Antinuclear

It’s not ‘Who lost Ukraine?’ It’s ‘Who destroyed Ukraine?

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL , 15 Aug 25

When Mao won the Chinese civil war in 1949, adding China to the USSR in the roster of commie countries, the US war hawks of that era excoriated the Truman administration for ‘losing’ China’. Their unhinged claim was that the commie filled State Department made Mao’s inevitable takeover possible. That helped fuel Sen. Joe McCarthy’s equally unhinged campaign to smoke out all those imagined commies in the Truman administration a year later.

A whiff of that 1949 anti commie hysteria is playing out on mainstream media ahead of Friday’s sit down between President Trump and Russian President Putin seeking a ceasefire and end to this disastrous war destroying Ukraine.

Morning Joe Scarborough this morning pondered whether Trump will cave to evil Putin’s Ukraine dismembership demands to achieve the peace that might garner him a Nobel Peace Prize. Yep, Moring Joe laid out the ‘Who lost Ukraine’ meme on Trump to prepare us for the onslaught of anti-Trump, anti-Russian hysteria sure to follow if a settlement reflecting the reality of Ukraine’s dismembership is inked in Alaska tomorrow.

A settlement is only possible if a US/Russia settlement verifies the battlefield reality. Ukraine’s military is teetering on collapse with over a million dead cannon fodder and 4 oblasts gone to Russia forever. If Trump accomplishes peace…which is far from likely, the blame game will focus on Trump who ‘lost’ Ukraine which will end up as a greatly diminished rump state dependent on US/European life support for years to come.

Historians instead should begin with the 6 administrations preceding Trump’s second term 2.0: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump 1.0 and most grievously Joe Biden. H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Trump 1.0 and Biden all promoted NATO expansion into Ukraine and dismissed all Russian security pleas that such expansion was a Red Line Russia would view as an existential threat.  

While his predecessors put Ukraine on the road to destruction, Joe Biden essentially pulled the trigger on a war Ukraine had no chance of winning. Putin tried to avoid invading. He saw Ukraine massing 60,000 elite troops on the Donbas border to polish off the Ukrainian separatists there seeking independence and safety from Kyiv neo fascists. His plea of December 21 2021 was dismissed out of hand. Biden told Putin that Russia’s security interests, which included autonomy for Ukrainian separatists as well as a neutral Ukraine not in NATO, were ‘not subject to discussion whatsoever.’

Biden knew that response would provoke a Russian invasion. But Biden miscalculated that US weapons combined with draconian Russian sanctions would result in a Vietnam style defeat for Russia, possibly even the overthrow of President Putin.

So here we are three years, eight months later with Putin, not Trump holding all the cards in tomorrow’s negotiation. Trump knows the correct outcome is settling on Russia’s terms: no return of Ukraine territory, no NATO for Ukraine and a demilitarized Ukraine that can never attack inside Russia territory again. He also knows he’ll be branded by America’s ravenous war hawks as ‘The man who lost Ukraine’ should he end the war.

Nobody lost Ukraine. But we now know who destroyed Ukraine. The only question to be answered is…How severely Ukraine will be destroyed before the guns go silent.

August 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Serious nuclear incident’ took place at Scottish Navy base.

14 Aug 25, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/14/serious-nuclear-incident-clyde-faslane-navy-base/

MoD admits ‘Category A’ event at HMNB Clyde which will raise concerns about maintenance of Trident nuclear submarines

‘Potentially serious’ event at HMNB Clyde prompts concerns about maintenance of Trident submarines

Category A events are defined as those which carry “actual or high potential for radioactive release to the environment”.

The revelation will raise serious concerns about how the Trident nuclear submarines in Scotland are being maintained. It is also likely to prompt questions over transparency and why the incident was not known about until now.

HMNB Clyde houses every Royal Navy submarine, including the Vanguard-class vessels which are armed with Trident missiles.

On Wednesday afternoon, the SNP demanded an urgent explanation from the Labour Government in Westminster over a “catalogue of failures” including separate contamination nearby.

The MoD declined to offer specific details of the incident, which was first reported by the Helensburgh Advertiser. This means it was unclear if any radiation was leaked into the environment or if there was a risk of this taking place.

The incident is not the first category A incident to take place at Faslane, with the MoD having reported two such cases from 2006 to 2007 and a third that took place in 2023.

The incident was disclosed in a written parliamentary answer by Maria Eagle, the procurement minister, after she was asked to provide the number of Nuclear Site Event Reports (NSERs) at the Coulport and Faslane naval bases.

She said there had been one category A event at Faslane between Jan 1 and April 22, two category B, seven category C and four category D. A further five events were deemed to be “below scale”, meaning they were less serious.

Nearby Coulport, where the UK’s nuclear missiles and warheads are stored, had four category C and nine category D events over the same period.

Ms Eagle told Dave Doogan, the SNP MP who tabled the question: “I cannot provide specific detail for the events as disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the capability, effectiveness or security of any relevant forces.

“I can assure the honourable member that none of the events listed in question 49938 caused harm to the health of any member of staff or to any member of the public and none have resulted in any radiological impact to the environment.”

She also said that NSERs “are raised to foster a robust safety culture that learns from experience, whether that is equipment failures, human error, procedural failings, documentation shortcoming or near-misses”.

Category B incidents are defined as having “actual or high potential for a contained release within [a] building or submarine or unplanned exposure to radiation”.

Category C incidents have “moderate potential for future release”, while category D incidents are unlikely to prompt any release but “may contribute towards an adverse trend”.

Radioactive water leak

It emerged last week that radioactive water from the Coulport and Faslane bases, which are situated near Glasgow, was allowed to leak into the sea after several old pipes burst.

The substance was released into Loch Long because the Royal Navy inadequately maintained a network of around 1,500 pipes on the base, a regulator found.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the pollution watchdog north of the border, found up to half the components at the base were beyond their design life.

David Cullen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Basic defence think tank, said attempts to hide previous serious incidents from the public had been “outrageous”.

Mr Cullen said: “The MoD is almost 10 years into a nearly £2bn infrastructure programme at Faslane and Coulport, and yet they apparently didn’t have a proper asset management system as recently as 2022.

“This negligent approach is far too common in the nuclear weapons programme, and is a direct consequence of a lack of oversight.”

Government accused of ‘cover-up’

Keith Brown, the deputy leader of the SNP, accused the Government of a cover-up in relation to the incident at Faslane.

Mr Brown said: “Nuclear weapons are an ever-present danger and this new information is deeply worrying.

“With repeated reports of serious incidents at Faslane and now confirmed radioactive contamination in Loch Long, it’s clear these weapons are not only poorly maintained but are a direct threat to our environment, our communities, and our safety.

“Worse still, the Labour Government is refusing to provide any details about the category A incident, or the full extent of the contamination, including who could potentially be affected.”

The SNP has vowed to scrap Trident, despite consensus in Westminster and among defence experts that the world is now more dangerous than at any point since the Cold War.

The accusations over a cover-up come after The Telegraph disclosed last month that Britain had secretly offered asylum to almost 24,000 Afghan soldiers and their families.

The Government earmarked £7bn to relocate Afghans to the UK over five years after they were caught up in the most serious data breach in history.

Despite enormous costs to the taxpayer, the breach was kept secret from the public for 683 days by two successive governments after the first use of a super-injunction by ministers.

An MoD spokesman said: “We place the upmost importance on handling radioactive substances safely and securely. Nuclear Site Event Reports demonstrate our robust safety culture and commitment to learn from experience.

“The incidents posed no risk to the public and did not result in any radiological impact to the environment. It is factually incorrect to suggest otherwise. Our Government backs our nuclear deterrent as the ultimate guarantor of our national security.

The MoD said it was unable to disclose details of individual incidents for “national security reasons”. However, it is understood all the NSERs were categorised as having a “low safety significance”.

August 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on

August 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hiroshima’s history lesson

August 3, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/08/03/hiroshimas-history-lesson/

By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.

 The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.

Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation.

Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority.

What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?

By Eric Ross, Common Dreams

In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.

The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.

Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.

The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?

The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.

A Tale of Two Laboratories

In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.

The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.

Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.

No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimerwould describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”

For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.

One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.

Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.

Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.

As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”

Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”

In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.

The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer

Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.

Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?

One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.

Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”

Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”

Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”

The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.

Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”

When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.

That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierlsacknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”

Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.

“Remember Your Humanity”

The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.

Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, researcher, and PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amhers

August 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment