Second Meeting of State Parties to Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to Be Held at Headquarters, 27 November–1 December
NEW YORK, 24 November (Office for Disarmament Affairs) — The second Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will be held at the United Nations Headquarters from 27 November-1 December 2023. Juan Ramón de la Fuente (Mexico) was elected as President of the Meeting.
The Treaty, the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty to be negotiated in more than two decades, was adopted on 7 July 2017 at the United Nations and entered into force on 22 January 2021. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called the Treaty “an important step towards the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and a strong demonstration of support for multilateral approaches to nuclear disarmament.”
The second Meeting of States Parties is expected to hold a thematic debate on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. States parties will also consider the status and operation of the Treaty, addressing issues that include universality; the total elimination of nuclear weapons; and victim assistance, environmental remediation and international cooperation and assistance. Other topics will include scientific and technical advice for the effective implementation of the Treaty, the complementarity of the Treaty with the existing nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime and implementing the gender provisions of the Treaty.
The Meeting is expected to adopt a political declaration. The period since the conclusion of the first Meeting of States Parties in April 2022 saw the appointment of a Scientific Advisory Group, which will present its initial reports at the second Meeting of States Parties. Since the first Meeting of States Parties, seven States signed the Treaty, three ratified it and one acceded to it.
The Treaty contains, inter alia, a comprehensive set of prohibitions on participating in any nuclear-weapon-related activities. This includes undertakings not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. The Treaty also prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons on national territory as well as the provision of assistance to any State in the conduct of prohibited activities.
The Treaty requires States parties to assist individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons, as well as to take environmental remediation measures in areas under their jurisdiction or control that have been contaminated due to the testing or use of nuclear weapons. States parties are required to cooperate with one another to facilitate the Treaty’s implementation.
To date, 69 States have ratified or acceded to the Treaty and 93 have signed it.
Media contacts for the second Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: Suzanne Oosterwijk, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, UN Secretariat, S-30FW, telephone: +1 917-367-2556, email: suzanne.oosterwijk@un.org.
Nuclear waste bags Fukushima – slowly falling apart
“Contaminated soil bags in Fukushima prefecture. The life span of these bags is about 5 years. No government plan to do anything with these so they are slowly falling apart.”
Arkadiusz Podniesinski was in Fukushima Prefecture.
TODAY. Rafael Gross’ and the IAEA’s breath-taking hypocrisy , as the nuclear lobby revs up for COP 28
There is no limit to their bravado and hypocrisy. They know that nuclear power is really for the weapons industry. They know it is not really safe. That it emits radiation – causes cancer. That there’s no solution for its eternal toxic wastes. That it is obscenely expensive.
And – they know that even if nuclear works against climate change (which it doesn’t), it would never be up and running in time to make any difference, as climate change is upon us now.
Does that stop these shameless hypocrites?
“In his opening statement to the IAEA’s Board of Governors today, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi spoke of the importance of food security in a world where hunger is on the rise, and in many cases is worsening due to climate change.
“Over the past three years the number of people who go hungry in the world has increased by almost a fifth,” Mr Grossi said in his statement to the Board, which is meeting at the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters from 22-24 November. The IAEA and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have joined forces in response to this challenge. Mr Grossi and FAO Director General Qu Dongyu launched Atoms4Food at the World Food Forum last month in Rome. The joint initiative aims to increase global food security and tackle growing hunger through the use of nuclear techniques………..
COP28
Looking ahead to the 28th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai next month, Mr Grossi noted the growing global momentum on nuclear energy. “For the first time in the history of COP, nuclear countries will be able to say ‘yes, we are here, yes nuclear energy is part of the solution for this global climate crisis that we have’.”
The IAEA will showcase initiatives such as Atoms4NetZero and Atoms4Food at COP28 as well as other aspects of its work in helping the world monitor, mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Fine print bombshell – share information which “undermines trust in government”, face jail
by Rex Patrick | Nov 21, 2023 https://michaelwest.com.au/government-review-of-secrecy-provisions-an-assault-on-democracy/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-11-23&utm_campaign=Michael+West+Media+Weekly+Update
The Government has released its ‘Review into Secrecy Provisions’ whose fine print contains the greatest assault on democracy and accountability in many years, writes Rex Patrick.
Secrecy is woven into the fabric of the Australian Government. There are eleven general secrecy offences in the criminal code, 295 non-disclosure duties in 102 laws that attract criminal liability, and 569 specific secrecy offences in 183 laws.
A rationalisation and a review of secrecy laws was long overdue.
But buried in this review is a bombshell. Carried out by the Attorney-General’s Department, the review report makes a key recommendation that disclosure of information that could cause a loss of trust in Government should be criminalised.
Paragraph 146 states:
“… disclosure of information that harms the effective working of Government undermines the Australian community’s trust in government and the ability of Commonwealth departments and agencies to deliver policies and programs. It is appropriate that conduct which causes or is likely to cause prejudice to the effective working of government be covered [by secrecy provisions enforceable under the criminal code]”
The national security bureaucrats’ view seems to be that secrecy is essential to ensure trust in government!
The infamous character of Sir Humphrey Appleby in the Yes Minister TV show would be so proud.
If implemented, this recommendation would raise for public servants a criminal penalty for anything embarrassing, anything that might put a question in the way of policy information or even any wrongdoing by officials to the extent that revealing such might undermine confidence in government.
Review origins
The review stemmed from a report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security looking into the 2019 ABC and the Smethurst media raids.
The review was intended to be the first step in a process that would ensure that these laws protect and are consistent with essential public interests, including the public interest in transparency in government decision-making, parliamentary scrutiny and accountability, and effective media investigations and reporting.
The recommendation of the Review that the Government create a new sweeping secrecy offence is quite at odds with the original objectives of this exercise, and is indeed quite contrary to proper principles of transparency, scrutiny and accountability of government.
While the review recommends the repeal of some redundant and outdated secrecy offences and non-disclosure duties, this very modest wind back of secrecy will be completely submerged by the development of “a new general secrecy offence” for inclusion in the Criminal Code Act 1995.
