Three Ukrainian drones have attacked Moscow in the early hours on Sunday, Russian authorities said, injuring one person and prompting a temporary closure of traffic in and out of one of four airports around the Russian capital.
Key points:
The Russian Defence Ministry referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime”
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the attack “insignificantly damaged” the outsides of two buildings in the Moscow city district
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force said the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned on Sunday that “war” was coming to Russia after the attack.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process,” Mr Zelenskyy said on a visit to the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
It was the fourth such attempt at a strike on the capital region this month and the third in a week, fuelling concerns about Moscow’s vulnerability to attacks as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its 18th month.
The Russian Defence Ministry referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and said three drones targeted the city.
One was shot down in the surrounding Moscow region by air defence systems and two others were jammed. Those two crashed into the Moscow business district…………………………………………………………………
Without directly acknowledging that Ukraine was behind the attack on Moscow, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force said that the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine………………………………….
Mr Ihnat also referenced a drone attack on Russian-occupied Crimea overnight.
Moscow announced on Sunday that it had shot down 16 Ukrainian drones and neutralised eight more with an electronic jamming system. There were no casualties, officials said.
In Ukraine, the air force reported that it had destroyed four Russian drones above the country’s Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up.
The unnamed enemy is China. A London based journalist reported from Townsville that the latest exercise was occurring against a “changing security landscape in which China grows evermore belligerent”. Apparently, he didn’t see any need to give evidence for this dubious claim. The defence minister, Richard Marles said Talisman Sabre provided an opportunity to practice “high-end” warfare. Just how participants such as PNG, Tonga and Fiji can do this is not clear. In a war, their role would be to let the US operate from their territory.
During the last exercise, the ABC’s national television news each night ran a video of the spy ships across the top of the screen. It hasn’t gone that far this time, but has given extensive coverage to the spy ships without explaining what harm they might be doing.
The participants don’t seem alarmed. During the last exercise, an ABC journalist asked an American soldier on an amphibious ship if he was worried about the presence of Chinese spy ships. He replied, “No, we do it to them and they do it to us”. An Australian military spokesman said this time that it had taken the appropriate precautions to ensure the spy ships don’t cause any harm. A core reason is that all signals traffic is encrypted. The reality is that the US and its allies conduct electronic intelligence gathering on a much greater scale than China can. The Pine Gap satellite ground station in central Australia, for example, generates billions of pieces of intelligence every day. This did not stop the ABC defence correspondent Andrew Green commenting on the activities of one Chinese spy ship, “If knowledge is power, China has just become more powerful”.
The RAAF’s P8A Poseidon electronic spy planes pose an aggressive threat to China by dropping sonar buoys in the South China Sea where its submarines are based on Hainan island close to the mainland. The small buoys contain an underwater microphone to pick up the sounds from submarines and relay the data to the spy planes conducting surveillance for potential military use.
Australia’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the same as if Chinese planes dropped sonar buoys outside the Fremantle base for Australian and US submarines. But the Chinese planes don’t do this. …………………………………………………………………………………
Certainly, Australian media would consider it provocative if China developed a long-range air capability and dropped sonar buoys off the submarine base at Fremantle. Albanese portrays the co-operation between the US and Australia to conduct potentially aggressive military activities in the South China Sea as part of the struggle between autocracies and democracy. Unfortunately, the draconian nature of some of Australia’s national security laws, deprive Australia of the right to call itself a liberal democracy.
Similar problems arise with Albanese’s iron grip on the Labor party’s federal conference in Brisbane on August 17-19. Although he describes Labor as a democratic party, he has effectively banned any parliamentarians attending the conference from supporting motions in favour of scrapping the AUKUS pact or the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Albanese has also banned any parliamentarian from supporting the existing conference policy of making it a priority to recognise of Palestine as a state. https://johnmenadue.com/australian-medias-alarm-over-chinese-spy-ship-highlights-stark-double-standard/
Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent…..
Tom Dispatch, JULY 30, 2023
Yes, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, would kill staggering numbers of people and be an eerily (if all too grimly) appropriate ending to the war that started with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, by August 1945, had resulted in the saturation bombing of 64 Japanese cities.
The scientist who led the team responsible for creating the bombs that destroyed those two cities (and for the initial nuclear test in New Mexico that, as we only recently learned, spread fallout over 46 states, Canada, and Mexico), the 41-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later borrow a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, to describe his mood at the time: “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” And eerily enough, the use of the weapon that would prove to be the second way humanity found to destroy our planet — the first, climate change, was already in effect but not yet known — would find all too few in the U.S. government hesitant to use it at that time. As historian John Dower would put it in his memorable book Cultures of War,
“The policy makers, scientists, and military officers who had committed themselves to becoming death… never seriously considered not using their devastating new weapon. They did not talk about turning mothers into cinders or irradiating even the unborn. They brushed aside discussion of alternative targets, despite the urging of many lower-echelon scientists that they consider this. They gave little if any serious consideration to whether there should be ample pause after using the first nuclear weapon to give Japan’s frazzled leaders time to respond before a second bomb was dropped.”
They just did it, twice, and the world changed radically. Almost 80 years later, at a moment when a global leader is once again evidently considering the possible use of what are now called “tactical nuclear weapons” (but can be several times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Oppenheimer is having his moment in the sun (or is it a blaze of atomic light?) in a film that, to the surprise of many, has hit the big time in an almost nuclear fashion. And as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung reminds us while considering that three-hour odyssey of a film, what “Oppie” began then has by now become a full-scale nuclear-industrial complex on a planet where ultimate destruction, it often seems, always lurks just around the corner. Tom
The Profiteers of Armageddon
Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”
These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”
Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”
Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.
The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war…………………..
The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”
Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.
Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.
The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
……………………………………………………. According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author ofAtomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillionfor nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.
Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.
And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.
Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby
The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.
A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.
The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. ……………………….. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.
Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.
The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.
Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.
A New Nuclear Reckoning?
Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.
Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”
On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.
In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake. https://tomdispatch.com/the-profiteers-of-armageddon/
J Robert Oppenheimer advocated for the regulation of nuclear energy after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and attempted to communicate with Jawaharlal Nehru about this in 1951.
Director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has once again put the spotlight on one of history’s most controversial figures, and by Nolan’s own estimation, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, a American endeavor which resulted in the creation of the world’s first atomic bombs.
Oppenheimer often spoke about the guilt that he feltafter two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dedicated the rest of his days to advocating for the regulation of nuclear power. He refused to participate in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and urged his government to tread very carefully. These themes are prominently explored in Nolan’s film, which ends with a guilt-ridden Oppenheimer having a vision of the world’s destruction.
