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Tag: nuclear weapons
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Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Including Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked
Now it’s no longer just high-ranking Kremlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials.
Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he’s willing to use “all weapons” in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.
“The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region,” Putin said.
“If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable,” he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.
NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.
Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described:
The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has “information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region.”
The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency.
The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany.
Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.
The letter accused NATO of an “unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia’s region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies’ officials.”
“This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance’s member states right from the outset of the conflict,” the letter said.
NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow’s letter:
“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.”
Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.
Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month
Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario – one in which the US military’s reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China – went mostly unnoticed by the public.
The biggest international AI news of the past three weeks was the Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon’s resignation. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. Coxon’s description of a “terminator” scenario, a machine becoming much smarter than humanity and deciding to wipe us out, captured the public’s, journalists’ and politicians’ attention, stirring waves of fear-inducing, credulous reporting, and policy actions.
The California governor, Gavin Newsom, issued a mandate to create an “AI kill-switch”; New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is similarly exploring the possibility of having “AI kill-switches”; and Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar introduced legislation to “ban artificial superintelligence”.
While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported.
A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.
A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.
It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.
Unlike the terminator, “rogue AI”, scenario, this incident didn’t galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn’t warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military’s reliance on error-prone chatbots.
We describe the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots as stochastic parrots, that is, models that are designed to regurgitate the patterns of the data they are trained on. News coverage describing them as “powerful” “rogue” models that could render humanity extinct all on their own, bolsters perceptions of tools based on these models being infallible enough to merit usage in stakes as high as warfare.
Even CNN’s more critical coverage describes the chatbot used by the US military as presenting “profound risks” because it is “powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology”.
In fact, today’s LLMs and the chatbots they power are not poorly understood, nor are they powerful in the sense of being effective tools for this use case. They are systems for generating plausible-looking text, built out of enormous, haphazardly collected datasets and then “fine-tuned” (that is, further trained) to be especially appealing to their intended users.
CNN wasn’t able to learn which chatbot product was used in this case, but the LLM powering the product was probably fine-tuned to output text with the stylistic hallmarks of intelligence reports. Both the basic functionality and the risks of such a model have been well-understood and well-documented for years, including in our 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
Claims that system behavior is mysterious arise from deliberate mystification on the part of those selling those systems, and a misapprehension of what their output is by those procuring and using it.
America’s Greenland deal has a radioactive backstory
The US, Denmark, and Greenland have signed a new agreement to expand American military activity on the island. Washington calls Greenland vital to its security, but an expanded military presence also raises an older question: What risks does the Arctic island take on in return?
The agreement builds on a defense partnership dating back to 1951. That history includes an episode that brought the risks of Washington’s Cold War strategy into sharp focus: An American mission over Greenland that ended in a nuclear disaster.
The nuclear patrols over Greenland
In the 1960s, in the middle of the Cold War, the US Air Force launched Operation Chrome Dome. This mission implied keeping bombers armed with nuclear weapons on continuous airborne alert, ready to strike the USSR if necessary. If you’ve seen the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’, you’ll remember that Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong’s crew was involved in such a patrol mission.
Theoretically, this strategy was feasible: It would have made it impossible for the USSR to disarm the US with a single blow. However, in practice, as the number of nuclear-armed aircraft patrols increased, so did the number of incidents involving nuclear weapons.
Then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocated for ending this program, arguing that Americans had already established an effective early warning system for ballistic missile launches, so the US could take fewer risks and cut costs. However, the Strategic Air Command resisted this idea, fearing it would decrease their importance and result in budget cuts.
A horrific incident occurred in 1966 over Spain when a bomber collided with a refueling tanker aircraft, resulting in several fatalities and nuclear bombs landing on beaches and in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite this incident, the US considered the nuclear threat from the USSR a matter of primary importance, one which justified any security measures.
Eventually, after intense debates, a compromise was reached: The number of patrolling bombers would be reduced, but the airborne patrols would continue.
