Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Lawrence Livermore

  • Nuke U: How the University of California Is Helping to Blow Up the World

    This article was originally published by The Bohemian.

    On my way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory a few years ago, I found it listed in a New Mexico phone book—under “University of California.”

    Since the early 1940s, UC has managed the nation’s top laboratories for designing nuclear bombs. Today, California’s public university system is still immersed in the nuclear weapons business.

    Sixty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the University of California imprimatur is an air freshener for the stench of preparations for global annihilation. Nuclear war planners have been pleased to exploit UC’s vast technical expertise and its image of high-minded academic purpose.

    During most of WWII, scientists labored in strict secrecy at the isolated Los Alamos lab in the New Mexico desert, making possible the first nuclear weaponry. After the atomic bombings of Japan, UC continued to manage Los Alamos. And in 1952, when the government opened a second nuclear bomb generator, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, UC won the prize to manage operations there, too.

    A few years into the 21st century, security scandals caused a shakeup. UC lost its exclusive management slots at Los Alamos and Livermore, but retained major roles at both laboratories.

    In mid-2006, the Los Alamos lab went under a new management structure, widened to also include Bechtel and a couple of other private firms. A year later, a similar team, likewise including UC and Bechtel, won a deal to jointly manage Livermore.

    At Los Alamos, I learned that the new management team was, legally speaking, an LLC, a limited liability corporation. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the concept of “limited liability” for managers of a laboratory that designs nuclear weapons.

    Weird, huh? But not any stranger than having the state of California’s top system of higher education devoted to R&D for designing better ways to blow up the planet.

    Yes, those laboratories do some nifty ecological research and other laudable things. But nuclear weapons remain central to the labs’ mission. And, lofty rhetoric aside, the federal government is pouring billions more dollars into the continuous high-tech pursuit of nuclear weapons “modernization.”

    Last spring, the White House announced plans for this decade that include investing $80 billion “to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex”—in addition to “well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems.”

    In fact, the U.S. government is now on a jag to boost spending for its nuclear arsenal. As the Livermore-based organization Tri-Valley CAREs noted weeks ago, “the 2011 budget request for nuclear weapons is the largest in our nation’s history; bigger than under George W. Bush and a whopping 40 percent higher than the amount spent for nuclear weapons activities on average during the Cold War.”

    Credit where due: the UC-managed laboratories for nuclear bombs have been on the cutting edge of digital advancement. Their record recalls a comment from Martin Luther King Jr., who noted the proliferation of “guided missiles and misguided men.”

    When I interviewed Los Alamos press officer Kevin Roark, he explained that “this laboratory has been at the forefront of computing research and development” from the Manhattan Project days of slide rules and punch cards to the lab’s present-day computers, with one able to do upwards of 100 trillion calculations per second.

    An official website of the University of California boasts that “UC has been involved in the management of these laboratories since their inception—a relationship spanning seven decades—as a public service to the nation.” With a lab on the UC Berkeley campus included in the mix, “the three laboratories have a combined workforce of more than 21,000 and operate on federally financed budgets totaling more than $4 billion.”

    For sure, there’s plenty of money sloshing around to reward the masters—and academic servants—of the nuclear weapons industry. But should the University of California be managing laboratories that design the latest technologies for nuclear holocaust? 

  • Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    We’ve all heard about the inspections that took place in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and programs to make them.  As we know, none were found in Iraq.

    That would not be the case if the inspectors were to come to the University of California.  They would find that programs to research, design, develop, improve, test, and maintain nuclear weapons have been going on under the auspices of this University for more than 60 years and that they are going on today.  They would find that the University of California provides management and oversight to the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  They would find that today these weapons laboratories are engaged in attempting to make new and more usable and reliable nuclear weapons.

    For a fee, the University of California has provided a fig leaf of respectability to the research and development of the most horrendous weapons known to humankind.  It is ironic that our government cannot tolerate the possibility of Iraqi scientists creating such weapons, but at the University of California such a horrid use of science is called “a service to the nation.”

