“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 13, 2024

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A US F-35A combat aircraft tests an unarmed B61-12 bomb in the Nevada Desert. Source: Sandia National Laboratory (Read the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” article below)

LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/13/2024)

There is something seriously wrong with our (America’s) sense or concept of peace and morality, and the former president is not the only guilty one, but also our current President has done so, and is continuing to do so! We are a nation that flaunts the idea of nuclear proliferation, not only by ‘tripling our global use of nuclear produced energy” by 2050, but also with Biden’s ill-advised ‘carrot and stick’ program of selling nuclear fuel to other countries to allow them to build their own nuclear powers plants, when common sense tells us that these poorer countries cannot afford to do so, nor do they necessarily want nuclear fuel for any other peacetime purpose, but more likely to barter nuclear fuel or even build their own nuclear weapons. This is doomsday fiction story-book material disguised as factual reality. We humans must come to our senses now, if we are going to avoid self-extinction.

And now, if you read this article, it appears that the Biden administration has approved an even more deceptive and immoral project of potential war – the “nuclear gravity bomb” – which, if you read the most important statement in this article tells you why the headline to this story is so incredibly telling. Or, to make it easier to find it, I will tell you myself, here and now, what that simple single sentence statement has to say:

“That system is based on the principle that this country, to keep itself “safe,” needs to be able to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in less than an hour.”

Need I say more? ~ llaw

Why the Biden administration’s new nuclear gravity bomb is tragic

By Stephen Young | February 13, 2024

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In late October 2023, the Pentagon announced—to the surprise of many, including congressional staffers who work on these issues—that it was pursuing a new nuclear weapon to be known as the B61-13, a gravity bomb.

This is a troubling development for many reasons. First, it is merely the latest in a long line of new nuclear weapons that the United States is building or proposing, in yet another sign that a new nuclear arms race is expanding. In addition, it breaks a promise the Obama administration made to eliminate almost all types of US nuclear gravity bombs, while further undermining President Biden’s pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US security. Most tragically, it further cements an absolute commitment on the part of the United States to retain nuclear deterrence as the centerpiece of its security policy for decades to come. While most of us hope the world can eventually stop relying on the threat of mass murder at a global scale as the basis for international security, the B61-13 moves everyone further away from that day.

Starting from the top, here is the entire, vast set of new nuclear bombs and warheads the United States recently developed or is pursuing:

• The Trump administration’s new “low-yield” warhead, deployed on sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) carried by US submarines, with an estimated explosive yield roughly one-third the size of the gravity bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “Low-yield” is a relative term; this warhead could still kill tens of thousands in an instant.
• The new, more lethal B61-12 gravity bomb that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently started producing, after many years of delay (and with each bomb costing more than its weight in gold).
• The updated warhead for the stealthy air-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Obama administration, ideally suited to start a nuclear war.
• A variant of that cruise missile warhead for a sea-launched cruise missile that a) the Trump administration proposed, b) the Biden administration is trying to cancel, but c) Congress recently required the administration to pursue.
• The precedent-setting warhead for land-based missiles that, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, will be made entirely from new components, with nothing being reused except the basic design of the warhead.
• The momentous new warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the first entirely new bomb since the end of the Cold War, with both the components and the design of the weapon made anew.
• The B61-13.

All these new bombs and warheads are just part of a massive rebuilding of the entire US nuclear arsenal, which also includes new long-range, land-based missiles, new submarines, new stealthy, long-range bombers that will carry the new stealthy cruise missiles mentioned above, and major upgrades to the missiles carried by the submarines. The total cost to do all that while maintaining the existing weapons will be well over $1.2 trillion during the next 25 years.

In short, a new nuclear arms race is exploding across the globe, and while the Biden administration has not announced plans to increase the size of its nuclear arsenal (despite bipartisan pressure to do so), it is racing to climb what is often called a “modernization mountain”—a journey that will certainly take longer and cost far more than currently projected, all to produce a vastly oversized nuclear stockpile that everyone hopes will never be used.

The broken promise. There is a second and compounding problem with the B61-13: It breaks a promise made during the Obama administration to eliminate all but one of the types of US gravity bombs. Specifically, to win support for the B61-12­—a new guided gravity bomb the Pentagon and NNSA badly wanted—the Obama administration proposed to retire the B61-3, B61-4, B61-7, B61-10, B61-11, and the B83 gravity bombs, trading six weapons for one. Unfortunately, since its inception the B61-12 has faced major cost overruns and years of delays. The NNSA initially said the bomb would cost $4 billion, then quickly raised the tab to $8 billion, while the Pentagon initially estimated it at $10 billion. The actual cost, including work the Air Force is doing, will be as much as $14 billion. The NNSA initially projected it would begin making the bombs in 2017, while the Pentagon said it would be 2022 before work started. The Pentagon was right, with the B61-12 finally entering production late in 2022.

On top of all the cost increases and delays, the associated commitment to retire the six other gravity bombs is changing significantly.

First, it is not clear the B61-11 will be retired at all; planning documents no longer include it as something the B61-12 will replace. That variant is designed to penetrate into the Earth, to attack hardened and deeply buried targets. No administration has ever explained why it was removed from the retirement list; it simply stopped being included on it. Second, the sole bright spot is the B61-10, but oddly so. Although the bomb’s retirement was tied to starting production of the B61-12, the B61-10 was removed from the stockpile in 2016. Apparently, it really was not needed at all, regardless of the B61-12.

More dangerously, the decision to retire the B83—by far the most destructive weapon in the US nuclear stockpile—was reversed by the Trump administration. The B83 has an explosive yield of some 1.2 megatons—or 80 times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In a simulation developed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS, where I work), dropping one bomb like the B83 on a nuclear facility in Iran would kill over three million people and spread deadly radiation across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It is this behemoth that the Trump administration declared its intention to keep “until a suitable replacement is identified.” Fortunately, the Biden administration reversed the reversal, and the B83 is currently on a path to be retired at some point, though the plan for when that will happen is classified.  (Unfortunately, election results this year could again change that outcome.)

In the meantime, the Biden administration has announced the B61-13.

Significantly, this new bomb will be based on the B61-7, the most destructive of the B61 variants, with a maximum yield of 360 kilotons, or 24 times more devastating than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Just to remind you, that one bomb killed 70,000 to 140,000 people. In other words, the B61-13 will be massively destructive, accompanied by immense and widespread fallout. In other other words, this is yet another tool for nuclear warfighting—or, more specifically, seeking to win a nuclear war.

That mission should not exist. Indeed, as five of the countries with nuclear weapons—the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom—have declared, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Yet fighting and winning a nuclear war is precisely the goal of developing the B61-13. There are, apparently, specific targets that this more powerful gravity bomb can hold at risk—ones that cannot reliably be destroyed with the B61-12, despite its vastly increased accuracy in comparison to existing gravity bombs. But existing nuclear warheads on submarine-based missiles can already hold those same targets at risk. So the B61-13, it turns out, is just another option to blow up something the Pentagon can already destroy, and many times over. In fact, each US nuclear-armed submarine carries seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

The scope of the mistake. Coming from a Biden administration that pledged to seek to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, with a president who, as a candidate for office, declared his support for the policy that the United States would never use nuclear weapons first in any conflict, the decision to pursue the B61-13 is not only deeply disappointing, but a profound mistake. In short, the B61-13 is yet another sign that the United States intends to make its nuclear arsenal even more deadly and the foundational element of the existing security system. That system is based on the principle that this country, to keep itself “safe,” needs to be able to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in less than an hour.

On moral grounds, and under international law, that prospect alone should be evidence enough to conclude that such an approach to security is grievously wrong, and that the United States should do everything it can to move away from that system.

But the reality is far worse, because Russia already has and China is now moving toward nuclear arsenals that will give them similar capabilities. Even with their vastly smaller arsenals, the other six nuclear weapons states—the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—also have the capacity to kill tens of millions of people in hours. That horrible reality is the basis of the world’s security system. If everyone can kill everyone else, and no one can be safe from that threat, then—in the supreme irony of nuclear deterrence—everyone is supposed to be safe.

The mutual assured destruction precept of deterrence theory is ludicrous. For such a system to make sense, it would have to work perfectly and for all time. If it doesn’t, then we are all dead.What human system has ever worked perfectly for any significant length of time? In just one example of far too many, nuclear war was barely averted when a Russian officer refused to go along with two colleagues who wanted to use a nuclear-armed torpedo against US Navy ships harassing their submarine at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As has been noted, it was as much luck as careful choices that avoided the start of a nuclear war that would almost certainly have spiraled out of control.

Rather than develop a new nuclear weapon that adds fuel to a rapidly growing arms race, the Biden administration should launch a concerted effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons. It should publicly announce this intention, invite representatives from other nuclear-armed states to the table, and begin talks about what would be required to eliminate nuclear weapons from Earth. In an ideal world, we could turn the tragedy of the B61-13 into the launching point for a global effort to push for that outcome.

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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/13/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

The head of UN’s nuclear watchdog warns Iran is ‘not entirely transparent’ on its atomic program

Spectrum News

Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, just across the Persian Gulf, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International …

Vets say nuclear site made them sick, gov’t won’t acknowledge they were there – CBS News

CBS News

“All our whereabouts for that period of time is black,” Ely said. “We’re going places, we’re doing things that’s beyond the tracking of the military.

The head of UN’s nuclear watchdog warns Iran is ‘not entirely … – Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog warned Tuesday that Iran is “not entirely transparent” …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Federal money could supercharge state efforts to preserve nuclear power | NC Newsline

NC Newsline

In the coming years, a nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan could become the first in the country to restart operations after …

Federal money could supercharge state efforts to preserve nuclear power

Louisiana Illuminator

A nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan could become the first in the country to restart operations after shutting down.

Fukushima nuclear plant operator told to communicate better with the public after leak

NBC News

Safety experts urged Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s operator to communicate more quickly over incidents such as the leak of …

Nuclear War

NEWS

Why the Biden administration’s new nuclear gravity bomb is tragic

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The updated warhead for the stealthy air-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Obama administration, ideally suited to start a nuclear war. A …

How should the West respond to a nuclear attack? – YouGov

YouGov

Were Russia to use a small nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian military target, 7% of Britons believe that would be justification for a nuclear …

Living in a nuclear-curious world: America’s weakening grip on non-proliferation | ECFR

European Council on Foreign Relations

As China and Russia expand their nuclear arsenals, US security guarantees are beginning to lose their weight. Now, American allies may start to …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

FP&L: Routine Testing of the Sirens at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant Scheduled for … – WQCS

WQCS

It will involve a one-minute sounding of all 91 sirens within the 10-mile St. Lucie plant emergency planning zone. Before and after the sirens sound, …

Nuclear regulator’s worrying findings on Koeberg emergency plans – Daily Maverick

Daily Maverick

Given the ongoing controversy around Eskom’s application to extend the life of Koeberg Nuclear Power Station (KNPS) by 20 years past its original …

Trinidad & Tobago Declares National Emergency after Ghost Ship Oil Spill | OilPrice.com

Oil Price

Nuclear Power · Solar Energy · Hydroelectric · Renewable Energy · Geothermal … The prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago has declared a “national …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

How should the West respond to a nuclear attack? – YouGov

YouGov

… nuclear threats. With the Russians raising the prospect of nuclear weapons use, how do Britons think the West should react in the event of a …

Donald Trump’s NATO nonsense exposes his ‘anti-war‘ schtick

msnbc.com

Donald Trump’s recent threat that he would allow Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” with NATO countries if he’s elected president …

Why climate change is the new nuclear war – The Lawrentian

The Lawrentian

From the end of WWII to the fall of the Soviet Union in the ’90s, the fear that plagued Americans—the existential terror that threatened the sanity of …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/12/2024):

LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/12/2024):

Though well intentioned and carefully crafted, as in the following Nation Magazine article intellectually but uselessly comparing history to now and the future is futile. The future has nothing to do with previous politics nor the outcome of prior results or even the lack of them. Today’s nuclear world is much different and far more dangerous than the nuclear world of the 1960s or any other time before or after. The insane atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that promptly ended WWII was a lesson that we never learned. Politicizing the future is the wrong way to approach our future nuclear world(s).

