Tag: nuclear weapons

The West Faces Uranium Shortage Amid Competition From China And Russia

American and European companies in the nuclear energy supply chain have become increasingly vulnerable to a possible supply shock in the uranium market amid fierce resource competition from China and Russia and the planned surge in nuclear power generation to meet electricity demand.

As many countries are now looking to nuclear power to cut emissions and reliance on imports of oil and gas, and meet the growing power demand from AI and data centers, they would need more uranium supply.

But China and Russia have moved to secure supply from African countries and are buying the key nuclear fuel from Kazakhstan, which is the biggest producer of uranium in the world and prefers to keep its sales diversified.

Not all in the nuclear power industry and the energy companies in the West have realized that competition for uranium supply is leading to a supply crunch, industry executives have told the Financial Times.

“We’re on a depletion curve that I don’t think many customers have realised,” Cory Kos, vice-president of investor relations at Cameco, the biggest western supplier based in Canada, told FT.

Amid plans for expansion of nuclear power generation in many countries, including in the United States, uranium demand is set to surge in the coming years and decades, while Western companies are seeing increased competition from China and Russia for supply.

“Russia and China are rapidly expanding their offtake of mined uranium from international partners, uranium enrichment capabilities, and nuclear infrastructure,” Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz with the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote in a report earlier this month.

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Trump and DOGE Want To Cut Waste? This Upcoming Test Launch of a Nuclear Missile Is All Waste – and Dangerous Folly

At a press conference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on last Thursday, President Trump once again reiterated his desire to cut military spending. He stated that the United States, Russia, and China should reduce their “defense” budgets in order to focus on more productive things.

“It doesn’t really make sense, does it? We’re spending the money against each other and we could spend that money for better purposes if we get along,” Trump said. “And I’ll tell you, I think that something like that will happen.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a town hall with troops at the Pentagon, also hinted at military program cuts. And Trump says DOGE will look at the Pentagon.

Trump was more specific when discussing nuclear weapons. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over or 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and [Russia] is building new nuclear weapons, and China is building new nuclear weapons.”

Trump is right about the danger of nuclear weapons. (However, during his first presidency, he withdrew the U.S. from the vital Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties.) If he is serious at all about his supposed goal of cutting military spending, “getting along” with Russia and China, and not wanting to build new nuclear weapons, a very effective way to achieve all three would be to eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) right now.

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A Pathway To Avoid Nuclear Catastrophe

Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?

There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when – pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons – the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements.  Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.

But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.  As international conflict heightened and the nuclear disarmament movement waned, additional nations became nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russian governments abandoned most of their nuclear disarmament agreements, and all nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) revived the nuclear arms race.  Some of their leaders – Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin – even issued public threats of nuclear war.  Recently, the hands of the famous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight – the most dangerous setting in its history.

Deeply disturbed by the slide toward disaster, the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), comprised of hundreds of organizations, teamed up with the governments of many of the world’s non-nuclear nations to foster a series of UN conferences focused on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war.  Eventually, a UN conference drawing representatives from some 130 governments and dozens of civil society organizations met in March 2017 and began negotiations for a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons.  In July, the delegates adopted a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by a vote of 122 in favor, 1 opposed, and 1 abstention.  The treaty banned the use, threatened use, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, stationing, and installation of nuclear weapons.

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Russia May Lift Restrictions on Nuclear Weapons If US Goes Through With Trump Missile Defense Order

Russia may expand its arsenal of nuclear weapons if the US goes ahead with a major missile defense program that’s been ordered by President Trump, Russia’s TASS news agency reported on Thursday.

Trump signed an executive order on Monday to develop an “Iron Dome for America” that can intercept ballistic, hypersonic, and other types of advanced missiles, unlike Israel’s Iron Dome, which is designed to intercept short-range crude rockets. The order also calls for an improvement in missile defense to protect US troops deployed in other countries and the territory of US allies.

Writing in the Russian journal International Affairs, Grigory Mashkov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special ambassador, said the US’s global missile defense posture was already a threat to Russia and said expanding it further “puts an end to the prospects of strategic offensive arms reduction and preservation of strategic stability on the previous terms.”

Mashkov said that it is not “not ruled out that in the current conditions of confrontation with the West, with its policy of inflicting strategic damage on Russia, we may face the need for moving away from restrictions on nuclear and missile arsenals in favor of their quantitative and qualitative increase.”

He said one possible retaliatory measure Russia could take is adjusting its position on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other commitments Moscow has made related to the transparency of its nuclear stockpile.

“We will have to take a fresh look at all our commitments in the area of strengthening transparency and confidence-building measures, and suspend discussions on nuclear risks and threats, which are becoming empty talk in the context of growing efforts by the West to undermine strategic and non-strategic nuclear deterrent forces,” Mashkov said.

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Thermonuclear Crack: The Death Wish of the ‘Elites’

Isn’t it high time we “augment” our nuclear force “posture”? Shouldn’t we fight to achieve peace through nuclear “strength” and “deterrence”? Isn’t it smart to “refurbish, rebuild, and modernize” the nuclear triad? What a great “investment” that is! And a “job-creator” too!

These are some of the buzz words thrown about by the nuclear “elites” in America. They want to sell us on new ICBMs (the Sentinel), a new stealth bomber (the B-21 Raider), and new nuclear SLBMs (on Columbia-class submarines). All this thermonuclear stupidity is projected to cost roughly $2 trillion over the next 30 years. Quite the “investment,” right?

What the “experts” don’t talk about is the genocidal and exterminatory nature of these thermonuclear bombs and missiles. They don’t talk about the destruction of most life forms on our planet due to thermonuclear winter. They don’t talk about the enormous and rapidly mushrooming cost of these weapons. (For example, the B-21 has already climbed from $550 million per plane to $750 million; much like a missile, Sentinel costs have rocketed upward even more rapidly.) And they sure as hell don’t talk about the immorality of mass murder.

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Energy Department Deploys Helicopters Over D.C. — Scanning for ‘Radiological or Nuclear Irregularities’ Ahead of Trump’s Historic Inauguration

As the nation’s capital braces for President-elect Donald Trump’s historic inauguration, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is ramping up unprecedented security measures.

Helicopters equipped with cutting-edge radiation detection technology are buzzing low over Washington, D.C., scanning for potential “radiological or nuclear irregularities.”

In an exclusive look at the security preparations, CBS’ Nicole Sganga joined Department of Energy senior scientist Jacqueline Brandon aboard one of the agency’s highly specialized helicopters.

Flying in a meticulous grid over the National Mall, the aircraft’s mission is clear: detect and neutralize threats like dirty bombs or other nuclear hazards.

“You’re trying to create a blueprint of what the radiation in Washington, DC, looks like ahead of the inauguration,” Sganga asked during the flight.

“Correct,” confirmed Brandon. With only two helicopters of this kind in the Department of Energy’s arsenal, every second of airtime counts. “If we find a radiological irregularity, we’ll investigate it even further,” she added.

Equipped with highly sensitive technology capable of detecting minute variations in radiation levels, these helicopters serve as an airborne watchdog.

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Angling Toward Armageddon: The Return of Senator Strangelove

Almost 80 years later, it’s sadly all too easy to forget that two nuclear weapons were once used with devastating effect on this planet. Here’s just a small description by one survivor of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that can be found in the book Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors: “Most of the A-Bomb survivors were burned all over their bodies. They were not only naked, but also their skin came off. They were wandering around looking for their parents, husbands, wives, and children in the city of Hiroshima which had been reduced to ashes.”

Only recently, one of the dwindling group of survivors of that American bombing, Shigeko Sasamori, died. She had been a child of 13 when her city was blown to smithereens and, though unlike so many of her compatriots, she lived to tell the tale, one-third of her body was severely burned. Unbelievably enough, she would be one of the 25 “Hiroshima maidens,” all disfigured by the first atomic bombing on this planet, chosen to receive medical help a decade later in New York City. Her death, as the New York Times reported in an obituary, came only “two months after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors, for its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung reminds us today, global nuclear arsenals, including the American one, continue to grow and now hold weapons that make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem more like BBs. To take just the three leading nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, each could, unaided, turn this planet (and undoubtedly several more like it) into giant graveyards.

While it’s true that, since Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9, 1945, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used in war, there are now believed to be more than 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet. Nine countries possess them and, in a significant nuclear conflict, the Earth could be thrown into a state of “nuclear winter” in which billions of us could die of starvation, and yet, as Hartung makes all too vividly clear today, the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal is still in the process of being expanded (the term, hideously enough, is “modernized”) to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in the coming decades. Let him explain.

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Current year US military is hilarious

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn’t go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn’t an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn’t had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can’t fly when it’s raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

Unfortunately none of the American cruise missiles are particularly long range or stealthy (there was a stealthy one, retired),  all are subsonic, and they have shorter ranges than the Russian gizmos, which also come in supersonic and hypersonic varieties. Rooskies also have newer generations of ballistic missiles, and are really good at shooting down cruise missiles, so there’s that. Supposedly they also have nuclear tidal wave torpedoes capable of wiping out US coastal areas in radioactive sea water, SLAM hypersonic nuclear  ramjet cruise missiles and who knows what else. Pretty obvious who wins a nuclear war scenario: it won’t be the US. I mean, nobody wins a nuclear war, but the days of US supremacy or even basic competence with maintaining nuclear forces are long over.

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Yakuza leader pleads guilty in U.S. court to conspiring to sell nuclear material

A member of the Japanese yakuza criminal underworld pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal, US authorities said Wednesday.

Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa and co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offenses, and both were remanded.

He was then additionally charged in February 2024 with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material and lethal narcotics from Myanmar, and to purchase military weaponry on behalf of an armed insurgent group, prosecutors said.

The military weaponry to be part of the arms deal included surface-to-air missiles, the indictment alleged.

“As he admitted in federal court today, Takeshi Ebisawa brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” said Acting US attorney Edward Kim, using another name for Myanmar.

“At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma.”

Prosecutors alleged that Ebisawa, 60, “brazenly” moved material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, alongside drugs, from Myanmar.

From 2020, Ebisawa boasted to an undercover officer he had access to large quantities of nuclear materials that he sought to sell, providing photographs of materials alongside Geiger counters registering radiation.

During a sting operation including undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.”

“The (US) laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Department said in its statement at the time.

One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had available more than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 — referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as ‘yellowcake’.”

The indictment claimed Ebisawa had suggested using the proceeds of the sale of nuclear material to fund weapons purchases on behalf of an unnamed ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar.

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Going Nuclear Is a Bad Option for South Korea

Robert Kelly and Min-hyung Kim support South Korean nuclearization:

With South Korea better able to handle the North Korean problem on its own, the United States could devote more attention to its top priority in East Asia—competition with China. But first, Washington needs to stop getting in its ally’s way and start letting Seoul make its own decisions. A South Korean decision to nuclearize could, on balance, be good not just for South Korea but also for the United States.

South Korea should not develop nuclear weapons, and the U.S. must remain firm on this point. Washington should not encourage South Korea to do this, and it should not look the other way if it happens. The last thing that East Asia needs is yet another nuclear weapons state. More proliferation will only make the region more unstable and dangerous than it is now.

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