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The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Leak forces Point Lepreau to shut down for 2nd time this month

Challenging location of the problem requires nuclear plant to go off-line for fix, official says

Sam Farley · CBC News · Sep 17, 2026, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/point-lepreau-leak-shutdown-9.7345240

The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station is shut down again, this time because of a heavy-water leak on an instrumentation line.

The line is part of the heat transport system, which is part of the heavy water station at the plant, Joel Armstrong, the deputy site vice-president at Point Lepreau, said in an interview.

Last week, there was an indication of a problem, he said, and the early indication systems worked exactly as planned, “allowing us to conduct a safe and predictable shutdown to facilitate the work.”

Heavy water carries heat from the reactor out to conventional boilers filled with regular water, creating steam to run the plant turbines.

Heavy water itself is not radioactive but over time when used in a reactor it begins to produce tritium as a primary source of radiation, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s website.

The page goes on to say that tritium is a “relatively weak source of beta radiation, which itself is too weak to penetrate the skin. However, it can increase the risk of cancer if consumed in extremely large quantities.”

CBC News has tried to ask N.B. Power about the radioactivity of the heavy water leaked at Lepreau and is waiting for an answer. 

“We identified that there was potential for a leak,” Armstrong said. “We have lots of early monitoring at the station that gave us early indication that there was an issue,

September 21, 2026 Posted by | safety | Leave a comment

Trump administration announces it has placed weapons in orbit, in major step in the militarization of space

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which 118 states, including the United States, are party, commits its signatories “not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”

Alison Storsve, the US delegate, told the committee that the United States “must vote NO on the resolution” titled “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space.”

Andre Damon, 15 September 2026

The Trump administration has placed weapons in orbit around the earth, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday. The United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink told the Air & Space Forces Association conference.

The announcement is a major step in the militarization of space and the escalation of war plans targeting nuclear-armed Russia and China. Meink spoke more than six months into the US-Israeli war on Iran, a day after Russian forces struck a passenger train near the Polish border and 10 days before Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House.

The Trump administration has abandoned or bypassed a series of arms-control agreements. In 2018, Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and in 2019, out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which had banned a class of US and Russian missiles. In 2020, he left the Open Skies Treaty, which had allowed unarmed surveillance flights.

New START, the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, expired February 5; Trump had given no formal answer to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to observe its limits for another year.

On October 30, 2025, Trump ordered the Pentagon “to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” and the next day the United States cast, for the first time, the lone vote against the annual resolution of the UN disarmament committee backing the moratorium on nuclear testing. The United States has not set off a nuclear explosive test since 1992.

On November 4, Alison Storsve, the US delegate, told the committee that the United States “must vote NO on the resolution” titled “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space.”

“I don’t want to tell Beijing and Moscow what I’ve done,” Lieutenant General Gregory Gagnon, head of Space Force Combat Forces Command, said of measures to protect US satellites in February. “We also need, as part of our joint force, the ability to attack.” In December 2025, the administration announced a record $11 billion arms package for Taiwan.

The Wall Street Journal, praising the move in a Tuesday editorial, noted that it takes place ahead of Xi’s arrival: “The timing of the space announcement may be no accident coming ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington next week.”

Meink refused to say what the weapons are, how many there are or when they were launched. The Space Force said in a statement to ABC News published Tuesday that the weapons “can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.”

Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation, a research group, told Defense One on Monday: “I don’t think any US government official has ever said that before. The US also now has to accept the Chinese and Russians doing/saying the same.” She told Al Jazeera Tuesday, “What this does is normalise weaponising space.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said Tuesday, “We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the same day that “space must be free of any weapon.”

In January 2025, US President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to build “proliferated space-based interceptors,” a program named Golden Dome that he priced at $175 billion that May. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this May that such a system would cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years, most of it for about 7,800 space-based interceptors.

The administration is asking $71.3 billion for the Space Force next fiscal year, nearly double the $40.1 billion requested a year earlier, inside the $1.5 trillion military budget it requested in April, a 44 percent increase over this year’s and the largest since World War II.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which 118 states, including the United States, are party, commits its signatories “not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”

It reserves the moon and other celestial bodies “exclusively for peaceful purposes” but says nothing about conventional weapons in orbit, and the Space Force said Monday that its operations comply with it.

The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between Washington and Moscow barred each side from developing, testing or deploying missile-defense systems that are “sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based.” US President George W. Bush withdrew from it in 2002, and Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors are the type of weapons it barred.

September 21, 2026 Posted by | space travel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The West is watching the wrong Ukrainian collapse

The detachment of the Ukrainian state from society did not begin yesterday. It started the moment the Ukrainian authorities placed the interests of their Western masters above those of their country.

As winter approaches, Ukraine again finds itself at a crossroads. And it appears to be once again choosing the path of war, a path that it’s being desperately pushed onto by Europe’s anti-Russia coalition. 

Missiles and territorial losses dominate the headlines, while the deeper rupture between state and society goes largely unnoticed

Sergey Poletaev, 14 Sept 26, https://www.rt.com/russia/645729-west-is-watching-wrong-ukrainian-collapse/

Last weekend, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and then Kiev. This was the first such visit in a long time, since all trilateral contacts between Russia, the US, and Ukraine were practically halted following the start of the conflict in Iran this February.

Following the visit, leaks regarding the talks emerged from Kiev; reportedly, the US envoys presented the Ukrainian side with a 28-point Russian peace plan that had been agreed upon a year earlier. Jared Kushner indirectly confirmed this on Saturday, stating that the territorial issue was the only point of the peace plan that remained unresolved.

Is it true that Ukraine accepted all the other fundamental demands of the Russian side – such as the points concerning the Russian language and the status of the Orthodox Church, the renunciation of military cooperation with NATO, the recognition of territorial changes, the reduction of the army, and so on? (Spoiler: no, it didn’t.)

Is Ukraine really losing the war, as many recent statements and publications suggest? Spoiler: yes, but not in the way you’d think. 

Let’s take a look at what this means. 

Shuttle diplomacy

The peace talks involving Steve Witkoff began in February-March 2025, shortly after a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump that signaled a fundamental shift in US policy toward Russia and the Ukraine conflict. 

Trump’s top priority was to avoid direct involvement, positioning America – as far as possible – at an equal distance from the parties. Of course, to truly achieve this, the conflict would have to be frozen; this would allow the US to restore relations with Russia, counterbalancing China. 

