Energy, Security

Algeria Should Force Sahara Nuclear Cleanup With or Without France

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France is getting itself in hot water because of its seventeen nuclear detonations in the Algerian Sahara.

More than scientific experiments or Cold War posturing, France’s nuclear tests in Algeria were a form of colonial risk externalization: the deliberate transfer of existential danger onto a colonized land and its people. The colonial administration exported the catastrophic potential of its nuclear program far from its own population, offloading the risks of fallout and long-term contamination onto a colony deemed expendable.

The controversy is now whether French colonial records are still meant to be a secret. The reality is that Algeria can and should force a cleanup forward regardless of what Paris declassifies or admits in the open.

Here are the four steps to a better world.

  1. Ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Algeria signed in 2017 and has yet to deposit ratification. Entry as a State Party places Reggane and In Ekker under Article 6, which obliges the affected state to remediate and entitles it to technical, material and financial assistance from every other party in a position to provide it. The Meeting of States Parties then becomes a standing forum where French failure is formally recorded year after year. Article 6(3) preserves every claim Algeria holds against France under general international law.
  2. Publish Algeria’s own baseline. The IAEA assessment of 2005 was released as preliminary, built on a single 1999 mission and on summaries France chose to supply. Algeria created a national agency for rehabilitation of the sites in 2021. That agency can commission an independent survey, publish its own coordinates and dose maps, and define in writing what remains unknown, despite France. A documented gap generates a demand France would need to answer. An undocumented one is what France toys with.
  3. Ask Paris for the Polynesia order. Macron ordered declassification of French nuclear archives in 2021 after the Toxique investigation. The same applies to the Sahara. Nine French deputies have already asked the Élysée to publish the burial maps. Algeria can put a dated request through the joint working group formed in 2008 and file the French answer, or their cynical refusal, as the public record.
  4. Invite the IAEA back with a mandate. The 2005 report recommended further study. A second mission, requested by Algeria as an IAEA member state and funded under Article 7, produces a current radiological map under international signature. French experts can join it or decline it. Either outcome will move the argument a step forward towards France being forced to account for their harms.

Each of these works without Paris being expected to end colonialism, as it should have decades ago. What time is it? Each step makes the next document that France fails to produce a matter of formal records. And Algeria can press forward with cleanup in a manner that France will have to answer for eventually.

Poetry, Security

Crow Calls Cue Cognitive Control Channel

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A new study says crows have evidenced brain function for vocalization.

…volitional vocalizations carry specific cognitive control demands, previously undescribed in birds…

The first call after a run of pecks came late; by the second call the delay was gone. Pecks after calls showed no delay at all.

In other words, a vocal channel has a control layer that the beak-peck channel does not. Calling is cue-to-decision-to-action. Pecking is cue-to-action.

Security

The Villainy of Texas Christian Militant Censorship at Texas Tech

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The simple story is that militant religious censorship of education in Texas is intentionally vague yet severe, making the architects appear as self-promoting villains.

Some teachers simply refuse to comply on the grounds of doing a good job.

Spurgeon, two years from retirement after more than two decades at Tech, said she’s also been pressured to pull back from teaching subjects she has spent years researching, including gender, race and sexuality in literature of the American West. She’s continued teaching them.

“Despite multiple emails making clear to them that I’m teaching this anyway. I mean, maybe this interview will be the nail in my coffin. It is possible,” Spurgeon said. “If they’re gonna fire me for doing my job to the best of my ability, then go ahead.”

Others leave, on the grounds of doing a good job somewhere else.

Limeri earned tenure at Tech this spring but left shortly afterward for a position in Rhode Island, a decision she said was driven entirely by the university’s restrictions. She believed the policies would prevent her from teaching biology accurately and would constrain her research.

“I would rather be untenured with academic freedom than tenured at Texas Tech University,” Limeri said. “The censorship is so severe and so damaging and so unacceptable that I uprooted my very happy life and moved across the country.”

History professor Jacob Bell described a similarly difficult decision. He taught history at Texas Tech for three years before leaving earlier this year for a job in New York, saying the restrictions would interfere with his ability to teach works like The Odyssey, where the Greek goddess Athena takes both male and female forms.

The censorship is so absurdly drafted that even the lack of enforcement generates widespread resistance.

History, Security

On this Day in History: 1917 Balfour Declaration

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Arthur Balfour spent 1905 keeping Jews out of Britain and 1917 finding them somewhere else to go. The two sides of his mouth worked as a single policy, and today we mourn how it worked.

The first part was the border. As Prime Minister, Balfour had carried the Aliens Act of 1905, the first peacetime immigration control in British law, written for Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms. In committee on 10 July 1905 he gave the Commons his reason, recorded in Hansard at col. 155:

He undoubtedly thought that a state of things could easily be imagined in which it would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able, and industrious, however much they threw themselves into the national life, still, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves.

The same evening he named the alternative. His government had offered “the Jewish race a great tract of fertile land in one of our possessions” so that they might find “an asylum from their persecutors” there (Hansard, col. 178).

Where was that? The land was in East Africa. A closed port at home was coupled with a colony abroad: Jews go elsewhere.

The second part was selling a destination. By 1917 Balfour was Foreign Secretary and the colony had moved to Palestine. A famous Jew serving in the Cabinet said out loud what Balfour meant. Edwin Montagu circulated a memorandum on 23 August 1917 titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government“. He warned that once Jews were told Palestine was their national home, “every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens,” and that “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto” (UN study, Part I, sect. II).

Montagu, despite concern for Jews, himself being one too, lost the debate. A clause was added on “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” to mollify him. It was meant in words only.

The third part was militancy. The War Cabinet approved the text on 31 October 1917. The minute records Balfour’s argument that since Jews in Russia and America appeared to favour Zionism, a declaration in their favour would let Britain “carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America” (CAB 23/4, WC 261, minute 12). The premise was that Jews moved as a bloc and could be bought during war. That premise is antisemitic on the face of it. The Cabinet purchased Jewish wartime support with Arab land.

Balfour said so once the bill came due, in a memorandum to Curzon on 11 August 1919 (UN study, Part I, sect. IV):

For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

The famous declaration by Balfour of 2 November 1917 reads as though he had sympathy for Jews. His own words show what the sympathy consisted of: from the London docks in 1905 to Curzon’s desk in 1919, at every point the Jews are a people spread apart, to be relocated into a single population that can be pulled as a single lever. The Arabs of Palestine appear twice in his papers: once as “existing non-Jewish communities“, and once as a number to be overridden.

…advocating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the British government would be reneging on a pact it had made with Arabs two years before. During World War I, the British strategized against the Ottomans, who were allied with Imperial Germany, by encouraging an Arab revolt led by the Sharif of Mecca: his people had long desired independence from the Turks. In return, the Sharif thought, the British would support a pan-Arabic kingdom. The Balfour Declaration compromised that communication…