Antinuclear

At the Brink, THE RISK OFNUCLEAR CONFLICTIS RISING.

New York Times , 4 Mar 24 [Awesome graphics] By W.J. HenniganW. J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.

Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.

THE RISK OF
NUCLEAR CONFLICT
IS RISING.

NUCLEAR NATIONS ARE
BUILDING UP THEIR ARSENALS,
SPEEDING TOWARD
THE NEXT ARMS RACE.

IS ANYONE
PAYING ATTENTION?

Today’s generation of weapons — many of which are fractions of the size of the bombs America dropped in 1945 but magnitudes more deadly than conventional ones — poses an unpredictable threat.

It hangs over battlefields in Ukraine as well as places where the next war might occur: the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula.

This is one story of what’s at stake — if even one small nuclear weapon were used — based on modeling, research and hundreds of hours of interviews with people who have lived through an atomic detonation, dedicated their lives to studying nuclear war or are planning for its aftermath.

Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.

By W.J. HenniganW.J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.

IF IT SEEMS ALARMIST to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The United States and Ukraine governments have been planning for this scenario for at least two years.

In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe. Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.

But well before that — just four days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, in fact — the Biden administration had directed a small group of experts and strategists, a “Tiger Team,” to devise a new nuclear “playbook” of contingency plans and responses. Pulling in experts from the intelligence, military and policy fields, they pored over years-old emergency preparedness plans, weapon-effects modeling and escalation scenarios, dusting off materials that in the age of counterterrorism and cyberwarfare were long believed to have faded into irrelevance.

The playbook, which was coordinated by the National Security Council, now sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House. It has a newly updated, detailed menu of diplomatic and military options for President Biden — and any future president — to act upon if a nuclear attack occurs in Ukraine.

At the heart of all of this work is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War. “We’ve had 30 pretty successful years keeping the genie in the bottle,” a senior administration official on the Tiger Team said. While both America and Russia have hugely reduced their nuclear arsenals since the height of the Cold War, the official said, “Right now is when nuclear risk is most at the forefront.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of this existential danger last week when he publicly warned of nuclear war if NATO deepened its involvement in Ukraine.

The risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, while now low, has been a primary concern for the Biden administration throughout the conflict, details of which are being reported here for the first time. In a series of interviews over the past year, U.S. and Ukrainian officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, diplomacy and ongoing security preparations.

And while it may cause sleepless nights in Washington and Kyiv, most of the world has barely registered the threat. Perhaps it’s because an entire generation came of age in a post-Cold War world, when the possibility of nuclear war was thought to be firmly behind us. It is time to remind ourselves of the consequences in order to avoid them.

Imagine a nuclear weapon is launched.

The missile is launched. Once its solid-fuel rocket motor burns out, the warhead plunges back toward Earth.

A third of a mile above the ground, it explodes.

Its plutonium core and surrounding contents — so delicately pieced together inside — convert into ionized gas and electromagnetic waves within a millisecond.

Temperatures inside the explosion reach millions of degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun.

A roar equal to 10,000 tons of TNT quakes the ground below. A massive fireball blooms so quickly that it seems instantaneous.

Nearly everything flammable below ignites: wood, plastics, oil. Small animals burst into flame, then turn to ash.

Ruptured gas and downed electricity lines fuel an inferno that can rage for miles.

The firestorm consumes so much oxygen that it can suffocate people sheltering inside their cars or homes.

Then there is the shock wave, a rumbling force that expands in every direction, racing at supersonic speeds.

Buildings, trees and other living things are torn apart and thrown at one another.

Near the explosion’s epicenter, buildings heave, sag and crumble. Scalding hot glass and debris shoot like shrapnel into everything in their path. Dry leaves crackle like popcorn and disappear in the blazing heat.

The wreckage — what once was asphalt, steel, soil, glass, flesh and bone — is suctioned into the roiling stem of a mushroom cloud rising for miles.

The cloud appears like a living thing. Its colors change from white to yellow to red to black, billowing into the sky until it eclipses the sun.

Screams for help — and for death — can be heard everywhere, but help is not on the way. Finding a doctor or a nurse is nearly impossible. Most medical workers in the immediate area are dead or injured. Those who survive are quickly overwhelmed.

