Donald Trump oversaw some scary moments in international politics. The former president seriously escalated tensions with North Korea and Iran, leading to several war scares. But he pulled back from the brink, sometimes against the wishes of his more hawkish advisers. He avoided a direct U.S.-Iranian war and opened a direct line of communication with North Korea.

Democrats seem to wish he'd gone to war instead. The Democratic National Committee's 2024 platform, approved in a symbolic vote on Monday night, tries to outhawk Trump, denouncing his "fecklessness" on Iran and his "love letters" to North Korea. Although the platform condemns Trump for pulling out of diplomacy with Iran, it also attacks his decisions not to bomb Iran at several crucial points.

Ironically, the Democratic platform is not much different from Republicans' own attacks on the Biden administration. Each side accuses the other of weakness, and neither wants to take credit for diplomacy or own the compromises necessary to avoid war.

It's easy to forget now, but in 2017 the Korean peninsula had become a remarkably tense place. North Korea was testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting U.S. soil. The U.S. military was massing forces in the region, and Trump was issuing threats.

Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, reportedly called for a military attack aimed at giving North Korea a "bloody nose." McMaster and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) publicly warned that war might be inevitable.

And then, in January 2018, a false alarm drove home the lesson that nuclear war is nothing to play around with. During a disaster preparedness drill, authorities in Hawaii accidentally sent an alert about an incoming ballistic missile. For more than half an hour, Hawaiians and tourists were convinced that they were going to die in a nuclear war.

A few months later, McMaster was out of the White House. Trump accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June 2018. Trump met Kim again in February 2019. Stepping over the North Korean–South Korean border in June 2019, Trump became the first U.S. president to visit North Korea.

The meetings failed to secure a permanent agreement—it didn't help that McMaster's replacement, John Bolton, publicly hinted that denuclearization would end in Kim's violent death—but they bought some crucial breathing room.

The Democrats' 2024 platform attacks the very idea of talks with North Korea. Trump's approach, the platform says, was "embarrassing the United States on the world stage including by flattering and legitimizing Kim Jong Un, exchanging 'love letters' with the North Korean dictator."

This isn't a break with past Democratic rhetoric. During the presidential debates in 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden said that Trump gave "North Korea everything they wanted, creating the legitimacy by having a meeting with Kim Jong Un." Another candidate, Kamala Harris, said that there are "no concessions to be made. He has traded a photo op for nothing."

If even talking to North Korea is a "concession," then it's hard to see what alternative Harris would accept, other than continuing to barrel towards nuclear war.

Iran, unlike North Korea, does not have nuclear weapons. In 2017, Trump tore up an international agreement that regulated Iranian nuclear activities, instead betting on a "maximum pressure" campaign designed to overthrow the Iranian government by cutting off its oil exports. Bolton later said in his memoir that "only regime change would ultimately prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons," and then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was obsessed with killing the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

The Iranian government did not react warmly to the maximum pressure campaign. Iranian forces encouraged rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, and Iran is believed to be behind sabotage attacks on the international oil industry, including a September 2019 drone strike on Saudi oil infrastructure.

The U.S. military massed forces off the coast of Iran during this time. On June 19, 2019, Iran shot down an American surveillance drone. (The two countries disagree on whether the drone was in Iranian airspace.) Trump ordered a bombing raid on Iranian air defense batteries, then pulled back at the last minute, because killing Iranian troops was "not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone."

Although the Democratic platform calls maximum pressure a "reckless and short-sighted decision," it also attacks Trump for failing to hit Iran back at each of these points. "Trump's only response" to an Iraqi militia attack on the U.S. consulate in Basra "was to close our diplomatic facility," the Democrats complain, and "Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies" for the attack on Saudi oil facilities.

The platform is somewhat ambiguous on whether Trump should have bombed Iran in June 2019. "Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team," it says. Perhaps putting American lives at risk to avenge the honor of a robot would be too far even for the Biden team.

Maximum pressure reached its climax in January 2020, when Trump followed Pompeo's advice and ordered the military to assassinate Soleimani. Iran responded by launching 12 ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq, which injured Americans but did not kill anyone. Trump called it even, claiming that "Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned."

At the time, Democrats were highly critical of the decision to risk war by killing an Iranian officer. "Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," Biden wrote right after Soleimani was assassinated. After the Iranian retaliation, Democrats immediately put forward a war powers resolution making it clear that the president does not have the authority to start a war with Iran.

