nuclear-news

France officially enters Nuclear Arms Race

4 March 2026

In what can only be called a worst case scenario, the burgeoning nuclear arms race has officially broken its bounds and will now include the world’s fourth largest nuclear superpower, France. (Counting only nuclear weapons actively deployed, France ranks third, behind the US and Russia, as less than 5% of China’s nuclear stockpile is actually deployed.)

Without offering precise numbers, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that France would increase its nuclear stockpile, currently estimated to include 290 nuclear warheads.

Macron also announced plans to build a second nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that would, like the currently deployed Charles de Gaulle, be capable of launching nuclear armed Rafale fighter jets.

In addition, Macron announced that some nuclear-capable Rafale jets might be temporarily deployed to allied European countries, naming Britain, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. This move expands France’s “nuclear umbrella” and places intermediate range missiles closer to Russia; it also positions France to replace US nuclear-armed aircraft currently deployed in three of those countries (Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands) in the case of US withdrawal from NATO.

France, like the US, Russia, China, and Great Britain, is a signatory to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That Treaty requires nuclear-armed states to pursue “in good faith” a cessation of the arms race and complete nuclear disarmament “at an early date.” Since the signing of that Treaty more than fifty years ago, the US and Russia have intermittently engaged in negotiations leading to reductions in stockpile size, but both have also maintained nuclear arsenals with more than 3,500 warheads and show no signs of attempting a full disarmament campaign.

That reality, along with the consistent refusal of the nuclear powers to provide required reports to the United Nations about efforts to comply with NPT obligations, led non-nuclear nations to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017. The TPNW entered into force in January 2021 and now has the support of a majority of global states.

The United States government has been dismissive of the TPNW, denouncing it when it was being negotiated in 2017 and ignoring it since then. The government’s attempt to pretend the Treaty does not exist has been abetted by US mainstream media that resolutely refuses to mention the TPNW even in articles exploring the current status of the nuclear threat that include hand-wringing about the failure of arms control efforts.

That same mainstream media has, in recent months, begun to speak of the new global nuclear arms race—something OREPA has been warning about for more than a decade. Fifteen years ago, we pointed out that US investment in “modernization” of its nuclear capabilities, including building new bomb plants like the Uranium Processing Factility in Oak Ridge, was pushing the world toward a new nuclear arms race.

Unfortunately, our prescience has since been validated. Today, as mainstream media used words like “verge” and “brink” to talk about the nuclear arms race, some media with deeper knowledge describe the situation more accurately. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, for instance, has stated that we are in a full-blown global nuclear arms race.

Until Macron’s announcement, that global nuclear arms race was considered to be between the US, Russia, and China. But as the illusion of the old “rules-based” world order collapses, nuclear weapons are once again being deployed as viable threats and, potentially, the beginning of the end for planet Earth.

Macron’s Monday speech did follow one long-standing rule of the nuclear establishment—never mention the human cost of nuclear weapons. Any conversation that includes the damage done to human beings, men, women, children, families, by nuclear weapons production, testing, use, and threat of use; or that mentions the trillions of dollars being spend on these weapons of mass destruction while hundreds of millions of people go hungry and lack health care and shelter; or that accounts for massive environmental damage at mines, processing, production, and testing sites around the world; or that warns of the effects of nuclear winter in the event of a nuclear exchange—would undermine if not erase arguments that nuclear weapons have a role in providing security in any rational, human sense.

As victims of nuclear weapons, the hibakusha, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, winners of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, courageously share their witness, telling the story of the worst day of their lives, the unimaginable horror of the devastation, death, and destruction wrought by bombs that, by today’s standards, are tiny. Their conclusion is the only one that makes sense—nuclear weapons must never be used again, and the only way to guarantee that is to abolish them altogether.

There exists today a path to nuclear disarmament, and it is not the path laid out by Emmanual Macron. It is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the only hope we have of avoiding a nuclear holocaust. As then-director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Beatrice Fihn, said in accepting the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize: “There are only two possible outcomes to the story of nuclear weapons. Either we do away with them, or they will do away with us.”

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Sellafield recruitment opens for Authorised Firearms Officers

The CNC has opened AFO recruitment at Sellafield as part of a rolling programme to sustain armed protection at one of the UK’s most sensitive nuclear sites.

