CND Press Roundup Tuesday 16th August 2022

War in Ukraine / NATO

• Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a telephone conversation on Monday to discuss the safe functioning of the Russian-backed Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. They also discussed initiatives to ease export limits on Russian fertiliser and food products.

• The UN has also offered to facilitate a visit by its nuclear watchdog to Zaporizhzhia, but needs both Ukraine and Russia to agree. Moscow has put conditions on an inspection, saying that any mission routed through Kiev would be too dangerous. It comes as both Russia and Ukraine accused each other of being responsible for shelling at the plant on Monday.

• Meanwhile on Tuesday, Sergei Shoigu said Russia has “no need” to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and branded media speculation on a nuclear attack as lies. “From a military point of view, there is no need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine to achieve the set goals. The main purpose of Russian nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack,” Shoigu told a security conference in Moscow.

• Further explosions were reported at a Russian ammo depot on the Crimean peninsula used to supply frontline fighting on the Ukrainian mainland. The explosion, labelled “sabotage” by the Kremlin, also caused disruptions to local train schedules. While Kiev has indicated it may have been responsible, it suggests that Ukraine has received new capabilities allowing it to strike deeper into Russian controlled territory and disrupt supply lines.

Trident

• Prime Ministerial hopefuls Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have both given their backing to a formal recognition of Britain’s nuclear test veterans. Sunak’s team said he would back the awarding of a medal – which needs to be approved by an independent committee – and for a formal investigation to be opened up to assess whether “the tests represented a criminal offence towards these veterans.” Truss meanwhile wants to look again at pensions for nuclear veterans, which under the current system sees only 1.6 percent of their claims approved. The push to recognise nuclear test veterans follows an investigation by The Mirror which found that the UK government downplayed the extent of health effects suffered by veterans and the true number of veterans to be affected.

Anti-War

• Former Scottish CND Chair Arthur West writes in the Morning Star on how the peace movement is needed now more than ever – referencing two particular organisations the Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW) and Don’t Bank on the Bomb.

UK Nuclear Energy

• The Times looks at how water shortages and climate change “erodes” faith in nuclear projects like Sizewell C in Suffolk: “The government is so keen to build the £20 billion Sizewell C that last month it pushed the button on the project despite its rejection by the planning inspectorate: a body that wanted “greater clarity about a sustainable water supply” for cooling the two reactors and their irradiated fuel. Still, could the bigger water issue actually be a saltier one: that, given global warming and coastal erosion, Sizewell C is not only in the “wrong location” but a potentially “dangerous” one? It’s the view of engineer Nick Scarr, who thinks developer EDF, the government and regulators are overlooking the risks that Sizewell C turns into a “promontory”, encircled by the sea. Scarr, a member of the Nuclear Consulting Group, a band of experts and academics, has long disagreed with EDF over the plant’s flood risk. And who knows if he is right. Yet his concern over the government’s development consent order goes further: that regulators and ministers have taken a “best-case, non-conservative assessment” of the science and opted to push ahead anyway. A sort of wishful thinking.”

• The FT bemoans how short-term politics is ruining British infrastructure projects. On nuclear power: “The last Labour government had plans for 10 new power stations to replace 11 ageing nuclear reactors, the last of them also opened nearly 30 years ago. France, by comparison, has 56 nuclear reactors, providing three-quarters of its electricity — though much of it is offline at the moment for maintenance. Anglo-Saxon “wisdom” that the French nuclear power programme was Gaullist statism run riot is no longer so obvious, in the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression as well as net zero. It is farcical for Boris Johnson to suggest that the UK could now open one nuclear power station every year after a short planning process. Hinkley Point C, the UK’s one current nuclear power project, was initiated more than a decade ago and won’t be commissioned for at least another five years. The complex £25bn private financing package, led by French energy giant EDF, took years to negotiate and has kept changing in a forlorn Treasury bid to limit risk. It is not replicable for future projects, yet no new blueprint either for financing or for accelerating the planning process is proposed for further projects.”

Iran Nuclear Deal

• Iran has submitted a written response to the EU’s draft text agreement on a renewed nuclear deal. Iranian state news didn’t give any details on the substance of the reply but did suggest that it didn’t accept all the proposals in the document, despite being told that this was non-negotiable.

• US officials have also replied to the EU’s draft text in private, not giving any further information about the nature of their response. State Department spokesperson Ned Price also called on Tehran to drop its “extraneous” demands such as having a unit of its Revolutionary Guards Corp removed from Washington’s list of terrorist organisations.

• Stephen Pollard’s Telegraph column links the Iran nuclear deal and the recent attack on the author Salman Rushdie, using the attack to argue that it is naive to accept Iran as a good faith actor: “Despite unrelenting attempts by those who should know better to portray Iran as on the cusp of reform, it remains a rogue state with a criminal regime which needs defeating, not schmoozing. Literally criminal. On Wednesday, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was charged in the US with plotting the murder of John Bolton, the former US National Security Adviser. Both on its own and using its terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah, Iran has a long history of attempted and successful murders. The first Iran deal, signed in 2015, was a disaster. As Iran carried on working towards a nuclear weapon, we pretended everything was fine, handing over huge amounts of foreign currency that allowed Iran to entrench its behaviour. President Trump sensibly abandoned the deal in 2018 and, under his “maximum sanctions” policy, Iran was being brought to its knees economically, which acted as a brake on its global terror activities.”

Nuclear Korea

• South Korea and the US will commence their largest joint war games in years next week. Dubbed Ulchi Freedom Shield, the exercises will take place between August 22 and September 1 and will include aircraft, warships, tanks and tens of thousands of troops. The expanded drills come amid a ramp up in North Korean missile testing and rumours of an upcoming nuclear test – Pyongyang’s first since a self-imposed moratorium in 2017.

• That’s as South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol offered what he called “audacious” economic aid to North Korea in exchange for denuclearisation. Speaking during celebrations to mark Liberation Day from Japan, Yoon used the opportunity to call for greater cooperation between Tokyo and Seoul towards a “common future” free from the legacies of Imperial Japan’s colonial past.

• Meanwhile Russia’s Vladimir Putin marked Liberation Day in a letter to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un marking both country’s “comradely friendship” which heralds back to the “anti-Japanese war” – a reference to World War Two. Putin also offered military aid and support to North Korea, while others have suggested that North Korean labourers could be sent to rebuild infrastructure in eastern Ukraine.  

Nuclear War

• 5 billion people would die from famine if a large nuclear war broke out between Russia and the US, a new study has found. Scientists from Rutgers in the US ran a number of nuclear conflict scenarios including several conflicts between India and Pakistan or various scales. The team’s conclusions matched that of CND – that a nuclear war must be avoided at all costs – and they recommended that the nuclear power states sign up to the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This story was picked up across outlets including Sky News, The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Mirror. The Timestakes a slightly different tack on the study, leading with the fact that Argentina and Australia were the best places to ride out the nuclear Armageddon.  

• Tom Ough responds in the Independent to Hamish de Bretton-Gordon’s recent Telegraph piece calling for Britain to prepare for nuclear war – speaking to Paul Ingram, from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Ingram is just back from the NPT review conference in New York where he noted that Russian diplomats are working hard “to change the way in which their statements earlier this year [on a nuclear conflict] are to be interpreted, and they’re trying to describe them as warnings rather than threats.”

Trump

• ICAN speaks to Business Insider on the news that confidential documents about nuclear weapons were among the cache of files seized by the FBI during a raid on former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. “I think we really have no idea what was going on inside Trump’s head and that’s all the more terrifying because at one point he had control over all of the US’s nuclear weapons. So I think it shows that we can’t rely on anybody to control weapons that can destroy the world 10 times over,” policy research coordinator Alicia Sanders-Zakre said.

Nuclear History

• Becky Alexis-Martin reflects on the passing of atom bomb survivor and fashion designer Issey Miyake, in this piece looking at the atom and how its place in popular culture whitewashes the destructive power of nuclear weapons.