Then, darkness. There’s a discordant ringing. The air is thick with smoke and debris. Breathing in is difficult — spit out a mouthful of dust and glass fragments, only to take in another.

EVEN AFTER LAST week’s nuclear threat, few believe that Mr. Putin will wake up one day and decide to lob megaton warheads at Washington or European capitals in retaliation for supporting Ukraine. What Western allies see as more likely is that Russia will use a so-called tactical nuclear weapon, which is less destructive and designed to strike targets over short distances to devastate military units on the battlefield.

The strategic thinking behind those weapons is that they are far less damaging than city-destroying hydrogen bombs and therefore more “usable” in warfare. The United States estimates Russia has a stockpile of up to 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, some small enough they fit in an artillery shell.

But the detonation of any tactical nuclear weapon would be an unprecedented test of the dogma of deterrence, a theory that has underwritten America’s military policy for the past 70 years. The idea stipulates that adversaries are deterred from launching a nuclear attack against the United States — or more than 30 of its treaty-covered allies — because by doing so they risk an overwhelming counterattack.

Possessing nuclear weapons isn’t about winning a nuclear war, the theory goes; it’s about preventing one. It hinges upon a carefully calibrated balance of terror among nuclear states.

After the nuclear age began in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an arms race. Each side amassed tens of thousands of nuclear arms.

Over time, nuclear weapons became symbols of national power and prestige. Other nations in Europe and Asia developed their own arsenals.

The dangerous, costly arms buildup pushed Washington and Moscow to the brink of confrontation, before a gradual warming in relations led to mutual reductions.

In the decades since, overall nuclear stockpiles have shrunk, but the number of nuclear powers has increased to nine

…………………………………………… Moscow has made implicit and explicit nuclear threats throughout the war to scare off Western intervention. Around this time, however, a series of frightening episodes took place.

On Oct. 23, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of Russia made a flurry of phone calls to the defense chiefs of four NATO nations, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to say Russia had indications that Ukrainian fighters could detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material — on their own territory to frame Moscow.

……………………………………………………… If the Russian leader was indeed inching toward the brink, he stepped back.

…………………………………….. IMAGINE THE DAMAGE THE WEAPON WOULD WREAK ON PEOPLE AND
THE ENVIRONMENT………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

India, which has continuing tensions over its borders with China and Pakistan, is fielding longer-range weapons.

Pakistan is developing new ballistic missiles and expanding nuclear production facilities.

North Korea, which has an arsenal of several hundred missiles and dozens of nuclear warheads, regularly threatens to attack South Korea, where the U.S. keeps about 28,500 troops.

China, which has publicly expressed its desire to control the U.S.-allied island of Taiwan by force if necessary, is increasing its nuclear arsenal at a “scale and pace unseen since the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s,” the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States concluded in October.

So while Washington has been helping Ukraine prepare for a nuclear attack, Taiwan or South Korea could be next. The National Security Council has already coordinated contingency playbooks for possible conflicts that could turn nuclear in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East. Iran, which has continued its nuclear program amid Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, has amassed enough enriched uranium to build several weapons if and when it chooses.

During this time of widening conflict, the rising nuclear threat is especially destabilizing: A nuclear explosion in Ukraine or Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have already been killed or injured, would sizeably escalate either conflict and its humanitarian toll………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

THIS ISN’T AN easy time for adversaries to be making big leaps of faith, but history shows it’s not impossible to forge deals amid international crises.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater, was signed by the United States, Britain and the former Soviet Union in 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Negotiations over the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which froze the number of American and Soviet long-range, nuclear-capable missiles, were concluded less than two months after the United States bombed Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam in 1972, damaging some Soviet ships. Several close calls in Europe during the Cold War contributed to a sweeping collection of agreements between Washington and Moscow that capped the number of each nation’s strategic weapons, opened communication channels and amplified monitoring and verification measures.

…………………………………………………………………………………… The United States is now preparing to build new nuclear warheads for the first time since 1991, part of a decades-long program to overhaul its nuclear forces that’s estimated to cost up to $2 trillion. The outline of that plan was drawn up in 2010 — in a much different security environment than what the country faces today. This administration, or the next one, could make the political case that even more weapons need to be built in response to the expansion and modernization of other nations’ arsenals, particularly Russia’s and China’s.

