“These figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing,” said the project’s director.
Less than a week after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a budget package that pushes annual military spending past $1 trillion, researchers on Tuesday published a report detailing how much major Pentagon contractors have raked in since 2020.
Sharing The Guardian‘s exclusive coverage of the paper on social media, U.K.-based climate scientist Bill McGuire wrote: “Are you a U.S. taxpayer? I am sure you will be delighted to know where $2.4 TRILLION of your money has gone.”
The report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft shows that from 2020-24 private firms received $2.4 trillion in Department of Defense contracts, or roughly 54% of DOD’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending for that five-year period.
The publication highlights that “during those five years, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion).”
In a statement about the findings, Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project, said that “these figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing.”
“This is not an arsenal of democracy—it’s an arsenal of profiteering,” Savell added. “We should keep the enormous and growing power of the arms industry in mind as we assess the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally.”
The paper points out that “by comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion. In other words, the U.S. government invested over twice as much money in five weapons companies as in diplomacy and international assistance.”
“Record arms transfers have further boosted the bottom lines of weapons firms,” the document details. “These companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and Ukraine, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. U.S. military aid to Israel was over $18 billion in just the first year following October 2023; military aid to Ukraine totals $65 billion since the Russian invasion in 2022 through 2025.”
“Additionally, a surge in foreign-funded arms sales to European allies, paid for by the recipient nations—over $170 billion in 2023 and 2024 alone—have provided additional revenue to arms contractors over and above the funds they receive directly from the Pentagon,” the paper adds.
The 23-page report stresses that “annual U.S. military spending has grown significantly this century,” as presidents from both major parties have waged a so-called Global War on Terror and the DOD has continuously failed to pass an audit.
Specifically, according to the paper, “the Pentagon’s discretionary budget—the annual funding approved by Congress and the large majority of its overall budget—rose from $507 billion in 2000 to $843 billion in 2025 (in constant 2025 dollars), a 66% increase. Including military spending outside the Pentagon—primarily nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy, counterterrorism operations at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other military activities officially classified under ‘Budget Function 050’— total military spending grew from $531 billion in 2000 to $899 billion in 2025, a 69% increase.”
Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed earlier this month “adds $156 billion to this year’s total, pushing the 2025 military budget to $1.06 trillion,” the document notes. “After taking into account this supplemental funding, the U.S. military budget has nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000.”
Noting that “taxpayers are expected to fund a $1 trillion Pentagon budget,” Security Policy Reform Institute co-founder Stephen Semler said the paper, which he co-authored, “illustrates what they’ll be paying for: a historic redistribution of wealth from the public to private industry.”
Semler produced the report with William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute. Hartung said that “high Pentagon budgets are often justified because the funds are ‘for the troops.'”
“But as this paper shows, the majority of the department’s budget goes to corporations, money that has as much to do with special interest lobbying as it does with any rational defense planning,” he continued. “Much of this funding has been wasted on dysfunctional or overpriced weapons systems and extravagant compensation packages.”
In addition to spotlighting how U.S. military budgets funnel billions of dollars to contractors each year, the report shines a light on the various ways the industry influences politics.
“The ongoing influence of the arms industry over Congress operates through tens of millions in campaign contributions and the employment of 950 lobbyists, as of 2024,” the publication explains. “Military contractors also shape military policy and lobby to increase military spending by funding think tanks and serving on government commissions.”
“Senior officials in government often go easy on major weapons companies so as not to ruin their chances of getting lucrative positions with them upon leaving government service,” the report notes. “For its part, the emerging military tech sector has opened a new version of the revolving door—the movement of ex-military officers and senior Pentagon officials, not to arms companies per se, but to the venture capital firms that invest in Silicon Valley arms industry startups.”
The paper concludes by arguing that “the U.S. needs stronger congressional and public scrutiny of both current and emerging weapons contractors to avoid wasteful spending and reckless decision-making on issues of war and peace. Profits should not drive policy.”
“In particular,” it adds, “the role of Silicon Valley startups and the venture capital firms that support them needs to be better understood and debated as the U.S. crafts a new foreign policy strategy that avoids unnecessary wars and prioritizes cooperation over confrontation.”
