Tag: nuclear weapons

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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:

His uncle’s files.

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Washington Is Underwriting the Proliferation It Went to War To Stop

The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.

The war is meanwhile six months old and the reader knows its shape. American and Israeli aircraft killed the Supreme Leader of Iran in February to end all Iranian enrichment and prevent Iran from ever building a weapon. It has not ended. A settlement deadline passed on 17 August with the president in no rush, and his Treasury Secretary now promises an economic D-Day, the toughest sanctions in the country’s history, on the concession that the bombing did not do what was promised. Enrichment is the thing the war is supposedly being waged for. It is also the thing the Saudi contract is for.

The agreement is a 123 agreement, the legal instrument that lets American firms build a foreign country’s nuclear program, and the Energy Department’s announcement calls it peaceful, upholding the highest standards of nonproliferation. Not so fast. Past American deals kept enrichment out of the recipient’s hands, because low-enriched fuel for a reactor and the highly enriched metal of a warhead come off the same cascades; the separative work that makes the first does most of the work of the second. The Saudi deal instead preserves the enrichment option and, on the reporting, opens a route to reprocess spent fuel, the plutonium road to a bomb that runs parallel to the uranium one. In place of international inspection it substitutes a bilateral arrangement whose terms are not public.

There is a standard for this, and it was set relatively recently and right next door. When a US firm built the Emirates’ reactors in 2009, the UAE volunteered the strictest safeguards on offer, renounced enrichment and reprocessing outright, and today draws a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power without owning a single centrifuge. Saudi Arabia has refused that bargain. It has declined to sign the Additional Protocol, the enhanced-inspection regime that 144 states accept and that lets the International Atomic Energy Agency hunt for undeclared sites, and in 2024 it rescinded even the small-quantities protocol it once held. The country being handed the fuel cycle is the one refusing the cameras. The country being bombed to give up enrichment, Iran, was under those cameras, and before the war the IAEA director general said there was no proof of a systematic Iranian move toward a weapon.

The American reassurances offered for the Saudi deal deserve scrutiny. The deal is called conditional: the president announced, the day after his own Secretary signed it, that it would proceed only if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalized relations with Israel, a term absent from the agreed text. A condition attached by afterthought can be lifted by afterthought. The deal is called subject to congressional review: in practice, lawmakers have ninety days to pass a resolution killing it, the clock can be stopped and has been stopped before, and if the two chambers do nothing it takes effect. Congress must muster a veto-proof majority to halt what it never voted for. Silence is assent. Some of the members are not silent. In November a group of them wrote to the secretary of state warning that the deal could enable Saudi Arabia to produce a nuclear bomb, and reminding him that he had once, as a senator, demanded the gold standard himself.

To see why enrichment is a reason for war in Tehran and a business line in Riyadh, look at what Saudi Arabia has already bought. In September last year, days after Israel bombed Doha and Washington did nothing, the kingdom signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and holds an estimated 170 weapons. Any attack on one, the pact says, is an attack on both. Asked whether it covered the arsenal, a Saudi official called it a comprehensive agreement encompassing all military means. Pakistan’s defense minister said the capabilities his country holds will be made available; once the sentence had done its work he said nuclear weapons were not on the radar. The saying and the unsaying are not a muddle to be resolved. They are the product. Riyadh takes the deterrent value of a Pakistani umbrella and the deniability of an official denial, and the world is left to guess. This is called strategic ambiguity and has been applied by Israel for decades. Three weeks ago the arrangement widened: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, extending the same all-for-one clause across three states, with Pakistani troops and aircraft already deployed on Saudi soil.

This is the government the United States has decided can be trusted with enrichment. Its crown prince has said, on the record and more than once, that if Iran gets a weapon Saudi Arabia will follow suit. Its own officials tie the nuclear question openly to Iran’s. It shelters under a foreign bomb it will not confirm and refuses the inspections Iran accepted. Nonproliferation experts read the deal for what it is, a US-blessed hedging strategy toward a bomb option, and say so.

There is one more fact, and it does not go in a footnote, because the war was sold on the memory of exactly this kind of fact. Fifteen of the nineteen men who flew airliners into American buildings on 11 September 2001 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born in the kingdom, a son of one of its richest families. None of the nineteen was Iranian. The state that produced the hijackers and the man who directed them is being handed a path to enrichment. The state that produced none of them is being currently bombed back into the stone age.

What connects the two decisions is money, and it runs through one family. Jared Kushner ran Middle East policy from the Trump White House and cultivated the Saudi crown prince throughout it. Six months after he left office, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund put $2 billion into his new and untested firm. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against it, finding the operation unsatisfactory in all aspects and the fees excessive. It was overruled by the fund’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA concluded had ordered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and cut apart, and whom Kushner had defended. The kingdom pays Kushner’s firm about 1.25 percent of $2 billion a year on that money, – do the math. The House committee that examined the arrangement called it the appearance of a quid pro quo for his foreign-policy work. The president’s son-in-law draws a continuous income from the Saudi state while the president tells the public, falsely, the Saudi state is not getting the thing it wants most, enrichment.

No investigation, if there was one, has shown the money bought the policy. What can be set down is narrower and still hard to look away from. A denial as flat as no enrichment, said over a document that permits enrichment, by a man whose Energy Secretary confirms the pathway and whose family is on the Saudi payroll, is not the language of a president who has not considered the future the document contains.

