This simple prescient and common sense statement from a survivor of the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki by the United States and the co-leader of the recently honored Nobel Prize group, Nihon Hidankyo, echoes the similar words of those who knew and understood “All Things Nuclear” since the 1940s Manhattan Project scientists who helped build and denounce the two nuclear bombs used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that ended World War II. We should all know by now that we cannot continue on the nuclear path, including nuclear power, that we are presently on and survive . . . ~llaw
Risk of nuclear war rising amid global conflicts, Nobel peace laureate says
‘Path to self-destruction’: Survivors recall horrors of nuclear bombings as they draw parallels to ongoing wars.
Demonstrators gather for a rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza, at the preserved Atomic Bomb Dome in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, in Hiroshima, Japan, on October 12, 2024 [Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters]
Published On 12 Oct 202412 Oct 2024
Conflicts raging around the world, including in Gaza, are heightening the possibility of a nuclear war, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize warned, renewing calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Nihon Hidankyo, the grassroots group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, won the prize on Friday for its “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons”.
On Saturday, Shigemitsu Tanaka, a survivor of the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki by the United States and co-leader of the group, said the “international situation is getting progressively worse, and now wars are being waged as countries threaten the use of nuclear weapons”.
“I fear that we as humankind are on the path to self-destruction. The only way to stop that is to abolish nuclear,” the resident of Nagasaki told reporters.
Nagasaki was the second Japanese city that was hit by a US nuclear bomb on August 9, 1945, killing at least 74,000 people. Three days earlier, the US bombing of Hiroshima had killed 140,000 people.
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
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With the end of the Cold War, it was decided that the airborne alert was no longer necessary. Instead, a smaller fleet of aircraft was maintained on a …
Nobel Peace Prize: Take Award as Chance to Contain Nuclear Threats … Amid an unprecedented increase in the nuclear threat posed by Russia’s aggression …
Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov served as deputy minister of foreign affairs and defense before being appointed as Moscow’s most senior diplomat in Washington in August 2017. (See AP photo credits in the article)
This article, courtesy of “Newsweek” is an up to the moment comprehensive report on the current and serious situation among Russia, Ukraine, the United States, Britain, the rest of NATO, and possibly the entire world.
The firing and timing of the Russian Ambassador by Putin seems to me to possibly be intentionally related to the U.S. presidential election, which may also be due to Donald J. Trump’s candidacy who has long been known to have a close and possibly illegal personal relationship (Logan Act violation) to Vladimir Putin, which has been suggested in Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward’s new book “War” to be released on October 15th.
There are also links to important older but related stories posted at the end of this informative and extremely harrowing current situation that could flare like an out of control forest fire into the first and last all-out nuclear war . . . ~llaw
Exclusive: Russia Ambassador Exits US With Warning of ‘Nuclear Catastrophe’
Published Oct 10, 2024 at 4:31 PM EDTUpdated Oct 11, 2024 at 12:03 AM EDT
Russia’s top envoy to the United States has ended his term, leaving behind an ominous forecast about the risk of deteriorating bilateral ties escalating into a nuclear-armed clash over the ongoing war in Ukraine in an exclusive interview with Newsweek.
The Kremlin announced on Thursday that Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov had been officially relieved of his duty after seven years of service. In the lead-up to his departure, Antonov spoke with Newsweek about the troubled state of relations between Moscow and Washington, which show no signs of improving as the war in Ukraine continues and NATO doubles down on military support for Kyiv amid recent advances by the Russian military.
‘”Project Ukraine’ is dragging American politicians only further into an abyss, from which it is increasingly difficult to get out,” Antonov told Newsweek. “As we see, the administration can only respond to the victories of Russian troops in Donbas and the failure of the provocation by the Ukrainian armed forces in the Kursk region by using the same hackneyed theses about ‘support as long as we can.'”
“There are zero signals to clients about the need to think over their position and sit down at the negotiating table,” he added. “Neither are there any hints about stopping the senseless flow of weapons at the expense of the local taxpayer.”
Instead, he argued that “Washington is continuing a dangerous discussion about the possibility of giving Ukrainians a permission to strike deep into Russian territory with Western long-range missiles.”
Such talk threatened to defy the latest ultimatum issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly warned against external intervention since first ordering a “special military operation” into Ukraine in February 2022.
“They refuse to take into account the clear warnings of the President of the Russian Federation that a ‘green light’ for such attacks would mean NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict,” Antonov said, “with all the following conclusions on our part.”
Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov at the United Nations headquarters. Antonov has left Washington after seven years of service. Sergey Guneev/Sputnik/AP
Divisions at Home and Abroad
Antonov served as deputy minister of foreign affairs and defense before being appointed as Moscow’s most senior diplomat in Washington in August 2017. He became a vocal advocate for the Kremlin’s position throughout the terms of U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who is also set to vacate his office soon as Vice President Kamala Harris gears up for a tight race against Trump next month.
Antonov said he had “no desire” to discuss the inner workings of U.S. politics today but observed that “local party strategists seem to be trying to come up with official statements for Ukraine to meet the demands of the U.S. current electoral cycle.”
“These people are not interested in the fate of Europeans and Kiev,” Antonov said. “They are only interested in the digits in public opinion polls, which supposedly can be adjusted in their favor if they demonstrate ‘determination’ and ‘leadership.’ This is pure recklessness.”
He also identified a “divided” public discourse in the U.S.
“On one hand,” Antonov said, “we see a lot of attempts by reasonable political scientists to understand the situation, find workable—at least in the eyes of the United States— options to end the conflict and develop an inter-party consensus based on a common understanding of the danger of collapsing into World War III.”
“However, any voices of reason in Washington today are silenced or written off as ‘Kremlin propaganda,” he added. “The recent unjustified sanctions against Russian journalists are in this vein, as well as provocative attacks by local intelligence services against Dmitry Simes, Scott Ritter and compatriots living in America.”
Antonov railed against what he called a “brutal ‘cleansing’ of the information space in America” via the prosecution and censorship of individuals accused of spreading Russian propaganda, sanctions and raids against state-backed Russian media outlets and other measures.
Such actions, he argued, target those “who call for a sober assessment of the risks of being dragged into a morass of the Eastern Europe conflict and the prospect of a head-on collision with a nuclear power, those who warn that sitting out overseas while others are dying, without any costs, is an illusion and self-deception.”
Newsweek reached out to the U.S. State Department and the Ukrainian Embassy to the U.S. for comment.
Washington and Kyiv have long accused Moscow of spreading disinformation via state-sponsored campaigns intended to serve the Kremlin’s interests.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has declared an unwavering position to continue military assistance to Ukraine, and many NATO allies have offered similar pledges. However, the issue has proved increasingly polarizing in Western capitals, with some, including a number of Republicans in the U.S., expressing growing skepticism about the utility of the current strategy.