Naturally, freezing the conflict (or, in Trump’s words, ending the war in one day) proved impossible; consequently, the US made the most out of the situation as the war dragged on: it shifted the entire burden onto Europe and stepped aside. This strategy allowed the US to maintain working contacts with Russia, reap maximum benefits from the ongoing fighting, and insulate itself from the risks of Ukraine’s potential defeat while still keeping the door open to capitalize on Ukraine’s hypothetical victory over Russia.

In short, Trump decided to sit on the sidelines and watch who would emerge victorious. 

For Moscow, too, contacts with Washington are incredibly valuable. It proved impossible to decouple Russia-US relations from the Ukraine issue, and relations between the two countries have effectively remained frozen. Yet the fact that the US is disengaging from the Ukraine conflict – and, more broadly, from European affairs – deprives Europe of confidence in US backing and consequently strips it of strategic depth.

The flip side of this maneuver is that the US has effectively relinquished its decisive say regarding Ukraine. Putin and Trump could reach any agreement whatsoever, but Ukraine is now entirely dependent on Europe. This means that it is Europe that will ultimately determine the final terms. As a Russian saying goes, “He who pays for the girl’s dinner gets to dance with her.”

Surely, Trump could exert pressure on all sides, but why bother? He is essentially satisfied with the current situation and needs nothing more from Moscow. So he has simply let things run their course,

Kiev is well aware of this, which is why Ukrainian officials play along with US envoys. Though direct opposition is out of the question – after all, they still need American missile defense systems – they can avoid any action and buy time. And that’s precisely what Kiev is doing. 

The fact that Zelensky visited Canada last week but not the US clearly shows that Kiev no longer sees Washington as the primary center of decision-making. Consequently, the negotiation track involving Witkoff and Kushner is seen by the Ukrainian side as little more than a mandatory part of the show. 

Is Ukraine losing? Yes, but not in the way you might think

On September 8, British magazine The Spectator published an editorial titled ‘Ukraine is losing the war’. A week before, several prominent Ukrainian figures – including former Defense Minister Mikhail Fyodorov and the current head of Zelensky’s office, Kirill Budanov – had expressed similar sentiments.

At first glance, this may sound reasonable: the AFU’s deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure wasn’t successful, and the summer offensive on the southern front, which is crucial for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has de facto failed. 

Moreover, Ukraine was unprepared for retaliatory strikes targeting port facilities, logistics, energy infrastructure, and transport networks. This confirmed what experts had been saying for over a year: Ukraine’s air defense systems, which are entirely dependent on US supplies and severely depleted, could barely cope with the previous intensity of air raids; now they can shoot down one ballistic missile out of a dozen, at best. This has made it possible for the Russian Army to launch massive attacks on the Ukrainian rear.

Of course, massive raids by Ukrainian drones and, occasionally, cruise missiles also inflict damage on the Russian rear. This summer was marked by a gasoline shortage and long lines at gas stations. Dozens of warehouses in the European part of Russia are in flames, and other targets are under attack as well. 

However, the scale of these attacks is incomparable: by various estimates, the AFU managed to disable up to 3% of Russia’s warehouse storage capacity, whereas Russia has disabled between 30% and 60% of Ukraine’s capacity. Ukrainian experts admit that the strikes on Odessa port have had a far greater impact on Ukraine’s fuel logistics than Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

For instance, the price of diesel fuel in Ukraine has topped 100 hryvnias, which is nearly three times the cost in Russia. For the first time since the start of the conflict, fuel rationing is being introduced for the AFU (no such measures have ever been implemented for the Russian Armed Forces).

Russian strikes have effectively halted Ukrainian grain exports by sea, depriving the national budget of a key revenue stream. Retail businesses are closing en masse, undermining what is arguably the economy’s last remaining civilian sector.

This looks like an obvious reason why Ukraine is losing the war. So does this mean that all those hysterical reports and articles are actually true?

Not quite. I would venture to say that all the above-mentioned factors are merely temporary difficulties to which Ukraine can adapt, and which have little impact on the situation at the front. It’s true that there is a gaping hole worth tens of billions of dollars in the Ukrainian budget; likewise, it’s true that the civilian population will face a harsh winter; and yes, what remains of the energy and industrial sectors is under constant attack. 

But all this means that the additional financial burden will fall on Europe’s shoulders, while the civilian sector and the state’s capacity to fulfill social obligations will continue to deteriorate; the people will be left to their fate. 

All this will affect not only ordinary citizens but entrepreneurs as well. Ukrainian businesses, which largely supported the Kiev regime and the war simply because there were no other options (given that their future was directly tied to that of the central government), are also being left to fend for themselves.

The central tension in Ukrainian society right now is the smoldering civil conflict between Territorial Centers of Recruitment (TCRs) and the men who are being conscripted by force. The destruction of the civilian economy is likely to spawn similar scenarios: bankrupt entrepreneurs, an impoverished middle class, and the unemployed will all see that the Ukrainian state is doing them more harm than good. As a result, the state itself, and not just state-controlled TCRs, will become the enemy. 

One might argue that as opportunities and funds in the civilian sector decline, the military sector becomes more attractive. However, there are no new opportunities in military production and logistics (after all, Ukraine has no money), and fewer people are willing to die on the front lines.

All of this will lead to an even greater disconnect between the Ukrainian state and society. And a state severed from society is essentially a military organization. History offers us many such examples, the most recent being ISIS.

A military organization that lacks the support of civil society cannot hold the front line, especially one stretching 1,500 kilometers. There are no historical precedents for this. 

A collapse of the front would mean the end of Ukraine in its current form. Kiev understands this perfectly well, which is why it undertakes superhuman efforts to hold the line – even at the cost of a smoldering civil war on the home front.

The detachment of the Ukrainian state from society did not begin yesterday. It started the moment the Ukrainian authorities placed the interests of their Western masters above those of their country.

As winter approaches, Ukraine again finds itself at a crossroads. And it appears to be once again choosing the path of war, a path that it’s being desperately pushed onto by Europe’s anti-Russia coalition. 

That is precisely why Witkoff and Kushner left Kiev empty-handed, and why the war will continue – first until the Kiev regime is completely severed from Ukraine, and then until that regime is utterly destroyed.

If you need an example, just look at ISIS. 

