Dounreay waste particle ‘most radioactive’ find for three years
Steven McKenzie, Highlands and Islands reporter and Rachel Grant, BBC Scotland. 23 Oct 25
A fragment of waste found near the decommissioned experimental nuclear power facility in Dounreay in April was the most radioactive to be detected in the past three years, the Highland site’s operator has said.
The fragment, categorised as “significant”, was discovered during monitoring work around the nuclear power plant near Thurso. It is the latest in a long line of particle discoveries in the area.
Dounreay was built in the 1950s as the UK’s centre of fast reactor research, but during the 1960s and 1970s sand-sized particles of irradiated nuclear fuel got into the drainage system.
Work to clear the pollution began in the 1980s, after particles were found washed up on the nearby foreshore.
The facility closed in 1994. The multi-billion pound decommissioning process involves hundreds of workers and is expected to last into the 2070s.
The full decontamination of the site is expected to take more than 300 years.
A Dounreay spokesperson said: “Particles are a legacy of industrial practices dating back to the early 1960s and our commitment today to environmental protection includes their monitoring and removal from the marine environment and transparent reporting of our activities.”
A group of independent experts, who advise the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and Dounreay, classify particles by the radioactivity of their caesium-137 content.
The categories are minor, relevant and significant.
Significant means a reading greater than one million becquerels of CS-137.
A becquerel is the standard unit of radioactivity.
The particle was found on the western part of Dounreay’s foreshore on 7 April. Eight other finds reported since then have been categorised as “minor” or “relevant”.
A significant-category particle was last discovered in March 2022.
Thousands of particles of different categories have been removed from beaches, foreshore and seabed at Dounreay.
The site’s operator said monitoring on the site on the north Caithness coast continued to be done on a fortnightly basis.
On occasions it said the scheduled work could be interrupted by bad weather or the presence of protected species of ground-nesting birds……………………………………………………..
What risk is there to the public?
According to official reports, risk to people on local beaches is very low.
Guidance issued by the UK government’s Nuclear Restoration Services says the most at-risk area is not accessible to the public.
The particles found along the coast vary in size and radioactivity with smaller and less active particles generally found on beaches used by the public.
Larger particles have only been found only on the foreshore at Dounreay, which is not used by the public.
The particles found on beaches are believed to come from the disintegration of larger fragments in the seabed near Dounreay. The area is continuously monitored for traces of radioactive materials.
Harvesting of seafood is prohibited within a 2km (1.2 mile) radius of a point near Dounreay. This is where the largest and most hazardous fragments have been detected.
Dounreay’s radioactive history
- 1954 – A remote site on the north coast of Scotland is chosen as the site of a new type of nuclear reactor. Modern homes were built in Caithness to attract workers to the sparsely populated area.
- 1957 – A chain reaction which provided sustained and controlled nuclear energy is achieved for the first time.
- 1959 – A new disposal site for radioactive waste called the Shaft opens. It drops 65.4m (214.5ft) below ground.
- 1962 – The fast reactor inside the dome is the first in the world to provide electricity to a national grid.
- 1977 – The original “golf ball” reactor is shut down and waste disposal in the Shaft ends after an explosion.
- 1994 – Dounreay nuclear power generating facility closes.
- 1998 – Decommissioning programme is announced.
- 2008 – Operation to scour the seabed for hazardous material begins and the Shaft shaft is encircled in a boot-shaped ring of grout to prevent contamination.
- 2020 – Clean-up begins of the highly contaminated Shaft – a three decades-long project.
- 2333 – Decontamination expected to be complete, making the 148-acre site available for other uses. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz91nx0lv59o
President Trump’s radical attack on radiation safety
By Daniel Hirsch, Haakon Williams, Cameron Kuta | October 15, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/president-trumps-radical-attack-on-radiation-safety/?variant=B&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Trump%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20safety&utm_campaign=20251009%20Thursday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29
In May, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that, in part, require the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider dramatically weakening its radiation protection standard. If federal radiation limits are gutted in the manner urged by the president, the new standard could allow four out of five people exposed over a 70-year lifetime to develop a cancer they would not otherwise get.
Contesting the scientific consensus. Section 5(b) of the executive order—formally titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”—directs the NRC to issue a proposed “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents,” including reconsideration of the agency’s “reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure.” The LNT model maintains that risk from radiation exposure is proportional to the dose: Even a tiny amount of radiation causes some small but real increased risk of cancer, and that risk goes up linearly as the dose increases.
While most Americans have doubtless never heard of the LNT model, it has been the bedrock of radiation exposure risk analysis for decades and forms the basis of public health protection from radiation. The LNT model is scientifically robust, supported by the longstanding and repeatedly affirmed determinations on low-dose radiation by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the NRC itself.
Despite the LNT model’s long track record and the well-established body of scientific evidence upon which it is built, President Trump has unilaterally issued a presidential finding that this scientific consensus is wrong. His order could lead to LNT’s complete abandonment in a matter of months, posing a serious increase in the amount of radiation that industries and government agencies would be allowed to inflict upon the public.
If the NRC goes along with Trump’s assertion, the weakening of radiation protection standards would likely be extreme. Advocates of abandoning LNT have often asserted that low-dose radiation is harmless or even beneficial, and therefore, that the public health radiation limits should be hugely increased. In 2015, three petitions for rulemaking to the NRC proposed doing away with the LNT model and increasing allowable radiation exposures for everyone—including children and pregnant women—to 10 rem. (The Roentgen equivalent man (rem) is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One rem is equal to 0.01 Sievert in the international system of units.)
One petition to the NRC went so far as to ask, “Why deprive the public of the benefits of low-dose radiation?” The NRC strongly rejected the petitions in 2021, citing the conclusions of numerous scientific bodies that “[c]onvincing evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a threshold.
Low-level, or “low-dose,” radiation is generally defined as a dose range of 10 rem and below. However, “low dose” is something of a misnomer, as 10 rem is still relatively high. Even when doses are low, they nonetheless cause substantial harm when spread across a large population over time, especially for sensitive groups like children.
Raising radiation exposure limits. If President Trump’s executive order results in a new public radiation exposure limit of around 10 rem—the level LNT opponents often advocate—the increased health risks would be extraordinary. Longstanding radiation protection limits for members of the public are in the range of 10 to 100 millirem (0.01 to 0.1 rem) per year. A 10-rem limit would increase allowed exposures to radiation by factors of 100 to 1000—and so would increase the risk of cancer.
A single chest X-ray is about 2 millirem (0.002 rem) of radiation exposure. An annual limit of 10 rem would correspond to a person receiving a dose equivalent to 5,000 chest X-rays each year, from conception to death. Current official radiation risk estimates—adopted by EPA from the National Academies’ BEIR VII study on the health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation—indicate that receiving 10 rem per year over a 70-year lifetime would result in about four out of every five people exposed getting a cancer they would not get otherwise.
Despite what opponents of the LNT model claim, there is no threshold at 10 rem below which there is no measurable health harm. A substantial body of scientific work has demonstrated significant negative health impacts well below 10 rem. Beginning in the 1950s, pioneering Oxford researcher Alice Stewart demonstrated that a single fetal X-ray with a dose of 200 millirem (0.2 rem) was associated with a measurable increase in the risk of that child dying of cancer. The radiation establishment fought Stewart’s findings vigorously, but her research has long since been vindicated.
More recently, a major study covering an international cohort of over 300,000 nuclear facility workers has found that annual doses well below 1 rem create measurable increases in the risk of developing a variety of cancers, and that, as NRC put it, “even tiny doses slightly boost the risk of leukemia.” A second massive study of nearly one million European children found that those who received a CT scan, at an average dose of 800 millirem (0.8 rem), suffered a measurable increase in their risk of getting cancer.
Standards already weak. Radiation protection standards should be tightened, not weakened. The US government has a long history of underestimating radiation risks. The more scientists have learned about low-dose radiation, the more their estimates of the risk per unit dose have tended to increase. Yet the NRC has not updated in step with the science.
The NRC protection limit for workers of 5 rem per year was set in the early 1960s and has not changed since, despite decades of increasing official estimates of radiation risk. The current best estimate, from the National Academies’ BEIR VII, indicates that one out of every five workers receiving the NRC’s allowable dose each year from ages 18 to 65 would develop a cancer.
NRC’s radiation exposure limits for the public have not been updated in 35 years. Despite a requirement to employ EPA’s more conservative radiation risk standards, the NRC has long ignored it and instead continues to use 100 millirem per year—100 times lower than what Trump’s executive order could lead to. Current risk figures from the National Academies and the EPA indicate that 70 years of exposure at that level would result in nearly one in 100 people getting cancer from that exposure. That is 100 to 10,000 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable risk range. As the former director of EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air said years ago, “To put it bluntly, radiation should not be treated as a privileged pollutant. You and I should not be exposed to higher risks from radiation sites than we should be from sites which had contained any other environmental pollutant.”
The NRC held a webinar in July to gather public feedback on implementing President Trump’s executive order on abolishing the LNT model. Many presenters—including representatives from the National Council on Radiation Protection and the Union of Concerned Scientists—gave a vigorous defense of the LNT model, as did many of the comments from the public. Yet the NRC, despite itself having strongly reaffirmed this standard only 4 years ago, seemed to minimize low-dose radiation risks and suggested that all radiation cancer risk models be treated equally (including the long-discredited view that low-dose radiation has health benefits). More concerning, the NRC has put its thumb on the scale, giving special treatment to LNT opposition by posting among the general meeting materials a link to one presenter’s paper, which suggests that an annual dose of 10 rem is acceptably safe.
At a time when radiation protection should be strengthened, President Trump has directed action to weaken it markedly. If the NRC implements the executive order, the potential outcome would be a new, deeply flawed radiation standard as much as a thousand times weaker than the current standard, resulting in a massive increase in radiation-related health hazards across the American population.
Leah McGrath Goodman, Tony Blair and issues on torture (with added radiation)
Published by arclight2011- date 15 Sep 2012 -nuclear-news.net
[…]
Accusations: Despite the mockery of the film Borat, leaked U.S. cables suggest the country was undemocratic and used torture in detention
Other dignitaries at the meeting included former Italian Prime Minister and ex-EU Commission President
Romano Prodi. Mr Mittal’s employees in Kazakhstan have accused him of ‘slave labour’ conditions after a series of coal mining accidents between 2004 and 2007 which led to 91 deaths.