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) has opened recruitment for Authorised Firearms Officers (AFO) at Sellafield as part of a rolling national programme to sustain continuous armed protection at one of the UK’s most sensitive nuclear sites.

The CNC provides 24/7 armed policing to protect civil nuclear sites, materials and facilities across England and Scotland. Maintaining that capability requires ongoing recruitment and training to ensure operational resilience and a deterrent to those who would threaten critical national infrastructure………

Civil Nuclear Constabulary 3rd March 2026,
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sellafield-recruitment-opens-for-authorised-firearms-officers

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Iran Is Morally Superior To The United States

Caitlin Johnstone, Mar 4

Iran is better than the United States. The United States is worse than Iran.

This is true not because Iran is especially good, but because the United States is especially evil.

.Iran isn’t blanketing a major metropolis with military explosives, killing over a thousand people including hundreds of children. The United States is doing this with its partner in crime Israel.
Iran isn’t continuously bombing and invading countries around the world, toppling governments, circling the globe with hundreds of military bases, targeting civilian populations with siege warfare and brandishing nuclear weapons at its enemies in the name of securing planetary domination. Only the United States is.

The US empire is the single most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. No one else comes anywhere remotely close. Not Iran. Not anybody. Every government in the world is morally superior to the most evil government, and the most evil government is the United States.

Whenever I say this I get US empire apologists going “We’re only the ones fighting the wars and dropping the bombs because we happen to be the ones with the power to do so!”

But that’s false. The US isn’t the world’s most vicious government because it happens to be the most powerful, it’s the most powerful government because it’s the most vicious. It’s the power structure which was willing to do whatever it takes to rule the world, no matter how profoundly evil.

Genocides. Starvation sanctions. Nuclear brinkmanship. Imperialist extraction. The deliberate creation of failed states and humanitarian catastrophes. Policies designed to keep entire regions in a continuous state of division and strife. The United States and the globe-spanning empire structured around it have inflicted depravities upon our species which cry out to the heavens for vengeance. If you could truly comprehend the scale of the suffering it has created over the years, even for a second, you would never stop screaming.

Another objection I’ll encounter when I make these observations is “Well, I’d rather live in the US than Iran!”
And it says so much about the western worldview that people think this is an argument. Sure it’s probably nicer to live in the United States than Iran, especially now, and certainly ever since the US has been deliberately strangling the Iranian economy with the explicitly stated goal of making its citizenry so miserable they wage a civil war against their government.

But it’s so revealing that westerners see someone saying Iran is better than the United States and think it’s a statement about where they personally would prefer to live, because it shows how completely invisible US warmongering is in their worldview. Washington’s acts of mass military slaughter simply do not count as immoral or abusive behavior in their eyes, because they are being inflicted on foreigners overseas. So they automatically assume the comparison is asking which country would make your feelings feel nicer to live in as an individual.

The fact that the US government happens to export the majority of its abusiveness to other countries outside its own borders doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical, it just means the people bearing the brunt of its savagery happen to live in other places. Their lives don’t matter any less than American lives, and only a warped, American supremacist worldview would feel otherwise.

The US government is quantifiably morally inferior to the Iranian government. It is quantifiably more tyrannical, more murderous, more destructive, and more megalomaniacal. It is the very last power structure on earth that should have any say in who leads Iran and how the Iranians ought to conduct their affairs. It is not morally qualified to be making those decisions.

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Going Native in the Trump Jungle: How it became Legal to Attack Iran

3 March 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark , https://theaimn.net/going-native-in-the-trump-jungle-how-it-became-legal-to-attack-iran/

The allies of the United States have gone native, feral even, in the jungle of international relations planted by President Donald J. Trump. While we keep hearing about how awful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, with its shattering of international law and its dismissiveness of the provisions of the United Nations Charter, the Israeli-US attack on Iran has been given the seal of approval by America’s client states and supporters. Countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada, for instance, were clear in endorsing a UN General Assembly resolution on February 24 supporting Ukraine in the face of Russia’s violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The provision explicitly “prohibits the threat or use of force,” calling on Member states “to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States.” Nothing of the sort has been seen regarding the illegal assault on Iran that began on February 28

Most pitiful in the repudiation of the Charter by US allies are the stances of the supposed “middle powers”, a term as flattering as middle management. These middling types – Australia and Canada stand out here – have been keen to wish themselves into abject irrelevance on the issue of international law. This is despite calls from the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that like-minded powers should club together to rectify the collapse of the rules-based international order so cherished under the Pax Americana. At his speech delivered at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Carney extolled the ideas of being principled and pragmatic which would include valuing “sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter.” Nothing of this was evident in the joint February 28 statement from Carney and his Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand: “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.”