Set the pieces in a row and the shape stops looking like contradiction. The United States is bombing one country to deny it enrichment while writing enrichment into a contract for another. It invokes nonproliferation in the press release for the act that proliferates. It strikes the state that admits inspectors and sells the fuel cycle to the state that turns them away. It bombs the country that produced no hijackers and arms the country that produced fifteen. Each decision has a reason, and the reasons are not the ones on the label.

The label is where the empire now does its work. A power able to enforce nonproliferation would not need to kill a head of state to attempt it, and would not find itself six months later reaching for sanctions because the strikes had failed. Its clients are interpreting the weakness for exactly what it is. They watched Doha burn and Washington stay silent, watched their own refineries burn and the guarantor offer only more war, and concluded that the protector cannot protect. So they bought a Pakistani deterrent and widened it into a three-state pact, and they extracted an American enrichment pathway as the price of a normalization the president wanted more than they did. The order the United States built and policed for eighty years is fraying at the hands of the government that claims to enforce it, and the fraying does not stop at the Gulf. The same erosion of trust in the American umbrella is visible in Seoul and in Warsaw. What a disarmament body called a tradable security service is what the end of an order looks like from inside it. The enforcer has begun to auction the thing it once forbade, because the auction is the leverage it has left.

No enrichment, the president wrote. In a few years, when the feasibility study is filed and the centrifuges the contract allows begin to turn, the sentence will read as the first official confirmation that the enrichment was always coming.

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Trump’s Saudi Nuclear Agreement May Prolong the Iran War

A final deal between the United States and Iran is slipping further out of reach. Since the Memorandum of Understanding collapsed in July, the prospects for reviving it have deteriorated by the day. While Tehran publicly demands a return to the MOU, Trump’s current position is that even if Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz, he would neither return to the agreement nor lift the blockade on Iran. And even in the unlikely event that he did, the MOU could not come back into force as long as Israel continues to bombard Lebanon. Iran is unlikely to accept an MOU minus Lebanon: its demand for a regional ceasefire is non-negotiable.

But even if these obstacles were resolved, profound differences over the nuclear issue would remain. And those differences have now grown dramatically more severe because of Trump’s nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. The details of the deal were just made public, and Kelsey Davenport at the Arms Control Association has published an excellent FAQ addressing its most important aspects.

The bottom line is: Trump is granting Saudi Arabia access to the same uranium-enrichment technology the United States has sought to deny Iran for more than three decades, while imposing a far weaker inspection regime on Saudi nuclear activities. In effect, Washington is providing Riyadh a pathway to the bomb while insisting that Iran have no enrichment capability whatsoever – the infamous zero-enrichment objective.

As ACA writes,

“the Trump administration rejected key nonproliferation conditions for U.S. nuclear cooperation that have long-standing bipartisan support and are internationally recognized best practices.

Most critically, the deal does not require Saudi Arabia to adhere to the more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement, known as the Additional Protocol.”

As a point of comparison, Iran began voluntarily implementing the Additional Protocol (AP) under Obama’s nuclear deal in 2016 and was expected to ratify it once the United States formally lifted sanctions through Congress. That never happened, however, because Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018.

Moreover, Trump’s agreement with Saudi Arabia gives the kingdom a pathway to develop a uranium-enrichment program reaching 20 percent. Again, the comparison with Iran is revealing. When Iran expanded its enrichment to 20 percent in 2010 to produce fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor – which, ironically, the United States had given Iran in the late 1960s as part of the Atoms for Peace program – Washington pointed to the move as further evidence of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.

State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley said on February 11, 2010, that Iran’s decision to begin enriching to 20 percent “further solidifies… our impression and that of the international community that Iran’s nuclear intentions are anything but peaceful.” At the UN Security Council, then-Ambassador Susan Rice argued that Iran’s decision moved it “closer to weapons-grade material,” as she made the case for new UN sanctions against Tehran.

Now, Trump wants Congress to approve a deal with Saudi Arabia that gives the kingdom access to precisely that technology – but with far fewer inspections – while bombing Iran to prevent it from having any enrichment at all.

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Was An Obama Energy Secretary A CCP Plant?

Before Steven Chu oversaw America’s national laboratories and nuclear-weapons complex, a group inside what U.S. officials describe as the CCP’s “political warfare” apparatus listed him as an “overseas honorary president.” He later launched landmark research and technology partnerships with Beijing from inside the Department of Energy.

The organization was not simply “China-linked.” Its own records say it was led by the CCP Central Secretariat and administered by the Central United Front Work Department—the sprawling Party organ the U.S. government says works to co-opt elites, neutralize opposition and manipulate foreign institutions in service of Beijing.

Buried inside a non-searchable image on the official website of the Western Returned Scholars Association, or WRSA, is Chu’s Chinese name: 朱棣文.

The page identifies the organization’s Fourth Council as serving from 1999 to 2003. In the official roster image, under the heading 海外名誉会长—“overseas honorary presidents”—WRSA lists ten additional prestige scientists.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences explicitly identifies 朱棣文 as “Steven Chu,” the Stanford physicist and 1997 Nobel laureate. WRSA itself later used the same Chinese name for the “former U.S. Energy Secretary and physicist” Steven Chu. The surrounding names—some of the most famous overseas Chinese scientists of the era—make the match effectively certain.

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