TODAY. Turning Point, The Cold War and the Bomb. Episode 3- Institutional Insanity
This begins with Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022 and Russian attacks on Ukraine, and Ukraine’s strong resistance. Author Garret Graff calls this first successful resistance “probably the turning point of the entire war.” So – it became a full scale war.
Now back to the 1950s. In the early years of the cold war, the USA treated nuclear war as something that could be survived. Public education programs. The message was that the Soviet Union was an existential threat, but that you could survive, with school training, with fallout shelters.
Fear of communism led to developing bigger bombs against the communists.
The movement to the hydrogen bomb, the thermonuclear device. Scary film of testing this on Elugelab Island in 1952, horrifying many, including Robert Oppenheimer. Albert Einstein wrote “General annihilation beckons“. Eisenhower shocked and shaken – “the power to erase human life from this planet“. The Soviets feel that they must equal this – their first hydrogen bomb test August 1953. So the USA responds in 1954 with the super-large Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll – making a 4-mile wide fireball. The island populations were affected by the radiation – horrifying personal stories. A Japanese ship affected by the “death ash“. The fisherman’s dying message – “let me be the last person killed by this awful weapon”.
A series of nuclear tests in the USA and across the world. Daniel Ellsberg recalls how he worked with the very clever test designers – “It turns out that intelligence is not a very good guarantee of wisdom“. The movie Dr Strangelove has words directly taken from them, and Ellsberg describes that film as a documentary. “Everything in that film could have happened“. People other than the President could launch an attack. Ellsberg saw the war plans – “they were strange and horrible“. The plan was to hit every city in Russia and China with thermonuclear weapons- with 600 million deaths – one fifth of the world population then. The Soviets then followed with a similar policy. It opened up the world as the playground of the two powers.
Covert operations all around the world. The CIA was created in 1947 modelled on Britain’s MI6. The Soviets had the KGB, very repressive under Stalin. In the USA intelligence and operational planning, and action, were combined in the CIA. By 1949 the CIA were doing paramilitary operations against the nations of Central Europe that were Soviet satellites. They started with Ukraine, training Ukrainian exiles (graphic film here), creating and funding “Ukrainian resistance cells” from 1949 – 1953 . These were suicide missions, because the British counter-spy Kim Philby was informing the Soviets. Subsequent operations to Poland, Romania – were also disasters.
From 1953, U.S. foreign policy , as run by the Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, brothers, saw communism behind every nationalist movement, happy to spread American democracy via any government, however vicious brutal and corrupt. The Dulles brothers also were dedicated to furthering the interests of multinational corporations, which meant controlling the countries that supplied resources.
They started with Iran and Guatemala, overthrowing the elected governments. The CIA used money and propaganda, controlling the Iranian media, flooding it with “fake news”, and created “communist thuggery”. They succeeded in reinstalling the Shah. Western oil companies now ran the oil business. Guatemala followed the same pattern, a highly repressive regime was set up.
The cold war was a battle for minds and hearts. The CIA from the late 40s to the early 60s had hundreds of “influence operations”, co-opting overseas and some American media.
The Soviet Union’s KGB used “Active measures” – set up to use disinformation, planting major stories in overseas news media to cause disruption and confusion, forging documents slipped to journalists. These were often accepted especially in developing countries as genuine proof of American conspiracies. In the Soviet Union, Stalin had complete control of the media.
Stalin’s death in 1953. Nikita Kruschev ushered in a new period – the Thaw. His story here told by his great-granddaughter. Kruschev released many innocent victims of Stalin’s gulags, revealed Stalin’s crimes, set the Soviet Union on a different course, opened up the possibility of liberal reform, lessened censorship. But Kruschev also believed that the Soviet Union must show its strength to the USA, boasted of its military strength, with a disinformation campaign to scare Americans about a 100 megaton bomb, and the number and reach of its missiles.
USA’s military thinking moved to plans to evacuate high-ranking officials, expecting that in a coming nuclear war most of America will die, but the government will survive in a mountain bunker.
Daniel Ellsberg reported on the secret doomsday machines, in the Pentagon Papers, and copied all his nuclear reports, published “Confessions of a nuclear war planner”. Now in 2022 we see him urging for cutting the defense budget, getting rid of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) – to avoid armageddon.
The episode ends with the warning of how suddenly a crisis can arise, with the greatest danger to the world, as happened in 1962 – when the Russians placed intermediate range nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba.
The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues .
Free speech is a key issue. If Julian is granted First Amendment rights in a U.S. court it will be very difficult for the U.S. to build a criminal case against him, since other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, published the material he released.
The ruling by the High Court in London permitting Julian Assange to appeal his extradition order leaves him languishing in precarious health in a high-security prison. That is the point.
CHRIS HEDGES, MAY 24, 2024, https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-slow-motion-execution-of-julian-986?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=778851&post_id=144930141&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journalist whose only “crime” was providing evidence of war crimes and lies by the U.S. government to the public. It does not mean he will be released from the high-security HMS Belmarsh prison where, as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Julian there, said he was undergoing a “slow-motion execution.”
It does not mean that journalism is any less imperiled. Editors and publishers of five international media outlets —– The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL —– which published stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks, have urged that the U.S. charges be dropped and Julian be released. None of these media executives were charged with espionage. It does not dismiss the ludicrous ploy by the U.S. government to extradite an Australian citizen whose publication is not based in the U.S. and charge him under the Espionage Act. It continues the long Dickensian farce that mocks the most basic concepts of due process.
This ruling is based on the grounds that the U.S. government did not offer sufficient assurances that Julian would be granted the same First Amendment protections afforded to a U.S. citizen, should he stand trial. The appeal process is one more legal hurdle in the persecution of a journalist who should not only be free, but feted and honored as the most courageous of our generation.
Yes. He can file an appeal. But this means another year, perhaps longer, in harsh prison conditions as his physical and psychological health deteriorates. He has spent over five years in HMS Belmarsh without being charged. He spent seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy because the U.K. and Swedish governments refused to guarantee that he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., even though he agreed to return to Sweden to aid a preliminary investigation that was eventually dropped.
The judicial lynching of Julian was never about justice. The plethora of legal irregularities, including the recording of his meetings with attorneys by the Spanish security firm UC Global at the embassy on behalf of the CIA, alone should have seen the case thrown out of court as it eviscerates attorney-client privilege.
The U.S. has charged Julian with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of computer misuse, for an alleged conspiracy to take possession of and then publish national defense information. If found guilty on all of these charges he faces 175 years in a U.S. prison.
The extradition request is based on the 2010 release by WikiLeaks of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs — hundreds of thousands of classified documents, leaked to the site by Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints.
In February, lawyers for Julian submitted nine separate grounds for a possible appeal.
A two-day hearing in March, which I attended, was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and of many of the rulings of District Judge Baraitser in 2021.
The two High Court judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, in March rejected most of Julian’s grounds of appeal. These included his lawyers’ contention that the UK-US extradition treaty bars extradition for political offenses; that the extradition request was made for the purpose of prosecuting him for his political opinions; that extradition would amount to retroactive application of the law — because it was not foreseeable that a century-old espionage law would be used against a foreign publisher; and that he would not receive a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. The judges also refused to hear new evidence that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate Julian, concluding — both perversely and incorrectly — that the CIA only considered these options because they believed Julian was planning to flee to Russia.
But the two judges determined Monday that it is “arguable” that a U.S. court might not grant Julian protection under the First Amendment, violating his rights to free speech as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The judges in March asked the U.S. to provide written assurances that Julian would be protected under the First Amendment and that he would be exempt from a death penalty verdict. The U.S. assured the court that Julian would not be subjected to the death penalty, which Julian’s lawyers ultimately accepted. But the Department of Justice was unable to provide an assurance that Julian could mount a First Amendment defense in a U.S. court. Such a decision is made in a U.S. federal court, their lawyers explained.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, who is prosecuting Julian, has argued that only U.S. citizens are guaranteed First Amendment rights in U.S. courts. Kromberg has stated that what Julian published was “not in the public interest” and that the U.S. was not seeking his extradition on political grounds.
Free speech is a key issue. If Julian is granted First Amendment rights in a U.S. court it will be very difficult for the U.S. to build a criminal case against him, since other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, published the material he released.
The extradition request is based on the contention that Julian is not a journalist and not protected under the First Amendment.
Julian’s attorneys and those representing the U.S. government have until May 24 to submit a draft order, which will determine when the appeal will be heard.
Julian committed the empire’s greatest sin — he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, routine violation of human rights, wanton killing of innocent civilians, rampant corruption and war crimes. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Labour, Trump or Biden — it does not matter. Those who manage the empire use the same dirty playbook.
The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Julian is extradited and convicted, it will become one.
Julian is in precarious physical and psychological health. His physical and psychological deterioration has resulted in a minor stroke, hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh, nicknamed “hell wing.” Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”
These slow-motion executioners have not yet completed their work. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner. He was locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.
Prolonged imprisonment, which the granting of this appeal perpetuates, is the point. The 12 years Julian has been detained — seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and over five in high-security Belmarsh Prison — have been accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, as well as unrelenting threats, pressure, prolonged isolation, anxiety and constant stress. The goal is to destroy him.
We must free Julian. We must keep him out of the hands of the U.S. government. Given all he did for us, we owe him an unrelenting fight.
If there is no freedom of speech for Julian, there will be no freedom of speech for us.
Coalition’s brave nuke world a much harder sell after new CSIRO report
Graham Readfearn, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/26/coalitions-brave-nuke-world-a-much-harder-sell-after-new-csiro-report?CMP=soc_568
The agency’s GenCost analysis says a first nuclear plant for Australia would deliver power ‘no sooner than 2040’ and could cost more than $17bn
The Coalition’s pitch on nuclear energy for Australia has had two recurring themes: the electricity will be cheap and it could be deployed within a decade.
CSIRO’s latest GenCost report – a document that analyses the costs of a range of electricity generation technologies – contradicts both of these points. It makes the Coalition’s job of selling nuclear power plants to Australians ever more challenging.
For the first time, the national science agency has calculated the potential costs of large-scale nuclear electricity in a country that banned the generation technology more than a quarter of a century ago.
Even using a set of generous assumptions, the CSIRO says a first nuclear plant would deliver power “no sooner than 2040” and could cost more than $17bn.
It is likely to spark an attack on the credibility of the report from nuclear advocates and those opposed to the rollout of renewable energy. Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has already attacked the report.
In the meantime, Australia waits for the Coalition to say what kind of reactors it would deploy, where it would put them and how much it thinks they would cost.
Now that CSIRO has released its report, here’s what we know about the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia.
What’s new on nuclear costs?
CSIRO’s GenCost report says a 1,000 megawatt nuclear plant would cost about $8.6bn to build, but that comes with some large caveats. The main one is that this was the theoretical cost of a reactor in an Australia that already had an established and continuous program of building reactors.
The $8.6bn is based on costs in South Korea, which does have a continuous reactor building program and is one country the least beset by cost blowouts.
To make the cost more relevant, CSIRO compared the Australian and South Korean costs of building modern coal plants. Costs were more than double in Australia.
But CSIRO warns the first nuclear plants in Australia would be subject to a “first of a kind” premium that could easily double the $8.6bn build cost.
In the UK, a country that has been building reactors intermittently, costs for its under-construction Hinkley C reactor (more than three times the size of a theoretical 1,000MW reactor in Australia) started at $34bn and could now be as high as $89bn.
In the United States, the country’s largest nuclear plant has just turned on its final unit seven years behind schedule and at double the initial cost. There are no more nuclear plants under construction in the country.
What about the cost of the electricity?
CSIRO also offers cost estimates for the electricity produced by large-scale reactors, but those too assume a continuous nuclear building program in Australia.
Electricity from large-scale reactors would cost between $141 per megawatt hour and $233/MWh if they were running in 2030, according to GenCost.
Combining solar and wind would provide power at between $73 and $128/MWh – figures that include the costs of integrating renewables, such as building transmission lines and energy storage.
What about those small modular reactors?
The Coalition has also advocated for so-called “small modular reactors” which are not commercially available and, CSIRO says, are unlikely to be available to build in Australia until 2040.
One United States SMR project lauded by the Coalition collapsed in late 2023 because the cost of the power was too high.
That project, CSIRO says, was significant because its design had nuclear commission approval and was “the only recent estimate from a real project that was preparing to raise finance for the construction stage. As such, its costs are considered more reliable than theoretical projects.”
GenCost reports that power from a theoretical SMR in 2030 would cost between $230 and $382/MWh – much higher than solar and wind or large-scale nuclear.
How quickly could Australia build a nuclear plant?
Nuclear advocates tend to point to low nuclear power costs in countries that have long-established nuclear industries.
Australia has no expertise in building nuclear power, no infrastructure, no regulatory agency, no nuclear workforce and a public that is yet to have a serious proposition put in front of it.
Australia’s electricity grid is fast evolving from one dominated by large coal-fired power plants to one engineered for and dominated by solar, wind, batteries and pumped hydro with gas-fired power working as a rarely used backup.
This creates a major problem for the Coalition, because CSIRO estimates “if a decision to pursue nuclear in Australia were made in 2025, with political support for the required legislative changes, then the first full operation would be no sooner than 2040.”
Tony Wood, head of the Grattan Institute’s energy program, says: “By 2040, the coal-fired power stations will be in their graves. What do you do in the meantime?”
“You could keep the coal running, but that would become very expensive,” he says, pointing to the ageing coal fleet that is increasingly beset by outages.
Wood says the GenCost report is only a part of the story when it comes to understanding nuclear.
The Coalition, he says, would need to explain how much it would cost to build an electricity system to accommodate nuclear.
Could you just drop nuclear into the grid?
The biggest piece of generation kit on Australia’s electricity grid is a single 750 megawatt coal-fired unit at Kogan Creek in Queensland. Other power stations are larger but they are made up of a series of smaller units.
But the smallest of the “large-scale” nuclear reactors are about 1,000MW and most are 1,400MW.
Electricity system engineers have to build-in contingency plans if large units either trip or have to be pulled offline for maintenance. That contingency costs money.
In Australia’s current electricity system, the GenCost report says larger nuclear plants would probably “require the deployment of more generation units in reserve than the existing system consisting of units of 750MW or less.”
But by the time a theoretical nuclear plant could be deployed, most if not all the larger coal-fired units will be gone.
Who might build Australian nukes?
Some energy experts have questioned whether any company would be willing to take up a contract to build a reactor in Australia when there are existing nuclear nations looking to expand their fleets.
Right now, nuclear reactors are banned federally and in several states.
The GenCost report also points to another potential cost-raiser for nuclear – a lack of political bipartisanship.
The report says: “Without bipartisan support, given the historical context of nuclear power in Australia, investors may have to consider the risk that development expenses become stranded by future governments.”
WA Liberals reject Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan
New Daily, AAP, May 26, 2024,
The Western Australia Liberal Party has poured cold water on the federal Coalition’s plan for nuclear power in the state, while backing coal to keep the lights on.
Energy spokesman Steve Thomas says federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan for nuclear power won’t work in WA.
“To get approvals and construction happening on a nuclear power plant, whatever the size is, is probably a 15-to-20-year timeframe,” he told reporters on Sunday.
“In the meantime, we have to keep the lights on we have to keep the air conditioners running and we have to do it at a cost that the community can afford.”
WA’s power system was small and a large cost-effective nuclear power plant wouldn’t work, Mr Thomas said.
“The size of the unit would matter significantly because as CSIRO has said, the small ones which will fit into our marketplace are more than two-to-three times as expensive per unit of electricity as the large ones,” he said.
“There might one day be room for a small one when the time is right and the business case steps up and the community accepts it.”
A CSIRO report released last week found building a large-scale nuclear power plant in Australia would take 15 years, cost at least $8.5 billion and produce electricity about twice the cost of renewables.
Any nuclear plant in WA would need significant federal government investment and Mr Thomas said he was happy to look at Mr Dutton’s business case and continue talks.
“This is a long, ongoing discussion and we the state Liberals are not afraid of nuclear energy … but it has to stack up and it has to have support,” he said………………………………… https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2024/05/26/wa-liberals-reject-dutton-nuclear-plan
The ‘first-of-its-kind’ premium that could add billions to Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plan
A new report from the CSIRO undermines federal Opposition claims that nuclear power could pave a cost-effective path to decarbonisation.
2 May 2024 By Gavin Butler https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-first-of-its-kind-premium-that-could-add-billions-to-peter-duttons-nuclear-power-plan/bugiw6tsa
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has previously suggested that, if elected at next year’s federal election, his government would construct seven large-scale nuclear reactors across Australia, using the sites of retiring coal plant
On Tuesday, Dutton claimed nuclear energy is “cheaper
KEY POINTS
- A new CSIRO report has found that renewable energy sources are much cheaper than nuclear in Australia.
- The report found electricity from nuclear power could be at least 50 per cent more expensive than solar and wind.
- The findings come as Peter Dutton and the federal Opposition continue to promote nuclear power plants.
A new report from the CSIRO has found it could cost as much as $17 billion and take more than 15 years to build a single nuclear power plant in Australia — and electricity from nuclear power could be at least 50 per cent more expensive than solar and wind.
The annual GenCost report, which compares nuclear power with other energy sources for the first time, undermines the federal Opposition’s claims that nuclear can provide cheap electricity to Australians.
“It’s the first time we looked at nuclear, so we were really interested ourselves to see how the numbers would fall out,” Paul Graham, lead author on the GenCost report, told SBS News.
Obviously we’ve got the capability to convert that cost into the cost of electricity, and we were very interested to find out how that would stand relative to other technologies.”
What the CSIRO researchers found is that nuclear is “a higher-cost technology than the ones we’re currently focused on as a country, which is solar and wind types of technologies”.
Breaking down the costs
Even when allowing for the extra costs of integrating solar and wind into the grid, a combination of solar and wind power remained the cheapest source of electricity, according to the GenCost report.
Depending on how much renewable energy was already in the system, electricity from a combination of solar and wind cost between $73 and $128 per megawatt hour (MWh). Large-scale nuclear reactors, by comparison, could cost between $141 and $233/MWh, while small modular reactors could cost between $230 and $382/MWh.
Researchers also found that a theoretical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant, if built in Australia today, would cost at least $8.6 billion — but only if the government commits to a continuous building program, and “only after an initial higher cost unit is constructed”.
Given the country has never built a large reactor before, the report added, those costs could double due to what authors called a “first-of-a-kind” premium. That could mean the reactor ends up costing about $17 billion.
The report’s cost projections were based on South Korea’s successful nuclear program, using the comparative costs of building coal plants in each country as a guide.
What the Opposition says about nuclear power
The GenCost report comes as Australia’s federal Coalition promotes nuclear power plants as a way of reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels and decarbonising by 2050.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has previously suggested that, if elected at next year’s federal election, his government would construct seven large-scale nuclear reactors across Australia, using the sites of retiring coal plants.
On Tuesday, Dutton claimed nuclear energy is “cheaper, it’s more reliable, it’s zero emissions”.
“That’s why if you look at the top 20 economies in the world, Australia is the only one, at the moment, that hasn’t got nuclear power or hasn’t signed up to it,” he said.
Opposition Treasury spokesperson Angus Taylor doubled down on this commitment on Wednesday, speaking at the National Press Club after the GenCost report was released.
“We have been very clear on this. We see nuclear as part of the future of our energy system in Australia, it’s because we’re going to lose our baseload (the minimum amount of power needed to be supplied to the electricity grid at any one time),” Taylor said, suggesting that the country should be “securing long-term, cheap, clean power by opening the door to nuclear energy”.
Antinuclear 