“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity” ~llaw
Apr 11, 2025
Illustration by Edmon de Haro for POLITICO
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY and the GLOBAL RISKS & CONSEQUENCES TOMORROW
In My Opinion:
The question is Trump Fears Nuclear Weapons. So Why Is He Making Them More Popular ~ Politico.
This is a more than a legitimate question and needs some serious answers. Perhaps he is unable to evaluate reality, or maybe he is suffering from dementia (as many of us have surmised), or is he just egotistical and believes that no one understands such important situations than he does. Whatever the reasons for his often ignorant and/or wrong decisions is a huge worry to the entire planet. So we are seeing many European countries and others making plans to build their own nuclear arsenals because America is walking away from helping to protect them (and us) with our own nuclear arsenal that we have formerly agreed to share if necessary. Today there just 9 nuclear armed countries. If America doesn’t continue to support other NATO, The Middle East, and other countries, the nuclear armed countries could easily double or even triple. So that is just one more of our dangerous dilemmas with the attitude and thinking of Donald Trump.
Tomorrow begins a very important conference with perhaps negative results concerning a possible agreement between the USA and Iran regarding control of Iran’s nuclear future. Iran doesn’t want to be “bombed”, of course, as Trump has loudly threatened, if they fail to accept the stipulations of America’s demands. Their leaders have said as of yesterday and today that they will do their best to pacify Trump and sign on to his so-called “deal”.
To my way of thinking, Trump’s way of thinking and his constant braggadocio attitude of superiority is100% wrong because polite political discussion of such international meetings should be professionally courteous — amicable but serious — showing respect for both party’s issues, wishes, reasoning, and hopes rather than a boisterous threat of war for days before the two countries even have a chance to sit down at the conference table. The cool, calm, and collected party at this conference seems to be Iran: Iran says it will give U.S. talks about nuclear plans a “genuine chance”.
We shall see . . . ~llaw
Illustration by Edmon de Haro for POLITICO
Trump’s Coming Nuclear Age
Trump Fears Nuclear Weapons. So Why Is He Making Them More Popular? – POLITICO
The threat of U.S. withdrawal has prompted countries around the world — from Germany to South Korea — to talk about building their own nuclear arsenals.
By Michael Hirsh
04/11/2025 10:00 AM EDT
- Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for POLITICO Magazine.
Donald Trump has been obsessed with preventing a nuclear holocaust since he was a bumptious boy builder back in the 1980s. Back then Trump reportedly proposed, with typical grandiosity, that if President Ronald Reagan appointed him “plenipotentiary ambassador” he would end the Cold War “within one hour.”
Since then, Trump has rarely stopped talking about mitigating the danger of nuclear weapons. In his first presidential term, shortly before heading off to what would become an infamous 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump called nukes “the biggest problem in the world” and summed up for reporters what he hoped to accomplish: “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.” Trump has repeatedly sounded the theme in his second term as well, warning over and over of “World War III.” In mid-February he declared: “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many.”
So it’s more than a little curious to consider that, in less than three months as president, Trump has already set in motion the opposite trend: potentially the fastest and most dangerous acceleration of nuclear arms proliferation around the world since the early Cold War.
The new nuclear powers aren’t just the rogue nations that have long been the focus of U.S. concern, countries like Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.
Nor is there any evidence that in the flurry of activity marking what Trump has called “the most successful” start of any presidency in U.S. history, his administration has even begun reckoning with the implications of these seemingly contradictory policies.
A National Security Council spokesperson, James Hewitt, did not respond directly to questions about whether Trump means to open the way for allies to obtain nuclear weapons as they assume more of the defense burden in their regions. But Hewitt said: “President Trump has repeatedly warned that nuclear destruction is the biggest threat to humanity and is committed to a policy that promotes nuclear nonproliferation around the world.”
Nuclear experts, however, note that the administration has few personnel in place to address nuclear proliferation. Several nominees from the Defense and State Departments to the Nuclear National Security Administration are awaiting confirmation. At the National Security Council, the post of senior director for arms control hasn’t yet been named.
“I’ve heard it’s a pure ghost town,” said Matt Costlow, who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in Trump’s first term. “There’s just no one there. And the staff that is there is spread so thin it’s causing this paralysis.” As a result, he adds, “I don’t know that the Trump administration yet has a set view on the desirability of allies going nuclear. I think there’s a mix of views.”