Thule Air Base in northern Greenland was established in the 1950s. A Mercator projection map gives a distorted sense of distance; in reality, its location was very convenient for potentially launching missiles at the USSR and monitoring missile launches from there. It also provided a convenient vantage point for reconnaissance of the Novaya Zemlya Soviet nuclear test site.
Has prelude to World War III arrived? ‘Key players greatly underestimate the potential for disaster’
A growing collection of wars and military flashpoints involving several nuclear powers is raising concerns that miscalculation or escalation in one region could pull major powers into a far wider conflict.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a “dangerous new phase” in which the threat of regional spillover is growing, U.N. Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo warned Wednesday, according to the United Nations. The Middle East is simultaneously confronting the continuing U.S.-Iran conflict and renewed fighting in Yemen, while tensions involving China and Taiwan and nuclear-armed India and Pakistan remain potential avenues for another major confrontation, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
“It’s possible to consider that World War III has begun,” defense policy analyst and retired Marine Dan Grazier told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The big problem before World War II was there were all these separate conflicts that were going on at the same time, and it was only a matter of time before they all got linked together.”
The number of armed conflicts worldwide has reached its highest level since the end of World War II, according to the CFR. Roughly 620 American government officials, foreign policy specialists and academics responded to CFR’s 2026 Preventive Priorities Survey, which identified a Taiwan Strait crisis and clashes between Russia and NATO as scenarios with potentially severe consequences for the United States.
“I would characterize the current environment as extremely dangerous, in part because key players greatly underestimate the potential for disaster,” the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, George Beebe, told the DCNF. “The biggest problem is that many leaders in the West believe the key to avoiding war is to demonstrate our resolve to escalate the use of force against our adversaries. They believe that diplomatic compromise constitutes ‘appeasement’ that endangers us.”
The nuclear danger extends beyond the sheer size of the world’s arsenals.
Of an estimated 12,187 nuclear warheads worldwide at the beginning of 2026, roughly 9,745 remained in military stockpiles available for potential use, 4,012 were deployed with operational forces and as many as 2,200 were kept on high operational alert aboard ballistic missiles, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. All nine nuclear-armed states also continued modernizing and enhancing their arsenals during 2025, with most deploying new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons systems.
NATO member moves closer to lifting nuclear weapons ban
Lithuania’s parliament has backed a constitutional amendment that would lift a ban on nuclear weapons, thus bringing the NATO member a step closer to hosting them on its territory. Russia has warned the Baltic country, which borders its Kaliningrad Region, that such a move would have significant security implications.
The proposal was backed by 99 lawmakers on Tuesday, with 13 voting against and five abstaining. Two more votes are required, scheduled for October 6 and January 12, 2027. At least 94 of Lithuania’s 141 MPs must support the amendment in each vote.
The measure would remove Article 137 of the Lithuanian constitution, which prohibits weapons of mass destruction and foreign military bases on the country’s territory. Supporters argue that the provision no longer reflects Lithuania’s security needs, while opponents have raised concerns over sovereignty and called for the issue to be put to a referendum.
President Gitanas Nauseda has backed removing the restriction, while Lithuanian officials have argued that allowing nuclear weapons would strengthen deterrence against Russia.
Moscow has repeatedly rejected claims that it intends to attack NATO countries.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova last week called the proposed change “absolutely irresponsible,” accusing NATO members of pursuing provocative policies and treating Lithuania as a potential staging ground against Russia.
North Korea’s Underground Nuclear Tests at Mount Mantap May Have Triggered 1400 Earthquakes: STUDY
The planet is still reeling from North Korea’s Nuclear tests.
Between 2006 and 2017, North Korea carried out six underground nuclear tests in the Punggye-ri test site.
This may read like irrelevant facts from the past, but seismic data from 2008 to 2025 detected no less than 1,399 earthquakes around the mountain.
It is suspected that the underground explosions may have reactivated long-dormant faults, according to a new scientific study.
The Korea Herald reported:
“An international research team led by Pusan National University Geological sciences Professor Kim Kwang-hee made the finding after analyzing 17 years of continuous seismic waveform data collected in South Korea and northeastern China between 2008 and May last year. The team included researchers from four Chinese institutions: Chengdu University of Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the China Earthquake Administration and Shandong University.
In the study, titled ‘Nuclear tests at Mt. Mantap have reactivated intraplate faults’, the researchers tracked changes in seismic activity around Mantapsan in Kilju, North Hamgyong Province, where the North conducted all six of its nuclear tests.”
WW3 Near-Miss? AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel Bound For Iran
Could runaway artificial intelligence (AI) spark a future WW3?
We don’t need movies like Terminator 2 and its SkyNet to help us imagine this, it’s 2026 and there is already a terrifying real-world precedent that could have kicked off a shooting war with nuclear-armed China.
A human analyst within the US intelligence community utilized data gathered by AI for a report that was later widely circulated across classified Pentagon channels, except that the chatbot which was relied upon in effect hallucinated nuclear weapons components being transported aboard a Chinese vessel bound for Iran.
Naturally this set off the highest alerts in Washington in the middle of an active hot war which President Trump launched ostensibly to prevent this very thing – Iran obtaining a nuke and atomic weapons components.
From there military planning kicked into high gear, with a special forces boarding operation imminent. Supposedly elite assets were already airborne, ready to descend on the Chinese ship in question.
But then, “the operation was halted only after officials took a closer look at the intelligence report and discovered that it had been produced with assistance from an AI chatbot,” CNN reports in a bombshell Friday exclusive. The episode reportedly happened last spring.
The severe error was realized with barely enough time to call off what could have been the geopolitical blunder and disaster of the century, “The chatbot had incorrectly identified the material the vessel was carrying.“
In essence the United States found itself based on completely manufactured ‘intel’ potentially headed for conflict with China.
As if to to preempt anyone who might be tempted to think the account is merely being hyperbolic or needlessly sensational, one official (unnamed) source told CNN that the intelligence assessment, which was “entirely false” – in the end “almost started a war.“
While Pentagon leadership, including US Special Operations Command Pacific, has yet to respond to CNN’s queries, the outlet pieces together the alleged chain of events and how this could have possibly happened in the following:
In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.
“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.
The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.
The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.
The report seems to be suggesting that the unknown AI tool that was utilized would be deemed substandard and weak for such an important assessment in the first place.
Further “comforting” for readers is that given heavy AI-integration seems the “irreversible” trend of the day across the DoD/Depart of War and IC, similar near-misses in the near and distant future are bound to happen.
CNN underscores, “Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.”
Ben Shapiro’s Uncle Who Stole U.S. Uranium and Built Israel’s Nuclear Program
Ben Shapiro has a favorite word.
Conspiracy.
Question whether Israeli pressure helped drag America into another Middle Eastern war?
“Conspiracy trash.”
Question Israel’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein?
“Mythology.”
Keep investigating?
“Brain rot.”
When Joe Kent accused Israel and its powerful American lobby of helping push America toward war with Iran, Shapiro did not merely disagree.
He ridiculed the question.
“Conspiracy trash.”
“Conspiratorial idiocy.”
“This stuff is brain rot.”
But there is one problem with Ben Shapiro’s favorite word:
OPEN HIS OWN FAMILY’S FILES.
Ben’s uncle, Zalman Shapiro, ran NUMEC, a Pennsylvania facility handling highly enriched uranium that became the center of a decades-long U.S. investigation into missing American nuclear material diverted to Israel.
The CIA became sufficiently concerned about Shapiro’s relationship with Israel that CIA Director Richard Helms asked the FBI to investigate the “nature and extent” of that relationship.
Then Israeli intelligence figures appeared inside his nuclear facility.
One of them was Rafael Eitan.
Eitan would later head LAKAM, run Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and participate in the Plumbat operation, which covertly diverted roughly 200 tons of uranium oxide to Israel.
So before Ben Shapiro dismisses questions about Israeli intelligence and influence as “brain rot,” there is somewhere Americans should look first:
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