Australia’s peak environmental body welcomes ‘king hit’ for nuclear waste dump at Kimba.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has welcomed the Albanese government’s decision to fully withdraw the former Coalition government’s proposal to establish a radioactive waste facility on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula against the wishes of Traditional Owners.

Last month the Federal Court ruled in favour of Barngarla Traditional Owners, setting aside former Resources Minister Keith Pitt’s declaration of the Kimba site.

“This is a welcome and sensible decision by Minister King and federal Labor to scrap this plan, which it inherited from the previous government and which was inconsistent with international best practice and community sentiment,” said ACF’s nuclear free campaigner Dave Sweeney.

“Today’s decision is a credit to the tenacity and courage of the Barngarla people, who have been utterly determined to protect their country.

“Labor’s decision is consistent with the Federal Court ruling and with Labor values on listening to First Nations’ wishes for their Country.

“This divisive and deficient plan has caused a lot of pain and division.

“Today’s announcement signals a different approach.

“ACF looks forward to constructive dialogue with the Albanese government to help develop a new and responsible approach to radioactive waste management in Australia.

“Minister Madeleine King is right to say the previous government’s plan to double-handle the transport of this waste – first from Lucas Heights in Sydney to temporary storage at Kimba, then on to an as-yet undetermined permanent disposal site – raised concerns regarding international best practice and safety. 

“The first step to getting something right is to stop getting it wrong.

“Today, the government took that important step.”

Further comment or context: Dave Sweeney 0408 317 812

August 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Australia news LIVE: Joe Biden to host PM for official US visit; Coalition pushes nuclear energy plan

Pesarl’

Anthony Albanese likes to think of himself as a Bob Hawke unifying type. But if he keeps dragging us along this war path, he will be remembered as our Tony Blair.

We hear a lot about how AUKUS is going to be about getting the balance right, rebalancing the region as China expands. And yes, China has its interests, and is building a military in the region and that is also to be concerned about. But I wonder about balance. And we’ve just been reminded again the stories from Guam and from Okinawa. There are 343 US bases in East Asia alone. Now, I don’t know how eight nuclear submarines adds to the balance in the region.

That’s from the very radical editorial column of the Australian Financial Review. Also from the Australian Financial Review today, “The AUSMIN talks over the weekend continue the trend since the late 1990s of tying Australia more tightly into both American grand strategy and war planning in Asia. The permanent American military presence on Australian soil is now at a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.”

They are preparing us for war.

That is why I could no longer work for this government. Up until February I was press secretary to Ed Husic, and the AUKUS policy is one of the main reasons I resigned from that position.

As I said to somebody coming in, “The secret to never being disillusioned with the Labor Party is never be illusioned with the Labor Party.” But the Labor Party, despite its many flaws, does have a tradition of opposing some unjust wars. This was pointed out by Paul Keating at a recent National Press Club speech he gave.

Labor was against the Vietnam War, eventually; Labor did stand against the second Iraq War. Although Bob Hawke did support the first Iraq war. So there’s a chequered history.

I’m going to talk about Tom Uren. Tom Uren many of you will know was a lone voice to start with against the Vietnam War in the Labor Party.

Keating pointed out that the ALP opposed Vietnam. But that’s not always how it was. Tom Uren points out in an interview he gave in 1996, that he and Jim Cairns, who went on to become treasurer, moved a motion to Labor caucus in 1965 opposing US bombing of North Vietnam. They lost that vote.

The left then of the Labor Party voted against it. But seven years later Gough Whitlam on a wave of anti-war sentiment took power and one of the first acts was to bring the remaining Australian troops home from Vietnam.

So we can fight back and we can make change. While Tom Uren started as a lone voice, on AUKUS in the Labor Party, I can say we are not alone. Already people like Paul Keating, Bob Carr, Carmen Lawrence, Doug Cameron, Peter Garrett are speaking out against the insanity of this policy.

War is a deadly business. It can’t be treated as a gambit against wedge politics from the opposition, but that is how it’s being treated.