BEHIND A NONDESCRIPT door on the fifth floor of the State Department building in Washington, down the hall from the former offices of the director of the Manhattan Project, a windowless control room provides a direct channel between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center was established in 1988 as a 24-hour watch station to facilitate the information exchange required by various arms control treaties and security-building agreements, mostly between the United States and Russia…………………………………

Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.

………………….. The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center is adding translating services for Persian, Mandarin, Korean and other languages in case more nuclear nations express an interest in sharing information to reduce the risk of an inadvertent conflict.

But for now, those ambitions are unrealized, and the communication lines remain quiet.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/04/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html

March 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

More fusion hot air, literally!

Megajoules and megaheadlines are all meganonsense

By Linda Pentz Gunter,  https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/04/more-fusion-hot-air-literally/ 4 Mar 24

Another week, more fusion news, cue another overblown headline, as the mainstream media once again paid homage to industry hype, digesting nuclear propaganda soundbites without even a hiccup. 

On February 8, we learned that the Joint European Torus fusion project, also known as JET, had broken its own record in energy output during a last gasp attempt to make fusion work. The 40-year old project is now closed down for good. 

The moment  — and just a fleeting moment it truly was, lasting a mere 5.2 seconds — was duIy celebrated as another breakthrough for fusion.

“Nuclear fusion: new record brings dream of clean energy closer,” trumpeted the BBC who were especially smug since Torus is based in the UK.

“Nuclear Fusion World Record Smashed in Major Achievement”, said Science Alert.

“Scientists have made a record-setting fusion energy breakthrough,” blared the headline on Vice.

Below – A jolly video about JET in which the narrator’s voice perhaps generates more energy than the reactor itself.

What actually happened? JET generated 69 megajoules of energy in those 5.2 seconds, breaking its previous record of 59 megajoules over 5 seconds in 2021.

For those of us who don’t go about measuring things in megajoules, I deferred to our colleague, physicist, M.V. Ramana, for an explanation. 

What are they really talking about here and is it actually a breakthrough?

“One can start with the annual average consumption of one US household,” Ramana said. “That’s about 10,500 kilowatt hours which is equivalent to 37,800 megajoules. Essentially using one hour = 3,600 seconds, and one joule = one watt-second.”

Head already spinning, I hoped he would do the rest of the math. He did. 

“The 69 megajoules generated by JET”, Ramana explained, “is equivalent to roughly 0.06 percent of the electricity consumed by an average US household.”

So a minuscule contribution. But here’s the catch. “The JET machine produced 69 megajoules, but this is all heat,” explained Ramana. “Only about a third of that can be converted into electricity under ideal circumstances.”

Mostly heat, and hardly any electricity. So what the JET fusion so-called breakthrough actually delivered was all hot air. Literally!

Then came some more hot air. “First ‘private’ nuclear reactor to power 2 million British homes” ran another headline. The private sector nuclear company in question is Westinghouse. Yes, that Westinghouse! The one whose executives are in jail over a failed new nuclear power plant project in South Carolina. The Westinghouse that went bankrupt, forcing its mega-giant parent company, Toshiba, to shed not only Westinghouse but all Toshiba’s nuclear assets to avoid going down with the Westinghouse ship.

The same Westinghouse that is now $20 billion over budget at its other new nuclear project at Vogtle in Georgia.

But the British press were all “oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen” over this announcement, a project that has about as much credibility as the whimsical plot of HMS Pinafore.

And finally, we learned that Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is seeking another $150 million to restart the old and decrepit Palisades nuclear plant.

Palisades has been closed for almost two years and the company that would re-open and run it, Holtec, which specializes in decommissioning and radioactive waste management, has zero experience running a nuclear power plant.

This latest ask comes on top of $150 million already approved last year for a Palisades restart and could be augmented by a $1.5 billion loan from the federal government as well. 

All of this nuclear nonsense comes on the heels of other hyperbole surrounding previous so-called advances in fusion (see our earlier coverage here and here), misrepresented almost universally as an imminent answer to our worsening climate crisis.

