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Joshua Frank, The Nuclear Disaster You Weren’t Thinking About

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Consider it something of a human miracle that, 80 years after the United States atomically obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, with eight other countries now possessing such weaponry (and my country and Israel at war with a nation they fear might become the ninth), nuclear weapons have never again been used in wartime (though they have repeatedly been tested out in peacetime).

As it happens, however, another kind of nuclear weaponry (though never thought of that way) has indeed spread globally and could go off at any moment, day or night. I’m thinking, of course, about nuclear power plants, of which there are about 440 operating in 31 countries. As we (should have) found out 15 years ago, when a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, went haywire, as is so vividly described today by TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of the forthcoming book Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future, the nuclear dangers on this planet are now only multiplying. And that’s even more the case because, on an ever more rapidly overheating planet faced with accelerating climate change, nuclear power has become a distinct alternative to coal, oil, and natural gas, which release such devastating levels of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere in what might be considered a slow-motion alternative to nuclear war.

Consider it strange as well, as you read Frank’s piece, that, from 1945 to today, nuclear disasters have largely been localized (if such a word can even be used, given the subject) to Japan. And with that in mind, consider our increasingly nuclearized world and its dangers. Tom

Searching for Solace in a Nuclearized World

The Nightmare of Fukushima 15 Years Later

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Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for "peaceful" nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer.

I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.

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Clarence Lusane, Racial Genetics Is Trump’s Defining Worldview (Full Stop!)

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Hey, the clip was “erroneously” posted at Donald Trump’s Truth Social website, right? You know, the one I mean, the 62-second video clip (to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) that featured Barack and Michelle Obama with ape heads, the one that the president felt there was simply no need to explain or in any way say he was sorry for. You know, the very one where, despite later deleting it from his account, he insisted, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.” Meanwhile, as NPR reported, “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the clip, saying, ‘Please stop the fake outrage.'”

Oh, right, it’s certainly fake outrage — but only, of course, if you happen to live in a distinctly White supremacist world. In that case, you’d certainly shrug off Michelle Obama’s response that “it’s his same old con, doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

How could the outrage not be fake when you’re talking about the president who wants to toss every immigrant he can find, who is not from Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, out of the country — oh, sorry, with the exception of White immigrants from South Africa? (“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark… Send us some nice people.”)

Of course, Donald Trump is not exactly alone in the history of American presidents. After all, 111 years ago, Woodrow Wilson screened a movie, The Birth of a Nation, that glorified the Ku Klux Klan in the East Room of the White House. And with all of that (and so much more) in mind, let TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane take you into a world in which Donald Trump learned all too much about race from… yes, of course, Jeffrey Epstein. Tom

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

The President with the “Right Genes”

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Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also -- wait for it -- a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.

Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

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Alfred W. McCoy, How the Past Whispers to the Present in Iran

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Honestly, I can barely believe that I’m living through it again. After all, I began TomDispatch in the wake — a distinctly appropriate word — of an American president (George W. Bush) ordering the invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and, remind me, how did that turn out? Now, here I am, 24 years later, with an American president — and the “peace president” at that — launching attacks on and a possible war against Iran. If it weren’t so bloody and painful, it would almost be comic. The supposedly greatest imperial power of this era (and perhaps any era, since no other country, historically, had quite so much power and influence globally as the United States did at the height of its ascendancy) is now visibly shooting itself in the foot (if not the head).

And mind you, all of this is happening on a planet where war and the fossil fuel emissions it releases in such staggering quantities only help ensure that not just one great power but the whole planet will be heading down, too. And one of the more striking things that Donald Trump’s strange imperial actions — from Venezuela to Iran — have been doing is taking attention away from what’s happening to this planet right now. I mean, did you even notice that recently the world’s largest iceberg, known as A23a, which once was more than twice the size of greater London, has essentially melted away in the Southern Atlantic Ocean in the growing heat of this moment? Or that, for the first time, there are mosquitoes in Iceland, which has had record high temperatures this year (and that the only place without them now is Antarctica)?

No, of course not! Not when President Trump’s assault on Iran (and so much else that he does) invariably steals the headlines, day after day, while, among other things, he devastatingly revokes “a scientific finding that climate change is a danger to public health.” Honestly, we couldn’t be in a more unnerving world, could we? Well, maybe we could — and that’s a truly frightening thought! And while that’s on your mind, check out TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy’s latest look at our mad president in this strange moment of distinct imperial decline — and while you’re at it, get your hands on his remarkable new book (which I can proudly say I edited), Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. I do consider it a must-read! Tom

Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz

The Iran War as America’s Very Own Suez Crisis

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In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current U.S. intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.

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