The White House has introduced radical changes that threaten to disrupt the effectiveness of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The agency was formed in 1975 to be an independent regulator, separating it from the promotional role pursued by its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. The NRC has set safety requirements that have become the global gold standard for nuclear regulation. The White House actions threaten to undermine this record.
Conversations with fellow former NRC chairs and retired NRC experts reveal a shared concern that the changes will have unintended, dangerous consequences. In February, the White House issued an executive order that intruded on the traditional autonomy of independent agencies, thereby giving the White House the capacity to control NRC regulatory actions and allow politics to infect regulatory decision-making. A series of executive orders on nuclear matters issued in late May compounded the challenge. One of the executive orders focuses on the reform of the NRC. It would establish arbitrary deadlines for decisions on construction permits and operating licenses, regardless of whether the design offers new and previously unevaluated safety challenges. Other provisions demand the review of all the extensive NRC regulations within 18 months. The other executive orders allow the construction of nuclear power reactors on federal lands—sites belonging to the Energy Department and the Defense Department—without any review by the NRC.
Then, on June 13, the Trump administration fired Christopher Hanson, an NRC commissioner and former chair, without any stated justification. These actions all serve to weaken protections for those who work in or live near reactors. Given the anticipated expansion of reliance on nuclear power, the drastic staff reductions contemplated by the White House come at the wrong time.
There is always room to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the regulatory process and adapt it to the evolution of nuclear technologies and their implementation. Recognizing that, past and current NRC commissioners and technical staff have set in motion changes to reduce the regulatory burden and speed the deployment of reactors at a lower cost. The changes are prudent and reasonable and support the promise of expanded reliance on nuclear energy. Congress has also encouraged those efforts and further instructed the NRC to make more improvements to the process through the bipartisan ADVANCE Act signed into law in 2024. All of this was underway before the White House interference.
The NRC has protected the health and safety of Americans for 50 years without a single civilian reactor radiation-related death. The lessons of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident have long been woven into the safety regime, and every commercial reactor in the United States is safer today because of major safety steps taken after the destruction of reactors in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Since Three Mile Island, the agency has licensed approximately 50 power reactors to operate. It has recently issued construction permits for advanced reactors ahead of schedule. And the NRC has cleared utilities to boost the power of many existing reactors and has licensed them to run longer than originally planned.
We are concerned about the unintended safety consequences that a reduced NRC independence and a schedule-driven regulatory paradigm threaten to bring.
We fear the loss of public confidence that can befall a safety agency when expediency is seen to be given priority. Reducing the NRC’s independence while mixing promotion of nuclear energy and responsibility for safeguarding the public and environment is a recipe for corner-cutting at best and catastrophe at worst.
We are also concerned that such steps could damage the reputation of US reactor vendors worldwide. A design licensed in the United States now carries a stamp of approval that can facilitate licensing elsewhere, including the many countries that plan to embark on a nuclear power program. If it becomes clear that the NRC has been forced to cut corners on safety and operate less transparently, US reactor vendors will be hurt.
The US nuclear industry is helped by the fact that it has a strong independent regulator behind it. The White House’s executive orders may produce the opposite effect from their stated purpose.
Editor’s note: The authors are former chairs of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The UN has named dozens of multinationals in a report for profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. . Stephanie Tran reports.
A landmark United Nations report has named dozens of multinational corporations that are aiding and profiting from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, accusing them of complicity in war crimes and calling for urgent accountability.
Authored by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the report details the role of weapons manufacturers, tech firms, energy companies and financial institutions in sustaining an “economy of occupation turned genocidal.”
But the list of named companies is just the beginning. Albanese describes the report as “the tip of the iceberg,” noting that more than 1,000 corporate entities were investigated for their involvement in Israel’s war machinery.
Weapons and warfare
At the centre of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza is a heavily militarised economy supported by Western weapons manufacturers.
U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin is identified as a central player, providing F-35 and F-16 fighter jets that have enabled Israel to drop an estimated 85,000 tonnes of bombs since October 2023. Their use has left more than 179,000 Palestinians dead or injured and destroyed vast swathes of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
According to the report, the F-35 program represents Israel’s largest-ever defence procurement project, involving over 1,650 companies.
Israel’s own arms manufacturers are also central to the genocide. Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, two of the country’s top weapons companies, are responsible for much of the surveillance, drone and targeting systems deployed in Gaza.