But, as the song goes in Pinafore, “Things are seldom what they seem.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International

March 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

GLOBAL WARFARE “Summit” “16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit”

The only real and proven tool we have, the hard work of diplomacy, is nowhere to be found. 

Instead of creating alliances with China and Russia to solve our dire mutual challenges, this rapid warring footing is being touted here as the only real option for our security.

There’s been a shift at these conferences away from facts and towards ideology.  “We’ve moved from Civil Service to profit”

02.03.24 – New York City – Anthony Donovan, https://www.pressenza.com/2024/03/global-warfare-summit-summons-national-priority/

Outraged about all the innocents being slaughtered in Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and the build-up for war in China/Taiwan?  Thank you.  Most of these below represent the armaments, bombs, guidance systems, and “intelligence” skill sets being sent to these regions.  It is one industry, clamoring for global dominance.

Ten feet tall, high above our heads, as the escalator descends deep below ground to the conference rooms for the 3-day “16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit” in Washington DC is a brightly lit welcoming.  It reads:

Securing Our World,

Ensuring Our Future

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

Deterrence need only fail once.  Once.

It will.  What gives anyone the right to threaten all our grandchildren’s existence?  Nothing and no one.   Our leaders have exceeded the banal mindset of the Cold War, without the public knowing it.  The ominous and wrong presumption of leading a nuclear arms race to win a nuclear war has crept back in.

Hundreds of contractors, corporations, the Pentagon, Government agencies, and universities fill the rooms to solidify contracts, and encourage each other to continue building more facilities for more nuclear devices, and much faster.   Why?  The constant shout here:  “Evil.”  The enemies Russia and China are fast upon us.   The “Summit” echoes their call for a national mobilization to move immediately and fully to deter these two “expansionist” fronts.

The only real and proven tool we have, the hard work of diplomacy, is nowhere to be found.  Only a handful have heard of the Treaty on The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and those misperceive it as naive.   The trillions $ funneled quietly for this “enterprise” are flowing, unaudited, and without any media discussion, oversight or democratic process.

  Jim Carrier, a discerning journalist reporting on the Summit, “I’m coming at this from the viewpoint of a journalist, not as an activist.   Although… it’s very eye-opening.  When I was covering this industry in 1995 everything seemed to be shutting down….  I’m shocked really.  Remarkably, it has all come back to life.  The vibe last year was that we couldn’t find enough people… this year it is the opposite tone.   [The industry] is underway and we’ve hired many thousands of new workers.   The big news announced is they will have the first new plutonium pit and it will be “war ready”.

It is frightening to see the inside of the sausage, the enthusiasm these folks are bringing to it, and the power they wield.  What we have is a huge lobbying machine of contractors, … We are in a new arms race, a new war going on.  The American public is wholly ignorant of it.”

“Enemies” remain the reason for maintaining a secret world of nuclear weapons and warfare.  The three days of drumming to build faster was eased by finding a knowledgeable, brave soul.

Greg Mello, Executive Director of Los Alamos Study Group, “This is a real mental health challenge….. There’s been a shift at these conferences away from facts and towards ideology.  …I’m going to be very blunt here.  This conference is very Sino and Russophobic,  … completely ignorant of aspects of foreign policy and history.   I spoke to someone on our U.S. Strategic Nuclear Posture Committee, and he did not know anything about US-Russia relations.  I was very shocked.   It is the acquired stupidity and incompetence in the highest parts of our government, which we did not have in the past, even under Reagan.  We don’t understand our “adversaries”.  There were hawks back then, but there were a lot of realists who had respect for their counterparties in the Soviet Union.   Now that is gone.  Now we have arrogance.  It has all been politicized. … We’ve moved from Civil Service to profit.”

Mello wisely addressed the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) and State Department during their presentation, “How can we bring in more of the dissident voices to make the discourse in your offices richer and more critical?  Can we get back to a more rational approach to the world?  And a little less righteous?  We need to do more to create channels, find a way to move forward.”

Mello confides later, “Back in the Obama years, on the policy side, it was clear, they could not hate Russia enough!  I felt this was going to go to a very dark place.”   Indeed, it has.

Hidden deeply on this Ground Hog Day of 2024, General Anthony Cotton, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM, all nuclear weapons of land, sea, air, space, and related facilities), addresses the Summit talking of the new “business model” of partnership with civilian industry and academia to give our nuclear weapon industry greater agility and speed.   “The tables have turned, the advancements of the civilian sector are being introduced to the DOD (Dept. of Defense), … incorporating these new technologies …. to make sure the Labs and the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) have all they need” He talks of modernizing facilities and tech systems “to move fast”, “sustain that flow, the tempo of a constant production line.”

The military-industrial complex we were warned of in 1959 is extolled at the “Summit” to be a national priority, hiring the young, luring in, and incorporating the ingenuity and wisdom long developed by our civilian sector, from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla, AI developers, Boeing, Harvard, MIT, and hundreds of other entities.

Instead of creating alliances with China and Russia to solve our dire mutual challenges, this rapid warring footing is being touted here as the only real option for our security.

General Cotton shares the blinders of this “integrated battle space”.  “…Platforms, weapons, they all have to be in alignment, in synch. … Analytically driven data, that informs the senior decision maker [the President] of what the picture truly is.  The confidence in the decision that you make will be incredible. …A digitalized enterprise is what we are looking at, the tools and state of the art capabilities… the incredible efficiencies we are seeing in the cloud-based environments….”

Harvey Bennett, a Vietnam Veteran, and member of Veterans for Peace reporting for Pacifica Radio, stood up for the final comment facing squarely General Cotton’s presentation.   “General, I think the military has been doing the job they’ve been tasked with.  But those missing in action, are the diplomats.   When I think about what an acceptable risk in strategic deterrence is, if it is not zero, then it is not acceptable because we are talking about annihilation, not just of our country, but worldwide.

Our successes in modernization and technology are laudable, but in the big picture, do they make us safer?   Or do they increase our adversary’s sense of vulnerability, and reduce their decision time when there is a question about whether they are under attack with nuclear weapons?

I want to mention the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force January 2021.   None of the nuclear weapon states are signatories, but we are a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Article 6 of that treaty mandates that nuclear states to pursue in good faith to negotiate with other states to reduce the nuclear arsenals with a view to disarmament.

We have a treaty now to globally eliminate nuclear weapons. I don’t want anyone to be out of a job, but I think the world wants peace, the world wants security.  I don’t think that is a zero-sum game.   We can’t be secure if the rest of the world isn’t secure.  Relying on nuclear weapons is not going to make us safe.

I was alarmed reading a report by General John Hyten in 2018, who had your job (Cmdr. of STRATCOM), speaking to the Arms Control Association.  He was describing the Global Thunder War Games of Strategic Deterrence.   He was blunt and said

“I hate to tell you but (nuclear war games) ENDS THE SAME WAY EVERY TIME.   IT ENDS BAD.”

Bennett said, “Even if it is not “every time”, that’s too many.”

The moderator quickly jumped in thanking the General, not allowing a response, and calling for a lunch break.  Silence is not an option, and neither is “Russia, China, Iran”. Thank you, Mr. Bennett, perfectly put.

We know the solution:  Shame our Representatives, and companies. Stop our unlimited funding to warfare, and re-direct it to the jobs we need for life and civilization to move forward.

The Dangers of the Nuclear Industrial Complex

By James Wohlgemuth

The Summit on Nuclear Deterrence was just last week and “WE” were there to witness the insanity and the "evil." Harvey Bennett joined Greg Mello, Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, and journalist Jim Carrier, who attended the three-day "summit" to hear members of the nuclear industrial complex and the Federal Government talk about nuclear war and deterrence. Can you imagine that they actually believe that we need to be ready to fight a nuclear war and win it? Hear that and a few voices of reason on what our country is doing in your name and with your tax dollars.

March 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear industry cries poor , as top nuclear propagandist Rafael Grossi begs banks for more money!

UN nuclear watchdog head urges development banks to fund new projects.
Rafael Grossi says World Bank and Asian Development Bank ‘out of touch’
with modern attitudes to atomic energy.

The head of the UN’s nuclear
watchdog has called on global development banks and their government
shareholders to fund new projects, warning that a failure to do so could
delay the energy transition.