September 21, 2026 Posted by | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

The Pentagon must prepare for battles around the moon: Joint Chiefs chair

Days after orbital weapons were revealed, Gen. Dan Caine ups the scope of the military’s desired reach.

Defense One, 16 Sept 26, Thomas Novelly


NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.— The U.S. military’s top uniformed leader says U.S. forces must be ready for war near or possibly even on the moon, a rhetorical leap that comes as service leaders are still wrestling with the legal frameworks surrounding its newly revealed orbital weapons.

“Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told airmen, guardians, and industry figures during his keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference.

Caine later repeated the thought—“today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space”—but he did not clarify whether he meant on the moon’s surface. U.S. law is ambiguous, defining cislunar space as “the region of space from the Earth out to and including the region around the surface of the moon.” At least one Harvard Law Journal article interprets the clause to mean on the moon itself, and the White House’s National Cislunar Science and Technology Action Plan explicitly said in late 2024 that it includes the lunar surface.  But the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2021 “Primer on Cislunar Space” appears to treat space and the moon’s surface as two different domains.

Caine pointed to recent comments made about orbital weapons by the Air Force secretary and the Space Force’s chief of space operations. Top space force officials have been hesitant to provide more details on how they would operate in that domain and how they’d responsibly use space weapons in future conflicts………………………………..

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the U.S. signed, outlaws certain military behaviors on the Moon and states that it shall be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” 

“The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited.”

Space Force Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the head of Combat Forces Command, told reporters during a media roundtable that the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons are now both sharing the cislunar mission among each other. ………………………https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/09/pentagon-battles-moon-joint-chiefs-chairman/416021/?oref=d1-skybox-post

September 21, 2026 Posted by | space travel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Labour won’t order new nuclear submarines for Royal Navy until 2028, Wes Streeting admits

Labour won’t order new nuclear submarines for Royal Navy until 2028, Wes
Streeting admits. Labour will not order any new nuclear-powered submarines
until 2028 as concerns grow over delays to Britain’s naval expansion plans.
Sir Keir Starmer last year said Labour would decide how many submarines to
commission by the time its Defence Investment Plan was published. The
report was released on June 30. But the Government has now postponed its
commitment to buying submarines until 2028.

Daily Mail 13th Sept 2026,
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16127723/labour-delays-nuclear-submarine-decision-2028.html

September 21, 2026 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Meta Wants To Build A $50 Billion Data Center In Louisiana

A small, rural community in Louisiana is confronting what it means to become the home of Big Tech’s next industrial megaproject.

Kieran Spencer, Breakthrough News, September 11 2026

Meta wants to build one of the largest data centers in the world in rural Louisiana. 

The facility, known as Hyperion, is being built to train and operate the artificial intelligence systems behind Meta’s products. What began as a $10 billion proposal has since ballooned into a more than $50 billion development spanning nearly 10 million square feet and roughly 3,650 acres. At full scale, Hyperion is expected to require 5 gigawatts of computing capacity, making it the largest data center in Meta’s global fleet and one of the largest ever built. According to Meta, the project is expected to employ around 7,500 workers during peak construction and support 1,000 permanent jobs once operational.

For residents of Richland Parish, the arrival of Meta has brought both desperately needed jobs and profound uncertainty about what the project will mean for the community. The enormous facility is being constructed on former farmland and will require an equally immense network of infrastructure to support it. In nearby Rayville, many residents view Meta as an economic lifeline after decades of limited employment opportunities, with local families securing jobs that pay far more than the parish’s median income. But the influx of highly paid, out-of-town workers has also driven up rent and the cost of living as landlords and businesses increasingly orient themselves toward Meta employees. Landlords routinely raise the rent of low-income housing in order to price out local tenants in favor of contractors, forcing residents to move out of the area to afford housing…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Meta’s empty promises of economic growth

The public’s skepticism is warranted. Data centers routinely generate thousands of temporary construction jobs while creating only a fraction as many permanent positions once construction ends. Meta’s projects in Texas and Oklahoma, for example, are expected to leave only around 100 operational jobs each after thousands of construction workers leave. QTS similarly estimates that a data center campus in York County, North Carolina will produce roughly 1,000 construction jobs but only about 100 permanent onsite positions. Even Hyperion’s original proposal called for roughly 5,000 construction workers but only 500 permanent operational employees. None of these figures guarantee that the permanent positions will go to Richland Parish residents. Meta has offered assurances about local hiring, but there is no binding commitment requiring the company to employ local workers.

Meta also claims the data center will bring tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue to Richland Parish, an argument it bolsters by pointing to the 2,000% increase in sales-tax totals since construction began – $50,000 of which has funded bonuses for some local schoolteachers. But that windfall is largely a product of the construction boom itself, not a sustainable source of revenue generated by the completed data center. The teacher bonuses are distributed through Richland Parish’s longstanding one-cent sales-tax program, which provides annual “13th checks” to eligible school employees. As those construction workers spend money in the parish, that pool has temporarily grown; once construction ends, so will much of the revenue feeding it. The result is a temporary infusion of money that can obscure the longer-term fiscal consequences of the project. When the construction boom ends, Richland Parish will be left with the costs of a massive industrial project, and fewer public resources to pay for them.

Cementing Louisiana’s dependence on fossil fuels amid environmental devastation

The environmental impact of the Meta data center could also be deadly for residents of Richland Parish and Louisiana as a whole. The Hyperion AI data center is expected to consume roughly half of the state’s electrical capacity – approximately seven times the energy consumed by the entire city of New Orleans – placing enormous new demands on Entergy’s already overburdened power grid. Louisiana residents know what a fragile electrical system can mean in a disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, Entergy’s restoration efforts took 42 days to complete across its service territory. In 2021, Hurricane Ida left nearly 950,000 customers without power after an Entergy tower fell into the Mississippi River, a disaster that required 15 days of restoration work just to bring more than 90% of affected customers back online.

Rather than address these vulnerabilities, Entergy’s proposed solution to Hyperion’s unprecedented energy demands is to build an entirely new fossil-fuel energy infrastructure around the data center. The company plans to construct ten natural-gas power plants, including seven new facilities capable of generating roughly 5.2 gigawatts of electricity, alongside new transmission lines and a massive 500-kilovolt substation. Meta, Entergy, and the Louisiana state government are working to present these projects as investments that will strengthen Louisiana’s electrical grid and improve reliability for ordinary customers.