The report notes that Israel’s repeated military campaigns have made it a testing ground for emerging weapons technologies. These systems are later marketed as “battle-proven”
At the centre of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza is a heavily militarised economy supported by Western weapons manufacturers.
U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin is identified as a central player, providing F-35 and F-16 fighter jets that have enabled Israel to drop an estimated 85,000 tonnes of bombs since October 2023. Their use has left more than 179,000 Palestinians dead or injured and destroyed vast swathes of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
According to the report, the F-35 program represents Israel’s largest-ever defence procurement project, involving over 1,650 companies.
Israel’s own arms manufacturers are also central to the genocide. Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, two of the country’s top weapons companies, are responsible for much of the surveillance, drone and targeting systems deployed in Gaza.
The report notes that Israel’s repeated military campaigns have made it a testing ground for emerging weapons technologies. These systems are later marketed as “battle-proven”
Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein — whose award-winning book, podcast and film series The Palestine Laboratory exposes how Israel’s occupation has become a global model for repression — told MWM:
“This landmark report goes to the heart of why Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine has lasted so long; the longest in modern times. Far too many corporations and individuals are making money from oppression. I’m honoured that the report frequently cites my work, The Palestine Laboratory, a book, podcast and film series that details how Israel’s occupation is a key model and inspiration for many around the world.”
“Cutting off Israel’s financial lifeline is the only way that this abomination will end.”
Surveillance and Silicon Valley
The UN report devotes substantial attention to the role of Silicon Valley in enabling Israel’s high-tech war.
Palantir Technologies, the U.S. surveillance firm founded by Peter Thiel, expanded its support for the Israeli military after October 2023. The company has provided “automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.”
In January 2024, Palantir’s board met in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”. In April 2024, CEO Alex Karp dismissed concerns about civilian casualties by stating that Palantir had killed “mostly terrorists.”
Microsoft operates its largest research centre outside the U.S. in Israel, and has been “integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003”. In October 2023, Microsoft’s Azure platform supported the Israeli military’s overloaded cloud systems. According to an Israeli colonel quoted in the report, “cloud tech is a weapon in every sense of the word.”
Amazon and Google, through their $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract, provide Israel with core cloud infrastructure for the military and government agencies.
IBM, which has operated in Israel since 1972, has operated the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority, “enabling collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel.”
Hewlett-Packard (HP) “has long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel,” supplying technology to the military, prison system, and police.
NSO Group, infamous for its Pegasus spyware, is cited as a textbook case of “spyware diplomacy.” Founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, the company has licensed its tools to repressive governments worldwide and used them to surveil Palestinian activists, journalists, and human rights defenders.
Financing Occupation
The financial industry underpins much of the infrastructure of occupation and genocide. Israeli treasury bonds, underwritten by global banks such as Barclays and BNP Paribas, have provided critical financing to the Israeli government. Asset managers like Blackrock, Vanguard and Allianz’s PIMCO were among more than 400 investors from 36 countries to purchase these bonds.
Blackrock and Vanguard are also among the largest shareholders in Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, and Chevron. Their funds distribute these investments across global markets via ETFs and mutual funds, spreading complicity to millions of unwitting investors.
Energy and resources
Glencore and Drummond Company dominate coal exports to Israel, primarily from Colombia and South Africa. Even after Colombia announced a suspension of coal exports to Israel in 2024, shipments continued through subsidiaries.
Chevron, which supplies over 70% of Israel’s energy, paid $453 million in royalties and taxes to the Israeli government in 2023. The company profits from the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields and owns a stake in the East Mediterranean Gas pipeline, which passes through occupied Palestinian maritime territory.
BP, the British energy giant, expanded its presence in 2025 with new exploration licences in maritime zones off the Gaza coast, areas Israel occupies in violation of international law.
Machinery
Heavy machinery has long played a role in Israel’s occupation through the demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of illegal settlements.
Caterpillar Inc. has supplied the Israeli military with bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes and infrastructure. Since October 2023, Caterpillar equipment has been used to “carry out mass demolitions – including of homes, mosques and life-sustaining infrastructure – raid hospitals and burying alive wounded Palestinians”. In 2025, the company signed another multi-million-dollar contract with Israel.
Heavy machinery producers Volvo and HD Hyundai have also been linked to the destruction of Palestinian property. After October 2023, Israel increased the use of this equipment, levelling entire districts in Gaza, including Rafah and Jabalia. The Israeli military reportedly obscured the logos of the machinery during these operations.