Yet it’s clear that Trump’s signaling of a global drawdown of the U.S. defense umbrella has also produced an accelerated trend toward building — or at least considering deploying — nuclear weapons. Potential U.S. adversaries as well as allies say they are puzzled by the fact that no one in the Trump administration seems willing or able to grapple with the issue.
In Beijing, Chinese officials are growing worried that that “regional security is fragmenting and eventually they’ll have to deal with more nuclear or ‘nuclear-latent’ countries in Asia,” said Francesca Giovannini, head of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who met with Chinese officials in late March. The problem, she said, is that the Chinese “really have zero idea of who he will appoint for arms control dealings. The Trump people don’t have the expertise in place to make decisions.”
One senior official who was just confirmed by the Senate, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, has been a leading and often strident voice in pressing European and Asian allies to beef up their own defenses. Last year Colby told Yonhap that South Korea was going to have to take “primary, essentially overwhelming, responsibility” for its own defense and added that Washington should not sanction Seoul if it decides to go nuclear.
“It would not be rational to lose multiple American cities to just deal with North Korea,” Colby was quoted as saying. In his Senate testimony in March, Colby also said that Trump believes Taiwan needs to boost its defense spending from under 3 percent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product to deter a war with China — a hike that Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai called “impossible.”
Many U.S. allies now have a sense that Trump is abandoning the entire postwar global system and casting the world back into a vicious scramble for power in which the biggest powers get to dominate their regions, and the smaller countries fend for themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but said as much in a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, when he effectively conceded that Washington’s hegemonic global stature had been “an anomaly.”
“It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet,” Rubio said.
“The message coming from the U.S. is that Trump’s foreign policy is all about spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine. China can have Taiwan,” said Karl Friedhoff, an expert in East Asian security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
As a result, some national security experts say this could be turning into the most unstable period since the early Cold War — an unstable period that could have a lot more nukes in a lot more places.
“People outside the U.S. see this more clearly,” Friedhoff added.
Nuclear Threats Go Local
The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the 20th century.
For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the air, ground or sea. The destructive power of those weapons led the two nations to conclude a series of arms control agreements that eventually reduced the size of those arsenals.
And in contrast to the Trump administration’s seemingly laissez-faire approach to arms control — in his first term Trump abandoned several nuclear-related pacts, including the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — his predecessors in the Oval Office going back to the 1950s worked hard to prevent the appearance of new nuclear states. Throughout the Cold War and well afterward Washington led an intense campaign to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
During the 1950s and 1960s, “from 30 to 40 countries started nuclear energy programs with an eye to actual military applications,” said Brad Roberts, director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Inspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pushed hard for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was signed in 1970 has since been a cornerstone of global nuclear non-proliferation and to which 191 nations are signatories.
Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a concern that the breakup of the Soviet Union would result in loose nukes and newly independent post-Soviet states being armed with nuclear weapons. As a result, three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — were pressured into relinquishing the weapons stationed on their territories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton made an anguished plea to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test a bomb; after Sharif refused, Clinton imposed sanctions. Finally, in the mid-90s the Clinton administration pushed successfully to extend the NPT from 25 years to an indefinite term. Among the nations that ultimately gave up active nuclear weapons programs: South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Italy, Yugoslavia, Switzerland and Australia.
Today, largely as a result of all this frenetic diplomacy led by Washington, there are just nine nuclear powers in the world, as there have been for decades: America, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and most recently, North Korea.
But some of those nations that surrendered programs are now rethinking those decisions, along with some new nuclear wannabes. What Trump will do about this, again, remains a large question mark. When Trump talks about “denuclearizing,” he tends to focus on the first three countries on that list, which still have the largest arsenals, and he talks about nuclear arms control as if it’s still something that the leaders of superpowers can decide among themselves.
Yet increasingly, nuclear weapons are being sought by countries that aren’t global superpowers but instead face threats from neighbors or regional rivals, such as Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East. That means the nuclear equation is increasingly a region-by-region strategic puzzle with global ramifications.
Here’s some of what that looks like.
Europe
In Germany — a country where even discussing the bomb used to be a political third rail — the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, didn’t rule out the idea of developing one in a March interview. Merz also said Berlin should start talks about expanding the French and British nuclear deterrents to Europe, and he suggested Germany may finally be ready to go along with France’s on-again, off-again push for strategic autonomy from the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella; on March 18 he said France will deploy its own Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035.
And in Poland, a NATO frontline nation, Prime Minister Donald Tusk in March became that country’s first leader to hint at going nuclear, saying in a speech his nation should “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” He also suggested that Ukraine made a mistake by giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, leaving itself vulnerable to Russia.
As for Ukraine, which feels threatened with abandonment by Washington in the face of Russia’s aggression, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has openly talked about reestablishing a nuclear deterrent. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will be in NATO,” Zelenskyy declared last October.
According to Ukrainian news reports, Zelenskyy said that, before the U.S. election in November, Trump told him during a meeting, “‘Your reasoning is fair.” Trump officials have since declared flatly that Ukraine will not be joining NATO.
“Say you’re Zelenskyy and you’re being forced into unsatisfactory peace with Russia without good security guarantees, what’s your best bet?” said Daniel Serwer of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Could the Ukrainians technically do this? Sure. Look what they’ve done driving the war. They know their business. They’ve handled a lot of nuclear material. They have good physicists and really good engineers. It’s not beyond Polish, German, Japanese or Taiwanese capabilities either.”
And in the long run a French guarantee of extended nuclear deterrence would not suffice for many European states. “Would the Poles see it as credible? Not a chance. It’s not likely the Germans would either,” said Roberts, who foresees a future of new regional groupings of nuclearized states, including the Nordic countries.
Middle East
In the Middle East, experts believe Iran has been backed into a strategic corner since Israel decimated its proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that its leaders are now more motivated than ever to build a bomb.
In his first term, Trump withdrew from an agreement the Obama administration and its partners had negotiated with the Iranian regime that froze its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. Since Trump ended that accord, Iran has raced to develop its program, and current assessments estimate that Iran is close to producing weapons-grade uranium and is only months, not years, away from completing a nuclear bomb.
Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have indicated they would duplicate Iranian nuclear capabilities if Tehran got a bomb. Turkey will begin operating its Russia-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — its first — this year. And numerous reports over the years have indicated that the Saudis may have a secret diplomatic understanding with Pakistan under which Riyadh could quickly obtain a nuclear weapon from Islamabad, which developed its own bomb in the 1990s with Saudi financial backing. (Saudi Arabia denies such an understanding.)
Trump is now seeking to reopen nuclear talks with Iran, vowing that the program must be completely dismantled. Iran has given mixed signals about how eager it is to reach an agreement. Representatives of both nations are set to hold their first, tentative meeting on Saturday in Oman.
All this is taking place as the region is more unstable than it has been in decades following the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, and concerns are now growing that a new Mideast war is imminent. The United States and Israel have threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could further destabilize the region. And nations that formerly dabbled in nuclear programs around the world, even Brazil, “are watching these developments very closely,” Roberts said.
East Asia
The Trump administration’s nuclear policy toward the Indo-Pacific is less clear, at least as of now. In contrast to his stunning rebuke of European allies in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Japan as an “indispensable partner in deterring Communist Chinese military aggression” during a visit to Tokyo in late March.
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But since his first administration, Trump and senior defense officials also have been pushing Asian allies hard to build up their own defenses. As a result, in South Korea and even Japan — where building a bomb was once unthinkable after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — there is a new willingness to embrace nuclear weapons in some form.
“The nuclear debate is still taboo in Japanese society, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we’ve seen a total wake-up call in Japan about what kind of additional military power to possess,” said Junjiro Shida, a national security expert at Meio University on Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed.
On March 7, in what has become a typical Trump trope about U.S. allies taking advantage of U.S. generosity, the president accused Japan of similar freeloading. “We have a great relationship with Japan, but we have an interesting deal with Japan that we have to protect them, but they don’t have to protect us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “And by the way, they make a fortune with us economically. … I actually ask, ‘Who makes these deals?’”
As a result of all this U.S. pressure, Shida said the new Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is embracing former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s call for “nuclear sharing”— diplomatic code for permitting nuclear missiles to be stationed on its soil for the first time. In a statement last fall, Ishiba proposed an “Asian version of NATO” that must “specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”
South Korean politicians have gone further. In January — a week before Trump’s inauguration — South Korea’s politically embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said for the first time that his country might consider building nuclear weapons in the face of mounting threats from nuclearized North Korea. Yoon has since been ousted after being impeached for declaring martial law last year. But even his likely successor, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea — which once stoutly opposed nukes — has not ruled this out.
“Since Yoon mentioned it there has not been one politician from the progressive side who’s laid out why Korea doesn’t need a nuclear weapon,” Friedhoff said.
As in Japan, the debate in Korea stops just short of a full-on endorsement of a bomb. South Korean politicians prefer to speak of a policy of “nuclear latency” — which effectively means becoming a threshold state that could swiftly build nukes if needed.
But Japan and South Korea, longtime rivals, are also watching each other closely and a move to go nuclear by one could provoke the other. “South Korean politicians and academics worry that Japan has more capability to develop nuclear weapons because Japan has so much plutonium,” thanks to its 64 nuclear power plants, Shida said.
Even in Taiwan — which is under constant threat of Chinese invasion but has been pressured by Washington to remain non-nuclear — there may be renewed interest in moving to nuclear weapons. Twice in the past the Taiwanese have been cited by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency for suspicious dabbling in fissile material. And as elsewhere, the Trump administration is pushing Taipei hard to take up more of its own defense.
Spheres of Influence
There is still a very long road, however, from discussions about building a bomb to getting it done.
The reason? “Going nuclear is one of the most politically dangerous and costly moves any country can make,” Harvard’s Giovannini said. “It’s not like one day is zero day and the next day you’re nuclear. You have to create an infrastructure and remove yourself from the NPT,” or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As North Korea has discovered, huge stigmas and often sanctions attach to any country that withdraws from the NPT.
But it’s Washington that has led efforts to impose sanctions and isolation on NPT violators. So much will depend on what signals the Trump administration sends to its allies in the coming months about how independent it wants them to become on defense, and how comfortable the administration is with nuclear weapons being part of that mix. “There continues to be a lack of clarity about how they’re going to direct their efforts on this,” said Mark Melamed of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Experts said the uncertainties created by Trump have turbo-charged discussions already underway in an increasingly volatile global environment.
“There is growing doubt among allies and partners about whether the United States will meet its defense commitments when the chips are down,” said Eric Brewer, the former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “But there are a lot of other systemic factors driving countries to talk about developing nuclear weapons. One is the deteriorating regional security environments. In Europe, [you have] Russia’s growing nuclear arsenal and threat. In Asia you have the growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East you have Iran at the nuclear threshold. The other factor is the absence of cooperation among great powers. During the Cold War we had U.S.-Soviet cooperation on non-proliferation. Now you have Russia actively aiding the missile if not nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.”
Putin is mainly responsible for bringing back the nuclear threat, beginning with his “escalate to de-escalate” policy — that is, threatening nuclear war to prevent conflicts from getting worse. Humiliated by the fierce Ukrainian resistance to his invasion, Putin has also repeatedly hinted that he could use nukes in that conflict, even announcing that he was moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus and suspending participation in the New START treaty, Moscow’s last major arms control pact with Washington.
China is also destabilizing the nuclear status quo. In the past few years, satellite photos have revealed China’s dramatic — and highly secret — nuclear buildup, which may include as many as 300 new missile silos. China’s nuclear arsenal now amounts to about 600 operational nuclear warheads as Beijing moves swiftly to counter the U.S. stockpile of about 3,700 warheads, the Federation of American Scientists reported in March.
And the United States isn’t sitting still, either. Under both Trump and Biden, Washington has been consistently upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including via developing the country’s first new nuclear warhead, the W93, in 40 years; a B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb; 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles; a fleet of nuclear-armed strategic submarines; and a new strategic bomber (the B-21) and air-launched cruise missile.
All this means that for war planners worldwide, nuclear calculations have once again become part of the conventional war equation. During the Cold War, the idea of nuclear war simply meant mutually assured destruction, or MAD, and the major powers created massive arsenals that no other nation could think of matching.
Today, from the Middle East to Europe and the Indo-Pacific, we live “in a world full of missiles that can be very precise about their delivery” and tipped with new types of lower-yield nukes known as “tactical” weapons, said Becca Wasser, a strategist at the Center for a New American Security. “We’ve seen an increased push toward the integration of conventional and nuclear war plans.”
Trump thus has no choice but to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and, at the same time, badger U.S. allies about beefing up their defenses.
“A lot of it comes down to our allies responding to a renewed nuclear threat regionally,” Costlow said. “That sort of went away at the end of the Cold War. We removed a lot of our regional nuclear weapons that we deployed in Europe and Asia. So it’s lot harder for us to respond quickly as Russia and China change. Russia has this enormous advantage in regional nuclear weapons. China, the same thing. We don’t have any of those.”
Trump’s Nuclear Opportunity
Yet some arms control experts say there may be cause for hope that Trump could also relieve some of the nuclear tension. They suggest that even as Trump has appeared eager to appease Putin, he has a kind of “Nixon goes to China” credibility in seeking to stabilize relations with Russia and China — perhaps even driving a partial wedge between them.
“There is quite a weird optimism within the nuclear community about Trump,” Harvard’s Giovannini said. “There is an idea that he has a political space that no other president before him had to make a good deal with Russia, China and Iran.” Giovannini, who confers frequently with Chinese officials, added that China had favored Trump over Kamala Harris in the U.S. election because “he seems to have more political space to compromise.”
In France, meanwhile, the government believes the rest of Europe is finally going along with the vision of partial autonomy from Washington that Charles De Gaulle laid out decades ago. And some European diplomats believe this could help re-stabilize the fraught transatlantic relationship. “There is a kind of convergence between the French vision and Trump’s vision of having Europeans taking responsibility for their own security,” said one European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Almost everybody in Europe now thinks that’s the right path.”
In late January, Trump told the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos by video that he’s very concerned about nuclear arms proliferation and he wants to start up talks with China and Russia, saying, “So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” Those talks have not gotten underway.
As Costlow put it, Trump faces a vastly complex challenge of supplying America’s “extended deterrence” — its global nuclear defense umbrella — to allies in the face of “opportunistic and coordinated aggression between Russia and China in two different theaters,” Europe and Asia. Trump’s defenders argue that he has already had success in bullying allies from Germany to Taiwan into investing more in defense against Beijing and Moscow.
And mainly what’s happening now in countries like Germany and South Korea is “nuclear signaling,” Wasser said. Countries are merely “demonstrating a willingness to pursue nuclear capability if that’s what’s required.”
In recent months the national security community in Seoul was extremely disturbed when Hegseth acknowledged North Korea as a “nuclear power” in a statement before his confirmation hearing as defense secretary.
“What makes the South Koreans nervous is the fear that we wouldn’t risk San Francisco to save Seoul,” said Robert Soofer, Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy.
But even now “the South Koreans would rather put pressure on the U.S. to help more than embarking on a costly nuclear strategy,” argued Giovannini. The challenge for Ukraine would be similar, she added. “There is no infrastructure in Ukraine at the moment that would lead to a bomb. And for them the process of nuclearization is very risky. Because the Russians are not just going to stand by.”
For key U.S. allies still haunted by World War II, like Japan and Germany, any nuclear debate will take years to play out. “Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy’ is very strong, partly because it is the only country to have experienced atomic bombings,” said Kazuhiro Maeshima, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Sophia University. “This is what makes it different from South Korea, where the argument for nuclear weapons is growing due to North Korea’s nuclear development. If the discussion of Japan’s nuclear armament grows, it is likely to cause a kind of panic in Japan.”
In Germany, too, the public outcry would be enormous — and cause a kind of existential crisis within the European Union. “Germany would certainly prefer to maintain the current nuclear order with the U.S.,” said Claudia Major, a national security expert at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “Any change means less security and stability for all involved. Taking a unilateral decision to develop a German bomb would signal our neighbors: ‘We don’t care about you; we gave up on European defense.’ It would call into question traditional German policies (like support for the NPT) and could encourage worldwide proliferation.”
But as Costlow and others point, just a willingness to broach the prospect of going nuclear could be something of a Pandora’s Box.
“I compare it to uranium enrichment: The first 20 percent is actually the hardest hurdle to overcome. The last 80 percent doesn’t take much time,” Costlow said. “For some of these countries just the fact that they’re now talking about becoming a potential nuclear state is the toughest hurdle.”
And, he added, they’re starting to clear it.
