CND Press Roundup - 16 December

• UK nuclear
• Dr David Lowry, Senior international research fellow at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge (MA), has written to The Times to contest their editorial claims that nuclear power is a ‘carbon-free’ way of generating electricity: “the carbon footprint of its full uranium “fuel chain” needs to be considered, from uranium mining, milling, enrichment (which is highly energy intensive), fuel fabrication, irradiation inside the reactor, radioactive waste conditioning, storage, and packaging to final disposal.” He points to Professor Mark Jacobson’s finding that nuclear’s carbon emissions are 10-18 times greater than renewables. Source: The Times. 
• Analysis this morning by Mark Lewis, the chief sustainability strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, points out that “wind and solar are intrinsically deflationary, whereas fossil fuels are intrinsically inflationary”, adding that this has “huge implications for the distribution of value across the global energy system over the next three decades.” Lewis highlights estimates that the cost of utility-scale solar installations fell by 80% 2010-19. Source: FT. 
• Picking up on Lewis’ article, Richard Murphy asks why, given renewables are the future, we are “still risking so much with nuclear?”. Murphy writes: “what is the reason for the risk of putting anther nuclear reactor on the Suffolk coast where the chance that it will be flooded within the foreseeable future is high? I wish I knew. We now have the option of viable energy to sustain the transition we need. More investment in it only increases its appeal. And yet still we stick with the harmful solutions.” Source: Tax Research UK. 

NATO 

• US-Turkey
• Turkey has condemned US sanctions over its purchase of a Russian missile defence system as a “grave mistake”, and threatened retaliation. The country’s foreign ministry said that the decision was “inexplicable” given Washington ‘repeatedly rejected Ankara’s offer to form a joint working group to allay U.S. concerns that the S-400s threatened NATO defences’. Source:Reuters. 
• Though the sanctions were ‘very mild’, and have more symbolic significance than any economic cost for Ankara, analysts suggest that dealing with tensions with Turkey remains a significant challenge for Biden. Asli Aydintasbas, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: “The Biden administration will still have to deal with the S-400 crisis… It’s a fairly significant thing for a Nato country to be sanctioned by the USA… Getting too a place where the S-400s are no longer an issue between Turkey and the US will be tough.” Source: FT. 
• Pacific pivot, or not? 
• Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, has argued in a piece for a conservative American foreign policy magazine that: ‘NATO members should resist any attempt to substantially reorient the alliance on countering China. NATO lacks the military tools, the societal will, and the strategic imperative to cast its gaze east of Suez.’ Barndollar suggests that NATO should focus on the security of Europe (including defence against Russian threats), rather than “becoming a half-hearted American auxiliary in Asia”. Source: The National Interest. 

Nuclear weapons 

• NATO TPNW worries? 
• NATO has issued a new statement condemning the TPNW, arguing that the treaty “does not reflect the increasingly challenging international security environment and is at odds with the existing non-proliferation and disarmament architecture.” The core of the statement’s argument is that the TPNW undermines the NPT, and in any case “will not change the legal obligations of our countries with respect to nuclear weapons.” Source: NATO. 
• Warhead arms control 
• A new piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists argues that it remains “profoundly in the security interests of the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world to aggressively develop a safe and reliable means to verify a potential nuclear weapons freeze and additional reductions to global nuclear arsenals.” To start these kind of efforts, it would be necessary first to verify and inventory the extent of nuclear warhead arsenals, requiring a “strategic nuclear verification initiative.” Worth reading in full. Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

To read: 

• China’s power is rising in an unstable world (Ryosuke Harada, FT) 

To listen: 

• What next for the Iran nuclear deal? (Channel 4 News)