Volvo is also tied to the settlement economy through its joint ownership of Merkavim, a bus manufacturer serving Israeli colonies.
Shipping, Tourism and Logistics
Multinational logistics firms are another key part of the war economy. A.P. Moller–Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, is responsible for transporting weapons parts, military equipment, and raw materials to Israel. Since October 2023, the company has facilitated the continued flow of US-supplied arms.
Tourism platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com are profiting from the settlement project. Booking.com listings in the West Bank have increased from 26 in 2018 to 70 in 2023; Airbnb listings have grown from 139 in 2016 to 350 in 2025. These platforms promote illegal settlements while restricting Palestinian access to land and resources.
Calls for sanctions
Albanese’s report is a damning indictment, not only of Israel’s genocide in Gaza but of the global political and economic architecture that enables it. The evidence it presents leaves no ambiguity, multinational corporations are not peripheral actors but central to the machinery of occupation, apartheid and now genocide.
Albanese urged states to impose a full arms embargo on Israel, halt all trade and investment ties with companies implicated in violations of international law, and freeze the assets of individuals and entities facilitating human rights abuses.
She called on the International Criminal Court and national courts to investigate and prosecute corporate executives for their role in war crimes and for laundering the proceeds of genocide.
“Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt (International Criminal Court) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
In a post on X late on Wednesday, Albanese wrote that she stood “firmly and convincingly on the side of justice, as I have always done,” without directly mentioning the U.S. sanctions. In a text message to Al Jazeera, she was quoted as dismissing the U.S. move as “mafia style intimidation techniques.”
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has called on states at the U.N. Human Rights Council to impose an arms embargo and cut off trade and financial ties with Israel while accusing the U.S. ally of waging a “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.
Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the ICC over its devastating military assault on Gaza. Israel denies the accusations and says its campaign amounts to self-defense after a deadly October 2023 Hamas attack.
In a report published earlier this month, Albanese accused over 60 companies, including major arms manufacturers and technology firms, of involvement in supporting Israeli settlements and military actions in Gaza. The report called on companies to cease dealings with Israel and for legal accountability for executives implicated in alleged violations of international law.
Albanese is one of dozens of independent human rights experts mandated by the United Nations to report on specific themes and crises. The views expressed by special rapporteurs do not reflect those of the global body as a whole.
Rights experts slammed the U.S. sanctions against Albanese. Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy think tank, labeled them as “rogue state behavior” while Amnesty International said special rapporteurs must be supported and not sanctioned.
“Governments around the world and all actors who believe in the rule-based order and international law must do everything in their power to mitigate and block the effect of the sanctions against Francesca Albanese and more generally to protect the work and independence of Special Rapporteurs,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard, a former UN special rapporteur, said.
Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has stopped U.S. engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council, extended a halt to funding for the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA and ordered a review of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO.
His administration imposed sanctions on four judges at the ICC in June in retaliation over the war tribunal’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The atomic age is perpetually on the verge of dawning.
Nuclear power is a political winner — but not a money saver. Just ask Tim Echols. Echols’ term on the Georgia Public Service Commission is up this year, and unlike most states, his position is an elected one.
He says the Vogtle nuclear plant has been a campaign issue — it’s hiked customers’ bills by about 12 percent since coming fully online last year, $21 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule — but that his opponents haven’t been able to weaponize it. He won his Republican primary resoundingly last month.
“All the Democratic opponents are saying that they would build Vogtle,” he said. “They’re just not saying how they would pay for it. Or they’re saying they’re going to lower bills, but they’re going to build nuclear, and those two things don’t go together.”
The hippies are dying out, and with them the memories of Shoreham, San Onofre, V.C. Summer, Three Mile Island and other nuclear plants that didn’t pan out, suffered radiation leaks or otherwise closed before their time. It’s not the policy that’s holding nuclear back: It’s the industry.
All the incentives and permitting reforms the government can muster won’t change the basic economics that have led to just three new nuclear plants getting built in the U.S. this century: It takes too long, is too expensive and is only getting pricier. “In terms of new nuclear, it’s a nonstarter,” said Stanford engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson, a longtime skeptic of nuclear power. “They can spend as much money as they want, it’s never going to happen.”
The event begins on July 24, 2025, at 18:30 UTC, which is 6:30 a.m. in Auckland, 8:30 a.m. in Honolulu, 11:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, 12:30 p.m. in Mexico City, 2:30 p.m. in New York, 7:30 p.m. in Yaoundé, 8:30 p.m. in Berlin, and 10 p.m. in Tehran.
The awardees for 2025 are Ralph Nader, Roger Waters, and Francesca Albanese.
The Artistic War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Roger Waters for his incredibly powerful combination of song-writing, singing, speaking, and performing against the horrors of war. During the event, we will play a new 8-minute song pre-recorded by Roger Waters called Sumud.
The David Hartsough Lifetime Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award — named for the late co-founder of World BEYOND War — goes to Ralph Nader for his brilliant and relentless advocacy, educating, organizing, analyzing, and criticizing war and related crimes and abuses.
The Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, for her fearless, incisive, and eloquent reporting on the genocide in Gaza.
Cindy Folkers reviews Thomas Bass’s excellent new book that is both a personal journey and a stark warning
Thomas A. Bass’s “Return to Fukushima” is a poignant blend of investigative journalism, environmental critique, and personal reflection that revisits the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster. Bass brings poetic prose, incisive analysis, and a deeply ethical lens to a subject often buried under technical jargon and political spin. This book is not just a recounting of catastrophe, but a stark reminder that, even in the face of individual and community resilience, science and policy fall short for those haunted by the permanence of radioactive contamination.
At the heart of the book lies a powerful question: What does it mean to live in a nuclear exclusion zone? Bass uses this inquiry to explore the “slow violence of radiation,” the enduring trauma of environmental contamination, the cultural amnesia that allows such disasters to fade from global consciousness, and the political and corporate machinery that enables this erasure. Rather than focusing on abstract debates, he humanizes the crisis by highlighting the lived experiences of those navigating the radioactive ruins of northeastern Japan. He remarks, “The process [of decontamination] is more about managing people’s perception of radiation than it is a solution.”
Rooting the book in personal and historical context, Bass recalls the surreal normalcy of growing up in a home adorned with photographs of mushroom clouds, reflecting his father’s involvement in fabricating both hydrogen (tritium) bombs and atomic bombs. Starting from this context, Bass links Fukushima to other sites of radioactive trauma—Chernobyl, Hanford, Bikini Atoll—framing them as part of a global pattern of technological arrogance, and recognizing the long-standing connection between civilian energy and military power.
Bass first visited Fukushima in 2018 and returned in 2022. His first trip revealed a superficial recovery, what he calls a “Potemkin” reconstruction aimed at showcasing Japan’s readiness for the Tokyo Olympics. By 2022, however, a more genuine—albeit cautious—resettlement was underway, with some people returning and farms being tentatively revived. Yet, even as the physical infrastructure was repaired, the psychic and ecological wounds lingered. Bass captures this tension with journalistic clarity and literary finesse.
Bass specifically relates his own encounter with radioactivity in a contaminated town in Japan — Namie: “As I get out of the car to photograph the bowling alley with the boat leaned against it, there is a metallic taste in my mouth, a lick of gunmetal.” Such moments remind readers that radiation, while invisible, is palpably real to those living with it daily.
Throughout the book, Bass offers a scathing critique of what he terms nuclear power’s “greenwashing.” Drawing from scientists, environmentalists, and historical evidence, he dissects the industry’s claims that nuclear energy is a safe, carbon-free solution to climate change. His tone is neither hysterical nor ideological; instead, it is sharply analytical and grounded. On the empty rhetoric of clean energy, he wryly notes, “Yes, plutonium is carbon-free. It will also kill you.”
Bass goes further by examining the systemic forces that allow nuclear risk to persist without accountability, laying bare the many attempts at covering over the severity of the ongoing nuclear catastrophe, including official lies about radioisotope content of contaminated water released into the Pacific, official allowable increases in the exposure limit to the public, and government gag orders placed on scientists. He delves into misinformation, regulatory failure, and public relations strategies that obscure the true costs—human and ecological—of nuclear energy.
In one of the book’s most disturbing passages, he highlights the Japanese government’s refusal to acknowledge radiation-related illnesses: “Doctors have left the area because the government refuses to reimburse them when they list radiation sickness as the cause for nose bleeds, spontaneous abortions, and other ailments resulting from ionizing radiation. (The only acceptable diagnoses are ‘radio-phobia,’ nervousness, and stress.)”
