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nuclear weapons
The AI-Fascism-Climate Disaster Pendulum Is Lowering, But We Can Stop It
The human, beneath the lowering pendulum, is not trapped; they can get up and develop national legislation and international treaties to stop the pendulum’s movement and, eventually, remove it entirely.
Sep 29, 2026
There are many ways in which the swinging pendulum could lower onto the neck of the human.
The human could come to represent something wholly different than themself in relying on advanced artificial intelligence. More drastically, the human could become subservient to AI at some point in the future. And, in the worst-case scenario, the human could be physically wiped out by AI-launched nuclear weapons. AI is already embedded in command-and-control systems surrounding American nuclear weapons. If given greater allowance in the future, it would be unlikely to have the same reservations about using them that humans do.
Then, there is danger with the human themself, as we see with End of Times-bent leaders, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. They could continue to further escalate wars and international criminal behavior to the point that would push the world into a wider conflict in which nuclear weapons may be used. Even if these destructive weapons were not used in a future global conflict, conventional weapons have the ability to decimate cities as we’ve seen with Dresden, London, and Gaza.
The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.
Lastly, there is climate change. While unlikely to cause the pendulum to drop on the human’s neck in one fell swoop, continuous massive fires, heat, flooding, and violent storms will cause further mass migration and xenophobic backlash. The countries where climate migrants go to—wealthy Western ones—will have their own weather-related disasters and will be depleted of relief funds. With no relief from “natural” devastation, the human is unlikely to see any use for government and likely to live in increasingly gated communities with tribalistic mindsets.
Already there are 450,000 projected heat-related deaths mostly in the Global South over the next half year from climate change and Super El Niño. This seems to have hardly caused most Westerners to bat an eyelash, as they have already heightened their walls against migration either by letting people drown in the Mediterranean or by voting for someone who promised mass deportations. The fascists we’ve elected or who are growing in power, like AfD in Germany, reflect the current lack of empathy for the Global South other, and we’re only seeing the beginning of human-caused climate change’s wrath.
But the human, beneath the lowering pendulum, is not trapped. There are no ropes around their torso or arms tying them down. The human can get up and develop national legislation and international treaties to stop the pendulum’s movement and, eventually, remove it entirely. The US, on a national level, nearly did this under former President Joe Biden. The Democrats were one vote away from passing Build Back Better, which would have created tens of thousands of green jobs and throttled the fossil fuel industry. Former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was the single holdout. Biden needed to arm-twist him to get him onboard, as we know the GOP would’ve done if they were in his shoes. Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 that makes it more difficult for Big Tech to collect individuals’ data without their consent. In 1987, nations came together and adopted the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Every country in the world has joined since, and the ozone layer is on track to recover. It is a proven template for future global climate action.
Thus, the pendulum need not fall on the human’s neck. The blind advance of AI to the detriment of workers, the environment, and what it means to be human can be stopped. The fascist wave has crested, but it can fall like in Hungary and potentially in the US after the November elections. The extent of future climate change disasters can be mitigated when the people take the power back.
The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.
The time to retake control of the human condition is now.
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Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: an Urgent Existential Threat
At this time of great peril, it is also a time of great opportunity if only we will act. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to take them apart.
Sep 26, 2026
On Saturday the world observes the United Nations International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, known as Nuclear Weapons Elimination Day. It was first observed on September 26, 2014 subsequent to the UN Declaration in December 2013 following high-level United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament. The day provides an opportunity to educate the public and elected officials about the benefits of eliminating nuclear weapons, as well as the humanitarian, social, and economic costs of their continued existence.
Today, our world faces the greatest threat of nuclear war with the devastating possibility of the extinction of humanity. Current nuclear arsenals have roughly 12,187 nuclear weapons, hundreds of which are on hair-trigger alert with the potential to cause the deaths of billions from the use of only this small percentage of the world’s arsenals.
We have seen a breakdown in relationships between the largest nuclear armed states. The expiration of the New START Treaty occurred on February 5 this year. This has left the world for the first time since 1970 with no agreed-upon nuclear limitation treaty. We have witnessed reckless and immoral threats against adversaries and ultimately to all of humanity by the nuclear “superpowers,“ including US President Donald Trump’s not-so-veiled nuclear threat to annihilate Iran and its people before the world community at the UN's 81st General Assembly on Tuesday of this week. Such vitriol and illegal statements regarding the threatened use of nuclear weapons cannot be tolerated. Imagine our reaction if we heard any other nation espousing similar comments before the international community.
An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way.
We have also recently acknowledged the illegal placement of weapons in space by the United States. In our technologically reliant world, the existence and potential use of such weapons threatens much of our day to day lives with the possibility of rendering technology impotent.
Each of these facts when combined with the potential for disruptive technologies, including discussions and testing of artificial intelligence in nuclear war scenarios, led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to reset their famous Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight earlier this year, the closest it has been since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 81 years ago.
The challenge to rein in these weapons seems daunting and impossible.
Yet, at this time of great peril, it is also a time of great opportunity if only we will act. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to take them apart. We have made tremendous progress through the decades reducing global arsenals from roughly 64,000 in 1985 to the current totals. What is needed is the political will and courage.
