Civil and military nuclear mutuality
‘The UK government is pursuing an uneconomic nuclear programme in large part so as to maintain & renew military nuclear capabilities’.
Rishi Sunak backs both civil and military nuclear: ‘Safeguarding the future of our nuclear deterrent and nuclear energy industry is a critical national endeavour’. French president Emmanuel Macron is even more upfront about it all: ‘Without civil nuclear power, no military nuclear power, without military nuclear, no civil nuclear.’ With the USA, China and Russia also evidently locked into similar paths, the global future doesn’t look too good.
‘The UK government is pursuing an uneconomic nuclear programme in large part so as to maintain & renew military nuclear capabilities’.
backs both civil and military nuclear: ‘Safeguarding the future of our nuclear deterrent and nuclear energy industry is a critical national endeavour’. French president Emmanuel Macron is even more upfront about it all: ‘Without civil nuclear power, no military nuclear power, without military nuclear, no civil nuclear.’ With the USA, China and Russia also evidently locked into similar paths, the global future doesn’t look too good.
Renew Extra Weekly, 13 Apr 24
Until recently, the UK government has always said that civil and military nuclear technologies were separate things, for example in response to claims that expansion of civil nuclear power capacity could lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons making capacity. But, as researchers at the University of Sussex have relentlessly catalogued, there seems to have been a change of view underway, culminating formally in March in a new policy document from No. 10 Downing Street. Entitled ‘Building the Nuclear Workforce of Tomorrow’ it claims that ‘domestic [civil] nuclear capability is vital to our national defence and energy security, underpinning our nuclear deterrent and securing cheaper, more reliable energy for UK consumers’. So they are intertwined and mutually beneficial- we need both!
UK Prime Minister Sunak says that ‘in a more dangerous and contested world, the UK’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent is more vital than ever’ and that civil nuclear power is the ‘perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain- it’s green, cheaper in the long term and will ensure the UK’s energy security for the long term’.
There are many issues raised by these claims. Leaving aside all the major moral and political issues associated with nuclear weapons, it is not at all clear that new nuclear reactors will be as costs effective as renewables. Indeed, the cost of renewables has fallen dramatically in recent years while the cost of nuclear projects has continued to escalate. It could be that, recognising this imbalance in cost, what we are now seeing is the government trying to provide a compensating justification for new civil nuclear- it will aid defence. Even if, arguably, it makes little economic sense as Business Green argued: ‘The UK government is pursuing an uneconomic nuclear programme in large part so as to maintain & renew military nuclear capabilities’.
Basically, as the Sussex University researchers have argued, it does seem that the government is just responding to military pressures. More specifically though, it’s a matter of rapidly expanding skill requirements- and shortages. Matthew Lay, Head of EDF Nuclear Skills Alliance, says that ‘the UK Government’s commitment to nuclear power must be seen in the context of a steady increase of nuclear capacity worldwide as well as growth in defence expenditure,’ and especially the growth in the ‘defence industry’s demand for nuclear skills, to deliver established and new nuclear submarine programmes’. So it’s about expanding nuclear skills for building nuclear sub power plants and civil reactors, including possibly Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which have some similarities. Presumably also about making fuels for them both too.
Some may be happy about civil-military skill sharing, but it’s a long way from the old rhetoric about ‘atoms for peace’. In 1953 President Eisenhower called for nuclear bomb technology to be turned to peaceful ends around the world, with US help e.g. in transferring nuclear plant technology to developing countries. That had floundered due, in part, to the high cost of nuclear plants. According to a review by Drogan, a State Department Intelligence Report, circulated in January 1954, ‘Economic Implications of Nuclear Power in Foreign Countries’, noted that ‘nuclear power plants may cost twice as much to operate and as much as 50 percent more to build and equip than conventional thermal plants’. So it warned that the introduction of nuclear power would ‘not usher in a new era of plenty and rapid economic development as is commonly believed’. You could say that we are still waiting!
There were also potential conflicts between the ‘atoms for peace’ idea and proliferation issues. Indeed that is now even more of a problem, with some newly developing countries, following the UAE’s lead, looking to have nuclear plants, which, in theory, could give them the ability to make bombs. And (the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty apart!) why not, if nuclear weapons states like the UK are seen as no longer maintaining a clear separation between civil and military nuclear technology? Except of course the high cost of civil nuclear may make renewables a much better deal- especially solar, of which many countries (in the Middle East and Africa for example) have plenty. ……………………………………………………………………………..
Clearly UK Prime Minister Sunak doesn’t see it this way- he backs both civil and military nuclear: ‘Safeguarding the future of our nuclear deterrent and nuclear energy industry is a critical national endeavour’. French president Emmanuel Macron is even more upfront about it all: ‘Without civil nuclear power, no military nuclear power, without military nuclear, no civil nuclear.’ With the USA, China and Russia also evidently locked into similar paths, the global future doesn’t look too good.
Do we really have to continue with all this? In 1995, Sir Michael Atiyah, then retiring as President of the Royal Society, said ‘I believe history will show that insistence on a UK nuclear capability [weapons and energy] was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources and a significant factor in our relative economic decline over the past 50 years’. He may have been right. https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2024/04/civil-and-military-nuclear-mutuality.html
Not enough war on the ground, the US is taking it to space
The military industrial complex is suiting up for a new arms race, far beyond the stratosphere
STAVROULA PABST, APR 05, 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/u-s-space-race/
Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX recently secured a classified contract to build an extensive network of “spy satellites” for an undisclosed U.S. intelligence agency, with one source telling Reuters that “no one can hide” under the prospective network’s reach.
While the deal suggests the space company, which currently operates over half the active satellites orbiting Earth, has warmed to U.S. national security agencies, it’s not the first Washington investment in conflict-forward space machinery. Rather, the U.S. is funding or otherwise supporting a range of defense contractors and startups working to create a new generation of space-bound weapons, surveillance systems, and adjacent technologies.
In other words, America is hell-bent on a new arms race — in space.
Space arms, then and now
Attempts to regulate weapons’ presence and use in space span decades. Responding to an intense, Cold War-era arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that space, while free for all countries to explore and use, was limited to peaceful endeavors. Almost 60 years later, the Outer Space Treaty’s vague language regarding military limitations in space, as space policy experts Michelle L.D. Hanlon and Greg Autry highlight, “leave more than enough room for interpretation to result in conflict.”
Stonewalling subsequent international efforts to limit the militarization of space (though the U.S. is participating in a new U.N. working group on the subject), Washington’s interest in space exploration and adjacent weapons technologies also goes back decades. Many may recall President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was established to develop land-, air-, and space-based missile defense systems to deter missile or nuclear weapons attacks against the U.S. Cynically referred to by critics as the “Star Wars” program, many SDI initiatives were ultimately canned due to prohibitive costs and technological limitations.
And while the Pentagon established Space Command in 1985, the Space Force, an entirely new branch of the military “focused solely on pursuing superiority in the space domain,” was launched in 2019, signaling renewed emphasis on space militarization as U.S. policy.
Weapons contractors cash in
Long-term American interest in space war tech now manifests in ambitious projects, where defense companies and startups are lining up for military contracts to create a new generation of space weaponry and adjacent tech, including space vehicles, hypersonic rockets, and extensive surveillance and communications projects.