The war in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people, left millions displaced, sparked regional destabilisation, engendered the ISIS calamity. A war with China would make Iraq look like a tea party; it would threaten nuclear catastrophe. This is what we’re facing with AUKUS.

It is also a threat to Australian sovereignty. AUSMIN and the military interoperability it is producing, means that there will be US soldiers enmeshed with Australian forces on a continual basis.

And this Australian government, this Labor government, is now allowing the rotation of B-52s through the Tindal base in the Northern Territory. Now, those planes carry nuclear weapons. They neither confirm nor deny. Australia’s quite relaxed at that policy. But we know that makes Australia a nuclear target.

It makes Australia not just a target and a victim, but an aggressor in the region; a host to war machines that could slaughter millions of people. We have to say, “No” to that.

I’m reminded of something Henry Kissinger said, “Being an enemy of the United States is very dangerous. Being a friend is fatal.”

Simon Crean was Labor leader when the Iraq war happened, and he bravely stood against the war drums. When Simon Crean died recently, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, “History has vindicated Simon’s judgment, but at the time his stance was deeply counter to the prevailing political and media climate.”

We are again looking for such courage in a Labor leader.

Instead, we have meekly inherited a Scott Morrison policy. When I speak at Labor Party meetings I say, “If we’d lost the last election, and Scott Morrison was pursuing this policy, you’d all be up in arms. You’d all be screaming about the injustice of it, the war mongering of it. Just because our guy’s doing it doesn’t mean you should shut up.”

And that’s what Labor Against War is about. We can’t sit silently on this. We only formed only a few months ago. Already, we are working branch by branch, moving motions, winning many, losing some, making alliances with the Maritime Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, the Electrical Trades Union, the Construction Union. Unions New South Wales has a policy opposed to AUKUS.

The South Coast Labor Council, which is facing having a nuclear submarine base in Port Kembla, has stood up and said, “No”.

Branch by branch anti-war activists are passing resolutions. We’ve now going into National Conference. We are hoping we can force at least a bit of a debate onto that conference. To not even discuss this would be an absolute travesty of Labor Party democracy.

We’re not expecting to win at the first hurdle, but neither did Tom Uren. This is a long campaign to win the Labor Party from being a war party to being a peace party.

Assurances count for nothing. The danger we face in a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar program is we don’t know who will be prime minister in ten years, five years. We don’t know who’s going to be in the White House at the end of next year. And yet we are going to be lumbered with a nuclear alliance with two fading Anglo powers on the other side of the world.

Our future is with our brothers and sisters in the Pacific and in Asia.

AUKUS is a mad, bad and dangerous war policy. And to borrow from the French, we don’t just think this, we know this. As an aside, I was absolutely gobsmacked by the chutzpah of Macron speaking in the Pacific, complaining about the ‘new imperialism’ recently.

Anthony Albanese likes to think of himself as a Bob Hawke unifying type. But if he keeps dragging us along this war path, he will be remembered as our Tony Blair.

Believe it or not, the ALP is meant to be a democratic socialist party. Read it, it’s in the rules.

It’s meant to fight for a better world. But we should no longer be satisfied for fighting for Chifley’s Light on the Hill. This is a labour of Sisyphus, a goal that we never reach. It is time to bring the light down into the shadows, to enlighten the world, to bring hope to today, not tomorrow………………..  https://johnmenadue.com/marcus-strom-aukus-is-a-mad-bad-and-dangerous-war-policy/

August 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The blockbuster movie ‘Oppenheimer’ leaves out the real story’s main characters: New Mexicans

The terrible emptiness of “Oppenheimer” Searchlight New Mexico, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, August 8, 2023

Bernice Gutierrez was eight days old when a light 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun cracked open the predawn sky. No one in south-central New Mexico knew where it came from, or that the tiniest units of matter could be split to unleash such energy. Nor could they know that when the cloud that followed bloomed some 50,000 feet into the sky, it was surrounded for the briefest of seconds by a blue halo, the “glow of ionized air,” as the Manhattan Project physicist Otto Frisch described it. 

