Beyond Nuclear International
Tax day and war resistance
What can we learn from Philip Berrigan’s quest for peace?
By Brad Wolf
It is April 15 and we can reflect on the life and work of Philip Berrigan and undertake our own ministry of risk for peace—to ease the suffering, to restore human dignity, and to challenge our doomed policy of warmaking.
Each year Americans forfeit a sizable slice of their income to the United States Treasury to fund the government. Tax Day is dreaded. No one likes surrendering their hard-earned cash. But rather than a resigned shrug, Americans should look closely at what they are getting for their money when it comes to government services and policy.
In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon received $858 billion for the preparation of war. This doesn’t include hidden costs for intelligence services, veterans’ benefits, Homeland Security, or the Department of Energy, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. All totaled, over $1 trillion a year is allotted for warmaking. By comparison, the 2023 budget for the U.S. Department of State, this nation’s department tasked with making peace across the globe, was a relatively miniscule $63 billion.
One way to register resistance to this profligate spending on warmaking is that of renowned peace activist and then Catholic priest Philip Berrigan. During the Vietnam War, Phil initiated the destruction of U.S. military draft files in Baltimore and Catonsville, Maryland, to save the lives of both Vietnamese and Americans, actions for which he received lengthy prison sentences.
These draft file actions by Phil initiated a new form of resistance to the Vietnam War, since no copies were kept of the draft files. Hundreds of similar actions followed at draft board offices across the country with hundreds of thousands of draft files destroyed, all stopping young men from being conscripted to kill or be killed.
Read MoreNuclear regulator delinquent on climate
US government agency reprimands NRC for ignoring climate crisis impacts on reactor safety
From Beyond Nuclear
The findings and recommendations of a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report confirm what Beyond Nuclear has been litigating with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): the agency cannot continue to ignore the safety impacts on nuclear power plants from the worsening climate crisis.
The GAO report is entitled NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS: NRC Should Take Actions to Fully Consider the Potential Effects of Climate Change. It criticizes the NRC for failing to conduct assessments for commercial U.S. nuclear power plants by projecting climate risks and incorporating adequate safety margins into both old and new designs.
These risks include a worsening of natural hazards and encompass heat and cold, drought, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and sea-level rise, according to the GAO, all of which could seriously jeopardize the safe operation of the nation’s current fleet that is going through extreme license renewals — and any future new — nuclear reactors if not properly safeguarded.
“The NRC is proceeding with the extension of operating licenses for several vulnerable nuclear power plants without any climate change risk analysis,” said Paul Gunter, a policy analyst and spokesperson for Beyond Nuclear. “Worse, the NRC staff claim that preparing for the effects of the climate crisis is outside its scope.”
Read MoreSpeaking with one voice
Tribes call for cleanup, remediation and an end to uranium mining and milling
By Linda Pentz Gunter
They were there to tell their stories. The contamination of air, land and water. The sicknesses. The displacement. The loss of community, culture and language. The deprivation of fundamental human rights. And they spoke with one voice in their plea for justice, the voice of Indigenous peoples in the United States and their lived experience of uranium mines and mills.
The occasion was a thematic hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) at the Organization of American States. The topic was: United States: Impacts of uranium exploitation on indigenous peoples’ rights.
The speakers came from Navajo, Arapaho, Havasupai, Ute and Oglala Lakota.
And, across the room, they came from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of the Interior.
The Native American speakers made the same plea they have reiterated for decades: effective cleanup and removal of the radioactive waste that has poisoned their communities and people, and will do so again as long new uranium mines are allowed to go forward. And no new mines.
The personal stories they told the listeners — representatives from the US government, the IACHR panel and members of the public in the audience —were those of universal injustice against Indigenous communities, stories that have been told before and, seemingly, have to be told over and over. They are stories that are listened to and not heard, often not responded to and almost never acted upon.
Read More“Nuclear comes last”
Banks reject nuclear funding, stocks nosedive and the industry says it should, believe it or not, slow down
By Linda Pentz Gunter
NuScale, the company whose small modular reactor project collapsed so spectacularly last November, is “burning cash at the rate of $185 million per year”. On March 22, the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, sold 59,768 of his shares in the company. This is the same CEO who declared NuScale’s SMR project, aptly named VOYGR, “a dead horse.” It’s clearly on a journey to nowhere.
Wells Fargo, with an eye on prudent investments, has declared, “We think investor enthusiasm for SMR is misguided”. As The Motley Fool reported, “NuScale’s VOYGR nuclear power product has ‘no secure customers’ and is ‘not cost competitive’ says the analyst.”
The splashy cheerleading Nuclear Energy Summit organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Brussels on March 21 proved to be just that. The participants arrived floating on the hot air of their misplaced enthusiasm but “left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions”.
European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros, told Summit attendees to their face that “The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high”. Representatives from the European and Latin American banking worlds said that “their lending priorities lean toward renewables and transmission grids” and that “nuclear comes last”.
Read MoreEinstein’s vision for peace
Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons, he threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation
By Lawrence S. Wittner
Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.
Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation. In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.” Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.”
Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”
Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law. In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.”
That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly. “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said. “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. . . . As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.” And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.
A special (nuclear) relationship
A little known US-UK nuclear weapons agreement is up for renewal. It needs to end instead.
By Kate Hudson
The “special relationship” is a longstanding refrain in British politics, used to justify so much that’s bad in UK foreign policy choices.
I recall in 2002 when Tony Blair agreed Britain had to pay a “blood price” to secure its special relationship with the US. We all know how that ended up.
But it wasn’t Blair who paid the blood price – it was 179 British service personnel, killed in an illegal war, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and countless more injured, displaced and traumatised.
Much that feeds war can be notched up to the US/UK special relationship, but it goes far beyond providing diplomatic and military cover and assistance to US enterprises.
That relationship is also responsible for the development of the UK’s nuclear arsenal and its continued possession of these weapons of mass destruction.
The special nuclear relationship is facilitated by the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) – the world’s most extensive nuclear sharing agreement.
Even though it comes up for renewal in parliament every ten years, few seem to know of its existence.
Neither do many know the extent to which it makes us dependent on the US – or indeed that it underpins the wider relationship between the US and UK.
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