Tag: death

The Black Market for Nuclear Weapons

The Black Market for Nuclear Weapons

The collapse of the USSR brought about a period within Russia of unbridled chaos, devolving into a free-for-all amongst citizens unsure where their next meal might be coming from. Everything that could have been stolen, was stolen, and included in that were up to 400 nuclear weapons. But where did all of these weapons end up, and how secure is the rest of Russia’s apocalyptic arsenal today? Will the nuclear black market be responsible for the next major terrorist attack? On the panel this week – Robin M Frost – (Uni. of Ottawa) – Eric Gomez – (CATO) – Foeke Postma – (Bellingcat) – Andrew Futter – (Uni. of Leicester) Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus For more information please visit – www.theredlinepodcast.com

Listen to this episode on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Libsyn RSS

Episode Overview:

Part 1: A Suitcase Full of Terror (3:56)

  • Robin M Frost begins our conversation with a look at the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which included nuclear sites in former Soviet states that were widely secret from the public until the end of the Cold War.

  • We discuss the realistic concerns about the security of these former sites, which independent investigations have proven to be extremely lax in security and operational protocols, and how much of a risk they pose for the nuclear black market.

  • What has stopped non-state actors who would want to use a nuclear weapon in an attack? Frost identifies a number of factors, including the difficulty of obtaining and fashioning enriched uranium into a suitable configuration for a weapon, the difficulty of constructing the triggers necessary to detonate, and the sophisticated knowledge required to build such a weapon.

  • The threat of “salting” a regular explosive device with spent radioactive materials, a radiological weapon, is a much more realistic threat according to Frost and could be created using much more readily available materials kept under significantly less security across the globe.

  • Interestingly, the IAEA notes that organised crime in the former Soviet Union has avoided dealing in nuclear materials, with Frost speculating both fear of handling the materials, the attention that would be brought upon their

Part 2: Recorking the Champagne (27:12)

  • Eric Gomez asserts that nuclear safety protocols are stronger than the public consensus seems to believe, backed up through the lack of accidental denotation of nuclear weapons.

  • Gomez notes the abundance of “tactical nukes” in the former Soviet Union, often forward-deployed with military units, which are small in payload but highly portable and typically featuring less safety protocols (i.e. codes for activation), poses the greatest threat to international safety today. However, many of the components in those weapons have degraded, leading to a questionable potency for those weapons in the current age.

  • We unpack how the United States security guarantee has served as a deterrent for other countries to develop their own nuclear weapons, but also note the scale of infrastructure (allowing for easy detection) and difficulty to build nuclear weapons is a major factor in preventing the spread of nuclear nations.

Part 3: A Fortified Castle… with a Broken Screen Door (46:02)

  • Foeke Postma posits that security of facilities and weapons are as strong as the people that guard it, noting the abundance of data in the modern world create highly traceable individuals and reveal the location of sites, transit routes, and other highly sensitive information that can be obtained on the black market.

  • Postma talks about how social media accounts and fitness devices are regularly used by Open Source Intelligence operatives and journalists to uncover such sensitive information, walking us through his work uncovering how US military personnel inadvertently revealed a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored.

  • Postma notes that governments and potentially non-state actors are no doubt utilising these OS opportunities to map military and intelligence networks, including current members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.

Part 4: Dumb Luck (1:08:27)

  • Andrew Futter notes that while there’s been a combination of luck and success with the security of nuclear weapons facilities, it’s not easy to assess what has been effective so far and what will need to change to continue success in the evolving security environment.

  • Futter notes the success of the AQ Khan proliferation network allowed for the flow of information about how to achieve a nuclear weapon program to several states with nuclear ambitions, but also demonstrates the scale of work that would be required to successfully launch such a program.

  • The fear of culpability is likely a major deterrent against states aiding non-state actors in the creation or use of a nuclear weapon, but Futter unpacks the possibility of a state being framed in a false flag attack, through the use of material or markers linked to that state in order to exacerbate tensions or trigger conflict.

  • We unpack nuclear deterrence theory and how in practice that would work in the modern day, noting that a significant amount of weaponisation would be required to be effective, as well as a certain level of overt testing and demonstration. We also talk about delivery methods and why missiles remain both preferred from a command and control perspective.

The Red Line’s Broken Arrows Reading List:

We’ve compiled a list of further reading to better understand the geopolitics of the nuclear black market.

Books:

The Politics of Nuclear Weapons

Andrew Futter

 

America’s Nuclear Crossroads: A Forward-Looking Anthology

Eric Gomez

Preventing Black Market Trade of Nuclear Technology

Matthew Bunn

Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the Futures That Have Never Arrived

Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.Photograph by Georg Gatsas / Verso Books
Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.Photograph by Georg Gatsas / Verso Books

Mark Fisher was a writer and academic from the English Midlands who, in the early two-thousands, felt at odds with many of the institutions around him. Fisher, then in his mid-thirties, had devoted himself to theories of capitalism and Internet culture that few people in his immediate vicinity appeared to care about. He was zealous about obscure music and cinema at a time when critical discourse seemed to be reorienting itself around our biggest stars. So, in 2003, he decided to start a blog.

Fisher’s blog was called K-Punk. The K came from kyber, the Greek root of “cyber,” and it was intended to signal his interest in a time before the rise of the sort of cyber boosterism that Fisher associated with Wired magazine. Punk, for Fisher, was a way of being and seeing that involved a refusal of things as they were. The blog would be a place to workshop and refine ideas, and a forum for debates that seemed marginal within academia but too dense for mainstream magazines.

Blogging, in those days, at its best, seemed like a distinct genre of writing and thinking. Fisher’s posts were adventurous and idiosyncratic, chasing allusions across his bookshelf, record collection, and multiple screens—a riff on Ronald Reagan, for instance, might be routed through Jonathan Swift, the Dadaists, and Fredric Jameson. K-Punk gave Fisher space to revisit past enthusiasms: the hyperactive dance singles, experimental filmmakers, and pulp novels that had rewired his outlook when he was growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s nineteen-eighties. He revisited some of these influences—the author J. G. Ballard, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek—frequently enough that, if you were a regular reader of the blog, they became a part of your world view, too.

But if there was a single theme around which K-Punk’s eclectic energies organized, it was the future. Specifically: What happened to it? Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.

K-Punk attracted an avid readership, and, in 2009, Fisher published “Capitalist Realism,” a slim, powerful book about “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” Fisher saw signs of exhausted resignation in everything from the faces of his students to grim Hollywood movies set in the near-future (“Children of Men,” “Wall-E”) to “Supernanny,” a British reality show about parents unable to rein in their misbehaving kids. Fisher was interested not only in the political causes and cultural expressions of this exhaustion but in its emotional dimensions, too: the feelings of sadness or despondency that seem increasingly common across the political spectrum.

“Capitalist Realism” became a cult favorite in part because of the relentless energy of Fisher’s writing and in part on account of the rousing call to arms that he offered in its pages. “The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism,” he writes. “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

K-PUNK ON LIBGEN

I knew awake the rapper/ Robert / Bobby Crimo

THREAD

XEN: THE ZEN OF THE OTHER
a book by Ezra Buckley of The PsychoPath.Org
(AD)

Dark green religion : nature spirituality and the planetary future


Dark green religion : nature spirituality and the planetary future
Description:
In this innovative and deeply felt work, Bron Taylor examines the evolution of “green religions” in North America and beyond: spiritual practices that hold nature as sacred and have in many cases replaced traditional religions. Tracing a wide range of groups—radical environmental activists, lifestyle-focused bioregionalists, surfers, new-agers involved in “ecopsychology,” and groups that hold scientific narratives as sacred—Taylor addresses a central theoretical question: How can environmentally oriented, spiritually motivated individuals and movements be understood as religious when many of them reject religious and supernatural worldviews? The “dark” of the title further expands this idea by emphasizing the depth of believers’ passion and also suggesting a potential shadow side: besides uplifting and inspiring, such religion might mislead, deceive, or in some cases precipitate violence. This book provides a fascinating global tour of the green religious phenomenon, enabling readers to evaluate its worldwide emergence and to assess its role in a critically important religious revolution.

DOWNLOAD: http://library.lol/main/B9BBB2CCA0487F104A243B0C16D053BC

This Civilisation is Finished with Rupert Read

This Civilisation is Finished with Rupert Read

This episode I’m joined by Rupert Read is an academicand a Green Party campaigner and a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion). In this episode we discuss the end of civilization, collapse, sustainable energy and more…

Read’s site: https://rupertread.net

LINK: http://library.lol/main/DFD70A0C0020BE5E3EB97AFC6BFE8DA5

Description:
Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth’s climate is changing disastrously, in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation. Sooner rather than later this global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own ecological contradictions. Unless humanity does something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people.

This book is for those ready to accept the full gravity of the human predicament – and to consider what in the world is to be done. How can humanity mindfully navigate the inevitable descent ahead? Two critical thinkers here remove the rose-tinted glasses of much social and environmental commentary. With unremitting realism and yet defiant positivity, they engage each other in uncomfortable conversations about the end of Empire and what lies beyond.

We cannot adapt our way out of climate crisis, warns leading scientist

Katharine Hayhoe says the world is heading for dangers people have not seen in 10,000 years of civilisation

Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe warns that if we continue emitting greenhouse gases no adaptation will be possible. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Katharine Hayhoe

The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on adaptation to limit damage is no substitute for urgently cutting greenhouse gases, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said the world was heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilisation, and efforts to make the world more resilient were needed but by themselves could not soften the impact enough.

“People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on,” she said. “This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”

LINK TO ENTIRE ARTICLE

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same

Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Coyotes and Town Dogs

Coyotes and Town Dogs

The American Conservation Classic

Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement

Revised and Updated in a 25th Anniversary Edition

Praise for Coyotes and Town Dogs

Susan Zakin’s writing is brilliant and irreverent, tough and funny, opinionated and sometimes outrageous But this is also a serious work, the most thorough and thoughtful survey of the American environmental movement I have seen.

 

Brad Knickerbocker, The Christian Science Monitor

Catches the rowdy, passionate utopianism of the first non-elite generation of environmentalists. They changed the game, and woke a lot of people up.

 

Gary Snyder, Pultizer-Prize winning poet, Turtle Island, Practice of the Wild

A primer for how to face our Earth’s predicament with wit and courage…Funny, smart, irreverent, opinionated and always mind-expanding.

 

Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature, founder 350.org

The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

Link: http://library.lol/main/EDFC8BE20C798A1BBBD2724391066755

Description:
In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction that reads like Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized crossed with David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, a celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds.

On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts— and tips America over the edge into ruin.

These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists—journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.

No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.

Flight Aborted After Eerie Pictures Mysteriously Sent To Passengers’ Phones

Flight Aborted After Eerie Pictures Mysteriously Sent To Passengers' Phones
Flight Aborted After Eerie Pictures Mysteriously Sent To Passengers’ Phones (Getty/IAA/Alamy)

Original article: https://www.unilad.co.uk/news/flight-aborted-eerie-pictures-sent-passengers-phone-plane-crashes-20220510

A flight was postponed just before takeoff after a number of passengers received some eerie pictures on their phones.

According to local reports, the passengers were set to travel from Israel to Turkey, but the pilot decided to turn back to the terminal at Ben Gurion Airport amid the panic.

Israeli publication Kan News noted how the images showed a series of plane crashes, with no one knowing who was responsible for sending them.

Passengers were understandably worried after receiving these images before takeoff. Credit: IAA/Getty
Passengers were understandably worried after receiving these images before takeoff. Credit: IAA/Getty

One passenger who was aboard the flight when it was aborted told the outlet: “We got on the flight and the plane started moving.

“Most people received a request for a photo confirmation in AirDrop, some approved and some did not.

“The plane stopped and the flight attendants asked who got the pictures.”

As police swarmed the plane, the passenger said they were escorted off the flight, adding: “The airport manager told us there was a security incident.

“They took all our luggage out of the plane for a second check.”

Another image showed the wreckage of a 2009 Turkish Airline crash. Credit: Creative Commons
Another image showed the wreckage of a 2009 Turkish Airline crash. Credit: Creative Commons

Adding to this, local radio broadcaster Galei Zahal reported that 166 passengers received the unnerving images.

After they notified the cabin crew of the unusual activity, the pilot decided to return the Turkish Airline plane to have the incident investigated by security.

Among the pictures were two of wreckages, one of which was of a Turkish Airline plane that crashed in Amsterdam in 2009 and led to the deaths of nine passengers.

A second showed the 2013 wreckage of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 that crashed in San Francisco, killing three.