All craven positions taken by states have slight differences, and the Australian one can be measured by the position that not taking part in the strikes does not mean having to consider their legal nature. “Obviously,” said Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on March 1, “Australia did not participate in these strikes.” But it supported “action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

The United Kingdom has gone one better by becoming entirely revisionist. In a March 1 statement, the government of Sir Keir Starmer revealed why the UK would be committing to the conflict against Tehran. This was not about Iran being pre-emptively and unlawfully attacked in the first place but Iran daring to defend itself by attacking regional powers hosting US military bases and personnel. Britain would therefore be mounting, at the insistence of Washington, a “defensive action” by targeting “missile facilities in Iran which were involved in launching strikes on regional allies.” It would also act “in the collective self-defence of regional allies who have requested support.” Any propaganda minister in the annals of history would have been proud of that fatuous formulation.

The propaganda of justification focuses on positions that, were they to become a template, could be applied to any number of regimes in the world. Do they crush and violate the human rights of their subjects, restrict lawful assembly, and fire on protestors? Are they theocracies, or governed by martial law, or traditional police states? Do they destabilise their region with needless meddling, posing “imminent” threats? Along the way, forget the limits on the use of force as stated in the UN Charter: that the territorial integrity of all states should be respected, and that any permission for the use of force should take place via the UN Security Council or be undertaken in cases of self-defence.

With sheer abandon, then, we can justify bumping off the leaders, the commanders, and the top officials – but be selective which theocracies, autocratic thugs and shifty types we want to keep company with. And the one to be selective here is Trump, who has personalised international relations with such dramatic effect as to terrify his allies into complicity and obedience. To condemn the actions against Iran as illegal could lead to frosty dismissal, the imposition of crushing sanctions or tariffs, exclusion from intelligence sharing, the shutting off from cooperative ventures. Be good to Donald, or he will bite. Best be bad to everybody he dislikes.

Important in the apologias for attacking Iran has been the anecdotal gauging of attitudes from the Iranian diaspora to be found in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. Celebratory gestures of flag waving and ghoulish revelling in the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, albeit understandable, have also been used to rationalise the war. The Iranian security apparatus had been brutal in putting down protests by brave citizens. We can forget what follows: greater instability and fractiousness within the borders of that state. The creation of more regional problems. The potential for even greater fanaticism and resolve.

In terms of immediate international consequences, protests against the killing of Khamanei in other Islamic states have taken place, in some cases with brutal results. In Pakistan, security forces have used lethal force, leaving 10 dead in Karachi, eight in Skardu and two in Islamabad. Yet little mention in the corridors of Western power is made about these fallen, presumably because they were not the right or relevant sort.

Both the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the NATO-led attacks on Libya in 2011 offer disturbing lessons, none of which interest the ahistorical outlaws of the Trump Jungle. The crime of international aggression against Iraq demonstrated the importance of lies and inflated threats – in that case deployable Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found – along with the dismal failure of occupation and nation building. The Libyan example is seminal given the current aerial nature of the Israeli-US campaign against Iran.

In Libya, a NATO-led coalition intervened in the civil war ostensibly to protect civilians against the security forces of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “When crisis erupted in Libya,” remarked Sir John Sawers, former Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, in February 2015, “we didn’t feel it right to sit by as Gaddafi crushed decent Libyans demanding an end to dictatorship.” But Britain and its partners “didn’t want to get embroiled in Libya’s problems by sending in ground forces.”

Initially framed as an operation to protect civilians, the air campaign became one of support for anti-government militias, leading to Gaddafi’s overthrow and lynch-mob murder. The country duly fractured between rival fundamentalist groups and remains divided to this day. It also became a safe-haven for al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces to conduct operations against the country’s neighbours. “Libya,” recalled Sawers, “had no institutions. Who or what would take over? The answer? Those with the weapons. Result? Growing chaos, exploited by fanatics.” The lessons for the Israeli-US campaign are all too startlingly relevant.

The grotesque cowardice of various representatives, including the clueless fawning by Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte, the unpardonable conduct of the European Commission’s top diplomats Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, and most of the EU governments, has also revealed their feral conversion to a doctrine of force that does away with softening diplomacy and the tenets of international law. It’s almost an embarrassment to read the EU statement on avoiding escalation when the powers escalating the matter were Israel and the US while still insisting that diplomacy would have a role. The Iranians were engaged in diplomacy and were reassured that more talks would follow. This was a charade, a confidence trick that will impair the credibility of the West, or Global North, in terms of its conduct of relations when it comes to addressing threats, actual or perceived. All is permissible in the Trump Jungle.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal | 1 Comment

Japan Eyes Pacific Island for Nuclear Waste Disposal Site

  Tokyo, March 3 (Jiji Press)
https://jen.jiji.com/jc/eng?g=eco&k=2026030300561
–The Japanese government is considering Minamitorishima, a remote Tokyo island in the Pacific, as a possible site for the final disposal of highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, it was learned Tuesday.
   At a press conference on the day, industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said that the government will submit a request for a related literature survey to the Tokyo village of Ogasawara, where the island is located, as early as later in the day.
   “Minamitorishima is considered to be an area with favorable conditions (for a nuclear waste disposal site),” Akazawa said.
   Similar surveys have so far been conducted in the town of Suttsu and the village of Kamoenai, both in the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido, and the southwestern town of Genkai, Saga Prefecture.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment

Iran says Natanz nuclear site hit in US-Israeli strikes

Iran’s sprawling nuclear facility at Natanz was struck during U.S. and Israeli military operations against the Islamic Republic, Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

Again they attacked Iran’s peaceful, safeguarded nuclear facilities yesterday,” Reza Najafi told reporters at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors. Asked by Reuters which facilities were hit, he replied: “Natanz.”

Reuters 2nd March 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-says-natanz-nuclear-site-hit-us-israeli-strikes-2026-03-02/

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Beyond Nuclear condemns attack on Iran

February 28, 2026,
https://beyondnuclear.org/beyond-nuclear-condemns-attack-on-iran/

Beyond Nuclear strongly condemns the attacks against Iran by two nuclear-armed countries, the United States and Israel, when a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program was already within reach.

“These renewed attacks on Iran come at a time when negotiations were already underway to secure a new nuclear verification agreement with Iran,” said Linda Pentz Gunter, the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “This illegal attack by the US and Israel is dangerous and provocative and risks leading to a wider war, potentially involving the use of nuclear weapons. Such an outcome would be catastrophic not only for the region but for the world.”

Iran is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that allows for the development of a civil but not military nuclear program and has consistently denied it has any plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Prior to the attacks by the US and Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June (pictured), the International Atomic Energy had said there was no evidence to suggest Iran was making nuclear weapons.

The premise for the attacks appears to be President Trump’s personal dissatisfaction with current negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But in 2018, President Trump destroyed a perfectly workable nuclear agreement with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that subjected Iran to verification and inspections to be sure it did not develop nuclear weapons.

Uranium enriched to 5% U-235 is considered for civil use. Above 90% is viewed as weapons grade. Currently, Iran is believed to be enriching uranium to 60% or possibly 80%, considered “weapons usable” but not suitable for the production of nuclear missiles.

“Instead of continuing with the diplomatic efforts already underway to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran, the Trump administration has chosen the reckless and unnecessary path of military aggression, a decision that will cost countless innocent lives and billions of US tax dollars,” Pentz Gunter said.

Although also a signatory to the NPT, the US has failed to abide by Article VI of the treaty, which calls for nuclear armed nations to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals. The US is instead “modernizing” its nuclear weapons — code for expansion and enhancement — at a cost of $946 billion over the next ten years.

Israel has refused to admit that it has nuclear weapons, but is estimated to possess at least 80 warheads and potentially as many as 200.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Macron plans to deploy nuclear weapons to Britain

French president announces dramatic increase in arsenal and says allies could host its aircraft.

Henry Samuel in Paris. James Crisp, 02 March 2026

French nuclear-armed jets could be stationed in Britain and other allied European countries after Emmanuel Macron unveiled a dramatic expansion of France’s deterrence doctrine…

The French president also used the symbolic
setting of Île Longue, the country’s Atlantic nuclear fortress in
Brittany, to announce the first increase in its nuclear warhead stockpile
since the 1990s.

Telegraph 2nd March 2026,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/02/macron-plan-nuclear-weapons-britain/

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

France to increase its number of nuclear warheads, Macron says – as it happened

French president says deterrent needs to be ‘strengthened’ in recognition of new challenges

Jakub Krupa, 3 Mar 26,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/02/eu-response-middle-east-conflict-evacuate-citizens-europe-live-latest-news

French president Emmanuel Macron has said France would increase the number of nuclear warheads and allow for temporary deployment of its nuclear-armed aircraft to allied countries for exercises as part of its new nuclear strategy seeking to “Europeanise” its deterrence programme (15:29, 15:50).
In a major speech at the nuclear submarines Navy base of Île Longue, Macron said Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom are expected to be involved in the programme, with London and Berlin playing particularly important roles (15:47, 16:00).
Several EU leaders confirmed their plans to engage with France on the details of the programme (16:44, 16:51, 17:04).
The president repeated his warnings that Europe needed to urgently step up its defence posture to respond to new, emerging threats and disintegration of rules on the use of nuclear weapons

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, weapons and war | Leave a comment

As Trump Bombs Iran, We Need to Reckon With the American War Machine

We cannot afford to slip into despair. We must push back against militarism everywhere, at every turn. By Negin Owliaei , Truthout, February 28, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/as-trump-bombs-iran-we-need-to-reckon-with-the-american-war-machine/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=4670da1a6d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_03_01_07_35&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-4670da1a6d-650192793

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 108 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.

Last year, when Israel and the U.S. launched the strikes that would be prelude to this attack, I wrote that the two countries were “shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.” In the wake of those strikes, once the immediate violence ceased, we largely heard crickets from U.S. lawmakers. This, despite the fact that those strikes, like these, were illegal under U.S. and international law. We cannot let this continued lack of accountability stand. If we do, what will happen next?

Over the years, U.S. and Israeli leaders have become increasingly vocal about their hopes for “greater Israel” — the boundless expansion of an apartheid state. Before the start of the current assault on Iran, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a favorite in the country’s upcoming elections, accused Turkey of being the hub of a threatening axis “similar to the Iranian one.” This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program. It is not a war to free Iranians from a repressive regime. This is a war to preserve U.S. power and hegemony across the entire region.

It is also not accurate to say that Israel is dragging the U.S. into a war against its choosing. Reporting has shown that these two nuclear powers were in lockstep in their planning of this attack. In order to stop this violence, we need to really contend with how it started. The U.S. is hardly a victim here.

This state of affairs is intolerable. I am disgusted to know that my tax dollars are being spent to bomb my ancestral homeland. I was sickened to wake up to messages from family members telling me that the city where they live was under attack from the country where I live. I’m terrified now that Iran’s government has cut internet access yet again, leaving us disconnected from our loved ones. No fear, of course, can compare to the terror of being on the receiving end of missiles or guns, whether they are wielded by a foreign power or your own government; Iranians have been killed by both in horrifying numbers over the last year. But for those of us in the diaspora, the fact that it has now become routine to check in on family and friends living through untold violence does not make it any less traumatic.

Despite the abject horror of this moment, we cannot afford to slip into despair. There is still space for things to get much worse, but, more importantly, there is still so much left that we must protect. No one can predict what will happen over the coming days and weeks, but we know they are likely to be filled with more violence and uncertainty. We need to use every single tool at our disposal to chip away at the war-making systems inflicting this horror, which are so thoroughly embedded in the heart of the United States.

We can start, of course, by demanding that Congress immediately pass a war powers resolution to put an end to this destructive assault. Beyond that we can lift up the call being made by groups like Defending Rights & Dissent for Congress to impeach not only Donald Trump but every single member of his cabinet who had a hand in making this unjust and illegal war possible.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Our elected officials need to publicly explain why they hemmed and hawed over a war powers resolution before these attacks occurred, despite an obvious military buildup.

We must demand that every member of Congress who has voted to increase our military budget to nearly a trillion dollars account for their choices. We must push those members who have personal investments in the military machine — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — even further. They need to explain their conflicts of interest, and why they continue to profit off this death and destruction. Lawmakers who take money from groups like AIPAC that are relishing in this war especially need to answer for their votes.

It’s also imperative to not view this war in a silo, but instead see it as part of the same violent, hegemonic project that has been conducting genocide and spreading violence across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond. We must hold elected officials accountable for failing to uphold U.S. and international law by continuing to support the transfer of weapons to Israel as it commits genocide against Palestinians. We must make it politically toxic for those lawmakers not to support legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which aims to stop such transfers.

We also can’t expect elected officials to do more just because we ask them to. We need to build power. We must support grassroots movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that seek to make war, apartheid, and genocide too costly to wage. We must back campaigns like Taxpayers Against Genocide that are searching for legal avenues to keep federal funds from being used to violate human rights.

We can wage campaigns against death-dealing corporations and make sure that war-profiteering is exposed and subjected to public outrage. The No Tech for Apartheid movement has long been organizing to push Silicon Valley to stop supplying the Israeli military with computing power, and has already found some success. The Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza has received a great deal of reporting; now that OpenAI has announced a deal to allow the Pentagon to use its models in their classified networks, the fight against AI has taken on renewed urgency. Campaigns across the country against data centers are now also a crucial nexus of resistance against militarism.

So too are campaigns for immigrant rights and against deportations. In the wake of the U.S. strikes against Iran last June, the Trump administration rounded up Iranian immigrants for deportation. Those deportations continued into this year, even as the Iranian government staged a brutal crackdown on protesters. As we prepare for war to rage across the region, we can demand the U.S. and Europe open their borders to people fleeing violence and despair. We can continue to show the links between the occupation of cities by federal immigration agents here at home and imperial wars waged abroad. The enemies of democracy here are also the enemies of democracy abroad.

Some of these demands may seem futile under this murderous president, backed by an obedient Congress, and with a Supreme Court that has offered comparatively little restraint. But this unaccountable bureaucracy makes it all the more essential that we build grassroots power to issue these demands and force those in power to heed them.

Polling shows that this war is unpopular. Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability. And we cannot let the leaders who follow him believe that they, too, can unleash such violence without consequences. After all, would we be here if there were any real repercussions for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day — not only in moments of crisis, but whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran risks terror, turmoil and the spread of nuclear weapons

Israel and America have attacked Iran without provocation – the consequences will be dire, as World Affairs Editor Sam Kiley reports

NewsBreak, 2 Mar 26

Citizens in countries across the Middle East have been told to take cover from Iranian airstrikes in retaliation for an unprovoked attack on Iran by America and Israel.

But the shockwaves from blasts as US-made Israeli jets and American pilots unleash their bombs against Iran’s regime – and a nuclear weapons programme that Donald Trump said had already been “obliterated” in the past – will be felt from London to Bangkok.

The strikes – described by President Trump as a “major combat operation” – reaffirm a new age. A rogue order led by the US president that many nations around the world run by authoritarian thugs will relish. They will also look to many Muslims and non-Muslims as an attack on Islam itself.

After killing upwards of 80,000 people in Gaza, flattening the enclave, Israel has continued with land grabs on what small patches of territory remain to Palestinians on the West Bank. The strikes on Iran – as with the war on Gaza – will lead to a violent backlash. It will lead to terrorism………………………………………………….. https://www.newsbreak.com/the-independent-517119/4516372678118-trump-s-unprovoked-attack-on-iran-risks-terror-turmoil-and-the-spread-of-nuclear-weapons

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

NewsReal: Historic Miscalculation? US & Israel ‘Decapitate Iranian Regime’, Yet Iran is Striking Back HARD

Sott.net. Mon, 02 Mar 2026 , https://www.sott.net/article/504928-NewsReal-Historic-Miscalculation-US-Israel-Decapitate-Iranian-Regime-Yet-Iran-is-Striking-Back-HARD

And so it begins. This time it isn’t ‘kayfabe’ and ‘negotiated strikes and counter-strikes’. The ‘peace president’, when announcing joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran on 28 February, said it would just take a few days, and gloated that he ‘took out the regime’ by targeting top Iranian leadership, including Ayatollah Khamenei. But Iran’s swift and massive response – bombing 11 countries housing US and Israeli military bases and installations, including a British base in Cyprus, EU territory – now has Trump saying the war will ‘last for weeks’…

What did they think was going to happen, that Iranians would ‘rise up and take power from their oppressors’? The Americans appear to have truly believed their own propaganda. In reality, Iranians are defiantly rallying in support of their country, and government, while Muslims across the region are preparing to potentially join the fray and do as Iran has always sought: remove all American military forces from the Persian Gulf, if not the Middle East as a whole.

