Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Greg Mello

  • What Would a Nuclear Ban Mean in the U.S.?

    greg_melloA ban treaty would be the natural culmination of the decades of brilliant civil society work that have brought us to this point.

    Such a treaty would be voluntary and non-coercive, yet ever more normative as more countries joined.  It would grow in importance only in the most democratic manner. It would affect nuclear arsenals in an indirect and therefore flexible manner, and only according to the evolving unique security circumstances of each state. It would not conflict with any existing or future disarmament or nonproliferation agreement or treaty, but rather would support them all. It would not add new obligations for NPT non-nuclear weapon states that are not in nuclear security relationships, which is most of the countries in the world. All these states have nothing to lose in a ban — apart from whatever nasty forms of leverage some nuclear weapon states (like the U.S.) and their allies might try to apply.

    A ban would stimulate and empower civil society in many countries, with benefits across humanitarian issues.

    Here in the U.S., a ban treaty would tremendously empower everything we are doing against nuclear weapons. I would like to explain this further because many people think that a ban would have no effect on U.S. policy, given that the U.S. won’t sign it.

    Nuclear policy in the U.S. is not made in a smooth, top-down, confident manner. There are many reversals and problems. The nuclear weapons establishment has many adversaries inside government and outside, not least its own bureaucrats and fat-cat contractors, who struggle to hide the scandals and ongoing fiascos. Key mid-career people are quitting early at facilities we know from job frustration, taking their knowledge and experience with them. Retirements left one plant (Y-12) without knowledge of how to make a critical non-commercial material at industrial scale. At the only U.S. nuclear weapons assembly plant, in Texas, snakes and mice infest one or more key buildings, which date from World War II. Rain comes through the roofs and dust through the doors. In Oak Ridge, huge pieces of concrete have fallen from ceilings and deep cracks have appeared in a structural beam in a key building. All this infrastructure may, or may not be, fully replaced. It is contested in many cases, difficult, and expensive.

    At Los Alamos, the main plutonium facility has been largely shut down for almost three years because of inadequate safety and staffing. Approximately seven attempts have been made since 1989 to construct a new factory complex for producing plutonium warhead cores — all have failed.  It might just be that nuclear weapons production, in the final analysis, is not compatible with today’s safety and environmental expectations and laws. Transmission of nuclear weapons ideology and knowledge under these conditions is a difficult challenge.

    A growing ban would reach deep into the human conscience, affecting everything, including career decisions. It would affect corporate investments as well as congressional enthusiasm for the industry. I have spoken with nuclear weapons CEOs who know it is a “sunset” field with only tenuous support in the broader  Pentagon, despite all the nuclear cheer-leading we see. Modernization of the whole nuclear arsenal is very likely unaffordable, even assuming current economic conditions hold (they won’t).

    A ban would also affect the funding, aims, and structure of the U.S. nonprofit universe and think-tank “ecosystem,” as well as media interest and coverage.

    Beyond all this, I believe a ban would also help decrease popular support in the U.S. for war and war expenditures in general. Why? There is a tremendous war-weariness in the U.S., right alongside our (real, but also orchestrated) militarism. A growing ban on nuclear weapons would be a powerful signal to political candidates and organizations that it is politically permissible to turn away from militarism somewhat, that there is something wrong with the levels of destruction this country has amassed and brandished so wildly and with such deadly and chaotic effects. Ordinary people here in the U.S. are seeing greater and greater austerity and precarity. They work extremely hard and have less and less to show for it. Polls (decades of them) show the public has never really supported the scale of nuclear armaments we have. One 1990s poll disclosed that most Americans think we have more than ten times fewer warheads than we actually do, more like the U.K., France, and China! Our economy is in bad shape and our infrastructure is visibly declining, sometimes with fatal results. A ban could help this benighted country recognize its folly, at least to some degree. It would be a wake-up call signalling that widely-held U.S. assumptions about our place in the world might need just a teensy bit of adjustment.

    I hope this helps fill in the picture somewhat for those far away who may not see why a ban would be powerful here in the U.S.

    The case for such a simple, totally flexible, and powerful treaty, with relatively low diplomatic cost for most states, is to our eyes unassailable.

  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki: What Now?

    This article was originally published by the Santa Fe New Mexican.

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago marked a turning point in U.S. history from which this country never recovered.

    Many wartime leaders had warned against using the bomb, and after the war the Air Force Strategic Bombing Survey found it was of no material aid in ending the war.

