In order to keep abreast of the weekend nuclear news, I will post Saturday and Sunday’s news, but without editorial comment. If a weekend story warrants a critical review, it will show up on Monday’s posts . . .
If you are not familiar with the weekday daily blog post, this is how the nuclear news post works . . . llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA”:
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available on this weekend’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Iranian leaders’ main concern may be that Trump could empower Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, while further …
Zelensky criticises Slovak PM threats to cut Ukraine’s electricity supply. Ukrainian president Voldoymyr Zelensky has accused Slovakian prime minister …
… nuclear weapons, in return for the relaxation of U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions … about 18% in all since Trump was elected in November. (Reporting …
In case of emergency, it is stipulated that the United States communicates with Japan about its nuclear use … nuclear use. … power, including nuclear …
… nuclear safety, radiation protection, emergency preparedness, waste management, and nuclear security. Ad. After a thorough review and assessment of …
Yellowstone quakes · Yellowstone quakes · Latest earthquakes under Yellowstone volcano. List and interactive map of current and past earthquakes near …
LAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
This human interest story from the “New Yorker” is very much worth reading, enjoying, and assimilating the entire article for its worthwhile sharing of values for all of us — friend or foe. I already know that one of my faithful readers who will soon be relocating to New Mexico, will take a great interest in what this article has to tell us all not only about New Mexico, but our entire country and the world . . .
Donald Trump’s shortcomings and associated nuclear-linked braggadocio attitude toward the United States’ nuclear war power is well-documented in this article. Just this one paragraph concerning the nuclear dangers of Trump as President should alarm you — even if you have been aware of his arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world when it comes to nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The story also quotes his now famous quote about the nuclear muscle of the United States. Here is a short copy of what the story says about that:
Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal and taunted Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea.
America and the entire world’s countries needs desperately to awaken and unite against the nuclear powers (even if we are living in one of them) and take action against this power-crazed man as well the similar leaders of other nuclear-armed nations. But it was Donald J. Trump who defined the word “woke” as “bullshit” just a few days ago . . . ~ llaw
New Mexico’s Nuclear-Weapons Boom
Los Alamos is growing at a pace not seen since J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.
Tourists in the Alamogordo Desert, in 1992.Photograph by Rene Burri / Magnum
On a recent Wednesday, ten students filed into a classroom at Northern New Mexico College, in the town of Española, to learn about the dangers of nuclear radiation. The students ranged in age from nineteen to forty-four. Most of them were in a program designed to train radiation-control technicians to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which is once again rapidly expanding to supply the nation with nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos was built in secret during the Second World War—J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the lab there as part of the Manhattan Project. The town hovers high above the Española valley, on a handsome mesa called the Pajarito Plateau. Originally, the only way to access the enclave was through two gates. Today, it accepts visitors but remains a company town, housing many of the lab’s scientists and high-level staffers. The community has a population of about thirteen thousand, and boasts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of millionaires. In New Mexico, such wealth is rare. Española, which sits on the Rio Grande and is a twenty-five-minute drive away, has a median household income of fifty thousand dollars, a poverty rate approaching twenty per cent, and an entrenched fentanyl crisis.
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Northern’s small campus, where cottonwood trees front adobe-colored buildings, is usually quiet, since many of its students commute or study online. The school offers both a trades program and what it calls the most affordable bachelor’s degree in the Southwest. Many students are studying for a career in social work, to combat the ravages of drugs, or hoping to secure a job at the lab. An Air Force veteran named Scott Braley teaches all of the school’s radiation-safety courses. He often wears a T-shirt that reads “Radiate Positivity.”
When I visited, Braley and his students were midway through an introductory safety course. The lecture focussed not on Chernobyl or Fukushima but on less catastrophic accidents, including an incident at an Iranian oil refinery in which a janitor accidentally picked up radioactive equipment, and a medical-exposure case involving breast-cancer patients. “This is the scale of event I worry about,” Braley said. If a wildfire overtook the lab, or Russia launched an attack on New Mexico, which represents the nexus of America’s nuclear-weapons complex, there would not be much for a lab technician to do. Braley wanted students to consider quotidian risks that they could prevent themselves. “We’ve had fatalities at Los Alamos,” he told them. News articles highlighting lapses at the lab were pinned on a bulletin board outside his office. Next to one story, about a Los Alamos worker who took a radioactive swipe home, he had scrawled, “Don’t do that!”
In recent years, Los Alamos has been essential to a sweeping 1.7-trillion-dollar update of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which comes as China expands its atomic-weapons program and Russia assumes a newly confrontational stance. The U.S. government has nearly five thousand nuclear warheads, close to two thousand of which are deployed inside submarines, bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also has thousands of plutonium pits—the fissionable cores of those warheads—in storage. But the plutonium in the stockpile is aging. Despite statements from groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argue that the arsenal remains sufficiently deadly to serve as deterrence, the government insists that it needs new warheads.
The nuclear-weapons overhaul involves facilities spread out across the United States. Its projects include fabricating new missiles, installing thousands of miles of fibre-optic transmission lines, building new computer centers at Air Force bases, and refurbishing the underground chambers where missileers control weapons. But Los Alamos is the only lab that is capable of actually producing the plutonium pits. (A second facility, in South Carolina, hopes to begin producing pits by 2032, but it is still under construction.) In the past two years, the lab has hired two thousand and seven hundred new employees. Traffic often clogs the road winding from Española, past the Pueblo de San Ildefonso and up the Pajarito Plateau. The private contractors who run the lab—Triad, which develops warheads, and N3B, which cleans up old waste from the Manhattan Project—have urgently recruited radiation technicians, electricians, welders, and even writers for its communications team. (Its staff includes former journalists from Outside magazine, which moved from Santa Fe to Boulder a few years ago.)
To support the boom, Los Alamos has invested millions of dollars in vocational pipeline programs at local colleges. Some of these programs teach transferrable skills—welding, electrical work. Others, like the radiation-tech program at Northern, are more likely to keep graduates tethered to Los Alamos. Radiation technicians at the lab use Geiger counters to make sure that scientists’ radiation levels are within a healthy range. They also monitor the rooms where workers move radioactive materials into secure containers. Salaries range from sixty-six thousand dollars to nearly twice that amount. On Española’s outskirts, near signs warning about fentanyl, billboards advertise the pipeline program with patriotic verve: “Support our community, serve our nation.”
New Mexico’s state budget is just above ten billion dollars. The federal government spends about as much money on just two laboratories: Sandia, in Albuquerque, which designs weapon components such as detonators, and Los Alamos. Kirtland Air Force Base, which stores nuclear weapons, has a budget of nearly two billion dollars. An underground nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico’s southern desert also receives federal funding; after a fire and an unrelated radiological release at the facility, ten years ago, the Department of Energy spent nearly five hundred million dollars on an update to its safety infrastructure. “It’s gone from being a company town to being a company state,” Zia Mian, the co-director of a program on science and global security at Princeton, said.
The interns in Braley’s class were already training with Triad and N3B. “They recruit us, send us to school, and pay for our school,” a student named Stevannah Marquez, who had grown up in the nearby village of Chimayó, said. Marquez, who is twenty-five, wore a Care Bears T-shirt and a necklace adorned with a cross. She had a job as a dialysis technician, but it paid less than what she expected to earn at Los Alamos. “An opportunity is given by God,” she said.
America’s rearmament is rooted in a deal that Barack Obama struck with Congress in 2010. Obama was strongly aligned with the philosophy of nuclear non-proliferation, which had driven a steady reduction in the U.S. stockpile since the end of the Cold War. His soaring rhetoric about a world free of nuclear weapons had helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize, and his views had bipartisan support. But, in many states, weapons production meant jobs. When Obama was working to secure congressional support for a nuclear-coöperation agreement with Moscow, Republican senators asked, in return, that he sign off on modernizing the country’s arsenal. He agreed.
At that point, nuclear-weapons development in Los Alamos was only one part of the lab’s remit. Its scientists had also carried out advanced research into nuclear energy, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen storage, fuel-cell development, and carbon capture and sequestration. But, in 2015, Congress instructed the National Nuclear Security Administration to prepare to build new warheads, and Los Alamos refocussed its mission. A scientist there told me, “The center of mass has shifted from ‘We are a multipurpose lab’ to ‘We are an honest-to-goodness weapons laboratory, and that’s what’s going to dominate.’ ” He likened it to a factory.
The lab is supposed to be building the capacity to produce thirty war-ready plutonium pits per year. So far, it has created just one, even as the budget has tripled. Mounting international tensions have only increased the pressure. According to the Defense Department, China has developed more than six hundred operational nuclear warheads, and it could have twice as many by 2030. The treaty that Obama signed with Russia in 2010 expires next year, and it is not expected to be renewed. Last June, in an address recorded for the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned of the creeping threat of nuclear war. “Humanity is on a knife’s edge,” he said. In 2023, Russia de-ratified a landmark nuclear-testing-ban treaty, and in November, following Ukraine’s use of long-range American missiles, Vladimir Putin lowered his country’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal and taunted Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. His Administration also signalled interest in reviving America’s defunct underground weapons-testing program. In preparation for his second term, he has adopted Ronald Reagan’s old motto—“Peace through strength.” But his military aims have been difficult to pin down, and the views of his presumptive cabinet are scattershot. Sharon Weiner, a professor of foreign policy and global security at American University, said that Trump’s nominees appear “willing to violate norms and rules that have been in place for a long time.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., as fears about China reach a fever pitch, a sense of alarm is seeping into discussions about nuclear policy. During a recent panel, Robert Peters, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who once worked as a lead strategist for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, discussed the slow progress at Los Alamos with frustration. “Let’s waive the environmental regulations, blow up the mountain, pave it over, build a highway that you need to get there, fire everyone who’s not building warheads,” Peters said. Increasingly, politicians have advocated boosting the number of nuclear weapons—not just updating the existing ones. “The U.S. is embarking on a pair of arms races,” Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said. “You hear from both Democrats and Republicans that expansion is inevitable.”
In Los Alamos, it is widely acknowledged that, during the Manhattan Project, environmental concerns were not a priority. Nuclear waste was simply dumped in the ground. This past August, a retired chemistry professor from Northern Arizona University named Michael Ketterer, who has studied nuclear sites around the West, announced that he had found what he called “the most extreme plutonium-contamination scenario” he has seen in an area close to Los Alamos. (The Department of Energy and the laboratory maintain that the radiation levels at the site are safe.) Worker-safety issues have also been a problem. In 2013, weapons development at the lab’s plutonium facility temporarily ceased after a series of incidents, including one in which staff members arranged plutonium rods together, for a photo opportunity, in a scenario that could have sparked an enormous nuclear reaction.
The contractors in charge of the lab maintain that they have learned from past errors. But the recent pressure to produce appears to align with a culture of haste. One of the oversight agencies that inspects the lab has published reports that reveal a concerning number of safety breaches. Last summer, plutonium was found on the hands of a worker who had handled radiological material without gloves. (“A key corrective action planned from this event is additional reinforcement of glove usage requirements,” the inspector wrote.) The following week, the same inspector reported that a glove box containing radioactive material had cracked, prompting an evacuation of personnel. A year earlier, a newly hired radiation-control technician was found to have been working for weeks without a dosimeter, the device with which workers monitor their exposure to radioactive materials. Suggested corrective actions included “ensuring that newly qualified RCTs receive their dosimeters prior to starting work.”
Like many of the people I spoke to in Española, Braley had complex feelings about the lab at Los Alamos. During the lecture I attended, he told students that, with incidents of radiation exposure, there was often no one to blame—accidents were more likely to be an unfortunate confluence of events in the presence of unforgiving materials. But he also reserved the right to skepticism. “I don’t feel like the workforce has really adopted a safety mentality,” he told me, of Los Alamos. “I think what they’ve got is a production mentality: ‘We have to meet certain milestones, and we don’t want to let a little bit of contamination slow us down.’ ”
More than twenty-five years ago, Congress, recognizing that Los Alamos’s economic dominance had been unhealthy for northern New Mexico, passed a law creating a foundation that would attempt to address inequities. The Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation now funds workplace-training programs and provides scholarships for nearby students, regardless of whether they go on to work at the lab. When I asked Alvin Warren, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo and the foundation’s vice-president of policy and impact, what he hoped the region would look like in thirty years, he said, “That my grandchildren can hunt elk in our canyon and not worry about whether it’s safe to eat; that they can go to school where they want and pursue whatever career they think is appropriate for them; that, if they believe strongly that the lab is not a good place to work, they don’t feel compelled to work there.”
The contractors who run Los Alamos maintain that they, too, are trying to improve economic outcomes in the area. “We are trying to build a workforce for the entire region,” Rebecca Estrada, who oversees Los Alamos’s recruitment efforts, told me. The lab provides funding for the training of math and science teachers, and backs an apprenticeship program for early-education workers. It partners with a union representing welders, plumbers, and electricians that recruits kids out of high school. But the lab’s ubiquity also creates a narrow set of options. “It limits other types of economic growth and productivity,” Frank Loera, who directs the career-and-technical-education program at Northern New Mexico College, said.
Stevannah Marquez, Braley’s student from Chimayó, told me that she’d grown up with an embedded understanding of the risks of working at Los Alamos. As a child, she heard about numerous people and relatives who became ill after working at the lab. One friend, she said, was paralyzed from his exposures. “Older generations didn’t have the justice,” she told me. But, she added, optimistically, “We know now what to do.”
Marquez’s ties to northern New Mexico are deep. Her home town, which is situated in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, east of Española, is the terminus of a revered annual pilgrimage. In the week before Easter, New Mexico’s highways fill with people walking to the Santuario de Chimayó, a Catholic church. Every year, Marquez leaves water for the pilgrims outside her house. “I will never leave Chimayó,” she said. But her allegiance to her home has also curtailed her options. Chimayó has suffered from the opioid epidemic, and local jobs are limited. Marquez said that leaving her job in medicine was bittersweet. “I love taking care of people,” she told me. After her years with sick patients, she liked the idea of keeping workers at the lab safe. She hoped that one day she might be able to find a job cleaning up the environment—perhaps removing waste from the Manhattan Project that sits atop the canyons that funnel the summer monsoons into the Rio Grande. “Furthering your knowledge and understanding of anything is always a good opportunity,” Marquez said, “even if it may seem like it’s the only one.” ♦
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’a ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in today’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear weapons, the specter of an Israeli military strike grows ever more likely. Israel has long considered Iran’s nuclear ambitions a direct threat
IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi visited Paraguay as part of ongoing support for the country’s use of nuclear science to advance its development in the areas of food security, cancer care and clean energy. Read more →
The IAEA’s ‘Nuclear Explained’ series takes scientific and technical subjects related to nuclear topics and makes them easier to understand. Here are our top five explainers from 2024. Read more →
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
These following statements are the final two paragraphs in this “Al Jazeera” article, and may help explain this attack on Ukraine on Christmas Day:
“Both sides are racing to secure an advantage before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised a swift end to the conflict.
This has led to concerns that Washington might push Kyiv into accepting a settlement favourable to Moscow.”
Someone said, ”All’s fair in love and war”, and a Christmas Day attack could be a signal from Russia that Ukraine will not be allowed to continue their independence and young democracy by remaining a US/NATO supported county. Trump’s role is questionable, but his concept to end the war will most likely be to offer in Russia’s favor, which, if Kiev agrees, n doubt under distress, will give the Kremlin back to Putin — the same place it was before Putin was at the end of Trump’s first term as president, but without Trump’s U.S. authority, the renewed military attacks by Russia on Ukraine was reignited in early February of 2022, no longer blessed with Trump’s then out-of -office apolitical support to Moscow. ~llaw
Biden condemns Russia’s ‘outrageous’ Christmas attack on Ukraine
Biden promises surge in weapons deliveries to Ukraine after drone and missile barrage hits its power grid.
A rescuer from the State Emergency Service works to put out a fire in a private house after a drone attack in Kharkiv, on December 25, 2024 [Sergey Bobok/AFP]
Published On 26 Dec 202426 Dec 2024
United States President Joe Biden has labelled as “outrageous” a Russian Christmas day attack on Ukraine’s power grid, promising a “surge of weapons deliveries to Ukraine”.
Moscow launched more than 170 missiles and drones on Ukraine on Wednesday, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The strikes, which killed an energy worker, hit a thermal power plant and prompted Ukrainians to take shelter in metro stations on Christmas morning.
“The United States will continue to work tirelessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in its defence against Russian forces,” the outgoing president said in a statement.
“The purpose of this outrageous attack was to cut off the Ukrainian people’s access to heat and electricity during winter and to jeopardise the safety of its grid,” Biden added.
The strikes on Ukrainian fuel and energy sources included 78 air, ground and sea-launched missiles as well as 106 Shaheds and other types of drones, Ukraine’s air force said. It claimed to have intercepted 59 missiles and 54 drones, with 52 more drones being jammed.
“Putin deliberately chose Christmas to attack. What could be more inhumane?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X. “The target is our energy infrastructure.”
This was the 13th large-scale strike on Ukraine’s energy system this year, the latest in Russia’s campaign targeting the power grid during winter.
Ukrainian plots foiled
Meanwhile, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced on Thursday that it had thwarted a plan by Ukrainian intelligence to kill senior Russian officers and their families in Moscow, according to the state-run TASS news agency.
Earlier this month, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, was killed by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service in Moscow when a bomb attached to an electric scooter exploded.
Russia on Thursday said five people had died in Ukrainian attacks and from a falling drone in the border region of Kursk and North Ossetia in the Caucasus on Wednesday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday cautioned that Russia would respond to Ukraine’s attacks, carried out with Western missiles and drones.
Russia targets only military facilities and infrastructure and “it’s not in our rules to strike civilian targets,” Lavrov said.
Ukrainians in traditional clothes take part in a Christmas procession at Sofiivska Square in Kyiv, on December 25, 2024 [Anatolii Stepanov/AFP]
Celebrating Christmas amid attacks
Ukraine officially celebrated Christmas on December 25 for the second time, after the government last year changed the date from January 7, when most Orthodox believers celebrate, as a snub to Russia.
Nearly 200 people paraded through the centre of Kyiv, singing Christmas carols.
The Christmas day attack also targeted Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, located near the Russian border. At least seven strikes sparked fires across the city, regional head Oleh Syniehubov wrote on Telegram. At least three people were injured, local authorities said.
Attacks continued overnight, with the Ukrainian military announcing on Thursday it shot down 20 drones out of 31 launched by Russia.
Outnumbered Ukrainian forces are now on the back foot across the front line in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions further south, ceding ground to better-equipped Russian troops.
Both sides are racing to secure an advantage before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised a swift end to the conflict.
This has led to concerns that Washington might push Kyiv into accepting a settlement favourable to Moscow.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’a ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Accidents and Emergencies · Czech company secretly supplied critical … power transmission lines connecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the ..
The threat of nuclear violence should be used with extreme caution due to its serious, existential nature. Only when all other tools and threats have …
… threat of all-out nuclear war has become even more prominent. China ‘s … threats and displaying shows of strength regarding their nuclear capabilities
‘And it would cause problems with water, agriculture and electrical grids.’ Although the Yellowstone caldera’s initial blast would kill thousands in a …
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
Happy Holidays to all! And may all your days be merry and bright as well as safe!
This short article about Japan expanding their nuclear power services is surprising to me, and I can’t imagine after the Fukushima nuclear disaster and their remembering of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a Pulitzer prize winning effort this year by their remembrances and admonishing of that terrible incident that ended World War II that Japan would ever allow ‘nuclear anything’ to return to their country for any reason . . .
Once again, for the third day in a row, I am baffled by the fact that responsible intelligent human beings would fail to realize that nuclear power plants, like nuclear bombs, are weapons of mass destruction as dangerous and catastrophic as nuclear bombs to human and other life in the event of nuclear war. Japan should know and understand this (as should the U.S.) better than all other countries on planet Earth. ~llaw
Japan to maximize nuclear power in clean-energy push as electricity demand grows
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, damaged by a massive March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, is seen from the nearby Ukedo fishing port in Namie town, northeastern Japan, Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Updated 8:21 AM PST, December 25, 2024
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TOKYO (AP) — A government-commissioned panel of experts on Wednesday largely supported Japan’s new energy policy for the next few years that calls for bolstering renewables up to half of electricity needs by 2040 while maximizing the use of nuclear power as the country seeks to accommodate the growing power demand in the era of AI while meeting decarbonization targets.
The Industry Ministry presented the draft plan for final review by the panel of 16 mostly pro-nuclear members from business, academia and civil groups. It calls for maximizing the use of nuclear energy, reversing a phaseout policy adopted after the meltdown crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011 that led to extensive displacement of residents and lingering anti-nuclear sentiment.
The plan is due to receive Cabinet approval by March after a period of consultation and will then replace the current energy policy, which dates from 2021. The new proposal says nuclear energy should account for 20% of Japan’s energy supply in 2040, up from just 8.5% last year, while expanding renewables to 40-50% from 22.9% and reducing coal-fired power to 30-40% from nearly 70% last year.
The current plan set a 20-22% target for nuclear energy, 36-38% for renewables and 41% for fossil fuel, for 2030.
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’a ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… (nuclear, biochemical) air filtration system. “We’ve definitely seen a spike in customers. After the invasion of Ukraine, my phone rang about every …
The new proposal says nuclear energy should account for 20% of Japan’s energy supply in 2040, up from just 8.5% last year, while expanding renewables …
Throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, Moscow has warned the West against escalating tensions, using its nuclear stockpile to remind other countries what …
Each trip is accompanied by a volcanologist from our team. Examples include: Kilauea (Hawai’i), Colima (Mexico), Krakatau and many others. Yellowstone …
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
“Morning Star,”, a British news socialistic anti-nuclear peace-seeking outlet offers us a view of Britain’s CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) of their approach to nuclear disarmament as well as the coming questionable nuclear policies and actions of their Parliament’s nuclear weapons indifference and concerns about the USA with former president Donald Trump about to be reinstalled for a 2nd term. Their concerns are perhaps characterized by Trump’s questionable policies related to international politics and his threatening nuclear war as what might be called a “red-neck” approach to governmental policies including “1st Use” (a non-sequitur by the way) and intolerance of a more cooperative agenda toward peaceful directives.
Of course these concerns are global issues, and the reasoning behind these anti-nuclear weapons and nuclear war are is sound, necessary, and legitimate, but once again, as I clearly wrote yesterday, nuclear power must be included in the mix because, clearly, nuclear power plants are also nuclear threats for many additional reasons other than war, but their use in a nuclear war is inevitable — as proven by the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war, which may be the prime catalyst to bring on WWIII. ~llaw
uesday, December 24, 2024
Confronting the terrifying prospect of nuclear war
Speaking to Ben Chacko, CND’s new leader SOPHIE BOLT outlines her organisation’s ambitious plans, from peace camps to base blockades to mass mobilisation, to fight the rising nuclear madness our politicians ignore
STANDING FIRM: CND activists protest at RAF Lakenheath against the siting of US nukes on British soil
SOPHIE BOLT has big ambitions for her first year at the head of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The cause of peace and disarmament faces huge challenges. Two major wars involving nuclear-armed states continue to rage in Ukraine and Palestine, with Britain entangled in both.
Donald Trump, who in his first term dismantled treaties aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear conflict such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces ban and the Iran nuclear deal, while equipping US nuclear submarines with smaller-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons, returns to the US presidency next month.
And an extreme crackdown on anti-war voices as part of the post-Corbyn Labour Party’s broader assault on the left has discouraged serious debate about the risks of war in Parliament — when Britain gave Ukraine permission to fire Storm Shadow missiles at Russian territory, for example, the government didn’t even bother to announce its change of policy in the Commons.
Bolt, who succeeded CND’s longstanding general secretary Kate Hudson at the end of last month, says Parliament’s apparent indifference to the growing threat of nuclear war is not mirrored by the public.
“There’s a democratic deficit between what you have in Parliament and what ordinary people think. You can tell that just from Keir Starmer’s ratings,” she tells me as we meet in CND’s soon-to-be-former offices on the Holloway Road (they are relocating to east London).
“Parliament isn’t really very representative of people’s concerns about nuclear weapons, though we do have an active Parliamentary CND group.
“We’ve seen a big increase in interest in CND over the last year. In September we ran adverts on the Tube and a social media campaign on a petition warning the threat of nuclear war has never been higher, and calling on the government to take steps to avert it and disarm — and we got thousands and thousands of people signing that.
“Talk to friends, family, people you know, and you see that people totally get that nuclear war is on the horizon.”
If that’s the view of ordinary people, though, the determination at the top is to shut people’s eyes to the danger.
Last month at the UN, Britain was one of just three states (the others were France and Russia) to vote against setting up a scientific panel to assess the effects of nuclear war. The United States and other Nato states abstained, also the position taken by most other nuclear powers, though one, China, voted with the majority of non-nuclear states in favour.
“Even the US abstained!” Bolt exclaims. “Yet Britain really doubled down on this … there was real shock from some other countries, who asked why would you not want to understand the consequences?
“The argument was ‘we already know,’ but this would be the first study of its kind in 40 years. The climactic modelling has totally changed, and there’s new evidence to consider suggesting the ‘regional’ nuclear wars being talked up by Nato and Russian strategists — as opposed to the global mutually assured destruction assumed during the first cold war — would still lead to devastating nuclear winters.”
Bolt reasons that the British government must have been trying to signal to the United States how totally committed it is to nuclear weapons and the Nato military doctrine that permits first use.
This is part of positioning aimed at showing willing to an incoming Trump presidency. Bolt is unconvinced by arguments that Trump will pursue an isolationist policy.
“Trump argues for a massive increase in military spending by Nato states,” she points out. “There has been no suggestion he will reverse the decision to station US nuclear weapons on European bases, including Lakenheath in Suffolk.
“He’s likely to try to push more of the financial burden of projecting US power onto European states.
“And it’s horrifying when you hear Trump advisers like Robert O’Brien talking about the need to ‘do a Soviet Union’ on China, to force it into a nuclear arms race to destroy it.
“I fear the America First policy will turn out to be a continued ratcheting up of US aggression.”
Bolt says the rhetoric deployed against not just Russia, but other states including China, North Korea and Iran “feels very much like we’re in another cold war, and increasingly we see it talked about explicitly, preparation for a third world war.
“Political leaders can’t ignore it any more. By trying to, they are simply alienating themselves further from the public.”
And CND is determined to make them sit up and notice. Bolt outlines plans for a “bases tour” in 2025, which will feature actions at Barrow-in-Furness, where nuclear submarines are built, the Devonport naval base and Aldermaston, and supporting, as part of Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, a two-week “peace camp” in April at Lakenheath, including an international conference with speakers from Japan, South Korea and the United States, and ending with a blockade of the base.
She’s delighted the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Japanese nuclear bomb survivors’ campaign Nihon Hidankyo, saying it will help raise awareness of the human costs of nuclear war — and pleased its co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki immediately compared the destruction visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, since the merciless mass killing of civilians is itself a warning of what modern states and politicians are capable of. She sees next year’s 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings as an opportunity to take that message across the country.
Raising awareness is a huge part of CND’s job, and one she’s been conscious of since first being involved in setting up Youth and Student CND toward the end of the 1990s.
She remembers as a student waking up to the US missile defence projects of that decade, the “unipolar moment” when following the collapse of the Soviet Union US power was unchallenged worldwide. “It was about the US being able to attack other countries with impunity. To create the same sort of circumstances as when it was able to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki without fear of retaliation.”
As with me, the first war she was involved in campaigning against was the 1999 Nato attack on Yugoslavia, and like so many new to left activism it was an eye-opener as to how the system closes ranks to enforce its approved narrative about the world.
“You know that phrase that truth is the first casualty of war? I remember being so shocked at the way the BBC would run what amounted to Ministry of Defence press releases.”
CND does not try to separate campaigning against nuclear war from the wider struggle for peace, and has worked with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and peace and Muslim organisations as a key organiser of the gigantic Gaza ceasefire demonstrations over the past year.
“We have to oppose wars where there’s a threat of nuclear war, and increasingly there is,” she says. “We want to make sure nuclear weapons never get used again. Clearly, escalating war in the Middle East and in Ukraine makes it more likely they will be used again.”
So does the threat to resume nuclear testing by both Russia and the United States. This means campaigning to defend the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will be another priority for CND over the next 12 months.
All these developments give the lie to claims that possession of nuclear weapons somehow makes the world safer by preventing wars. “It’s not worked, has it? It’s obscene.
“It was always racist, as it conflated the absence of direct war in Europe with world peace while wars of a horrific nature were fought in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan or Iraq.”
Joining the dots between international crises, bringing the cause of nuclear disarmament together with campaigns for environmental and social justice, was a theme of CND’s conference last October.
“We’ve been doing this for decades: showing the relevance of all these campaigns to the whole of society, showing what the endless militarism costs us, socially and ecologically. We’re going to be doing a lot more of this: exposing the links between militarism and climate change, the impact of inflated arms budgets on the rest of the public sector.”
CND might date back to the 1950s, but in a darkening world it seems more relevant than ever. It seems a safe bet that Morning Star readers will be working to make its 2025 campaigns as big and influential as possible.
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There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Experts told Newsweek that such a dual-capable missile will give China an advantage in a nuclear war. The Chinese defense ministry did not immediately …
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons() has accomplished a lot of good work and good deeds this year, and this article rates the top 5 in reverse order and also provides an “Honorable Mention List”, all of which are extremely important to avoiding nuclear war, and, of course, recognizing that abolishing nuclear weapons is the key. But there are two keys and only one is being used.
So, let me point out that so long as nuclear power plants continue to exist and are now on the verge of flourishing in the future, there will always be nuclear weapons. It’s not just that they use the same fuel (enriched uranium), but also because nuclear reactors, even if locked in a stationary plant or facility environment, are also nuclear weapons — in some ways more tactfully dangerously overlooked than all grades of nuclear bombs.
It bothers me immensely that we rail against nuclear weapons of mass destruction, but we insanely praise nuclear power as if one is a doomsday issue and the other is our salvation. How stupid are we, anyway? “Ignorance is bliss . . .”, wrote Thomas Gray, in the 18th Century,, who apparently said it first: “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”.” Adding the 2nd half of the quotation is exactly what is happening in today’s world of “all things nuclear”, and getting rid of just one variety won’t save us from self-destruction. ~llaw
Rising together against the nuclear threat: ICAN’s highlights for 2024
December 23, 2024Campaign News
Rising together against the nuclear threat: ICAN’s highlights for 2024
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In 2024, we saw a strong global pushback against the nuclear threat. While the danger of nuclear weapons use seemed to loom larger than ever, with mounting tensions, escalatory rhetoric, irresponsible policy changes and the conflicts in Russia and the Middle East driving up the risk, all around the world, ICAN campaigners spoke out and took bold, powerful action, demanding their governments do their part to get rid of nuclear weapons once and for all.
Here are some of the highlights from 2024:
#5 We now have half of the world on board with the treaty banning nuclear weapons
Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Solomon Islands became the latest states parties to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), in a clear signal of the global support for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and the ban as a way to get there. São Tomé and Príncipe also ratified it at the beginning of the year.
#4 Launch of the Swiss Popular Initiative
“We demand that words are finally followed by action.”
When the Swiss Government decided to ignore the will of parliament and instead bow to the will of nuclear-armed states, we refused to take no for an answer. We helped to form an alliance of Swiss organisations to launch a federal popular initiative to put the power to join the treaty into the hands of the Swiss people. This is the first case where we are using direct democracy to fight back against closed-door decision-making.
#3 Now reaching over 100 cities each in Spain and Italy, the City Appeal is growing rapidly
Local governments have been playing a massive role in building up pressure in pro-nuclear weapons countries, with 123 new cities making the case this year, including capitals and iconic cities like Tirana, Rome and the Hague and the first two cities in India, and cities in Greece are joining rapidly. Special mention goes to Italy and Spain, in which each crossed the milestone of 100 cities on board the ICAN Cities Appeal!
#2 Pushing back against nuclear weapons spending with a powerful week of action
Every year, ICAN publishes the only report exposing the billions of dollars wasted on nuclear weapons, generating global headlines and sparking outrage. The news that the nine nuclear-armed states spent $91.4 billion in 2023 generated considerable coverage across the world including in top-tier outlets in the nuclear-armed states this year (ABC, NBC, Washington Post, Newsweek, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, The Times, Radio France, BFM TV and Le Figaro and more). Irish President Michael D Higgins responded to the report, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva cited our figures when addressing the UN General Assembly, while Costa Rica, Jamaica, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka all referred to ICAN’s figures in national statements on nuclear weapons.
This year, in addition to releasing the report, ICAN called for a week of action against this unacceptable diversion of public resources. And campaigners from around the world delivered. From the US to Italy, from Japan to Switzerland, we saw rallies, signature drives, teach-ins, social media collaborations, Op-Eds, webinars, protests at banks, media campaigns and more to put pressure on governments and financial institutions to stop spending on nuclear weapons. Look back at the action here.
Honourable mentions
It has been such a busy year that it is impossible to list all the incredible things ICAN and our campaigners did in one article (do keep an eye out for our annual report early next year). But here are a few more great moments from this year that also warrant a shout-out:
Three days for nuclear disarmament and nuclear justice in Kazakhstan, a country still dealing with the legacy of nuclear testing.
A powerful new report describing how nuclear weapons are uniquely harmful to children, based on the experiences of children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those living near nuclear test sites
A new statement by the Global Alliance for Banking on Values calling for the financial industry to stop profiting from weapons (including nuclear weapons)
#1 Nobel Peace Prize for the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
October came with unexpected but very timely and welcome news: Nihon Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize (!!!) “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again” and the organisation’s key role in building up and maintaining the nuclear taboo.
Having worked alongside this Japanese grassroots movement of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other hibakusha to push for the prohibition and total elimination of nuclear weapons, ICAN was thrilled by this exciting award and was proud to help support and celebrate them in Oslo during the Nobel Peace Week. The hibakusha’s testimonies and tireless campaigning have been crucial to progress on nuclear disarmament in general and the adoption and entry into force of the TPNW in particular. As we mark 80 years since the devastating U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can build on the momentum from this past year and use this opportunity to build on the ban.
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’a ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM. Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. In fact, Medvedev pressed the nuclear threat button a total of 12 times ..
In order to keep abreast of the weekend nuclear news, I will post Saturday and Sunday’s news, but without editorial comment. If a weekend story warrants a critical review, it will show up on Monday’s posts . . .
If you are not familiar with the weekday daily blog post, this is how the nuclear news post works . . . llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA”:
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available on this weekend’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
United States Mission to the United Nations – State Department
… nuclear weapons. Nearly three years ago, we sat with the Russians in this Chamber urging de-escalation, negotiations, peace talks – anything but war.
… nuclear safety, all to vilify Ukraine and issue thinly veiled threats … war over Ukraine or false accusations that Ukraine stores weapons in nuclear …
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
As you read the following article by By Janice Stein from “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, keep in mind that a so-called ‘Tactical Nuclear Weapon’ as discussed concerning this incredibly dangerous issue may be as powerful and cause as much or more deaths and destruction as the USA bombing of Japan that ended WWII at a huge cost, including perhaps a quarter of a million innocent Japanese citizens who had nothing to do with that war.
It seems to be fairly obvious that Putin’s idea to defeat Ukraine and re-occupy the country is something similar, with a copy-cat approach, to that first and last time an atomic bomb has ever been used in war. But, as this article points out quite clearly, nuking Ukraine could easily backfire on Russia for several reasons, including nuclear fallout risk to Russia itself.
The whole idea of using nuclear weapons and a preventive or protective system called ‘deterrence’ is sadly an indication that our average human intelligence quotient (in general) is like constantly building better mouse traps, but refusing to provide the cheese. We are irresponsibly bankrupting the world with the costs of nuclear deterrence while acting out with our world leaders’ childish behavior tantamount to segregated groups of school kids trying to control who runs the playground.
There is only one way to a happy ending, and that is a to unite as a cooperative communal species that has always, ignorantly and erroneously, defied our laughable concept of humanitarianism in wealth, politics, family, and ethnicity with insane self-conceived racial discrimination and superiority with never-ending battles and wars all around the world collectively. This war, if it happens, will be the last one . . . ~llaw
Ukraine started using the older, shorter-ranged US-supplied ballistic missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, in October 2023. The Biden administration has now allowed Ukraine to use long-range ATACMS to help defend its forces in the Kursk region of Russia. (Credit: US Government / John Hamilton, via DVIDS)
In the bizarre interregnum since the US presidential elections, world leaders have been calling President-elect Donald Trump in Florida before his inauguration on January 20. Some of them worry that the ongoing war between an increasingly desperate Ukraine that kills a Russian general in Moscow as it did this week and an emboldened Russia could spin out of control through miscalculation. The darkest scenario is one that culminates in escalation when Russia detonates a nuclear weapon. How likely is such a scenario in the few weeks left before inauguration day?
The likelihood of nuclear escalation cannot be estimated. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945 are the only cases of the use of nuclear weapons. That strategy was deliberate, not a product of miscalculation, and can best be described as “escalate to de-escalate.” There is no case of nuclear escalation through miscalculation from conventional war to nuclear fighting. No estimate of likelihood has any validity unless there are a large enough number of cases to generate a probability distribution. Nuclear escalation occurs in a world of what Oxford University’s John Kay calls “radical uncertainty” in which historical information provides no reliable guidance.
One way to think about nuclear escalation in the context of Russia’s current war against Ukraine is to build scenarios in which Russia uses a nuclear weapon and then trace a logically compelling pathway back to the present. It then becomes possible to ask what conditions could enable such a pathway to escalation.
Tactical nuclear weapon. In one scenario that has been discussed, Russia explodes a tactical nuclear weapon to force Ukraine to end the fighting and agree to cede Crimea and the four Ukrainian provinces that Russia is currently occupying and claiming as its own. Under what conditions is it possible that Russia might adopt such a strategy? Detonating a single tactical nuclear weapon would provide very limited battlefield advantage to Russian forces, and there is some risk that the radioactive fallout could blow back and inflict harm on nearby Russian troops.
Nor would the damage from a single tactical nuclear weapon be grave enough to so demoralize the Ukrainian public that it would buckle under the pressure. If anything, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon would likely radicalize Ukrainians who have been reluctantly moving toward grudging acceptance of a ceasefire.
Were Russia to use a tactical nuclear weapon, such a strategy might backfire. The Ukrainian public might well rally around the flag, unite behind its leader, and stiffen its resistance to ceasefire proposals that are increasingly the subject of discussion inside Ukraine.
Finally, the detonation of a single tactical nuclear weapon—however small its payload—would break the “nuclear taboo” that has held for almost eight decades. In October 2022, encouraged by the United States, Russia’s key partners—China and India—signaled their strong opposition to the use of any nuclear weapon under any circumstances. Now isolated from the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin would not want to alienate his fellow leaders of the nine BRICS countries, which include China, India, and Iran.
There is, therefore, no compelling logic that supports the use of even a single tactical nuclear weapon. What conditions could change that logic?
Russia could face a situation where its forces are being pushed back and out of Ukraine. Putin faced a version of that scenario in the autumn of 2022 when Ukraine’s armed forces were pushing the Russian army back. It was then that the CIA issued the estimate that there was a 50 percent chance that Russia would use a nuclear weapon.
After Ukrainian troops broke through and pushed Russian forces back from Kharkiv in the northeast and Kherson in the south, US intelligence overheard a conversation among senior Russian military commanders about when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Putin was reportedly not part of these conversations. That intelligence was circulated inside the US government in mid-October. In addition, there are unconfirmed reports that Russia moved some tactical weapons out of storage and loosened operational controls that would make the use of a tactical nuclear weapon easier. It was these two developments that pushed up the US intelligence estimate that Russia might use a nuclear weapon.
Around the same time, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in one of his calls with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, accused Ukraine of planning to use a “dirty bomb.” Concern among Western officials grew that Putin was preparing a false flag operation. Only a long phone call between Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov, reduced the tensions. The most senior military officer from each country discussed Russia’s doctrine governing the use of nuclear weapons and reassured one another. This episode tells us that even when Russian forces were retreating in Ukraine, Putin did not break the nuclear taboo.
Russia has since significantly lowered the threshold of when it would use nuclear weapons. In November 2024, Putin signed a decree amending Russia’s nuclear doctrine in two important ways. The doctrine now declares that Russia has the right to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state that attacks Russia or its allies and is supported by a nuclear power. In addition, Russia’s nuclear doctrine released in 2020 declared that Russia would use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy. The new amendment lowers that threshold to a conventional attack that is a critical threat to Russia’s sovereignty or territory.
Putin also railed against the Biden administration’s decision in November to allow Ukraine to use US-supplied longer-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, against military installations inside Russia and warned that this decision was tantamount to NATO declaring war on Russia. Moscow then launched the Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile equipped with multiple warheads, against Ukraine. The missile can carry nuclear warheads. Despite the bellicose rhetoric and the new missile launch, Russia has not loosened operational controls on any tactical nuclear weapons nor moved any of these weapons out of storage. Instead, Gerasimov again reassured the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., in a phone call that the missile launch was planned long before the announcement about the ATACMS.
The difference between now and the fall of 2022, of course, is that Russian troops are on the offensive on the battlefield and Ukrainian forces are struggling to contain Russian advances. Political and military leaders are far more likely to take risks when they fear losses than when they are making gains.
Miscalculation. What about a scenario in which Putin uses a nuclear weapon because of a technical miscalculation? Experts have long warned that miscalculation could occur if nuclear and conventional forces and their command-and-control structures are integrated. As nuclear weapons are modernized and, in some cases, become smaller, integration is becoming more frequent. However, all these scenarios deal with conventional wars between large nuclear powers that escalate to a nuclear confrontation. In Ukraine, Russia is not at war with another nuclear power. It is difficult to see how these scenarios of escalation through technical miscalculation would be relevant.
Political miscalculation, another type, can occur when a leader miscalculates the consequences of the use of a nuclear weapon to demonstrate resolve. Could Putin make this kind of miscalculation in the weeks before or shortly after President Trump is inaugurated? A scenario might go something like this.
Conflicts tend to intensify as the parties anticipate negotiation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, deeply alarmed by the prospect of an imposed ceasefire, tries a “Hail Mary pass” to break the stalemate on the battlefield. To do so, he decides to use almost all his drone and missile forces in a coordinated attack on the front and behind the lines in Russia. Inevitably, some of the missiles get through, causing Russian forces to retreat, even temporarily, and significant casualties among Russian civilians. Ukrainian intelligence services also assassinate two or three other key Russian generals far behind the lines to show their long reach, as they did when they brazenly killed Gen. Igor Kirilov in Moscow this week. The Russian public is furious and military bloggers stoke the fury, calling for a fierce response. An outraged Putin then gives the order to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon.
How compelling is the path toward that scenario?
It is not impossible that a desperate Zelensky could try to reverse his losing hand. Trump and his team are floating a “peace plan” that is deeply alarming to Zelensky and appears to be very favorable to Russia. It is hard to imagine that Putin would sacrifice that very large potential gain—and possibly more—in exchange for no gain on the battlefield, universal opprobrium from friends and foes alike, and the poisoning of his relationship with the new US president. Putin would have to be so outraged and so emotionally dysregulated that he would lose all self-control. The evidence we have of Putin as an ice-cold and ruthless decision-maker does not fit that profile. This scenario also ignores the multiple conventional options that Putin still has in his arsenal that could inflict far greater punishment on Ukraine.
Context matters. If nuclear escalation through technical or political miscalculation is not a grave concern in the transition period between the Biden and Trump administrations, another pattern is concerning.
From the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Putin has hinted that the use of a nuclear weapon is a live option. Before launching his full-scale invasion in February 2022, he ordered an unknown level of alert that proved to be no more than increased staffing of strategic command centers and issued veiled nuclear threats if NATO were to intervene. A few months later, Putin loosened operational controls on tactical nuclear weapons and two years later lowered the threshold of nuclear use. Even though Putin never appeared to approach a decision to use a nuclear weapon, he manipulated the threat to use nuclear weapons to deter NATO from supplying weapons to Ukraine.
This strategy failed again and again. The United States and its Western allies supplied Ukraine with increasingly more sophisticated equipment over time despite the “nuclear noise.” They judged Putin’s intentions not by what he said but by the larger context in which he was making his thinly veiled threats designed to coerce. They took him seriously only once when Russian forces were in retreat.
Context always matters, even when the threats are nuclear. Putin now has the unenviable reputation of someone who bluffs. This reputation can only encourage NATO to continue to call his bluff in the future. But one day Putin may not be bluffing. If leaders do not pay attention to context, they may well miss the “signal” that, this time, Russia is serious about using a nuclear weapon to coerce an adversary.
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There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Eswatini is taking tangible steps to prepare for its first public radiotherapy centre to enable cancer patients to be treated in-country, according to a team of international experts. Read more →
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Photo of an Underground Bunker Bedroom (from the AP/NPR article)
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
From what is already known about a future nuclear war, it seems a bit silly to buy an underground bunker for several reasons that I will leave to the article and your own information and imagination. If you have followed this blog for awhile you should already know from all kinds of multiple sources and articles that, as this story indicates, is a waste of future comfort, time, and money.
Living underground or in caverns seems like survival for no other reason than to go on living might, in time, make you wish you had died when everybody else most likely did. You would likely never see the son again, nor walk on the planet’s surface again, so why would life in a bunker, even if it extended your life, seems so futile that, if we think about such way of living, would be something to avoid rather than seek . . . ~llaw
Nuclear bunker sales increase, despite warnings they won’t provide protection
December 18, 20241:14 AM ET
By
The Associated Press
The owner, who asked not to be identified because of concerns about his privacy, turns on the lights in his underground shelter in an undisclosed Southern California city, on Dec. 16.
Jae C. Hong/AP
When Bernard Jones Jr. and his wife, Doris, built their dream home, they didn’t hold back. A grotto swimming pool with a waterfall for hot summer days. A home theater for cozy winter nights. A fruit orchard to harvest in fall. And a vast underground bunker in case disaster strikes.
“The world’s not becoming a safer place,” he said. “We wanted to be prepared.”
Under a nondescript metal hatch near the private basketball court, there’s a hidden staircase that leads down into rooms with beds for about 25 people, bathrooms and two kitchens, all backed by a self-sufficient energy source.
With water, electricity, clean air and food, they felt ready for any disaster, even a nuclear blast, at their bucolic home in California’s Inland Empire.
“If there was a nuclear strike, would you rather go into the living room or go into a bunker? If you had one, you’d go there too,” said Jones, who said he reluctantly sold the home two years ago.
Global security leaders are warning nuclear threats are growing as weapons spending surged to $91.4 billion last year. At the same time, private bunker sales are on the rise globally, from small metal boxes to crawl inside of to extravagant underground mansions.
Critics warn these bunkers create a false perception that a nuclear war is survivable. They argue that people planning to live through an atomic blast aren’t focusing on the real and current dangers posed by nuclear threats, and the critical need to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The owner, who asked not to be identified because of privacy concerns, walks out of his underground shelter in an undisclosed Southern California city, on Dec. 16, 2024.
Jae C. Hong/AP
Meanwhile, government disaster experts say bunkers aren’t necessary. A Federal Emergency Management Agency 100-page guide on responding to a nuclear detonation focuses on having the public get inside and stay inside, ideally in a basement and away from outside walls for at least a day. Those existing spaces can provide protection from radioactive fallout, says FEMA.
But increasingly, buyers say bunkers offer a sense of security. The market for U.S. bomb and fallout shelters is forecast to grow from $137 million last year to $175 million by 2030, according to a market research report from BlueWeave Consulting. The report says major growth factors include “the rising threat of nuclear or terrorist attacks or civil unrest.”
Building bunkers
“People are uneasy and they want a safe place to put their family. And they have this attitude that it’s better to have it and not need it then to need it and not have it,” said Atlas Survival Shelters CEO Ron Hubbard, amid showers of sparks and the loud buzz of welding at his bunker factory, which he says is the world’s largest, in Sulphur Springs, Texas.
Hubbard said COVID lockdowns, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war have driven sales.
On Nov. 21, in the hours after Russia’s first-ever use of an experimental, hypersonic ballistic missile to attack Ukraine, Hubbard said his phone rang nonstop.
Four callers ended up buying bunkers in one day, he said, and more ended up ordering doors and other parts for shelters they were already building.
Hubbard said his bunkers are built for all disasters.
“They’re good for anything from a tornado to a hurricane to nuclear fallout, to a pandemic to even a volcano erupting,” he said, sweeping his arms toward a massive warehouse where more than 50 different bunkers were under construction.
A loaded shotgun at arm’s length and metal mesh window shields to block Molotov cocktails nearby, Hubbard said he started his company after building his own bunker about 10 years ago. He says callers ask about prices — $20,000 to multimillions, averaging $500,000 — and installations — they can go just about anywhere. He said most days he sells at least one bunker.
The owner, who asked not to be identified because of concerns about his privacy, closes the heavy metal door of his underground shelter in an undisclosed Southern California city, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jae C. Hong/AP
Under Hubbard’s doomsday scenario, global tensions could lead to World War III, a situation he is prepared to live through.
“The good news about nuclear warfare,” he said, “if there ever was any, that it’s very survivable if you’re not killed in the initial blast.”
He’s not wrong, say U.S. government disaster preparedness experts.
“You want to go to your most robust building”
“Look, this fallout exposure is entirely preventable because it is something that happens after the detonation,” said Brooke Buddemeier a radiation safety specialist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the U.S. government designs nuclear weapons. Buddemeier and his colleagues are tasked with evaluating what could happen after an attack and how best to survive. “There’s going to be a fairly obvious nuclear explosion event, a large cloud. So just getting inside, away from where those particles fall, can keep you and your family safe.”
Buddemeier and others in the U.S. government are trying to get Americans — who decades ago hid under desks during nuclear attack drills — educated about how to respond.
After a deadly and deafening blast, a bright flash and a mushroom cloud, it will take about 15 minutes for the radioactive fallout to arrive for those a mile or more away from ground zero, said Michael Dillon, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“It’s going to literally be sand falling on your head, and you’re going to want to get out of that situation. You want to go to your most robust building,” he said. In their models, they estimate people may need to stay inside for a day or two before evacuating.
The government’s efforts to educate the public were reinvigorated after a false alarm missile alert in Hawaii in 2018 caused widespread panic.
The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones statewide just before 8:10 a.m., said: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
For the next 40 minutes there were traffic jams, workers running into and out of buildings, families huddling in their bathrooms, students gathering in gyms, drivers blocking tunnels, all in an attempt to seek shelter, without any clear idea of what “seek immediate shelter” actually meant.
Today the federal government offers a guide to prepare citizens for a nuclear attack that advises people to find a basement or the center of a large building and stay there, possibly for a few days, until they get word about where to go next.
“Gently brush your pet’s coat to remove any fallout particles” it says, adding that the 15-minute delay between bomb and fallout allows “enough time for you to be able to prevent significant radiation exposure.”
Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, who directs the FEMA-backed National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, said “the scenarios of a nuclear detonation are not all or nothing.”
If a small number of weapons detonate rather than all-out war, he said, sheltering inside a large building to avoid the fallout could save lives.
“Underground bunkers aren’t going to protect people”
Nonproliferation advocates bristle at the bunkers, shelters or any suggestion that a nuclear war is survivable.
“Bunkers are, in fact, not a tool to survive a nuclear war, but a tool to allow a population to psychologically endure the possibility of a nuclear war,” said Alicia Sanders-Zakre at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Sanders-Zakre called radiation the “uniquely horrific aspect of nuclear weapons,” and noted that even surviving the fallout doesn’t prevent long-lasting, intergenerational health crises. “Ultimately, the only solution to protect populations from nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
A bedroom is shown inside an underground shelter in an undisclosed Southern California city, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jae C. Hong/AP
Researcher Sam Lair at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies says U.S. leaders stopped talking about bunkers decades ago.
“The political costs incurred by causing people to think about shelters again is not worth it to leaders because it forces people to think about what they would do after nuclear war,” he said. “That’s something that very, very few people want to think about. This makes people feel vulnerable.”
Lair said building bunkers seems futile, even if they work in the short term.
“Even if a nuclear exchange is perhaps more survivable than many people think, I think the aftermath will be uglier than many people think as well,” he said. “The fundamental wrenching that it would do to our way of life would be profound.”
That’s been a serious concern of Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern for almost 50 years.
“If we ever get to a point where there’s all out nuclear war, underground bunkers aren’t going to protect people,” he said. “Instead, we ought to be investing our resources and our energy trying to talk about a nuclear weapons freeze, initially.”
Next, he said, “we should work for the day when we get rid of all nuclear weapons.”
Year after year he introduces legislation pushing for nonproliferation, but looking out his office window at the Capitol, he said he’s disappointed by the lack of debate over what will be a $1 trillion expenditure to build and modernize the U.S. arsenal.
“The stakes, if a nuclear weapon is ever used, is that millions and millions and millions of people will die. It really is shocking that we have world leaders who talk casually about utilizing nuclear weapons. I mean, it would be catastrophic, not just for those that are involved in an exchange of nuclear weapons, but for the entire world.”
McGovern pushed back against FEMA’s efforts to prepare the public for a nuclear attack by advising people to take shelter.
“What a stupid thing to say that we all just need to know where to hide and where to avoid the most impacts of nuclear radiation. I mean, really, that’s chilling when you hear people try to rationalize nuclear war that way,” he said.
Nuclear war was far from a couple’s mind when they went house-hunting in Southern California a few years ago. They wanted a home to settle down and raise their family, and they needed extra garage space. They spotted an online ad for a home with at least eight parking spots. On the basketball court, there was a metal hatch. Beneath it was a bunker.
This was Jones’ former home, which Jones said he put up for sale for family reasons.
The husband, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about his family’s privacy, went ahead and bought Jones’ home, bunker and all. They aren’t particularly worried about nuclear war, and haven’t spent a night in the bunker, but they have stored food and medical supplies down there.
“We have told some of our friends, if something goes crazy and gets bad, get over here as fast as possible,” the husband said. “It does provide a sense of security.”
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(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
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“And if such countries pose a threat to us, we reserve the right to use our nuclear weapons against them. “We have announced that if the same threats …
From the article: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy/ Associated Press Photo
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY AND THE RISKS & CONSEQUENCES OF TOMORROW
From the following brief “TCM” article “Only fools are not afraid of weapons. Volodymyr Putin has lost his mind, as evidenced by his missile attacks. His threats should frighten the entire world. This is about nuclear war!” the Ukrainian President stressed.
So could it be that now we will soon have two world leaders consulting with each other who have “lost their minds”? Just wondering — ‘nuff said! ~llaw
“It’s about a nuclear war”: Zelenskyy admits whether Putin’s threats frighten Him
Published at
18:16, 18.12.24
Reading time
2 min
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Photo: Associated Press
The President of Ukraine emphasizes that the threats made by the Russian dictator should alarm the entire world.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy states that only fools are not afraid when it comes to threats involving the use of nuclear weapons.
The Head of State made this remark during an interview with Le Parisien.
Zelenskyy was asked whether the threats by Russian president Volodymyr Putin to use nuclear weapons frighten him.
“Only fools are not afraid of weapons. Volodymyr Putin has lost his mind, as evidenced by his missile attacks. His threats should frighten the entire world. This is about nuclear war!” the Ukrainian President stressed.
According to him, the world is not responding strongly enough to Russia’s nuclear threats.
“All possible sanctions must be applied to prevent any leader – Putin or anyone else – from even considering such a thing. Unfortunately, we do not see a strong enough reaction against him,” Zelenskyy stated.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’a ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Volodymyr Putin has lost his mind, as evidenced by his missile attacks. His threats should frighten the entire world. This is about nuclear war!” the .
… nuclear threats,” said NTI Co-Chair and CEO Ernest J. Moniz. “Peter … NTI urges UN member states to support the proposed resolution on Nuclear War ..
![Ukrainians wearing traditional clothes take part in a Christmas procession at the Sofiivska Square in Kyiv, on December 25, 2024. [Anatolii STEPANOV / AFP]](https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto%2Cq_auto%3Agood%2Cfl_progressive%3Asteep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff94f77b7-1932-4176-acc5-874a85a59c26_770x514.jpeg?ssl=1 "Ukrainians wearing traditional clothes take part in a Christmas procession at the Sofiivska Square in Kyiv, on December 25, 2024. [Anatolii STEPANOV / AFP]")
