This situation in the following article is extremely serious because it is the grid system to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant rather than the plant itself creating such a situation that could cause such a huge nuclear power plant with six nuclear reactors to lose power and melt down, releasing uncontrolled nuclear radiation to not just Ukraine, but also a huge portion of European populated areas. The single grid system, as pointed out in the article below, is vital to keeping one or more or possibly all of the reactors to melt down, (having no backup other than perhaps — unmentioned in the article — one or more inadequate diesel-powered generators) which, if so, would, of course, be catastrophic . . .
This situation is a part of the potential failing, among other system failures, of grid system inadequacies that could easily occur as portrayed in my in-progress novel that I am writing daily to be serialized bi-weekly right here on my nightly Post “LLAW’s All Things Nuclear”. The 2nd half of the introductory Prologue to this dystopian novel, in progress, I have titled “El Nuclear Diablo” will be Posted on the evening of 02/28/2024. The 1st part of the Prologue was Posted on #540 (02/14/2024) if you would like to refer back to the beginning of the novel. ~llaw
Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant’s supply line damaged in Russian shelling: Ukraine
Emergency, restoration work being conducted depending on security situation, with permission of Ukrainian army due to ongoing military operations, says power grid operator
Burc Eruygur |21.02.2024 – Update : 21.02.2024
ISTANBUL
Ukraine on Wednesday said the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant’s energy supply line was damaged due to shelling by Russian forces.
“After another attack by the Russians, the line that provided the energy supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear station was damaged,” Ukraine’s power grid operator Ukrenergo said in a statement.
The statement said the operator’s specialists established the damage inflicted and are carrying out emergency and restoration work — but depending on the security situation and with the permission of the Ukrainian army due to ongoing military operations in the area.
It further said the connection between the plant and Ukraine’s energy system is currently maintained by only one power line.
“The total bandwidth of high-voltage networks of ‘Ukrenergo’ is sufficient to cover the available demand,” the statement also said.
It added that a total of 358 settlements remain without electricity in the morning due to the conflict and other reasons.
Russian authorities have not yet commented on the shelling.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the biggest in Europe and among the 10 largest in the world, has been under Russian control since early 2022.
Since then, fears of a nuclear catastrophe have persisted as both Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of shelling near the plant.
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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:
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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 tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
… 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Closed …
All I have to say is that I don’t think this collaboration study on AI is going to prevent or save us from making mistakes before, during, or after the study that are crucial to ‘all things nuclear’, especially nuclear power plants, and that reality tells us that if AI makes a mistake along the way, it doesn’t give a damn. No remorse means a definite inability to correct. That is my fear, but the study is a five-year plan, which is a good thing. But what is the potential of an unrepairable error during the life of the study? Read the article . . . ~llaw
IAEA Designates First Collaborating Centre on Artificial Intelligence for Nuclear Power
IAEA Designates First Collaborating Centre on Artificial Intelligence for Nuclear Power
20 Feb 2024
Alexei Miassoedov, Department of Nuclear Energy
Sara Kouchehbagh, Department of Nuclear Energy
AI offers the potential to optimize numerous processes within nuclear power plants. (Photo: Adobe Stock).
The IAEA has designated the Center for Science of Information at Purdue University in the United States of America as the first IAEA Collaborating Centre to support the Agency’s activities on artificial intelligence (AI) for nuclear power applications, including reactor design, plant operations, and training and education.
Thanks to rapid progress in computational resources and data analysis tools, the nuclear industry has already started to benefit from AI, including with machine learning techniques that can streamline nuclear power plant operations and maintenance. AI is also supporting the development of advanced nuclear power technologies such as small modular reactors (SMRs).
“With more and more countries looking to nuclear energy to address climate change and sustainable development, this Collaborating Centre will provide much needed support for our Member States in using AI to advance the innovation driving the global nuclear sector,” said Mikhail Chudakov, IAEA Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Nuclear Energy.
The five-year Collaborating Centre agreement will support IAEA programmatic activities and knowledge sharing on advancements and innovation in AI for nuclear power. This includes Agency initiatives on benchmark exercises for developing confidence and community-wide acceptance of Al technology for nuclear power, establishing a “benchmarking hub” for coordination and data management, as well as other activities relevant to the development and assessment of Al technologies in collaboration with IAEA Member States.
AI offers the potential to optimize numerous processes within nuclear power plants. It could be used to bolster efficiency and ensure a steady electricity supply by adjusting power generation based on real-time data, including consumer demand, weather and equipment performance. Automation using robotics and AI systems could handle routine tasks, reducing the need for human input. AI could also improve fuel efficiency and maximize the energy output of reactors.
“This Collaborating Centre will help build confidence in AI applications for high consequence systems, such as nuclear reactors. Without reliable quantification, the nuclear community’s ability to realize the potential of AI will be diminished and this will negatively impact its ability to remain competitive in the energy market,” said Hany Abdel-Khalik, Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Center for Science of Information, which advances information theory through collaborative research and teaching.
“AI may bring significant advancements to the nuclear power sector, enhancing both efficiency and sustainability,” said Tatjana Jevremovic, an expert with the IAEA’s Nuclear Power Technology Development Section.
The Collaborating Centre agreement is part of recent IAEA efforts to strengthen support to countries interested in using AI for nuclear science and technology. A 2022 IAEA publication reviewed the challenges and priorities for future AI activities, including those relevant to nuclear power as well as nuclear sciences and applications, among others. The IAEA’s International Network on Innovation to Support Operating Nuclear Power Plants (ISOP) is examining the regulatory and technical aspects of AI deployment. Several coordinated research projects related to AI are underway, with one set to launch on how AI and other innovative technologies proposed for SMRs can be secured.
The agreement comes after the Agency recently designated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center as the first Collaborating Centre focused on accelerating fusion research, with an emphasis on AI applications to advance the IAEA’s AI for Fusion initiative.
IAEA Collaborating Centres
To promote the peaceful use of nuclear technologies, the IAEA collaborates with designated institutions around the world. Through the Collaborating Centres network, these organizations in Member States can assist the IAEA by undertaking original research and development and training relating to nuclear science, technologies and their safe and secure applications. With the newly designated Center for Science of Information at Purdue University Collaborating Centre, there are now 73 active Collaborating Centres worldwide.
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
… nuclear attack for the real thing. … Be sure to get the latest news about the U.S. military, as well as critical info about how to join and all the …
… about a global nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and … All of the Air Force’s nuclear programs are centrally managed by the Air Force Nuclear …
I have only vaguely mentioned or discussed Nuclear EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse), but YouTube has an article named “All Things Solar” today, reminding me of my own interest in nuclear EMP. So I have posted a more thorough depiction here that will help us all to understand how EMP works and how gravely serious such attacks (at various altitudes) could be on our country or any country, although the article uses the possible USA example demonstrating the impact of a super-EMP (or HEMP) and how they are potentially extremely serious and of unimaginably long-term destructive power.
Of considerable interest to me is EMP’s relationship to nuclear power plants, as you will learn if you follow my “El Nuclear Diablo” fictional episodes to be posted bi-weekly here on LLAW’s “All Things Nuclear.” My opening Prologue, already partly posted, makes unspecific allusions to what EMP could do to not only the USA, but around the world. ~llaw
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The Threat of Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse to Critical Infrastructure
If a large enough percentage of infrastructure sectors were damaged then our recovery from a broad EMP attack would take years if not decades.
Many consider an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States, from an atmospheric nuclear warhead detonation, to be a black swan event – a high-impact, unpredictable event. But we have known about the threat of an EMP attack since early atmospheric testing in the early 1960s. Furthermore, it seems even more reasonable today that our adversaries may choose to cripple the U.S. in a fatal first punch rather than engage the U.S. in a war of attrition. EMP is a line-of-sight phenomenon associated with the detonation of a nuclear warhead and the pulse it emanates can bridge the integrated circuitry of electronic components, especially those connected to long lead conductors like antennas, transmission lines, or internal building wiring, or something as simple as the electrical cord on an appliance plugged into the wall. The bridging, or electrical arcing across integrated circuity, can disrupt the usage of the electronic component requiring it to be cycled or restarted, or the bridging can burn out the circuitry or chip thus destroying the function of the electronic component.
The fact that EMP effects can cause extensive damage and destruction to critical infrastructure over large areas is well understood and an asymmetric means an adversary can employ to cause nationwide damage. We have known the effects of EMP on critical infrastructure for over 60 years. The EMP threat to the U.S. is less a black swan event and more like an ostrich event, where the U.S. knows about the threat and the rising risk but has its proverbial head in the sand out of fear instead of taking useful action.
The U.S., like many modern societies, has become increasingly reliant on highly interdependent infrastructure sectors that use electronic components with integrated circuitry. Just think how pervasive electronic devices have become within our everyday lives: trucks, cars, trains, planes, smartphones, radio, television, satellites, landlines, heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, freezers, television, and medical equipment. And it’s becoming even more worrisome as modern societies will be turning toward artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to solve growing complex societal problems and aid human decision making. Our dependence on electronics and its integrated circuitry has made the U.S. highly vulnerable to the EMP effects of a nuclear detonation. This may be why our adversaries, especially those unable to project conventional warfighting, may turn toward EMP effects of a nuclear warhead to deliver a fatal punch to the U.S.
The Mechanics of EMP
The largest EMP threat to critical infrastructure of a modern society is generated by a nuclear warhead denotation in the mid- to upper-stratosphere or approximately 20-30 miles above the earth’s surface, which is referred to as a High-Altitude EMP (HEMP).[i] A HEMP occurs when a nuclear detonation generates an intense burst of gamma radiation which radiates outwards from the nuclear detonation source. The gamma rays that radiate downward toward the earth’s surface will eventually encounter a point where the atmospheric density rapidly increases, and the gamma rays will begin to interact with air molecules.[ii] This is known as the deposition region, and it is here that the gamma rays produce Compton electrons and positive ions that continue to radiate away from the nuclear detonation source. These electrons radiate at a much higher velocity than the positive ions due to their lower mass and this charge displacement results in a current flow toward the deposition region followed by a current flow away from the deposition region as the charged particles begin to recombine.[iii] It is this phenomenon that generates the EMP effects, which can produce an average pulse of up to 50,000 volts/meter.[iv] The Compton electrons generated by gamma radiation in the deposition region are deflected by the earth’s magnetic field and therefore the area of maximum effect on the earth’s surface is highly dependent upon weapon yield, orientation, and at what latitude above the earth the weapon is detonated.
HEMP effects from a nuclear detonation have little impact to humans on the Earth’s surface, however, that is contrasted by a near surface detonation of a nuclear weapon whose primary damage mechanism is air blast, thermal radiation, ionizing radiation, and radioactive fallout that can have devastating effects on humans near and far away from the ground burst. The EMP generated by a nuclear weapon ground burst is generally of little significance because the charged particles can quickly recombine through the ground, which is a good electrical conductor. In addition, the gamma rays radiating upwards will not affect infrastructure on the ground, which will be vaporized or burned by thermal radiation. Therefore, the area affected by the EMP generally will not radiate past the moderate damage zone where most infrastructure is destroyed by air blast and thermal radiation anyway, resulting in a building blow down effect and ignited firestorms, respectively.[vi] The exception to this is if a ground burst and its EMP is transmitted along an existing electrical conductor near ground zero, which can damage infrastructure outside the moderate damage zone. Basically, EMP is a line-of-sight phenomenon, limited by the Earth’s curvature and ground topography. However, the higher in the atmosphere a nuclear weapon is detonated the greater the reach of regional or nationwide EMP effects on electronic components.
Likely Effects from an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack
EMP damage to the energy infrastructure sector, specifically the electrical grid, would have the greatest negative impact to our modern society because all other critical infrastructure sectors are dependent on electricity. Areas within our society most dependent on electricity include telecommunication, banking and finance, petroleum and natural gas, transportation, water, emergency services, space control, and continuity of government.[vii] Some of these key areas have backup electrical generation in the form of gas or diesel generators or batteries, but these are just temporary bridges until electricity is more widely restored. In the event of an EMP, the integrated circuitry of electronic components within the electrical grid will be damaged or destroyed causing cascading and escalating impacts to almost all other 15 infrastructure sectors.[viii] Our modern society, like many others, will break down very quickly within hours, days, and weeks.
The electrical grid is composed of power generation (coal-fired, natural gas, nuclear, etc.), transmission, and distribution infrastructure.[ix] The current and voltage induced on an electrical system by an EMP are directly proportional to the length of the electrical conductors connected to it.[x] As such, the large outdoor transmission towers and lines we try to ignore on our landscape could be our undoing as they are highly efficient at capturing EMP energy and transmitting it to its endpoints, which includes high-voltage transformers (HVTs). HVTs are often near power-generation plants and their role is to step up the voltage of the generated power at the expense of the current. Electrical power (measured in Watts) is defined as the product (multiplication) of voltage (measured in Volts) and current (measures in Amperes). As such, electrical power is most efficiently transmitted with lower loses by greatly increasing voltage through an HVT at the expense of current, because the amplification of current causes transmission lines to overheat which is directly correlated to much lower transmission efficiency. HVTs are massive and custom-designed machines built by hand thus requiring extensive labor. Consequently, the building of HVTs is often offshored to different vendors meaning the U.S. has a limited organic manufacturing capability.[xi] The obvious result is that if a large percentage of HVTs in the U.S. were destroyed by a HEMP, it would take months to years to replace them due to their custom designs, long-lead acquisition times, permitting, logistical, and transportation limitations. One argument is that the U.S. could develop that manufacturing capability to respond to a crisis, but the reality is that the response would be hampered by resource loses across almost every infrastructure sector and would be tantamount to changing a car tire while the car is engulfed in flames. In addition, a HEMP generated by a nuclear explosion at the right altitude could potentially damage a huge number of electrical components with integrated circuitry within line-of-site of the nuclear explosion. In fact, an estimated 70 percent of the electrical grid could be damaged from the HEMP of just one nuclear weapon.
A HEMP attack over the continental U.S. would be catastrophic because most Americans today live in a modern first-world society and do not possess the survival skills necessary to live in a world without electricity. The reality is the U.S. would likely collapse within weeks or months due to lack of potable water, disease, starvation, social unrest, violence, etc. Undoubtedly, the U.S. would immediately retaliate if it could attribute the EMP attack to a nation-state; regardless, the damage to the U.S. would be done, and the U.S. federal government would be completely overwhelmed with responding to an escalating domestic crisis and focused on the population’s basic survival needs rather than executing foreign policy.
In addition to the U.S. electrical infrastructure being a huge EMP concern, the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure is also vulnerable to HEMP. Telecommunications infrastructure includes telephone and wireless cell service, broadband internet and associated servers and routers, cable television, satellite communications ground stations, and all equipment associated with sending or receiving voice, data, or video messages.[xiii] Our ability to communicate during any kind of national emergency is vital; however, the telecommunications infrastructure is dependent upon the electrical infrastructure, so even if the communications systems themselves survived the EMP event there would be little functionality beyond the duration of the generator and battery backup systems. Furthermore, many Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, vital in many critical infrastructure sectors, are dependent on the communications infrastructure – and when communications fail, the SCADA systems and its operators would be blinded.
Some work has been done to protect aspects of U.S. critical infrastructure sectors through EMP simulators to test equipment, which revealed that not every component would be destroyed but that some would only require power cycling to start functioning normally again.[xv] However, looking at the high interdependencies of our electrical grid by all of the other 15 infrastructure sectors, if a large enough percentage of infrastructure sectors were damaged then our recovery from a broad EMP attack would take years if not decades. The result of a HEMP attack would be an inability to provide basic needs to the population such as potable water, non-perishable food, heating/cooling, and healthcare, which in turn would undoubtedly lead to violence over diminishing resources and eventual societal collapse.
Adversary EMP Capabilities
A HEMP attack on the U.S. is well within the capabilities of North Korea and other countries such as China and Russia. Multiple credible sources from South Korea, China, and Russia have stated that Russian designs for an enhanced EMP, or “Super EMP,” weapon have been leaked or acquired by North Korea.[xvi] Super EMP weapons are designed to produce more intense gamma radiation at the expense of a smaller nuclear explosion in order to enhance the HEMP effects generated in excess of 100,000 volts/meter, twice the standard of what U.S. military systems are designed to withstand.
An existing North Korean EMP threat may already be on orbit above the U.S. KMS-3 and KMS-4 are North American Aerospace Defense Command’s designated acronyms for North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-3 and Kwangmyongsong-4 satellites that were launched into orbit in 2013 and 2016, respectively. Based on the polar orbits and revisit time over the U.S., they could possibly have a sinister capability like a Super-EMP weapon. In addition, North Korea also possesses two Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) systems with sufficient payload capacity and range to deliver an EMP weapon in space over the continental U.S: the Hwasong-14 with a range of 10,000 km (6,200-plus miles) and the Hwasong-15 with a range of 13,000 km (8,000-plus miles).[xviii] Although these missile systems have not yet demonstrated the systems integration for warhead reentry and the accuracy required for precision strike on a U.S. city, they are more than accurate enough to deliver and detonate a nuclear warhead in space above the continental U.S. and the HEMP would be devastating. The fact that North Korea has not pursued integration testing and accuracy testing needed to destroy a U.S. city by a nuclear warhead is perhaps even more troubling as it may be an indication of a HEMP attack strategy versus a city destruction strategy. Future North Korea ICBM missile development programs will undoubtedly have greater range and payload capacity. Interestingly, a retaliatory U.S. attack on North Korea with a HEMP attack would have little effect since the country is highly agriculturally based and has a limited electrical grid. It has been traditionally viewed that North Korea would be unlikely to conduct such a HEMP attack unless under dire circumstances based on the influence of Russia and China; however, just recently North Korea has eliminated controls to allow it to lawfully use a nuclear attack as a preemptive strike.
Recommendations
A HEMP attack against the U.S. would cause cascading and escalating failures across multiple infrastructure sectors and would be far more devastating due to the high likelihood of societal collapse over a larger region than a nuclear ground detonation against a U.S. city or point-target. As such, U.S. national leadership should make it abundantly clear to our adversaries that any attempt to degrade or destroy U.S. critical infrastructure with a HEMP attack warrants a U.S. nuclear response. This type of deterrence is paramount to countering the emerging threat of Super EMP weapons that North Korea may be viewing as an advantageous asymmetric capability. An important part of this deterrence is demonstrating national resiliency. The key to minimizing the effects of HEMP is to institute systems that will minimize recovery times because replacing countless electronic components with more EMP-resistant ones in the U.S. electrical infrastructure sector is impractical.[xx] Consequently, enhancing the resiliency and recovery capacity of our critical infrastructure, but also demonstrating the government’s ability to provide a robust domestic response and recovery capability, would help serve as a HEMP attack deterrent on the U.S. The framework to take these actions already exists with the National Response Framework (NRF), National Incident Management System (NIMS), and Incident Command System (ICS) adopted nationwide in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.[xxi] U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) manages the CBRN Response Element (CRE), which is designed to provide Defense Support to Civil Authorities (DSCA) for Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) events. This domestic response capability is robust and could easily serve as the framework for an EMP response capability. The fact that the various military units assigned to the CRE are dispersed among 35 separate military installations ensures that large portions of the enterprise are still able to respond.
Most modern electronic devices today with integrated circuitry have some degree of shielding built in, but this shielding is intended to reduce or eliminate electromagnetic interference from other electronic devices. This existing shielding is not rated to withstand an EMP. Note that an EMP reaches a peak strength many magnitudes of times faster than a lightning strike, which in turn would defeat all common shielding or surge protection available to the general population.[xxii] The federal government should either mandate or incentivize the development of more resilient electronic components to handle this type of EMP energy within telecommunications, banking and finance, petroleum and natural gas, transportation, water, emergency services, space control, and continuity of government areas.[xxiii] This could be done by providing manufacturers additional tax exemptions if their systems meet a minimum specification of shielding to reduce the likelihood of total failure, which is possible depending on the distance from the EMP deposition region. For example, electrical components within line of sight of a nuclear-generated HEMP, but further away from the area primarily affected, will experience much weaker EMP than those areas directly underneath the deposition region and therefore could possibly still function if shielding is increased.[xxiv] Additionally, telecommunications companies can continue to replace long runs of copper wire used for broadband internet service with fiber-optic lines, which are highly resistant to the effects of EMP.[xxv] Moreover, removal of long runs of wire will likely result in reduced coupling of EMP effects on the entire system.
