This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
Tony Williams surveys damage at his Mineral, Va. home after an earthquake struck Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011. Items in his home were knocked over and displaced, and the home suffered some structural damage after the most powerful earthquake to strike the East Coast in 67 years shook buildings and rattled nerves from South Carolina to New England. The quake was centered near Mineral, a small town northwest of Richmond. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Unbeknownst to many, there are numerous fault lines in the city, but a few stand out for their size and prominence: the 125th Street Fault, the Dyckman Street Fault, the Mosholu Parkway Fault, and the East River Fault.
The 125th Street Fault is the largest, running along the street, extending from New Jersey to the East River. Part of it runs to the northern tip of Central Park, while a portion extends into Roosevelt Island.
The East River Fault looks a bit like an obtuse angle, with its top portion running parallel, to the west of Central Park, before taking a horizontal turn near 32nd St. and extending into the East River and stopping short of Brooklyn.
Just outside of the city is the Dobbs Ferry Fault, located in suburban Westchester; and the Ramapo Fault, running from eastern Pennsylvania to the mid-Hudson Valley, passing within a few miles northwest of the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, less than 40 miles north of the city and astride the intersection of two active seismic zones.
The locations of faults and the prevalence of earthquakes is generally not a concern for most New Yorkers. One reason might be that perceptions of weaker earthquakes vary widely.
On Nov. 30, a magnitude 4.1 earthquake, centered near Dover, Delaware, could be felt in nearby states. Less than 200 miles away in New York City, some people reported on social media that they felt their houses and apartments shaking. At the same time, some New Yorkers, again, did not feel anything:
KevBarNYC@KevBarNYC
Just felt my whole building shake in the East Village, NYC #earthquake#nyc
What I referred to as “a giant ghost in the apartment shaking the christmas tree” in my texts to everyone this p.m. turned out to be my very first #earthquake in #nyc!
I felt the earthquake too! I wanna be part of this! I watched the water in a water bottle go back forth for a long time after the 3 seconds of shaking. Thought about the T-rex scene from Jurassic Park and went back to work. #earthquake#nyc
We didn’t but The US Geological Survey reports that a 4.4 magnitude #earthquake has occurred in Dover, Delaware & was reportedly felt by some in the #NYC area. There are no reports of injuries or damage in #NYC at this time.#UpperEastSide#UES
Won-Young Kim is a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which monitors and records data on earthquakes that occur in the northeast. Kim says it’s not clear who feels smaller earthquakes, as evident by a magnitude 0.8 quake in the city in December of 2004.
“Hundreds of people called local police, and police called us. Our system was unable to detect that tiny earthquake automatically,” Kim said. “We looked at it, and, indeed, there was a small signal.”
Kim says some parts of the city will feel magnitude 1 or 2 earthquakes even if the seismic activity does not result in any damage.
You have to go back to before the 20th Century, however, to find the last significant earthquake that hit the city. According to Lamont-Doherty researchers, magnitude 5.2 earthquakes occurred in 1737 and 1884. In newspaper accounts, New Yorkers described chimneys falling down and feeling the ground shake underneath them.
“1737 — that was located close to Manhattan,” Kim said. “It was very close to New York City.”
According to Kim, the 1884 quake was felt in areas in or close to the city, such as the Rockaways and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. But it was felt even as far away as Virginia and Maine.
From 1677 to 2007, there were 383 known earthquakes in a 15,000-square-mile area around New York City, researchers at Lamont-Doherty said in a 2008 study.
A 4.9 located in North Central New Jersey was felt in the city in 1783; a 4 hit Ardsley in 1985; and in 2001, magnitude 2.4 and 2.6 quakes were detected in Manhattan itself for the first time.
But the 1737 and 1884 quakes remain the only known ones of at least magnitude 5 to hit the city.
Smaller earthquakes are not to be ignored. Lamont-Doherty researchers say frequent small quakes occur in predictable ratios to larger ones and thus can be used — along with the fault lengths, detected tremors and calculations of how stress builds in the crust — to create a rough time scale.
Researchers say New York City is susceptible to at least a magnitude 5 earthquake once every 100 years, a 6 about every 670 years, and 7 about every 3,400 years.
It’s been 134 years since New York was last hit by at least a magnitude 5. When it happens next, researchers say it won’t be much like 1884.
The city’s earthquake hazard is moderate, according to the New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation (NYCEM), but experts agree that, due to its higher population and infrastructure, the damage would be significant.
Before 1995, earthquake risks were not taken into consideration for the city’s building code. Thus, Lamont-Doherty says many older buildings, such as unenforced three- to six-story buildings, could suffer major damage or crumble.
The damage an earthquake causes is also dependent on what’s in the ground. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, bedrock is more resistant to earthquakes than sediment.
The upper third of Manhattan has harder soil that is more resistant to shaking. Parts of Midtown are more susceptible, while Downtown Manhattan’s soil is even softer, according to the NYCEM.
Exceptions to Upper Manhattan’s strength? Portions of Harlem and Inwood — both areas consist of a large amount of soft soil. Central Park has the strongest soil in Manhattan, outside of a small segment of Inwood..
Not all boroughs are created equal. While the Bronx is also made of solid bedrock, the ground in Queens and Brooklyn is softer.
“If you go to Queens and Brooklyn, you have sediment, so there would be more shaking relative to Manhattan,” Kim said. “So, it’s not easy to say the damage would be the same.”
New York City is not a hotbed for seismic activity; it is not close to a tectonic plate, and it is not clear if one of the faults would be the source of a strong quake. But the predicted damage to the city has concerned many experts.
Until that day, earthquakes are isolated events for New Yorkers. Some have felt the ground move, while others have only felt shaking when subway cars travel underground.
But researchers agree: One day, the ground will wake up in the city that never sleeps, and all New Yorkers will understand what Mineral, Virginia felt when their homes rattled with the earth.
One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.
In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.
Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.
Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”
Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad
While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.
Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.
In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.
Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.
But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)
Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”
Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions…. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”
Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.
“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”
Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.
Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”
It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”
That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.
It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”
Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again. “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.
Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political ceasefire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”
But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7th attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.
The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?
Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.
What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”
“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”
And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket.
With both India and Pakistan having acquired MIRV capabilities, the likelihood of impulsive behavior triggering nuclear war has risen. The balance of terror that is key to South Asian strategic stability must therefore be restored.
Rapidly advancing military technologies incentivizing first-strike capabilities have stamped the balance of terror in South Asia so hard that they have rendered second-strike capability redundant. The introduction of multiple independent targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), which can deliver multiple warheads, aiming at the same or different targets in a single missile, is going to haunt regional stability. Nonetheless, in order to reign in the balance of terror in South Asia, the key is to establish and maintain first-strike and force-posture stability.
The introduction of MIRVs signifies a diverse, adaptable, and penetrable force posture; however, there are several trade-offs inherent in MIRV design. To enable a single missile to carry multiple warheads, the design not only gives greater punch to adversaries and hedges against defences with greater penetrability, but also makes MIRV-equipped missiles an attractive and expensive target. To decrease this vulnerability, dispersion, colocation, and hardening are the options, but colocation is a risky option, because one Indian strike can cause significant erosion of a mix of forces and infrastructure. Moreover, to accommodate several warheads, the design requires smaller, but more accurate warheads so as to adjust to the overall weight capacity of the vehicle.
MIRV-equipped missiles are cost-effective in terms of one missile carrying several warheads instead of one missile carrying one warhead. They simply multiply the advantages of speed, precision (smaller warheads), and range with mass; however, they significantly shrink the existing limited window to react. Between the India-Pakistan nuclear dyad, this further complicates nuclear command and control (NC2). Moreover, the reliability of the design is also important, because the consistent and enhanced reliability of MIRVs can significantly put the reliability of the adversary’s missile inventory and second-strike capability in doubt.
In order to assess the incentives of the first strike in South Asia, the works of scholars such as James Fearon, Robert Powell, Bahar Leventoglu, Branislav Slantchev, A. F. K. Organski, Steven Beard, and Joshua Strayhorn are insightful and instructive.
In MIRV deployed South Asia, India and Pakistan have sufficiently large advantages that tremendously reduce the bargaining range. In the presence of overwhelming first-strike advantages and incentives, neither side can commit not to attack in order to shift the advantage and power to the other side.
The geographical close proximity between India and Pakistan, as several scholars have reasoned, renders the assumption of tactical, battlefield, or demonstrative nuclear use inadequate, or, in other words, the argument states stating that any nuclear use at any time in the South Asian nuclear environment is or will be considered strategic. However, technological developments in perfecting counterforce, first-strike, and offensive capacities do not conform to this line of argument. One does not need to be irrational to strike first, because the advantages of a first strike, such as surprise, offence, and preemption, can comfortably offset the gains one can receive by foregoing the strike.
Considering the record of crises in South Asia post-overt nuclearization, both nuclear-armed rivals have proven to be risk-acceptant, and now they have developed capabilities that offer first-strike or offensive advantages. Hence, the risk of them engaging in quid pro quo, fait accompli warfighting is greater. The development of enhanced first-strike capabilities allows early and quick mobilisation, as well as a greater punch—all factors that can shape their engagement in a quid pro quo manoeuvre, for instance.
With modernization, both states are not only establishing first-strike advantages, but also illustrating that they are racing to sufficiently increase their expected payoffs from warfighting if they were to strike first. This implies a loss of confidence in the survivability of their second-strike capabilities, but, at large, it also signifies serious commitment difficulties on both sides, leading to a bargaining breakdown.
In MIRV deployed South Asia, India and Pakistan have sufficiently large advantages that tremendously reduce the bargaining range. In the presence of overwhelming first-strike advantages and incentives, neither side can commit not to attack in order to shift the advantage and power to the other side. Such commitments are simply not credible.
Therefore, in a first-strike environment, stability can be maintained if both sides make an unbreakable vow not to exploit the advantage, no matter how tactical in nature, that a devastating first-strike offers. To enter into and maintain such a vow is challenging, because the shift of advantage and power in this environment is rapid, hence tempting. However, to maintain first-strike stability, both India and Pakistan will have to willingly forego the option of surprise, as well as maintain an adaptive and diversified force posture.
Foregoing surprise, strategic or tactical, is a huge sacrifice. It is also important to highlight here that surprise does not always prove decisive in ending a crisis or war. For instance, commonly cited strategic surprises such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 and the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in 1973 are considered indecisive in the course of wars, whereas tactical surprises such as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki bombings proved decisive in ending the war. In order to render the advantage of surprise ambiguous in a particular engagement, a state has to achieve a zero probability of collapse, or a probability of collapse that is significantly lower than that of its adversary.
Keeping in view the progressive exploitation of surprise in the India-Pakistan context, it is possible that India preempts any future non-state actor’s attack on its territory or prevents an escalation by striking first. Undoubtedly, first-strike capabilities offer such freedom of action to New Delhi, along with the compulsive commitment to reap an advantage by striking first.
Can India and Pakistan achieve such a probability? In 1999, India was caught by a surprise Pakistani force buildup in Kargil, but the surprise proved indecisive as New Delhi responded with a large-scale counter-offensive, yet maintained restraint by not crossing the Line of Control (LoC), which resulted in heavy Indian casualties. In 2019, the surprise crossing of the LoC into Pakistani territory by the Indian Air Force during the Pulwama-Balakot crisis was swiftly retaliated by Pakistan’s air operation. In both crises, the surprise proved indecisive, because the probability of collapse was significantly low; nonetheless, the crossing of the LoC in response to a non-state actor’s attack during the Pulwama-Balakot crisis has raised the ante for the Indian response to a future attack of this kind on its territory.
Keeping in view the progressive exploitation of surprise in the India-Pakistan context, it is possible that India preempts any future non-state actor’s attack on its territory or prevents an escalation by striking first. Undoubtedly, first-strike capabilities offer such freedom of action to New Delhi, along with the compulsive commitment to reap an advantage by striking first. In MIRV-deployed mode, given conventional asymmetries, an Indian first- or counterforce strike is going to cause substantial military losses for Pakistan, resulting in an escalation. To respond to such an offensive, Islamabad possesses a mobilization advantage that can guide its defence against New Delhi’s offensive. These advantages are challenging to maintain; however, they are essential to establishing first-strike stability. But they also tend to make this stability fragile at the same time.