For starters, Space Force’s Space Development Agency recently granted defense contractors L3Harris and Lockheed Martin and space company Sierra Space contracts worth $2.5 billion to build satellites for the U.S. military’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), a constellation of hundreds of satellites, built out on tranches, that provide various warfighting capabilities, including the collection and transmission of critical wartime communications, into low-Earth orbit.
The PWSA will serve as the backbone of the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control project, an effort to bolster warfighting capacities and decision-making processes by facilitating “information advantage at the speed of relevance.”
Other efforts are just as sci-fi-esque. Zoning in on hypersonic weapons systems and parts, for example, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman have collaborated to secure a DARPA contract for a Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapons Concept, where scramjet-powered missiles can travel at hypersonic speeds (Mach 5 or faster) for offensive purposes.
And Aerospace startup True Anomaly, which was founded by military officers and has received funding from the U.S. Space Force to the tune of over $17 million, is developing space weapons and adjacent conflict-forward tools. An example is True Anomaly’s Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle, an imaging satellite able to take on, according to True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, “rendezvous and proximity operations missions” with “uncooperative” targets.
As True Anomaly finds fiscal success, accruing over $100 million in a December 2023 series B fundraising round from venture capitalists including Eclipse Ventures and ACME Capital, other aerospace start-ups are flooding the market with the assistance of the U.S. government, both in funding and other critical partnerships.
Take how Firehawk Aerospace — which wants to “create the rocket system of the future” to “enab[le] the next generation of aerospace and defense systems” — partnered with NASA in 2021 to test rocket engines at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. It recently secured Army Applications Laboratory and U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research Awards to advance developments in its rocket motors and engines.
And data and satellite-focused American space tech company Capella Space, a contractor for federal agencies including the Air and Space Forces, specializes in reconnaissance and powerful surveillance tools, including geospatial intelligence and Synthetic Aperture Radar monitoring that help national security officials identify myriad security risks. In early 2023, Capella Space even formed a subsidiary, Capella Federal, to provide federal clients with additional access to Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery services.
We need diplomacy, not space superiority
The funding of expensive, futuristic space surveillance and weapons projects indicates the U.S.’s eagerness to maintain superiority, where military personnel posit such advancements are critical within the context of both a “space race” and an increasingly tumultuous geopolitical climate, if not the possibility of war in space outright.
As Space Force General Chance Saltzman declared at the recent Mitchell Institute Spacepower Security Forum: “if we do not have space, we lose.” Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in late February, U.S. Space Force General Stephen N. Whiting explained that the U.S. Space Command must bolster its military capacities through increased personnel training and investments in relevant technologies so that the U.S. is “ready if deterrence fails.”
While upping its own military capacities, however, Washington is simultaneously pushing against other countries’ anti-satellite weapons testing, a capability the U.S. already has.
In any case, such pointing fingers, when coupled with ongoing space deterrence and weapons proliferation efforts, does little to advance genuine diplomacy, where states could instead discuss, on equal terms, how space should be used and shared amongst nations.
Ultimately, weapons and aerospace companies’ efforts have launched a new generation of weaponry and adjacent tech — buoyed by consistent support from a “deterrence”-focused U.S. As a result, the military industrial complex has further expanded into the domain of space, where defense companies have new opportunities to score lucrative weapons contracts and theoretically even push for more conflict.
The Longer it Takes the West to Accept that Ukraine is Losing, the Worse Things Will Get for Ukraine
Our leaders keep warning us that Putin will roll his tanks into the Baltic States and maybe even Poland should the Russians be successful in beating the Ukrainians. France’s President Macron is even telling us that we may have to send NATO troops to fight in Ukraine. Everyone seems to automatically assume that Putin’s ambition is still to conquer all of Ukraine and incorporate it in the Russian Federation. This is despite the fact that he said that it was to keep Ukraine out of NATO and to safeguard the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine from Ukrainian nationalist militias.
Well, we do seem to have got ourselves into a bit of a pickle in Ukraine. How we get out of it is not immediately obvious.
Like many wars, this one seems to have started due to catastrophic blunders by the ruling elites on both sides. To simplify a rather complex situation, I believe that there were two massive blunders.
The West’s blunder – for several years Putin has warned NATO “not one inch further” – that he would not accept further NATO expansion eastwards and would not allow countries like Ukraine and Georgia, both with long borders with Russia, to join NATO. In 2008, Putin even attended a NATO summit during which he gave a speech warning NATO that Russia would not accept Ukraine’s and Georgia’s admission to NATO. To me that seems reasonable. After all, the U.S. would hardly accept Russia doing a deal with, say, Mexico which would allow Russia to establish bases close to the U.S.-Mexico border (although it’s also understandable that Ukraine and Georgia wanted to join NATO, given Putin’s sabre-rattling). And, of course, there was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the USA was not too pleased about Russian missiles being situated close to the American mainland. Probably due to stupidity, hubris or a belief that Putin was bluffing, NATO delivered a diplomatic note to the Kremlin reiterating NATO’s view that countries like Ukraine and Georgia could join the Alliance if they wished. The result – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s blunder – Putin seems to have believed that it would only take a couple of weeks for the Russian army to get to Kiev, overthrow and murder the Zelensky Government and install a Russian-friendly regime. He got that one wrong and several hundred thousand Russians have been wounded or killed as a result. Moreover, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted Sweden and Finland to join NATO – another consequence Putin seems to have failed to foresee.
The war seemed to have started well for Ukraine. The Ukrainian army surprised the Russians and the world by fighting off the initial Russian invasion. Then the success of the summer 2022 Ukrainian offensive appeared to suggest that Ukraine might even be able to push the Russians out of Eastern Ukraine, retake Crimea and, by humiliating Putin, maybe even cause a coup in Russia which could overthrow Putin and his mafia cronies.
But after the 2022 Ukraine summer offensive, the Russians built formidable defensive lines protected by miles of minefields, dragon’s teeth and trench systems. So, when the 2023 Ukrainian combined operations offensive was launched, the Ukrainians were caught in a death trap and suffered huge losses of personnel and equipment while making little progress
We are now in a third phase of the war – the war of attrition – in which Russia is gaining the upper hand. Russia can massively out-produce Ukraine (and the quivering West) in terms of munitions, tanks, planes, missiles, artillery systems, drones and numbers of soldiers. Moreover, Russia has also received military material from North Korea, Iran, Syria and probably China. Meanwhile, Ukraine is running out of ammunition and troops. Some sources have suggested that the average age of Ukrainian forces is a worrying 43. And Ukraine doesn’t have time to mobilise, equip and train the numbers necessary to stem the Russian advance. In a war of attrition, the side with the greatest resources usually wins by grinding down its opponent. And that’s what we’re seeing now with small but continual Russian advances and Ukrainian retreats.
Our leaders keep warning us that Putin will roll his tanks into the Baltic States and maybe even Poland should the Russians be successful in beating the Ukrainians. France’s President Macron is even telling us that we may have to send NATO troops to fight in Ukraine. Everyone seems to automatically assume that Putin’s ambition is still to conquer all of Ukraine and incorporate it in the Russian Federation. This is despite the fact that he said that it was to keep Ukraine out of NATO and to safeguard the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine from Ukrainian nationalist militias.
By the end of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Putin’s forces could have walked into the Georgian capital Tbilisi. Instead, they withdrew and merely stayed on to guard the Russian-speaking enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – the equivalent of the similar enclaves in Ukraine.
Putin has the habit of doing exactly what he says he’s going to do. This is a concept which contemporary Western politicians find so alien to their natures, of course, that they’re totally unable to grasp it (although their distrust of Putin is understandable).
Moreover, if we look at military budgets, you might wonder who is actually threatening whom. The USA’s military budget is around $877 billion. The total NATO military budget in 2023 (including the USA) a cool $1.3 trillion. The Russian Federation military budget prior to the Ukraine invasion? Just $86 billion a year.
Our rulers have repeatedly told us that we must “do whatever it takes” to stop Putin and that the West will support Ukraine for “however long is necessary”. But it seems to be becoming clear to everyone except our rulers that Ukraine is losing and can now never win if winning means expelling all Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
The best Ukraine can now hope for is an untidy truce which involves a loss of the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine – at least 20% of Ukrainian territory. Though the longer this war goes on, the more territory Ukraine will lose.
So, what will our rulers choose – humiliation or annihilation?
Will our rulers accept total humiliation by pushing Ukraine to do a deal with Russia in which Ukraine will have to hand over at least 20% of its land area to the Russian Federation and agree that what little is left of Ukraine will be a neutral country and never join NATO? And how will our rulers explain this defeat to us, their electorates? Moreover, what will the West’s defeat do to the global balance of power? It will, of course, embolden those in the anti-Western bloc – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – who wish to do us harm. Moreover, it will convince many non-aligned countries that their future lies in alliances with the resurgent and increasingly powerful autocratic anti-Western bloc rather than with the declining, defeated, war-weary, supposedly democratic West.
Or will our rulers decide to try and save face and their own careers by ‘upping the ante’ – getting us more involved in helping Ukraine? Thanks to the incompetence of the head of the German air force, whose unsecured phone conference was recorded by Russian spies, we now know that British troops are apparently in Ukraine already, possibly helping with the loading and targeting of Storm Shadow missiles. It’s a pity our politicians ‘forgot’ to tell us that British troops are actually operating in Ukraine. Moreover, the New York Times recently revealed that the CIA has between 12 and 14 bases in Ukraine where it trains Ukrainian soldiers. If our rulers do get Western troops directly involved in killing Russians, as France’s President Macron has repeatedly proposed, we would risk the possibility of a nuclear war between Russia and the West.
I’m no military strategist. But it seems obvious to me that our rulers have blundered into a situation without any plan for how to extricate us in the event of things not turning out as they planned, thus forgetting the most basic rule of war – that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Or, as boxer Mike Tyson explained, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face.”
It will be interesting to see whether our rulers choose humiliation by accepting Ukraine’s and, by extension, NATO’s defeat, or instead go for escalation which could lead to nuclear annihilation.
J.D. Vance – New York Times: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up
The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque.
Mr. Zelensky’s stated goal for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — is fantastical.
J.D.Vance, The New York Times, Fri, 12 Apr 2024 , https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/jd-vance-ukraine.html
President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.
Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.
The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.
The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.
Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly leads to Ukrainian victory.
Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests.The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.
The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.
These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war in Ukraine.
If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse. Here are the basics:Russia has nearly four times the population of Ukraine. Ukraine needs upward of half a million new recruits, but hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men have already fled the country. The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old, and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with a diagnosed mental disability.
Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.
These basic mathematical realities were true, but contestable, at the outset of the war. They were obvious and incontestable a year ago, when American leadership worked closely with Mr. Zelensky to undertake a disastrous counteroffensive. The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign. The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Our allies in Europe could better support such a strategy, as well. While some European countries have provided considerable resources, the burden of military support has thus far fallen heaviest on the United States.
By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both the American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goal for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — is fantastical.
The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.
Will Biden’s zero sum game approach to foreign conflict bumble US into regional/nuclear war in Europe and Middle East?
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 14 Apr 24, https://heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/
President Biden continues on his astonishing and disheartening path to regional/nuclear war in both Europe and the Middle East.
In Europe, he plows ahead with his foolish demand to squandering another $61 billion in weapons for the lost cause in Ukraine. Any weapons manufactured will not reach Ukraine before their impending collapse, turning Ukraine into a rump state of abject poverty requiring endless US/NATO assistance.
Biden views the Russo Ukraine war as a zero sum game: US must win, Russia must lose. That requires endless US efforts to reclaim all Russian held Ukraine territory and bring Ukraine into NATO. Biden’s approach? Assisting Ukraine attacks on Russian territory.
Ukraine President Zelensky’s only hope is to widen the war to obtain direct US intervention. He almost provoked that 2 years ago when he claimed an errant Ukraine missile that killed 2 Poles in neighboring NATO Poland, was a Russian strike requiring immediate NATO response. Every day this 26 month long war continues represents another chance for US belligerence to make that happen. But Biden pushes on to possible all out war with his refusal to pivot from military provocation to diplomacy. That would require Biden dropping his zero sum game. Not likely.
The Middle East is more precarious still. The US has been Israel’s go to weapons and diplomatic supporter in their grotesque genocidal ethnic cleansing of 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza. That has turned both Israel and America in pariah states worldwide.
Besides the genocide, the possibility of all out regional war between Israel and its Arab neighbors looms daily. Biden remained silent when Israel launched its dastardly bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing 7. But when Iran signaled its intent to reply militarily, Biden invoked his standard zero sum game view that Israel can do no wrong. Iran? They can do no right. That’s a recipe for all out war.
President Biden only learned one thing from his six decades of political leadership: America is 100% right in foreign affairs; our imagined enemies 100% wrong. History is filled with empires that disappeared from that zero sum game.
Will Biden’s America be next?
Five Years At Belmarsh: A Chronicle Of Julian Assange’s Imprisonment
Kevin Gosztola, Apr 11, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/12/five-years-at-belmarsh-a-chronicle-of-julian-assanges-imprisonment/
Calls for Assange’s freedom are renewed as the WikiLeaks founder marks five years in Belmarsh prison.
At the behest of the United States government, the British government has detained WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh for five years.
Assange is one of the only journalists to be jailed by a Western country, making the treatment that he has endured extraordinary. He has spent more time in prison than most individuals charged with similar acts.
Since December 2010, Assange has lived under some form of arbitrary detention.
He was expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy on April 11, 2019, and British police immediately arrested him. Police transported Assange to Belmarsh, a maximum-security facility often referred to as “Britain’s Guantanamo.”
Around the same time, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment that alleged that Assange had conspired with U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to commit a “computer intrusion.” The following month the DOJ issued another indictment with 17 additional Espionage Act charges.
2019
On May 1, Assange was sentenced by a British court to 50 weeks in prison as punishment for seeking political asylum from Ecuador while Sweden was attempting to extradite him. His sentence was longer than the six-month sentence that Jack Shepherd, the “speedboat killer” received for “breaching bail.”
Continue readingCoalition nuclear plan flips back to SMRs after latest meeting with lobbyists
Giles Parkinson, Apr 12, 2024, https://reneweconomy.com.au/coalition-nuclear-plan-flips-back-to-smrs-after-latest-meeting-with-lobbyists/
And then, in a single bound, it was back to small modular reactors. The federal Coalition’s confused nuclear power policy has lurched from SMRs to large scale nuclear and back again to SMRs. It’s as if the policy is decided by the nuclear lobbyist most recently consulted.
Coalition leader Peter Dutton’s latest thought bubble on nuclear, dutifully reported in The Australian newspaper last weekend, is that Australia should sign up to SMRs, and should be able to build the first of them by the middle of the 2030s – faster than even most of the technology’s boosters admit is possible.
And then, in a single bound, it was back to small modular reactors. The federal Coalition’s confused nuclear power policy has lurched from SMRs to large scale nuclear and back again to SMRs. It’s as if the policy is decided by the nuclear lobbyist most recently consulted.
Coalition leader Peter Dutton’s latest thought bubble on nuclear, dutifully reported in The Australian newspaper last weekend, is that Australia should sign up to SMRs, and should be able to build the first of them by the middle of the 2030s – faster than even most of the technology’s boosters admit is possible.
Dutton says the new plan will be fully sketched out before the federal Labor government’s budget in early May – and according to The Australian this latest plan follows meetings last week with executives of Rolls Royce SMR and its Australian partner Penske.
Renew Economy decided to check all this out with Rolls Royce SMR itself, and got some surprising answers.
“It wasn’t a representative of ours (who met with Peter Dutton),” a company spokeswoman said by email. “I believe it was a potential partner of ours that met with Peter Dutton who spoke about RR SMR on our behalf.”
Dutton and other Coalition boosters like to talk about SMRs in the present tense, and most mainstream media dutifully follow suit, as if they are already operating.
This is deception. A group of my friends chatting over coffee this week was stunned to hear that SMRs are not actually a thing, despite what they read in the press. A few smaller nuclear reactors exist, such as in China and Russia, but they are in no way modular, which is the supposed key selling point of this new technology.
“One of the biggest problems for SMRs is that they don’t exist,” Allison Macfarlane, director of the school of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia and a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told the Financial Times this week.
“We’re still at the paper stage, the computer model stage. To get to demonstration models and then a full-scale model when you are ready to commercialise will take billions of dollars,” she added.
Rolls Royce SMR is still at least two years away from obtaining a licence, and the spokesperson told Renew Economy this week that the company is hopeful that the first SMR can be completed “in the early 2030s.”
However, Simon Bowen, the chair of Great British Nuclear, the government agency that is trying to lead the technology’s revival and find ways to replace its existing ageing fleet, told the FT this week the first SMR won’t likely be seen until the mid 2030s.
That time line is important, because it goes to the fantasy nature of the Coalition’s nuclear policy. Is Dutton seriously suggesting that Australia, with no civil nuclear power industry, can match the UK on timing on their proprietary nuclear technology.
And first-of-their-kind technologies are always considerably more expensive than those that follow. But more on the timing later, because that goes to the heart of what the Coalition is trying to do – not so much build nuclear, but to stop renewables in their tracks.
But it is impossible to think that Australia would commit to an SMR before it is built in its host country, with all the embedded infrastructure and know-how. And no country is going to commit to more SMRs until the first one is built, and can prove itself. Which straightaway pushes the Coalition timeline back into the 2040s.
On costs, Dutton is trying to convince everyone that nuclear – contrary to all available evidence – is low cost, which The Australian, unsurprisingly, reported as a matter of fact.
The Coalition’s energy spokesman Ted O’Brien engages in some impressive verbal calisthenics by claiming that they might be expensive for investors, but are low cost for consumers.
But if new-build nuclear is to be low cost to consumers it will be the result, as it is in France, of massive government subsidies. And given the Coalition’s horrified reaction to Labor’s “Made in Australia” green manufacturing plan, they are definitely not in favour of government subsidies.
The Australian reported that the Rolls Royce SMR is priced at around $5 billion for a 470 MW facility, which appears an heroic assumption given it is less than one third of the price of the only SMR to actually obtain a licence to date, the NuScale project in the US that was cancelled last year because it was too expensive for consumers.
Rolls Royce SMR’s own web page describes a study produced last year that claimed its technology could reduce wholesale prices in the UK by between three per cent and 13 per cent, depending on how many SMRs were rolled out.
Curiously, the study – according to the detailed Rolls Royce summary of it – arrives at these numbers by comparing SMRs to the cost of peaking gas plants, the most expensive generation on the grid, and which – in reality – is rarely used. They are only switched on around 1 to 2 per cent of the time.
These peaking gas plants are not seen as the usual competitor to nuclear or SMRs, because nuclear is designed to be baseload, not the fast response and flexible capacity needed to fill in the gaps of a grid dominated by wind and solar.
And, it should be noted, nuclear itself is highly dependent on fast-response capacity – peaking gas and pumped hydro – to make up for its own lack of flexibility.
The Rolls Royce spokesperson told Renew Economy that this analysis was conducted in the winter of 2022/23, when the energy crisis was at its worst, gas prices had soared, and energy consumers were being hit by huge bills.
It begs a question, which Rolls Royce didn’t answer: If SMRs are only able to undercut peaking gas power plant prices by a small amount, what does that imply when those costs are spread across the whole day?
The spokesperson confirmed that Rolls Royce SMRs will indeed be focused on “baseload” power, and its SMRs are designed not to displace renewables, but replace “the loss in low-carbon electricity … caused by our ageing existing reactor fleet going offline in the years ahead.”
The spokesperson said SMRs do have a degree of flexibility to load follow and respond “when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” and can use its thermal output to produce hydrogen or process heat, which might be attractive in the northern hemisphere.
But they have little ability to ramp up to fill in gaps of wind and solar because, as the spokesperson told Renew Economy in their email: “SMRs work most cost-effectively when ‘always on’.”
And this is important because it goes to the heart of why the Coalition nuclear plan makes absolutely no sense and is more about destruction of one industry, rather than construction of another.
Australia is heading towards 82 per cent renewables by 2030, and even if it doesn’t meet that deadline, it will be above 90 per cent by the mid 2030s, and likely close to 100 per cent.
A fleet of “always on” nuclear power plants will struggle to find a role in that scenario, particularly as daytime demand will be almost entirely met by the anticipated ongoing boom in small-scale solar on the roofs of household and business consumers.
But the Coalition policy, and it makes no secret of this, is not about compatibility. O’Brien’s own energy advisor admits that nuclear and renewables are effectively an “either-or” because the system is either going to be baseload or renewables and storage.
And the Coalition’s fundamental stand is that it refuses to believe that wind and solar can power a modern economy. “The lights will go out,” says Dutton, or “your fridge goes off at home” he added this week.
Which is why they are calling for a moratorium on the roll out of wind, solar, battery storage and transmission, and why they want coal-fired power stations to stay open until nuclear can arrive.
And it’s why their proxies in the mainstream and social media – and so-called think tanks and ginger groups backed by billionaires such as Gina Rinehart and Trevor St Baker – spend so much time demonising the technologies that are currently available, and which can do the job, such as solar, wind, battery storage and electric vehicles.
Dutton’s rhetoric is also liberally splattered with outright falsehoods. A check of his media transcripts this week reveals a number of common false statements.
The first is the claim that Australia is the only OECD country not to have or want nuclear. Not true. Germany closed down the last of its nuclear generators a year ago, and Italy voted against the technology in a referendum a decade ago after shutting down the last of its reactors. A number of other EU countries are following suit.
Dutton also claims that the federal government is planning “28,000 kms of new transmission lines by 2030.” Again, not true. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan models 10,000km by 2030 in its core step change plan. That’s still a lot, but little more than one third of what Dutton claims.
The 28,000km number is a 2050 target, not 2030, and only in the scenario where Australia becomes a renewable energy superpower by exporting green hydrogen and other green products, most likely from vast wind and solar projects in the middle of the country that will need to link into the grids or production facilities.
Dutton says he wants to have a “mature” discussion about the energy mix. But that can’t happen if his rhetoric is based around obvious lies.
Cook by-election candidate Simon Kennedy says locals are ‘comfortable’ living near nuclear reactors
ABC News, By Ethan Rix 13 Apr 24
The by-election for former prime minister Scott Morrison’s southern Sydney seat has not garnered national fanfare the way other by-elections have in the past.
And as voters head to the polls today, you can count the apathy being felt in the electorate of Cook — with early voting down by about 11 per cent compared to the 2022 federal election and nearly 13 per cent lower than the Voice referendum late last year, according to the Australian Electoral Commission.
Even the Liberals’ candidate, Simon Kennedy, won’t be able to personally boost voter turnout as his team confirmed he didn’t move into the electorate in time to meet the registration deadline — denying him an opportunity to pose for the cameras as he votes for himself.
Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm is because the Liberals look set to comfortably hold a seat they have held for half a century, or maybe it’s because the Labor Party has opted not to put a horse in the race, diminishing any usual analysis the result could be a “test” of Anthony Albanese’s leadership.
But for people who are eligible to cast a ballot today, what are they really voting for?
A nuclear reactor in Cook’s backyard
Former McKinsey consultant Simon Kennedy has openly backed his party’s push to introduce nuclear power to the national energy grid, with the opposition preparing to announce up to six possible sites for nuclear plants.
When asked whether he would oppose a nuclear power reactor being built in the electorate of Cook, Mr Kennedy said locals were “comfortable” with the concept because there was already one positioned on its “doorstep” in Lucas Heights.
“People are comfortable with where Lucas Heights is, they’ve been comfortable with that concept,” he said.
“I haven’t heard any fear or worries about that at all.”
Lucas Heights, which is located on the outskirts of the Sutherland Shire, is home to Australia’s only nuclear reactor, which is not used to produce electricity.
It instead produces medical and industrial isotopes and stores low-level waste and a small amount of intermediate-level waste on-site.
“They’re [voters] not looking for people pushing clean or coal or one over the other, they’re looking for cheap, reliable and clean power,” Mr Kennedy said.
Looking at getting more female candidates
The number of female MPs in the Coalition has also been a key question in the lead-up to this by-election.
Mr Kennedy comfortably defeated the only female candidate to put her hand up for Liberal pre-selection, Veteran Family Advocate Commissioner Gwen Cherne, who received 35 votes to his 158.
The result was said to have upset those within the party pushing for more females to be preselected to safe Liberal seats……………….
Who else is running?
…………… The Australian Greens have put up Martin Moore, who has a Fine Arts Degree with a Masters in Social Ecology and ran for the local seat of Miranda at the 2023 NSW election.
Mr Moore disagreed with Mr Kennedy that locals would be comfortable living next to a nuclear reactor.
“I feel that people are really concerned that we’re being dragged into a nuclear wasteland with the AUKUS deal … and the opposition’s ideas of reactors,” he said……………………………… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-13/cook-byelection-simon-kennedy-nuclear-reactors/103696760—
Annie Jacobsen: ‘What if we had a nuclear war?’
The author and Pulitzer prize finalist, who has written the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, Nuclear War: A scenario, on the “shocking truths” about a nuclear attack
By Annie Jacobsen, 12 April 2024, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2426579-annie-jacobsen-what-if-we-had-a-nuclear-war/
Not long after the last world war, the historian William L. Shirer had this to say about the next world war. It “will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquers and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”
As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?
“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”
If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like? To write Nuclear War: A scenario, I put this question to scores of former nuclear command and control authorities. To the military and civilian experts who’ve built the weapon systems, been privy to the response plans and been responsible for advising the US president on nuclear counterstrike decisions should they have to be made. What I learned terrified me. Here are just a few of the shocking truths about nuclear war.
The US maintains a nuclear launch policy called Launch on Warning. This means that if a military satellite indicates the nation is under nuclear attack and a second early-warning radar confirms that information, the president launches nuclear missiles in response. Former secretary of defense William Perry told me: “Once we are warned of a nuclear attack, we prepare to launch. This is policy. We do not wait.”
The US president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He asks permission of no one. Not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the joint chief of staff, not the US Congress. “The authority is inherent in his role as commander in chief,” the Congressional Research Service confirms. The president “does not need the concurrence of either his [or her] military advisors or the US Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons”.
When the president learns he must respond to a nuclear attack, he has just 6 minutes to do so. Six minutes is an irrational amount of time to “decide whether to release Armageddon”, President Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs. “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope… How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” And yet, the president must respond. This is because it takes roughly just 30 minutes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to get from a launch pad in Russia, North Korea or China to any city in the US, and vice versa. Nuclear-armed submarines can cut that launch-to-target time to 10 minutes, or less.
Today, there are nine nuclear powers, with a combined total of more than 12,500 nuclear weapons ready to be used. The US and Russia each have some 1700 nuclear weapons deployed – weapons that can be launched in seconds or minutes after their respective president gives the command. This is what Shirer meant when he said: “Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it.”
Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilisation in a matter of hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause nuclear winter. Agriculture will fail. Some 5 billion people will die. In the words of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead”.
I wrote Nuclear War: A scenario to demonstrate – in appalling, minute-by-minute detail – just how horrifying a nuclear war would be. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” UN secretary-general António Guterres warned the world in 2022. “This is madness. We must reverse course.”
How true.
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, published by Torva (£20.00), is available now. It is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up here to read along with our members
Getting bigger but not safer or cheaper – the myth of Rolls Royce and its very big non-modular reactor
By David Toke, April 2024, https://100percentrenewableuk.org/getting-bigger-but-not-safer-or-cheaper-the-myth-of-rolls-royce-and-its-very-big-non-modular-reactor
Rolls Royce’s so-called small modular reactor (SMR) is getting bigger, but is likely to have fewer special safety features compared to EDF’s increasingly pricey design for Hinkley C.
In 2017 Rolls Royce said that its small modular reactor would be between 220 and 440 MW, but the latest design is bigger, at 470 MW. It is strange to call this small. Reactors in service at the moment (the so-called AGR reactors) were around the 600 MW size for each unit and, strange as it might seem, most of the first generation of so-called ‘Magnox’ nuclear reactors built in the UK were actually smaller than 470 MW. They were not called ‘small’. So why is Rolls Royce calling this a SMR? There’s no reason for this other than public relations.
Rolls Royce claim that the parts will be mainly built in factories. Well, of course they will, that’s always the case with nuclear power plant. The difference with building a relatively smaller plant of course is that you get less of the economies of scale in doing this. That is why nuclear power plant have got bigger.
So the fact that the Rolls Royce unit will be about a third the size of the EPR is likely to make them cost more. But there is one way that Rolls Royce will be able to economise compared to the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) being built at Hinkley C, and that is because I have seen no sign that Rolls Royce will include some special safety features that have been included in the EPR.
The best known of these safety features are a) a ‘double containment’ feature that is designed to stop material from the inside getting out (as well as another external shell to shield from aircraft) and b) a ‘core catcher’ to stop a melting core eating its way into the ground and potentially contaminating water courses. I am assuming Rolls Royce will not be including either of these features, although it will have to satisfy the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) that it has other ways of stopping radioactive releases from accidents.
Rolls Royce are now starting a ‘Generic Design Assessment’ (GDA) process with the ONR which will take around 5 years. After then they will be asking the UK Government for a blank cheque for a project.
Of course there is another factor and that is that EDF have some experience (admittedly not very successful of late) of building nuclear power plant. Rolls Royce do not have experience of building large nuclear power plant (which is what they are really hoping to do). Producing small (and, it must be said extremely expensive) genuinely small reactors for nuclear submarines is not the same thing at all! So Rolls Royce are likely not to have the skills to build large nuclear power plant. That is a bad sign!
The so-called SMRs proferred by Rolls Royce will just be the latest in a long line of very expensive, very lately delivered nuclear power stations in the UK. It is unlikely to be any cheaper than the reactor that EDF is building at Hinkley C (becoming more expensive as time goes on). But it will have fewer safety features.
Sign the petition for mandatory solar panels on buildings , and for fossil fuels to be banned in new buildings. See the petition page here.
Please share the petition page link as widely as you can on social media. Please write to you MP asking for solar pv to be mandatory on all new buildings and for fossil fuel boilers to be banned in them.
TODAY. The nuclear lobby’s new “prime wheeze” – Community Interest Companies
The UK, famous for comedy, had a great character, Bertie Wooster, who kept thinking up wonderful (useless and silly) new ideas, that he called “Prime Wheezes”. In true Bertie Wooster tradition, the nuclear lobby does the same.
They usually go for “registered charities” – and there’s any number of these, that the industry creates, really nuclear front groups, that pose as genuinely working for the public good.
So why is the nuclear lobby now going for the non-profit Community Interest Companies (CICs)?
Some of the reasons:
- The nuclear industry can get approval and respectability, “piggy-back” on a lot of genuinely positive and popular businesses in an existing CIC.
- The CIC business model can incorporate a wider range of social aims than are allowed for charities. This is because the definition of community interest within the test applied to a CIC is broader than the Public Benefit Test for charities.
- easier to set up than is a charity..
- murkiness of funding – relatively easy from private donors, grants or community development finance
- can more easily buy and sell commercially.
- It is a lightweight structure, it is unencumbered by bureaucracy. It can be set up in a couple of days
- it is like a standard profit-making company then, but with social objectives supposedly built in.
- it avoids the accountability mechanisms that charities have, e.g a CIC can have just one director. It does have a (poorly funded) government regulator, Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies, but there appears to be no pro-active monitoring of whether CICs are operating for community benefit.
- Directors and functioning can change overtime, not encumbered by rules that ensure its social aims. The directors of a CIC can pay themselves whatever they can argue could reasonably be seen as necessary.
- any money in the organisation can very easily be siphoned out to profit-making enterprises.
- No legal requirement to have a democratic structure
In Somerset UK, where there is community anxiety about the development of Hinkley Point C nuclear station, and its effect on the environment – what better prime wheeze for the nuclear lobby, than to join an existing reputable Community Interest Company?
Hinkley Point C, has teamed up with the CIC Passion for Somerset. as a principal partner.
Dutton’s decaying nuclear energy plans have the briefest half-life
Every time the opposition leader starts down the nuclear path, he hits another dead end.
JOHN QUIGGIN, APR 13, 2024, https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/duttons-decaying-nuclear-energy-plans?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=806934&post_id=143441241&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Peter Dutton can’t seem to take a trick on nuclear power. Any option he puts forward seems to vanish as soon as he makes a commitment.
Since Dutton became opposition leader, he’s pushed the idea of small modular reactors (SMRs). At least in their original concept, these were reactors small enough (say 50-to-70MW capacity) to be built in a factory and shipped to sites where they could be installed in whatever number was required. The leading candidate was NuScale, a US firm that had contracted with a group of utilities in Utah to develop a pilot project of 12 (later reduced to six) SMRs.
The idea had the enthusiastic backing of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the government’s official adviser on nuclear technology. The ANSTO website includes information on how SMRs can be constructed in three to five years, and that the US will have them operational by 2026.
That sounded too good to be true, and sadly, it was — NuScale abandoned its project late last year. After a bit of prodding, ANSTO added a disclaimer and a note that the “three to five year estimate” came from a research paper by the University of Leeds, which in turn could be traced to a dodgy consulting report from 2014.
On nuclear, Coalition prefers the optimism of misleading, decade-old, unverified claims Read More
Having given up hope on NuScale, Dutton needed an alternative.
He settled on Rolls-Royce, a reassuringly familiar name with a long track record of engineering excellence, not always matched by its financial success (it was famously nationalised and broken up by the Conservative UK government in the 1970s). It produces the nuclear reactors to be used in the submarines we will acquire under the AUKUS deal.
Rolls-Royce also offers what it calls an SMR, though this is something of a misnomer. At 470MWe, the reactor scarcely qualifies as small. It’s far too big to be built in a factory and shipped to its installation site. The “modular” description refers to the fact that the design uses 1,500 “modular components”, which are to be produced in a factory then assembled on site.
This is precisely the approach that was attempted, unsuccessfully, in the Westinghouse AP1000 design. Of four AP1000 reactors started in the US, two were abandoned with a loss of billions of dollars while the other two (at Vogtle in Georgia) have finally been completed, years late and billions over budget.
Despite these concerns, Rolls-Royce looked like a frontrunner, at least in the UK. Its design was the first to enter the Office for Nuclear Regulation approval process in 2021, with a target delivery date of 2030. The UK government provided £210 million (about A$400 million) in funding to support the project.
So, late last week, Dutton briefed Simon Benson at The Australian on a plan to deliver Rolls-Royce reactors into the grid by the mid-2030s.
What could go wrong? Plenty it seems. Just as The Australian story appeared, the UK government announced the winners of a grant to build SMRs in County Durham, and Rolls-Royce was not among them. UK deployment of the Rolls-Royce design now seems unlikely.
Rolls-Royce is now talking about building its first plants overseas. Poland has been mentioned as a possibility, but that’s a furphy. Under the now-departed Law and Justice government, Poland announced deals involving a string of different reactor designs: the AP1000, the GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300 (a direct competitor for Rolls-Royce), Last Energy microreactors, and even NuScale. Few if any will actually be built.
So, if Dutton goes ahead with Rolls-Royce, Australia could be in the unenviable situation of building “first of a kind” (FOAK) reactors with an untested design. Even more than nuclear plants in general, FOAK projects are notorious for delays and cost overruns. For a country like Australia, with no established nuclear industry or regulatory structure, it would be madness to try such a thing.
What next for Dutton’s nuclear policy? There’s still time for a climbdown before the policy is officially announced, but it’s unclear that the nuclear true believers in the LNP would accept such a thing. He could switch to a design with slightly better chances, such as the BWRX-300, but that would risk a third embarrassment if the design failed. So he has little choice but to press ahead with the Rolls-Royce dream and hope that it is not finally dispelled before the 2025 election.
Former PM Paul Keating on a craven acceptance of US strategic hegemony in Asia
By Paul Keating, Apr 11, 2024 https://johnmenadue.com/a-craven-acceptance-of-us-strategic-hegemony-in-asia/
The Financial Review, if it wishes to remain relevant, requires a monster dose of reality – a de-lousing of its misplaced strategic ideology and its craven acceptance of US strategic hegemony in Asia, a region where not one US state resides.
In the mid-1980s, a young and enthusiastic Michael Stutchbury was a permanent attendee at my often two-hour press conferences as treasurer, drumming into the Canberra press gallery that the presence of large economic forces was more important and more newsworthy than the gallery’s normal diet of election speculation, leadership changes, tax cuts and cigarette prices.
And Michael lapped it up. He was an early graduate of my school of advanced economic and entrepreneurial thinking. And while he has become more conservative as he has become older, his stewardship of The Australian Financial Review provides an attestation that those economic lessons were an anchor, a ballast, for the wider presentation and contemporary dissertation of economic news and events.
In short, Michael’s close proximity to and at the reformation of the Australian economy in the 1980s and early 1990s has made his views and leadership on economic issues today to be of substantial national value. But economic insight is where Michael’s experience shutters. On foreign policy, as in The AFR View ‘‘JAUKUS shows Australia seeks security in Asia’’ (April 9), Michael is away with the pixies
– a sugar plum fairy in the Australian strategic fantasy.
And that fantasy goes to asserting that an Atlantic power, the United States, along with other Anglos, Britain and Australia, but topped up with some resentment sauce from Japan, in some way fashions a new Asia construct – a construct in which Australia is or can be part. Distorting my policy that Australia could find its security in Asia by being tied up and indentured to a particularly un-Asian bunch.
Unlike Europe, which after the Thirty Years’ War hit upon the Westphalian model of collective security among states of roughly equal size, Asia has always been a hierarchy of countries with China at its top. This remains the case today.
So, the policy of any nation, particularly a Pacific one, thinking it can deal with Asia by ignoring China or pretending it doesn’t exist or that it is in some way illegitimate, is a policy of fantasy. A policy of fools.
But if you are a sugar plum fairy, as in foreign policy Michael seems happy to be, you will believe almost anything. Like AUKUS nuclear subs will belong to Australia and be sovereign to it, despite US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s regular and blatant assertions that he expects the subs to be at the beck and call of the United States whenever it wishes to hop into China over Taiwan.
The Financial Review, if it wishes to remain relevant, requires a monster dose of reality – a de-lousing of its misplaced strategic ideology and its craven acceptance of US strategic hegemony in Asia, a region where not one US state resides.
First published in the Australian Financial Review, April 10, 2024.
What’s Inside the President’s Nuclear Football
the creation of the Football, the president’s emergency satchel. But what about the nuclear war plans inside? And what about the Black Book? As surprising as this now seems, until 1960, several of the U.S. military branches had their own individual plans for nuclear war. What this meant was that the Army, Navy, and Air Force chiefs each had authority over a uniquely designated stockpile of nuclear weapons—including the delivery systems for those weapons and lists of targets to strike—for them to use at their own discretion in the event of nuclear war. When incoming Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara learned about these multiple, competing nuclear war plans, he ordered them integrated into a single plan. This is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, got its name.
What began as the Single Integrated Operational Plan is now the Operational Plan, or OPLAN.
The Operation Plan for nuclear war is a colossal and cumbersome set of documents, too large to be carried around in the Football. Parsed down to a more manageable size, the plans become nuclear strike options as delineated in the Black Book.
plan for “mass extermination.” “evil beyond any human project ever,” “the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere.”
BY ANNIE JACOBSEN, APRIL 11, 2024 https://time.com/6965539/u-s-presidents-nuclear-footb
Jacobsen’s new book is Nuclear War: A Scenario
Nuclear threats have reemerged on the world stage. Frequently, Vladimir Putin warns the West that Russia is ready for nuclear war. “Weapons exits in order to use them,” Putin says. North Korea accuses the U.S. of having, “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” Entwined with the rising rhetoric, one physical object stands alone—the president’s emergency satchel, also known as the nuclear Football.
This bulging leather briefcase remains with the president at all times, carried by a military aide, and never more than an arm’s length away. It’s an iconic reminder of preeminent power and national mystery. A “nominally secret command-and-control system used to assure presidential control of nuclear use decisions,” historian William Burr says of the Football. Items located inside the president’s emergency satchel confirm his identity and connect him, as commander in chief, to the National Military Command Center, a nuclear bunker located beneath the Pentagon.
Also inside the Football is the Black Book. This cryptic set of documents, parsed down from a much larger operational plan for nuclear war, provides the commander in chief with nuclear launch options should policy dictate the president needs to act. This includes which targets to strike, which delivery systems to use, and the timing of action. “It’s called the Black Book because it involves so much death,” says Dr. Glen McDuff, a nuclear weapons engineer who served as the classified museum historian at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Football is with the president at all times. The first publicly-released photograph of the Football is from May 1963, at the Kennedy Family Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. It can be seen swinging from the military aide’s hand as he walks directly behind the president. The Football accompanied President Regan to the Red Square in Moscow, in 1988. When President George H.W. Bush was photographed out on jog, his military aide—also in running shorts and sneakers—can be seen just a few steps behind, carrying the iconic briefcase in her left hand.
The Football is always within a few feet of the president of the U.S. Once, when President Clinton was visiting Syria, President Hafez al-Assad’s handlers tried to prevent Clinton’s military aide from riding in an elevator with him. “We could not let that happen, and did not let that happen,” former Secret Service director Lewis Merletti says. Merletti was the special agent in charge of President Clinton’s detail at that time. “The Football must always be with the president,” he asserts. “There are no exceptions.” How the Football came to be has long been shrouded in mystery. “Its origins remain highly classified,” journalist Michael Dobbs wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2014. And then, just a few months ago, Los Alamos National Laboratory finally declassified the Football’s origin story. It goes like this.
One day in December 1959, a small group of officials from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy visited a NATO base in Europe to examine joint-custody nuclear bomb protocols. The NATO pilots stationed there flew Republic F84F jets, the first U.S. Air Force fighter-bomber aircraft designed to carry nuclear bombs. Operation Reflex Action was in effect, air crews were trained and ready to strike predetermined targets in the Soviet Union in less than fifteen minutes from the call to nuclear war. One of the men on this visit was Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos scientist with a unique history.
Agnew was one of the three physicists assigned to fly on the Hiroshima bombing mission as a scientific observer. He carried a movie camera with him and took the only existing film footage of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as seen from the air. Now, in 1959, Agnew was at Los Alamos overseeing thermonuclear bomb tests; he later became the lab’s director. During the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. “I observed four F84F aircraft . . . sitting on the end of a runway, each was carrying two MK 7 [nuclear] gravity bombs,” he wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that “custody of the MK 7s was under the watchful eye of one very young U.S. Army private armed with a M1 rifle with 8 rounds of ammunition.” Agnew told his colleagues: “The only safeguard against unauthorized use of an atomic bomb was this single G.I. surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away.”
Back in the U.S., Agnew contacted a project engineer at Sandia Laboratories named Don Cotter and asked “if we could insert an electronic ‘lock’ in the [bomb’s] firing circuit that could prevent just any passerby from arming the MK 7.” Cotter got to work. He put together a demonstration of a device, a lock and coded switch, that functioned as follows: “[a] 3-digit code would be entered, a switch was thrown, the green light extinguished, and the red light illuminated indicating the arming circuit was live.”
Agnew and Cotter went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate this locking device—first to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, then to the president’s top science advisor and finally to the president himself. “We presented it to President Kennedy, who ordered it be done,” Agnew recalled. The military objected. The man in charge of nuclear weapons at the time, General Alfred D. Starbird, opposed the idea. Glen McDuff, who coauthored (with Agnew) the now declassified paper on the subject, summed up the general’s documented concerns. “How is a pilot, U.S. or foreign, somewhere around the world, going to get a code from the President of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops?” For the U.S. military, the locking device issue opened Pandora’s box. “If gravity bombs were coded,” McDuff explains, “why not all nuclear weapons including missile warheads, atomic demolition munitions, torpedoes, all of them.” The president decided they needed to be.
The answer came in the creation of the Football, the president’s emergency satchel. But what about the nuclear war plans inside? And what about the Black Book? As surprising as this now seems, until 1960, several of the U.S. military branches had their own individual plans for nuclear war. What this meant was that the Army, Navy, and Air Force chiefs each had authority over a uniquely designated stockpile of nuclear weapons—including the delivery systems for those weapons and lists of targets to strike—for them to use at their own discretion in the event of nuclear war. When incoming Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara learned about these multiple, competing nuclear war plans, he ordered them integrated into a single plan. This is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, got its name.
Starting in December 1960, for the first time in the nuclear age, the SIOP gave the president, not the military, control of America’s nuclear arsenal. This new locking device designed by Agnew and Cotter, called a Permissive Action Link, or PAL, became an integral part of this new system. Only with the invention of the Football would the order to launch nuclear weapons—and the ability to physically arm them—come from the president alone. “This is how the president got the Football,” writes Agnew.
Over the years, the name for the nuclear war plan has changed. What began as the Single Integrated Operational Plan is now the Operational Plan, or OPLAN. For the Nuclear Information Project, in consort with the Federation of American Scientists, project director Hans Kristensen and senior researcher Matt Korda have identified the current Operational Plan as OPLAN 8010-12. It consists of “‘a family of plans’ directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran,” the authors write. The Operation Plan for nuclear war is a colossal and cumbersome set of documents, too large to be carried around in the Football. Parsed down to a more manageable size, the plans become nuclear strike options as delineated in the Black Book.
The number of individuals who have written out their first-hand impressions of the SIOP is extremely limited. John Rubel, an avionics expert who served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Kennedy, wrote about the SIOP in his 2008 memoir, Doomsday Delayed. He liked it to a plan for “mass extermination.” Daniel Ellsberg reflected on the SIOP in his 2017 memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “It depicted evil beyond any human project ever,” Ellsberg wrote. A plan that calls for “the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere.”
As for the Black Book, few details exist on the public record. In 2015, U.S. Strategic Command battle watch commander Colonel Carolyn Bird shared with CNN previously unreported details. An identical Football resides inside the Stratcom nuclear bunker, viewers learned, locked in a safe beneath Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. “The [Black Book inside the] president’s football and our black book are duplicates,” Bird told CNN. “They contain the same information in the same way so that we are talking off the same documents when we are discussing nuclear options.”
In an interview with the History Channel, President Clinton’s former military aide, a colonel named Robert “Buzz” Patterson, likened the Black Book to a “Denny’s breakfast menu.” He made the analogy that choosing retaliatory targets from a predetermined nuclear strike list was as simple as deciding on a combination of food items at a restaurant. “It’s like picking one out of Column A and two out of Column B,” Patterson said.
Dr. Theodore Postol has seen the contents of the Black Book. His thoughts provide unsettling context to Patterson’s observations. From 1982 to 1984 Postol served as the assistant for weapons technology to the chief of naval operations. In this capacity, he worked on technical details regarding submarine launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs. “Nitty gritty features,” Postol generalizes.
“Seeing the contents of the Black Book,” he recalls, “I was freaked out beyond belief.” Not for reasons he expected; as a weapons technologist Postol was familiar with the mass carnage involved. Instead of being confronted with a succinct summary of these horrifying facts—the targeting of cities, the death tolls in the millions—
Postol found the contents of the Black Book to be an obfuscation of the facts. The nuclear launch plans, he says, “had been sterilized down to military terminology designed to remove you from the reality of what would be happening.” An attempt at sanitizing nuclear war into a seemingly more palatable event. “My first thought,” Postol remembers, was “how would a president understand what these attack options actually mean?” This censoring of grim truths about nuclear war extends to the public as well, Postal contends. “You don’t want your population to know you’re planning genocide.”
What, if any, is the solution to this madness? Between the saber rattling and the secrecy, nuclear matters can present themselves as intractable. And yet, in reporting this story I witnessed a change in attitude from an unlikely source: the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a federal government organization that I’ve covered as a reporter for fifteen years.
“It’s the Oppenheimer effect,” Dr. Glen McDuff told me of this new attitude, “as in Oppenheimer the film.” Ever since the release of Christopher Nolan’s 2023 feature film, “the lab has been inundated with public curiosity about the bomb,” McDuff clarifies. “With requests about nuclear weapons.” And, he says, the lab has done its best to respond. The popularity of the film has renewed dialogue about the existential dangers nuclear weapons pose. And it led to the declassification (at this reporter’s behest) to one of the laboratory’s long-held secrets—the origin story of the Football.
Were the President of the United States to be called upon to open the Football, the situation that would follow would almost certainly spiral out of control. “The world could end in the next couple of hours,” former Stratcom commander General C. Robert Kehler (ret) says of nuclear war.
Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilization in a matter hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause a nuclear winter. State-of the art climate modeling predicts five billion humans will die. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead.”
And yet, threats abound. Vladimir Putin insists he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. North Korea has test launched more than 100 missiles since January 2022, including nuclear-capable weapons that can hit the U.S. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warns the world, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” The world balances on the razor’s edge. “This is madness,” Guterres says, “we must reverse course.” Change is possible. Help reverse course. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned the world in a joint statement in 1985. Conversations between these two leaders led to the reduction in nuclear weapons from an all-time high of 70,481 warheads, to some 12,500 today. Dialogue matters. Join the conversation about nuclear weapons now, while we are all still able to have one.
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