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In 'Historic Victory' for Oceans, Norway Pauses Controversial Deep-Sea Mining Plans
"We will not let this industry destroy the unique life in the deep sea, not in the Arctic, nor anywhere else," one campaigner said.
Dec 03, 2025
In a move celebrated by environmental advocates as a "massive win for nature," the Norwegian government on Wednesday delayed the issuing of deep-sea mining licenses in its Arctic waters for a second year in a row, this time until 2029.
In January 2024, Norway drew massive criticism from ocean campaigners and scientists when it became the first European country to open its waters to the controversial practice. Since then, however, smaller parties have twice succeeded in delaying the granting of licenses in return for passing the yearly budget.
“Deep-sea mining in Norway has once again been successfully stopped," Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle, the deep-sea mining campaigner at Greenpeace Nordic, said in a statement. "We will not let this industry destroy the unique life in the deep sea, not in the Arctic, nor anywhere else."
Wednesday's decision came as part of the new Labour government's budget negotiations, as the Reds, the Socialist Left Party, and the Green Party all opposed granting licenses. To pass its state budget, the government agreed "not to launch the first tenders for deep-sea mining during the current legislative term," which lasts four years, according to Agence France-Presse. The agreement comes a year after a similar intervention by the Socialist Left Party delayed the first round of licenses.
"Wherever this industry tries to start, it fails. We can protect the oceans from extraction."
The Norwegian government also said it would no longer direct public funds toward mapping for minerals, which Greenpeace called a "major shift in its stance on deep-sea mining."
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) agreed, saying, "This decision represents a significant shift in Norway’s position and is a historic victory for nature, science, and public pressure."
A 2024 Greenpeace report warned that mining the Arctic seabed could cause "irreversible harm" to its unique ecosystems and even drive some as yet unstudied species extinct.
“This decision is a historic victory. Norwegian politicians decided to listen to scientific expertise and to the strong public demand to protect the vulnerable deep-sea environment, rather than being swayed by the mining lobby,” Karoline Andaur, CEO of WWF-Norway, said in a statement.
Louisa Casson, a Greenpeace International deep-sea mining campaigner, wrote on social media: "Deep-sea miners thought it would be easy to start mining the Arctic seafloor… But thanks to campaigning, Norway has just halted all deep-sea mining development! Wherever this industry tries to start, it fails. We can protect the oceans from extraction."
Deep-sea mining opponents like Greenpeace saw Norway's decision as "another blow" to an industry that has faced widespread popular opposition. It follows the decision by the Cook Islands last month to postpone a determination on deep-sea mining until 2032.
“There is no version of seabed mining that is sustainable or safe," Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Juressa Lee said in a statement at the time. "Alongside our allies who want to protect the ocean for future generations, we will continue to say a loud and bold no to miners who want to strip the seafloor for their profit.”
Following its pause on licenses, environmental advocates want Norway to bolster the growing momentum against deep-sea mining by joining the nations who have signed on in support of a global moratorium.
"Now Norway must step up and become a real ocean leader, join the call for a global moratorium against deep-sea mining, and bring forward a proposal of real protection for the Arctic deep sea," Helle said.
WWF's Andaur noted that "as cochair of the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, Norway now has a unique opportunity be consistent and stand alongside their cochair Palau and the 40 countries already supporting a global moratorium or pause on deep-seabed mining, turning this national pause into true global ocean leadership."
“Millions of people across the world are calling on governments to resist the dire threat of deep-sea mining to safeguard oceans worldwide," Greenpeace's Casson said. "This is yet another huge step forward to protect the Arctic, and now it is time for Norway to join over 40 countries calling for a moratorium and be a true ocean champion."
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What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
The history serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
Jul 18, 2025
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierls acknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
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No, We Don’t Need a New Manhattan Project for AI
What we need is not a renewed arms race fueled by fear, competition, and secrecy, but its opposite: a global initiative to democratize and demilitarize technological development.
Jun 03, 2025
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Marx’s aphorism feels newly prescient. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a jingoistic call on social media for a “new Manhattan Project,” this time to win the so-called race for artificial intelligence supremacy.
But the Manhattan Project is no blueprint. It is a warning—a cautionary tale of what happens when science is conscripted into the service of state power, when open inquiry gives way to nationalist rivalry, and when the cult of progress is severed from ethical responsibility. It shows how secrecy breeds fear, corrodes public trust, and undermines democratic institutions.
The Manhattan Project may have been, as President Harry Truman claimed, “the greatest scientific gamble in history.” But it also represented a gamble with the continuity of life on Earth. It brought the world to the brink of annihilation—an abyss into which we still peer. A second such project may well push us over the edge.
If we are serious about the threats posed by artificial intelligence, we must abandon the illusion that safety lies in outpacing our rivals.
The parallels between the origins of the atomic age and the rise of artificial intelligence are striking. In both, the very individuals at the forefront of technological innovation were also among the first to sound the alarm.
During World War II, atomic scientists raised concerns about the militarization of nuclear energy. Yet, their dissent was suppressed under the strictures of wartime secrecy, and their continued participation was justified by the perceived imperative to build the bomb before Nazi Germany. In reality, that threat had largely subsided by the time the Manhattan Project gathered momentum, as Germany had already abandoned its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
The first technical study assessing the feasibility of the bomb concluded that it could indeed be built but warned that “owing to the spreading of radioactive substances with the wind, the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon…”
When in 1942 scientists theorized that the first atomic chain reaction might ignite the atmosphere, Arthur Holly Compton recalled thinking that if such a risk proved real, then “these bombs must never be made… better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”
Leo Szilard drafted a petition urging President Truman to refrain from using it against Japan. He warned that such bombings would be both morally indefensible and strategically shortsighted: “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction,” he wrote, “may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”
Today, we cannot hide behind the pretext of world war. We cannot claim ignorance. Nor can we invoke the specter of an existential adversary. The warnings surrounding artificial intelligence are clear, public, and unequivocal.
In 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” In more recent years, Geoffrey Hinton, referred to as the “godfather of AI,” resigned from Google while citing mounting concerns about the “existential risk” posed by unchecked AI development. Soon after, a coalition of researchers and industry leaders issued a joint statement asserting that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Around this time, an open letter, signed by over a thousand experts and tens of thousands of others, called for a temporary pause on AI development to reflect on its trajectory and long-term consequences.
Yet the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence continues unabated, propelled less by foresight than by fear that halting progress would mean falling behind rivals, particularly China. But in the face of such profound risks, one must ask: win what, exactly?
Reflecting on the similar failure to confront the perils of technological advancement in his own time, Albert Einstein warned, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” His words remain no less urgent today.
The lesson should be obvious: We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the atomic age. To invoke the Manhattan Project as a model for AI development is not only historically ignorant but also politically reckless.
What we need is not a renewed arms race fueled by fear, competition, and secrecy, but its opposite: a global initiative to democratize and demilitarize technological development, one that prioritizes human needs, centers dignity and justice, and advances the collective well-being of all.
More than 30 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg, former nuclear war planner turned whistleblower, called for a different kind of Manhattan Project. One not to build new weapons, but to undo the harm of the first and to dismantle the doomsday machines that we already have. That vision remains the only rational and morally defensible Manhattan Project worth pursuing.
We cannot afford to recognize and act upon this only in hindsight, as was the case with the atomic bomb. As Joseph Rotblat, the sole scientist to resign from the Project on ethical grounds, reflected on their collective failure:
The nuclear age is the creation of scientists… in total disregard for the basic tenets of science… openness and universality. It was conceived in secrecy, and usurped—even before birth—by one state to give it political dominance. With such congenital defects, and being nurtured by an army of Dr. Strangeloves, it is no wonder that the creation grew into a monster… We, scientists, have a great deal to answer for.
If the path we are on leads to disaster, the answer is not to accelerate. As physicians Bernard Lown and Evgeni Chazov warned during the height of the Cold War arms race: “When racing toward a precipice, it is progress to stop.”
We must stop not out of opposition to progress, but to pursue a different kind of progress: one rooted in scientific ethics, a respect for humanity, and a commitment to our collective survival.
If we are serious about the threats posed by artificial intelligence, we must abandon the illusion that safety lies in outpacing our rivals. As those most intimately familiar with this technology have warned, there can be no victory in this race, only an acceleration of a shared catastrophe.
We have thus far narrowly survived the nuclear age. But if we fail to heed its lessons and forsake our own human intelligence, we may not survive the age of artificial intelligence.
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