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TODAY’s NUCLEAR WORLD’s NEWS DIGEST, Friday, (04/11/2025)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Amid deep mistrust, U.S. and Iran try to work out a nuclear deal | Iowa Public Radio
Iowa Public Radio
All Things Considered. Iowa Public Radio News. All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:00 PM The Daily. 0:00. 0:00. All Things Considered. Iowa Public Radio …
The imperative of augmenting US theater nuclear forces – Atlantic Council
Atlantic Council
… all of its theater nuclear forces. The challenge of compensating for … A theater nuclear force that is not survivable is not a credible deterrent to …
Atomic Age Goes Smaller: Austin Company Unveils Next-Generation Nuclear Power Plant
Pulitzer Center
Last year, Gov. Abbott announced a focus on expanding two things: nuclear energy and the electric grid. … By building all the components to the …
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Nuclear Energy Is Having a Moment, Again – UT Austin News
UT Austin News – University of Texas at Austin
Haas rejects the question of whether molten salt reactors would make nuclear power safe, because he says it always has been safe. “It’s always been …
States look to smaller advanced nuclear reactors for power needs – Fox Business
Fox Business
Whoops! We couldn’t access this Tweet. The Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office would “promote the development of advanced nuclear reactor projects …
Nuclear Power Is Back. And This Time, AI Can Help Manage the Reactors. – WSJ
WSJ
A control room simulator at the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert, Mich. The average age of nuclear power plants in the U.S. is …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
The power industry must oppose Trump’s coal bailout … again – Utility Dive
Utility Dive
… emergencies allows DOE to subsidize 50-year old power plants cannot survive scrutiny. … Read More in Generation. Concrete cooling tower nuclear ..
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Trump’s Coming Nuclear Age – POLITICO
Politico
Nuclear Threats Go Local. The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the .
Iran warns it could expel UN nuclear inspectors ahead of US talks – Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
… nuclear watchdog inspectors in response to “external threats”. “The continuation of external threats and Iran being in a state of military attack …
Iran says it will give US talks about nuclear plans a ‘genuine chance’ | Reuters
Reuters
Israel regards Iran’s nuclear programme as existential threat. DUBAI, April 11 (Reuters) – Iran said on Friday it was giving high-level nuclear …
Nuclear War
NEWS
Iran says it will give US talks about nuclear plans a ‘genuine chance’ | Reuters
Reuters
Israel and Hamas at War · Japan · Middle East · Ukraine and Russia at War … DUBAI, April 11 (Reuters) – Iran said on Friday it was giving high-level …
Trump Fears Nuclear Weapons. So Why Is He Making Them More Popular? – POLITICO
Politico
For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the …
Europeans sidelined in US-Iran nuclear talks despite holding key card | Reuters
Reuters
… nuclear achievements exhibition in Tehran, Iran April 9, 2025. Iran’s … war in Ukraine, where Washington has begun direct talks with Moscow …
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
‘It was amazing’: Scientists discover ash from 2 mystery volcanic eruptions in Wyoming
Live Science
The Yellowstone volcano is known to have produced two supereruptions before the Lava Creek Tuff eruption — the Mesa Falls Tuff eruption 1.3 million …
Ancient Yellowstone supervolcano study highlights rhinos – Billings Gazette
Billings Gazette
Entombed at the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, teeth from the rhino fossils were analyzed by researchers at the University of …
Inside the supervolcano eruption that could kill 90000 people – US News
Daily Express US
One of the most extensively studied and potentially dangerous supervolcanoes today is located in the United States: the Yellowstone Caldera in …
IAEA Weekly News
11 April 2025
Read the top news and updates published on IAEA.org this week.
11 April 2025
IAEA Director General Visits China to Strengthen Cooperation
China is making remarkable progress in nuclear energy and is a strong supporter of the IAEA’s mission to ensure that nuclear technology serves peace and development, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said while meeting China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. Read more →
10 April 2025
Update 285 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has carried out five deliveries of equipment and other technical assistance over the past week as it remains fully focused on helping to prevent a nuclear accident during the military conflict in Ukraine, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said today. Read more →
9 April 2025
What is Food Irradiation and Why is it Important?
Food irradiation is a gentle, non-invasive technique that uses radiation to keep food fresh and safe to eat. It eliminates microbes and control insects and other pests while preserving the nutritional content, flavour and overall quality of food. Read more →
8 April 2025
Sufficient Uranium Resources Exist, However Investments Needed to Sustain High Nuclear Energy Growth
Sufficient uranium resources exist to support both the continued use of nuclear power and its significant growth through 2050 and beyond. However, timely investments in new exploration, mining operations and processing techniques will be essential to ensure that uranium becomes available to the market when needed. Read more →
7 April 2025
Conference on Radiation Applications: From Planes and Plastics to Climate Change and Culture
Experts in the use of radiation technologies are gathering in Vienna to discuss innovative applications in aeronautics, recycling, climate monitoring and more. Read more →