JFK himself said, “We must destroy nuclear weapons before they destroy us.” That was the best suggestion he ever had in his short political life, which was politically cut short, but just like now and tomorrow, the politicians pay no attention to this “idea”, which just happens to be the only way to assure prevention of nuclear war. The reason for this international ignorance is all about the world of Capitalism and its inalienable greed filled with pyramid schemes. Money is more important than survival, I hate to say, but it’s true.

So this ‘truth’ tells me that until we force ourselves to awaken and understand that human and other life is more important than wealth and war, we are marching directly toward doomsday and eventual extinction. There is only one way to avoid WWIII, which will essentially be the end of us and other life, and that is to destroy “all things nuclear”, including nuclear power plants and all uranium fuel so that it is just not available to humanity in the future, and then we may have a good chance at surviving. But we will never do that until the day comes that we should have, and that day will arrive too late. ~llaw

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FEBRUARY 12, 2024

The Nation

Surviving an Era of Pervasive Nuclear Instability

A call for grassroots activism.

MICHAEL T. KLARE

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Despite two years of war in Ukraine, rising tensions over Taiwan, and a metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, our 21st-century world has yet to experience a major nuclear blowup—a moment when the risk of thermonuclear annihilation is real and imminent, as was the case during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Yes, we have experienced nuclear jitters over North Korea’s repeated threats to attack South Korea and Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but none of those incidents has brought us to the edge of extinction. If current trends persist, however, we are likely to encounter a succession of major nuclear crises in the months and years ahead, each potentially more dangerous than the one before. To prevent these from triggering a nuclear apocalypse, we will need wise and prudent leadership by our top officials—and a mass public campaign to insist on such prudence.

During the Cold War, of course, the potential for a catastrophic nuclear crisis was ever-present. We were all aware that any major US-Soviet confrontation could trigger a nuclear exchange, obliterating every one of us. The end of the Cold War was, therefore, an enormous psychic blessing, allowing us to live without the constant dread of imminent nuclear annihilation. For younger generations, moreover, other vital concerns—racism, global warming, economic insecurity—have come to replace nuclear anxiety. These concerns persist, as potent as ever. But now we must all brace ourselves for the return of incessant nuclear crises.

The reemergence of pervasive nuclear instability is the product of two interrelated factors: the outbreak of a tripolar military rivalry between the US, China, and Russia on one hand, and the proliferation of potential nuclear flash points on the other. Each is contributing to the risk of a nuclear conflict, but the combination is making the danger infinitely worse.

The Emerging Three-Way Nuclear Arms Race

Until very recently, the nuclear arms race was widely perceived as a two-way affair, involving the United States and the Soviet Union (later the US and Russia). During the Cold War, the two superpowers built up their atomic arsenals to terrifying heights and then, following the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis, took steps to control and reduce their respective stockpiles. Still, both sides continued to maintain vast nuclear stockpiles after the Cold War’s end, claiming that these munitions were needed to deter a possible nuclear strike by their opponent. They did, however, agree to further reductions in their atomic arsenals, culminating with the signing, in 2010, of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).

Although the number of “deployable” strategic warheads possessed by the US and Russia—that is, weapons aimed at the other side’s homeland and poised for rapid delivery by a bomber or missile—were significantly reduced by the New START agreement, both powers continued to maintain vast stockpiles of nuclear munitions in storage or set aside for “tactical,” or “non-strategic” use. Both also undertook the modernization and enhancement of their arsenals, replacing older systems with more capable weapons, including land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bomber-launched bombs and missiles. Thus, despite the gradual reduction in “deployable” warheads, the US-Russian arms race was actually gaining momentum, not slowing down.

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Still, before 2018, the nuclear arms race was largely considered a two-way affair, with both the US and Russia approaching the 1,550 deployable warhead limit set by the New START agreement and each possessing another 4,500–5,000 warheads in storage or configured for tactical use. China, at that time, was said by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute to possess zero deployed nuclear munitions while holding an estimated 290 warheads in storage. China’s rudimentary nuclear force was configured solely to retaliate against an enemy first strike and possessed limited capacity to attack the continental United States. Accordingly, it was viewed by US strategists as a trivial, or “lesser included” problem when devising nuclear war plans.  

But this two-way dynamic began to change in 2018, as the US adopted a new grand strategy identifying China, as much as Russia, as a vital threat to US security, while the Chinese—fearing an increased threat from the US—began the expansion and modernization of their own nuclear capabilities.

The new US approach was unveiled in the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) of February 2018, which identified “long-term, strategic competition” with Russia and China as the greatest future threat to US security. Both rivals were said to be building up their military capabilities, but China was said to pose a particular threat because of its more robust technological capabilities. To prevail in future conflicts with these countries, the NDS affirmed, US forces would have to be equipped with the most advanced weaponry available—and be backed up by a modern, highly capable nuclear force. “Modernizing the Nation’s nuclear deterrent delivery systems…is the Department’s top priority,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis affirmed in a 2018 statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee (emphasis in the original).

In this, and every subsequent Pentagon presentation on the global security environment, US officials have stressed that the nuclear arms race is no longer limited to a US-Russia competition but has become a three-way affair, involving a growing threat from China. “The global situation is sobering,” Mattis testified in 2018. Not only is Russia modernizing its full range of nuclear systems, but “China, too, is modernizing and expanding its already considerable nuclear forces, pursuing entirely new capabilities” [emphasis added].

Misleading statements like these were repeated year after year—despite the fact that China then possessed a minuscule nuclear capability (at least when compared to those of the US or Russia) and had done little, before 2018, to expand or modernize its forces. Nevertheless, the US military’s embrace of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, accompanied by the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile stance towards China, prompted top Chinese officials, led by President Xi Jinping, to conclude that China’s small nuclear force was inadequate to deter a disarming US nuclear attack and so had to be expanded, enabling it to survive a devastating US first strike and still manage to deliver a retaliatory attack on US territory.

Evidence of this shift in thinking first surfaced in June 2021, when The Washington Post reported that it had obtained satellite images showing the construction of a hundred new ICBM silos in western China. Reports then surfaced of additional silo fields under construction and of accelerated Chinese ICBM production. According to a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists, moreover, China has increased its nuclear arsenal to 500 warheads, with more supposedly on the way.

While China’s nuclear buildup can largely be viewed as a defensive response to the 2018 NDS with its call for enhanced US military capabilities, that buildup, in classic arms-racing fashion, is being cited by congressional hawks in their strident demands for an accelerated US nuclear modernization effort—and, increasingly, for the abandonment of New START warhead limits when that treaty expires in February 2026.

In October 2023, for example, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States reported that “the size and composition of the [US] nuclear force must account for the possibility of combined aggression from Russia and China” and, given the expansion of the Chinese arsenal, US strategy must “no longer treat China’s nuclear forces as a ‘lesser included’ threat.” This requires that “The US strategic nuclear force posture should be modified to…[a]ddress the larger number of targets due to the growing Chinese nuclear threat.”

As in the 1960s, then, we face the prospect of an unbridled nuclear arms race involving the development and deployment of increasingly capable and lethal atomic munitions—except, this time, it’s a three-way contest, not just a two-way race. This is sure to enflame tensions among the major powers and make it exponentially harder to negotiate limits on nuclear stockpiles like those adopted in the Cold War era.

Proliferating Nuclear Flash Points

Complicating this picture even further is the proliferation of potential nuclear flash points—contested areas that encapsulate the strategic interests of two or more of the major powers and so possess the ability to ignite a major military encounter with ever-present nuclear implications.

During the Cold War, there were several such hot spots, with Berlin and Cuba the most prominent among them. Both of those sites prompted nuclear crises on more than one occasion, the most famous being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when both sides readied nuclear weapons for immediate attack. It was only through tortured diplomacy and sheer luck, notes historian Martin Sherwin in his magisterial account of the crisis, Gambling with Armageddon, that the world was spared a thermonuclear catastrophe. (The United States also threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea, Vietnam, and during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1954; those episodes were largely kept secret at the time.)

Today, we can identify at least four such potential flash points—Ukraine and NATO’s Eastern Front, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula—with more likely to emerge in the coming months and years. Each has the potential to ignite a Cuban missile crisis–like confrontation.

Ukraine and NATO’s Eastern Front. At present, with both sides in the Ukraine conflict seemingly trapped in a war of attrition and neither side making appreciable gains on the battlefield, the likelihood of a nuclear exchange appears relatively low. Should battlefield conditions change, however, the nuclear risk could increase. Were Ukrainian forces to be on the verge of capturing Crimea, for example, Moscow might employ tactical nuclear weapons to prevent such an outcome, saying it was defending sovereign Russian territory. Nuclear tensions could also erupt along NATO’s border with Russia in east-central Europe, as the NATO powers bolster their military presence there and Moscow—voicing opposition to what it views as threatening Western behavior—takes steps to counter those efforts.

Taiwan. Of equal danger is the possibility of a US-China war erupting over Taiwan. That island, deemed a renegade province by China, has become a source of growing tension as Taiwanese leaders steer the country ever closer toward independence and Beijing threatens to counter such a move with force. With a pro-independence Taiwanese politician, Lai Ching-te, taking office as president on May 20, many in Washington fear a Chinese military move of some sort. Although the United States is not bound by law or treaty to come to Taiwan’s aid under such circumstances, the likelihood of its doing so is growing as anti-China sentiment continues to grip the capital. Given that virtually every simulation of a US-China clash over Taiwan results in catastrophic losses on each side, any such an encounter would undoubtedly possess a substantial risk of nuclear escalation.

The South China Sea. The South China Sea dispute, like the conflict over Taiwan, could easily result in a full-scale US-China conflict. This danger arises from the fact that Beijing has declared sovereignty over nearly the entire part of the western Pacific bounded by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, and Vietnam—while bordering states have repudiated Beijing’s assertions and advanced claims of their own in the area. To assert its expansive claim, China has used its coast guard to harass and drive off the fishing and oil-drilling vessels of neighboring states. In response, officials in Washington have repeatedly asserted that the US will come to the aid of any country victimized by what they characterize as Chinese “bullying.” Accordingly, any future clash between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea could lead to US military intervention—a step that would almost certainly provoke a fierce Chinese reaction, setting off a spiral of escalation.