Notwithstanding the first-strike advantages they offer, MIRVs are likely to boost impulsive behaviour, resulting in inadvertent nuclear launch or use. A challenge for NC2 in the region is that it is more accustomed to managing and prevailing in a state of mutual vulnerability. Therefore, the balance of terror on which South Asian strategic stability rests needs to be restored.
One way to do that is for both India and Pakistan to agree to ban MIRVs and defences in the region, for which they would need to find themselves in a political environment conducive to such dialogue and negotiations. At present, such an environment is at a distance, but that does not bar both sides from continuing to strive in that direction. Otherwise, both sides enter into an agreement not to strike first with MIRVs, to allow mutual vulnerability to prevail and live happily ever after under the reign of terror. The second option appears relatively feasible. However, for this option to be feasible, both sides need to enter into an unbreakable vow.
India has just tested an Israeli air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM), reflecting a move away from Russia as its primary supplier for high-end weapons and the possible adoption of a counterforce strategy against Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
This month, multiple media sources reported that India has successfully tested the Crystal Maze 2 ALBM, launching the projectile from a Su-30 MKI fighter jet. This test took place in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, under the oversight of the tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command.AsiaTimesfalse
The Crystal Maze 2, developed by Israel and known as ROCKS, is designed for precision strikes against high-value targets up to 250 kilometers away. It can operate effectively in GPS-denied environments and penetrate areas protected by air defense systems, offering penetration or blast fragmentation warhead options.
These tests underscore India’s operational readiness and commitment to self-sufficiency in defense manufacturing, with many of these missiles planned to be procured under the “Make in India” initiative.
The successful integration and demonstration of these advanced missile systems boost India’s strategic military capabilities, emphasizing the nation’s focus on enhancing its defense sector and reducing dependence on imports.
Israel may have used ROCKS during its retaliation strike against Iran this month, following an extensive drone and missile attack from Iran in response to Israel’s strike against its consulate in Damascus, Syria, which was allegedly a command center for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.
According to Israeli defense contractor Rafael, ROCKS is a next-generation extended standoff air-to-surface missile. It is designed to strike high-value stationary and relocatable targets above ground, underground and heavily fortified targets with pinpoint accuracy in GPS-denied areas. ROCKS can be armed with a penetration or blast warhead.
ROCKS builds on the technologies used in Rafael’s legacy Popeye cruise missile and SPICE smart bombs. Its multiple guidance systems, such as an electro-optical seeker, INS/GPS and anti-radiation homing ensure all-weather capability
Before launch, the pilot allocates a mission to the missile and loads data such as target type, coordinates, impact angle, azimuth, topographic image data and fuse delays.
ROCKS uses INS/GPS guidance for midcourse navigation trajectory, with its terminal phase using terrain matching or anti-radiation technology that locks onto target radar signals to overcome GPS jamming scenarios and minimize target location errors, with a circular error probable (CEP) of just 3 meters.
This month, Politico reported that India’s arms purchases from Russia have been declining, with the Ukraine war being a significant factor in the decrease. Politico notes that while Russian weapons made up 76% of India’s arms purchases from 2009 to 2013, that has now dropped to 36% in the last five years.
The source notes that while India will continue to buy spare parts from Russia for in-service Russian equipment, it no longer considers Russia a source of big-ticket items.
It mentions the poor performance of Russian weapons in the Ukraine war, such as its widely-touted Kinzhal hypersonic weapon, which has been intercepted by Patriot missiles in the conflict.
The report also notes its Black Sea Fleet warships have been sunk by drones and cruise missiles while top-of-the-line aircraft such as Sukhoi fighters have been shot down quickly.
The provision of substandard MiG-29K fighters to India and unfulfilled defense contracts have also acted as significant disincentives for India to continue to rely on Russia as its primary arms supplier, the report said.
Politico notes that while India cannot wean itself off Russian weapons overnight, it is diversifying its defense partners, engaging countries such as the US, France, Germany, South Korea and Israel, while recalibrating its relations with Russia to avoid Western secondary sanctions.
In discussing the role of ALBMs in India’s military doctrine, Rohit Kaura notes in a December 2018 article for the Center for Air Power Studies that evolving air defenses have rendered traditional strategic bombers obsolete, necessitating ALBMs to allow bombers to stay away from the range of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and interceptor aircraft.
Kaura notes that ALBMs allow bombers to remain a credible second-strike option, as ALBMs are very hard to intercept after launch, ensuring counterstrike capabilities.
He also notes that ALBMs deprive adversaries of lower-altitude boost-phase intercept opportunities, with the ability to launch ALBMs from bombers from multiple locations, leaving terminal-phase interception the only realistic defense.
Kaura notes that in times of high alert, the Indian Air Force (IAF) could send its strike aircraft to holding positions far from the range of enemy air defenses, thus not needing to enter enemy airspace to be effective.
He notes that once ALBM-armed aircraft are airborne, the national leadership can be assured of retaliation capabilities, with aerial refueling enabling them to be airborne for a day.
Kaura mentions that ALBMs offer a way to increase the survivability of land-based nuclear forces until India can develop reliable submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) as the ultimate in nuclear deterrence.
He notes that ALBMs can be retargeted before launch, which is a capability deficient in ground-based systems. In addition, he says that ALBM-armed aircraft can be used as a second-strike weapon to attack targets missed in a first strike or attack countervalue or counterforce targets.
Countervalue targeting refers to using nuclear weapons to target an enemy’s cities or economic infrastructure. Coupled with the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD), this is thought to reduce significantly the possibility of a first strike.
In contrast, counterforce targeting aims to eliminate an adversary’s military infrastructure in a limited nuclear war. However, counterforce targeting is associated with first-strike capabilities, bringing the possibility of nuclear escalation.
