NASA moves up lunar nuclear reactor plan to counter China, Russia
Sean Duffy issued the directive on a fission surface power program in internal documents.
Duffy instructed that a nuclear reactor with a minimum output of 100 kilowatts be made operational on the lunar surface in order to secure power supplies necessary for activities there.
NASA earlier planned to construct a 40-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon with the goal of completing it in the early 2030s. Under the latest directive, the planned output has been increased and the schedule has been moved up.
The move demonstrates the US stance of countering China and Russia, which announced a joint plan to place a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface by the mid-2030s.
Duffy told reporters on Tuesday that the United States is "in a race with China to the moon" and "to have a base on the moon, we need energy."
However, the question now is whether the plan can be realized as scheduled, given the massive budget cuts for NASA proposed by the administration of President Donald Trump.
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The Diplomat
44 minutes ago
- The Diplomat
Indonesian State Investment Fund to Pursue Railway Debt Restructuring
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Japan Times
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Why Hiroshima must keep being commemorated
Nobody should ever say that it was a good call, but it was the only one a U.S. President was likely to make in 1945. The decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 80 years ago, was the almost-inevitable outcome of Japanese intransigence and of the technical success of the Manhattan Project, which brought into being nuclear weapons. The anniversary is generating a wave of commemorations and renewing the arguments for and against the mission of Col. Paul Tibbets to drop Little Boy from his B-29, named Enola Gay, over Japan on that summer morning. In the 21st century, many brand the bombing a war crime — maybe the worst of all those committed in World War II save the Holocaust. I disagree. Some 20 years ago, I wrote a book about the 1944-1945 battle for Japan for which I spent months poring over the Hiroshima controversy. I found writing a chapter about it one of the toughest challenges I have ever faced as a historian because the military, political and moral issues are so complex. No sane person could applaud the dropping of the first bomb, and less still that of the second, which annihilated Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Yet I defend U.S. President Harry Truman and those around him who shared responsibility for doing so. Many modern critics assume that the bombs represented the worst possible outcome of the war. This is not so. At the rate people were dying in Japan — especially prisoners in Japanese hands — more victims would have perished than the 100,000 (a conservative guesstimate) who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the struggle continued for even a few weeks longer. Moreover, during the earlier months of 1945, conventional bombing of Japanese cities by B-29s had already killed more than 300,000, one-third of these in the March 9 fire-raising assault on Tokyo. There is a myth that commands support among a modest faction of modern historians that in August 1945 the Japanese were ready to quit. This is untrue. The Tokyo leadership, dominated by the military, certainly wanted an out. But they sought terms such as no U.S. government would entertain. They wished to maintain Japanese hegemony over Korea and Manchuria, to be spared from allied occupation and to be granted the right themselves to conduct any war crimes trials. Despite their catastrophic defeats in successive Pacific battles, the Tokyo war party believed Japan still held an important card — the capability to savage an invasion of the mainland, inflicting casualties that the squeamish Americans would find unacceptable. The Japanese looked forward to wreaking carnage among allied troops landing on Japanese beaches. There is another, uglier aspect of the story. This derives from technological determinism — the extent to which the bomb-dropping commitment was finally made because the weapons existed, that they had been bought and paid for. An especially repugnant conversation took place in July 1945, when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard trekked to the Spartanburg, South Carolina, home of Secretary of State James Byrnes, to argue passionately against using the weapon he had helped to create. Byrnes, disgusted by the impassioned outburst, responded with two remarks that reflect scant credit on him. First, he said that the U.S. Congress "would have plenty to say if $2 billion proved to have been expended on the Manhattan Project for no practical purpose.' He added that the bomb could even help to get Josef Stalin's legions out of Szilard's own country. The visitor walked back to Spartanburg station having accomplished nothing. Along with most of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, he had for years been motivated by terror that Hitler might acquire a nuclear device ahead of the allies. They saw their own work as defensive. When Germany collapsed, and with it the threat of a Nazi bomb, it became abhorrent to consider its use. Their difficulty in making their case was that they were bound by intensive secrecy and could not speak out. Truman had assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, ignorant of the program. When he was briefed that the U.S. would, within weeks, probably possess the most terrible weapon in history, nobody invited him to make any great decision. It was taken for granted that if the Japanese were still fighting when the bomb program achieved consummation, the U.S. would use its progeny to force Tokyo's surrender. Some people to this day assert that Americans would never have employed the bomb against Europeans. This is almost certainly untrue. The German generals who claimed that, if Hitler had followed their advice, they could have kept the European war going for months longer, ignored the near certainty that in such circumstances, the first nuclear weapon would have fallen on Berlin. As it was, even after Hiroshima most of the Japanese leadership persisted in resisting surrender. Their obduracy provided an excuse for the far less defensible detonation of the second bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki because there was a desire to test its technology. Nonetheless the decisive factor in the belated Japanese surrender, conveyed to the Americans on Aug. 14, was the Russian declaration of war on Japan and invasion of Manchuria. Stalin had known of the American nuclear program through his agents in the West but was devastated by news of Hiroshima because he worried Tokyo would quit immediately, denying him the excuse for belligerency and seizure of the territorial prizes he had been promised. As it was, on Aug. 9, the Red Army launched its assault and secured Stalin's booty. Many of the Western critics who today denounce the bombs are essentially arguing that the U.S. should have saved the Japanese people from the madness of their own leaders. Yet in the sixth year of a horrific global struggle that had desensitized all its participants in various degrees, this was asking too much. I believe Truman would have a stronger moral case in the eyes of posterity had the U.S. given an explicit public warning to Japan if they kept fighting. In July 1945, the allies did threaten dire consequences but failed to specify what these would be. Moreover, there seems a good argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done much to preserve mankind ever since. The mushroom cloud, the ghastly images of the horrors of nuclear warfare, leave no room for doubt that if any nation resorts to such weapons, we are doomed. Even the world's vilest dictators recognize this. It is right that we continue to commemorate the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pivotal and dreadful moments in the history of humankind. But responsibility for them should rest with the Japanese leaders who launched their country into a war of aggression that cost countless lives. We should be thankful that billions of today's people, though familiar with little history, at least know what happened on those August days 80 years ago, and thus recognize that a repetition would augur an end of everything. Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His histories include "Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945," "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975" and "Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962."
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The Trump administration plans to scale back criticism of El Salvador, Israel and Russia over human rights, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing drafts of the State Department's annual human rights report. The draft reports related to those countries were significantly shorter than the ones prepared by the administration of Democratic former President Joe Biden, who left office in January, following Republican Donald Trump's November 2024 election win. The State Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has not yet officially released this year's report, which covers last year's incidents. A senior State Department official in a briefing with reporters declined to provide specific details about the contents of the report but said it had been restructured in a way that "removes redundancies, increases report readability." The United States has traditionally viewed the promotion of human rights and democracy as well as press freedom as core foreign policy objectives, although critics have repeatedly pointed out the double standard Washington has had towards its allies. Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the traditional promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country's affairs. Instead, Trump officials have interfered in other ways, repeatedly weighing in on European politics to denounce what they see as suppression of right-wing leaders, including in Romania, Germany and France, and accusing European authorities of censoring views such as criticism of immigration. On El Salvador, the draft State Department report states that it had "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" in 2024, the Post said. The previous report published under the Biden administration said there were "significant human rights issues" there including credible reports of "degrading treatment or punishment by security forces" and "harsh and life-threatening prison conditions." The Trump administration has deported people to El Salvador with help from the government of President Nayib Bukele, whose country is receiving $6 million from the U.S. to house the migrants in a high-security mega-prison. The draft report makes no mention of corruption or threats to the independence of Israel's judiciary, the Post reported. The previous report mentioned isolated reports of government corruption and cited the criminal case of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust — all of which he denies. Previous references to Israeli surveillance of Palestinians and restrictions of their movements were also not addressed in the draft report, the newspaper said. The final report on Russia issued under the Biden State Department made several references to violence and harassment faced by LGBTQ+ people in Russia. The Washington Post said the draft report removed all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them, and descriptions of government abuses that remained had been softened. The embassies of El Salvador, Israel and Russia in Washington did not immediately respond to separate emailed requests for comment. The Trump administration has moved to reshape the State Department's human rights bureau, which it said had become a platform for "left-wing activists to wage vendettas against 'anti-woke' leaders." Usually, the annual report is released around March or April each year but has been delayed this year. The State Department official said the report would be released "in the very near future." "The report is not meant to be every single human rights abuse that's happened in every single country. It's meant to be illustrative and a broad picture of what the conditions of human rights are on the ground in each country," the official said.