    But despite or because of the horror and repressed guilt, we clung to it. We embraced a policy of threatened annihilation as a core principle of policy. Had we rejected the bomb, as many prestigious voices argued, postwar U.S. development would have been quite different. With the bomb in our pocket, we did not become a people of justice and equality, or a social democracy.

    Chris Hedges quotes D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted.”

    I would like to tell Hiroshima survivors that we have changed, but we have not. America is as brutal and violent as ever, at home and abroad. Recently, President Barack Obama bragged about bombing seven countries.

    E.L. Doctorow described our postwar devolution: “The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our diplomacy. Next it became our economy.
    Now it’s become our culture. We’ve become the people of the bomb.”

    When Ivan quit we became even more of an empire. There was nothing holding us back — or so it seemed. We became the Unipower, the Indispensable Nation. Just ask us.

    In 1945 as today, we sought and still seek to control as much of the world’s resources as possible, not just to feed our grotesque consumerism but also to satisfy our controlling oligarchs, while denying those declining resources to others.

    The 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine spells it out: “Our first objective is to … prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would … be sufficient to generate global power.” Since the Russian Federation is such a region all by itself, this is a formula for destabilization and war, both of which are ongoing projects. They are not going well.

    Despite, or because of, all our material and moral sacrifices, the only “victory” in 70 years for America’s vast, self-serving nuclear-military complex has been the destruction of our own democracy. As a result, our children’s prospects are nothing short of abysmal.

    Obama has budgeted a trillion dollars to operate and upgrade each and every warhead, bomb and delivery system we have, a vast expense that is itself dwarfed by the rest of our gargantuan military. But there is no plan to wean the U.S. from oil and gas, no plan to address inequality and poverty, no serious plan to forestall climate change.

    And no disarmament. Seventy years on from Hiroshima, there are far more nuclear weapons in the world than when the peace movement started in earnest in the aftermath of the disastrous 1954 Castle Bravo test in the Marshall Islands.

    Today’s U.S. stockpile of 7,100 warheads range in yield up to 80 times the Hiroshima bomb, with most in a middle range of 100 to 400 kilotons, sufficient to incinerate a large city. Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that detonation of just 2 percent of U.S. warheads alone over cities would result in global nuclear darkness and famine, civilizational collapse and the extinction of many higher life-forms and quite possibly humanity itself.

    Movements for nuclear disarmament have not been successful. Why?
    Generally citizens, on every issue, want to believe they can change history with a few hours of activist entertainment. We need instead the opposite: full-time committed organizers and revolutionaries, supported by local communities. We are well past the point where mere reform can save the country, the climate or the planet. This is the path of maturity and fulfillment today. Accept no substitutes.

    Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit policy think-tank and lobbying organization. His formal education is in engineering, environmental sciences and regional planning.

  • Obama Boosts Nukes

    This article was originally published by Foreign Policy In Focus.

    On February 1,
    the Obama administration delivered a budget request calling for a full
    10 percent increase in nuclear weapons spending next year, to be
    followed by further increases in subsequent years.    

    These increases, if enacted, would bring the recent six-year period
    of flat and declining nuclear weapons budgets to an abrupt end. Not
    since 2005 has Congress approved such a large nuclear weapons
    budget. Seeing Obama’s request Linton Brooks, who ran the National
    Nuclear Security Administration for President Bush from 2003 to 2007,
    remarked to Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor, “I would’ve killed for this kind of budget.”

    Largest Since Manhattan Project

    Obama’s request includes more than twice last year’s funding for a
    $5 billion upgrade to plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production
    facilities at Los Alamos. If the budget request passes intact, Los
    Alamos would see a 22 percent budget increase in a single year, its
    biggest since the Manhattan Project. 

    The request proposes major upgrades to certain bombs as well as the
    design, and ultimately production, of a new ballistic missile
    warhead. Warhead programs are increased almost across the board, with
    the notable exception of dismantlement, which is set to decline
    dramatically. A continued scientific push to develop simulations and
    experiments to partially replace nuclear testing is evident. 

    All these initiatives and others are embedded in an overall military
    budget bigger than any since the 1940s that includes renewed funding
    for the development of advanced delivery vehicles, cruise missiles, and
    plenty of money for nuclear deployments. 

    Linked to START

    This proposed “surge” responds to a December 2009 request
    from Senate Republicans (plus Lieberman) for significant increases in
    nuclear weapons spending. Such increases, these senators said, were necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) to obtain their ratification votes for a follow-on to the START treaty (which expired in December). 