Protecting the leaders
To be clear, public servants already have a duty not to disclose information unless they are authorised to do so, or they are required/permitted to disclose it by law.
But it’s one thing to say that public servants should operate in a ‘privacy of government’ environment, it’s completely another thing to say that everything they discuss or write about is confidential and they should go to jail if they reveal anything.
Under the current ‘privacy of government’ arrangements, we are supposed to let the government quietly get on with business overseen by Parliament, the Auditor-General, the Ombudsman, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and law enforcement, the Freedom of Information Regime and whistleblower protection.
This all sounds good; except the Parliament is very weak on oversight, the Auditor-General and Ombudsman are underfunded, the NACC operates in complete secrecy, the FOI regime is totally broken and whistleblower protections are simply non-existent.
Secrecy overreach
But even if the accountability of government systems did work, the Secrecy Review’s recommendation is overreach. It just re-enforces a culture of secrecy inside government that is already in need of a secrecy exorcism.
The much better view is that of former Sir Anthony Mason, AC KBE GBM KC in the High Court Case of Commonwealth v John Fairfax & Sons Ltd (“Defence Papers case“) [1980], before he was Chief Justice, when he said:
“It is unacceptable in our democratic society that there should be a restraint on the publication of information relating to government when the only vice of that information is that it enables the public to discuss, review and criticize government action.
His judicial pronouncement trumps the bureaucratic authors of a review that presses a recommendation that aims to protect senior leadership and ministers from embarrassment and the exposure of incompetence using the threat of criminal punishment. But his views only last until new laws are passed.
A captured Attorney General
The next question, of course, is whether the Attorney-General and the Government will act on this recommendation and remain beholden to his national security bureaucrats?
If his past record of betraying whistleblowers and his refusal to pursue Freedom of Information reforms is any guide, there aren’t any grounds for optimism.
Proceeding down this path would deal a great blow to democratic accountability and public interest journalism.
Proceeding down this path would deal a great blow to democratic accountability and public interest journalism.
It would embed the already harmful secrecy culture that exists across a vast expanse of government activity and could also blow a hole in Australia’s already weak and failing FOI regime.
But does the Government and the Attorney General want a political fight over a move towards excessive and unjustified secrecy? We will have to see, but if they do go down this path it’s a fight they’re sure to get.
What Would It Mean to ‘Absorb’ a Nuclear Attack?- nuclear missile silos as a “sponge”
Scientific American , By Ella Weber on November 22, 2023
The missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota make it a potential target for a nuclear attack. And that doesn’t come close to describing what the reality would be for those on the ground.
This podcast is Part 4 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.…..
Ella Weber: Members of my tribe live with nuclear missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The weapons sit in underground concrete silos that are surrounded by antennas in small, fenced-off areas. The missiles are armed and ready to launch in 60 seconds. This is one reason they are called Minutemen missiles…………………………….
Weber: After learning that the Air Force had not explained to my tribe what the new nuclear missiles were for–which the Air Force intended to deploy for another 60 years on our reservation–I decided to dig deeper.
I wanted to know what role the missiles and their silos play today in U.S. nuclear strategy and what the risks for the tribe were in hosting them—something that the tribe never agreed to in the first place………………….
I wasn’t really clear on what Secretary Jim Mattis meant by the ICBM force providing a “cost-imposing strategy,” so I talked to Leonor Tomero to get some clarity. She used to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration in 2021…………
Weber: Leonor explained to me that should the U.S. face a potential nuclear attack, the president would have two choices with regards to the ICBMs: launch them preventively before the missiles possibly got destroyed, or decide to absorb the attack and retaliate later.
Weber (tape): What do you mean by absorbing an attack?
Tomero: I think, you know, it’s, you know, they’re considered a sponge.
Weber (tape): So it’s kind of like making these ICBMs, like, a target ….
Tomero: Yes…
Weber (tape): …. rather than, like, these other major cities or other places…
Tomero: Right.
Weber: In case you don’t know — the role of the ICBM is to force an adversary to use many nuclear weapons if they decided to attack the U.S. The silos are basically meant to divert and absorb the incoming nuclear missiles from important and critical areas in the country, like cities.
But what would that mean for the Fort Berthold reservation?……………………………………………………………………
Frank Von Hippel: Basically the secretary of defense had come in and testified to Congress. When one of the senators asked how many people would such an attack kill, he estimated 15,000 to 25,000. And he said, ‘Well, that would be terrible, but it would be not what you would expect from a major nuclear attack.’
That seemed low to, actually, the senator from New Jersey [Clifford Case]. And he asked for a peer review of the Defense Department calculations, and, and I was then asked to be an unpaid consultant to look into that. And, in fact, I went over to the Pentagon to talk to the people who have done the calculations.
Weber: Frank found something unexpectedly horrifying.
Von Hippel: The Defense Department had assumed that explosions of the warheads over the ICBM silos would be so high that they would not cause fallout. They pointed out they would also not damage the silos.
Weber: Basically, the Department of Defense hadn’t calculated properly. The DOD had made incorrect assumptions about the altitude of nuclear explosions aimed at destroying the silos. Initially, it had thought the nuclear explosions would need to be at an altitude. But–they actually needed to be at ground level.
Von Hippel: The DoD was forced to go back and do new calculations reflecting these points, and they came out about 1,000 times higher: 20 million—on the order of 20 million people killed.
Weber (tape): Wow.
…………………………………. Von Hippel: Well, you know, the, I don’t know who coined this term about the silos being a nuclear sponge, but the local….I think there would be annihilation of the local population around the silos. Wouldn’t just be the fallout—would also be the, the blast effects, and so on. So they would be the worst affected.
Weber (tape): My grandma only lives two and a half miles away from an ICBM silo. What would happen to her and her place?
Von Hippel: I think she would be within the blast radius … and the fire radius…. I don’t know how flammable… her house would be presumably burned after being knocked flat. And then there would be the fallout. These explosions would have to be low enough to hit the set of silos with sufficient overpressure to destroy the missiles inside. It would have to be low enough for, for the dirt to be and debris to be sucked up into the cloud. And then that would bring down some of the radioactivity in a very intense patch around the silo. So … multiple ways in which she might die. I’m sorry.