However, “Return to Fukushima” is not merely a catalog of policy failures or even a polemic against nuclear energy. It is above all an ethical and human-centered work. The personal stories Bass shares—such as those of the Kobayashis, who collaborate with Chernobyl survivors, or citizen scientists using homemade Geiger counters—bring dignity and agency to people often ignored by mainstream narratives. “‘You measure everything and keep measuring,’ says Takenori Kobayashi… ‘That’s the most important lesson we have learned from Chernobyl.’”
Despite these attempts at self-determination, Bass’s takeaway is a chilling question: “Is this what our future looks like? A daycare center full of radiation maps and equipment for monitoring our contaminated Earth?” The line encapsulates the book’s quiet horror and urgent relevance. As nations look to nuclear power as a climate solution, Bass reminds us that technological fixes without ethical grounding can cause irreversible harm.
“Return to Fukushima” is far more than a chronicle of disaster. It is a searing indictment of technological arrogance, a meditation on environmental justice, and a terrifying look into a future we can still largely avoid. With eloquence, empathy, and unflinching honesty, Thomas A. Bass confronts the radioactive legacy of our times. As Noam Chomsky aptly states, this is a book “so crucial that it bears on the survival of the earth.” Anyone interested in energy policy, environmental ethics, or the future of our planet should read it.
America’s largest airport by size is reportedly considering plans to build a nuclear reactor on its sprawling 33,500-acre property. Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington, 67, made the shocking revelation during a recent Future of Aerotropolis event hosted by local business publication, Business Den. Washington, a former pick to lead Joe Biden’s FAA before he withdrew under heavy Republican criticism over the airport’s safety record, told the panel discussion the he was seriously considering a ‘small modular reactor’ to meet growing energy demands.
The collapse of the world’s second-largest ice sheet would drown cities worldwide. Is that ice more vulnerable than we know?
Last year, Scientific American chief multimedia editor Jeffery DelViscio spent a month on the Greenland ice sheet, reporting on the work of scientists taking ice and rock cores from the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) and the bedrock underneath. This massive flow of ice drains ice into the ocean, and its melt has been speeding up in the past decade.
Bedrock samples under ice from an area in northwest Greenland indicate it was ice-free as recently as about 7,000 years ago when global temperatures were only a few degrees warmer than they are now. The sheet won’t melt all at once, of course, but scientists are increasingly concerned by signs of accelerating ice-sheet retreat. A recent report showed that it has been losing mass every year for the past 27 years. Another study found that nearly every Greenlandic glacier has thinned or retreated in the past few decades.
The NEGIS itself has extensively sped up and thinned over the past decade. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, global sea levels would rise by about 24 feet, inundating coastal cities, farmland and homes. “I have, for the first time ever in my career, datasets that take my sleep away at night,” says Joerg Schaefer, GreenDrill’s co-principal investigator. “They are so direct and tell me this ice sheet is in so much trouble.”
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) suggested Monday that it plans to transfer spent nuclear fuel from its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant to an interim storage facility in the city of Mutsu in Aomori Prefecture. The plan was included in a medium- to long-term program for the facility, presented to Aomori Gov. Soichiro Miyashita by Tepco President Tomoaki Kobayakawa at a meeting in the Aomori Prefectural Government office the same day.
Spent nuclear fuel stored at the plant’s No. 5 and No. 6 reactors, a joint storage pool and the Fukushima No. 2 plant at the time of the March 2011 nuclear meltdown at the No. 1 plant is set to be transferred to the Mutsu facility.
The possible construction of new nuclear power plants in Switzerland, as currently discussed, depends on many factors. Even if the ban on new construction were lifted, there would still be numerous other political, technological, economic, and social uncertainties, as the Energy Commission of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences outlines in a new report.
Even if the ban on new construction is lifted, commissioning a new nuclear power plant is unlikely before approximately 2050. Before connecting to the power grid, various political, administrative, and economic decisions must be made. Several referendums and even appeals are expected. The majorities are uncertain from today’s perspective and could change due to individual events such as Fukushima.