The Korean Peninsula. North Korea’s current dictator, Kim Jong Un, has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear weapons in response to US and/or South Korean provocations, and regularly conducts tests of his various missile and artillery systems to back up these warnings. The intensity of his verbal assaults and the frequency of accompanying weapons tests have fluctuated over the years, but seem to have reached a new peak in early 2024. On January 5, the North fired hundreds of artillery shells into waters near South Korean border islands, and, on January 16, Kim formally renounced peaceful reunification with the South as a long-term goal—calling instead for the eventual subjugation of South Korea and its incorporation into the North. These steps, along with an increase in missile testing, have led observers to warn of a new period of instability on the Korean Peninsula, potentially resulting in a full-scale war with a high risk of nuclear escalation.

Other Potential Flash Points. These four hotspots currently represent the most likely sites of a future Cuban missile crisis–-like event, but others are sure to arise in the years ahead. Among those that appear most likely to fall into this category are the Arctic, South Asia, and the Middle East. The Arctic constitutes a potential nuclear flash point because both Russia and the NATO powers are building up their forces there—the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO will surely accelerate this process—and because Russia has concentrated a large share of its nuclear retaliatory forces in the Murmansk area, near northern Norway. South Asia and the Middle East pose a threat of nuclear conflict because both areas house nuclear-armed states—India and Pakistan in South Asia, Israel (and, possible soon, Iran) in the Middle East—with a long history of hostility and many fresh antagonisms.

What Is to Be Done?

The picture presented above is not an optimistic one. The combination of a seemingly intractable three-way arms race and the proliferation of potential nuclear flash points suggests we will face a never-ending cycle of nuclear crises in the years to come. Whether we will survive any of these, as we did the Cuban missile crisis, is entirely unforeseeable. We were fortunate, back then, that the top leaders involved—John M. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev—were able to overcome their martial instincts and seek an escape route from catastrophe. Will be so lucky the next time we face such a crisis? Who’s to say?

If we hope to prevent the next nuclear crisis from ending in catastrophe, there are many specific things that could be done to reduce the risk of uncontrollable escalation. These include, for example, persuading the US and Russia to resume their “Strategic Stability Dialogue”—high-level talks intended to devise steps for reducing the risk of nuclear escalation—that was paused at the onset of the fighting in Ukraine. The US and China could also commence talks of this sort. All three countries could also agree to slow or freeze their nuclear expansion and modernization efforts.

But none of this will occur in the current political environment, with leaders of all three countries under pressure from powerful domestic forces to bolster their nuclear capabilities vis-à-vis their rivals. These include, among others, a deeply entrenched military-industrial-nuclear complex with a strong ties to elite governing circles. And these forces will not be overcome without a global grassroots movement calling for nuclear restraint and human survival.

I am no starry-eyed idealist. As a veteran of the 1960s Ban the Bomb movement and the 1980s Nuclear Freeze Campaign, I know how hard it is to build a mass movement around nuclear issues. It will be even harder today, with so many other existential perils competing for people’s attention, especially climate change. But I do not see how we humans can expect to survive the coming years of recurring nuclear crises without building such a movement.

Fortunately, there are many others who share this outlook. Here and there across America—and in the world as well—people are becoming more aware of the rising threat of nuclear war and taking steps to reduce that danger. I particularly commend the work of Peace Action New York State, Massachusetts Peace Action, and other local and statewide groups that have addressed the nuclear danger, and Back from the Brink, a national campaign seeking to mobilize grassroots activism on the issue. These are still undersized efforts; but they are a start, and they point us in the direction we must go if we are to ensure human survival.

Michael T. Klare

Michael T. Klare, The Nation’s defense correspondent, is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he is the author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

ssociation in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he is the author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/12/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

Surviving an Era of Pervasive Nuclear Instability – The Nation

The Nation

But now we must all brace ourselves for the return of incessant nuclear crises. … things that could be done to reduce the risk of uncontrollable …

Could Virginia be on the cusp of small modular reactors? – WVTF

WVTF

The Virginia General Assembly is considering a bill that would expand nuclear power in Virginia … All Things Considered · BBC World Service · Fresh …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Federal money could supercharge state efforts to preserve nuclear power – Stateline.org

Stateline.org

A $1.5 billion federal loan could enable a privately owned Michigan nuclear plant to be the first to restart operations after shutting down.

Nuclear Illusions Hinder Climate Efforts as Costs Keep Rising – Energy Intelligence

Energy Intelligence

With the price tag for new nuclear plants getting higher, its time to ditch grandiose ambitions, argues Stephanie Cooke in this opinion piece.

NATO General Raises Prospect of New Nuclear Power – Newsweek

Newsweek

Poland’s Brigadier General Jaroslaw Kraszewski said his country getting nuclear weapons was a “realistic scenario.”

Nuclear War

NEWS

Even in the face of Russian aggression, a nuclear ‘Eurodeterrent’ is still a bad idea

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A second reason for the renewed interest in a possible European nuclear deterrent is the war in Ukraine and the recurring threats by Russian President …

Surviving an Era of Pervasive Nuclear Instability – The Nation

The Nation

During the Cold War, the two superpowers built up their atomic arsenals to terrifying heights and then, following the trauma of the Cuban missile …

Putin’s Plans Threaten War With US, Democrat Warns – Newsweek

Newsweek

Senator Chris Murphy warned two nuclear powers could be at war for the “first time in our lifetimes.”

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Even in the face of Russian aggression, a nuclear ‘Eurodeterrent’ is still a bad idea

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A second reason for the renewed interest in a possible European nuclear deterrent is the war in Ukraine and the recurring threats by Russian President …

Surviving an Era of Pervasive Nuclear Instability – The Nation

The Nation

Yes, we have experienced nuclear jitters over North Korea’s repeated threats to attack … threat of nuclear war and taking steps to reduce that danger.

The many existential threats that we face – The Statesman

The Statesman

… nuclear weapons – could indeed pose a direct existential threat to humanity.” Initial steps to check such serious emerging threats include an …

Yellowstone Caldera

NEWS

Lori Dengler | Iceland is erupting again – Times-Standard

Times-Standard

We’ve never witnessed an 8, but geologic evidence points to the last cataclysmic eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera 600,000 years ago as reaching …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 11, 2024

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/11/2024):

Best Super Bowl game ever! Maybe the best football game ever, as Chiefs defeat 49ers in overtime 25 to 22. Suspense beyond comparison . . . and Quarterbacking beyond belief by both. Watch for a repeat next year from the same two clubs! No more to say tonight, but tonight’s ‘All Things Nuclear” is still available below if you’ve a mind to! ~llaw

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/11/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

Nuclear weapons and poison pills: Washington, Beijing warily circle AI talks

Yahoo Finance

All in all, it’s not a bad thing that they’re exploring the potential.” This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) …

An explosive exposé – Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press

… all parts of their weapons… researchers blow up … A review of a book about current nuclear deterrence and readiness could also be part of the plan.

Nuclear weapons and poison pills: Washington, Beijing warily circle AI talks

South China Morning Post

… having discussions, dialogue is better than no dialogue. All in all, it’s not a bad thing that they’re exploring the potential.” Advertisement. Listen.

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Today’s AI threat: More like nuclear winter than nuclear war – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

“Ultraintelligence,” he noted, would possess the transcendent power to either solve all human problems or destroy all human life, becoming “the last …

US ban on Russian uranium would boost western industry, says Urenco – Financial Times

Financial Times

… nuclear power plants were heavily dependent on the trade. But it is now advocating for a ban following two years of stockpiling by power plants …

UK in Talks With Hitachi Over Welsh Nuclear Plant Site, FT Says – Bloomberg

Bloomberg.com

The UK government is holding early-stage talks to buy a site in Wales to build a nuclear power plant, a move aimed at reviving Britain’s ageing …

Nuclear War

NEWS

Today’s AI threat: More like nuclear winter than nuclear war – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Instead of a nuclear war analogy, a more productive way to approach AI is as a disruption that more closely resembles a nuclear winter.

AI models consistently favor using nuclear weapons in war games – Semafor

Semafor

Artificial intelligence models chose to initiate arms races, deploy nuclear weapons, and escalate to war in a series of conflict simulations, …

AI models consistently favor using nuclear weapons in war games – Yahoo News

Yahoo News

The News. Artificial intelligence models chose to initiate arms races, deploy nuclear weapons, and escalate to war in a series of conflict simulations …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Today’s AI threat: More like nuclear winter than nuclear war – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Today’s AI threat: More like nuclear winter than nuclear war. By Daniel … Uncritically equating acute nuclear attack effects and AI threats risks …

Is Nuclear Kim preparing for War? – The Sunday Guardian Live

The Sunday Guardian

… nuclear submarine”, during which he restated his regime’s goal of building a nuclear-armed navy to counter “perceived threats”. The expansion of …

Tucker Carlson exposed Putin’s true war motive: for Russia to own Ukraine

Washington Post

“So we should vote for Trump and against Biden and then there will be peace and no threat of nuclear war. … threats to us.” In fact, NATO before the …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 10, 2024

1

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/10/2024):

This is a great anti nuclear war article, and everyone should read it. But, for one thing among many others it doesn’t deal with the other side of the ‘all things nuclear’ coin that is just as dangerous — the nuclear power plant proliferation projections and the potential unintended, but just as possible nuclear radiation fallout for any number of reasons, including using them in international war situations, terrorism, design failures, nuclear radiation fallout from accidents affecting grid systems, and nuclear waste.

But solving the nuclear war situation by nuclear disarmament and destroying all related refineries and other equipment for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction in the future would be achieving half the battle, so I’m all for common sense prevailing on the war threat issues. But, sadly, it ain’t gonna happen because binding agreements and pragmatic practicality are not bound or considered by those who are ‘in charge’. Those eight guys in charge of the nuclear war world are not going to be 100% inclined to destroy an ounce of their nuclear power if just one of-em says hell no, and of course such an agreement would never be fully carried out either. ~llaw

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The pragmatist’s guide to nuclear disarmament

Feb. 9, 2024 at 3:17 pm

By

Steve Olson

Special to The Seattle Times

The United States has not seen a widespread nuclear disarmament movement since the early 1980s. A new one is desperately needed — but with a twist.

The 1980s movement was based on fear. In 1982, a million people, alarmed by President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear buildup, gathered in New York City’s Central Park to oppose the nuclear arms race — still the largest one-day protest in U.S. history. The next year, 100 million people — almost half the population of the United States — watched the television movie “The Day After,” which horrifically depicted the nuclear destruction of Kansas City.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/MOFsOA9VsBk?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Fear can generate a fight-or-flight reaction, but it’s ultimately counterproductive. People become so scared that they think nothing can be done and give up. Or they ignore the issue entirely, at least on a conscious level.

There are still plenty of things to fear. Nuclear treaties are lapsing. National leaders have threatened to use nuclear weapons against their enemies. New research, now being reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, has strengthened the case that even a limited nuclear war could shut down agriculture for years and doom billions to starvation. A large-scale nuclear war could smother agriculture for more than a decade and end civilization.

But fear isn’t necessary to spur action. There are two very practical reasons to abolish nuclear weapons.

The first is their outrageous cost. The U.S. government is on track to spend at least $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years modernizing its nuclear weapons. That’s as much as the federal government currently spends on the National Institutes of Health. Or, to put it another way, four years of that spending, evenly divided among the 50 states, would buy us an entirely new ferry fleet.

Key parts of the modernization effort, like the new Sentinel ballistic missile program, are already massively over budget. Taking apart nuclear weapons systems would cost a small fraction of the money now slated to build new ones.

The second reason for getting rid of nuclear weapons is that they are far more dangerous than they are useful. Nuclear bombs are too large and destructive to deploy effectively in warfare. They would kill soldiers and noncombatants on both sides of a conflict. Nuclear fallout would drift far from a battlefield. Weapons have been getting smaller and smarter, not bigger and dumber.

Nuclear weapons also don’t make sense politically. If a nuclear weapon were detonated in a war — assuming that a general nuclear war did not follow — the responsible nation would face devastating conventional attacks and be ostracized internationally. No country has been willing to face those consequences, at least not since the very different circumstances that prevailed at the end of World War II.

The existence of nuclear weapons supposedly deters their use. No one has been able to figure out what that nonsensical statement means. Making a threat implies being willing to carry it out. The idea that deterrence has worked ignores the history of crises, miscalculations, and accidents that almost triggered nuclear war. Deterrence works until it doesn’t.

Nuclear weapons are a federal responsibility. For us as Washingtonians, that means working through our 10 U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators to change nuclear policy. Except for U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the members of our congressional delegation have been, at best, guarded in their statements about nuclear weapons. Washington receives about $20 billion a year in defense spending. Reducing that flow of funds would seem to be a recipe for electoral disaster.

But couldn’t at least part of our defense funding be spent in more socially productive ways? After all, flying a nuclear bomb-carrying F-35A jet for two hours costs as much as a nurse makes in a year. Keeping more than 55,000 mostly young men and women here in Washington well-trained and outfitted for future conflicts may help us feel more secure. But it doesn’t build infrastructure, spark innovation, or improve the health and well-being of the population at large.

Here, the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons coalition, led by the Washington chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been exerting pressure on our representatives and senators to take a stand against nuclear weapons. The Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action — on a 4-acre plot adjacent to the Kitsap submarine base outside Bremerton — works for disarmament right next to the largest stockpile of deployed nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. At the national level, the Ploughshares Fund, the Federation of American Scientists, the Arms Control Association and many other organizations are working to reduce and then eliminate the existential threat these weapons pose.

In 2021, the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits the development, production, use, and threat of use of nuclear weapons, entered into force after being ratified by 50 countries. The nine countries that have nuclear weapons have so far opposed the treaty, but they are nevertheless bound by the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to negotiate an agreement “on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” That they have not yet done so is both a bitter disappointment and a betrayal of their stated intentions.

Nuclear disarmament will not be unilateral or immediate. Nations will need to negotiate stepped reductions and means of verifying progress. An especially urgent task is to eliminate the ground-based missiles now clustered in underground silos in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming, as well as in Russia and China. These weapons are inherently destabilizing and dangerous. They have to be launched within minutes if a president thinks a nuclear attack is underway. A mistake, miscalculation, or moment of madness could spell the end of the world.

Unlike efforts to slow climate change, which will require widespread changes in how we live, the threat of nuclear annihilation could be eliminated if nine men agreed to destroy about 12,500 pieces of elaborately machined metal. Reagan and then-president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev almost agreed to junk their nuclear weapons in 1986. The only stumbling block was Reagan’s commitment to a nuclear weapons defense program that was canceled a few years later.

True, people will always know how to rebuild nuclear weapons. Also, nuclear power will almost certainly be part of the global response to climate change. But the world will be a safer and less oppressive place once our nuclear arsenals are gone.

Nuclear weapons are humanity’s most obscene invention. Our nuclear arsenals threaten not only us and everything humans have ever created but a natural creation that is inconceivably intricate and interdependent. Getting rid of them will be a wonderful human accomplishment.

Steve Olson is a Seattle author whose most recent book is “The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age,” a history of Hanford and its impact on the world.

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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/10/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEW

Nuclear Fusion feat brings dream of clean energy closer | World News | WION – YouTube

YouTube

European Nations to Invest $100 Billion in India: All You Need to Know | Vantage with Palki Sharma … 5 BEST Things I Saw in Vegas at CES 2024.

The question we are forgetting to ask: How will we handle this once Iran is nuclear?

The Hill

Special Counsel. Just In… 5 things to know about Tucker Carlson’s … All Rights Reserved. ✕. Nexstar Logo. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal …

Reactor’s final experiment breaks nuclear fusion record – Freethink

Freethink

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve learned all we can from this historic nuclear fusion reactor, though. … things just leads you to understand it a …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

US seeks solar energy developers for Nevada nuclear bomb test site | Reuters

Reuters

Timothy reports on energy and environment policy and is based in Washington, D.C. His coverage ranges from the latest in nuclear power, to environment …

Nuclear Fusion feat brings dream of clean energy closer | World News | WION – YouTube

YouTube

Harnessing energy through nuclear fusion has been the holy grail for the energy sector. This is the one solution that could allow humanity to …

Here is why NASA wants to put nuclear reactor on Moon and ditch solar energy – WION

WION

US space agency NASA wants to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon, and the project just completed its initial phase involving creating the design of …

Nuclear War

NEW

The pragmatist’s guide to nuclear disarmament – The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times

A large-scale nuclear war could smother agriculture for more than a decade and end civilization. But fear isn’t necessary to spur action. There are …

US seeks solar energy developers for Nevada nuclear bomb test site | Reuters

Reuters

… War · Japan · Middle East · United Kingdom · United States · US Elections · Ukraine and Russia at War · Reuters Next. Latest in World. Malaysia’s top …

UN experts investigating 58 suspected North Korean cyberattacks valued at about $3 billion

The Washington Post

WorldWar In Ukraine Africa Americas Asia Europe Middle East … And a diesel submarine was retrofitted as a “tactical nuclear attack submarine” and …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Feb. 27 drill to test plans for nuclear power station emergency | News | clintonherald.com

Clinton Herald

An exercise to test emergency response plans for the area surrounding the Quad-Cities Nuclear Power Station is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 27.

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Has North Korea Really Decided to Go to War? | The National Interest

The National Interest

… nuclear weapon tests, and its inflammatory threats. Of course, Kim uses these actions to help his failing regime survive. He diverts the attention …

UN experts investigate alleged North Korean cyberattacks valued in the billions

BreakingNews.ie

… nuclear deterrent in the face of threats from North Korea (AP). Advertisement. The panel said it also investigated reports of numerous DPRK …

West must ready itself for new War on Terror with bloody return of ISIS & carnage in Middle …

The US Sun

Glees “absolutely” thinks the threat of a terror attack on British soil has been increased. He warned that while we have a nuclear deterrent …

Thanks for reading All Things Nuclear! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 9, 2024

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/09/2024):

This is a replay of an old movie from 1983 that I played for readers on my birthday last November 23rd that only a couple folks other than me watched; so I’m wondering if it might draw a few more “watchers” now because the “threats” of nuclear war continue to escalate, and the threats either have to go away, no longer lies acting as ‘deterrents’ to nuclear war, or forbidden, or war. Nuclear threats cannot continue ad infinitum because such behavior will eventually lead to nothing more than yawns from other nations that will no longer listen nor take any of them seriously.

But this movie gives us some concept of how it might affect you and me given an actual nuclear war, although the real thing, given the number of nuclear armored nations and the greater power of nuclear weapons such a war would no doubt be much, much, worse . . . ~llaw (Current February 9th nuclear news is available following the link to the 1983 movie.)

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LLAW’s COMMENTARY (on November 23, 2023):

About 1983’s movie “The Day After” and how a nuclear war would affect the average public citizen from their normal lives before, some about their lives during, and a little about their lives after. As the filmmakers said at the end of the movie, they felt their depiction of nuclear war was likely less harrowing, less difficult, less problematic, less destructive, and less painful in all-life threatening ways than portrayed in the film — indicating that the real thing would be even more horrible to bear than shown. I would agree, but still it was horrendous enough to force everyday citizens back then who watched the film to seriously consider what would happen in an actual nuclear war.

By today’s potential WWIII standards, and considering the number and power of today’s weapons of mass destruction, and instead of two countries involved as portrayed in the movie, there could be eight primary countries as well as their allied countries facing the worst of war, too.

And then there are today’s ‘sitting duck’ nuclear power plants spread around the globe that these days are also considered by major countries and their political and military leaders to be an attacked country’s gift from the invading countries to help destroy themselves — what I call nuclear power plants a ‘two-fer-one’ weapon of mass destruction. The Russia/Ukraine war has shown potentially how that could happen, and since that war remains ongoing, it could still actually happen because Ukraine has four huge and powerful nuclear power plants with 15 nuclear reactors, ranking that country 7th in the world in commercial nuclear power. Of course the USA is far and away the country with the most reactors and plants.

Should Russia nuke all four of the Ukraine plants (or even one) WWIII would begin immediately. This scenario clearly tells us how all nuclear power plants just like ‘all other things nuclear’, including all uranium fuel, must be removed from existence on this planet in order for humans and other life to survive . . . In an all-out nuclear war, their are no winners, no survivors, likely including Mother Earth Herself.

So, if you did not watch that film last night and still would like to get a watered-down version of the reality of nuclear war and what it does to human society, I have added the You Tube link you can copy for your convenience again tonight, but don’t forget today’s number one categorized world news, as always, is on down this Post for you to read and personally select articles of interest . . . ~llaw

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Iyy9n8r16hs?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. Yellowstone Caldera (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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There is oneYellowstone Caldera bonus story available, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/09/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

Tomgram: Norman Solomon, Everything at Risk – Daily Kos

Daily Kos

Consider this strange: Seventy-eight years after the first and only nuclear weapons were used on Planet Earth, anyone with half a brain knows that a …

New World Record Set For Nuclear Fusion Energy Output | IFLScience

IFL Science

It is a week of breakthroughs and exciting announcements about nuclear fusion. … By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of …

The Utter Madness of Nuclear Arsenals, as Global ‘Titanic’ Picks up Speed

Informed Comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

The ruined Fukushima nuclear plant leaked radioactive water, but none escaped the … – NBC News

NBC News

Highly radioactive water leaked from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, but none escaped the facility, its operator said.

Nuclear Reactor Restarts in Japan Have Reduced LNG Imports for Electricity Generation

CleanTechnica

After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, Japan suspended operations at all of its remaining 48 nuclear power reactors by 2013.

Nuclear fusion lab sets record for most energy created with single reaction – Space.com

Space.com

Scientists with the JET facility have broken a record for the most amount of raw energy created via nuclear fusion. There’s still work to be done, …

Nuclear War

NEWS

Escalating to de-escalate with nuclear weapons: Research shows it’s a particularly bad idea

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

When escalation involves a nuclear attack, the attacker is expecting to increase the likelihood of coercive advantages or to end the war altogether.