Weber (tape): I mean, she didn’t make the decision to have them there. So …
Von Hippel: Yeah, I know
Weber: Being treated as expendable isn’t new to Indigenous communities. As far as I could tell, members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation don’t see themselves as living in a sacrifice zone.
This designation treats certain areas and people as acceptable losses; they bear the brunt of the risks and consequences associated with nuclear weapons and decisions made by others. Maybe if members of the tribe had a better understanding of what the risks were, they could challenge the deployment of these silos on our land…………………………….
Sébastien Philippe: Now I’m going to put the whole image of the entire areas that can be impacted by the fallout, and I can walk you through the color coding, but that’s basically the worst case possible for every single person on the map.
Edmund Baker: Okay. Holy crap. Even Disneyland’s not immune. Disney World’s out. New York—there’s no safe place.
So that batch there, North Dakota, the white sort of color…?
Philippe: Yeah.
Baker: That’s 100 percent fatality in that zone?
Philippe: Times 10. Yeah, ten times what you would need to die—and that’s just from the radioactivity.
Baker: Okay, so that’s not in the EIS, I figure, or is it?
Philippe: Uh, no.
Weber: By the way, Edmund’s talking about an environmental impact statement, or EIS—a two-volume report released by the U.S. Air Force that is meant to analyze, “the potential effects on the human and natural environments from the deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile system.”
This was the report that the Air Force had presented to my reservation—in a different place than it had initially advertised. And in the entire 3,000 pages of the report and its appendices— which cost $33 million to write, by the way — Sébastien had found that the consequences of a nuclear war that could impact my tribe were kind of glossed over.
The EIS mentioned the “casualties” and “grave implications” of such a war but they didn’t really go beyond that.
Here’s Frank again, speaking about the military’s attitudes toward the consequences of war in general.
Von Hippel: They talk about people like your grandmother as being collateral damage. I mean…, they try to desensitize themselves to what the consequences are, what they’re talking about—and, in fact, I remember when I first went over to the Pentagon to talk to people, I learned—the first time I heard this word called “collateral damage,” that is—“We, you know, we didn’t intend to kill your grandmother…. She’s, unfortunately, collateral damage.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Weber: If anyone could advise the U.S. on resilience and survivability, it would be us: the MHA Nation. And I have a feeling that keeping ICBM silos operating across our land may not be part of our preferred strategy.
In the next and final episode, I go back to the rez and report what I found to my family and members of the tribe. We sit down and discuss: What happens now?
This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert. Music by Epidemic Sound.
I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton, and Columbia Journalism School. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/what-would-it-mean-to-absorb-a-nuclear-attack/
Nuclear Power: UK’s Financial Challenge Unveiled
the actual cost might reach as high as £10 billion per reactor, resulting in an astonishing cumulative expense for the decommissioning process. …
this substantial cost could ultimately fall on taxpayers, raising concerns about the financial burden on the public.
Dev X Noah Nguyen, November 21, 2023
The UK’s Commitment to Nuclear Power and Financial Challenges
The United Kingdom’s dedication to nuclear power is becoming a financially challenging commitment as the dismantling expenses for its nuclear generating facilities continue to escalate. These costs have been advantageous for businesses involved in the dismantling process but a noteworthy expenditure for UK taxpayers
Regardless of the substantial costs associated with the new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Site C and the rising price of clean-up initiatives, the nation’s government remains committed to nuclear technology. This unwavering commitment is driven by the belief that nuclear power is crucial for achieving the UK’s long-term energy security and climate change goals. However, critics argue that increased investment in renewable energy sources could provide similar benefits, without the high financial burden and safety concerns associated with nuclear power……………………………………………………
Concerns Regarding Decommissioning Costs and Life Expectancy of Reactors
Nearly all of the remaining functional reactors are scheduled for closure by 2028, except Sizewell B, anticipated to stay in operation until 2035. With a life expectancy of roughly 40 years—considerably shorter than the 60 to 80 years frequently claimed by the sector—questions emerge about the demolition costs for the existing 23 reactors and the two under construction at Hinkley Point C.
As these reactors reach the end of their life cycle, it is crucial to plan and allocate resources effectively for their dismantling and waste disposal. The cost of decommissioning and managing nuclear facilities can significantly impact the overall economic feasibility of the energy generated, emphasizing the need for accurate cost estimations and environmentally responsible strategies.
Projected Costs of Dismantling and Importance of Effective Management
By the end of 2022, the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) projected a total dismantling cost of £149 billion. If this figure encompasses Hinkley Site C, it would equate to about £6 billion per reactor. This substantial financial investment highlights the importance of thoroughly managing the decommissioning process to ensure effective resource allocation. With the growing push towards renewable energy sources, proper management and safe dismantling of nuclear reactors have become increasingly significant for the country’s transition towards sustainable energy.
Higher Potential Costs and the Financial Burden on Taxpayers
However, Professor Stephen Thomas from the University of Greenwich’s energy policy department posits that the actual cost might reach as high as £10 billion per reactor, resulting in an astonishing cumulative expense for the decommissioning process. He further elaborates that this substantial cost could ultimately fall on taxpayers, raising concerns about the financial burden on the public. To mitigate such consequences, proper planning and establishing an adequate funding source must be undertaken for a feasible and efficient decommissioning process…………………………………………………………………………………….
What are the concerns regarding the decommissioning costs and life expectancy of nuclear reactors in the UK?
With functional reactors scheduled for closure and shorter life expectancies than often claimed, there are concerns about the demolition costs for the existing reactors and effective management of resources for dismantling and waste disposal. The cost of decommissioning can significantly impact the overall economic feasibility of nuclear-generated energy and necessitates accurate cost estimations and environmentally responsible strategies………….. https://www.devx.com/news/nuclear-power-uks-financial-challenge-unveiled/
White House Fears Pause In Fighting Will Let Journalists See What’s Been Happening In Gaza
Israel and Hamas have reportedly agreed to a four-day ceasefire which will entail the release of 50 hostages held by Hamas in exchange for 150 hostages held by Israeli forces.
