Weekly Column

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

John’s Letter from Jail

Artist Mark Taylor’s rendition of Uncle Sam and his German doppelganger sentencing John LaForge.

January 15, 2023

This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously toward the court system here and have refused to cooperate with its deeply corrupt and dishonest protection of the nuclear weapons establishment.

Because Susan Crane and I had the gall to occupy the top of a nuclear weapons bunker that holds U.S. hydrogen bombs here in Germany, and then refused to apologize by paying a fine for trespassing, the court has decided that seven weeks in this modern prison ought to mend my ways, or at least discourage other abolitionists.

The three war-weary events are Martin Luther King Day, January 16; the second anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, January 22; and the yearly setting of the “Doomsday Clock,” January 24 – that weirdly formulaic gauge of nuclear armageddon’s likelihood concocted by a group of scientific nuclear eggheads.
The establishment of the MLK holiday and of the TPNW were both monumental achievements made against fierce, wealthy, bigoted, and colonialist forces of reaction. Advocates of nonviolent action and campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons this Monday and next Sunday, then get back to work Tuesday when the alarm goes off again on the Doomsday Clock. Of course the clock’s “up one year, down the next” assessment of nuclear war risks has been ignored as a worn out rewrite of the Chicken Little tale. Yet the five metric tons of plutonium dust that was lofted into the upper atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests is all making its way back down to Earth. So yes, Mr. Watson, in fact the worst part of the sky is falling.

Dr. King and opposition to nuclear weapons will always be connected in my mind because MLK said, “We have guided missiles and misguided men” and “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and because nuclear weapons are nothing if not genocidal.

Dr. King’s books, and the hard-won triumphs of the fearlessly nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, inspired a group of us in the 1980s to repeatedly blockade the entrance to the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota which then controlled 150 land-based, long-range nuclear-armed missiles. Over a ten-year period, our band of nuclear resisters served enough county jail time after staging so many marches, protests, and stunts – once pouring blood across the 100-ton concrete lid of a locked-and-loaded Minuteman III missile silo – that when the Air Force later decided to eliminate over half of its land-based missiles, the Grand Forks nukes were some of the first to go.

Our small group efforts were encouraged back then by news of hundreds of thousands across Europe who took to the streets demanding – successfully, it turned out – the ouster of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles. Any prospective use of the weapons was almost universally viewed in Europe as suicidal.

We never know if our demands will be realized – only that nothing is gained without venturing. Anti-nuclear marchers in the ‘80s never guessed they’d see the UN General Assembly vote 122-to-3 to endorse a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have agreed that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, that any chance of a successful medical response to their effects is impossible, that these effects would illegally cross neutral borders, do long-term criminal damage to the environment, and then recoil to maim and destroy the very militaries that unleash them. (That’s why I wrote “B61 = Suicide” on the weapons bunker just before being detained.)

Today, the groundbreaking TPNW has permanently shamed and stigmatized the nuclear weapons states as hypocrites, scofflaws, and rogues who ridicule and ignore the treaty’s means while cynically claiming to desire its ends.

The nine-member thermonuclear cartel, like a gang of coldblooded mobsters, acts outside and above the law by rewarding their judicial, police, and prison authorities for the cover they provide – authorities who then wink and pretend that the protection racket is necessary and that the Bomb is legal.

Maybe our marching, our rebellion, and the law of nations can’t denuclearize the cabal of atomic weaponeers. Maybe the nuclear mobsters won’t re-direct their war chests to useful purposes before they run our earthly train off the rails. But then nothing changes unless we demand it.

— Written by John LaForge

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

What Can the United States Bring to the Peace Table for Ukraine?

PhotoCredit:https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/ukraine-russia-peace-talks-belarus-b2024774.html

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies

So far, the debate has revolved around what Ukraine and Russia can do to end the war and restore peace. However, given this war is not just between Russia and Ukraine, NATO, and the United States must consider what they can bring to the table to end it. The geopolitical crisis that set the stage for the war in Ukraine began with NATO’s broken promises not to expand into Eastern Europe, and was exacerbated by its declaration in 2008 that Ukraine would eventually join this primarily anti-Russian military alliance.

Then, in 2014, a U.S.-backed coup against Ukraine’s elected government caused the disintegration of Ukraine. Only 51% of Ukrainians surveyed recognized the legitimacy of the post-coup government, and large majorities in Crimea and in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces voted to secede from Ukraine. Crimea rejoined Russia, and the new Ukrainian government launched a civil war against the self-declared “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The civil war killed an estimated 14,000 people, but the Minsk II accord in 2015 established a ceasefire and … casualties declined substantially. But the Ukrainian government never resolved the political crisis by granting Donetsk and Luhansk the autonomous status promised in the Minsk II agreement. Now former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President François Hollande have admitted that Western leaders only agreed to Minsk II to buy time to build up Ukraine’s armed forces to recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force. Russia and Ukraine drew up a 15-point “neutrality agreement,” which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly presented on March 27th, 2022. Russia agreed to withdraw from the territories it occupied since the invasion in exchange for a Ukrainian commitment not to join NATO or host foreign military bases. That framework included proposals for resolving the future of Crimea and Donbas.

But in April … Western allies … persuaded Ukraine to abandon its negotiations with Russia. U.S. and British officials said they saw a chance to “press” and “weaken” Russia, resulting in a prolonged and devastating conflict with hundreds of thousands of casualties. U.S. and NATO leaders now claim to support a return to the negotiating table … with the same goals. They implicitly recognize that nine more months of unnecessary and bloody war failed to greatly improve Ukraine’s negotiating position.