In a 2018 article in the peer-reviewed International Security Journal, Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang note that Pakistan’s introduction of tactical nuclear weapons may have put India in strategic paralysis, with India caught between its “no first use” nuclear doctrine and the possibility of Pakistan using tactical nuclear weapons against India’s conventional forces.
Hence, Clary and Narang note that some Indian policymakers are drawn to developing counterforce capabilities to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear capability to attack strategic targets in India.
While they note that a counterforce strategy is in line with India’s massive retaliation doctrine, it incentivizes Pakistan to unleash its nuclear arsenal before losing it.
Moreover, they point out the questionable odds of a successful Indian counterforce strike on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, mentioning challenges in identifying and intercepting Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
They also say that India’s adoption of even a limited counterforce nuclear strategy could fuel an arms race, as Pakistan would most likely react to India’s acquisition of counterforce capabilities.
Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has stated that Iran is just weeks rather than months away from possessing enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb.
According to Grossi, while uranium enrichment at levels close to weapons-grade is concerning, it does not directly imply that Iran currently possesses nuclear weapons.
In an interview with Deutsche Welle published on Tuesday, April 23, Grossi stated that a “functional nuclear warhead requires many other things independently from the production of the fissile material”.
The IAEA Director General referred to Iran’s actions as fueling these speculations and stated that the agency does not have satisfactory access to monitor Tehran’s nuclear program, leading to increased speculation about Tehran’s program.
Grossi has repeatedly warned Iranian counterparts about sensitivities arising from the agency’s lack of access to Tehran’s activities.
“I have been telling my Iranian counterparts time and again […] this activity raises eyebrows and compounded with the fact that we are not getting the necessary degree of access and visibility that I believe should be necessary,” he said.
Referring to the discovery of enriched uranium materials in unrelated locations, Grossi said that this issue has also intensified doubts about Tehran’s transparency.
Grossi, noting that he will soon travel to Iran for a new round of talks, stated that his message to Iranians is that they should cooperate more with the agency.
There have been many speculations about whether Iran’s nuclear facilities are one of Israel’s military targets, and even Grossi recently stated, referring to Israel’s targeting of Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981, that the agency does not want to repeat the Iraq experience and if Iran continues to resist transparency and inspection, the IAEA might reach a point where it will refrain from providing credible assurance that it is absolutely certain Iran’s nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders. The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of cease-fire talks. (AP video and production by Mehmet Guzel)Photos
BY ABBY SEWELLUpdated 9:44 AM MDT, April 25, 2024Share
The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of talks for a cease-fire in Gaza. The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession by the militant group officially committed to Israel’s destruction.
But it’s unlikely Israel would consider such a scenario. It has vowed to crush Hamas following the deadly Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the war, and its current leadership is adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR
Al-Hayya, a high-ranking Hamas official who has represented the Palestinian militants in negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage exchange, struck a sometimes defiant and other times conciliatory tone.
Speaking to the AP in Istanbul, Al-Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the rival Fatah faction, to form a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank. He said Hamas would accept “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions,” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
If that happens, he said, the group’s military wing would dissolve.
“All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army,” he said.
Khalil al-Hayya, a high-ranking Hamas official who has represented the Palestinian militant group in negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage exchange deal, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, in Istanbul, Turkey, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
Over the years, Hamas has sometimes moderated its public position with respect to the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But its political program still officially “rejects any alternative to the full liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” — referring to the area reaching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which includes lands that now make up Israel.
Al-Hayya did not say whether his apparent embrace of a two-state solution would amount to an end to the Palestinian conflict with Israel or an interim step toward the group’s stated goal of destroying Israel.
AP correspondent Karen Chammas reports on an AP interview with a top Hamas official.
Ophir Falk, a foreign policy adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declined to comment on Al-Hayya’s comments, dismissing him as a “high-ranking terrorist.” But he said Hamas had broken a previous truce with its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Militants dragged some 250 hostages into the enclave.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government set a mission to destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza, free the hostages and ensure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel and the rest of the civilized world in the future,” he said. “Those goals will be achieved.”
Khalil al-Hayya, a high-ranking Hamas official who has represented the Palestinian militant group in negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage exchange deal, sits in front of a backdrop showing the old city of Jerusalem during an interview with The Associated Press, in Istanbul, Turkey, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
There was no immediate reaction from the PLO or the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized self-ruled government that Hamas drove out when it seized Gaza in 2007, a year after winning Palestinian parliamentary elections. After the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority was left with administering semi-autonomous pockets of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority hopes to establish an independent state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza — areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. While the international community overwhelmingly supports such a two-state solution, Netanyahu’s hard-line government rejects it.
Nearly seven months into the war in Gaza, cease-fire negotiations have stalled. Israel is now preparing for an offensive in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have fled to.
Israel says it has dismantled most of the initial two dozen Hamas battalions since the start of the war, but that the four remaining ones are holed up in Rafah. Israel argues that a Rafah offensive is necessary to achieve victory over Hamas.
Al-Hayya said such an offensive would not succeed in destroying Hamas. He said contacts between the political leadership outside and military leadership inside Gaza are “uninterrupted” by the war and “contacts, decisions and directions are made in consultation” between the two groups.
Israeli forces “have not destroyed more than 20% of (Hamas’) capabilities, neither human nor in the field,” he asserted. “If they can’t finish (Hamas) off, what is the solution? The solution is to go to consensus.”
In November, a weeklong cease-fire saw the release of more than 100 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. But talks for a longer-term truce and release of the remaining hostages are now frozen, with each side accusing the other of intransigence. Key interlocutor Qatar has said in recent days that it is undertaking a “reassessment” of its role as mediator.
Most of Hamas’ top political officials, previously based in Qatar, have left the Gulf country in the past week and traveled to Turkey, where Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday. Al-Hayya denied a permanent move of the group’s main political office is in the works and said Hamas wants to see Qatar continue in its capacity as mediator in the talks.
Israeli and U.S. officials have accused Hamas of not being serious about a deal.
Al-Hayya denied this, saying Hamas has made concessions regarding the number of Palestinian prisoners it wants released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages. He said the group does not know exactly how many hostages remain in Gaza and are still alive.