Rafael Grossi, director-general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Financial Times that a lack of
funding for [?] emissions-free nuclear energy by multilateral lenders such as
the World Bank and Asian Development Bank was “out of step” with the
wishes of most of their shareholders. He said there had been a
“sea-change” in attitudes to nuclear power due to the climate crisis
and the Russia-Ukraine war, which propelled energy security to the top of
policymakers’ priority lists.

 FT 4th March 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/7cb8dda3-1739-47f0-b0a7-3d726f068808 u

March 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’

who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police

The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithmsSun 6 Jun 2021 18.00 AESTShare

Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.

……………………………………… What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.

………………………..systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled – and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorise people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.

……………………………Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories – certainly an improvement – however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers].

And we could only study ImageNet because it is public. There are huge training datasets held by tech companies that are completely secret. They have pillaged images we have uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms and turned them into private systems.

……………………………………………. What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is published by Yale University Press (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/06/microsofts-kate-crawford-ai-is-neither-artificial-nor-intelligent

March 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The nuclear narrative

What is a narrative? ……… In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.

Jean-François Nadeau, March 4, 2024, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/808350/chronique-narratif

The future of the world, at least according to the head of the AtkinsRéalis firm, lies in nuclear power. This company, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, has changed its name. The scandals that have affected her, she asserts, belong to the past.

For its campaign to promote atomic energy, AtkinsRéalis secured the services of two former prime ministers: Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris. In 2019, as revealed by Radio-Canada, Jean Chrétien had already gone so far as to propose, with astonishing lightness, storing foreign nuclear waste in Labrador. In a letter, the former prime minister wrote to a Japanese firm: “Canada has been the largest supplier of nuclear fuel for years, and I have always thought it would be appropriate for Canada to become, at the end of account, the steward and guarantor of the safe storage of nuclear waste after their first service cycle. »

No carbon neutrality without nuclear power , repeats the boss of AtkinsRéalis like an advertising slogan. We must replace fossil fuels, while doubling or tripling, thanks to nuclear power, the production of electricity, he pleads. There is no question, in this presentation, of rethinking a model of society based on an infinite expansion of consumption. Always more cars, as long as they are electric. Always more heating, regardless of the fact that our buildings are thermal sieves. In other words, what continues to matter is growth. And the increase in AtkinsRéalis’ turnover is largely due to nuclear power, as noted by Le Devoir .

Last week, Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon reiterated again that he was not closing the door to the return of nuclear power. Since the arrival of Michael Sabia at the head of Hydro-Québec , the signals pointing in the direction of this revival have multiplied. “I think that as a government, in the ministry, at home, we must stay on the lookout for what is happening in nuclear power,” the minister further affirmed in front of an audience of business people. To have such projects accepted, the minister specified that “you simply have to have a good narrative”. In Quebec, he laments, “we have not had any narrative on nuclear power” since the closure of Gentilly-2 .

What is a narrative? In 1928, Edward Bernays, the founding father of the public relations and advertising industry, called these language elements capable of manipulating public opinion propaganda . This word ended up, as we know, having unfavorable connotations. Others were therefore substituted. Here is the latest addition, used in all sauces: the narrative . In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.

Pierre Fitzgibbon shows interest in mini nuclear reactors. The boss AtkinsRéalis also praises this technology, which is far from wonderful. Nobody says too loudly that these types of plants produce more nuclear waste per megawatt. These mini power plants would produce up to thirty times more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants.

In his “narrative”, the boss of AtkinsRéalis barely concedes that the management of radioactive materials constitutes a serious danger for humanity.

In Ontario, a large dump for radioactive waste was approved on January 9. Tons of heavy metals, dangerous radioactive elements, plutonium, uranium, etc. will pile up there for a century, not far from the Ottawa River. The whole thing promises to occupy, for eternity, an area equivalent to 70 National Hockey League ice rinks.

In France, 280 km of underground galleries are being built to store nuclear waste. To give an idea, the galleries of the Montreal metro total 71 km. This giant sarcophagus will be the largest construction site in Europe. In these galleries, the most dangerous waste will be able to spew radioactivity for 100,000 years.