The impacts of that unholy halo were all too apparent in the years after, when her great-grandfather died of stomach cancer. One person after another would receive their own wrenching cancer diagnoses — 41 people in her immediate family, spanning five generations. Every one of them had lived in the Tularosa Basin and within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” was detonated on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Gutierrez was one of a group of downwinders, including Mary Martinez White and Tina Cordova, cofounder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who watched the movie “Oppenheimer” together when it opened. In one scene after another, New Mexico’s landscapes unfurled — all painfully beautiful and all, it appeared, empty and unpeopled. 

In New Mexico, we have lived in the blind spot of a national narrative for eight decades, repeated once again in this box office hit. Over its exhaustive three-hour run-time, it managed to avoid mentioning what we here have been sharing with loved ones at kitchen tables for decades: the violent evictions that took place on the Pajarito Plateau to build Los Alamos, the Pueblo and Hispanic men and women who did essential work for the Manhattan Project, or the thousands of New Mexicans affected to this day by the Trinity test. 

To watch J. Robert Oppenheimer’s character instead create and destroy in the state’s big, beautiful and ostensibly barren lands is to deny the presence of so many people whose lives were indelibly transformed by the dawn of the atomic era and continue to be shaped by the juggernaut that is today’s nuclear industrial complex.

Oppenheimer, the son of a wealthy businessman, had come here as part of a cultural moment. He hiked, rode horses and camped. He stayed at a dude ranch in Pecos. He fell in love with and then changed New Mexico forever.

“I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place,” he would later confess.

The film, Gutierrez said, skipped blithely over the ruin. “They leave out the fact that in those isolated areas lived ranchers whose lands they took away and who were never compensated for it.”

The blast was so hot it liquified sand and pieces of the bomb into hunks of green glass. Lead-lined tanks were dispatched to take soil samples at ground zero as fallout cascaded across 46 states. Ash fell from the sky like snow for days afterward, contaminating cisterns, acequias, crops, livestock, clothing and people. At the time of the detonation, 13,000 people lived within a 50-mile radius. 

‘Love-struck’ with the beauty

Oppenheimer initially arrived in New Mexico among a wave of smitten travelers. Artists, writers, dancers, anthropologists, museum boosters, health seekers and at least one psychoanalyst (Carl Jung), all had come as well-to-do tourists in search of the ineffable — landscapes, light, exotic cultures, “a patch of America that didn’t feel American,” in the words of writer Rachel Syme. 

Long before he became the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was “love-struck” with the stark beauty of New Mexico, as Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin wrote in “American Prometheus,” the biography upon which the movie is based. He would later lease and then buy a home in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his brother, Frank. Like so many others, he’d been mesmerized by the West.

New Mexico and the Southwest had long been lodged in America’s psyche. Landscape painting and photography pictured this new and alien frontier to incoming settlers and tourists as early as 1848, the year the United States annexed the region from Mexico. The art forms ended up serving the nation’s gospel, Manifest Destiny, by portraying “uninhabited” landscapes open to settlement. At the same time, U.S. forces brutally removed Indigenous peoples and others of mixed descent from their ancestral lands.

That aesthetic was at work in “Oppenheimer,” a movie that not only played up the romance of the landscape but also made it appear that the atomic bomb test only affected an elite group of scientists watching raptly in cars and bunkers.

“That’s the thing about the white supremacist imagination, right? They create alternate realities for our lives and communities and we have to live with the consequences,” said Mia Montoya Hammersley, an environmental attorney and member of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe whose ancestry includes the earliest stewards of the Tularosa Basin, where the first bomb was detonated. 

“This narrative that New Mexico is this empty barren place, people still really buy into that and believe it.”………………………………………………………………………………………………

There is nothing to suggest during any of that storytelling that New Mexico was essentially poisoned, its residents never warned, evacuated or educated about the health hazards of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.

“It was,” as artist Medina put it, “a great act of desecration.” 