Louisiana is being asked to construct an enormous new fossil-fuel-based energy system so that a single private corporation can consume an unprecedented share of its electricity. More generation may increase capacity, but it does not eliminate the physical vulnerabilities that have repeatedly left Louisiana residents without power after hurricanes. Instead, the state is doubling down on a centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent grid whose infrastructure will remain vulnerable to the same storms that have already decimated Louisiana’s communities.

Entergy’s catastrophic deal with Meta has arrived as Louisiana is already on the front lines of an environmental crisis. The state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land since 1932 and continues to lose more than 16 square miles each year. The state has experienced 31 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters since 2018, leaving communities to repeatedly rebuild from hurricanes, flooding, and extreme weather. Meanwhile, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the area known as “Cancer Alley” contains a dense concentration of petrochemical and chemical facilities, exposing surrounding communities to significant air pollution and toxic emissions which have resulted in a cancer rate fifty times higher than the national average.

People of Louisiana reject corporate profiteering…………………………………………………………………..

The resistance emerging across Louisiana is more than a battle over a single data center. It is a decisive stand for the right of Louisianians to determine their own future, rather than surrender it to corporate interests. This is a battle for the future of working people everywhere, and the people have vowed to keep fighting https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/09/11/meta-wants-to-build-a-50-billion-data-center-in-louisiana/

September 21, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

UK to sign nuclear fusion AI pact with US

Government estimates that bringing “fusion power closer to reality” will create 10,000 UK jobs by 2030.

September 14th 2026,  https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/603758/uk-to-sign-nuclear-fusion-ai-pact-with-us/

The UK and the US are expected to announced agreements at a summit in London aimed at delivering progress across the global fusion energy sector.

The first agreement will launch a new supercomputing partnership between the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, combining AI computing and fusion to accelerate development.

The UK and US will also sign a joint statement committing to closer co-operation on regulating fusion energy at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London Monday.

Energy minister Michael Shanks said nuclear fusion, a nascent technology, would deliver thousands of jobs in the UK in the next three years.

The UK has been pursuing fusion technology through a series of investment and support programs based around Oxford, Birmingham and Nottingham, and announced “record” £2.5 billion investment in fusion energy technology in May.

According to the UK Fusion Investment Prospectus, also published in May, the global fusion market could in future be worth between £3 trillion and £12trn.

Energy minister, Michael Shanks, said: “Fusion has the potential to provide virtually limitless clean energy while supporting more than 10,000 jobs across the UK by 2030, attracting investment and creating major opportunities for British businesses.

“By strengthening our partnership with the US we’re accelerating the race to commercial fusion, turning cutting-edge research into economic growth and cementing Britain’s position as a world leader in fusion energy.”

On top of the UK-US agreements, Japan’s largest fusion company, Kyoto Fusioneering, will also invest up to £3 million in the UK’s prototype fusion energy plant, the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project at the former coal-burning West Burton power station in Nottingham.

Further, the University of Birmingham’s Electric Power Research Institute and industry partners have launched a £2.63 million collaboration on fusion materials through through the FURESHMA (Fusion Reactor Shielding Materials) programme.

Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) minister for the Americas, Chris Elmore said: “The UK’s relationship with the United States supports growth and thousands of jobs at home.

“By bringing together world-leading expertise in fusion, artificial intelligence and advanced computing, we’re helping British businesses and researchers access the investment, knowledge and international partnerships needed to succeed in the industries of the future.”

September 21, 2026 Posted by | politics international, technology | Leave a comment

UK Nuclear Startup Signs MOU On Technology To ‘Dramatically’ Speed Up Component Production for planned Odin microreactor

By David Dalton, 16 September 2026, https://www.nucnet.org/news/uk-nuclear-startup-signs-mou-on-technology-to-dramatically-speed-up-component-production-9-3-2026

Companies will explore uses for planned Odin microreactor

UK nuclear engineering startup Cambridge Atomworks has signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambridge Vacuum Engineering (CVE) to explore how best to use technology that could dramatically accelerate the production of critical nuclear power components including reactor vessels and internals.

A statement said the aim is to leverage CVE’s expertise in electron beam welding, including the company’s Ebflow technology.

The two companies will explore the use of advanced electron beam welding to manufacture critical components for the Odin microreactor project.

The Odin microreactor was originally developed by US-based Nano Nuclear Energy. It is designed to fit within standard shipping containers to provide energy for remote communities, disaster relief and industrial sites.

In 2025 Nano Nuclear announced it was selling the Odin design and all associated intellectual property to Cambridge Atomworks, which had already been developing Odin for Nano Nuclear on an outsourced consulting basis.

Cambridge Atomworks is aiming to have an operational prototype of Odin by 2031.

Odin is a low-pressure reactor that uses solid nuclear fuel and molten salt coolant and is designed as a transportable, standalone power system. Manufactured largely offsite and deployed with minimal supporting infrastructure, potential applications for Odin include mining operations, remote and island communities, developing markets and other off-grid industrial users where reliable power can otherwise be expensive or logistically difficult to provide.

Ian Farnan, chief executive officer at Cambridge Atomworks, said “the agreement with CVE is an important step in developing the supply chain and manufacturing approach needed to make the Odin microreactor technology a reality.

He said: “Electron beam welding has the potential to transform how key reactor components are manufactured.”

September 21, 2026 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK | Leave a comment

Don’t get ‘locked in’ by EU rules, top nuclear adviser warns Burnham

John Fingleton tells POLITICO “risk aversion” in Whitehall must not
slow Britain’s dash for new nuclear. Britain should not feel “locked
into” pre-Brexit EU environmental rules as it tries to rapidly boost its
nuclear power capacity, a top adviser to the government has warned. John
Fingleton, author of an influential government-commissioned review into how
red tape is blocking new U.K. nuclear projects, said in an interview that
Whitehall should not dampen efforts to boost domestic capacity through
“risk aversion.” “I think on some of the environmental things there’s
a risk that people in the system legally think we’re locked into EU
regulation circa 2022 when we left [the EU],” he said.

Politico 17th Sept 2026,
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-rules-nuclear-power-adviser-john-fingleton-andy-burnham/

September 21, 2026 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Cory Doctorow: AI’s big beasts aren’t really scared of their products. They’re scared of their competition

Once the government stipulates that “superintelligence risk” is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another.