Internationally, nuclear weapons are illegal to possess, develop, test, acquire, transfer, use, or threaten to use, by virtue of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was adopted on July 7, 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021. This treaty evolved from the inertia of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with the understanding of the humanitarian consequences of even a limited war, and the refusal of the non-nuclear nations to be held hostage any longer by their nuclear counterparts. Initially adopted by 122 nations, the treaty currently has 101 nations that have signed it and 75 that have ratified it through their legislative bodies representing a majority of the world‘s population. The lion's share of effort on this treaty has been by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN is a coalition of 733 international partner organizations.
Here in the United States, a similar grassroots coalition exists called “Back From the Brink.“ This coalition includes 505 organizations encompassing every sector of society, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 594 local and state officials, 70 members of Congress through Congressional Resolutions H.Res 317 and S.Res 323, and 28 community hubs across the nation. Addressing the urgent danger of nuclear weapons, the campaign works to build awareness and support for the need to abolish these weapons coupled with the immediate actionable precautionary measures necessary to prevent nuclear war until their elimination is achieved.
As such, Back From the Brink calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war. It urges the US to enact these five policy solutions:
- Pursue global elimination of nuclear weapons through a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
- Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
- End the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack;
- Take US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
- Cancel the plan to replace the entire US arsenal with enhanced weapons.
Working with Back From the Brink is Students for Nuclear Disarmament (SND). As a national, nonpartisan, organization dedicated to raising awareness among Gen Z about the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, its growing presence in high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation educates and empowers young people to take action against the growing threat of nuclear war.
To succeed in this critical effort to save humanity, we must remain informed and work to inform others. Our movement, while still barely noted by corporate media, is unstoppable and must continue to move quickly and strategically. An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way. We must demand wise public officials to act immediately and move away from the brink of nuclear war.
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Trump, Nukes, AI, and Civilizational Suicide
The man who calls an existential threat nothing but a "hoax," proves himself a maniac—which makes us sitting ducks.
Sep 22, 2026
As human beings we have always been sitting ducks to extinction’s cosmic whims. We are a few astronomical units away from a life-ending meteor or comet strike, the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs after they were their own animal kingdom for a couple of hundred million years. Nothing we can do about that.
For the brief time human beings have roamed the earth–less than five seconds if earth’s history were a 24-hour clock–we’ve shown nearly equal aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing, and for suicide. Aptitude for reproduction is nothing special. As Cole Porter put it, birds, bees and even fleas do it. But you have to be human to know suicide, by which I mean the act of engaging in knowing self-destruction, as most wars of recorded and (easy to guess) unrecorded history of the last 100,000 years have been.
Those mass suicides have ended tribes, empires and civilizations, but so far not humanity itself. It is only since 1945 that we’ve acquired that skill. A global nuclear war today would end life on the planet, which would become “a republic of insects and grass,” as Jonathan Schell, the Cole Porter of nukes, put it in The Fate of the Earth (1982).
There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario.
Nuclear war was the top public concern of 1985, even ahead of unemployment, which averaged above 6 percent all year. We worried, we debated, and to Gorbachev’s and Reagan’s credit, in that order, we got a start on arms control deals that improved with time, at least until Obama, Trump and Putin decided to bring us back near the brink, where we are now: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight, “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.” Almost half of Americans think a nuclear war is likely in the coming decade, though they don’t seem to be too concerned about it, as if it were something they might still get to watch on TV: This year’s list of top concerns doesn’t even include nukes.
Since the 19th century we’d been developing a new method of global suicide, only we didn’t know it until June 23, 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen testified to Congress that “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” The implication was that global warming was a threat, but not yet a life-ending threat. Hansen and other panelists before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee happened to speak on a day when temperatures in the Washington, D.C. area neared 100. He predicted that 1988 would prove to be the warmest year on record. It was, though the record was short-lived, as have near-annual new records since. The panel said the world had, with reasonable and prudent policies, time to respond.
It didn’t. For decades the world has been aiming to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit), above pre-industrial levels, the threshold climate accords had said we cannot safely cross. We will overshoot the target by the end of the decade. That’s not bad news just for a few Pacific islanders, but for places like Flagler Beach as seas continue to rise: that extra 10 feet the designers added to the new pier opening in a few months may not look so high in a few decades.
We’ve known since 1988 that warming is an existential threat to humanity. It is now our third means of civilizational suicide. As with wars and nukes, it’s still controllable. The solution has always been in our hands.
We now have yet another existential threat to humanity, and this one, like meteors, may soon be out of our control: artificial intelligence. Unlike meteors, the chances of extinction are not near zero. Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger warns there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next ten years if unregulated. You don’t have to be a genius to understand how dangerous and already out of control your peppy AI bots are. If you use anything like Gemini or ChatGPT, you know that they hallucinate and fabricate, they mislead, they get an attitude, and they double down to hide their mistakes. Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.
There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario. I was surprised to hear even my usually more prudent colleague Brian McMillan claiming on the radio Friday that he “can’t tell whether that’s Y2K-scare level or not,” and calling fears an “extrapolation.” I don’t know how a reportedly informed journalist can make that analysis when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for a pause in the technology’s development, as did OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.
These men hate each other. They all agree that differences must be set aside to build guardrails–on their business. I don’t know that you can point to an instance in American history when the chief executives of their own companies called on regulatory guardrails about their own product, when you could so easily “extrapolate,” to use Brian’s word, from their fears that they don’t trust their own product. Nor do they trust each other to singly address the crisis, knowing what they know of their product and of themselves.
As a New York Times report explained it, “A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call ‘recursive self improvement,’ is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.”
The technology is new. The existential crisis is not. Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bohr, Einstein and many other scientists involved or not in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atom bombs campaigned for guardrails about what they’d wrought, but the company they were working for (Einstein wasn’t) was the American government, and their audience were the American and Soviet public–similar to the AI industry’s audience now.
As a matter of self-defense, AI is the most important scientific, ethical and moral priority of the day. We can leave the ethics and morality of it to philosophers, theologians and academics. The science is our era’s Manhattan Project. As with the Manhattan Project, the only unifying and resource-ready force to build and enforce guardrails and draft other countries to do likewise is not Anthropic or Space X. It is government, guided by reason and the better angels of our history.
Of course I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think the AI industry knows. Not yet, anyway. This is a collective effort that requires the pooling of unimaginable thought and resources. But we have guides, we have principles.
“Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer because he knows that he dies and he knows the advantage which the universe has over him,” Pascal wrote four centuries ago. “The universe does not know these things.” Substitute “AI” for the “universe,” and Pascal was onto something: “All our dignity, then, consists in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, he wrote. “Let us labor, then, to think well: that is the principle of morality.”
We don’t have a solution. But we know the essentials: we know how to get there. The rest is just thought, it’s just raising ourselves.
Instead, we are once again being debased. Donald Trump and his congressional harem now call the AI crisis a hoax. We knew they were immoral. We refused to know they would be suicidal. To his credit, Trump once fast-tracked the Covid vaccine. He has it in him, and could do with AI what he did with the vaccine, at warp speed. Instead, he is slow-walking us to a potential catastrophe as uncontrollable as a nuclear weapon’s chain reaction.
He is our dinosaur in chief, and we’re all sitting ducks.
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In a World of Nukes and Climate Emergency, Knowledge Is Survival
We cannot pursue solutions to the nuclear and global warming threats amid confusion, myths, half-truths, and a lack of basic understanding of facts.
Sep 20, 2026
The current state of our world has repeatedly been described as one of the most challenging moments since the end of World War II and certainly since the end of the Cold War. We are bombarded daily by the devastating and terrifying news of wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine; global warming inducing unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, glacial collapse, and floods; and more recently reports and debates surrounding the existential risk that artificial intelligence may present to humanity. How we address this seeming state of permanent crisis may not just be a matter of humanity’s ability to thrive into the future, but actually survive.
Two of the current threats that have seemingly disparate time scales and geographical footprints, and even differences as to whether they would make the world unlivable by way of decreased or increased temperatures, are nuclear war and global warming. And yet, in both cases, we are dealing with human-made problems that humans can resolve, with some work, yes, but certainly nothing insurmountable. The answer to the nuclear threat is the elimination of nuclear weapons, and the answer to the global warming threat is the remaking of how we produce and use energy to move away from burning fossil fuels. Arguably, the biggest impediment to the solutions to both crises are the false narratives that are advanced for the sake of power, profit, and dominance. We simply cannot agree on the solutions, let alone implement them, if we do not understand what is at stake when it comes to nuclear war and global warming.
The nuclear war threat has been with us since the dawn of the nuclear age. In 1946, when just one country, the United States, had a handful of atomic bombs, Albert Einstein wrote that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift to unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein understood right away that: (1) the nuclear weapon threat was not going to reach its culmination with the destruction of individual cities the way that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed but something far greater and more catastrophic—he called it unparalleled catastrophe; and (2) what was needed was to change our modes of thinking—meaning that peace, cooperation, and a genuine fraternity among nations were needed in the nuclear age to ensure that the unparalleled catastrophe would not come to pass.
Alongside of the ever-present nuclear “sword of Damocles,” we have a planet that is warming and doing so very quickly, with the increase in temperatures creating numerous other climatic and environmental changes,
Eighty years after Einstein’s prophetic words, nine countries possess more than 12,000 atomic bombs and much more powerful hydrogen bombs, most of which make the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like child’s play. Even if the world were relatively peaceful, which it is not, these weapons would continue to hold us hostage to the threat of ultimate destruction, even just from accidents or misunderstandings or miscalculations. This is at least in part due to some of the current policies of nuclear-armed states, like hair-trigger alert, or readiness to launch nuclear weapons in a matter of a few minutes, and launch-on-warning, or readiness to launch nuclear weapons in response to a warning of a strike, not an actual strike, not to mention the advances in delivery vehicles of these weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the history of the nuclear age is full of incidents in which nuclear weapons could have been launched, with all indications pointing to nuclear war as the outcome of even an accidental nuclear explosion. Today, a time of widespread conflicts, the danger is not just a blunder into nuclear war, but even a deliberate use of nuclear weapons.
What is at stake in a nuclear war?
- Millions of people if not hundreds of millions dying in cities and nations that are attacked depending on who exactly is involved. Many of those deaths would occur instantly at the moment of the explosion.
- Radiation spreading across the globe within hours, days, weeks, and months in ways that will threaten the health and survival far outside the countries that are attacked.
- Quick onset of nuclear winter, with large drops in temperature that result in widespread failure of food production and subsequent famine that threatens the life of billions of people.
- Ozone layer destruction that will further reduce our ability to produce food and make even the farthest reaches of the planet potentially uninhabitable due to the high levels of UV radiation.
What we are facing is the unparalleled catastrophe that Einstein warned about. And for a variety of reasons, it remains largely out of the public’s consciousness, invisible, and yet all too real, especially today when there are, according to the Geneva Academy, over 100 armed conflicts around the world, including 24 international armed conflicts involving two or more nation states. Two play a prominent role—the war in Ukraine, which has been described as a proxy war between NATO and Russia, and the US and Israel war on Iran. In both wars, nuclear weapons have featured prominently, not just as the underlying justification for conflict, as the US and Israel have claimed about Iran’s potential to build a nuclear weapon, but also via direct and indirect threats, including by President Donald Trump on April 7 of this year, that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Although the history of the nuclear age is full of examples of US presidents contemplating or outright threatening to use nuclear weapons in previous conflicts, we seem to have reached a novel stage of danger, risk, and complexity.
Alongside of the ever-present nuclear “sword of Damocles,” we have a planet that is warming and doing so very quickly, with the increase in temperatures creating numerous other climatic and environmental changes, including sea-level rise, wildfires, droughts, and more. We have watched and experienced some of these impacts in horror even just this summer, including the heatwave and wildfires in Europe and the glacier collapse and floods in Nepal and China. A commenter to a Geopolitical Economist Hour podcast episode where I spoke about the climate threat with the host, Radhika Desai, wrote, “In British Columbia, we no longer have summer season, we just have fire season,” which sums up the situation rather succinctly.
Why is the globe warming? The globe is warming because we humans are burning fossil fuels, which release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising the temperature across the planet, albeit in uneven ways. For example, Europe has been warming at twice the rate of global temperature increases, and the Arctic is warming at nearly three times the rate of global temperature rise. Combined with the complexity of climate, streams, weather patterns, and more, this will continue to lead to widespread negative consequences across the globe, in fits and starts with devastating local and regional implications. Wildfire smoke spreading far and wide, for example, will ensure that even the regions least prone to impact will not be safe. No corner of the Earth will be unaffected.
Genuine solutions exist. In 1986, the world had more than 70,000 nuclear warheads and over the next 30 years, managed to eliminate more than 80% of them. Energy transformation solutions exist, and China, for one, has been employing them rapidly and effectively over the last few years. But we cannot pursue solutions amid confusion, myths, half-truths, and lack of even a basic understanding of facts.
Neither of these issues will be properly addressed with blind faith in a narrative. They will be resolved when ordinary people and elected leaders alike take up the hard task of understanding the issues and then discussing the solutions that are right for their communities, nation states, and the world as a whole. Knowledge is often considered to mean power. In this case, it may just mean survival.
A modified portion of these remarks was delivered during a webinar entitled Permanent Crisis? Permanent War? Who wants it? Who benefits? Who cares? with professors Radhika Desai, Ivana Nikolic Hughes, Fadhel Kaboub, Steve Keen, Jeffrey Sachs, and Genevieve Vaughan; chaired by Rajani Kanth, for the Global Political Economy channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHarGYBto9A
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Donald Trump Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank... at the End of the World
By embracing fossil fuels and shutting down renewable energy, “our” president is making a fortune off end-of-the-world policies. Think of him, in fact, not figuratively, but all too literally, as the president from hell.
Sep 10, 2026
Honestly, I don’t think we really get it yet.
Let’s face it. It’s going to be hot, hot, hot. Or do I mean hotter, hotter, hotter, or even hottest, hottest, hottest, or someday, for all we know, beyond any words we might now have to describe it.
Though it seldom seems that way in the daily news, we’re talking about a genuinely apocalyptic possibility. Give us human beings full credit. Somehow, we’ve managed to come up with not one but two distinctly apocalyptic ways to potentially destroy ourselves and this planet—one a relatively speedy way to go and the other already operating in world-destroying slow motion—and that, believe me, is no small thing.
Here are just a few examples of that slow-motion version of our self-destruction on this increasingly extreme planet of... well, can I really say “ours” anymore, or should I say theirs?
The Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around.
Of course, Europe has recently experienced remarkably extreme temperatures and scorching fires across significant parts of the continent (heat estimated to have resulted in at least 16,000 extra deaths—and no, that is not a misprint—at its high point in June and at least 35,000 across the whole summer). Western Europe, in fact, experienced the hottest June on record. And that (or worse) is increasingly likely to be an every-summer event for what’s now the fastest-warming continent on this planet.
And don’t forget that the predicted El Niño in the Pacific beginning this fall, expected to be the strongest in more than a century, or a “Godzilla” event (if you happen to remember your movie dinosaurs), is likely to heat significant parts of the planet even more severely. (Oh, and in case you missed it, it’s not just the land that’s getting ever hotter. This August, the world’s oceans hit their hottest temperature ever—yes, ever!—adding, of course, to sea level rise and the further flooding of coastal communities.)
And sadly enough, we just can’t seem to stop, can we? Worse yet, humanity’s latest brilliant invention-discovery—artificial intelligence—may someday have to be relabeled artificial stupidity (of the first order), given that the production of AI is, it seems, going to involve pouring staggering amounts of—yes, of course!—fossil fuels into our already overheating atmosphere. As environmental expert Bill McKibben put it recently, “The planned data center buildout will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by at least 20%, and perhaps as much as a third.”
In truth, you’ve got to hand it to us humans when it comes to utter self-destructiveness (and I’m not even thinking about our never-ending, devastating wars from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and Somalia that also pour endless fossil fuels into the atmosphere, as does the US military).
A Global Disaster That Needs a New Name
You would think, of course, that, faced with what’s likely to happen in the years to come, humanity might have responded by working ever harder to bring our fossil-fuel usage under control. But not much such luck there, of course. After all, China, the country that has moved in the most significant fashion on climate change by figuring out how to produce ever more green energy and sell globally the mechanisms—solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment—that make it (as well as stunning numbers of electric vehicles), continues to pour the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of any place on Earth.
And though other countries are indeed beginning to try to switch to green power, when you look at this endangered planet of ours, explain to me how, in 2024, the American people by a slight majority (even if not quite 50% of the vote) managed to reelect as president one Donald J. Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order. And in his second term in office, he’s focused as much attention as he’s capable of focusing (which, of course, is a distinctly limited amount) on blocking wind and solar projects while promoting ever more fossil-fuel production of every kind. (And of course, in the process, he’s brilliantly ceding the vast and growing green-energy sales market to that other superpower, China.)
Let me guarantee you one thing: Someday, when it comes to the overheating of this world of ours, he will be seen as an almost unparalleled idiot, assuming that anybody then is seeing much of anything.
Consider climate change, in fact, a potential global disaster that deserves a far more horrifying name. And consider it just the latest form of (in)human warfare to come to our attention, this time against the planet itself as a livable place for us. And consider it as well no small thing that we humans have indeed produced a second way to essentially destroy this planet and ourselves.
A Climate Bomb of a President
As for that first one, it’s still unsettling to think about the way the United States developed the atomic bomb and then used it twice in August 1945 to devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end World War II in the Pacific. And those first two bombs did indeed represent, all too literally (or do I mean figuratively?), something new on this planet that, until that moment, had only been a dystopian fantasy—the possible future ability of humanity to totally devastate this planet of ours? In fact, given human history, consider it little short of a miracle that, 80 years later, with at least nine countries now possessing atomic weapons, often in significant quantities—there are now an estimated 12,000 such weapons on planet Earth—one has never been used again in wartime (although more than 2,000 have been detonated in atomic tests in what still passes for peacetime).
And there can be little question that, were an atomic war to break out between any of the great (or even lesser) powers on this planet, we could indeed find ourselves thoroughly devastated.
Now, give us humans distinct credit since, having developed a first way to functionally do in this planet of ours and ourselves, we then came up with a completely separate, distinctly slow-motion version of planetary destruction via our use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to pour what have come to be known as greenhouse gases that trap heat into the atmosphere, potentially broiling this planet in a process that’s come to be known all too mildly as—yes!—“climate change.” (Think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion version of atomic warfare happening right before our eyes every moment of every day.)
And unfortunately, when it became ever more obvious that this was indeed another way to do this planet in, the response was sadly all too different from atomic weaponry, with the urge to stop it proving far milder than it should be.
And of course, in 2024, Americans did indeed vote to reelect a presidential candidate all too literally committed to broiling this planet of ours (as, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, the ruler of one of the other great powers on this planet). Yes, the Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around. And don’t forget that, this time, among the donors celebrating his victory and inauguration with giant financial contributions was oil company Chevron with $500,000. (In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has reported that, overall, oil companies invested $5 million in that inauguration alone—and even that may be a low estimate.)
And yes, his second time in office he did also launch his own version of a global nuclear arms race, but that, sadly, is the least of it, since he’s distinctly determined to release ever more fossil fuels into our world, while doing anything he can to shut down wind power, in particular. Oh, and don’t forget that, amid all the climate chaos and—thanks to his war on Iran—fossil fuel chaos as well, he continues to make a fortune (as much as $15.5 million or a nearly 40% rise since January) from fossil fuel stocks he owns, including shares in ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum. And more are evidently still being purchased for him.
And all of that is a reality of our world even as, thanks to his war with Iran, American drivers continue to pay ever more for their gas. And with that new El Niño climate pattern already on the all-too-literal horizon and guaranteed to wildly overheat the Pacific Ocean, starting this fall, this planet is only going to get hotter yet. That coming “Godzilla” event could, as The Guardian reports, “push about 50 million people worldwide into acute hunger before the end of next year.”
In short, “our” president is making a fortune off end-of-the-world policies. Think of him, in fact, not figuratively, but all too literally, as the president from hell.
And if you want to add to the potentially world-ending nightmares of this planet at this very moment, keep in mind that, over its long history, humanity has proven all too brilliant when it comes to destruction. So don’t for a second imagine that there isn’t, in fact, a third (or even a fourth) way to do us all in still waiting to be discovered just over (or under?) the present horizon.
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JD Vance Says If His Work With Trump 'Leads to the End Times' That Is 'OK'
"Show this clip to anyone who says Iran is run by religious lunatics," responded one podcaster.
Sep 01, 2026
Shortly before US President Donald Trump on Tuesday spurred fresh fears that he'll use nuclear weapons in his illegal war on Iran, Vice President JD Vance told a Christian podcaster that he's fine with the administration's work leading to the end times.
"Do I think that we're in the end times? I don't know," Vance told 22-year-old podcaster Bryce Crawford nearly an hour into a lengthy video interview released Monday. While admitting his fascination with the theories, the VP said that "I think that it's probably bad for me, spiritually, to focus too much on it."
As The New Republic's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling explained: "The Christian end times refer to the religion's interpretations of the final days of humanity. That's detailed in the Bible as a period involving widespread turmoil and deception (such as wars, earthquakes, and a false prophet), a seven-year stretch of unprecedented hardship known as the Great Tribulation that will end in Armageddon, the emergence of the Antichrist and a cadre of their followers who reject Christ's teachings, and a final judgment by God."
As Vance sat beside a propped-up edition of his new book on his religious journey, including his conversion to Catholicism, he said that "I think that there are... things about the world that make me feel like not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us, but again, I try not to focus too much on it."
"One of the things that I think that Catholics are very focused on, that I think is very good for me, is this idea that... we don't know when God is coming, but we're commanded to try to, as much as possible, try to make the world the kind of world that God wants it to be," the vice president continued.
"While I wouldn't be shocked if we are living in the end times," he added, "what I'm trying to focus on is doing as much of God's work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, OK, and if that leads to, you know, us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I'm gone, that's great, too."
Those remarks—from a man expected to compete with figures such as Donald Trump Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the GOP's 2028 presidential nomination, if the president doesn't try for an unconstitutional third term—were met with alarm.
Critics wrote that "this should concern us all" and wondered: "WTF does that mean? Is he OK with using nuclear weapons?"
Sharing a clip of Vance's comments on social media, Iranian-American writer Alex Shams noted that "these guys are trying to convince you Iran is ruled by a crazed messianic theocracy."
Podcaster and writer Katie Halper said, "Show this clip to anyone who says Iran is run by religious lunatics."
As Vance's video interview began circulating on Monday, over six months into the Iran War, a reporter in the Oval Office asked Trump if he's ruled out using a nuclear weapon against the Mideast country.
While suggesting he has ruled out nuclear war, Trump also said: "What a stupid question that is, actually. Here they are, they're totally defeated militarily, so now I defeat them, and now I should use a nuclear weapon on top of them?"
Just a day later, Trump triggered speculation that he'll pursue a nuclear attack. On Tuesday, while bombing alleged Iranian military targets, he wrote on his Truth Social platform, "If the failed Nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level, but it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran!"
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Trump Issues New Mass Murder Threat, Warning Iran of 'Biggest Attack of Them All'
The president's threat came just a day after he appeared to rule out using nuclear weapons.
Sep 01, 2026
President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued yet another unhinged threat to commit mass murder as the US military restarted its illegal bombing campaign against Iran.
In a Truth Social post, the president warned Iran against striking back at the US shortly after American forces began bombing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targets in the country.
"If the failed Nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level," Trump wrote, then ominously added that "it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran!"
Iran appeared undeterred by Trump's saber-rattling, however, as The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the country retaliated by launching missiles and drones shortly after the US attack.
On Monday, a reporter in the Oval Office asked the president if he would consider using nuclear weapons against Iran, and he appeared to rule it out.
"There's no reason for it," Trump said. "What a stupid question that is, actually. Here they are, they're totally defeated militarily, so now I defeat them and now I should use a nuclear weapon on top of them?"
"Have you ruled out using a nuclear weapon against Iran?"@POTUS: "They're totally defeated militarily — so I defeat them and now I should use a nuclear weapon on top of them? What a stupid question." pic.twitter.com/Gv9dXAJ9Zu
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 31, 2026
In April, Trump issued a similarly unhinged threat to commit mass murder in Iran, warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" unless Iran surrendered to the US. Trump backed down from that threat hours later and agreed to a since-expired ceasefire agreement with Iran.
Brett Erickson, managing partner at Obsidian Risk Advisors, warned in a Tuesday social media post that the president's threats should not be dismissed simply because he hasn't followed through on them in the past.
"Throughout this entire war, I have been incredibly skeptical of any claims that President Trump is so much as DISCUSSING the use of nuclear weapons," Erickson wrote. "This reads to me clear as day that they are on the table now."
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A Nuclear Bomb Took My Arms Before I Was Born; We Must Not Let One Take Our Future
I want to be among the last people whose bodies carry the legacy of the nuclear age; whether I am depends on decisions that are still within our reach.
Aug 29, 2026
I paint with a brush held between my teeth or my toes. I was born without arms in 1968 about 100 kilometers from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan. My parents’ generation watched mushroom clouds rise over the steppe without being told what the explosions could do to their bodies or their children.
For four decades, the Soviet Union conducted more than 450 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. The fallout left cancers, disabilities, trauma, and contaminated land. Today, when leaders discuss nuclear weapons in the language of “deterrence” and “strategic balance,” I think of families paying for decisions in which they had no voice. The bomb is not an abstraction to me. Its history is written on my body.
August 29 carries two memories. On that date in 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device at Semipalatinsk. On the same date in 1991, Kazakhstan closed the test site. At Kazakhstan’s initiative, the United Nations later proclaimed August 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests. It is not simply a day of commemoration. It is a warning from the past about choices being made now.
In 2026, that warning is urgent. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the world began this year with 12,187 nuclear warheads. All nine nuclear-armed states continued strengthening their arsenals last year, while up to 2,200 warheads remained on high operational alert. In February, New START, the last treaty limiting the strategic arsenals of the United States and Russia, expired without a successor. In May, the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended without consensus for the third consecutive time.
I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.
The world is not merely failing to disarm. It is learning to rely on the bomb again. There is growing rhetoric that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of peace and security. In moments of heightened tension, some states and strategic thinkers argue that only nuclear capability can prevent coercion, deter conflict, or preserve sovereignty. This logic of “nuclear reassurance” is being normalized not only in official doctrine but in public debate, where deterrence is recast as stability and restraint is portrayed as risk. Yet this framing erodes the very foundation of non-proliferation. It suggests that safety flows from the possession of the most destructive weapons ever created, rather than from law, diplomacy, and mutual restraint.
A non-proliferation system cannot endure if abstinence is portrayed as vulnerability while possession is equated with safety and status. The NPT rests on a bargain: Non-nuclear states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons, while nuclear-weapon states undertake to pursue disarmament. Both sides must keep their word. Rules cannot bind the weak and excuse the powerful.
Kazakhstan chose another logic. When we became independent, 1,410 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads remained on our territory, giving us what was then the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. We could have treated them as a shortcut to status or a shield against an uncertain future. Instead, a society that knew the price of radiation demanded a different kind of security. We closed Semipalatinsk, relinquished the weapons, and joined the NPT as a non-nuclear state. That choice did not erase the damage, but it showed that renunciation can be an act of sovereignty and strength.
Kazakhstan has tried to turn that experience into institutions. We helped establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and host the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Low Enriched Uranium Bank.
Our message is not “no” to nuclear science. Peaceful nuclear energy, subject to rigorous safeguards, can serve human development. It is “no” to weapons whose effects no border, hospital, or government can control.
The immediate path is clear. The nine remaining states whose ratification is required must bring the test-ban treaty into force. The United States and Russia must negotiate new verifiable limits, and all nuclear-armed states must join the work of reduction. Iran and the United States must restore full IAEA access through an enforceable agreement. More countries should join the prohibition treaty, while nuclear-armed states should engage with it even before they are ready to accede. Nations must also fund healthcare, victim assistance, and environmental repair. Disarmament cannot speak only about the future while abandoning those living with the past.
Some will call a world without nuclear weapons naive. I have learned what is truly naive: believing that thousands of warheads can remain ready for use indefinitely without error, miscalculation, rage, or technical failure. Deterrence requires every leader to remain rational, every warning system to be accurate, and every crisis to stay controlled—forever. Humanity has never met such a standard.
An artist begins with a blank canvas and believes another reality can be created. I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.
I want to be among the last people whose bodies carry the legacy of the nuclear age. Whether I am depends on decisions that are still within our reach. Kazakhstan turned away from the bomb. The world can do so too.
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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Bringing Cancer Potential to a Community Near You
Under pressure to expand nuclear energy production, the commission has proposed weakening standards protecting workers and communities from radiation exposure.
Aug 27, 2026
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, whose mission is to protect public health and safety regarding nuclear energy, has now transformed into an agency, as so many have under the current administration, to support the nuclear industry and its billionaire backers. Following other captured federal agencies like the Department of Energy, which is variably led by individuals from the very industries it is intended to regulate, the NRC is under pressure from the president to facilitate the quadrupling of nuclear energy production by 2050. This is to be accomplished by fast-tracking the licensure and building of reactors while discarding the nuclear radiation exposure safety measures in place for decades as these are seen to be onerous and financially burdensome to the industry.
The current safety standard for nuclear exposure comes from the BEIR VII (Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation) study. This was produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and concluded that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation exposure above background, noting that any excess exposure above background increases the risk to human health of cancer, and other diseases associated with nuclear exposure. This is the so-called Linear No Threshold, LNT, theory. This theory is the basis for the core precautionary safety principle and risk management approach used in the fields of ionizing radiation exposure from medicine and dentistry to nuclear energy referred to as “ALARA,” or "As Low As Reasonably Achievable.”
The problem that exists, even with current standards of radiation exposure allowance, is that they are based on the “Reference Man,” which is a 25-to-30-year-old 70 kilogram man. This androcentric standard totally disregards the fact that the majority of humanity is not represented by this standard, and that children, females, pregnant women, and the elderly are more sensitive to radioactivity exposure. In addition workers involved throughout the entire nuclear cycle are at increased risk from exposure. Furthermore, a recent Harvard study demonstrated increased cancer rates in the communities surrounding nuclear power plants within ~18.5 miles.
The current NRC proposal plans to do away with ALARA while purportedly supporting the LNT. This flies in the face of reason and is duplicitous as LNT is the basis of ALARA. Their plan is to substitute an unproven “graded approach” allowing workers to be exposed to near the regulatory limits and then taking added measures so as not to exceed it. They propose allowing the exceeding of exposure limits under “certain circumstances” setting up a banking system from subsequent year allowances amortizing over five years. They have even invoked the controversial unproven hypothesis of “Radiation Hormesis,” which proposes that a small amount of radiation causing cellular damage will stimulate cellular repair, as though to say what does not kill you, is good for you. Remember LNT.
The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31.
Furthermore, when implemented, these new regulations will most likely be used to reduce the already weak cleanup standards, further increasing the health risks to impacted communities contaminated from our nuclear legacy and history. These include communities such as the South Carolina Savannah River Site and New Mexico Los Alamos Nuclear Lab and Trinity Test Site to the Navajo Nation mining sites, Hanford Washington site, Nevada Test Site, St Louis Cold Water Creek, Parks Township (Pennsylvani), Rocky Flats Site near Denver, and the Santa Susana Field Lab near Los Angeles, among others.
The rationale for this current proposal is to facilitate the fast-tracking of nuclear power for the uncontrolled growth of data centers (with 1,500 new data centers currently in development), artificial intelligence, additional large commercial nuclear power plants, and new plutonium pits that are the nuclear trigger of nuclear weapons, reminding us that nuclear power remains the cover story for nuclear weapons.
The potential health risks of cancer, heart disease, birth defects, cognitive defects, thyroid and endocrine disorders, genetic mutations, and infertility are all related to ionizing radiation exposure. These are risks lasting for generations, passed on from one generation to the next. Yet, these health effects do not have to be and can be prevented if we demand the strengthening of current radiation exposure guidelines. The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31. Your comment is critical and can be submitted at federalregister.gov. More information can be found at www.protectbetter.org.
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Markey to Congress: Block Trump-Saudi Deal, a 'Starting Gun for a Middle East Nuclear Arms Race'
"This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of US national security."
Aug 26, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Monday sent his proposed nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia to Congress, and a leading Senate Democrat responded on Wednesday with a call for his colleagues to "block this dangerous deal."
That call came from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-chair of the bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group.
The 30-year deal was reached in July. It would allow US companies to share nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia, without safeguards to ensure that the Middle East kingdom would not use the materials to build nuclear weapons.
Following the White House submission to Congress, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, lawmakers have 90 days of continuous session to review the pact—as required by Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act—and either object or let it take effect.
Since US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed the deal in July, nonproliferation experts have expressed concerns. Kelsey Davenport from the Arms Control Association said at the time that the "inadequate" deal "sets a terrible precedent" because it "goes against long-standing bipartisan support for negotiating nuclear cooperation agreements that prohibit enrichment and reprocessing," and "Congress should vote to disapprove it."
Markey echoed expert concerns on Wednesday. He said that "as a US senator, Marco Rubio once understood that handing Saudi Arabia the technology to produce nuclear weapons was a terrible idea. But now, as secretary of state, Rubio is doing exactly that, and he and Trump are pursuing the most reckless nuclear deal in US history."
"This giveaway to Saudi Arabia is the starting gun for a Middle East nuclear arms race," he argued. "Congress must reject it."
Markey also said that "if the Trump administration wants to stop a Saudi bomb, it should require the nonproliferation gold standard, which would ban enrichment and reprocessing and require International Atomic Energy Agency additional protocol safeguards in Saudi Arabia. If Riyadh did not want a bomb, it would accept the gold standard. But the opposite is happening."
"Why? Maybe we should ask Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who has said repeatedly that he wants a nuclear bomb," the senator suggested, before taking aim at the president's son-in-law. "Or maybe we should ask Jared Kushner, who accepted a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund after leaving the White House at the end of the first Trump administration."
"This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of US national security," Markey concluded. "Congress must stop this dangerous agreement before it triggers a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East."
Even if the Republican-controlled Congress doesn't heed warnings from Markey and nonproliferation experts and block the deal, Trump may ultimately do so himself.
Administration officials have confirmed to journalists this week that the president will only let the pact move forward if Saudi Arabia agrees to a condition he imposed only after negotiations: joining the Abraham Accords, an initiative from Trump's first term that led to various countries normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel.
As CNN reported Wednesday:
Wright, speaking at a Wednesday press conference with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the nuclear agreement and Abraham Accords negotiations "will be worked in parallel."
A Saudi official responded to a CNN query saying, "Saudi-US relations are ever-evolving and have continued to broaden and to deepen over the years."
"Saudi Arabia is looking forward to working closely with the US administration and Congress on ways to strengthen our partnership," the official added.
Congressional consideration of the agreement comes amid an illegal US-Israeli war on Iran. Trump continues to claim the military campaign is aimed at stopping the Iranian government from building nuclear arms—even though he tore up the Obama administration's related agreement during his first term, and the American intelligence community concluded before the current conflict that Tehran wasn't pursuing such weapons.
Last week, former Republican Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that members of Trump's administration "are discussing using nuclear weapons on Iran in strategy meetings." In response, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said that "we must shut the Pandora’s box of the Iran War before more horrors are unleashed—including the possible use of nuclear weapons. The longer this catastrophic war of choice continues, the more horrors we risk unleashing that many of us would have previously found unthinkable."
In addition to the United States and Israel, the countries known to have nuclear weapons are China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as of January, the estimated global inventory of warheads is 12,187—about 9,745 of which are in military stockpiles for potential use.
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