The division also runs through the upcoming U.S. election. Harris vows to continue with Biden’s approach of supporting Ukraine until victory, while Trump has promised to quickly reach a deal that would put an end to what has become Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
But as these debates play out at a turbulent time for U.S. politics, Antonov accused U.S. think tanks of responding to “reasonable” publications with “poisonous commentaries about the harm of any conversation with ‘the Russians'” and said that U.S. politicians prefer “to listen to ‘hawks.'”
Rather than seeking peace, they discuss “creating hostilities between the Slavs, encouraging the killing of people, and intensifying military escalation,” he argued.
“All this only confirms that the political elites have set themselves the task not just to defeat Russia but to preserve the old world order, based on the rules favorable to NATO countries,” Antonov said. “We want to change this obviously outdated state of affairs. We want our security interests to be taken into account.”
Ukrainian personnel fire a howitzer toward Russian positions near the front line in Chasiv Yar on September 30. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images
A Flashpoint in Flames
While Russia’s large-scale war against Ukraine began in February 2022, the roots of the conflict could be traced back to seismic shifts in the global order that began decades earlier.
Since first assuming power on the eve of the 21st century, less than 10 years after the fall of the USSR, Putin has consistently argued against the growing presence of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance in the former Soviet sphere of influence. He has accused Western rivals of seeking to encircle Russia; Washington and its allies have argued that entry into NATO was voluntary and was often pursued due to the perceived threats of Russian aggression.
The geopolitical storm landed in Ukraine a decade ago, when a mass uprising supported by the U.S. in 2014 ousted the government in favor of leadership seeking closer ties with the West. Moscow condemned what it called a “coup” and sent forces to seize the Crimean Peninsula as Russia-aligned separatists rose in the eastern Donbas region.
Thus began the largest militarization on the continent since the Cold War, with NATO increasingly shoring up its position in Eastern Europe and Russia dedicating more troops and equipment to its western frontier.
As Russian troops began to amass in unprecedented numbers along Ukraine’s borders in 2021, Moscow issued two proposals for demilitarizing that would effectively see NATO reduce its presence in regions near Russia’s borders, to which Antonov said the response was “silence and smirks.”
Talks quickly unraveled, and Putin ultimately resorted to force. Both sides continue to blame one another for setting the stage for conflict.
“In America, there is an unwillingness to recognize that over the past few decades, the West, led by Washington, has been rejecting Moscow’s outstretched hand of cooperation again and again,” Antonov said. “Year after year, it has been militarily ‘exploiting’ European territory, conducting waves of NATO expansion to the East.”
“It has organized color revolutions and anti-constitutional coups,” he said, “increasingly encircling Russia in a hostile ‘ring,’ and as the ‘decisive battering ram’ it chose Ukraine.”
Antonov said that the Pentagon has gone so far as “to study the outcomes of using nuclear weapons on the agricultural sector of Eastern Europe, including Russia,” including “modeling a global nuclear war scenario that will lead to the destruction, as Americans think for some reason, of only agricultural farms.”
“Such simulations were actively conducted during the Cold War years,” Antonov said. “It is noteworthy that even the American military started to contemplate a nuclear conflict.”
“At the same time, they mistakenly believe that this catastrophe will only affect Europe and Russia,” he added. “This is extremely short-sighted. America will not be able to sit it out across the ocean. A global nuclear catastrophe would affect everyone.”
Now, Antonov said, “The objective maximum task at this stage is to prevent the ties between two great powers and permanent members of the Security Council from finally plunging into an uncontrolled nosedive.”
“Russia, as a responsible state, is not interested in such an extremely dangerous development of the situation,” he said. “We convey this idea to our interlocutors and the general public in America on a regular basis. We try to put it explicitly that an insatiable desire to achieve strategic victory on the battlefield over Russia is simply impossible.”
Russian personnel fire a rocket launcher against Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka on October 4. Evgeny Biyatov/Sputnik/AP
Rival Proposals
Several notable attempts have been made to achieve a diplomatic solution since the beginning of the conflict, including direct talks held in Belarus and Turkey in the early weeks. The discussions appeared to make the most progress in Istanbul in April 2022 but have since remained largely frozen.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for a resolution that would see Russian forces unconditionally withdraw from his country’s territory, including four provinces annexed by Moscow in an internationally disputed referendum held in September 2022, as well as from Crimea, which was annexed in a similar vote after being captured by Russia in 2014. He’s also stated that Russian officials, including Putin, must face accountability for alleged war crimes.
These core demands, which Russia outright rejected, were reportedly featured in the new “victory plan” presented by the Ukrainian leader to the White House last month. The plan was set to be unveiled this weekend at a summit in Germany, but the meeting was canceled after Biden pulled out to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.
Putin presented a new proposal of his own in June. This entailed Ukraine ceding the unilaterally Russian-annexed territories, Kyiv abandoning its desire to become a full NATO member, and other measures dismissed by Zelensky and his foreign backers.
Harris referred to the conditions of the Russian plan as “proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable,” during a meeting last month with Zelensky.
Trump has not responded directly to the Russian proposal but has said he had his own plan that would end the war “in 24 hours.” While he has declined to offer details, his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, has revealed the plan would likely include a “demilitarized zone” along the current line of demarcation between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
On the ground, the war has only intensified. Russian forces have advanced on several key axes, while Ukrainian forces have conducted strikes further into Russia itself, including a ground incursion into Kursk province.
Echoing the position expressed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during an exclusive interview with Newsweek earlier this week, Antonov saw additional pledges of military assistance to Ukraine from the U.S. and other Western countries as a direct response to the Russian peace plan, resulting in new warnings from the Kremlin over growing foreign involvement in the conflict.
“Now, amid talks of long-range missiles, Vladimir Putin has sent a clear warning to the United States and its allies,” Antonov said. “He reminded them of the direct involvement of American so-called ‘technical specialists’ in planning and carrying out strikes against Russia.”
Antonov compared the discussions surrounding providing such missiles to Ukraine to “a diver frozen before the decisive jump into the abyss.” He added, “Just think about how far the Western elites have gone in their desire to profit from pitting two Slavic peoples against each other.”
He also referenced the recent reports of a U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter jet being downed by friendly, potentially from a U.S.-supplied Patriot air defense system, as a “clear and obvious confirmation that the Ukrainian army is not ready to operate modern Western weapons.”
Asked last month about the ongoing deliberations of allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike Russia, Biden simply said, “We’re working that out right now.” No policy changes have since been announced.
Later in September, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller responded to a question about the use of U.S.-provided long-range missiles in the war by stating that there was no “one magic capability that would change the face of the conflict.”
“We look at all of the capabilities and all the tactics and all the support that we provide Ukraine in totality,” Miller said at the time, “and when we approve any new weapon system or any new tactic, we look at how it’s going to affect the entire battlefield and Ukraine’s entire strategy. And that’s what we’ll continue to do.”
Last week, however, Zelensky accused Western partners of “dragging out” the supply of long-range weapons during a meeting with new NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
U.S. President Joe Biden (R) meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on September 26. Antonov isn’t hopeful that fighting between Russia and Ukraine would change when the next president takes office. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
A ‘Sobering’ Farewell Message
Antonov left Washington in the midst of the most challenging period in the U.S.-Russia relationship since the end of the Cold War. While he continued to advocate for improved ties, he also acknowledged the depth of the bilateral deterioration between the world’s top two nuclear powers.
“The average American reader, who sees and hears on a daily basis a stream of anti-Russian reports and articles from the media and notes Russophobic slogans coming from government officials and legislators, would hardly be surprised by an unsatisfactory assessment of bilateral ties between Russia and the U.S.,” Antonov said.
“Relations between Moscow and Washington are going through an extremely turbulent period, arguably touching the lowest point in their history,” he added. “Trust between our countries has been completely lost. With rare exceptions, almost all areas of interaction have been ‘frozen.'”
He saw “only a few” politicians and organizations today that he said, “are trying to look behind the curtain of propaganda clichés and understand what really provoked this ‘ice age’ in Russian-American relations.”
Otherwise, he saw few efforts “to take a critical look at the situation and try to understand the root causes of the downward spiral, rather than throwing out sharp accusations of ‘unprovoked aggression,’ ‘imperialism,’ and alleged attempts to subjugate nearly half of Europe.”
In the White House, he described an administration that “continues to burn one bridge after another.”
“We believe that normalization of relations is valuable in itself for either party,” Antonov said. “It takes two to tango. We will not forcefully invite anyone to cooperate.”
Antonov was not especially hopeful that the situation would change depending on whether Harris or Trump emerged victorious next month.
“We stay clear-eyed and understand that in the current circumstances, there is little chance for people who may assume power in the United States not to ultimately find themselves under the dense influence of the ‘deep state’ and corporate structures that are Russophobic towards Russia,” Antonov said.
“The debris in Russia-U.S. relations is so huge that it is extremely difficult to clear it up even with very serious political will,” he added. “Blind support for the Kiev regime and its terrorism on Russian territory puts an end to even an attempt to approach the discussion of normalization of relations.”
With little indication of peace on the horizon and the threat of an even larger-scale confrontation still looming, Antonov cautioned against those who “believe that through controlled escalation it is possible to avoid the worst and weaken Russia, send it into oblivion—to the ‘dump’ of history.”
“The main sobering message that is now required to avoid fatal mistakes is to stop and cease the openly hostile policy towards the Russian Federation,” Antonov said. “Recognize that our country has national interests and a legitimate right to ensure the safety of its citizens, to have its own alternative viewpoint and the opportunity to share it with anyone who is interested in hearing it.
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
88.5 NEPM. All Things Considered. 88.5 NEPM. All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:30 PM Marketplace. 0:00. 0:00. All Things Considered. 88.5 NEPM. 0:00 0 …
Ahead of the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on 13 October, we look at the role played by the IAEA’s unique Incident and Emergency Centre in preparing and responding to potential nuclear or radiological emergencies. Read more →
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) has restored its connection to a 150 kilovolt (kV) power line that could be used as a back-up option for the plant, although the supplies of electricity needed for reactor cooling and other essential functions remain fragile, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said today. Read more →
The IAEA Director General has engaged with Slovenian leaders and civil society today, in the lead up to a key referendum on expanding the country’s nuclear power programme. Read more →
To mark World Cotton Day, the IAEA Director General has highlighted how nuclear science helps optimize the growth of the world’s most important natural fibre, at celebrations in Benin this morning. . Read more →
With just a short four weeks until election day, you owe it to yourself to read this excerpt and analysis from Bob Woodward’s new book “War”. I believe if Trump is re-elected President of the United States of America, he will immediately put Ukraine, the United States, and NATO in an extremely serious precarious political and military situation with Russia. ~llaw
It is a study in contrasts—and of just how dysfunctional the U.S. political system has become, even in the conduct of foreign policy. Over the last several years, around the same period of time U.S. President Joe Biden was confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin, his predecessor Donald Trump was secretly talking to him and opposing U.S. military aid to Ukraine, according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in his new book, War.
Among the shocking new disclosures in the book, a copy of which was obtained by Foreign Policy ahead of its release date next week, Woodward reports that Trump spoke to Putin as many as seven times after he left the presidency and that at one point, in 2024, Trump told a senior aide to leave the room at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call” with the Russian leader.
It was not clear how many of the other calls to Putin occurred before or after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. But the disclosures raise new questions about whether the former president might have violated the Logan Act, which forbids a U.S. citizen from communicating “without authority” from the federal government with foreign officials to “influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” in a dispute with the United States. Such questions date back to suggestions that incoming Trump officials had contacts with Russia even before he was inaugurated in January 2017.
With the U.S. presidential election less than a month away, the book resurrects unsettling questions about Trump’s relationship to Putin and the largely unresolved mystery of the former president’s business and financial ties to Russia.
In particular, the Woodward disclosures raise fresh questions about Trump’s well-documented deference to Putin, especially since Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war “in 24 hours” if elected, hinting broadly that he would do so by forcing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia and forswear joining NATO, which is partly what Putin demands. Going back to just days before the invasion, as Russian troops were amassing on the Ukrainian border, the former president went out of his way to praise Putin for his aggression. “I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump told a right-wing radio program on Feb. 22, 2022. He also suggested that Putin’s effort to subsume Ukraine could be a model for how the United States should deal with its immigration problem. “We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen,” Trump said.
War, Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., $32, October 2024
As Woodward writes, “Trump’s unwillingness to criticize Putin was not a one-off incident but a consistent character trait.” Woodward describes his source on Trump’s post-presidential phone calls to Putin as a single anonymous Trump aide, but when he asked Jason Miller, the former president’s top 2024 campaign aide, about the calls, Miller did not outright deny Woodward’s account but said, “I’d push back on that.” Asked further whether Trump could resolve the Ukraine war with one phone call, as the former president has occasionally claimed, Miller said:
“I think he could. He knows the pressure points. He knows what is going to motivate both sides, and I think he can do that with one phone call each,” meaning to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, respectively.
Woodward also quotes Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, as saying he himself has long been mystified by Trump’s relationship with Putin. “His reaching out and never saying anything bad about Putin. For me … it’s scary,” Coats told Woodward.
Asked to comment on Woodward’s reporting, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded with a lengthy personal broadside against the journalist. “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement, adding that Trump is already “successfully” suing Woodward “because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously.” Cheung added: “Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent, and overall a boring person with no personality.”
Cheung did not mention that Trump has agreed to numerous interviews with Woodward, who is regarded as Washington’s leading chronicler of presidents, going back to 1989.
Woodward also supplies some harrowing new details on Biden’s “missiles of October” moment in 2022, parts of which have been previously reported. In the fall of that year, six months into Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine and in the face of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Biden administration began receiving alarming intelligence that the Russian president was increasingly desperate over his battlefield losses. New intelligence reports indicated that there was a 50 percent chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon, an assessment that was dramatically up from 5 percent and then 10 percent earlier in the war, Woodward writes.
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Nuclear energy produces about 10% of the world’s electricity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It generates more carbon-free power …
Maybe we should all consider taking a look at this old film — or at a minimum reading the following dramatic in its own right — “report”, if we can spare the time between now and the U.S. presidential election just a few weeks away.
It might help make us more aware, allowing us some time to contemplate our own present reality of a similarity to the “nightmare scenario that was all too plausible in an era of heightened tension between the West and the then Soviet Union.”, as the article references the old 1984 movie “Threads”.
These similarly intensifying ‘threats’ as ‘threads’ are coming now in an even more realistically possible way that could instantly turn into an an apocalyptic armageddon-like nuclear war at any time on any day. Awareness, even fictional, is very much worth our time now given the potential of a World War III . . . llaw
Brutal lessons of 1984 nuclear bomb drama Threads
Image caption,
Much of the supporting cast of Threads were people from the Sheffield area
Greg McKevitt
BBC Archive
Published9 October 2024, 02:15 BST
One of the most terrifying programmes ever shown on British television, Threads is the nuclear apocalypse drama-documentary that continues to haunt people’s nightmares 40 years on. Ahead of a rare new showing on the BBC, here’s a look at how the drama still has the potential to terrify people.
First broadcast on 23 September 1984, anyone who tuned in to BBC Two on that Sunday evening would experience a bleak and unforgettable depiction of a massive nuclear bomb attack on a British city and its aftermath.
It was a nightmare scenario that was all too plausible in an era of heightened tension between the West and the then Soviet Union.
Rarely seen on television since its first broadcast, it’s being shown again on BBC Four and iPlayer on 9 October.
Sheffield was chosen as the fictional nuclear target because its writer, Kes author Barry Hines, lived there.
Ahead of transmission, about 600 people from the area who volunteered to work as extras were invited to a private viewing of the film. Some were involved with amateur dramatics while others just thought it might be a bit of fun. Maybe they could spot themselves or their friends on television.
No one was expecting anything quite like this.
Media caption,
1984: Look North interviews some of the extras who have just watched Threads
One young woman told the BBC’s Look North news programme: “When I was doing it, it was just a good laugh, you know? I didn’t really think about what it would likely be like to see it, and when you see it it’s a lot different – it’s very disturbing.”
Another woman, trying to hold back tears, said: “I didn’t think I would have reacted like this but I just couldn’t help it. There’s just going to be nothing after, is there? Nothing.”
Named Threads because of the strands that bind life together in a large city, it covered the events leading up to the attack and the 13 horrendous years after it, as seen through the lives of two families, the Kemps and the Becketts.
Their attempts to survive after the attack make for harrowing viewing, with society breaking down as nuclear winter sets in.
Another woman who appeared as an extra said that while she was watching the drama she thought “everybody’s going to get out of it like all the other films,” but Threads offered no hope.
“I want to die when it hits me because I don’t want to live through anything they lived through, not at all – it was horrible,” she added.
The effect of a nuclear attack on Sheffield was calculated precisely by the makers of Threads, whose director Mick Jackson had previously worked on the grim 1982 BBC documentary, QED: A Guide to Armageddon.
Such a one-megaton airburst would create shockwaves causing severe damage to buildings up to nine miles away.
Much of the following morning’s Breakfast Time was given over to discussing the issues raised by the programme.
Showing impeccable timing, Boy George was on as a guest to promote Culture Club’s new single The War Song, with its catchy “war is stupid” chorus.
He said: “A lot of people see war programmes as something really glamorous, so I think it’s about time they did see things that show it for what it is.”
Media caption,
Threads extras Norma and Debbie Neath talk about the experience on Breakfast Time
Breakfast Time reporter Paul Burden spoke to another two women who signed up as extras, only to receive “a brutal first-hand lesson in the realities of life after the bomb”.
For Norma Neath and her daughter Debbie who lived on the outskirts of Sheffield in the village of Coal Aston, in the event of such an attack “the chance of instant death would be only one in 20”.
Debbie said on the day of filming, it started off as a laugh but by the end “it became a bit too real”.
She said: “They’d got all people laid out with horrible wounds and nasty things, and we were freezing cold and beginning to feel how we probably would really feel if we were in that situation.”
Writer Barry Hines said it was not their intention merely to shock “like it was a horror film”.
“It’s just that it’s such a shocking subject that there’s some very harrowing scenes in it, and so there’s no way that we could avoid shocking the audience,” he said.
Image caption,
Karen Meagher and Reece Dinsdale played the young couple at the centre of the family drama before the bomb dropped
Media caption,
Threads creators Barry Hines and Mick Jackson explain why they tackled the subject in this way, on Pebble Mill at One
On the day after the Threads broadcast, Hines and Jackson also appeared on Pebble Mill at One to deliver a sobering message for viewers of the cosy lunchtime magazine programme.
Hines said his main reason for making Threads was to get people thinking about nuclear weapons, as “a lot of people don’t know anything about it”.
Jackson said many people had the “misconception” that a nuclear bomb meant “a flash and a bang and it’s all over”.
He added: “I think Threads might have shown those people that in fact, in even the severest worst scenario for a nuclear war that you can imagine, more people are going to survive than perish immediately, and that sort of long, drawn-out suffering is something that most people would have to go through if it happens.”
Media caption,
Journalist John Tusa introduces the broadcast of Threads on BBC Two
Later on, Newsnight was given over to a special debate featuring a panel of military and strategic experts from Britain and the US, along with representatives from the three main parties.
Three questions were under discussion:
Can nuclear escalation be controlled so that it stops well short of mass destruction and the nuclear winter?
What lessons can be drawn about Britain’s civil defence programme and its ability to provide either for the aftermath of a mass nuclear attack or the prospect of nuclear winter?
What effect does the nuclear winter hypothesis have on nuclear deterrence and our readiness to rely on nuclear weapons as a key element of defence?
Threads has since become cult viewing, although it has been rarely broadcast on the BBC in the following 40 years.
Director Mick Jackson will introduce a fresh showing on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer, at 22:00 BST on 9 October.
At the time, television critics largely approved of the decision to show Threads.
Herbert Kretzmer of the Daily Mail said that recent programmes about nuclear weapons had showed the BBC “confidently fulfilling its ancient role as a convener and focus of national debate”.
But he worried about the film’s purpose. “Is there not a sense in which programmes like this, while seeking to alert the populace, succeed mainly in paralysing the will?”
In the Times, Peter Ackroyd commented: “It was not clear if the point of Threads was to frighten or inform… they are not incompatible aims, although I suspect they come under the larger heading of entertainment.”
Sean French in the Sunday Times wrote: “By the end we were a little better informed and a lot more worried. Answers were as far away as ever.”
Media caption,
Experts and interested parties give their reaction to Threads, on Did You See
A week after Threads was broadcast, the television review programme Did You See sought a range of views from people with a professional interest in the subject.
Bruce Kent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament felt that “at the end it could have given people a bit more positive direction about the sorts of things they could actually do”.
Military strategist Air Vice-Marshall Stewart Menaul remained sceptical about the programme’s claims.
He said: “Let me emphasise straight away, nobody is going to start chucking 5,000 megatons around this planet. Nobody, neither the Russians, the Americans, the British, the French, or anybody else. It will simply never happen.”
One of those who watched the film at a formative age was Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker, who was 13 in 1984.
He told Desert Island Discs in 2018: “I remember watching Threads and not being able to process what that meant; not understanding how society kept going.”
He added: “I assumed it [nuclear war] was going to happen and I think in the 1980s it did seem like that was going to happen.”
While the world has changed in so many ways since Threads was first broadcast, it retains its harrowing power.
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Meetings Coverage and Press Releases – the United Nations
… nuclear Iran must be unacceptable to all”. Iran, she continued, intends … about the Russian Federation’s announcement of the upcoming revision of its …
… threatened the West with Russia’s nuclear arsenal. In a strong, new warning to the West late last month, Putin said any nation’s conventional attack …
From the article below: “Both Washington and Seoul have warned that any nuclear strike by North Korea would likely lead to the collapse of Kim’s regime.”
The question is, and it has been asked before is, “Even though it could no doubt be done, would we do it?” The answer is, in my long=considered opinion, it doesn’t matter, because any nuclear attack on another nation with nuclear weapons would automatically represent the beginning of WWIII, which would only take a few days from beginning to end.
All nuclear armed nations’ leaders ought to have better sense, but the constant banter from them all, including the US, and especially Russia’s Putin who seems to have remained close to Kim Jong un. So that could mean a nuclear attack on South or North Korea would be equivalent to a nuclear attack on the United States or Russia. I believe the same probability extends throughout all of the 9 nuclear armed countries, and Iran may well have become number ten, which may have suddenly defused Israel’s Netanyahu. That’s a good thing for now, but certainly not for long . . . ~llaw
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has once again raised the specter of nuclear conflict, warning that his country could set off its nukes in potential confrontations with South Korea and the U.S.
His latest warning comes as tensions on the Korean Peninsula escalate, with Kim accusing the two nations of provocation and exacerbating regional hostilities.
In a speech delivered at the Kim Jong Un University of National Defense on Monday, he asserted that North Korea would “without hesitation use all its attack capabilities against its enemies,” should they employ armed forces against the North. “The use of nuclear weapons is not ruled out in this case,” he warned, signaling a willingness to consider preemptive nuclear action.
Kim’s comments are part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive rhetoric since he adopted a more confrontational nuclear doctrine in 2022.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, watches an artillery exercise at an undisclosed place in North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the… More Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP
Analysts speculate that North Korea may ramp up military provocations as the U.S. presidential election approaches next month.
The North Korean leader criticized the growing military alliance between South Korea and the U.S. specifically a new deterrence guideline established in July that integrates South Korean conventional forces with U.S. nuclear capabilities.
Kim argues that such moves threaten to disrupt the balance of power on the Korean Peninsula, where South Korea remains without its own nuclear arsenal.
But experts remain skeptical about North Korea’s actual nuclear capabilities, given that its military is outmatched by U.S. and South Korean forces.
Both Washington and Seoul have warned that any nuclear strike by North Korea would likely lead to the collapse of Kim’s regime.
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Israel ‘Cancels’ Plan To Attack Iran’s Nuclear Oil Fields After Bombshell Report & Warnings · Erdogan Finally Enters Israel War? · Iran’s ‘Nuke Test’ …
warned that the war is entering a dangerous phase, highlighting NATO’s increased focus on nuclear … ‘Nuclear War Risk High’: Putin’s Aide Warns U.S. & …
Nuclear weapons · Kim Jong Un · South Korea · United States · Nuclear threat. New Nuclear Threats Made to US From Kim Jong Un. Published Oct 08, 2024 …
A conflict between or among any nations so long as one has nuclear arms could start World War III, because any act of such a war would bring immediate retaliation from an ally of a nuclear armed country or countries. This particular instance in the article following these comments is a very scary example, and of course there are others such as North Korea and South Korea because if North Korea were to use nuclear weapons against South Korea, the United States would defend South Korea with US nuclear weapons. The same thing could happen with Russia nuking Ukraine, which is a NATO member.
So it is that we must remain alert to all international conflicts no matter their nuclear capability. Also there are the smaller nations’ conflicts that may have nuclear power plants that are ripe for terrorism attacks that could destroy other nations with radiation poisoning even without nuclear arms by damaging nuclear reactors or even incoming power lines leading to nuclear power generating facilities. This issue is already in the forefront of such possibilities in the Russia/Ukraine war where nuclear power plants are already a huge issue in the war.
The only realistic salvation, without intervention of some unknown kind, mankind has in order to avoid all-out nuclear war, or any other international nuclear catastrophe, is to convince all nations to collectively find a way for peace that includes the honest and legitimate dismantling and removing of all things nuclear from human ability to ever use all things nuclear for military or electricity or any other purposes. Doing so can only be accomplished by world unification of all nations, large and small. Otherwise, we are leading ourselves to armageddon followed by innocent other life all the way to the Earth’s 6th extinction. ~llaw
He is doing everything to unite all Muslims and to sever the Western civilization’s centuries-old relations with the Islamic world
My realism-in-international-relations-theory cap on: Unless you make it intentionally, peace cannot occur all by itself. But wars can. You don’t have to do anything special to start a war. But if there is a war you want to start and for some reason, you yourself cannot initiate it, then you find a dog. After all, why keep a dog and bark yourself?
Now, the cap off; back to what is really happening!
Israeli Prime Minister (or the prime suspect of the only genocide of the 21st century that has been going on for the last year) Benjamin Netanyahu started a deluge in his country, and now he is about to let in all those who facilitated his genocide on the prospect of exterminating at least 2 millions of Tehran residents and making about 100 million people injured and sick in Iran and neighboring countries that is on the path of the wind storms of the thermo-nuclear weapons he is going to drop on Iran.
That seems the only way for Netanyahu to keep himself out of Israeli prison: It would gratify the Zionist Armageddon troops in his coalition government who would never allow the Jerusalem District Court to put its claws on him in one count of bribery and three of fraud; he denies them all. His wife and other family members have been involved in all cases.
Netanyahu refused to resign for the trial; he argued that it would not contradict his work. His trial was suspended in October due to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, raid in the occupied territories; his lawyers asked for another delay claiming he does not have time to prepare, and he will only be able to testify in March of next year. That is, Netanyahu needs to prolong that war to something large and endless like George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.”
As the Hamas Raid provided the favorable circumstances to begin his coalition partners’ plan for the “Final Solution in Palestine,” now he has ample opportunity to respond to the 200 plus rockets the Iranian Mullahs fired on Israel last week as retaliation to Israel’s killing Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. Now it is Netanyahu’s turn to retaliate against Iran’s counterretaliation. That is his last opening to spread his war on Gaza to the entire Shiite Crescent, starting at the two ends of it, Lebanon and Yemen, and reaching to the center: Iran, itself.