The US giants would love to stop battling each other and be protected from China – and they might have hit on just the narrative to make that possible, writes our tech columnist

Cory Doctorow, Sep 19, 2026, https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-superintelligence-openai-anthropic-google-meta?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=the-trouble-with-steven-pinker-weekend-edition&_bhlid=908300191252e2da6f90f63419219331f1249af1

There’s lots of reasons to believe the “hyperscaler” model of AI can never be profitable. This business model pursued by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and others of spending billions on chips and data centres in the hope of recouping it through subscriptions is delusional because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products).

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance-sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they’re faking their finances is very strong.

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you’ll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of “profitable” that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics. 

But let’s give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money furnaces they’ve been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who’ve supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shovelling into their models’ coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they’re saying: “Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running carriages over them and make a profit.” Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, scores of OpenAI’s best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That’s because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker: “What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?” and to a one, they said: “No problem, we’ve designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse.”

That means that you can’t just “build the railroad and run the carriages over it”. The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they’ve got a new, adjacent railroad that’s even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen’s race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a non-aggression pact among themselves promising not to compete any more. But there’s two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another; and, second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese “open weight” models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US “frontier models” by a mere four months.

Freaking out about superintelligence is a canonical example of ‘criti-hype’, where critics repeat boosters’ claims but append ‘(and that’s bad)’ to them

Even if you don’t trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust.

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen’s race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on “superintelligence”.

Once the government stipulates that “superintelligence risk” is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another.

Freaking out about “superintelligence” is a canonical example of “criti-hype”, where critics repeat boosters’ claims but append “(and that’s bad)” to them.

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai colluded to rig the ad market with a secret program called Jedi Blue. Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20bn in exchange for Apple not entering the search market. And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret “no poach” agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another’s top engineers by offering them raises.

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he’s just talking about Greta Thunberg) is “wasteful competition”.

When an industry that is eating itself alive through hyperscaling demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open-source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its “rogue AI hacking” story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do.

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it’s because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO is indirectly propped up by X engagement metrics generated by letting the world’s stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs using Grok. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn’t mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanours.

This is an edited version of a post from pluralistic.net. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 creative commons licence

Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is published by Verso

September 20, 2026 Posted by | spinbuster, technology | Leave a comment

Lawfare Daily: ‘The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI’—A Conversation with Cory Doctorow

Jun 30, 2026 Lawfare DailyOn this episode of Lawfare Daily, Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speak with Cory Doctorow—science fiction author, activist, journalist, adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the writer who coined “enshittification”—about his new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.” Doctorow argues that the most important thing about the AI boom isn’t what the technology can or can’t do, but the historic investment bubble and the new arrangements of work being built on top of it—the same analytic lens he brought to platform decay, now turned on AI. They discuss whether the AI bubble will actually burst or merely deflate, and the unit economics underneath it; the “reverse centaur,” the worker conscripted to serve the machine; and how it maps onto a broader culture and questions of AI “knowledge collapse,” the human analogue to AI model collapse.

September 20, 2026 Posted by | media | Leave a comment

26 September International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

United Nations, September 2026

Achieving global nuclear disarmament is the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations. It was the subject of the General Assembly’s first resolution in 1946, which established the Atomic Energy Commission (dissolved in 1952), with a mandate to make specific proposals for the control of nuclear energy and the elimination of atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction. The United Nations has been at the forefront of many major diplomatic efforts to advance nuclear disarmament since. In 1959, the General Assembly endorsed the objective of general and complete disarmament. In 1978, the first Special Session of the General Assembly Devoted to Disarmament further recognized that nuclear disarmament should be the priority objective in the field of disarmament. Every United Nations Secretary-General has actively promoted this goal.

Yet, today an estimated 12,187 nuclear weapons remain. Countries possessing such weapons have well-funded, long-term plans to modernize their nuclear arsenals. More than half of the world’s population still lives in countries that either have such weapons or are members of nuclear alliances. While the number of deployed nuclear weapons has appreciably declined since the height of the Cold War, not one nuclear weapon has been physically destroyed pursuant to a treaty. In addition, no nuclear disarmament negotiations are currently underway.

Meanwhile, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence persists as an element in the security policies of all possessor states and many of their allies. The international arms-control framework that contributed to international security since the Cold War, acted as a brake on the use of nuclear weapons and advanced nuclear disarmament, has come under increasing strain. On 2 August 2019, the United States’ withdrawal spelled the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, through with the United States and the Russian Federation had previously committed to eliminating an entire class of nuclear missiles. Furthermore, the Russian Federation announced on 21 February 2023 that it will suspend its participation in the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (“New START”). The extension of New START until February 2026 had provided an opportunity for the possessors of the two largest nuclear arsenals to agree to further arms control measures, however it expired on 5 February 2026 without a successor arrangement. Consequently, for the first time since the 1970s, no agreed limits constrain the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation.

Frustration has been growing amongst Member States regarding what is perceived as the slow pace of nuclear disarmament. This frustration has been put into sharper focus with growing concerns about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of even a single nuclear weapon, let alone a regional or global nuclear war.

The General Assembly commemorates 26 September as the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. This Day provides an occasion for the world community to reaffirm its commitment to global nuclear disarmament as a priority. It provides an opportunity to educate the public – and their leaders – about the real benefits of eliminating such weapons, and the social and economic costs of perpetuating them. Commemorating this Day at the United Nations is especially important, given its universal membership and its long experience in grappling with nuclear disarmament issues. It is the right place to address one of humanity’s greatest challenges; achieving the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

In accordance with General Assembly resolution 68/32 and subsequent resolutions, the purpose of the International Day is to further the objective of the total elimination of nuclear weapons through enhancing public awareness and education about the threat posed to humanity by nuclear weapons and the necessity for their total elimination. In so doing, it is hoped that these activities will help to mobilize new international efforts towards achieving the common goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.un.org/en/observances/nuclear-weapons-elimination-day

September 20, 2026 Posted by | Events | 1 Comment

Under Cover Of AI Doomsday, Big Tech Is Writing Its Own Rules

Today, democracy and the rule of law are controversial among billionaires in Silicon Valley and in the AI Safety world. Many simply don’t think it’s viable or moral. They believe the best case is for humanity to live in a gilded cage, fed and treated well by those rational enough to look out for the best interests of most of us, who cannot otherwise care for ourselves. To that end, anything they do to benefit their own power is virtuous.

“The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity. These are actually just literal quotes from my colleagues at Anthropic. They’ll say things like ‘endgame’ or ‘crunch time.’ From their perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity“

To unpack this, I’ll first describe the technology as best I can. Then I’ll offer two different narratives of what is happening. The first narrative, the doomer narrative driving this panic, is that AI is a new form of civilization uncontrollable by humans, and we are moving quickly toward a singularity where bots will take over. The second narrative, call it the “rule-of-law” narrative, is that AI products are risky, perhaps existentially risky, but they are manageable if we can apply standard rules, such as negligence or criminal fraud, to the powerful people building them.


Matt Stoller THE LEVER, September 16, 2026

Silicon Valley says its machines could destroy humanity.

The more immediate danger is letting the people building AI decide how they’re governed.

Editor’s note: Since Matt Stoller first published this essay on his Substack on Friday amid the mounting AI crisis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei hascalled for slowing the development of powerful AI models, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hassaid an OpenAI IPO right now would be “ill-advised.”

But Stoller’s central point remains unchanged: The companies building these systems are still asking to set the rules. The real AI crisis doesn’t lie within the technology; it’s our failure to govern the powerful people building and profiting from it.

Something very weird is going on in our political economy discourse.

Over the past month, the executives at the top AI companies have engineered a slow-motion panic over AI, snowballing into an argument that they are on the verge of creating a technology with a reasonable chance of ending human civilization. A few days ago, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old AI researcher at Anthropic, resigned his role and posted a thread on X, arguing these companies are building super-intelligent systems that may destroy the world. Coxon’s comments garnered a front-page Wall Street Journal story, more than 110 million views, and wide commentary from lawmakers, CEOs, AI experts, and journalists.

Then another 20-something Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, chimed in to say that most employees at Anthropic agreed with Coxon, and “do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” putting the odds at 10 percent within the next decade. These are extraordinary claims, and the people making them are nicknamed “AI Doomers” or sometimes called the “AI Safety” movement. This group loosely encompasses the network that used to surround disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, a quasi-religious order known as effective altruists, who believe a cadre of hyper-rational elites can guide humanity. Despite their weirdness, this technology’s capabilities are improving, and some dangerous events have happened recently.

Yet at the same time, Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence “frontier lab,” is likely to go public in the next six weeks with an initial public offering valuing the firm at multiple trillions. This move will immediately create many AI doomer billionaires and millionaires, and it follows a similar IPO from SpaceX and a possible future IPO for a similar firm, OpenAI. It’s about to be very good times for San Francisco real estate, the yacht business, or whatever else AI techies like to buy.

That said, it’s not clear these companies have a sustainable business. Despite raising hundreds of billions of dollars, they are likely not profitable. They are competing fiercely with each other, and with cheaper Chinese open-source models. OpenAI just cut pricing for one of its models by 80 percent, despite losing $26 billion in 2025. Where are the long-term sustainable profits? To remain at the frontier with pricing power, these guys have to spend every dollar of revenue they bring in on training ever more powerful models and then some.

Despite these financial hurdles and predictions of mass extinction, no one is considering canceling the IPOs. And that is true despite the fact that the AI doomer messaging has now broken through to the culture and politics writ large. Former Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin have suggested a Presidential working group on AI risk, modeled after similar commissions put together to deal with financial crises. Bernie Sanders is convening senators over the threats to humanity by AI and calling for a pause on AI development; Ted Cruz is calling for guardrails, and Democrats are considering a special House committee to look at Big Tech and AI. Celebrities like Sheryl Crow are posting in all black on their Instagram accounts.

Something about this odd dynamic, of multitrillion-dollar IPOs by loss-making companies, combined with panicky messages of doom passed around via influencers, seems off. It’s not that there’s no risk to AI systems. It’s that if you don’t accept the full doomer worldview, you get gaslit as not taking risk seriously. Right after 9/11, during the debate over the war in Iraq, the financial crisis in 2008, right before COVID-19, and during various bailouts, I was distressed by the broad demand to stop thinking or reasoning, as the urgency was too great to delay action. A similar pressure campaign feels like it’s happening now. And I’m not alone; experienced tech investor Roger McNamee and many others see it too.

It’s hard to escape that there’s something very strange and manipulative about AI safety discourse. The AI doomers have a lot of money; they run the major AI companies; they fund most AI research; and they staff the major AI Safety nonprofits, like the one that investigates security problems. Many are sincere, but the strange hyper-rationalist effective altruism theology is a huge part of the AI Safety space. As an academic computer scientist who has been around this world for a decade told me, “It’s a weird quasi-religion, like a cult. The core people are sociopaths, and then the rest are neurotics.” It’s not a coincidence that Sam Bankman-Fried was the single most important early funder of Anthropic.

So what is the real deal with AI products? Is it all just a ruse? Not at all. Agentic AI is truly a through-the-looking-glass type of technology that does unexpected things and presents new challenges.

To unpack this, I’ll first describe the technology as best I can. Then I’ll offer two different narratives of what is happening. The first narrative, the doomer narrative driving this panic, is that AI is a new form of civilization uncontrollable by humans, and we are moving quickly toward a singularity where bots will take over. The second narrative, call it the “rule-of-law” narrative, is that AI products are risky, perhaps existentially risky, but they are manageable if we can apply standard rules, such as negligence or criminal fraud, to the powerful people building them.

Ok, let’s go to the technology…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The AI Doomer Narrative

We’ll start with the doomers. Their view of the world is based on the idea that building generalized artificial intelligence is likely to end humanity, and they have believed that for many years. But they see the last six months as particularly validating to their fears……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The narrative from the AI Doomer world, most prominently an essayist named Dwarkesh Patel, is that this story shows we are on the verge of being supplanted as the dominant species on earth. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. So that’s the doomer narrative. And it is quite scary.

The Rule-Of-Law Narrative

Now, let’s go to the rule-of-law narrative, in which agents are not creatures, but are simply unsafe machines.

In this telling, it’s important not to think of agents as humans with wants and desires………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The bottom line is that OpenAI researchers released a system designed to hack, gave it access to powerful tools, let it run wild, and then it did the hell out of what it was asked to do in ways these researchers did not fully anticipate……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Why isn’t it possible to force model developers to invest in tech to make agents safer? Well, it is. We just choose not to force the powerful financiers at these AI firms to invest in safer products. “Perhaps it’s time that we put aside the sci-fi tales,” writes Newport, “and actually hold these labs to account for playing fast and loose with an ill-advised way of building AI systems.”

The Real Crisis

So where do I come down? Well, I think you can tell I believe in the rule-of-law narrative. And that’s because the evidence for it is overwhelming. It just doesn’t make any sense that we’d allow OpenAI and Anthropic to go public at multitrillion-dollar valuations, even though they make deeply unsafe products, unless we have a crisis with the rule of law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

This dynamic isn’t driven by technological advance, it’s driven by a refusal to collectively manage risk. We just don’t govern. It’s true that AI creates serious cybersecurity vulnerabilities in our society for which we are unprepared, but it’s also true that corporations have successfully lobbied aggressively against being mandated to patch software infrastructure for many years, worsening this situation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….We haven’t constrained new technologies for decades, because we lost touch with our traditions of public governance. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Today, democracy and the rule of law are controversial among billionaires in Silicon Valley and in the AI Safety world. Many simply don’t think it’s viable or moral. They believe the best case is for humanity to live in a gilded cage, fed and treated well by those rational enough to look out for the best interests of most of us, who cannot otherwise care for ourselves. To that end, anything they do to benefit their own power is virtuous………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity. These are actually just literal quotes from my colleagues at Anthropic. They’ll say things like ‘endgame’ or ‘crunch time.’ From their perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Now it’s certainly possible to assume we will never be able to govern risk as a society. But recognize that’s not actually a fear of technology; it’s an argument about the inevitable weakness of democracy and how self-government is a ruse that will lead to our collective annihilation, while an all-powerful caste, by contrast, can protect and enrich our lives. It’s very Divine Right of Kings, actually.

In other words, the AI Safety goal is to find a way to place what they perceive as the immense power of AI in the hands of the only people capable enough to prevent the destruction of the human species, and not have to deal with those petty things like laws, competition, or democratic feedback. The real doomer solution for humanity is for the Anthropic IPO to go really, really well and to find a way to turn those losses into profits. So color me skeptical of ghost stories. We can manage the risks of AI products. The real crisis is that we no longer manage the risks of anything. https://www.levernews.com/the-ai-doomsday-distraction/

September 20, 2026 Posted by | politics international | Leave a comment

Trump denials can’t hide $billions in US weapons sent to Ukraine

These continuing deliveries are not new awards, but they are still taxpayer-funded military aid to Ukraine that will add up to about $20 billion in aid over the 4 years of Trump’s term.

What Ukraine needs much more than weapons, and what the United States continues to provide in increasing amounts, is intelligence, logistics, and operational support.  The details of this support are classified, but public reporting offers some insight.

Jennifer Kavanagh, 9 Sept 26, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-weapons-aid/

Trying to pin the blame for the depletion of U.S. military stockpiles on something other than the war in Iran, President Donald Trump fell back on a usual scapegoat last week: Ukraine. “The Biden administration gave far more munitions away to Ukraine, at no cost to them whatsoever, than we have used in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

This is a familiar refrain. Trump loves to remind his audience that because of him, Americans are “not spending on Ukraine anymore” and instead, Europe is footing the bill. In truth, most people in the United States don’t think about Ukraine much these days. But since Trump himself brought it up, it’s worth asking: What exactly is going on with U.S. military support to Ukraine?

The answer might surprise you. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the United States remains deeply embroiled in Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia in ways that create national security risks and run counter to Trump’s own foreign policy goals.

It is true that Trump has reduced U.S. support to Ukraine compared to its high mark under his predecessor, Joe Biden. First, his administration has stopped the use of Presidential Drawdown Authority to transfer weapons from U.S. stocks directly to Ukraine. The Biden administration used this mechanism to give Ukraine almost $35 billion in weapons free of charge. Second, the Trump administration has not requested additional funds for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which uses U.S. financing to purchase new weapons for Ukraine.

But Trump has not cut off all assistance to Ukraine. Several important channels remain. First, there are about $13 billion in outstanding USAI contracts as of June 2026, down from $20 billion in January 2025. These contracts, signed by Biden and now implemented by Trump, will procure weapons for Ukraine through about 2028. Weapons in the pipeline include longer-lead time systems like NASAMs, Patriot missiles and components (Ukraine is reportedly receiving at 10-20 PAC-3s per month under these contracts), counter-drone systems, artillery rockets, and ammunition.

These continuing deliveries are not new awards, but they are still taxpayer-funded military aid to Ukraine that will add up to about $20 billion in aid over the 4 years of Trump’s term. Weapons produced under these contracts come off overburdened U.S. production lines. This has a high opportunity cost given the limits of U.S. defense industrial capacity. Without obligations to Ukraine, industrial resources could shift to different weapons or systems that the United States needs more.

If the Trump administration were serious about ending U.S. spending on the Ukraine war, it could still recoup these funds and reallocate the money to support U.S. defense production needs. It has instead allowed the aid to continue.

There has also been some new funding approved since Biden left office. Congress included about $800 million of USAI funding in the 2026 and 2027 NDAAs. We can expect more in future bills as well.

And the State Department has continued to send military aid of its own. A portion of this aid goes through the Ukraine’s Ministry of Interior, including drones, armored vehicles, guns, grenade launchers, and similar equipment. Since this equipment ends up with Ukraine’s National Guard and border police it is often counted as non-military and intended for things like counterdrug operations, but today these personnel serve as combat units.

The State Department has also approved $3 billion of new arms sales to Ukraine in 2025 and 2026 that will be at least partially funded from foreign military financing (FMF), which means U.S. dollars supporting foreign government purchases of U.S. weapons. Some of these funds may come from money allocated but not spent under President Biden, but much of the funding will be new, coming from the State Department’s budget.

The bottom line is that U.S. weapons transfers to Ukraine continue under Trump, amounting to, on average, as much at $5 billion per year. But this is no longer the most important, or expensive, type of support that the United States gives to Ukraine

What Ukraine needs much more than weapons, and what the United States continues to provide in increasing amounts, is intelligence, logistics, and operational support.  The details of this support are classified, but public reporting offers some insight.