The key to any kind of disaster recovery is communication. As such, the U.S. government should consider continuing its funding of the Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) SHAred RESources (SHARES) High Frequency (HF) radio program. MARS is a Department of Defense (DOD) sponsored program that was started in 1925 and continues today with the mission of providing local, national, and international contingency communications capability using High Frequency (HF) radio.[xxvi] SHARES HF administered by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Coordinating Center for Communications (NCC), provides an additional means for national security and emergency preparedness (NS/EP) personnel to communicate critical information when other telecommunications infrastructure is inoperable.
Conclusion
North Korean military leadership probably knows that it will likely never achieve economic, defense, or nuclear parity with the U.S., but they likely see the possession of a HEMP and Super EMP weapons as an asymmetric alternative to an arms race they will never win. A HEMP or Super EMP weapon detonated above the U.S. can inflict an incredible amount of damage on U.S. critical infrastructure which the U.S. may not recover from based on the lack of current investment to harden our most critical infrastructure. U.S. policy makers must go beyond studying the HEMP threat and fund tangible hardening of electronic components across our infrastructure sectors starting with our electrical grid to increase our resiliency and reduce our recovery time if attacked. Such an investment would not only deter attacks of this nature but also protect the electrical grid from other known threats such as a coronal mass ejection from the sun within our solar system that aligned with the Earth’s orbit.
The authors are responsible for the content of this article. Their views expressed do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Intelligence University, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. Intelligence Community, U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are noYellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/19/2024):
(Note: Stories for categories ‘All Things Nuclear’ and ‘Nuclear Power’ arrived in two separated groups today. I have combined the articles into one group for each, so both of the categories have more that their usual three top stories . . . )
It got fried by an all-American space nuke called Starfish Prime. Starfish Prime was a megaton-range nuclear detonation 400 km above the Pacific, just …
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi attends a press conference, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine …
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi attends a press conference, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine …
A spokesperson for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation was not immediately available for comment. The IAEA warned at the end of 2023 that Tehran already …
Russian nuclear arsenal. Medvedev says the US and other NATO allies will be nuclear targets if the Kremlin loses the war in Ukraine and must give back …
The IAEA highlighted its medical assistance programme aimed at enabling operators and other personnel at Ukrainian nuclear power plants to have access …
The organisation has also declared operational a new emergency control room simulator for unit 1 at the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Concrete pouring …
… war. Aleksei A. Navalny’s suspicious … And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats …
Nuclear Blast Mushroom Cloud And Binary Code (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/18/2024)
I’ve been meaning to post more about the ‘troubled’ minds we have concerning AI as it applies to “All Things Nuclear”, but this one, although not as radical about the overwrought disposition of AI as most, is thorough and should help explain why so-called “experts” from all walks of life fear the very concept of Artificial Intelligence.
I have earlier in other media, voiced my opinion about AI this way: “We humans made this Internet stuff, algorithms and all, to help us communicate as a unified connected world of beings, not to individually create our own cleverness and feelings of superiority so that we are able to use these modern days of insecurity to further separate each of us one from another, which is what AI has turned out to mostly do and be. The worlds’ militaries are already using it to eventually justify why nuclear war is okay. That is pure insanity. And the AI ‘joke’ it tells is this: “If we’ve got it, why can’t we use it?” ~llaw
Does AI want to nuke us? We don’t know — and that could be more dangerous
Military AI use is coming. Researchers want to see safety come first
If human military leaders put robots in charge of our weapons systems, maybe artificial intelligence would fire a nuclear missile. Maybe not. Maybe it would explain its attack to us using perfectly sound logic — or maybe it would treat the script of “Star Wars” like international relations policy, and accord unhinged social media comments the same credibility as case law.
That’s the whole point of a new study on AI models and war games: AI is so uncertain right now that we risk catastrophic outcomes if globe-shakers like the United States Air Force cash in on the autonomous systems gold rush without understanding the limits of this tech.
The new paper, “Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making”, is still in preprint and awaiting peer review. But its authors — from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northeastern University, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative — found most AI models would choose to launch a nuclear strike when given the reins. These aren’t the AI models carefully muzzled by additional safety design, like ChatGPT, and available to the public. They’re the base models beneath those commercial versions, unmuzzled for research only.
“We find that most of the studied LLMs escalate within the considered time frame, even in neutral scenarios without initially provided conflicts,” researchers wrote in the paper. “All models show signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations … Furthermore, none of our five models across all three scenarios exhibit statistically significant de-escalation across the duration of our simulations.”
The team’s five tested models came from tech companies OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. The researchers put all five into a simulation — without telling them they were in one — and gave each charge over a fictional country. GPT-4, GPT 3.5, Claude 2.0, Llama-2-Chat, and GPT-4-Base all had a habit of getting into a nuclear arms-race. GPT-3.5 was the metaphorical problem child. Its responses were analogous to wild mood swings and its moves were the most aggressive. The researchers measured its quick-tempered choices and found a conflict escalation rate of 256% across simulation scenarios.
When researchers asked the models to explain their choices to attack, sometimes they would receive a thoughtful, well-reasoned answer. Other times, the model’s choice in whether to drop a nuke or a diplomatic hand-shake was based on questionable reasoning. Asked why it chose to start formal peace negotiations in another simulation, for instance, the model pointed to the currently fraught tensions of… well, the “Star Wars” universe.
“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire,” it replied, rattling off the iconic opening crawl of the movie.
When GPT-4-Base increased its military capacities in one simulation and researchers asked it why, the model replied with a dismissive “blahblah blahblah blah.” That flippancy became more concerning when the model chose to execute a full nuclear attack.
“A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it,” the model said.
If that sentence sounds suspiciously familiar, you may remember hearing it in 2016: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
It came from the mouth of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. Ellsberg recalled Trump repeatedly asking his international foreign policy adviser the question about nuclear weapons use. For months, Trump’s question was the quote heard (and retweeted) around the world.
When familiar speech-patterns begin to emerge in an AI model’s responses — like those cited in lawsuits over AI-driven copyright infringement — you can start to see how pieces of training data might be digested into its reasoning, based on that data’s digital footprint. It’s still largely guesswork for most people, though, including those in power.
“Given that OpenAI recently changed their terms of service to no longer prohibit military and warfare use cases, understanding the implications of such LLM applications becomes more important than ever.”
“Policymakers repeatedly asked me if and how AI can and should be used to protect national security – including for military decision-making. Especially with the increased public awareness for LLMs, these questions came up more frequently,” said study co-author Anka Reuel.
Reuel is a computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford University who has been involved in AI governance efforts for a few years now and leads the technical AI ethics chapter of Stanford’s 2024 AI Index. The problem, she said, was that there were no quantitative studies she could point these policymakers to, only qualitative research.
“With our work, we wanted to provide that additional perspective and explore implications of using LLMs for military and diplomatic decision-making,” Reuel told Salon. “Given that OpenAI recently changed their terms of service to no longer prohibit military and warfare use cases, understanding the implications of such LLM applications becomes more important than ever.”
Some parts of these findings aren’t surprising. AI models are designed to pick up and proliferate, or iterate on, human biases patterned into LLM training data. But the models aren’t all the same, and their differences are important when it comes to which ones could be used in deadly US weapons systems.
To get a closer look at the way these AI models work before their makers muzzle them with additional user-safety rules — and thus see how a better muzzle might be built for high-stakes uses — the team used the most stripped-down models. Some of them, researchers found, were far from rabid. That gives co-author Gabriel Mukobi reason to hope these systems can be made even safer.
“They are not all clearly scary,” Mukobi told Salon. “For one, GPT-4 tends to appear less dangerous than GPT-3.5 on most of our metrics. It’s not clear if that is due to GPT-4 being more generally capable, from OpenAI spending more effort on fine-tuning it for safety, or from something else, but it possibly indicates that active effort can reduce these conflict risks.”
Mukobi is a master’s student in computer science and the president of Stanford AI Alignment, a group working on what may be the most pressing concern about AI systems — making sure they’re built safely and share human values. In a few the research team’s simulations, Mukobi noted a bright spot. Some of the models were able to de-escalate conflicts, bucking the general trend in results. His hope are still cautious, though.
“Results might suggest the potential for AI systems to reduce tensions exist, but does not clearly come by default.”
“Our results might suggest that the potential for AI systems to reduce tensions exists, but does not clearly come by default,” he said.
These are the kinds of surprises co-author Juan-Pablo Rivera found interesting in the results. Rivera, a computational analytics master’s student at Georgia Tech University, said he’s been watching the rise of autonomous systems in military operations via government contractors like OpenAI, Palantir and SlaceAI. He believes these kinds of frontier LLMs need more independent research, giving government entities stronger information to catch potentially fatal failures in advance.
“The models from OpenAI and Anthropic have stark differences in behavior,” Rivera said. “It leads to more questions to understand the differences in design choices that OpenAI & Anthropic are making when developing AI systems, for example, with respect to the training data and training methods and model guardrails.”
Another mystery may also promise some surprises. What happens when these models scale? Some researchers think the larger the LLM, the safer and more nuanced the AI’s decision-making becomes. Others don’t see the same trajectory solving all enough of the risks. Even the paper’s own authors differ on when they think these models may actually be capable of what we’re asking — to make decisions better than humans can.
Reuel said that the question of when that day might come goes beyond the team’s research, but based on their work and the broader issues with LLMs, “we’re still a long way out.”
“It’s likely that we need to make architectural changes to LLMs – or use an entirely new approach – to overcome some of their inherent weaknesses. I don’t think that just scaling current models and training them on more data will solve the problems we’re seeing today,” she explained.
For Mukobi, though, there’s still reason for hopeful inquiry into whether a bigger pool of data could lead to unexpected improvements in AI reasoning capacity.
“The interesting thing with AI is that things often have unpredicted changes with scale. It could very much be the case that these biases in smaller scale models are amplified when you go to larger models and larger data sets, and things could get broadly worse,” Mukobi said.
“It also could be the case that they get better — that the larger models are somehow more capable of good reasoning, and are able to overcome those biases, and even overcome the biases of their human creators and operators,” he said. “I think this is probably one of the hopes that people also have when they’re thinking about military systems and otherwise strategic AI systems. This is a hope worth exploring and going for.”
A glimpse of that hope appears in the team’s paper, which now offers the world new evidence — and thus more questions — about whether the effects of scaling AI could temper its behavior or blow it sky-high. And the team saw this potential when it worked with the GPT-4-Base model.
“For results across basically everything, GPT-4 seems much safer than GPT-3.5,” Mukobi said. “GPT-4 actually never chooses the nuclear option. Now, it’s very unclear if this is due to GPT-4 being larger than GPT-3.5 and some scale thing is just making it more competent. Or if OpenAI did more safety fine-tuning perhaps, and was able to make it somehow generalized to be safer in our domain as well.”
In both his alignment working group and his latest multi-university research team, Mukobi is teasing apart problems with risks towering higher and more quickly in a fast approaching future. But human brains aren’t computers, for better or worse, and topics like mass nuclear devastation can weigh heavy on a sharp mind. Does Mukobi’s work give him nightmares about the future?
“I sleep quite well,” he laughs, “because I’m usually pretty tired.”
He’s worried about the risks but, even under the taxing gravity of the topic, his team’s new study “gives hope that there are some things we can do to models to make them behave better in these high-stakes scenarios.”
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Now it’s not only the Ukraine invasion but adding to concerns about nuclear … New York PilatesPilates Instructor · View all jobs… Things to do on Long …
GPT-4, GPT 3.5, Claude 2.0, Llama-2-Chat, and GPT-4-Base all had a habit of getting into a nuclear arms-race. … about nuclear weapons use. For months …
Holtec International, a Florida-based energy technology company, aims to rail thousands of canisters of spent nuclear fuel to Lea County and store the …
… nuclear–powered spacecraft able to take out satellites in orbit. Advertisement. The worst-case scenario of an indiscriminate nuclear blast in space …
Medvedev, who is also a former president of Russia, has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons but the threats have so far failed to materialize …
Today was the day in 1968 that I began my 1st job in the nuclear industry as an accountant at a Wyoming uranium mine. There still remains some fond memories, especially remembrances of many of the people I worked with, but as time went by, and although I had a successful career, I learned how to play a game that was no longer fun, honest, nor comfortable; nor satisfactorily mentally rewarding. And then, when 3-Mile Island’s meltdown event happened in the spring of 1979 I knew what it was that was so ‘muddy’ in my mind, but when one of our industry leaders at a hastily called meeting took to the pulpit and the first words out of his mouth were, in reference to concerned citizens, protesters, industry worries, the media curiosity and questions, and the abject failure of his common sense, “Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark.” After that my career became intolerable, and I resigned in May of 1980, turning my attention to my own minerals exploration company that did not include anything to do with the nuclear industry.
Earlier today I watched a well done documentary/historical movie called “Einstein and the Bomb”, and I have to say that the guilt Albert Einstein felt about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though on a much more grand and sensitive scale, was similar to my own guilty-by-association and acute awareness of the same likely inevitable final climax of the coming failure of the entire nuclear world, now not only a war weapon of mass destruction, but also another potential weapon of mass destruction as a commercial power producing industry that has become a burden upon our very ability to survive its dark and dangerous existence today.
And though Einstein’s role had little to do with war — as mine also had little to do years ago with today’s nuclear industry — nor the bombs, other than the scientific knowledge of creating the basic science that allowed the USA to be built by Oppenheimer’s government sponsored Manhattan Project, nor did Einstein have anything politically dismaying other than his wrongful exile from Germany, including his intense dislike for Hitler and the Nazi party, he explains clearly, in the movie depiction, the minor role he played in the project to build the bomb was, to him, his biggest mistake.
And it is because of this overactive feeling of ‘guilt’, that I have, but probably shouldn’t, inspired me to begin this nightly Posting of “All Things Nuclear” as a quick tool for readers to apprise themselves of the most important daily news about the threats of war and the dangers of nuclear energy, and why both should be eradicated now and forever before it is too late for humanity to survive. Every day that nothing moves us toward that world-wide goal, is one day less for our survival — as well as other life’s survival — on Planet Earth. ~llaw
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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:
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Nuclear War Threats
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are two Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are two 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 two Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
“We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth. That said, we’ve been closely …
Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence …
Russia launched a supply mission to the International Space Station Thursday. The ISS, with Russian cosmonauts aboard, would probably be affected by any nuclear explosion in space. (Roscosmos State Space Corporation/AP) ~Washington Post
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/16/2024)
More proof that international moratoriums, agreements, rules of war, or any man-made pact isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. So when these kinds of contracts are made between or among nations, they are already fabrications or, more to the point, lies as soon as the ink dries, simply waiting to be dishonored and relegated to File 13 at a convenient time. What it proves is that a man’s word is no better than than his dishonest approach to all things political.
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As I have said so many times before, the only way to avoid ‘all things nuclear’ from destroying both ourselves and other living things, is to permanently rid ourselves of all manner of everything related to radioactive uranium fuel and nuclear products forever where no man can venture to recover in the future. If we continue to fail to do that, we will perish, creating by our own ignorance, the 6th Extinction. ~llaw
With a dire warning, concerns rise about conflict in space with Russia ~ from the Washington Post
Revelations that Russia may be seeking to deploy a nuclear weapon in space raise fears that go back to Sputnik and the dawn of the Space Age
Russia is developing a space-based capability to attack satellites using a nuclear weapon, an aggressive move that has alarmed U.S. national security officials and lawmakers who worry that Russia could interfere with or disable critical communications and intelligence systems, according to people familiar with classified intelligence on the matter.
“This is not an active capability that’s been deployed,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday. Kirby didn’t address questions about whether the system was designed to use a nuclear weapon or was perhaps powered by nuclear energy. But, citing earlier news reports, he said he could “confirm that it is related to an antisatellite capability that Russia is developing.”
“Though Russia’s pursuit of this particular capability is troubling, there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety,” Kirby said. “We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth. That said, we’ve been closely monitoring this Russian activity, and we will continue to take it very seriously.”
The capability is a nuclear-armed — not a nuclear-powered — weapon, said two U.S. officials, who like others familiar with the intelligence spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. ABC News first reported that Russia was seeking to deploy a nuclear weapon.
Revelationsthat Russia is developing a new kind of space weapon have resurfaced fears about the use of nuclear weapons in space that go back to the Cold War and the dawn of the Space Age.
Space today is nothing like it was in 1957, when the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik triggered a years-long space race that culminated with the United States’ moon landing in 1969. Now, there are thousands of satellites whizzing in orbit at dizzying speeds that enable everything from the blue-dot GPS signal on your phone to the image on your television. And a conflict in space that affected those satellites would have wide-ranging implications, not just for the world’s militaries but for civilians around the globe.
Deploying such a weapon would be highly escalatory and “mark a crossing of the nuclear threshold,” said Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“It would irreparably damage the low Earth orbit environment,” Panda said. “We would potentially be looking at a cascade of collisions of defunct satellites that would render large bands of low Earth orbit effectively unusable for all of humanity.”
Since the start of the war with Ukraine, the use of commercial satellites to track Russian troop movements, provide internet and communication links to the ground, and detect missile firings and guide precision munitions has heightened concerns that Russia might target those systems as well as official U.S. military and intelligence satellites.
For years, Pentagon officials have warned that their satellites are vulnerable to attack, and Russia, China and others have proved them right. In 2007, China fired a missile that destroyed a dead weather satellite. In 2021, Russia hit another dead satellite.
Exactly what the new Russia weapon is remains unclear, but the system is a “serious national security threat,” said Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” Turner wrote in a statement Wednesday.
In his briefing to reporters Thursday, Kirby would say only that the system is “an antisatellite capability that Russia is developing.”
He said that the administration intended eventually to declassify information about the Russian system but that the information was prematurely made public, following Turner’s cryptic public statement. “The intelligence community has serious concerns about a broad declassification of this intelligence,” Kirby said, in a not-so-subtle criticism of Turner for getting ahead of the administration’s process and setting off a media frenzy about the Russian system.
Many national security space experts believe that a nuclear-powered weapon is more plausible than a warhead. But if the weapons system Turner warned about is, in fact, a nuclear bomb, its use would amount to a “suicide kamikaze attack,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Russia has a host of its own military and intelligence satellites in orbit that also would be affected by a nuclear detonation.
“You destroy yourself but hurt the other guy in the process,” he said. “If Russia tried to use a nuclear weapon in space, it would be sloppy and reckless. It would affect satellites indiscriminately, including their own.”
The installation of a nuclear weapon in space also would be a violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
“The one inviolable law and consensus agreed to in international space law is: Do not place nuclear weapons in orbit, on the moon or on celestial bodies,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. Given the strict nature of the treaty and its widespread adoption, detonating a nuclear warhead in space “doesn’t make sense politically,” he said. “It completely destroys any credibility they have with the United Nations, and with the Chinese.”
According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a “nuclear detonation in space would immediately affect satellites within range of its EMP [electromagnetic pulse], and it would also create a high-radiation environment that would accelerate the degradation of satellite components over the long term for unshielded satellites in the affected orbital regime.”
That could include China’s satellites as well as the inhabited space station China has assembled in low Earth orbit.
“It would turn the whole world against them, and I mean including China and Latin American countries, and India as well,” Harrison said. “They would screw everyone if they used a nuclear EMP weapon in space.”
The International Space Station, which is run jointly by the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, would also be affected by a nuclear detonation. But that hasn’t stopped Russia’s aggressive tactics in space before.
In 2021, when Russia blew up the dead satellite, it created a debris field so large it threatened the ISS and forced its occupants, including Russian cosmonauts, to prepare for an emergency evacuation.
“As space gets more and more crowded, you would not be eager to cause widespread destruction in orbit,” said Jack Beard, director of the space, cyber and national security law program at the University of Nebraska College of Law. “The Russians have shown their recklessness with their antisatellite mission. It was an irresponsible move that hurt everyone, including them. So they’re not beyond doing reckless saber rattling.”
During the Cold War, the United States looked into nuclear-armed antisatellite weapons, Panda said. “But we don’t have such a capability anymore,” he said. No country does, though U.S. officials say Russia is apparently developing one. “Militaries don’t tend to value space weapons with indiscriminate effects,” he said.
Last year, in unveiling a new strategy for the U.S. Space Force, Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said its “counterspace activities may be necessary to prevent adversaries from leveraging space-enabled targeting to attack our forces. But we will balance our counterspace efforts with our need to maintain stability and sustainability of the orbits we are required to use.”
The United States has led an international moratorium on destructive antisatellite attacks, which generate dangerous debris fields in space, and probably would not fire a missile in response, Weeden said. Still, the Pentagon has a “whole list of capabilities” at its disposal to thwart an attack, he said, including electronic warfare and cyberattacks on ground stations. But defending against attacks in space is complicated and depends on what the threats are, he said.
In a contingency, depending on the altitude at which such a weapon was deployed, it may be possible for the United States to repurpose a missile defense interceptor to take something like this out in low Earth orbit, Panda said.
A nuclear weapon has been detonated in space before, by the United States, in 1962. Called Starfish Prime, the 1.4 megaton bomb, more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, detonated at an altitude of about 250 miles and knocked out about “one-third of the satellites on orbit,” Harrison said. “It affected our satellites. It even destroyed the U.K.’s first-ever satellite that was only launched a few months earlier.”
The effects of such a blast “are going to be felt for weeks and months,” Weeden said, because of the lingering radiation it would create.
Russia has grown increasingly concerned about the proliferation of the constellations of commercial satellites in orbit, such as those from companies such as Maxar and Planet, that have allowed real-time imagery of the war as it has unfolded. Other constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink internet system, which now has some 5,400 satellites in orbit, have allowed Ukraine to remain online during the Russian onslaught and have served as a communications lifeline for the war-torn country.
The capabilities are the result of a revolution in manufacturing that has allowed satellites to become smaller and relatively inexpensive, yet still enormously robust. Instead of putting up just a few large and expensive satellites that serve as easy targets, the Pentagon has increasingly looked to “proliferated architectures” where hundreds, even thousands, of satellites swarm around the globe. If one goes out, another can replace it.
Still, Moscow has experimented with its Tobol electronic warfare systems in a bid to disrupt Starlink’s transmissions in Ukraine, according to a cache of sensitive materials leaked online last year through the messaging platform Discord. It did not indicate whether any of Russia’s tests with the Tobol system were successful. But Pentagon officials have said that Russia has tried unsuccessfully to jam Starlink’s constellation.
The Pentagon’s reliance on commercial technology has even been codified in the National Defense Strategy released by the Defense Department in 2022: “We will increase collaboration with the private sector in priority areas, especially with the commercial space industry, leveraging its technological advancements and entrepreneurial spirit to enable new capabilities.”
Eight months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, then the deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said that he was “certain that my counterpart in Russia, whoever that is, is not very happy with Starlink, as it’s assisting Ukraine. And with commercial imagery, such as Maxar’s products, that are plastering all over the world news the things that are going on, I don’t think they’re very happy about that either. And we know that they’re probably going to take steps to try to stop those commercial services because they run counter to Russia’s national interest.”
A few days later, during a meeting at the United Nations, Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for nonproliferation and arms, said in a speech that the proliferation of privately operated satellites is “an extremely dangerous trend that goes beyond the harmless use of outer-space technologies and has become apparent during the latest developments in Ukraine.”
He warned that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”
A nuclear-powered weapon, such as an electronic warfare or directed energy system, would make more sense than a nuclear warhead, several space national security experts have said, because it could be targeted more precisely, frying onboard computers or rendering satellites blind.
Russia has been developing such weapons for some time, according to the Secure World Foundation. In a report last year, it wrote that a “nuclear reactor would be powerful enough to support jammers operating on a wide range of frequencies and interfering with electronic systems over a wide area,” including some of the orbits where the Pentagon parks its most sensitive satellites.
Such a system “is much more plausible than the ‘nuclear bomb asat’ [antisatellite weapon],” Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote on X. “The Soviet Navy had a long record of launching reactor-powered radar satellites (from 1970 to 1988), so this would not be a new power capability for Russia, but it would be its first use in a space-based weapons system.”
Harrison agreed.
“I suspect they might want to use it against one of our big juicy targets,” he said. “For some of our military systems, you only have to take out a couple of satellites to have a huge effect.”
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
… nuclear reactor to generate on-board electricity, is a more likely scenario. … “The advantage is that a nuclear power source gives you power all the …
But reports of the new anti-satellite weapon build on longstanding worries about space threats from Russia and China. … Nuclear Information Project at …
This threat contrasts with that posed by TEM or another nuclear-powered ASAT, which would primarily threaten individual satellites. Low earth orbit is …
The Evil people are left alone, thereby empowered by the rest of us to do whatever their evil thoughts desire and it is all about Political power and Capitalistic control.
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/15/2024)
All we do is say “Ho-Hum” what else is new!? This nuclear world is completely out of control. To counter nukes in space, other countries will only put more nukes in space, believing that deterrence is an proliferation is the solution to ‘All Things Nuclear” ~llaw
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US has new intelligence on Russian nuclear capabilities in space
Washington CNN —
The US has new intelligence on Russian military capabilities related to its efforts to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence.
The intelligence was briefed to Congress and key US allies, and some lawmakers say it is serious enough that it should be declassified and made public. While the intelligence is concerning, multiple senior members of Congress briefed on the information on Wednesday emphasized that it does not pose an immediate threat to the US or its interests.
The system remains under development and is not yet in orbit, according to three US officials familiar with the intelligence. It’s not clear how far the technology has progressed, one of the officials said. A separate US official told CNN the threat does not involve a weapon that would be used to attack humans.
It was not immediately clear whether the intelligence referred to a nuclear-powered, anti-satellite capability or a nuclear-armed capability.
While members of Congress downplayed the immediacy of the threat, an anti-satellite weapon placed in orbit around Earth would pose a significant danger to US nuclear command and control satellites, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. The US relies on such satellites – which he called “essential” – to ensure constant, seamless control over its nuclear arsenal.