In an article titled “Biden admin officials see proof their strategy is working in hostage deal,” Politico describes the deal as “the administration’s biggest diplomatic victory of the conflict” and reports that White House officials are calling it a “vindication” of Biden’s decision making. Which is an entirely inappropriate level of verbal fellatio for an achievement as minimal as not murdering children for a few days.
Tucked away many paragraphs into this report is a sentence which is getting a lot of attention on social media today saying that according to Politico’s sources there has been some resistance to the pause in fighting within the administration due to fears that it will allow journalists into Gaza to report on the devastation Israel has inflicted upon the enclave.
“And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel,” Politico reports.
In other words, the White House is worried that a brief pause in the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza will allow journalists to report the truth about the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza, because it will hurt the information interests of the US and Israel. They are worried that the public will become more aware of facts and truth.
Needless to say, if you’re standing on the right side of history you’re not typically worried about journalists reporting true facts about current events and thereby damaging public support for your agendas. But that is the side that the US and Israel have always stood on, which is why the US empire is currently imprisoning Julian Assange for doing good journalism on US war crimes and why Israel has a decades-long history of threatening and targeting journalists.
During Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza in 2021 the IDF reportedly targeted more than 20 Palestinian press institutions in the enclave, as well as the tower hosting the international outlets AP and Al Jazeera. During this current onslaught Israel has been killing dozens of Palestinian journalists, sometimes by actively bombing their homes where they live with their families. The IDF’s campaign to wipe out inconvenient news reporters has resulted in the Committee to Protect Journalists calling this the deadliest conflict on record for journalists anywhere, ever.
Both the US and Israel have been attacking the press in this way because their governments understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. They understand that while power is controlling what happens, ultimate power is controlling what people think about what happens. Human consciousness is dominated by mental narratives, so if you can control society’s dominant narratives, you can control the humans.
This is why the powerful have been able to remain in power in our civilization — because they understand this, while we the public generally do not. That’s why they bombard us with nonstop mass media propaganda, that’s why they work to censor the internet, that’s why Julian Assange languishes in prison, that’s why Israel routinely murders journalists, and that’s why the White House is afraid of what will happen if worldwide news reporters are able to get their cameras into Gaza.
Lawsuit Against Alleged CIA Spying on Assange Visitors: A Rare Court Hearing
A federal judge pushed back when a government attorney refused to confirm or deny whether the CIA had engaged in warrantless surveillance.
SCHEERPOST, By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter, November 21, 2023
A United States court held an extraordinary hearing on November 16, where a judge carefully considered a lawsuit against the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo for their alleged role in spying on American attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Judge John Koeltl of the Southern District of New York pushed back when Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea refused to confirm or deny that the CIA had targeted Americans without obtaining a warrant. He also invited attorneys for the Americans to update the lawsuit so that claims of privacy violations explicitly dealt with the government’s lack of a warrant.
In August 2022, four Americans sued the CIA and Pompeo: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer who represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.
The lawsuit alleged that as visitors Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of a Spanish company called UC Global, which was contracted to provide security for the Ecuador embassy.
UC Global and the company’s director David Morales “copied the information stored on the devices” and shared the information with the CIA. The agency even had access to live video and audio feeds from cameras in the embassy………………………………………………………………………………………………
Though the court was open to reviewing arguments against the CIA, Koeltl seemed highly skeptical that the claim against Pompeo in his individual capacity would survive against the government.
In 1971, a U.S. Supreme Court case known as Bivens created a process for bringing cases against federal government officials for violating a person’s constitutional rights. Pompeo was sued under that doctrine. However, courts have been extremely reluctant to allow plaintiffs to pursue damages when a case may set a precedent or lead to a court intruding upon national security and foreign policy matters…………………………………………………………….
The CIA knew from their passports whether they were American citizens or not, and the agency still went ahead with targeted surveillance against them. https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/21/lawsuit-against-alleged-cia-spying-on-assange-visitors-a-rare-court-hearing/
TODAY. Nuclear lobby busting to control COP 28 – now their stooge John Kerry is touting the fantasy of nuclear fusion.
Yeah yeah – we all know that nuclear fusion is theoretically “carbon-emissions-free”
Great! BUT:
Time. “The reality is that fusion energy will not be viable at scale anytime within the next decade, a time frame over which carbon emissions must be reduced by 50% to avoid catastrophic warming of more than 1.5°C,” – climate expert Michael Mann
Energy. Nuclear fusion requires 100 times more energy to charge than the energy it ends up producing.
Cost. Requires highly expensive tritium and lithium.
Space. Current efforts have taken up a huge area – how much space would be needed to do fusion on a commercial scale?
Wastes. tritium is the radioactive form of hydrogen. Its little isotopes are great at permeating metals and finding ways to escape tight enclosures. Obviously, this will pose a significant problem for those who want to continuously breed tritium in a fusion reactor.
Weapons connection. Since first tried out in that monstrous Marshall Islands explosion, fusion has been intended as a tool of war. the American government is interested not in using fusion technology to power the energy grid, but in using it to further strengthen this country’s already massive arsenal of atomic weapons.
A new Palestinian state could never be free as long as its neighbor, Israel, possesses nuclear weapons.
The 2-State Solution’s Nuclear Option
SCHEERPOST, By Scott Ritter / Consortium News, November 20, 2023
“………………………………………………………………………………………………. the United States continues to provide diplomatic cover for Israel’s nuclear weapons, maintaining the fiction of ambiguity despite knowing full well Israel possesses a very robust nuclear arsenal. This posture is becoming more difficult to sustain, given the increasingly aggressive posture assumed by the Israeli government regarding its own policy of ambiguity.
In 2022, during a periodic review by the United Nations of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) , then-Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid addressed the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission about Israel’s “defensive and offensive capabilities, and what is referred to in the foreign media as other capabilities. These other capabilities,” Lapid said, clearly alluding to Israel’s nuclear weapons, “keep us alive and will keep us alive as long as we and our children are here.”
As things stand, the threat posed by Israeli nuclear weapons to both regional and global security is as great today as at any time in Israeli history. With the potential of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict expanding to include Hezbollah and perhaps Iran, Israel for the first time since 1973 faces a genuine existential threat — the kind of threat Israel’s nuclear weapons were built to deter.
An Israeli minister has already alluded to the attractiveness of using nuclear weapons against Hamas in Gaza. But the real threat comes from what happens if Iran is dragged into the war. Here, Israel’s much rumored “Samson Option” could come into play, where Israel uses its nuclear arsenal to destroy as many enemies as possible once the continued survival of Israel is at risk.
Given the present risk posed by Israel’s nuclear arsenal, it is essential that the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict be prevented from expanding. Once the conflict can be ended, the process must begin for a long-term solution that includes a free and independent Palestine. However, a new Palestinian state can never be free if its neighbor, Israel possesses nuclear weapons.
Operating with the understanding that the creation of a Palestinian state would coincide with a renewed push for normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the result vis-à-vis the security of Israel would be a much-improved situation that made Israel’s need for nuclear weapons moot.
South African Example
The question then becomes how Israel can be persuaded to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. Fortunately, there is an example from history.
Apartheid South Africa had embarked on a nuclear weapons program in the early 1970s. U.S. intelligence reports show that South Africa formally began its nuclear weapons program in 1973. By 1982, it had developed and built its first nuclear explosive device.
Seven years later, in 1989, South Africa had manufactured six functional nuclear bombs, each capable of delivering an explosive equivalent of 19 kilotons of TNT.
The South African nuclear weapons program mirrored that of the Israeli program in that it was conducted in great secrecy and designed to deter the threat posed by communist-supported black liberation movements operating all along the periphery of the South African nation.
In 1989, South Africa elected a new president, F. W. de Klerk, who quickly realized that the political winds were changing and that the country could very well, in the span of a few years, fall under the control of black nationalists led by Nelson Mandela.
To prevent that, De Klerk took the unprecedented decision to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state and open its nuclear program for inspection and dismantlement. South Africa joined the NPT in 1991; by 1994, all South Africa’s nuclear weapons had been dismantled under international supervision.
Once the Palestinian-Israeli war comes to an end, and if Israel begins negotiating in good faith about the possibility of a free and independent Palestinian state, the United States should lead an effort to get the Israeli government to follow the path taken by F. W. de Klerk by signing the NPT and working with the International Atomic Energy Agency to dismantle the totality of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
Such a move should be non-negotiable — if the United States is serious about creating the conditions of a long and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, then it should use all the leverage at its disposal to pressure Israel to voluntarily disarm itself of nuclear weapons.
This is the only viable path to peace between Israel and the Arab and Muslim world that surrounds it.
Nuclear Fusion Won’t Save the Climate But It Might Blow Up the World
the United States’ first full-scale hydrogen bomb was, in fact, a fission explosion that initiated a fusion reaction.
since first tried out in that monstrous Marshall Islands explosion, fusion has been intended as a tool of war. And sadly, so it remains,
Buried deep in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s website, the government comes clean about what these fusion experiments at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) are really all about.
above – Edward Teller – inventor of the thermonuclear fusion bomb – (a man consumed by his fear and hatred of Russia)
they require 100 times more energy to charge than the energy they ended up producing.
Resilience, By Joshua Frank, originally published by TomDispatch 23 Jan 23
.”…………………. the New York Times and CNN alerted me that morning, at stake was a new technology that could potentially solve the worst dilemma humanity faces: climate change and the desperate overheating of our planet. Net-energy-gain fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for all that’s wrong with traditional nuclear-fission energy (read: accidents, radioactive waste), had finally been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California…………………..
…All in all, the reviews for fusion were positively glowing and it seemed to make instant sense. After all, what could possibly be wrong ……………..
The Big Catch
On a very basic level, fusion is the stuff of stars. Within the Earth’s sun, hydrogen combines with helium to create heat in the form of sunlight. Inside the walls of the Livermore Lab, this natural process was imitated by blasting 192 gigantic lasers into a tube the size of a baby’s toe. Inside that cylinder sat a “hydrogen-encased diamond.” When the laser shot through the small hole, it destroyed that diamond quicker than the blink of an eye. In doing so, it created a bunch of invisible x-rays that compressed a small pellet of deuterium and tritium, which scientists refer to as “heavy hydrogen.
“In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet,”explained New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang. “Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5 in energy gain.”
As with so many breakthroughs, there was a catch. First, 3 megajoules isn’t much energy. After all, it takes 360,000 megajoules to create 300 hours of light from a single 100-watt light bulb. So, Livermore’s fusion development isn’t going to electrify a single home, let alone a million homes, anytime soon. And there was another nagging issue with this little fusion creation as well: it took 300 megajoules to power up those 192 lasers. Simply put, at the moment, they require 100 times more energy to charge than the energy they ended up producing.
“The reality is that fusion energy will not be viable at scale anytime within the next decade, a time frame over which carbon emissions must be reduced by 50% to avoid catastrophic warming of more than 1.5°C,” – climate expert Michael Mann
Tritium Trials and Tribulations
The secretive and heavily secured National Ignition Facility where that test took place is the size of a sprawling sports arena. It could, in fact, hold three football fields. Which makes me wonder: how much space would be needed to do fusion on a commercial scale? No good answer is yet available. Then there’s the trouble with that isotope tritium needed to help along the fusion reaction. It’s not easy to come by and costs about as much as diamonds, around $30,000 per gram. Right now, even some of the bigwigs at the Department of Defense are worried that we’re running out of usable tritium.
…………”tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment.” – writes Daniel Clery in Science.
…………………… the reactors themselves will have to be lined with a lot of lithium, itself an expensive chemical element at $71 a kilogram (copper, by contrast, is around $9.44 a kilogram), to allow the process to work correctly.
Then there’s also a commonly repeated misstatement that fusion doesn’t create significant radioactive waste, a haunting reality for the world’s current fleet of nuclear plants. True, plutonium, which can be used as fuel in atomic weapons, isn’t a natural byproduct of fusion, but tritium is the radioactive form of hydrogen. Its little isotopes are great at permeating metals and finding ways to escape tight enclosures. Obviously, this will pose a significant problem for those who want to continuously breed tritium in a fusion reactor. It also presents a concern for people worried about radioactivity making its way out of such facilities and into the environment.
“Cancer is the main risk from humans ingesting tritium. When tritium decays it spits out a low-energy electron (roughly 18,000 electron volts) that escapes and slams into DNA, a ribosome, or some other biologically important molecule,” David Biello explains in Scientific American. “And, unlike other radionuclides, tritium is usually part of water, so it ends up in all parts of the body and therefore can, in theory, promote any kind of cancer. But that also helps reduce the risk: any tritiated water is typically excreted in less than a month.”
If that sounds problematic, that’s because it is. This country’s above-ground atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s was responsible for most of the man-made tritium that’s lingering in the environment. And it will be at least 2046, 84 years after the last American atmospheric nuclear detonation in Nevada, before tritium there will no longer pose a problem for the area.
Of course, tritium also escapes from our existing nuclear reactors and is routinely found near such facilities where it occurs “naturally” during the fission process. In fact, after Illinois farmers discovered their wells had been contaminated by the nearby Braidwood nuclear plant, they successfully sued the site’s operator Exelon, which, in 2005, was caught discharging 6.2 million gallons of tritium-laden water into the soil.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) allows the industry to monitor for tritium releases at nuclear sites; the industry is politely asked to alert the NRC in a “timely manner” if tritium is either intentionally or accidentally released. But a June 2011 report issued by the Government Accountability Office cast doubt on the NRC’s archaic system for assessing tritium discharges, suggesting that it’s anything but effective. (“Absent such an assessment, we continue to believe that NRC has no assurance that the Groundwater Protection Initiative will lead to prompt detection of underground piping system leaks as nuclear power plants age.”)
Consider all of this a way of saying that, if the NRC isn’t doing an adequate job of monitoring tritium leaks already occurring with regularity at the country’s nuclear plants, how the heck will it do a better job of tracking the stuff at fusion plants in the future? And as I suggest in my new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, the NRC is plain awful at just about everything it does.
Instruments of Death
All of that got me wondering: if tritium, vital for the fusion process, is radioactive, and if they aren’t going to be operating those lasers in time to put the brakes on climate change, what’s really going on here?
Maybe some clues lie (as is so often the case) in history. The initial idea for a fusion reaction was proposed by English physicist Arthur Eddington in 1920. More than 30 years later, on November 1, 1952, the first full-scale U.S. test of a thermonuclear device, “Operation Ivy,” took place in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It yielded a mushroom-cloud explosion from a fusion reaction equivalent in its power to 10.4 Megatons of TNT. That was 450 times more powerful than the atomic bomb the U.S. had dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki only seven years earlier to end World War II. It created an underwater crater 6,240 feet wide and 164 feet deep…………….
Nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” the bomb was a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device, named after its creators Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. It was also the United States’ first full-scale hydrogen bomb, an altogether different beast than the two awful nukes dropped on Japan in August 1945. Those bombs utilized fission in their cores to create massive explosions. But Ivy Mike gave a little insight into what was still possible for future weapons of annihilation.
The details of how the Teller-Ulam device works are still classified, but historian of science Alex Wellerstein explained the concept well in the New Yorker:
“The basic idea is, as far as we know, as follows. Take a fission weapon — call it the primary. Take a capsule of fusionable material, cover it with depleted uranium, and call it the secondary. Take both the primary and the secondary and put them inside a radiation case — a box made of very heavy materials. When the primary detonates, radiation flows out of it, filling the case with X rays. This process, which is known as radiation implosion, will, through one mechanism or another… compress the secondary to very high densities, inaugurating fusion reactions on a large scale. These fusion reactions will, in turn, let off neutrons of such a high energy that they can make the normally inert depleted uranium of the secondary’s casing undergo fission.”
Got it? Ivy Mike was, in fact, a fission explosion that initiated a fusion reaction. But ultimately, the science of how those instruments of death work isn’t all that important. The takeaway here is that, since first tried out in that monstrous Marshall Islands explosion, fusion has been intended as a tool of war. And sadly, so it remains, despite all the publicity about its possible use some distant day in relation to climate change. In truth, any fusion breakthroughs are potentially of critical importance not as a remedy for our warming climate but for a future apocalyptic world of war.
Despite all the fantastic media publicity, that’s how the U.S. government has always seen it and that’s why the latest fusion test to create “energy” was executed in the utmost secrecy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One thing should be taken for granted: the American government is interested not in using fusion technology to power the energy grid, but in using it to further strengthen this country’s already massive arsenal of atomic weapons.
Consider it an irony, under the circumstances, but in its announcement about the success at Livermore — though this obviously wasn’t what made the headlines — the Department of Energy didn’t skirt around the issue of gains for future atomic weaponry. Jill Hruby, the department’s undersecretary for nuclear security, admitted that, in achieving a fusion ignition, researchers had “opened a new chapter in NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program.” (NNSA stands for the National Nuclear Security Administration.) That “chapter” Hruby was bragging about has a lot more to do with “modernizing” the country’s nuclear weapons capabilities than with using laser fusion to end our reliance on fossil fuels.
“Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb,” Edward Teller once said, “there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.” Some attitudes die hard.
Buried deep in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s website, the government comes clean about what these fusion experiments at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) are really all about:
NIF’s high energy density and inertial confinement fusion experiments, coupled with the increasingly sophisticated simulations available from some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, increase our understanding of weapon physics, including the properties and survivability of weapons-relevant materials… The high rigor and multidisciplinary nature of NIF experiments play a key role in attracting, training, testing, and retaining new generations of skilled stockpile stewards who will continue the mission to protect America into the future.”