[…]
Last week a senior adviser to the Kazakh president said that Mr Blair had opened an office in the capital.Presidential adviser Yermukhamet Yertysbayev said: ‘A large working group is here and, to my knowledge, it has already opened Tony Blair’s permanent office in Astana.’
It was reported last week that Mr Blair had secured an £8 million deal to clean up the image of Kazakhstan.
[…]
Mr Blair also visited Kazakhstan in 2008, and in 2003 Lord Levy went there to help UK firms win contracts.
[…]
Max Keiser talks to investigative journalist and author, Leah McGrath Goodman about her being banned from the UK for reporting on the Jersey sex and murder scandal. They discuss the $5 billion per square mile in laundered money that means Jersey rises, while Switzerland sinks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA_aVZrR5NI&feature=player_detailpage#t=749s
And as well as protecting the guilty child sex/torturers/murderers of the island of Jersey I believe that they are also protecting the tax dodgers from any association.. its just good PR!
FORMER Prime Minister Tony Blair was reportedly involved in helping to keep alive the world’s biggest takeover by Jersey-incorporated commodities trader Glencore of mining company Xstrata.
11/September/2012
[…]
Mr Blair was said to have attended a meeting at Claridge’s Hotel in London towards the end of last week which led to the Qatari Sovereign wealth fund supporting a final revised bid from Glencore for its shareholding. Continue reading
As UN Turns 80, Trump Continues US Violation of Charter’s Limits on Use of Force.
Donald Trump has ignored UN rules about attacking other nations, but he is not the first US president to do so
By Marjorie Cohn , Truthout, September 29, 2025
n his inflammatory September 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump expressed contempt for the UN, falsely claiming he had ended seven wars and stating, “I realized that the United Nations wasn’t there for us. I thought of it really after the fact … that being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations?”
If Trump studied history, he would know the answer to that question.
Eighty years ago, after two world wars claimed millions of lives, nations around the world — including the United States — came together and established the UN system “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The UN Charter requires that all states settle their disputes peacefully and refrain from the use of armed force except in self-defense under Article 51, after an armed attack against a UN state by another state, or when the Security Council authorizes it.
But, motivated by American exceptionalism — the notion that the U.S. is unique and morally superior and thus not bound by the rules — successive elected U.S. governments have violated the commands of the UN Charter and illegally attacked other countries with impunity.
Violation of UN Charter by Last Five U.S. Presidents
Trump has ignored the straightforward rules about the lawful use of force, but he is not the first U.S. president to do so. We need look no further than the last five presidents, who have launched armed attacks without Security Council approval against countries that had not carried out armed attacks on the United States or other UN member countries.
Bill Clinton could have helped prevent the genocide in Rwanda. But instead, he precluded the UN from acting to stop the killing of 800,000 people. In 1993, Clinton bombed Iraq to retaliate for an assassination attempt against George H. W. Bush. In 1998, on the eve of his impeachment, Clinton once again bombed Iraq, ostensibly to enforce Security Council resolutions, even though only the Council has the power to enforce its resolutions. Both bombings violated the UN Charter. The 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia also violated the Charter, killing roughly 500 civilians. Madeline Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, labeled the UN “a tool of American foreign policy.”
In 2001, George W. Bush’s administration illegally invaded Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan had not attacked the United States. On September 11, 2001, 19 men (15 of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia) committed crimes against humanity in the United States. But that was not an armed attack by another state sufficient to trigger the Charter’s Article 51 self-defense provision. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was not lawful self-defense, and the Security Council had not approved it.
Two years later, before he illegally invaded Iraq and changed its regime, Bush tried to obtain the consent of the Security Council, but the Council refused to authorize the invasion. Then Bush cobbled together prior Security Council resolutions from the first Gulf War, none of which authorized him to attack Iraq in 2003, in a vain attempt to legitimize his illegitimate war.
John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the UN during George W. Bush’s second term, and national security adviser during Trump’s first term, was a strong advocate for Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 1994, Bolton displayed his hatred for the UN when he stated that “there is no such thing as the United Nations,” cynically adding, “If the UN Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Barack Obama launched illegal drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. None of those seven states had mounted an armed attack against the U.S. or any other UN member country, and the Security Council did not authorize the strikes. Moreover, the Obama administration provided no evidence that any of those states were about to launch an imminent attack on the United States. Even if the U.S. Congress had authorized Obama’s wars, they still would not have been in compliance with the Charter.
During Trump’s first regime, he ordered the illegal bombing of Syria. In 2017, he sent 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to attack Syria in response to its alleged use of chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb. Syria had not attacked the United States or any other UN state before Trump’s missile strike. The use of chemical weapons by Syria did not constitute an armed attack to trigger the right of self-defense. And the Security Council had not approved Trump’s use of force. It therefore violated the Charter.
In 2020, Trump ordered the illegal drone assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani who was present in Iraq. Neither Iran nor Iraq had attacked the United States and the Council had not authorized Trump’s drone attack. It was therefore illegal under the Charter.
One month after Joe Biden was inaugurated, he authorized airstrikes in Syria on buildings that purportedly belonged to Iran-backed militias who were allegedly responsible for attacks against U.S. and allied personnel in Iraq. Syria, however, had not undertaken an armed attack on the U.S. or another country, and the Security Council had not approved the attack. Biden also authorized illegal drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2021 and 2022, and in Yemen in 2024.
Trump Renames “Department of Defense” the “Department of War”
Trump signed an executive order attempting to rename the “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War.” Permanently renaming the department would require congressional approval, but the move is indicative of his explicit rejection of the Charter’s fundamental precept of self-defense. And his actions since assuming office for his second term are consistent with that rejection.
After Israel illegally attacked Iran in June, Trump conducted a series of military strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities. Although he claimed his objective was to put “a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,” Iran did not constitute an imminent threat. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, affirmed at the time that Iran did not even have nuclear weapons capability. The U.S. strikes were not mounted in self-defense, and the Council had not given its imprimatur for the attacks.
Earlier this month, Trump illegally ordered armed attacks on at least three Venezuelan fishing vessels under the guise of fighting the drug war, killing at least 11 people, in direct violation of the Charter. He was apparently testing the waters. Now NBC News is reporting that Trump is considering mounting drone strikes within Venezuela in the next few weeks.
Since October 7, 2023, when Israel began its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the United States — under both Biden and Trump — has six times vetoed Security Council resolutions to end the fighting, despite the UN Charter’s command that international disputes be settled peacefully. The Trump administration filed the most recent U.S. veto on September 18.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has issued an unprecedented order summoning high-ranking military officials to attend a meeting in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30, reportedly to deliver a message about upholding a “warrior ethos.” Whether this signals a new aggressive approach or remains a mere photo op, the Trump administration is likely to continue the foreign policy tradition of disregarding the UN Charter, thanks to decades of impunity enjoyed by previous administrations.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense, and is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack
The Conversation , 26 Sept 25 A.R.E. Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Communications, University of Exeter
It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m driving along a quiet, rural road that stretches through the Kent countryside. The sun flashes through breaks in the hedgerow, offering glimpses of verdant crop fields and old farmhouses.
Thick hawthorn and brambles make it difficult to see the 10ft high razor-wire fence that encloses a large grassy mound. You’d never suspect that 100ft beneath the ground, a hi-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding the most valuable commodity of our age: digital data.
This subterranean data centre is located in a former nuclear bunker that was constructed in the early 1950s as a command-and-control centre for the Royal Air Force’s radar network. You can still see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish once sat upon. Personnel stationed in the bunker would have closely watched their screens for signs of nuclear missile-carrying aircraft.
After the end of the cold war, the bunker was purchased by a London-based internet security firm for use as an ultra-secure data centre. Today, the site is operated by the Cyberfort Group, a cybersecurity services provider.
I’m an anthropologist visiting the Cyberfort bunker as part of my ethnographic research exploring practices of “extreme” data storage. My work focuses on anxieties of data loss and the effort we take – or often forget to take – to back-up our data.
As an object of anthropological enquiry, the bunkered data centre continues the ancient human practice of storing precious relics in underground sites, like the tumuli and burial mounds of our ancestors, where tools, silver, gold and other treasures were interred.
The Cyberfort facility is one of many bunkers around the world that have now been repurposed as cloud storage spaces. Former bomb shelters in China, derelict Soviet command-and-control centres in Kyiv and abandoned Department of Defense bunkers across the United States have all been repackaged over the last two decades as “future-proof” data storage sites.
I’ve managed to secure permission to visit some of these high-security sites as part of my fieldwork, including Pionen, a former defence shelter in Stockholm, Sweden, which has attracted considerable media interest over the last two decades because it looks like the hi-tech lair of a James Bond villain.
Many abandoned mines and mountain caverns have also been re-engineered as digital data repositories, such as the Mount10 AG complex, which brands itself as the “Swiss Fort Knox” and has buried its operations within the Swiss Alps. Cold war-era information management company Iron Mountain operates an underground data centre 10 minutes from downtown Kansas City and another in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
The National Library of Norway stores its digital databanks in mountain vaults just south of the Arctic Circle, while a Svalbard coal mine was transformed into a data storage site by the data preservation company Piql. Known as the Arctic World Archive (AWA), this subterranean data preservation facility is modelled on the nearby Global Seed Vault.
……………………..Bunkers are architectural reflections of cultural anxieties. If nuclear bunkers once mirrored existential fears about atomic warfare, then today’s data bunkers speak to the emergence of a new existential threat endemic to digital society: the terrifying prospect of data loss.
Data, the new gold?
………………………………………………………………… For governments, corporations and businesses, a severe data loss event – whether through theft, erasure or network failure – can have a significant impact on operations or even result in their collapse. The online services of high-profile companies like Jaguar and Marks & Spencer have recently been impacted by large-scale cyber-attacks that have left them struggling to operate, with systems shutdown and supply chains disrupted. But these companies have been comparatively lucky: a number of organisations had to permanently close down after major data loss events, such as the TravelEx ransomware attack in 2020, and the MediSecure and National Public Data breaches, both in 2024.
With the economic and societal impact of data loss growing, some businesses are turning to bunkers with the hope of avoiding a data loss doomsday scenario.
The concrete cloud
One of the first things visitors to the Cyberfort bunker encounter in the waiting area is a 3ft cylinder of concrete inside a glass display cabinet, showcasing the thickness of the data centre’s walls. The brute materiality of the bunkered data centre stands in stark contrast to the fluffy metaphor of the “cloud”, which is often used to discuss online data storage.
Data centres, sometimes known as “server farms”, are the buildings where cloud data is stored. When we transfer our data into the cloud, we are transferring it on to servers in a data centre (hence the meme “there is no cloud, just someone else’s computer”). Data centres typically take the form of windowless, warehouse-scale buildings containing hundreds of servers (pizza box-shaped computers) stored in cabinets that are arranged in aisles………………………………………………………….
We often think of the internet as an immaterial or ethereal realm that exists in an electronic non-place. Metaphors like the now retro-sounding cyberspace and, more recently, the cloud perpetuate this way of thinking.
But the cloud is a material infrastructure composed of thousands of miles of cables and rows upon rows of computing equipment. It always “touches the ground” somewhere, making it vulnerable to a range of non-cyber threats ………………………………………………………………………………….
Like any computer, servers generate a huge amount of heat when they are running, and must be stored in constantly air-conditioned rooms to ensure they do not overheat………………………………………………………………………
An average data centre consumes an estimated 200-terawatt hours of electricity each year. That’s around 1% of total global electricity demand, which is more than the national energy consumption of some countries. Many of these facilities are powered by non-renewable energy sources, and the data centre industry is expected to emit 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.
In addition, to meet expectations for “uninterruptible” service levels, data centres rely on an array of fossil fuel-based back-up infrastructure – primarily diesel generators. …………………………
………….Amid hype and speculation about the rise of AI, which is leading to a boom in the construction of energy-hungry data centres, the carbon footprint of the industry is under increasing scrutiny…………………………..
For technology behemoths like Apple and Google, cloud storage is a key strategic avenue for long-term revenue growth. While the phones, laptops and other digital devices they make have limited lifespans, their cloud services offer potentially lifelong data storage. Apple and Google encourage us to perpetually hoard our data rather than delete it, because this locks us into their cloud subscription services, which become increasingly expensive the more storage we need.
Apple’s marketing for its cloud storage service, iCloud, encourages users to “take all the photos you want without worrying about space on your devices”. Google has made “archive” rather than “delete” the default option on Gmail. While this reduces the likelihood of us accidentally deleting an email, it also means we are steadily consuming more of our Gmail capacity, leading some to purchase more Google Drive storage space.
Cloud hoarders
It is also increasingly difficult to operate off-cloud. Internal storage space on our digital devices is dwindling as the cloud becomes the default storage option on the majority of digital products being developed. Users must pay a premium if they want more than the basic local storage on their laptop or smartphone. Ports to enable expandable, local storage – such as CD drives or SD card slots – are also being removed by tech manufacturers.
As our personal digital archives expand, our cloud storage needs will continue to grow over our lifetimes, as will the payments for more and more cloud storage space. And while we often imagine we will one day take the time to prune our accumulations of digital photos, files, and emails, that task is often indefinitely postponed. In the meantime, it is quicker and easier to simply purchase more cloud storage.
Many consumers simply use whichever cloud storage service is already pre-installed on their devices – often these are neither the cheapest nor most secure option. But once we commit to one provider, it is very difficult to move our data to another if we want a cheaper monthly storage rate, or simply want to switch – this requires investing in enough hard drives on which to download the data from one cloud provider and upload it to another. Not everyone is tech-savvy enough to do that…………………………………………. https://theconversation.com/underground-data-fortresses-the-nuclear-bunkers-mines-and-mountains-being-transformed-to-protect-our-new-gold-from-attack-262578
The evolution of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Israel-Ukraine bond.
Orinoco Tribune By Sarah B. – Aug 20, 2025
Volodymyr Zelenskyy: The Pragmatist Who Normalized the Extreme,
Volodymyr Aleksandrovich Zelenskyy, born in 1978 in Krivoy Rog, is one of the most paradoxical figures to emerge from the war. A Jewish comedian turned wartime leader, he has become an international symbol of “resistance” and Western liberal values. But beneath the cultivated myth lies a far more uncomfortable truth: Zelenskyy is the keystone legitimizer in Ukraine’s normalization of far-right extremism, not in spite of his identity, but because of it.
Raised in a Russian-speaking Jewish family in the industrial city of Krivoy Rog, Zelenskyy experienced firsthand the Soviet-era antisemitism and post-Soviet chaos that shaped a generation. He earned a law degree from the Krivoy Rog Economic Institute in 2000, but chose a career in comedy and satire, eventually founding the Kvartal 95 troupe. His 2015 television show Servant of the People, in which he played a humble schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes president, catapulted him into national fame.
In 2018, life imitated art. Riding a wave of anti-oligarch sentiment and public fatigue with Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy launched his own political party, borrowing the name of his TV show, and won the 2019 presidential election in a landslide, taking over 70% of the vote.
At the time, Zelenskyy appeared ideologically distant from Ukraine’s far-right fringe. His campaign promised peace with Donbass and normalization of relations with Russia. But once in power, his rhetoric softened, his promises evaporated, and the machinery of war began grinding forward with the same paramilitary formations he once distanced himself from now integrated into the state apparatus under his watch.
Zelenskyy’s presidency coincided with the formal mainstreaming of extremist militias like the Azov Regiment, the Tornado Battalion, and Right Sector. Though Azov had been absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard in 2014, it was under Zelenskyy that it achieved full symbolic legitimacy. In 2023, Azov members were publicly awarded medals despite their use of SS-style insignia, and Zelenskyy referred to them in national speeches as “defenders of freedom.”
Zelenskyy’s defenders argued these moves were necessary under conditions of war. But the symbolic shift was profound: the Jewish president of Ukraine had now become the key validator of openly neo-Nazi formations and, more broadly, of a political culture that increasingly erased the boundaries between patriotism and fascism.
Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity played a central role in shaping his geopolitical posture. Early in his presidency, he gained support from prominent Jewish donors and Western liberal institutions. But it was his alignment with Israeli ideology and strategy that proved most consequential.
In a 2022 interview with Haaretz, Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine’s future should resemble a “big Israel,” a state built on constant mobilization, militarism, and national unity. The comparison wasn’t metaphorical. Zelenskyy repeatedly cited Israel’s compulsory service, hardened identity, and “resilience” as ideals for a wartime Ukraine.
“I think all our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about “Switzerland of the future.” But we will definitely become a “big Israel” with its own face. We will not be surprised that we will have representatives of the Armed Forces or the National Guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons.
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy, April 2022
In practice, this meant close coordination with Israeli and Zionist networks. Zelenskyy has consistently refused to condemn Israel’s military actions in Gaza, including the 2024–2025 bombardments that employed starvation tactics and AI-guided strikes. Instead, he echoed Israeli rhetoric about terrorism and security, drawing direct parallels between Ukraine’s fight against Russia and Israel’s war with Iran and its regional proxies.
Military cooperation followed suit. Israeli-made drones and surveillance systems flowed to Ukraine through third parties. Ukrainian forces supplied intelligence to Israel on Iranian missile tech recovered from Russian stockpiles and downed drones. Zelenskyy hosted Israeli officials, sought Iron Dome defense systems, and oversaw joint data-sharing agreements between Ukraine’s cyber units and Israeli partners.
Zelenskyy’s personal connections only deepen the alignment. His parents have reportedly lived in Israel for years, a fact often omitted in mainstream profiles but acknowledged in Jewish community outlets. In 2020, Zelenskyy visited Yad Vashem and gave a carefully worded speech reframing Ukrainian nationalism as compatible with Holocaust memory. Instead of confronting Ukraine’s role in the Shoah, Zelenskyy emphasized shared trauma and unity, an appeal that resonated with Israeli officials eager for a strategic partner in Eastern Europe.
Zelenskyy’s ties to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement also run deep. Chabad maintains a large presence in Dnepropetrovsk, historically bankrolled by oligarch Igor Kolomoyskiy. Zelenskyy has also attended Chabad-sponsored events and leaned heavily on global Jewish networks to secure diplomatic and military aid.
The Shifting Center
Zelenskyy’s ideological transformation can be summarized in three phases:
· Pre-2019: A secular liberal, anti-corruption satirist with no links to the far-right.
· 2019–2022: A centrist reformer forced into security pragmatism by war.
· 2022–Present: A full convert to the “big Israel” model, integrating far-right forces and prioritizing militarized nationalism over liberal pluralism.
In the end, Volodymyr Zelenskyy may not be a fascist. But he has become the indispensable manager of a system that rehabilitates fascism, at home, abroad, and in the name of something larger. His legacy will not be one of purity or resistance, but of convergence.
An extract from Gaza to Donbass: How Israel and Ukraine Built a Fascist, Transnational War Machine.
Gaza to Donbass: How Israel and Ukraine Built a Fascist, Transnational War Machine.
Orinoco Tribune By Sarah B. – Aug 20, 2025
From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, a new axis of ethno-supremacy is rising, fueled by U.S. backing. Same guns. Same flags. Same ideology. Gaza and Donbass are not separate wars. They are one machine.
The Ukraine–Israel Nexus: Pragmatic Alliances Amid Paradoxes and Shared Challenges
From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, echoes of ethno-nationalist revival resonate in the modern trajectories of Ukraine and Israel, two states forged through war, hardened by siege mentalities, and fueled by historical narratives of existential struggle. But these similarities are no accident of parallel development. They reflect a deepening alignment shaped by shared adversaries like Russia and Iran, backed and brokered by the same Western patrons.
In 2022, an officer of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, toured Israel after surviving the siege of Mariupol. By 2025, Israeli drones were flying missions over Rafah, while American-made PSRL-1 rocket launchers, initially supplied to Ukraine, were spotted in conflict zones across the Middle East. Some experts suggest these may have reached Gaza through black-market channels, though a direct transfer remains unproven. What is undeniable, however, is the convergence of military technologies, intelligence doctrines, and battlefield logistics spanning both theaters.
In April 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, himself a stalwart ally to the Zionist cause, declared that he envisioned Ukraine becoming “a big Israel.” In doing so, he abandoned the pretense of liberal reform and embraced a future defined by permanent militarization, domestic surveillance, and an ideologically mobilized citizenry. Ukraine, he suggested, would survive not by joining Europe’s post-national dream, only by imitating the ethos of a heavily securitized Middle Eastern state.
Zelenskyy’s statement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It followed decades of quietly intensifying Ukrainian–Israeli ties, in historical memory, military cooperation, tech integration, and shared narratives of victimhood. But it also exposed a deeper and more disturbing fusion. When the president of a country still reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its own fascist collaborators calls for the building of a “Big Israel,” he is not just invoking a model of defense, he is invoking a model of justified violence, permanent siege, and a long tradition of selective memory, one that both Ukraine and Israel have wielded to reconcile uncomfortable historical alliances of culpability.
Just as the OUN’s collaboration with Nazi Germany is selectively reframed within the Ukrainian national mythos, Israel’s founding story often omits its own moments of strategic accommodation with fascism.
In the 1930s and ’40s, elements of the Zionist movement, most notably the Haavara Agreement between Nazi Germany and the Jewish Agency, facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine while bypassing international boycotts of the Nazi regime. Revisionist factions like Lehi (the Stern Gang) and Irgun Zvai Leumi even sought military cooperation with the Axis powers against the British. These uncomfortable truths, long buried beneath the moral absolutism of Holocaust remembrance, underscore a shared willingness, Ukrainian and Zionist alike, to collaborate with and even become genocidal regimes when national aspirations were at stake.
What binds Gaza and Donbass is not a monolithic “machine of violence” but a transnational matrix of ideological alignment, technical cooperation, and strategic utility. Ukraine’s campaign of “decommunization” often mirrors Israel’s internal securitization and demographic engineering, both clad in the moral armor of historical trauma. In practice, both states justify aggressive internal and external policies through the language of survival.
This article maps the ideological, military, economic, and cultural architecture of the Ukraine–Israel relationship. From Soviet-era tensions to the post-2014 reconfiguration of alliances, we explore how pragmatic imperatives have forged a new axis of ethno-nationalist power, increasingly central to NATO’s long-term vision of regional dominance.
I. Historical Ties
To understand the modern partnership between Ukraine and Israel, one must begin with their shared, and often contradictory past. Ukraine was both a cradle of early Zionism and a site of violent antisemitic pogroms. Movements like Hibbat Zion, emerged in the 1880s in cities like Odessa and Kiev, decades before Theodor Herzl’s more famous Vienna-based political Zionism. Their mission: to restore the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Ukraine, in this sense, was an incubator for the ideological DNA of the Israeli state……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
…………………….The historical relationship between Israel and Ukraine is not one of ideological clarity. It is a pragmatic evolution, shaped by war, memory, trauma, and strategy. The next sections will examine how these contradictions manifest on the battlefield through weapons, doctrine, personnel, and propaganda, across Gaza and Donbass alike.
Selective Memory: How Competing Genocides Forged Strategic Amnesia
In the narrative war between historical truth and political utility, few examples are as revealing, or as cynical, as the ways Ukraine and Israel have reframed and often embellished their respective traumas to enable strategic cooperation.
By the 1980s, Ukrainian nationalist émigrés began aggressively promoting the 1932–33 Soviet famine, or Holodomor, as the “Ukrainian Holocaust.” This was a calculated response to the rising global awareness of Jewish suffering, spurred by the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, which explicitly portrayed Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators. For diaspora groups still loyal to Stepan Bandera’s legacy, the documentary posed a threat to their rehabilitated image, which they had worked fervently to whitewash. In turn, they constructed a counter-narrative of equal, if not greater, Ukrainian victimhood, one that would cast the Soviet state as genocidal and reframe Ukrainian history through the lens of national martyrdom.
This rhetorical project relied on inflating death tolls,………………………………………………………………..
The result is a pact built on strategic amnesia: a cold alliance between two states whose foundational traumas have been rewritten to serve military alignment, ideological affinity, and common enemies………………………….
…………II. Blood Ties and Battle Lines: Commanders, Crusaders, and Collaborators
The machinery of transnational warfare is not only built with weapons, laws, and doctrines, but with men. Individuals who embody the ideological convergence between Zionist ethno-nationalism and Ukrainian fascism do not operate in the shadows; they are often celebrated, recruited, and strategically deployed across theaters like Gaza and Donbass. These figures serve as ideological evangelists, field commanders, propaganda tools, and networking nodes between far-right militias, Western intelligence networks, and private security structures.
Some are Azov veterans turned actors and influencers. Others are American-Israeli contractors building bridges between Tel Aviv and Kiev. ……………………..
Continue readingSetting the record straight on the background to events in Ukraine.
First, both the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 in resistance to a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected president Viktor Yanukovych in February of that year. The independence vote came just eight days after neo-Nazis burned dozens of ethnic Russians alive in Odessa. To crush their bid for independence, the new U.S.-installed Ukrainian government then launched an “anti-terrorist” war against the provinces, with the assistance of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which had taken part in the coup. It is a war that is still going on eight years later, a war that Russia has just entered.
During these eight years, the Ukrainian Armed Forces and Azov have used artillery, snipers and assassination teams to systematically butcher more than 5,000 people (another 8,000 were wounded) — mostly civilians — in the Donetsk Peoples Republic, according to the leader of the DPR, who provided these figures in a press conference recently. In the Luhansk People’s Republic, an additional 2,000 civilians were killed and 3,365 injured. The total number of people killed and wounded in Donbass since 2014 is more than 18,000.
This has received at most superficial coverage by The New York Times; it has not been covered by Western corporate media because it does not fit the official Washington narrative
Ukraine & Nukes After a New York Times reporter grossly distorted what Putin and Zelensky have said and done about nuclear weapons, Steven Starr corrects the record and deplores Western media, in general, for misinforming and leading the entire world in a dangerous direction. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/03/ukraine-nukes/ By Steven Starr,
The New York Times recently published an article by David Sanger entitled “Putin spins a conspiracy theory that Ukraine is on a path to produce nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, it is Sanger who puts so much spin in his reporting that he leaves his readers with a grossly distorted version of the what the presidents of Russia and Ukraine have said and done.
Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent statements at the Munich conference centered around the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which welcomed Ukraine’s accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in conjunction with Ukraine’s decision to return to Russia the nuclear weapons left on its territory by the Soviet Union.
In other words, the Budapest Memorandum was expressly about Ukraine giving up its nukes and not becoming a nuclear weapon state in the future. Zelensky’s speech at Munich made it clear that Ukraine was moving to repudiate the Budapest Memorandum; Zelensky essentially stated that Ukraine must be made a member of NATO, otherwise it would acquire nuclear weapons.
This is what Zelensky said, with emphasis added:
“I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.
Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability [i.e. Ukraine relinquished the Soviet nuclear weapons that had been placed in Ukraine during the Cold War]. We don’t have that weapon. … Therefore, we have something. The right to demand a shift from a policy of appeasement to ensuring security and peace guarantees.
Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. . . I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt. . .
I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”
Sanger’s Times article implies that it was a “conspiracy theory” that Zelensky was calling for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. Sanger was not ignorant of the meaning of the Budapest Memorandum, rather he chose to deliberately ignore it and misrepresented the facts.
President Vladimir Putin, along with the majority of Russians, could not ignore such a threat for a number of historical reasons that The New York Times and ideologues such as Sanger have also chosen to ignore. It is important to list some of those facts, since most Americans are unaware of them, as they have not been reported in the Western mainstream media. Leaving parts of the story out turns Putin into just a madman bent on conquest without any reason to intervene.
First, both the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 in resistance to a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected president Viktor Yanukovych in February of that year. The independence vote came just eight days after neo-Nazis burned dozens of ethnic Russians alive in Odessa. To crush their bid for independence, the new U.S.-installed Ukrainian government then launched an “anti-terrorist” war against the provinces, with the assistance of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which had taken part in the coup. It is a war that is still going on eight years later, a war that Russia has just entered.
During these eight years, the Ukrainian Armed Forces and Azov have used artillery, snipers and assassination teams to systematically butcher more than 5,000 people (another 8,000 were wounded) — mostly civilians — in the Donetsk Peoples Republic, according to the leader of the DPR, who provided these figures in a press conference recently. In the Luhansk People’s Republic, an additional 2,000 civilians were killed and 3,365 injured. The total number of people killed and wounded in Donbass since 2014 is more than 18,000.
This has received at most superficial coverage by The New York Times; it has not been covered by Western corporate media because it does not fit the official Washington narrative that Ukraine is pursuing an “anti-terrorist operation” in its unrelenting attacks on the people of Donbass. For eight years the war instead has been portrayed as a Russian “invasion,” well before Russia’s current intervention.
Likewise, The New York Times, in its overall coverage, chose not to report that the Ukrainian forces had deployed half of its army, about 125,000 troops, to its border with Donbass by the beginning of 2022.
In other words, acquiring tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier for Ukraine than for some other states I am not going to mention here, which are conducting such research, especially if Kiev receives foreign technological support. We c
The importance of neo-Nazi Right Sektor politicians in the Ukraine government and neo-Nazi militias (such as the Azov Battalion) to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, also goes unreported in the mainstream corporate media. The Azov battalion flies Nazi flags; they have been trained by teams of U.S. military advisers and praised on Facebook these days. In 2014, Azov was incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard under the direction of the Interior Ministry.
The Nazis killed something on the order of 27 million Soviets/Russians during World War II (the U.S. lost 404,000). Russia has not forgotten and is extremely sensitive to any threats and violence coming from neo-Nazis. Americans generally do not understand what this means to Russians as the United States has never been invaded.
So, when the leader of Ukraine essentially threatens to obtain nuclear weapons, this is most certainly considered to be an existential threat to Russia. That is why Putin focused on this during his speech preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sanger and The New York Times must discount a Ukrainian nuclear threat; they can get away with doing so because they have systematically omitted news pertaining to this for many years.
Sanger makes a very misleading statement when he writes, “Today Ukraine does not even have the basic infrastructure to produce nuclear fuel.”
Ukraine is not interested in making nuclear fuel — which Ukraine already purchases from the U.S. Ukraine has plenty of plutonium, which is commonly used to make nuclear weapons today; eight years ago Ukraine held more than 50 tons of plutonium in its spent fuel assemblies stored at its many nuclear power plants (probably considerably more today, as the reactors have continued to run and produce spent fuel). Once plutonium is reprocessed/separated from spent nuclear fuel, it becomes weapons usable. Putin noted that Ukraine already has missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, and they certainly have scientists capable of developing reprocessing facilities and building nuclear weapons.
In his Feb. 21 televised address, Putin said Ukraine still has the infrastructure leftover from Soviet days to build a bomb. He said:
“As we know, it has already been stated today that Ukraine intends to create its own nuclear weapons, and this is not just bragging.
