#us russia china wars

[i-news-you]

In our latest YouTube video, we delve into a critical report from the Strategic Posture Commission, which is sending shockwaves through the realm of international geopolitics. The report highlights the urgent need for the United States to prepare for the possibility of simultaneous wars with both Russia and China.

Tensions with China over Taiwan and escalating conflicts with Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine have set the stage for a potentially dire scenario. The report even raises concerns about possible coordination between Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons, adding a layer of complexity to the situation.

Our video thoroughly explores the key findings of this report, the recommendations it presents, and the implications for the United States and global security. This is a pressing issue that deserves your attention.

Watch our video to gain a comprehensive understanding of this crucial report, and be sure to share it with your friends. Knowledge is power, and staying informed about these critical geopolitical matters is of utmost importance.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more in-depth analysis of the pressing global issues that impact our world. Don't miss out on staying informed and engaged in the world of international affairs.

[goldenstarprincesses]

*modern trench warfare being used for the first time in a major conflict during the American civil war*

*trench warfare leaving mental scars on Alfred that takes years of healing to move past*

Alfred showing up to Europe and seeing they somehow made trench warfare worse

[whereserpentswalk]

Hey, western leftist! Please explain why you think American and British soldiers in the Iraq war were just innocent young men victimized by propaganda, but how Israeli, Russian or Chinese soldiers are all cold ruthless monsters who bare full responsibility for the actions of their state. Please give an answer that doesn't A) describe western soldiers as brave and upstanding while describing eastern soldiers as sadistic and bloodthirsty. B) defend the actions of western governments. C) make it sound like you think real world countries are inhabited by uruk-hai and white walkers. D) all of the above. You have fifteen minutes before the rats begin.

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇸 🚨

UNITED STATES CONGRESS PASSES SERIES OF ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND PRO-WAR BILLS DESPITE PUBLIC OPPOSITION

The United States Congress and Senate passed a series of bills, including three controversial anti-democratic and pro-war bills, two of which were tied together, on Saturday, bypassing public opinion and popular opposition to the profligate, pro-war, globalist, Neolib/Neocon agenda currently driving United States domestic and foreign policy.

Included in the bills passed was a bill to force TikTok to divest from its connections with China at risk of being banned immediately, which naturally was tied to a Foreign aid bill.

However, as even Republican Senator Rand Paul mentioned in an opinion piece in Reason Magazine, the Bill is almost certain to lead to more power for American political elites and their administrations to pressure companies like Apple and Google to further ban apps and sites that offer contradictory opinions to that of the invented narratives of the American Political class.

Before long, Americans, many of whom are already poorly informed, and heavily misinformed by their mainstream media, could lose access to critical information that contradicts the narratives of the United States government and corporate elites.

Horrifically, this only the start. The US Congress also extended the newly revised FISA spy laws, which gives the United States government the power to spy on the electronic communications of foreigners, while also conveniently sweeping up the conversations of millions of Americans, as we learned years ago thanks to the sacrifices of whistle blowers and journalists like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

The new FISA Law goes further than this, however, granting US Intelligence agencies the power to spy on the wireless communications of Americans in completely new ways.

A recent Jacobin article describes these new powers as a, "radical expansion of government surveillance that would be ripe for abuse by a future authoritarian leader", or it could just be used by the authoritarian leadership we have right now, and have had for decades.

In fact, when one commentator described the new powers as "Stasi-like," Edward Snowden himself replied with a long post in which he remarked, "invocation of "Stasi-like" is not only a fair characterization of Himes' amendment, it's probably generous. The Stasi dared not even dream of what the Himes amendment provides."

The amendment in question just "tweaks" the current law's definition of an "electronic communication provider," which is being changed to "any service provider," something extremely likely to be abused by the government to force anyone with a business, a modem and people using their broadband to collect the electronic communications of those people, while also forcing their victims into silence.

The government could essentially force Americans to spy on other people and remain silent about it. Cafe's, restaurants, hotels, business landlords, shared workspaces all could get swept up into the investigations of the Intelligence agencies.

Worse still, because picking out the communications of a single user would be next to impossible, all of their victim's data would end up being surrendered to the authorities.

Sadly, the assault on Americans by their own political elites didn't end there, to top this historic day in Congress, at time when the United States public debt is growing at an astounding rate of $1 trillion every 100 days, US lawmakers also passed a series of pro-war aid packages to American allies (vassals) totalling some $95 billion.

Included in the foreign aid bill are aid packages totalling $61 billion for the Ukraine scam, $26 billion for Israel's special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific to provoke WWIII with China, at the same time we're also provoking a nuclear holocaust with the Russian Federation.

Also buried in these aid packages is the authorization for the United States government to outright steal the oversees investments of the Russian Federation, and thereby the Russian taxpayers.

Astonishingly, and in direct opposition to the wishes of their own voters, Republican support was won without the possibility of conditioning the aid to any kind of border security, this despite the issue being among the top biggest concerns of Republican voters.

Although much of the money is to be used replenishing the heavily depleted stocks of America's weapons and munitions, it remains unclear where the munitions are expected to come from, as US defense production has remained sluggish and slow to expand despite heavy investments and demand in recent years, despite the rapid urgency with which the policy elite describe the situation.

It bodes poorly for working Americans that only a relatively small handful of lawmakers opposed the bills, producing unlikely bedfellows like Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee in the Senate, opposing the FISA bill.

While in the House, the loudest opposition to the foreign aid bill mostly came from populist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Goser. Only 58 Congresmembers voted against the Foreign Aid Bill in which the TikTok ban was tucked.

Not one word from American politicians about the need to raise the minimum wage, which hasn't been increased since 2009 despite considerable inflation, nor a word about America's endlessly growing homelessness crises, property crime increases, or the 40-year stagnation of American wages, the deterioration of infrastructure, and precious little was said besides complaints about border security over the immigration crises sparked by American Imperialist adventures and US sanctions.

What we've learned today is that we are highly unlikely to see any changes to the insane behavior of the US and its allies any time soon, neither with regards to the absolutely bonkers Neocon foreign policy leading us to the edge of abyss, nor the spending-for-the-rich/austerity-for-the-poor Neoliberal domestic policy of the last 45 years.

#source1

#source2

#source3

#source4

#source5

#source6

#source7

#source8

@WorkerSolidarityNews

Blue: titles are opinion pieces or analysis, and may or may not contain sources.

[sataniccapitalist]

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

[worstloki]

Loki surveilling the skyline of New York from the top of Stark Tower and clocking that his favorite paired set of buildings are gone. sad

[theculturedmarxist]

Yves here. You are getting a Sunday extra on the conflict in Gaza and where it looks set to be headed, given Hamas’ apparent strategy, the dug in position of the US and Israel, and the so far on-track behavior of the Arab world.

John Helmer’s post clinically and persuasively draws conclusions that most commentators, including yours truly, have been loath to state clearly, perhaps because depicting the likelihood of bad outcomes somehow feels as if it increases the odds they come to pass (magical thinking cults and their lesser “intention” cousins illustrate this superstitious tendency).

Even though the earlier part of Helmer’s analysis is based on known facts (at least if you’ve been paying attention), he adds critical information about the implications of even a shortish war with Israel’s neighbors on Israel, and the apparently-not-heretofore-reported sighting that China has naval vessels in the Persian Gulf that have anti-sub and anti-missile capabilities.

It’s not hard to conclude from Helmer’s depiction that with the US and Israel unwilling to accept a loss and the lack of any adults on “our team” mean the odds of eventual nuclear war are way too high.  And if you think Helmer is too pessimistic, listen to the section from Larry Johnson in the broadcast on Judge Napolitano with Ray McGovern. Starting at 11:40, Johnson describes how Pakistan has offered to send some of its nukes to Türkiye in case of a dustup with Israel.

By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Preamble1.  Since 1943 the US and its European allies, including Germany (Olaf Scholz’s government, not Adolf Hitler’s), have aimed to liquidate the secular nationalist Arab leadership capable of co-existence with the West and a state for the Jewish people.

2.  In Palestine Hamas has studied seventy-five years of lessons on the impossibility of coordinating Arab state war in the defence of the Palestine part of the two-state solution.

3. For more than a year, therefore, Hamas has prepared in well-kept secret an offensive against Israel to achieve five objectives – the first to demonstrate how inferior the Israeli military is, how vulnerable, how incompetent their intelligence on the Arab world. This has been achieved by the initial attack of October 7.

4. The second Hamas objective has been to demonstrate the Israeli plan of ethnic cleansing of Gaza,  genocide against the Arabs, and incorporation of all Israeli-occupied territories in a single theocratic Zionist state —  Quod erat demonstrandum. The third objective is to hold out against the expected Israeli counterattack for long enough to activate the Hezbollah forces on the northern Lebanon front;  Syrian and Iranian forces on the eastern Golan front; and the West Bank Palestinians, including the Jordanian Palestinians; the latter’s targets will be US air and armoured land force bases in Jordan. So far, so good.

5. The final Hamas objectives are to compel the vacillating sheikhdoms to resist US pressure; limit oil and gas supplies to the enemy markets; prevent regional land base and air transit rights being activated in support of Israel — so far, so good. And lastly, the fifth objective, to engage the friendly nuclear powers – Russia, China – to deter, and if necessary combat US forces in the region and Israel’s threat to fire its nuclear weapons.

The rules of war 6.  These aren’t in the code of secular international humanitarian law referred to in the western media and by UN officials in support of Israel. Those rules were eliminated by the destruction of two generations of Arab leaders willing to abide by them. The war doctrine of Hamas does not concede that international law may dictate to or supersede Islamic law.  In parallel, the war doctrine of Israel is that Jewish and Israeli law supersedes every other.

This report is the most comprehensive record in English to date of the official Israel statements of genocide against the Gaza Palestinians in intention, policy and practice. Source:  https://ccrjustice.org/ In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide expressly included in Article II “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Forty years later, in 1988, the US Congress added two qualifiers to the provision in the US criminal code which defines genocide as a crime to be prosecuted if Americans commit it. This new US law declared genocide is “the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group”. “Substantial part,” the statute now said, meant “a part of a group of such numerical significance that the destruction or loss of that part would cause the destruction of the group as a viable entity within the nation of which such group is a part.” So long as the genocidal Arab killer isn’t “specific” in intention and the part of the people attacked isn’t “substantial”, the killer is off the hook in the US criminal code.  This was a calculated US change to the crime of genocide. The US senator who drafted it and promoted it into law was Joseph Biden. For more, read The Jackals’ Wedding – page 14-18.

7. The Hamas offensive of October 7, OPERATION AL AQSA FLOOD ( عملية طوفان الأقصى,  amaliyyat ṭūfān al-ʾAqṣā), is, as its code name indicates and in the interpretation of Islamic law, lawful self-defence, and the killing of Israelis, including civilians, lawful according to the retribution doctrine of Qisas.  It’s clear there is a Koranic injunction against killing non-combatants, particularly children, the infirm, the old, and women.  When women are combatants, as they are in the kibbutzim, they lose their exemption; also children, if they are armed and trained. So, the evidence question is — how many children under the age of arms-bearing were killed at the border settlements on October 7? And how did they die – by Hamas directly, or in crossfire between Hamas and IDF?  The Israelis say one thing; Hamas says nothing.

8. It is clear the Israeli rules of war allow indiscriminate killing of children in offensive and defensive operations, in retribution and in collective punishment. No Palestinian Arab or Iranian is in any doubt that this has been Israeli policy from the beginning; that it has always been US policy to support it; and that the destruction of Gaza is the current episode of the long laid plan.

The two-state solution 9. Zionist ideology and Israel’s constitution have ruled out the two-state solution.

Source: https://perma.cc/9PZN-DJGY 

10. The Arab state supporters of the two-state solution (including Fatah and the Palestine National Authority) cannot support it when Gaza is being liquidated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), supplied by the Pentagon.

11. President Joseph Biden’s (lead image) recent public remarks endorse Israel’s one-state solution, adding his personal religious benediction — “may God protect our troops”.    Until he said that, Biden had limited himself to invoking God’s protection of “our troops” in speeches on the Afghanistan  War in April 2021  and on the war against Russia in the Ukraine in February 2023.  Before Biden, it was President George Bush Jr. who claimed God on the US side when he meant self-defence – “we will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail. May God bless our country and all who defend her.”  With Biden the Christian, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring himself Jewish in Israel,   the war of Israel against Gaza is a theocratic one, a crusade.  This is how it is understood now throughout the Muslim world.

12. According to God, therefore, there is only a one-state solution – it is either Palestine or Israel.

The current battlefield situation 13. On the Gaza front, Hamas has fought the IDF to a standstill outside the Gaza border wall. The Israel Air Force has dropped about 4,000 tonnes of bombs per week, 8,000 tonnes to October 21; that is more than the US Air Force dropped on Afghanistan in the peak year of 2019.   More than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed so far, including at least 1,030 children  and hundreds of family units; more than 12,500 people have been injured, one million Palestinians displaced, and thousands of homes destroyed. About 1,200 are missing believed to be trapped under the rubble. The Israeli and US government record, reported by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington, documents the continuing firing from Gaza into Israeli territory in what the ISW calls its “Iran updates”.   A prolonged IDF siege threatens to kill several hundred thousand Palestinians by starvation, dehydration, disease, and a combination of artillery and aerial bombardment,  while leaving the Hamas forces relatively unscathed and waiting to inflict a higher rate of casualties on the IDF than it has ever experienced.

14. On the northern front across the Lebanon border, there have been exchanges of missile, drone, anti-tank rocket, artillery, and mortar fire between the IDF and Hezbollah. There have been casualties on both sides. Border settlements on the Israeli side have been evacuated to the south. For a summary of the ISW reports favouring Israel, read this;    For maps and summaries of military action as of October 20 on the Gaza and northern fronts, as well as the Golan and West Bank, click to open.

Incident map on the northern front between October 12 and 17; source:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/

15. US forces on the Jordan front. The Israeli press has been reporting some details of USAF reinforcements at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the northeastern corner of Jordan and possible Marine deployments in Jordan.  Whether the Marines will be moved to defend the Al-Tanf base on the Syrian side of the border, 230 kilometres northeast of Muwaffaq Salti, isn’t known.

Top, right – the US airbase at Muwaffaq Salti; source: https://twitter.com/ According to an Israeli report, “a squadron of U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle bombers based in Britain was deployed over the weekend at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base east of the Jordanian capital of Amman. Another squadron of A-10 attack aircraft has also been deployed there.”  Bottom, the location of Al-Tanf in Syria across the Jordanian and Iraqi borders.

16. Russian and Chinese navy deployments. The Russian fleet based at Tartous, Syria, is at sea, as reported here.   At the moment, there are as many, possibly more Chinese vessels of the 44th Naval Escort Task Force in the Persian Gulf.   The anti-surface, anti-submarine, and anti-air missile capabilities of the Type-052D destroyer can be followed here,  and of the Type-054A frigate here.  For the time being, the significance of this Chinese screen to deter a US-Israeli missile and aircraft attack on Iran has been missed in the western press and by Russian military reporters.

Top:  https://russianfleetanalysis.blogspot.com/ Bottom: the Chinese Defense Ministry announcement of the arrival of the destroyer Zibo and frigate Jingzhou at Kuwait on October 19.  

Armageddon strategy 17. US Afghanistan War veteran: “Suppose Israel and the US understand they are facing an existential survival future in which they must combat swarm attacks on three or four fronts — Gaza/Hamas, North/Hezbollah, Golan/Syria/Iran, and West Bank/Jordan, and they calculate the Arabs have at least a 30 to 60–day arms supply in stock, do they calculate they can withstand a multi-front offensive for enough time, resupplied by air from the US? If they calculate that they can withstand a 30-day multi-directional swarm, they must understand that, at a minimum, Israel’s infrastructure and economy will be ruined. In a scenario like that, even if they ‘win’, they lose. In terms of airlifting and shipping supplies, we’ve already seen that the Arabs can hit Israeli military and civilian airfields, airports and seaports. Defending Israeli infrastructure with their air defence capability is the main mission of the strike groups the US is deploying in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Red Sea.

According to the Pentagon on October 19,  the USS Carney, a part of the USS Gerald Ford group, had transited into the Red Sea through the Suez Canal the day before and was in the northern Red Sea when it intercepted three land attack cruise missiles and several drones.

Western societies like Israel cannot function without solid, reliable, electrical power and communications services. We can be certain that power generation, transmission and distribution will be targeted by the Arabs non-stop. The cell towers and central communications centres will be too.”

18. Moscow source. “When does the threat to Israel become so dire, they go nuclear, and when they do, against what targets will they fire – Hamas, Beirut, Damascus, Teheran?*  The US won’t accept a Palestinian state so the only option left for the Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians, possibly Turks is to fight with this new kind of warfare whose objective is to cut into the flesh and bones of the Israeli adversary, and make life in that state unviable. Without a Palestinian homeland, all of Israel and the Arab territories become a battlefield. The IDF options then shrink to two – carpet bombing and mass killing of the civilian population centres on all fronts at once. If that isn’t sustainable or effective for the Israeli-American purpose, then option 2 is to attack Lebanon, Syria and Iran to stop the flow of reinforcements. But that’s regional war, and it can only be conducted by the Israelis with full US military participation. This becomes nuclear very quickly because President Putin has already placed the Kinzhal missiles in range of the US carrier fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Chinese have installed their screen to protect Iran. It’s obvious that the race hatred policies of Biden and Netanyahu, and their belief that God has chosen them both as destroyers for their people, lead to the final, nuclear weapons solution. The Russians and Chinese can maximise their limited military projection by deterring, or if need be pre-empting a nuclear attack on the Arab cities or Teheran. For this to work, the Russians and the Chinese need to say more – loudly so there’s no mistaking what they mean.”

[*] In 1983, in conversation with his General Staff, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein said: “the Iraqis would be able to withstand three years of fighting in a war. However, the Israelis cannot withstand one year of fighting in a war.” In April 1990 Hussein was hosting Yasser Arafat of the PLO in Baghdad. “[Israel] has 240 nuclear warheads, 12 out of them for each Arab capital,” Arafat said. Saddam replied: “I say this and I am very calm and wearing a civilian suit [everyone laughs]. But I say this so that we can get ready at this level.” Quoted in The Jackals’ Wedding, page 16.  

[nando161mando]

What a generous guy. 🤪

Saw this, recently.

https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/mark-zuckerberg-donates-for-school-in-hawaii-12012024.php

In the article headline they call him “big hearted”. Okay, I’ll bite. Let’s do a test and confirm that.

According to the article, the Zuck is worth 198 billion. He donated 1.5 million (750k in cash, the rest in tech).

1.5m divided by 198b gives us 0.000007575% (repeating). That’s the percentage of his worth that he donated.

Still, these numbers are not in a scale most people can fully comprehend. So let’s use the formula on something more relatable.

The median net worth of the average American is 192,000 (in 2022). Let’s round up and say 200k.

200k times 0.000007575 gives us an equatable donation of $1.51.

So yeah. He donated the equivalent, to him, of a buck and a half.

What a generous man. /s

[jarviskingston]

🌏🌍🌎

[newsupdate2]

Three killed and dozens injured by bomb at Thai festival

Read more

/

Help reporter

[xtruss]

The First Light of Trinity

— By Alex Wellerstein | July 16, 2015 | Annals of Technology

Seventy years ago, the flash of a nuclear bomb illuminated the skies over Alamogordo, New Mexico. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

The light of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. This is because the heat of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. Seventy years ago today, when the first atomic weapon was tested, they called its light cosmic. Where else, except in the interiors of stars, do the temperatures reach into the tens of millions of degrees? It is that blistering radiation, released in a reaction that takes about a millionth of a second to complete, that makes the light so unearthly, that gives it the strength to burn through photographic paper and wound human eyes. The heat is such that the air around it becomes luminous and incandescent and then opaque; for a moment, the brightness hides itself. Then the air expands outward, shedding its energy at the speed of sound���the blast wave that destroys houses, hospitals, schools, cities.

The test was given the evocative code name of Trinity, although no one seems to know precisely why. One theory is that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the U.S. government’s laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the director of science for the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the bomb, chose the name as an allusion to the poetry of John Donne. Oppenheimer’s former mistress, Jean Tatlock, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was a professor there, had introduced him to Donne’s work before she committed suicide, in early 1944. But Oppenheimer later claimed not to recall where the name came from.

The operation was designated as top secret, which was a problem, since the whole point was to create an explosion that could be heard for a hundred miles around and seen for two hundred. How to keep such a spectacle under wraps? Oppenheimer and his colleagues considered several sites, including a patch of desert around two hundred miles east of Los Angeles, an island eighty miles southwest of Santa Monica, and a series of sand bars ten miles off the Texas coast. Eventually, they chose a place much closer to home, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on an Army Air Forces bombing range in a valley called the Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man,” an indication of its unforgiving landscape). Freshwater had to be driven in, seven hundred gallons at a time, from a town forty miles away. To wire the site for a telephone connection required laying four miles of cable. The most expensive single line item in the budget was for the construction of bomb-proof shelters, which would protect some of the more than two hundred and fifty observers of the test.

The area immediately around the bombing range was sparsely populated but not by any means barren. It was within two hundred miles of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and El Paso. The nearest town of more than fifty people was fewer than thirty miles away, and the nearest occupied ranch was only twelve miles away—long distances for a person, but not for light or a radioactive cloud. (One of Trinity’s more unusual financial appropriations, later on, was for the acquisition of several dozen head of cattle that had had their hair discolored by the explosion.) The Army made preparations to impose martial law after the test if necessary, keeping a military force of a hundred and sixty men on hand to manage any evacuations. Photographic film, sensitive to radioactivity, was stowed in nearby towns, to provide “medical legal” evidence of contamination in the future. Seismographs in Tucson, Denver, and Chihuahua, Mexico, would reveal how far away the explosion could be detected.

The Trinity test weapon. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

On July 16, 1945, the planned date of the test, the weather was poor. Thunderstorms were moving through the area, raising the twin hazards of electricity and rain. The test weapon, known euphemistically as the gadget, was mounted inside a shack atop a hundred-foot steel tower. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of wires, screws, switches, high explosives, radioactive materials, and diagnostic devices, and was crude enough that it could be tripped by a passing storm. (This had already happened once, with a model of the bomb’s electrical system.) Rain, or even too many clouds, could cause other problems—a spontaneous radioactive thunderstorm after detonation, unpredictable magnifications of the blast wave off a layer of warm air. It was later calculated that, even without the possibility of mechanical or electrical failure, there was still more than a one-in-ten chance of the gadget failing to perform optimally.

The scientists were prepared to cancel the test and wait for better weather when, at five in the morning, conditions began to improve. At five-ten, they announced that the test was going forward. At five-twenty-five, a rocket near the tower was shot into the sky—the five-minute warning. Another went up at five-twenty-nine. Forty-five seconds before zero hour, a switch was thrown in the control bunker, starting an automated timer. Just before five-thirty, an electrical pulse ran the five and a half miles across the desert from the bunker to the tower, up into the firing unit of the bomb. Within a hundred millionths of a second, a series of thirty-two charges went off around the device’s core, compressing the sphere of plutonium inside from about the size of an orange to that of a lime. Then the gadget exploded.

General Thomas Farrell, the deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, was in the control bunker with Oppenheimer when the blast went off. “The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” he wrote immediately afterward. “It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.” Twenty-seven miles away from the tower, the Berkeley physicist and Nobel Prize winner Ernest O. Lawrence was stepping out of a car. “Just as I put my foot on the ground I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant,” he wrote. James Conant, the president of Harvard University, was watching from the V.I.P. viewing spot, ten miles from the tower. “The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me,” he wrote. “The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world.”

In its first milliseconds, the Trinity fireball burned through photographic film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Trinity was filmed exclusively in black and white and without audio. In the main footage of the explosion, the fireball rises out of the frame before the cameraman, dazed by the sight, pans upward to follow it. The written accounts of the test, of which there are many, grapple with how to describe an experience for which no terminology had yet been invented. Some eventually settle on what would become the standard lexicon. Luis Alvarez, a physicist and future participant in the Hiroshima bombing, viewed Trinity from the air. He likened the debris cloud, which rose to a height of some thirty thousand feet in ten minutes, to “a parachute which was being blown up by a large electric fan,” noting that it “had very much the appearance of a large mushroom.” Charles Thomas, the vice-president of Monsanto, a major Manhattan Project contractor, observed the same. “It looked like a giant mushroom; the stalk was the thousands of tons of sand being sucked up by the explosion; the top of the mushroom was a flowering ball of fire,” he wrote. “It resembled a giant brain the convolutions of which were constantly changing.”

In the months before the test, the Manhattan Project scientists had estimated that their bomb would yield the equivalent of between seven hundred and five thousand tons of TNT. As it turned out, the detonation force was equal to about twenty thousand tons of TNT—four times larger than the expected maximum. The light was visible as far away as Amarillo, Texas, more than two hundred and eighty miles to the east, on the other side of a mountain range. Windows were reported broken in Silver City, New Mexico, some hundred and eighty miles to the southwest. Here, again, the written accounts converge. Thomas: “It is safe to say that nothing as terrible has been made by man before.” Lawrence: “There was restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.” Farrell: “The strong, sustained, awesome roar … warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” Nevertheless, the plainclothes military police who were stationed in nearby towns reported that those who saw the light seemed to accept the government’s explanation, which was that an ammunition dump had exploded.

Trinity was only the first nuclear detonation of the summer of 1945. Two more followed, in early August, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as many as a quarter of a million people. By October, Norris Bradbury, the new director of Los Alamos, had proposed that the United States conduct “subsequent Trinity’s.” There was more to learn about the bomb, he argued, in a memo to the new coördinating council for the lab, and without the immediate pressure of making a weapon for war, “another TR might even be FUN.” A year after the test at Alamogordo, new ones began, at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. They were not given literary names. Able, Baker, and Charlie were slated for 1946; X-ray, Yoke, and Zebra were slated for 1948. These were letters in the military radio alphabet—a clarification of who was really the master of the bomb.

Irradiated Kodak X-ray film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

By 1992, the U.S. government had conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests, and other nations—China, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—had joined in the frenzy. The last aboveground detonation took place over Lop Nur, a dried-up salt lake in northwestern China, in 1980. We are some years away, in other words, from the day when no living person will have seen that unearthly light firsthand. But Trinity left secondhand signs behind. Because the gadget exploded so close to the ground, the fireball sucked up dirt and debris. Some of it melted and settled back down, cooling into a radioactive green glass that was dubbed Trinitite, and some of it floated away. A minute quantity of the dust ended up in a river about a thousand miles east of Alamogordo, where, in early August, 1945, it was taken up into a paper mill that manufactured strawboard for Eastman Kodak. The strawboard was used to pack some of the company’s industrial X-ray film, which, when it was developed, was mottled with dark blotches and pinpoint stars—the final exposure of the first light of the nuclear age.

[ukrainenews]

Daily Wrap Up March 21, 2023

Under the cut:

A Ukrainian army major in the Bakhmut area says the situation remains extremely difficult, but that he believes the Russians are losing their "offensive potential."

The U.K. Minister of State for Defense Annabel Goldie said on March 20 that some of the ammunition her country would deliver to Ukraine alongside Challenger 2 tanks contains depleted uranium. “Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles,” Goldie added. The U.K. pledged to supply Ukraine with 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks as part of the Western allies’ assistance package. Multiple countries promised to send dozens of German-made Leopard 2 tanks, and the U.S. promised to send 31 Abrams tanks later this year.

Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, have finished formal talks at the Kremlin, and are signing documents on strategic cooperation, Russian state media are reporting. The pair signed a joint statement “deepening the two countries’ comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for the new era”, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign affairs ministry, said.

The US has changed course and is now providing Ukraine with 31 M1-A1 Abrams tanks instead of the newer M1-A2 variants previously planned, Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Tuesday. This will allow for the tanks to get there faster. 

Patriot missile defense systems are set to be deployed to Ukraine faster than originally planned, and a group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers will complete their training on the systems at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the coming days, US defense officials said on Tuesday.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin emerged from two days of talks on Tuesday with warm words of friendship between China and Russia and joint criticism of the West, but no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough over Ukraine.

“A Ukrainian army major in the Bakhmut area says the situation remains extremely difficult, but that he believes the Russians are losing their "offensive potential."

Maksym Zhorin said on his Telegram channel that "the main task for the Ukrainian army is to hold the connection corridor, which allows for the supply and evacuation of the wounded."

"Therefore the fighting around this corridor, in the area of Ivankivske and Bohdanivka, is the most difficult," he said.

The two villages sit on routes west from Bakhmut toward the city of Kostiantynivka.

"One thing I can say for sure is that the enemy is gradually running out of offensive potential," Zhorin said. "They have sustained significant losses while trying to advance in the South and in the North, as well as while trying to attack directly through urban areas. Nevertheless, the endless assault attempts continue." "The Russians have a goal to take Bakhmut at any cost. We have orders to hold the line. We are following our orders."”-via CNN

~

“The U.K. Minister of State for Defense Annabel Goldie said on March 20 that some of the ammunition her country would deliver to Ukraine alongside Challenger 2 tanks contains depleted uranium.

“Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles,” Goldie added.

The U.K. pledged to supply Ukraine with 28 Challenger 2 main battle tanks as part of the Western allies’ assistance package. Multiple countries promised to send dozens of German-made Leopard 2 tanks, and the U.S. promised to send 31 Abrams tanks later this year.

U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview with Reuters on Feb. 22 that Challenger tanks could start to arrive in Ukraine in the spring.

Depleted uranium is a dense metal formed as a byproduct of enriching natural uranium for nuclear fuel. Being still radioactive but at a much lower level than the original material, depleted uranium is used in armor-piercing projectiles and bombs for greater penetration power.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, depleted uranium can seriously threaten human health if its particles are ingested or inhaled. Munitions containing depleted uranium were used in both Gulf Wars, Serbia, and Kosovo.

Many studies on depleted uranium report no evidence of danger, but their results remain controversial, the Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks of the European Commission wrote.

On March 21, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin condemned the U.K.’s plans to send ammunition containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, saying Moscow “would have to respond accordingly,” as quoted by Reuters.

Russia has made a series of nuclear threats since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Kremlin's continuous messaging of low-credibility threats of nuclear escalation aims to "intimidate the West and appeal to its (Kremlin's) ultranationalist base," the Institute for the Study of War wrote on March 2.”-via Kyiv Independent

~

“Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, have finished formal talks at the Kremlin, and are signing documents on strategic cooperation, Russian state media are reporting.

The pair signed a joint statement “deepening the two countries’ comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for the new era”, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign affairs ministry, said.

Xi and Putin “stressed that the Ukraine crisis should be settled through peace talks”, she said.

Hua added, “On the Ukraine issue, the two sides believe the purposes and principles of the UN Charter must be observed and international law respected. Russia speaks positively of China’s objective and impartial position on the Ukraine issue.

The two sides oppose the practice by any country or group of countries to seek advantages in the military, political and other areas to the detriment of the legitimate security interests of other countries.””-via The Guardian

~

“The US has changed course and is now providing Ukraine with 31 M1-A1 Abrams tanks instead of the newer M1-A2 variants previously planned, Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Tuesday.

“[A]fter further study and analysis on how best to do this, DoD in close coordination with Ukraine has made the decision to provide the M1-A1 variant of the Abrams tank, which will enable us to submit significantly expedite delivery timelines and deliver this important capability to Ukraine by the fall of this year,” Ryder said at a press conference.

He added that the US would also be providing Ukraine with “advances armor and weapons systems” that are “very similar capability” to the M1-A2, including a .50-caliber heavy machine gun and 120 mm cannon.”-via CNN

~

“Patriot missile defense systems are set to be deployed to Ukraine faster than originally planned, and a group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers will complete their training on the systems at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the coming days, US defense officials said on Tuesday.

The troops will then move on to Europe for additional training on the two Patriot systems—one American, and one built by the Germans and Dutch— that will be deployed to Ukraine in the coming weeks, the officials told reporters at Fort Sill.

US trainers at Fort Sill, where the 65 Ukrainians have been training since January 15, were able to significantly speed up the timeline of the course because of the Ukrainians’ baseline knowledge of air defense systems, the officials said. The acceleration of Patriot deployments comes the same day it was reported that the US will accelerate the time it takes to ship Abrams tanks to Ukraine by sending older M1-A1 models of America's main battle tank instead of the more modern version of the tank, according to two US officials.

“Our assessment is that the Ukrainian soldiers are impressive, and absolutely a quick study,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Morgan, the Fort Sill commander. “Due to their extensive air defense knowledge and experience in a combat zone, it was easier— though never easy—for them to grasp the Patriot System Operations and Maintenance concepts.”

The US military had allocated 10 weeks for the training, but the Ukrainians completed it in about 8 weeks. The training schedule was “aggressive,” a Fort Sill official said, with the Ukrainians training daily from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time.”-via CNN

~

“Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin emerged from two days of talks on Tuesday with warm words of friendship between China and Russia and joint criticism of the West, but no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough over Ukraine.

Xi's visit to Moscow - long touted by the Kremlin as a show of support from its most powerful friend - featured plenty of demonstrative bonhomie. The two leaders referred to each other as dear friends, promised economic cooperation and described their countries' relations as the best they have ever been.

A joint statement included familiar accusations against the West - that Washington was undermining global stability and NATO barging into the Asia-Pacific region.

On Ukraine, Putin praised Xi for a peace plan he proposed last month, and blamed Kyiv and the West for rejecting it.

"We believe that many of the provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when they are ready for that in the West and in Kyiv. However, so far we see no such readiness from their side," Putin said.

But Xi barely mentioned the conflict at all, saying that China had an "impartial position" on it.

Responding to the meeting, the White House said China's position was not impartial, and urged Beijing to pressure Russia to withdraw from Ukraine's sovereign territory to end the war.

The summit, Putin's biggest display of diplomacy since he ordered his invasion of Ukraine a year ago, was partly upstaged in Kyiv, where Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made an unannounced visit and met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The latest world leader to make the gruelling overland journey to show solidarity with Ukraine, Kishida toured Bucha on the capital's outskirts, left littered with dead last year by fleeing Russian troops. He lay a wreath by a church before observing a moment of silence and bowing.

"The world was astonished to see innocent civilians in Bucha killed one year ago. I really feel great anger at the atrocity upon visiting that very place here," Kishida said.”-via Reuters

[troythecatfish]

[workersolidarity]

🇷🇺🇨🇳🇺🇳 RUSSIA AND CHINA VETO US RESOLUTION ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT AT UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL

The Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China have just vetoed a UN Resolution on the Israel-Palestine conflict that was sponsored by the United States at the United Nations Security Council Wednesday, according to a report by the Russian State-owned Ria Novosti News Agency.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[magnoliamyrrh]

.

[eaarths-blog]

📰 essential read the US warmongering explained.

MICHAEL HUDSON speaking with RADHIKA DESAI Extracts from the programme that lift the lid on the motivational forces that causes the US to behave so disgraceful. “In today’s show, we look at how the United States is responding to this structural transformation of China’s economy. Our short answer is: badly. It keeps military and diplomatic tensions high, continues provocative visits of…