(See “Axios” article below for description and photo credits ~llaw
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
First of all you might be wondering: Who is Steve Witkoff? He is a “friend” of Trump’s who is now somehow the chief U.S. representative in the so-called Iran/USA nuclear talks. In case you don’t know, here is a brief background excerpt from “Wikipedia”: OMG!
Steven Charles Witkoff is an American real estate investor, lawyer, and diplomat who serves as the United States Special Envoy to the Middle East. He is the founder and chairman of the Witkoff Group. He began his career as a real estate attorney, before transitioning to property investment and development. ~Wikipedia
Does the left hand have any idea what the right hand is doing in Trump’s White House? We have a Real Estate lawyer negotiating with Iran over the strength of Uranium fuel — whether it’s far enough below military grade or not, but Trump says they can’t be producing nuclear fuel at all to satisfy the proposed nuclear agreement. Evidently the next meeting/talks are supposed to be in Rome this coming Saturday, but maybe somewhere else. llolloll!
And so the confusion, stupidity, and ignorance continues on . . . I do know it’s not funny, but it is ridiculous. ~llaw
Trump delivers remarks alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio (L) and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Apr. 10, 2025. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
President Trump held a meeting on Tuesday morning in the White House situation room about the ongoing nuclear deal negotiations with Iran, two sources with direct knowledge told Axios.
Why it matters: The high-level meeting with all of the Trump administration’s top national security and foreign policy officials present was focused on discussing the U.S. position in the next round of talks planned for Saturday, the sources said.
Ahead of the meeting Trump spoke on the phone with the Sultan of Oman Haitham bin Tariq and discussed the Omani mediation between the U.S. and Iran.
“The two leaders discussed ways to back these negotiations to achieve the desired outcomes,” the Omani state news agency said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump “emphasized to the Omani Sultan the need for Iran to end its nuclear program through negotiations.”
Behind the scenes: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House national security adviser Mike Waltz, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA director John Ratcliffe and other top officials participated in the situation room meeting on Tuesday.
The meeting took place amid intense debate within the administration over the way forward in the negotiations and the compromises the U.S. should or shouldn’t make.
Vance and Witkoff think diplomacy could lead to a nuclear deal and think the U.S. should be ready to make some compromises in order to get it.
Other senior members of the administration, including Rubio and Waltz, are highly skeptical and support a maximalist approach to the negotiations.
Trump himself is sending mixed messages. He has said he wants a deal and thinks the nuclear crisis is solvable through diplomacy but has alsothreatened Iran with a military strike.
The White House declined to comment on the meeting. Leavitt told reporters that “the maximum pressure campaign on Iran continues but the president made it clear he wants to see dialogue and discussion with Iran while making clear Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Driving the news: On Monday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Iran has to move fast in the negotiations and stressed that Iran “might be tapping us along” in the nuclear talks.
Trump threatened again to use military power against Iran. “If we have to do something very harsh we will do it,” he said.
On Monday evening, Witkoff said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News that the first round of talks with Iran last Saturday in Oman was positive.
Zoom in: Witkoff said the U.S. position is Iran would have to stop enriching uranium to the level of 20% and to the near weapons-grade level of 60%, but didn’t rule out that the Iranians would be able to continue enriching uranium to the level of 3.67% that is needed for a civilian nuclear energyprogram.
Witkoff added that any nuclear deal would have to verify Iran’s enrichment levels and that it doesn’t build ballistic missiles that can deliver a nuclear weapon or build triggers that can detonate nuclear bombs.
Witkoff’s remarks were very different from what Waltz said in recent weeks about the need to dismantle the entire nuclear program.
His remarks also contradicted what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his meeting with Trump last week about the need to fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, like what he claimed happened in Libya in 2003.
On Tuesday morning, Witkoff clarified his remarks and wrote on X that “any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East — meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”
The other side: Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday during a meeting with top government officials in Tehran that the first round of talks with the U.S. was “satisfactory.”
Khamenei said he is “neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic” about the negotiations and stressed he is “very skeptical of the other party, but confident in our own capabilities.”
What to watch: The next round of talks between the U.S. and Iran on Saturday was supposed to take place in Rome.
The U.S., Iran and the Italian government confirmed it and visas have been issued for the Iranian delegation.
But on Monday evening the Iranian foreign ministry said the venue for the next round of talks has been moved back to Muscat. U.S. officials haven’t confirmed the change in location.
Sources with knowledge of the issue said one of the reasons for moving the talks from Rome was that Vance is expected to be there over the weekend and the White House wanted to avoid the overlap.
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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.
The meeting included a Sixth International Nuclear Emergency Exercise (INEX-6) topical session on the long-term recovery phase following 26 countries …
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… Yellowstone region. Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
See Al Jazeera article below for description and photo credits ~llaw
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
To me, it appears that Donald Trump is the obstructionist in these talks, which are still not direct talks as continually sad these discussions would be. It is his constant and continuing “war” threats that seem to keep other nations deeply involved — such as Russia — to referee Trump’s threatening and obnoxious game.
So, if the truth were known, is it not Trump who is the agitator, aggressor, and the prevaricator rather than Iran? All four of these articles — three linked — are pointed directly at Trump and his premature obstruction and he is even reported to be “angry” with Putin, not to mention that Trump’s threats continue to include his mythical “nuclear bomb” accusation. This is no way to conduct America’s role in this situation. ~llaw
Iran to consult Russia on US nuclear talks, Rome may host next meeting
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to visit Moscow as US allies seek to avoid being sidelined by Trump.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi will meet with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later this week for consultations over nuclear talks with the US [File: AFP]
Published On 14 Apr 202514 Apr 2025
Tehran’s foreign minister will travel to Moscow this week for consultations over Iran’s nuclear talks with the United States, Iran and Russia have announced.
Abbas Araghchi will visit the Iranian ally later this week, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. The announcement of the trip – during which Araghchi will meet his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, Moscow said – came as details emerged regarding a second set of talks between Iran and the United States to follow up on an initial meeting over the weekend in Oman.
Araghchi’s visit to Russia “was planned in advance, but there will be consultations regarding the talks with the US”, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said.
Iran and the US said over the weekend that they had held “positive” and “constructive” talks although the negotiations remain indirect with Oman acting as mediator.
The two nations have agreed to reconvene on Saturday with reports on Monday suggesting that Rome will play host, though Iran reportedly prefers Geneva.
The US and its Western allies accuse Iran of seeking to use its nuclear programme to develop weapons. Tehran says the work has only civilian purposes.
Iran’s diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear dispute and lift sanctions on its struggling economy have accelerated amid demands from US President Donald Trump, which have come with threats of military action.
Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, has played a role in recent years in nuclear negotiations between the West and Iran.
As an ally of Tehran, it was a signatory to a 2015 nuclear agreement that saw international inspections agreed and sanctions eased, but Trump abandoned the deal during his first term as president in 2018.
Amid the renewed negotiations between Iran and the US, Moscow has called for a focus on diplomatic contacts instead of actions that it said may lead to an escalation.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed on Monday that Foreign Minister Lavrov will meet Araghchi.
“We are expecting Iranian colleagues, talks with Sergey Lavrov as well as meetings with Russian officials are planned,” ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
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All Things Nuclear
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Nuclear War Threats
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Yellowstone Caldera & Other Volcanoes (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
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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.
In order to keep abreast of the weekend nuclear news, I will post Saturday and Sunday’s news, but without editorial comment. If a weekend story warrants a critical review, it will show up on Monday’s posts . . .
