Tag: nuclear
Opinion | Europe Needs Its Own Nukes
“If Washington truly abandons its role as the world’s police officer, Europe would struggle to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army, at least in that time frame. Many European countries, especially Germany, have neglected their own military in recent decades. While Russia has converted everything to a war economy, parts of Europe have only just woken up from the dream of a peaceful world. Military experts proclaim that it will take more than four years to manufacture an arsenal of conventional weapons of the size needed to counter a Russian invasion. While most observers consider a Russian attack on Germany unlikely, even this is not an impossible scenario.
That’s why, to deter Russia, Germany and Europe need their own nuclear shield.”
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“relying solely on France seems risky especially with French nationalist Marine Le Pen, a known Russia sympathizer, or another figure from her nationalist party potentially taking over the Élysée Palace in the near future. A broader European solution also involving Britain’s nuclear capabilities — and possibly Poland as a front-line state — would be far more prudent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/08/nuclear-weapons-europe-defense-trump-00278754
INDIA & Pakistan Prepare for War
26 innocent tourists were executed by terrorists in Kashmir. India blames Pakistan for supporting terrorist groups. India has suspended a water sharing treaty made with Pakistan in 1960. Pakistan heavily depends on the water flowing from India. India may retaliate militarily for the terrorist attack. Both countries have nukes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0smelzrdPqA
Opinion | The Iranian Negotiating Tactic the Trump Administration Doesn’t Get
“sanctions have never made the clerical regime abandon its nuclear ambitions. During Trump’s first term, his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign did real damage to Iran’s economy. Iran didn’t, however, concede its atomic assets.”
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” Obama’s more friendly outreach only made progress after Washington made a key concession — Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium. The Americans also made a second key concession: allowing Iran to retain a substantial nuclear infrastructure, which could ramp back up at any time. Ali Salehi, the MIT-educated nuclear engineer who was probably the mastermind behind Iran’s dual-use import network, loved the Obama agreement because it would guarantee the Islamic Republic a more advanced, better-financed atomic program that it could grow in the open. It was Obama’s permissive terms much more than the promised financial relief that induced the theocracy to sign the 2015 accord.”
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” Along the way, the clerical regime might agree to dilute its stock of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which is near weapons-grade, or even cap enrichment at a lower level. It would be a flashy concession that won’t fundamentally affect the complexion or the trajectory of Tehran’s nuclear program. The mullahs know that what matters most are protecting its new generation of centrifuges. With much greater efficiency and speed, these machines can enrich uranium to bomb-grade and can be housed in small facilities that are harder to detect.”
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“Even a stringent inspection regime, unless supported by a well-placed human-intelligence network, would find locating these centrifuges an excruciatingly difficult task.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/19/iran-nuclear-talks-trump-00299466
Trump May Be Triggering the Fastest Nuclear Weapons Race Since the Cold War
“Trump has been obsessed with preventing a nuclear holocaust since he was a bumptious boy builder back in the 1980s. Back then Trump reportedly proposed, with typical grandiosity, that if President Ronald Reagan appointed him “plenipotentiary ambassador” he would end the Cold War “within one hour.””
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“the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/11/trump-says-he-fears-nuclear-weapons-so-why-is-he-making-them-more-popular-00278790
Risk of War: US & Iran Deploy Strike Assets
U.S. building up air and naval assets in the Middle East for potential war with Iran.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6VqEAYSfBc
Trump’s Trade War Will Make Energy More Expensive
“the U.S. is heavily reliant on Canadian crude oil to make liquid fuels and other petroleum products. Most U.S. refineries were built in the 1970s to accommodate heavy oil from the Middle East and Canada. This was well before the American shale boom, which brought lighter-grade oil to the market. In 2023, nearly 60 percent of crude imports came from Canada and July 2024 saw a record 4.3 million barrels of oil per day imported from the country.
“Canada is by far our largest supplier, and we build refineries specifically to refine heavier Canadian crude,” explains Nick Loris, the executive vice president of policy at C3 Solutions, a free market energy think tank. “Depending on the tariff rate and how long they’re in place, gas prices could rise anywhere from 10-30 cents per gallon, with the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain Region getting hit the hardest,” Loris tells Reason.”
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“tariffs could also harm American nuclear power. Despite generating the most nuclear energy in the world, the U.S. relies on other nations for uranium to fuel its fleet. Canada is the largest supplier of raw uranium (27 percent of imports in 2022), followed by Kazakhstan (25 percent) and Russia (12 percent), the latter of which the U.S. depends on for roughly a quarter of its uranium enrichment needs.
With last year’s passage of a bill to ban imports of Russian uranium signed into law, Canada is primed to play an increasingly important role in America’s uranium supply. Tariffs would threaten this and could increase fuel costs for American nuclear power producers”
https://reason.com/2025/02/04/trumps-trade-war-will-make-energy-more-expensive/
Nuclear Energy Prevents Air Pollution and Saves Lives
“While estimates vary, studies agree that air pollution has caused great harm to human health. Max Roser at Our World in Data reviewed information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on global air pollution mortality estimates. WHO and IHME report that between 4.2 million and 4.5 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution annually. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated that 3.6 million people prematurely die as a result of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The PNAS study estimated that the 194,000 annual premature deaths in the U.S. resulting from fossil fuel air pollution amounted to the annual loss of 5.7 million life years.
Contrast these estimates with the number of deaths associated with generating nuclear power. The 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown caused no injuries or deaths, and Fukushima’s 2011 tsunami-caused disaster may have led to just one radiation-related death years later.
Chernobyl’s reactor blast killed two workers, and 47 emergency workers who doused the core fires later died of radiation exposure. The good news is that a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation noted that most people downwind “were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background.” Consequently, the report concluded that the “vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chornobyl accident.”
Using air pollution data derived from satellite observations, the NBER economists generally find that bringing a reactor online significantly reduces ambient fine particulate air pollution around the nearest cities. Using estimates provided by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index, they calculate how much life expectancies would have increased owing to reduced air pollution had the extrapolated trend in constructing new nuclear power plants not stalled.
The economists reckon that the construction of each additional nuclear power plant, by reducing air pollution, could save more than 800,000 life years. “According to our baseline estimates, over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of [nuclear power plants] worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies,” they report. “Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in [nuclear power plant] growth in these countries after Chernobyl.” They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment.
Cautioning that their estimates are only intended to illustrate a hypothetical timeline in which nuclear power plants continued to grow at the same rate as before the Chernobyl disaster, the researchers nonetheless conclude that “air pollution would have likely been much lower, which in turn, would have had significant health benefits.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/29/nuclear-power-saves-lives/
Towards a New Nuclear Arms Race? Putin, the Breakdown of Nuclear Treaty Limits & MIRVs
Nuclear weapons are on the rise–more of them, more dangerous ones, more advanced ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnZLWjOkHU
Are drones looking for nuclear weapons in New Jersey?
It’s not likely that drones flying over New Jersey are looking for a lost nuclear weapon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8TYJirmfWI