Yes, despite all the media attention to climate change, this is a rare yet intentional admission, surely meant to frighten officials in China and Russia. It leaves little doubt about what this fusion breakthrough means. It’s not about creating future clean energy and never has been. It’s about “protecting” the world’s greatest capitalist superpower. Competitors beware.
Sadly, fusion won’t save the Arctic from melting, but if we don’t put a stop to it, that breakthrough technology could someday melt us all. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-26/nuclear-fusion-wont-save-the-climate-but-it-might-blow-up-the-world/
Japan’s Fukushima plant completes third water release
Canberra Times By Mari Yamaguchi, November 20 2023 – Australian Associated Press
The release of a third batch of treated radioactive wastewater from Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean ended safely as planned, its operator says, as the country’s seafood producers continue to suffer from a Chinese import ban imposed after the discharges began.
Large amounts of radioactive wastewater have accumulated at the nuclear plant since it was damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
It began discharging treated and diluted wastewater into the ocean on August 24 and finished releasing the third 7800-ton batch on Monday.
The process is expected to take decades.
The discharges have been strongly opposed by fishing groups and neighbouring countries including China, which banned all imports of Japanese seafood, badly hurting Japanese producers and exporters of scallops and other seafood……………………………………………………
Japan’s government has set up a relief fund to help find new markets for Japanese seafood, and the central and local governments have led campaigns to encourage Japanese consumers to eat more fish and support Fukushima seafood producers.
TEPCO is also providing compensation to the fisheries industry for “reputational damage” to its products caused by the wastewater release and said it has mailed application forms to 580 possible compensation seekers…………………………..
TEPCO and the government say the process is safe, but some scientists say the continuing release of water containing radionuclides from damaged reactors is unprecedented and should be monitored closely.
Monday’s completion of the release of the third batch of wastewater brings the total to 23,400 tons.
TEPCO plans a fourth release by the end of March 2024.
That would only empty about 10 of the approximately 1000 storage tanks at the Fukushima plant because of its continued production of wastewater, although officials say the pace of the discharges will pick up later.
The tanks currently hold more than 1.3 million tons of wastewater, most of which needs to be retreated to meet safety standards before release.
TEPCO and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks need to be removed from the grounds of the plant so that it can be decommissioned. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8430646/japans-fukushima-plant-completes-third-water-release/
A four-decade-old Pacific treaty was meant to preserve the ‘peaceful region’. Now experts say it’s being exploited
“We regret that the Aukus agreement … is escalating geopolitical tensions in our region and undermining Pacific-led nuclear-free regionalism,” says the Pacific Elders’ Voice,
the US and the UK will increase rotations of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia,
Pacific countries rushed to join the TPNW six years ago, reflecting their longstanding concerns about nuclear testing legacies. It’s the same regional sentiment that spurred the earlier Treaty of Rarotonga.
Daniel Hurst in Rarotonga
Nearly 40 years after the Treaty of Rarotonga came into force, the region is on edge about another rise in geopolitical tension
…………………………………………………………………………….heightened concerns permeated the region in the months leading up to the crucial meeting in the Cook Islands in August 1985 where leaders endorsed a nuclear-free zone.
Hawke, the Australian prime minister at the time, hailed the negotiations as a “dramatic success” that would send “a clear and unequivocal message to the world”, with the treaty leaving major powers in no doubt about the region’s desire to preserve “the South Pacific as the peaceful region which its name implies”.
But nearly 40 years after the Treaty of Rarotonga came into force, the region is on edge about another rise in geopolitical tensions – and critics say gaps in the treaty’s coverage are now being exploited.
“The treaty was really important to a lot of people, especially for grassroots activists,” says Talei Mangioni, a Fijian-Australian board member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia.
But it was quite watered down. And so even though we celebrate it today, what activists were saying in the 1980s and what progressive states like Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu were saying was that it wasn’t comprehensive enough.”
Mangioni, who researches the legacy of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement, adds: “That’s what’s left us now with things like Aukus exploiting certain loopholes that have remained in the treaty.”
A hotbed of great-power competition?
When leaders met last week in the Cook Islands for the annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum (Pif), the Treaty of Rarotonga was once again on everyone’s lips.
The host of the summit, prime minister Mark Brown of the Cook Islands, argued the region “should rediscover and revisit our Rarotonga treaty to ensure that it reflects the concerns of Pacific countries today, and not just what occurred back in 1985”.
The treaty – signed on the 40th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima – reflected “the deep concern of all forum members at the continuing nuclear arms race and the risk of nuclear war”.
Also known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, it designated a vast area from the west coast of Australia to Latin America where its parties must prevent the “stationing” (critics say this was always a deliberately ambiguous word) of nuclear weapons.
“The treaty prohibits the use, testing or stationing of nuclear explosive devices in the South Pacific,” the Cook Islands News explained on 7 August 1985.
“It does not prohibit countries from transporting nuclear devices through the zone nor does it prohibit nuclear-powered or equipped ships from calling in ports within the area.”
Today the parties to this treaty are Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Once again, many of these nations are worried about the Pacific becoming a hotbed of great-power competition and the risk of that spiralling into conflict. Aukus feeds into some of those fears.
“We regret that the Aukus agreement … is escalating geopolitical tensions in our region and undermining Pacific-led nuclear-free regionalism,” says the Pacific Elders’ Voice, a group of former leaders whose members include Anote Tong, the ex-president of Kiribati.
The legality of a treaty – and the spirit of it
Under the Aukus plan, Australia will buy at least three Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines from the US in the 2030s, before Australian-built boats enter into service from the 2040s.
In the meantime, the US and the UK will increase rotations of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, all aimed at deterring China from unilateral action against Taiwan or destabilising activities in the increasingly contested South China Sea.
One point of sensitivity is that it will be the first time a provision of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime has been used to transfer naval nuclear propulsion technology from a nuclear weapons state to a non-weapons state.
The Australian government has worked assiduously behind the scenes to reassure Pacific leaders on a key point about Aukus.
“Certainly when I was talking to people about it I would explain how it was consistent with the Treaty of Rarotonga,” says the Australian minister for the Pacific, Pat Conroy.
Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University, concurs. The treaty, he notes, does not deal with nuclear-propelled submarines.
“My view is that Aukus is consistent with Australia’s Treaty of Rarotonga obligations,” Rothwell says.
“Pacific states may have concerns about the potential stationing of US and UK nuclear-armed warships in Australian ports under Aukus. The stationing of such vessels, as opposed to port visits, would be contrary to the treaty.”
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sought to allay any Aukus-related concerns when he briefed Pacific leaders during the Pif meetings last week and appears to have held off any open rebellion.
Albanese insists the treaty remains “a good document” and “all of the arrangements that we’ve put in place have been consistent with that”.
But anti-nuclear campaigners point to the planned new aircraft parking apron at the Tindal base in the Northern Territory that will be able to accommodate up to six US B-52 bombers.
The US refuses to confirm or deny whether the aircraft on rotation would be nuclear-armed, in line with longstanding policy.
“We should delineate between a legalistic interpretation of the Treaty of Rarotonga and the spirit of it,” says Marco de Jong, a Pacific historian based in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“Pacific nations are growing increasingly frustrated at Australia’s reliance on loopholes and technicalities.”
Australia: the regional outlier
The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says a good way for Australia to reassure the region about its long-term intentions would be to sign the newer Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
This is an idea Albanese previously supported enthusiastically but which appears stalled.
One potential problem is that the US has warned that the TPNW – which includes a blanket ban on helping others to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons – wouldn’t allow for close allies like Australia to enjoy the protection of the American “nuclear umbrella”.
Documents obtained by the Guardian under freedom of information laws show the Australian defence department has warned the Labor government that the TPNW is “internationally divisive” because the nuclear weapons states “are all opposed”.
But Mangioni, a member of the Youngsolwara Pacific movement of activists, counters that Pacific countries rushed to join the TPNW six years ago, reflecting their longstanding concerns about nuclear testing legacies. It’s the same regional sentiment that spurred the earlier Treaty of Rarotonga.
“I would say that Australia is indeed the outlier compared to the rest of the Pacific states,” Mangioni says.
“Australia depends on nuclear deterrence as its policy but the rest of the Pacific states are nuclear abolitionists.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/19/a-40-year-old-pacific-treaty-was-meant-to-maintain-the-peaceful-region-now-experts-say-its-being-exploited
A Duty to Obey: David McBride, Whistleblowing and Following Orders
Australian Independent Media November 19, 2023, Dr Binoy Kampmark
The unpardonable, outrageous trial of Australian whistleblower David McBride was a brief affair. On November 13, it did not take long for the brutal power of the Commonwealth to become evident. McBride, having disclosed material that formed the Australian public about alleged war crimes by special forces in Afghanistan, was going to be made an example of.
McBride served as a major in the British army before becoming a lawyer for the Australian Defence Force, serving two tours in Afghanistan over 2011 and 2013. During that time, he gathered material about the culture and operations of Australia’s special forces that would ultimately pique the interest of investigators and lead to the Brereton Inquiry which, in 2020, made 36 referrals to the Australian Federal Police related to alleged war crimes.
McBride was subsequently charged with five national security offences. He was also denied immunity from prosecution under the near-unworkable provisions of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (Cth).
A central contention of the Crown was that McBride had, first and foremost, a duty to follow orders as a military lawyer. Such a duty flows on from the oath sworn to the sovereign, and no public interest could trump that undertaking. “A soldier,” contended Trish McDonald in her astonishing submission, “does not serve the sovereign by promising to do whatever the soldier thinks is in the public interest, even if contrary to the laws made by parliament.”
Even a layperson’s reading of the oath would surely make a nonsense of this view, but Justice David Mossop was in little mood to suggest otherwise. “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order.” It was a point he would be putting to the jury, effectively excluding any broader public interest considerations that might be at play in disobeying a military order.
For anybody vaguely familiar with military law since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders in 1945, such orders are never absolute, nor to be obeyed without qualification. Following orders without question or demur in all cases went out – or so the 1945 trials suggested – with Nazi officialdom and the Third Reich. There are cases when a soldier is under a positive duty to disobey certain orders. But McDonald was trapped in a fusty pre-Nuremberg world, evidenced by her use of a 19th century authority on military justice that would have sat well with the German defence team: “There is nothing so dangerous to the civil establishment of the state as an undisciplined or reactionary army.”
Chief counsel representing McBride, Stephen Odgers, hoped to drag Australian military justice into the twenty-first century, reaffirming the wisdom of Nuremberg: there are times when a public duty supersedes and transcends the narrow demands of authority, notably when it comes to the commission or concealment of crimes. The oath McBride swore as a member of the ADF to serve the sovereign comprised an element to act in the public interest, even when opposed to a lawful order…………………………………………..
With the trial resuming on November 17, Mossop issued another stinging order: that the Attorney-General’s office remove classified documents in McBride’s possession that could be presented to the jury at trial. As one of the defence team, Mark Davis, told reporters, “We received the decision just this afternoon, which was in essence to remove evidence from the defence.” In doing so, “The Crown, the government, was given the authority to bundle up evidence and run out the backdoor with it.”
With such gloomy prospects, McBride requested a new indictment on lesser charges, to which he pleaded guilty. Facing sentencing in the new year, he may be eligible to serve time outside carceral conditions, though a decade long stint is also in the offing. “The result of today’s outcome,” wrote transparency advocate and former Senator Rex Patrick, “is one brave whistleblower likely behind bars and thousands of prospective whistleblowers lost from the community.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..more https://theaimn.com/a-duty-to-obey-david-mcbride-whistleblowing-and-following-orders/
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
15 April – Zoom –Nuclear Power is Not the Solution
Apr 15, 2026 01:00 AM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
Join the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) on Tuesday, April 14th for a timely webinar exploring the risks associated with nuclear power and challenging the myth that it offers a simple, safe, carbon-free solution to the climate crisis
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Host Contact Info: australia@icanw.org
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 