Joshua Baker

“I ain’t no highfalutin neocon; I’m just a simple country warmonger”

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and surrounding areas of the exclusion zone, seen February 10. The town of Futaba is visible to the right of the plant, and Okuma to the left. Credit: The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP

15 years ago today, the world watched Fukushima-Daiichi being shattered. As an editor, I'm seeing the narrative shift from "safety at all costs" to "tripling capacity" (as seen at yesterday's Paris Nuclear Energy Summit).

But is the nuclear disaster over? (1/n)

#Fukushima15 #NukeSky #NuclearEnergy

Democratic members of Congress need to attack this war as a crime, because that’s what it is. “The president did not plan out his war of aggression as well as he could have” is a foolish and self-defeating position to take.

How do governments justify the unjustifiable?

Join OPSR for The Decision to Drop the Bomb. Vincent Intondi examines the story behind the decision made 80 years ago and the narratives used to explain & defend that choice.

🗓️ Wed., Feb. 4
🕕 6:00 PM PT
💻 Zoom (oregonpsr.org/decision)
(link in bio)

!!!!!

In less than 7 months Trump et al Regime has twice pulled a surprise attack on critical assets of people/states it was ostensibly negotiating with at the time (Iran & Venezuela).

I want us to be clear about that.

As I’ve been saying, this has major ramifications for nuclear launch procedures. It’s foolish to think legality offers any kind of constraint on what is clearly a de facto unilateral power for the president to launch a first strike.

People like me have sometimes gotten pushback for not considering the supposed legal checks on presidential “sole authority.” Lawyers would not allow an illegal strike, we were told - and in any case the military would refuse such an order. Would like to know what those folks think now!

Cancer risk may increase with proximity to nuclear power plants | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health In Massachusetts, residential proximity to a nuclear power plant was associated with significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining by distance, according to a new Harvard Chan School s...

In Massachusetts, residential proximity to a nuclear power plant (NPP) was associated with significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining by distance, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. #NoNukes #NukeSky

hsph.harvard.edu/news/cancer-...

The Return of Nuclear Proliferation A recent article in the establishment security journal Foreign Affairs makes the case for nuclear proliferation among America’s allies. Not only are its arguments unsound, but they also understate the...

Good @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social piece pushing back against a recent Foreign Affairs article:

"Below the confidence in America’s power to shape the global status quo seems to lurk a quiet admission that the American empire is fracturing" jacobin.com/2025/11/nucl...

No one could have predicted, etc. www.reuters.com/business/aer...

Declassified cable reinforces proliferation concerns about high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel The declassified document reveals an urgent need for an international review of the proliferation risks of HALEU.

🚨 JUST IN: A newly declassified cable reinforces proliferation concerns about high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel, and reveals an urgent need for an international review of #HALEU use, writes Ed Lyman (@nucsafetyucs.bsky.social).

#uranium #enrichment #proliferation #IAEA #safeguards #nukesky

A House of Dynamite Gets It Right—But Here’s the Full Picture The Pentagon is wrong to attack the movie for being inaccurate. We cannot rely on missile defense systems to protect us from nuclear destruction.

My @ucs.org colleague @lauraegrego.bsky.social explains how #AHouseofDynamite has the better take on the flawed US anti-missile system than the Pentagon's inaccurate claims that it works. Bottom line: the system has not been shown to work under realistic conditions.

A black and white map prepared by Richard Miller showing (in dark black streaks) areas across the continental United States where two or more radioactive fallout clouds passed over between 1951 and 1962. Every state was affected, with eastern Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and others being especially hard hit.

As a reminder, here's what happened after we exploded 100 nuclear devices in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site from 1951-62:

American military film crew filming “surrender” of Bikini Atoll

Nuclear testing you say?

"Nuclear Conquistadors: Military Colonialism
in #Nuclear Test Site Selection during the Cold
War”

#NuclearTesting #ColdWar #NukeSky

ipus.snu.ac.kr/eng/wp-conte...

We're getting nights like this basically monthly now, and the major funders of nuclear policy work are still retreating

If a complete update and renovation of existing weapons was accomplished during his first term, as he said, then we can cancel all future modernization plans, yeah?

Let's go!

Oregon PSR Endorses Nuclear Abolition Day Joint Appeal

🌍 Today is the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. OPSR is proud to endorse this joint appeal, making an urgent global call to abolish nukes, cut dangerous budgets, and invest in a safer, healthier future for all.
👉 tinyurl.com/NuclearAbolitionDay

My book comes out in three
weeks.
www.bloomsbury.com/us/contempor...

What’s the Plan for ‘Golden Dome’? Even Experts Aren’t Sure A sweeping U.S. missile defense program comes with many risks, costs and uncertainties, analysts say

Excellent @sciam.bsky.social Golden Dome article details the lack of information about the proposed system, the enormous amount of taxpayer $$$s it will consume (even as it fails), & the negative ramifications for US security overall: www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

The president has sole authority to order nuclear use- How did we get here? How does it work? What’s the issue? Can we solve it?

My new @scientistsorg.bsky.social report on nuclear launch authority in the U.S. - “All the King’s Weapons” - is out! Read it below 👇

fas.org/publication/...

Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups

“A law firm representing opponents of offshore wind farms is demanding that Brown University retract research that details links between the fossil fuel industry and anti-wind groups.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

p.48-49 - emphasized text: "Thousands of people had nobody to help them. Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse with her sleepless companions. ... Mr. Tanimoto, after his long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed uneasily. When he awoke, in the first light of dawn he looked across the river and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandpit the night before. The ride had risen above where he had put them; they had not had the strength to move; they must have drowned. He saw a number of bodies floating in the river."

p. 45 - highlighted text - Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandpit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, "These are human beings." It took him three trips to get them all across the river.

This is a graphic and heartbreaking section. There is no justification for ever using these weapons again. A lot of people get paid a lot of money to tell you it's actually complicated and that there are scenarios where we could and should use them - but I promise, it's not complicated.

p.24-25: The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion - and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima - with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many might have lived died. Of 150 in the city, 65 were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1780 nurses, 1654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. in the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only 6 doctors out of 30 were able to function, and only 10 nurses out of more than 200. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki." "Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and in the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochere, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls ... crept into the hospital. In a city of 245,000, nearly 100,000 people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a 100,000 more were hurt. At least 10,000 of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had 600 beds

Page 16 of Hiroshima - highlighted text - "Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

I'm going to thread a few passages that jumped out at me (warning: some are heartbreakingly sad, some are grizzly and very graphic) but truly I encourage anyone who is seeing this to just read the book, as the impact of all of it at once is infuriating and oppressive in a terribly radicalizing way.

Inspired by this article, I finally sat down with John Hersey's Hiroshima this Saturday while at the river. In the book Hersey interviews a handful of survivors a year after Hiroshima, with follow ups 40 years later. The stories in that book will likely stay with me the rest of my life.