A Whole Lot of Nuclear Madness in One Week |
Water storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site. (IAEA inspection photo.)
Remember that 1963 comedic caper movie, “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”? Okay, maybe not. It was director Stanley Kramer’s escape from his more traditionally dark subject matter — Judgment at Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind. The bridge from those more sober productions to “Mad” was his favorite and perennial lead actor, Spencer Tracy.
We’ve crossed that bridge now, into a world so mad, and decidedly not funny, that we’ll need a whole lot more “mads” in the title for the dystopian 2025 version.
In the space of just a few days, a slew of truly insane news broke — and I’m not even talking here about anything emanating from the Trump regime.
US Intelligence, if any such thing still exists, announced it foresaw an attack on Iran’s nuclear centers by Israel in the next six months. By ‘attack’, they mean ‘bomb’.
The Iranian government immediately barked back with an announcement that for every hundred such facilities destroyed they would “build a thousand other ones.”
This is no idle threat from either side. Just last October, according to US and Israeli officials, Israel reportedly destroyed a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research facility. (Iran continues to deny it is developing nuclear weapons.)
In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, a cyber attack likely launched by Israel and the United States, infected computers at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant before spreading across other facilities including to the Natanz uranium enrichment complex. Israel has also assassinated at least five of Iran’s nuclear scientists, between 2010 and 2024.
No one really knows what if anything got destroyed by Israel (and the US) in Iran and what has been rebuilt at least once, if perhaps not one thousand times.
Iran is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty whose Article IV rashly gives the “inalienable” right to non-nuclear weapons states to develop “peaceful” nuclear energy. Iran has long-claimed that it’s doing precisely that. But because nuclear power provides a direct pathway to nuclear weapons development, Iran is at best doubted if not disbelieved by its enemies.
Also this week came the news that Japan would go for a “maximization” of nuclear power, aiming for a 20% energy share........