Instead of sending more weapons to fuel a war that cannot be won, Western leaders have a grave responsibility to restart negotiations and ensure that they succeed. Instead of risking nuclear annihilation, the U.S. could open up a new era of disarmament treaties.

For years, President Putin has complained about the large military footprint in Eastern and Central Europe. But in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. actually beefed up its European military presence. It increased the total deployments of American troops in Europe from 80,000 before February 2022 to roughly 100,000. It sent warships to Spain, fighter jet squadrons to the U.K., troops to Romania and the Baltics, and air defense systems to Germany and Italy.

Even before the Russian invasion, the U.S. began expanding its presence at a missile base in Romania that Russia objected to since 2016. The U.S. also built “a highly sensitive military installation” in Poland, just 100 miles from Russian territory. These bases have sophisticated radars … and interceptor missiles. The Russians worry these can be re-purposed to fire offensive or even nuclear missiles, exactly what the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union prohibited, until President Bush withdrew from it in 2002.

While the Pentagon describes the two sites as defensive and pretends they are not directed at Russia, Putin has insisted the bases are evidence of the threat posed by NATO’s eastward expansion.

Here are some steps the U.S. could put on the table to start de-escalating the rising tensions and improve chances for a lasting ceasefire and peace agreement:

—The U.S. and other Western countries could support Ukrainian neutrality with the security guarantees Ukraine and Russia agreed to last March.

—The U.S. and NATO could lift sanctions against Russia as part of a comprehensive peace agreement.

—The U.S. could significantly reduce the 100,000 troops it now has in Europe, and remove its missiles from Romania and Poland, handing over those bases to their respective nations.

—The U.S. could commit with Russia to resume mutual reductions in their nuclear arsenals, and to suspend plans to build more dangerous weapons. They could restore the Treaty on Open Skies, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2020, so both sides can verify the other is removing and dismantling the weapons.

—The U.S. could remove its nuclear weapons from the European countries where they are deployed: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey.

De-escalation would give Russia a tangible gain to show its citizens. It would allow the U.S. to reduce military spending and enable Europeans to take charge of their own security, as their people want.

— Reprinted and edited for space from Global Research, Jan. 26, 2023.
— Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK, and the author of several books. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and researcher with CODEPINK.

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Blustery New START Suspension Familiar Territory for U.S.

By Lindsay Potter

President Putin announced in his national address on February 20 that he is suspending Russian participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The treaty was signed in 2010 and given a five year extension in 2021. It binds Russia and the U.S., who together boast over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, to limit their arsenals and permit up to 18 inspections a year to verify compliance. New START allows up to 1,550 nuclear warheads and 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-equipped bombers – an arsenal large enough to cause massive human suffering and environmental apocalypse which begs the usefulness of any treaty that does not require elimination of all nuclear weapons. Set to expire in 2026, with no new negotiations underway, both the U.S. and Russia argue the other is not in compliance. The Kremlin points to U.S. provocation as cause for its decision to withdraw from the Treaty – accusing the U.S. of perpetrating a war against Russia by escalating the conflict in Ukraine in order to weaken Russia in a strategic defeat. In the eyes of Moscow, this changes the posture of the two nations and is tantamount to a U.S. treaty violation, as it attempts to undermine Russian national security. Furthermore, Putin accused the West of efforts to attack Russian strategic air bases and asserted the U.S. is skirting limitations on the number of deployed nuclear warheads capped by the Treaty. Russia refused an attempt to restart inspections in November and has since been out of compliance.

U.S. Air Force Staff performing a simulated missile reduction in accordance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on Minot Air Force Base, N.D., 2011. Photo: Flickr/US Air Force

The U.S. has its own deep history of abandoning arms agreements, because it finds the other party to be offensive to national security interests. After the U.S. armed Ukraine with billions of dollars in ammunition, rockets, tanks, and now possibly fighter jets, and as evidence mounts proving the U.S. orchestrated terrorist attack on the Nordstream pipeline, it would be reasonable for the Kremlin to consider the U.S. antagonistic. Putin said his decision was based partly on indication the U.S. may begin testing nuclear weapons once more, which violates New START, and Putin clearly asserted Russia would do the same only if the U.S. does so first.

Though the move is escalatory, Russian officials hedged the decision, reminding pundits that Putin merely suspended the treaty rather than withdrawing altogether. Russia says it will observe limitations on nuclear warheads and nuclear missile carriers as well as continuing to notify the U.S. of nuclear deployments to “prevent false alarms,” and maintain “strategic stability,” according to remarks by defense ministry official Major-General Yevgeny Ilyin. Risks to global security include the likelihood of less transparency on arsenals on both sides. However, Russian leaders and Biden asserted the decision does not signal an increased risk of a nuclear war.

Russia clearly outlined olive branches the U.S. could extend to bring Russia back to New START – such as earnest efforts at de-escalation in Ukraine and inclusion of British and French nuclear weapons in the Treaty. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Everything will depend on the position of the West. … When there’s a willingness to take into account our concerns, then the situation will change.” The U.S. must show restraint in no longer being held accountable by the Treaty and remember that, in 2021, Biden, Putin, and other leaders of nuclear-armed nations signed onto a reiteration of Gorbachev and Reagan’s 1985 observation that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Headlines of nuclear threat flow constantly from U.S. media coupled with no demand the U.S. and NATO ratchet down their nuclear posture, alone in maintaining a first-use policy. As the faint peeping of reluctance to continue funding and arming Ukraine has pierced the media wall lately, this New START development may be used to rally the war cry and whip up renewed public enthusiasm, to foreshadow deepening U.S. and NATO involvement in Ukraine, perhaps beyond the veil of proxy.

— Reuters, The Independent, and Aljazeera, Feb. 22, 2023

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