Netanyahu’s Likud has seven coalition partners – United Torah Judaism, Shas, Religious Zionist Party, Otzma Yehudit, New Hope and Noam – and they actually keep him trapped inside the hardline coalition. His partners are spending billions of dollars in the Occupied Territories opening new settlements and religious schools. Hard-line religious parties allowed gun ownership without investigation. If Netanyahu ever objects to any of these government decrees, his National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir the leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, threatened to end the coalition, which might mean Netanyahu goes to prison with his wife.
This political paralysis will not only keep him doing whatever Ben-Gvir wants him to do, but he has to gear up so that he keeps his allies at the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., Britain and France, on a leash. He knows that in America going to a fateful election would not allow him to keep the Israeli armed forces permanently in the Gaza Strip. America wants Israel to withdraw completely, to let the Palestinian Authority take control. Netanyahu cannot accept cooperation with the Palestinians and he can no longer oppose the U.S. demands. The only way out for him seems to raise the level of hostilities in the region.
State built on blood
Israel was created (at the expense of the Ottoman Empire) to provide a safe refuge for Jews. But it has never been what it was intended for. Since its establishment in 1948, over 20,000 Jews have been killed and over 100,000 of them injured and maimed in the wars the Israeli government started. Not all the Israeli prime ministers were warmongers. Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, for instance, wanted to put an end to the violence caused by Israel’s rejection of the U.N.’s partition of Palestine between the Jews and native Muslims and Christians. He signed the Oslo Accords to finally make peace in Palestine. But Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student and ultranationalist who radically opposed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace initiative, particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords, killed him. Guess who benefited from this political murder?
After a brief interval of seven months with Shimon Peres, Netanyahu became the prime minister and again with a coalition of religious hardliners, he rejected the peace accords Rabin signed and began occupying the Palestinian villages and towns.
According to Mouin Rabbani, former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and co-editor of Jadaliyya Ezine magazine, Netanyahu has three modi vivendi since his first tour of government in 1996. The first is to launch outrageous provocation guaranteed to elicit an armed response. The second is to use overwhelming firepower to kill Arabs and remind them who is boss. The third and the last is to mobilize foreign parties to quickly restore calm on improved conditions.
Forcing their hands
Now Netanyahu is the prime minister for the sixth time, and he has successfully paved the way to elicit any support not only from the U.S. but also from the British, French and German governments.
If, for any reason, he cannot drag the American generals with him into a disastrous war in Iran, there is a way to bring peace to Palestine. American politicians and their trigger-happy generals (who, overruling President Kennedy’s objection, helped Israel go nuclear in the first place) should understand that millions of dead people in Iran and their neighbors, a devastated Tehran and the misery that would follow would make all the Muslim people in the region, Türkiye included, turn their back on the West for good. Those generals should not even think that Iran is a Shiite country and most of the Arabs and Turks are not, so they won’t really bother about the mass killings and devastation in Iran! Even one single, small Jericho rocket with a nuclear bomb would not only demolish the years of efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Middle Eastern nations, but also any future cooperation between the West and the East would be impossible for the foreseeable future.
As professor Stephen Walt, whose realistic cap and basic teachings I borrowed here, says: “If you don’t want someone to do something, you don’t give them the means to do it. One must therefore conclude the U.S. government does not object to what Israel has been doing for the past year.”
We hope the U.S. still has the final control of Netanyahu’s push-button of those bombs which U.S. President Johnson acquiesced to be built in the Negev Desert in Israel after Kennedy was assassinated. (No, I don’t mean that Kennedy was killed by the Israeli Zionists!)
About the author
Hakkı Öcal is an award-winning journalist. He currently serves as academic at Ibn Haldun University.
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Even as the US has made clear it opposes a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Gallant said Israel has not ruled out any of its options. “Everything …
Tripling that to nearly 300 GW will involve the construction of hundreds of new reactors of all … Based in Toronto, Canada, Paul writes about nuclear …
The revised rules, outlined by President Vladimir Putin, say that an attack on Russia with “participation or support of a nuclear power” will be seen …
This is a change in Russia’s “nuclear doctrine” against striking first with nukes — a central plank nuclear deterrence back in the Cold War of 1946 to …
… risks, believing that nuclear weapons will deter an unacceptably strong US or South Korean response.” While the report said “an offensive strategy ..
This article from “Salon” by Norman Solomon is what I would guess to be the most comprehensive, intelligent, and knowledgeable explanation to date of what this world of human “madness” is doing to ensure the end of human lives, as well as most innocent other life, that any concerned person who wants to more thoroughly understand our problem with “All Things Nuclear”, and how it all came to be that way.
The roots of this story describe what this daily blog’s Posts, and other contributors, such as the thoroughly documented doomsday story told in Annie Jacobsen’s recent book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario”, have been trying to get across to the wide world(s) of humanity every day now for 2-plus years. My story is broad and rambling in an effort to tell you all more of the ugly details about how this likely tragedy came to be and how it continues to grow more lethal every day, but this “Salon” article is the capsule of it all and, fittingly, to survive we need to swallow the correct pill . . .
A nuclear war would be planet Earth’s 6th Extinction and the 1st that we humans had anything at all to do with because there weren’t any of us back then, but in this case we are making sure we unmistakably take full credit and that we do it all up right — by killing a beautiful blue and green living oxygen-breathing planet that can no longer support life of virtually any kind for a minimum of thousands of years other than a few cold-blooded creatures and maybe 1 to 2 percent of severely damaged animals like us. ~llaw
COMMENTARY
“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1,000 Holocausts
Nuclear arsenals are vastly more powerful today than during the Cold War — and the risk of apocalypse keeps growing
Nuclear Weapons Pointed At Each Other Over Earth(Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
This article is adapted from the keynote speech given by the author at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, Sept. 24, 2024.
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on Communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khrushchev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing: “escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Sen. William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” nukes in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion — by Russian military and political elites — of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated — ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On Sept. 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The U.S. keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems, programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan — formerly a supreme Cold Warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to issue urgent warnings about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The U.S. should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
That’s a zero-sum view of the world. A one-way ticket to omnicide.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to green-light NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
Consider what John F. Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban missile crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to the offices of every senator and House member, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence — it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five Western states.
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles — or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”
Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”
The U.S. should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancellation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs, they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.
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“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1,000 Holocausts … Nuclear War Planner,” summing up the preparations for nuclear …
The presidential election is just a month away. . . and there are millions of people out there who want Donald J. Trump to be the next president of the United States? Here are 3 quotes from the following “Audacy” article that ought to change your mind . . .
“I hated to build the nuclear, but I got to know first hand the power of that stuff,” Trump said Friday. “And I’ll tell you what, we have to be totally prepared, we have to be absolutely prepared.” (llaw ~ Huh!? Trump never built anything nuclear, so what does he mean and why does he refer to “nuclear” anything as stuff?)
“Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later,’” said former President Donald Trump Friday regarding President Joe Biden’s recent statements on conflict between Israel and Iran. (llaw~ Just shoot from the hip and ask questions later? I realized he is not talking about “hitting” Iran’s nuclear facilities with our nuclear weapons, but Trump got us into this mess during his previous presidency. OMG! )
“That’s the stuff you want to hit, right?” said Trump, the current GOP nominee for president. “I said: ‘I think he’s got that one wrong, isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit?’” (llaw~ I am at a loss for words. He must have got this idea from Putin and Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.)
Please read the rest of this short article and consider what nothing more than what evidently believes we should do and consider just that opening salvo could lead to World War III. ~llaw
Trump says Israel should ‘hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later’
“When they asked him that question, the answer should have been: ‘Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later,’” said former President Donald Trump Friday regarding President Joe Biden’s recent statements on conflict between Israel and Iran.
This Wednesday, Biden said he would not support Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, according to a Reuters report.
“That’s the stuff you want to hit, right?” said Trump, the current GOP nominee for president. “I said: ‘I think he’s got that one wrong, isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit?’”
As we reach the first anniversary of a large-scale terrorist attack by the Palestinian group Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel, tensions in the Middle East are increasing. War still rages in Gaza, where Israel has been criticized for the loss of civilian life as it works to defeat Hamas.
After months fighting Hezbollah, Israel also recently conducted attacks in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Lebanese terrorist group exploded. These explosions caused several deaths, including the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“Hezbollah, since its establishment, has defined itself in opposition to Israel. Its main objectives have been to drive Israel out of Lebanon and, ultimately, to destroy the state of Israel,” explained the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a Friday analysis of the current Middle East conflict.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are financed and supported by Iran. This Tuesday, Iran itself fired 180 missiles at Israel, though that attack has been described as “ineffective.” Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran would pay for the attack, and Israel conducted new airstrikes on Lebanon Saturday, CNN reported.
According to an Al Jazeera report citing Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 41,788 people, including nearly 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. More than 96,794 people have been injured and more than 10,000 were missing as of Oct. 3. In Lebanon, the death toll is also rising.
So, what do nuclear weapons have to do with all of this?
Well, Israel is believed to have around 90 nuclear weapons, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. That means it is the only nation in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal. However, Iran also has a nuclear program focused on providing nuclear energy, and ICAN said its recent nuclear activities indicate it might be able to develop a nuclear weapon.
“Several Israeli politicians from the governing coalition, including a junior cabinet minister, have talked about using nuclear weapons in the current war in Gaza,” said ICAN this April. “Although these comments have been disowned by the Israeli Prime Minister, these threats are dangerous and irresponsible, as they further inflame tensions, and are banned under the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”
ICAN noted that Israel’s allies – including the U.S., as well as Britain and France – have urged the country not to escalate conflict with Iran.
According to ICAN, today’s nuclear weapons are more powerful than the bombs that killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan, and 74,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. Detonation of a single nuclear weapon in a populated area is expected to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and cause radioactive fallout that would contaminate large areas, possibly including the country that used the weapon (especially in the Middle East, where targets are close). Ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons can cause death or severe illness and can have long-term health consequences, including cancer and genetic damage that can be passed down to future generations.
“They do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants and their use would kill, injure and maim civilians in huge numbers,” said ICAN of nuclear weapons. “This means their use would almost certainly constitute a war crime under the existing laws of war.”
During his Friday appearance in Fayetteville, N.C., Trump also noted that: “It’s the biggest risk we have – nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.”
Globally, the risk of nuclear war is higher than it’s been since the Cold War, said ICAN. Apart from war in the Middle East, tension on the Korean Peninsula and the Russian invasion of Ukraine pose nuclear war threats. Just last month, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin hinted at possible nuclear war.
“It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation,” he said.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2024, the U.S. and other allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have been supporting Ukraine with military aid and funding. Putin’s comments came as the U.S. and U.K. discussed the possibility of allowing Ukraine to use Western missiles in Russia.
Compared to Israel’s 90 estimated nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Russia are the world’s largest nuclear powers and each has more than 5,000 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, though Russia has slightly more, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Around five years ago, a simulation by researchers at Princeton’s Science and Global Security program estimated that there would be 91.5 million immediate casualties, including 34.1 million fatalities, if the U.S. and Russia went to war with their nuclear weapons.
“I hated to build the nuclear, but I got to know first hand the power of that stuff,” Trump said Friday. “And I’ll tell you what, we have to be totally prepared, we have to be absolutely prepared.”
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
It was previously reported that Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid could lead to emergencies at one of the three operating nuclear power plants, …
US officials have voiced support for Israel responding to Iran’s missile attack earlier this week, with multiple officials publicly saying there must …
Wilson, a professor at Gettysburg College, faces that daunting task in describing the cataclysm that created the caldera in which Yellowstone National …
So it seems that this oddly short blurb is a bit of politicized gamesmanship between what is going on at the Russian Kursk power plant, reportedly attacked by Ukraine’s military on August 6th, has taken a threatening swing as Russia’s continued attacks goes on in Ukraine for 2+ years of serious damage to their Russian occupied and operated Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine.
It seems to be getting more and more difficult to know and understand how and why this continues to happen, but there is no question it is the beginning of a new kind of nuclear war using nuclear power plants rather than nuclear bomb — at least for now . . . ~llaw
Kremlin accuses Ukraine of ‘playing with fire’ after reported attack near Kursk nuclear plant
By Reuters
October 4, 20242:38 AM PDT Updated 12 hours ago
A view shows the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP), as seen from the town of Kurchatov in the Kursk Region, Russia August 27, 2024. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
MOSCOW, Oct 4 (Reuters) – The Kremlin on Friday accused Ukrainian authorities of playing with fire, a day after Russian forces said they had intercepted a Ukrainian drone near the Kursk nuclear plant and some news outlets reported a fire had broken out several miles away.
“Kyiv is continuing to play with fire, and we will naturally bring this to the attention of the IAEA’s representatives,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhyi on Thursday denied that Ukraine had fired weapons at or near the plant.
Ukrainian forces entered the Kursk region in a surprise cross-border incursion on Aug. 6 and remain there even as the Russian military tries to eject them.
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… nuclear watchdog in August to issue a warning about a nuclear disaster. … All Opinion · Beyond the Bubble · Club Med · Declassified · From Across the …
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that “any nation’s conventional attack on Russia that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a …
Russia-Ukraine War · Vladimir Putin · Nuclear weapons · Kremlin · NATO · Ukraine. Are Putin’s ‘Irresponsible’ Nuclear Threats Credible? Published Oct …
By introducing superior breeds of livestock and harnessing cutting-edge techniques to tackle animal diseases, the IAEA is helping Burundi to ensure food security. Read more →
This October, the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture is celebrating a remarkable milestone — its 60th anniversary. Read more →
Zeynep Gulerce’s career has been shaped by earthquakes. She was a young civil-engineer-in-training in Türkiye when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the Kocaeli Province of the country. Read more →
Implementing hypofractionation – fewer but higher doses of radiation per daily treatment session over a shorter time frame – compared with conventional radiotherapy in prostate and breast cancer could provide radiotherapy for an additional 2.2 million patients globally, according to a Lancet Oncology Commission led by the IAEA. Read more →
This is the follow-up related article to my blog post from yesterday, which was also available on yesterday’s NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS section on this daily blog. If you read yesterday’s post, this article will give you a better understanding of this story, also from “Scientific American”.