For example, the United States gives Ukraine real-time targeting information, including on the movement of Russian troops and the location of key command centers. This information has been important to Ukraine’s mid-range strike campaign on Russian logistics as well as its deep strikes against military and energy targets inside of Russia. In addition, U.S. reconnaissance and surveillance assets in countries on the NATO border (including routine E-3 flights) are integrated with Ukraine’s air defense network, improving the accuracy and speed of Ukraine’s response.

Beyond intelligence, the United States also provides logistical and maintenance support, including forward and remote assistance to repair American-made equipment, necessary spare parts to keep older systems running, and training. It also facilitates the expensive transfer of European purchases of U.S. weapons.

The cost of the intelligence, logistics, and other operational support the United States provides to Ukraine does not show up anywhere as an itemized bill, even as U.S. assistance increases. But we can use available public information to draw some conclusions about the expenses incurred.

The 2024 defense supplemental bill, for instance, allocated about $15 billion to “military training, intelligence sharing, increased presence, and other support activities.” In theory, these funds are intended to cover activities conducted in support of Ukraine that would not occur if the United States remained uninvolved in that conflict. Some portion of this money will go to the salaries of military personnel who would be paid no matter where they work.

Since about a third of each military service’s budget is personnel costs, we could estimate the cost of extra activities conducted for Ukraine, excluding baseline manpower, at about $10 billion over the course of a year or so. If Trump has truly expanded intelligence sharing with Ukraine, this price tag may have increased over time.

The money included in the bill is likely only a portion of the actual burden the U.S. military and intelligence community have shouldered to support Ukraine’s war. Many intelligence activities, like tasking and analyzing satellite data and collecting signals intelligence, might be covered in classified national security budgets. Starting in 2023, in fact, the classified intelligence budget increased by 10%, a large jump over the 2022 total. The increase was justified by intelligence community leaders as resulting from shifts in the national security landscape, including especially concern about China’s rise and spillover from conflict in Ukraine. Since the total increase in funding was about $10 billion, we can guess that Ukraine-related expenditures might amount to $3-$5 billion per year, or about one-third to one-half of the total increase.

All told, then, U.S. taxpayers are still spending roughly $20 billion per year on Ukraine. Today, assistance to Ukraine comes primarily in the form of direct operational support, not weapons. But the shift in type of aid increases the risk of U.S. support to Ukraine to average Americans.

First, assisting Ukraine in striking energy targets inside of Russia has a perverse effect on the Trump administration’s efforts to keep gas prices low. As Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent acknowledged, Ukraine’s strikes inside Russia push global oil prices up, imposing higher costs of living on Americans.

Second, U.S. intelligence support deepens U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war, making it an all-but-direct combatant. Russian assistance to Iran, both in terms of weapons and intelligence sharing, is a reaction to the comparable U.S. role in Ukraine, and it leaves U.S. servicemembers in the Middle East and elsewhere less safe. Growing U.S. participation in Ukraine also increases the risk that miscalculation leads to a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation, a nightmarish possibility given the degraded state of U.S. military readiness.

Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He has instead deepened U.S. entanglement in ways that create real risks and new fiscal costs for the United States. American interests would be best served if the United States were to walk away entirely, but if Trump instead opts for the status quo, he should at least be honest about it.

Jennifer Kavanagh

Dr. Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. Previously, Dr. Kavanagh was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. She is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

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September 20, 2026 Posted by | Ukraine, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israeli officials fume over award-winning death-by-AI documentary


Mon, 14 Sep 2026 , https://www.sott.net/article/508401-Israeli-officials-fume-over-award-winning-death-by-AI-documentary

Israeli Culture Minister Miki ZoharCulture Minister Miki Zohar has called for NAZA’s directors to be stripped of citizenship while accusing them of “betrayal against the state”

Several senior Israeli politicians have lashed out at the filmmakers behind a documentary accusing the IDF of using AI-assisted systems in the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Zohar went so far as to accuse the two Oscar-winning directors of treachery and threatened to have them stripped of Israeli citizenship.

The controversy erupted after the 80-minute-long film NAZA – the name alludes to an Israeli military shorthand for expected “collateral casualties” – received a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last week and won the Special Jury Prize.

The film, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on the accounts of anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders alleging that the IDF heavily relied on AI systems to identify people and homes for attack on a massive scale, often disregarding collateral civilian casualties. Some insiders described the process as “insanely fun” and akin to a “videogame.”

The IDF has categorically rejected the film’s portrayal, saying the selection and approval of strikes are carried out “by human personnel only.”

Comment: Israel’s AI systems tech did exactly that…movement…noise...bombed.


The film also caused a stir among senior Israeli officials. Zohar called the accolade “shocking,” accusing the directors of seeking to “harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-Semites around the world.”

He wrote on X on Sunday:

“[This] is inconceivable and constitutes a betrayal of the state… As Minister of Culture, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had attacked the documentary even before the award, calling it a “horrific blood libel” and saying it was particularly infuriating that the accusations had come from Israeli filmmakers. He also acknowledged civilian casualties in Gaza, but argued that “there is no magic button that can destroy Hamas, or any terrorist organization hiding behind” ordinary people.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – widely regarded as one of the most hardline figures of Israel’s right-wing camp – called the directors a “disgrace,” suggesting Hamas would welcome them, while former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman branded the pair “enemies of Israel.”

Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his office commented on the matter.

Despite Zohar’s threat, there is no precedent of Israeli filmmakers being stripped of citizenship for producing a critical documentary, while the minister himself does not have a mandate to take such a measure.

Israeli law allows a court to strip citizenship for a “breach of loyalty,” including terrorism, treason, and serious espionage, but in the past the power was treated extremely cautiously. In 2022, as Israel’s Supreme Court considered two cases involving citizens convicted of serious terrorist attacks, it ruled against the revocation, citing flaws in the proceedings and stressing that the measure could only be applied in exceptional circumstances.

However, Israeli filmmakers have faced other legal consequences in the past over similar work. In 2022, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on screenings of the documentary Jenin, Jenin – a film by Palestinian-Israeli director Mohammad Bakri which portrayed alleged IDF abuses. The court ordered Bakri to pay around $57,000 in damages after he was sued for defamation.

In 2012, Haaretz journalist Uri Blau was sentenced to four months of community service for unauthorized possession of classified IDF documents used in reporting on targeted killings, even though his articles had passed military censorship. Meanwhile, his military source was sentenced to several years in prison.

September 20, 2026 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

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