    As of this writing the new treaty remains under negotiation.
    Ratification of any treaty requires 67 votes, a much higher hurdle than
    the 60 needed to break a filibuster. As the 2010 campaign season begins
    in earnest, it remains to be seen if this expansive nuclear spending
    package is anywhere near hawkish enough to buy the necessary votes. 

    Also, key politicians of both parties have pork-barrel interests in
    the nuclear weapons complex, interests not confined by the boundaries
    of their districts and states. In today’s Congress, money and influence
    flow freely across these lines. The contracts at stake are big by any
    standard. Nuclear weapons complex contractors are among the nation’s largest recipients of contract dollars. So far in FY 2010, seven of the top 10 U.S. contractors are nuclear weapons site management contractors or partners.  

    For their part, most Democrats assume — despite a small mountain of
    evidence otherwise — that a nuclear weapons spending surge is genuinely
    needed. Some of the administration officials behind this surge have
    been retained from the Bush administration. Others, like Undersecretary
    of State Ellen Tauscher, are Democratic hawks. There are no doves. 

    Squared with Prague?

    This increase in spending on the nuclear complex does not contradict
    Obama’s public statements, for example in Prague in April 2009, that he
    would “seek” nuclear disarmament. In contrast to Picasso’s famous
    dictum (“Others seek, I find”), Obama has said only that he would
    “seek” disarmament. Despite the powers theoretically available to him
    as commander-in-chief, which encompass every aspect of nuclear
    deployment and procurement, Obama has said nothing about finding disarmament. 

    In many ways the President is building on the rhetorical foundation
    laid in January 2007 by the so-called “Four Horsemen” — George Schultz,
    Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn — who with 16 others laid out their rationale
    for a “world free of nuclear weapons.” These men did not, either in
    their original op-ed or in their subsequent ones, actually advocate any
    but the vaguest steps toward actual disarmament. 

    What they offered instead was aspirational rhetoric that was
    all-too-uncritically received in most circles. Subsequently, three of
    the four supported the Bush administration’s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) or its equivalent, and Perry co-convened an influential nuclear policy report that called for funding increases, new construction, and replacement warheads. Their op-ed
    last month calling for a big increase in nuclear weapons spending
    brought these rhetorical contradictions sharply into view. Nuclear
    disarmament, even as an aspiration, was missing.

    No New Nukes?

    Administration spokespersons have been quick to say there are no
    “new” warheads under consideration. That is because the word “new” can
    simply never be used in connection with warheads, no matter how many
    changes are involved. Last year’s Defense Authorization Act, authored
    by then-congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Livermore), builds a spectrum
    of potential innovation into the structure of the “Stockpile
    Management” program.

    Last year, the administration requested and received a great deal of
    money for what amounts to a new bomb, mostly for European deployment,
    without the embarrassment of talking about a “new” bomb like George
    Bush did. George Orwell would be proud. 

    These linguistic innovations go back to 1996, when weapons
    administrators and contractors sought a politically palatable path to
    warhead innovation. At that time, Clinton administration bureaucrats
    consciously chose to emphasize themes of “replacement” and
    “stewardship” in describing programs they knew (and privately said at
    the time) would result in new warheads. As attendees at one 1996
    meeting said,
    even “the use of the word ‘warhead’ may not be acceptable.” Linguistic
    cleansing paved the way for this month’s proposed spending surge. 

    Next Step: Congress

    Will Congress, especially the Democratic members of Congress, fund
    these increases? In part the answer depends on how seriously they take
    the several converging crises facing the country and the planet, and
    how seriously they address populist anger about the economy, especially
    in relation to their own reelection prospects. 

    In many ways the proposed nuclear weapons budget, and the defense
    budget overall, can be seen as bold raids on a diminishing pool of
    resources, as well as very real commitments to fading imperial
    pretensions. Nuclear weapons compete directly with the renewable energy
    and conservation jobs funded in the Energy and Water funding bills.  

    Congress therefore has to decide, and citizens have to help them
    decide, between a new generation of nuclear weapons and the factories
    to make them or the greener alternative of energy and climate security
    and the better economic prospects that would ensue.

    Nuclear weapons are an especially dangerous investment for a
    declining hegemon.  The sooner we choose a nuclear weapons path
    involving less and less money, not more and more, the sooner we will be
    able to wake from the hubris and pervasive violence currently
    destroying us.