The current Democratic platform takes a different tone. When "Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops," the document declares disapprovingly, Trump "again took no action." The platform criticizes Trump for making light of U.S. troops' brain injuries without mentioning the assassination that prompted the Iranian attacks in the first place.

After all, it would be hard for Biden to criticize Trump for bringing America to the brink of war in the Middle East when he has done the same.

After four short years of a Democratic administration, the mood among Democratic leaders has gotten more hawkish, especially as the defense of Ukraine gives them a "good war" to rally behind. But that's not necessarily how the American people, including Democratic voters, feel. Direct talks with North Korea are still popular, and direct war with Iran is still unpopular. Republicans and independents are less likely to call themselves hawks than in 2014, and even Democratic voters are only one percentage point more likely to consider themselves hawkish than before.

There is a public appetite for diplomacy and deescalation. But party leaders don't seem to want to take the opportunity. They would prefer to fight over who can outhawk whom.

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Various scenarios to getting to net zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2050 hinge on the success of some hugely ambitious initiatives in renewable energy, grid enhancements, and other areas. Perhaps none of these are more audacious than an envisioned renaissance of nuclear power, driven by advanced-technology reactors that are smaller than traditional nuclear power reactors.

What many of these reactors have in common is that they would use a kind of fuel called high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). Its composition varies, but for power generation, a typical mix contains slightly less than 20 percent by mass of the highly fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U-235). That’s in contrast to traditional reactor fuels, which range from 3 percent to 5 percent U-235 by mass, and natural uranium, which is just 0.7 percent U-235.

Now, though, a paper in Science magazine has identified a significant wrinkle in this nuclear option: HALEU fuel can theoretically be used to make a fission bomb—a fact that the paper’s authors use to argue for the tightening of regulations governing access to, and transportation of, the material. Among the five authors of the paper, which is titled “The Weapons Potential of High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium,” is IEEE Life Fellow Richard L. Garwin. Garwin was the key figure behind the design of the thermonuclear bomb, which was tested in 1952.

The Science paper is not the first to argue for a reevaluation of the nuclear proliferation risks of HALEU fuel. A report published last year by the National Academies, “Merits and Viability of Different Nuclear Fuel Cycles and Technology Options and the Waste Aspects of Advanced Nuclear Reactors,” devoted most of a chapter to the risks of HALEU fuel. It reached similar technical conclusions to those of the Science article, but did not go as far in its recommendations regarding the need to tighten regulations.

Why is HALEU fuel concerning?

Conventional wisdom had it that U-235 concentrations below 20 percent were not usable for a bomb. But “we found this testimony in 1984 from the chief of the theoretical division of Los Alamos, who basically confirmed that, yes, indeed, it is usable down to 10 percent,” says R. Scott Kemp of MIT, another of the paper’s authors. “So you don’t even need centrifuges, and that’s what really is important here.”

Centrifuges arranged very painstakingly into cascades are the standard means of enriching uranium to bomb-grade material, and they require scarce and costly resources, expertise, and materials to operate. In fact, the difficulty of building and operating such cascades on an industrial scale has for decades served as an effective barrier to would-be builders of nuclear weapons. So any route to a nuclear weapon that bypassed enrichment would offer an undoubtedly easier alternative. The question now is, how much easier?

“It’s not a very good bomb, but it could explode and wreak all kinds of havoc.”

Adding urgency to that question is an anticipated gold rush in HALEU, after years of quiet U.S. government support. The U.S. Department of Energy is spending billions to expand production of the fuel, including US $150 million awarded in 2022 to a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp., the only private company in the United States enriching uranium to HALEU concentrations. (Outside of the United States, only Russia and China are producing HALEU in substantial quantities.) Government support also extends to the companies building the reactors that will use HALEU. Two of the largest reactor startups, Terrapower (backed in part by Bill Gates) and X-Energy, have designed reactors that run on forms of HALEU fuel, and have received billions in funding under a DOE program called Advanced Reactor Demonstration Projects.

The difficulty of building a bomb based on HALEU is a murky subject, because many of the specific techniques and practices of nuclear weapons design are classified. But basic information about the standard type of fission weapon, known as an implosion device, has long been known publicly. (The first two implosion devices were detonated in 1945, one in the Trinity test and the other over Nagasaki, Japan.) An implosion device is based on a hollow sphere of nuclear material. In a modern weapon this material is typically plutonium-239, but it can also be a mixture of uranium isotopes that includes a percentage of U-235 ranging from 100 percent all the way down to, apparently, around 10 percent. The sphere is surrounded by shaped chemical explosives that are exploded simultaneously, creating a shockwave that physically compresses the sphere, reducing the distance between its atoms and increasing the likelihood that neutrons emitted from their nuclei will encounter other nuclei and split them, releasing more neutrons. As the sphere shrinks it goes from a subcritical state, in which that chain reaction of neutrons splitting nuclei and creating other neutrons cannot sustain itself, to a critical state, in which it can. As the sphere continues to compress it achieves supercriticality, after which an injected flood of neutrons triggers the superfast, runaway chain reaction that is a fission explosion. All this happens in less than a millisecond.

The authors of the Science paper had to walk a fine line between not revealing too many details about weapons design while still clearly indicating the scope of the challenge of building a bomb based on HALEU. They acknowledge that the amount of HALEU material needed for a 15-kiloton bomb—roughly as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima during the second World War—would be relatively large: in the hundreds of kilograms, but not more than 1,000 kg. For comparison, about 8 kg of Pu-239 is sufficient to build a fission bomb of modest sophistication. Any HALEU bomb would be commensurately larger, but still small enough to be deliverable “using an airplane, a delivery van, or a boat sailed into a city harbor,” the authors wrote.

They also acknowledged a key technical challenge for any would-be weapons makers seeking to use HALEU to make a bomb: preinitiation. The large amount of U-238 in the material would produce many neutrons, which would likely result in a nuclear chain reaction occurring too soon. That would sap energy from the subsequent triggered runaway chain reaction, limiting the explosive yield and producing what’s known in the nuclear bomb business as a “fizzle.“ However, “although preinitiation may have a bigger impact on some designs than others, even those that are sensitive to it could still produce devastating explosive power,” the authors conclude.

In other words, “it’s not a very good bomb, but it could explode and wreak all kinds of havoc,” says John Lee, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan. Lee was a contributor to the 2023 National Academies report that also considered risks of HALEU fuel and made policy recommendations similar to those of the Science paper.

Critics of that paper argue that the challenges of building a HALEU bomb, while not insurmountable, would stymie a nonstate group. And a national weapons program, which would likely have the resources to surmount them, would not be interested in such a bomb, because of its limitations and relative unreliability.

“That’s why the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], in their wisdom, said, ‘This is not a direct-use material,’” says Steven Nesbit, a nuclear-engineering consultant and past president of the American Nuclear Society, a professional organization. “It’s just not a realistic pathway to a nuclear weapon.”

The Science authors conclude their paper by recommending that the U.S. Congress direct the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to conduct a “fresh review” of the risks posed by HALEU fuel. In response to an email inquiry from IEEE Spectrum, an NNSA spokesman, Craig Branson, replied: “To meet net-zero emissions goals, the United States has prioritized the design, development, and deployment of advanced nuclear technologies, including advanced and small modular reactors. Many will rely on HALEU to achieve smaller designs, longer operating cycles, and increased efficiencies over current technologies. They will be essential to our efforts to decarbonize while meeting growing energy demand. As these technologies move forward, the Department of Energy and NNSA have programs to work with willing industrial partners to assess the risk and enhance the safety, security, and safeguards of their designs.”

The Science authors also called on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the IAEA to change the way they categorize HALEU fuel. Under the NRC’s current categorization, even large quantities of HALEU are now considered category II, which means that security measures focus on the early detection of theft. The authors want weapons-relevant quantities of HALEU reclassified as category I, the same as for quantities of weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium sufficient to make a bomb. Category I would require much tighter security, focusing on the prevention of theft.

Nesbit scoffs at the proposal, citing the difficulties of heisting perhaps a metric tonne of nuclear material. “Blindly applying all of the baggage that goes with protecting nuclear weapons to something like this is just way overboard,” he says.

But Lee, who performed experiments with HALEU fuel in the 1980s, agrees with his colleagues. “Dick Garwin and Frank von Hipple [and the other authors of the Science paper] have raised some proper questions,” he declares. “They’re saying the NRC should take more precautions. I’m all for that.”

Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.

Rumors of War

"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."

Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.

Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief

"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.

"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."

The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.

Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."

If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.

A Game Both Sides Can Play

Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.

In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."

American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.

And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.

The Wider War Is Here

Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.

"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.

Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.

Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.

So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.

The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.