So that the hydrogen and the fumes released from this collection of waste do not explode, it is necessary to continually ventilate. Which requires electricity. A power outage, if it lasts more than a week, could be catastrophic. Obviously, electrical problems, cataclysms, wars, terrorists, this will never happen in a hundred years. Not again in a thousand years, probably. Moreover, at the entrance to these sites, in what language should we warn future generations not to dig?

The speech of the boss of AtkinsRéalis is very similar to that which is also being given these days by the cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s. Gary Pilnick, its CEO, is sad to see the cost of food soaring. However, he does not recommend reviewing the profit margins on which the food giants are fattening, nor the exploitation system which governs this surge in prices. He simply suggests eating cereal at dinner, so that consumers can lower their bills and cereal manufacturers can make more money. At the bottom of the scale, this makes no difference to the misfortunes of the majority. Agricultural producers in Quebec, for example, find themselves this year with the lowest net incomes since 1938, they say.

Nuclear industries operate according to the same elastic logic which consists of making money at all costs. Our dependence on automobiles and energy-intensive lifestyles suits them. And it is enough, to hear them, to continue to rush forward, head down, to escape from a reality that is ruining the future. Their technologies promise to fix everything. As long as you are willing to swallow their narrative first, like soft cereal .

March 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

TODAY. Normalising the unthinkable –  the 16th Annual Nuclear (so-called) Deterrence Summit

The 16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Washington DC finished in early February

The propaganda guff should alert us to the deliberately misty thinking of the war-mongers, as they contort the facts, and kid themselves, and us, that they work for a peaceful world. The lovely phrases trip off their tongues so easily:

“Analytically driven data” “state of the art capabilities” “incredible efficiencies ” ” the cloud-based environments” “A digitalized enterprise”. Blah blah . My favourite is always “the cloud”, when what they really mean is acres and acres of dirty great machines guzzling electricity and water.

What this whole conference (now more gloriously termed “summit”) is really about, is profit, money for the American corporations – weapons ones, digital ones, space companies, contractors, and also the Pentagon, government agencies, corporate media and universities. Check out the sponsors –

There are words and phrases that you won’t hear at these conferences – “diplomacy” “negotiation” “understanding”. There’s no money in that stuff.

But you will hear “adversaries” “enemies” “evil” – there’s money in being “war ready” even better “global war ready”. Some participants actually believe that the USA could wage a nuclear war and win it – (whatever “winning a nuclear war” might mean)

I’m not religious, but I can’t help thinking what might have happened if Jesus somehow got into this crooked conference. He wouldn’t have been polite – tables overturned, lap-tops and projectors busted, corporate salesmen driven. Of course, he would be arrested as a terrorist, and given the Julian Assange treatment.

March 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAR 4, 2024,  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/so-theyre-experimenting-with-military?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=142282788&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

When I say this is most assuredly happening, I am not being hyperbolic for effect. Author and journalist Antony Loewenstein gave a lengthy interview on The Chris Hedges Report back in December about Israel’s long and extensively documented history of using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons, spyware, surveillance and security systems, AI, drones, and tactics, which has profited scores of corporations and enabled Israel to become a player of outsized success in the global weapons industry. 

“Israel’s drones, surveillance technology including spyware, facial recognition software, and biometric gathering infrastructure, along with smart fences, experimental bombs, and AI-controlled machine guns are all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results,” says Hedges in introduction. “These weapons and technologies are then certified as ‘battle-tested’ and sold around the world.”

This doesn’t only happen in Gaza. This past September The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.” In January of last year CNN published a report titled “How Ukraine became a testbed for Western weapons and battlefield innovation,” with one source saying that Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations.”

And of course we are also seeing this same phenomenon in Africa. In 2021 Mintpress News published a report by Scott Timcke titled “West Africa is the Latest Testing Ground for US Military Artificial Intelligence” about this very same trend. In 2020 Libya saw what is believed to have been the first time a human being has ever been killed by a fully automated drone attack — that is, killed without the machine having been told to do so by a human.

The other day we discussed how the empire’s great weakness is that it depends on normal human beings to carry out its orders and turn the gears of the machine. If you look at the facts and think about them for a moment, it’s not hard to see how the empire managers are hoping to overcome this weakness in the future.

March 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment