This week we talk about tokamaks, inertial confinement fusion, and magnetic fields.
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Nuclear Fusion

A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016. 

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This week we talk about the Tories, Labour, and the UK Parliament. We also discuss the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and Rishi Sunak’s gamble. Recommended Book: Like, Literally, Dude by Valerie Fridland Transcript The government of the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy led by a Prime Minister and their cabinet, the Prime Minister attaining their position through the primacy of their party in the country's key legislation-passing body, its Parliament. So the Prime Minister runs day-to-day operations in the country, they are technically appointed by the monarch, who is currently Charles III, as of 2022, though that appointment is generally determined by other factors, like who has the most support within Parliament—the most seats held by their party, and in many cases seats held by allies and allies of convenience, as well; when this happens, the resulting government is called a coalition government, because while the Prime Minister is from one party, usually the one with the most seated MPs, Members of Parliament, they're only able to govern because they have one or more other parties working with them as part of a coalition. Now, the UK government has two houses in its Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and the names of these houses tell you a lot about them: the House of Lords consists of folks who have been granted Lordships by government higher-ups, alongside those who have inherited Lordships from their parents, but it also includes experts in various fields who have been granted that status by the Prime Minister—economists, for instance. The House of Commons, in contrast, is voted upon by the people, so when there are Parliamentary elections in the UK, that's what we're talking about, votes for MPs who represent a region, a parliamentary constituency—of which there are 650 across the UK's constituent countries, England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland. Within the UK, political parties have to be officially registered to participate in governance and votes, though folks who want to run solo can register as independent or label-less candidates for voting purposes. As of late-May 2024, there were 393 officially registered political parties in the UK, though only 13 of them currently have representatives in the House of Commons, and only four of those have more than 10 seated representatives—the Conservative and Unionist Party, often called the Tories or Conservatives, the Labour Party, which is the main center-left party in the UK, the Scottish National Party, which is also generally center-left, but tends to be focused on Scottish politics and priorities, and the Liberal Democrats, who are generally seen as a sort of blend of the Tories and Labour. General elections, during which MPs are voted upon, are held every five years or so, but elections can also be held sooner if the current Prime Minister asks the monarch to dissolve parliament, which in practice means the Prime Minister is calling for a general election, generally scheduled for a specific date in the future, usually because the House of Commons has lost faith in the current government, which makes passing law and overall getting things done difficult; they don't have enough votes to pass anything, basically, though in some cases it's because of more general political circumstances that indicate calling for an election, now, might be better than holding an election sometime later in the future. That latter case seems to be the impetus for what I'd like to talk about today, which is the recently called and now upcoming UK general election, and the state of political play in this, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential countries. — On May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was calling for a snap election on July 4 of this year, just a half-dozen weeks in the future, surprising many analysts who expected he would wait as long as possible before committing to a date. That expectation was predicated on the reality of how Sunak's party, the Tories, have been doing in the polls in recent years; pretty abysmally. Labour has been crushing the Conservatives in these polls, of late; the Tories have been in power since 2010, which means purely by virtue of having been governing that long, a lot of people will tend to blame them for a lot of things, their party having been in charge all that time, but they also catalyzed and oversaw the secession of the UK from the European Union, which is a move that was initially pushed by many on the further right wing of the party, but the populist nature of the movement eventually claimed the majority of Tory politicians who changed their vote to support it, rewiring politics in the UK, similar to how former President Trump rewired the Republican Party in the US—a lot of power changing hands, a lot of previously top people being elbowed aside or pushed into retirement, a lot of new policies ascending to the front-burner, while previous priorities were relegated to the back-burner. Not quite a decade after the referendum that led to the passage of Brexit, back in mid-2016, polls from from this month, May of 2024, show that 55% of British people think leaving the EU was the wrong choice, while only 31% think it was a smart move. So while some of the tarnishing of the Tory party's reputation is likely the result of simply having been in power for a long time, and during some really unusual global happenings, like COVID and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, some of it is directly attributable to specific things they've done which turned out not to be very popular, once implemented. Many of the non-Brexit complaints the majority of British citizens have about how the Tories have governed are related to their austerity policies—the idea that they need to shrink the government and its spending as much as possible, because that will, according to their theories, at least, make the country wealthier, more efficient, and more secure. This has led to dramatic cutbacks on incredibly popular programs and agencies focused on or related to health, housing, and education, alongside the bankrupting of civil services, the privatization of previously public assets like highways and waste systems, and the concomitant spending—while claiming there's not enough money for healthcare and public services—on pet projects for Conservative lawmakers and their constituents, many of which ended up being money pits. All parties in all countries are of course periodically staggered by scandals, spending-related and otherwise, but over their long period in control, the Tories have racked up a huge number and a large variety of scandals, and some of them led to very public embarrassments for the party, including the Tories' seeming inability to keep a Prime Minister in office following the Brexit referendum, then-PM David Cameron making way for Theresa May, who handed things over to Boris Johnson, who was ousted and replaced by Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for a record-setting 49 days before resigning and being replaced by current PM Rishi Sunak. That's five prime ministers in the six years between 2016 and 2022, all of them from the same party, that party seemingly unable to govern with enough popularity to maintain the confidence of parliament. So the situation right now, following all that, is that Labour has a 17-point lead over the Conservatives and is, and has been for a while, broadly expected to wipe the floor with the Tories in the next election; and a few minor elections leading up to this point seem to support that assumption. This is why Sunak was expected to delay scheduling the next election as long as possible, because as soon as that election is held, his party is expected to be pushed out of power, and that expectation is leading to an exodus amongst Tory lawmakers, 121 of them stepping down instead of running for reelection as of late-May, surpassing a similar wave of quitting in 1997, when 117 of them declined to run again, leading up to a landslide victory for the Labour Party and their popular leader, Tony Blair. This isn't an unusual phenomenon: being part of the government is very different from being part of the opposition party, and back in 2010, after Labour had been in control for 13 years, and was expecting to lose in the next election, 149 politicians decided to step down rather than running again—100 of them Labour MPs, and 35 of them Conservatives; that later group ostensibly because while the Tories won, they didn't take a majority, and had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which is also a very different situation from being in a government that has complete control, rather than shared control; some MPs just don't want to deal with that kind of negotiated leadership. Sunak's reasoning here, then, might be that while things are bad for his party now, they could get even worse if he waits to hold an election; so it's better to act at a moment in which some economic numbers are actually starting to look a little bit better, after a long period of the opposite, and at a moment in which announcing an election would catch his Labour opposition off-guard, possibly providing his party the benefit of surprise and better preparation. This announcement has led to a scramble, though, for all UK parties, seemingly, to try to get some actual governing done—work they thought they'd have several more weeks to finish up, at least, before going into full campaign-mode, suddenly needing to be accomplished yesterday. That's meant a lot of important legislation has been dropped or permanently back-burnered, including some of the policies, like a smoking ban, an end-to no-fault evictions, and a plan that would allow the government to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which Sunak had wanted to serve as fundamental elements of his prime ministerial legacy—those have now been completely dropped. This has led to a situation in which the Tories seem to be scrambling to put new ideas out into the ether—future-facing stuff to replace all the things they had to drop or backtrack on—hoping that something they propose in this way appeals broadly enough to earn them the votes they require to hold their own in the upcoming election; to maybe still lose, but not as much, and in such a way that they're in a good spot when the next election is called. One such idea is mandatory national service for 18-year-olds, which would require that folks either serve in the military or volunteer for one weekend a month, beginning on their 18th year—a policy that's reportedly meant to compete with a proposal from Labour leader Keir Starmer, that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to vote. The degree to which any of these new plans will catch the public imagination is up in the air, though,  as again, a lot of what's happening now, in terms of campaigning, is somewhat half-baked, all involved parties scrambling to prepare for what seems to have been a somewhat last-minute decision on Sunak's part to upend expectations about the timing of the next election in order to attain some kind of advantage for his party, which seems to be entering this round with a losing hand. And all of this is important, of course, if you live in the UK, but it's also important globally, even standing out amongst the many other important elections that are occurring around the world this year, because the UK, even battered and bruised in the aftermath of Brexit and a COVID crisis that it weathered somewhat less-well than its world-leading peers, is still an incredibly powerful, influential, and wealthy entity of global significance. It has the sixth largest economy in the world, after only the US, China, Japan, Germany, and India. It's incredibly powerful geopolitically, out of proportion with its population and military strength, in part because of the role it plays within the Commonwealth, a group of 53 nations that the UK previously ruled, and in part because it has long-lived, tight alliances and relationships with governments and other entities that it's been maintaining for centuries, in some cases. The UK is a nuclear power, and is the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world—though it's especially vital to the global aircraft market, military and non-military. The UK is home to the second-largest financial center in the world, London, and it's culturally very powerful, exporting all sorts of norms and pop culture and creative products; a sort of soft-power that plays a huge role in beliefs, behaviors, and understandings, worldwide. Whomever wins this election, then, and how they win, and to what degree they control Parliament, will have a major impact not just on the UK, but on the world, and at a moment in which there are several major military conflicts ongoing, in which new technologies are simultaneously threatening and enlivening entire industries and economies, and in which the global order that has set the tone and guardrails for the world since WWII is being challenged—all variables the UK may influence in substantial ways, and over which the folks running the UK government will thus have outsized sway. Show Notes https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/23/rishi-sunak-rwanda-smoking-policies-election-conservatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c844x1xp05xo https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqhvmnb/revision/6 https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/more-uk-conservative-lawmakers-set-quit-than-before-1997-election-defeat-2024-05-24/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/labour-finally-has-uk-election-it-craves-but-traps-lie-in-wait https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-23/uk-election-sunak-has-the-weight-of-history-against-him https://wsj.com/world/uk/british-leader-sunak-calls-snap-election-as-his-party-trails-in-polls-e234bdc0 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/25/how-rishi-sunaks-early-election-backfired-on-pm https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-labour-starmer-sunak-tory-gove-b2551518.html https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/lagging-polls-uk-conservatives-pitch-national-service-18-2024-05-26/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288xxvrdz7o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2jjvpxxgr5o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_government https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_Kingdom https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Search/Registrations?currentPage=1&rows;=10&sort;=RegulatedEntityName&order;=asc&et;=pp&et;=ppm®ister=gb®ister=ni®ister=none®Status=registered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_Kingdom 

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UK General Election 2024

Gaza Conflict Update

This week we talk about ENSO, El Niño, and attribution science. We also discuss climate change, natural disasters, and the trade winds. Recommended Book: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway Transcript The field of attribution science, sometimes referred to as "extreme event attribution," focuses on figuring out whether and to what degree a particular weather event—especially rare weather disasters—are attributable to climate change. Severe floods and tornadoes and hurricanes all happen from time to time, which is why such events are sometimes referred to as once in a decade or once in a century disasters: the right natural variables align in the right way, and you have a disaster that is rare to the point that it's only likely to happen once every 10 or 100 years, but such rare events still happen, and sometimes more frequently than those numbers would imply; they're not impossible. And they're not necessarily the result of climate change. Folks working in this space, which is a blend of meteorology and the rapidly evolving field of climate science, do their best to figure out what causes what, and how those odds might have been impacted by the shifts we're seeing in global average temperatures in particular, and the knock-on effects of that warming, like shifts in the global water cycle; both of which influence all sorts of other planetary variables. The most common means of achieving this end is to run simulations based on historical climate data and extrapolating those trend-lines forward, allowing for natural variation, but otherwise sticking with the range of normal fluctuations that would have been expected, had we not started to churn so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere beginning with the industrial revolution. So if we hadn't done the Industrial Revolution the way we did it, what would our global climate and weather systems look like? They have a bunch of models with different assumptions baked into them that they have running, and they can simulate conditions, today, based on those models, and