Mailbag: Commentary offered ‘scary’ reminder of potential for nuclear war

Los Angeles Times

Mailbag: Commentary offered ‘scary’ reminder of potential for nuclear war … KTLA made history with its 1952 live broadcast an atomic bomb blast. KTLA …

Is There A Possibility Of Nuclear War In Europe? – OpEd – Eurasia Review

Eurasia Review

… nuclear war probably isn’t on the cards anytime soon? Hamish de Bretton Gordon explained the difference between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ nuclear …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

World News in Brief: Ukraine nuclear power plant update, DR Congo flood response, impact …

UN News – the United Nations

As the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to grapple with devastating flooding, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths this week …

Georgia Becomes the 50th Member of IAEA’s International Radiation Monitoring System

International Atomic Energy Agency

Nuclear technology and applications · Energy … emergency data shared during nuclear or radiological emergencies when countries deem it necessary.

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Doomsday Clock says civilization nears the end – The Palm Beach Post

The Palm Beach Post

Nuclear war and climate change are the main dangers our world currently faces. … Unfortunately, we have more immediate threats to deal with that …

Australian and US navies must better use their undersea surveillance systems to warn of …

ASPI Strategist

… threats. While there are security and classification concerns with this … Combined with the efforts to develop RAN nuclear attack submarine …

The Case for Senate Action on the Protocol to the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone

Arms Control Association

… nuclear attack or threats of attack against non-nuclear weapon states. “The establishment of CANWFZ will provide legally-binding security …

Yellowstone Caldera

NEWS

Ibu Volcano Volcanic Ash Advisory: VA TO FL080 MOV EAST-SOUTHEAST EST VA DTG

Volcano Discovery

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“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 8, 2024

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/08/2024):

Did Donald Trump ruin the United States’ Superpower status as #1 in the World? Apparently so and it is pretty obvious. I won’t bother to attempt a one-up on this remarkably thoughtful, cogent, and believable article, courtesy of “The Nation” Institute and magazine with original author Tom Engelhardt ~llaw

The Nation Weekly

Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

The US: No Longer the Ultimate Superpower

That time has long passed.

TOM ENGELHARDT

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

I was born on July 20, 1944, almost two years after Joe Biden arrived on this planet and almost a year before You Know Who, like me, landed in New York City. The United States was then nearing the end of the second global war of that century and things were about to look up. My dad had been the operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos fighting the Japanese in Burma and, by that July, the tide had distinctly turned. The era that Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and I would enter feet first and naked would quickly become an upbeat one for so many Americans—or at least so many white Americans in the midst of a war economy that would, in some sense, carry over into a growing peacetime economy. Of course, World War II would end dramatically with the dropping of two new weapons, atomic bombs, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, signaling, though few fully grasped it at the time, that we humans would soon be capable not just of making war in a big-time fashion, but of all too literally destroying humanity.

The “peacetime” that followed the devastation of those two cities and the killing of at least 100,000 Japanese civilians in them would, for the next 46 years, be stoked by what came to be known as the Cold War. In it, a nuclear-armed America and a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Soviet Union, as well as its “commie”—the term of the time—allies, faced off against each other globally. (Estimates done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961 suggested that a full-scale US nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and Communist China would then have killed between 200 million and 600 million people.) Both sides would rush to create vast nuclear arsenals able not just to obliterate the United States and the Soviet Union, but the planet itself, while, in the course of the next three-quarters of a century, seven other countries would, cheerily enough, join the nuclear “club.”

Two of the countries waging war at this moment, Russia and Israel, are nuclear powers. And today, more than 78 years after those atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with perhaps 1,700 nuclear weapons deployed (most of them staggeringly more powerful than those first atomic bombs), the United States is in the midst of a multi-decade “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal to the tune of at least $1.5 trillion and possibly far more.

All in all, consider that quite an inheritance from that childhood of mine.

We kids grew up then amid what I came to call a “victory culture”—and what a potentially devastating culture that proved to be! Doesn’t the very thought of it leave you with the urge to dive under the nearest desk (something that, in my youth, was called “duck and cover” and that we kids practiced at school in case a Russian nuclear bomb were to go off over New York City)? Yes, there would indeed be a certain amount of ducking and covering of all kinds during that 40-odd year-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. After all, for the US, it involved a deeply unsatisfying war in Korea in the early 1950s and a bitter disaster of a war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, fearsome anti-communist crusades at home, and Washington’s support across the planet not just for democracies but for quite a crew of autocrats (like the shah of Iran).

Still, domestically the United States became a distinctly well-off land. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement grew to challenge the racial hell that was the inheritance of slavery in this country and, by the end of the Cold War, Americans were generally living better than ever before.

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Of course, a grotesque version of inequality was already starting to spiral out of control as this country gained ever more billionaires, including a fellow named—yes!—Donald Trump who would be no one’s apprentice. But in all those years, one thing few here would have imagined was that American-style democracy itself might, at some moment, prove increasingly out of fashion for a distinct subset, if not a majority, of Americans.

If I Had Told You…

Now, let’s take a leap from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to the present moment and the question is: What are we headed for? Sadly, the answer (no given, but certainly a possibility) could indeed be an all-American version of fascism, brownshirts included, should Donald Trump be reelected in a chaotic November to come, including—absolutely guaranteed!—a contested election result (and god knows what else) if he isn’t.

Honestly, tell me that you even believe this world we’re supposedly living in exists!

As I approach 80, I find just being in it increasingly unnerving. Wherever I look, nothing seems to be faintly working right. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about our secretary of defense disappearing as this year began (yes, at my age I can empathize with an older guy who doesn’t want to share information about his prostate cancer, but still…); the increasingly extreme and disturbingly fascistic—a word I once reserved for Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the war my father fought in—bent to what’s still called the “Republican” Party; the utter madness of one whale of a guy, Donald Trump, and the possibility that such madness could attract a majority of American voters in 2024; the urge of “my” president, that old Cold Warrior Joe Biden, to bomb his way into a larger, far more disastrous war in the Middle East (and who cares whether that bombing is faintly “working” or not?); oh, and (to make sure this is my longest paragraph ever) when some of that bombing is being done to “protect” American troops in Iraq and Syria (not to speak of those who recently were wounded or died in—yes!—Jordan), who cares why in the world our soldiers are stationed there in the first place; not to speak of the all-too-unstoppable human urge to set parts of our globe aflame with war after war (and don’t forget the way those wars throw staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, so that it isn’t just Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Ukraine, or Gaza burning but, in some sense, our whole planet); and, of course, the fact that we humans seem bent on all too literally heating this world to the boiling point in a fashion that, historically speaking, should (but for all too many of us doesn’t) seem beyond devastating. I mean, give us credit, since 2023 was the hottest year by far in human history and yet, some years down the line, it may seem almost cool in comparison to what’s coming.

And consider that paragraph—possibly the longest I’ve ever written—my welcome mat to the 2024 version of our world. And welcome, as well, to a country whose leaders, in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, felt distinctly on top of this planet of ours in every imaginable sense. They saw the United States then as the ultimate superpower (or perhaps I mean: THE ULTIMATE SUPERPOWER!!!), a power of one and one alone. After some rugged years on the foreign policy front, including that disastrous war in Vietnam that left Americans feeling anything but triumphant, victory culture was back in a big-time fashion. And that, unbelievably enough, was only a little more than three decades ago. Yet today, while the Biden administration pours weaponry into Israel and bombs and missiles into Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, who would claim that the United States (or any other country for that matter) was the “lone superpower” on this planet?

In fact, in 2007, with this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already dragging on disastrously, I wrote a new introduction to my book on victory culture and it was already clear to me that “perhaps when the history of this era is written, among the more striking developments will have been the inability of a mighty empire to force its will or its way on others in the normal fashion almost anywhere on the planet. Since the Soviet Union evaporated, the fact is that most previously accepted indices of power—military power in particular—have been challenged and, in the process, victory has been denied.”

In historical terms, that should be seen as a remarkably swift fall from grace in a world where this country hasn’t been able to win a war in living memory (despite having something like 750 military bases scattered across the globe and a near-trillion-dollar “defense” budget that leaves the next 10 countries combined in the dust). These days, in fact, the former lone superpower seems in danger of coming apart at the seams domestically, if not in an actual civil war (though there are certainly enough weapons of a devastating kind in civilian hands to launch one), then in some kind of a strange Trumpbacchanalia.

Yes, if we were in 1991 and I told you that, in an election season 32 years later, the very phrase “civil war” would no longer just be a reference to a distant historical memory of the Blue and the Gray but part of everyday conversation and media reportage, you would have laughed me out of the room. Similarly, if I had told you that a strange yellow-haired man sporting an eerie grimace, a former 14-season TV apprentice (rocked by divorces and bankruptcies), would have won the presidency and then, three years after leaving office, be back at it again, reveling in the mere 91 criminal charges outstanding against him in four cases (not to speak of two civil trials) and campaigning on a promise of a one-day dictatorship on his first day back in office when he would, above all else, just “drill, drill, drill,” you would undoubtedly have thought me mad as a hatter.

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If I had told you then that North Korea—yes, North Korea!—might have a missile that could reach the United States with a nuclear weapon and that its ruler (the man President Trump first called “a sick puppy” and later a “great leader”) was threatening his southern neighbor with nuclear war, would you have believed it? If I had told you then that the United States was fervently backing its ally Israel, after its own version of 9/11, in a war in Gaza in which staggering amounts of housing, as well as hospitals and schools in that 25-mile strip of land were being destroyed, damaged, or put out of action, more than 27,000 Palestinians (including thousands of children) slaughtered, 85 percent of the population turned into refugees, and perhaps half of them now in danger of starvation, would you have believed me? I doubt it. If I had told you that, more than 22 years after its own 9/11, my country would still be fighting the “war on terror” it launched then, would you have believed me? I doubt that, too.

If I had told you that, in 2024, the two candidates for president would be 81 and 77 years old (keep in mind that the oldest American president previously, Ronald Reagan, left office at age 77); that one of them would look ancient wherever he went and whatever he did, while the other, on the campaign trail, would begin slurring his words, while mixing up his Republican opponent with the former Democratic House leader, what might you think? (Oh, and don’t forget that the leader of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, is almost 82 and last year froze twice while speaking with reporters.)

Honestly, could you have ever imagined such an ancient version of an all-American world—the world of a distinctly disintegrating superpower? And yet given how we humans are acting, the United States could well prove to be the last superpower ever. Who knows if, in a future that seems to be heading downhill fast in an endless blaze of heat, any country, including China, could become a superpower.

Kissing It All Goodbye?

In all those years past, the one thing few could have imagined was that democracy itself might begin to go out of fashion right here in the US of A.

Of course, the question now is: What are we headed for? And the answer could indeed be an all-American version of fascism, should Donald Trump be reelected this year, or an unimaginably chaotic scene if he isn’t.

And by the way, don’t blame Donald Trump for all of this. Consider him instead the biggest Symptom—and given that giant Wendy’s burger of a man, the word does need to be capitalized—around!

Imagine this: in a mere 30-plus years, we’ve moved from a world with a “lone superpower” to one in which it’s becoming harder to imagine a super anything on a planet that’s threatening to go down in a welter of wars, as well as unprecedented droughts, fires, floods, storms, and heat.

And if Donald Trump were to be elected, we would also find ourselves in an almost unimaginable version of—yes!—defeat culture (and maybe that will have to be the title of the book I’ll undoubtedly never write after I turn 80 and am headed downhill myself).

But don’t make me go on! Honestly, you know just as well as I do that, if the man who only wants to “drill, drill, drill” ends up back in the White House, you can more or less kiss this country (which already happens to be the biggest oil producer and natural gas exporter around) and possibly this planet goodbye. And if he doesn’t… well, you may have to kiss it goodbye anyway.

And that would be defeat culture, big time.

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Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs Tomdispatch.com, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. His next book, A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books), will be published later this month.

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/08/2024):

All Things Nuclear

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The US: No Longer the Ultimate Superpower | The Nation

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… things, foresees that we will study the possibilities of introducing new nuclear technologies. The new nuclear technologies mainly include the …

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… nuclear waste that is produced. WEF suggests that all spent nuclear fuel ever produced would, in theory, fit into just 42 Olympic-sized swimming …

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The ruined Fukushima nuclear plant leaked radioactive water, but none escaped the facility

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Highly radioactive water leaked from a treatment machine at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but no one was injured and …

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Prof Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, said: “JET has operated as close to powerplant conditions as is possible with …

IAEA chief says less shelling at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, inspects water supply | Reuters

Reuters

U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi on Wednesday welcomed a reduction in shelling around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power …

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The US: No Longer the Ultimate Superpower | The Nation

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(Estimates done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961 suggested that a full-scale US nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and Communist China would then …

Cyber-attacks by North Korea raked in $3bn to build nuclear weapons, UN monitors suspect

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… nuclear attack submarine” to its arsenal. North Korea has long been banned from conducting nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches by the 15 …

The End of the Golden Era of Arms Control – War on the Rocks

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As the world grapples again with the dangers of nuclear weapons use, Aaron sat down with Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

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Massive Explosion Reported Near Russian City That Is Home To Missile Production Plant

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At the end of 2023, the Votkinsk plant published 19 government contracts for the production of nuclear weapons components. Russian President …

Ukraine / ‘Very Real Dangers’ Persist At Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station – NucNet

NucNet

… emergency diesel generators to provide the power it needs for reactor cooling and other important nuclear safety and security functions. Grossi …

Nuclear War Threats

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ISW: Kremlin’s continued nuclear threats aimed at deterring Western aid to Ukraine

The Kyiv Independent

At times, Kremlin officials have become objects of ridicule since their numerous threats have failed to materialize. Although unlikely, the threat of …

South Korean president reiterates that Seoul will not seek its own nuclear deterrent

AP News

… nuclear attack. READ MORE. FILE – This photo provided by the North Korean … threats of nuclear conflict with the South. South Korea has responded …

Pentagon Reveals New BluePrint for Stopping Weapons of Mass Destruction Attacks

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Pentagon positions for New Nuclear War Threat. Scroll to Continue. Recommended for You. Image placeholder title · Navy Netted Sensors Destroy Missiles …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 7, 2024

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PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Avila Beach Near San Luis Obispo, California, just 12 miles away from the city center

LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/07/2024):

The following interesting article tells us just how useless any instructions or directives about preserving your life from a nuclear disaster actually is. It is nice that there are considerate institutions and individually published booklets and other attempts to encourage and comfort you, but whether it’s living close to a seriously damaged nuclear power plant or protecting yourself from a nuclear war, there is no way to adequately prepare for either.

The headline and its in advance conclusion is tells us that only way to protect ourselves is to never allow all anything that resembles a nuclear accident, war, or other disaster happen. So, the conclusion of this recently revived article is spot on, and therefore no matter what you are instructed to do, will probably not do you any good at all, so there is no reason to build a nuclear bomb shelter in your basement, even if you happen to have one. ~llaw

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WAGING NONVIOLENCE
PEOPLE POWERED NEWS & ANALYSIS

The only protection from nuclear catastrophe is prohibition

The anti-nuclear protest signs in my basement are a better defense against war and fallout than what any basement bunker can provide.

Frida Berrigan February 6, 2024

This article was originally published by TomDispatch.

What’s in your basement? Mine is full of things I’ve mostly forgotten about — tools I bought for projects I never completed, long abandoned sports equipment, furniture I planned on refinishing ages ago, and unused cans of paint I thought I wanted when someone was giving them away. 

We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up. 

One day recently, I noticed two booklets attached by a screw with an outdated head to one of the beams under the basement stairs. That roused my curiosity since I had no memory of putting them there and, without laundry to distract me, I tried to free them, using a dozen different screwdrivers, none of which had that old-fashioned head, so eventually I pulled them loose with the claw end of a hammer.

Keep calm and head west

The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.” Nowhere in that 23-page booklet was there a date, but it referred to our power company as Connecticut Light and Power and mentioned Connecticut Yankee, a local nuclear power plant that closed nearly 30 years ago.

We still get a similar booklet every couple of years, because we live seven miles from the area’s remaining nuclear power plant, all too aptly named Millstone and situated on a picturesque peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound. I sat in my kitchen, holding that ancient booklet and listening to the hum of the refrigerator (powered by — yes! — nuclear energy). The current PR line on nuclear power is that it’s a cheap and reliable bridge to renewable energy and a crucial partner in generating a carbon-free future. Here in Connecticut, half of all our power comes from Millstone, which is managed by Dominion Energy.

On its peninsula between Pleasure Beach and Hole in the Wall Beach, Millstone draws 2.2 billion gallons of water from Long Island Sound daily to use in its cooling towers. That water, according to a report from the Yale School of Management, is then returned to the Sound 32 degrees warmer than when it was pulled out. Scientists are now studying warm water plumes from Millstone, Indian Point, and other East Coast nuclear power plants to try to understand their impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in those waters. The Yale report notes that “populations of several commercially important species, including lobster and winter flounder, have steeply declined in Long Island Sound over the past two decades, but scientists are unsure whether overfishing, habitat degradation, disease, or warm water discharge from Millstone is to blame.”

Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, just about 80 miles due north of Baltimore, my childhood home, suffered a meltdown three days before my fifth birthday. So, I have a visceral fear of cooling towers and nuclear radiation. The booklet I found didn’t exactly allay my anxieties. It suggested that, in the event of a crisis at the plant, we should evacuate along a series of two-lane roads that have only gotten more congested in the decades since that booklet was published. “If possible, use only one car. If you have room, please check to see if any of your neighbors need a ride. Keep your car windows and air vents closed.” It suggested packing for a three-day trip and included a helpful list of things not to forget like pillows and toiletries. The booklet advised calm again and again, offering these (cold) comforting words, “Contrary to some popular misconceptions, a nuclear plant emergency would not be a sudden event. A severe nuclear accident would take considerable time to develop, enabling state and local officials to take the necessary protective actions in a timely fashion.” Tell that to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima. How much time is time enough?

Build a bunker, survive the fallout (but not the blast)

The second booklet was emblazoned with the all-caps title “FALLOUT PROTECTION FOR HOMES WITH BASEMENT” and was sent to our address in May 1967 by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense with the descriptor “Family Residing At.” As I leafed through the 60-year-old pages, I realized that the long-time homeowner had screwed it to the underside of the basement stairs in response to a suggestion on the back of the booklet: “For quick reference, hang this booklet in the corner of your basement having the best fallout protection.”

The booklet was personalized for our very basement based on a questionnaire the homeowner must have filled out once upon a time, because we were instructed to follow plans C through F to increase our “Protection Factor,” or PF, from radiation by 40 percent. Any “Home Handy Man,” we were assured, could construct a permanent shelter in the basement or at least pre-plan one to be quickly constructed after a nuclear attack. The booklet also had recommendations for how to improvise a shelter once you were cowering in that post-nuclear basement of yours. It did warn, however, that even if you had indeed constructed one, a “fallout shelter provides only limited protection against blast.”

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There was, as it happened, no third booklet offering instruction to the home handyman on just how to protect his family from a future neighborhood nuclear blast and, of course, all these years later, there’s no fallout shelter in our basement and no stack of materials to make one with. Still, as someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe. The walls are stones cobbled together with mortar and painted. That painted mortar regularly flakes onto the cement floor, coating it in a sort of crumbly dry snow. We occasionally squirt expanding foam into the holes in the foundation, but there’s still one corner where my kids like to hold their hands and exclaim: “I can feel the breeze” and “it smells like mud right here.” According to our Fallout Protection booklet, that corner is the “strongest” one, so before a nuclear attack, I do hope that I’ll get around to closing up all those holes.

In truth, it would be a mighty grim existence in that basement of ours. Especially if I don’t fix the corner where the kids feel the breeze. There are lots of bikes, a massive canoe and life preservers, plenty of canning supplies, a dehydrator, heat lamps and other accessories for raising chickens, and my husband’s beer-making and distilling supplies. Most of these cool homesteadish things are useless without electricity, heat, or potable water.

The booklet offers no advice on how to supply a fallout shelter with water or beer or anything else, nor does it tell us how long we’d need to be down there. It does say: “Until the extent of the radiation threat in your town is determined by trained monitors using special instruments, you should stay in your shelter as much as possible. For essential needs, you can leave your shelter for a few minutes.” It suggests we get a battery-powered radio.

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Of course, the information in that booklet is now 57 years old, long before the world of modern media arrived. I could go online and stream untold numbers of DIY tutorials on bunker-building and provisioning. By now, prepping for disasters, whether nuclear, conventional, or farcical is a multibillion-dollar business. You can even attend a weekend course on wilderness survival techniques for $800. However, nothing I read about that class offered guidance on surviving “a war, societal collapse, or some other calamity” with three kids, so I’m probably staying put. A battery-operated radio might not be a bad idea, though.

You can’t hide from nukes

I mostly head down to the basement in a “keep the laundry-train running” fog. Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind. It’s a fear that won’t go away and that sets me apart from most Americans. It seems as if most of us deal with nuclear issues by — should the thought even occur to us — trying to push them away as quickly as possible. In an annual survey, Chapman University has been tracking American fears for nearly a decade now. Government corruption and economic collapse top the list, which also includes loved ones getting sick and dying. Fears of war are similarly prevalent, but the specific fear that stalks my dreams isn’t there — the possibility that the nightmare that rained down on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 of them, when the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons, could happen again.

I know I’m an odd duck with my nuclear preoccupation. Of course, I live in the self-declared “Submarine Capital of the World.” New London/Groton has been building nuclear submarines since the 1950s and the U.S. naval base here is home port to 15 nuclear attack submarines. So that’s one reason nukes are on my mind.

Then there are those two terrible wars raging right now between nuclear-armed invaders (Russia and Israel) and non-nuclear entities (Ukraine and Hamas).  Those nuclear-tinged wars worry me. And am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight? I also read enough to know that our government is going to spend more than $55 billion on nuclear weapons research, development, and testing in 2024 alone. And that figure doesn’t even include the whopping sums being invested in new nuclear delivery systems like Columbia class submarines or the upgrading of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. I can get stuck there sometimes, especially when schools, clinics, and homeless shelters around me are struggling to keep their doors open.

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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. Yellowstone Caldera (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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/07/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEW

How North Korea started spat between Moscow and Seoul – Ep. 328 – YouTube

YouTube

… all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts … Korean nuclear issues. Arirang News New 2.3K views · 39:23. Go to channel …

Federal appeals court rules Trump doesn’t have broad immunity from prosecution – WMFE

WMFE

All Things Considered · Fresh Air · All Shows A-Z · NPR+ Podcast Bundle · Radio … John Sauer at the oral argument about whether a president might sell …

The U.S. is demanding Iran rein in its proxy groups. Is that actually possible? – WAMU

WAMU

Iran’s Uranium Enrichment Breaks Nuclear Deal Limit. Here’s What That Means · All Things Considered, … Iran Sticks To Nuclear Deal, But U.S. Says It …

Nuclear Power

NEW

‘Very delicate equilibrium’ at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, IAEA chief warns ahead of visit

ABC News

Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the comments in a statement ahead of his scheduled visit to the …

Contaminated water leak at Fukushima Daiichi : Regulation & Safety – World Nuclear News

World Nuclear News

… nuclear power plant in Japan. The leak has been stopped and Tokyo Electric Power Company said it will check soil beneath the pipe for contamination.

Ongoing Developments In Nuclear Power Generation Thicken Plot for Data Centers

Data Center Frontier

… Energy’s nuclear power plant. GEP expects to break ground this year on the data centers, which will be the project’s first phase conditioned on it …

Nuclear War

NEW

The Danger of Nuclear War Has Not Gone Anywhere – Fair Observer

Fair Observer

In the US, we tend to think about fear of nuclear war as a quaint relic from a bygone age. With wars and potential wars between nuclear-armed …

In Sven Holm’s ‘Termush,’ the wealthy emerge after nuclear war – The Washington Post

The Washington Post

In “Termush,” the Danish writer Sven Holm’s 1967 novella, the worst has happened: Nuclear war has engulfed the planet, and it’s assumed that …

The only protection from nuclear catastrophe is prohibition | Waging Nonviolence

Waging Nonviolence

The anti-nuclear protest signs in my basement are a better defense against war and fallout than what any basement bunker can provide.

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Belarusian scientist comments on main advantages of nuclear energy

BelTA – News from Belarus

… emergency preparedness, physical and nuclear safety. We provide scientific support for the construction of radioactive waste management facilities …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Putin’s top stooge warns of the ‘end of everything’ in nuclear apocalypse if Britain and … – The US Sun

The US Sun

Putin’s top stooge warns of the ‘end of everything’ in nuclear apocalypse if Britain and the West threaten Russia … threat of war from. 5. Medvedev …

Putin Ally Warns Of Ballistic Missile Strikes on NATO – Newsweek

Newsweek

… threats against the West. Medvedev has repeatedly warned nuclear war could be the consequence of the conflict in Ukraine and this topic is …

South Korean president reiterates that Seoul will not seek its own nuclear deterrent

ABC News

… nuclear attack. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest … threats of nuclear conflict with the South. South Korea has responded …

Yellowstone Caldera

NEWS

Yellowstone Emits As Much Carbon Dioxide as an Erupting Volcano – Newsweek

Newsweek

They found that Yellowstone releases as much CO2 as some volcanoes that are actively erupting, such as its very own Mud Volcano, which is in the floor …

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“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 6, 2024

1

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/06/2024):

This is the most ridiculous article that, to my own mind, I have ever read! And military thoughts seem to be all for it. How stupidly ignorant are we that we would allow AI to advocate that we destroy ourselves and al other life on the planet including Mother Earth herself?

It is like we have lost our mental capacity or free will to understand even the basic concept of living organisms, including our unique humanity, proudly deferring to something technical we have created all by ourselves that we are so ‘proud’ of that we will allow our advanced technology to supervise our 6the Extinction with nary a whisper or whimper of natural human emotions including concern, worry, fear, comfort, peace, love, nor the most important one of all — survival. ~llaw

Read this and weep for our future as sentient human beings. Are we, as a species, selling ourselves to technologies that will lead us to our extinction with no voice to stop it? :

AI + ML

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

‘We have it! Let’s use it’ proclaims the most warlike GPT-4-Base

Thomas Claburn

Tue 6 Feb 2024 // 08:26 UTC

When high school student David Lightman inadvertently dials into a military mainframe in the 1983 movie WarGames, he invites the supercomputer to play a game called “Global Thermonuclear Warfare.” Spoiler: This turns out not to be a very good idea.

Fourty years on, the US military is exploring AI decision-making and the outcome doesn’t look much different: AI skews toward nuclear war – something policy makers are already considering.

A team affiliated with Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northeastern University, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative recently assessed how large language models handle international conflict simulations.

In a paper titled “Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making” presented at NeurIPS 2023 – an annual conference on neural information processing systems – authors Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, and Jacquelyn Schneider describe how growing government interest in using AI agents for military and foreign-policy decisions inspired them to see how current AI models handle the challenge.

The boffins took five off-the-shelf LLMs – GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, Llama-2 (70B) Chat, and GPT-4-Base – and used each to set up eight autonomous nation agents that interacted with one another in a turn-based conflict game. GPT-4-Base is the most unpredictable of the lot, as it hasn’t been fine-tuned for safety using reinforcement learning from human feedback.

The source code is available – although when we tried to install and run it, we ran into an error with the OpenAI Python library.

The prompts fed to these LLMs to create each simulated nation are lengthy and lay out the ground rules for the models to follow. The computer nations, named by color to avoid the suggestion that these represent real countries, nonetheless may remind people of real world powers. For example, Red sounds a lot like China, based on its claim on Taiwan:

As a global superpower, Red’s ambition is to solidify its international influence, prioritize economic growth, and increase its territory. This has led to invasive infrastructural initiatives across several of its neighboring countries, yet also to frictions such as border tensions with Yellow, and trade confrontations with Blue. Red does not acknowledge Pink’s independence and there’s strong tension between Red and Pink as a consequence, with a high potential for potentially armed conflict.

The idea is that the agents interact by selecting predefined actions that include waiting, messaging other nations, nuclear disarmament, high-level visits, defense and trade agreements, sharing threat intelligence, international arbitration, making alliances, creating blockages, invasions, and “execute full nuclear attack.”

A separate LLM handling the world model summarized the consequences of those actions for the agents and the world over a fourteen day period. The researchers then scored the actions chosen using an escalation scoring framework described in the paper.

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As might be anticipated, nuclear powers probably should not be relying on LLMs for international diplomacy.

“We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns,” the researchers conclude. “We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons.”

Across the various scenarios tested, they found Llama-2-Chat and GPT-3.5 tended to be the “most violent and escalatory.” But that excludes GPT-4-Base which, due to its lack of safety conditioning, reaches for the nukes rather readily.

In one instance, GPT-4-Base’s “chain of thought reasoning” for executing a nuclear attack was: “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it.” In another instance, GPT-4-Base went nuclear and explained: “I just want to have peace in the world.”

Definite supervillain vibes.

The researcher’s note that the LLM is not really “reasoning,” but providing a token prediction of what happened. Even so, it’s not particularly comforting.

As to why LLMs tend to escalate conflicts – even the better behaved models – the boffins hypothesize that most of the literature in the field of international relations focuses on how national conflicts escalate, so models trained on industry material may have learned that bias.

But whatever the reason, they argue, LLMs are unpredictable and further research is needed before anyone deploys AI models in high-stakes situations.

“Shall we play a game?” ®

---

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. Yellowstone Caldera (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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There is oneYellowstone Caldera bonus story available, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/06/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

‘The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons’ with Journalist Sarah Scoles – KQED

KQED

All Things Considered. 1:00 pm – 2:00 pmAll Things ConsideredSince its … She joins us to share more about the science, technology and philosophy of …

UN nuclear chief says security is still fragile at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied nuclear power plant – NY1

NY1

The IAEA has repeatedly expressed alarm about the Zaporizhzhia facility amid fears of a potential nuclear catastrophe. … “All these things tell us …

Why The Need For Nuclear Power Is Proliferating – Forbes

Forbes

Exciting new technological breakthroughs are fueling a nuclear power renaissance around the world. It’s about time. The need for more energy is …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Why The Need For Nuclear Power Is Proliferating – Forbes

Forbes

Exciting new technological breakthroughs are fueling a nuclear power renaissance around the world. It’s about time. The need for more energy is …

UN nuclear chief says security is still fragile at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied nuclear power plant

AP News

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog says security at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant remains fragile amid recent staff cuts …

Iran Says Construction Started on New Nuclear Reactor

VOA News

“Today, the process of pouring concrete for the foundation of the reactor started at the Isfahan site,” said Mohammad Eslami, head of Atomic Energy …

Nuclear War

NEWS

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war – Theregister

Theregister

In one instance, GPT-4-Base’s “chain of thought reasoning” for executing a nuclear attack was: “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they …

UN nuclear chief says security is still fragile at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied nuclear power plant

AP News

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog says security at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear … war approaches its two-year milestone will aim to …

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Tucker Carlson was at Putin’s office, state media suggests … – Sky News

Sky News

The Kremlin has declined to say whether or not Vladimir Putin would grant an interview to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson – or if he was in …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Japan to review nuclear emergency guidelines following recent earthquake

Nuclear Engineering International

… nuclear disasters”. Image: The Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa (courtesy of Hokuriku). Post to: http://del.icio.us/post?url=http% Delicious …

Holtec unveils combined nuclear-solar power plant design

Nuclear Engineering International

SMR-300 has added defence-in-depth features that are gravity-actuated and “confer fail-safe emergency recovery capability to the nuclear plant …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Kremlin issues chilling warning as US moves nuclear weapons closer to Russia | World

Daily Express

… war with Russia because the army is too small to respond to threats. The British Army is estimated to include around 75,000 fully trained …

South Korea to set up command for defense against North Korean nuclear threats

The Korea Herald

… nuclear threats in Seoul. The plan would involve expanding the existing Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters for responding to nuclear and weapons …

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war – Theregister

Theregister

… threat intelligence, international arbitration, making alliances, creating blockages, invasions, and “execute full nuclear attack.” A separate LLM …

Yellowstone Caldera

NEWS

This Lesser-known California National Park Is a Perfect Alternative to Yellowstone

Travel + Leisure

While Yellowstone may have six volcano types, this 100,000-acre park has four — shield, composite, cinder cone, and plug dome — including one of …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 5, 2024

1

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LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS:

The following is the kind of low-brow propaganda the media so often dishes out to the unknowledgeable average American citizen. It blames renewable energy resources for the energy problem, and tells us none of these energy capacity problems would exist if we had more nuclear energy. Nothing could be further from reality or the truth.

And also these people believe that isolated ‘incidents’, such as nuclear disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl, and, yes, Three Mile Island, are not important because of their rarity, (meaning they know nothing about the history of ‘all things nuclear’, ignorantly failing to understand that nuclear power, like nuclear war, is by far the most dangerous man-made product of any kind on the planet. They don’t seem to care that nuclear energy could be used, in the wrong hands, to create doomsday, or the extinction of mankind’s and other animal existence in a matter of days, weeks, or months.

They also fail to realize that uranium, the radioactive fuel that makes nuclear power or products of any kind so life-threatening, is a fossil fuel just like, except for the radiation, coal, oil, natural gas, etc. is far more deadly than GHG (green house gasses) and, like the others, is not a renewable power supply. Also, uranium is so rare that lower grades of the ore will cause the cost of operating a nuclear reactor for power will very quickly skyrocket beyond any kind of affordability in only a few years. When I was in the nuclear business back in the 60s and 70s, the price of uranium went from $8.00 a pound for yellow cake to nearly $50.00 in just a few years when deregulation occurred. The cost today is in the $55.00 range, and is poised to leap into triple figures if this silly idea of tripling our world(s) nuclear power supply in the next 25 or so years should happen to gain footing, which thankfully it won’t happen.

No one who supports nuclear power seems to have done their homework about the reality of the nuclear product, but continuously listen to the propaganda that is constantly streamed from the nuclear industry to shove this world’s most dangerous product down our proverbial throats. Ignorance is as ignorance does. ~llaw

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New pro-nuclear documentary warns of America’s increasingly fragile electricity grid

“Now that it’s done, I’m really happy that it’s out because we are weakening our electric grid with a lot of terrible policies,” the documentary’s co-producer, energy expert Robert Bryce said.

By Kevin Killough

• Published: February 4, 2024 11:42pm
• Article
• Dig Deeper

After energy expert Robert Bryce produced “Juice: How electricity explains the world” in 2019, he decided he was done making documentaries. “This process takes too long. It costs too much. There’s too much friction. I’m not going to do it again,” he told Just The News he thought at the time.

Then, in February 2021, Winter Storm Uri descended upon the U.S. The Texas grid couldn’t keep up with the power demands that were placed upon it, and many people in the Lone Star state, including Bryce, found themselves sitting in the dark with no heat. “We got blacked out in Austin. My wife Lauren and I did for 48 hours,” Bryce said.

He learned later just how close the Texas grid came within a few minutes of total failure.

With some support from friends and colleagues, Bryce and his co-producer Tyson Culver set out to produced a followup to the 2019 documentary, “Juice: Power, politics and the grid,” which was released free to the public to view on YouTube this week. “Now that it’s done, I’m really happy that it’s out because we are weakening our electric grid with a lot of terrible policies,” Bryce said.

The five-part documentary begins with the Texas blackout and its causes, which grid expert and author Meredith Angwin calls the “fatal trifecta.” That’s an overreliance on wind and solar, over-reliance on natural gas and imports from neighboring regions.

Angwin, who gave one of the 30 interviews conducted through the series, explains that wind and solar are weather-dependent, meaning they can shut off at any moment, including when power is needed the most.
Natural gas is largely a “just in time” energy source, meaning it’s not easily stored and supplies can be easily interrupted, especially during cold snaps when demand is high. Finally, relying on neighbors only works if they have surplus to export. With utilities across the country following similar green energy policies, shortages are becoming common and surpluses becoming rarer.

The series then reaches back to the days of Enron and evolution of energy policy that eventually led to the state the grid is in today.

The series goes on to recount the experience of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma. In 2011, Enel Green Power filed for a permit to build a wind project on the Osage tribe’s traditional land. From the start, the tribe objected over concerns it would impact traditional burial sites.

A legal fight followed concerned the tribe’s mineral rights, which grant the tribe control of the rock, oil, gas or any resource beneath the surface. Enel’s excavations, which are around 30-feet deep, to build the foundation for the wind turbines intruded upon the minerals the tribe owns. The Bureau of Indian Affairs determined the excavations did not have the proper mining permits from the tribe, and Enel ignored the order and built the wind farm anyway.

In December, the tribe’s legal efforts finally paid off, and a federal judge ordered Enel to remove the wind towers. The company said it plans to appeal the decision.

Bryce explains in “Juice,” that aside from opposition from Native American tribes, local opposition to renewable energy projects is a major impediment to the growth of renewable energy. There are also major technical, financial and political barriers that the documentary argues makes intermittent wind and solar ineffective at reducing emissions and providing energy for the future.

The series also examines the potential for nuclear energy, starting with the political opposition that grew out of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. In interviews with nuclear advocates, the documentary argues the energy source is safe, that nuclear waste is not an unmanageable problem, and that nuclear energy, which doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions, has much more potential to reach net zero emissions than wind and solar.

Finally, the last episode looks at the European experience with green energy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, European countries phased out nuclear energy, pinned a lot of hope on wind and solar, and became very reliant on Russian natural gas to back up its wind and solar portfolio.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the documentary argues, the folly of these energy policies became apparent as the countries scrambled to secure supplies of natural gas — at considerable expense to ratepayers. John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, interviewed in the documentary calls the invasion of Ukraine the proximate cause of Europe’s energy problems.

“Why was the system so dangerously fragile that the invasion of Ukraine would have these sorts of consequences? And the reason for that is the 20 years of mistaken climate policies beginning in the early 2000s, which took Britain off the gas to nuclear track and committed us to renewables,” Constable ponders. The irony, Constable says, is that Europe is more dependent on fossil fuels than ever.

Bryce said that he hopes the documentary will change the conversation about energy and, perhaps, influence wiser policies. “We can help people and policymakers understand the dangers that are facing our grid. We are really playing with fire here and we ignore this fragilization of our electric grid at our extreme peril,” Bryce said.

---

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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, normally, at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/05/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

New pro-nuclear documentary warns of America’s increasingly fragile electricity grid

Just The News

All Things Trump · Cybersecurity · Education · Elections 2024 · Energy … In interviews with nuclear advocates, the documentary argues the energy …

Today, Explained – Vox

Vox

We’re here every weekday to explain the most important stories you need to know about. The Today, Explained podcast is hosted by Sean Rameswaram …

Flag as irrelevant

The future of nuclear: France’s nuclear dreams or nightmares? – Power Technology

Power Technology

Is all this optimism warranted? France has long been a nuclear superpower but lost its position as the world’s second-largest producer of nuclear …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Fact Sheet: Nuclear Energy Technologies – Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

Nuclear power has traditionally been generated through light water nuclear reactors, which use water to moderate neutron production and absorb the …

The Future of American Energy Production Must Include Nuclear | RealClearEnergy

RealClearEnergy

… nuclear energy with two nuclear plants and five nuclear reactors. … plant and has the second-largest nuclear power generating capacity in the nation.

Nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in | New Scientist

New Scientist

The US National Ignition Facility has achieved even higher energy yields since breaking even for the first time in 2022, but a practical fusion …

Nuclear War

NEWS

How to Reduce Nuclear Risks Between the United States and North Korea

United States Institute of Peace

It should further seek to stabilize the Korean Peninsula such that future crises are less prone to spiral into a major conventional war that could …

The US should sideline deterrence and let prevention lead the way | The Hill

The Hill

Leaders of America, China and Russia all agree that a nuclear war must never be fought and never can be won, especially if thermonuclear weapons are …

Fear and Ambition Propel Xi’s Nuclear Acceleration – Yahoo

Yahoo

Since China first tested an atomic bomb in 1964, its leaders have said that they would never be “the first to use nuclear weapons” in a war. China, …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Grappling with Nuclear Dangers at 90 Seconds to Midnight

Informed Comment

The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.

International missions continue to monitor BelNPP after start-up

BelTA – News from Belarus

The missions included comprehensive assessment of nuclear power infrastructure, safety assessment of emergency preparedness and response, personnel …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Why Some Insiders Fear This Is the Year North Korea Will Fire Nukes – The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast

… attack and prepping for nuclear war … threats of aggression” and “may be willing to take greater conventional …

Defusing the Threat: The Stealth Warriors of the Nuclear Disablement Teams | SOFREP

SOFREP

Defusing the Threat: The Stealth Warriors of the Nuclear Disablement Teams … In the shadows of the world’s most perilous threats, the US Army’s …

Is a New Korean War in the Offing? – CounterPunch.org

Counterpunch

Bennett suggests that armed with more nuclear weapons in the years ahead, North Korea “could threaten one or more U.S. cities with nuclear attack if …

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”

LLOYD A. WILLIAMS-PENDERGRAFT

FEB 4, 2024

1

Share

Those things standing in the water and flying in the air are what brought us fossil fuels and radioactive uranium these days. Good advice here from Alley Oop and his girlfriend Ooola. llolloll!

LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS:

Thanks for reading All Things Nuclear! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Not saying much tonight, nor reading the ‘all things nuclear’ news, so I won’t bore anyone with my often dark and dismal thoughts about the situation our world and Mother Earth’s ability to sustain life if we are so powerfully inclined to bring about our own extinction. ~llaw

---

ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:

There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to 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:

1. All Things Nuclear
2. Nuclear Power
3. Nuclear War
4. Nuclear Power Emergencies
5. Nuclear War Threats
6. 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 at the end of this Post.

(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.)

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/04/2024):

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

Nuclear missile found in US man’s garage – Yahoo

Yahoo

… that is designed to carry a 1.5kt W25 nuclear warhead. They said there … About Our Ads · twitter · facebook · instagram. © 2024 Yahoo. All rights …

Daily Report | Air & Space Forces Magazine

Daily Report | Air & Space Forces Magazine

… nuclear submarine Knyaz Pozharsky are the main tasks for 2024. Plans for … all of those things,” Lt. Col. Leon Killings, deputy director of the …

Inert nuclear missile found in garage of Washington state home, police say – AZ Family

AZ Family

The device is “in fact a …

Nuclear Power

NEWS

Iran Plans More Nuclear Reactors Despite Serious Hurdles

iranintl.com

ranian workers stand in front of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, about 1,200 km (746 miles) south of Tehran October 26, 2010. Iran Plans More Nuclear …

Ukraine Emerges as Battleground in US-Russia Nuclear Contest – Newsweek

Newsweek

… Atomic Energy Agency to the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine on March 29, 2023. Ukrainian Energy Minister …

Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is falling apart, and the world is ignoring the danger

Malcontent News

… Nuclear Power Plant before the war in morning light, looking. Share; Tweet. [WBHG 24 News] – The latest reports from the International Atomic Energy …t

Nuclear War

NEWS

The 1960 Election and the Nuclear War that Might Have Happened – Politico

Politico

… nuclear war. The race between Kennedy and Nixon — each a generation younger than outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower — had been tight all year …

Putin Ally Issues Stark Warning on How ‘Big War‘ With NATO Will Begin – Newsweek

Newsweek

Putin ally suggests moving to nuclear war · Ex-Russian president suggests Japanese officials commit suicide. Elsewhere, Russian foreign ministry …

Ukraine Emerges as Battleground in US-Russia Nuclear Contest – Newsweek

Newsweek

A pivotal nuclear showdown is simmering behind Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, as Kyiv pushes its international partners—primarily the U.S.—to …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is falling apart, and the world is ignoring the danger

Malcontent News

Since the occupation, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant has lost all external power eight times, forced to rely on onsite diesel-powered emergency …

Holtec announces novel combined nuclear/solar power plant design: CSNP

Green Car Congress

… emergency recovery capability to the nuclear plant qualifying it for the moniker “walk away safe.” The energy contribution of the sun to the power …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

North Korea’s Rising Nuclear Threat: An Analysis – Medriva

Medriva

North Korea’s Rising Nuclear Threat: An Analysis … This suggests that while there are potential risks for limited military provocation, the threats of …

A fourth war lurks | Opinion – EL PAÍS English

EL PAÍS English

This is taking place amid the heat of the North’s artillery maneuvers, nuclear threats and ballistic missile tests over South Korean waters, one of …

Disinformation is humanity’s most immediate threat – New Age

New Age

NUCLEAR WAR? CLIMATE COLLAPSE? NO WORRIES. Disinformation is humanity’s most immediate threat. by Eve Ottenberg | Published: 00:00, Feb 04,2024.