Ukraine has the nuclear technologies created back in the Soviet times and delivery vehicles for such weapons, including aircraft, as well as the Soviet-designed Tochka-U precision tactical missiles with a range of over 100 kilometers.
But they can do more; it is only a matter of time. They have had the groundwork for this since the Soviet era.
If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will drastically change, especially for us, for Russia. We cannot but react to this real danger, all the more so since let me repeat, Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”
NATO-US Refuse Binding Nuclear Treaties
In his Times piece, Sanger states, “American officials have said repeatedly that they have no plans to place nuclear weapons in Ukraine.”
But the U.S. and NATO have refused to sign legally binding treaties with Russia to this effect. In reality, the U.S. has been making Ukraine a de facto member of NATO, while training and supplying its military forces and conducting joint exercises on Ukrainian territory. Why wouldn’t the U.S. place nuclear weapons in Ukraine — they have already done so at military bases within the borders of five other European members of NATO. This in fact violates the spirit of the NPT, another issue that Sanger avoids when he notes that Russia has demanded that the U.S. remove nuclear weapons from the European NATO-member states.
For years the U.S. proclaimed that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) facilities it was placing in Romania and Poland, on the Russian border, were to protect against an “Iranian threat,” even though Iran had no nuclear weapons or missiles that could reach the U.S. But the dual-use Mark 41 launching systems used in the Aegis Ashore BMD facilities can be used to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles, and will be fitted with SM-6 missiles that, if armed with nuclear warheads, could hit Moscow in five-to-six minutes. Putin explicitly warned journalists about this danger in 2016; Russia included the removal of the U.S. BMD facilities in Romania and Poland in its draft treaties presented to the U.S. and NATO last December.
I wonder if Sanger has ever considered what the U.S. response would be if Russia placed missile launching facilities on the Canadian or Mexican border? Would the U.S. consider that a threat, would it demand that Russia remove them or else the U.S. would use military means to do so?
30 Years Ago
Sanger states that today Russia takes a “starkly different from the tone Moscow was taking 30 years ago, when Russian nuclear scientists were being voluntarily retrained to use their skills for peaceful purposes.”
Russians would reply that 30 years ago NATO had not moved to Russian borders and was not flooding Ukraine with hundreds of tons of weapons and the U.S. had not yet overthrown the government in Kiev to install an anti-Russian regime.
While the Times is still considered the U.S. “paper of record,” during the last few decades it has devolved into the primary mouthpiece for the official narratives coming from Washington.
There is a real danger to the nation when a free press is replaced with corporate media that stifles and censors dissent. Rather than a free press, we now have a Ministry of Propaganda that acts as an echo chamber for the latest diktats from the White House. The systematic creation of false narratives by corporate media, designed to serve the purposes of the federal government, have so misinformed the American public about world events that we find the nation ready to go to war with Russia.
This is suicidal course for not only the U.S. and the EU, but for civilization as a whole, because this would likely end in a nuclear war that will destroy all nations and peoples.
Steven Starr is the former director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program, and former board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. His articles have been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Federation of American Scientists and the Strategic Arms Reduction website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He maintains the Nuclear Famine website.
SEEDS OF PEACE -AUGUST 2025.
WEST SUBURBAN PEACE COALITION, Walt Zlotow, 5 Aug 25
Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings
Every year the four day period August 6 – 9 brings to mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This marks the 80th anniversary of those horrific acts.
I learned of the atomic bombings 74 years ago at age 6 and have been haunted by them ever since. For the first decade afterward, I swallowed whole the US fairytale that the military and political elite were unified in dropping the bombs to prevent a U.S. invasion and its estimate of a million U.S. casualties.
Few if any reputable historians buy that version today. They point to a number of top military leaders who opposed the nuclear attacks, for good reasons. Most prominent was U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall who argued not using the Bomb would strengthen America’s prestige and position in post war Asia. He even advocated for inviting the Russians to view its July 16, 1945 test.
Navy Secretary and later Defense Secretary James Forrestal argued the bombings would impede our post WWII relations with the Soviet Union. Fleet Admiral William Leahy, senior US military officer on active duty in WWII, called the proposed bombings “barbaric”. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy told Truman that neither invasion nor atomic bombings were necessary. Japan would surrender if we avoided terminology ‘Unconditional Surrender’ since any surrender would amount to that without saying so. McCloy even advocated telling Japanese leaders we had the Bomb as additional incentive to quit the war.
Tho not involved in the Bomb decision process, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious we dropped them, telling Secretary of War Harry Stimson shortly after the attacks “I voiced my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”
Ike, McCloy, Leahy, Forrestal, Marshall and others were right; Truman and his supporters were wrong. Eighty years on America is still the only country to explode nukes in anger. Current belligerency against maintaining nuclear agreements, routinely threatening imagined enemies with “all military options are on the table”, spending a trillion dollars to upgrade our nukes, risking nuclear war with Russia and China nu all bode ill we’ll make another 80 years nuclear attack free.
80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president
By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News, https://www.mintpressnews.com/hiroshima-nagasaki-us-nuclear-lies/290336/ August 7, 2025
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.
With Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear energy sites, India and Pakistan going to war in May, and escalating violence between Russia and NATO-backed forces in Ukraine, the shadow of another nuclear war looms large over daily life.
Eighty Years Of Lies
The United States remains the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. While the dates of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are seared into the popular conscience of all Japanese people, those days hold far less salience in American society.
When discussed at all in the U.S., this dark chapter in human history is usually presented as a necessary evil, or even a day of liberation—an event that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, prevented the need for an invasion of Japan, and ended the Second World War early. This, however, could not be further from the truth.
American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.
“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.
Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.
As he wrote in 1950:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.
“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”
Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb,” said John McCloy, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War.
Nevertheless, Truman initially took an absolutist position, refusing to hear any Japanese negotiating caveats. This stance, according to General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, actually lengthened the war. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “If the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” Truman, however, dropped two bombs, then reversed his position on the emperor, in order to stop Japanese society from falling apart.
At that point in the war, however, the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower and enjoyed an unprecedented position of influence. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan underscored this; it was a power play, intended to strike fear into the hearts of world leaders, especially in the Soviet Union and China.
First Japan, Then The World
Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically curbed the U.S.S.R.’s ambitions in Japan. Joseph Stalin’s forces had invaded and permanently annexed Sakhalin Island in 1945 and planned to occupy Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island. The move likely prevented the island nation from coming under the Soviet sphere of influence.
To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases.
Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.
War planners estimated this figure to be around 400. To that end, Truman ordered the immediate ramping up of production. Such a strike, we now know, would have caused a nuclear winter that would have permanently ended all organized life on Earth.
The decision to destroy Russia was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community. It is now widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario. This part of history, however, was left out of the 2023 biopic movie.
By 1949, the U.S.S.R. was able to produce a credible nuclear deterrent before the U.S. had produced sufficient quantities for an all-out attack, thus ending the threat and bringing the world into the era of mutually assured destruction.
“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” concluded a 1946 report from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president, was of the same opinion, stating that:
Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”
Nevertheless, both Truman and Eisenhower publicly toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons against China to stop the rise of Communism and to defend their client regime in Taiwan. It was only the development of a Chinese warhead in 1964 that led to the end of the danger, and, ultimately, the détente era of good relations between the two powers that lasted until President Obama’s Pivot to Asia.
Ultimately, then, the people of Japan were the collateral damage in a giant U.S. attempt to project its power worldwide. As Brigadier General Carer Clarke, head of U.S. intelligence on Japan wrote, “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them [Japanese citizens] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
Tiptoeing Closer To Armageddon
The danger of nuclear weapons is far from over. Today, Israel and the United States – two nations with atomic weaponry – attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Yet their continued, hyper-aggressive actions against their foes only suggest to other countries that, unless they too possess weapons of mass destruction, they will not be safe from attack. North Korea, a country with a conventional and nuclear deterrent, faces no such air strikes from the U.S. or its allies. These actions, therefore, will likely result in more nations pursuing nuclear ambitions.
Earlier this year, India and Pakistan (two more nuclear-armed states) came into open conflict thanks to disputes over terrorism and Jammu and Kashmir. Many influential individuals on both sides of the border were demanding their respective sides launch their nukes – a decision that could also spell the end of organized human life. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues, with NATO forces urging President Zelensky to up the ante. Earlier this month, President Trump himself reportedly encouraged the Ukrainian leader to use his Western-made weapons to strike Moscow.
It is precisely actions such as these that led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move their famous Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.
“The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation,” they wrote in their explanation, adding that conflicts in Asia could spiral out of control into a wider war at any point, and that nuclear powers are updating and expanding their arsenals.
The Pentagon, too, is recruiting Elon Musk to help it build what it calls an American Iron Dome. While this move is couched in defensive language, such a system – if successful – would grant the U.S. the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response.
Thus, as we look back at the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, we must understand that not only were they entirely avoidable, but that we are now closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation than many people realize.
Why no Hollywood movie on Nagasaki A Bombing?
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn 8 Aug 25
In the 1952 movie ‘Above and Beyond’, movie idol Robert Taylor played handsome Col. Paul Tibbetts, straight out of Central Casting, who piloted Enola Gay to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago August 6. We all grew up in awe of Tibbetts, Enola Gay and the perfect mission which incinerated Hiroshima from the first A Bomb dropped in anger. My awe eventually turned to revulsion upon learning it was a monstrous war crime.
But who piloted what plane that dropped the second A Bomb on Nagasaki just 3 days later, August 9? The American Story has largely erased the saga of the Nagasaki mission for good reason. It was a colossal screw up that almost got the pilot court martialed; indeed, nearly detonated Fat Man over the Pacific enroute.
Trouble began early on. Paul Tibbetts, fresh from his Hiroshima success, picked his friend Charles Sweeney to pilot the drop plane ‘Bockscar’ instead of its regular pilot Fred Bock. Sweeney was unfamiliar with both combat and the plane. Preparing for takeoff, Sweeney was unable to operate the reserve tank containing 640 gallons of fuel needed to get Bockscar safely back to its Tinian takeoff point. Bock may have had the familiarity with the plane to accomplish that. Regulations required the mission be scrapped so Sweeney and crew exited Bockscar. But Tibbetts overruled them and the mission was on with insufficient fuel.
Three hours in, worse trouble. Fat Man’s red detonation lights began blinking wildly. Chief weaponeer Dick Ashworth frantically searched the blueprints and realized 2 switches had been reversed in the preflight assembly. Solving that problem, everyone relaxed till Bockscar failed to rendezvous with the second of two back up planes, one for photography and one for instruments. The instrument plane, The Big Stink, was 9,000 feet above Bockscar. Instead of pushing on to original target Kokura, Sweeney wasted 45 minutes of precious fuel trying to link up. Big Stink pilot Hoppy Hopkins broke radio silence frantically calling Tinian asking “Is Bockscar down?” Mission officials only heard “Bockscar Down” and freaked out believing Bockscar, Fat Man and the 13 member crew were in Davy Jones Locker.
Ashford was frantic that all was lost. As tension mounted between the weaponeer and the pilot, he finally persuaded Sweeney to proceed to primary target Kokura. But a smokescreen put up by Japanese defenders responding to the Hiroshima attack caused Sweeney to go around for a second and third bomb run, wasting fuel. More trouble. Flack and approaching Japanese Zeros forced Sweeney to abandon Kokura to flee 100 miles to alternate target Nagasaki.
The drop made, Sweeney made a desperate dive to avoid the mushroom cloud that nearly engulfed them. But his previous delays made the return trip to Tinian impossible. Low on fuel, Sweeney began a treacherous 450 mile flight on dwindling fuel for Okinawa. All aboard Bockscar prepared to ditch. Approaching the Okinawa airfield unable to radio the tower of their emergency, Bockscar had to drop in to a forced landing amid numerous other flights without control tower clearance. Bockscar bounced 25 feet in the air landing at 30 MPH over the maximum landing speed, nearly colliding with a row of fuel laden B-24’s. One engine quit on the approach and another upon touchdown. Thinking Bockscar was lost, airport personnel inquired who this strange plane was that descended out of the sky unannounced. ‘We just dropped an atomic bomb’ was the reply.
There were no celebrations for the crew of Bockscar. Officials considered court martialing Sweeney for his life and mission threatening delays but considered the embarrassment it would cause and decided against. Why mar the mission-perfect first nuking of civilians by Paul Tibbetts and Enola Gay?
While we’ll never get a Hollywood treatment of the Bockscar A Bomb mission, it would be a lot more exciting than ‘Above and Beyond’. An appropriate title? ‘Nearly Down and Out Over Nagasaki’.
The new space race: How the US, China, and Russia are all vying to be the first to build a nuclear reactor on the MOON.
By WILIAM HUNTER, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY REPORTER, 5 August 2025, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14971339/new-space-race-US-China-Russia.html
In the years of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union tussled to prove their superiority by rushing to become the first nation to put a man on the moon.
While America might have claimed that particular prize in 1969, a new and even more dramatic space race is only just beginning.
This week, it was revealed that Sean Duffy, the new head of NASA, is preparing to install an American nuclear reactor on the moon before 2030.
In a directive, first reported by Politico, Mr Duffy claims this would allow the US to declare a ‘keep-out zone’ on the lunar surface.
This is seen as a necessary step towards protecting the landing site for a future American moon base, planned as part of the Artemis Programme.
However, the US is far from being the only country to set its sights on our lunar satellite.
In May, China and Russia signed a memorandum of cooperation to build their own nuclear reactor on the moon.
But with Russia and China targeting 2036 as their completion date, the three superpowers are now locked in a head-to-head race to get there first.
This comes as the US makes a rapid and unexpected shift towards prioritising human exploration in space.
Despite slashing scientific missions and giving NASA the smallest budget since 1961, the agency has allocated more than $7 billion for lunar exploration.
The Artemis programme, once feared to be a target for Donald Trump’s cuts, is now scheduled to return a human presence to the moon by 2027.
In the directive, Mr Duffy called for NASA to ‘move quickly’ in establishing a nuclear reactor on the moon in order to ‘support a future lunar economy‘.
Mr Duffy, who is also US transport secretary, has asked NASA to place a reactor capable of producing at least 100 kilowatts on the moon by the end of the decade.
That is enough energy to power 80 average American households and could provide the energy backbone for a permanent lunar base.
NASA had previously planned to place a 40-kilowatt reactor on the moon in a similar timeframe, but it is not clear if they will be able to use the same designs.
Mr Duffy will give NASA 30 days to appoint an official to oversee the operation and 60 days to issue a request seeking proposals from commercial companies for the project.
Nuclear power is seen as key for establishing a lunar presence because it is plunged into complete, freezing darkness for two weeks every month.
At the South Pole, where NASA is planning to establish its operations, the sun never rises high above the horizon and some craters are shrouded in permanent darkness.
That makes it practically impossible for spacecraft or bases to survive on the moon using solar power and batteries alone.
However, this sudden swing back to lunar exploration may be a product of increasing competition from other superpowers.
Tellingly, Mr Duffy warned that ‘the first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence if not there first.’
This is almost certainly a reference to Russia and China’s recent plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, announced in May.
That reactor would be used to power the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which should be completed by 2036 according to the latest plans.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, wrote in a statement at the time: ‘The station will conduct fundamental space research and test technology for long-term uncrewed operations of the ILRS, with the prospect of a human being’s presence on the Moon.’
The groundwork will be laid by China’s upcoming Chang’e-8 mission, which will be the nation’s first attempted human moon landing.
This means that the moon, and especially the south pole, is now becoming the target of a new international space race.
Dr Mark Hilborne, a security studies expert from King’s College London, told Daily Mail: ‘The Moon is a place where nations will have competing interests. There will be parts of the moon that are more valuable than others and, therefore, could be particular points of competition.
‘The Moon is valuable as a low-gravity staging base where future space developments can be built. Lunar materials, mined in situ, would be valuable in building elements that would further lunar exploration.
‘If these could be built on the Moon, rather than sent from Earth, the cost would be far cheaper.’
The big concern for the US, and presumably Russia and China, is that whatever country starts building on the moon first could effectively claim it as its own territory
Countries’ dealings in space are governed by a set of rules called the Outer Space Treaty, which was first signed in 1967.
Signatories to the treaty agree that space is ‘not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.’
This explicitly means that nations are not legally able to make territorial claims on celestial bodies like the moon.
However, in practice, America has recently doubled down on a far more assertive version of the law by signing a series of rules called the Artemis Accords in 2020.
Critically, the Artemis Accords also gives states the power to implement ‘safety zones’ – exclusive areas which members of other states will not be able to enter or use without permission from the owner.
While the US insists that these boundaries will end ‘when the relevant operation ceases’, for a permanent colony, this would function almost exactly like the borders of a sovereign territory.
These rules essentially create a principle that whoever gets to a part of the moon first gets to keep it for their own use.
Dr Jill Stuart, an expert on space law from the London School of Economics, told Daily Mail: ‘Countries could use a part of the lunar surface for a scientific base – without claiming long-term ownership of it – but must communicate to other users where that base is and be transparent about its purpose.
‘Although this seems like a potentially “fair” way to allow for future activity on the moon, it also creates a “first mover advantage” in that those who can set up bases first have the right to claim a safety zone around it.’
That idea may now be alarming to America as China shows rapid advancements in its spaceflight program that have put a human presence on the moon within reach.
While these safety zones might be essential for a nuclear reactor, experts say this may lead to an increasingly risky space race.
Dr Fabio Tronchetti, a space law expert from Northumbria University, told Daily Mail: ‘It is evident that we are heading towards a space rush.
‘The United States is attempting to act quickly and get to the Moon first, at least before China and Russia, so as to be able to unilaterally claim the right to set out the rules of the game.’
This has the serious potential to spark conflict between the nations since China and Russia, having not signed the Artemis Accords, have no legal requirement to respect the US ‘keep-out zones’.
Dr Tronchetti says that international law ‘does not recognise the possibility’ of the US’s claims, adding that the US is attempting to ‘force its [China’s] hand to set out rules favourable to its own interests’.
How this conflict might play out on the lunar surface remains to be seen, but in the future, we might see the conflicts here on Earth extend out into space.
The real story of Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster in history
The Chernobyl Sarcophagus Memorial sculpture was erected in 2006 and is dedicated to the memory of the heroic plant workers and emergency crew who prevented a global catastrophe .
28 July 25,https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-story-of-chernobyl-the-worst-nuclear-disaster-in-history
On 26th April 1986, a routine safety test went catastrophically wrong and triggered the worst nuclear accident of all time. The incident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine led to the release of 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during WW2.
31 people died in the immediate aftermath, whilst the long-term health effects caused by Chernobyl are still a hotly debated subject. Approximately 60,000 square miles around the plant were contaminated and an area nearly twice the city of London remains an exclusion zone to this day.
Background of Chernobyl
Lying just 10 miles from the Belarus-Ukraine border and around 62 miles north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned in 1977 as part of the old Soviet Union, with the first reactor supplying power to the grid later that year. By 1984, four reactors had entered commercial operation, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electrical power.
Just under two miles from the plant was the city of Pripyat, founded in 1970 and named after the nearby river. It was built to serve the power plant and at the time of the disaster, its total population was just shy of 50,000.
Nuclear disaster unfolds
Throughout Friday, 25th April 1986, Chernobyl’s engineers lowered power at Reactor No. 4 in preparation for a safety test to be conducted later that evening. The test was supposed to check whether the reactor turbines could continue powering emergency water coolant pumps in the event of a power failure.
Ironically, the safety test was anything but safe as human error and substandard reactor design led to a partial meltdown of the core.
The experiment was poorly conceived and equally badly executed. Firstly, the less-experienced night shift crew carried out the safety test and later claimed they had not received full instructions from the day shift crew on how to properly conduct it. Secondly, the emergency core cooling system for Reactor 4 was disabled along with the emergency shutdown system.
Finally, the reactor’s power level dropped to a dangerously unstable level at which point the engineers removed most of the control rods in violation of safety guidelines. Although power began to return, it was far from under control.
Explosion in Reactor 4
At 1:23am on 26th April, the safety test was given the all-clear by plant supervisors. Almost immediately a power surge occurred, triggering the engineers to re-insert all 211 control rods. The control rods were graphite tipped, a design flaw that would prove fatal as they increased the reaction in the core, instead of lowering it.
The subsequent steam explosions blew off the steel and concrete lid of the reactor as the core suffered a partial meltdown. Two engineers were killed instantly whilst two more suffered severe burns. The explosion, along with the resulting fires, released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere. Blown by the wind, radioactive materials were spread to many parts of Europe over the coming days.
Emergency response begins
Firefighters quickly arrived on the scene but without proper protective clothing, many perished in the coming months from acute radiation syndrome. By dawn, all the fires were suppressed except for the one in the reactor core.
The other three reactors were shut down a short while later. The following day officials ordered helicopters to begin dumping more than 5,000 tonnes of sand, lead, clay, and boron onto the burning reactor to help extinguish the core fire.
A Soviet cover-up
It took nearly 36 hours for Soviet officials to begin evacuating nearby Pripyat. The city’s residents were unaware of the true dangers presented by the previous day’s events. Advised to pack only necessities, the people of Pripyat were loaded onto buses believing their evacuation to be temporary. Little did they know, they would never return to their homes again.
Two days after the catastrophic explosion the rest of the world remained in the dark as the Soviets attempted to cover up the event. However, on 28th April, Swedish radiation monitoring stations 800 miles away began detecting high levels of radiation. With their backs to the wall, the Soviets finally made a statement, with the Kremlin admitting an accident had occurred at Chernobyl, but assuring the world that officials had it under control.
Heroism on display
In the days that followed, hundreds of workers risked their lives to contain radiation leaking from the reactor core.
On 4th May, three divers made their way through the dark flooded basement of Reactor 4 to turn valves and drain the ‘bubbler pools’ sitting below the core. Had they not succeeded in their mission, molten nuclear material would have eventually melted its way down to the pools.
This would have triggered a radiation-contaminated steam explosion and destroyed the entire plant along with its three other reactors, causing unimaginable damage and nuclear fallout that the world would have struggled to recover from.
Radioactive debris also needed to be removed from the roof of the reactor. After robots failed to do the job, workers equipped with heavy protective gear were sent in.
Nicknamed ‘Bio-robots’, these workers were unable to spend more than 90 seconds on the roof due to the extreme levels of radiation. In the end, 5,000 men went up on the irradiated rooftop to successfully clear the radioactive material from it.
Clean-up commences
By mid-May, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered thousands of firefighters, miners, and soldiers to begin the long and arduous task of cleaning up. Known as ‘Liquidators’, 600,000 – 800,000 of them began burying radioactive debris and topsoil, as well as shooting all wildlife (both domestic and wild) within the 19-mile exclusion zone surrounding the power plant.
Nicknamed ‘Bio-robots’, these workers were unable to spend more than 90 seconds on the roof due to the extreme levels of radiation. In the end, 5,000 men went up on the irradiated rooftop to successfully clear the radioactive material from it.
Clean-up commences
By mid-May, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered thousands of firefighters, miners, and soldiers to begin the long and arduous task of cleaning up. Known as ‘Liquidators’, 600,000 – 800,000 of them began burying radioactive debris and topsoil, as well as shooting all wildlife (both domestic and wild) within the 19-mile exclusion zone surrounding the power plant.
Aftermath
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was eventually extended to cover approximately 1,000 square miles, whereby it was declared uninhabitable for over 20,000 years. The other three reactors at Chernobyl remained active until their individual shutdowns in 1991, 1996, and 2000. Gorbachev later wrote that he believed the incident at Chernobyl was the ‘real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union’.
Whilst the lasting health effects of the disaster remain unclear and much debated, various sources have estimated that thousands of cancer deaths can be linked back to Chernobyl.
The Kyshtym disaster: Russia’s hidden nuclear crisis
The Kyshtym disaster in 1957 was the Soviet Union’s biggest nuclear crisis until Chernobyl. So, why did the Soviets keep quiet about the former for decades?
28 July 25, https://www.history.co.uk/articles/kyshtym-disaster-russia-hidden-nuclear-crisis
What would be considered the worst nuclear disaster in history? Many scholars would say Chernobyl, when an explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine released dangerous levels of radiation.
This was on 26th April 1986, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. Was Chernobyl inevitable? Many historians do believe that Soviet authorities failed to learn lessons from an earlier nuclear crisis on their own soil. Below, we at Sky HISTORY look back at the 1957 Kyshtym disaster — and how the Soviets kept it under wraps for decades.
Was there really a nuclear plant in Kyshtym?
The nuclear plant at the heart of the Kyshtym disaster was not actually in the Russian town of that name. Instead, it was in a secretive ‘closed city’ nearby, called Chelyabinsk-40. Today, it is called Ozyorsk. (Both Kyshtym and Ozyorsk are in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast.)
In the 1940s, the Soviets realised that they were trailing the United States in the development of nuclear weapons. To help themselves catch up, they hastily built what is now commonly known as the Mayak nuclear plant.
This facility, which still stands today, was tasked with processing plutonium needed to make nuclear weapons. However, because the plant was assembled in a rush, many safety risks of the project were not considered sufficiently.
The Kyshtym explosion and its immediate aftermath
Before the Kyshtym disaster, it was routine for Mayak workers to deposit radioactive waste into the Techa River. This bode ill (literally) for villagers along the river who used it as a source of drinking water.
So, Mayak staff later decided to store such waste in an underground storage compartment of the plant itself. This space comprised 14 stainless steel containers attached to a concrete base.
However, in the 1950s, the cooling system in one of these tanks started to malfunction. This led the waste in the container to heat up and eventually, on 29th September 1957, explode. The force sent 20 curies of radioactive material flying a kilometre into the air.
The wind blew the radioactive particles over an area of about 20,000 square kilometres inhabited by approximately 270,000 people. This was generally to the northeast, away from Chelyabinsk-40, which lay upwind from the Mayak plant.
How did authorities initially react?
Residents of nearby areas were not initially notified of what had happened. This was largely due to the Soviet Union’s strong culture of secrecy during the Cold War. The national government didn’t want to let slip that Mayak even existed, let alone that a nuclear explosion had happened there.
It was also around the same time that the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, a big PR coup. Admitting responsibility for what was the world’s biggest nuclear disaster to date would have been more than an inconvenient fly in the ointment.
Still, the Soviets also knew that doing what they could to limit the radioactive contamination would go some way towards keeping everyone in the dark. So, while about 10,000 local residents were evacuated over the next two years, they weren’t told exactly why.
A cover-up lasting for decades
Almost 17,000 hectares of the contaminated area was turned into East Ural Nature Reserve in 1968. Members of the public were barred from entry, which remains the case to this day. Scientists have studied the reserve to monitor the long-term effects of nuclear radiation on its ecology.
The Kyshtym disaster was kept secret from the public until 1976, when Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev reported about it in New Scientist magazine. However, the Soviet government still did not openly acknowledge the Kyshtym disaster before accidentally revealing it to the United Nations in the late 1980s.
It is estimated that thousands of cancer cases may have resulted from exposure to radiation caused by the nuclear explosion way back in 1957.
How does Kyshtym compare to Chernobyl?
On the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), Kyshtym is classified as Level 6. Chernobyl, an even bigger catastrophe, is ranked just one level higher (Level 7) on the INES. Kyshtym released about 40% as much radioactivity as Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is thought to have affected a larger population, too, as 335,000 people were evacuated in the wake of the 1986 disaster. Also, while Chernobyl quickly claimed 31 lives, none were lost in the immediate aftermath of Kyshtym.
Israel’s genocide is big business – and the face of the future
“Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.”
21 July 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2025-07-21/israel-genocide-big-business/
US corporations and military planners welcome the ‘legal maneuver space’ Israel has opened up for them to profit from warfare that slaughters and starves civilians
[An audio version of this article is available here]
The Financial Times revealed this month that a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.
The secret consortium appears to have been seeking practical ways to realise US President Donlad Trump’s “vision” of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”: transforming the small coastal enclave into a playground for the rich and an enticing investment opportunity, once it can be ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population.
Meanwhile, the UK government has declared Palestine Action a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct-action campaign group has been banned under Britain’s already draconian terrorism legislation.
Notably, the government of Keir Starmer took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action after lobbying from Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons maker whose factories in the UK have been targeted by Palestine Action for disruption. Elbit supplies Israel with killer drones and other weapons central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
These revelations came to light as the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report – titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” – exposing Big Business’ extensive involvement in, and profits from, Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza.
That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.
Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.
Window on the future
Israel effectively serves as the world’s largest business incubator – though, in its case, not just by nurturing start-up companies.
Rather, it offers global corporations the chance to test and refine new weapons, machinery, technologies, data collection and automation processes in the occupied territories. These developments are associated with mass oppression, control, surveillance, incarceration, ethnic cleansing – and now genocide.
In a world of shrinking resources and growing climate chaos, such innovative technologies of subjugation are likely to have domestic, in addition to overseas, applications. Gaza is the corporate world’s laboratory, and a window into our own future.
In her 60-page report, Albanese writes that her research “reveals how the forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech… while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”.
Her point was underscored by the Israeli arms firm Rafael, which issued a promotional video of its Spike FireFly drone that showed it locating, chasing and killing a Palestinian in what it called “urban warfare” in Gaza.
As the UN special rapporteur points out, quite aside from the issue of genocide in Gaza, western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to sever ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer.
That was when the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer – or what Albanese refers to as policies of “displacement and replacement”.
Instead, the corporate sector – and western governments – continue to deepen their involvement in Israel’s crimes.
It is not just arms manufacturers profiting from the genocidal levelling of Gaza and the occupations of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Big Tech, construction and materials firms, agribusiness, the tourism industry, the goods and services sector, and supply chains have also got in on the act.
And enabling it all is a finance sector – which includes banks, pension funds, universities, insurers and charities – keen to continue investing in this architecture of oppression.
Albanese describes the mosaic of companies partnering with Israel as “an eco-system sustaining this illegality”.
Escaping scrutiny
For these corporations and their enablers, international law – the legal system Albanese and her fellow UN rapporteurs are there to uphold – serves as an impediment to the pursuit of profit.
Albanese notes that the business sector can escape scrutiny by shielding behind other actors.
Israel and its senior officials are on notice for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
When she wrote to 48 companies to warn them that they were colluding in this criminality, they either responded that this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.
Corporations, Albanese points out, can secure their biggest profits in the “grey areas of the law” – laws they have helped to shape.
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets, whose “beast mode” has been shop-windowed by Israel as it has destroyed Gaza, depend on some 1,600 other specialist firms operating in eight separate states, including Britain.
Late last month the UK high court, while admitting British-made components used in the F-35 were likely to contribute to war crimes in Gaza, ruled that it was up to Starmer’s government to make “acutely sensitive and political” decisions about the export of these parts.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy, by contrast, told a parliamentary committee it was not for the government to assess whether Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, using British arms, it was “a decision for the court”.