Khalil al-Hayya, a high-ranking Hamas official who has represented the Palestinian militant group in negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage exchange deal, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, in Istanbul, Turkey, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
But he said Hamas will not back down from its demands for a permanent cease-fire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops, both of which Israel has balked at. Israel says it will continue military operations until Hamas is definitively defeated and will retain a security presence in Gaza afterwards.
“If we are not assured the war will end, why would I hand over the prisoners?” the Hamas leader said of the remaining hostages.
Al-Hayya also implicitly threatened that Hamas would attack Israeli or other forces who might be stationed around a floating pier the U.S. is scrambling to build along Gaza’s coastline to deliver aid by sea.
“We categorically reject any non-Palestinian presence in Gaza, whether at sea or on land, and we will deal with any military force present in these places, Israeli or otherwise … as an occupying power,” he said.
Al-Hayya said Hamas does not regret the Oct. 7 attacks, despite the destruction it has brought down on Gaza and its people. He denied that Hamas militants had targeted civilians during the attacks — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — and said the operation succeeded in its goal of bringing the Palestinian issue back to the world’s attention.
And, he said, Israeli attempts to eradicate Hamas would ultimately fail to prevent future Palestinian armed uprisings.
“Let’s say that they have destroyed Hamas. Are the Palestinian people gone?” he asked.
___
This story has been updated to correct the number of Palestinian prisoners freed during a cease-fire in November.
___
Associated Press journalists Khalil Hamra in Istanbul and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
“Frankly, the People’s Republic of China is moving at breathtaking speed in space and they are rapidly developing a range of counter-space weapons to hold at risk our space capabilities,” Gen Whiting said.
Counter-space attacks range from disruption of GPS signals or spoofing, to destroying a satellite by detonating a missile in space.
Experts have long warned of Beijing’s misuse of anti-satellite weapons and the need to clean up space from an environmental perspective. Debris still lingers in space from the ballistic missile China fired in 2007 to destroy an orbiting satellite.
China using space ‘to improve lethality’
Gen Whiting added that China had used “space capabilities to improve the lethality, the precision and the range of their terrestrial forces”.
Speaking at the US embassy in London, Col Raj Agrawal, commander of America’s Space Delta 2 force, also warned that China had shown a “clear intent” to project its power through space and stressed the “precision” with which it could strike targets thousands of miles away, beyond the curve of the Earth.
Lt Col Travis Anderson, head of a Space Force intelligence squadron, also said its fleet of 350 satellites had “increased by 300 per cent since 2018”.
“It allows them to look into the Indo-Pacific and find the US and allied forces’ ships,” he said.
Last week, Beijing announced the creation of an information support force within the People’s Liberation Army, which will reform the way cyber, information, logistics and space operations are run.
Gen Whiting said these changes “further enhance the importance of space and information warfare and cyber operations” in China’s military.
‘Serious national security threat’
Beijing has invested billions of dollars into its military-run space programme in an effort to catch up with the United States and Russia.
The intelligence warned the weapon could be used to target Western satellites in space which could disrupt communications and military targeting systems.
Last year, Gen B Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the US Space Force, said the danger posed by China’s anti-satellite missile capabilities was one of the biggest challenges it faced.
This is the second in a series of commentaries about the vital role nuclear safety inspections conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) play in protecting the public. The initial commentary described how NRC inspectors discovered that limits on the maximum allowable control room air temperature at the Columbia Generating Station in Washington had been improperly relaxed by the plant’s owner. This commentary describes a more recent finding by NRC inspectors about animproper safety assessment of a leaking cooling water system pipe on Entergy’s Unit 3 reactor at Indian Point outside New York City.
Indian Point Unit 3: Leak Before Break
On February 3, 2017, the NRC issued Indian Point a Green finding for a violation of Appendix B to 10 CFR Part 50. Specifically, the owner failed to perform an adequate operability review per its procedures after workers discovered water leaking from a service water system pipe.
On April 27, 2016, workers found water leaking from the pipe downstream of the strainer for service water (SW) pump 31. As shown in Figure 1, SW pump 31 is one of six service water pumps located within the intake structure alongside the Hudson River. The six SW pumps are arranged in two sets of three pumps. Figure 1 shows SW pumps 31, 32, and 33 aligned to provide water drawn from the Hudson River to essential (i.e, safety and emergency) components within Unit 3. SW pumps 34, 35, and 36 are aligned to provide cooling water to non-essential equipment within Unit 3.
Fig. 1 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge)
Each SW pump is designed to deliver 6,000 gallons of flow. During normal operation, one SW pump can handle the essential loads while two SW pumps are needed for the non-essential loads. Under accident conditions, two SW pumps are needed to cool the essential equipment. The onsite emergency diesel generators can power either of the sets of three pumps, but not both simultaneously. If the set of SW pumps aligned to the essential equipment aren’t getting the job done, workers can open/close valves and electrical breakers to reconfigure the second set of three SW pumps to the essential equipment loops.
Because river water can have stuff in it that could clog some of the coolers for essential equipment, each SW pump has a strainer that attempts to remove as much debris as possible from the water. The leak discovered on April 27, 2016, was in the piping between the discharge check valve for SW pump 31 and its strainer. An arrow points to this piping section in Figure 1. The strainers were installed in openings called pits in the thick concrete floor of the intake structure. Water from the leaking pipe flowed into the pit housing the strainer for SW pump 31.
The initial leak rate was modest—estimated to be about one-eighth of a gallon per minute. The leak was similar to other pinhole leaks that had occurred in the concrete-lined, carbon steel SW pipes. The owner began daily checks on the leakage and prepared an operability determination. Basically, “operability determinations” are used within the nuclear industry when safety equipment is found to be impaired or degraded. The operability determination for the service water pipe leak concluded that the impairment did not prevent the SW pumps from fulfilling their required safety function. The operability determination relied on a sump pump located at the bottom of the strainer pit transferring the leaking water out of the pit before the water flooded and submerged safety components.
