404 Media

2025-12-04 15:11:34

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants

During a presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence on December 3, a US Department of Energy scientist laid out a grand vision of the future where nuclear energy powers artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence shapes nuclear energy in “a virtuous cycle of peaceful nuclear deployment.”

“The goal is simple: to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” Rian Bahran, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors, said.

His presentation and others during the symposium, held in Vienna, Austria, described a world where nuclear powered AI designs, builds, and even runs the nuclear power plants they’ll need to sustain them. But experts find these claims, made by one of the top nuclear scientists working for the Trump administration, to be concerning and potentially dangerous.

Tech companies are using artificial intelligence to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. But few know the lengths to which the Trump administration is paving the way and the part it's playing in deregulating a highly regulated industry to ensure that AI data centers have the energy they need to shape the future of America and the world.
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At the IAEA, scientists, nuclear energy experts, and lobbyists discussed what that future might look like. To say the nuclear people are bullish on AI is an understatement. “I call this not just a partnership but a structural alliance. Atoms for algorithms. Artificial intelligence is not just powered by nuclear energy. It’s also improving it because this is a two way street,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in his opening remarks.

In his talk, Bahran explained that the DOE has partnered with private industry to invest $1 trillion to “build what will be an integrated platform that connects the world’s best supercomputers, AI systems, quantum systems, advanced scientific instruments, the singular scientific data sets at the National Laboratories—including the expertise of 40,000 scientists and engineers—in one platform.”
Image via the IAEA.
Big tech has had an unprecedented run of cultural, economic, and technological dominance, expanding into a bubble that seems to be close to bursting. For more than 20 years new billion dollar companies appeared seemingly overnight and offered people new and exciting ways of communicating. Now Google search is broken, AI is melting human knowledge, and people have stopped buying a new smart phone every year. To keep the number going up and ensure its cultural dominance, tech (and the US government) are betting big on AI.

The problem is that AI requires massive datacenters to run and those datacenters need an incredible amount of energy. To solve the problem, the US is rushing to build out new nuclear reactors. Building a new power plant safely is a mutli-year long process that requires an incredible level of human oversight. It’s also expensive. Not every new nuclear reactor project gets finished and they often run over budget and drag on for years.

But AI needs power now, not tomorrow and certainly not a decade from now.

According to Bahran, the problem of AI advancement outpacing the availability of datacenters is an opportunity to deploy new and exciting tech. “We see a future of and near future, by the way, an AI driven laboratory pipeline for materials modeling, discovery, characterization, evaluation, qualification and rapid iteration,” he said in his talk, explaining how AI would help design new nuclear reactors. “These efforts will substantially reduce the time and cost required to qualify advanced materials for next generation reactor systems. This is an autonomous research paradigm that integrates five decades of global irradiation data with generative AI robotics and high throughput experimentation methodologies.”

“For design, we’re developing advanced software systems capable of accelerating nuclear reactor deployments by enabling AI to explore the comprehensive design spaces, generate 3D models, [and] conduct rigorous failure mode analyzes with minimal human intervention,” he added. “But of course, with humans in the loop. These AI powered design tools are projected to reduce design timelines by multiple factors, and the goal is to connect AI agents to tools to expedite autonomous design.”

Bahran also said that AI would speed up the nuclear licensing process, a complex regulatory process that helps build nuclear power plants safely. “Ultimately, the objective is, how do we accelerate that licensing pathway?” he said. “Think of a future where there is a gold standard, AI trained capacity building safety agent.”

He even said that he thinks AI would help run these new nuclear plants. “We're developing software systems employing AI driven digital twins to interpret complex operational data in real time, detect subtle operational deviations at early stages and recommend preemptive actions to enhance safety margins,” he said.

One of the slides Bahran showed during the presentation attempted to quantify the amount of human involvement these new AI-controlled power plants would have. He estimated less than five percent “human intervention during normal operations.”
Image via IAEA.
“The claims being made on these slides are quite concerning, and demonstrate an even more ambitious (and dangerous) use of AI than previously advertised, including the elimination of human intervention. It also cements that it is the DOE's strategy to use generative AI for nuclear purposes and licensing, rather than isolated incidents by private entities,” Heidy Khlaaf, head AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, told 404 Media.

“The implications of AI-generated safety analysis and licensing in combination with aspirations of <5% of human intervention during normal operations, demonstrates a concerted effort to move away from humans in the loop,” she said. “This is unheard of when considering frameworks and implementation of AI within other safety-critical systems, that typically emphasize meaningful human control.”

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Sofia Guerra, a career nuclear safety expert who has worked with the IAEA and US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, attended the presentation live in Vienna. “I’m worried about potential serious accidents, which could be caused by small mistakes made by AI systems that cascade,” she said. “Or humans losing the know-how and safety culture to act as required.”

Megaphone Embeddable Player

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404 Media

2025-11-14 17:28:04

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants

Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. According to a report from think tank AI Now, this push could lead to disaster.

“If these initiatives continue to be pursued, their lack of safety may lead not only to catastrophic nuclear consequences, but also to an irreversible distrust within public perception of nuclear technologies that may inhibit the support of the nuclear sector as part of our global decarbonization efforts in the future,” the report said.
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The construction of a nuclear plant involves a long legal and regulatory process called licensing that’s aimed at minimizing the risks of irradiating the public. Licensing is complicated and expensive but it’s also largely worked and nuclear accidents in the US are uncommon. But AI is driving a demand for energy and new players, mostly tech companies like Microsoft, are entering the nuclear field.

“Licensing is the single biggest bottleneck for getting new projects online,” a slide from a Microsoft presentation about using generative AI to fast track nuclear construction said. “10 years and $100 [million.]”

The presentation, which is archived on the website for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the independent government agency that’s charged with setting standards for reactors and keeping the public safe), detailed how the company would use AI to speed up licensing. In the company’s conception, existing nuclear licensing documents and data about nuclear sites data would be used to train an LLM that’s then used to generate documents to speed up the process.

But the authors of the report from AI Now told 404 Media that they have major concerns about trusting nuclear safety to an LLM. “Nuclear licensing is a process, it’s not a set of documents,” Heidy Khlaaf, the head AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and a co-author of the report, told 404 Media. “Which I think is the first flag in seeing proposals by Microsoft. They don’t understand what it means to have nuclear licensing.”

“Please draft a full Environmental Review for new project with these details,” Microsoft’s presentation imagines as a possible prompt for an AI licensing program. The AI would then send the completed draft to a human for review, who would use Copilot in a Word doc for “review and refinement.” At the end of Microsoft’s imagined process, it would have “Licensing documents created with reduced cost and time.”

The Idaho National Laboratory, a Department of Energy run nuclear lab, is already using Microsoft’s AI to “streamline” nuclear licensing. “INL will generate the engineering and safety analysis reports that are required to be submitted for construction permits and operating licenses for nuclear power plants,” INL said in a press release. Lloyd's Register, a UK-based maritime organization, is doing the same. American power company Westinghouse is marketing its own AI, called bertha, that promises to make the licensing process go from "months to minutes.”

The authors of the AI Now report worry that using AI to speed up the licensing process will bypass safety checks and lead to disaster. “Producing these highly structured licensing documents is not this box taking exercise as implied by these generative AI proposals that we're seeing,” Khlaaf told 404 Media. “The whole point of the lesson in process is to reason and understand the safety of the plant and to also use that process to explore the trade offs between the different approaches, the architectures, the safety designs, and to communicate to a regulator why that plant is safe. So when you use AI, it's not going to support these objectives, because it is not a set of documents or agreements, which I think you know, is kind of the myth that is now being put forward by these proposals.”

Sofia Guerra, Khlaaf’s co-author, agreed. Guerra is a career nuclear safety expert who has advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and works with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the safe deployment of AI in nuclear applications. “This is really missing the point of licensing,” Guerra said of the push to use AI. “The licensing process is not perfect. It takes a long time and there’s a lot of iterations. Not everything is perfectly useful and targeted …but I think the process of doing that, in a way, is really the objective.”

Both Guerra and Khlaaf are proponents of nuclear energy, but worry that the proliferation of LLMs, the fast tracking of nuclear licenses, and the AI-driven push to build more plants is dangerous. “Nuclear energy is safe. It is safe, as we use it. But it’s safe because we make it safe and it’s safe because we spend a lot of time doing the licensing and we spend a lot of time learning from the things that go wrong and understanding where it went wrong and we try to address it next time,” Guerra said.

Law is another profession where people have attempted to use AI to streamline the process of writing complicated and involved technical documents. It hasn’t gone well. Lawyers who’ve attempted to write legal briefs have been caught, over and over again, in court. AI-constructed legal arguments cite precedents that do not exist, hallucinate cases, and generally foul up legal proceedings.

Might something similar happen if AI was used in nuclear licensing? “It could be something as simple as software and hardware version control,” Khlaaf said. “Typically in nuclear equipment, the supply chain is incredibly rigorous. Every component, every part, even when it was manufactured is accounted for. Large language models make these really minute mistakes that are hard to track. If you are off in the software version by a letter or a number, that can lead to a misunderstanding of which software version you have, what it entails, the expectation of the behavior of both the software and the hardware and from there, it can cascade into a much larger accident.”

Khlaaf pointed to Three Mile Island as an example of an entirely human-made accident that AI may replicate. The accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of a Pennsylvania reactor in 1979. “What happened is that you had some equipment failure and design flaws, and the operators misunderstood what those were due to a combination of a lack of training…that they did not have the correct indicators in their operating room,” Khlaaf said. “So it was an accident that was caused by a number of relatively minor equipment failures that cascaded. So you can imagine, if something this minor cascades quite easily, and you use a large language model and have a very small mistake in your design.”

In addition to the safety concerns, Khlaaf and Guerra told 404 Media that using sensitive nuclear data to train AI models increases the risk of nuclear proliferation. They pointed out that Microsoft is asking not only for historical NRC data but for real-time and project specific data. “This is a signal that AI providers are asking for nuclear secrets,” Khlaaf said. “To build a nuclear plant there is actually a lot of know-how that is not public knowledge…what’s available publicly versus what’s required to build a plant requires a lot of nuclear secrets that are not in the public domain.”

“This is a signal that AI providers are asking for nuclear secrets. To build a nuclear plant there is actually a lot of know-how that is not public knowledge…what’s available publicly versus what’s required to build a plant requires a lot of nuclear secrets that are not in the public domain.”

Tech companies maintain cloud servers that comply with federal regulations around secrecy and are sold to the US government. Anthropic and the National Nuclear Security Administration traded information across an Amazon Top Secret cloud server during a recent collaboration, and it’s likely that Microsoft and others would do something similar. Microsoft’s presentation on nuclear licensing references its own Azure Government cloud servers and notes that it’s compliant with Department of Energy regulations. 404 Media reached out to both Westinghouse Nuclear and Microsoft for this story. Microsoft declined to comment and Westinghouse did not respond.

“Where is this data going to end up and who is going to have the knowledge?” Guerra told 404 Media.

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Nuclear is a dual use technology. You can use the knowledge of nuclear reactors to build a power plant or you can use it to build a nuclear weapon. The line between nukes for peace and nukes for war is porous. “The knowledge is analogous," Khlaaf said. “This is why we have very strict export controls, not just for the transfer of nuclear material but nuclear data.”

Proliferation concerns around nuclear energy are real. Fear that a nuclear energy program would become a nuclear weapons program was the justification the Trump administration used to bomb Iran earlier this year. And as part of the rush to produce more nuclear reactors and create infrastructure for AI, the White House has said it will begin selling old weapon-grade plutonium to the private sector for use in nuclear reactors.

Trump’s done a lot to make it easier for companies to build new nuclear reactors and use AI for licensing. The AI Now report pointed to a May 23, 2025 executive order that seeks to overhaul the NRC. The EO called for the NRC to reform its culture, reform its structure, and consult with the Pentagon and the Department of Energy as it navigated changing standards. The goal of the EO is to speed up the construction of reactors and get through the licensing process faster.

A different May 23 executive order made it clear why the White House wants to overhaul the NRC. “Advanced computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and other mission capability resources at military and national security installations and national laboratories demands reliable, high-density power sources that cannot be disrupted by external threats or grid failures,” it said.

At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gutted the NRC. In September, members of the NRC told Congress they were worried they’d be fired if they didn’t approve nuclear reactor designs favored by the administration. “I think on any given day, I could be fired by the administration for reasons unknown,” Bradley Crowell, a commissioner at the NRC said in Congressional testimony. He also warned that DOGE driven staffing cuts would make it impossible to increase the construction of nuclear reactors while maintaining safety standards.

“The executive orders push the AI message. We’re not just seeing this idea of the rollback of nuclear regulation because we’re suddenly very excited about nuclear energy. We’re seeing it being done in service of AI,” Khlaaf said. “When you're looking at this rolling back of Nuclear Regulation and also this monopolization of nuclear energy to explicitly power AI, this raises a lot of serious concerns about whether the risk associated with nuclear facilities, in combination with the sort of these initiatives can be justified if they're not to the benefit of civil energy consumption.”

Matthew Wald, an independent nuclear energy analyst and former New York Times science journalist is more bullish on the use of AI in the nuclear energy field. Like Khlaaf, he also referenced the accident at Three Mile Island. “The tragedy of Three Mile Island was there was a badly designed control room, badly trained operators, and there was a control room indication that was very easy to misunderstand, and they misunderstood it, and it turned out that the same event had begun at another reactor. It was almost identical in Ohio, but that information was never shared, and the guys in Pennsylvania didn't know about it, so they wrecked a reactor,” Wald told 404 Media.

"AI is helpful, but let’s not get messianic about it.”

According to Wald, using AI to consolidate government databases full of nuclear regulatory information could have prevented that. “If you've got AI that can take data from one plant or from a set of plants, and it can arrange and organize that data in a way that's helpful to other plants, that's good news,” he said. “It could be good for safety. It could also just be good for efficiency. And certainly in licensing, it would be more efficient for both the licensee and the regulator if they had a clearer idea of precedent, of relevant other data.”

He also said that the nuclear industry is full of safety-minded engineers who triple check everything. “One of the virtues of people in this business is they are challenging and inquisitive and they want to check things. Whether or not they use computers as a tool, they’re still challenging and inquisitive and want to check things,” he said. “And I think anybody who uses AI unquestionably is asking for trouble, and I think the industry knows that…AI is helpful, but let’s not get messianic about it.”

But Khlaaf and Guerra are worried that the framing of nuclear power as a national security concern and the embrace of AI to speed up construction will setback the embrace of nuclear power. If nuclear isn’t safe, it’s not worth doing. “People seem to have lost sight of why nuclear regulation and safety thresholds exist to begin with. And the reason why nuclear risks, or civilian nuclear risk, were ever justified, was due to the capacity for nuclear power. To provide flexible civilian energy demands at low cost emissions in line with climate targets,” Khlaaf said.

“So when you move away from that…and you pull in the AI arms race into this cost benefit justification for risk proportionality, it leads government to sort of over index on these unproven benefits of AI as a reason to have nuclear risk, which ultimately undermines the risks of ionizing radiation to the general population, and also the increased risk of nuclear proliferation, which happens if you were to use AI like large language models in the licensing process.”

Dem NRC members warn they could be fired over safety decisions - E&E News by POLITICO

A Wednesday hearing also revealed more details about a meeting with a Department of Government Efficiency official.

^{Nico Portuondo, Francisco "A.J." Camacho (E&E News by POLITICO)}

404 Media

2025-10-30 16:22:42

Trump Orders Nuclear Testing As Nuke Workers Go Unpaid

Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear stockpile. Because of the current government shutdown, 1,400 NNSA workers are on furlough and the remaining 375 are working without pay.

America detonated its last nuke in 1992 as part of a general drawn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Four years later, it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans nuclear explosions for civilian or military purposes. But Congress never ratified the treaty and the CTBT never entered into force. Despite this, there has not been a nuke tested by the United States since.
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Trump threatened to resume nuclear testing during his first term but it never happened. At the time, officials at the Pentagon and NNSA said it would take them a few months to get tests running again should the President order them.

The NNSA has maintained the underground tunnels once used for testing since the 1990s and converted them into a different kind of space that verifies the reliability of existing nukes without blowing them up in what are called “virtual tests.” During a rare tour of the tunnel with journalists earlier this year, a nuclear weapons scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR that “our assessment is that there are no system questions that would be answered by a test, that would be worth the expense and the effort and the time.”

Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.

That’s a lot of chaos for a government agency charged with ensuring the safety and effectiveness of America’s nuclear weapons. The NNSA is currently in the middle of a massive project to “modernize” America’s nukes, an effort that will cost trillions of dollars. Part of modernization means producing new plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear warhead. That’s a complicated and technical process and no one is sure how much it’ll cost and how dangerous it’ll be.

And now, it may have to resume nuclear testing while understaffed.

“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”

Three days later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said the furlough was making the world less safe. “NNSA facilities are charged with maintaining nuclear security in accordance with long-standing policy and the law,” she said in a press release. “Undermining the agency’s workforce at such a challenging time diminishes our nuclear deterrence, emboldens international adversaries, and makes Nevadans less safe. Secretary Wright, Administrator Williams, and Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics, rescind the furlough notice, and reopen the government.”

Trump announced the nuclear tests in a post on Truth Social, a platform where he announces a lot of things that ultimately end up not happening. “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post said.

Matt Korda, a nuclear expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the President’s Truth social post was confusing and riddled with misconceptions. Russia has more nuclear weapons than America. Nuclear modernization is ongoing and will take trillions of dollars and many years to complete. Over the weekend, Putin announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile and on Tuesday he said the country had done the same with a nuclear-powered undersea drone. Russia withdrew from the CTBT in 2023, but neither recent test involved a nuclear explosion. Russia last blew up a nuke in 1990 and China conducted its most recent test in 1996. Both have said they would resume nuclear testing should America do it. Korda said it's unclear what, exactly, Trump means. He could be talking about anything from test firing non-nuclear equipped ICBMs to underground testing to detonating nukes in the desert. “We’ll have to wait and see until either this Truth Social post dissipates and becomes a bunch of nothing or it actually gets turned into policy. Then we’ll have something more concrete to respond to,” Korda said.

Worse, he thinks the resumption of testing would be bad for US national security. “It actually puts the US at a strategic disadvantage,” Korda said. “This moratorium on not testing nuclear weapons benefits the United States because the United States has, by far, the most advanced modeling and simulation equipment…by every measure this is a terrible idea.”

The end of nuclear detonation tests has spurred 30 years of innovation in the field of computer modeling. Subcritical computer modeling happens in the NNSA-maintained underground tunnels where detonations were once a common occurrence. The Los Alamos National Laboratories and other American nuclear labs are building massive super computers that are, in part, the result of decades of work spurred by the end of detonations and the embrace of simulation.

Detonating a nuclear weapon—whether above ground or below—is disastrous for the environment. There are people alive in the United States today who are living with cancer and other health conditions caused by American nuclear testing. Live tests make the world more anxious, less safe, and encourage other nuclear powers to do their own. It also uses up a nuke, something America has said it wants to build more of.

“There’s no upside to this,” Korda said. He added that he felt bad for the furloughed NNSA workers. “People find out about significant policy changes through Truth social posts. So it’s entirely possible that the people who would be tasked with carrying out this decision are learning about it in the same way we are all learning about it. They probably have the exact same kinds of questions that we do.”

Opinion | America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.

The $1.7 trillion overhaul is already underway.

^{W.J. Hennigan (The New York Times)}

404 Media

2025-10-27 18:39:31

'House of Dynamite' Is About the Zoom Call that Ends the World

This post contains spoilers for the Netflix film ‘House of Dynamite.’

Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow-directed nuclear war thriller wants audiences to ask themselves the question: what would you do if you had 15 minutes to decide whether or not to end the world?

House of Dynamite is about a nuclear missile hitting the United States as viewed from the conference call where America’s power players gather to decide how to retaliate. The decision window is short, just 15 minutes. In the film that’s all the time the President has to assess the threat, pick targets, and decide if the US should also launch its nuclear weapons. It’s about how much time they’d have in real life too.
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In House of Dynamite, America’s early warning systems detect the launch of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The final target is Chicago and when it lands more than 20 million people will die in a flash. Facing the destruction of a major American city, the President must decide what—if any—action to take in response.

The US has hundreds of nuclear missiles ready to go and plans to strike targets across Russia, China, and North Korea. But there’s a catch. In the film, America didn’t see who fired the nuke and no one is taking credit. It’s impossible to know who to strike and in what proportion. What’s a president to do?

House of Dynamite tells the story of this 15 minute Zoom call—from detection of the launch to its terminal arrival in Chicago—three different times. There’s dozens of folks on the call, from deputy advisors to the Secretary of Defense to the President himself, and each run through of the events gives the audience a bigger peak at how the whole machine operates, culminating, in the end, with the President’s view.

Many of the most effective and frightening films about nukes—Threads and The Day After—focus on the lives of the humans living in the blast zone. They’re about the crumbling of society in a wasteland, beholden to the decisions of absent political powers so distant that they often never appear on screen. House of Dynamite is about those powerful people caught in the absurd game of nuclear war, forced to make decisions with limited information and enormous consequences.

In both the movie and real life, America has ground-based interceptors stationed in California and Alaska that are meant to knock a nuke out of the sky should one ever get close. The early film follows missileers in Alaska as they launch the interceptor only to have it fail. It’s a horrifying and very real possibility. The truth of interceptors is that we don’t have many of them, the window to hit a fast moving ICBM is narrow, and in tests they only work about half the time.

“So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, played by Jarred Harris, says in the film. This detail caught the eye of the Trump White House, which plans to spend around $200 billion on a space based version of the same tech.

Bloomberg reported on an internal Pentagon memo that directed officials to debunk House of Dynamite’s claims about missile defense. The Missile Defense Agency told Bloomberg that interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” The Pentagon separately told Bloomberg that it wasn’t consulted on the film at all.

Director Bigelow worked closely with the CIA to make Zero Dark Thirty, but has tussled with the Pentagon before. The DoD didn’t like The Hurt Locker and pulled out of the project after showing some initial support. Bigelow has said in interviews that she wanted House of Dynamite to be an independent project.

Despite that independence, House of Dynamite nails the details of nuclear war in 2025. The acronyms, equipment, and procedures are all frighteningly close to reality and Bigelow did have help on set from retired US Army lieutenant general and former US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Chief of Staff Dan Karbler.

Karbler is a career missile guy and as the chief of staff of STRATCOM he oversaw America’s nuclear weapons. He told 404 Media that he landed the gig by scaring the hell out of Bigelow and her staff on, appropriately, a Zoom call.

Bigelow wanted to meet Karbler and they set up a big conference call on Zoom. He joined the call but kept his camera off. As people filtered in, Karbler listened and waited. “Here’s how it kind of went down,” Karbler told 404 Media. “There’s a little break in the conversation so I click on my microphone, still leaving the camera off, and I just said: ‘This is the DDO [deputy director of operations] convening a National Event Conference. Classification of this conference TOP SECRET. TK [Talent Keyhole] SI: US STRATCOM, US INDOPACOM, US Northern Command, SecDef Cables, military system to the secretary.”

“SecDef Cables, please bring the secretary of defense in the conference. Mr. Secretary, this is the DDO. Because of the time constraints of this missile attack, recommend we transition immediately from a national event conference to a nuclear decision conference, and we bring the President into the conference. PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center], please bring the President into the conference.”

“And I stopped there and I clicked on my camera and I said, ‘ladies and gentleman, that’s how the worst day in American history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice,’” Karbler said. The theatrics worked and, according to Karbler, he sat next to Bigelow every day on set and helped shape the movie.

House of Dynamite begins and ends with ambiguity. We never learn who fired the nuclear weapon at Chicago. The last few minutes of the film focus on the President looking through retaliation plans. He’s in a helicopter, moments from the nuke hitting Chicago, and looking through plans that would condemn millions of people on the planet to fast and slow deaths. The film ends as he wallows in this decision, we never learn what he chooses.

Karbler said it was intentional. “The ending was ambiguous so the audience would leave with questions,” he said. “The easy out would have been: ‘Well, let’s just have a nuclear detonation over Chicago.’ That’s the easy out. Leaving it like it is, you risk pissing off the audience, frankly, because they want a resolution of some sort, but they don’t get that resolution. So instead they’re going to have to be able to have a discussion.”

In my house, at least, the gambit worked. During the credits my wife and I talked about whether or not we’d launch the nukes ourselves (We’d both hold off) and I explained the unpleasant realities of ground based interceptors.

Karbler, too, said he wouldn’t have launched the nukes. It’s just one nuke, after all. It’s millions of people, sure, but if America launches its nukes in retaliation then there’s a good chance Russia, China, and everyone else might do the same. “Because of the potential of a response provoking a much, much broader response, and something that would not be proportional,” Karbler said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 million people, an entire city, a nuclear attack that hit us, but if we respond back, then you’re going to get into im-proportionality calculus.”

Despite the horrors present on screen in House of Dynamite, Karbler isn’t a nuclear abolitionist. “The genie is out of the bottle, you’re not going to put it back in there,” he said. “So what do we do to ensure our best defense? It seems counterintuitive, you know, the best defense is gonna be a good offense. You’ve gotta be able to have a response back against the adversary.”

Basically, Karbler says we should do what we’re doing now: build a bunch more nukes and make sure your enemies know you’re willing to use them. “Classic deterrence has three parts: impose unacceptable costs on the adversary. Deny the adversary any benefit of attack, read that as our ability to defend ourselves, missile defense, but also have the credible messaging behind it,” he said.

These are weapons that have the power to end the world, weapons we make and pray we never use. But we do keep making them. Almost all the old nuclear treaties between Russia and America are gone. The US is spending trillions to replace old ICBM silos and make new nuclear weapons. After decades of maintaining a relatively small nuclear force, China is building up its own stockpiles.

Trump has promised a Golden Dome to keep America safe from nukes and on Sunday Putin claimed Russia had successfully tested a brand new nuclear-powered cruise missile. The people who track existential threats believe we’re closer to nukes ending the world than at any other time in history.

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

Shooting missiles out of the sky from space could require a constellation of 36,000 satellites.

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2025-10-14 13:01:18

Man Stores AI-Generated Robot Porn on His Government Computer, Loses Access to Nuclear Secrets

A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network. As part of an appeals process in an attempt to get back his security clearance, the man told investigators he felt his bosses spied on him too much and that the interrogation over the porn snafu was akin to the “Spanish Inquisition."

On March 23, 2023, a DOE employee attempted to back up his personal porn collection. His goal was to use the 187,000 images collected over the past 30 years as training data for an AI-image generator. He said he had depression, something he’d struggled with since he was a kid. “During the depressive episode he felt ‘extremely isolated and lonely,’ and started ‘playing’ with tools that made generative images as a coping strategy, including ‘robot pornography,’” according to a DOE report on the incident.
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Fueled by depression, the man meant to back up his collection and create a base for training AI to make better “robot pornography” but he uploaded it to the government computer by accident. He didn’t realize what he’d done until DOE investigators came calling six months later to ask why their servers were now filled with thousands of pornographic pictures.

“The Individual ‘thought that even though his personal drives were connected to [his employer’s], they were somehow partitioned, and his personal material would not contaminate his [government-issued computer],” a DOE report said.

According to the report, the man was using his cellphone to look at AI-generated porn images, but the screen wasn’t big enough so he moved the pictures to his government computer. “He also reported that, since the 1990s, he had maintained a ‘giant compressed file with several directories of pornographic images,’ which he moved to his personal cloud storage drive so he could use them to make generative images,” he said. “It was this directory of sexually explicit images that was ultimately uploaded to his employer’s network when he performed a back-up procedure on March 23, 2023.”

The 187,000 images represented a lifetime’s collection. “He stated that the sexually explicit images were an accumulation of ‘25–30 years worth of pornographic material’ he had collected on his personal computer,” he said. He told a DOE psychologist that he should have realized he’d backed up his personal porn collection to a DOE network but said he “was not thinking multiple steps ahead or considering the consequences at the time because he was so depressed.”

According to the DOE employee, he’s been treated for depression since he was a kid. He has ups and downs, and was in a bad headspace when he accidentally uploaded his entire porn collection. He admitted he violated HR rules, but “did not think it was very wrong,” according to the DOE ruling. He also “asserted that his employer ‘was spying on him a little too much’...and compared the interview with his employer following the discovery of his conduct to ‘the Spanish Inquisition.’”

When someone loses their security clearance with the DOE, they can appeal to get it back. In this case, the appeal led to a lengthy investigation and multiple interviews with various DOE psychologists and the man’s wife. When the DOE makes a ruling on an appeal they publish it publicly online, which is why we know about the man’s private porn stash.

He did not get his clearance back. “The DOE Psychologist opined that the individual's probability of experiencing another depressive episode in the future was ‘very high,’” according to the report.

PSH-24-0142 - In the Matter of Personnel Security Hearing

Access Authorization Not Restored; Guideline I (Psychological Conditions) and Guideline M (Use of Information Technology)

^Energy.gov