Category Archives: Nuclear weapons

Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

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The world is anxiously watching the election, with the candidates far apart on issues such as the climate crisis and nuclear weapons

Foreign policy barely gets a mention in this US election, but for the rest of the world the outcome on 3 November will arguably be the most consequential in history.

All US elections have a global impact, but this time there are two issues of existential importance to the planet – the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation – on which the two presidential candidates could hardly be further apart.

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‘Poisoning the Pacific’: New book details US military contamination of islands and ocean

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More than 12,000 pages of US government documents show military operations contaminating the Pacific with radioactive waste, nerve agents, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange

In 1968, Leroy Foster was a master sergeant in the US Air Force, assigned to the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, a United States island territory in the Pacific. The day after he arrived on the island, he recalled being ordered to mix “diesel fuel with Agent Orange”, then spraying “it by truck all over the base to kill the jungle overgrowth”.

Soon after, Foster suffered serious skin complaints and eventually fell sick with Parkinson’s and ischemic heart disease. Later, his daughter had cancer as a teenager, and his grandchild was born with 12 fingers, 12 toes, and a heart murmur. Foster died in 2018.

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Revealed: Saudi Arabia may have enough uranium ore to produce nuclear fuel

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Confidential Chinese report seen by the Guardian intensifies concerns about possible weapons programme

Saudi Arabia likely has enough mineable uranium ore reserves to pave the way for the domestic production of nuclear fuel, according to confidential documents seen by the Guardian.

Details of the stocks are contained in reports prepared for the kingdom by Chinese geologists, who have been scrambling to help Riyadh map its uranium reserves at breakneck speed as part of their nuclear energy cooperation agreement.

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Japan PM sparks anger with near-identical speeches in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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‘It’s the same every year. He talks gibberish and leaves,’ says one survivor after plagiarism app detects 93% match in speeches given days apart

Survivors of the atomic bombings of 75 years ago have accused Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, of making light of their concerns after he delivered two near-identical speeches to mark the anniversaries of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A plagiarism detection app found that Abe’s speech in Nagasaki on Sunday duplicated 93% of a speech he had given in Hiroshima three days earlier, the Mainichi Shimbun reported.

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Imperial War Museum unveils film marking 75 years since Hiroshima bomb

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Video by Es Devlin and Machiko Weston tells story of nuclear bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A powerful 10-minute video artwork marking the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been released by the Imperial War Museum in London.

The museum commissioned stage designers Es Devlin, who is British, and Machiko Weston, who is Japanese, to make the piece, which tells the stories and explores the impact of the bombings from different perspectives.

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Japan recognises dozens more survivors of Hiroshima in landmark ruling

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More than a dozen ‘black rain’ plaintiffs died during legal battle to prove people living further away also suffered radiation exposure in 1945

A court in Japan has for the first time recognised dozens of people who were exposed to radioactive “black rain” as survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, even though they lived outside the area hit hardest by the attack in August 1945.

The Hiroshima district court said the 84 plaintiffs, who are suffering from illnesses linked to radiation exposure, were entitled to the same medical benefits as survivors who lived closer to where the bomb struck.

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Iran admits incident at Natanz nuclear site caused major damage

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Country says suspected attack could slow production of advanced centrifuges, which Israel and US see as threat

Iran has admitted an incident at one of its main nuclear sites last week caused major damage and could slow down the country’s production of advanced centrifuges, technology Israel and the US see as a threat, intensifying suspicions there may have been a deliberate attack on the facility.

Newly released satellite imagery showed the damage from what Iranian authorities attributed to a fire at the Natanz nuclear facility was far more extensive that previously disclosed.

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Rise of Iran hardliners threatens nuclear diplomacy, Europe warned

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Improved economic deal could strengthen hand of Tehran’s reformists, says report

European diplomats are being urged to restart shuttle diplomacy with Iran after the US presidential election in November or risk Tehran hardliners gaining still wider control of Iran’s many layers of government and its economy.

The European 3 (E3) – Germany, France and the UK - managed to maintain their unity at a meeting on Friday at which they agreed to keep the nuclear deal alive, oppose a US plan for the snapback of sanctions and possibly limit the lifting of the UN conventional arms embargo on Iran due to take place in the autumn.

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Russia will open nuclear disarmament talks with US

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But Moscow warns against insisting on including China in New Start negotiations

Russia has confirmed that it will open talks with the US this month on extending a major nuclear disarmament treaty but warned that Washington’s insistence on including China could scuttle efforts.

The deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will meet the US envoy Marshall Billingslea in Vienna on 22 June to begin negotiations on New Start, which expires in February.

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Fumbling the nuclear football: is Trump blundering to arms control chaos?

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The president believes he alone can negotiate away nuclear weapons and win a Nobel prize – but he has quit three treaties and gutted his administration of experts

The Trump administration signaled this week that it was ready to get back in the business of nuclear arms control. A newly appointed envoy, Marshall Billingslea, made his first public remarks to announce talks with Russia are about to resume.

“We have concrete ideas for our next interaction, and we’re finalizing the details as we speak,” Billingslea said.

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North Korea’s Kim Jong-un holds talks on increasing ‘nuclear war deterrence’

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Leader makes first appearance in several weeks to talk about ‘considerably increasing the firepower’ of the military, state media reports

North Korea discussed new policies for increasing its “nuclear war deterrence” during a military meeting presided over by leader Kim Jong-un, state news agency KCNA reported on Sunday.

KCNA did not specify what the nuclear deterrence entailed, but said that “crucial measures” were taken at the meeting “for considerably increasing the firepower strike ability of the artillery pieces of the Korean People’s Army”.

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US security officials ‘considered return to nuclear testing’ after 28-year hiatus

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Discussion held this month as way to press Russia and China into agreeing arms control deal, officials say

US officials have debated whether to carry out the first US nuclear tests in 28 years as a way to pressure Russia and China into make a trilateral arms control deal, according congressional aides and former officials.

They said the discussion took place at a “deputies meeting” of senior national security officials at the White House on 15 May, but that the proposal was shelved for the time being.

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World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US

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  • Spending by nine nuclear-armed states rose 10%
  • Trump boosted nuclear funding but cut pandemic prevention

The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a new report.

The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.

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North Korea fires projectiles into sea for third time in a month

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Suspected short-range missile launches come as Pyongyang announces legislature to meet in April amid coronavirus pandemic

North Korea fired two projectiles that appeared to be short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula, South Korea’s military reported.

The launch on Saturday follows two earlier this month, when North Korea fired short-range missiles and multiple projectiles, according to South Korea’s military, drawing US and Chinese appeals for Pyongyang to return to talks on ending its nuclear and missile programmes.

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Real estate for the apocalypse: my journey into a survival bunker

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Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it. By Mark O’Connell
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Not long ago, I travelled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to see the place from which humanity would supposedly be reborn after global civilisational collapse. The end of the world was trending, and it seemed as good a time as any to visit a place for sitting out the last days. Over the previous few months, perhaps as a means of sublimating my own anxieties about raising a small child in an increasingly dark and volatile world, I had become preoccupied with the apocalyptic tone of our culture.

One of the more perverse aspects of this obsession was a months-long binge of doomsday prepper content, of blogs and forums and YouTube videos in which burly American guys, most of whom were called things like Kyle or Brent, explained how to prepare for a major catastrophe – your global pandemics, your breakdowns of law and order, your all-out nuclear wars – by pursuing various strategies for “tactical survival”. And this had opened out on to a broader vista of apocalyptic preparedness, and to a lucrative niche of the real estate sector catering to individuals of means who wanted a place to retreat to when things truly went sideways.

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Macron’s post-Brexit nuclear ambitions are destined to fail | Rebecca Johnson

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With Britain out of the picture he has spied an opportunity. But France is not going to be Europe’s nuclear shield

Now that Britain has left the European Union, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has moved swiftly to put French nuclear weapons front and centre of EU defence policies. In an hour-long speech on Friday to L’École de guerre (School of War) in Paris, the French president called for a European dialogue about defence and deterrence based on France’s force de frappe of nuclear weapons launched by air and submarine, and invited other EU states to participate in exercises by his country’s nuclear forces.

This is the post-Brexit revival of a vision held by successive French leaders, who itched to establish EU defence policies that would rely on European nuclear weapons rather than the US and Nato. For decades, this aim was marginalised by other EU members. Brexit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have emboldened Macron to put it back on the table – and this time he is getting more attention.

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Deployment of new US nuclear warhead on submarine a dangerous step, critics say

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First submarine to go on patrol armed with the W76-2 warhead makes a nuclear launch more likely, arm control advocates warn

The US has deployed its first low-yield Trident nuclear warhead on a submarine that is currently patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, it has been reported, in what arms control advocates warn is a dangerous step towards making a nuclear launch more likely.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, the USS Tennessee – which left port in Georgia at the end of last year – is the first submarine to go on patrol armed with the W76-2 warhead, commissioned by Donald Trump two years ago.

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Doomsday clock lurches to 100 seconds to midnight – closest to catastrophe yet

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  • Nuclear and climate threats create ‘profoundly unstable’ world
  • Robinson: climate inaction is ‘death sentence for humanity’

The risk of civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis is at a record high, according to US scientists and former officials, calling the current environment “profoundly unstable”.

Related: Trump's impeachment lawyers 'tending toward conspiracy theories' says Schiff – live trial updates

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The Guardian view on Trump’s folly: racing to war | Editorial

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If the 2015 nuclear pact cannot be rebuilt or a new one struck, then the choice will be to let Iran have the bomb or to bomb Iran

Next week the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will unveil the current time on its Doomsday Clock, meant to convey the nuclear dangers facing the world. The closer the clock is to midnight, the greater the existential threat. If the stand-off between Iran and Donald Trump persists, or takes a frightening turn for the worse, then the clock’s hands may be closer to the bell tolling than they have ever been. This would mean the danger to the planet was judged greater than at any time since the first H-bomb tests.

The drumbeat of war reverberates around the Middle East. On Tuesday, Britain, France and Germany said that they had been “left with no choice” but to trigger a dispute mechanism in the six-nation nuclear deal with Iran after Tehran declared, in the aftermath of the US assassination of its top general, that it would no longer observe the pact’s “operational restrictions”. Iran’s president then warned that European soldiers in the Middle East “could be in danger”, a clear indication that if the continent stood with Mr Trump then its forces could expect to be treated as enemy combatants.

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Kim Jong-un signals North Korea could resume nuclear missile tests

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Trump says he trusts leader to refrain from testing, despite Kim’s criticism of Washington’s ‘gangster-like demands’

Kim Jong-un has signalled that North Korea will lift its moratoriums on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in a move likely to anger Donald Trump.

The North Korean leader told a four-day meeting of party officials in Pyongyang that the test ban, which Kim agreed to in talks with the US president, was no longer needed, state media said on Wednesday.

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