    Two of the weapons developed at Los Alamos were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were relatively small weapons, and they caused the deaths of over 200,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians, by incineration, blast and radiation.  There are no guarantees that the nuclear weapons being developed today under UC auspices will not be used again.  In fact, the odds are that if we continue as we are, they will be used again, by accident or design.

    There are three important reasons the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business.  First, the UC is a great University, and no great University should lend its talents to making weapons capable of destroying cities, civilizations and most life on Earth.  The function of a University is to examine the amazing wonders of our world, to collect and categorize knowledge, to expand the knowledge base, and to pass important knowledge from the past on to new generations.  How can a great University allow itself to be co-opted into becoming complicit in creating weapons of mass destruction?  How can the UC Board of Regents justify this as “a service to the nation”?

    Second, there is no moral ground on which nuclear weapons can rest.  These are weapons of mass murder.  They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians.  They kill indiscriminately – men, women and children.  By continuing to develop and improve these weapons, the United States, economically and militarily the strongest country in the world, is signaling to other nations that these weapons would be useful for them as well.

    Third, the International Court of Justice has stated that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law.  It allowed only one possible exception in which the “very survival of a state” was at stake.  In such a situation, it said that the law was unclear, but under any circumstance the use of nuclear weapons would not be legal if it violated international humanitarian law by failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants or causing unnecessary suffering.  There is virtually no possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in warfare without violating these precepts of international humanitarian law.

    Sir Joseph Rotblat, the only Manhattan Project scientist to leave the project on moral grounds and the 1995 Nobel Peace Laureate, asked: “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such weapons also be illegal, and should not scientists also be culpable?  And if there is doubt even about the legal side, should not the ethical aspect become more compelling?”

    In 1995, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, a senior physicist on the Manhattan Project, issued this plea: “I call on all scientists in all countries to desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter – other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

    If we are ever to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, we must heed the words of words of wise individuals such as professors Rotblat and Bethe.  Even if for personal reasons the scientists and engineers at the nuclear weapons laboratories are unwilling to give up their role in creating and improving nuclear weapons, then at least the larger UC community could send a message to the rest of the country and the world that it is no longer willing to participate in the management and oversight of laboratories making weapons of mass murder.

    The motto of the University of California is Fiat Lux, meaning “let there be light.”  It is unlikely that the light the founders of the University had in mind was the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” from the explosion of a nuclear weapon.  I think they meant the light of knowledge, truth and beauty.  Unfortunately, the University of California’s relationship to the nuclear weapons laboratories, renewed at Los Alamos in 2005, casts a dark shadow over the higher values that a university is charged with passing on to future generations.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  He is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • A Citizens Weapons Inspection

    On November 11, 2002 (Veteran’s Day), a Citizens Weapons Inspection Team and over 200 supporters gathered outside the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a key facility in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Their presence emphasized the need for reciprocity given the recent United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for Iraqi compliance with weapons inspectors.

    A Notice of Intent was served to LLNL Director Michael Anastocio, detailing the lab’s near 50-year history of creating weapons of mass destruction and questioning plans for new weapon development. The letter cites U.S. disregard for sentiments among the international community opposing the proliferation on weapons of mass destruction, specifically the Biological Weapons Convention, International Court of Justice, and Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Student leaders from numerous campuses shared their views. Some of the campuses represented were UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis.

    Similarly, event sponsors and endorsers included Tri-Valley CAREs, Western State Legal Foundation, California Peace Action, Veterans for Peace, Livermore Conversion Project, Global Exchange, Alameda County Peace and Freedom Party, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Circle of Concern, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Grandmothers for Peace.

    Links:

    Notice of Intent.
    URL: http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/citinspletllnl.htm

    UCSB Daily Nexus, Californians Protest Weapon Development.
    URL: http://www.dailynexus.com/news/2002/3910.html

    Contra Costa Times, Who Will Disarm America?
    URL: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/4500387.htm