Lockheed Martin has joined the buck-passing. A spokesperson said: “Foreign military sales are government-to-government transactions. Discussions about those sales are best addressed by the US government.”
Big Tech collusion
Albanese also points the finger at leading tech firms for rapidly and deeply embedding in Israel’s illegal occupation, including by acquiring Israeli start-ups that exploit expertise gained from the oppression of Palestinians.
The NSO Group has developed Pegasus phone spyware that is now being used to surveill politicians, journalists and human rights activists around the world.
Last year the Biden administration signed a contract with another Israeli spyware firm, Paragon. Will we learn one day that the US used exactly this kind of technology to spy on Albanese and other international law experts, on the pretext that they were waging so-called “economic warfare”?
IBM trains Israeli military and intelligence personnel, and is central to the collection and storage of biometric data on Palestinians. Hewlett Packard Enterprises supplies technology to Israel’s occupation regime, prison service and police.
Microsoft has developed its largest centre outside the US in Israel, from which it has fashioned systems for use by the Israeli military, while Google and Amazon have a $1.2 billion contract to provide it with tech infrastructure.
The prestigious research university MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has collaborated with Israel and companies like Elbit to develop automated weapons systems for drones and refine their swarm formations.
Palantir, which supplies the Israeli military with Artificial Intelligence platforms, announced a deeper strategic partnership in January 2024, early in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, over what the Bloomberg news agency termed “Battle Tech”.
Over the past 21 months, Israel has been introducing new automated programs driven by AI – such as “Lavendar”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?” – to select huge numbers of targets in Gaza with little or no human oversight.
Albanese calls this “the dark side of the start-up nation that is so embedded, so intimately related to the military industry aims and gains.”
Not surprisingly, tech firms are falling back on all-too-familiar smears against the special rapporteur and the UN for pulling back the veil on their activities. The Washington Post reported that, in the wake of Albanese’s report, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, called the UN “transparently antisemitic” in a chat on a staff forum.
Concentration camp
There are a long list of other household names in Albanese’s report: Caterpillar, Volvo and Hyundai are accused of supplying heavy machinery to destroy homes, mosques and infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.
Leading banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have underwritten treasury bonds to boost market confidence in Israel through the genocide and maintain its favourable interest rates.
BP, Chevron and other energy firms are profiting from existing gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean and pipelines that pass through Palestinian maritime waters off Gaza. Israel issued exploration licences for Gaza’s own undeveloped gas field, off the coast, shortly after launching its genocidal slaughter.
Israel’s latest plan to create, in its own words, a “concentration” camp inside Gaza – where Palestinian civilians are to be tightly confined under armed guard – will doubtless rely on business partnerships similar to those behind the bogus “aid distribution hubs” Israel has already imposed on the enclave’s people.
Israeli soldiers have testified that they are being ordered to shoot into crowds of starving Palestinians queueing for food at these hubs – explaining why dozens of Palestinians have been killed daily for weeks on end.
Those hubs, run by the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, were in part the brainchild of the Boston Consulting Group, the same management consultants caught this month plotting to turn Gaza into Trump’s Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Israel’s planned concentration camp built on the ruins of the city of Rafah – to be termed, again deceptively, a “humanitarian zone” – will require all those entering to be “security screened”, using biometric data, before their incarceration.
Doubtless other contractors, using largely automated systems, will control the camp’s interior until, in the Israeli government’s words, “an emigration plan” can be implemented to expel the population from Gaza.
Albanese points to the many precedents for private corporations driving some of the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust.
Albanese urges lawyers and civil society actors to pursue legal avenues against these firms in the countries in which they are registered. Where possible, consumers should exert what pressure they can by boycotting these corporations.
She concludes by recommending that states impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel.
Further, she calls on the besieged International Criminal Court – four of whose judges are, like her, under US sanctions – as well as national courts “to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes”.
Psychopathic culture
All of this is crucial to understanding why western capitals have continued to partner in Israel’s slaughter, even as Holocaust and genocide scholars – many of them Israeli – have reached a firm consensus that its actions amount to genocide.
Governing parties in western countries like the US and Britain are largely dependent on Big Business, both for their electoral success and, after victory at the polling booth, in maintaining popularity through the promotion of “economic stability”.
Keir Starmer reached power in the UK after spurning the popular grassroots funding model of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and wooing instead the corporate sector with promises that the party would be in its pocket.
His reassurances were also key to making sure the billionaire-owned media – which had ferociously turned on Corbyn, constantly vilifying him as an “antisemite” for his democratic socialist and pro-Palestinian positions – smoothed Starmer’s path to Downing Street.
In the US, the billionaires even have one of their own in power, in Donald Trump. But even his campaign depended on funding from big donors like Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson is among a number of top donors, funding both main parties, who make no bones about their number one political priority being Israel.
Once in power, parties are then effectively held to ransom by major corporations on large areas of domestic and foreign policy.
The financial sector had to be bailed out by taxpayers – and still is through so-called “austerity measures” – after its reckless excesses crashed the global ecomomy in the late 2000s. Western governments considered the banks “too big to fail”.
Similarly, Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is just too big to be allowed to fail as well. Even as it commits genocide.
Critics of the rise of globalised corporations over the past half century, such as famed linguist Noam Chomsky and law professor Joel Bakan, have long noted the inherently psychopathic traits of corporate culture.
Corporations are legally obligated to pursue profit and prioritise shareholder value over other considerations. Limitations on their freedoms to do so are near non-existent after waves of deregulation from suborned western governments.
Bakan observes that corporations are indifferent to the suffering or safety of others. They are incapable of maintaining enduring relationships. They lack any sense of guilt, or capacity for self-restraint. And they lie, cheat and deceive to maximise profits.
These psychopathic tendencies have been on show in scandal after scandal, whether from the tobacco and banking industries, or from pharmaceutical and energy companies.
Why would Big Business behave any better in pursuing profits tied up in the Gaza genocide?
Bakan addresses those who confuse his argument with a conspiracy theory. The psychopathic behaviours of corporations simply reflect the legal imperatives on them as institutions – what he calls their “logical dynamic” – to maximise profit and sideline rivals, whatever the consequences for the wider society, future generations or the planet.
Growing fat on genocide
The stakes in Gaza are high for western governments precisely because they are so high for the business world growing fat on Israel’s genocide.
Governments and corporations have an overwhelming shared interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny and criticism: it serves as their colonial attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East, and it acts as a cash-cow for the weapons, surveillance and incarceration industries.
Which explains why Trump and Starmer, on one side, and university administrations, on the other, have invested so much political and moral capital in crushing the spaces, especially in academia, where free speech and protest are supposed to be most prized.
The unversities are far from a disinterested party. Before their campus encampments were trashed by police, student demonstrators sought to highlight how heavily invested the universities are in the economy of occupation and genocide, both financially and through research partnerships with the Israeli military and Israeli universities.
The need to ringfence Israel from scrutiny also explains rapid moves in the West both to impute “antisemitism” to every effort to hold Israel, or its genocidal army, to account.
The desperate lengths to which governments will go was on display this month as UK officials and the establishment media kicked up a storm of outrage after a punk band at Glastonbury chanted “Death, death to the IDF!” – a reference to Israel’s genocidal army.
And as the power of the antisemitism accusation has weakened from misuse, western capitals are now rewriting their statutes to designate as “terrorism” any attempt to put a spoke in the wheels of the genocide economy, by for example sabotaging weapons factories.
Morality and international law are being scattered to the winds to keep the West’s most important colonial spin-off a money-maker.
Business as usual
Israel’s indispensability to the corporate sector and a captured western political class extends far beyond tiny Gaza. Israel is playing an outsize role as a war-industries incubator on a global battlefield in which the West seeks to ensure its continuing military and economic primacy over China.
Last month the global business elite – comprising tech billionaires and corporate titans, joined by political leaders, media editors, and military and intelligence officials – met once again at the publicity-shy Bilderberg summit, this year hosted in Stockholm.
Prominent were the CEOs of major “defence” suppliers and arms manufacturers such as Palantir, Thales, Helsing, Anduril and Saab.
Drone warfare – being used in innovative ways by key military clients like Israel and Ukraine – was high on the agenda. The greater integration of AI into drones appears to have been a mainstay of the discussions.
The subtext this year, as in recent years, was a supposed rising threat from China and an associated “authoritarian axis” comprising Russia, Iran and North Korea. This threat is seen chiefly in economic and technological terms.
In May, Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google and a Bilderberg board member, wrote with alarm in the New York Times: “China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier.”
He added that the West was in a race against China over the imminent development of super-intelligent AI, which would give the winner “the keys to control the entire world”.
Schmidt, like other Bilderberg regulars, predicts that the power-draining needs of super AI will lead to ever-intensifying energy wars for the West to stay top dog.
Or as a Guardian report on the conference summed up the mood: “In this desperate winner-takes-all race for the keys to the world, in which the ‘geopolitics of energy’ becomes ever more important, power stations – along with the data centers they feed – are going to become the No 1 military targets.”
Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is seen as playing a critical role in opening up the “battlescape”.
The same corporations cashing in on the Gaza genocide stand to benefit from the more permissive environment – legally and militarily – created by Israel for future wars, ones where massacred civilians count only as “incidental deaths”.
An April article in the New Yorker magazine set out the challenge facing US military planners, who have considered themselves hobbled since the 1980s by the rise of a human rights community that developed an expertise in the laws of war independently from the Pentagon’s self-serving interpretations.
The result, say US generals regretfully, has been a “general aversion to collateral damage risk” – that is, killing civilians.
Pentagon military planners are keen to use the slaughter in Gaza as a precedent for their own genocidal violence in subduing future economic rivals like China and Russia who threaten the official US doctrine of “global full-spectrum dominance”.
The New Yorker sets out this thinking: “Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.”
According to the magazine, the genocidal violence being unleashed by Israel is opening up the “legal maneuver space” – the space needed to commit crimes against humanity in full view.
This is where much of the impulse comes from in western capitals to normalise the genocide – present it as business as usual – and demonise its opponents.
The arms makers and tech companies whose coffers have been swollen by Israel’s genocide in Gaza stand to make far greater riches from a similarly devastating war against China.
Whatever the script we are sold, there will be nothing moral or existential about this coming battle. As ever, it will be about rich people keen to get even richer.
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