The Japanese government wants to turn its nuclear power stations back on – but some local residents and Indigenous Ainu people don’t want nuclear waste stored near them. Fourteen years after the Fukushima disaster, Japan is restarting its nuclear reactors – and two wind-blown near-deserted fishing villages on the northern island of Hokkaido could be the destination for all their radioactive waste. But, while some residents of Suttsu and Kamoenai welcome the government money that volunteering to store the waste will bring, others are fiercely opposed due to fears that the nuclear waste will contaminate their land and water. The controversy could delay Japan’s goals to use carbon-free nuclear energy to replace electricity generation from expensive imported fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions on the way to net zero by 2050.
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have spoken by telephone numerous times since the former reassumed office seven months ago. Not much appears to have been accomplished by way of these exchanges, some of which have been lengthy, according to the accounts Washington and Moscow have provided afterward.
No progress toward a durable settlement to end the war in Ukraine. Talk and desultory diplomatic contacts with a view to repairing the profligate damage successive American administrations have done to U.S.–Russian relations, but no substantive advances. O.K., it is what it is, as we say. But there was something singularly conclusive about the telephone conversation the U.S. and Russian leaders had last Thursday.
I detect that a dead end has been reached.
Trump was trying once again to get Putin to agree to an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire” in Ukraine — “the quick end to the military action,” as Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s senior foreign policy adviser, put it. Putin was trying once again to explain that the time has come to structure an enduring settlement by addressing — the Kremlin’s favored phrase these days — the “root causes” of the conflict.
Maybe it is the barrage of drones and missiles with which the Russians bombarded Kiev and other Ukrainian cities within a few hours of the Trump–Putin exchange that prompts me to think the two leaders or their diplomats are unlikely ever to get anywhere on the telephone or at the mahogany table.
The Ukrainians, for what their word is worth, counted 539 drones and 11 missiles, including a hard-to-intercept, high-velocity (Mach 10 hypersonic) projectile called the Kinzhal.
This was the largest aerial attack so far in the war, by the Ukrainians’ reckoning, and it left Kiev smoldering last Friday morning. It is hard to avoid concluding the Kremlin had a point to make after the failure of the phone call.
Trump Has Nothing to Propose
Or maybe it is Trump’s remarks after the call that makes me think a diplomatic settlement seems simply beyond reach — this at least until the Ukrainian military is decisively smashed, and very possibly not even then.
“I was very unhappy with my call with President Putin,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One afterward. “I didn’t make any progress with him at all. He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it’s no good.”
You cannot be surprised at this current state of affairs. Trump made no progress with the Russian leader because he has nothing to propose that would make progress possible. Social media messages demanding a ceasefire, replete with capital letters and exclamation points, do not count and do not work as statecraft; they betoken nothing so much as Trump’s — read, the West’s — un-seriousness.
The fundamental problem here is that Kiev and its sponsors are unable to accept defeat. I concluded more than a year ago that Ukraine and its Western powers had lost the war — “effectively lost,” I thought for a time, but then I dropped “effectively.”
For a good long time now what we’ve watched is nothing more than postwar gore. If you have lost a war but cannot admit you have lost because the West must never lose anything, you are down to the old game of pretend. And so long as the U.S. and its European clients insist that they deserve any consequential say in the terms of negotiation — as if they can assert the authority of a victor — it amounts to the pointlessness of pretending.
It is as if the Germans, if you do not mind the comparison, insisted they set the terms of surrender in May 1945, or had a say in the settlement concluded at Versailles in 1919.
When a settlement is finally reached it will not be termed a surrender — you can count on this — but this is what it will come to. And Russia, to turn this question another way, will have a responsibility to avoid turning a finally achieved peace into another Versailles disaster — where the victors planted the seeds for a renewal of conflict — by asking too much.
I am confident Moscow will hold to its currently expressed demands, which I consider eminently just and not at all excessive: A new security architecture in Europe; no NATO membership for a neutral Ukraine that must be demilitarized and de-Nazified; and recognition of the four oblasts that voted to join Russia.
Ressentiment
But I am not confident Ukraine and the neo–Nazis who control the military and the civilian administration — yes, both — will ever accept any kind of coexistence with the Russian Federation. The hatred is too visceral, too irrational, too atavistic, too pathological. This is why de–Nazification was and remains a Russian objective.
The neo–Nazi beast, never far below the surface in post–1945 Ukraine, was sprung into the open air with the U.S.–cultivated coup in 2014. Washington and its clients in Kiev needed the neo–Nazis, especially but not only the armed militias, because they could be relied upon to fight the Russians with the sort of visceral animus the occasion required.
