TODAY. Anthony Blinken would get into bed with the devil, if it meant lucrative sales of USA weapons and nukes to Hell
One cannot help but admire the frantic peregrinations of Antony Blinken all around the world, in pursuit of American weapons companies’ interest, as well as doing the smarmy cover-up for USA’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The guy has amazing energy and zeal. Not sure about integrity.
However, this is all symptomatic of American prevailing culture. The Biden administration does seem hell-bent on backing Israel – even though the horror of the atrocity in Gaza is visible to the world. Even though the world’s Jews now fear an awful backlash, and the rise of nasty anti-semitism.
But the USA blunders on. The war in Ukraine drags on, and the weapons flow no doubt will continue there. (The U.S. Republicans will surely eventually find a way to back the provision of more weapons to UKraine). The weapons flow continues to Israel, despite Biden’s pious proclamations about peace.
I’m forever reading in the U.S. press about other countries clamouring to buy USA nuclear technology – plans to sell small and large nuclear reactors to Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, Kenya, Ghana, and of course, the big nuclear submarine coup sale to Australia ………………
I also read – what I find rather nauseous – stuff about how the USA is “helping” the people of Gaza – compassionate aid, plans for when Israel is finally completely victorious, and so on.
But it was the BBC’s story today that really impressed me: Blinken visits Middle East to discuss Gaza post-war plan.
“The major Arab sponsor Saudi Arabia would normalise relations with Israel in return for access to advanced US weapons and an American-backed civilian nuclear power programme.“
I momentarily lack the energy to write about the USA’s new best friend – Saudi Arabia, (itself a buyer of USA arms), about the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, about the discrimination against women, and Saudi Arabia’s whole theocratic suppression of human rights.
But all is forgiven, if we can make money selling weapons, and if that means some delicate diplomatic acrobatics what better acrobat than Antony Blinken?
UK and Australia set to elevate defence relationship to NATO level with new ‘status of forces’ agreement
ABC News, by Defence correspondent Andrew Greene, 21 Mar 24
- In short: UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps are in Australia to discuss efforts to help Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and the AUKUS partnership to deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.
- It’s expected the two parties will sign a new “status of forces” agreement, which establishes the framework under which military personnel can operate in a foreign country.
- What’s next? The first Australian-built submarine is scheduled to arrive in the early 2040s.
……………………………………… During formal meetings in Canberra on Thursday, and then at AUKMIN in Adelaide on Friday, discussions are expected to focus on efforts to help Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and the AUKUS partnership to deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.
“If the United Kingdom signs a ‘Status of Forces’ agreement with Australia it will be the first such arrangement it has done so with any country outside NATO,” an official familiar with AUKMIN planning told the ABC, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
A Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, is either a multilateral or bilateral agreement and establishes the framework under which military personnel can operate in a foreign country.
It can also shape how domestic laws of that jurisdiction apply towards them while posted there.
…………………….The Australian and British ministers will head to Adelaide late Thursday ahead of a “significant” announcement on sovereign submarine shipbuilding in Adelaide.
British defence giant BAE Systems, which is currently constructing Australia’s Hunter-class frigates, is widely anticipated to be announced as the main builder for the new SSN-AUKUS submarines to be assembled in Adelaide.
BAE Systems currently builds the Royal Navy’s submarines in northern England and already has a considerable presence in Adelaide.
The first Australian-built submarine is scheduled to arrive in the early 2040s.
Following the submarine announcement, all four ministers will go behind closed doors for their AUKMIN talks, before a joint press conference in the afternoon. …. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-21/uk-and-australian-to-strengthen-military-ties/103613164
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Glorious new financial jargon from the nuclear lobby – the “International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure (IBNI)”
International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure (IBNI) will become the ‘Gold Standard’ of nuclear finance.
the IBNI will have an estimated 30+ sovereign governmental member shareholders, each with aligned views on nuclear energy and other global policy objectives. …….. IBNI – as a specialised ‘global nuclear infrastructure bank’ – will have a global mandate to finance and support nuclear sector projects, programmes and industries in all its member countries .
where the bank aims to achieve the most significant global impacts will be in catalysing a highly significant ‘capital multiplier impact’, which represents the total quantum of global financial markets capital mobilised relative to each dollar of public investment (by sovereign shareholder member states) in the bank.
IBNI will become the ‘Gold Standard’ of nuclear finance.
Why nuclear energy needs exclusive global multilateral infrastructure bank By Daniel Dean, 18 Mar 2024 https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/why-nuclear-energy-needs-exclusive-global-multilateral-infrastructure-bank/—
The mobilisation of trillions of dollars of global capital necessary for the nuclear sector to scale in the near-term can be supported by a new kind of financial institution – an international multilateral infrastructure bank focused exclusively on nuclear energy, writes Daniel Dean, IBNI-IO SAG chairman.
Attaining current policy objectives, including 2050 Net Zero, will require global nuclear technologies to scale to an unprecedented magnitude and at breakneck speed.
COMMENT on Lie number 1. Attaining 2050 Net Zero may well be impossible anyway, but there is zero likelihood of nuclear power to have anything meaningful to do with it, other than to slow down real solutions – energy conservation and renewable energy .
This historically unmatched scaling will also require the very rapid mobilisation of multiple trillions of dollars of capital into the sector.quick online loans. Existing nuclear project delivery and financing mechanisms rely mainly on governmental support and attract very limited risk appetite from the global financial markets. Such existing models will be insufficient for catalyzing the very significant quanta of capital necessary required to enable nuclear to scale as quickly as possible to achieve multiple 100s of GW’s of additional global nuclear generation capacity. If the world is going to achieve its ambitious climate, clean energy, energy transition and energy security goals in this short period of time, there simply needs to be a fundamental change in the approach toward financing nuclear infrastructure.
Scaling of the nuclear sector faces numerous and multidimensional impediments. These interrelated impediments span a broad spectrum and include among others: public policy; regulatory, markets and ESG frameworks; social license; geopolitical; commercial and risk allocation models; and perhaps most importantly, affordability and accessibility. Each of the nuclear sector’s impediments is manifested in the form of financial risk. Clearly, the nuclear industry will need to do its part through increased on-time and on-budget performance and other progressive improvements, alongside the key roles of governments, owner-operators, end-users/ratepayers and all other stakeholder groups that will each need to do their part. However, the ‘sum of these parts’ (e.g. what each stakeholder can individually do) does not add up to a solution that will enable nuclear to scale.
The mobilisation of the necessary capital required for nuclear to scale, requires formulation of systemic and multidimensional risk mitigation solutions. The nuclear sector is currently caught in a ‘vicious circle’, whereby nuclear cannot and will not scale without access to a ‘runway’ of cost-efficient capital and such capital is not accessible unless nuclear becomes sufficiently de-risked due to scaling. Nuclear’s ‘vicious circle’ needs to be very rapidly transformed into a ‘virtuous circle’, which will require immediate risk mitigation solutions and unlocking capital flows well before scaling can begin.
From a financial risk management perspective, the nuclear sector poses excessive financial risk as it is measured in the form of the Value at Risk (“VaR”) metric. From a financier’s perspective, VaR can be described simply as: the amount of at-risk capital deployed and the probability of loss.
Because nuclear sector financings are both highly capital intensive and the real and perceived risks of the sector are viewed to be high, it is intuitive that the nuclear sector’s VaR profiles currently compare unfavourably against many other alternative asset classes.
Well that one sure is true!
A new nuclear investor
The proposed International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure (IBNI) will be a new multilateral nuclear infrastructure bank that will be focused on enabling nuclear technology to rapidly scale and become both highly affordable and accessible within all its member countries, globally. Importantly, IBNI will finance and support both the production and supply chain (supply side) as well as the customer side (demand side) of the nuclear sector in member countries ranging from developing countries to highly developed ‘nuclear mature’ countries. The bank will act as the global early and long-term patient capital provider and it will finance and support all areas of the nuclear value spectrum on a technology-, vendor-, and country-neutral basis including new-build (Gen. III/ III+, Gen IV and future fusion, other); life-extensions and re-starts; refinancing and restructurings; fuel cycle (mining through repository); production and supply chains; nuclear infrastructure; and decommissioning and nuclear waste management projects, programs and industries.
IBNI will be capitalised, governed and operated using models similar to those that have been proven mission-successful by the world’s major global multilateral banks, which have been in existence for many decades. Those models include the World Bank Group (WBG); the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). In other words, the IBNI will have an estimated 30+ sovereign governmental member shareholders, each with aligned views on nuclear energy and other global policy objectives. Whereas those existing ‘multilateral development banks’ like the WBG, EBRD and ADB are generally focused on missions such as economic development and poverty eradication (and generally, within defined geographies, developmental and/or income strata), IBNI – as a specialised ‘global nuclear infrastructure bank’ – will have a global mandate to finance and support nuclear sector projects, programmes and industries in all its member countries (not limited to geography, developmental status or income level). The existing multilateral banks are currently not providing any material support for the nuclear sector. While the change in longstanding policies of these institutions toward nuclear is highly encouraged and would be complimentary (not competitive), these institutions are ill-equipped to be seen as a substitute for IBNI’s proposed role as the global nuclear financing institution.
On the one hand, the bank will use its own capital to directly co-finance and support qualified nuclear projects based on the principle of ‘additionality’ (i.e. ‘bridging gaps’ throughout the nuclear value spectrum where existing public and private funding and financing are not adequately accessible on a cost-efficient basis). It is anticipated that the bank’s main commercial operating arm, the IBNI Ordinary Operations Fund will be a self-sustaining entity that will issue long-term debt in the global ‘sovereign and supranational bond markets’. Based on the strong shareholder liquidity and support offered by the bank’s shareholders, it is envisaged that the fund will achieve ‘triple-A’ credit ratings or the highest credit quality that will allow IBNI to borrow funds at the lowest cost and in turn, pass along lowest cost financing for the benefit of the bank’s programme participants. Certainly, accessing least-cost capital is one critical element that will drive down nuclear generation costs and enable nuclear technologies to achieve affordability targets, which are critical for enabling nuclear to scale.
On the other hand, and most importantly, where the bank aims to achieve the most significant global impacts will be in catalysing a highly significant ‘capital multiplier impact’, which represents the total quantum of global financial markets capital mobilised relative to each dollar of public investment (by sovereign shareholder member states) in the bank. IBNI’s advisory team projects that the bank should reasonably target a ‘capital multiplier impact’ of more than 100x, from the bank’s targeted establishment date in 2024/25 through 2050. Accordingly, the potential for the highly significant ‘capital multiplier impact’ effect targeted by IBNI will provide the highest value for money for each public dollar invested. Thus, a comparative investment in the bank would represent the most efficient means of achieving both national and global policy objectives, relative to strictly inward investments in a countries own nuclear sector’s domestic and bilateral initiatives (which the bank would not compete with).
COMMENT: utterly convincing? Not really.
Managing nuclear risk
In order to accomplish the bank’s core mission of scaling nuclear to attain a sustainable 2050 Net Zero World, IBNI will need to enable multidimensional risk mitigation solutions that will rapidly and sufficiently reduce nuclear sector VaR profiles to levels that become acceptable and in line with other similar infrastructure asset classes.
IBNI will implement programmes and offer customised financial product lines that will be engineered to systemically and progressively ‘flatten’ the VaR curves all across the nuclear sector. This ambition goes well beyond the necessary goal of developing market confidence through the necessary demonstration of global fleet deployments of serialised, repeatable, successful nuclear projects delivered within schedule and budget. IBNI will also serve as a global aggregator of an adopted set of universal nuclear-specific standards and criteria and the bank will aim to become a global institutional repository of nuclear financing expertise, which will become relied upon by investors, lenders and financing institutions for their own evaluation of nuclear sector financing transactions. Borrowing from the World Bank’s phraseology, IBNI will become the ‘Gold Standard’ of nuclear finance. While currently there are discrete elements of nuclear-specific financing standards and expertise available (from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, and Equator Principles IV, International Finance Corporation Standards, for example), there is, by no means, the necessary comprehensive set of nuclear-specific financing standards and criteria, such as those that pertain to every other asset class which are available from the existing major multilateral financing institutions like the World Bank. Nuclear is a very unique asset class that deserves its own global financial institution that would have deep expertise within the sector and an understanding of the unique multidimensional risk elements of nuclear finance. Such an institution would be able to adopt a set of standards and criteria specific to these unique elements.
Without an IBNI, and despite the valiant combined efforts of individual governments, sporadic international cooperation and the nuclear industry itself, the nuclear sector’s ability to scale will most likely continue to be constrained and the ‘vicious circle’ will persist unbroken.
COMMENT. Yes – agreed – the nuclear sector’s ability to scale will most likely continue to be constrained and the ‘vicious circle’ will persist
IBNI offers a unique ‘whole of the world’ proposition that will enable the global nuclear sector to rapidly and efficiently break the ‘vicious circle’ that persistently plagues the sector. Only through a global and systemic approach toward mitigating nuclear’s multidimensional risk elements and sufficiently ‘flattening’ the nuclear sector’s VaR curves can the sector’s ‘vicious circle’ be transformed into a ‘virtuous circle’. IBNI offers this unique global risk mitigation solution which will enable the mobilisation of trillions of dollars of global capital necessary for the nuclear sector to scale in the near term.
This article first appeared in Nuclear Engineering International magazine.
Armed by Washington, Israel Trashes the Genocide Convention
Stop treating Gaza like a natural disaster.
SCHEERPOST, By Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox / TomDispatch 20 Mar 24
It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.
The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.
Flouting the Order to Stop the Killing
On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling in a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. It ordered that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described” in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The court’s first order prohibited “killing members” of the Palestinian population or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December 2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000 Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip past 25,000. The court’s order, issued days later, would have essentially zero effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000.
During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had advertised as “safe zones.” Typically, when, on February 12th, Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the survivors told reporters that they’d been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central Gaza, killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.
Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing spree by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”
In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)
In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”
Such powerful bombs, reported Al Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars………………………………………………………………………………………………………more https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/20/armed-by-washington-israel-trashes-the-genocide-convention/
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 