compare them with the reality of how things actually are in the real world, a world in which we did start to burn fossil fuels at a frantic rate, with all the pros and cons of that decision aggregating into our current climactic circumstances. This comparison, between a baseline, non-climate-change-impacted Earth, and what we see happening on real Earth, allows us to gauge the different in likelihoods for various weather systems and increasingly even specific weather events, like massive floods or hurricanes. It also allows us to ascertain what elements of a disaster or system are more or less likely, or the same, compared to that baseline Earth; so maybe we look at a regional heat wave and discover that it was a rare event made more likely by climate change, but that the intensity of the heat wasn't impacted—as was the case with a heat wave in Russia in 2010; climate change made the heat wave more likely, but had such a heat wave occurred, despite its low likelihood, in that non-industrial revolution scenario, the heat would have been roughly the same intensity as it was in real life. Both components of this system, attributing events and patterns to climate change, and confirming that they were not impacted, that they were just run of the mill bad luck, the consequence of natural systems, are arguably important, as while the former provides data for folks wanting to predict future climate change-related outcomes, and provides some degree of ammunition for the argument that climate change is making these sorts of things worse, which helps put a price tag on not moving faster to shift away from fossil fuels, it's also vital that we understand how climate and weather systems work, in general, and that we are able to set proper expectations as to what will change and how, as the atmosphere's composition continues to change, while also understanding what will remain the same, what various regions around the world need to be prepared for in a vacuum, leaving climate change out of it, and how our global weather systems work on a granular level, so that as outside influences like climate change, but not limited to climate change, act upon them, we can make better predictions about how that will adjust or overhaul the practical reality for people and ecosystems impacted by them. What I'd like to talk about today is a natural weather phenomenon that is expected to return soon, and how this phenomenon might change our latent, global weather patterns, for the better, for the worse, and for the neutral, and in turn how it might be changed by the climactic adjustments we're tracking using these simulations. — The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO phenomenon, is the monicker we've given to a collection of sea surface temperature and wind variations in the Pacific Ocean that, largely unpredictably, tweak the patterns of these systems from time to time, influenced by and influencing a large number of other, micro- and macro-scale systems around the world. Most directly, ENSO dictates how warm it will be across the tropics and subtropics, El Niño bringing warm waters to the surface of the relevant oceans and the Southern Oscillation referring to air pressure variations spanning the ocean between Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, low pressure tending to occur over warm bodies of water, and higher pressure over colder bodies of water. When the water in this part of the Pacific, the central and east-central equatorial pacific, is warmer, on the surface, that reduces atmospheric pressure thereabouts, which in turn reduces the strength of the Pacific trade winds. That reduction, among other things, decreases rainfall over parts of Australia, India, and Indonesia, while upping the same, while also stoking additional cyclone risk, in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Fundamental to understanding why this is a big deal is understanding that this tweak in water and atmospheric conditions causes low level surface trade winds, which usually blow from east to west, to either stop blowing or barely blow, or in some cases to reverse direction. If you think about how weather patterns form, determining everything from who gets rain and how much, to what temperatures are like in a given area—because those winds pull warm or cold air along with them as they pass over warmer or cooler parts of the planet, like mountains and glaciers, but also deserts and tropical rain forests—it becomes clear why this change-up is such a big deal. There's a neutral phase of this phenomenon that typically occur between warmer and colder phases, and during that neutral phase, we usually see other, similar systems that are interconnected and predicated on still other geographic and atmospheric variables, like the Pacific-North American teleconnection pattern, and the North Atlantic Oscillation, having more of an impact on global weather and water cycle patterns. When this system is in a warmer El Niño state, though, that tends to cause a lot of heat waves throughout tropical regions in particular, while also spiking global surface temperatures for around a year, with all the secondary consequences of suddenly jolting the global thermostat higher: melting glaciers and ice caps, increasing the range of disease-carrying pests, messing with planting seasons; things like that. The opposite side of this coin, La Niña, can also be quite disruptive though, its influence defined by cooler waters rising to the surface in that part of the Pacific, warmer waters headed westward where they have less influence on this component of the world's thermostat and weather machine, and that drop in water temperature in this part of the ocean tends to reset many of the dials that are turned up by El Niño, moderating some of the weather patterns that are amplified by those warmer waters and returning the trade winds to their normal settings, while also reducing global temperatures to what we might think of as their default. But the next La Niña phenomenon—which experts in this space say will likely arrive sometime in the next few months, June or July of 2024, marking a quick transition away from the record-setting El Niño system we've been living through since July of 2023, which has been designated the fourth most extreme in recorded history—this anticipated new La Niña setup will follow a truly intense opposite pattern, which means if it's not strong enough, it may not counteract all of the warming brought about by its precursor El Niño system, which means the next El Niño system could compound upon this outgoing one, in terms of its globe-heating effects. There are also concerns that, because of that strong El Niño, and it arriving at a period of human-caused warming—two forces raising the temperature on the thermostat simultaneously, basically—there's a chance that the moderating force of this La Niña might run up against an insurmountable variable adjustment, even if it is otherwise powerful enough; meaning, this ENSO phenomenon could contribute to a long term, even permanent increase in global temperatures because its warming effects are mirroring another, external warming effect caused by us and our greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know exactly what that would mean in practice and long-term, but it could lead to more. and more extreme versions of what we've seen this past year: namely a surge in weather disasters like extreme droughts and floods and wildfires that never really end; just bigger and bigger surges, combined with higher and higher temperatures. And again, that's possible even if the La Niña pattern that's set to arrive is of a normal, non-weak strength, because of how potent this outgoing El Niño has been, and because its effects may be compounded by climate change. If the new La Niña does prove potent enough to counteract this outgoing El Niño, that may help with short-term temperature changes, but we're then likely to see a substantially more severe hurricane season; which is normally what happens during these periods of change, La Niña conditions making hurricanes more likely, but it could be even more severe than usual because of lingering oceanic heat from the El Niño, which popped temperatures in the Atlantic to 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average temperature from the past three decades—and oceanic heat is what powers hurricanes, informing how big and destructive they can become. Last year's Atlantic Ocean hurricane season was already above-average in terms of the number of hurricanes and their strength because of that heat, but the amalgamation of variable-tweaks inherent in a La Niña transition make hurricanes more likely, whatever the ocean's temperature, so the combination of, likely, more hurricanes, plus far warmer than usual oceanic temperatures, means more, but also potentially a lot more powerful, hurricanes this season. We've been watching these systems and transitions for a while now, and our science related to them—including our ability to predict what they're going to do, and how much—has gotten pretty good over the last few decades. But all of these systems and all of their variables are interconnected, each and every piece touching each and every other piece of the planet's cycles and ecosystems and compositions; so there's a lot we're not tracking, a lot we're not tracking with the resolution we'd need for it to be valuable in this regard, and a lot of entanglements and relationships we're not even aware of, yet. In particular, the impact that climate change is having on these systems, directly and indirectly, is a big question mark in all these computations. Yes, we understand all of this better than a few decades ago, and yes, our simulations and models have gotten pretty solid, and are getting better by the day as we develop better formulae and software, and deploy more fancy satellites and other tracking tools that allow us to keep tabs on the relevant variables in an up-to-the-second manner. But because of how complex all of this is, it's a truly chaotic jumble of systems, and because of how we're scrambling to play catch-up, the world changing around us faster than we're learning about those changes—these sorts of systems are evolving even as we come to understand how they work; so our most up to date information is always a little bit out of date, leaving us prone to new unknowns and larger shifts than we'd anticipated based on our existing data. Human-amplified climate change, then, is fiddling with all the knobs and switches, changing how these phenomena work right before our eyes, and each new system and cycle is part known, part complete surprise because of how even tiny changes can make huge differences when compounded by these spirals and cascades of cause and large-scale, multifaceted effect. In other words, we have a good sense of what we need to be worried about and watching for during this probable upcoming transition, and we maybe have some things to look forward to, alongside a few other things to worry about and prepare for. We'll also be watching to see how much global temperatures come down, as that will tell us to what degree this outgoing El Niño has been tweaking those temperatures, and to what degree climate change is to blame for the disconcerting numbers we've been seeing in this regard. But we'll also be watching to see how everything is being amplified and compounded by all of these interconnected effects, as it may be, still allowing for ups and downs and other variations year to year, that these patterns, and others like them, will lead to wider, broader, more dramatic swings for the foreseeable future because of all those changes, natural and human-caused. Show Notes https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/el-nino-end-by-june-la-nina-seen-second-half-2024-says-us-forecaster-2024-05-09/ https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/el-nino-la-nina-hurricane-season https://www.vox.com/climate/24145756/la-nina-2024-el-nino-heat-hurricane-record-temperature-pacific https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html https://theconversation.com/la-nina-is-coming-raising-the-chances-of-a-dangerous-atlantic-hurricane-season-an-atmospheric-scientist-explains-this-climate-phenomenon-228595 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_event_attribution https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-climate-change-affect-natural-disasters https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-1-2.html https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47583 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/ https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/2/28/24085691/atlantic-ocean-warming-climate-change-hurricanes-coral-reefs-bleaching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event https://theconversation.com/is-climate-change-to-blame-for-extreme-weather-events-attribution-science-says-yes-for-some-heres-how-it-works-164941 

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La Niña 2024

This week we talk about APT28, spoofing, and hybrid warfare. We also discuss the Baltics, Tartu airport, and hacking. Recommended Book: The Middle Passage by James Hollis Transcript In early May of 2024, the German government formally blamed a Russian hacking group called APT28 for hacking members of the governing German Social Democratic Party in 2023, and warned of unnamed consequences. Those consequences may apply just to APT28, which is also sometimes called "Fancy Bear," or they may apply to the Russian government, as like many Russia-based hacking groups, APT28 often operates hand-in-glove with the Russian military intelligence service, which allows the Russian government to deny involvement in all sorts of attacks on all sorts of targets, while covertly funding and directing the actions of these groups. APT28 reportedly also launched attacks against German defense, aerospace, and information technology companies, alongside other business entities and agencies involved, even tangentially, with Ukraine and its defense measures against Russia's invasion. This hacking effort allegedly began in early 2022, shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the head of the Russian embassy in Germany has been summoned to account for these accusations—though based on prior attacks and allegations related to them by Russia's intelligence agencies, and the hacking groups it uses as proxies, that summoning is unlikely to result in anything beyond a demonstration of anger on the part of the German government, formally registered with Russia's representative in Berlin. For its part, Russia's government has said that it was in no way involved in any incidents of the kind the German government describes, though Germany's government seems pretty confident in their assessment on this, at this point, having waited a fair while to make this accusation, and utilizing its partnerships with the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand to confirm attribution. This accusation has been leveled amidst of wave of similar attacks, also allegedly by Russia and its proxies, against other targets in the EU and NATO—including but not limited to the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden. Many of these attacks have apparently made use of an at-the-time unknown security flaw in Microsoft software that gave them access to compromised email accounts for long periods of time, allowing them to, among other things, scoop up intelligence reports from folks in the know in these countries, sifting their messages for data that would help Russia's forces in Ukraine. This group, and other Russia GRU, their intelligence service, proxies, have reportedly targeted government and critical infrastructure targets in at least 10 NATO countries since the fourth quarter of 2023, alone, according to analysis by Palo Alto Networks, and experts in this space have said they're concerned these sorts of attacks, while often oriented toward intelligence-gleaning and at times embarrassing their targets, may also be part of a larger effort to weaken and even hobble intelligence, military, and critical infrastructure networks in regional nations, which could, over time, reduce stability in these countries, increase extremism, and possibly prevent them from defending themselves and their neighbors in the event of a more formal attack by Russian forces. What I'd like to talk about today is another sort of attack, allegedly also launched by Russia against their neighbors in this part of the world, but this one a little less well-reported-upon, at this point, despite it potentially being even more broadly impactful. — The Global Positioning System, or GPS, was originally developed in 1973 by the US Department of Defense. Its first satellite was launched in 1978, and its initial, complete constellation of 24 satellites were in orbit and functional in 1993. This satellite network's full functionality was only available to the US military until 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton announced that it would be opened up for civilian use, as well. This allowed aviation and similar industries to start using it on the vehicles and other assets, and normal, everyday people were thenceforth able to buy devices that tapped this network to help them figure out where they were in the world, and get to and from wherever they wanted to go. A high-level explanation of how GPS works is that all of these satellites contain atomic clocks that are incredibly stable and which remain synchronized with each other, all showing the exact same, very precise time. These satellites broadcast signals that indicate what time their clocks currently read. GPS devices, as long as they can connect to the signals broadcast by a few of these satellites, can figure out where they're located by noting the tiny differences in the time between these broadcasts: signals from satellites that are further away will take longer to arrive, and that time difference will be noted by a given device, which then allows it to triangulate a geolocation based on the distance between the device and those several satellites. This is a simple concept that has created in a world in which most personal electronic devices now contain the right hardware and software to tap these satellite signals, compute these distances, and casually place us—via our smartphones, cars, computers, watches, etc—on the world map, in a highly accurate fashion. This type of technology has proven to be so useful that even before it was made available for civilian use, catalyzing the world that we live in today, other governments were already investing in their own satellite networks, most predicated on the same general concept; they wanted to own their own constellation of satellites and technologies, though, just in case, because the GPS network could theoretically be locked down by the US government at some point, and because they wanted to make sure they had their own militarizable version of the tech, should they need it. There are also flaws in the US GPS system that make it less ideal for some use-cases and in some parts of the world, so some GPS copycats fill in the blanks on some of those flaws, while others operate better at some latitudes than vanilla GPS does. All of which brings us to recent troubles that the global aviation industry has had in some parts of the world, related to their flight tracking systems. Most modern aircraft use some kind of global navigation satellite system, which includes GPS, but also Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's BeiDou, among other competitors. These signals can sometimes be interrupted or made fuzzy by natural phenomena, like solar flares and the weather, and all of these systems have their own peculiarities and flaws, and sometimes the hardware systems they use to lock onto these signals, or the software they use to compute a location based on them, will go haywire for normal, tech-misbehaving reasons. Beginning in the 1990s, though, we began to see electronic countermeasures oriented toward messing with these global navigation satellite system technologies. These technologies, often called satellite navigation deceivers, are used by pretty much every government on the planet, alongside a slew of nongovernment actors that engage in military or terrorist activities, and they operate using a variety of jamming methods, but most common is basically throwing out a bunch of signals that look like GPS or other navigation system signals, and this has the practical effect of rendering these gadgets unusable, because they don't know which signal is legit and which is garbage; a bit like blasting loud noises to keep people from talking to each other, messing with their communication capacity. It's also possible to engage in what's called GPS Spoofing, which means instead of throwing out gobs of garbage signals, you actually send just a few signals that are intended to look legit and to be accepted by, for instance, a plane's GPS device, which then makes the aircraft's navigation systems think the plane is somewhere other than it is—maybe just a little off, maybe on the other side of the planet. Notably, neither of these sorts of attacks are actually that hard to pull off anymore, and it's possible to build a GPS-jamming device at home, if you really want to, though spoofing is a fair bit more difficult.  Also worth knowing is that while making your own jammer is absolutely frowned upon by most governments, and it's actually illegal in the US and UK, across most of the world it's kind of a Wild West in this regard, and you can generally get away with making one if you want to, though there's a chance you'd still be arrested if you caused any real trouble with it. And it is possible to cause trouble with these things: most pilots and crew are aware of how these devices work and can watch for their effects, using backup tools to keep tabs on their locations when they need to; but using those backup tools requires a lot more effort and attention, and there's a chance that if they're hit by these issues at a bad moment, when they're distracted by other things, or when they're coming in for a landing or attempting to navigate safely around another aircraft, that could present a dangerous situation. That's why, until May 31, at the minimum, Finnair will no longer be flying to Tartu airport—which is a very small airport in Estonia, but it's home to the Baltic Defense College, which is one of NATO's educational hubs, and losing a daily flight to Tartu (the only daily flight at this particular airport) from Helsinki, will disconnect this area, via plane, at least, from the rest of Europe, which is inconvenient and embarrassing. This daily flight was cancelled because of ongoing disruptions to the airport's GPS system, which was previously an on-and-off sort of thing, but which, since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become a lot worse. And Tartu relies exclusively on GPS for planes landing at the airport, and thus doesn't have another fallback system, if GPS fails at a vital, dangerous moment. This is a running theme throughout the Baltic region, an area populated by now-democratic NATO members that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and which are considered to be at risk of a Russian invasion or other sort of attack if the invasion of Ukraine goes Russia's way. Almost all aircraft flying through this area have experienced GPS-jamming issues since 2022, and though that Finnair flight is the only one to have been cancelled as a result of all this jamming, so far, there are concerns that this could really scramble travel and shipping in the region, as it's making all flying in the area that much more risky on a continuous basis. Finland's government is framing this jamming as part of a hybrid warfare effort on Russia's part—alongside other hybrid efforts, like bussing migrants to Finland's borders in order to strain national coffers and nudge politics toward reactionary extremes. Some other nations are thinking along the same lines, though there's a chance that, rather than this jamming representing an intentional assault on these neighboring nations, it may actually be something closer to overflow from other, nearby jamming activities: Russia jamming GPS signals in Ukraine, for instance, or the governance of the Kaliningrad region, which is a Russian enclave separated from the rest of Russia and surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, engaging in their own, localized jamming, and those signals are then picked up across national borders, because that's how these signals work—just like sound can travel further than you might intend. It's possible we're seeing a bit of both here, overflow from that huge regional conflict, but also intentional jabs meant to make life more difficult for NATO nations, stressing their systems and costing them money and other resources, while also maybe testing the region's capacity to cope with such GPS disruptions and blackouts in the event of a potential future conflict. Another point worth making here, though, is that we see a lot of this sort of behavior in conflict zones, globally. FlightRadar24 recently introduced a live GPS jamming map to keep track of this sort of thing, and as of the day I'm recording this, alongside these consistent irregularities in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Europe, there's jamming occurring in the Middle East, near Israel, throughout Turkey, which has ongoing conflicts with insurgents in the afflicted areas, a portion of Moldova that is attempting to break away with the support of Russia, similar to what happened in Ukraine back in 2014, a northern portion of India where the Indian government has an ongoing conflict with separatists, and in Myanmar, where the military government is embroiled in fighting with a variety of groups that have unified to overthrow them. This has become common in conflict zones over the past few decades, then, as those who want to deny this data, and the capabilities it grants, to their enemies tend to blanket the relevant airwaves with disruptive noise or incorrect location information, rendering the GPS and similar networks less useful or entirely useless thereabouts. In Ukraine, the military has already worked out ways around this noise and false information, incorporating alternative navigation systems into their infrastructure, allowing them to use whichever one is the most accurate at any given moment. And it's likely, especially if this dynamic continues, which it probably will, as again, this is a fairly easy thing to accomplish, it's likely that spreading out and becoming less reliant on just one navigation system will probably become more common, or possibly even the de facto setup, which will be beneficial in the sense that each of these systems has its own pros and cons, but perhaps less so in that more satellites will be necessary to keep that larger, multi-model network operating at full capacity, and that'll make it more expensive to operate these systems, while also creating more opportunities for satellite collisions up in the relevant orbit—an orbit that's becoming increasingly crowded, and which is already packed with an abundance of no longer operational craft that must be avoided and operated-around. Show Notes https://www.dw.com/en/gps-jamming-in-the-baltic-region-is-russia-responsible/a-68993942 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cne900k4wvjo https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/04/30/who-is-jamming-airliners-gps-in-the-baltic https://www.ft.com/content/37776b16-0b92-4a23-9f90-199d45d955c3 https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/what-is-gps-jamming-why-it-is-problem-aviation-2024-04-30/ https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect-of-russian-military-activity-finnish-transport-agency-says/ https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/types-of-gps-jamming/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviaconversiya https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-hackers-targeted-nato-eastern-european-militaries-google-2022-03-30/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/russian-hackers-nato-forces-diplomats/index.html https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/russian-cyber-attacks-targeted-defence-aerospace-sectors-berlin-says-2024-05-03/ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/3/germany-accuses-russia-of-intolerable-cyberattack-warns-of-consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear 

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Nuclear Fusion

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