The daily checks instituted by the owner included workers recording the leak rate and assessing whether it had significantly increased. But the checks were against the previous day’s leak rate rather than the initial leak rate. By September 18, 2016, the leakage had steadily increased by a factor of 64 to 8 gallons per minute. But the daily incremental increases were small enough that they kept workers from finding the overall increase to be significant.
The daily check on October 15, 2016, found the pump room flooded to a depth of several inches. The leak rate was now estimated to be 20 gallons per minute. And the floor drain in the strainer pit was clogged (ironic, huh?) impairing the ability of its sump pump to remove the water. Workers placed temporary sump pumps in the room to remove the flood water and cope with the insignificantly higher leak rate. On October 17, workers installed a clamp on the pipe that reduced the leakage to less than one gallon per minute.
The operability determination was revised in response to concerns expressed by the NRC inspectors. The NRC inspectors were not satisfied by the revised operability determination. It continued to rely on the strainer pit sump pump removing the leaking water. But that sump pump was not powered from the emergency diesel generator and thus would not remove water should offsite power become unavailable. Step 5.6.4 of procedure EN-OP-14, “Operability Determination Process,” stated “If the Operability is based on the use or availability of other equipment, it must be verified that the equipment is capable of performing the function utilized in the evaluation.”
The NRC inspectors found additional deficiencies in the revised operability determination. The NRC inspectors calculated that a 20 gallon per minute leak rate coupled with an unavailable strainer pit sump pump would flood the room to a depth of three feet in three hours. There are no flood alarms in the room and the daily checks might not detect flooding until the level rose to three feet. At that level, water would submerge and potentially disable the vacuum breakers for the SW pumps. Proper vacuum breaker operation could be needed to successfully restart the SW pumps.
The NRC inspects calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would completely fill the room in about 29 hours, or only slightly longer than the daily check interval.
Flooding to depths of 3 feet, 10 feet, and the room’s ceiling affected all six SW pumps. Thus, the flooding represented a common mode threat that could disable the entire service water system. In turn, all safety equipment shown in Figure 2 no longer cooled by the disabled service water system could also be disabled. The NRC estimated that the flooding risk was about 5×10-6 per reactor year, solidly in the Green finding band.
Fig. 2 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge)
UCS Perspective
“Leak before break” is a longstanding nuclear safety philosophy. Books have been written about it (well, at least one report has been written and may even have been read.) The NRC’s approval of a leak before break analysis can allow the owner of an existing nuclear power reactor to remove pipe whip restraints and jet impingement barriers. Such hardware guarded against the sudden rupture of a pipe filled with high pressure fluid from damaging safety equipment in the area. The leak before break analyses can provide the NRC with sufficient confidence that piping degradation will be detected by observed leakage with remedial actions taken before the pipe fails catastrophically. More than a decade ago, the NRC issued a Knowledge Management document on the leak before break philosophy and acceptable methods of analyzing, monitoring, and responding to piping degradation.
This incident at Indian Point illustrated an equally longstanding nuclear safety practice of “leak before break.” In this case, the leak was indeed followed by a break. But the break was not the failure of the piping but failure of the owner to comply with federal safety regulations. Pipe breaks are bad. Regulation breaks are bad. Deciding which is worse is like trying to decide which eye one wants to be poked in. None is far better than either.
As with the prior Columbia Generating Station case study, this Indian Point case study illustrates the vital role that NRC’s enforcement efforts plays in nuclear safety. Even after NRC inspectors voiced clear concerns about the improperly evaluated service water system pipe leak, Entergy failed to properly evaluate the situation, thus violating federal safety regulations. To be fair to Entergy, the company was probably doing its best, but in recent years, Entergy’s best has been far below nuclear industry average performance levels.
The NRC must continue to protect the public to the best of its ability. Delegating safety checks to owners like Entergy is inconsistent with that important mission.
Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.he Hudson River. The six SW pumps are arranged in two sets of three pumps. Figure 1 shows SW pumps 31, 32, and 33 aligned to provide water drawn from the Hudson River to essential (i.e, safety and emergency) components within Unit 3. SW pumps 34, 35, and 36 are aligned to provide cooling water to non-essential equipment within Unit 3. Fig. 1 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge) Each SW pump is designed to deliver 6,000 gallons of flow. During normal operation, one SW pump can handle the essential loads while two SW pumps are needed for the non-essential loads. Under accident conditions, two SW pumps are needed to cool the essential equipment. The onsite emergency diesel generators can power either of the sets of three pumps, but not both simultaneously. If the set of SW pumps aligned to the essential equipment aren’t getting the job done, workers can open/close valves and electrical breakers to reconfigure the second set of three SW pumps to the essential equipment loops. Because river water can have stuff in it that could clog some of the coolers for essential equipment, each SW pump has a strainer that attempts to remove as much debris as possible from the water. The leak discovered on April 27, 2016, was in the piping between the discharge check valve for SW pump 31 and its strainer. An arrow points to this piping section in Figure 1. The strainers were installed in openings called pits in the thick concrete floor of the intake structure. Water from the leaking pipe flowed into the pit housing the strainer for SW pump 31. The initial leak rate was modest—estimated to be about one-eighth of a gallon per minute. The leak was similar to other pinhole leaks that had occurred in the concrete-lined, carbon steel SW pipes. The owner began daily checks on the leakage and prepared an operability determination. Basically, “operability determinations” are used within the nuclear industry when safety equipment is found to be impaired or degraded. The operability determination for the service water pipe leak concluded that the impairment did not prevent the SW pumps from fulfilling their required safety function. The operability determination relied on a sump pump located at the bottom of the strainer pit transferring the leaking water out of the pit before the water flooded and submerged safety components. The daily checks instituted by the owner included workers recording the leak rate and assessing whether it had significantly increased. But the checks were against the previous day’s leak rate rather than the initial leak rate. By September 18, 2016, the leakage had steadily increased by a factor of 64 to 8 gallons per minute. But the daily incremental increases were small enough that they kept workers from finding the overall increase to be significant. The daily check on October 15, 2016, found the pump room flooded to a depth of several inches. The leak rate was now estimated to be 20 gallons per minute. And the floor drain in the strainer pit was clogged (ironic, huh?) impairing the ability of its