I do not know what a de–Nazification operation would look like, given the phenomenon’s above-noted characteristics, but something will have to be done to rid the Ukrainian consciousness of this deformity.
What we will see in Ukraine otherwise will prove an horrific case of ressentiment — enduring and poisonous. Ressentiment is a term the Germans, Friedrich Nietzsche among them, borrowed from the French in the 19th century because they had no term for the phenomenon.
It denotes the hostility and anger within a group arising from a shared sense of inferiority in the face of another — this other becoming a kind of scapegoat for a society’s frustrations and complexes.
Max Scheler, the 19th and early 20th century phenomenologist, explored all this in Ressentiment, a brief but pithy book he published in 1912 (in English, Marquette Univ. Press, 1994). As Scheler explained in interesting detail, a socially accepted set of values arises from this complex of feelings.
What we will see in Ukraine otherwise will prove an horrific case of ressentiment — enduring and poisonous. Ressentiment is a term the Germans, Friedrich Nietzsche among them, borrowed from the French in the 19th century because they had no term for the phenomenon.
It denotes the hostility and anger within a group arising from a shared sense of inferiority in the face of another — this other becoming a kind of scapegoat for a society’s frustrations and complexes.
Max Scheler, the 19th and early 20th century phenomenologist, explored all this in Ressentiment, a brief but pithy book he published in 1912 (in English, Marquette Univ. Press, 1994). As Scheler explained in interesting detail, a socially accepted set of values arises from this complex of feelings.
Ressentiment is a potentially dangerous sentiment when it animates a society that feels itself wounded over a sustained period of time. We need look no further than the extreme Russophobia evident today among some segments of the Ukrainian population for a case in point.
Against this historical and social backdrop, I do not see the Ukrainians as capable of reaching a settlement to end the war that has already torn apart the nation and its people. I do not see that they can achieve peace, either with others or among themselves, because they do not know peace and they are not capable of it.
A Rockface of History
But I see another reason peace in Ukraine will prove elusive, if not impossible, even as the Russians achieve it on the battlefield. (And I tend toward the latter probability.) This judgment arises when we put the Ukraine crisis in a larger, global context.
I think of Ukraine as resembling the rock face in a mine, or a front line in a global conflict: It is where the non–West is most urgently chiseling a new world order into being. It is a site of insistence, let us say. And it is where the West proposes to stop this world-historical turn of history’s wheel — a turn that simply cannot be stopped.
Think of Putin’s demands. Apart from de–Nazification — an objective that, to me, reflects considerable insight on Moscow’s part — there are the more encompassing “root causes.” I gather Putin used this phrase yet again in his call with Trump. [See: Rooting Out the Root Causes in Ukraine]
Putin, Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, and other senior Russian officials have been clear on this point at least since Moscow sent those two draft treaties Westward in December 2021 as the proposed basis of negotiations that would lead to an encompassing new security structure between Russia and the West.
This framework would relieve the decades of tension along Russia’s western flank and Europe’s east and would be of benefit to both sides. This was and remains Moscow’s intent. Settlements that address the concerns of all sides, as against one side’s at the expense of another, is the very essence of sound statecraft.
But any such settlement would stand as an expression of parity between West and non–West. As I have argued severally over the years, parity between these two spheres is a 21st century imperative. There will be no world order without it — only more of the disorder the Western powers call, altogether absurdly, “the rules-based order.”
But it is precisely even the thought of parity that the United States and its trans–Atlantic allies refuse to accept. It would bring to an end the half-millennium of dominance the West cannot release from its grasp even as it will eventually have to do so.
“It is no good,” Trump said after his latest telephone talk with Putin. No, and I do not see how it can be. Trump has nothing to offer the Russians that would amount to a serious address of what is genuinely at issue between America and Russia — between the West and non–West.
I leave it to readers to conclude where this leaves the Ukraine conflict and the larger question of Russo–American relations. It is, once again, what it is — or what it is at the moment.
In another column I will revisit this question of parity as it applies in West Asia.
French utility EDF’s Civaux 2 unit, where EDF recently detected fresh stress corrosion, was the most modulated of France’s four 1.5 GW nuclear reactors last year, according to a study by analytics firm Kpler requested by Montel.
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