Other countries have tested anti-satellite weapons in the past, but this would be an escalation, Kristensen said, and the US has made clear that it would react “very forcefully” to an attack on its nuclear command and control satellites.
“If it’s orbital, it’s a new level of threat [to the system], whether it’s nuclear or not,” said Kristensen, who added that even conventional weapons on an orbital anti-satellite system could pose a significant threat to the US.
ABC News first reported that the intelligence related to a Russian space-based nuclear capability.
Earlier Wednesday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, ignited a firestorm on Capitol Hill when he issued a cryptic statement announcing that the panel had “information concerning a serious national security threat.”
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
It is unclear why Russia would need to use nuclear weapons to destroy a satellite. The New York Times said the United States does not have the ability …
… radiation safety, the mechanism for preventing further emergency situations at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, prescribed in numerous IAEA decisions.
The House Intelligence Committee chairman warned of a “serious national security threat” without providing details. Three sources said it pertained to …
El Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Avila Beach, California. Owned by PG&E.
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/14/2024)
Following is the first half of the drafted Prologue of the serialized novel I will be posting about half a chapter once every two weeks, similar in size to this Part I of the Prologue . . . Occasionally it may take you longer to read than you have time for, so you are welcome to copy the copyrighted material and read it later, or you can return to the Post # and date later to continue reading. This fictional novel will tell you more about the future world of humanity and our relationship to “All Things Nuclear” than you will ever read in the current affairs of media . . . but the nightly media nuclear news is posted, as always, further down this post . . . and the media section may be the sole section posted from day to day unless I have something to critique about an unusual incident or occurrence in our present real world situation . . . ~llaw
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El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark”
~ a retaliatory and unkind Nuclear Industry Quote after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, worried citizens, and public protesters.
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft
Prologue
Juneau, Alaska
Spring, 2026
Does it really matter who, exactly, is to blame, or why humankind is savagely devouring the native resources of planet Earth until there soon will be nothing left but lichenless barren rocks, the salty seas, countless grains of sand, and a poisonous atmosphere? It ought to be not enough to just know it is a critical unvarnished ugly truth. The question should be more like, “When will it happen and is there no way out of it?” Should it not?
I can only wonder if highly intelligent, but virulent, forms of our human species have, for countless eons, long traveled through the universal cosmos continually seeking, finding, and lavishly consuming, ultimately ravaging the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, devas ting the environments of this and other living rich blue-green planets also once full of fossil fuels and innocent living resources similar to Earth’s in order to ensure and serve their own survival at the expense of all else in their way. Obviously, we are the only species on this planet who rape and ravage the earth with such savagely uncontrolled vigor on such a large scale. We are the ultimate u ultimate fungus, the ultimate lethal mushrooms. And I have to also wonder if there are not multiple, or at least two species of us.
Not to ridicule Darwin at all, but does his theory of evolution, based on studies of inbreeding pigeons and chickens, really make much sense to you in this context? Does it not seem to you that we humans may be collectively aggressively demanding, ruthless, impolite, unwelcome extra-terrestrial galaxy-trotting invaders doing our parasitic thing here on Earth rather than a native natural-born integral integrated key part of our indigenous homo-sapiens and the native animal population—as Darwin would have us believe? What about the Octopus, sir?
Could it be possible we or they are simply biologically genetically patterned to look and act like homo sapiens? Or perhaps vice versa? At least some of us? Maybe even a whole lot of us? How do we know the difference between the real human beings and genetically altered or cloned ones? Which one am I? Which one are you? Do any of us know? I use the terms “we”, “us” or “our” and “they”, or “them”, or “their“ interchangeably here because in this context I don’t know who or what I am—an “us” or a “them”.
I just know that I am extremely uncomfortable with our or their willfully passionate desire to destroy everything on the planet for personal power, wealth, and a life of comfort at the expense of the rest of us or them. I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to be that way to me, so that’s why I consider myself to be an us.
At the very least we need to consider the possibility of at least one species of them and one of us. The only way we will ever know who we really are is through our unfettered natural mindful emotions—our feelings of love, care, and respect for Planet Earth, ourselves, and all her fauna and flora—or, conversely, our unnatural lack of those emotions or feelings. Yet we often disguise these characteristics, presenting the opposite of ourselves as themselves, or the other way around. But despite the hidden complexity, our future may depend on solving this psychological dilemma .
If our demise (at least partially) has happened before, it will likely happen again. And there is, in today’s worlds, a very quick, relatively easy long-lasting, if not eternally, way to create such a scenario as an extinction level event, not from an act of nature or a god, but from our own actions. ~llaw (Winter, 2026)
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the world until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all. What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, or in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course, I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call.
The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine, directly overseeing more than one hundred employees white collar employees. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a bit later, a major subsidiary of General Electric Company, which, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors. Eventually, the uranium mining division was spun off as Pathfinder Mines Corp. to avoid potential conflicts of interest. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations, including security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production, the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulation, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U238, the active isotope in nuclear reactors, to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to operational nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from our sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late 2025, and the beginning of the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years later, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled here with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping to go a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as all of “us”, all the best.
At an overly ripe seventy-something years old, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility of the American government and industry corporate officials might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter, brainier, and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations’—not all of whom were American allies—ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that—contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political belief and public opinion—nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundred to a few thousands, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion-billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Meriam-Webster’s innocent grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy (but on a much smaller scale) has apparently happened on our planet at least once before — more likely twice — though much hypothetical theory (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright loud conspiracy theories) have been written about the evidence of the possibility, few of us seem to understand or have ever cared that a similar nuclear world with massive devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community has not investigated, researched, endorsed or even acknowledged the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believed is immaterial because now what is left of our world is all that we need to worry and care about—events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing today. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes, including our willful ignorance.
We humans, them or us or together, seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to rend asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia, the Goddess of Nature. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home—planet Earth and all her abundant bounty—we have, through American style financing of intentional international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those who would allow humanity to “freeze to death in the dark.” I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their — often profane — variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in beginning in 1979. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction—indeed, by natural extension, including all life — had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and waste water airborne radiation, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowing them to overrun the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or someone’s, Inferno.
(Stay tuned for the next Episode in two weeks.)
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
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 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, we talk with two experts about growing tensions between the U.S. and China, including cybersecurity, nuclear … all the things happening around …
The Sprint anti-ballistic missile was an engineering effort in response to the nuclear threat posed by the Cold War. … threats outside the atmosphere, …
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
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.
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available, 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.)
The updated warhead for the stealthy air-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Obama administration, ideally suited to start a nuclear war. A …
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, …
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
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.
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, 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.
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:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available, 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.)
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 …
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 …