sump pump to remove the water. Workers placed temporary sump pumps in the room to remove the flood water and cope with the insignificantly higher leak rate. On October 17, workers installed a clamp on the pipe that reduced the leakage to less than one gallon per minute. The operability determination was revised in response to concerns expressed by the NRC inspectors. The NRC inspectors were not satisfied by the revised operability determination. It continued to rely on the strainer pit sump pump removing the leaking water. But that sump pump was not powered from the emergency diesel generator and thus would not remove water should offsite power become unavailable. Step 5.6.4 of procedure EN-OP-14, “Operability Determination Process,” stated “If the Operability is based on the use or availability of other equipment, it must be verified that the equipment is capable of performing the function utilized in the evaluation.” The operability determination explicitly stated that no compensatory measures or operator manual actions were needed to handle the leak, but the situation clearly required both compensatory measures and operator manual actions. The NRC inspectors found additional deficiencies in the revised operability determination. The NRC inspectors calculated that a 20 gallon per minute leak rate coupled with an unavailable strainer pit sump pump would flood the room to a depth of three feet in three hours. There are no flood alarms in the room and the daily checks might not detect flooding until the level rose to three feet. At that level, water would submerge and potentially disable the vacuum breakers for the SW pumps. Proper vacuum breaker operation could be needed to successfully restart the SW pumps. The NRC inspectors calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would flood the room to the level of the control cabinets for the strainers in 10 hours. The submerged control cabinets could disable the strainers, leading to blocked cooling water flow to essential equipment. The NRC inspects calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would completely fill the room in about 29 hours, or only slightly longer than the daily check interval. Flooding to depths of 3 feet, 10 feet, and the room’s ceiling affected all six SW pumps. Thus, the flooding represented a common mode threat that could disable the entire service water system. In turn, all safety equipment shown in Figure 2 no longer cooled by the disabled service water system could also be disabled. The NRC estimated that the flooding risk was about 5×10-6 per reactor year, solidly in the Green finding band. Fig. 2 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge) UCS Perspective “Leak before break” is a longstanding nuclear safety philosophy. Books have been written about it (well, at least one report has been written and may even have been read.) The NRC’s approval of a leak before break analysis can allow the owner of an existing nuclear power reactor to remove pipe whip restraints and jet impingement barriers. Such hardware guarded against the sudden rupture of a pipe filled with high pressure fluid from damaging safety equipment in the area. The leak before break analyses can provide the NRC with sufficient confidence that piping degradation will be detected by observed leakage with remedial actions taken before the pipe fails catastrophically. More than a decade ago, the NRC issued a Knowledge Management document on the leak before break philosophy and acceptable methods of analyzing, monitoring, and responding to piping degradation. This incident at Indian Point illustrated an equally longstanding nuclear safety practice of “leak before break.” In this case, the leak was indeed followed by a break. But the break was not the failure of the piping but failure of the owner to comply with federal safety regulations. Pipe breaks are bad. Regulation breaks are bad. Deciding which is worse is like trying to decide which eye one wants to be poked in. None is far better than either. As with the prior Columbia Generating Station case study, this Indian Point case study illustrates the vital role that NRC’s enforcement efforts plays in nuclear safety. Even after NRC inspectors voiced clear concerns about the improperly evaluated service water system pipe leak, Entergy failed to properly evaluate the situation, thus violating federal safety regulations. To be fair to Entergy, the company was probably doing its best, but in recent years, Entergy’s best has been far below nuclear industry average performance levels. The NRC’s ROP is the public’s best protection against hazards caused by aging nuclear power reactors, shrinking maintenance budgets, emerging sabotage threats, and Entergy.Replacing the NRC’s engineering inspections with self-assessments by Entergy would lessen the effectiveness of that protective shield. The NRC must continue to protect the public to the best of its ability. Delegating safety checks to owners like Entergy is inconsistent with that important mission. Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.
Ross PeelResearch and Knowledge Transfer Manager, Department of War Studies and the Centre for Science and Security Studies, King’s College London
Disclosure statement
Ross Peel is affiliated with the Centre for Science & Security Studies at King’s College London.
Recent reports of a series of drone strikes on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) have demonstrated the serious safety and security concerns at Europe’s largest nuclear power station. It has not been confirmed who is responsible for the strikes. Both Russia, which occupied ZNPP in March 2022, and Ukraine have pointed the finger at each other.
But Russia has recently announced plans to restart the plant. This would greatly increase the danger of a nuclear accident, as operating reactors allow much less time before an accident occurs if they are damaged or their safety systems are interrupted. The pressure and temperature inside an operating reactor are also much greater, creating the potential for large explosions and the widespread dispersal of radioactive material.
The IAEA board of governors held an emergency meeting on April 17, passing a motion to call for the immediate return of control of the plant to Ukraine and the urgent withdrawal of unauthorised military and other Russian personnel.
Drones strike targets
Attacks have included a drone strike on the oxygen and nitrogen production facility, two on the training centre and a drone shot down above a turbine hall. The training centre, which was first attacked by Russian forces in March 2022, is a useful target for anyone seeking to emphasise the threat posed by the plant without actually sparking a disaster. It is clearly part of the power plant, yet is isolated and likely contains little to no nuclear material, meaning the risk of resulting nuclear accident is relatively low.
Europe’s largest nuclear power station: Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock
During the second half of 2022, after ZNPP was captured by the Russians, the plant was subject to regular shelling, for which – as has happened recently – Russia and Ukraine blamed each other. Since Russia gained control of ZNPP, Ukrainian staff have remained at their posts to prevent accidents, despite indications of mistreatment, kidnap and even torture by Russian occupiers.
Like any modern nuclear power plant, ZNPP possesses a wide range of safety and security features, allowing it to weather occasional relatively minor attacks – such as the ones launched so far in this conflict. But it is far from invulnerable. A major attack would have the potential to cause a serious nuclear accident.
Huge risk of disaster: IAES director-general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, says recent attacks on ZNPP significantly increase the risk of a major nuclear accident. EPA-EFE/Max Slovencik
The IAEA continues to call for restraint and for all military activity to be halted in the vicinity of the plant.
