Stephen Schwartz
@AtomicAnalyst
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Editor/Co-author, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 • Nonresident Senior Fellow @BulletinAtomic • Fellow @NSquareCollab
Chicago, IL
Joined May 2013
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Pinned Tweet
This is my last day on Twitter. Under the malign direction and influence of its owner, this site now fully embraces and promotes disinformation, antisemitism, and hatred. I cannot in good conscience continue to tacitly support this toxic and antidemocratic environment by staying.
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When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why.
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This is patently absurd. Literally nothing has happened in the last 201 days to increase the overall power of the US nuclear arsenal.
My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before....
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Someone came across this 22-month-old tweet of mine last night and it has been blowing up ever since.
I hate it when I’m right.
When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why.
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Today in 1974, Karen Silkwood’s car was apparently forced off a quiet highway in western Oklahoma, where it crashed into a culvert, instantly killing her. Silkwood was employed as a technician at Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation’s plutonium fuel rod fabrication plant in Cimarron.
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78 years ago today—at 5:29:45 AM (Mountain War Time)—about 35 miles SE of Socorro, New Mexico, the nuclear age began with a big bang. Contrary to popular belief, the area surrounding the remote Trinity test site was not uninhabited, and the fallout did not drift away harmlessly.
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The irony here is that this is the last thing a self-described germaphobe like Trump should want to do. Maybe ignorance is bliss?
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1. NBC obtained the unclassified version only.
2. You're not POTUS yet.
3. This is why skipping your daily intelligence briefings is dumb.
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Oh look, the Trump administration has its own uranium-related scandal, except this one is real and there's proof the administration did the industry's bidding.
Uranium firm urged Trump officials to shrink Bears Ears National Monument
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Roger Fisher's idea for making the decision to use nuclear weapons less abstract (from March 1981
@BulletinAtomic
):
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Silkwood was on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter and an Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union official to discuss safety concerns and blow the whistle on Kerr-McGee by sharing falsified quality control records for fuel rods manufactured at the Cimarron facility.
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While I appreciate everyone making this old tweet blow up, the people who were truly prescient about the grave dangers of the Bolton/Trump NSC reorganization are our public health security experts, incl. those quoted in the article:
@creynoldsdc
,
@JeremyKonyndyk
, and
@llborio
.
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In 2014, Kerr-McGee agreed to pay $5.15 billion to settle a lawsuit about its failure to obey environmental laws at two dozen heavily-contaminated sites across the United States—the largest fine ever levied by the US government to enforce such laws.
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On this date 35 years ago, thanks to “a funny feeling in my gut,” 44 year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov disobeyed standing orders, averting what would most likely have been a catastrophic but accidental global thermonuclear war with the United States.
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A few days before she died, someone from Kerr-McGee deliberately contaminated Silkwood’s apartment with plutonium—a material she did not work with at the Cimarron facility. She and her roommates were also under continuous company surveillance.
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From 1970-75, workers at Cimarron mixed two metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium with uranium and placed it in 19,000 stainless steel fuel rods for the Fast Flux Test Facility reactor at the Hanford Reservation. In 1974, the AEC discovered about 40 pounds of Pu-239 was missing.
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In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that Silkwood’s estate was entitled to $10 million in punitive damages from Kerr-McGee which was awarded in a jury trial in 1979. In 1986, after the Supreme Court refused to intervene a second time, Kerr-McGee settled for $1.38 million.
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@realDonaldTrump
@nytimes
Have you forgotten—or would you prefer we forget—your 11 rallies this year?
Jan 3, Miami
Jan 9, Toledo
Jan 14, Milwaukee
Jan 28, Wildwood
Jan 30, Des Moines
Feb 10, Manchester
Feb 19, Phoenix
Feb 20, Colorado Springs
Feb 21, Las Vegas
Feb 28, North Charleston
Mar 2, Charlotte
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I’d like Treason for $500, Alex.
Tucker: What's the difference between getting dirt from Russian government and hiring the guy who wrote the Steele Dossier?
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Just past midnight today in 1983, thanks to “a funny feeling in my gut,” 44 year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov’s calm assessment that a satellite warning of the launch of five US Minuteman ICBMs was a false alarm likely averted a catastrophic nuclear war.
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Today in 1980, at 2:26am EDT, warning displays at the Strategic Air Command suddenly indicated that a Soviet SLBM attack on the United States was underway, first showing 2 and then, 18 seconds later, 200 inbound missiles. SAC ordered all alert air crews to start their engines.
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Thanks to "a funny feeling in my gut," Stanislav Petrov literally averted an accidental nuclear war in Sept. 1983.
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77 years ago today—at 5:29:45 AM (Mountain War Time)—about 35 miles SE of Socorro, New Mexico, the nuclear age began with a big bang. Contrary to popular belief, the area surrounding the remote Trinity test site was not uninhabited, and the fallout did not drift away harmlessly.
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@realDonaldTrump
@nytimes
And what about your 11 trips to play golf at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, FL, at taxpayer expense as the pandemic raged?
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After less than two years in office, Donald Trump has spent an astonishing 23 percent of his days playing golf, almost always on a course that he personally owns. The estimated cost to taxpayers of his leisure activity now stands at $83,000,000 and rising.
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Yes, it’s a cult (part 547 of an ongoing series):
“The crowd burst into applause. Mr. Bowling, though, wasn’t finished.
‘Just kidding,’ he said. ‘That was Barack Obama.’
The cheering abruptly stopped. The crowd went mostly silent. There was a lone boo.”
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Just past midnight 37 years ago, thanks to “a funny feeling in my gut,” 44 year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov’s calm calculation that a satellite warning of the launch of five US Minuteman ICBMs was a false alarm likely averted a catastrophic nuclear war.
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Huge sleeper story: House GOP just gave Trump full control of VOA/RFE/RL, ability to broadcast propaganda worldwide.
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On April 20, Trump declared total US deaths would be between 50-60,000. This week, he insisted the number would be 65-70,000. Having nearly reached 65,000 today, he's upped the number again. This isn't shifting the goalposts, it's moving the body bags and hoping no one notices.
TRUMP: "Models predicted between 1.5 million & 2.2 million people would die in the US ... we have saved thousands and thousands of lives ... hopefully we are going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost." (Trump has moved goalposts from 0 deaths to 60,000 to 70,000 to 100,000.)
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Today in 1985, French secret agents—in an elaborate intelligence operation codenamed Satanique—bombed and sank the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, New Zealand, as it prepared to return to Mururoa Atoll to protest French underground nuclear testing there.
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Watching thousands of die-hard, non-social distancing Trump supporters pour into the BOK Center in Tulsa for tonight's rally is like watching passengers board the RMS Titanic in 1912 if they had known in advance that the great ship was going to slam into an iceberg and sink.
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@gtconway3d
Trump hired a company to pay background actors $50 each to enthusiastically fill out his very first campaign event at Trump Tower five years ago this Tuesday ... and then stiffed that company for four months.
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@Toon_Fan_1
I'm a nuclear weapons and weapons policy expert specializing in US nuclear weapons. It is literally my job to know. What's your expertise?
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@WhiteHouse
Crackerjack job, champ. Ayatollah Khomeini has been dead for 30 years. Good luck sanctioning his corpse.
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Watch
@BradMossEsq
leave a Fox News anchor speechless after dissecting Donald Trump’s baseless and utterly undefined accusations that President Obama somehow committed a crime: “Well, uh, we’re gonna have to leave it there.”
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Today in 1969, an incensed and intoxicated President Richard Nixon ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to attack North Korea with a nuclear weapon after its fighter jets intercepted and shot down a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 crew members.
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@jamiewithorne
Years ago, pre-9/11, when flying from Chicago to New York City, I had to explain to the security drones running the X-ray machine why I was traveling with the literal Doomsday Clock (which at the time was a heavy metal disk about 18 inches in diameter). That was interesting.
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“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”
— Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Trump pushes the fedsurrection conspiracy theory, ignoring that we all witnessed him organizing and inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
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Silkwood’s story is told in the 1983 film “Silkwood,” adapted from Howard Kohn’s 1981 book. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, incl. best actress (Meryl Streep), best supporting actress (Cher), best screenplay (Norah Ephron & Alice Arlen), and best director (Mike Nichols).
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I wrote this so-called prophetic tweet two years ago today (it’s not prophecy, just common sense). What I failed to foresee was Trump making a deadly pandemic catastrophically worse by dismissing the threat for weeks and blocking his own officials from taking appropriate action.
When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why.
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Trump hasn't even been POTUS 36 hours and this is what's on his mind during a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency. Let that sink in.
BREAKING: President Donald Trump accuses media of lying about inauguration crowds, wrongly says crowd reached Washington monument.
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Tonight in 1945 at Los Alamos, 24-year-old graduate student and Manhattan Project physicist Harry Daghlian, Jr., was conducting a risky criticality experiment alone when he accidentally dropped a 4.4-kg (9.7-lb) tungsten carbide brick on a 6.2-kg (13.7-lb) plutonium core.
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My favorite signs from today’s loud and large protest against Donald Trump while he visited his namesake Chicago hotel and condominium to raise millions of dollars for his re-election campaign (or whatever he may divert it to):
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Talk show host Buck Sexton was 7 years old when the Berlin Wall fell.
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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
— George Orwell, “1984”
Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley on the White House falsely touting that Trump has succeeded in "ending" the coronavirus pandemic: "I'm not going to quibble over semantics."
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Okay, but what's the explosive yield of a six-foot-tall human being?
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72 years ago now—11:02am Aug. 9, local time—"Fat Man" (21kt) exploded over Nagasaki, killing at least 60-80,000 men, women, and children.
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Why is Donald Trump in the Rose Garden doing a live (and very bad, very low energy) remake of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"?
"Pepsi Cola, Chick-fil-A, Subway, Yum Brands, Papa John's" -- Trump is still reading off the names of random companies during a press briefing that is ostensibly about a deadly pandemic that is killing Americans
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@fox32news
... or expend significant time and money painting Nazi and Confederate flags on wooden pallets and prominently display them.
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OTD 15 years ago at Minot AFB, North Dakota, munitions crews mistakenly loaded a B-52H bomber with six Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a live W80-1 nuclear warhead with a variable yield of 5-150 kilotons. The plane sat on the tarmac overnight without any special guards.
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Another date that should live in infamy: today in 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced eviction, property forfeiture, and internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, about 70,000 of whom were American citizens.
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This afternoon or evening, Rishi Sunak, the UK’s newest prime minister, will be briefed on its nuclear war plans and then pen a new “Letter of Last Resort” to the commander of each of its four Vanguard-class SSBNs, to be opened and read only if a nuclear war destroys the country.
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In fact, some 40,000 people lived in the vicinity. Manhattan Project scientists methodically tracked the radioactive cloud from that first test (left). The Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment Project created a more recent graphic (right) using the same data.
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@shannonrwatts
Well, CBS isn't preempting "60 Minutes." ABC and NBC are also showing their regular program. Fox, however, bumped the "The Simpsons" to show a living and breathing orange cartoon man.
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Although ignored for decades, Trinity’s radioactive fallout had significant immediate and long-term consequences. This
@BulletinAtomic
article reveals evidence of a dramatic increase in infant mortality in the downwind region in the months after the test.
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@BulletinAtomic
@wellerstein
@atomcentral
There is only one in-focus, properly-exposed, color photograph of the Trinity test fireball. It was taken with this camera by Jack Aeby, a 21-year-old civilian Manhattan Project employee based at Los Alamos who was not a professional photographer.
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Radioactive fallout from the Trinity test drifted across the country, but the government never alerted people to the danger. Some of it fell into rivers in Indiana and Iowa, contaminating the strawboard Kodak used to package its X-ray film and ruining it.
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@BulletinAtomic
Lacking familiar objects in the frame, it’s very difficult to gauge how large the Trinity explosion was in photos or films. Fortunately,
@wellerstein
created this composite image which stacks photos at a consistent scale and includes the Empire State Building as a reference.
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Today in 1957, a C-124A Globemaster II ferrying 3 unarmed Mark-5 atomic bombs and 1 plutonium capsule to an overseas base from Dover AFB, Delaware, lost power in both its port-side engines off Cape May, New Jersey, and began losing altitude. To make a safe emergency landing …
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@ROBannon10
I'm a nuclear weapons and policy expert specializing in US nuclear weapons for >30 yrs. It is literally my job to know this. What do you do?
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If you were president of the United States—secure in your abilities and proud of your record—and you invited people to a televised rally to encourage them to re-elect you, would you spend 10 entire minutes (I counted!) defensively explaining your unusual behavior a week earlier?
Here's Trump mocking himself for the way he walked down a ramp at West Point last weekend. He's been talking about this for about 6 or 7 minutes now.
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@BulletinAtomic
@wellerstein
@atomcentral
Those present at Trinity had a variety of reactions. Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, was more blunt: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
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OTD 35 years ago, the most incongruous—and my absolute favorite—“Football” photo was taken, showing Coast Guard Lt. Cdr. Woody Lee in Red Square during the Moscow Summit with the satchel strapped to his left wrist, while Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan talk just out of frame.
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Sixty years ago tonight, as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated toward confrontation, a sentry on patrol at Duluth AFB, Minnesota, thought he saw someone climbing the perimeter fence. He shot at the intruder and activated the base sabotage alarm, which by design automatically ...
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Just past midnight today in 1983, thanks to “a funny feeling in my gut,” 44 year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov’s calm assessment that a satellite warning of the launch of five US Minuteman ICBMs was a false alarm likely averted a catastrophic nuclear war.
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This is a perfect indictment of the Trump administration’s incoherent, inept, and inadequate response to COVID-19. And, honestly, aren’t we all ready for something completely different?
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@NormOrnstein
@ddale8
And in case anyone is wondering why those golf cart rentals are so costly, this is what it looks like every time Trump plays golf at one of his courses (photo by his golf partner David Frost, taken March 5, 2017, while playing at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida):
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Trump at press conf. in Seoul this AM: "We have a nuclear submarine, also positioned …" Has a president ever outed Silent Service like that?
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Nothing to see here. Just the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (2012-14) and Trump's first National Security Advisor (for 23 days) General Michael Flynn casually endorsing the military overthrow of the United States government. On Memorial Day weekend.
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This will always be my favorite bracket (from Spy magazine, December 1989).
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@BulletinAtomic
@wellerstein
In 2019,
@atomcentral
released stunning, restored black-and-white HD footage of the Trinity test, which was conducted in New Mexico’s aptly-named Jornada del Muerto desert. The cleaned-up film reveals a remarkable amount of detail previously unseen.
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US Coast Guard Lt. Cdr. Jayna McCarron, a White House Military Office aide who regularly carries the nuclear "Football" for Donald Trump, has contracted COVID-19,
@JenniferJJacobs
has learned. McCarron last accompanied Trump to Bedminster, NJ, on Thursday.
The White House Military Office Coast Guard aide is on “Football” duty for Trump’s fundraising trip to his golf resort in Bedminster, NJ, so he can continue to subvert democracy. The ~45-lb. briefcase follows Trump 24/7, holding everything he needs to authorize a nuclear attack.
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Today in 1970, France conducted “Licorne,” its fourth H-bomb test—and 36th test overall—at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. Six hours after the 914-kt explosion, Defense Minister Michel Debré swam in the lagoon as a publicity stunt to show it was not dangerously radioactive.
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Tonight in 1983, more than 100 million Americans saw multiple thermonuclear weapons destroy Kansas City, Missouri, in “The Day After” on ABC. A.C. Nielsen Co. reported that 62% of television sets that night tuned in the film. I watched in my packed college dorm lounge. You?
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While I appreciate everyone making this old tweet blow up, the people who were truly prescient about the grave dangers of the Bolton/Trump NSC reorganization are our public health security experts, incl. those quoted in the article:
@creynoldsdc
,
@JeremyKonyndyk
, and
@llborio
.
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In contrast, here’s a fatally wrong prediction by Trump campaign spokeswoman
@kayleighmcenany
on February 25: “This President will always put America first. He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.”
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Flying costs for Air Force One and its support aircraft are about $514,000 per hour, so Trump’s non-essential jaunt to Phoenix today to, primarily, tour a Honeywell International Inc. mask assembly line, will cost taxpayers about $3.6 million.
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A Kodak executive and personnel at other film companies were issued “Q” clearances to receive and use this secret information to ensure their company’s products were not harmed by radioactive fallout. By contrast, the AEC consistently lied to the public about fallout’s dangers.
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Trumpland ceaselessly condemns the mainstream media for false or out-of-context reporting. In fact, the news media hardly ever run Trump’s comments in full. If they did, more people would realize how ill-informed, incurious, and incoherent he actually is.
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This isn’t the first time DHS IG Joseph Cuffari—appointed by Trump in 2019—has failed to do his job. In 2020, he rebuffed a staff recommendation to investigate the Secret Service’s role in clearing Lafayette Square before Trump’s authoritarian photo-op outside St. John’s Church.
Department of Homeland Security watchdog was alerted in February to unavailable records of top officials, but did nothing to alert or investigate. Report by
@CarolLeonnig
&
@mariasacchetti
@washingtonpost
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In 2021, scientists at Los Alamos reassessed the yield of the Trinity test using high-precision mass spectrometry and found the actual yield was 24.8 ± 2 kilotons, significantly larger than the longtime accepted value of 21 kilotons.
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In fact, owing to ongoing reductions to comply with the 2010 New START agreement, there are somewhat _fewer_ nuclear weapons on alert today!
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@BulletinAtomic
@wellerstein
@atomcentral
At one point, Groves ordered Patrick Stout, a 29-year-old Army counterintelligence agent and his driver, to join him at ground zero to prove it was safe. Stout—who also witnessed the Trinity test—remained there for 30 minutes. He became severely ill with leukemia 22 years later.
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One year ago today ...
Ultimate Trump Voter Quote, from Crystal: "Oh I think he's crazy, and he may get us killed, but at least he's going to be truthful with us."
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Sinclair Broadcast Group (
@WeAreSinclair
) owns 173 broadcast TV stations comprising 528 channels in 81 markets across the United States. If the
@FCC
approves, it will soon acquire 42 more stations in 33 markets from the Tribune Media Co. and reach 72% of US households. Concerned?
How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media:
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60 years ago today—October 27, 1962—was arguably the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day when human error, rushed preparations, aggressive tactics, and sky-high tensions could have ignited WWIII by accident at least three separate times. Here’s what happened:
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To all the trolls who've come after me over the last several weeks to defend Trump by falsely claiming President Obama acted too slowly on H1N1 pandemic in 2009: best estimates show ~60.8 million US cases from April 2009-April 2010, ~274,304 hospitalizations, and ~12,469 deaths.
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Instead of staying in France tonight after visiting Normandy to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, Trump flew all the way back to Doonbeg, Ireland, to spend a second night at his own unprofitable resort because, he says, "it’s convenient and it’s a great place." (cc:
@waltshaub
)
Trump to stay at Doonbeg, his money-losing golf course threatened by climate change
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@nytimes
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
— George Orwell, “1984”
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When the same problem occurred after the first test in Nevada in early 1951, Kodak threatened to sue the gov’t. In response, the Atomic Energy Commission offered to alert Kodak before each future test and provide classified daily maps showing areas of potentially heavy fallout.
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Today in 1961, K-19—the Soviet navy’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine—suffered a complete loss of reactor coolant during its initial patrol while off the southeastern coast of Greenland, sending dangerously-radioactive steam into every compartment of the boat.
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This isn't a contract to restore Puerto Rico's electrical infrastructure. It's a get-rich-quick scheme at taxpayer expense (see thread)!
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At this instant 77 years ago (8:15am August 6, local time), Little Boy—a 15-kiloton atomic bomb—destroyed Hiroshima, killing (per US military estimates) ~70,000 men, women, and children, incl. 12 American POWs. Independent estimates later maintained ~140,000 people were killed.
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The White House Military Office Army aide was on “Football” duty this morning for President Biden’s departure for Hiroshima. The ~45-lb. satchel accompanies Biden 24/7, enabling him to authorize the use of any of our ~1,770 deployed nuclear weapons—up to 900 on alert—at any time.
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54 years ago today, astronaut and lunar module pilot Bill Anders took this photograph as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. “Oh my God. Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!” (This is the original B&W image that NASA remastered into color.)
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Today in 1989, more than 70 armed FBI and EPA agents raided the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats Plant 21 miles northwest of Denver, Colorado, in “Operation Desert Glow” to investigate illegal incineration of plutonium-contaminated wastes and other environmental crimes.
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"When the president speaks about unity, what he means is victimhood. When President Trump says, 'Why isn't there more unity?,' what he says is, 'Why are you criticizing me?' He never sees unity as something that he does for others. Unity is something that others do for him."
Watching
#SOTU
tonight? Last year's APS Evening at the Square speaker
@DavidFrum
predicts the president will use the speech to try to bring back his base. Listen to Frum's conversation with
@rachelnpr
on
@NPR
’s
@MorningEdition
:
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This afternoon or evening, Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, will be briefed on its nuclear war plans and then pen a new “Letter of Last Resort” to the commander of each of its four Vanguard-class SSBNs, to be opened and read only after a nuclear war destroys the country.
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