The mainstream news is still conjecturing about Putin’s new threat(s), now added to. Some of the MSM articles below try to understand its content, meaning, and seriousness . . .
But also there is one Yellowstone story that could calm us all down a bit. Resident Alien is playing on Netflix these days and here is a story from a future series and episode: Five Thoughts on Resident Alien‘s “Lovebird”
This week on Resident Alien, Harry decided he would move in with Heather to her home planet, naturally leading Asta to plot to break them up so he would stay committed to protecting Earth. D’Arcy, however, was more troubled to learn Ben is an alien abductee, and struggled with whether to tell him or not. Oh, and Max decided to steal Harry’s model of the Yellowstone Caldera for the science fair.
1. So Much… Tongue
I know, it’s a comedy, so it’s not very profound to say it’s funny as hell, but good lord, Harry and Heather’s sexual antics completely broke me; I know it’s absolutely revolting that they’re do it in Asta’s truck, on the sofa in Harry’s office, and in her bathroom, but goddamn it’s hysterical – like D’Arcy says, it’s as if Asta has two cats who are constantly in heat. The scene where Harry declares his plan to leave Earth was an amazing mix of plot progression and epic cringe comedy, and Alan Tudyk & Edi Patterson deserve all the awards for their relentless portrayal of Harry and Heather’s passion, as do Sara Tomko & Alice Wetterlund for not breaking character. And the shot of Heather pooping on Lady Liberty? Well, now I really have seen everything.
2. Truth Hurts
Harry can tell Asta and D’Arcy aren’t on board with his full-blown love affair and gets really obnoxious about it, stating they’re just jealous and that’s why they’ll die lonely old spinsters, among other rude comments. Still, his claim D’Arcy is needy gnaws away at her, leading her to decide to tell Ben the truth to prove she’s not selfish. Harry’s behavior was correct in the sense sometimes true friends call each other out on their bullshit, but he’s not self-aware to realize in his case that he’s just weaponizing the truth to hurt them, and that if he were in their shoes, they’d be trying to break him and Heather up too – which is all very ironic for the one giving a monologue about potentially causing an imbalance, chemical or otherwise.
3. Max You Little Shit
Max asks Harry for his help creating an impressive science fair display, but he and Heather bully him out of their home, not wanting to be bothered, so the boy steals the caldera model and the grey chemical Harry was studying while they’re in the bedroom. Stealing the model I can understand, that was petty revenge, but the chemical? That was very immature and reckless: did Max learn nothing from the last time he stole something mysterious from Harry? What a smug little man you’re becoming. At least the incident led Ben and Kate to admit they’re pretty bad parents, and Harry to discover the greys were planning to use the chemical in conjunction with the caldera eruption to make Earth’s gravity more suitable for them.
4. Patience is More Like an Archipelago Than a Town
There’s so much going on in Patience now, I’m not surprised Asta forgot to tell D’Arcy Jay’s staying with them now. Mike’s on Joseph’s trail, while trying to uncover what the physics formula in Peter’s diary is, but the constant mockery Liv is facing over the documentary causes her to lose faith in herself, and believe she caused Wendy’s murder by inviting Peter to the town. Torres also shows up to warn Mike that he’s stepping into something far beyond his usual field of expertise.
Fortunately, Kate cheers Liv up with her newfound interest in alien abductions, leading her to pass on details of a nearby support group; their conversation also causes Kate to discover the tracking chip in the back of her neck. D’Arcy then shares the truth with Ben, awkwardly it must said, and I could only imagine how helpful it would’ve been if she knew what Kate’s going through; still, at least Ben seems open-minded about the idea. Oh, and David Logan managed to duplicate Peter’s ability to see aliens’ true forms – what a busy episode!
5. Heartbreak!
The episode ends on an eerie note, as the little ditty Harry composes about Heather on the guitar gives way to Joseph grabbing her on the street, and blackmailing her into spying on him for the greys. Poor Harry: he’s especially vulnerable given he feels he can share everything with her. My first thought was that Mike better find Joseph soon, which led me back to him bumping into Torres on the street: wasn’t that rather sudden and random? And didn’t Mike mentioning her (still unseen) son come across awkwardly? What if it was Joseph in disguise? Or what if… Lena is a hybrid too?
Continued below (But not here on “All Things Nuclear” . . .
– We learn from her foster mother that Jay is ADHD and queer, so I take back what I said last week: Jay was the show’s first LGBT character.
– I’m not surprised Kate’s the worst-rated teacher at the school: I do not recall ever seeing her teach a class.
– Harry realizing he should’ve used “sex” instead of “intercourse” in his song was absolutely note-perfect, as I had the exact same thought. Oh no… what is this show doing to me?
– It’s wild we’ve had Terry O’Quinn in two episodes where he’s shirtless, doesn’t have any dialogue, and in this part, dressed like the Borg.
See you next week for “Bye Bye Birdie,” which certainly doesn’t sound ominous. I’m serious by the way, doesn’t the thought of Ann-Margret fill you with joy? Anyway, “time to say goodbye!”
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Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can’t speak Cantonese or Arabic.
Now back to a new kind of fiction, based on possible future reality: In order to edit and update the Preface to the in-progress novel “Ell Nuclear Diablo” , re-edited and now altogether in a single introductory opening to the story that will be presented here on a bi-weekly basis updated every two weeks on this nightly Post, I have delayed Chapter 1 for two additional weeks in order to provide the ‘Preface’ to new readers and others who may have already read part or all of the former draft, with a new suggestion about how the reader and I can keep up with current story as it is posted.
I will Post a single chapter at a time instead of in segments as I had originally planned to do. This will provide more continuity and easier recollection of the content of each story and the overall novel. I suggest that you copy and paste each chapter (including this revised and edited “Prologue” to your own download/document file under the file name “El Nuclear Diablo” and gradually add to the novel, which will make it easier to read on your own time and also have it all in one place rather than spread in new bi-weekly “All Things Nuclear Posts”. You can begin that ‘book-building’ effort tonight by copying the ‘Preface’ to the new file you set up. I hope you will assemble the book in this manner, but if you can’t but still want to read the story you can find it here either on Substack or on my own “LLAWs Worlds” website on every Thursday night’s Post. I have added a new Heading description to isolate the bi-weekly Post, beginning tonight, just below:
”El Nuclear Diablo” Preface (Thursday, 03/16/24)
El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark” ~Nuclear Industry Quote after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, worried citizens, and public protesters.
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft (writing as the fictional “Albert Lloyd Williams)
Prologue (complete version)
. . . introduction written from Juneau, Alaska, by Albert Lloyd Williams, Nuclear Physicist & Chief Nuclear Engineer, Williams’ Atomic Laboratories, San Francisco
Early Spring, 2026
Does it really matter who, exactly, is to blame, or why humankind is savagely devouring the native resources of planet Earth until there soon will be nothing left but lichenless barren rocks, the salty seas, countless grains of sand, and a poisonous atmosphere? It ought to be not enough to just know it is a critical unvarnished ugly truth. The question should be more like, “When will it happen and is there no way out of it?” Should it not?
I can only wonder if highly intelligent, but virulent, forms of our human species have, for countless eons, long traveled through the universal cosmos continually seeking, finding, and lavishly consuming, ultimately ravaging the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, t the environments of this and other living rich blue-green planets also once full of fossil fuels and innocent living resources similar to Earth’s in order to ensure and serve their own survival at the expense of all else in their way. Obviously, we are the only species on this planet who rape and ravage the earth with such savagely uncontrolled vigor on such a large scale. We are the ultimate u ultimate fungus, the ultimate lethal mushrooms. And I have to also wonder if there are not multiple, or at least two species of us.
Not to ridicule Darwin at all, but does his theory of evolution, based on studies of inbreeding pigeons and chickens, really make much sense to you in this context? Does it not seem to you that we humans may be collectively aggressively demanding, ruthless, impolite, unwelcome extra-terrestrial galaxy-trotting invaders doing our parasitic thing here on Earth rather than a native natural-born integral integrated key part of our indigenous homo-sapiens and the native animal population—as Darwin would have us believe? What about the Octopus, sir?
Could it be possible we or they are simply biologically genetically patterned to look and act like homo sapiens? Or perhaps vice versa? At least some of us? Maybe even a whole lot of us? How do we know the difference between the real human beings and genetically altered or cloned ones? Which one am I? Which one are you? Do any of us know? I use the terms “we”, “us” or “our” and “they”, or “them”, or “their interchangeably here because in this context I don’t know who or what I am—an “us” or a “them”.
I just know that I am extremely uncomfortable with our or their willfully passionate desire to destroy everything on the planet for personal power, wealth, and a life of comfort at the expense of the rest of us or them. I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to be that way to me, so that’s why I consider myself to be an us.
At the very least we need to consider the possibility of at least one species of them and one of us. The only way we will ever know who we really are is through our unfettered natural mindful emotions—our feelings of love, care, and respect for Planet Earth, ourselves, and all her fauna and flora—or, conversely, our unnatural lack of those emotions or feelings. Yet we often disguise these characteristics, presenting the opposite of ourselves as themselves, or the other way around. But despite the hidden complexity, our future may depend on solving this psychological dilemma.
If our demise (at least partially) has happened before, it will likely happen again. And there is, in today’s worlds, a very quick, relatively easy long-lasting, if not eternally, way to create such a scenario as an extinction level event, not from an act of nature or a god, but from our own actions. ~llaw
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the world until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all. What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, or in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
These last several days we have followed spring’s warming north along the western United States and British Columbia coasts by yacht. Any boat is ripe for the pickings of choice at any deserted marina, which would likely be most all of them, although two of our crew also happen to be the legal owners of our schooner, which offers us all some conscience relief.
California, Oregon, and Washington (other than the shoddy shutdown activity at Diablo Canyon, have long been devoid of operational nuclear power plants with the exception of Washington’s inland Richmond plant (known as the “Columbia River Generating Station”), which, unlike Diablo Canyon was, is not in the process of closing, leaving it to be the only functional nuclear power facility anywhere in the entire Pacific Northwest or anywhere else along the western Pacific coastline from the Aleutians to Tierra del Fuego. We very soon will be looking forward to scientific help from the governmental and corporate experts in eastern Washington who are still to this day handling and cleaning up the fallout from the infamous Hanford plutonium military arms manufacturing disaster that has contaminated wide swaths of earth and the Columbia River for decades. Oregon has not had an operating nuclear power plant since the mid-1990s when their only facility, near Mt. St. Helens, developed structural cracks forcing the plant to close, and British Columbia has, quite honorably, never built one. Alaska’s only nuclear facility was shut down more than fifty years ago, and today it uses diesel engines to generate steam. Juneau is the closest downwind haven from nuclear airborne protection and freedom from contamination that the climate and geography can offer, along with the fortunate absence of nearby previously operational nuclear power facilities, providing at least a temporary refuge from the eastern Asian Pacific together with the central and eastern United States, eastern Canada, and European soon-to- be extinction level atmospheric conditions.
Some of the oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and meteorologists who were already here in Juneau are trying to determine the predicted world-wide safe zones and timelines, comparing Juneau’s and its surrounding weather patterns and wind history. They have long understood the favorable high-altitude wind currents from the north and southeast creating wind havoc among the treacherous three-thousand+ foot mountain ranges rising from sea level providing conditions that hopefully will carry airborne radiation far above and around us for a few months at least, giving us critical time to figure out just where the world’s few survivors will need to migrate and congregate. We know, too, that global communications will be inadequate to the point of probable futility, possibly requiring some of us to travel, sometimes long distances afoot, to gather these groups together and guide them to new promising safelands.
Our future could turn out to be very much like an extended encore and final Mad Max film, although, ironically, Australia has no nuclear energy power plants, which they banned officially in 1998. But true isolated tribalism will return everywhere to the few of us who are left to make our way on a mostly neutered and dead planet that will eventually consume Australia as well, although it may be the last bastion of life along with New Zealand, whose leaders have also banned nuclear reactors save for the joing U.S. military/Australia world-wide espionage Pine Ridge project near Alice Springs. Yet this death threat by human hands meddling with something akin to the power of the sun will eventually be a significant part of their survival story as well as our own.