It’s too early for predicting such an end-game, but in the meantime, it appears that, in the absence of Iranian popular support for US and Israeli ‘regime intervention’, the strategy could switch to attacking the people of Iran and the country’s infrastructure, ‘punishment’ for not ‘capitulating’.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear power falls below half its historic peak share of global electricity generation.

Jim Green, 3 Mar 26

The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation has fallen to 8.7%. [1]
That is less than half its historic peak of 17.5% in 1996. [2]
The International Energy Agency projects the share of renewables to rise from 32 percent in 2024 to 43 percent by 2030. [3]
Renewables have doubled then tripled nuclear generation over the past decade and by the end of this decade renewables will out-generate nuclear by at least a factor of 5.
[1] p.23, https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/p15942-25-02880E_RDS-1-45_web.pdf
[2] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2025-HTML-version
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2025/renewable-electricity

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY | Leave a comment

Could a huge data centre revitalise Ayrshire – or ruin it?

Jonathan Geddes,BBC Glasgow and West reporter, 1 Mar 26

It is currently a large, unassuming patch of farmland in East Ayrshire – but within years it could be one of the largest artificial intelligence data centres on Earth.

About 100 hectares (250 acres) of land near HMP Kilmarnock has been earmarked for a technology hub by energy firm ILI Group.

ILI says the development would be similar in size to the prison, while the “vast majority” of the land would be set aside for “biodiversity and landscaping”.

Supporters talk of it revitalising the region, bringing new jobs and investment that would be ploughed back into the community. But the plans have met strong opposition from locals concerned about the impact on the wider area.

Some of those opposed have contacted BBC Your Voice, and say the firm has not provided concrete details about a building that would dominate Hurlford for decades to come.

In recent years, a string of applications for data centres have been made across Scotland. The group Action to Protect Rural Scotland estimate 17 are at various stages of the planning process.

It comes during a worldwide rush to develop data centres. Estimates in 2025 suggested about $3tn (£2.2tn) will be spent on data centres that support AI between now and 2029.

That surge has been accompanied by growing concern about the knock-on effects of the facilities, especially the large amounts of energy and water they consume……………….

For some Hurlford residents though, the announcement of the facility – called Rufus – prompted questions, and a lot of them.

Lisa Beacham became aware of the proposal – which ILI stress is still at a very early stage – shortly after the initial announcement.

A student from Hurlford, she then went down a rabbit hole looking at the amount of water that would be needed for coolant, the process which stops the computer chips there from overheating.

“The site proposal is that it would be powered at 540MW, which would require millions of litres of water a day,” she said.

“Water is a global commodity and we are currently facing global water bankruptcy, according to the UN. Yet we’ll have a site that is using up a huge amount, and due to residue [from the centre] the water used there cannot easily be recirculated.”

Last year the BBC told of people who lived near a data centre in Georgia in the USA who were struggling with an excessive build-up of sediment in water supplies………………………….

Alex De Vries, who runs the Digiconomist blog and website, said he estimated a 540MW facility “could result in almost 6bn litres of annual fresh water consumption” to generate the power needed.

He told BBC Scotland News: “The relatively cooler climate in Scotland isn’t going to do much to mitigate this.”…………………………………..

Cheryl Rowland, an admin assistant at a construction company, who lives in Hurlford, is sceptical.

Speaking at the consultation event, she said: “They are talking about something that will be here for 40 or 50 years.

“Would they arrange education upskilling, to bring local people through and help them grow into jobs here, or will the jobs all be people coming into the area?”……………………

Rowland says it is a worry such a large site will be built by a company who will not be there long term.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2d1ny161yyo

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, water | Leave a comment

This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Sybil Fares, Mar 02, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/united-nations-israel-us-attack-iran

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a lett er to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51. They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.

At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.

The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.

We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population. The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.

Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress. Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace. The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.

The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.

It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other fourteen Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom. These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.

The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation. Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.

When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.

The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime. The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings—notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US —are also complicit in this war crime.

This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience. For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world—in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others—honoring the true multipolarity of our world.

Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).

The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs. The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.

Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China. US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.

A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.

The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine. Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.

These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.

March 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment