Experts

The Trump administration is promising an even tougher anti-immigration agenda after an Afghan national was charged this week in the shooting of two National Guard members, with new restrictions targeting the tens of thousands of Afghans resettled in the U.S. and those seeking to come, many of whom served alongside American soldiers in the two-decade war.

But those still waiting to come were already facing stricter measures as part of President Trump’s sweeping crackdown on legal and illegal migration that began when he started his second term in January. And the Afghan immigrants living in the U.S. and now in the administration’s crosshairs were among the most extensively vetted, often undergoing years of security screening, experts and advocates say.

In its latest move, the Trump administration announced Friday that it will pause issuing visas for anyone traveling on an Afghan passport.

The suspected shooter, who worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan war, “was vetted both before he landed, probably once he landed, once he applied for asylum,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. “But more importantly, he was almost certainly vetted extensively and much more by the CIA.”

Haris Tarin, a former U.S. official who worked on the Biden-era program that resettled Afghans, predicted that “as the investigation unfolds, you will see that this is not a failure of screening. This is a failure of us not being able to integrate — not just foreign intelligence and military personnel — but our own veterans, over the past 25 years.”

The program, Operations Allies Welcome, initially brought about 76,000 Afghans to the United States, many of whom had worked alongside American troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators. The initiative was in place for around a year before shifting to a longer-term program called Operation Enduring Welcome. Almost 200,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.S. under the programs.

Among those brought to the U.S. under the program was the suspected shooter, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who now faces a first-degree murder charge in the death of 20-year-old Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom. The other National Guard member who was shot, 24-year-old Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition.

Those resettlements are now on hold. The State Department has temporarily stopped issuing visas for all people traveling on Afghan passports, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced late Friday on X.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric

Trump and his allies have seized on the shooting to criticize gaps in the U.S. vetting process and the speed of admissions, even though some Republicans spent the months and years after the 2021 withdrawal criticizing the Biden administration for not moving fast enough to approve some applications from Afghan allies.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Lakanwal “should have never been allowed to come here.” Trump called lax migration policies “the single greatest national security threat facing our nation,” and Vice President JD Vance said Biden’s policy was “opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees.”

That rhetoric quickly turned into policy announcements, with Trump saying he would “permanently pause all migration” from a list of nearly 20 countries, “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.” Many of these changes had already been set in motion through a series of executive orders over the last 10 months, including most recently in June.

“They are highlighting practices that were already going into place,” said Andrea Flores, a lawyer who was an immigration policy advisor in the Obama and Biden administrations.

Lakanwal applied for asylum during the Biden administration, but his request was approved in April of this year — under the Trump administration — after undergoing a thorough vetting, according to #AfghanEvac, a group that helps resettle Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the war.

Flores said the system has worked across administrations: “You may hear people say, ‘Well, he was granted asylum under Trump. This is Trump’s problem.’ That’s not how our immigration system works. It relies on the same bedding. No asylum laws have really been changed by Congress.”

Afghans in the U.S. fearful for their status

Trump and other U.S. officials have used the attack to demand a reexamination of everyone who came to the U.S. from Afghanistan, a country he called “a hellhole on Earth” on Thursday.

“These policies were already creating widespread disruption and fear among lawfully admitted families. What’s new and deeply troubling is the attempt to retroactively tie all of this to one act of violence in a way that casts suspicion on entire nationalities, including Afghan allies who risked their lives to protect our troops,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, said in a statement Friday.

This has left the nearly 200,000 Afghans living across the U.S. in deep fear and shame over actions attributed to one person. Those in the U.S. are now worrying about their legal status being revoked, while others in the immigration pipeline here and abroad are waiting in limbo.

Nesar, a 22-year-old Afghan who arrived in the U.S. weeks after the fall of Kabul, said he had just begun to assimilate into life in the U.S. when the attack happened Wednesday. He agreed to speak to the Associated Press on condition that only his first name be used for fear of reprisals or targeting by immigration officials.

“Life was finally getting easier for me. I’ve learned to speak English. I found a better job,” he said. “But after this happened two days ago, I honestly went to the grocery store this morning, and I was feeling so uncomfortable among all of those people. I was like, maybe they’re now looking at me the same way as the shooter.”

Two days before the shooting, Nesar and his father, who worked for the Afghan president during the war, had received an interview date of Dec. 13 for their green card application, a moment he said they had been working toward for four years. He says it is now unclear if their application will move forward or whether their interview will take place.

Another Afghan national, who also spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said that after fearing for his life under Taliban rule, he felt a sense of peace and hope when he finally received a special immigrant visa to come to the U.S. two years ago.

He said he thought he could use his experience working as a defense attorney in Afghanistan to contribute to American society. But now, he said, he and other Afghans will once again face scrutiny because of the actions of an “extremist who, despite benefiting from the safety and livelihood provided by this country, ungratefully attacked two American soldiers.”

“It seems that whenever a terrorist commits a crime, its shadow falls upon me simply because I am from Afghanistan,” he added.

Cappelletti and Amiri write for the Associated Press. AP writer Renata Brito contributed to this report.

Reporting from Sacramento — Two of California’s leading candidates for governor say they’re going to end the housing shortage, a driver of the state’s affordability crisis.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa both have said they want developers in California to build a half million homes in a year — something that’s never happened, at least in modern history. And they want builders to do it for seven straight years, resulting in 3.5 million new homes from the time the next governor takes office through 2025.

Those numbers are so out of scale with California’s history that they might be impossible to achieve. Practical concerns, including developers lining up enough financing and construction workers to build so many homes so quickly, could stymie the effort. Meeting the goals could also require rolling back decades of popular state policies on growth, taxation and the environment, according to housing academics and economists.

Without specific plans to transform how housing gets approved in California, said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Los Angeles-based consulting firm Beacon Economics, Newsom and Villaraigosa’s promises are empty.

“You’re just saying it,” Thornberg said of the homebuilding goals. “You don’t really mean it.”

Newsom and Villaraigosa said in separate statements to The Times that setting the 3.5-million home goal ensures they’ll be held accountable to whatever needs to be done to attain it.

Here’s why the two candidates’ goals will be so difficult to achieve and how they say they’re going to do it.

How many houses are we actually talking about?

For decades, not enough homes have been built in California to accommodate a growing population, leading to a spike in housing costs. Since 2011, for instance, the Bay Area has added about 627,000 new jobs but only 138,000 homes, according to the Building Industry Assn. of the Bay Area.

Newsom and Villaraigosa’s homebuilding goals would address that problem, but they’re without precedent.

Only twice since 1954 — the year the state building industry began tracking permits — have developers built more than 300,000 homes in a year. The highest year on record is 1963, when 322,018 home permits were issued.

To reach 500,000 homes in a year, the state would need to replicate its largest production in modern history plus an additional 178,000 homes, a number the state has surpassed just three times in the past 27 years.

Overall, the state’s rate of homebuilding would have to triple the historical average, quadruple last year’s production and reach nearly seven times the pace of building in the last decade.

Where do these numbers come from?

The goal of 3.5 million homes originated in a 2016 report on California’s housing problems by the McKinsey Global Institute, a private think tank.

The report found that California ranked 49^th in the country in housing production per capita and estimated the state would need 3.5 million new units through 2025 to build homes at a per capita rate equivalent to New Jersey and New York.

California could achieve that goal, the report said, through a dramatic increase in development near transit, increasing building on parcels already zoned for apartments and condominiums and adding some units to single-family parcels.

But there’s a crucial difference between the McKinsey report and the pledges from Newsom and Villaraigosa. The McKinsey report sets a goal for California to build 3.5 million homes from 2015 through 2025, an 11-year period. The gubernatorial candidates want to do it in only seven years, a period that would begin when the new governor takes office in 2019.

How do they plan to get there?

Housing affordability has emerged as one of the most prominent issues in the gubernatorial campaign, and all major candidates have pledged to address the problem. State Treasurer John Chiang, also a Democrat, has set a goal of having developers build 1.6 million homes for low-income Californians by 2030 through a mix of state bond funding, tax credits and other subsidies.

Newsom and Villaraigosa, however, are the only ones to have set the 3.5-million home goal.

Newsom’s proposal relies on spending hundreds of millions of dollars more on low-income homes, approving some development through regional governments rather than solely at the local level and financially rewarding cities and counties that approve housing, especially near transit, and punishing those that don’t.

Villaraigosa emphasizes sequestering property tax dollars to finance low-income housing, making loans to homeowners who want to build a second unit on their lots and making unspecified changes to the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, the 1970 law that requires developers to analyze and lessen a project’s effect on the environment.

Neither of them, though, have specified how many homes they expect each part of their housing plans to produce to add up to 3.5 million homes. Instead, they contend that simply setting a bold goal will require them to allocate funding and reduce the red tape needed to meet it.

“A crisis of this magnitude requires ambitious goal setting matched with focused leadership and bold, innovative policy initiatives,” Newsom said in a statement responding to questions from The Times. “It requires an affordable housing ‘moonshot.’”

“Housing has to be delivered at the local level, and building consensus is the only way to get there,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “It comes down to having the courage and experience to lead on this issue, and I am committed to getting it done.”

What would it actually take?

As governor, Newsom or Villaraigosa would have to reshape how housing gets permitted to make the process faster and more likely to result in approval.

Doing so, experts said, could require taking on three of the most substantial barriers to large-scale housing production, all of which have had long enjoyed broad support

Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that restricts property tax increases, which gives cities incentives to approve commercial and hotel development instead of housing because those projects generate more local tax revenues. It has also helped protect homeowners from rising taxes.

— The California Environmental Quality Act, which creates a lengthy process for assessing the effects of new housing and leaves projects vulnerable to litigation. Environmental groups also credit the law with preserving the state’s natural beauty.

— Local control over development decisions. Cities and counties determine what is built in their communities, and desirable coastal locales often prefer restrictions on growth. Los Angeles, for instance, had in 1960 zoned enough housing to accommodate 10 million people, a figure that’s since been reduced to a little over 4 million. Residents like to shape how their neighborhoods look.

Michael Lens, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, said the candidates would need to make substantial changes to all three policies, potentially even scrapping them, if they wanted to reach the homebuilding targets.

“You could take away one of those pillars and have a wobblier table of housing resistance,” Lens said. “But [removing] all three would be more useful.”

The housing production goal also could conflict with other promises. Newsom and Villaraigosa support California’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, which require concentrating homes near jobs and transit so people drive less. That means the state couldn’t count on large, single-family developments, such as suburban projects built during an early 2000s surge in production, to meet the 3.5-million home target.

Even if it were politically possible to supercharge housing production, there are practical problems that the candidates would have less control over. After a long period of growth, Gov. Jerry Brown has warned that the state economy should expect a slowdown in the coming years, which could also decelerate development.

In addition, it takes time for builders to secure land and financing, no matter how quickly a government approves blueprints and permits. Changes implemented on the first day of a Newsom or Villaraigosa administration might take years before they’d lead to ribbon cuttings for new homes.

“Depending on the size of the project, the stuff that starts in 2019 might not even come online until somewhere around 2025,” Lens said.

There have to be enough construction workers to build all those homes, too. California contractors already are having trouble finding labor, and that’s before spending ramps up on more than $5 billion annually in road repairs and transit upgrades coming after the Legislature approved a gas tax hike last year, said Peter Tateishi, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of California.

“We don’t see a path to building 500,000 homes in one year on top of all the other infrastructure projects that are on the docket,” Tateishi said.

[email protected]

Twitter: @dillonliam

ALSO

Gov. Brown just signed 15 housing bills. Here’s how they’re supposed to help the affordability crisis

California won’t meet its climate change goals without a lot more housing density in its cities

California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state’s housing crisis. Here’s why they’ve failed

Updates on California politics

With searches for ‘avoid jet lag’ soaring, travel experts have revealed the perfect time to fly

Anyone heading off for some winter sunshine this festive period might find themselves fretting about jet lag – particularly if you’re travelling somewhere quite distant. According to Google Trends data, searches for ‘avoid jet lag’ have rocketed by 9,900% over the past month, with holidaymakers worried this could ruin their break.

But dodging jet lag could be as straightforward as picking the ideal departure time, according to specialists at Go2Africa. They recommend booking your flight to arrive at a local time between 2pm-5pm, which means you’ll touch down in optimal conditions with plenty of daylight exposure and the chance to remain alert until bedtime. This sets you up for a properly synchronised body clock throughout your getaway.

Circadian rhythm alignment

One explanation for why your arrival time can help prevent jet lag is that it allows your body’s circadian rhythm sufficient time to adjust to external signals like light and darkness.

Any sudden shift, such as crossing time zones during air travel, can throw this alignment off balance and trigger jet lag symptoms.

Strong reset signal

“Light is the strongest signal to the body that it needs to reset”, the specialists explain. “Strategic exposure or, of course, avoidance, changes your circadian phase, supercharging the reset of your internal body clock.”

Daylight and wakefulness

The experts add: “Getting to your destination between the hours of 2pm and 5pm local time is perfect as you have enough daylight to reset your body clock, but it’s not so late that you will struggle to stay awake until bedtime. Arriving too early (morning) risks falling asleep prematurely or being awake for too many hours before night, confusing your clock.”

Other ways to beat jet lag

If you can’t manage to touch down at the ideal time, there are still plenty of methods to reduce your chances of suffering from jet lag.

The first approach is to slowly modify your sleep pattern at least three days before you travel. Achieve this by hitting the hay 30 to 60 minutes earlier each evening.

Another suggestion is to maximise your light exposure by stepping outdoors into natural sunlight as quickly as possible once you’ve landed.

Though if you touch down during the evening hours, experts recommend steering clear of harsh lighting (particularly screens) for an hour or two before your local bedtime.

During your first complete day at your destination, synchronise your meals, wake-up time and sleep schedule with the local timezone, as your body’s digestive rhythm also plays a crucial part in your circadian system.

A newly released batch of correspondence involving disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has prompted new speculation about ties between the deceased financier and United States President Donald Trump, but experts say its significance stretches beyond the White House.

The never-before-seen emails have added to pressure on the Trump administration to release files about Epstein in the US government’s possession, with a vote in Congress now expected as early as next week. Trump has rejected suggestions that he has anything to hide, and insists that while he knew Epstein, they broke ties in the early 2000s.

But the newly released emails also raise ethical questions about the role played by acclaimed author Michael Wolff as he appeared to provide advice to Epstein on how to handle his dealings with Trump.

In the exchanges published by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Wolff – best known for his bestselling books on the first Trump presidency – appeared to share confidential information before a presidential debate on CNN in December 2015 with Epstein, advising him on how to exploit his connection with Trump.

“I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you – either on air or in scrum afterwards,” Wolff wrote.

“If we were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein replied.

“I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” Wolff told Epstein.

“You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime,” Wolff added, in his response to Epstein.

Al Jazeera reached out to Wolff for comment, but has not received a response.

In a conversation on a podcast with the news outlet The Daily Beast, Wolff said he was seeking to build a relationship with Epstein at the time to better understand Trump, but acknowledged that in “hindsight”, his comments could be seen as “embarrassing”.

Wolff, 72, is best known for his four books exposing the inner workings of the first Trump presidency, including Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said any judgement on whether behaviour like Wolff’s with Epstein was appropriate would depend on how the writer’s role is understood.

“Some people are reporters, some are commentators, and some are book authors, and there are some differences in the way that those different people operate,” Kirtley told Al Jazeera.

“If you want to be a public relations person, or if you want to be an agent, those are perfectly valid career choices. But I think that they are unfortunately incompatible with journalism because the public has a right to assume and to believe that you are acting independently,” she continued.

“You can’t serve two masters, as the saying goes, and your interest has to either be the public interest or serving some other interests.”

Insider reporting

Experts note that reporters often face ethical and professional dilemmas while cultivating relationships with sources, especially in areas where insider information is highly sought after, such as Wolff’s research on relations between various figures in the first Trump administration.

But the prerogative to build rapport with sources, especially those with influence, can also raise difficult questions about a reporter’s proximity to the very centres of power they are supposed to be scrutinising.

Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said such relationships have to maintain certain boundaries and be balanced with the usefulness of the information being brought to the public’s attention.

“I think that the public has the right to be sceptical of this kind of cosy relationship with sources,” Wasserman told Al Jazeera. “But the answer the journalist has is that this is in the interest of the public, that there’s a redemptive dimension to this. It enables the kind of relationships that will allow people to confide in a reporter, who can then share that information with the public.”

Still, such relationships can also have a troubling inversion, where a journalist might be tempted to offer a source preferential treatment if they believe they might be rewarded with information.

Another journalist who corresponded with Epstein in emails released on Wednesday, a former New York Times finance reporter named Landon Thomas Jr, also appeared to have a close relationship with the convicted sex offender, whom he informed about a writer named John Connelly who was researching him.

“Keep getting calls from that guy doing a book on you – John Connolly. He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media. I told him you were a hell of a guy :)” Thomas Jr said in an email dated June 1, 2016.

“He is digging around again,” Thomas Jr said in another email to Epstein on September 27, 2017. “I think he is doing some Trump-related digging too. Anyway, for what it’s worth…” he added.

The public broadcaster NPR reported that Thomas Jr was no longer working for the Times by January 2019, and it had come to light that the reporter had asked Epstein for a $30,000 donation to a cultural centre in New York City. The New York Times has previously stated that the behaviour was a clear violation of its ethics policies and that it took action as soon as it learned of the incident.

In the case of Wolff, Wasserman also noted that his direct participation in matters relating to Trump, Epstein, and the media raised doubts about the writer’s ability to credibly report on those issues. Those questions may be especially poignant in a scandal that, for many people in the US, has become a symbol of close relationships among figures at the highest levels of power.

“The problem is that Wolff was offering advice on how to engineer, how to play this situation, in a way that’s advantageous to Epstein. And the problem that I have with that is that he then would presumably preserve the right to report on the consequences,” he said.

It also remains unclear whether Wolff’s relationship with Epstein resulted in the kind of public revelations that journalists typically point to when justifying close ties with sources.

“It occurs to me as important that in this exchange, Wolff doesn’t do anything to illuminate the core mystery, which is whether Trump was a sexual participant in what was going on with Epstein and these young women,” said Wasserman.

“And there’s nothing in this where I’m seeing Wolff even asking that,” he added.

United States President Donald Trump is committed to providing Americans with $2,000 cheques using money that has come into government coffers from Trump’s tariffs.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump’s staff is exploring how to go about making the plan a reality.

The president proposed the idea on his Truth Social media platform on Sunday, five days after his Republican Party lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere largely because of voter discontent with his economic stewardship — specifically, the high cost of living.

A new AP-NORC poll finds that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 33 percent approve.

The tariffs are bringing in so much money, the president posted, that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.’’

“Trump has taken to his favorite policymaking forum, Truth Social, to make yet another guarantee that Americans are going to receive dividend [cheques] from the revenues collected by tariffs,” Alex Jacquez, who served on the National Economic Council under former US President Joe Biden, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“It’s interesting that Trump’s arguments—which he has been pushing forward for several months now on Truth Social—do not match the arguments that his lawyers are making in court. It seems he is trying to pressure the Justices by implying that this will be some massive economic disaster if they rule against the tariffs.”

Budget experts have scoffed at Trump’s tariff dividend plan, which conjured memories of the Trump administration’s short-lived plan for Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dividend cheques financed by billionaire Elon Musk’s federal budget cuts.

“The numbers just don’t check out,″ Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, told the Associated Press.

Details are scarce, including what the income limits would be and whether payments would go to children.

Even Trump’s US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, sounded a bit blindsided by the audacious dividend plan.

Appearing on Sunday on the ABC News programme This Week, Bessent said he hadn’t discussed the dividend with the president and suggested that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government. Instead, Bessent said, the rebate might take the form of tax cuts.

The tariffs are certainly raising money — $195bn in the budget year that ended September 30, up 153 percent from $77bn in fiscal 2024. But they still account for less than four percent of federal revenue, and have done little to dent the federal budget deficit, a staggering $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025.

Budget wonks say Trump’s dividend math doesn’t work.

John Ricco, an analyst with the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will bring in $200bn to $300bn a year in revenue. But a $2,000 dividend — if it went to all Americans, including children — would cost $600bn. “It’s clear that the revenue coming in would not be adequate,” Ricco said.

The analyst also noted that Trump couldn’t just pay the dividends on his own. That would require legislation from Congress.

Legal challenges

Moreover, the centrepiece of Trump’s protectionist trade policies — double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country in the world — may not survive a legal challenge that has reached the US Supreme Court.

In a hearing last week, the court’s justices sounded sceptical about the Trump administration’s assertion of sweeping power to declare national emergencies to justify the tariffs. Trump has bypassed Congress, which has authority under the US Constitution to levy taxes, including tariffs.

If the court strikes down the tariffs, the Trump administration may be refunding money to the importers who paid them, not sending dividend cheques to American families. Trump could find other ways to impose tariffs, even if he loses at the Supreme Court, but it could be cumbersome and time-consuming.

Mainstream economists and budget analysts note that tariffs are paid by US importers who then generally try to pass along the cost to their customers through higher prices.

The dividend plan “misses the mark,” the Tax Foundation’s York said. “If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs.”

Nov. 6 (UPI) — President Donald Trump’s calls to ramp up nuclear weapons testing last week have put nuclear watchdogs and world leaders on alert while experts say the United States has little to gain.

In a post on Truth Social on Oct. 29, Trump said he is ordering the Department of Defense to immediately begin testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis.” What this means remains unclear, though Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in an appearance on FOX News these would not be full-scale explosive tests.

“These are not nuclear explosions,” Wright said. “These are what we call non-critical explosions.”

The comment by Wright echoes the stance Brandon Williams, under secretary of energy for Nuclear Security in the Department of Energy, shared during his Senate confirmation hearing in May. Williams said testing nuclear weapons above the criticality threshold would not be advisable.

According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor, the United States possesses more than 5,000 nuclear weapons. It has performed 1,054 explosive nuclear tests, more than any other country.

The type of testing the president is calling for is an important distinction to make, Dylan Spaulding, senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told UPI. The delivery systems of nuclear weapons and the components of the weapons are commonly tested.

Subcritical tests are also performed. These are tests that do not yield a sustained nuclear reaction that would cause an explosion.

“He did mention testing on an equal basis,” Spaulding said. “If that’s the case, in fact the United States already does conduct all the kinds of tests of our nuclear delivery systems and even the components of the weapons themselves that other countries do.”

The United States and most of the rest of the world, aside from North Korea, have refrained from full-scale nuclear weapons testing for more than 30 years. In 1993, the United States signed a unilateral moratorium on explosive testing under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Breaking from the treaty is likely to open the door to escalation in the form of other countries, including adversaries like China and Russia, openly testing nuclear explosives, Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told UPI.

“What if those countries decided that maybe this is a cue for them to test?” Sokolski said. “Would that provoke any of the larger states that signed [the treaty] but didn’t ratify to test?”

The only country to break from the agreement in this treaty is North Korea, conducting six nuclear tests concluding in 2017.

Sokolski argues that the United States has the least to gain by breaking the moratorium and setting off a precedent for open nuclear weapons testing. The United States’ research in the field is extensive, beyond that of any other country. Other countries, such as Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea stand to benefit the most from more explosive research while the United States would likely gain little more knowledge.”

“I spend a lot of time talking to weapons designers about this. You don’t test for reliability testing generally,” Sokolski said. “That requires 10 to 20 datapoints. That means 10 to 20 tests of each design. That seems kind of wasteful. You don’t design to prove things you’ve already proven.”

“If you’re doing a design that is totally radical, that’s something different, but we’re not,” he continued. “We’re fiddling with yield-to-weight ratios. There are countries like Israel who have tested once, in 1979, one test. Are you telling me their stockpile is unreliable and doesn’t work? If you want to make weapons you can do it very cheaply and quickly without testing.”

Spaulding agrees that full-scale testing is not necessary, adding that scientists continue to analyze data from the repository of the United States’ nuclear weapons testing history.

“We are still learning from those underground tests,” he said. “Other countries don’t have that advantage right now but we would be essentially giving them permission to catch up by returning to testing.

The argument for more live-testing of nuclear weapons capabilities is that it can insure and assure that the stockpile of weapons is reliable.

The United States has the Stockpile Stewardship Program that already tests the reliability and safety of its nuclear weapons. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told UPI the scientific community is “very confident” in the program.

While the United States is one of only nine countries that have not ratified the treaty, it is legally bound as a signatory to not violate the object or purpose of the agreement, Kimball said. He is doubtful that this will deter Trump.

Of the 1,054 explosive nuclear tests performed by the United States, 928 have been conducted at the Nevada Nuclear Site in south-central Nevada about 65 miles outside of Las Vegas. The site is the only candidate for hosting further nuclear testing, according to experts.

The last explosive test was conducted in 1992 before the United States began observing the international moratorium.

Past tests at the site yielded observable health and environmental impacts on residents of the region and beyond.

“Anyone born in ’63 or earlier, they were exposed to some level of strontium 90, which was showing up in the baby teeth of American children in the 50s and 60s,” Kimball said. “It accumulates in the teeth because you drink milk and it gets concentrated in the teeth.”

The United States joined the Soviet Union and United Kingdom in the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, in part because of the baby teeth study. The treaty banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

Subjects of the baby teeth study were children in the St. Louis area, more than 1,600 miles from the Nevada nuclear test site.

With the atmospheric testing ban in place, explosive testing was moved underground in deep boreholes. This was meant to limit nuclear fallout, lessening environmental and health implications.

The vertical testing shafts are reinforced to limit geological impacts but the powerful explosions still generate fractures in the earth and the leakage of radionuclides, a hazardous radioactive material.

People who lived downwind of the Nevada test site, known as downwinders, have experienced higher than average rates of cancer.

“These downwinders, in their second generation, they’re still suffering from some of these adverse health effects,” Kimball said. “They are particularly angry. Trump’s announcement is a slap in the face to them as they see it. They want to see all forms of testing, above and below ground, concluded.”

Restarting full-scale testing would be no small task, Sokolski said. What he refers to as a “quick and dirty” test, one that provides an explosion but little in the way of research, would take months and millions of dollars to prepare.

“To get data, depending on how much data, we could be talking about one to two years and much, much more money, maybe approaching a higher order of magnitude, a billion [dollars],” Sokolski said. “Those stumbling blocks are the ones of interest.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin today ordered his top officials to draft proposals on possible nuclear weapons testing. Putin was reacting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media posting last week, stating the U.S. would begin conducting new testing. 

It remains unclear whether Trump was referring to restarting live nuclear detonations or tests on the reliability of warhead delivery systems, like the one conducted today with an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, which already occur regularly. U.S. officials have appeared to clarify, at least to some degree, that Trump’s testing will be limited to delivery systems and the nuclear deterrent apparatus, not detonations. Still, there are questions as to his true intent, which could always change. Regardless, Russian officials “assess that Washington is aiming to prepare and conduct nuclear tests,” according to the official Russian TASS news outlet.

Given Trump’s Truth Social post, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov told Putin that it was “advisable to prepare for full-scale nuclear tests” immediately. He added that Russia’s Arctic testing site at Novaya Zemlya could host such tests at short notice. The site is widely believed to have been used for the recent launch systems test of Russia’s mysterious Burevestnik (also known to NATO as SSC-X-9 Skyfall) cruise missile

Belousov offered no further details, so we asked several nuclear weapons experts for their assessments on how quickly Russia could detonate a nuclear device – something it hasn’t done since 1990 – and what it would entail to make it happen. Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

Hans
Kristensen — Director, Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists. Writes the bi-monthly Nuclear Notebook and the world nuclear forces overview in the SIPRI Yearbook.

“Short notice is relative. The quickest would be to drive a warhead into an existing tunnel and seal it off. But that wouldn’t give them any new data and probably risk a leak.

So, unless they already have one prepared, if they want to do a new fully instrumented test, I suspect it would involve preparing a tunnel, the device, and rigging all the cables and sensors to record that data. There has been a lot of tunnel-digging at Novaya Zemlya for quite some time for their existing experiments, so presumably a new fully instrumented test would be in addition to that. 

Preparing a new one would probably take several months, possibly six-plus, but difficult to estimate because we don’t know what they already have prepared.“

Jon B. Wolfsthal, Director of Global Risk, American Federation of Scientists.

“Russia also has an active nuclear maintenance program as does the U.S. However, Russia tests near the Arctic Circle at Novaya Zemlya Island. As a result, they can really only – barring a real emergency – test in summer and late fall. So it would take them some time, and at least until next year. 

However, if they want to gain a lot of technically useful data from a test, it may take them longer. Just to conduct a basic test could take less than 12 months. But as I have said, this is what an arms race looks like. Action/reaction cycles. Russia will test if we do. I suspect they will not if we do not. 

I don’t know what Russia would test. It would not have to be a massive bomb to be useful. You generally only need to test the first stage of a thermonuclear device to get useful data. It could be as small as 1 to 5 kilotons or up to 15 to 20, but there is no way for people outside of the Russian scientific community to predict well.”

Daryl G. Kimball has been Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) and publisher and contributor for the organization’s monthly journal, Arms Control Today, since September 2001.

“The U.S., China, and Russia all have ‘nuclear test readiness’ plans and I would assess that Russia would be able to resume nuclear explosive testing more quickly than the United States. 

I just know it would be less than the optimistic 24-36 months for a full-scale underground contained nuclear test explosions at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). Russia would not be encumbered by the same safety and environmental safeguards and domestic political obstacles that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would have to deal with in order to conduct a full-scale multi-kiloton nuclear explosion underground at the former U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada.

But, most importantly, there is no technical, military or political reason why Putin or Trump should order the resumption of nuclear explosive testing, and Defense Minister Belousov’s comments are counterproductive and irresponsible. 

The United States and Russia deploy some 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads and they possess other sub-strategic nuclear weapons. Their arsenals consist of various, well-tested warhead types. The United States conducted more than 1,030 nuclear test explosions and Russia 715, the vast majority of which were to proof-test new warhead designs. Neither side needs to or wants to develop a new warhead, so any new nuclear test explosions would be purely for ‘show,’ which would be extremely irresponsible.“

Ankit
Panda — Expert on nuclear policy, Asia, missiles, & space. Stanton Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Author of ‘Kim Jong Un and the Bomb.’

“We know from both open source and official U.S. assessments that the Russians maintain a relatively high level of test readiness at Novaya Zemlya. They’ve also strongly emphasized the parity principle on the testing issue, so it makes sense that they’d take these steps given Trump’s recent comments. 

They want to be positioned so that if the U.S. tests, they can follow quickly. The specific timeline of Russian readiness is difficult to nail down, but they could test probably without significant instrumentation without much difficulty. I would think weeks if there was sufficient political demand for a rapid demonstration.“

Stephen
Schwartz — Editor/Co-author ‘Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940‘.

“The United States has an enormous advantage in nuclear testing over every other country in the world, partly because we conducted more tests than everyone else combined (1,030, involving 1,149 individual detonations), and because we have a very elaborate and well-funded ($345 billion to date) Stockpile Stewardship program. Since 1996, this has enabled us to ‘test’ our nuclear bombs and warheads via extremely powerful computers, eliminating the need for actual underground tests and providing us with critical insights into our weapons we could not obtain from physical nuclear testing alone.

So given that, and given Trump’s recent out-of-the-blue demand that we resume nuclear testing immediately, it is unfortunately not surprising that Russia is responding the way that it is. In Russia, as in the United States, there are political and military leaders and weapons scientists who have never given up on one day resuming nuclear testing. Russia, like the United States, has long maintained a readiness program to resume nuclear testing. It is an unfortunate escalation of at least rhetoric at this point, sliding the United States and Russia, and perhaps also China and maybe North Korea and other states further down the road toward resuming nuclear testing, which has not happened in decades.

Right now, we and the Russians conduct what are known as subcritical tests, which are tests that do not result in a nuclear yield, but nevertheless provide useful scientific information that can make our weapons more safe and reliable. 

Russia could probably resume underground nuclear testing pretty quickly. Satellite imagery from 2023 and this past July indicates that they’ve been doing some work at the test site to expand the facilities there and potentially make them more ready to resume nuclear testing. I suspect Russia could probably do this faster than the United States. Our testing would take place in Nevada – at least that’s the only test site that we have available right now, and it would probably take on the order of one to three years (for the U.S.) to do a fully instrumented test.

We can’t see inside the [Russian] buildings that have gone up, so we don’t know exactly what’s going on there. But, if I have to guess, and it is only a guess, I would say a matter of several weeks to several months, perhaps [for a Russian test]. But it really depends on what their intentions are. 

If they simply want to blow something up to demonstrate that they’ve returned to doing that kind of testing that can be done fairly quickly if they want to actually have a scientifically and militarily useful test where there’s all sorts of diagnostic equipment and they’re able to measure the results, and determine something about the test other than the fact that it simply went off, that could take more time.

If they’ve been planning and preparing, if they have personnel and equipment there, they could probably do something fairly quickly – on the very short end, potentially a matter of a few weeks to perhaps a few months. It could be longer; it could be a matter of six months. But again, if you only want to send a political message that we are resuming nuclear testing, you can take a nuclear bomb or warhead out of your stockpile and transport it to Novaya Zemlya, stick it in an underground tunnel, seal it off and detonate it.“

We reached out to the White House to see what concern, if any, they have about Putin’s order for proposals on how to resume nuclear testing. We are waiting for a response. The experts we spoke with, however, voiced their own worries.

“As for concerns, Russia’s testing could enable them to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons via computer simulations where now it is hard for them to do so,” explained Wolfsthal. “Russia could close the testing advantage the U.S. now possesses.”

Contact the author: [email protected]

Kyiv, Ukraine – The collective West is scared of Moscow’s new, nuclear-powered cruise missile because it can reach anywhere on Earth, bypassing the most sophisticated air and missile defence systems, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has claimed.

“They’re afraid of what we’ll show to them next,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the RIA Novosti news agency on Sunday.

Days earlier, she said Moscow was “forced” to develop and test the cruise missile, which is named the Burevestnik, meaning storm petrel – a type of seabird, in response to NATO’s hostility towards Russia.

“The development can be characterised as forced and takes place to maintain strategic balance,” she was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying. Russia “has to respond to NATO’s increasingly destabilising actions in the field of missile defence”.

With much pomp, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday handed state awards to Burevestnik’s developers.

Also awarded were the designers of Poseidon, an underwater nuclear-powered torpedo which Putin has also claimed has been successfully tested.

Russia says Poseidon can carry nuclear weapons that cause radioactive tsunamis, wiping out huge coastal areas. The “super torpedo” can move at the speed of 200km/h (120mph) and zigzag its way to avoid interception, it says.

“In terms of flight range, the Burevestnik … has surpassed all known missile systems in the world,” Putin said in his speech at the Kremlin. “Same as any other nuclear power, Russia is developing its nuclear potential, its strategic potential … What we are talking about now is the work announced a long time ago.”

But military and nuclear experts are sceptical about the efficiency and lethality of the new weapons.

It is not unusual for Russia to flaunt its arsenal as its onslaught in Ukraine continues. Analysts say rather than scaring its critics, Moscow’s announcements are merely a scare tactic to dissuade Western powers from supporting Kyiv.

“There’s nothing revolutionary about,” the Burevestnik, said Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project at the the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.

“It can fly long and far, and there’s some novelty about it, but there’s nothing to back [Putin’s claim] that it can absolutely change everything,” Podvig told Al Jazeera. “One can’t say that it is invincible and can triumph over everything.”

The Burevestnik’s test is part of Moscow’s media stratagem of intimidating the West when the real situation on the front lines in Ukraine is desperate, according to a former Russian diplomat.

The missile is “not a technical breakthrough but a product of propaganda and desperation”, Boris Bondarev, who quit his Russian Foreign Ministry job to protest against the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, wrote in an opinion piece published by the Moscow Times.

“It symbolises not strength but weakness – the Kremlin’s lack of any tools of political influence other than threats.”

Few details about ‘unique’ missile

The problem is that officials have so far unveiled very little about the Burevestnik, which NATO has dubbed the SSC-X-9 Skyfall – a missile that has a nuclear reactor allegedly capable of keeping it in the air indefinitely.

On October 26, when fatigues-clad Putin announced Burevestnik’s successful test, he was accompanied by his top general Valery Gerasimov.

“This is a unique item; no one else in the world has it,” said Putin, in televised remarks.

Gerasimov said the Burevestnik had flown 14,000km (8,700 miles) in 15 hours during a recent test. It can manoeuvre and loiter midair, and unleash its nuclear load with “guaranteed precision” and at “any distance”.

“There’s a lot of work ahead” before the missile is mass-produced, Putin concluded, adding the test’s “key objectives have been achieved”.

A Ukrainian military expert ridiculed the Kremlin’s claims.

“Much of the news report is fake, the (Burevestnik) missile is subsonic, it can be detected and destroyed by missile defence systems,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces who specialised in air and missile defence, told Al Jazeera.

As for the Poseidon nuclear drone, it is too destructive – and can be used only as a second-strike, retaliatory weapon after the start of a nuclear war, experts warned. As with the Burevestnik, the lack of detailed information about Poseidon casts doubt upon the Kremlin’s claims.

Trump decries ‘inappropriate’ tests

The announcements followed Washington’s scrapping of United States President Donald Trump’s summit with Putin in Budapest, Hungary.

Trump has called the Burevestnik’s test “inappropriate” and ordered the Pentagon to resume the testing of nuclear weapons and missiles.

But ahead of next year’s midterm elections, he may seek to show how he forced the Kremlin to stop hostilities in Ukraine.

“Trump will have to play with pressure on Russia,” Romanenko said. “Hopefully, the circumstances will force Trump to act.”

What Putin has not mentioned is that only two of the Burevestnik’s dozen tests, starting in 2019, have been successful.

Its 2019 launch near the White Sea in northwestern Russia killed at least five nuclear experts after a radioactive explosion, Western experts said at the time. Russia’s state nuclear agency acknowledged the deaths, but officials and media reports do not provide video footage, detailed photos or other specifics of the Burevestnik and its testing route – making Putin’s latest claims hard to corroborate or disprove.

Western experts were able to identify the Burevestnik’s probable deployment site in September. Known as Vologda-20 or Chebsara, it is believed to be 475km (295 miles) north of Moscow and has nine launch pads under construction, the Reuters news agency reported last year.

The missile’s capabilities have divided military analysts.

“In operation, the Burevestnik would carry a nuclear warhead (or warheads), circle the globe at low altitude, avoid missile defences, and dodge terrain; and drop the warhead(s) at a difficult-to-predict location (or locations),” the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a US nonprofit security group said in a 2019 report after the missile’s first somewhat successful test.

A year later, the US Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center said, if brought into service, Burevestnik would give Moscow a “unique weapon with intercontinental-range capability”.

‘Burevestnik is a mystification’

Others doubt the missile’s functionality.

“Burevestnik is a mystification for the whole seven-and-a-half years since it was first announced,” Pavel Luzin, a visiting scholar at Tufts University in Massachusetts, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s impossible to create a reactor that is compact and powerful enough to ensure a cruise missile’s movement,” Luzin said. “This is a basic physics textbook.”

Moscow claims that Burevestnik utilises nuclear propulsion instead of turbojet or turbofan engines used in cruise or ballistic missiles.

But Luzin said the smallest nuclear reactors used to power satellites weighed 1 metric tonne, supplying several kilowatts of energy – roughly equal to what a regular household consumes – while emitting some 150kw of thermal energy.

The experimental nuclear reactors developed in the 1950s and the 60s for aircraft weighed many tonnes and were the size of a railway carriage, he said.

An average engine for a cruise missile weighs up to 80kg, generates 4kw for onboard electric and electronic devices, and about 1 megawatt of energy for propelling the missile, he said.

Other analysts think that Burevestnik’s nuclear engine can function, but do not consider the weapon groundbreaking.

There are a few places on a plane that are best avoided, and if you’re looking for a few ideas, some experts have shared their top tips for finding a seat that’ll make your trip more comfortable.

Jetting off on holiday is always exciting, especially during the chillier months when the idea of swapping the UK for somewhere warm and sunny is enough to lift anyone’s spirits. However, even if you’re simply heading to a European destination, the journey there isn’t always plain sailing.

We’ve all endured the horror of a dreadful flight before. Whether it’s down to discomfort, fellow passengers’ antics, or something else entirely, it can cast a shadow over your holiday before it’s even started.

So, to help travellers kick off their trips on the right foot, I decided to consult some experts about the worst spot on the aircraft to reserve your seat – and they all had very similar answers.

Nearly all of the specialists I spoke to agreed that the very last row of the aircraft might not be your best bet if you’re after a peaceful journey, reports the Express.

Nicholas Smith, Holidays Digital Director at Thomas Cook, warned that anyone who struggles with turbulence will want to steer clear of this section. He explained: “Seats at the very back are typically less desirable. They are close to the galley and restrooms, service can be slower, food choices may be limited, and it is also the area where movement during turbulence feels strongest.”

He also emphasised the importance of being organised when reserving aircraft seats. This often comes at an extra charge, but if you’re anxious about securing a decent seat, then there’s a good chance it’ll be money well spent.

The expert continued: “Thinking about your priorities in advance also makes a difference – nervous flyers will be more comfortable over the wings, those with a tight connection should choose an aisle near the front, while couples booking a row of three might secure the window and aisle, leaving the middle free for a chance at extra space.”

Izzy Nicholls, a travel expert and founder of road trip blog The Gap Decaders, agreed, saying: “Seats at the back are best avoided. They’re typically noisier because of engine proximity and galley activity, and you’ll be among the last to board and leave the plane.”

Unsurprisingly, the front of the aircraft proved to be the best location for the smoothest experience. Izzy explained: “Travellers who want a calmer journey should book seats at the front of the plane. This area is away from restrooms and heavy foot traffic, so you’ll experience fewer interruptions.

“Choosing an aisle seat here also gives you the freedom to stretch your legs and get up easily without disturbing others. Select these placements to make long flights more comfortable and reduce the effects of motion.”

The rear section of the aircraft isn’t just problematic for comfort – it’s also less ideal when it comes to storage space, particularly if you’re late boarding. Jacob Wedderburn-Day, CEO and Co-Founder of luggage storage firm Stasher said: “Avoid sitting near galleys and toilets, where staff members often store their things in overhead bins, leaving less space for passenger baggage.

“The last few rows are a concern because if you board late, the bins above you may be filled, which means you may have to store your luggage several rows away. Also, stay away from seats that are located behind bulkheads, as these spaces often have limited storage.”

Travel expert Andrea Platania from Transfeero also warned passengers to avoid the back row when flying, explaining: “The very last row is typically the least desirable: limited recline, proximity to bathrooms, and more cabin noise. Middle seats anywhere are usually least popular unless you’re traveling in a group.”

However, for those seeking maximum legroom, there are two areas offering the most space. Andrea said: “Exit-row and bulkhead seats offer more space, but they come with trade-offs: fixed armrests, limited recline, or restrictions for passengers traveling with children.”

And for travellers prone to airsickness during turbulence, one specific location is recommended. The expert added: “Sit over the wings. This area is closest to the aircraft’s centre of gravity, so you’ll feel less turbulence compared to the back, where bumps are magnified.”