Ukrainian staff recently placed the final ZNPP reactor into a state of “cold shutdown”. This means the cooling water in the reactor is below 100°C and at atmospheric pressure. This is safer than the previous state of “hot shutdown”, but a restart would be far worse than either of these. If the reactor or associated equipment and its containment were to be breached, cooling water and potentially nuclear material could be ejected with great force into the atmosphere and spread over huge distances.
ZNPP has struggled through the past two years with unreliable access to cooling water, back-up electricity, staff numbers and more. Putting ZNPP, a plant still on the front line of an armed conflict, into operation would therefore be highly risky.
Is there any benefit that makes this risk worthwhile? It does not appear so, primarily because there is very little demand for the energy the plant could produce. The nearby population has largely evacuated, and Ukraine currently refuses to accept power from Russia. That said, Russia has recently redoubled its efforts to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and may be trying to engineer a situation where Ukraine has to accept energy supplied from power plants in regions of the country occupied by Russian forces.
Another possibility is that Putin, who has an eye for the historical gesture, wants to reactivate the plant in time for the 40th anniversary of its connection to the Soviet power grid in December 1984. In either case, the risks seem hard to justify.
Another noteworthy anniversary is on April 26. Chernobyl Remembrance Day commemorates the world’s worst nuclear disaster, which occurred in 1986 in what is today Ukraine. Thirty-eight years later, Moscow officials are risking creating another major nuclear disaster for the Ukrainian people.
Updated on: April 25, 2024 / 9:32 AM EDT / CBS News
Hamas released a video Wednesday appearing to show one of its Israeli hostages delivering an address in captivity. In the video, a man identifies himself as Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin before delivering a long statement clearly crafted by Hamas, which has long been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel.
The video may give the young man’s family hope, however, as the message he conveys includes a reference to his 200 days in captivity — which suggests it was either filmed on or to mark April 24, exactly 200 days since Hamas launched its attack. CBS News cannot verify the date of filming or the contents of the video released by Hamas’ armed Al-Qassam Brigades, but it was posted on the same social media channel used regularly by the group to publish propaganda videos, including others showing hostages.
A U.S. official confirmed to CBS News the White House received the video on Monday, and said the White House has been in touch with the Goldberg-Polin family since it was received. The family also received a copy of the video directly, the official said.
The official noted this is the first time Hamas has publicly released a video of a U.S. citizen hostage.
A statement released Wednesday by the Hostage Families Forum, which represents the families of those still held in Gaza, said Goldberg-Polin’s parents wanted the message he was delivering to get out, and the group did not question the video’s authenticity.
“Hersh’s cry is the collective cry of all the hostages — their time is rapidly running out. With each passing day, the fear of losing more innocent lives grows stronger. We cannot afford to waste any more time; the hostages must be the top priority,” the group said in its statement.
There had been no clear indication from Hamas that Goldberg-Polin, now 24, was still alive. He was seriously injured when militants rampaged through the music festival he was attending near the Gaza border during Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.”
In the video, Goldberg-Polin shows that he is missing his left hand, and there are some marks visible on his head and face, but he speaks clearly in Hebrew and appears otherwise thin but healthy. The video includes English subtitles, which CBS News has verified as accurate.
The statement he delivers, clearly under duress in Hamas captivity, includes a litany of insults and admonishments for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to secure a deal for the remaining hostages’ release.
There are believed to be about 130 people still held in Gaza, of the roughly 240 initially taken hostage by Hamas.
It is not clear how many of the remaining hostages are still alive, but Goldberg-Polin says in the videotaped statement that Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have killed “about 70” of the captives. The U.S. official could not confirm that or other details of what was said under duress in the video, including when it was filmed. Hamas has previously issued false statements about the hostages’ fate, accusing Israel of killing people who were later found alive.
“This is a an innocent young man being held hostage by a terrorist organization and he should be released immediately without condition and without delay,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a briefing Wednesday afternoon. He said FBI experts are analyzing the video.
“The moment that we got the video that showed Hersh, we gave it to the FBI hostage fusion recovery cell,” Sullivan said. “…I’m not going to get ahead of that assessment to make any judgments about time, you know, recency, etc. I will let them make those judgments and then when we have something we can share publicly in light of all the sensitivities we’ll share it with you.”
The video was released as Jews observe the Passover holiday, and the Israeli-American man’s mother Rachel Goldberg was quoted Tuesday by the French news agency AFP as saying, “all of the symbolic things we do at the seder will take on a much more profound and deep meaning this year.”
Goldberg told CBS’ “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan earlier this month that her family was living through “a painful, staggeringly indescribable odyssey” as they waited for news of her son. They knew already that he’d lost part of an arm in the Oct. 7 attack on the Supernova music festival, and had to apply his own tourniquet, according to witnesses.
A U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday that there are five U.S. nationals still unaccounted for and presumed to be living hostages in Gaza, including Goldberg-Polin. Three other Americans who were in Israel when Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attack — Itay Chen, Judith Weinstein and Gad Haggai — are presumed dead, but their bodies have not yet been recovered.
In the video released Wednesday, Goldberg-Polin says Netanyahu and his fellow Israeli leaders should be “ashamed” for carrying on with their mission in Gaza while he and his fellow captives are stuck “in underground hell, without water, food or sun.”
Near the end of the statement, Goldberg-Polin addresses his own family directly, naming his parents and siblings and saying: “I love you. I know you’re doing your best to get me home as soon as possible. I want you to stay strong for me
Goldberg-Polin’s parents are among the relatives and loved ones of hostages who have brought tremendous pressure on Israel’s leaders to negotiate a new cease-fire and hostage release deal with Hamas.
“I don’t know that the cabinet needed to have a flame lit under them to get these hostages out,” his father Jonathan Polin told CBS News’ Chris Livesay in December. “But if they did, it happens today.”
“If Hersh somehow, somewhere can hear this — just know we love you, stay strong, survive,” his mother pleaded in the interview with CBS News, adding: “We’re coming. The world is coming.”
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