The original version, from “Nature”, of the article was also posted here on October 1st. Tomorrow we will get our posts back in order so far as timely dates are concerned. Hopefully, though, we should have a better understanding of AI and its relationship to its consumption of electricity in general and to nuclear power plants specifically . ~llaw
October 2, 2024
5 min read
Power-Thirsty AI Turns to Mothballed Nuclear Plants. Is That Safe?
As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to power AI, nuclear specialists weigh in on the unprecedented process
Cooling towers emit steam at the Exelon Corp. Three Mile Island nuclear power plant with decommissioned cooling towers, at right, in this aerial photo taken in Middletown, Pennsylvania, U.S., on Friday, March 18, 2011.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft announced on 20 September that it had struck a 20-year deal to purchase energy from a dormant nuclear power plant that will be brought back online. And not just any plant: Three Mile Island, the facility in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, that was the site of the worst-ever nuclear accident on US soil when a partial meltdown of one of its reactors occurred in 1979.
The move, which symbolizes technology giants’ need to power their growing artificial-intelligence (AI) efforts, raises questions over how shuttered nuclear plants can be restarted safely — not least because Three Mile Island isn’t the only plant being brought out of retirement.
Palisades Nuclear Plant, an 805-megawatt facility in Covert, Michigan, was shut down in May 2022. But the energy company that owns it, Holtec International, based in Jupiter, Florida, plans to reopen it. This reversal in the facility’s fortunes has been bolstered by a US$1.5-billion conditional loan commitment from the US Department of Energy (DoE), which sees nuclear plants — a source of low-carbon electricity — as a way of helping the country to meet its ambitious climate goals. The Palisades plant is on track to reopen in late 2025.
“It’s the first time something like this has been attempted, that we’re aware of, worldwide,” says Jason Kozal, director of the reactor safety division at a regional office of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Naperville, Illinois, and the co-chair of a regulatory panel overseeing the restart of Palisades.
Here, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about what it will take to restart these plants and whether more are on the way as the world’s demand for AI grows.
A change in fortunes
Since 2012, more than a dozen nuclear plants have been shut down in the United States, in some cases as a result of unfavourable economics. Less cost-effective plants — such as those with only a single working reactor — struggled to remain profitable in states with deregulated electricity markets and widely varying prices. Three Mile Island, owned by the utility company Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Maryland, is a prime example. Today, 54 US plants remain in operation, running a total of 94 reactors.
Nuclear energy, which accounts for about 9% of the world’s electricity, has seen some resurgence internationally, but is also competing with other energy sources, including renewables. After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Japan suspended operations at all of its 48 remaining nuclear plants, but these are gradually being brought back online, in part to cut dependence on gas imports. By contrast, Germany announced a phase-out of its nuclear plants in 2011, and shut down its last three in 2023.
In the United States, nuclear energy’s fortunes might be turning as technology companies race to build enormous, energy-gobbling data centres to support their AI systems and other applications while somehow fulfilling their climate pledges. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to being carbon negative by 2030.
“It’s further confirmation of the value of nuclear, and, if the deal is right — if the price is right — then it makes business sense, as well,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
A new start
This isn’t the first time that the United States has brought a powered-down reactor back online. In 1985, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility company, took the reactors at its Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Athens, Alabama, offline. After years of refurbishment, they were brought back online, with the final reactor restarted in 2007.
The cases of Palisades and Three Mile Island are different, however. When those plants closed, their then-owners made legal statements that the facilities would be shut down, even though their operating licenses were still active. Three Mile Island, which will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center under the proposed restart, shut down its single remaining functional reactor in 2019.
Because the plants were slated for shutdown and safety checks were therefore stopped, regulators and companies must now navigate a complex licensing, oversight and environmental-assessment process to reverse the plants’ decommissioning.
Safety checks will be needed to ensure, among other things, that the plants can operate securely once uranium fuel rods have been replaced in their reactors. When these plants were decommissioned, their radioactive fuel was removed and stored, so the facilities no longer needed to adhere to many exacting technical specifications, says Jamie Pelton, also a co-chair of the Palisades restart panel, and a deputy director at the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in Rockville, Maryland.
It will be no small feat to reinstate those safety regulations: to meet the standards, infrastructure will need to be inspected carefully. According to Buongiorno, any metallic components in the plants that have corroded since the shutdowns, including wires and cables used in instrumentation and controls, will need to be replaced.
The plants’ turbine generators, which make electricity from the steam produced as the plants’ fuel rods heat up water, will also get a close look. After sitting dormant for years, a turbine could develop defects within its shaft or corrosion along its blades that would require refurbishment. In the case of Palisades, the NRC announced on 18 September that the plant’s steam generators would need further testing and repair, following inspections conducted by Holtec.
Nuclear’s prospects
As the plants near their restart dates, their operators will also have to contend with a challenge faced by even fully operational plants: the need to source fresh nuclear fuel. US nuclear utility companies have long counted on the international market to buy much of the necessary raw yellowcake uranium and the services that separate and enrich uranium-235, the isotope used in nuclear reactors’ fuel rods. Russia has been a major international supplier of these services, even after the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, because US and European sanctions have not targeted nuclear fuel. But to minimize its reliance on Russia, the United States is building up its own supply chain, with the DoE offering $3.4 billion to buy domestically enriched uranium.
There probably won’t be too many other restarts of mothballed nuclear plants in the United States, however, even as demand for low-carbon electricity grows. Not every US plant that has been shut down is necessarily in good enough condition to be easily refurbished — and the idea of reopening some of those would meet with too much resistance. As an example, Buongiorno points to New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which was closed in 2021. The plant’s proximity to New York City had long provoked criticism from nuclear-safety advocates.
But that doesn’t mean that all of these sites will remain unused. One option is to build advanced reactors — including large reactors with upgraded safety features and small modular reactors with innovative designs — on sites where old nuclear plants once stood, to take advantage of existing transmission lines and infrastructure. “We might see interest in the US in building more of these large reactors, whether that’s fuelled by data centres or some other applications,” Buongiorno adds. “Utilities and customers are exploring this at the moment.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 30, 2024.
Michael Greshko is a freelance science journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a former staff science writer at National Geographic. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science, Atlas Obscura, MIT Technology Review and elsewhere. Follow Greshko on social media here.
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There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Through its escalating threats of nuclear war, Russia has tried to stop Western countries from supporting Ukraine, particularly when it comes to …Flag as irrnt