Some geologists propose that this moment marks the start of a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene. In New Mexico, it marks a new epoch of our own — when we became a nuclear colony. We are the only “cradle-to-grave” state in the nation, home to uranium mining, nuclear weapon manufacturing and waste storage. Two of the nation’s three weapons labs — Los Alamos and Sandia — are located here, and some 2,500 warheads are buried in an underground munitions complex spitting distance from the Albuquerque Sunport.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently undergoing a multi-billion-dollar expansion to create plutonium pits on an industrial scale — the “new Manhattan Project,” as Ted Wyka, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s field office manager, recently said in an aside before a media tour. Wyka told me he imagined himself in the role of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project; LANL’s current director Thomas Mason was his Oppenheimer, he said. 

The film gestures obliquely toward a future world irrevocably changed by the spectacle of nuclear military might. That future — our present — is now a global arms race. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 in the film, there are only two references to Indigenous peoples. In the first, Oppenheimer is selecting the Pajarito Plateau for the Manhattan Project. The second arrives after the U.S. decimates Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A scene in the oval office shows a crass Harry Truman asking Oppenheimer what to do with the site now that the bombs have been dropped. 

Oppenheimer’s response? “Give it back to the Indians.” 

Instead, the nuclear arms race was born……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

What remains is a persistent belief that the creation of atomic weapons ended World War II and made for “one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time,” as a plaque near the Santa Fe Plaza reads…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Gutierrez, White and Cordova, all three on the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium’s steering committee, left the film no less resolved. Days after seeing the movie, Gutierrez was back at work, researching all the infants that died the summer of the Trinity test. Cordova was busy writing about the movie and pushing for compensation for New Mexico’s downwinders, her mission for the past 18 years. And White had helped organize a photography exhibition in Las Cruces on the legacy of Trinity from a local perspective. 

The movie’s over, but the battle goes on.

 https://searchlightnm.org/the-terrible-emptiness-of-oppenheimer/?utm_source=Searchlight%20New%20Mexico&utm_campaign=d8aa66d841-2%2F23%2F2022%20-%20The%20disappearing%20world_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-d8aa66d841-395610620&mc_cid=d8aa66d841&mc_eid=a70296a261—

August 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Antarctica could become ‘global radiator’ if ice loss continues at the current rate .

UK homes could be at risk of flooding if Antarctica becomes ‘global
radiator’ and ice melts. Scientists have warned that the Antarctic could
start to absorb solar heat rather than reflect it if ice loss continues at
the current rate, further accelerating global warming. Antarctica is at
risk of becoming a “global radiator”, with the current rate of ice loss
at the upper bounds of previous forecasts, scientists have warned. The
southern continent currently acts to cool the global climate by reflecting
large amounts of solar radiation with its pure white surface. The melting
of ice, and loss of that surface, means it could begin to absorb heat
instead. Melting ice also means that 16 million more people, including in
the UK, could be exposed to flooding every year. The warning came alongside
the publication of a major synthesis paper pulling together Antarctic
scientific research from the last several years to paint a continent-wide
picture.

 iNews 8th Aug 2023

https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/uk-homes-risk-flooding-antarctica-global-radiator-ice-melts-2530819

 Times 8th Aug 2023

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/antarctica-global-warming-climate-change-effects-2023-6m7fstwmd

August 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

‘Virtually certain’ extreme Antarctic events will get worse without drastic action, scientists warn

It is “virtually certain” that future extreme events in Antarctica
will be worse than the extraordinary changes already observed, according to
a new scientific warning that stresses the case for immediate and drastic
action to limit global heating.

A new review draws together evidence on the
vulnerability of Antarctic systems, highlighting recent extremes such as
record low sea ice levels, the collapse of ice shelves, and surface
temperatures up to 38.5C above average over East Antarctica in 2022 – the
world’s largest ever recorded heatwave.

 Guardian 8th Aug 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/08/drastic-action-needed-to-limit-worsening-extreme-events-in-antarctica-scientists-warn

August 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

TODAY For the survival of the human species, we need Women In Decision-Making – at the very least with equal representation.

“If there is one takeaway from Christopher Nolan’s recent film “Oppenheimer,” it is that the nuclear field has been male-dominated from the very start,”

That’s just one reflection from InDepth’s excellent article on the need for gender parity in nuclear disarmament talks.