A new way of life in a desolate lonesome world does not normally make for a pretty picture–nor a heart-warming romantic adventure tale. But still…so long as there is hope there is a story… ~llaw (Spring, 2026)
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call. The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine site, directly overseeing more than one hundred white collar employees. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a bit later, a subsidiary of General Electric Company with a new name for the mining division known as Pathfinder Mines Corporation General Electric, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors so Utah International with its Pathfinder Mines was a natural fit. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations of uranium, including extremely complicated accounting, security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production and the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulations, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U238 and U235, the active isotope in nuclear reactors (as well as nuclear weapons), to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to operational nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from the sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
# Back to the Present
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late 2025, and the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years later, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale without prejudice. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping for a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as us, all the best.
At an overly ripe eighty-something, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility by the United States government and industry corporate officials might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations—not all of whom were American allies—ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that—contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political belief and public opinion—nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was and is the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundred to a few thousands, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion + billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky for no reason. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Webster’s grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy has apparently happened on our planet at least once before—more likely twice — and though much (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright conspiracy theories) has been written about the evidence and the possibility, few of us seem to understand nor have ever cared that a similar nuclear world devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community did not investigate, research, endorse or even acknowledge the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believe is immaterial because now what is left of our world is all that we need to worry and care about—events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes. including our willful ignorance.
We humans seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to run asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home—planet Earth and all her abundant bounty—we have, through American style financing of intentional international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those who would “freeze ‘em to death in the dark.” I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their–often profane–variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in the 1980s. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction—indeed, by natural extension, including all life–had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and water waste radiation, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowed to run the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or, maybe, Diablo’s, Inferno.
###
Beginning, March 28, 2024: Chapter 1: On the Way to Juneau, Alaska . . .
We have reached Canada and passed through customs, mooring on Vancouver Island for the night, happy to find an open restaurant at the harbor, although we have more than ample food and other supplies on board the schooner, which, by the eay, bears the title “The Pacifier”. It has certainly lived up to its name during the early days of our journey north. It will take us three or four days to travel the additional 800 nautical miles along the coastline to reach Juneau.
At dinner we are delighted to meet a team of six employees from the Hanford Project, who are also on their way by boat to Juneau for essentially the same reasons we are and we agree to travel together the rest of the way, giving us a more comforting feeling concerning the remainder of our trip. Over our dining, we discuss the implications and share our knowledge about the future of North America and, indeed, the world and what the prospects are to provide pockets of preservation for human life, and in general where we think those places might be. The discussion is not a confident one, nor is it at all pleasant. But we all realize that we have to do our best to have some success in our unexpected new mission in our lives.
###
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 is one (for fun)Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
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.
… emergencies. These include emergencies … nuclear power. The agency prepares and … Emergency Management Agency – and the Federal Emergency Management …
So, the nuclear world buzz tonight is all about Putin’s latest threat to the rest of the world, or at least to the West. Without posting an article tonight, following, borrowed from Reuters, is the crux of the new threat that perhaps makes it more serious than the usual mundane threat of ‘deterrence’ . . . and remember this is an election year, and consider seriously that the likely GOP presidential candidate who is mentally incompetent and who is Putin’s friend and idol very, very, seriously. For this reason I believer Putin will maintain the status quo at least until the election unless the U.S. and NATO send troops into Ukraine. ~llaw
NUCLEAR DOCTRINE
In a U.S. election year, the West is grappling with how to support Kyiv against Russia, which now controls almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and is rearming much faster than the West and Ukraine.
Kyiv says it is defending itself against an imperial-style war of conquest designed to erase its national identity. Putin says he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in Feb. 2022 to bolster Russia’s own security against a hostile West.
Putin reiterated the use of nuclear weapons was spelled out in the Kremlin’s nuclear doctrine, which sets out the conditions under which it would use such a weapon: broadly a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or the use of conventional weapons against Russia “when the very existence of the state is put under threat”.
“Weapons exist in order to use them,” Putin said.
Putin’s nuclear warning came alongside another offer for talks on Ukraine as part of a new post-Cold War demarcation of European security. The U.S. says Putin is not ready for serious talks over Ukraine.
Reuters reported last month that Putin’s suggestion of a ceasefire in Ukraine to freeze the war was rejected by the U.S. after contacts between intermediaries.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said this week that, without more Western support, Ukraine would lose more territory to Russia which would embolden Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, told the Senate Intelligence Committee it was in U.S. interests to help Kyiv get into a stronger position before talks.
Putin said Russia would need written security guarantees in the event of any settlement.
“I don’t trust anyone, but we need guarantees, and guarantees must be spelled out, they must be such that we would be satisfied,” Putin said.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 in tonight’s Post.)
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.
“Therefore, I don’t think that here everything is rushing to it (nuclear confrontation), but we are ready for this.” The Biden administration has said …
Rethinking Nuclear Power: Evolution & Future of Nuclear Energy · Why Do Animals Play? The Science Behind Play Behavior · The Role of Fungi in Climate …
OMG! $1.6 Billion in 2025 for a Nuclear Energy Office Budget that is an administrative agency? Have we gone crazy? Don’t answer that — I already know the answer.
A small part of the budget is reserved to help Deploy U.S. Reactors Internationally to what I gather 3rd World countries who may not be contributing at all to global warming/climate change, but to hap-hazardly spread nuclear power around the planet indiscriminately is a really bad idea, just as Biden’s ‘carrot and stick’ uranium sales to poorer countries who ‘want’ to build nuclear power plants — or do they really want to traffick in nuclear fuel for building bombs — especially with HALEU fuel (although I don’t know (and they probably don’t either) if there is enough HALEU or even military grade uranium to go around) to fire them up in an effort to compete with Russia’s uranium fuel varieties of enrichment. Low enrichment does not mean that it increases the the safety of avoiding accidents at new nuclear power plants. We human beings should not be doing this kind of stuff because we are not qualified to do it.
The really bad news is that we are increasing our risk of nuclear extinction when we should be doing the exact opposite. Einstein may well be turning over in his grave. It is as though we are bound and determined to do the lemming thing and follow each other over the proverbial cliff, purposefully exterminating ourselves. What we need is world peace, as Einstein said, not a world of nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs. Read on . . . ~llaw
The request includes $694.2 million in research and development activities that will help advance important reactor and fuel technologies, address gaps in the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and harness the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to optimize the performance of the nation’s fleet of reactors.
Below are five key takeaways from the FY25 budget request for nuclear energy.
1. Access to HALEU
HALEU reguli made from EBR-II spent nuclear fuel at Idaho National Laboratory.
Idaho National Laboratory
NE is requesting $188 million to secure a near-term supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for DOE-supported research and demonstration projects.
The funding complements the Department’s longer-term strategy to expand its domestic enrichment capacity through purchase agreements with industry partners to help spur demand for additional HALEU production.
The recently passed FY24 spending bill directed $2.72 billion to further build out a low-enriched uranium and advanced nuclear fuel supply chain. It will also help assure there is an adequate supply of low-enriched uranium fuel to meet the current needs of U.S. reactors and our allies to eliminate the nation’s dependance on Russian fuel services.
2. Developing New Reactor Technologies
The FY25 request includes $142.5 million to support the continued execution of five advanced reactor projects supported through DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
NE is also requesting $56 million to establish new testing facilities at the national labs, including $12 million to finish the construction of the NRIC DOME at Idaho National Laboratory.
The funding also includes $16.5 million for DOE’s MARVEL microreactor testing platform to complete the fabrication of its fuel and key components.
NE is also requesting more than $18 million to initiate construction of the LOTUS testbed that will be used to test first-of-a-kind technologies to generate data required for design and licensing.
3. Boosting University R&D
NE is requesting $143 million to support emerging technologies developed by U.S. universities, colleges, and small businesses.
The funding will also be used for university infrastructure improvements and fuel services, along with workforce development activities such as scholarship and fellowship opportunities.
NE is inching closer to eclipsing the $1 billion funding mark with more than $990 million awarded to colleges and universities across the country since 2009.
4. Additive Manufacturing and AI
The FY25 request also includes $32 million to advance the use of cutting-edge digital tools and manufacturing methods to strengthen nuclear supply chains and help optimize reactor performance.
This funding includes $17 million to support the qualification of additively manufactured materials for use in nuclear reactors and $9 million to develop and demonstrate advanced sensors, instrumentation and control systems, including potential ways to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to advanced reactor designs and operations.
The two technologies combined could drastically reduce the time it takes to test, qualify, and deploy new reactor components and fuels.
The remaining $6 million will address high priority supply chain needs for the near-term deployment of advanced reactors.
5. Deploying U.S. Reactors Internationally
Finally, the FY25 request includes $8 million to support several U.S. international projects, including providing workforce development, training, and technical expertise to new and emerging nuclear energy countries in Africa, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.
The funding will be used to establish regional clean energy training centers in key markets to provide capacity-building and professional development opportunities in regions looking to develop or grow their civil nuclear programs.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 in tonight’s Post.)
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.
As global conflicts increase the possibility of nuclear war, it’s certainly important to talk about the ongoing legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima …
The Atomic Energy Advancement Act is not only a practical, commonsense solution but also a bipartisan one. It will modernize licensing and streamline …
In a fission reactor, neutrons bombard the nuclei of atoms of certain elements. When one such nucleus absorbs a neutron, it destabilises and breaks up …
… threats from Kim’s military. He has urged his soldiers to grab lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as the nature of combat evolves.
Okay now! I just watched the Academy Awards (Oscars) for the 1st time in maybe a decade because I wanted desperately to see the nuclear bomb-building Manhattan Project movie (that we all need to see) that put an abrupt ending to World War II at the expense of common everyday citizens living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan and, indeed, “Oppenheimer” did win the Best Picture award.
That made my old heart and fretful mind happy! And to my mind we all need to watch it now, or again and again, until we finally understand what all things nuclear can and will do to humanity and all the rest of life on planet Earth if all things nuclear are allowed to continue as a part, no matter how small, of our world(s).
So in the here and now, a tragic historical novel my co-author and I wrote can be read and used to compare, on a much smaller scale of course, that makes the concept of nuclear war, much easier to understand what and how it can affect humanity, So, I urge you to buy the books, read them and consider the impact that mankind’s greed and desire for power over others can have on those others.
I just want to see and somehow ensure that our own recently published novel “The Sweetwater Conspiracy” (in two parts and two books) be read by as many of us as possible so that we can easily relate to the problem with war, no matter on what scale it happens, and also for the story to become a movie production like no other because this19th century story is a predecessor ‘nuclear anything’ demonstrating what powerful men then and now wearing the blinders of greed over their collective third eyes can do to this beautiful world of love and life that Mother Earth granted us free of charge, and yet we made a literal trash can out of it, mainly in a few hundred years, and are now trying to finish the destruction, for which we will likely pay the ultimate price unless we do a prompt about face and create a new world peace and order that is, without doubt, our one and only way to survive. And even with that mandatory global effort the chance of survival has become questionable.
Why do I want our historical novel ‘The Sweetwater Conspiracy” to be popular enough to rate a Pulitzer Prize, and to be filmed and nominated for an Academy Award and winning? It has nothing to do with me personally, nor my co-author either. though it might help pay a few bills, llolloll. The answer is that it is the same story of power-crazed, money hungry, politically obsessed men failing to understand that the feminine way on this Earth and that their inability to make world peace — because men will never agree with global unity — is the only way we can avoid self-extermination and manage to survive as a species.
This almost identical scenario to ” Oppenheimer” on an easier to follow and understand scale of the gunslinging settling up of old west of the late 1800s.”The Sweetwater Conspiracy” tells the amazing story of why the male of our species, when they’re not shooting themselves, with their narrow minds full of self-importance, greed, misogyny and their complete domination of the young single female at the risk of her life who might somehow compete with them and their cattle is decidedly not to be allowed the same opportunities and freedoms of the man who does the same thing, no matter how more modest or practical than those men’s felonious claims to sprawling free-graze range, who insist on ruling their territorial ranches with no competition from anyone, especially of the feminine persuasion.
The story is built on the true story of an atrocity that even in the late 1880s in the Wyoming Territory of the United States of America, and then purposely spread across our country and on to Britain, an interested Germany and beyond, by a few men’s fabrications full of outright lies upon lies that the American History books still to this day report as an historical fact that in reality is nothing at all close to the truth.
We need to fix that huge historical mistake for the sake of one woman’s name that was, under duress, intentionally given to her by the Wyoming Press who were intimidated into reporting the fervent fabrications to protect a few wealthy cattlemen with deranged visions of some kind of eternal power and wealth, not much different than our powerful leaders in this nuclear world of today, rather than in the cattle world of the old wild west that eventually required federal Marshall Law for the first and hopefully the last time over the range wars between the wealthy ranchers and the dirt-poor homesteaders who Abraham Lincoln had innocently encouraged to “go west” in order to settle up the country.
This tale is identical to what we are doing in today’s world(s), but on a global scale compared to the mountains, valleys, and rivers of Wyoming and surrounds. Male dominance didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now, and it will never work . . .
This novel, in two parts and two books, will tell you why . . . Let’s make it a Pulitzer prize winning story, and the Academy Award winning movie sometime in the next few years. I want to live to see it happen, and so should you, because you-all collectively, not me alone, are the only ones who can do it by supporting it . . .
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
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.
“He actually said to me ‘young people are not that concerned about nuclear weapons, it’s not really at the forefront of their fears’. … all our films …
This unexpected setback underscores the persistent vulnerabilities of nuclear power, despite heightened focus on emergency backup power post-Fukushima …
Extended deterrence based on nuclear-sharing in Europe was a crucial part of US and NATO strategy throughout the Cold War, with Russia’s 2022 invasion …
Oppenheimer’s Lessons for Nuclear Threats Today. 7 minute read. Robert … We must learn those lessons, avoid repeating the mistakes from the Cold War, …
From the Einstein/Russell Manifesto on July 9, 1955
LLAW’s CONCERNS & COMMENTS, Sunday, (03/10/2024)
It is all well and good that many anti-nuclear individuals from scientists to conscientious objectors to authors like me, and to just plain common ordinary citizens who have tried to crucify the idea of war and more recently nuclear war, which, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell jointly tried desperately to point out in the old cover image above, is equivalent to perishing, better known today as extinction.
Yet nobody has succeeded in destroying all things nuclear rather than allowing all things nuclear destroy us and all other life on planet Earth. So it is that 80 years later the threat is still there and rapidly growing more critical in a nuclear world of intolerance, universal hatred, and untold kinds of division among nuclear armed nations with the capability of ending it all virtually instantly. And as I have publicly said hundreds if not thousands of times, like Einstein and Russell and others, that world peace is the only way to save ourselves and all the innocent other life forms as well. ~llaw
NOT JUST OPPENHEIMER
How other scientists tried to change nuclear weapons policy for the better—and how some succeeded
J.Robert Oppenheimer was the charismatic physicist who led the World War II project to design the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fission bombs and, after the war, was for five years the US government’s leading technical advisor on nuclear weapons policy. His career as an advisor ended in 1954 after he recommended against developing 1,000-times-more-powerful thermonuclear bombs.
Oppenheimer was re-introduced to the public last year in the eponymous Christopher Nolan film that drew huge worldwide audiences and earned 13 Oscar nominations. He was not, however, the only scientist struggling with foreign policy and security issues once the world realized that nuclear explosives could be made. Many other scientists tried to influence nuclear weapons policy—and some did successfully.
Nuclear arms control
NIELS BOHR
Niels Bohr was 60 in 1945 and second only to Einstein in fame among 20th-century physicists for explaining the energy levels of electrons in atoms, creating the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to which young physicists flocked from all over Europe to develop the new quantum mechanics, and then explaining nuclear fission.
After Bohr escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943, he was invited to visit Los Alamos, where he learned that the United States was well on its way to making fission bombs.
He focused immediately on the dangerous nuclear arms race that would result once the Soviet Union had the bomb. As was his wont, he engaged colleagues in prolonged, deep discussions which resulted in his concerns and ideas spreading among the physicists in the project. (In 1964, two years after Bohr’s death, Oppenheimer would record a magnificent appreciation of the impact of Bohr’s concerns.)[1]
In the summer of 1944, admirers obtained meetings for Bohr with both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a memo written for Roosevelt, Bohr summarized his proposal:
“[T]he terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence [and] will therefore demand such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about industrial efforts, including military preparations, as would hardly be conceivable unless all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness… Personal connections between scientists of different nations might … offer means of establishing preliminary and unofficial contact.”[2]
Roosevelt expressed interest in Bohr’s idea of talking with Stalin about the bomb, but Churchill vetoed it. The British prime minister was particularly irate at Bohr’s suggestion that the basis for such a discussion could be laid by communications among Western and Soviet scientists. Fearing Bohr might leak nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, Churchill told his science advisor, “Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”[3]
Niels Bohr, December 1945. (AIP)
“Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”
—Winston Churchill
JAMES FRANCK
LEO SZILARD
EUGENE RABINOWITCH
GLENN SEABORG
The following year, Bohr’s efforts were picked up by a group of scientists at the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (also known as the “Met Lab”) at the University of Chicago, where the US plutonium-production reactors were designed.
In May 1945, as the decision to use nuclear bombs on Japan was being finalized, Arthur Compton, director of the Met Lab, allowed James Franck, 63, to organize a study of the “social and political implications” of nuclear bombs. Franck, a German refugee, had been sensitized to the social responsibility of scientists, in part by Bohr, after allowing himself to be recruited into Germany’s World War I poison gas program.
The co-authors of the resulting “Franck Report”[4] included the irrepressible genius, Leo Szilard, inventor of the nuclear chain reaction and co-designer with Enrico Fermi of the first nuclear reactor; Franck’s research collaborator, Eugene Rabinowitch, later founding editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; and chemist Glenn Seaborg, 33, co-discoverer of plutonium and other “transuranic” elements (artificial elements heavier than uranium), and later, during the 1960s, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
The Franck Report argued for not bombing Japanese cities, assessing that a post-war nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union would be inevitable if the United States were to use nuclear bombs in a surprise attack on Japan. It urged instead that the atomic bomb be demonstrated to representatives of the United Nations, which had just had its founding meeting in San Francisco in April 1945, and that the UN be consulted on its use.
President Roosevelt had just died and the report went to the “Interim Committee” chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who asked Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence (head of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory) whether any demonstration of nuclear weapons could be as effective in convincing Japan to surrender as bombing Japanese cities. The four reported back, “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”[5]
The Interim Committee’s formulation of the question ignored, however, the lesson the Soviet Union would draw from a secret US-UK decision to use nuclear bombs in a surprise attack on an enemy.
Stalin had launched a nuclear-weapons development program in 1943, based on intelligence about the US-UK nuclear-weapons program. After the bombing of Hiroshima, however, Stalin gave the Soviet nuclear-weapons program a priority similar to that the United States had given when it was driven by fear of a Nazi nuclear bomb. Stalin reportedly told the leaders of his nuclear program, “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed!”[6]
Bohr’s concerns were correct.
Leo Szilard was one of the seven signatories of the 1945 Franck Report that warned of a nuclear arms race. (Argonne National Laboratory / AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
James Franck (left) and Enrico Fermi worked together at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. (AIP)
The Franck Report was principally written by Eugene Rabinowitch, founding editor of the Bulletin. (Rabinowitch Family Archives)
Arthur Compton’s letter introducing the Franck Report to Secretary of War Stimson.
International brainstorming
JOSEPH ROTBLAT
BERTRAND RUSSELL
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist on a fellowship in the United Kingdom when Hitler’s army invaded Poland. Rotblat had already carried out an experiment in Poland that demonstrated the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium. In the United Kingdom, Rotblat helped start the British nuclear-weapon program and then joined Los Alamos when the British effort was folded into the US nuclear-weapon program.
Like the other refugee physicists from Europe, Rotblat acted out of fear that the Nazis might be the first to get nuclear bombs.
In 1944, after US intelligence had concluded that the Nazis never had a serious nuclear-weapons project, according to Rotblat, General Groves told a dinner group at Los Alamos that the new rationale for the US nuclear project was to “subdue” the Soviet Union. Rotblat decided to leave.[7]
After his return to the United Kingdom, Rotblat pioneered the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer. He also worked with Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, mathematician, and public intellectual, to recruit eminent international scientists to endorse a manifesto Russell had written calling on scientists from around the world to “assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution.”[8] Albert Einstein’s endorsement of Russell’s manifesto was his last public act before his death in 1955, and it became known as the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto.”
Rotblat became the first secretary general of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, named after the village in Nova Scotia where the first meeting was held in 1957 to discuss how to reduce the danger of nuclear war. Through the 1980s, Pugwash working groups developed the technical bases for nuclear and also chemical, biological, and conventional arms control agreements. Rotblat and Pugwash shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “common security” owed an intellectual debt to Bohr and Pugwash. The circle around Gorbachev who advocated for the new approach to foreign and security policy called it the “new thinking”—inspired, according to Gorbachev’s reformist foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze,[9] by the lines in the Russell-Einstein manifesto:
“We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”
Joseph Rotblat with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during a Pugwash workshop in Moscow, February 1995. (Pugwash)
Joseph Rotblat’s Los Alamos ID badge photo. He left the Manhattan Project in 1944 on moral grounds, the only scientist to do so.
“We have to learn to think in a new way.”
—from the Russell-Einstein manifesto
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein’s Manifesto
Civilian control of US nuclear research and development [10]
FEDERATION OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
After the end of World War II, the younger scientists in the different installations of the Manhattan Project organized to educate their fellow citizens about the policy issues that would have to be dealt with now that nuclear weapons had been created. Groups were organized at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab; Los Alamos; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the US World War II uranium enrichment facilities had been built; and MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, where US wartime radar development was based.
The first nuclear policy issue on Congress’ agenda was how to manage post-war nuclear research and development.
The War Department (renamed the Defense Department in 1949) drafted a bill sponsored by Rep. Andrew May and Sen. Edwin Johnson. The younger atomic scientists feared the bill would result in even academic nuclear research being subject to military secrecy, but Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Lawrence signed a letter urging the bill’s rapid passage, creating a temporary split between the senior and younger scientists.
The site organizations sent representatives to Washington to present their views. Within a month, they had established a small volunteer-staffed office and created the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later renamed Federation of American Scientists). Members of Congress and journalists were eager to meet the young articulate atomic scientists and learn about their concerns.
By the end of 1945, the May-Johnson bill was bogged down in controversy and an alternative bill emerged that put control of nuclear energy under a civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission. This was a success. The influence of the atomic scientists on policy quickly faded, however, after as public interest subsided and the scientists returned to research and teaching.
After the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test in August 1949, Washington hunted for who had revealed the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The scientists responded that the key secret—that fission bombs could be made—had been revealed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And a report commissioned by General Groves, the War Department’s overseer of the Manhattan Project, had also revealed how the United States enriched uranium and produced plutonium.[11] But US officials were not convinced: There must have been a mole among atomic scientists.
In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, who had been a member of the British delegation in Los Alamos during World War II, confessed to sharing information with the Soviets, including the design of the Nagasaki bomb. Nuclear scientists who advocated nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union then came under heavy surveillance. The FBI’s investigative files on the Federation of American Scientists grew,[12] and the organization went into decline until it was revived in 1970 under the presidency of mathematician Jeremy Stone.[13]
Scientists of the Manhattan Project formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists in 1945 to advocate for international and peaceful control of atomic energy. (Oregon State University Special Collections)
The influence of the atomic scientists on policy quickly faded as public interest subsided and the scientists returned to research and teaching.
Driving nuclear tests underground
With the development of the much more powerful thermonuclear weapons, atmospheric nuclear testing became a political issue. For high-yield thermonuclear tests, the United States moved its testing from Nevada to the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific, while the Soviet Union moved its high-yield testing to the remote Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya.
In 1954, winds blew the radioactive fallout from the US 15-megaton Bravo test on Bikini atoll in an unpredicted direction, contaminating an inhabited atoll, Rongelap, and a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon No. 5.
Fortunately, the residents of Rongelap were on its southern islands, where the fallout was 10 times less than on the northern islands, and were evacuated before they received lethal doses.[14] However, many children developed thyroid tumors, the population suffered additional health problems, and the atoll was eventually abandoned.
All this was successfully hushed up by the United States, but the Japanese fishing boat returned to Japan with its crew suffering from severe radiation illness, with one death resulting. Their fish was radioactively contaminated. A global furor resulted.
The high doses received by the Rongelap islanders and the Japanese fishermen were from local radioactive fallout. Roughly half of the radioactivity from Soviet and US high-yield nuclear tests ended up in the stratosphere, however, from which it slowly filtered down globally. A community effort in St. Louis collected 320,000 baby teeth and found easily measurable levels of strontium-90, a 30-year half-life radioactive fission product with a biological uptake similar to calcium.[15]
LINUS PAULING
ANDREI SAKHAROV
Two scientists, Linus Pauling in the United States and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, pointed out that huge quantities of radioactive carbon 14 also were being created by neutron absorption in atmospheric nitrogen. They estimated that millions of cases of serious health effects would result during that isotope’s long decay period (half-life of 5,600 years).[16]
In 1957, Pauling and his allies collected the signatures of 11,000 scientists on a petition calling for the end of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. In 1960, he was subpoenaed to testify before the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and questioned about whether his efforts were Communist-abetted.[17]
In 1961, at a meeting of Premier Khrushchev with the leadership of the Soviet nuclear program, Sakharov addressed Khrushchev to argue that most of the planned Soviet high-yield tests were unnecessary. According to Sakharov’s recollection, Khrushchev responded that that the tests were necessary to deter US nuclear threats and told Sakharov, “I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!”[18]
Two years later, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear tests everywhere but underground. That same year, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution. Sakharov’s efforts as an insider were relatively invisible to the outside world, but, in 1975, he too received the Nobel Peace Prize recognizing “his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations.”[19]
Linus Pauling, 1954 Nobel prize winner for chemistry, holds up a sign opposing atmospheric nuclear testing at a rally near the White House, April 28, 1962. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
“I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!”
—Nikita Khrushchev
Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine—first in 1977, two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and again in 1990, a few months after his death.
Limiting ballistic missile defense
RICHARD GARWIN
HANS BETHE
PAUL DOTY
MIKHAIL MILLIONSHCHIKOV
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided the United States would deploy defenses against incoming ballistic missiles. Johnson’s decision came despite his science advisors arguing that the system being proposed could easily be countermeasured and would provoke a Soviet nuclear buildup in response.[20]
Johnson was under political pressure at the time from the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, who claimed the Soviet Union was ahead in ballistic missile defense. Johnson later decided not to run for reelection because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam war, and Nixon got elected the next year.
The Nixon administration inherited the Johnson administration plan, which would have proceeded as planned but for two facts. First, in the absence of today’s homing technology, the long-range space interceptors were equipped with nuclear warheads 300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.[21] Second, the Defense Department decided to base the nuclear-armed interceptors in the suburbs of major US cities—starting with Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Honolulu, New York City, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
This deployment resulted in “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) uprisings by suburbanites living near the proposed deployment sites who felt at risk of accidental nuclear explosions of the interceptor warheads.
Two senior government science advisors, Richard Garwin and Hans Bethe, decided to publish in Scientific American their arguments about the many ways in which a country like the Soviet Union, with the level of technology required to build intercontinental ballistic missiles, could equip them with decoys and other countermeasures to confuse or blind the radars guiding the interceptors.[22] Other scientists argued more generally that the deployment of defenses would provoke offensive buildups to still higher levels. In fact, that happened with the development of missiles with multiple independently targetable warheads in anticipation of missile defenses.
The Garwin-Bethe article made the issue accessible to members of Congress who had become interested in the issue because of the NIMBY uprisings. In response, the Nixon administration hastily moved the interceptors away from the cities and renamed the system “Safeguard.” But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings anyway, inviting the scientist critics as well as Defense Department officials to testify, and Congressional opinion shifted against the system.
It took a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Spiro Agnew, about a year into the new administration, to win Senate approval for funding to construct the first two interceptor sites. The Nixon administration saw the writing on the wall and decided to use the Safeguard system as a bargaining chip to be negotiated away with the Soviets.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with its 1974 protocol limited the United States and Soviet Union each to one interceptor site with 100 interceptors—a hardly significant number given that the each country was on its way to 10,000 nuclear warheads deployed on long-range ballistic missiles.
At first reluctant to agree to limitations on defensive systems, the Soviet leadership came to accept the merits of an ABM Treaty, in part thanks to discussions between US and Soviet scientists. Arguments similar to those made by Garwin and Bethe had circulated in discussions at Pugwash meetings in the mid-1960s and in bilateral meetings of the so-called Soviet-American Disarmament Study Group, organized by Harvard chemist Paul Doty in collaboration with Mikhail Millionshchikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Shortly before his death in 1972, Millionshchikov drafted a report to the Academy crediting the ABM Treaty and other agreements to those informal discussions.[23]
Editorial cartoon about the “not-in-my-backyard” movement opposition to the Johnson Administration proposed deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in US suburbs. (via Frank von Hippel)
The Soviet leadership came to accept the merits of an ABM Treaty, in part thanks to discussions between US and Soviet scientists.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
EVGENY VELIKHOV
THOMAS COCHRAN
AARON TOVISH
CHARLES ARCHAMBEAU
The end of the US-Soviet nuclear arms race was made possible by a series of different events, including, in the United States, a grass-roots uprising calling for a “freeze” on the nuclear arms race in the early-1980s and, in the Soviet Union, the choice by the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo of Mikhail Gorbachev as its next general secretary in 1985.
Gorbachev’s first nuclear arms control initiative was to declare a unilateral Soviet test moratorium to begin on August 6, 1985 (Hiroshima Day). His hope was to turn the Kennedy- Khrushchev Limited Test Ban Treaty into a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by ending underground nuclear testing as well.
When the Reagan administration refused to join the moratorium, physicist Evgeny Velikhov, who had succeded Millionshchikov as vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was an arms control advisor to Gorbachev, searched for a way forward. In October 1985, at the centennial celebration of Niels Bohr’s birth in Copenhagen, Velikhov suggested to me the idea of inviting an outside group to verify that Soviet testing had stopped.
Thomas Cochran, a physicist with the US Natural Resources Defense Council, was interested and had the backing of the chairman of the Council’s board, and Aaron Tovish, then with Parliamentarians for Global Action, had found a seismologist, Charles Archambeau, who was able to recruit a team of seismologists from the University of California, San Diego to monitor the Soviet Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. After a first meeting in Moscow in May 1986, the effort moved quickly and, in July, the seismologists set up a monitoring station at the first of three geologically favorable locations around the test site.[24]
This initiative immediately excited test ban advocates in Congress.
The effort to achieve a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had failed two decades earlier because of Soviet unwillingness to allow as many on-site investigations of suspect seismic events as the United States was demanding. Now a new Soviet leadership was allowing a US group to establish in-country monitoring stations—unilaterally! Congress began to press the Reagan and then George H.W. Bush administrations for test-ban negotiations and finally, in 1992, imposed a moratorium on US nuclear testing as long as other countries—especially Russia—did not test.[25]
Serious negotiations followed on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was opened for signatures in 1996. To date, the treaty has been ratified by 177 states, but it has not yet come into force because Annex 2 of the treaty requires ratifications by 44 specific countries.[26] Among the nine nuclear-weapon states whose ratifications are required, only France and the United Kingdom have done so. China, Israel, Russia, and the United States have all signed, however, and the Vienna Convention on Treaties requires countries that have signed a treaty to comply with it unless they unsign. India and Pakistan have not signed but have not tested since 1998. North Korea, which also has not signed, has not tested since 2017.
The different issues above show that, when there is public interest, scientists’ efforts to advance nuclear arms control have been able to change policies. Unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, public and therefore congressional interest in nuclear arms control have waned, and the nuclear military-industrial complex has taken back control of nuclear weapons policy in the United States.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinly-veiled nuclear threats, China’s nuclear-weapons buildup, and non-nuclear-armed states pressing for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, however, nuclear arms control is becoming salient again. Will public interest meet this historical moment?
Editor’s note: In October 2023, the US Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, which has about a thousand members, convened a meeting at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to explore the possibilities for an international mobilization of physicists. This article is based on a talk given at that meeting. The author thanks Matthew Evangelista, author of Unarmed Forces: The Trans-national Movement to End the Cold War(Cornell University Press, 1999), who also gave a talk at that Trieste meeting, for his comments and suggestions.
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There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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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… about reaching into the nuclear arsenal. … At least initially, their use would look nothing like an all-out nuclear exchange, the great fear of the …
Three major environmental groups filed a lawsuit to stop California from extending the life of its last nuclear–power plant. The lawsuit from San Luis …
NDRF 10th Battalion trains Karnataka SDRF on nuclear emergencies in Kondapavuluru, Krishna district for effective response capabilities … power plant, …
The intercepts revealed that for the first time since the war in Ukraine had broken out, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military …
According to Sakharov’s recollection, Khrushchev responded that that the tests were necessary to deter US nuclear threats and told Sakharov, “I’d be a …
Every now and then, science serves up poison pills. Knowledge gained in the course of exploring how nature works opens doors we might wish had stayed shut: For much of the past year, our newsfeeds were flooded with stories about how computational superpowers can create amoral nonhuman “minds” that may learn to think better than we do (and then what?). On the big screen, the movie Oppenheimer explored a threat people have lived with for nearly 80 years: How the energy of the atom can be unleashed to power unimaginably destructive bombs.
When potentially catastrophic inventions threaten all humanity, who decides how (or whether) they’re used? When even scientists toss around terms like “human extinction,” whose voice matters?
Such questions were at the core of the Oppenheimer film, a blockbuster now nominated for more than a dozen Oscars. To me, the movie hit home for a different reason. I spent a great deal of time with Frank Oppenheimer during the last 15 years of his life. While I never knew his brother, Robert, Frank remained anguished over what he felt was Robert’s squandered opportunity to engage the world’s people in candid conversations about how to protect themselves under the shadow of this new threat.
KC Cole and Frank Oppenheimer mixing images in Bob Miller’s Everyone Is You and Me (1980), an Exploratorium exhibit exploring perception, optics and light. Courtesy of KC Cole
During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert—the “father of the atom bomb”—and his younger brother, Frank—the “uncle” of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world.
They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics.
Robert—whose fame surged after the war—believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen—that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace.
In the end, both lost. Both paid for their efforts with their careers (although Frank eventually resurrected his ideas as a “people’s science museum” that had a worldwide impact).
Given that the question “Who decides?” underlies so much of today’s fast-evolving sciences, the brothers’ story seems more compelling and relevant than ever.
Ethical education
In many ways, the Oppenheimer brothers were very much alike. Both studied physics. Both chain-smoked. Both loved art and literature. Both had piercing blue eyes, inherited from their mother, Ella Friedman Oppenheimer, an artist with a malformed hand always hidden in a glove. Their father, Julius, was a trustee of the Society for Ethical Culture, dedicated to “love of the right.”
They shared a Manhattan apartment with maids, Renoirs and books piled down the halls and into the bathrooms. Ella was terrified of germs, so tutors and barbers often came to them. Frank had his tonsils out in his bedroom. Both boys attended Ethical Culture schools in New York, so morality was baked into their upbringing.
But they were also in other ways opposites.
Robert and Frank Oppenheimer as children. Frank Oppenheimer, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
Robert was, by his own admission, “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” Frank was anything but. He sneaked out at night to scale New York City’s rooftop water towers; by high school, he was using the electric current in the family home to weld whatever metal he could get his hands on. He took apart his father’s player piano (then stayed up all night putting it back together).
Robert got through Harvard in three years and received his PhD from the University of Göttingen two years later, in 1927, at age 23. Frank didn’t get his PhD until he was 27. Robert was arrogant, picky about his company. Frank would talk with anyone and did, later befriending even his FBI tail.
When Robert joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, he was described as “a sort of patron saint,” always center stage, smooth, articulate, captivating. When Frank arrived at Caltech many years later for graduate work, he was described as standing “at the fringe, shoulders hunched over, clothes mussed and frayed, fingers still dirty from the laboratory.”
Still, they loved each other dearly. Frank, eight years Robert’s junior, wept when his older brother left for graduate school in Europe. Robert wrote Frank that he would gladly give up his vacation “for one evening with you.” He sent his little brother books on physics and chemistry, a sextant, compasses, a metronome, along with letters full of brotherly wisdom. My personal favorite: “To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.”
In summer, they retreated to a cabin in the mountains of New Mexico, which Robert called Perro Caliente (Spanish for “hot dog”). They rode horses over 13,000-foot peaks, 1,000 miles a summer. During one night ride, Robert got knocked off his horse. “He was very thin anyway,” Frank said. “Here was this little bit of protoplasm on the ground, not moving. It was scary, but he was all right.”
On a road trip back to Caltech, Frank rolled the car into a ditch, breaking Robert’s arm. When Robert stopped at a store to get a sling, he came back with a bright red one, to cheer up his little brother, who he knew was feeling bad about the accident.
Frank Oppenheimer holds a gyroscope during his time as a high school teacher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in the late 1950s. Stanley Fowler / Courtesy of KC Cole
The world around them was fraught, with fascism on the rise in Germany, Italy and Spain. The Depression meant people were still out of work. Robert kept mostly aloof from politics, but Frank dived in. He married a University of California, Berkeley, student who was a member of the Young Communist League, then joined himself. He admired the Communists for taking unemployment seriously—and for understanding the threats posed by Hitler and Mussolini. His personal tipping point was the treatment of Black swimmers at a Pasadena public pool: They were allowed only on Wednesdays; the pool was drained before the white swimmers came back on Thursday. Only the Communist Party seemed concerned.
Robert didn’t approve of Frank’s decision to join the party, and he didn’t approve of his wife, Jackie, either, referring to her as “that waitress.” He accused Frank of being “slow” because it took him what Robert regarded as too long to get his PhD. He called Frank’s marriage “infantile.” The feelings became mutual. Jackie later regarded Robert and his wife, Kitty, as pretentious, phony and tight.
Frank soon realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a Communist, and he quit. He felt the party was too authoritarian and not as interested in social justice as in petty bickering. (Robert never joined, although Kitty had been a party member.)
From quantum theory to atom smashers
The brothers were both working as physicists when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Robert, the theorist, was sharing the revolutionary physics of quantum mechanics with his American colleagues at Berkeley and Caltech, where he had joint appointments. Frank, a natural-born experimentalist, was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley on the rapidly developing technology of particle accelerators—known to some as “atom smashers.”
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer confers with Leslie Groves, the military lead of the Manhattan Project. U.S. Department of Energy / Public Domain
Once it became clear that the enormous energy contained in the atomic nucleus could be used to build a bomb—and that Nazi Germany might well be doing just that—President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a major American effort to beat them to it: the Manhattan Project. It came as a surprise to everyone when General Leslie Groves tapped Robert as director. Seemingly overnight, the ethereal young man who enjoyed reading poetry in Sanskrit became the ringleader of the most concentrated collection of brilliant minds ever assembled—scientists summoned from around the world to a makeshift lab on a desolate New Mexico mesa, where they would build an atomic bomb to stop Hitler.
Frank, meanwhile, worked with Lawrence on what he called “racetracks” (officially calutrons) used to coax small but vital amounts of pure uranium-235 out of a dirty mix of isotopes by steering them in circles with magnets. Uranium-235, like plutonium-239, is easily split, just what was needed to set off a chain reaction. Since no one knew how to bring together a critical mass of the stuff to make an explosion, two designs were pursued simultaneously. The plutonium bomb acquired the nickname Fat Man; the uranium bomb was Little Boy.
Frank helped supervise an enormous complex for uranium separation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Frank liked Groves, and Groves, in turn, liked Frank—and later defended him when he was booted from physics for his politics.
As the time to test the bomb approached, Frank joined his brother at the Trinity site, a dry scrubby desert formerly part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range. Frank, who saw his job (ironically enough) as a “safety inspector,” mapped escape routes through the desert and made sure workers wore hard hats.
Leslie Groves, center, Robert Oppenheimer, in a pale hat, and others pose next to the remains of the tower destroyed by the testing of the Trinity bomb in a photo dated from September 1945, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. U.S. Department of Energy / Public Domain
Finally, on July 16, 1945, the go-ahead was given. After a long night on edge watching driving rain and lightning rage around “the gadget”—a Fat Man-style plutonium bomb perched on a 100-foot-tall tower—the proverbial (and literal) button was pushed.
The brothers lay together at the nearest bunker, five miles away, heads to the ground. Frank later described the “unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple and very awesome … and all the thunder of the blast was bouncing, bouncing back and forth on the cliffs and hills. The echoing went on and on.” The cloud, he said “just seemed to hang there forever.”
Frank and his brother embraced each other: “I think we just said: ‘It worked.’”
On August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped on the pristine city of Hiroshima—which had been deliberately untouched by U.S. bombs, the better to assess the damage. In an instant, the city was all but flattened, people reduced to charred cinders, survivors hobbling around with their skin peeled off and hanging from their bodies like rags. An estimated 140,000 people were killed in the attack and in the months after, according to Japanese authorities.
Frank heard the news outside his brother’s office at Los Alamos. “Up to then I don’t think I’d really thought of all those flattened people,” he said. The U.S. bombing of Nagasaki with Fat Man just days later brought the death toll even higher.
Some physicists saw their success as a moral failure. Still, many—including Frank and Robert—also hoped this new weapon would cause people to see the world differently; they hoped it would ultimately bring about peace. “Those were the days when we all drank one toast only,” Robert said: “‘No more wars.’”
Intolerable weapon
After the war, the brothers’ lives diverged, driven by circumstance, in ways that were painful to both.
Robert was a hero; he mingled easily with the powerful. Famously, he was Einstein’s boss—director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He chaired a committee to advise the government on a new and vastly more powerful type of bomb—the hydrogen bomb. Rather than split atoms, it fused them, using the physics of stars. The H-bomb could be 1,000 times more powerful than Little Boy.
Robert’s committee voted unanimously against developing it. “The extreme dangers to mankind inherent in this proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this weapon.” They described it as a “threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable.”
Frank, meanwhile, had joined the physics department at the University of Minnesota, building detectors to catch cosmic rays streaming from space with equipment tethered to balloons he frequently lost but chased gamely through Cuban forests and other remote locations. He was excited about their discovery that the cosmic ray particles were not merely protons, as people had assumed, but the nuclei of many elements—from hydrogen to gold—implying that some were forged in supernova explosions.
At the same time, he was giving speeches “all over the map,” as he put it, trying to educate the public about nuclear bombs, trying to explain what 1,000 times more powerful really meant. He spoke to bankers, civic associations, schools. He argued that so-called “smart” people weren’t all that different from everyone else. The mistrust of the “hoi polloi,” Frank thought, stemmed largely from the tendency of people to credit their own success to a single personal characteristic, which they then “idolize” and use to measure everyone else by the same yardstick.
He believed people would educate themselves if they thought their voices mattered. “All of us have seen, especially during the war, the enormous increase in the competence of people that results from a sense of responsibility,” he said. Building the “racetracks” during the war had required training thousands of people “fresh from farms and woods to operate and repair the weirdest and most complicated equipment.”
Frank Oppenheimer, left, works on one of his cosmic ray detectors, which were carried high into the atmosphere by balloons. Courtesy of KC Cole
Soon, his physics career was cut short. The FBI had been keeping tabs on both brothers for years, pausing only for the war, when military intelligence took over. Agents followed them everywhere, tapped their phones, planted microphones in their houses.
In 1949, Frank received a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to take the fifth, but also refused to testify about anyone other than himself. He was effectively fired from the University of Minnesota physics department, leaving the chair’s office in tears.
Attempts to find work elsewhere were blocked at every turn, despite support from multiple Nobel laureates, Groves and even H-bomb enthusiast Edward Teller. Finally, an FBI agent told Frank flat out: If he wanted a job, he had to cooperate. “Then I realized what the wall was.”
Out of options, and having just purchased a ranch to live on “someday,” Frank and Jackie became serious cattle ranchers, learning from neighbors and veterinary manuals. (The FBI was right on their tails, pestering neighbors for information, suggesting they were broadcasting atomic secrets to Mexico.) All the while, Frank thought and wrote about physics and peace, civil rights, ethics, education and the critical role of honesty in science and public life.
Robert did not approve of any of Frank’s activities. He thought there wasn’t time to bring the public in on the debate; he thought he could use his fame and power to influence policy in Washington toward peaceful ends. Frank expressed his disgust at what he considered his brother’s futile and elitist approach. Robert made it clear that he thought the idea of becoming a rancher was a little silly—as well as beneath Frank.
Frank felt he could no longer reach him. “I saw my bro in Chicago,” Frank wrote his best friend Robert Wilson at Cornell University in an undated letter probably from the early 1950s. “I fear that I merely amused him slightly when, in brotherly love, I told him that I was still confident that someday he would do something that I was proud of.”
A man destroyed
Robert’s now-famous downfall was swift. Many great books have been written about the subject (not to mention Christopher Nolan’s colossal film); in effect, he was punished for his opposition to the H-bomb, probably his arrogance and naivete as well. After a series of secret hearings, his security clearance was revoked; he was, by all accounts, a ruined man.
It wasn’t something Frank liked to talk about. “He trusted his ability to talk to people and convince them,” Frank said. “But he was up against people that weren’t used to being convinced by conversation.”
Some of Robert’s most poignant testimony during the hearings involved Frank. Asked if his brother had ever been a Communist, Robert answered: “Mr. Chairman … I ask you not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg of you not to ask me these questions.”
The broader tragedy for both brothers was that the creation of the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction—a thing too horrible ever to use—didn’t much change how people viewed war. The H-bomb was just another weapon.
“What undid him,” Frank said, “was not just his fall from official grace, but the fact that this fall represented a defeat for the kind of civilized behavior that he had hoped nations would adopt.”
Robert died at the age of 62, in 1967. Frank’s last memory of his brother is poignantly familial. Robert was lying in bed, in great pain from throat cancer. Frank lay down beside him, and together they watched “Perry Mason” on TV.
A new path
While Robert was being politically destroyed, Frank had started teaching science in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long, students from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, were winning the state science fairs. Eventually allowed into academia by the University of Colorado in 1959, Frank promptly built a “library of experiments” out of equipment scavenged from other labs.
That “library” in time grew into a vast public playground of scientific stuff housed in the abandoned Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Exhibits—sometimes sophisticated and delicate—were meant to be played with, even broken; no guards stopped people from touching anything, no rules prevented theft—and, remarkably, there was almost none. He called it an “Exploratorium” so people wouldn’t think it was a “museum” where good behavior was expected (although he liked the idea that “no one flunks a museum”). Top scientists and artists from around the globe contributed time and talent. Barbara Gamow, wife of the physicist George Gamow, painted a sign to hang over the machine shop: “Here is Being Created an Exploratorium, a Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness.”
Frank Oppenheimer stands at his Pendulum Table exhibit at the Exploratorium. Courtesy of KC Cole
In the end, I like to think Frank proved his brother (and most everyone else) wrong about the willingness of everyday people to engage and learn. The “so-called inattentive public,” he’d said, would come to life if people didn’t feel “fooled and lied to,” if they felt valued and respected. And if people got addicted to figuring things out for themselves, they’d be inoculated against having to take the word of whatever bullies happened to be in power. Society could tap into this collective wisdom to solve pressing global problems—the only way he thought it could work.
Today, decades after Frank’s death in 1985, Exploratorium-style science centers exist in some form all over the globe.
I count myself as one of Frank’s many thousands of addicts, hooked on science (a subject I’d found boring) the minute I met him in 1971. (In a weird resonance with today, my first foray into journalism was a piece on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia for the New York Times magazine.) I was interested in peace, not physics. Frank talked me into writing for him, explaining optics and wave mechanics to the public. My first editor was Jackie. Over the years, Frank and I spent endless hours chatting about life, art, science and his family, including his brother.
Nolan’s film Oppenheimer doesn’t offer much insight into Robert’s thoughts on science and peace or science and human morality. However, Robert did think and talk about these ideas, many of which are collected in his 1954 book Science and the Common Understanding, as well as other places.
Frank continued to get upset (and a little drunk) every August 6, the day Hiroshima was bombed. He’d rub his forehead hard, as if he were trying to rub something out. He had much the same reaction to many previous dramatizations of the Oppenheimer story, because he thought they focused too much on the fall of his brother, rather than on the failure of attempts to use the horror of the bomb to build a warless world.
Frank’s fierce integrity permeated our work together: He refused to call me writer/editor because he said that meant writer divided by editor. Instead, I was his Exploratorium Expositor.
If someone said, “It’s impossible to know something, or impossible to adequately thank someone,” he’d argue: It’s not impossible, it’s only very, very, very hard.
No matter what impossible thing Frank was trying to do, he refused to be stopped by so-called “real world” obstacles. “It’s not the real world,” he’d rage. “It’s a world we made up.” We could do better. In fact, so many of what we came to call “Frankisms” seem more relevant today than ever:
“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do to you is turn you into a son of a bitch.”
“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society.”
“If we stop trying to understand things, we’ll all be sunk.”
Navigating the dark side of science, I think, will require attending closely to all of these. The “real world” we’re presented with is not the way things have to be. We shouldn’t become sons of bitches. We can never stop noticing or trying to understand.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
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.
… things happen—that is … about nuclear bombs, trying to explain what 1,000 times more powerful really meant. … All the while, Frank thought and wrote …
They wanted to have a plan to be “in the best possible position” if Russia used nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. In this period, from late …
The assessment of potential scenarios in which Russia would contemplate using nuclear weapons included situations perceived as existential threats to …
… nuclear attack by Russia on Ukraine. They … The potential loss of entire Russian units threatened to be a “potential trigger” for nuclear weapon use.
Where have all these wild and increasingly tense and frightening rumors and threats of nuclear war come from, and what on planet Earth is the actual reason for them? As near as I can tell the potential of nuclear war is only about nuclear war itself with maybe a few asides about geographic territory and control of natural and human resources.
But the entire world — including down under — now seems to be riled up over nuclear war and the nuclear nations threatening nuclear war to stop nuclear war, if that makes any sense at all, which it shouldn’t, yet does. Who are these guys and what are they thinking. Each country has to remodel their nuclear silos and build bigger and more powerful missiles with more powerful nuclear warheads — and maybe put nukes in orbit. Our governments call this “deterrence” which makes about as much sense as street gang fights or big kids beating up on the little kids on a primary school playground during recess.
Are our elected and appointed leaders of the various and sundry earthly world(s) actually that juvenile or childish? It seems so. America is rebuilding its entire nuclear arsenal, and no doubt Russia, China, North Korea, and the lesser radical nuclear nations are too, to the degree that they can. Listening to President Biden’s “State of the Nation” speech last night was built around the the basics of war and conflict, both defensively and offensive — as well as protective for some of our allies. But are we walking away from our help from Ukraine in order to conserve our pocket books and pacify Putin? We do this because he seems to say that if America and NATO actually send troops and military gear beyond what’s already there, Russia will attack three nations in NATO, and they will be nuclear attacks, or so the threat goes. No doubt this, if came to be, would quick-start the beginning of WWIII, because one offensive nuclear strike automatically would lead to an all-out defensive retaliation.
Wars and conflicts of any kind do not make eternal peace; they only ruin the quality of life for the losing nation(s) at the cost of doing the same to the winning nations(s). Both are filled with death ad destruction and are worse off than before. Retribution is always in the heart of the loser(s) even though a certain strained peace is managed until the loser(s) are once again strong enough to try to do their vengeance. Such is the way this has always been since the beginning of human history, but now it is an armageddon thing.
In the case of all-out nuclear war, all nations lose — even the ones that don’t even know that war is happening, including the animal kingdoms, nor do they understand that these wars will be their doomsday, too! ~llaw
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 in tonight’s Post.)
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 United States, among other countries, is giving its nuclear arsenal—which contains about 5,000 weapons—a makeover. … Plus, to stay updated on all …
In the last 47 years, China, France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom have all developed the tools to recycle nuclear waste. The U.S., by contrast …
Biden announces emergency port for Gaza aid · Expanding Israeli settlements a war crime: UN · Russia & China Plan Building Lunar Nuclear Power Plant on …
Lithuania’s intelligence agencies publish their national security threat assessment reports every year. The latest document looks into key threats and …
In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, Airman 1st Class Jackson Ligon, left, and Senior Airman Jonathan Marinaccio, 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron technicians connect a re-entry system to a spacer on an intercontinental ballistic missile during a Simulated Electronic Launch-Minuteman test Sept. 22, 2020, at a launch facility near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Mont. (Senior Airman Daniel Brosam/U.S. Air Force via AP, File)
These strains on people, from you and me as individuals, to corporate workers, teachers and other educators, independent shops and employees, soldiers, farmers, all of us, subjected to “nuclear modernization” (if there actually is such a thing) create significant concerns that are not only woefully inconvenient and costly, but also extremely dangerous. Yet, as always, our capitalistic societies worries far more about money and finance than the terrible invisible fear behind it all. We should all ask the question, why are we doing this? And why do we have to do it all over again? There is an answer, and it’s simple: We don’t have to do this and we are ‘dead’ wrong to do it.
The answer is the unification of peace in exchange for war by a motley group of separated countries and their leaders (I like to call them world(s) because, though similar, each is a world-apart from their neighbor. And the further apart they are the more their world(s) differ. But to survive, all of us from every country must bury the hatchet; otherwise we will eventually die at the hands of nuclear war and/or nuclear radiation poisoning, possibly with the help of CO2 and global warming/climate change.
We ought to be able to live peacefully together, even with different faiths and beliefs, skin colors, wealth, climate, GNP, and whatever else makes us jealous enough to despise one another. Humans were never meant to have nuclear power and until recently we had no idea what it was, and after we did we didn’t realize it would become the probable singular human-produced products that could or would annihilate all living life, humans and otherwise, on planet Earth, leaving Mother Nature also dead and barren for eons into the future.
We must understand that “All Things Nuclear”, not just weapons of mass destruction, are capable of destroying life on planet Earth, and the new desire to build more and more nuclear power plants to help resolve our constant need for more electricity will sooner or later come back to haunt us as we turn a viable world into a dystopian world of constant death. That’s if we’re lucky, but our luck has most likely dwindled from an ocean to mudpuddle. Our only way out of nuclear dystopia and eventual extinction is to somehow learn to honor one another, if not whole-heartedly, but enough to know that without Peace on Earth we have nothing. Have you ever wondered why our ungrateful hateful nation’s leaders never consider peaceful solutions in favor of eternal war, failing to acknowledge that if they kill off all of us, then they will be just as dead as we are. ~llaw (Read on . . .)
From his house near Great Falls, Mont., farmer Walter Schweitzer can see the frequent military convoys, sometimes large trucks with missiles as cargo, as they rumble toward their destination.
Schweitzer, 62, lives just 25 miles from Malmstrom Air Force Base. He’s spent his whole life around the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 400 of which are deployed across rural Western states, including Montana.
But Schweitzer has concerns about a vast effort from the Air Force to overhaul this land-based leg of the nuclear triad with a brand-new missile called Sentinel.
Schweitzer, the president of the Montana Farmers Union, said the Air Force has “danced around” community questions concerning public safety, housing and road maintenance, as the military prepares to bring thousands of workers to their city.
“We’re experiencing a shortage of affordable housing, and this would be a great opportunity if they had some public involvement and discussion on how they approached it,” he said. “There has been no public meetings discussing location or how this is going to be handled.”
While the U.S. is planning to modernize its entire nuclear triad, which includes bombers and submarines in addition to ICBMs, the Minuteman replacement effort is the most complicated.
The bulk of the Sentinel construction work will take place at three Air Force bases, in the rugged and rural northern U.S.: F.E. Warren outside Cheyenne, Wyo.; Minot, near the North Dakota city of the same name; and Malmstrom in Montana.
This effort will require the cooperation of local communities, who must work with an influx of up to 3,000 workers in the area for several years.
The project, which is being handled by defense contractor Northrop Grumman, will bring jobs and money into communities, so it’s generally being welcomed.
“This is a huge project,” said Minot Mayor Tom Ross. “It’s probably going to be the largest construction project in the history of the state of North Dakota.”
But the expected wave of workers is forcing community adaptation and bringing questions about public safety and housing.
Sentinel has also raised local environmental concerns involving fuel waste disposal and the easement of private property.
The Air Force did not respond to The Hill’s questions about public safety and housing but said it was engaged in ongoing discussions with local communities.
Public safety, housing concerns
Sentinel will swap out the 400 deployed missiles with new ones, which will host revamped warheads and new plutonium shells.
But the costliest part of the project — and the part that requires the most community cooperation — is the redevelopment of the 450 launch areas, which will entail refurbishing underground silos where the missiles are stored and their launch control centers.
Northrop Grumman will also construct close to 50 new support buildings, 62 communication towers and more than 7,500 miles of utility lines and corridors.
Preliminary work began last year at F.E. Warren, and construction is expected to start within the next few years, according to Air Force Global Strike Command.
The Air Force wants to begin deploying the missiles in 2030, though the military branch is facing an inflating budget that may delay the project by two years or more.
The construction workers are expected to arrive sometime in the late 2020s to early 2030s and will work at each base for two to five years. They will be housed in living facilities known as workforce hubs, commonly referred to as “man camps.”
The Air Force has said it will not place the hubs near schools, residential neighborhoods or other sensitive areas, noting it will work with local communities to comply with zoning laws.
A Northrop Grumman official told The Hill the workers are expected to be handled by a subcontractor on the project — a construction company called Bechtel — and that the work was still years away, considering that part of the Sentinel project has yet to be awarded.
The official, who spoke on background to discuss material not made publicly available yet, said it was “difficult to speculate about things not under the current scope.”
The flow of workers will impact states that house missile silos in the Midwest, including Nebraska.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) said in a town hall meeting last year after he vetoed $10 million in funding for infrastructure related to Sentinel funding that the federal government was responsible for housing them, according to a local outlet.
“When you think about the infrastructure that takes place, we have to work day and night with them to make sure they hold their end of the bill up,” Pillen said, adding that he would not spend money on infrastructure that would be boarded up once the workers leave.
In Montana, work at Malmstrom is primarily going to impact two communities: Great Falls and Lewistown. The Air Force held town halls there in January to discuss Sentinel.
But Rick Tryon, a Great Falls city commissioner, said his concerns were not adequately addressed at the town hall and that the Air Force told him there was no money in the budget for public safety.
In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, Staff Sgt. Brandon Mendola, left, with the 90th munitions squadron at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming demonstrates how they train new missile maintainers to look for scratches on the top of a nuclear warhead. Even a hairline scratch on the polished black surface of the cone could create enough drag when fired to send the weapon off course, so maintainers inspect the devices closely. (Senior Airman Sarah Post/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a little behind in adequately funding our public safety,” Tryon said, adding that his city has around 100 police officers in a community of roughly 60,000 people. “Everybody understands that before this happens, we’ve got to do something to beef up our public safety here, locally.”
“And the way it stands right now, there’s no plan from the Air Force or the federal folks to do that.”
Schweitzer told The Hill it was not clear how and where the workers would be housed, describing 3,000 workers as a “major city.”
“There needs to be a whole lot more discussion and planning,” he said. “Our county seat has half that population or less.”
Minot is in the vicinity of North Dakota’s Sentinel project. But in that city, it’s being largely welcomed with open arms.
Ross, the mayor, said the Air Force has not told his city to build housing. But he said the local government may allocate funds anyway to grow the municipality.
“We see it as an opportunity, and we’re going to build housing,” he said. “There’s a great potential for them to stay in Minot when the project is complete.”
Environmental and property concerns
The Air Force identified in its 2023 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that it must dispose of the Minuteman missiles, each of which weighs nearly 80,000 pounds and hosts three solid-propellant rocket motors.
The decommission plan includes the complete disassembly of Minuteman missiles and the burning of solid rocket motor fuel for release at the Utah Test and Training Range in a process that could last up to five years.
The Environmental Protection Agency asked the Air Force to study alternatives in the EIS. The Air Force did not respond to a request for comment on procedures for the disposal of fuel.
Sébastien Philippe, a research scholar with Princeton University’s program on science and global security, said releasing solid rocket fuel through detonation into the outside environment is not a safe and environmentally friendly option.
Philippe, who has released a website tracking concerns about Sentinel, added that the project will have a “massive impact” for the U.S. in environmental terms.
In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, Airman 1st Class Jonathan Marrs, 21, left, and Senior Airman Jacob Deas, 23, right, work to dislodge the 110-ton cement and steel blast door covering the top of the Bravo-9 nuclear missile silo at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., Aug. 24, 2023. When the first 225-pound aluminum tow, or “mule” could not pull the door open, Marrs dragged down a second tow to give them more power. (John Turner/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“When you unpack [Sentinel], it’s such a huge project,” he said. “Even if everything goes well, there will be some degree of environmental impact.”
In the EIS, the Air Force said the “shipping, handling, disassembly, storage, and disposal of ICBM boosters and interstages have been routinely conducted by Air Force personnel following established protocol for approximately 60 years.”
For local communities, another concern is how private property will be affected by expanding Air Force needs, which has been a focus at town halls.
The Air Force said Sentinel involves negotiations with hundreds of private property landowners and that it has notified landowners whose property might be needed for Sentinel infrastructure.
Air Force officials said town hall meetings are ongoing and pledged to “answer all questions affected landowners may have and seek landowner cooperation regarding existing easements.”
Initial agreements before property acquisition allow the Air Force and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct real estate surveys on “limited portions” of private property, officials said.
Cooperation with landowners could allow for utility line installations without property acquisition, they added, and the surveys are crucial to determine the boundaries of any easements.
The Air Force has also told residents in Montana that it will need a 2-mile-wide corridor for utility lines, according to Schweitzer. He said local farmers are upset about the corridor because it will impose restrictions for building wind farms. The Air Force did not respond to a detailed question on that concern.
Schweitzer said the corridor is likely to amount to the restriction of 10 million acres around one of the windiest regions of Montana.
“Our national security, as well as our food security, is critically important to this country,” he said. “Our family farms provide food security, and yet we’re struggling economically to make ends meet.”
“We’re losing farmers every day, because they’re going bankrupt,” he added. “Some of my neighbors are making more money off their windmills than they are from their farms. If they were to impose this 2-mile corridor, I own about 30,000 acres, and none of it would be available.”
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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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Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
“Even if everything goes well, there will be some degree of environmental impact.” In the EIS, the Air Force said the “shipping, handling, disassembly …
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied …
The following article from Vox provides us with a perspective concerning nuclear war between Russia and the United States and what lies between the two countries in Europe. Although ICBMs might play the largest role in a nuclear war, it is not a pretty picture to see that nuclear warheads are everywhere — on land and in the sea and perhaps soon in space. Some nukes belong to the countries they are deployed in and many more nuclear warheads are provided by the United States. Not counting nuclear weapons deployed in Russian, the United States, and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, it appears that there are enough nuclear weapons spread throughout Europe to destroy the world all by itself, yet most of these weapons are meant to stand as “deterrent” weapons to somehow “prevent” nuclear war by fear of the very same kind of weapons that are meant to destroy others.
Deterrence is an insane, almost childish, way to rely on keeping the peace, and in reality the only way to avoid the threat of these doomsday nuclear devices is to destroy them before they destroy us at the cruel hands of power-stricken self-aggrandizing leaders around the world(s). There are 8 or 9 of them, depending on who we include, but it takes just one to begin nuclear war, and the others will follow immediately, yet there is no adequate human defense against the power of nuclear weapons. The same rationale goes for nuclear power plants, which in the event of war, as Russia has proven in Ukraine, will only add to the abundance of deadly destruction and certain death of humanity along with our animal kingdom and planet Earth— our Mother Earth — too, who so kindly gave us life in the 1st place.
“We all die in World War III” (with a “No Symbol” around it) should be our international mantra and the motivation to prevent such a war. That slogan, all by itself, is certainly more powerful than nuclear “deterrence”. Let’s make and buy T-shirts, baseball caps, and other motifs all over the world . . . That will help some. ~llaw
Caught between Trump and Putin, are European countries ready to go nuclear?
Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images (For more images ee the full unedited story, linked below)
Joshua Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.
At the height of the Cold War in 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle famously questioned the value of American security guarantees, asking then-President John F. Kennedy if the US would really be willing to “trade New York for Paris” in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It was because of these doubts that, under de Gaulle’s leadership, France developed its independent nuclear deterrent, which it maintains to this day.
Lately, de Gaulle’s old question has started to seem disturbingly timely.
Just last week, after French President Emmanuel Macron floated the idea of European NATO members sending ground troops into Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Western leaders that Russia has “weapons that can hit targets on their territory” and that they were risking the “destruction of civilization.” The takeaway was unignorable: After years in which it was a largely forgotten political issue on the continent, the continent’s leaders clearly can no longer afford to ignore the threat of nuclear weapons.
Thanks to a renewed threat from Russia as well as doubts about America’s security umbrella thanks to the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House next year, the topic of nuclear deterrence is back in a big way, and has some European leaders to talking openly about whether their countries should acquire nuclear deterrents of their own — independent from a suddenly less predictable US.
Leaders in Poland, literally on the frontline of the conflict between NATO and Russia, have proposed hosting NATO nuclear weapons on their soil. Manfred Weber, a senior German politician who leads the center-right European People’s Party, the largest grouping in the EU parliament, recently argued for Europe to develop its own nuclear deterrent. He told Politico: “Europe must build deterrence, we must be able to deter and defend ourselves …We all know that when push comes to shove, the nuclear option is the really decisive one.”
The idea of such a “Euronuke” is not new, but the fact that the discussion is being revived in a serious way is a telling indicator of Europe’s existential anxieties in the age of Putin and Trump.
Atom bombs for peace
There are already a large number of nuclear weapons on the continent. France and the United Kingdom both have arsenals of about 290 and 225 warheads respectively. The US also maintains an arsenal of around 100 warheads in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey.
These US warheads are B61 “gravity bombs,” which are among the smallest nukes in the American arsenal and are classified as “tactical” nuclear weapons, but they have a range of possible yields and in some modifications are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons are kept in underground vaults and can only be used with “permissive action link” codes, which are kept in American hands, but they are officially designated as a deterrent for the NATO alliance. In NATO’s most recent “strategic concept,” its periodically updated mission statement, the members affirmed that they are still a “nuclear alliance” that maintains its arsenal in order to “preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”
All of this is in place because of Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal with more than 4,000 active warheads. Moscow has deployed nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, though it is not clear if there are actual nuclear warheads based there. Russia also claimed last year to have moved some tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, which borders Ukraine as well as several NATO countries, though it’s not known how many weapons were sent or how they are being deployed.
Despite the frequent threats and references to nuclear war by Russian officials including Putin since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has shown no signs that it is actually preparing to useits nuclear arsenal in Ukraine. But the mere fact of Russia’s nuclear might has been sufficient to deter Western countries from certain actions, including sending their own ground troops to Ukraine (or at least publicly admitting to sending them) or imposing a no-fly zone over the country, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy requested when the war began.
As for Europe’s own nuclear weapons, their value as a deterrent has less to do with their number or strength than the political structure in which they are embedded. Article 5 of the treaty that established NATO in 1949 states that “an armed attack against one or more [member country] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and that other members will assist the country that comes under attack, including by using military force. Therefore, even though most NATO member countries don’t have nuclear weapons, they benefit from the protection of being in an alliance with countries that do — the so-called nuclear umbrella.
In many respects, the war in Ukraine perfectly illustrated the value of Article 5. Even as NATO countries have ramped up support for Ukraine, with billions of dollars in military aid flowing across the country’s borders, Russia has refrained from any attacks on the territory of NATO states aside from some apparently accidental errant missiles. There are some lines that even Putin is wary of crossing.
But at least one country on the frontlines is looking for more tangible assurances.
A Polish nuke?
Since the war in Ukraine began, Poland, a NATO member that shares a 140-mile border and a bloody, painful history with Russia, has been bulking up its conventional military power: It now spends a greater percentage of its GDP on defense than any other NATO member, including the United States.
But wary of the possibility that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he might turn his eyes toward other countries that were once part of Moscow’s sphere of influence, senior Polish officials including President Andrzej Duda and former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki have said they would support the basing of US nuclear weapons on their territory.
AD
As Morawiecki put it last June, “We do not want to sit idly by while [Russian President Vladimir] Putin builds up his threats of various kinds.”
Poland once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil — though these deployments were secret and most Poles only learned of them after the end of the Cold War. It seems unlikely for the time being that NATO nuclear weapons will be moved to Poland. Doing so would require agreement from all 31 NATO member states, which have been less than fully unified lately.
Basing American nukes in Poland would undoubtedly be seen as a highly provocative move by Moscow, and critics contend that doing so would provide little military benefit, as such weapons would be more vulnerable to a preemptive Russian strike than those based deeper in Western Europe. The move would also violate the NATO-Russia Founding Act, an agreement from the 1990s under which NATO countries agreed not to base nuclear weapons on any new member states — although that may be a moot point these days given that Russia has also violated a number of its commitments under the agreement.
Some analysts have gone further, suggesting that rather than host NATO nuclear weapons under ultimate American control, Poland ought to have full control of them. As Dalibor Rohac, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote, “for deterrence to be credible, the weapons ought to be controlled by the party that bears the most risk of a direct Russian attack: Poland itself.”
For now, that idea looks even more unrealistic, and Polish leaders have mostly stayed away from explicitly backing it. But a recent comment by Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski during an appearance in Washington suggested it’s not entirely off the table. “If America cannot come together with Europe and enable Ukraine to drive Putin back, I fear that our family of democratic nations will start to break up,” Sikorski said at the Atlantic Council. “Allies will look for other ways to guarantee their safety. They’ll start hedging. Some of them will aim for the ultimate weapon, starting off a new nuclear race.”
The Euronuke
It’s not just Moscow that has Western European countries rethinking nuclear deterrence — it’s Washington as well. The debate over “Euronukes” is not new, but recent events have given it greater urgency. “The French have been talking about this since the ’90s,” said Heather Williams, director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What’s different now is a couple of things. The first thing that’s different is that there is a war going on in Europe. The second thing is Donald Trump.”
It’s not hard to understand why. Trump is an outspoken critic of defense guarantees in general, which he argues encourages free-riding and reckless behavior by allies at America’s defense, and NATO in particular. As president he discussed pulling the US out of NATO altogether and onetime advisers like former national security adviser John Bolton have said he would likely have done so if he had been reelected in 2020.
Last year, Congress passed legislation preventing a future president from pulling the US out of the alliance without congressional approval, but that wouldn’t prevent Trump from simply refusing to fulfill US obligations under the alliance, including Article 5. During a meeting in 2020, Trump reportedly told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” More recently, he has said he would let Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to European countries that were “delinquent” by not meeting their NATO-mandated 2 percent of GDP defense spending targets.
In light of this, the old Cold War question has returned. “If there were to be President Trump back in the White House next January, and if we [Europeans] were to ask ourselves the question, ‘Is Trump going to risk Chicago for Berlin?’ I think it would be quite difficult to answer that question except in the negative,” said Nick Witney, a defense policy analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “And then you really have to wonder what the US nuclear guarantee is worth.”
When it comes to a potential independent European nuclear deterrent, the key country is France, which, since Brexit, is the only country in the EU with its own nuclear weapons. While Britain’s nuclear forces — which have been having a rough few weeks with a second failed submarine missile launch tests — are assigned to NATO and experts question whether its program could even survive without US support, France has a fully independent deterrent, owing to de Gaulle’s old concerns about sovereignty and the value of US assurances. It does not participate in NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, which sets deterrence strategy for the alliance. France’s nuclear deterrent is France’s alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish Prime Minister Andrzej Duda, and French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris on June 12, 2023.
Andrea Savorani Neri/NurPhoto via Getty Images
But back in 2020, Macron raised eyebrows with a speech arguing that while France’s nuclear weapons are solely for the purpose of defending France’s vital interests, those interests “now have a European dimension.” He called for a dialogue with France’s European partners on the “role of French nuclear deterrence in our collective security.”
Macron has repeatedly called for Europe to shore up its own defenses and act more strategically independent from the United States, and in 2022, his office affirmed that he was still open to “Europeanizing” France’s nuclear deterrent, suggesting he was open to extending France’s own nuclear umbrella to its European partners. Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, expressed support for the proposal last month.
Meanwhile, a host of German politicians from across the political spectrum, including Weber, have been tentatively calling for Germany to seek a European nuclear deterrent, separate from the United States, a major shift for a country where public opposition to military force in general and nuclear weapons in particular has been high for decades.
Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister and leader of the liberal Free Democratic Party, recently argued in an op-ed that Germany should give serious consideration to France’s offer of dialogue on European nuclear deterrence and that “we should understand Donald Trump’s recent statements as a call to further rethink this element of European security.”
Of course, many Germans may not consider French security guarantees to be all that more reassuring than American ones. One anonymous official recently told the Wall Street Journal that Germany should be wary of a nuclear alliance with a country that was “one election away” from electing a pro-Russian president, referring to France’s increasingly prominent far-right National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen. This has led some national security experts in Germany to argue that the country should look to acquire its own nuclear weapons, which would be held separately from the US arsenals in the country.
That idea would be a tough sell for the German public. While the war in Ukraine has caused many Germans to reevaluate their dislike of US weapons on German soil, 90 percent of Germans oppose the country acquiring nuclear weapons of its own.
At a meeting with reporters in Washington on Monday, Charles Fries, EU deputy secretary general for peace, security, and defense, acknowledged that the topic of an independent nuclear deterrent appeared to be garnering more interest lately but said that as of now, “the debate has not really taken place at the EU level.”
Nukes — what are they good for?
Underlying the Euronukes debate is the question of just how effective nuclear weapons really are as a deterrent. As countries including Israel and Pakistan have recently demonstrated, just having nukes is not a guarantee of perfect safety. But they can be effective at deterring the sort of threat — a massive conventional invasion aimed at seizing territory — that Russia potentially poses.
For evidence, many would point at Ukraine itself. At the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal on its soil. As Ukrainian leaders including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have frequently pointed out, Ukraine “gave up” those weapons to Russia in exchange for guarantees that its security would be respected.
This talking point is slightly misleading: The weapons on Ukraine’s soil were under Moscow’s operational control, just as the weapons in Europe today are under Washington’s, and Ukraine could not have actually used them. But it has nonetheless taken hold as a powerful narrative about the naivety of trusting diplomatic guarantees over hard military power. The governments of Iraq and Libya also likely regretted abandoning their nascent nuclear programs before being attacked by Western forces.
Europe is not the only place where these discussions are taking place. South Korea, like NATO countries, is under the US nuclear umbrella, having signed a mutual defense treaty with the United States in the 1950s. But with external threats growing (North Korea and China in this case) and doubts about US credibility in the age of Trump, public support for the country developing its own nuclear weapon is high. Leaders of Saudi Arabia have openly said they will seek a nuclear arsenal if Iran acquires one.
While these countries may not go nuclear overnight, these discussions seem to augur a world where nuclear strategy and brinkmanship are once again at the center of global politics. The dream expressed in a formerly Communist Central European capital by an American president just 15 years ago of a world without nuclear weapons has never looked farther off.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
“What’s different now is a couple of things. … Of course, many Germans may not consider French security guarantees to be all that more reassuring than …
I have posted the following article article from the “Office of Nuclear Energy” only to further demonstrate that the government and nuclear energy corporations and their representatives and propagandists don’t care about the absolute insanity of replacing ‘black lung’ from coal plant workers with radioactive poisoning from nuclear plant workers. It’s a great idea that we shut down all carbon reeking non-renewable coal, oil, and natural gas power plants, but they should always be replaced with solar, wind, hydro, and geo-thermal renewable resources. Nuclear replacement is equal to insanity.
Not one single word in this article expresses the idea that there may be far more risk to workers and surrounding communities that, given a nuclear accident, could destroy life in all of these ‘surrounding’ communities. This very situation is at the forefront of the lives of millions of Ukrainian and other eastern countries right now, and the situation there concerning the prevention of a massive meltdown of the Zaporizhia NPP still without back up power – Nuclear Engineering International concerning a potential tragedy far worse that Chernobyl that last week the world(s) had been led to believe that the power grid failure for lie-saving incoming power to the nuclear power plant had been successfully resolved. It appears now that that news story was in error:
The lead-in to the current situation begins like this … emergency diesel generators. In the history of nuclear energy, this is an unprecedented situation and clearly not sustainable.
The purpose of my nightly “LLAW’s All Things Nuclear” report and daily categoirzed nuclear headlines is to keep humanity abreast of how dangerous ‘all things nuclear’ are, and for me “The Office of Nuclear Energy” is seriously at fault for not bothering to mention the absolute ongoing danger of nuclear power plants, while at the same time telling the world(s) that a switch from coal to nuclear power will make a more healthy environment for long-suffering coal miners. Not only is that not true, it is intentionally written propaganda among others in the article that you can read for yourself, including the “buzz- phrase” that nobody can understand, but it sounds really good — the change to nuclear will help us reach “net-zero emissions by 2050”, which is another bit of nuclear propaganda and does not even mean what it seems to indicate. What it essentially means is that the CO2 (global warming/ climate change problem will still exist, but “should not” get any worse. The use of the term is laughable.
Office of Nuclear Energy
8 Things to Know About Converting Coal Plants to Nuclear Power
8 Things to Know About Converting Coal Plants to Nuclear Power
Nearly 30% of the nation’s coal-fired power plants are projected to retire by 2035 as states continue to prioritize a shift toward cleaner energy sources.
But with power demands expected to rise due to the electrification of more cars, appliances, and processes, something must help fill the void.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects we’ll need an additional 200 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and some of that could take place at or near retiring coal plants — creating new job and economic opportunities for these energy communities.
Here are 8 things you should know about transitioning coal stations to nuclear power plants.
1. The Majority of U.S. Coal Plants Could Be Converted
A 2022 DOE report found that more than 300 existing and retired coal power plant sites are suitable to host advanced nuclear power plants. Each plant could match the size of the site being converted and help increase nuclear capacity by more than 250 GW—nearly tripling its current capacity of 95 GW.
2. Coal to Nuclear Transitions Could Preserve and Create New Jobs
According to the same study, employment in the region associated with an incoming nuclear plant could increase by more than 650 permanent jobs spread across the plant, supply chain, and surrounding community. Occupations seeing the largest gains include nuclear engineers, security guards, and nuclear technicians.
The plants could also leverage the existing coal plant workforce in the community to help transition their current skills and knowledge to work in nuclear energy with wages that are typically 50% higher than those of other energy sources.
3. Converting Coal Plants to Nuclear Could Drive Economic Growth
The study also indicates that long-term job impacts of a converted coal to nuclear power plant could lead to additional annual economic activity of $275 million. This includes a 92% increase in tax revenue from the new nuclear plant for the local county when compared to prior tax revenue from a coal plant.
These tax payments would also increase the amount of money available to improve local schools, infrastructure projects, and public services.
Additional benefits would also be distributed throughout the community as the wages from good-paying nuclear energy jobs lead to increased household spending. Local businesses may also benefit as suppliers of goods and services in support of plant operations, while others may benefit from increased household spending in the community.
4. Coal to Nuclear Transitions Could Bring Environmental Benefits
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal plants account for 20% of the nation’s total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.
Replacing unabated coal combustion with fission, a physical process that doesn’t emit carbon, would dramatically reduce green gas emissions in the energy sector. It would also directly improve the air quality in the region by avoiding other harmful byproducts produced by fossil fuel plants that are linked to asthma, lung cancer, and heart diseases — helping to improve the over health of the community.
5. Converting Coal Plants to Nuclear Could Save on New Construction Costs
The DOE report also found that new nuclear power plants could save up to 35% on construction costs depending on how much of the existing site assets could be repurposed from retired coal power plants.
These assets include the existing land, the coal plant’s electrical equipment (transmission connection, switchyard, etc.) and civil infrastructure, such as roads and buildings.
6. Many States are Considering a Coal to Nuclear Transitions
More than 10 states have expressed interest in coal to nuclear transitions.
Interest in repurposing coal sites is growing.
TerraPower plans to build its Natrium reactor near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, WY with funding support from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
In addition to Wyoming, 10 other states have publicly expressed interest in repurposing their coal sites with nuclear energy. These states include: Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin.
The interest level varies from state to state and comes from different stakeholders such as state and local governments, transition planning groups, economic development agencies, and community members.
7. Coal to Nuclear Transitions Help Ensure Communities are Not Left Behind
Siting new nuclear power plants in coal communities is one way of ensuring that coal power plant workers and their communities are supported as their power plants retire.
In January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration signed an executive order to create an Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization.
This initiative honors the coal, oil, natural gas, and power plant workers and communities who have been essential to the growth of the United States. It also ensures that none of these workers or communities are left behind as the U.S. transitions to clean energy sources.
8. There is Help to Prepare for Coal to Nuclear Transitions
These studies are specific to the community and utility being studied but have been written with the idea that other potential transitions sites will be able to gain some insight.
The studies will hopefully be seen as a jumping off point for similar situated coal sites as they enter their own energy transition journey.
The GAIN team can also provide assistance to communities around the country as they consider advanced nuclear in their energy transitions.
This assistance can include providing information about nuclear energy plants, transition opportunities, and connecting communities to potential funding opportunities through the interagency working group.
Qualifying communities could also apply for technical assistance through DOE’s Communities LEAP program to help shift away from their historical reliance on fossil fuels. GAIN also supports public meetings, group work sessions, and strategizing forums in communities to help them learn more about the energy transition process.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including 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, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about 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 War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
… all, is it any wonder they failed for a decade on energy policy when … Judge Jeanine: Things are bad for ‘The Big Guy’. Fox News New 211K views · 6 …
It looks peaceful now, but this valley in Yellowstone is part of an ancient volcanic caldera (collapsed volcanic dome) that erupted in a supervolcano …
