and safe thermostat adjustments. Hungary’s voluntary conservation effort reduced demand by 700 MW on 2 August, nearly three times the output of the final Paks turbine, demonstrating that contracted or coordinated demand reduction can provide more immediate capacity than the reactor output still being defended.
Nuclear generation is not uniquely exposed to climate change. Hydroelectric, gas, coal, biomass, transmission and renewable generation all have different weather and climate dependencies. Nuclear’s exposure is unusually consequential because individual units are large and some national systems concentrate much of their electricity production at a single site. Its high historical capacity factors remain valuable, but they do not remove the need to plan for correlated periods of high temperature, low water and high demand.
This matters directly for reactor life extensions. Evaluations that add another 20 or 30 years of operation should use forward projections of river temperature, seasonal flow and extreme low-water events rather than treating the historical record as stationary. The engineering options include modified intakes, additional pumping, cooling towers, hybrid or dry cooling, and revised operating limits, each with costs and efficiency penalties that should be included in the life-extension case.
The grid response is broader than plant adaptation. Stronger interconnection reduces dependence on one national fleet, batteries and demand response cover the evening period when cooling demand remains high and solar production falls, and additional solar generation supplies electricity during many of the hottest daytime hours without depending on river flow. Planning also has to recognize that nuclear and hydro constraints can occur together across the same watershed rather than treating each generator’s risk independently.
Romania’s river intervention does not show that nuclear power has ceased to be a useful low-carbon resource. It shows that a reactor can be technically sound while its inherited cooling assumptions become less reliable. Climate resilience for legacy nuclear generation now belongs inside capacity planning, life-extension economics and grid design, not in an environmental appendix written after the major investment decisions have already been made.
Climate change exacerbates nuclear risks in the Arctic. And we are not ready
The Arctic under a nuclear umbrella. A main source of increased nuclear dangers in the Arctic is the intensified geopolitical competition among interested nuclear-armed powers. Increased cooperation between Beijing and Moscow and the expansion of NATO to encompass seven of the eight Arctic states have reshaped Arctic geopolitics around growing competition between Russia and, increasingly, China on one side, and the United States and NATO on the other. This happens as the entire Arctic region now finds itself under a nuclear umbrella.
These strategic changes in the Arctic extend beyond deterrence calculus and into an urgent need for regional cooperation.
By Nikita Gryazin, Iren Marinova | Analysis | July 29, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/climate-change-exacerbates-nuclear-risks-in-the-arctic-and-we-are-not-ready/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Nuclear%20risks%20in%20the%20Arctic&utm_campaign=20260730%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Editor’s note: This article is published as part of a continuing collaboration between the European Leadership Network and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Climate change is transforming the Arctic: Melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and changing maritime accessibility are opening new territories, resources, and shipping routes while reshaping the region’s strategic landscape. These changes have placed the Arctic at the center of a geopolitical competition between Russia, NATO states, and increasingly China. But the significance of these developments extends beyond economic interests and regional rivalry.
The Arctic hosts critical military infrastructure, strategic nuclear assets, and key pathways for power projection, making it a geopolitical magnifying glass in the evolving global security environment. But while climate change is widely recognized as a threat multiplier in the Arctic, regional governance has not yet adapted to this new reality. Climate change, geopolitical competition, and nuclear risk are typically treated as separate policy challenges, managed by separate institutions with different mandates. The global climate governance institutions approach the Arctic primarily through a focus on climate change effects and environmental management, while the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the bedrock of the global nuclear order, addresses nuclear risk through the traditional pillars of non-proliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. At the regional level, the Arctic Council, the leading intergovernmental forum for Arctic governance and cooperation, explicitly excludes military security from its mandate. The result is a growing governance gap that no longer reflects the magnitude and complexity of issues in the Arctic.
The governance of the Arctic remains organized around institutional silos that treat climate, security, and nuclear issues as separate rather than mutually reinforcing threats. This disconnect leaves policymakers ill-prepared to manage the security consequences of a rapidly changing Arctic as global tensions are rising and the nuclear order is already under strain. Addressing the governance deficiency in the Arctic is now both a regional and a nuclear risk-reduction imperative. It requires a complementary risk-reduction dialogue—potentially structured as a Track 1.5 mechanism—alongside Arctic-specific planning within NATO, greater attention to regional risks through the NPT process, and renewed bilateral risk-reduction channels.
The Arctic under a nuclear umbrella. A main source of increased nuclear dangers in the Arctic is the intensified geopolitical competition among interested nuclear-armed powers. Increased cooperation between Beijing and Moscow and the expansion of NATO to encompass seven of the eight Arctic states have reshaped Arctic geopolitics around growing competition between Russia and, increasingly, China on one side, and the United States and NATO on the other. This happens as the entire Arctic region now finds itself under a nuclear umbrella.
This strategic competition carries important nuclear dimensions.
The Arctic remains central to Russia’s second-strike nuclear deterrent, hosts critical military infrastructure, including early-warning systems and two-thirds of its sea-based nuclear forces. The region also serves as a key operating environment for Russia’s strategic submarines, which have historically relied on Arctic ice cover for concealment from NATO anti-submarine warfare assets, using the region’s unique acoustic environment and under-ice operating conditions to reduce detectability. Climate change has begun to erode the very geography underpinning this strategy. At the same time, China has expanded its economic, scientific, and military footprint in the region through closer cooperation with Russia and growing interest in Arctic shipping routes and resource development.
For the United States, the Arctic is central to homeland defense and nuclear deterrence, serving as a key theater for missile warning, strategic surveillance, and submarine operations. In response to Russia’s growing Arctic posture, NATO has significantly expanded its own presence through exercises, deployments, and anti-submarine warfare activities.
Finland and Sweden, by joining NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively, have altered deterrence dynamics and the broader nuclear balance in the Arctic. Their accession has changed the Nordic region from being a peripheral space of nuclear restraint to becoming a strategically integrated frontline of the alliance’s deterrence posture. For decades, both Nordic countries remained non-aligned and staunch promoters of non-proliferation, and even NATO members Denmark and Norway maintained cautious policies on the peacetime stationing of nuclear weapons on their territories. The extension of NATO’s nuclear umbrella resulting from their accession has marked a critical strategic shift in the Arctic. While nuclear stationing in the region remains politically sensitive, NATO’s expansion across the European Arctic increases the strategic significance of the High North and heightens the potential for escalation surrounding Russia’s Arctic-based nuclear assets.
In early 2026, the US administration’s coercive rhetoric over Greenland generated significant political tensions across the North Atlantic. But the Greenland crisis, combined with general shifts in US foreign policy towards Europe in the last year, has raised serious concerns among European allies over the long-term credibility of the US nuclear umbrella. The Nordic interest in complementary European deterrence arrangements involving France and the United Kingdom has also intensified as a result.
Nuclear dangers in the Arctic. A less predictable Arctic means a less predictable deterrence environment. Melting ice and increased maritime access raise the likelihood of submarine detection, close military encounters, and miscalculation between nuclear-armed powers operating in increasingly contested waters. These strategic changes in the Arctic extend beyond deterrence calculus and into an urgent need for regional cooperation.
Novaya Zemlya, the archipelago hosting Russia’s nuclear test infrastructure, sits atop a far older problem. Between 1955 and 1990, the Soviet Union conducted 224 nuclear detonations there, releasing a total of around 265 megatons of explosive energy, and scuttled more than 100 decommissioned nuclear submarines in the surrounding Barents and Kara seas. Plutonium and cesium from both sources are detectable in regional sea sediments and soil beneath glaciers. Permafrost, which used to keep much of this contamination stable, is now thawing. Researchers showed that the Arctic’s Cold War nuclear legacy is one of the least-understood consequences of global warming, as radioactive isotopes locked in frozen soil for decades are now finding new pathways in the environment. Novaya Zemlya remains largely closed to independent researchers, and Russia has offered minimal transparency about current contamination levels at the test site.
The Arctic is also increasingly becoming a theater for nuclear signaling. Russia has repeatedly invoked its nuclear capabilities in the context of confrontation with NATO, embracing more aggressive forms of signaling and appearing more willing to blur the thresholds surrounding potential nuclear use. The result is a region where climate disruption, military competition, and nuclear deterrence are becoming mutually reinforcing pressures.
A fragmented governance system frozen in place. Existing governance institutions have not yet adapted to the rapidly evolving nature of these multifaceted threats in the Arctic. The region’s governance remains reliant on a fragmented and complex ecosystem of international treaties, UN bodies, and regional forums that primarily dictate shipping, resource management, and environmental protection. But the unique complexity of challenges in the Arctic and the rising geopolitical tensions require a more integrated approach.
Geopolitical tensions have removed many of the mechanisms that historically helped manage Arctic issues. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Arctic Council has been largely paralyzed, scientific cooperation has deteriorated, and global arms control structures have continued to erode. No treaty governs nuclear activities in the region, and the collapse of US-Russia arms control frameworks has left few institutional safeguards in place.
These overlapping gaps compound one another: Regional governance relies on multiple different institutional arrangements; the Arctic Council cannot discuss military activity; and the NPT review process does not address region-specific escalation risks. This results in a structural blind spot that leaves states without agreed rules of the road at precisely the moment when the risk of miscalculation is rising. The absence of any dedicated forum that brings together climate scientists, arms control experts, and defense officials means that the linkages between environmental change and nuclear risk remain invisible to policymakers until a crisis makes them undeniable.
Closing the governance gap.
Read more: Climate change exacerbates nuclear risks in the Arctic. And we are not readyThe disconnect between siloed governance bodies and self-reinforcing risks in the Arctic demands concrete responses across several institutional levels. Despite its current constraints, the Arctic Council remains the region’s most successful institutional forum for circumpolar cooperation. Institutional bridges should be built around it as a cornerstone. But cooperation through the Arctic Council has been resilient precisely because its mandate explicitly excludes military security and instead focuses on scientific cooperation, sustainable development, and participation of indigenous populations.
Rather than expanding the Arctic Council’s mandate to encompass military security, the Arctic states should instead focus on closing the governance gap between climate change, geopolitical competition, and nuclear risks. This could be achieved through a complementary Arctic risk-reduction dialogue, potentially structured as a Track 1.5 mechanism, that operates alongside the Arctic Council and brings together foreign ministers, defense officials, coast guards, scientific experts, and representatives of indigenous communities. It could potentially be convened by an Arctic state with a strong record of regional diplomacy, such as Norway or Iceland, or a UN-affiliated body. The purpose would be to bring together experts in different areas to discuss the changing and multi-faceted threat environment in the Arctic.
Initially, such a forum could focus on practical areas of shared concern, including maritime incidents, search and rescue, environmental problems, critical infrastructure, and nuclear risk mitigation. Creating formal channels of communication would provide a venue for identifying and managing the increasingly interconnected climate, geopolitical, and nuclear threats emerging in the Arctic.
Complementary institutional responses should be established above the immediate regional level as well. Building on the Strategic Concept’s recognition of climate change as a threat multiplier, NATO should translate this commitment into Arctic-specific planning by incorporating climate-driven deterrence instability into its strategic planning and pursue dedicated Arctic incident-prevention protocols, including direct communication channels modelled on existing incidents-at-sea agreements, to reduce the risk of miscalculation.
At the multilateral level, the NPT review process should give greater attention to the interconnected nuclear risks in the Arctic by encouraging voluntary transparency, expert assessment, and reporting on climate-related vulnerabilities, radioactive contamination and nuclear legacies in the region, including at sites such as Novaya Zemlya. Finally, even amid the current political environment, the United States and Russia should prioritize the Arctic by pursuing or renewing Arctic risk-reduction channels, including incidents-at-sea arrangements and joint environmental monitoring of thawing contaminated sites. While these are minimal confidence-building measures that do not require broader arms control consensus, they could meaningfully reduce the risk of miscalculation and escalation.
Rapid warming in the Arctic has opened the door to intense geopolitical competition in the High North at the same time that the region is being placed under a broader nuclear umbrella. In the Arctic, these issues can no longer be addressed as separate concerns but rather as reinforcing one another and heightening regional and global insecurity. Existing governance institutions in the region must adapt to these new security challenges.
Fukushima nuke plant struggles to clear radioactive waste debris
By TOMOYUKI SUZUKI/ Staff Writer, July 25, 2026 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16663961
Fifteen years after the nation’s worst nuclear accident, the upper floors of the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant remain littered with wreckage from a hydrogen explosion.
Just clearing all the radioactive waste, a significant step toward decommissioning, remains a mountain to climb at the crippled plant, which suffered triple meltdowns.
The huge amount of debris must be cleared before the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., proceeds with the removal of spent nuclear fuel assemblies stored in the water-filled cooling pool located on the upper portions of the No. 1 reactor building.
But the long-overdue clearance would require TEPCO to construct new interim storage facilities in a race against time to keep up with the increasing waste volume in what is likened to a “cat and mouse game.”
Experts on nuclear decommissioning say TEPCO and other stakeholders should tackle reducing the radioactive waste as an urgent priority in tandem with the greatest challenge of removing the melted nuclear fuel.
The No. 1 reactor building holds 392 spent fuel assemblies in the cooling pool, apart from the melted nuclear fuel.
A new crane installed on the upper floor is expected to load debris from the hydrogen explosion into containers for the transfer to an on-site solid waste storage facility. The clearing work began on June 22.
The hydrogen explosion at the No. 1 reactor building occurred on March 12, 2011, the day after the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s eastern Tohoku region, resulting in the loss of power at the facility to cool the reactors.
The blast blew off the structure’s upper floors, scattering numerous pieces of the roof and the overhead crane.
Today, the No. 1 reactor building is shielded with a giant retractable cover, which measures 56 meters by 66 meters. The cover, together with a new crane, weighs about 7,900 tons, the equivalent of two Tokyo Towers.
The cover was installed in January to prevent radioactive dust from escaping into the air and rainwater from seeping inside during the spent nuclear fuel recovery, which is scheduled to begin between fiscal 2027 and 2028.
TEPCO has been conducting checks of the upper floors for potential large cracks. It has been moving some debris through a remote-controlled demolition system.
Containers holding the waste from the clearance work will be stored temporarily in a solid waste storage facility at the plant.
Known as the No. 10 storage facility, it consists of A, B and C buildings. Buildings A and B have been in use since 2024. The newest one, building C, is 50 meters by 180 meters and 20 meters in height.
Inside building C, containers are neatly stacked. Receptacles with readings of high levels of radiation are sited in the center of the building and surrounded by ones with lower readings, which serve as shields to lower air dose rates in the surrounding area.
In contrast, the grounds outdoors appeared jumbled. Trees chopped down to create space for tanks and working space for operators were left lying on some parts of the grounds while waste containers were piled up in the open.
In addition, TEPCO still relies on makeshift storage in areas along the coast that stores waste on an impermeable liner spread underground and covered with soil.
The company intends to house all the radioactive waste in the indoor facilities by fiscal 2028 to safeguard the containers from fire risks and corrosion.
Before the nuclear disaster, the nuclear plant had eight waste storage facilities. The No. 9 and No. 10 facilities were added after the 2011 accident. Construction of the No. 11 facility is underway for the planned opening for May 2028.
If everything goes as planned, the nuclear plant’s capacity for waste storage would rise to 216,000 cubic meters by the end of fiscal 2028, sufficient for an estimated 207,000 cubic meters of waste to be produced by the time.
It is clear, however, that TEPCO may need additional storage space. The company is considering constructing a No. 12 facility, given that the plant’s storage capacity is projected to be full by fiscal 2035.
The entire situation is even more concerning as little progress has been made in the discussion of the final disposal of the vast amount of radioactive waste.
Moreover, waste produced from the treatment of contaminated water, such as slurry and sorbents, is not included in the materials bound for these storage facilities.
TEPCO will transport parts of such waste into the No. 1 large-scale waste storage facility during the current fiscal year. The storage area, which measures 23 meters by 186 meters and 17 meters in height, underwent seismic retrofitting recently and is ready for use.
The big question is the total amount of radioactive waste that will be generated.
The utility estimates that there will be around 800,000 cubic meters of waste by the end of fiscal 2036. But it has not provided a figure for the overall amount during the decommissioning process.
An Atomic Energy Society of Japan committee advising on the decommissioning of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant estimates there will be about 5.6 million cubic meters of radioactive waste–equivalent to 4.5 Tokyo Domes–unless reduction measures are taken.
TEPCO plans to sort waste by radiation level for interim storage. Of the projected 800,000 cubic meters of waste, 70 percent is eligible to be held in solid waste storage facilities.
While the company aims to halve the volume of this waste, it is set to recycle the remaining 30 percent.
Scrap metal or concrete waste with a dose of 0.005 millisievert per hour or more will be cut or partially crushed to reduce the size. For waste with a dose of less than 0.005 millisievert per hour, TEPCO will consider having it melted for recycling.
But the facility for melting metal will likely be completed between fiscal 2032 and 2034, three years behind schedule, due to a design review.
The amount of melted nuclear fuel, or fuel debris, is estimated at 880 tons at the No. 1 through No. 3 reactors where the meltdowns occurred.
TEPCO plans to eventually retrieve all the fuel debris, but it has yet to determine the final disposal method.
Satoshi Yanagihara, a guest professor for nuclear decommissioning at the University of Fukui, called on TEPCO to more aggressively reduce the waste volume.
“Since utilities’ primary focus is on operating power plants, they tend to invest less in the management of nuclear waste in terms of money and human resources,” he said. “Recovering melted fuel is certainly a daunting challenge, but TEPCO should also grapple with how to lessen the waste volume simultaneously.”
Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. – Ukraine is dying at American hands.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Sybil Fares July 22, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-proxy-war-in-ukraine
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite.
Read more: Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on RussiaBarack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
A Seat Cushion Triggered One Of History’s Strangest Nuclear Accidents And A Geopolitical Scandal That Lasted Decades
A cushion, a crash, and a Cold War cover-up.
Tom Hale,19 July 26, https://www.iflscience.com/a-seat-cushion-triggered-one-of-historys-strangest-nuclear-accidents-and-a-geopolitical-scandal-that-lasted-decades-84141
There have been 32 known incidents where the US has accidentally detonated, misfired, or lost nuclear warheads (at least those that the public is allowed to know about). Just one of these accidents, however, became an international scandal and environmental disaster thanks to a cozy seat cushion for someone’s ass.
The incident unfolded in early 1968, a time when The Beatles were blasting on the radio, the Vietnam War was raging, and the threat of full-blown nuclear war between the US and the USSR was still very much on the cards.
Ever paranoid about the atomic threat, the US had launched an airborne patrol of up to 12 nuclear-armed bombers to constantly patrol the skies. Known as Operation Chrome Dome, the fleet of planes flew 24/7, non-stop from 1961 to 1968.
The operation’s routes regularly shifted to keep the USSR on its toes, but many of the flights cruised around the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, a nice vantage point from which the US could hop over the Soviet Union and casually obliterate a few million people.
The incident unfolds, then explodes
On the morning of January 21, 1968, a B-52 bomber loaded with four B28FI thermonuclear bombs flew out of Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York to take up its shift policing the skies.
It was mid-winter and temperatures were achingly low as the giant plane headed northeastwards into the Arctic Circle by mid-afternoon. In a struggle to keep warm, some of the crew had reportedly covered parts of the cabin with cushions. Unbeknownst to them, they had been placed over a heating vent that was blasting hot air from the overheating engine. The cushions turned into a smoldering tinder, and flames slowly engulfed the aircraft.
As the plane headed near the US Thule Air Base in Greenland, the crew bailed. Six of the seven successfully parachuted to safety, but one crew member, co-pilot Leonard Svitenko, attempted to escape through the lower hatch and sustained a fatal head injury.
They drifted down to the ice-covered expanse below, watching the plane turn into a fireball as it nosedived towards Wolstenholme Fjord. The plane exploded on impact, rupturing the nuclear warheads and spreading radioactive debris for miles around like a dirty bomb.
It was about to become a very long day for the US State Department, to say the least. First, they had to find the bombs and the nuclear debris, then they had to consider how they were going to clean up the mess. To make matters even more complicated, nukes weren’t technically allowed in Greenland, a territory under Danish control, and Denmark was keen to maintain its reputation as a nuclear-free zone (at least in public).
“Aircraft carried four repeat four nuclear weapons,” reads a telegram between the State Department and the US Embassy in Denmark. “Wreckage covers five mile area. Difficult climate conditions and lack of daylight hampering search operations. Special USAF team being sent.”
What followed was a nine-month cleanup operation, one of the largest and strangest in Cold War history. Hundreds of US airmen and Danish workers spent the sunless Arctic winter traveling via dog sleds and scraping contaminated ice, snow, and wreckage off the fjord by hand. Greenlandic Inuit people reportedly joined the charge, building a village of igloos to shelter the crews when the wind and chills became too much to bear.
Eventually, some 600 containers of contaminated snow had been gathered and were shipped to the US. Three of the nuclear bombs were accounted for, but the fourth was never fully recovered, presumably buried somewhere in ice.
“Thulegate”
Dealing with the contamination was one thing, but the political fallout was just as tricky to traverse. Publicly, the US and Denmark claimed the B-52 had been diverted over Greenland because of an unexpected in-flight emergency. But both governments were lying.
In the 1990s, declassified documents and journalistic investigations revealed that nuclear-armed bombers had been routinely flying over Greenland throughout the 1960s, unbeknownst to the Danish public. It became a political scandal dubbed “Thulegate” that deepened when it was revealed the Danish government had secretly signed a deal with the US to hold 50 nuclear weapons at the Thule base between 1958 and 1965.
Almost six decades later, Washington’s interest in Greenland hasn’t cooled with President Trump’s repeated demands to acquire the territory, one way or another.
Hopefully, a chilly pilot won’t threaten to turn tempers nuclear once again.
Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age
Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein | July 16, 2026
Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways are there to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place…………………………………………………………………………………………..
This list has a strong Anglophone bias, and with a few notable exceptions approaches the topic from largely American points of view. This is a reflection of its author’s limitations and the film’s relative accessibility to an American. Undoubtedly lists could (and should) be created from different cultural and national perspectives. The list is presented chronologically and can be thought of as an unfolding of the nuclear perspective from the early nuclear age to the present.
Godzilla
1954, Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Released in the USA as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, in 1956. Inspired in part by the 1954 Castle Bravo fallout disaster, which killed a Japanese fisherman and led to a boycott on tuna in Japan, Godzilla (Gojira in the Japanese original) is a more complicated film than just “radioactive monster attacks Tokyo.”…………………………….
On the Beach
United Artists, 1959. Directed by Stanley Kramer. The premise of On the Beach, adapted from the 1957 novel by the British author Nevil Shute, is that a future global nuclear war using cobalt bombs has both eradicated most of human civilization and created a massive, deadly cloud of fallout that is gradually circulating the globe, killing all in its path. Those in the southern hemisphere are momentarily safe, but the cloud is coming……………..
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1964, Columbia Pictures. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about the risk of unauthorized and accidental nuclear war fundamentally altered the lexicon with which we talk about nuclear weapons…………………… . When Daniel Ellsberg, then still at RAND and having just completed a classified study into the command and control problems central to the plot, saw the film in theatres, he was amazed — it was, he wrote later, “essentially, a documentary.”
Fail Safe
1964, Columbia. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Fail Safe might be remembered as the film of mid-1960s nuclear anxiety had it not come out the same year as Dr. Strangelove and overlapped so significantly with its themes………… its management of tension has led to its retrospective status as a critical success.
The China Syndrome
1979, Columbia Pictures. Directed by James Bridges.The sole film specifically about nuclear power on this list, The China Syndrome is a taut thriller that was elevated into something even more by its historical moment. ………………………..The film would work on its own merits, but the fact that the film premiered less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident catapulted it to the position of prophecy—for better and for worse.
Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)
1983, Kyodo Eiga. Directed by Mori Masaki. Barefoot Gen, first a manga (Japanese comic book) published in 1976, is a fictionalized version of writer and illustrator Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences of being a six-year-old boy growing up in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing.
The Day After
1983, ABC. Directed by Nicholas Meyer. This classic made-for-television movie about the run-up to nuclear war and its immediate aftermath ……………… The film is sometimes cited as a factor in Reagan’s willingness to initiate talks with the Soviet Union and initiate “the golden era of arms control.”
Testament
Paramount, 1983. Directed by Lynne Littman. Among the crowded field of “the day after nuclear war” films of the early 1980s, Testament stands out for its relative quiet, reasonableness, and lack of sensationalism. ………………………………..
WarGames
1983, MGM. Directed by John Badham. WarGames is simultaneously a very ridiculous film and a very intelligent one. A teenage computer hacker infiltrates a government mainframe that, unbeknownst to him, is actually an advanced supercomputer at NORAD run by a highly capable-but-flawed artificial intelligence. ………………with nuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.”
Threads
BBC, 1984. Directed by Mick Jackson. Widely regarded as the darkest and most dismal of the “day after” genre,………………………………………………………..
When the Wind Blows
Recorded Releasing, 1986. Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami. This distinctly British animated film, adapted from a 1982 graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs, follows an aging couple living in rural Sussex before, during, and after a nuclear war. Stereotypically British stiff upper lips, enhanced by blundering ignorance, keeps them in largely non-complaining good humor even as the world collapses around them. ………………………….
Oppenheimer
2023, Universal. Directed by Christopher Nolan. There have been several attempts to represent the complicated life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on film. Nolan’s is the most stylized and artistic, and it’s based on the best source material ………………………
A House of Dynamite
2025, Netflix. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. This recent nuclear thriller depicts the 20 minutes between the detection of an unattributed missile launch heading towards the United States, and its arrival at its target……………….
Honorable mentions
There are many other films one might want to include in such a list. Those that did not make the cut, but came close to it for me, included the suppressed British nuclear aftermath pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966); the ruminative Soviet post-apocalyptic Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986); the impending nuclear attack cult-classic Miracle Mile (1988); the Japanese Hiroshima family retrospective Black Rain [Kuroi ame] (1989); the late-Cold War Tom Clancy submarine defection thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990); the Cuban Missile Crisis dramatization Thirteen Days (2000); and the post-Cold War Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002). https://thebulletin.org/premium/2026-07/thirteen-films-that-are-essential-to-understanding-the-nuclear-age/
‘They used axes to spare the ammo’: How modern Ukraine’s Nazi heroes massacred Poles during WWII
For modern Ukraine, the Volyn massacre is an inconvenient story. Ukrainian nationalists of the Second World War are considered national heroes, and the fact that these people stained themselves with horrific crimes creates a serious problem – especially since the victims were Poles, and modern Poland is seen as an ally and even a patron of Ukraine. However, this hero worship is unlikely to change anytime soon. Ukraine’s entire public agenda is heavily influenced by nationalists who revere the OUN, so the murderers are destined to remain on a pedestal for now.
The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia went on for several months, gradually shifting from east to west. The experience the killers had acquired in punitive operations with the Nazi police was not wasted: the massacre was carried out methodically, with the discipline of an army operation. For example, it was characteristic of the Nazis to gather villagers in one building and then burn them alive, and about forty Poles were killed in Guchin in the same manner. A Ukrainian who had hidden a Polish woman was executed along with the Poles. Another common technique was to appear friendly to the Poles at first, so they would not immediately flee, and later gather the victims together in one place under some plausible pretext.
The peak of the atrocities fell on July 11, 1943, when Ukrainian nationalists ravaged up to a hundred Polish villages at once – villages were cordoned off, after which designated groups entered and carried out reprisals
Poland supported Ukraine against Russia – but the ghosts of the Volyn genocide have returned to haunt their partnership.
11 Jul, 2026 , https://www.rt.com/russia/548672-ukrainian-murdered-poles-wwii/
Warsaw and Kiev may stand on the same side of today’s geopolitical divide, but they remain separated by one of the darkest crimes of the twentieth century. Their dispute over the Volyn massacre has intensified in recent months, turning historical memory into a diplomatic battlefield. This July 11 – marking both the 83rd anniversary of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacres and ten years since Poland declared the date a national day of remembrance for the victims of the Volyn genocide – serves as a reminder that some wars do not end when the shooting stops.
The Second World War is usually seen as a confrontation between giant military alliances. However, in reality, many smaller separate conflicts unfolded within this epic war, and the struggle between peoples and countries was often conducted without compromise or mercy. One of the darkest and least-known pages of the Second World War is the Volyn massacre – an ethnic cleansing carried out by pro–Nazi Ukrainian nationalist groups in the Volyn region, which is now almost entirely part of Ukraine.
Volhynia has historically been a border zone. These swampy forests were part of Russia in the Middle Ages and later became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – the Polish state in its heyday. The partitioning of Poland brought Volhynia into the Russian Empire. After the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, Volhynia was once again part of an independent Poland. In short, this region, although a bit of a backwater, has changed hands often.
By the beginning of the Second World War, it was a good agricultural region with a diverse population. Approximately 70% of the region’s inhabitants were Ukrainians, 16% were Poles, and another 10% were Jews. In the first two decades of Poland’s renewed independence, Ukrainian national organizations were banned in Volhynia, and, most importantly, poverty was a very acute problem. The level of urbanization was extremely low, and there was little good land for peasants in Volhynia. National tensions had already existed, but their roots stemmed from economic problems. The Polish minority was, on average, more prosperous, and the central authorities distributed Volhynia’s best plots of land among Polish veterans.
In 1939, Germany began World War II by attacking Poland. Within a couple of weeks, the Polish army’s main forces were defeated. Against this background, on September 17, 1939, Soviet troops entered the territory of western Ukraine and Belarus. Though the Poles considered this a treacherous blow, Poland itself had acquired its eastern provinces by forcibly capturing them at the end of the Russian Civil War. From Moscow’s point of view, it had protected the local population from the Nazis while creating a buffer for itself in case of a major war. From whatever angle you look at these events, the national republics within the USSR were formed from territories with their own native populations. The borders of the ruined Russian Empire had evolved not according to some national principle, but were the results of hostilities. Now populated mainly by Ukrainians, Volhynia became part of Soviet Ukraine.
Naturally, redrawing the borders did not make national tensions disappear. The Polish minority was not happy about this at all, and the Polish government sitting in exile in London was not prepared to give up even an inch of land. The Polish government continued to see the ‘Kresy’ – the disputed territories in western Belarus and Ukraine – as its own territory.
In 1941, the Nazis began a grandiose campaign of conquest against Russia. The beginning of the war was disastrous for the Soviet Union. The Red Army immediately suffered a series of heavy defeats, and the Germans occupied Volhynia within literally one or two weeks.
However, the Nazis’ grip on Volhynia was not that tight. It wasn’t very important to them from a strategic or economic standpoint, so only a few cities were actually held by German forces. Moreover, there were a number of different guerrilla-insurgent groups operating in the countryside. The Polish ‘Home Army’ saw its task as restoring Polish rule. Soviet partisans fought against the Nazis in the interests of their own country. Volhynia was also one of the key centers of activity for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Although it tried to play an independent role, the OUN initially operated under the patronage of the Nazis and the organization itself was divided into factions.
However, all of the Ukrainian nationalist movements were united in their opposition to Volhynia’s non-Ukrainian populations. The OUN’s policy paper, ‘Instructions for the First Days of the Organization of State Life’, explicitly stated: “National minorities are divided into those friendly and hostile to us.” The latter included “Muscovites, Poles and Jews.” “Friendly” differed from “hostile” only in that “friends… can return to their homeland.” According to this document, “hostile” national minorities were subject to “destruction in the struggle.” This masterpiece of rhetoric was accompanied by the remark: “Our government should be terrible to its opponents. Terror for alien-enemies and their traitors.” In the text that follows, the ethnic cleansing program is described in detail. It is curious that this cannibalistic manifesto was actually compiled before the beginning of the Soviet-German war in May of 1941. Initially, there was a kind of segregation – the anti-Semitism of the Ukrainian nationalists brooked no exceptions, while the Poles planned to destroy “only” the intelligentsia and assimilate the ordinary peasants.
With the outbreak of the war, the nationalists followed the Wehrmacht with calls to destroy “Moscow, Poland, Magyars and Jews”, accompanied by demands that the population obey the OUN and its leader, Stepan Bandera. In fact, nationalist auxiliary units began killing Jews even before the Nazis did. The attitude of the nationalists towards national minorities was generally more vicious and uncompromising than the Germans’, and the range of people subject to unconditional murder was wider. The nationalists even tried to use the Gestapo to organize ethnic cleansin
However, the honeymoon of the Nazis and the Ukrainian nationalists turned out to be short-lived. The Germans came to see nationalist leader Bandera and his plans to create an independent Ukraine as obstacles to their own plans, which didn’t envision any independent states within the occupied territories of the USSR. Bandera was quickly arrested. The Germans used the nationalists within their own units, and the OUN decided to change course. So as not to play into the hands of Moscow, they did not fight the Nazis. In fact, clashes with the Germans were random and rare. The nationalists operated underground and were mainly engaged in propaganda for quite a long time. They had enough weapons – some were received from the Germans in the summer of 1941, some were retrieved from battlefields, and others were obtained by bribing the occupying forces.
By the end of 1942, it became clear that Germany was losing the war, and the nationalists’ plans changed. They were still planning an armed uprising, but the solution to the “issue of national minorities” was updated again. The attitude towards the Russians softened – now only “activists” were to be destroyed. Jews were only to be deported since they were considered to have “great influence.” But the Poles – the largest national minority in Volhynia – were to be dealt with in the most brutal way: “to evict everyone and destroy those who refuse to leave.”
At the beginning of 1943, the Ukrainian auxiliary police formed by the Nazis began to desert en masse and join the ranks of the OUN. In total, up to 5,000 former policemen went underground. These people had already managed to participate in the extermination of Jews as part of the Holocaust, as well as the murders of Russians and Belarusians. The Nazi occupation of the USSR was insanely cruel. Without exaggeration, the population of the occupied territories spent two to three years inside a meat grinder. In many areas, up to a quarter of the population was killed through executions and village burnings, as well as organized famines and humanitarian catastrophes. Many villages and even small towns were completely massacred. Auxiliary nationalist units were often directly responsible for perpetrating these acts of intimidation and genocide. As is easy to guess, these people did not suffer from an excess of scruples or moral principles.
Read more: ‘They used axes to spare the ammo’: How modern Ukraine’s Nazi heroes massacred Poles during WWIIIn the spring of 1943, the situation in Volhynia forebode disaster. The fragile balance of power between Soviet, Polish, and Ukrainian partisan groups was broken and, for a while, the nationalists became the main force in the forests. The theoretical framework for killing a lot of people had already been created, and the nationalist underground was replenished by a horde of Nazi policemen unburdened by a humane worldview.
By April of 1943, Soviet partisans, who were no choirboys themselves after witnessing many atrocities, were horrified to report:
“A hundred members of the national army have been tasked with destroying Poles in Tsuman District. The local population was slaughtered and settlements in Zaulok, Galinovsk, etc. were burned down. On March 29, 18 people were hacked to death in the village of Galinovk. The rest fled into the forest. Bandera nationalists were led to a Polish doctor by his wife, and they cut off the doctor’s ears and nose. Up to 50 Poles were shot in the village of Pundynki.”
After a short discussion, the leadership of the OUN approved the mass extermination of Poles. The key instigator of this purge was Dmitry Klyachkovsky, aka ‘Klim Savur’, who had previously been arrested for extremism in both Poland and the USSR. Having escaped from a Soviet prison during the Wehrmacht offensive, he now became the architect of the massacre as one of the key commanders of OUN forces.
The attacks were preceded by primitive propaganda campaigns. One of the rioters, Juhim Orlyuk, later told the USSR’s secret police during interrogation:
“In approximately May or June of 1943, two people arrived in the village of Mogilnoye. There was one named Vladimir Volynsky who the villagers called ‘Iron’. He was from the village of Ostrovok, which is about 1 kilometer from the mountains. I didn’t know the other person. They gathered all of Mogilnoye’s Ukrainian residents at the village school and announced that they had been sent by the Ukrainian insurgent army. Next, ‘Iron’ asked those present if they wanted to or were willing to fight the enemy (against whom specifically, he did not say). Those present replied that they were ready. He went on to say that the Germans would lose the war, that a revolution would break out in Germany, that the Red Army would only reach the old border, and that, at that time, the Ukrainian insurgent army, which had a lot of people in it, would rise up, and an independent Ukrainian state would be created.”
Volhynia was not a major area of activity for either Polish or Soviet partisans. The partisan forces in Volhynia were small. The Poles had few weapons, and the Russians were mainly focused on other areas. The Soviet partisan detachments were waging a desperate war against the Germans, and the appearance of a new front was an unexpected problem for them. The Poles created self-defense detachments called plyatsuvki, as well as mobile partisan groups to aid them. Groups of ethnic Poles also operated in Volhynia as part of the Soviet partisan movement. However, all these forces suffered from a severe shortage of weapons and ammunition and were often simply powerless to stop the killers. The Soviet partisans focused mainly on sabotage against German military installations and did not have enough forces or equipment to protect villages. To make matters worse, there was a distinct lack of trust between the Soviet and Polish partisans.
Meanwhile, events were rapidly developing. The incident that kicked off what would later be called the Volyn massacre is considered to be a raid on the village of Paroslya on February 9, 1943. The militants did not waste bullets: Poles were hacked to pieces with axes. A number of villages were dealt with in a similar fashion. In March, the village of Lipniki was destroyed. Among the survivors was a one-and-a-half-year-old baby, who had been accidentally overlooked. The infant, whose grandfather had been stabbed with a bayonet, was found the next morning by chance, lying in the snow among the dead and dying. He would grow up to become the first Polish cosmonaut, Miroslav Germashevsky.
The blood was intoxicating, and the carnage became more and more ferocious. Polish women were raped, and many Poles were brutally tortured before being killed. The murders were mainly carried out using farming equipment or other improvised means. As is often the case, political violence begot criminal violence. The most unscrupulous of peasants tried to appropriate other people’s land by nefarious means, often employing the simplest method – killing the owners. In addition, the nationalists bound ordinary peasants together by blood. They drove prisoners into a pile and forced the Ukrainian peasants to kill them.
The Nazis used the massacre with truly diabolical ingenuity. Police detachments made up of Polish collaborators who had already killed Ukrainians were brought into Volhynia, so many peasants took the Germans’ atrocities to be revenge by the Poles.
The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia went on for several months, gradually shifting from east to west. The experience the killers had acquired in punitive operations with the Nazi police was not wasted: the massacre was carried out methodically, with the discipline of an army operation. For example, it was characteristic of the Nazis to gather villagers in one building and then burn them alive, and about forty Poles were killed in Guchin in the same manner. A Ukrainian who had hidden a Polish woman was executed along with the Poles. Another common technique was to appear friendly to the Poles at first, so they would not immediately flee, and later gather the victims together in one place under some plausible pretext.
Victims were thoroughly robbed, houses were burned. The murderers tried not only to execute the people but destroy their cultural values as well. After about a hundred Poles had been shot en masse in Poritska, nationalists blew up an 18th-century church with the help of an artillery shell and then set fire to what was left of the building. The commanders did not hesitate to personally participate in the killings. For example, Pyotr Oleinik, aka ‘Aeneas’, who led the OUN forces near Rivne, executed captured Poles himself.
Gender and age were no protection – 438 people were killed in the village of Ostrovki, of whom 246 were children under the age of 14. “The entire Polish population, including infants, was destroyed (cut and chopped up). I personally shot 5 Poles there who were fleeing into the forest,” a captured militant later told Soviet investigators during interrogation about his participation in an attack on another village.
As a rule, the main murder weapons were peasant tools – axes, pitchforks, knives, and hammers. In some cases, places were swept a second time to find people who had managed to hide during the first attack and returned to the ashes. The Poles’ attempts to organize negotiations failed. The Home Army sent Sigmund Rummel, an officer and poet who spoke Ukrainian well, to parlay with the leaders of the OUN. He, as well as the officer and guide accompanying him, were seized and tortured to death.
The peak of the atrocities fell on July 11, 1943, when nationalists ravaged up to a hundred Polish villages at once – villages were cordoned off, after which designated groups entered and carried out reprisals
The killings continued on a smaller scale until the winter of 1944. According to various estimates, from 40,000 to 60,000 Poles were killed in total. Up to 7,000 people escaped by joining Soviet partisan detachments or taking refuge in cities where OUN detachments were not active. In addition to Poles, almost a thousand ‘disloyal’ Ukrainians, more than a thousand Jews, and about 135 Russians were killed. In addition, the forces of the Polish Home Army, as well as pro-German collaborators, killed more than 2,000 Ukrainians.
In the 1944 campaign, the Wehrmacht was defeated, and Volhynia was liberated by the Red Army. For the Soviet government, the OUN and the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA), which had been formed during the Volyn massacre, became a major headache, as the numerous armed groups posed a serious problem. By 1945, the main forces of the nationalists had been defeated. The Volyn massacre was certainly a crime from the standpoint of the Soviet authorities. Consequently, Yuri Stelmaschuk, who had been one of the key OUN commanders during the massacre in Volhynia, was arrested in January of 1945 and brought before a tribunal.
At the trial, Stelmaschuk tried to dodge the charges, claiming that he had tried to sabotage Klyachkovsky’s order to massacre the Poles. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of murdering 5,000 Poles, sentenced to death, and shot. Pyotr Oleinik, the commander of the OUN forces near Rivne, was shot during a special NKVD operation in February of 1946. Finally, Dmitry Klyachkovsky, the leader and organizer of the massacre, was eliminated thanks to the capture of Stelmaschuk, who revealed his hiding place under interrogation. A large NKVD detachment surrounded and defeated Klim Savura’s detachment, and the executioner himself was mortally wounded during the pursuit.
For modern Ukraine, the Volyn massacre is an inconvenient story. Ukrainian nationalists of the Second World War are considered national heroes, and the fact that these people stained themselves with horrific crimes creates a serious problem – especially since the victims were Poles, and modern Poland is seen as an ally and even a patron of Ukraine. However, this hero worship is unlikely to change anytime soon. Ukraine’s entire public agenda is heavily influenced by nationalists who revere the OUN, so the murderers are destined to remain on a pedestal for now.
Nuclear Power is Now Trump Power…What Could Go Wrong?
Karl Grossman – Harvey Wasserman, July 10, 2026, https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/10/nuclear-power-is-now-trump-power-what-could-go-wrong/
Donald Trump is now the ultimate face of the U.S. nuclear power industry.
What could go wrong?
If you are advocating atomic energy in any form, you are promoting The Donald’s latest and largest fiscal fleecing of the American people. It mirrors his mega swindles in crypto and so much more—except this time with apocalyptic impact.
It’s a hyper-push for nuclear power.
As The New York Times this week headlined the “Climate Forward” column of Claire Brown: “Trump’s plans for nuclear power lurch ahead.”
Her July 7th piece began: “President Trump wants to quadruple nuclear power production in the United States by 2050. To get there, developers would need to build about a hundred times as much nuclear capacity in the next 25 years as they did in the past 25. In recent weeks, a series of government announcements have nudged the country a bit closer to that goal.”
It continued: “Nuclear power has broad bipartisan support in Congress, and many climate experts have embraced it as a low-emissions source of energy. Other experts remain opposed, arguing that it is too expensive or that the safety risks are too high.”
Through its Truth Social corporate front, the Trump Family has bought a major interest in TAE Technologies, a $6 billion California-based plunge into nuclear fusion.
To serve that investment, Trump is scamming his presidency to funnel billions of public dollars into a “Peaceful Atom” from which he expects to personally profit.
Right now, he’s pushing through Congress a $17.5 billion interest-free slush fund to promote more U.S. reactor construction.
Similar handouts from George W. Bush and Barack Obama fed two new nuclear power plants in Georgia. Originally promised at around $15 billion, the two plants fired up last year some seven years late and nearly $25 billion over budget. Their most recently reported price tag approaches $40 billion. Their output will never compete with renewables. They’ll bleed Peach State mega-cash as long as they operate.
Two abandoned nuclear plants in South Carolina blew $9 billion outright. The double debacle bankrupted Westinghouse, once the world’s leading reactor producer.
Meanwhile Trump pushes so-called Small Modular Reactors, hyped to power data centers that produce his beloved crypto. Projected to operate around 2030, SMR cultists hope their juice might (at best) cost a mere three times the proven cost of solar panels, and four times or more than that of currently operating onshore wind turbines.
But despite Trump’s frantic efforts to kill it, the real-world transition to green “Solartopian” renewables may be. Epic advances in battery technology essentially eliminate any need for the base-line power nuclear plants produce when they don’t break down or blow up. California’s battery capacity is now seven times as large as the maximum output that can be produced by the state’s last two hyper-expensive Diablo Canyon nuclear power plants.
Those dangerously decrepit reactors are surrounded by at least a dozen earthquake faults. They sit just 45 miles from the San Andreas fault.
In 2013, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned that Diablo might not withstand a credible quake from the seismic faults surrounding it. Peck’s warning was ignored. Now he is gone from the commission. In the Trump era, no such report could be written in the first place.
In 2018, California adopted a comprehensive plan to shut Diablo and to phase in renewables. The transition was hugely accelerated by massive advances that have dropped battery prices while expanding their capabilities. Through at least part of most days now, California gets 100% of its electricity from renewables, much of it coming from solar panels in the Central Valley.
But “green” Governor Gavin Newsom is trashing the transition. In 2022, he handed Diablo’s owner, PG&E, billions in Trump-style grift while promoting his own run for The White House. As a result, California’s electric rates are now the highest in the continental U.S.
Meanwhile, Trump attacks the green competition with billions of public dollars to buy out leases from wind and solar projects, which threaten to produce electricity far cheaper than his beloved nukes. With the epic spread of cheap batteries (which are also fueling a global boom in electric vehicles) more than 80% of the world’s newly installed electric generating capacity now comes from renewables. All Trump’s mob-style assaults in the U.S. are being challenged in court and at the grassroots. But the global market push remains unrelenting.
Despite the growing danger as they deteriorate from age and maladministration, atomic reactors have been federally shielded from accident insurance requirements since 1957. Amidst escalating safety concerns, Congress has extended the liability exemption to SMRs, meant to power thousands of the crypto-loving data centers now being vehemently opposed by grassroots citizens throughout the US.
Last year Trump became the first U.S. president to fire a chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court has now confirmed the royal prerogative of a sitting president to fire any regulatory official. In the wake of Musk’s DOGE purge of at least 100 technical experts at the NRC, Trump is now sole arbiter of health and safety regulations, which are now in terrifying free fall at the 94 licensed U.S. nuclear power plants.
Trump also wants to put new reactors on military reservations, shredding residual NRC restraints through the even looser Department of Energy.
Two operating U.S. nuclear power plants (at North Anna in Virginia and Perry in Ohio) have already been significantly damaged by earthquakes (Perry twice). With neither accident insurance nor credible safety regulation, Trump/Nukes Inc. is a sitting duck for terror attacks. Russian drones have already damaged reactors and fuel storage sites at Ukraine’s Zaporizhia and Chernobyl. Others have been under fire.
Trump has infamously launched outright war on Iran’s nuclear weapons production. But as in Ukraine, a single drone could turn any of the world’s 400-plus reactors into a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, plunging us into an economic, ecological and health abyss from which we might never recover.
Meanwhile, an industry that hypes itself as “climate friendly” burns at 500 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. In France, the U.S. and elsewhere, commercial reactors super-heat lakes and rivers that can no longer cool them, while boiling billions of marine organisms.
Seven decades after the first commercial reactor opened in Pennsylvania, The Donald is the undisputed self-dealing face of the “Peaceful Atom.”
He’s its top investor. He rules the shell of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He’s the presidential purveyor of taxpayer grift and chief hit man aiming to kill the renewable competition.
If you are for nuclear power, you are for Trump power.
What could go wrong?
Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)
Senior U.S. Diplomats, Journalists, Academics and Secretaries of Defense Say: the U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine
it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine.
it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine.
The Ukraine Papers, by Donald A. Smith, PhD, 27 June 26
It took some years for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about the war in Vietnam. Thanks to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and thanks to the antiwar movement, Americans eventually learned about the injustices and failures of that war.
Likewise, it took several years after the starts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about those wars as well.
Americans are just now starting to realize that they’ve been lied to about the war in Ukraine. (The propaganda effort has been quite effective, with the New York Times, in particular, acting as a mouthpiece for the government’s position.) More and more mainstream publications are exposing the lies, and a majority of Americans now oppose further arming of Ukraine.
This essay is a summary of what the U.S. government has been hiding about the war in Ukraine, with links to sources for further information.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, U.S. military actions since 9/11 directly killed over 900,000 people, with an additional 3.5 million people dying from indirect effects. The wars cost Americans at least $8 trillion and displaced over 38 million people from their homes. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, if you count all expenditures.
If we go back to the 1960s, the number killed by U.S. wars includes the several million killed in the Vietnam war, the approximately 1 million killed by U.S. support for Indonesian military’s attacks on left wing groups, and the hundreds of thousands, at least, killed in proxy wars and government overthrows in Latin America.
The wars, overthrows, and associated sanctions caused mass migrations worldwide — particularly in Europe and at the southern U.S. border — and destabilized politics. The Lancet medical journal reported that between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed over half a million people annually. Yet almost nobody (except for whistleblowers) was held accountable for these disasters; indeed, many of the same people are in Congress or work for the government or the weapons industry.
Moreover, the U.S. government lied about almost all the wars — in particular, about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also about the war in Yugoslavia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine, here (Chapter 3), and here. In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA, and U.S. propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the U.S. intervention. Likewise, The U.S. backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia.
The United States withdrew from the following arms treaties: Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Strategic Arms Reduction (START II)Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran deal, Open Skies Treaty, and Conventional Armed Forces Treaty (Russia withdrew after alleged NATO non-compliance)
So, it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, claims by President Biden and others that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked” are greatly exaggerated.
Read what these diplomats, secretaries of Defense, journalists, academics, politicians, and others have to say:
Here the author gives quotations from 30 highly regarded people – certainly not pro Russian propagandists ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Ambassador Jack Matlock (referenced above) said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?” Matlock said the U.S. backed the 2014 coup, and “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis — we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.” And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
See this for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence Nazis in Ukraine and U.S. support for them.
Evidence of U.S. involvement in the coup is overwhelming. The Cato Institute (not a radical Marxist outfit!) wrote America’ Ukraine Hypocrisy which includes:
The extent of the Obama administration’ meddling in Ukraine’ politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria] Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government… Both the Obama administration and most of the American news media portrayed the Euromaidan Revolution as a spontaneous, popular uprising against a corrupt and brutal government… It was a grotesque distortion to portray the events in Ukraine as a purely indigenous, popular uprising.
The 2019 RAND Corporation study Overextending and Unbalancing Russia examines “cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress — overextend and unbalance — Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” It includes the paragraph:
“Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in US military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages.”
The highlighted words indicate that the authors were quite aware that US provocations would cause Russia to respond militarily.
The New Yorker’s Is the F.B.I. Truly Biased Against Trump? contains a telling paragraph on the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress information about exactly what happened in Ukraine:
According to [FBI agent] Buma’s statement, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he was told to terminate relations with one of his most valuable sources in that field, Dynamo. The order came from both his supervisors and the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and, per Buma, superiors told him that the shutdown of Dynamo was based on “highly classified information from the National Security Agency” which he could not access. They also said that it was part of a broader effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many “sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.”
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia wanted desperately to be integrated into the West and, up to the end of 2021, pleaded with D.C. to come to an equitable peace in Ukraine, but the U.S. wanted to weaken Russia, and NATO needed an enemy to justify its existence. The expansion of NATO — which violated multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders — provoked the war that is now touted as showing the need for NATO.
According to the LA Times’s Russia feels threatened by NATO. There’s history behind that, “some of Russia’s security concerns are real. Offering to discuss them doesn’t qualify as appeasement; Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus.”
From 2018, in Medium’s American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line: “Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile….Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems.”
Right before the Russian invasion, in January of 2022, Yahoo News reported: CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades. After the invasion, in March of 2022, Yahoo News reported: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion..
In November of 2023, the Washington Post exposed that “Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said…. The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed.” Foreign Policy’s essay of July 11, 2025 mentions the “CIA’s decade of covert support for Ukraine.” ABC News also has an article about CIA involevment in Ukraine since 2015.
Likewise, a New York Times article The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, dated February 25, 2024, revealed that the CIA had been coordinating with Ukrainian intelligence since at least 2014 and that the Ukrainians had been launching assasinations and other kinetic actions in Crimea and Russia. As Mark Episkopos writes in Responsible Statecraft, CIA in Ukraine: Why is this not seen as provocation?: “An explosive new NYT report shows how Washington needlessly fed into Russia’s worst fears and precipitated the invasion, justified or not.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
These facts and opinions do not justify Russia’s brutal invasion, but they certainly give the lie to statements by President Biden and others that the invasion was “unprovoked.” Even the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 was provoked: it occurred after, and partially in response to, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.
And the facts expose stunning hyprocrisy. The U.S. launched numerous unjustified wars, proxy wars, bombings and coups far from U.S. borders; surrounded Russia and China with pro-US allies and military bases (about 800 worldwide); exited multiple arms treaties; and increased military spending to about $1 trillion a year despite $34 trillion in debt and dire domestic needs. Yet we accuse Russia and China of being the aggressors.
Both sides can be at fault in a conflict. The U.S. too has blood on its hands.
Finally, the facts are strong reasons why the U.S. should not be arming Ukraine to the teeth, pushing it to fight to the last Ukrainian and risking a nuclear war. Instead, it should push for a negotiated end to the war. https://theukrainepapers.org/senior-US-diplomats-academics-journalists-and-secretaries-of-defense-say-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html
Russia adds four Ukrainian groups and ‘Glory to Ukraine’ salute to register of ‘fascist organizations and associated symbols’
January 19, 2024, Source: Meduza, https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/01/18/russia-adds-four-ukrainian-groups-and-glory-to-ukraine-salute-to-register-of-fascist-organizations-and-associated-symbols
Russia’s Justice Ministry has included four Ukrainian organizations in its register of groups that either collaborated with those condemned by the Nuremberg trials or deny the crimes of Nazism, reports Russian state news agency TASS.
The list appeared on the ministry’s website on January 18 and is officially called the “List of organizations specified in parts three and four of Article 6 of the federal law ‘On Commemorating the Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945’, as well as the attributes and symbols of these organizations.”
The list includes the following four organizations:
- The Ukrainian People’s Revolutionary Army (UNRA),
- The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA),
- The Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNSO),
- The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
The list also features the organizations’ slogans, including the salute “Glory to Ukraine” [Slava Ukraini] and the response “Glory to the Heroes” [Heroiam Slava].
The document also includes the organizations’ symbols, such as the Trident of Prince Volodymyr, depicted on Ukraine’s coat of arms.
An Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz – for peace in Ukraine – Jeffrey Sachs.
Economist and diplomat Jeffrey Sachs is calling on German Chancellor Merz to begin immediate talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about peace in Europe.
Jeffrey D. Sachs | May 27, 2026 | Berliner Zeitung
When I wrote an open letter to you a half year ago, I urged Germany to pursue diplomacy with Russia rather than the normalization of war. Six months later, the situation in Europe is dramatically worse. Europe and Russia are slipping into open war. And in that drift, Chancellor, your responsibility is singular. No European leader — not in Paris, not in Warsaw, not in Rome — holds the position that Germany holds, or has the power that you personally hold, to interrupt this catastrophe. Will you try for peace?
You yourself, with Prime Minister Meloni and President Macron, called in January 2026 for Europe to restart relations with Russia and described Russia as „a European country.“ Yet you did not pursue diplomacy. With the future of Europe at stake, this is an extraordinary abdication of leadership. Have you, in your months as Chancellor, attempted one substantive dialogue with President Putin? Has your foreign minister attempted one substantive dialogue with Foreign Minister Lavrov? Real conversations, the kind that ended the Cold War. The answer, as far as the public record reveals, is no. Not once. And not for want of recognizing the urgency.
The past days have brought a dangerous acceleration that should focus every European mind. Both capitals are now under sustained attack: Ukrainian long-range drones have struck deep into Moscow, including civilian sites; Russian missile and drone strikes against Kyiv have greatly intensified. Ukrainian drones have crossed into the airspace of the Baltic states, raising the immediate prospect of an incident that could pull Europe directly into the war. A horrific Ukrainian strike on a boys’ school in Lugansk has further eroded what little remains of restraint. And on May 25, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, acting on instructions from President Putin, formally notified the United States Secretary of State that the Russian Armed Forces are now launching „systematic and sustained strikes“ on facilities and decision-making centers in Kyiv, and the Russian Foreign Ministry has advised that the United States and other countries „ensure the evacuation of their diplomatic personnel and other citizens from the capital of Ukraine.“ That message is the prologue to a major escalation. Diplomacy is more urgent than ever.
The way to defend Ukraine is not continued slaughter, but peace on terms that are agreeable to all parties. Instead, we face escalation, with more deaths, more destruction, and the real prospect of a war that expands beyond Ukraine. By calling for ever more weapons, ever greater war-fighting capacity, and ever louder demonstrations of „resolve,“ and by signaling that Germany is preparing for war rather than working to end it, you have allowed Berlin to become an accelerant rather than a brake to a European-wide war.
Germany’s Responsibility: Six Particulars
Germany bears profound responsibility for the situation it now confronts. Before German policy can be reset toward peace, Germany’s record must be confronted honestly. I set out below six serious failures of German foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia since German reunification in 1990.
First — the 2+4 Treaty and NATO’s eastward expansion. On 12 September 1990, in Moscow, Germany signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany — the „2+4 Treaty“ — that completed German reunification. That treaty was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. The declassified record — including the now-public memoranda assembled by the National Security Archive of George Washington University — is unambiguous: those assurances were given and were clearly meant at the time to apply beyond the territory of the former GDR to Eastern Europe. These assurances were reaffirmed through 1990 and 1991.
The 2+4 Treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the former GDR, and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation’s security should come at the expense of another’s. Does any serious person believe that the Soviet Union cared about Western troops on the territory of the former GDR but was indifferent to NATO armies in Warsaw, Vilnius, or Kyiv? Of course not.
The matter of NATO enlargement was discussed in detail and explicit assurances of non-enlargement to the East were given by Germany to the Soviet leaders — and then were broken. Germany was the principal beneficiary of those assurances, which were the quid pro quo for Germany’s reunification. Yet as early as 1993, German leaders began to promote the violation of those assurances.
Second — Chancellor Merkel’s own testimony. In her memoirs, Angela Merkel writes with striking candor that she understood at the time of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia. She knew Russia’s red line. And yet she gave in to American pressure, accepting the compromise communiqué that Ukraine and Georgia „will become“ NATO members. That single sentence set in motion the catastrophes of 2014 and 2022. Merkel’s later candor is a gift to her successors: she has told you, plainly and in her own words, what was understood at the time. Germany should not now pretend otherwise.
Third — the betrayal of the February 21, 2014 agreement. On 21 February 2014, in Kyiv, Germany’s then–Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, together with his Polish and French counterparts, brokered an agreement between President Yanukovych and the opposition. The agreement provided for a return to the 2004 constitution, the formation of a national-unity government, and early presidential elections. President Putin was consulted; the agreement was confirmed. It was a serious diplomatic achievement under conditions of intense violence. Yet within twenty-four hours Yanukovych was forcibly overthrown by a violent coup. Germany did not insist on the agreement it had just guaranteed. Instead, following the U.S. lead, Germany backed the new government, as if there had been no agreement in place. That decision persuaded Moscow that Western signatures could not be trusted.
Fourth — Minsk II. In February 2015, Chancellor Merkel personally negotiated Minsk II in the Normandy Format and pledged Germany’s political backing through the Declaration of Support adopted in Minsk on 12 February 2015. For seven years, the key political provision — autonomy for the Donbas regions within a sovereign Ukraine — was never implemented by Kyiv. Germany did not press Kyiv to implement the autonomy provision it had championed — and Merkel later acknowledged that the agreement had been used as a holding action to allow Ukraine to rearm. President Hollande said the same. The guarantee, in other words, was not a guarantee at all. It was a stratagem — once again at Washington’s behest. Once again, the message to Moscow was that Western signatures cannot be trusted
Fifth — Nord Stream. On 7 February 2022, in the East Room of the White House, President Biden announced — with then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz standing beside him — that „if Russia invades… then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.“ Asked how, he replied, „I promise you, we will be able to do that.“ The pipelines were destroyed seven months later in an act of sabotage in the Baltic Sea. The available evidence — investigative reporting in the United States and Germany, the trail followed by the German federal prosecutor, and the public statements of former officials — points overwhelmingly to a joint Ukrainian-American operation. The German government has long known this. And yet Germany has permitted the public blame to fall on Russia, against the direct evidence, while an act of industrial sabotage against the German economy has gone unprosecuted and unanswered.
Sixth — the April 2022 Istanbul agreement that was within reach. Just weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators converged in Istanbul on the terms of a peace agreement: Ukrainian neutrality outside NATO, multilateral security guarantees, agreed troop limits, and the political resolution of the Donbas and Crimea questions over time. The agreement was within days of signature. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, one of the mediators, has confirmed publicly that the deal was close and that the West — the United States and the United Kingdom in particular — moved to block it. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s mission to Kyiv in April 2022 to instruct Ukraine not to sign is a matter of public record. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the wider European order, have paid the price for that US–UK intervention. Germany has not raised its voice on this — even though Germany, more than any other European state has borne the economic consequences.
The Second Catastrophe: Germany’s Economic Self-Destruction
Your first concern must be peace. Yesterday’s message from Moscow tells us how late the hour is. But there is a second catastrophe unfolding alongside the first: the willful destruction of the German economy, with Berlin as both author and victim.
Germany’s industrial economy was built on trade with Russia. The destruction of Nord Stream and the subsequent severance of Germany’s trade relations with Russia have left Germany buying natural gas from the United States at prices several times higher than the Russian pipeline gas it replaced. This is industrial suicide. Germany’s chemical sector, its steel sector, its glass industry, its energy-intensive manufacturers — the very foundations of the Mittelstand — are losing international competitiveness day by day. Skilled jobs are draining out of the German economy. And the German taxpayer and the German consumer are making a transfer of national wealth from Germany to American gas producers at a scale unprecedented in postwar Europe.
On top of this, the German government is now pledging an enormous defence build-up — hundreds of billions of euros over the coming decade — to arm for a war that diplomacy can easily prevent. This is a profound misallocation of national resources. The fundamental challenge facing Germany in this decade is competitiveness in the digital age. Every euro spent on tanks, missiles, and artillery shells is a euro not spent on Germany’s AI capacity, its chip-design and chip-fabrication capability, its energy infrastructure, and the high-speed digital networks that Germany needs to remain a top global economy.
The hard reality, Mr. Chancellor, is that there is no security to be bought with these arms that diplomacy cannot buy at a tiny fraction of the cost, and there is no prosperity to be had without the digital and energy investments that this arms buildup will crowd out.
My Appeal
Chancellor Merz, more than any other European leader, the question of whether Europe descends into general war, or returns to negotiation, and to economic sanity, rests with you. The hour is very late. Yesterday’s formal message from Moscow to Washington says so explicitly. Please open a dialogue with President Putin. Please send your foreign minister to Moscow or invite Russia’s Foreign Minister to Berlin. Please reopen the OSCE channels that Germany has allowed to atrophy. Please tell Kyiv to cease its strikes on civilian targets.
Most importantly, please tell the German public the truth: that a negotiated peace based on Ukrainian neutrality is the realistic path out of catastrophe, and that restoring a normal economic relationship with Russia is the realistic path out of Germany’s industrial decline.
The terms of an acceptable agreement that Germany could propose are clear. The fighting would stop on an armistice line. All sides would renounce any future resort to violence on the question of borders. Ukraine would restore its neutrality, and NATO would permanently renounce further eastward enlargement.
Europe and Russia would restore economic relations and would stop the warmongering. The OSCE would once again become the central forum for European security, with the fundamental precept that European security is indivisible, not based on military blocs dividing Europe. Alongside this peace, Germany would redirect its national resources toward the digital, AI, semiconductor, and energy investments that Germany’s economic future demands.
History will record what you do in the weeks ahead, and what you fail to do. So will the German public. So will the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Europe generally. It’s time for diplomacy, Mr. Chancellor. The choice is yours to make.
Respectfully,Jeffrey D. SachsUniversity Professor of Columbia University
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/jeffrey-sachs-an-open-letter-to-chancellor-friedrich-merz-10038768
The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safety
In the absence of an objective ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
By Frank von Hippel | Analysis | May 27, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/the-trump-administrations-reckless-attack-on-radiation-protection-will-have-long-term-consequences-for-public-safety/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Trump%20admin%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20protection&utm_campaign=20260528%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Worldwide, regulations limiting doses from the radiation emitted by nuclear fissions and decays are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. This hypothesis posits that, irrespective of whether ionizing radiation comes in a pulse or over years, the additional risk of developing cancer as a result is proportional to the cumulative amount of energy deposited per gram of tissue, with weighting risk factors for radiation type, sex, age, and specific organs.
Since 1975, the US nuclear industry has been required to limit exposures to workers and the public to “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) levels. What the ALARA level should be is determined by cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of dose reductions are compared with the benefits to workers and the public, measured in terms of reduced disease and longer life expectancy.
In May 2025, four months after taking office, the Trump administration challenged this five-decade-old regulatory approach as part of an Executive Order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC). The order claimed the “NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure,” which corresponds to the linear hypothesis. “Those models lack sound scientific basis,” the Executive Order added, before directing the NRC to “reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ [ALARA] standard, which is predicated on LNT.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had reviewed exactly this question in 2021 in response to a campaign by advocates of the radiation “hormesis” theory, which posits that low doses of ionizing radiation actually protect against cancer by stimulating the body’s DNA repair mechanism—the exact opposite of ALARA. The NRC rejected that contention, concluding that “the LNT model continues to provide a sound regulatory basis for minimizing the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure to both members of the public and radiation workers.” As a result, the commission maintained the current dose limit requirements contained in its regulations.
But President Donald Trump’s decision to bring independent regulatory agencies under White House control and to fire the NRC’s chairman ended the commission’s resistance. On July 2, 2025, an anonymous NRC spokesperson enthused in a social media post that the Executive Order reforming the NRC “gives us a chance to reconsider our radiation protection framework in support of the whole-of-government effort to safely enable the nation’s use of nuclear power.”
Two weeks later, the NRC hosted a webinar for input on the issue of the LNT hypothesis. The Nuclear Energy Institute—the US nuclear industry’s lobbying organization—recommended that the commission remove ALARA and dose minimization as regulatory requirements. Instead, the institute proposed to establish a “practical threshold”—for instance, 2 rem per year (or 20 milliGray per year for gamma rays) for workers—below which further dose reduction would not be required. (The rem is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One millirem is one-thousandth of a rem. The Gray measures the absorbed dose, which is the physical amount of radiation energy absorbed by any material or tissue. One Gray corresponds to one Joule per kilogram.)
Radiation hormesis.
Read more: The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safetyAdvocates of the theory of radiation “hormesis” do not believe the LNT hypothesis. Radiation hormesis is a fringe theory with passionate adherents who are taking advantage of the Trump administration’s skepticism about regulations of all types.
One of the most vocal hormesis advocates is Edward Calabrese, an emeritus professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He argues that the evidence for the linear no-threshold hypothesis is based on scientific fraud and, therefore, should be replaced with a model that considers the possibility of no risk—and even possible benefits—from ionizing radiation below a certain dose.
Calabrese’s arguments persuaded some recent leaders of the Health Physics Society (HPS), an association of radiation-protection professionals, to host a 22-part, 10-hour video lecture series by Calabrese on the history of the LNT model in 2021-22. John Cardarelli, the HPS president when the videos were produced, summarizes Calabrese’s argument at the end of each video. In the final one, Cardarelli declares his conclusion that the LNT model is “based on flawed research, ideological motives, deliberate misrepresentation of the research record, and political agendas.”
Although the Health Physics Society declares that “the views expressed in these videos are not intended to represent official positions,” it also advertises that its associated credentialing organization, the American Academy of Health Physics, has “preapproved 10 continuing education credits for certified health physicists watching all 22 episodes of this video series.”
Physicist-epidemiologist Jan Beyea published a critique of Calabrese’s allegations in the HPS journal Health Physics, to which both Calabrese and Cardarelli have responded with lengthy rebuttals.
The research and reports Calabrese and his supporters are trying to discredit were done more than 50 years ago. For decades, the largest human population studied for radiation effects was the survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who, depending on their proximity to the ground zeros, were exposed to whole-body doses ranging from near zero to several Gray delivered in a single burst. But the cancer statistics for the Japanese survivors were not good enough to determine with high confidence carcinogenic effects in the dose range relevant for worker radiation protection (in the tens of milliGray per year). Hormesis advocates also argue that cellular mechanisms should be more effective in repairing the damage from low-rate radiation than from a nuclear explosion’s short pulse.
The lack of data on the effect of small low-rate doses left a gap in the epidemiological confirmation of the applicability of LNT estimates of the cancer risks from low doses to radiation workers and to civilian populations exposed to radioactive releases from nuclear accidents. That gap has been partially filled, however, in more recent studies of large populations of individuals who have received low-rate doses of ionizing radiation.
A directly relevant example is the INWORKS study done by an international consortium of researchers on the excess cancer deaths among approximately 310,000 nuclear industry workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, whose radiation doses were measured and recorded throughout their decades of employment. As of 2012-16, this population had an average age of about 65, and about one third had died, with 28 percent of the deaths being due to “solid” cancers (abnormal masses of tissue arising in organs, glands, or bones), therefore excluding leukemia. Of those deaths, 5,500 to 14,000 were excess cases relative to the rate observed in a control group of 51,000 nuclear workers with near-zero occupational doses.
Figure 1 [on original]shows the rate of excess deaths from solid cancers in this population as a function of cumulative on-the-job dose 10 years before death, assuming that any solid cancer caused within the last decade of life would not have had time to become lethal. The bars show the 90-percent probability range associated with the number of deaths in each dose bin; that is, there is statistically only a 10-percent probability that, with more data, the number of excess deaths would converge outside that range (5 percent chance above and 5 percent below). The solid line is the best linear fit of the data to the LNT model.
By this measure, there are significant excess cancer deaths among nuclear workers down to cumulative doses of 30 milliGray.
Energy Department’s takeover. In addition to bringing the NRC to heel, the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy has been inviting startups promoting new-design nuclear power reactors to build prototypes on department land, including the 900-square-mile footprint of the Idaho National Laboratory, where they will not be subject to NRC safety requirements.
According to President Trump’s May 23 Executive Order, the NRC will be required “to approve reactor designs that the Defense Department or the Energy Department have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely.”
At most, the startups will only be able to demonstrate that they will not have had a serious accident or a near miss within their first few years of operation before they hope to build their reactors in large numbers across the country and export them abroad. In their efforts to compete with natural gas, photovoltaic, and wind power plants, the nuclear startups are under great economic pressure to cut safety and security requirements currently required by the NRC and other regulators around the world. Costly requirements include containment buildings that prevent the release of radioactivity to the atmosphere in case of a core meltdown accident. Regulations also include requirements that it be possible for the timely evacuation of areas around the reactors where the population could be at risk of high radiation doses from an accident, and robust around-the-clock guard forces to protect nuclear plants against potential sabotage.
By putting the Energy Department, which is pouring billions of dollars into nuclear startups, first in line in safety regulation, the Trump administration has partially undone the 1974 decision of the post-Watergate Congress to separate safety regulation from nuclear power promotion by breaking up the Atomic Energy Commission to create the NRC and Energy Department.
Even before the Trump administration, under political pressure from the nuclear industry through congressional Republicans, the NRC commissioners backed off by majority vote from requiring filtered vents for a set of US reactors designed by General Electric that were clones of the Fukushima-Daiichi reactors 1–3, whose small-volume containments released large amounts of radioactivity due to overpressure after core meltdowns. The NRC also refused to end the practice of dense-packing spent fuel pools to five times their design density despite Fukushima unit 4’s near miss of a potentially much more catastrophic spent-fuel fire because of an undetected water level drop.
The end of ALARA. After it was effectively given much of the responsibility of regulating the US nuclear industry, the Energy Department commissioned a review of the LNT hypothesis by the Idaho National Laboratory, which supports the Office of Nuclear Energy’s mission to promote new types of nuclear power reactors.
INL quickly produced a report, which cited a 2013 comparison by Mohan Doss of the LNT model against the radiation hormesis, as “[p]erhaps most significant for regulatory considerations.” Dr. Doss is a radiologist, not an epidemiologist. His article was published in the journal Dose-Reponse, which was founded in 2003 with Professor Calabrese as its editor-in-chief and focuses on hormesis advocacy. Contrary to what the INL report claims, Dr. Doss’ article is not a meta-analysis but rather an argument for radiation hormesis.
Doss starts by arguing at length that the atomic bomb survivors study would have shown a hormesis effect had it been compared with a control group that had a higher incidence of cancer. Doss even replotted the atomic bomb survivor data to show the result if such a control group were used. In fact, there are appropriate zero-dose control groups for the atomic bomb survivors study, including those who were away from the cities at the time of the bombings. When those control groups have been used in studies, they showed some non-linearity with dose for male cancers, but no hormesis effect.
At the same time, INL referenced but ignored the findings of two actual meta-analyses of low-dose studies: one by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and one by an international team of 16 cancer epidemiologists led by Michael Hauptmann and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and partly funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Energy Department.
The National Council review concluded that “no alternative dose-response relationship appears more pragmatic or prudent for radiation protection purposes than the LNT model.” Hauptmann and colleagues found that “there is evidence of cancer risks from low-dose ionizing radiation.”
INL’s “reevaluation report” was quickly cited in a memorandum by the Department’s Undersecretaries of Science and Nuclear Security recommending that the Secretary of Energy “eliminate ALARA from all Department of Energy Directives and Regulations,” which he reportedly has done.
In the absence of an objective ALARA cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently made a similar decision that it will no longer take into account the health benefits from limiting air pollution. In 2024, the Biden administration announced new limits on fine particulate pollution from coal power plants and other facilities. Those regulations were justified by an estimate that, on average, 77 dollars in health benefits would result from each dollar spent by industry on emission reductions and that the regulations would save 4,500 lives per year.
A climate reporter commented in the New York Times about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back the air-pollution regulation that, for over four decades, “different administrations have used different estimates of the monetary value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses. But until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
The damage that will result from the evisceration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not be immediate and may arguably turn out to be minor on the scale of the damage the Trump administration is doing in other policy areas. But public safety analysts and decision makers must keep track of the dismantlement of regulatory structures that have been built over generations. Hopefully, it will be possible to reconstruct some of them, with improvements where possible. In the meantime, however, the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
1 This Month
No Nuclear in Cwm Llynfi! Stop the nuclear power station near Maesteg.
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