And according to writer Nayantara Sahgal, Oppenheimer attempted to communicate with then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the US government’s efforts to build a weapon ‘far more deadly than the atomic bomb’, and begged Nehru to not trade all-important thorium with the Americans in exchange for the wheat that India needed at the time. In her book Nehru: Civilizing A Savage World, Sahgal, who is Nehru’s niece, reproduced a letter that received in 1951 from her mother and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was serving at the time as India’s envoy in Moscow, Washington and London.
In the letter, she told him about a conversation she had with Oppenheimer, who’d rung her up from Princeton, and told her that he had ‘something very urgent to communicate’ and was sending an emissary, Amiya Chakravarti, who brought the ‘chilling message that the United States was developing a weapon far more deadly than the atom bomb.’ For this purpose, the US needed access to India’s ‘inexhaustible supply’ of thorium, and was prepared to offer wheat in exchange. Oppenheimer begged of India not to sell any thorium to the US voluntarily or through pressure, but Nehru wouldn’t have done it either way, as he ‘abhorred nuclear weapons and strove passionately to seek their total elimination’, as Sahgal wrote.
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US’ (SMH)
‘Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US and others’ (9 News)
‘US to help Australia develop guided missiles by 2025’ (Aljazeera)
Above are just a few of the rapturous headlines in the print media. Then the joyous Australian TV and radio media – orgasmic delight at Australia’s new subservience to USA militarism.
BUT – by today – 204 comments on thed Sydney Morning Herald’s delighted article by Matthew Knott. July 28, 2023. Yes quite a few comments rejoicing in the prospect of the missiles industry . BUT the overwhelming majority of commentators were disgusted. Below are some of the comments.
Australia will be the front line in a US war with China
And make Australia a target for attacks un-necessarily ? Australia should NOT be drawn into any activity that is war-like in nature. We are a peaceful country that should not be militarily engaged in other nations issues. Sure we can have a voice BUT NOT ACT MILITARILY .. If the Americans want to stick their nose in other nation’s affairs, so be it .. Don’t drag us in militarily !!!
We voted Labor and they are throwing any semblance of autonomy we had away.Terrible idea !We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
The Syrian war and Ukraine wars have generated 10 million refugees who have fled into the rest of Europe. The South China Sea has 200 million people living within 10 km of the coastline. Australians were easily convinced to turn back the boats and create a cruel offshore detention program all for the expediency of the LNP’s re election. The obsession with contributing to the US led arms race and the insistence of provoking a war over Taiwan will inevitably lead to our shiny new missiles and military arsenal being used as an expediency to turn back the thousands of boats
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ? More military lunacy.
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?As Fraser said, we should have got out of Anzus at the end of the Cold War. Seems now we’re more captured by the US’s foreign policy agenda than ever before.
For Labor it’s clearly about the domestic optics. They want to be seen as the tough guy on military and defence matters, so long that being the Coalition’s political play.
Because of Morrison, and no Choice. We ended up with ALBO the United States Cheerleader.
Albo will NOT provide leadership and he will not provide intellectual input in the following areas; •‘Made a public call for building an autonomous Australia in a persistent attempt to shake off Australia’s shackles and prove that it is not the vassal of The United States. •that Australia should be one pole of multipolarity with its own independent position to serve its own interests, and cannot be a vassal of other forces, •When dealing with its relations with the US, it is hoped that Australia can truly safeguard its own core interests and get rid of the shackles the US has placed on it in the fields of economy, trade, ideology and even security, Finally he has no idea on how to make Australia a world class manufacturing hub as declared in his election policy speech.
I’d much rather see Australia manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines and exporting them to the rest of the world to help tackle the growing threat of global climate change. Instead we focus on weapons and the machinery of war. Strange priorities from a Labor government…..disappointing really!
Big cheers for this ‘Hugely significant’!!! We finally became like North Korea, soon we will be able to replace New Year celebrations with real deadly missiles.
With the added bonus for politicians: whenever they make a mess they just fire missiles to distract the electorates … and at the same time it would be ‘Hugely Great’. The Rednecks and war mongers will be cheering all the way … it’s win win… well done Albo
We are being conned. Can we go back to making cars. At least they were useful. Missiles are for war. Unless we agree to annilate all Mankind we are walking down the wrong path. In a car you can go somewhere.
And so the violence industry marches on. By setting such an example is it little wonder there is so much killing & maiming in the world today?
So now new funding just extending the Morrison/Dutton Missile manufacturing policy announced in 2021?
Will it be like the F18 program all over again – assembling kits from the US? How much will the taxpayer subsidise the program?
So we’ve been sold out to the military industrial complex and will become fully integrated into the US War machine as the US makes its last ditch attempt to maintain its global hegemony and it control over the pacific region. We are being marched into WWIII by the crazy neo cons in the USA and we are too blind to see it, chanting USA, USA, USA as we are led like lambs to the slaughter.
Unbelievable.
How are we a ‘peaceful country’ – name a war we HAVEN’T been involved in! We’re sycophants, hiding under the US’s skirt.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
Unbelievable.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
This is a step up from days of Lithgow Small-Arms .303s and these days, our Bushmasters. We’ll just be making them here to another nation’s specs & IP, all for the promise of jobs.
Blinken & Bush: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia. A charm offensive that Albanese must take heed.
We import foods & goods from our neighbours for survival only for them to be killed by our missiles. How gross!
While the US and Australia are incessantly focusing on arms and the military in the Pacific, China’s hospital ship, the Peace Ark is in Tonga and will depart Nuku’alofa on 4 August 2023. It will also visit Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomons Islands and Timor-Leste during its mission. The ‘Peace Ark’, on her third goodwill visit to Tonga on a humanitarian medical mission from 28 July to 4 August 2023. So which country is doing more for the people in the Pacific?
American owned, designed, parts supplied. We are just like a 3rd world country assembling stuff, all profits going offshore with no tax paid. What a waste………… And paying for the privilege
And another target added to the growing number of American bases.
..and what about all the bs about becoming self-sustaining after the pandemic when we saw how reliant we are on imports? Or this is suddenly irrelevant? They need a Royal Commission into the capabilities of Australia when another and worse pandemic hits. Oh, I can write the summary now “We will be stuffed – starvation, no drugs, no products”. But yes, focus on warheads. Made with Australian metal I hope? Stick some kangaroo prints on it so when it is dug out of children we can be proud.
Yes, “assembled ‘Down Under’ from imported components subject to our strict specifications so you can rest assured that when you get hit by a genuine ‘Aussie’ missile it’s gonna hurt”…………….. Exactly! How gullible we are to trust the Americans? It’s unbelievable!
Now imagine if an LNP government announced we were making killing things for Uncle Sam. You’d never hear the end of it. Oh the hypocrisy.
Nice not, when we have industry again it is all about weapons and destruction.
What have we become? So we are not making products that will make our life easier and more comfortable? We are not making tools and machines to facilitate our normal daily activities? We are no building metro lines to reduce commute times? We are not making electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions? Yet we are going to making missiles for wars that will kill human beings. What a weird sense of priority we’ve got ???
Lloyd Austin moved from the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defence. Is it any wonder we are now getting sucked into arms manufacturing a cycle of endless wars, which is a bona fide policy of the US. We need to be much more discerning than “all the way with Uncle Sam” this is a very poor sign of our priorities, and the “jobs and growth” mantra has been taken from the liberal playbook to justify this stupid and dangerous choice.
So the plan is to continue a longstanding trend to make us even more financially and militarily dependent on foreigners right?
“Sydneysiders are aghast at the level of gun violence breaking out. On to happier news, Australia is going to create its very own missile manufacturing plants”.RESPECT8
We’re being used again, it won’t be to our advantage everything the US does is for theirs. We are their lapdog. The anti-China brigade in Canberra is pushing hard to get Labor to think China wants to go to war & so we have to be closely allied with the US.
NO it is the USA that always wants to go to war – look how many we’ve followed them into and look at China, only min-wars or skirmishes on their borders, never ever far afield.
I think this idea stinks.
ALP – American Lapdog Party
What is hugely significant is Albo’s lost his marbles.
No way. To restore our manufacturing capacity, I’d rather prefer we start making electric vehicles and solar panels, not missiles.
We’re becoming completely dependant upon the American military machine. AUKUS are about all our government seems to care about anymore. Meanwhile… over 1 million young people are living in poverty and koalas are going extinct. It’s all about priorities and it’s 100% obvious what and who our leaders are working for and it ain’t the people or the country. With friends like Labor, who needs Liberals?
Who cares what Simon Birmingham thinks, or says.
He represents a government that made defence decisions that were more photo-op than substance; cancelled the SEA1000 project that put us squarely into the ship-building “Valley of Death” that the COALition hyperventilated over; failed abysmally in both defence and foreign policy, all the while telling us what absolute standouts they were in government.
It was the COALition that left us with this mess called AUKUS.
I can’t see us receiving nuclear-powered submarines, despite the efforts to push through with AUKUS. At some point, the taxpayers of Australia will simply say “enough!” The options being offered are far too expensive.
“US defence contracting giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been selected by the government as preferred partners for its guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise“. The Hawkei is made by Prime contractors including Thales Australia (French) Boeing (US) Plasan (Israel). The Virginia submarines are designed and built by US General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Huntington Ingalls Industries. Virtually all military equipment purchased or being built in Australia by foreign, usually US companies. Australia is feeding overseas military complexes, not developing anything new.
A gigantic error from the government here. The only priorities here are for shareholders of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US are always looking for the next endless war. History repeating itself over and over. We will be used as pawns between the US and China.
The spectre of an international nuclear waste dump in Australia hangs over AUKUS and what this secretive agreement commits Australia to. Does it oblige us simply to dispose of spent nuclear reactors from our submarines if and when we get them? Or is there a hidden agenda whereby we also take the expired nuclear reactors from US and British submarines? If so, could it lead to Australia becoming a dump for high-level waste from civil nuclear reactors around the world?
Crikey.com is the latest to set speculative hares running. On 26 July it published an article by David Hardaker claiming the Albanese government had struck a secret deal under AUKUS to build a high-grade nuclear waste facility in Australia. Crikey claimed the deal has echoes that resound from 26 years ago.
Indeed it does. In December 1998, a proposal was made by Jim Voss, an American nuclear evangelist, who through his company Pangea proposed constructing an international nuclear waste repository on Billa Kalina, a pastoral lease near Roxby Downs in South Australia. Roxby Downs is a town built to service the giant BHP uranium, gold, copper and silver mine at Olympic Dam. Water for the town and the mine comes from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
As I wrote in Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions (Scribe 2003 and 2022), Voss’s proposal was leaked to the public by Friends of the Earth. Pangea was flying a kite on behalf of Anglo-American and possibly other nuclear interests. It made the unassailable observation that there is a real risk of nuclear weapons proliferation through the theft of plutonium or highly enriched uranium from nuclear power programs. Voss proposed a nuclear waste dump in Western Australia to take about a quarter of the high-level waste from the 445 commercial power reactors in 30 countries around the globe.
This, he claimed, would achieve several things – support international efforts to reduce nuclear weapons proliferation, further the objectives of nuclear disarmament, strengthen Australia’s relations with the United States, protect the global environment, and support the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations. How all this would happen he didn’t say.
Such a repository has also been a gleam in the eyes of the Australian nuclear lobby and several politicians for many years. In 2006, John Howard’s Nuclear Review sought to expand Australia’s nuclear footprint by making nuclear power ‘a practical option’ in Australia’s electricity production. He also envisioned an international nuclear waste dump somewhere in the Outback. In 2014, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, supported by then South Australian Premier Adam Giles, proposed to put a high-level nuclear waste depository at Muckaty Station north of Tennant Creek in South Australia. Hawke said the money earned would be of immense value to indigenous communities.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott had similar aspirations. So did Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2015 suggested that Australia should not just export uranium oxide (U3O8), but enrich it, process it into fuel rods, retain Australian ownership by leasing the rods abroad, and take them back as spent fuel for permanent disposal in Australia. That way, he said, Australia retained ownership of the uranium, preventing it from being diverted into clandestine weapons programs.
None of these proposals resulted in practical action. Except for qualified acceptance of the export of Australian yellowcake under safeguards to approved civil nuclear energy companies, the Australian public maintained an aversion to all things nuclear. The earlier careless disposal of nuclear tailings at Radium Hill, the contemptuous and ineffective clean-up of highly toxic plutonium in the aftermath of Britain’s nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga in the 1950s, and French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1990s, all consolidated Australians’ aversion.
Following negative public reactions to his proposal, Voss quietly closed his Pangea office In January 2002 and retreated to Europe. But several years later, he was given renewed hope.
In 2016, the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission under former South Australian governor Kevin Scarce concluded that although nuclear energy in Australia would not be economically viable for the immediate future, research should continue regarding the feasibility of an international spent fuel repository.
Voss returned to Australia in 2022, and took over the optimistically-named Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation in Melbourne. Safe disposal of nuclear waste remained on his agenda. According to Crikey, Voss reckons very deep boreholes of around three to five kilometres could safely incarcerate spent fuel from the reactors of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines for thousands of years.
Could such a storage facility attract US or British attention? Could their governments pressure Australia to take their own submarine spent fuel reactors as well as those of Australia?
They have strong motives to do so. Around 90 British spent fuel submarine reactors are said to be lying around Devonport Docks in Plymouth and the Rosyth dock in Fife, safeguarded only at huge expense. The US Navy has many more in open trenches at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. There are plans to process and store their transuranic elements somewhere permanently, but the Yukka Mountain Deep Geological repository in Nevada was de-funded in 2010, and has been subject to complex political manoeuvring ever since.
Given Albanese’s and Marles’ supine acceptance of US conditions to keep the reactors from our own submarines after their service lives, they could also easily be leant on to take US and UK used submarine reactors as well.
Could this in turn lead to Voss’s grand vision of Australia becoming a spent fuel repository for the international nuclear industry? Since we cannot even decide on the location of a repository for low-level nuclear waste from hospitals and materials testing laboratories, let alone places for intermediate and high-level waste, such an expansion seems a pipe dream. But we must not under-estimate the persistence of the Australian nuclear industry or its backers in Federal and State parliaments and in the Murdoch press.
FORTUNE, BY STEPHANIE COOKE, July 29, 2023 Since the turn of the millennium, at least $50 billion has been spent on a frantic effort to create a new Golden Age for nuclear energy in the U.S. Billions more are being lavished on an even more desperate effort to launch small reactors as supposedly safer, cheaper alternatives to yesteryear’s elephant-sized versions. Most of the money comes from ratepayers and taxpayers, accompanied by an avalanche of public relations that rivals the 1950s “Atoms for Peace” campaign with its claims of “too cheap to meter” electricity.
So far, the effort has produced little in tangible assets: roughly one gigawatt of capacity from the Watts Bar-2 reactor completed after decades of on-and-off-again construction and the promise of 2 GW from the long-delayed Plant Vogtle in Georgia. So far, not a single molecule of CO2 emissions has been avoided by a new reactor, and the primary beneficiaries are not the people who paid but publicly-owned utilities, reactor design companies, and PR and law firms. They are part of a chorus of advocacy groups and government agencies, led by the Department of Energy (DOE), advancing the idea that low-carbon nuclear is essential to any long-term climate change solution.
The story is selling well but the push for more and more money—in direct subsidies, ratepayer financing, and government grants or loans–has a dark side. To cite just a few examples, former state officials and utility executives in Illinois and Ohio face lengthy prison terms for bribery schemes linked to subsidies for unprofitable nuclear plants. In South Carolina, two former Scana executives received prison sentences after pleading guilty to criminal charges in 2020 and 2021 over a nuclear project that ultimately collapsed. Two Westinghouse executives also charged are facing a similar fate, with one still awaiting trial in October.
When it comes to costs and schedules, the lack of honesty surrounding nuclear projects is often breathtaking. In Georgia, where two Westinghouse reactors at Vogtle have been under construction since 2009, only one is completed and is now struggling to achieve commercial operation after multiple unplanned reactor and turbine trips, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission staff testimony. That testimony also included allegations that utility executives have been providing “materially inaccurate” cost estimates over the project’s life. Vogtle’s estimated total $33 billion cost, as outlined in the testimony, versus $13.3 billion originally estimated makes it the most expensive power plant ever built in the United States. Most of the tab is being footed by ratepayers, with the US taxpayer, via DOE, providing $12 billion in loans.
And still, the messaging that nuclear is a must for reducing emissions goes on at a fever pitch. But the message is distorted: The industry cannot deliver what is needed. The U.S. lost its industrial base, including heavy forging capacity, decades ago–and the costs of a major nuclear buildout could now be in the trillions.
Moreover, the billions currently being spent on nuclear are crowding out viable, less costly solutions for decarbonizing the power sector (not only renewables such as wind and power but also high-voltage direct current transmission lines to deliver them to where they’re needed), thus slowing the transition. A surfeit of renewables projects is seeking grid access, enough to meet 90% of the Biden administration’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, according to a Berkeley Lab report, but the country’s Balkanized electricity market system, monopolistic utilities, and lack of adequate transmission capacity will likely prevent most of it from succeeding.
The transmission capacity needed for renewables will require anywhere from $30 billion to $90 billion to meet demand by 2030, with the figures rising to $200 billion to $600 billion between 2030 and 2050, according to a study by the Brattle Group. Squandering such sums on nuclear should be out of the question.
Our current fleet of 92 reactors generates about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, but most of the plants are slated for permanent closure by 2050, assuming they operate well beyond their 40-year design life. The DOE admits that such “life extensions” put operators in uncharted waters because there is no actual experience to support 60- or 80-year reactor lifetimes.
The problem of where to put used nuclear fuel (radioactive waste) remains after funding was withdrawn for an estimated $100 billion underground repository project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Proposed privately-owned interim storage sites in New Mexico and Texas, though licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, face intense local and state opposition as well as political obstacles at the federal level.
Industry officials privately acknowledge these challenges. Even so, nuclear is receiving the most favorable media coverage since the 1950s, and the latest annual Gallup poll on nuclear, released in April, showed the highest level of support in a decade for nuclear power among the American public–at 55%. Nuclear opponents in Congress are now silent on the issue or even hinting at changed views, and bipartisan support in Congress has over the past couple of years resulted in billions in tax incentives and other forms of support for both existing and planned nuclear plants.
But public opinion is fickle–and no guarantee for the future. Since Gallup began polling on nuclear in 1994, support peaked at 62% in 2010, a year before the triple meltdowns at Fukushima. After that, it went steadily down, to a low of 44% in 2016. Nor is popular opinion an indicator of whether nuclear’s formidable technical, financial, environmental, and geopolitical challenges can be overcome.
The primary aims of today’s promoters are to prevent aging, uneconomic reactors from closing, and to secure funding for small modular reactors (SMRs) and “advanced” reactors (and associated fuels).
The push for smaller reactors appears to have been an act of desperation by a nuclear-centric energy agency–the DOE (which also oversees the country’s nuclear weapons programs)—after its failed attempt to create a nuclear “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Although that project generated interest (utilities filed plans for 28 large-scale reactors), only the two at Vogtle were ever built………………………………………………………………………………………
does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?
If Wednesday’s House Oversight subcommittee hearing on UFOs had happened ten years ago instead of today, it would have shaken the world. Imagine someone from 2013 hearing congressional testimonies about “routine” military pilot encounters with giant flying tic tacs, floating orbs, 300-foot red squares, and cubes in clear spheres zipping around in ways that surpass all known earthly technology by leaps and bounds, or about secret government possession of otherworldly aircraft they’re trying to reverse engineer and the dead bodies of their non-human pilots, or about the possibility that these creatures are not merely extraterrestrial but extra-dimensional. Their jaws would have hit the floor.
Now in 2023 we’ve been getting incrementally drip-fed bits and pieces of these stories for six years, so the scene on Capitol Hill on Wednesday didn’t have the impact it would’ve had in 2013. It’s making headlines and getting attention, but not as much as Sinead O’Connor’s death or people’s thoughts on Barbie and Oppenheimer. The response from the general public could be described as a collective nervous laugh and a shrug.
……………………………………………………. the new UFO narrative wasn’t just cooked up at the last minute to distract from current headlines, it’s been unfolding for six years, and people aren’t even paying that much attention to it. The empire doesn’t tend to orchestrate spectacular events as a “distraction” anyway; the adjustment of public attention tends to take the much more mundane form of agenda setting in the media, where some stories receive more attention than others based on what’s convenient for the oligarchs who own the press.
……………………………………. for me what really stinks about all this UFO stuff is the timing. Here we are in the early stages of a new cold war which features a race to militarize space, and we’re hearing congressional testimony about mysterious vehicles posing a threat to US airspace which have the ability to go up and down between earth and space very quickly. That smells off.
I mean, does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?
A Foreign Policy article from last year blares the headline “China and Russia Are Catching Up to U.S. in Space Capabilities, Pentagon Warns” with the subheading “The militarization of space is picking up pace.” These warnings are echoed in articles by Defense One and Time. An article on the United Nations website from last year carries the title “‘We Have Not Passed the Point of No Return’, Disarmament Committee Told, Weighing Chance Outer Space Could Become Next Battlefield.” A 2021 report from the war machine-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies titled “Defense Against the Dark Arts in Space: Protecting Space Systems from Counterspace Weapons” warns of the urgent need to build more space weapons to counter US enemies. A Global Times article from last year carries the title “Chinese experts urge avoidance of space weaponization amid commercial space capability deployment in Ukraine.”
………………………………….it just seems mighty suspicious to me how we’re being slowly paced into this UFO narrative (or UAP narrative for those hip to the current jargon) right when there’s a mad rush to get weapons into space. I can’t actually think of any other point in history when the timing of something like this would have looked more suspicious.
So for me the most disturbing parts of the UFO hearing were the parts that could wind up facilitating the agenda to militarize space, like when this phenomenon was framed as a “national security” threat or when it was mentioned that they can transition from earth to space very rapidly.
When asked by congressman Glenn Grothman “do you believe UAPs pose a threat to our national security?”, former Navy commander David Fravor answered with an unequivocal yes. A few minutes later Fravor described these vehicles as being able to “come down from space, hang out for three hours and go back up.”
When asked by congressman Andy Ogles whether UFOs could be “collecting reconnaissance information” on the US military, all three witnesses — Grusch, Fravor, and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves — answered in the affirmative. Asked by Ogles if UFOs could be “probing our capabilities,” all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs could be “testing for vulnerabilities” in US military capabilities, all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs pose an existential threat to the national security of the United States, all three said they potentially do. Asked if there was any indication that UFOs are interested in US nuclear technology, all three said yes.
Ogles concluded his questioning by saying, “There clearly is a threat to the national security of the United States of America. As members of Congress, we have a responsibility to maintain oversight and be aware of these activities so that, if appropriate, we take action.”
When asked by congressman Eric Burlison if “there has been activity by alien or non-human technology, and/or beings, that has caused harm to humans,” Grusch said he couldn’t get into specifics in a public setting (a common theme throughout the hearing), but said that “what I personally witnessed, myself and my wife, was very disturbing.”
Grusch would complicate this cryptic statement a few minutes later by saying that he’s never seen a UFO. How this statement doesn’t contradict his previous statement about having witnessed harmful behavior from non-human technology and/or beings was not made clear.
So you’ve got US policymakers being told that there are vehicles using technology not of this world routinely violating US airspace and posing an existential threat to US national security, and that these craft can go from earth to space and back at will, and that they need to help make sure their nation can address this threat.
What conclusions do you come to when presented with that kind of information? If you’re a lawmaker in charge of facilitating the operation of a highly militaristic empire, you’re probably not going to conclude that it’s time to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. You’re probably eventually going to start thinking in terms of military technology.
One of the most important unanswered questions in all this UFO hullabaloo is, why now? Why are we seeing all this movement on “disclosure” after generations of zero movement? If these things are in fact real and the government has in fact been keeping them secret, why would the adamant policy of dismissal and locked doors suddenly be reversed, allowing “whistleblowers” to come forward and give testimony before congress? If they had motive to keep it a secret this entire time, why would that motive no longer be there?
…………………………………So why now? Why the drastic and sudden shift from UFOs and aliens being laughable tinfoil hat nonsense to the subject of serious congressional inquiries and widespread mainstream media coverage?
Well, the timing of the race to militarize space might provide an answer to the “why now?” question. Is it a coincidence that this new UFO narrative began its rollout in 2017, around the same time as the rollout of the Space Force? Are we being manipulated at mass scale about aliens and UFOs to help grease the wheels for the movement of war machinery into space? How likely is it that by pure coincidence this extraplanetary narrative timed out the way it did just as the US empire makes a last-ditch grab at unipolar planetary domination?
I don’t know. I do know that if I’m assigning degrees of probability, “Extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings are here and take a special interest in us and sometimes crash their vehicles and our government recovered them but kept them a secret but suddenly decided not to be so secretive about them anymore” ranks significantly lower than “Our rulers are lying and manipulating to advance their own interests again.”
I am 100 percent wide open to the possibility of extraterrestrials and otherworldly vehicles zipping around our atmosphere. What I am not open to is the claim that the most depraved institutions on earth have suddenly opened their mind to telling us the truth about these things, either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they were “pressured” by UFO disclosure activists.
‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record. The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record.
Quite suddenly, any vestige of Australia being an independent country has disappeared overnight.
An entire continent has been handed over to the American military machine, by Australia’s cowardly and self-serving politicians.
And the Australian media exultantly choruses “ Jobs! Jobs ! Jobs! “
I have often wondered why that chorus is repeated endlessly – in awed, religious, joy?
If you work in a caring industry, or in nurturing animals, plants, the environment, in growing food or in one of the many jobs that support life – you can derive some pride in your work. It’s good to be paid some money, but it’s especially good to be able to derive some dignity, self-respect, genuine joy, in knowing that you are genuinely contributing to well-being – to the common good.
It’s a matter of integrity – dare I mention this? – some spiritual satisfaction. You can hold your head up high.
Where is the integrity in making killing machines, things for massacring thousands of people, destroying the land and animals?
And just to make sure that the Americans really mean it, we have the odious Antony Blinken now emphasising that the USA will certainly punish our courageous Australian truth-teller Julian Assange.
PM Albanese, and wimp Foreign Minister Penny Wong just kow tow and agree!
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US, Sydney Morning Herald, By Matthew Knott, July 28, 2023
Australia is set to begin manufacturing its own missiles within two years under an ambitious plan that will allow the country to supply guided weapons to the United States and possibly export them to other nations.
( USA sees Australia has seemingly “deep pockets” to do the hard lifting so USA could probably on sell these missiles at a profit or just use Australia as a little America – with the ever present threat of being a security target )
The push to accelerate the creation of a local missile manufacturing industry in co-operation with the US will be one of the centrepiece announcements at the Australia-United States Ministerial (AUSMIN) consultations on Saturday.
Both US and Australian officials are seeking to play down concerns the AUKUS pact could be derailed by division in the US Congress after 23 Senate Republicans warned they would not support the proposal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia unless the US Navy doubled its own production capacity.
The joint missile manufacturing effort is being driven by the war in Ukraine, which has highlighted a troubling lack of ammunition stocks in Western nations including the US.
“This is really important for the industrial base of both of our countries,” Defence Minister Richard Marles said on Friday after meeting with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in Brisbane.
“It is hugely significant in terms of developing Australia’s defence industry. It will be very important in ensuring Australia has the necessary war stocks in the future.”
Marles said the announcement would significantly bring forward the planned opening of local missile factories, which had been expected to take several years to get off the ground.
As well as creating local jobs, a domestic missile manufacturing industry will make Australia less reliant on imports and provide a trusted additional source of munitions for the US.
The US and Australia will also announce plans to upgrade air bases in northern Australia so they can be used for training exercises by both Australian and American troops.
(Hands up those people who see the establishment of missile manufacturing in Australia as one – a Red Flag for Warmongering in our Region sending the wrong message in our neck of the woods….and two – a big fat bullseye security target on our back!)
…………………………………………………………….. While noting that AUKUS enjoyed strong in-principle bipartisan support, the USA senators said: “Under the current AUKUS plan to transfer US Virginia-class submarines to a partner nation before meeting the Navy’s own requirements, the number of available nuclear submarines in the US submarine fleet would be lowered further.
“This is a risk we cannot take.”
Describing the congressional negotiations as “colour and movement”, Marles said: “We’re not worried about that … I’m confident about the progress of Australia acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability. We are encouraged by the progress of legislation through Congress.”
US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy insisted that the submarine plan was “not at risk at all” and dismissed suggestions negotiations had stalled…………..
Speaking before a meeting with Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia. And I don’t think that alliance or partnership has ever been stronger, at least in my experience.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was “very confident” Australia would secure at least three Virginia-class submarines from the US……………..
Ashley Townshend, a senior fellow for Indo-Pacific security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it would take several billion dollars in extra investment from the US government to meet the Republican senators’ demand to increase submarine production from 1.2 to 2.5 vessels a year.
finding a national waste repository is not urgent because it has been stored this way for 60 years.
it’s not even clear if centralising the waste is the best option. ..there’s an implicit risk in transporting the waste from the various sites to a new site, and there should be a safety comparison with leaving it where it is.
Courts have quashed a decision to store water in Kimbra, meaning there is still no centralised repository in the country
More than 20 tonnes of reprocessed nuclear fuel will stay at Australia’s only reactor in southern Sydney, while nuclear waste will remain scattered in “cupboards and filing cabinets” around the country, after the federal court blocked plans for a long-term storage site in outback South Australia.
The site in Kimba was selected more than 40 years after Australia started planning for a centralised repository. But this month, that decision was quashed by the courts.
There is currently no live national facility option, and the waste pile is growing.
Successive governments and agencies have said there are more than 100 sites that are storing nuclear waste littered across the land, in hospital basements and universities, on defence and mining sites and in research laboratories.
There’s no definitive list, because of a licensing split between the federal and state governments, but the vast majority is produced and stored at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) facility in Lucas Heights.
A national inventory published last year found Australia’s 2,061 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste (ILW) will more than double to 4,377 cubic metres in the next 50 years.
………….The inventory predicted that the 2,490 cubic metres of low-level waste will more than quadruple to 13,287 within the next five decades. LLW includes gloves, paper, gowns and other ephemera used in nuclear medicine. Much of it can be left to “delay and decay”, and can be disposed of as regular rubbish.
Ansto’s waste makes up about 93% of the LLW, and about 96.5% of the ILW.
Ansto is also responsible for the spent fuel rods from its Opal research reactor at Lucas Heights, in Sydney’s south, which are sent to France, the UK or the US for reprocessing.
Last year, the UK shipped two tonnes of ILW to be stored at Sydney’s Lucas Heights facility until it could be transported to a national facility – it was part of a waste-swap deal after Australia sent spent fuel rods from Opal predecessor to be recycled.
In 2015, 25 tonnes of radioactive waste from France was returned to Australia after reprocessing – that too will be housed at Lucas Heights until a dump is selected and built. Since then, Australia has sent more spent fuel rods to France to have the uranium and plutonium extracted, but their return has not been announced, and it’s not clear what will happen with such deals now that Kimba option is off the table.
The current government policy is to build a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF) to dispose of LLW permanently, and ILW temporarily while a permanent dump is built.
The traditional owners of the land around Kimba, the Barngarla people, took the government to court, and won – former resources minister Keith Pitt’s declaration of the site was cast aside because of his “apprehended bias” and “pre-judgement”.
Now, the process is on hold as the government considers the judgement, and as the case continues with final details to be ironed out.
Top nuclear waste expert, emeritus professor Ian Lowe, says waste is kept in “cupboards and filing cabinets in universities and hospitals”…………“It’s clearly not optimal … the reason it hasn’t been a problem is there’s not actually anything very nasty you can do with low level waste. It’s not very radioactive,” Lowe says.
Ansto says such waste needs “minimal shielding”, while some major hospitals use “delay tanks” and other facilities use drums.
So, Lowe says, finding a national waste repository is not urgent because it has been stored this way for 60 years.
Lowe, who is from Griffith University, says it’s not even clear if centralising the waste is the best option. He says there’s an implicit risk in transporting the waste from the various sites to a new site, and there should be a safety comparison with leaving it where it is.
“I haven’t even seen a crude, back of the envelope calculation,” he says.
With the intermediate level waste, which is “much nastier stuff”, he says he “couldn’t see the point of moving it from temporary storage at Lucas Heights to temporary storage at Kimba while we work out a permanent solution”.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Greens are pushing for it to remain at Lucas Heights for now.
The ACF’s Dave Sweeney says the waste at Lucas Heights is secure, and that keeping it there could be a “circuit breaker” after years of political wrangling. He accepts that Lucas Heights is not set up to permanently dispose of the waste, but points out that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency has said it is safe there.
And, he says, much of the LLW currently being managed in hospitals was never going to get to Kimba anyway. On top of all that, Kimba was only ever going to hold ILW temporarily until a permanent facility was built.
“We need to actually take a breath and get very serious, systematic and credible about how we advance radioactive waste management,” he says.
“[This shows] the need for and a clear ability to deliver a circuit breaker and inject some responsibility, credibility and respect into this process.”
A spokesperson for resources minister, Madeleine King, said it would be inappropriate to comment on the future of a NRWMF while the Barngarla case is still before the court. The government has lodged a submission to the federal court and could appeal the decision……………………………………
Lowe says only Finland and Sweden have managed to solve the issue with long-term waste storage, and they did it by finding communities who are keen to have the waste in return for investment.
Exciting news in the latest PAX-ICAN report “Moving away from mass destruction” out today: the number of financial institutions across the globe rejecting nuclear weapons keeps growing! The number of financial institutions excluding the nuclear weapons industry from their investments continues to grow year on year, and many are naming the UN nuclear weapons ban treaty as a reason to stop funding the bomb.
The 109 financial institutions profiled in this report know that nuclear weapons represent a systemic reputational and regulatory risk, and are putting policies in place that limit or completely exclude any financial engagement with this controversial industry.
The report shows the financial community is taking a more responsible approach, embracing the positive role they can play in further stigmatising and delegitimizing nuclear weapons. Even with Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and skyrocketing defence spending, the financial community is holding a firm line against financing weapons of mass destruction.
These policies do more than simply cut off the funding to the individual companies producing nuclear weapons: they signal that doing business off weapons of mass destruction is not a viable business model particularly now the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is in place. https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/policy-analysis-report-moving-away-from-mass-destruction/
Nearly one month into Russia’s invasion, the New York Times quietly abandoned any pretense that the US aim was to defend Ukraine and bring the war to a quick end. The White House, the Times reported, “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation.”
Eighteen months later, the desired quagmire has been achieved. This is due not only to a massive influx of NATO weaponry, but a Western blockade of every tangible path to de-escalation, most notably the April 2022 Ukraine-Russia peace deal that Boris Johnson nixed.
With a Russian quagmire the overriding goal, the US and its partners have adopted an attendant disregard for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives sacrificed for the task.
In the war’s early stages, only the most outwardly enthusiastic proxy warriors, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, could candidly admit that US support ensured that Ukraine would “fight to the last person.” With Ukraine now struggling to mount a widely hyped counteroffensive, the prevailing indifference to its human toll is more widely acknowledged.
“When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day. They haven’t.”
It is unclear how Western officials could have “hoped” that Ukrainian “resourcefulness” would make up for the training and weapons that they did not provide. A war zone, after all, is not an episode of MacGyver or the A-Team, and Ukraine’s adversary happens to be one of the world’s most powerful militaries. The operative Western definition of “Ukrainian courage”, however, is not hard to discern: a willingness to use Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder.
“Senior U.S. officials,” the New York Times reports, have “privately expressed frustration that some Ukrainian commanders… fearing increased casualties among their ranks” have recently “reverted to old habits — decades of Soviet-style training in artillery barrages — rather than sticking with the Western tactics and pressing harder to breach the Russian defenses.”
The Times did not ask these same US officials whether it is appropriate to express “frustration” at the decision of another military – the one we claim to support – to avoid “increased casualties” among its ranks. But Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, asked an equally salient question of his US counterparts: “Why don’t they come and do it themselves?”
Frustrated US officials are well aware of Ukraine’s toll. According to the New York Times, Western states now estimate that Ukraine lost about 20 percent of its weaponry in the first weeks of its counteroffensive, a “startling rate of losses… as Ukrainian soldiers struggle against Russia’s formidable defenses.” Oddly, the Times omits any mention of losses in Ukrainian lives – a tacit admission, perhaps, that the human casualties are even more startling.
As is also increasingly admitted, all of this was foreseen. “U.S. Defense Department analysts knew early this year that Ukraine’s front-line troops would struggle against Russian air attacks,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Or as the Washington Post puts it: “Privately, U.S. military officials concede that their expectation from early this year, described in leaked intelligence documents, that Ukraine is likely to make only modest gains in its counteroffensive has not changed, despite public pronouncements seeking to downplay fallout from the disclosure.”
In other words, US “public pronouncements” have entailed lying to the public to “downplay fallout” of fueling a knowingly catastrophic and futile war. The participants in this deception include Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who declared in March that the Ukrainian military had “a very good chance for success,” despite privately being told the opposite.
One reason for Ukraine’s current woes, as President Biden recently admitted to CNN, is that “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition,” and “we’re low on it” as well. Another major factor, a classified Pentagon assessment noted in February, was Ukraine’s “inability to prevent Russian air superiority.” Or as a senior European official now warns, “everyone worries that the Ukrainians will run out of ammunition and air defenses.”
“America would never attempt to defeat a prepared defense without air superiority, but they [Ukrainians] don’t have air superiority,” John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and professor at the U.S. Army War College, observes. “It’s impossible to overstate how important air superiority is for fighting a ground fight at a reasonable cost in casualties.”
According to the Pentagon, NATO’s latest influx of heavy weaponry will not change the tide. Speaking at a Washington security conference this month, John Kirchhofer, chief of staff at the US Defense Intelligence Agency, claimed that the Ukraine war is at a “stalemate” and that “none of these” newly provided weapons – including Storm Shadow missiles and cluster bombs — “are the holy grail that Ukraine is looking for.”
Accordingly, the Wall Street Journal notes, the unlikelihood of “any large-scale breakthrough by the Ukrainians… raises the unsettling prospect for Washington and its allies of a longer war—one that would require a huge new infusion of sophisticated armaments and more training to give Kyiv a chance at victory.”
For Washington, perhaps that prospect is not unsettling. According to veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, the Ukraine war has already yielded a “triumphal summer” for the NATO alliance.
“The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked,” Ignatius writes. “NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values.”
Accordingly, “for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians).”
Indeed, it is quite easy to reap a “windfall” from 18 months of war when the US is not itself fighting it. It has instead sacrificed future generations of an entire nation, whose worth is so devalued that their unfolding catastrophe is openly reduced to an afterthought.
SOTT – Signs of The Times, Michael Hudson, The Unz Review, Sat, 22 Jul 2023
Economic Logic has been Replaced by National Security Overrides
The July NATO summit in Vilnius had the feeling of a funeral, as if they had just lost a family member – Ukraine. To clear away NATO’s failure to drive Russia out of Ukraine and move NATO right up to the Russian border, its members tried to revive their spirits by mobilizing support for the next great fight – against China, which is now designated as their ultimate strategic enemy. To prepare for this showdown, NATO announced a commitment to extend their military presence all the way to the Pacific.
The plan is to carve away China’s military allies and trading partners, above all Russia, starting with the fight in Ukraine. President Biden has said that this war will be global in scope and will take many decades as it expands to ultimately isolate and break up China.
The U.S.-imposed sanctions against trade with Russia are a dress rehearsal for imposing similar sanctions against China. But only the NATO allies have joined the fight. And instead of wrecking Russia’s economy and “turning the ruble to rubble” as President Biden predicted, NATO’s sanctions have made it more self-reliant, increasing its balance of payments and international monetary reserves, and hence the ruble’s exchange rate.
To cap matters, despite the failure of trade and financial sanctions to injure Russia – and indeed, despite NATO’s failures in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO countries committed themselves to trying the same tactics against China. The world economy is to be split between US/NATO/Five Eyes on the one hand, and the rest of the world – the Global Majority – on the other. EU Commissioner Joseph Borrell calls this as a split between the US/European Garden (the Golden Billion) and the Jungle threatening to engulf it, like an invasion of its well-manicured lawns by an invasive species.
From an economic vantage point, NATO’s behavior since its military buildup to attack Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern states in February 2022 has been a drastic failure. The U.S. plan was to bleed Russia and leave it so economically destitute that its population would revolt, throw Vladimir Putin out of office and restore a pro-Western neoliberal leader who would pry Russia away from its alliance with China – and then proceed with America’s grand plan to mobilize Europe to impose sanctions on China…………………..
The US/NATO West has led this global fracture, yet it will be the big loser. NATO members already have seen Ukraine deplete their inventory of guns and bullets, artillery and ammunition, tanks, helicopters weapons and other arms accumulated over five decades. But Europe’s loss has become America’s sales opportunity, creating a vast new market for America’s military-industrial complex to re-supply Europe. To gain support, the United States has sponsored a new way of thinking about international trade and investment. The focus has shifted to “national security,” meaning to secure a U.S.-centered unipolar order.
The world is dividing into two blocs: a post-industrial US/NATO vs the Global Majority
……………………………………………………………………………. By trying to prevent other countries from following this logic, U.S. and European NATO diplomacy has brought about exactly what U.S. supremacists most feared. Instead of crippling the Russian economy to create a political crisis and perhaps breakup of Russia itself in order to isolate it from China, the US/NATO sanctions have led Russia to re-orient its trade away from NATO countries to integrate its economy and diplomacy more closely with China and other BRICS members.
Ironically, the US/NATO policy is forcing Russia, China and their BRICS allies to go their own way, starting with a united Eurasia. This new core of China, Russia and Eurasia with the Global South are creating a mutually beneficial multipolar trade and investment sphere.
By contrast, European industry has been devastated. Its economies have become thoroughly and abjectly dependent on the United States – at a much higher cost to itself than was the case with its former trade partners. European exporters have lost the Russian market, and are now following U.S. demands that they abandon and indeed reject the Chinese market. Also to be rejected in due course are markets in the BRICS membership, which is expanding to include Near Eastern, African and Latin American countries……………………………………………………………………..
Today’s fighting against Russia on the Ukrainian front can be thought of as the opening campaign in World War III. In many ways it is an outgrowth of World War II and its aftermath that saw the United States establish international economic and political organizations to operate in its own national self-interest. The International Monetary Fund imposes U.S. financial control and helps dollarize the world economy. The World Bank lends dollars to governments to build export infrastructure to subsidize US/NATO investors in control of oil, mining and natural resources, and to promote trade dependency on U.S. farm exports while promoting plantation agriculture, instead of domestic food-grain production. The United States insists on having veto power in all international organizations that it joins, including the United Nations and its agencies.
The creation of NATO is often misunderstood. Ostensibly, it depicted itself as a military alliance, originally to defend against the thought that the Soviet Union might have some reason to conquer Western Europe. But NATO’s most important role was to use “national security” as the excuse to override European domestic and foreign policy and subordinate it to U.S. control. Dependency on NATO was written into the European Union’s constitution. Its objective was to make sure that European party leaders followed U.S. direction and opposed left-wing or anti-American politics, pro-labor policies and governments strong enough to prevent control by a U.S.-client financial oligarchy.
NATO’s economic program has been one of adherence to neoliberal financialization, privatization, government deregulation and imposing austerity on labor. EU regulations prevent governments from running a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. That blocks Keynesian-type policies to spur recovery. Today, higher military arms costs and government subsidy of energy prices is forcing European governments to cut back social spending. Bank policy, trade policy and domestic lawmaking are following the same U.S. neoliberal model that has deindustrialized the American economy and loaded it down with debt to the financial sector in whose hands most wealth and income is now concentrated.
Abandoning economic self-interest for “national security” dependence on the US
The post-Vilnius world treats trade and international relations not as economic, but as “national security.” Any form of trade is the “risk” of being cut off and destabilized. The aim is not to make trade and investment gains, but to become self-reliant and independent. For the West, this means isolating China, Russia and the BRICS in order to depend fully on the United States. So for the United States, its own security means making other countries dependent on itself, so that U.S. diplomats won’t lose control of their military and political diplomacy…………………………………………………………………………………………………
The world is dividing into two blocs – with quite different economic philosophies……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
We are witnessing what seems to be an inexorable Decline of the West. U.S. diplomats have been able to tighten their economic, political and military control leadership over their European NATO allies. Their easy success in this aim has led them to imagine that somehow they can conquer the rest of the world despite de-industrializing and loading their economies so deeply in debt that there is no foreseeable way in which they can pay their official debt to foreign countries or indeed have much to offer.
The traditional imperialism of military conquest and financial conquest is ended
……………………………….. The US has only one weapon: Missiles and bombs can destroy, but cannot occupy but not occupy and take over a country.
The second way to create imperial power was by economic power to make other countries dependent on U.S. exports……………………………Control of world oil trade has been a central aim of US trade diplomacy………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.sott.net/article/482853-Washingtons-looming-war-against-China —
Antinuclear 