If you are not familiar with the daily blog posts, this is how the nuclear news post works . . . llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’s All Nuclear Daily Digest” RELATED MEDIA”:
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available on this weekend’s Sunday Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
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 NEGOTIATIONS: Trump brings a ‘different set of rules’ to foreign policy … Val Kilmer & Mel Gibson Tell You What We All Thought Was True About …
The U.S. and Iran have launched negotiations to strike a new deal that would scale back Iran’s nuclear program … All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:00 …
Nuclear power plants were historically modelled on coal power plants (Radkau, 1983). Such plants rely on boilers that turn water into steam. The steam …
… atomic power station, the department said. Close. Nuclear Disaster Training. Buy Now. Volunteers showing contamination are scanned during a training …
… War Excuse’; ‘Not Interested In Your Outdated Nuclear Submarines’ | Watch … Explained: Why Iran May Not Be Worried About Trump’s Attack Threats, Has …
Nuclear News Alert: This Saturday’s nuclear media news is all about the Trump threats of “WAR” as the Iran/U.S. talks begin today! The scenarios are nearly all of a negative nature! . . .
In order to keep abreast of the weekend nuclear news, I will post Saturday and Sunday’s news, but without editorial comment. If a weekend story warrants a critical review, it will show up on Monday’s posts . . .
If you are not familiar with the daily blog posts, this is how the nuclear news post works . . . llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’s All Nuclear Daily Digest” RELATED MEDIA”:
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available on this weekend’s Saturday Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
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.
The Aalo Pod: A groundbreaking modular nuclear reactor by Aalo Atomics, poised to transform energy solutions for data centers worldwide. IN A NUTSHELL.
US-Iran Talks: Nukes, sanctions & war threats — Can Trump seal the nuclear deal? … Report Warns Iran’s Nuclear Threat Has “Worsened Significantly” | ..
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
The question is Trump Fears Nuclear Weapons. So Why Is He Making Them More Popular ~ Politico.
This is a more than a legitimate question and needs some serious answers. Perhaps he is unable to evaluate reality, or maybe he is suffering from dementia (as many of us have surmised), or is he just egotistical and believes that no one understands such important situations than he does. Whatever the reasons for his often ignorant and/or wrong decisions is a huge worry to the entire planet. So we are seeing many European countries and others making plans to build their own nuclear arsenals because America is walking away from helping to protect them (and us) with our own nuclear arsenal that we have formerly agreed to share if necessary. Today there just 9 nuclear armed countries. If America doesn’t continue to support other NATO, The Middle East, and other countries, the nuclear armed countries could easily double or even triple. So that is just one more of our dangerous dilemmas with the attitude and thinking of Donald Trump.
Tomorrow begins a very important conference with perhaps negative results concerning a possible agreement between the USA and Iran regarding control of Iran’s nuclear future. Iran doesn’t want to be “bombed”, of course, as Trump has loudly threatened, if they fail to accept the stipulations of America’s demands. Their leaders have said as of yesterday and today that they will do their best to pacify Trump and sign on to his so-called “deal”.
To my way of thinking, Trump’s way of thinking and his constant braggadocio attitude of superiority is100% wrong because polite political discussion of such international meetings should be professionally courteous — amicable but serious — showing respect for both party’s issues, wishes, reasoning, and hopes rather than a boisterous threat of war for days before the two countries even have a chance to sit down at the conference table. The cool, calm, and collected party at this conference seems to be Iran: Iran says it will give U.S. talks about nuclear plans a “genuine chance”.
The threat of U.S. withdrawal has prompted countries around the world — from Germany to South Korea — to talk about building their own nuclear arsenals.
By Michael Hirsh
04/11/2025 10:00 AM EDT
Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for POLITICO Magazine.
Donald Trump has been obsessed with preventing a nuclear holocaust since he was a bumptious boy builder back in the 1980s. Back then Trump reportedly proposed, with typical grandiosity, that if President Ronald Reagan appointed him “plenipotentiary ambassador” he would end the Cold War “within one hour.”
Since then, Trump has rarely stopped talking about mitigating the danger of nuclear weapons. In his first presidential term, shortly before heading off to what would become an infamous 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump called nukes “the biggest problem in the world” and summed up for reporters what he hoped to accomplish: “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.” Trump has repeatedly sounded the theme in his second term as well, warning over and over of “World War III.” In mid-February he declared: “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many.”
So it’s more than a little curious to consider that, in less than three months as president, Trump has already set in motion the opposite trend: potentially the fastest and most dangerous acceleration of nuclear arms proliferation around the world since the early Cold War.
The new nuclear powers aren’t just the rogue nations that have long been the focus of U.S. concern, countries like Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.
Nor is there any evidence that in the flurry of activity marking what Trump has called “the most successful” start of any presidency in U.S. history, his administration has even begun reckoning with the implications of these seemingly contradictory policies.
A National Security Council spokesperson, James Hewitt, did not respond directly to questions about whether Trump means to open the way for allies to obtain nuclear weapons as they assume more of the defense burden in their regions. But Hewitt said: “President Trump has repeatedly warned that nuclear destruction is the biggest threat to humanity and is committed to a policy that promotes nuclear nonproliferation around the world.”
Nuclear experts, however, note that the administration has few personnel in place to address nuclear proliferation. Several nominees from the Defense and State Departments to the Nuclear National Security Administration are awaiting confirmation. At the National Security Council, the post of senior director for arms control hasn’t yet been named.
“I’ve heard it’s a pure ghost town,” said Matt Costlow, who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in Trump’s first term. “There’s just no one there. And the staff that is there is spread so thin it’s causing this paralysis.” As a result, he adds, “I don’t know that the Trump administration yet has a set view on the desirability of allies going nuclear. I think there’s a mix of views.”
Yet it’s clear that Trump’s signaling of a global drawdown of the U.S. defense umbrella has also produced an accelerated trend toward building — or at least considering deploying — nuclear weapons. Potential U.S. adversaries as well as allies say they are puzzled by the fact that no one in the Trump administration seems willing or able to grapple with the issue.
In Beijing, Chinese officials are growing worried that that “regional security is fragmenting and eventually they’ll have to deal with more nuclear or ‘nuclear-latent’ countries in Asia,” said Francesca Giovannini, head of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who met with Chinese officials in late March. The problem, she said, is that the Chinese “really have zero idea of who he will appoint for arms control dealings. The Trump people don’t have the expertise in place to make decisions.”
One senior official who was just confirmed by the Senate, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, has been a leading and often strident voice in pressing European and Asian allies to beef up their own defenses. Last year Colby told Yonhap that South Korea was going to have to take “primary, essentially overwhelming, responsibility” for its own defense and added that Washington should not sanction Seoul if it decides to go nuclear.
“It would not be rational to lose multiple American cities to just deal with North Korea,” Colby was quoted as saying. In his Senate testimony in March, Colby also said that Trump believes Taiwan needs to boost its defense spending from under 3 percent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product to deter a war with China — a hike that Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai called “impossible.”
Many U.S. allies now have a sense that Trump is abandoning the entire postwar global system and casting the world back into a vicious scramble for power in which the biggest powers get to dominate their regions, and the smaller countries fend for themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but said as much in a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, when he effectively conceded that Washington’s hegemonic global stature had been “an anomaly.”
“It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet,” Rubio said.
“The message coming from the U.S. is that Trump’s foreign policy is all about spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine. China can have Taiwan,” said Karl Friedhoff, an expert in East Asian security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
As a result, some national security experts say this could be turning into the most unstable period since the early Cold War — an unstable period that could have a lot more nukes in a lot more places.
“People outside the U.S. see this more clearly,” Friedhoff added.
Nuclear Threats Go Local
The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the 20th century.
For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the air, ground or sea. The destructive power of those weapons led the two nations to conclude a series of arms control agreements that eventually reduced the size of those arsenals.
And in contrast to the Trump administration’s seemingly laissez-faire approach to arms control — in his first term Trump abandoned several nuclear-related pacts, including the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — his predecessors in the Oval Office going back to the 1950s worked hard to prevent the appearance of new nuclear states. Throughout the Cold War and well afterward Washington led an intense campaign to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
During the 1950s and 1960s, “from 30 to 40 countries started nuclear energy programs with an eye to actual military applications,” said Brad Roberts, director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Inspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pushed hard for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was signed in 1970 has since been a cornerstone of global nuclear non-proliferation and to which 191 nations are signatories.
Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a concern that the breakup of the Soviet Union would result in loose nukes and newly independent post-Soviet states being armed with nuclear weapons. As a result, three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — were pressured into relinquishing the weapons stationed on their territories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton made an anguished plea to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test a bomb; after Sharif refused, Clinton imposed sanctions. Finally, in the mid-90s the Clinton administration pushed successfully to extend the NPT from 25 years to an indefinite term. Among the nations that ultimately gave up active nuclear weapons programs: South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Italy, Yugoslavia, Switzerland and Australia.
Today, largely as a result of all this frenetic diplomacy led by Washington, there are just nine nuclear powers in the world, as there have been for decades: America, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and most recently, North Korea.
But some of those nations that surrendered programs are now rethinking those decisions, along with some new nuclear wannabes. What Trump will do about this, again, remains a large question mark. When Trump talks about “denuclearizing,” he tends to focus on the first three countries on that list, which still have the largest arsenals, and he talks about nuclear arms control as if it’s still something that the leaders of superpowers can decide among themselves.
Yet increasingly, nuclear weapons are being sought by countries that aren’t global superpowers but instead face threats from neighbors or regional rivals, such as Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East. That means the nuclear equation is increasingly a region-by-region strategic puzzle with global ramifications.
Here’s some of what that looks like.
Europe
In Germany — a country where even discussing the bomb used to be a political third rail — the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, didn’t rule out the idea of developing one in a March interview. Merz also said Berlin should start talks about expanding the French and British nuclear deterrents to Europe, and he suggested Germany may finally be ready to go along with France’s on-again, off-again push for strategic autonomy from the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella; on March 18 he said France will deploy its own Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035.
And in Poland, a NATO frontline nation, Prime Minister Donald Tusk in March became that country’s first leader to hint at going nuclear, saying in a speech his nation should “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” He also suggested that Ukraine made a mistake by giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, leaving itself vulnerable to Russia.
As for Ukraine, which feels threatened with abandonment by Washington in the face of Russia’s aggression, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has openly talked about reestablishing a nuclear deterrent. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will be in NATO,” Zelenskyy declared last October.
According to Ukrainian news reports, Zelenskyy said that, before the U.S. election in November, Trump told him during a meeting, “‘Your reasoning is fair.” Trump officials have since declared flatly that Ukraine will not be joining NATO.
“Say you’re Zelenskyy and you’re being forced into unsatisfactory peace with Russia without good security guarantees, what’s your best bet?” said Daniel Serwer of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Could the Ukrainians technically do this? Sure. Look what they’ve done driving the war. They know their business. They’ve handled a lot of nuclear material. They have good physicists and really good engineers. It’s not beyond Polish, German, Japanese or Taiwanese capabilities either.”
And in the long run a French guarantee of extended nuclear deterrence would not suffice for many European states. “Would the Poles see it as credible? Not a chance. It’s not likely the Germans would either,” said Roberts, who foresees a future of new regional groupings of nuclearized states, including the Nordic countries.
Middle East
In the Middle East, experts believe Iran has been backed into a strategic corner since Israel decimated its proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that its leaders are now more motivated than ever to build a bomb.
In his first term, Trump withdrew from an agreement the Obama administration and its partners had negotiated with the Iranian regime that froze its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. Since Trump ended that accord, Iran has raced to develop its program, and current assessments estimate that Iran is close to producing weapons-grade uranium and is only months, not years, away from completing a nuclear bomb.
Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have indicated they would duplicate Iranian nuclear capabilities if Tehran got a bomb. Turkey will begin operating its Russia-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — its first — this year. And numerous reports over the years have indicated that the Saudis may have a secret diplomatic understanding with Pakistan under which Riyadh could quickly obtain a nuclear weapon from Islamabad, which developed its own bomb in the 1990s with Saudi financial backing. (Saudi Arabia denies such an understanding.)
Trump is now seeking to reopen nuclear talks with Iran, vowing that the program must be completely dismantled. Iran has given mixed signals about how eager it is to reach an agreement. Representatives of both nations are set to hold their first, tentative meeting on Saturday in Oman.
All this is taking place as the region is more unstable than it has been in decades following the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, and concerns are now growing that a new Mideast war is imminent. The United States and Israel have threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could further destabilize the region. And nations that formerly dabbled in nuclear programs around the world, even Brazil, “are watching these developments very closely,” Roberts said.
East Asia
The Trump administration’s nuclear policy toward the Indo-Pacific is less clear, at least as of now. In contrast to his stunning rebuke of European allies in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Japan as an “indispensable partner in deterring Communist Chinese military aggression” during a visit to Tokyo in late March.
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But since his first administration, Trump and senior defense officials also have been pushing Asian allies hard to build up their own defenses. As a result, in South Korea and even Japan — where building a bomb was once unthinkable after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — there is a new willingness to embrace nuclear weapons in some form.
“The nuclear debate is still taboo in Japanese society, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we’ve seen a total wake-up call in Japan about what kind of additional military power to possess,” said Junjiro Shida, a national security expert at Meio University on Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed.
On March 7, in what has become a typical Trump trope about U.S. allies taking advantage of U.S. generosity, the president accused Japan of similar freeloading. “We have a great relationship with Japan, but we have an interesting deal with Japan that we have to protect them, but they don’t have to protect us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “And by the way, they make a fortune with us economically. … I actually ask, ‘Who makes these deals?’”
As a result of all this U.S. pressure, Shida said the new Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is embracing former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s call for “nuclear sharing”— diplomatic code for permitting nuclear missiles to be stationed on its soil for the first time. In a statement last fall, Ishiba proposed an “Asian version of NATO” that must “specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”
South Korean politicians have gone further. In January — a week before Trump’s inauguration — South Korea’s politically embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said for the first time that his country might consider building nuclear weapons in the face of mounting threats from nuclearized North Korea. Yoon has since been ousted after being impeached for declaring martial law last year. But even his likely successor, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea — which once stoutly opposed nukes — has not ruled this out.
“Since Yoon mentioned it there has not been one politician from the progressive side who’s laid out why Korea doesn’t need a nuclear weapon,” Friedhoff said.
As in Japan, the debate in Korea stops just short of a full-on endorsement of a bomb. South Korean politicians prefer to speak of a policy of “nuclear latency” — which effectively means becoming a threshold state that could swiftly build nukes if needed.
But Japan and South Korea, longtime rivals, are also watching each other closely and a move to go nuclear by one could provoke the other. “South Korean politicians and academics worry that Japan has more capability to develop nuclear weapons because Japan has so much plutonium,” thanks to its 64 nuclear power plants, Shida said.
Even in Taiwan — which is under constant threat of Chinese invasion but has been pressured by Washington to remain non-nuclear — there may be renewed interest in moving to nuclear weapons. Twice in the past the Taiwanese have been cited by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency for suspicious dabbling in fissile material. And as elsewhere, the Trump administration is pushing Taipei hard to take up more of its own defense.
Spheres of Influence
There is still a very long road, however, from discussions about building a bomb to getting it done.
The reason? “Going nuclear is one of the most politically dangerous and costly moves any country can make,” Harvard’s Giovannini said. “It’s not like one day is zero day and the next day you’re nuclear. You have to create an infrastructure and remove yourself from the NPT,” or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As North Korea has discovered, huge stigmas and often sanctions attach to any country that withdraws from the NPT.
But it’s Washington that has led efforts to impose sanctions and isolation on NPT violators. So much will depend on what signals the Trump administration sends to its allies in the coming months about how independent it wants them to become on defense, and how comfortable the administration is with nuclear weapons being part of that mix. “There continues to be a lack of clarity about how they’re going to direct their efforts on this,” said Mark Melamed of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Experts said the uncertainties created by Trump have turbo-charged discussions already underway in an increasingly volatile global environment.
“There is growing doubt among allies and partners about whether the United States will meet its defense commitments when the chips are down,” said Eric Brewer, the former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “But there are a lot of other systemic factors driving countries to talk about developing nuclear weapons. One is the deteriorating regional security environments. In Europe, [you have] Russia’s growing nuclear arsenal and threat. In Asia you have the growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East you have Iran at the nuclear threshold. The other factor is the absence of cooperation among great powers. During the Cold War we had U.S.-Soviet cooperation on non-proliferation. Now you have Russia actively aiding the missile if not nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.”
Putin is mainly responsible for bringing back the nuclear threat, beginning with his “escalate to de-escalate” policy — that is, threatening nuclear war to prevent conflicts from getting worse. Humiliated by the fierce Ukrainian resistance to his invasion, Putin has also repeatedly hinted that he could use nukes in that conflict, even announcing that he was moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus and suspending participation in the New START treaty, Moscow’s last major arms control pact with Washington.
China is also destabilizing the nuclear status quo. In the past few years, satellite photos have revealed China’s dramatic — and highly secret — nuclear buildup, which may include as many as 300 new missile silos. China’s nuclear arsenal now amounts to about 600 operational nuclear warheads as Beijing moves swiftly to counter the U.S. stockpile of about 3,700 warheads, the Federation of American Scientists reported in March.
And the United States isn’t sitting still, either. Under both Trump and Biden, Washington has been consistently upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including via developing the country’s first new nuclear warhead, the W93, in 40 years; a B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb; 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles; a fleet of nuclear-armed strategic submarines; and a new strategic bomber (the B-21) and air-launched cruise missile.
All this means that for war planners worldwide, nuclear calculations have once again become part of the conventional war equation. During the Cold War, the idea of nuclear war simply meant mutually assured destruction, or MAD, and the major powers created massive arsenals that no other nation could think of matching.
Today, from the Middle East to Europe and the Indo-Pacific, we live “in a world full of missiles that can be very precise about their delivery” and tipped with new types of lower-yield nukes known as “tactical” weapons, said Becca Wasser, a strategist at the Center for a New American Security. “We’ve seen an increased push toward the integration of conventional and nuclear war plans.”
Trump thus has no choice but to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and, at the same time, badger U.S. allies about beefing up their defenses.
“A lot of it comes down to our allies responding to a renewed nuclear threat regionally,” Costlow said. “That sort of went away at the end of the Cold War. We removed a lot of our regional nuclear weapons that we deployed in Europe and Asia. So it’s lot harder for us to respond quickly as Russia and China change. Russia has this enormous advantage in regional nuclear weapons. China, the same thing. We don’t have any of those.”
Trump’s Nuclear Opportunity
Yet some arms control experts say there may be cause for hope that Trump could also relieve some of the nuclear tension. They suggest that even as Trump has appeared eager to appease Putin, he has a kind of “Nixon goes to China” credibility in seeking to stabilize relations with Russia and China — perhaps even driving a partial wedge between them.
“There is quite a weird optimism within the nuclear community about Trump,” Harvard’s Giovannini said. “There is an idea that he has a political space that no other president before him had to make a good deal with Russia, China and Iran.” Giovannini, who confers frequently with Chinese officials, added that China had favored Trump over Kamala Harris in the U.S. election because “he seems to have more political space to compromise.”
In France, meanwhile, the government believes the rest of Europe is finally going along with the vision of partial autonomy from Washington that Charles De Gaulle laid out decades ago. And some European diplomats believe this could help re-stabilize the fraught transatlantic relationship. “There is a kind of convergence between the French vision and Trump’s vision of having Europeans taking responsibility for their own security,” said one European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Almost everybody in Europe now thinks that’s the right path.”
In late January, Trump told the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos by video that he’s very concerned about nuclear arms proliferation and he wants to start up talks with China and Russia, saying, “So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” Those talks have not gotten underway.
As Costlow put it, Trump faces a vastly complex challenge of supplying America’s “extended deterrence” — its global nuclear defense umbrella — to allies in the face of “opportunistic and coordinated aggression between Russia and China in two different theaters,” Europe and Asia. Trump’s defenders argue that he has already had success in bullying allies from Germany to Taiwan into investing more in defense against Beijing and Moscow.
And mainly what’s happening now in countries like Germany and South Korea is “nuclear signaling,” Wasser said. Countries are merely “demonstrating a willingness to pursue nuclear capability if that’s what’s required.”
In recent months the national security community in Seoul was extremely disturbed when Hegseth acknowledged North Korea as a “nuclear power” in a statement before his confirmation hearing as defense secretary.
“What makes the South Koreans nervous is the fear that we wouldn’t risk San Francisco to save Seoul,” said Robert Soofer, Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy.
But even now “the South Koreans would rather put pressure on the U.S. to help more than embarking on a costly nuclear strategy,” argued Giovannini. The challenge for Ukraine would be similar, she added. “There is no infrastructure in Ukraine at the moment that would lead to a bomb. And for them the process of nuclearization is very risky. Because the Russians are not just going to stand by.”
For key U.S. allies still haunted by World War II, like Japan and Germany, any nuclear debate will take years to play out. “Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy’ is very strong, partly because it is the only country to have experienced atomic bombings,” said Kazuhiro Maeshima, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Sophia University. “This is what makes it different from South Korea, where the argument for nuclear weapons is growing due to North Korea’s nuclear development. If the discussion of Japan’s nuclear armament grows, it is likely to cause a kind of panic in Japan.”
In Germany, too, the public outcry would be enormous — and cause a kind of existential crisis within the European Union. “Germany would certainly prefer to maintain the current nuclear order with the U.S.,” said Claudia Major, a national security expert at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “Any change means less security and stability for all involved. Taking a unilateral decision to develop a German bomb would signal our neighbors: ‘We don’t care about you; we gave up on European defense.’ It would call into question traditional German policies (like support for the NPT) and could encourage worldwide proliferation.”
But as Costlow and others point, just a willingness to broach the prospect of going nuclear could be something of a Pandora’s Box.
“I compare it to uranium enrichment: The first 20 percent is actually the hardest hurdle to overcome. The last 80 percent doesn’t take much time,” Costlow said. “For some of these countries just the fact that they’re now talking about becoming a potential nuclear state is the toughest hurdle.”
And, he added, they’re starting to clear it.
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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.
All Things Considered. Iowa Public Radio News. All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:00 PM The Daily. 0:00. 0:00. All Things Considered. Iowa Public Radio …
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China is making remarkable progress in nuclear energy and is a strong supporter of the IAEA’s mission to ensure that nuclear technology serves peace and development, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said while meeting China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. Read more →
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A mural on the wall of the former US embassy in Tehran depicts the Iranian government’s view of negotiations with the US
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
But, if Trump agrees to this one demand from Iran, in order “to seal the deal” with the U.S. government, “But US President Donald Trump must first agree there can be no “military option”, Foreign Minister Abbas said, and added that Iran would “never accept coercion”, my question is would Trump lie and agree to the demand, and then go forward with the “military option” is an agreement is not agreed to . . .
Another negative possibility is that Trump will simply refus to negotiate without the “military option” in place, which would also immediately cancel the Saturday scheduled meetings.
Neither one of these options is acceptable because Trump’s word is not anything other world leaders, or even U.S. leaders and our citizens, can rely on because he may order that Iran be militarily attacked — or “bombed” in Trump’s vernacular — in either case. ~llaw
Iran says it is ready for nuclear deal if US stops military threats
David Gritten
BBC News
AFP
A mural on the wall of the former US embassy in Tehran depicts the Iranian government’s view of negotiations with the US
Iran is ready to engage with the US at talks on Saturday over its nuclear programme “with a view to seal a deal”, its Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said.
But US President Donald Trump must first agree there can be no “military option”, Araghchi said, and added that Iran would “never accept coercion”.
Trump, who pulled the US out of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers during his first term, warned that Iran would be in “great danger” if talks were not successful.
The US and Iran have no diplomatic ties, so last month Trump sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader via the United Arab Emirates. It said he wanted a deal to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to avert possible military strikes by the US and Israel.
Trump disclosed the upcoming talks during a visit to the White House on Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said on Tuesday that both leaders had agreed “Iran will not have nuclear weapons” and added “the military option” would happen if talks dragged on.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful and it will never seek to develop or acquire nuclear weapons.
However, Iran has increasingly breached restrictions imposed by the existing nuclear deal, in retaliation for crippling US sanctions reinstated seven years ago, and has stockpiled enough highly-enriched uranium to make several bombs.
Watch: Iran, tariffs and hostages – key moments in Trump meeting with Netanyahu
The US president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that this weekend’s meeting in Oman would be “very big”.
“I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump said.
But he also warned that it would “be a very bad day for Iran” if the talks were not successful.
“We will meet in Oman on Saturday for indirect negotiations. It is as much an opportunity as it is a test,” Araghchi said.
Iran harboured “serious doubts” about the sincerity of the US government’s intentions, he noted, citing the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions that Trump restored soon after starting his second term.
“To move forward today, we first need to agree that there can be no ‘military option’, let alone a ‘military solution’,” he said.
“The proud Iranian nation, whose strength my government relies on for real deterrence, will never accept coercion and imposition.”
Araghchi insisted there was no evidence that Iran had violated its commitment not to seek nuclear weapons, but also acknowledged that “there may exist possible concerns about our nuclear programme”.
“We are willing to clarify our peaceful intent and take the necessary measures to allay any possible concern. For its part, the United States can show that it is serious about diplomacy by showing that it will stick to any deal it makes. If we are shown respect, we will reciprocate it.”
“The ball is now in America’s court,” he added.Subscribed
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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.
ABC News New 85K views · 13:26 · Go to channel · Scientists Warn Yellowstone Caldera Volcano is About to Erupt Massively. ViewCation New 319 views · 5 …
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the crowd in Tehran, Iran, March 31.
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
Dementia? Iran has apparently never said they would agree to direct talks with Trump about a nuclear deal. In fact they have said the opposite. Is Trump lying intentionally or is he mentally ill? Read the “Guardian” story or listen to the video — or both — and consider whether this man is mentally able to continue as the U.S. president. The last “direct” talks between the U.S and Iran were held 45 years ago in 1980.
Some the article’s reporting has somehow apparently been edited out of the original story, so far as I can tell, from both the “Guardian” and the “AP” stories, and also from “NPR”s more recent version of the story: All I could fine was … nuclear deal. Source: AP. Mon 7 Apr 2025 21.55 EDT Last modified on … all the warnings about a ‘dementia tsunami’, here are the things you …
I did find in a time-related “Guardian” story about “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” in an article where Trump is quoted in the following way: “ As Trump himself observed: “The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Donald Trump has announced that the US is to hold direct talks with Iran in a bid to prevent the country from obtaining an atomic bomb, while also warning Tehran of dire consequences if they fail.
Sitting beside Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the Oval Office, Trump indicated that discussions would start this coming weekend, though he also implied communications had already begun.
He said the talks were happening in an effort to avoid what he called “the obvious” – an apparent reference to US or Israeli military strikes against the regime’s nuclear facilities.
“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” he told reporters.
“And I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or, frankly, that Israel wants to be involved with, if they can avoid it.
“So we’re going to see if we can avoid it. But it’s getting to be very dangerous territory. And hopefully those talks will be successful. And I think it would be in Iran’s best interests if they are successful.”
He gave no details of where the talks would take place or which officials would be involved. When questioned by journalists, Trump issued a thinly veiled threat if the talks failed, saying Iran would be in “great danger”.
“I think if the talks aren’t successful with Iran … Iran is going to be in great danger, and I hate to say it – because they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“It’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Right now we have countries that have nuclear power that shouldn’t have it. But I’m sure we’ll be able to negotiate out of that too as part of this later on down the line.
“And if the talks aren’t successful I actually think it will be a very bad day for Iran.”
During his presidency, Trump pulled out of a deal signed by Barack Obama known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That deal offered Iran sanctions relief in exchange for limitations on its uranium enrichment activities – resorting instead to a policy of “maximum pressure” that tightened economic embargoes.
Critics say Iran nevertheless accelerated its nuclear program and is now closer to building a bomb than ever before. Attempts by Joe Biden at reviving the deal negotiated by Obama faltered.
Netanyahu, who views Iran as an existential threat to Israel, actively undermined Obama’s agreement and has long railed against any deal that would allow the country’s theocratic rulers to maintain a program that could converted to nuclear weaponry.
Iran, for its part, has consistently denied any intent to build a bomb and said its program is meant for purely civilian purposes.
Iran and the US have had no direct diplomatic relations since 1980, when ties were severed after revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held 53 diplomats hostage for 444 days.Subscribed
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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 program but revealing a potential sticking point about the format for negotiating … All Things · Culture · Food and Drink · The Guide · All …
The B-2 Spirit Bomber, capable of delivering up to 20 tons of either conventional or nuclear bombs
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion: . . . And here we go with questionable deal-maker, Trump at the negotiating helm for the United States. Let us hope “sound minds” if they exist, which is also questionable, prevail.
With the Iranian army on full alert, and Trump having threatened (a week ago on March 31) that:
“There Will Be a Bombing’”, according to Trump’s threats, “if No Nuclear Deal Reached”, and today it seems that there is at least one bomber within striking distance. A spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command has confirmed the presence of the B-2 Spirit on the island of Diego Garcia, which serves as a strategic U.S. military base for operations across the Middle East, Africa, and Indo-Pacific regions.
So, at this point all we can do is wait and see what happens. There are links to further information included at the end of this “FDD” (Foundation for Defense of Democracies). ~llaw
April 7, 2025 | Flash Brief
‘They Are Sitting Inside a Glass Room’: Citing U.S. Threats, Iran Puts Army on High Alert
Latest Developments
Iran Fears U.S. Strikes: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei placed his country’s military on its highest alert level, fearing potential strikes by the United States, according to an Iranian official cited by Reuters on April 6. The move comes after President Donald Trump said on March 30 that if Iran does not reach a deal with the United States over its nuclear weapons program, he will issue secondary tariffs alongside “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” Iran has also reportedly sent a notice to the region’s U.S.-allied states — including Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Bahrain — that a U.S. attack using their territory or air space would be considered a hostile action.
Tehran Rejects Trump’s Negotiation Offer: On March 5, Trump presented an offer for direct negotiations with Tehran over its rapidly advancing nuclear program in a letter sent to Khamenei. Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian rejected the offer, responding that if the White House’s “maximum pressure” campaign persists, they would only engage in indirect negotiations through Omani intermediaries.
Iran Threatens U.S. Military Positions: On March 31, Khamenei said during an Eid-al-Fitr speech that “if [U.S. forces] commit any mischief they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow.” In an interview the same day, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh said, “The Americans have at least 10 bases around Iran in the region, which accommodates some 50,000 forces. This means they are sitting inside a glass room.” The regime-affiliated Tehran Timesreported on March 31 that the Iranian armed forces have “readied missiles with the capability to strike U.S.-related positions.”
FDD Expert Response
“This raising of Iranian military posture levels is the natural result of President Trump’s recently launched ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and Israel’s kinetic actions against Iran last fall. In truth, it does not matter what posture level Iranian forces are at; both the United States and Israel can impose costs on Iran at any time they choose. President Trump should stop the rhetorical threats against Iran and impose kinetic costs, at least in response to Iran’s support for the Houthis.” — RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, FDD Senior Fellow and Senior Director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology
“Tehran lacks the financial resources, military capability, and domestic support for a large-scale military conflict with the United States and Israel. However, Iran’s leaders likely prefer a limited, surgical military strike on their nuclear program over a voluntary, full dismantlement of that program.” — Saeed Ghasseminejad, Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor
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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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Yellowstone Caldera & Other Volcanoes (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in today’s Post.)
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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.
US unveils nuclear expansion plan to meet growing energy demand · The U.S. plans to add 15 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2035, with a goal of reaching …
High-profile disasters shook our faith in atomic power. But many climate activists now believe that we’re afraid of the wrong things.Photograph by Mitch Epstein
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
This is a fairly long article from “The New Yorker” by Pulitzer Prize author Elizabeth Kolbert, the well-known and knowledgeable author of ongoing deadly environmental issues around the world, including her books — which I urge all of you to read if you haven’t already — “The Sixth Extinction”, “Under a White Sky”, and “Filed Notes from a Catastrophe,” all of which I have read and taken notes, and there are a few more that I haven’t got to yet, too. She is a brilliant writer and has travelled the world in her very interesting research, also making her a keen scientific observer of climactic and other catastrophic issues facing humanity and most all other life on planet Earth.
To understand the article I’ve posted below, you have to read the entire article and understand as you are reading the questionable opinions of others about positive views regarding nuclear power that she is being perhaps a bit doubtful about their views, and you begin to understand the positive praise coming from those who in one way or another praise the concepts of nuclear energy, and who also discard and write-off the tragic history, and attempt to pronounce nuclear power as safe and the savior of Earth’s climate and ourselves . . . ~llaw
Environmentalists Are Rethinking Nuclear. Should They?
Fourteen years after the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power is being rebranded as a climate savior, and fission is in fashion.
High-profile disasters shook our faith in atomic power. But many climate activists now believe that we’re afraid of the wrong things. Photograph by Mitch Epstein
The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake, also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Great Sendai Earthquake, struck the island of Honshu. The shock, which registered 9.1 on the Richter scale, was so powerful that it knocked the island eight feet closer to Hawaii and generated a tsunami that sloshed all the way to Antarctica.
That afternoon, three of Fukushima’s six reactors were up and running; the other three were down for maintenance. The quake tripped the plant’s emergency-response system, and control rods were automatically inserted into the fuel assemblies in the units numbered one, two, and three. Even so, the reactors continued to give off heat. When the tsunami hit, about forty-five minutes later, it flooded the plant’s backup generators, along with the batteries that were supposed to back up the backups. As a result, Fukushima’s cooling pumps failed. Within hours, the temperature inside Unit 1 rose to five thousand degrees, and the fuel assembly started to melt down. Everyone living within a mile and a half of the plant was ordered to evacuate.
Setback followed setback, in what one report would refer to as a “chain reaction” of crises. On March 12th, exploding hydrogen destroyed much of Unit 1 and exposed the pool that housed spent fuel rods to the air. The evacuation zone was extended to six miles, then, later that day, to twelve miles. Workers at the plant tried frantically to contain the damage, by, for example, spraying seawater from fire hoses and rigging up car batteries to supply power. On March 13th, the fuel assembly in Unit 3 melted. On March 14th, that unit suffered an explosion. On March 15th, there was another explosion, this time in Unit 4, where highly radioactive waste was being stored. (The reactors’ containment domes remained intact.)
Electric Power Company, considered pulling its workers from the plant. The Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, met with aides to assess the consequences of such a move. They concluded that without workers the situation would spin further out of control and that eventually all of Tokyo, which is a hundred and fifty miles south of Fukushima, might have to be emptied. Kan grew so alarmed that, reportedly, he stormed into TEPCO’s offices to demand that the workers stay at their posts. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, according to press accounts.
In the immediate aftermath, the lesson of Fukushima seemed clear. On March 15th, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced a shutdown of the seven oldest of the country’s seventeen working reactors.
“The absolutely improbable became reality,” Merkel, who had previously been staunchly pro-nuclear, said. “That changes the situation.” A few weeks later, her government decided to decommission all of Germany’s nuclear facilities. In short order, Switzerland, Belgium, and Japan announced phaseout plans. In earthquake-prone Italy, which had already shuttered its reactors, voters overwhelmingly rejected a government proposal to allow new ones to be constructed. “I am really happy,” one Roman voter told Reuters. “We do not want nuclear plants.”
But, with time, the accident’s significance has faded. When, in 2023, Germany fulfilled Merkel’s promise and shut the last of its reactors, her successor as head of the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz, mourned the event, calling it a “black day.”
“It raises the question of who here is driving in the wrong direction,” Merz said. By now, Switzerland, Belgium, and Japan have all backed away from their phaseout goals. Many countries, including Canada, France, and the United States, have signed on to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. Google has teamed up with a nuclear startup called Kairos Power. Amazon is investing in another nuclear startup, X-energy. Microsoft wants to reopen a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island, in central Pennsylvania. Fourteen years after Fukushima, fission, for better or worse, is back in fashion.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, a freelance journalist, was brought up in the nineteen-nineties on whole-wheat sandwiches packed in reused paper bags. Her environmentalist parents opposed nuclear power and might well have marched at anti-nuclear protests had the U.S. not mostly given up building reactors by then. Influenced by what she calls “years of indoctrination,” she became worried about environmental problems, particularly climate change. As an adult in Southern California, she helped organize her neighbors to install solar panels. She still viewed nuclear skeptically—until she learned that some prominent climate scientists were calling it the world’s best hope for limiting warming.
“Could it really be true that something that had once threatened to doom us was now needed to save us?” she wondered. She set out to learn more, and chronicles her journey of discovery in “Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy” (Algonquin).
“For reasons I don’t understand, I could absolutely annihilate a tomato juice right now.”
Cartoon by Tommy Siegel
Prominent among the book’s “evangelists” are Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, who founded a group called Mothers for Nuclear. (The organization’s logo shows a mother cradling a baby, encircled by rings of electrons.) Hoff and Zaitz both work at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, in central California. They are athletic and adventurous, and Tuhus-Dubrow clearly admires them.
“The two women seemed like more outdoorsy and capable versions of me, the kind of person I sort of wished I were,” she writes. But, recognizing that they are being paid by the nuclear industry, she also tries to maintain her reportorial distance: “I knew to be cautious about accepting their claims at face value.”
As it happens, Hoff was in the control room at Diablo Canyon the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake. According to Tuhus-Dubrow, Hoff’s initial reaction to the meltdowns was much like everyone else’s: “her confidence in nuclear power was shaken.” Gradually, though, Hoff recovered her faith. Yes, every nuclear operator’s nightmare had come true at Fukushima. But what had been the actual consequences? No one living close to the plant, or anyone working inside it, had died from acute radiation syndrome. As the years passed, there was no discernible rise in cancer deaths in the area around Fukushima. Meanwhile, a great many people—it’s been estimated at more than two thousand—had died prematurely as result of the disruptions caused by the evacuations. (Most of these victims were sick or elderly or both.) On the Mothers for Nuclear website, Hoff eventually summarized her view as follows: “Our fears were largely misdirected.”
In her travels with nuclear evangelists, Tuhus-Dubrow hears versions of this argument over and over. The problem is not that nuclear plants are prone to catastrophic meltdowns; it’s that people are prone to catastrophic thinking. “You see time and time again that fear of radiation, fear of nuclear, has been more dangerous than nuclear itself,” Eric Meyer, a former opera singer who heads a group called Generation Atomic, tells her.
Much of “Atomic Dreams” is devoted to the plant that employs Hoff and Zaitz. This is partly a function of Diablo Canyon’s location—it’s the only working nuclear station in Tuhus-Dubrow’s home state—and partly a function of its history. No nuclear facility in the U.S., and perhaps none in the world, has been the subject of more wrangling.
The fight began all the way back in 1961, when Pacific Gas & Electric proposed siting a nuclear reactor in Bodega Bay, a fishing village north of San Francisco which Alfred Hitchcock once described as “picturesque.” (He shot “The Birds” there.) At that point, the Sierra Club had yet to take a position on nuclear power, but it opposed P.G. & E.’s plan out of concerns that cooling towers would mar the scenery. P.G. & E. then proposed moving the plant three hundred miles south, to the Nipomo Dunes. This was where Cecil B. DeMille had filmed “The Ten Commandments,” and the Sierra Club objected again, for similar reasons. The Diablo Canyon site—a bluff on the Pacific roughly halfway between San Francisco and L.A.—was also spectacular. This time around, the Sierra Club was willing to compromise. In 1966, its executive board declared the bluff a “satisfactory alternative.” Ground was broken on Unit 1 two years later.
In 1969, geologists discovered the Hosgri Fault just offshore from Diablo Canyon. Mothers for Peace, a San Luis Obispo group originally formed to protest the Vietnam War, swivelled to take on P.G. & E. (“Mothers for Peace are fighting another war” is how the local newspaper put it. ) The organization filed motion after motion aimed at halting construction. This slowed but did not stop the work. Then, in 1979, Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown. The ranks of Diablo Canyon’s opponents swelled. In 1981, protesters blocked the only paved access road to the plant. Within two weeks, more than nineteen hundred people were arrested.
Diablo Canyon Unit 1 finally went online in May, 1985. Unit 2 followed in March, 1986. A month later, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in northern Ukraine, melted down and caught fire. (The accident, which resulted in more than a hundred cases of acute radiation syndrome and several thousand cases of thyroid cancer, is still considered the world’s worst nuclear disaster.) Mothers for Peace members took to wearing badges that said “Remember Chernobyl: It can happen here.”
For the next couple of decades, the mothers kept fighting and Diablo Canyon kept operating, more or less uneventfully. This was the case even though several additional earthquake faults were discovered nearby. All the while, though, the glow was coming off the atom. Nuclear power had been promoted as affordable—according to one famous prediction, it would be “too cheap to meter”—but was instead proving too expensive to sustain. By contrast, other forms of energy, such as solar and wind, were falling steeply in price. In 2016, P.G. & E. announced that it would close Diablo Canyon when the reactors’ operating licenses expired, in 2025. The utility promised to replace the power with other forms of carbon-free energy. Gavin Newsom, then the state’s lieutenant governor, called the arrangement one “we can all be proud of.”
It was around the time of this announcement that Hoff and Zaitz founded Mothers for Nuclear. The duo thought shuttering the plant was a terrible idea, and not just, they insisted, because it would cost them their jobs. (“The only way we can have a utopia is if we do nuclear!” Hoff tells Tuhus-Dubrow.) Conceived as a foil to Mothers for Peace, Mothers for Nuclear adopted many of the older group’s tactics: protesting, testifying at hearings, offering up catchy slogans—in this case, ones like “Split, Don’t Emit.” And, as with Mothers for Peace, they were—initially, at least—frustrated.
But then came yet another turn of the turbine. In the summer of 2020, California experienced a brutal heat wave. The demand for air-conditioning strained the state’s power grid, and the grid’s operator, which goes by the acronym CAISO, instituted rolling blackouts. (The situation, Tuhus-Dubrow observes, “highlighted how energy use and climate change feed on each other in a vicious cycle.”) Diablo Canyon was then providing almost ten per cent of the state’s electricity, and, despite the terms P.G. & E. had agreed to, it seemed likely that, if the plant shut down, at least some of the power it generated would be replaced by burning fossil fuels. In February, 2022, more than seventy-five energy and climate experts sent a letter to Newsom, who by then had become the governor, urging him to “delay the closure of the plant.” (In the letter, the group called comparisons between Diablo Canyon and Fukushima “alarmist.”) A few months later, Newsom, in effect, ripped up the deal to decommission the plant.
“Some would say it’s the righteous and right climate decision,” he told the Los Angeles Times. What struck Tuhus-Dubrow most about the reaction to the Governor’s reversal was that there wasn’t much of one. Mothers for Peace, which was still actively opposing Diablo Canyon, was “furious, of course,” she reports. But “the general public sentiment seemed to be a shrug.” Late last year, after “Atomic Dreams” went to press, California’s public-utilities board approved a rate hike that is expected to increase the total price of electricity in the state by more than seven hundred million dollars. The hike was explicitly designed to cover the cost of Diablo Canyon’s continuing operation.
Marco Visscher is a Dutch journalist whose backstory resembles Tuhus-Dubrow’s. For much of his life, he regarded nuclear power with hostility. Writing in a monthly magazine called Ode, he once declared that the technology had “nothing good to bring to people or nature” and that “now is the time to bring the nuclear industry down.” But he kept hearing about environmentalists and climate scientists who were staunchly pro-nuclear. He decided to look into the matter and, in the process, experienced a full-blown conversion. In “The Power of Nuclear” (Bloomsbury Sigma), he declares, “Just about everything we think we know about nuclear power turns out to be wrong.”
Our first and most important mistake, according to Visscher, is thinking that nuclear power represents a special threat. Every form of energy production poses risks. Coal-fired power plants belch out pollutants that cause, among many other health problems, lung disease, heart disease, and cancer. A study published in The Lancet estimated that coal, on a per-kilowatt basis, was nearly five hundred times deadlier than nuclear. Though gas-fired plants burn cleaner, they, too, emit dangerous particulates. Renewables, meanwhile, pose hazards of their own. Hydroelectric dams collapse; small planes fly into wind turbines. “Nuclear power is the safest of all energy sources,” Visscher asserts.
So how did it get such a bad rep? In Visscher’s telling, the problem, paradoxically, stems from the industry’s tireless pursuit of safety. In the U.S., reactors operate under the requirement that radiation doses, for workers and the public, be kept “as low as is reasonably achievable”—for short, ALARA. The nuclear industry accepted this requirement in the nineteen-seventies “in an attempt to reassure the public,” Visscher writes. “But it didn’t work.” ALARA reinforced the idea that any exposure was too much: “If the industry itself treated very low doses of radiation with the utmost care, it must be very dangerous, right?”
Another big mistake is the fear of nuclear waste. When spent fuel rods are first removed from a reactor, they are extremely hot, in terms of both temperature and radioactivity. Although in the first sense they will cool down in a matter of years, in the second they will remain hazardous for centuries. In the U.S., the Department of Energy has been trying for nearly five decades to draft a plan for the long-term storage of nuclear waste, but has yet to come up with one that can win congressional approval. As a result, a hundred thousand tons’ worth of spent fuel has piled up at reactors around the country. Two thousand additional tons are added each year. Disposal has been called the nuclear industry’s Achilles’ heel.
Here, again, Visscher waves away concerns. Solutions exist, he says—they just have to be implemented. Finland is currently building a “deep geological repository” for its waste; the repository, on the country’s southwestern coast, will eventually consist of thirty miles of tunnels bored into the granite bedrock. Spent fuel can also be recycled or, to use the term of art, reprocessed. This is done in, among other countries, France. Finally, in what are known as fast reactors, waste can be converted into fuel. “The highly radioactive waste from nuclear plants is special, indeed, but in a good way,” Visscher writes.
Among climate scientists, the most outspoken proponent of nuclear power is probably James Hansen, a former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is sometimes called the father of global warming. Hansen recently co-wrote an op-ed in the Albany Times Union that praised New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, for embracing “advanced nuclear” as a way to cut the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions. (“Advanced nuclear” is a catchall term that’s used for a variety of proposed plants, none of which have yet received operating licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) “If the state hopes to achieve its climate goals, it will need more nuclear power,” the article concluded.
Visscher presents climate change as the ultimate pro-nuclear argument. Industrialized economies need reliable electricity, and the sun and the wind provide power only intermittently. Those who disagree with him are, he suggests, either hypocrites or dupes. This group includes the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who says that nuclear plants take too long to build, and the former European commissioner for climate action Frans Timmermans, who says that they’re too expensive. Delays and cost overruns aren’t reasons to oppose nuclear power, Visscher counters; they are products of the opposition to nuclear power, which can add years and billions of dollars to construction. Nuclear foes “have turned out to be the useful idiots” of the fossil-fuel industry, he writes.
Work on the Shoreham nuclear power plant, on the North Shore of Long Island, began in early 1973. The plant was intended to help meet the area’s surging electricity demand, but, from early on, it was plagued by problems. To start with, Shoreham’s owner, the Long Island Lighting Company, made the containment dome too small. A New York State official who visited the site during construction compared the equipment-stuffed dome to a shoebox crammed with junk. Another said that entering it was like walking into “the middle of a bowl of spaghetti.”
LILCO had originally projected that Shoreham would take five years to build and cost five hundred million dollars. The plant was nowhere near finished when, in 1979, the Three Mile Island accident took place, and opposition exploded. On June 3, 1979, an estimated fifteen thousand people gathered on a Long Island beach to protest. Some friends and I were among them.
We were in high school then and lived across the Long Island Sound, in Westchester County. I can’t remember if it was already raining when we set out, in a borrowed station wagon, but by the time we got near Shoreham it was pouring. After an hour or so of shivering in the wet, I suggested that we had registered our opinions and should head home. My friends, I recall with some bitterness, disagreed.
Three Mile Island was the kind of accident that the nuclear industry had insisted couldn’t happen. When it did happen, it changed the way plants were regulated. Operators now had to develop evacuation plans in concert with local officials. Those who tried—in good faith or not—to come up with such a plan for Shoreham had to contend with Long Island’s awkward geography. In the event of an accident, the only practical way to get away from the plant would be to drive west, toward New York City. (The other, impractical option would be to take a boat across Long Island Sound.) People living east of the reactor would thus have to head into danger in order to escape it. In 1983, the Suffolk County Legislature declared there was no evacuation plan that would “protect the health, welfare, and safety” of the public.
“I guess we were so distracted by the whole cookie thing we forgot he was a monster.”
Cartoon by Joe Dator
Years of wrangling ensued. In 1985, a hurricane knocked out power for many LILCO customers; the company struggled to get the lights back on, raising fresh questions about its competence. In 1988, LILCO was convicted of misleading state regulators to win rate increases. It nearly went bankrupt. Finally, in 1989, it announced that it would abandon Shoreham. In return, the state agreed to allow the company to recoup from ratepayers the cost of the plant, which had ballooned to almost six billion dollars (roughly fifteen billion dollars in today’s money). The reactor was shut down before it could deliver a single kilowatt-hour of electricity. Shoreham has been called “every utility’s nightmare,” a monument to human folly, and “a world-class fiasco.”
The abandonment of the reactor made Long Island that much more reliant on coal and natural gas. It’s been estimated that Shoreham’s closure resulted in the emission of an additional three million tons of CO2 a year, or more than a hundred million tons over the past three and a half decades.
Were those who opposed the plant wrong to do so? As Marco Visscher points out, all forms of energy production entail risk. And, as James Hansen points out, the risk—or, really, the certainty—of continuing to burn fossil fuels is global catastrophe: major cities under water, grain belts too hot to produce grain, forests in flames, entire ecosystems unravelling.
Clearly, the new nuclear evangelists have a point. Just as clearly, they’re also missing something. Say what you will, Fukushima was a world-class disaster. Hundreds of tons of highly radioactive fuel are still sitting at the bottom of Units 1, 2, and 3 because no one knows what to do with them, or even how to get at them. Cleaning up the site could take a century, if it happens at all. And the really chilling part is that a much bigger accident was averted only by accident.
Because Unit 4 was undergoing maintenance when the tsunami hit, workers had filled its reactor well with water. Owing to a leak that shouldn’t have existed, some of this water seeped into the unit’s spent-fuel pool. It’s likely that without this leak the hot fuel rods in the pool would have caught fire. In that case, radionuclides would have been spewed over a wide area, possibly including Tokyo. A high-ranking Japanese official called this possibility the “Devil’s scenario.”
Nuclear power—and this includes burying or reprocessing the resulting waste—has always been safe on paper. The trouble is that we don’t live on paper. We live in a world where earthquake faults are belatedly discovered, contractors cut corners, utilities mislead regulators, and people panic—a world, in short, of errors, terrors, and corruption. As the world warms, global instability will only increase. In this sense, climate change represents a pretty good argument against going nuclear.
In the end, the most convincing case for learning to love fission may be the grimmest—not so much green as dark green. Few nuclearists embrace it, but it did have one influential advocate: James Lovelock, the British scientist best known for developing the Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock, writing in 2001, observed that the bubonic plague presented a great threat to medieval Europeans but was “of no consequence for the Earth itself.” Much the same could be said of nuclear accidents: they are traumatic for the human beings involved but have little appreciable effect on the biosphere.
“The land around the failed Chernobyl power station was evacuated because its high radiation intensity made it unsafe for people,” Lovelock, who died in 2022, on his hundred-and-third birthday, wrote. “But this radioactive land is now rich in wildlife, much more so than neighboring populated areas. We call the ash from nuclear power nuclear waste and worry about its safe disposal. I wonder if instead we should use it as an incorruptible guardian of the beautiful places of the Earth. Who would dare cut down a forest in which was the storage place of nuclear ash?” ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 14, 2025, issue, with the headline “Going Nuclear”
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And, of course, Russia is ready to make every effort, to do everything possible to contribute to this problem’s resolution by political and diplomatic …
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The PG&E Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Avila Beach in California
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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.
All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:30 PM Marketplace. 0:00. 0:00. All Things … MICHAEL KNIGHTS: We have a two-headed crisis – one part where President …
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