But really, if you look at the history of just about anything, but especially war, you find that the decision-makers are pretty much exclusively male.

Without going into the complex reasons for this, it is now obvious that, if we want to survive, we are going to need a different style of decision-making.

When even peace talks are dominated by men – we’re in trouble.

In the 21st Century we are at an extraordinary stage. Women are no longer just the objects for male activities (if they ever really were) – not just sexual objects, baby-making machines, scivvies for all the dirty and boring work .. and so on. They now have, (though not all of them,) control over their own sexuality, education, and unlimited potential. Sacre bleu- they’re playing football!

It’s definitely time for women, and humanist values, to take control. Now, before it’s too late!

August 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Target China

The UNZ Review, MIKE WHITNEY • AUGUST 3, 2023

The Biden Administration is implementing a plan to draw Taiwan into a direct military confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. The plan bears many similarities to the strategy that was used in Ukraine where Russia was goaded into invading the country in response to emerging threats to its national security. In this case, Beijing is expected to react to mounting challenges to its territorial integrity by US proxies and their political allies operating in Taiwan. These incitements will inevitably lead to greater material support from the United States which has stealthily worked behind the scenes (and in the media) to create a crisis. 

The ultimate objective of these machinations, is to arm, train and provide logistical support for Taiwanese separatists who will spearhead Washington’s proxy war on China. According to a number of independent reports, there is already growing operational collaboration between the Taiwanese Army and US Armed Forces. That collaboration will undoubtedly deepen after hostilities break out and the island is plunged into war.

The plan to confront China militarily was outlined in the 2022 National Security Strategy in which the PRC was identified as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” who expressed its “intent to reshape the international order.” This NSS analysis was followed by an explicit commitment to prevail in the struggle to control the “Indo-Pacific” region which “fuels much of the world’s economic growth and will be the epicenter of 21st century geopolitics.”...(“No region will be of more significance to …everyday Americans than the Indo-Pacific.”) Biden’s NSS emphasizes the critical role the military will play in the impending confrontation with China: “We will…modernize and strengthen our military so it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with major powers”… “America will not hesitate to use force to defend our national interests”.

Drawing China into a Taiwan quagmire is the first phase of a broader containment strategy aimed at preserving America’s top spot in the global order while preventing China from becoming the region’s dominant economy. The plan also includes economic, cyber and informational elements that are designed to work in concert with the military component. In its entirety, the strategy represents Washington’s best effort to roll-back the clock to the heyday of the unipolar world order when America set the global agenda and the United States had no rival.

Trouble in Taiwan

Taiwan is not a country. Taiwan is an island off the coast of China much like Santa Catalina is an island off the coast of California. No one disputes that Santa Catalina is part of the United States, just as no one disputes that Taiwan is a part of China. The issue was settled long ago, and the US agrees with the results of that settlement. For all practical purposes, the issue has been resolved.

The United Nations does not recognize Taiwan’s independence nor do the 181 countries that have established diplomatic relations with China. In fact, the UN adopted a General Assembly Resolution back in 1971 acknowledging the “People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government representing the whole of China.”

The One-China policy explicitly relates to the status of Taiwan. Taiwan is part of China, that’s what the One-China policy means. Nations that want to have relations with China must agree on the status of Taiwan; it is the foundational principle upon which all relations with China are based. The issue is not debatable. One can either accept that ‘Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory’ or take their business elsewhere. There is no third option.

The United States claims that it is committed to the One-China policy. In their recent visits to Beijing, all three senior-level officials from the Biden Administration (Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen and John Kerry) publicly stated their unwavering support for the One-China policy. This is an excerpt from an article at Forbes:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the U.S.’ position on its One China policy as he met with China’s leader Xi Jinping Monday, saying it does not support Taiwanese independence and that containing China’s economy was not an American goal….

Blinken said the U.S. held a “One China” policy and does not support Taiwanese independence, but is concerned about China’s “provocative actions” along the Taiwan Strait. Blinken Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Does Not Support Taiwanese Independence, After Meeting To Quell Tensions, Forbes

President Joe Biden has also stated his support for the One-China principle on many, many occasions, which is what you would expect since it is the official position of the United States government. Here’s a short recap on the issue from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The US made the following commitments to China regarding the one-China principle in the three China-US joint communiqués.

In the Shanghai Communiqué released in 1972, the US explicitly stated that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position”.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations released in 1978, the US clearly stated that, “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”.

In the August 17 Communiqué released in 1982, the US unequivocally stated that “In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations on January 1, 1979, issued by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the United States of America, the United States of America recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China, and it acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”, and that “it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’”. (China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

The western media would like their readers to think there is some “gray area” here and that the issue regarding China’s sovereign territory has not been settled. But—as we have shown—it has been settled. Taiwan is China. We must assume therefore that the media is being intentionally misleading in order to garner support for an “independence” movement that serves only one purpose; to legitimize the arming and training of US assets and insurgents that will be used in a bloody conflagration with China. In truth, the United States is laying the groundwork for a proxy-war on China, and Taiwan has been designated as the frontlines in that war. The independence movement is merely the cover Washington has chosen to conceal its real objectives.

This is why Taiwan has become a flashpoint in US-China relations. This is why numerous US-led delegations have visited Taiwan expressing their tacit support for Taiwan independence. This is why Congress has allocated millions of dollars to provide lethal weaponry for the Taiwanese military. This is why the US Navy has sent warships through the Taiwan Strait and conducted massive military drills on China’s perimeter. This is why Washington continues to provoke Beijing on the one issue that it is most sensitive. All of these incitements were conjured-up with one goal in mind: War with China. This is from Politico:

The Biden administration announced a $345 million weapons package for Taiwan on Friday, the first tranche in a total of $1 billion the U.S. has allotted to be transferred directly from Pentagon stockpiles to the island this year…..………………………………………………..

Repeat: “The move is sure to anger China.”

Indeed, the move was designed to anger China. That was clearly the point. But, why? Why is Washington challenging China on an issue on which there is virtually universal agreement?

Two reasons come to mind:

1. To goad China into overreacting and thus alienating itself from its allies and regional trading partners.
2. To turn public opinion against China by portraying the country as a violent aggressor that poses a clear threat to its neighbors.

Here’s more from the World Socialist Web Site:

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Preparing for war with China, US provides $345 million in arms to Taiwan, 

Imagine if China sent millions of dollars of lethal weapons to a budding secessionist movement in Texas. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

And, ask yourself this: Haven’t we seen this drill before? Didn’t this same scenario unfold in Ukraine following the CIA-backed coup in 2014 after which the US armed and trained Ukrainian forces to dig-in and provoke hostilities with Russia?……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Let’s summarize:

1. The Indo-Pacific is now America’s top foreign policy priority because that is the area that will experience the most growth
2. The US will lead with its military and with the allies who share US interests
3. “We will…modernize and strengthen our military” to prevail in our “strategic competition with major powers.”
4. America’s Number 1 enemy is China; “the PRC presents America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge ….The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it…”
5. “The post-Cold War era is over” but the United States is prepared to preserve the “rules-based order” whatever the cost in blood and treasure.

This is America’s foreign policy in a nutshell. US leaders and their globalist allies are fully committed to prevailing in today’s great power struggle with Russia and China. They have a clear grasp of the objectives they want to achieve and they are prepared to risk anything, including nuclear war, to achieve them. Any developments in Taiwan must be seen through the lens of Washington’s geopolitical ambitions which are clearly driving events.…. more https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/target-china/

August 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Oppenheimer’ depicts a man becoming powerful—and irrelevant

By Laura Grego | August 4, 2023,  https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/oppenheimer-depicts-a-man-becoming-powerful-and-irrelevant/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter08072023&utm_content=NuclearRisk_PowerfulAndIrrelevant_08042023

It was a packed house on Barbenheimer’s opening night—a box-office phenomenon of double feature viewing of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer. It was a stormy night, too. So much so that we mistook the thunder outside for sound effects. (The sound design of Nolan’s film was spectacular and powerful, especially the silences.) I was glad to see Oppenheimer with longtime colleagues who work in this field. Like Nolan, so many of my cultural touchstones were about the Cold War. Generation X grew up acutely aware of the possibility of nuclear Armageddon, but it’s been a long time since teenagers were lining up for a film about nuclear weapons.

When I read Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book American Prometheus, which the film is based on, a few weeks ago before seeing the movie, I was struck by a few things I hadn’t really known or understood about Oppenheimer. One surprise to me was how much J. Robert Oppenheimer was passionate about his two early loves: physics and New Mexico. By all accounts he loved the land and the people living there. And that love seemed to have been the reason the Manhattan Project’s secret laboratory was built in Los Alamos—though its remoteness seemed to suit the security needs of the project.

By the same logic, when came the moment of testing the bomb, the Trinity team selected a “suitably isolated” spot in the southern New Mexico desert for the first nuclear explosion. Little is said in American Prometheus about those who lived near the Jornada del Muerto site, only that the Trinity team had to “evict a few ranchers by eminent domain.” The scientists and engineers believed that the flat terrain and generally low winds would limit the spread of radiation. While the Tularosa basin was remote, about half-a-million people lived within 150 miles of the Trinity site. They were not warned or told to evacuate, neither before nor after the test. And data on civilian exposure from the Trinity test was not collected, so as not to alarm the public.

In fact, this negligence would become a regular feature of the post-war US nuclear test program, which included more than 200 aboveground nuclear explosions. Data collected by the National Cancer Institute shows the fallout from these tests has led to tens to hundreds of thousands of excess cancers. Some people have received compensation from the government for their illnesses, but not Trinity downwinders. (Though the Senate’s recent vote for a major expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act may remedy this.)

When I entered the theatre on that stormy night, I wondered whether Nolan’s Oppenheimer would pause to acknowledge that these first casualties of the nuclear age were in a place so close to the heart of Oppenheimer the man. In the end, the film’s perspective is Oppenheimer’s first-person, subjective point of view, with Nolan not inclined to widen the lens further. As someone who has worked on these issues for decades, I felt it to be a great weakness of the film, almost unforgiveable, to make so little room in a three-hour movie for those who suffered from the decisions made by “great men” in cloistered rooms. The film also fails by showing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastation only obliquely and reflected to us through Oppenheimer’s emotional remove.

Another thing that struck me in the book is that Oppenheimer’s strategy of persuading other scientists to join the project included his argument that the nuclear weapon would end not just the war in Japan, it would “end all wars,” once people understood the enormity of the weapons. Today it seems an incredibly naïve idea: 80 years later, the United States is still spending a billion dollars every five days to maintain its nuclear weapons. But how was Oppenheimer—so widely educated in history and philosophy and steeped in ethics—unable to see its consequences? Was he blinded by the greatness of his own creation or by ambition? Others would see this more clearly.

In the film, Oppenheimer’s friend and confidante Isidor Rabi provides a much-needed counterbalance to Oppenheimer’s intellectualizing, recognizing that the bomb “will fall on the just and unjust alike,” adding that he did not wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.

To retake control on what had been set in motion, it would have taken not only wisdom but more political savvy than Oppenheimer demonstrated. In the film, the scene in which the decision is taken to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki skillfully shows an Oppenheimer who is being outmaneuvered. If he had really intended to argue the position of the Franck report and Szilard petition—two documents pressed on him by Manhattan project scientists—before the US political and military leadership, it seems it would have taken a different temperament and set of skills than he had. Oppenheimer was not the man for that moment.

Oppenheimer’s post-war attempt to advise the US government on nuclear weapons as a political insider ended in 1954 with the cruel public humiliation of the Atomic Energy Commission’s security hearing. After this, either because this experience broke him or he was not suited to the life of a nongovernmental critic, he essentially withdrew from the public debate about nuclear weapons almost entirely. He confined his comments mainly to abstracted and intellectual debates for the rest of his life. Oppenheimer did not sign the Einstein-Russell Manifesto against nuclear war, nor did he join the Pugwash Conferences thereafter.

As American Prometheus puts it, “Oppenheimer was still capable of being a critic; he just wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists. He was consumed with deep ethical and philosophical dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons, but at times it seemed that, as Thorpe put it, ‘Oppenheimer offered to weep for the world, but not to help change it.’”

Toward the end of the film, Oppenheimer is given an Enrico Fermi Award and being fêted—maybe because, as Einstein’s voiceover suggests, he was no longer so relevant.

August 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The digital data industry is an energy and water guzzling climate disaster.

Energy-hungry AI could pose a challenge for data centre ESG

The Age By Tim Biggs, August 5, 2023 

Sustainability experts have warned of a crunch ahead for the booming data centre industry, as increasing energy usage amid demand for new artificial intelligence-powered technologies crosses paths with a hotter, drier climate.

Data centres are becoming an asset-class part of infrastructure, as AI powers a boom in growth and demand for data while investment managers and superannuation funds increase their stakes. Late last year, US asset manager DigitalBridge and Melbourne-based IFM investors acquired data centre leader Switch for $US11 billion ($16.83 billion).

Meanwhile  the International Energy Agency estimates that software-related activities currently account for about 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which may rise to 14 per cent by 2040. Data centres and transmission networks specifically account for around 1 per cent, but some estimates predict that to rise rapidly to more than 3 per cent in a matter of years.

……….. a recent report from the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures suggested the data centre industry was “exposed to significant ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) risks that have largely escaped our collective attention”, including the increasing need for cooling combined with huge demands for data.

“This all comes at the same time as we’re seeing a shift in our weather patterns. We’re heading for days of peak heat events,” said researcher Gordon Noble, who led the UTS study.

“So the challenge is, we have 45-degree days in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, where data centres will need to increase the demand for energy to ensure that they’re delivering their services. At a time when households will also be wanting to make sure that they’ve got cool homes.”

The study, which was commissioned by data centre technology provider Pure Storage, also surveyed experts in charge of sustainability at their organisations, of whom only five per cent said they were getting detailed sustainability information from their data centre provider.

As record heat waves affect parts of Europe, recent figures have shown data centres in Ireland consume 18 per cent of the country’s electricity, around the same as homes. Ireland is the European home of several tech giants, but some of the nation’s politicians have said the power-hungry data centres put pressure on the national grid, increase electricity prices for everyone and will make it impossible to hit emissions targets.

“From an Australian perspective, data centres need to be on the sustainability agenda,” Noble said.

“It’s probably fair to say other issues have been in the limelight. But we’ve got increasing demand for data, which is only going to exacerbate because of the investments that we’re seeing in new technology like AI. We need to understand where we’re located, particularly in the context of El Nino.”

RMIT University school of computing dean Professor Karin Verspoor said AI – like blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining before it – was getting a lot of attention from developers and investors, but there was not enough discussion of the exponentially increasing amounts of energy it used.

Some researchers have calculated that training a single medium-sized generative AI model could consume electricity and energy equivalent to 626,000 tons of CO2 emissions, around what five American cars would use throughout their lifetimes, including manufacturing.

“These are huge models, and they’re only getting bigger, and there’s more of them. Massive quantities of data are involved in training,” Verspoor said, adding this was on top of the ongoing energy costs once users are hitting data centres constantly to use the generative AI product.

“And it’s not just energy actually, it’s also water because water is used often to cool the data centres. So, there are these sorts of secondary climate impacts.”

While Verspoor agreed data centre providers could help mitigate the impacts with more energy-efficient technologies and offsets, she said the developers and consumers of AI products also had to take some responsibility…………………………………….

AI company Hugging Face has run experiments in low-power AI development using nuclear energy, but still found its development of a large language model produced around 50 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or the equivalent of an individual taking 60 flights between London and New York. It estimated that OpenAI, when developing its last-generation ChatGPT model, may have produced 500 metric tonnes…………………….. more https://www.theage.com.au/technology/energy-hungry-ai-could-pose-a-challenge-for-data-centre-esg-20230802-p5dtad.html

August 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment