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NATO’s Steadfast Noon, is Ready-Made Doom

 

A U.S. B61 free-fall gravity bomb inside a bunker alongside a German Tornado fighter jet on Büchel Air Force Base, Germany.

By John La Forge, October 20, 2023

On October 16, during the NATO-supplied, nuclear-armed hot war in Ukraine, the alliance began its annual nuclear attack rehearsal dubbed “Steadfast Noon.” This practice involves air forces from 13 countries, the “exercising” of fighter jets and U.S. B-52s, lasts until October 26, and will be roaring over Italy, Croatia and the eastern Mediterranean — not far from two aircraft carrier battle groups charging toward the war over the Gaza Strip prison break.

A hundred people joined an October 14 protest outside Germany’s Nörvenich Air Base calling for cancellation of the rehearsal, to no avail.

NATO Sec. Gen. Jens Stoltenberg naturally said, “Our exercise will help to ensure the credibility, effectiveness and security of our nuclear deterrent.” This is shrewd, silk tie talk about threatening nuclear attacks, threats barely distinguishable from Russia’s verbal warnings. Mr. Stoltenberg dared to add, “[T]he fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

Aware that this fundamental purpose was disproved and vaporized by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, NATO practices nuclear attacks. Steadfast Noon is a role-play for pilots, a dry run to test classroom preparations made at the German branch of the U.S. Air Force Nuclear College on Ramstein Air Base. According to the AFNC website, the school “is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day.” Some such air-delivered nuclear weapons are the U.S. “B61” free-fall gravity bombs stationed in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey.

One Nuclear College course named “Theater Nuclear Operation” was described this way (before the page was taken down): “[A] 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting.” Another class is said to provide: “proficiency in importing and creating target models, developing attack plans using conventional or nuclear weapons, performing consequence assessment to WMD scenarios.”

If you imagined that nuclear war is unthinkable, this school says its fighter jet pilot students, “will be able to import, edit, and modify target sites”; “calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] “develop attack plans using either conventional or nuclear weapons.”

These B61s are just the U.S. nukes closest to Moscow. Add to these the French, British and U.S. thermonuclear weapons on submarines, long-range missiles, and bombers (totals are approximately 5244 U.S., 225 British, and 290 French).

At the protest in Nörvenich, Ludo De Brabander, from the Belgian peace group Peace Now, spoke of the 10 to 20 B61s stationed at Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium. “These bombs will soon be replaced by new B61-12 nuclear bombs,” he said. “Because of their ‘precision’ and ‘low yield,’ these nuclear weapons are considered ‘operational,’ lowering the threshold for nuclear war. All of this is happening without any official explanation or public debate.”

The concept of suicidal ideation applies to steadfast planning or the actual launch of nuclear weapons attacks. Daniel Ellsberg, in Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (Haymarket Books 2016), said, “[O]our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.”

So Steadfast Noon is not just code language, or public relations. The event is a large-scale, psychological operation intended to teach us to pretend that nuclear attacks can do good. Of course if nuclear firestorms could save lives and end war — as U.S. mythology says of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki — then the Pentagon would have used them on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. People love to be fooled.

— This was first published at CounterPunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/20/natos-steadfast-noon-is-ready-made-doom/

 

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U.S. Adding Uranium Weapons to Long List of Ukraine War Systems

By John LaForge

The Biden administration is expected to supply Ukraine with highly controversial depleted-uranium shells which are to be fired from the Abrams battle tanks the U.S. is sending to Kyiv, the Wall St. Journal reported June 13.

Any delivery of U.S. depleted uranium (DU) weapons to Ukraine would be in addition to the State Department’s Dec. 22, 2022 approval of the sale to Poland of as many as 112,000 heavy 120-millimeter DU shells which was announced by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The large120mm DU anti-tank shells are so heavy that the uranium in 112,000 munitions could weigh as much as 36 tons.

The British Ministry of Defense announced last March 20 that it too would send depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine along with its Challenger battle tanks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded then alleging that sending DU into Ukraine would mean the U.K. was “ready to violate international humanitarian law as in 1999 in Yugoslavia.” The reference is to the United Nations Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights which in 2002 labeled the use of DU “inhumane” and a violation of treaties that expressly forbid any use of “poison or poisoned weapons.”

The Wall St. Journal’s understated June 13 sub-headline warned: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.” Indeed, between 1997 and 2004, USA Today, the Associated Press, New York Daily News, Life magazine, CNN, and others all reported that studies were finding an significantly increased rate of birth abnormalities among children of U.S. Gulf War veterans and among Iraqi children born after 1991.

The Wall St. Journal acknowledged that “The United Nations Environment Program said in a report last year that the [depleted uranium] metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure, and increase the risks of cancer.’”

However, the paper “balanced” this U.N. warning by quoting John Kirby, a National Security Council coordinator, who reportedly dared to say last March that “studies indicate it isn’t a radioactive threat.”

In fact, the most damning reports about the harmful health and environmental effects of exposure to DU contamination come from the U.S. military itself. (See below.)

If the shells are used in the Ukraine war, the soil and water of the territory being contested will likely be contaminated with uranium and the other radioactive materials that are in the armor-piercing shells.

In 2003, experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes of DU were used by U.S.-led forces during their attack on Iraq in March and April that year.

That same year, the British Royal Society, declared that hundreds of tons of DU used by Britain and the U.S. against Iraq should be removed to protect the civilian population, contradicting Pentagon claims it was not necessary.

After NATO’s use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe called for a world-wide ban on the production, testing, use, and sale of DU weapons, asserting that DU pollution would have “long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations.” The call went unheeded.

A U.S. soldier holds a 120-mm depleted uranium anti-tank round which disperses poison heavy metal dust when it burns through hard targets. Photo by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Background

Depleted uranium is uranium hexafluoride or uranium-238, a waste material left from reactor fuel and nuclear warhead production. It is radioactive and a toxic heavy metal, and there are between 560,000 and 700,000 metric tons of this waste stored in the United States. On March 25, 1997 the New York Times reported the volume as 1.25 billion pounds. The military calls the DU munitions “armor piercing cartridges” avoiding the taint of the word “uranium.”

As Nukewatch reported in the 2000s, when DU smashes through tank armor, it becomes an aerosol of dust or gas-like particles that can be inhaled and carried long distances on the wind, contaminating soil and water.

In 1991, between 300 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait by U.S. forces. The Pentagon says the U.S. military fired about 10,800 DU rounds — about three tons — into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. Over 31,000 DU rounds — about ten tons — were shot into Kosovo in 1999 according to NATO. In Iraq, in the number of birth abnormalities skyrocketed following the massive use of DU in the Persian Gulf War.

The U.S. Department of Energy admitted in January 2000 that the metal in DU shells is often contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, and americium, long-lived, highly radioactive isotopes, much more hazardous than DU, or uranium-238.

While the U.S. military repeatedly declares that its uranium weapons contain only uranium-238, and that its DU shells “are less radioactive than natural uranium,” the United Nations Environment Program and others proved that uranium shells used by the U.S. and the U.K. were spiked with fission products including plutonium.

In Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (International Physicians Press, 1992), the authors say “A safe conclusion is that plutonium is probably the most carcinogenic substance known.

Government evidence of harm

* The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General’s 1993 manual “Depleted Uranium Safety Training” says the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer (lung and bone) and kidney damage. It recommends that the Army “… convene a working group … to identify countermeasures against DU exposure.”

* The U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute found in 2002 that DU produces one-million times as much chromosome damage as would be predicted from its radioactivity alone, and that it causes a form of long-term “delayed reproductive death” of cells. The institute then canceled the funding of this research.

* In 1979, the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command warned, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity (emergency and fire-fighting personnel) but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to airborne uranium dust.”

* In 1995, the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute reported, “The radiation dose to critical organs depends upon the amount of time that depleted uranium resides in the organs. When this value is known or estimated, cancer and hereditary risk estimates can be determined.” Depleted uranium has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body, the AEPI found.

* In 1997, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute reportedly found that, “In animal studies, embedded DU, unlike most metals, dissolves and spreads throughout the body depositing in organs like the spleen and the brain, and a pregnant female rat will pass DU along to a developing fetus.”

* In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that depleted uranium is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” The report said that “long term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in cancer … there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

 

– Beyond Nuclear, April 16; Common Dreams Mar 21; Chris Bugsby “Uranium weapons being employed in Ukraine have significantly increased Uranium levels in the air in the UK,” March 2023; ICBUW Jul 3, 2022

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Ukraine De-Escalation Can Start with Ending Nuclear Weapons “Sharing”

By John LaForge

Ukraine, the United States, and NATO have condemned what they correctly called Russian President Putin’s “dangerous and irresponsible” transfer of nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.

On June 9, Putin announced that Moscow would deploy its nuclear weapons in Belarus, reporting that work on new facilities for housing the weapons would be complete by July 7-8.

Putin had said on March 25 that Belarusian “President Alexander Lukashenko’s right: He says we’re your closest allies. Why do the Americans deploy their nuclear weapons to their allies, on their territory, train the crews, and pilots how to use this type of weapon if needed? We agreed that we will do the same.”

U.S. hyprocrisy and double-talk were on parade as Uncle Sam demanded the global community accept, ignore, or applaud destabilizing U.S. nukes stationed in Europe, yet condemns Putin for sending Russian nuclear warheads to Belarus. All nuclear sharing is escalatory, illegal and should end.

Indeed, the United States has transferred more than 100 of its 50- and 170-kiloton nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s to bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey, where allied pilots rehearse nuclear weapons attacks using their allied fighter jets. Case in point, NATO’s “Air Defender 2023,” a nine-day German-led, international war game involving 24 countries live-flying all across Germany, began on Monday June 12, in the midst of the hot war in Ukraine.

Point of information: The Associated Press keeps calling these nuclear weapons “tactical,” and less destructive than “city-busting” “strategic” devices. So it must be recalled that the city-busting Hiroshima bomb was a 15-kiloton weapon far less destructive than today’s B61 “tactical” hydrogen bombs.

Russian Iskander-E missile launcher operates during International Military and Technical Forum 2022 in Alabino outside Moscow, Russia August 17, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo

Now Putin and Lukashenko copy the U.S. practice of violating the terms of the 1970 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the same way that the United States has for decades. All such nuclear “sharing” constitutes not just a violation of the NPT’s Articles I, II and VI, but a hair-raising and unnecessary escalation of the quagmire powder keg in Ukraine.

Last May 15, ICAN, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, confronted the increasingly globalized war in Ukraine by sending a set of four demands to the G7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., all of which are actively arming Ukraine — noting that every one of the them employ nuclear weapons “either as nuclear-armed states or as host or umbrella states.” ICAN’s four demands included a clear denunciation of nuclear sharing, as practiced by the U.S. and NATO, noting:

“Following Russia announcing plans to place nuclear weapons in Belarus, the G7 leaders must agree to end all nuclear-armed states stationing their weapons in other countries and engage Russia to cancel its plans to do so. Several G7 members are currently involved in nuclear sharing arrangements of their own, and can demonstrate their opposition to Russia’s recent deployment announcement by commencing negotiations of new Standing of Forces Agreements between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Italy, to remove the weapons currently stationed in those countries.”

This important call for an end to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in other countries, and its direct reference to the U.S. and its allies, helps contextualize Russia’s escalation. The only practically workable way to move Putin to reverse his deployment to Belarus, is to offer to reverse the Pentagon’s deployment.

Call it a Cuban Missile Crisis Redux. That terrible confrontation was resolved when President Kennedy offered to, and then did, withdraw U.S. nuclear-armed missiles from Turkey. De-escalation works, and it can lead to further breakthroughs.

— BBC Mar 26, 2023

— A version of this opinion was syndicated by PeaceVoice.org

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U.S. Depleted Uranium to Make Ukraine War Dirtier

By John LaForge

The Biden administration is expected to supply Ukraine with highly controversial depleted-uranium munitions which are to be fired from the Abrams battle tanks the U.S. is sending to Kyiv, the Wall St. Journal reported June 13.

Any delivery of U.S. depleted uranium (DU) weapons to Ukraine would be in addition to the State Department’s Dec. 22, 2022 approval of the sale to Poland of as many as 112,000 heavy 120-millimeter DU shells, which was announced by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

The British Ministry of Defense announced last March 20 that it too would send depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine  along with its Challenger battle tanks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded at the time charging that sending DU into Ukraine would mean the U.K. was “ready to violate international humanitarian law as in 1999 in Yugoslavia.”  The reference may be to the United Nations Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights which in 2002 labeled the use of DU “inhumane” and a violation of treaties like the Hague Conventions which expressly forbid any use of “poison or poisoned weapons.”

The Wall St. Journal’s understated sub-headline on June 13 warned: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.” Indeed, between 1997 and 2004, USA Today, the Associated Press, New York Daily News, Life magazine, CNN, and others reported that studies were finding a significantly increased rate of birth abnormalities among children of U.S. Gulf War veterans and among Iraqi children born after 1991. (“DU in UKRAINE – John Pilger & Phil Miller,” Consortium News, May 11, 2023; “Tainted uranium, danger widely distributed,” USA Today, June 25, 2001)

The Journal’s article acknowledged that “The United Nations Environment Program said in a report last year that the [depleted uranium] metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure, and increase the risks of cancer.’”

However, the paper “balanced” this U.N. warning by quoting John Kirby, a National Security Council coordinator, who reportedly dared to say last March that “studies indicate it isn’t a radioactive threat.” In fact, the most damning reports about the harmful health and environmental effects of exposure to DU contamination come from the U.S. military itself. (See below.)

If the shells are used in the Ukraine war, the soil, water, crops, and livestock of the territory being contested will likely be contaminated with uranium and the other radioactive materials that are in the armor-piercing munitions. This is because when DU smashes through tank armor, it becomes an aerosol of dust or gas-like particles that can be inhaled and carried long distances on the wind.

In 2003, experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes of DU were used by U.S.-led forces during their attack on Iraq in March and April that year. That same year, the British Royal Society, declared that hundreds of tons of DU used by Britain and the U.S. against Iraq should be removed to protect the civilian population, contradicting Pentagon claims it was not necessary. (“Scientists Urge Shell Clear-Up to Protect Civilians, Royal Society spells out dangers of depleted uranium,” The Guardian, April 17, 2003)

After NATO’s use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe called for a world-wide ban on the production, testing, use, and sale of DU weapons, asserting that DU pollution would have “long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations.” The call went unheeded.

Background

Depleted uranium is uranium hexafluoride or uranium-238, a waste material left from reactor fuel and nuclear warhead production. It is radioactive and a toxic heavy metal, and there are between 560,000 and 700,000 metric tons of this waste stored in the United States. On March 25, 1997 the New York Times reported the volume as 1.25 billion pounds. The military calls DU munitions “armor piercing cartridges” avoiding the taint of the word “uranium.”

In 1991, between 300 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait by U.S. forces. The Pentagon says the U.S. military fired about 10,800 DU rounds — about three tons — into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. Over 31,000 DU rounds — about ten tons — were shot into Kosovo in 1999 according to NATO. In Iraq, in the number of birth abnormalities skyrocketed following the massive use of DU in the Persian Gulf War. (“EU begins inquiry of veterans’ cancer,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 4, 2001) In Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (International Physicians Press, 1992), the authors say, “… plutonium is probably the most carcinogenic substance known.”

The U.S. Department of Energy admitted in January 2000 that the metal in DU shells is often contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, and americium, long-lived, highly radioactive isotopes, much more hazardous than DU, or uranium-238. (“Pentagon admits plutonium exposure: NATO shells used radioactive metals,” London, AP, The Capital Times, February 3, 2001; New York Times, February 14, 2001)

While the U.S. military repeatedly declares that its uranium weapons contain uranium-238, and that its DU shells “are less radioactive than natural uranium,” the United Nations Environment Program and others demonstrated that uranium shells used by the U.S. and the U.K. were contaminated with fission products including plutonium. (“DU at Home,” The Nation, April 9, 2001)

Government evidence of harm

* In 2002, the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute found in a preliminary report that DU produces one-million times as much chromosome damage as would be predicted from its radioactivity alone, and that it causes a form of long-term “delayed reproductive death” of cells. The AFRR institute then canceled the funding of this research.

* In 1997, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute reportedly found that, “In animal studies, embedded DU, unlike most metals, dissolves and spreads throughout the body depositing in organs like the spleen and the brain, and a pregnant female rat will pass DU along to a developing fetus.”  The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General’s 1993 manual “Depleted Uranium Safety Training” says the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer (lung and bone) and kidney damage. It recommends that the Army “… convene a working group … to identify countermeasures against DU exposure.”

* In 1995, the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute reported, “The radiation dose to critical organs depends upon the amount of time that depleted uranium resides in the organs. When this value is known or estimated, cancer and hereditary risk estimates can be determined.” Depleted uranium has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body, the AEPI found.

* In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that depleted uranium is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” The group’s report said that “long term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in cancer … there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

* In 1984, the Federal Aviation Administration warned its investigators, “If particles are inhaled or ingested, they can be chemically toxic and cause a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue.”

* In 1979, the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command warned, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity (emergency and fire-fighting personnel) but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to airborne uranium dust.”

Any threatened or actual use of poisonous, gene-busting depleted uranium munitions in Ukraine cannot be considered lawful or ethical and must be condemned unreservedly by civil society on all sides of the Ukraine war.  ###

— John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States. A version of this was published June 30, 2023 by CounterPunch.org.

 

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U.S. Energy Market Interests Fuel Ukraine War

By Lindsay Potter

The nuclear industry has demonstrated a long list of failures including costliness, vulnerability, and toxicity. Operators deny the impossibility of safely handling waste from nuclear reactors. Currently, radioactive wastewater is slated for dumping from the Eastern Coast of the United States to Japan’s Pacific Coast. Every natural disaster near a nuclear site risks releasing deadly radiation, poisoning water and soil, and depressing local communities. Of the world’s nuclear reactors, 20 percent are vulnerable to earthquakes. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory are in areas prone to massive wildfires. The Navy dry docks servicing nuclear submarines in Bangor, Washington, closed bays to study risks of seismic activity. Turkey’s recent devastating 7.8-magnitude quake damaged areas near Incirlik Air Base, where the U.S. stores 50 nuclear warheads, and yet Turkey plans to build even more new fragile reactors. In France, reactors shutdown due to lack of cooling water from rising temperatures and dried up rivers.

The world has also witnessed what disaster nuclear sites can unleash through human error at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now potentially at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. Cataclysmic meltdown and radioactive release have been avoided despite blackouts and nearby strikes, but Ukraine’s 15 reactors, six of which sit at Zaporizhzhia, are all time bombs awaiting an errant missile.

Yet there is a current surge for new nuclear technology that diverts hundreds of billions of dollars away from proven renewable sources of cleaner and cheaper energy. In response to shortages of Russian energy, from sanctions and the war in Ukraine, Europe is walking back commitments to ween off of nuclear and switch to renewables. Belgium deferred plans for a 2025 exit from nuclear, extending the life of two reactors by ten years. Germany pushed off the slated 2022 closure of its remaining three reactors. The U.K. plans to build eight new reactors. In January, Sweden green-lighted legislation to construct new reactors. Not to be outdone, in February, Poland announced plans to construct 79 Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) by 2038 in addition to six other reactors, including the Westinghouse AP1000 (despite the fact two U.S. Westinghouse reactors now under construction at Vogtle in Georgia are seven years behind schedule and over budget at $30 billion). The U.S. loaned $3 billion to Romania on a contract, scooped from China, to build several new reactors. Yet, last year, French power company EDF reported a $19 billion loss. Half of France’s 56 reactors shuttered for repairs, and its nuclear energy production fell by 30%, leaving one of the world’s most nuclear-powered nations a net importer of energy in 2022.

On February 10, 2023, one of the reactor units at Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Facility shut down.

Most unbelievably, Ukraine’s energy minister announced an order for two new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors for the Khmelnytskyi facility, despite last November’s emergency shutdown of the site’s two current reactors due to missile attacks. Ukraine’s reactors in the war zone present an unprecedented threat of global catastrophe, reiterated by the UN and IAEA. The world holds its breath in hopes each bout of shelling fails to spill Zaporizhzhia’s more than 2,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel, a prospect made only riskier by reports Ukraine is stashing Western-supplied arms at nuclear reactor sites.

Rather than defending democracy or sovereignty, the U.S. and NATO and their nuclear-backed tyranny pursue, via proxy war, economic and technological dominance. Biden’s sanctions and attack on the Nordstream pipeline resulted in Europe buying more expensive U.S. fracked gas. Still, Russia found outlets for its oil and gas. Exxonmobil took home a record-breaking $56 billion in profits for 2022. Yet Europe needed $640 billion in energy subsidies through the winter to stabilize the disrupted market. African countries were largely unable to cushion the shocking thirty-year-high energy cost spike, another example of African citizens suffering under the political machinations of wealthier nations.

After one year of war in Ukraine, the ripples across the global economic landscape – from cold homes in Europe to famine in the horn of Africa – prove this war is about energy. It should be no surprise, as U.S. arsenals shift from Europe to the Pacific, one harbinger of war in Asia is new nuclear energy policy. After years of increased military presence, arms sales, drills, and missile testing, Japan moves further from its nuclear taboo, and the U.S. continues to antagonize China and intervene on the Korean Peninsula. Japan has now approved draft legislation to allow limitless longevity for reactors, prolonging operation of some to 60 years. As part of their return to nuclear, Japan pledged to build 20 “next-generation” reactors to replace those scheduled for decommissioning. North Korea has increased plutonium processing. South Korea will add more nuclear reactors in lieu of promises to add new renewable energy infrastructure. South Korea and Japan sit under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but analysts are clamoring at the possibility the two nations could develop their own nuclear arsenals.

From construction of new reactors, to growth in the market for U.S. natural gas, to unfathomable profits for weapons manufacturers whose contracts are inextricably linked with the nuclear power industry, the energy crises caused by the Ukraine war serve U.S. interests – albeit not the interests of the hungry, poor, sick, or unhoused. It is important to note, in the same year, renewables produced more energy than ever before and the affordability and accessibility of renewable technology grew. Though we are still on a cusp of transition, projections continue to confirm renewables can provide faster, cleaner energy than nuclear. Essential energy decisions cast the specter of two very different paths: a future that builds human and environmental well-being or a future of unabated avarice.

— un.org, Feb. 13, 2023; Reuters, Jan. 11, 2023; BBC, Oct. 18, 2022

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