Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace activism

  • Why Today’s Peace Activists Should Not Be Discouraged: An Example from 1958

    Originally published on History News Network

    After nearly five years of bloody, costly war in Iraq, with no end in sight, many peace activists feel discouraged. Protest against the war and the rise of antiwar public opinion seem to have had little effect upon government policy.

    But, in fact, it is too early to say. Who really knows what impact peace activism and widespread peace sentiment have had in the past five years or will have in the near future? Certainly not historians, who will spend decades pulling together such information from once secret government records and after-the-fact interviews.

    What historians can do, of course, is assess the impact of popular protest on events in the more distant past. And here the record provides numerous intriguing illustrations of the power of protest.

    One example along these lines occurred fifty years ago, in 1958, when the Soviet and U.S. governments stopped their nuclear explosions and commenced negotiations for a nuclear test ban treaty.

    Ever since the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, in July 1945, the great powers had been engaged in a deadly race to develop, test, and deploy what they considered the ultimate weapon, the final guarantee of their “national security.” The United States, of course, had the lead, and used this with devastating effect upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1949, the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons was cracked by the Soviet Union. In 1952, the British also entered the nuclear club. As the nuclear arms race accelerated, all three powers worked on producing a hydrogen bomb–a weapon with a thousand times the destructive power of the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. Within a short time, all of them were testing H-bombs for their rapidly-growing nuclear arsenals.

    The nuclear tests–which, by late 1958, numbered at least 190 (125 by the United States, 44 by the Soviet Union, and 21 by Britain)–were conducted mostly in the atmosphere and, in these cases, were often quite dramatic. Enormous explosions rent the earth, sending vast mushroom clouds aloft that scattered radioactive debris (fallout) around the globe. The H-bomb test of March 1, 1954, for example–which the U.S. government conducted at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a U.N. trust territory in the Pacific—was so powerful that it overran the danger zone of 50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England). Generating vast quantities of radioactive fallout that landed on inhabited islands and fishermen outside this zone, it forced the evacuation of U.S. weather station personnel and Marshall Islanders (many of whom subsequently suffered a heavy incidence of radiation-linked illnesses, including cancer and leukemia). In addition, the Bikini test overtook a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, which received a heavy dose of radioactive ash that sickened the crew and, eventually, killed one of its members.

    Recognizing that these nuclear tests were not only paving the way for mass destruction in the future, but were already beginning to generate sickness and death, large numbers of people around the world began to resist. Prominent intellectuals, such Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, issued public appeals to halt nuclear testing. Pacifists sailed protest vessels into nuclear test zones in an attempt to disrupt planned weapons explosions. Citizens’ antinuclear organizations sprang up, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE) in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, and dozens of others in assorted nations. In the United States, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made a halt to nuclear testing a key part of his campaign. Antinuclear pressures even developed within Communist dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, top scientists, led by Andrei Sakharov, appealed to Soviet leaders to halt nuclear tests.

    Polls during 1957 and 1958 in nations around the globe reported strong public opposition to nuclear testing. In the United States, 63 percent of respondents favored a nuclear test ban; in Japan, 89 percent supported a worldwide ban on the testing and manufacture of nuclear weapons; in Britain, 76 percent backed an agreement to end nuclear tests; and in India (with the survey sample limited to New Delhi), 90 percent thought the United States should unilaterally halt its nuclear tests. In late 1957, pollsters reported that the proportion of the population viewing H-bomb testing as harmful to future generations stood at 64 percent in West Germany, 76 percent in Norway, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in the Netherlands, 60 percent in Belgium, 73 percent in France, 67 percent in Austria, and 55 percent in Brazil.

    Within the ranks of the U.S. government, this public aversion to nuclear testing was regarded as bad news, indeed. The Eisenhower administration was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the central component of its national security strategy. Thus, halting nuclear testing was viewed as disastrous. In early 1956, Lewis Strauss–the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the top figure in setting the administration’s nuclear weapons policy–insisted: “This nonsense about ceasing tests (that is tantamount to saying ceasing the development) of our nuclear weapons plays into the hands of the Soviets.” The United States, he told Eisenhower, should hold nuclear tests “whenever an idea has been developed which is ready for test.”

    And yet, other administration officials felt hard-pressed by the force of public opinion. In a memo written in June 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted that, although the United States needed a nuclear arsenal, “the frightful destructiveness of modern weapons creates an instinctive abhorrence to them.” Indeed, there existed “a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our forfeiting the good will of our allies and the support of a large part of our own people.” Consequently, “we must . . . propose or support some plan for the limitation of armaments.”

    But Dulles equivocated over specific plans, and the administration increasingly felt the heat. In September 1956, with Stevenson’s call for an end to nuclear testing now part of the presidential election campaign, Eisenhower ordered an administrative study of a test ban, citing “the rising concern of people everywhere over the effect of radiation from tests, their reaction each time a test was reported, and their extreme nervousness over the prospective consequences of nuclear war.” Given opposition from other officials, this study, too, went nowhere. Even so, Eisenhower remained gravely concerned about the unpopularity of nuclear testing. In a meeting with Edward Teller and other nuclear weapons enthusiasts in June 1957, the president told them that “we are . . . up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation,” and “the United States could [not] permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’ ” There was not only “the question of world opinion . . . but an actual division of American opinion . . . as to the harmful effects of testing.”

    By early 1958, the outside pressures were becoming so powerful that Dulles began a campaign to halt U.S. nuclear tests unilaterally. Having learned, through the CIA, that the Soviet government was about to announce a unilateral suspension of its tests, he called together top administration officials on March 23 and 24 and proposed that Eisenhower issue a statement saying that, after the U.S. government completed its nuclear test series that year, there would be no further U.S. nuclear testing. “It would make a great diplomatic and propaganda sensation to the advantage of the United States,” Dulles explained, and “I feel desperately the need for some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world opinion.” But Strauss and Defense Department officials fought back ferociously, while Eisenhower, typically, remained indecisive. Testing was “not evil,” the president opined, “but the fact is that people have been brought to believe that it is.” What should be done in these circumstances? Nothing, it seemed. Eisenhower remained unwilling to challenge the nuclear hawks in his administration.

    However, after March 31, 1958, when the Soviet government announced its unilateral testing moratorium, the U.S. hard line could no longer be sustained. With the Soviet halt to nuclear testing, recalled one U.S. arms control official, “the Russians boxed us in.” On April 30, Dulles reported that an advisory committee on nuclear testing that he had convened had concluded that, if U.S. nuclear testing continued, “the slight military gains” would “be outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the moral isolation of the United States.” The following morning, Eisenhower telephoned Dulles and expressed his agreement.

    Thereafter, the president held steady. Meeting on August 12 with Teller and other officials, he reacted skeptically to their enthusiastic reports about recent weapons tests. “The new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful,” he observed, but “they are not . . . as powerful as is world opinion today in obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy. Ten days later, after a showdown with the Defense Department and the AEC, Eisenhower publicly announced that, as of October 31, the United States would suspend nuclear testing and begin negotiations for a test ban treaty.

    As a result, U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear explosions came to a halt in the fall of 1958. Although the French government conducted its first nuclear tests in early 1960 and the three earlier nuclear powers resumed nuclear testing in late 1961, these actions proved to be the last gasps of the nuclear hawks before the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963–a measure resulting from years of public protest against nuclear testing. Against this backdrop, the 1958 victory for the peace movement and public opinion should be regarded as an important break in the nuclear arms race and in the Cold War.

    Thus, if peace activists feel discouraged today by the continuation of the war in Iraq, they might well take heart at the example of their predecessors, who recognized that making changes in powerful institutions requires great perseverance. They might also consider the consequences of doing nothing. As the great abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1857: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.

  • Notes From The Road

    Recently, I spent some time in northern California. The trip was both rewarding and productive. The main reasons for the visit were to speak at the Hands Around Livermore Lab Rally and March, strategize actions for the upcoming year with fellow members of the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California, and co-facilitate a workshop introducing the UC Nuclear Free Campaign at the University of California Student Association (UCSA) Congress.

    Livermore

    On Sunday, August 10th, Hands Around the Lab: Rally and March drew over 1,000 people to a key facility in the US nuclear weapons complex, UC-managed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California. The day’s agenda included a gathering at William Payne Park adjacent to LLNL and culminated in participants joining of hands encircling the lab. The event was one of the many organized to commemorate the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and mobilize citizens toward a nuclear weapons free world. KPFA’s Miguel Gavilan Molina served as master of ceremony, orchestrating a series of passionate of musicians and speakers. I used my allotted microphone time to emphasize the power of young people in the struggle to protect civil rights and work for peace. Moving from the theoretical to practical, I informed listeners of UC student efforts to get their university out of nuclear weapons business. Slightly revising the day’s schedule, I asked recent UC Santa Cruz grad, Darwin BondGraham, to share his thoughts on the subject. His comments framed the nuclear issue within the larger trend of the increasing militarization of colleges and universities. We ended by inviting people to visit our small information table and/or join us for our planning meeting the following day. There was an excellent line-up of speakers that followed. Unfortunately, I only heard bits and pieces of their comments as I talked with various people while walking through the crowd back to our information table.
    Berkeley

    The following day, members of the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California met to brainstorm and reach consensus around actions to advance the UC Nuclear Free Campaign during the 2003-2004 school year. Undergraduate and graduate students from Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz contributed to the dialogue as well as representatives of Tri-Valley CAREs and Western States Legal Foundation. I spoke on behalf of the Foundation and committed myself to reporting back to UCSB students who could not attend due to prior commitments. Given its history of student and community activism, UC Berkeley was a great place to meet. If you are interested in the notes from this brainstorming session, please write me at youth@napf.org.
    Sacramento

    Prior to our workshop at the University of California Student Association (UCSA) Congress, three of us from the Coalition joined UCSA at their action opposing Proposition 54, otherwise known as The Racial Privacy Initiative. Introduced by UC Regent Ward Connerly, the misleading October ballot measure would effectively restrict efforts to resolve societal problems that have racial implications, such as hate crimes and discrimination, health care and disease treatment, and education access and achievement. The action was held at Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute based in Sacramento. Connerly is the same Regent who the San Francisco Chronicle quoted as saying that UC will not bid to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory if the Department of Energy chose to implement an open competition, which was announced in April. Furthermore, common ground between anti-racism and anti-nuclear weapons movements is evident in that people of color suffer disproportionately from both the testing of nuclear weapons and storage of toxic waste from weapons development and nuclear energy production.
    Davis

    Later in the day, we began our workshop and dialogue, introducing about 20 undergraduate, graduate, and professional student leaders from UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCSD, and UCR to the UC Nuclear Free Campaign. The Coalition had a strong showing of co-facilitators present, representing 3 campuses and 2 community organizations. There was a good diversity of viewpoints and experiences: one student had visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum as a high school student, another’s parents worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, another declared that nuclear weapons are going to be used in the near future, and another was a member of the Berkley Associated Students that passed a resolution calling for UC to get out of the nuclear weapons business. We provided participants with an overview of US nuclear weapons policy, a description of the history and future plans of our Coalition, a highly-interactive question and answer period, and hand-outs, particularly One Bomb, Two Bomb, Gold Bomb, Blue Bomb: The Scholastic Adventures of Robbie D. Bomb, written and designed by Emily Hell and Darwin BondGraham. Newcomer Coalition member, Brian Sparks came through with the question of the day: “So what are we going to do?” Ultimately, we had to bring our workshop to a close due to time constraints, and Michael Cox volunteered to explore answers to Brian’s question throughout the remaining 3 days of the Congress. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute our piece to the UCSA Congress in part because UCSA is recognized by the UC Administration, UC Board of Regents, California Legislature, the California Governor’s Office and numerous state and federal agencies as the official voice of the over 180,000 UC Students, but more so as active citizens seeking alternatives and solutions to current conditions.
    However before we left UC Davis, we visited the UC Davis physics department for an impromptu weapons inspection. We were lucky to meet Professor Wendell Potter amidst the dust of summer construction and renovation. He spoke with the five of us for about 30 minutes about the integrity of university researchers, the often fine line between defense and civilian applications, and love of learning. He understood why we chose the physics department for our inspection, but cautioned us not to overlook the biology department. As you may know, UC Davis is the proposed site for a $200 million infectious disease research facility laboratory that would work with potentially lethal viruses and bacteria. The exchange with Professor Potter was an unexpected highlight of the trip.
    It was great solidifying established contacts and meeting new allies! I thank all of you whose curiosity and generosity made my week enjoyable.

  • Honoring the Legacy of Cesar E. Chavez

    Unveiled in September 2002, a commemorative stamp honoring the legacy of Cesar E. Chavez was made available for purchase recently. The stamp features rows of lush green farm land in the background and the smiling side-profile of the legendary labor organizer and nonviolence practitioner in the foreground. Cesar’s motto of “si se puede” (it can be done) speaks to all of us who face obstacles, set backs, and/or doubts. His deeds set a shining example of overcoming odds, helping others, and affirming life. It is fitting to remember him now with April 23rd, 2003 being the 10th anniversary of his passing.

    Paul Chavez, Chairman of the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation, shared these thoughts at the unveiling ceremony, “My father’s teachings of compassion, justice and dignity still ring true almost a decade after his passing. The Cesar E. Chavez commemorative stamp is a powerful vehicle to introduce a new generation of Americans to his vital legacy, teaching them that through determination and hard work they can improve their own lives and communities.”

    It is not enough to remember him though. We must continue his work. For example, the vision and mission of the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation is to maximize human potential to improve communities by preserving, promoting and applying the legacy and universal values of civil rights leader Cesar E. Chavez. Their youth outreach programs emphasize service-learning, which combines community service and academic coursework to address needs in your immediate community. Visit their website for resources to organize your own event honoring Cesar Chavez: http://www.cesarechavezfoundation.org/.

    Read an essay about Cesar Chavez written for our Peace Heroes Essay Contest: https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/peaceheroes/cesar_chavez.htm. Do something!

  • Regrouping After the War: NAPF Peace Education Coordinator Leah Wells Addresses the Campus Antiwar Network

    Last night I spoke with Kathy Kelly, who just returned from Iraq the day before as a steady member of the Iraq Peace Team, about her experiences there over the past few months, and where she sees the movement headed here in the United States. She and I spoke about an article she wrote for the Electronic Iraq website, an heartwrecking story about a mutual good friend of ours in Iraq. Kathy decided to leave Iraq after her conversation with our friend and driver, Sattar, who is quite possibly the kindest person I have ever met. Reading her account of his ordealduring the U.S.-led invasion (http://electroniciraq.net/news/692.shtml) made me shudder to think what my friend had endured over the past month.

    Squeamish by nature, Sattar had spent weeks working in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in a hospital, volunteering for overworked, overstretched doctors, nurses and hospital staff. He did everything from moving patients to inserting IV needles.

    Another member of the Iraq Peace Team, Cathy Breen mentioned that it will probably be easier to transport Americans across the Iraqi border now. He said, “You’re right. This is your country now.”

    Currently in Iraq, the American military, the American government and American corporate interests all control nearly every facet of life forthe Iraqis. Americans have almost single-handedly destroyed the country, and now want to profit from rebuilding it. UNICEF takes grant money from USAID, and the contractors must go through the U.S. government for permission to rebuild, renovate or rehabilitate any sector of Iraqi society. In essence, we control everything.

    And what is the peace movement to do? Before and during the war, bright ideas were a dime a dozen for stopping the invasion. Everyone had a spin on what would work best. And now, we are left at an uncomfortable juncture. We did not stop the war, and we have to figure out what to do now.

    It seems that American interests from the military to the government to the corporations to even the peace movement have emerging ways of telling Iraqis how things should be in their country now.

    What if we paused a moment, took a deep breath, and gave the Iraqis some space to allow them themselves to discern what would be best for them. We should give ordinary Iraqis some time to take stock of their lives and make decisions of their own before deciding that we, too, even the well-intentioned peace movement, have control over the direction oftheir lives. We should also encourage the United Nations and its international bodies to play an appropriate role in the reconstruction of Iraq as well as in global disarmament and peacekeeping.

    Rather than focusing on the external, on what is going on in Iraq, we should be focusing internally on what is going on socially and politically in our own cities and states. As citizens of the United States, what do we have the most authority over? Our country and our lives.

    Recently I spent some time at the Earthsong community near Na’alehu, Hawaii. I had gone there to finish writing and organizing a book on peace education that I began working on in mid-2001. The entire Earthsong community is sustainable. The women staying there urinate in the yard and use compost toilets for solid waste. All buildings are powered by solar energy, and the copious garden space provides lush abundance of fruits, vegetables and grains. It was quite a rude awakening for me; I initially whined for the nearest Hilton. I am not accustomed to this lifestyle and found it rather disorienting.

    Staying at Earthsong ended up being the most valuable lesson in peace education for me. I got my own radical, revolutionary course in peace education and ustainability in confronting the crucial inner peacework that makes the outer peacework possible. Since the war started, I havefelt ornery, angry, useless, agitated, sullen and just about every emotion in the range between frustration and rage. In a word, I have been unbalanced.

    Perhaps this is a familiar experience? Has anyone ditched family or friends in the past two months in order to do “the work” for preventing, opposing or ending the war? Has anyone been rundown, sick or suffered poor nutrition? Has anyone been in at least one major fight? Anyone missed sleep?

    What if we realized that our inner lives all the aforementioned questions actually mirrored all the mess, craziness and dysfunction ofthe external world, i.e. everything we’re working against. What if allthat we oppose and disavow actually exists right inside of us, and in order to effectively confront the greater evils of the world, we have to begin in our own space and consciousness?

    Rather than saying, “George W. Bush is hateful, ignorant and greedy,” we could turn the statement around and examine where each of us individually is hateful, ignorant and greedy.We need to acknowledge and honor our own lives and processes, being fully congruent in our thoughts and actions. Integrity means that we don’t put on the charade of being a happy, cheerful peacemaker out in the world and then return home grumbly and gnarly spreading peace in the world and hate in our homes.

    We should be mindful of the power of our thoughts, words and actions. We need to be aware of ourselves and of the need to keep balance and not let ignorance govern our behavior. And we should be especially concerned about our greediness, our over-consumptive lives and mindless wasteful practices. How can we begin to model what we would like to see happen in the world on a wider scale if we are not putting the “reduce, reuse, recycle” principle into practice. Living sustainably, calling for peace and justice in our own homes and neighborhoods is making the first step. Founder of the Catholic Worker communities, Dorothy Day once said that those who have more thanthey need are stealing from the poor.

    Yet, as I recall my experience in Hawaii, I heard many people who are living in beautiful conditions say that they could never return back tothe mainland after experiencing the liberation of living sustainably. While it’s important for them to live their truth, it makes me concerned for the areas where more people need to hear the message of peace through self-inquiry, mutual causality rather than blame and sustainable living practices.

    In general, there’s an overabundance of activists and “progressives” living in well-informed, cushioned, safe communities, especially in urban hubs. A whole country of consumption, of Wal-Marts and Rite-Aids, of CostCo’s and Big Lots, needs to be exposed to the reality that not onlyoil is a precious resource, but arable land, access to clean water and fresh air are as well. More people with experience in sustainable living need to fan out and bring these once-lost-now-regained practices to places where people are living most unsustainably. People in Colorado, in Southern California, in the Bible Belt, the Deep South and especially Texas need to hear about compost, about community garden space and about practices that make individuals and the planet healthier.

    A redefining moment for the peace movement

    As a group, the antiwar mobilization did not stop the invasion of Iraq,but we certainly made it much more costly on a political level, both nationally and internationally. Our challenge now is to transform the momentum from opposing this war to addressing concerns in our country, drawing attention to our ailing domestic economy, to the obliterated education budgets in so many states, and to the welfare of our citizens young, old, differently-abled and veterans.

    We need to be looking at the roots of what made this war possible.We need to examine why the military is such an attractive option for young people, a stable, well-funded and respectable institution that provides an alternative to the fact that upon graduation, many students have no viable skills or direction in an ever-shrinking job market. Because there is no living wage in our country, we need to be fully cooperating with the labor movement to ensure that jobs pay well enough and utilize students’ skills and talents that they are not subsumed into the ranks of the military simply to pay for school or have some boundaries which should have been set and supported by their home communities.We need to examine why education is bearing the brunt of budget cuts. A systematically undereducated country is a malleable, gullible country. An ignorant population is easily swayed by propaganda and fear, troublingly influenced not by books and words but by images and sounds. Having given up much of our critical thinking responsibility to powerful elected or appointed decision-makers or their corporate media mouthpieces, many American citizens cannot tell truth from fiction and are paralyzed in the chasm between.

    We need to examine why we do not have people in office who represent people like us, people who have our interests at heart. By and large, we do not have people in office who represent us because by and large, we are not running for office! One-third of the elections in our country go uncontested every year, a free and natural platform in our democratic process that we do not take advantage of. To some extent, people who want to create change that will bring about balance and peace to the world must learn to play the political game and learn how, in our own integrity, we can play to win. A few months ago, I was moved by a speech by Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder who told the UC Santa Barbara audience that we need to run candidates for office who will win. We laud candidates like Kucinich, Wellstone and Ted Kennedy but are reluctant to run for public office and attempt to make an impact like they have.

    (Michael Moore ran for the School Board during his Senior year of high school, got elected and eventually played a role in the Principal’s early resignation.)

    The Weapons Industry: Getting to the roots of the problem

    The technology used to wage the war, from start to finish, were researched, developed and built here in the United States. Our number one moneymaking export is weapons. The United States supplies nearly three-fourths of the weapons used in conflicts going on worldwide. The industry which produces weapons of mass destruction has its home in the United States.

    The nuclear weapons industry is maintained and overseen by the University of California Regents who have had exclusive contracts with the United States Department of Energy for the past fifty years. The UC Nuclear Free campaign, a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, seeks to shed light on the UC’s complicity in the research, development, manufacturing and testing of nuclear weapons since their inception. It is immoral and inappropriate that universities who are charged with intellectual growth are also the sole responsible parties for producing weapons of mass destruction.

    Yet these are not faceless entities. There are real people, real graduate students and real professors, real administrators with real families who are just doing their jobs, the same as the employees at Boeing, Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglas and TRW. They are corporations who employ people not in a void but rather in a context, in their contexts as a professor needing tenure, as a graduate student needing funding, as a secretary needing stability and health insurance which exist for their livelihood.

    We cannot begin to transform, or even shut down, the weapons manufacturing industries without directly impacting people who work there and who do not set the policies.

    It’s conventional to hammer on the top of the power triangle, exposing the CEO’s, the shady business practices and the sweetheart deals for their blatant war profiteering. CorpWatch is a crucial instrument in this endeavor.

    It’s radical to get to the base of the power triangle, the workers in their average lives, and start organizing and influencing the employees!

    Oil and Power

    One of the primary reasons among many that this invasion took place, to no one’s surprise, is oil. Evidenced by the contracts secured by Halliburton and Bechtel, the government and corporate insiders positioned themselves to make a killing, so to speak, on their oil-based opportunities.In revising our critique of the motivations of the Bush administration, we should also take a look at how we depend on their nouveau conquistador policies. How many of us drove here to this gathering? Flew here? Carpooled? Rode bicycles? Used biodiesel? Used public transportation? We should be especially observant of our own hypocrisyand our dependence on petroleum products, not only on fuel but on plastics as well.

    Natural resources like oil are at the heart of global conflicts. Water and coastline space are already limited resources as the ocean levels rise and access to clean water is more scarce. These issues certainly will float to the surface in the next few years.

    The war was not only about oil, though. Regional control and domination served as powerful motivators for this conflict as well, and the increasing connections between Iraq and the struggle for a free Palestine cannot be overlooked. Already interconnected, another layer of overlap between these places is the context of occupation: Palestine by Israel,and Iraq by the United States.

    What to do about Iraq?

    With respect to Iraq itself, we have our work cut out for us. First and most importantly, the sanctions regime which our State Department said would remain in place “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power or until the end of time” are still punishing the people of Iraq. What use do economic sanctions serve, and is there a bigger global lesson to be learned fromthe devastating effects that have killed more than a million and a halfpeople in Iraq since 1990? The issue of the sanctions, contrary to some opinions, is not obsolete. The recalcitrant sanctions are most relevant now, when the goalpost established by the State Department has been reached.

    In many of the news reports that I have read recently, especially through independent media, the common sentiment of the Iraqi people is tepid graciousness for their “liberation” and scalding desire for the rapid exit of U.S. presence in their country. The Iraqi people want the United States out of their country. They are furious that U.S. soldiers and tanks protected the Ministry of Oil and let looters and ransackers destroy food stocks, precious artifacts and civilian infrastructure. Just recently a group of Iraqi antiwar, anti-occupation protesters were killed by our military for demonstrating. Is this the free and democratic Iraq the Bush administration envisioned? Apparently not.

    As I said before, we should not give up on the United Nations as a powerful intermediary in creating and maintaining peace in the Middle East, and we should not give up on ourselves. After the first Gulf War, much of the peace movement felt frustration and chagrin for the lack ofsuccess in stopping the war, and effectively went to sleep on the issue until 1996 when many realized that the war had not ended. No-Fly-Zones and sanctions were a debilitating after-war presence.

    At the termination of the flagrant bomb-dropping and battlefield conflict in Iraq, we have some very strong leverage points as a movement. We can keep the momentum by working on what’s doable, like focusing internally on our own political pressure points and singling out people from our communities who helped to orchestrate the war and are complicit in maintaining the occupation of Iraq.

    For example, the University of California students present at the gathering today have a powerful ally in the Middle East. Her name is Barbara Bodine, and she is the UC Alumni Regent and has been active in the UC Santa Barbara community. As a regent, she has influence over the UC’s oversight of the nuclear weapons program as well as being one of the central administrators in Iraq under newly-appointed Iraqi interim leader Jay Garner. The UC students are her constituents, and we should be able to find some important things to say to her and to lobby for. Where are the places where we can apply pressure here? The options range from importing technology necessary to determine if depleted uranium is present in the body, to ensuring that student exchanges are able to take place.

    The young people of Iraq could possibly be our greatest concern in establishing a plan for the peace movement. In Iraq, 46% of the population is under age 16. What are their needs, and what is our accountability to them? Two wars and more than twelve years of sanctions later, policies enforced by our government have been met with unfailingcompliance by the American people who are ignorant of the experiences of average Iraqis. Our inaction and ignorance have helped to kill more than half a million kids in Iraq and imprison millions of others in the sequestered hell of a nation under sanctions. These kids have died because, quite frankly, they could not afford to live. The dinar devalued from 3.3 to 3,000 dinar to 1USD in the span of twelve years. Health care and education have become luxuries in a country where public welfare was once the envy of the Middle East.

    In February when I was in Iraq for an international student gathering, I presented students and teachers with the Campus Antiwar Network statements as well as the antiwar resolutions from many other American college campuses. One gap that my presence was able to bridge is the gaping disparity of cross-cultural communication between Iraqi and American students. In early March, students from UC Santa Barbara participated in a radio dialogue with students from Baghdad University for nearly two hours. They spoke frankly about the pending war, as well as shared jokes, poetry and personal insights about philosophies on life.

    As students, one of your most powerful platforms is making the connections between education and militarism, i.e. the need for funding schools and for teaching peace. Those of you who are called to be teachers should examine the vast amount of resources available to make educating for peace an integral classroom component. The military recruiters on campus should get no more access to students than is allowed under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and certainly should be balanced with other peopleoffering careers with a conscience and peaceful alternatives to military service.

    So what’s the big picture? We have our work cut out for us. I am grateful for your hard work and organizing to make this student antiwar conference happen, and it will be a long process. I hope you are in this for the long haul.

    While I was in Hawaii, I had the time to look through a book of quotes I’ve compiled over the past few years. One in particular by June Jordan stood out to me because of its appropriateness: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

    Thank you.

  • Student Coalition Demands Weapons Disarmament of Labs

    Coalition members stage press conference in protest of weapons of mass destruction research at the University of California

    Students from five UC campuses spoke out by the UC Office of the President building in Oakland on March 20 to demand an end to weapons of mass destruction research at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

    Denied a face-to-face meeting with the UC Regents, students from the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California held a press conference outside the Office of the President building in Oakland, California on March 20, demanding that the UC Regents discuss the UC’s involvement with weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs.

    Michael Coffey, representative from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, explained that since the Regents meeting was cancelled, they hand delivered the letter to the Office of the President.

    “We had our own press conference. We went to the Office of the President building in downtown Oakland on 9 a.m. Thursday, March 21, the morning after the war broke out,” Coffey said.

    Michael Cox, coalition representative from UCLA, stated that the students want the UC relationship with the nuclear weapons lab changed.

    “We’re not seeking the termination of the long-held contract to run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories-this is a last resort,” Cox said. “If the UC Regents don’t take steps to negotiate our demands, then we will call on the termination of the contract.”

    Under the leadership of the Department of Energy, the University of California manages three national laboratories: Los Alamos in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore in California and the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, also in California.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation states that these laboratories “modify and monitor nuclear weapons.”

    Cox declared that the coalition is against the continual research and development of nuclear weapons.

    “We’re calling on any new research and development to stop completely,” Cox said. “[We’re] asking that the labs change functions from the efforts of proliferation to the international campaign of arms reduction and verification.”

    According to Tara Dorabji, a Tri-Valley CAREs spokeswoman, student leaders presented a letter requesting to “disarm and democratize the weapons labs” to the Regents secretary from four UC campuses.

    They requested a response to the letter by April 21.

    The coalition’s original plan was to meet directly with the UC Regents during their meeting.

    The UCOP office did not state a specific reason as to why the meeting was cancelled, but the Regent secretary stated that it was probably attributed to the outbreak of the war.

    “The students were promised a meeting, but despite being persistent [UCSC Chancellor MRC Greenwood] now will not meet with them,” Dorabji said.

    The coalition student group has partnered with local community organizations including Tri-Valley CAREs in Livermore, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara and Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland.

    A press statement from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation states the main belief of the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC, in that “no institution in the U.S. or abroad should continue to design and develop nuclear weapons.”

    Coffey attributes the coalition entirely to student efforts.

    “This campaign is student-led. Students let us know what type of support they need and we do our best to provide it,” Coffey said.

    According to Coffey, the coalition gives students a forum to discuss the role of nuclear weapons’ management by the UC. There are currently five UC schools involved: UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSB, UCSD and UC Davis.

    “We had someone at UC Irvine, but she didn’t gain very much support there. I think administration didn’t give her a great response either,” Cox said.

    The main declaration from the coalition is the Unity Statement, outlining the “steps the UC Regents need to take, like disarming and democratizing the weapons labs, if they are to continue managing the National Labs.”

    “The abolition of all nuclear weapons is a core value uniting the group,” Dorabji said.

    UC Spokesman Jeff Garberson stated that there is much history behind UC’s involvement with the laboratories.

    “There’s a historical reason,” Garberson said. “The United States government has always asked the [University of California] to operate the labs.”

    According to Garberson, UC manages these national laboratories for historical reasons as well as for service to the public.

    “[The] first reason—historical precedence that the university has always managed the labs. The university has seen it’s operation of the labs as a public service. They do important national work, some for national defense, some of it not,” Garberson said.

    Garberson also stated that both the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories deal with national security. While the labs are involved in the design, research and maintenance of nuclear weapons, the weapons themselves are constructed elsewhere.

    Garberson said the UC Regents stand behind the laboratories and all of its work.

    “The university has always been willing and proud to manage the national labs,” Garberson said.

    In response to the UC involvement with nuclear weapons, UC President Richard Atkinson supported the UC in a July 2002 letter to Armin Tenner, a former UC professor and member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation. “Ensuring these remaining weapons are safe and effective without nuclear testing is a challenging scientific problem—one that requires the efforts of outstanding technical experts such as those at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories,” Atkinson said. “The University of California takes this responsibility very seriously.”

    Atkinson continued to say that the role of the UC with nuclear weapons is a significant one.

    “The University of California takes this responsibility very seriously. If the university did not manage these laboratories, the weapons would not, of course, go away,” Atkinson said. “But we would then worry more about the future of the planet.”

    Cox hopes that the coalition will soon be able to voice their opinions directly to the UC Regents.

    According to Cox, the March UC Regents meeting was rescheduled for later on this week through a teleconference meeting.

    “If they do allow time for public comment, then we will definitely be participating in that,” Cox said.

  • UC Nuclear Free Student Press Conference

    On Thursday, March 21, 2002, students from 5 University of California campuses spoke from in front of the UC Office of the President in downtown Oakland demanding that the Regents disarm and democratize the weapons labs. Members of the Coalition to De-Militarize the University of California asserted that the Regents are accountable if the U.S. launches a nuclear attack on Iraq.

    Speakers highlighted the UC Nuclear Free Statement of Unity calling for the Regents to get out of the nuclear weapons business, a statement that has been endorsed by over 25 student and community groups in California and New Mexico. A scheduled UC Regents meeting was cancelled early Wednesday, March 20th denying concerned students and community members the opportunity to directly address the Regents regarding their management of labs that research and develop weapons of mass destruction.

    One agenda item on the cancelled meeting involved the Regents reporting to the Department of Energy regarding recent security problems, employee fraud, and key resignations at the labs. Following students’ comments, representatives from local news agencies questioned students about their demands and community members shared their thoughts on the significant tax dollars allocated toward weapons research by academic institutions, the environmental impact of the labs on their surrounding communities, and the strikes against Iraq that had begun just the night before.

    As a final act, students delivered a letter and list of demands to the Regents’ secretary. In the letter, students requested that the Regents designate time for public comments on weapons research issues during the May 14-15, 2003 Regents meeting at UCLA.
    Student Comment Excerpts

    Darwin BondGraham
    …The Militarization of American Society – Why must America go to war? To answer this question we have to look at our institutions, our culture, and our society. We have to look at how our economy functions; War is necessary. We have to look at our culture; our popular films, and mass media; War is an obsession. We have to look at how our politicians deal with problems; War is their answer:

    Since 1991 the United States has intervened militarily in dozens of nations. Each time war has been the answer. The US currently sells more weapons than nearly all other nations combined. Our government spends more on its military than the next twenty largest foreign militaries combined. The percentage of US exports that are weapons are 5% of total exports.

    Crowning this obsession with violence, this profanity, is our nation’s commitment to nuclear weapons. We have spent over $5 trillion on nuclear weapons. This year we will spend $6.38 billion on nuclear weapons. Our nation has made a renewed commitment to the research, design, and production of weapons of mass destruction…

    Valerie Kao
    My name is Valerie Kao. I am a UC Berkeley student and I am against the war!! I am here to express student and faculty sentiments about UC management of the United States nuclear weapons facilities. I want to express that the University of California, my university, is an unfit manager for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The most recent news with regards to Los Alamos has exposed credit card fraud and missing equipment, among other scandals. But mismanagement reaches far beyond these headlines. The real issues here are disarmament and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons development. How many of the Regents are aware that laboratory directors, usually people chosen by the Regents, have regularly served as spokespersons for the modernization of nuclear weapons? That some actively sought to obstruct US negotiations for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty? Time and again, since it became US law in 1970, the labs and the UC administration have been implicated in violations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Jamil Pearson
    …Seeing that the University of California is funded in part by the students and taxpayers, it is unfair to have the blood of innocents on those students and faculty who did not make the decision to manage nuclear weapons labs…It is time for the Uc Regents to e held accountable for their actions. The students of the University of California demand our voices be heard. The UC system is world renowned as an institution of higher learning. The students do not want to indirectly support nuclear weapons development not do we want to procure the stigma as a weapons developer….

    Michael Cox
    …In regards to nuclear weapons, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which became US law in 1970, is the legal keystone in the effort to avoid nuclear holocaust. It requires that all member states pursue in good faith the abolition of their nuclear arsenals….The United States and the University of California stand in clear violation of the NPT….We are waging a war supposedly to disarm Saddam of WMD, while simultaneously threatening to the use of nuclear weapons to accomplish this goal…In this past Monday’s war speech given by President Bush, he stated that: “When evil men plot chemical, biological, and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could rbring destruction of a kind never before seen on this Earth.” Mr. President, we cold not agree with you more, and we are working to change the US policy of proliferation in order that you do not go down in history as this “evil man” of whom you speak…
    * The full student comments are available on demand. Contact Tara Dorabji with Tri-Valley CAREs at (925) 443-7148 or Michael Coffey with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at (805) 965-3443.

  • UC Students Assert: Regents Accountable if U.S. Launches Nuclear Attack on Iraq

    Oakland- Students representing five University of California campus peace groups, which are members of the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California, will hold a press conference to demand that the UC Regents do everything in their power to uphold international law and disarm Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Students had planned to bring their demands to the Regents at their quarterly meeting; however the UC Regents cancelled their meeting because of the impending war. The student press conference will now be held at the UC Regents Headquarters on Thursday March 20, 9 AM, at 1111 Franklin St., Downtown Oakland.

    “If the United States declares an illegal war on Iraq, the possibility of the U.S. launching a nuclear attack rises dangerously. Since it is UC scientists designing these nuclear weapons, the Regents are accountable for a potential use of these weapons, that could plunge the world into a nuclear war and obliterate the taboo that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons since the U.S. bombed Japan over 50 years ago,” says UC Santa Cruz student Emily Hell.

    Sophia Santiago, a UC Berkeley student, expressed her concern for the important international agreements to which the US is party: “The UC Regents as managers should be holding the labs accountable; they should ensure that the labs are complying fully with the [nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT is an extremely critical document, especially with respect to an imminent attack on Iraq in which the labs’ work will make more probable the use of nuclear weapons.”

    Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories design, modify and monitor nuclear weapons. UC has managed the operation of the labs under contracts with the Department of Energy for more than 50 years. Hundreds of undergraduates, graduate students and professors from the Universities are involved in cooperative research with the laboratories. Recently, both Livermore and Los Alamos were allocated $15 million to study the development of a new nuclear weapon: the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.

    Michael Cox, student at UC Los Angeles, describes how the UC managed labs violate international law and jeopardize global security, “Not only is the research and development of nuclear weapons like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator illegal, immoral, and a complete waste of resources, this work could be in preparation for the deployment of nuclear weapons on Iraq and the other 6 nations listed in the Nuclear Posture review. The United states is belligerently hypocritical in its proliferation of WMD and irresponsible in its position of world leadership.”

    According to UC Berkeley student Valerie Kao, the central critique of the UC Regents management of the National Laboratories must address the Regents systematic failure to bring the two labs into compliance with international law. “UC management could be criticized on the sole basis of its track record, having failed to protect whistleblowers and to hold stronger accountability with Lab administration. However, the real issue is the labs’ role in reviving the arms race and preventing real steps toward international disarmament, as required by international law.”

    The Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California has partnered with local community organizations including the Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, Tri-Valley CAREs in Livermore, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara.

    CONTACT:
    Tara Dorabji: (925) 443-7148 Tri-Valley CAREs
    Michael Coffey: (805) 452-1166, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Valerie Kao: (510) 841-8365, UC Berkeley student
    Michael Cox: (818) 399-0349, UC Los Angeles student

  • Human Rights Defenders Visit the Foundation

    In areas of conflict and oppression working for peace and human rights can be dangerous and even life threatening. To help ameliorate such situations, foreign activists can, under certain circumstances, provide an international presence that pressures oppressive governments not to crack down on local human rights workers. Two such international activists, Claudio Valls and Andrew Miller, recently visited the Foundation and spoke about their experience providing protective accompaniment in Colombia with Peace Brigades International (PBI).

    Andrew, co-director of Peace Brigades International/USA, began the talk by giving an overview of PBI as an organization. PBI’s mission is to work to open a space in which conflicts can be addressed in a nonviolent way in regions where there is oppression and conflict. The organization currently has four active projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Indonesia and Colombia. PBI works only upon the request of local organizations working for human rights, social change and the development of civil society, and which use nonviolent means. PBI’s establishes its presence by placing volunteers in the area of conflict, who physically accompany local activists and network with the local officials and embassies. Andrew explained that the work of the volunteers on the ground is reinforced by an emergency response network maintained by PBI country groups around the world. These country groups network with their federal officials who can put pressure on the oppressive government not to harm the activists accompanied by PBI. The organizational structure of PBI is unique in that it works by consensual process and uses non-hierarchical structures.

    Claudio, a Santa Barbara resident who previously worked at the Foundation, is currently volunteering with PBI on a one year stint in Colombia. Claudio gave the talk’s participants a feeling for what it is like for PBI volunteers in the field. “Sometimes we go into an area where the authorities have told us that we would have government protection, and it turns out the area is not even controlled by the military but by guerrillas,” he explained. This is dangerous because the guerilla and paramilitary groups that are active in Colombia are not susceptible to same kind of international pressure that the Colombian government is. PBI volunteers, such as Claudio, undergo a training and selection process that evaluates there language ability, their ability to work in a group and their ability to hold up in high pressure situations. According to Claudio there are certain “red flags” that volunteers look for that signal the need to alert their emergency response network. Such signs could include direct threats against the activists PBI is accompanying or public statements by the government criticizing the work of the activists.

    Though it is difficult to gauge success in their work, Claudio and Andrew feel that PBI accompaniment has saved many lives. When PBI is fully successful it diffuses the threat to the local activists and allows them to continue their work. At other times, the accompaniment buys activists enough time to get out of the area where they have been threatened.

    That PBI activists are able to use nonviolent means to protect local activists trying to work for a more just society is a formidable accomplishment. That those working with PBI struggle to take the international support given to repressive regimes and turn it into effective and restraining influence is a sign that they have a profound sense of responsibility to their international community.

    For more information about PBI see their website athttp://www.peacebrigades.org

  • Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr.

    David KriegerThe world lost one of its great men of peace when Gene Carroll, the former long-time Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, passed away on February 19th. Gene was intelligent, articulate and committed to doing his part to create a peaceful, nuclear weapons free world. He was an extraordinarily unique admiral, one who spent the years following his career in the Navy fighting for peace, nuclear weapons abolition, and drastically reduced military budgets.

    Gene had a vision of America’s greatness resting on our ability to make peace, not war. He had a rare blend of intelligence, heart and experience that will be impossible to replace. Nonetheless, we must try. The world needs many more individuals like Gene Carroll, individuals with the courage to stand uncompromisingly for peace.

    This is what Admiral Carroll had to say about US nuclear policy: “American leaders have declared that nuclear weapons will remain the cornerstone of U.S. national security indefinitely. In truth, as the world’s only remaining superpower, nuclear weapons are the sole military source of our national insecurity. We, and the whole world, would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished and Planet Earth was a nuclear free zone.”

    In his last message to me, not long ago, Gene expressed his strong belief in the relevance of the United Nations: “Until there is something better than the UN,” he wrote, “it seems to me that we must support its authority under the Charter. Considering that the US essentially wrote the Charter to protect our security interests in 1945, that seems desirable to me now.”

    He continued: “I don’t know if irony sells but we shouldn’t miss any opportunity to point out that Bush cannot restore relevance and respect to the UN by flagrantly violating the Charter. In truth, if we initiate war without UN authorization the blow might be fatal to its future.”

    In that same message, he described the Bush doctrine as “the road to ultimate disaster.” We would do well to pay heed to this wise warrior for peace.
    United States Policy and Nuclear Abolition
    by Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll*, Jr. US Navy (Ret.)

    An address to the Olaf Palme Institute in Stockholm, Sweden on May 12, 1998

    You are certainly aware that the United States is committed under Article VI of the Non Proliferation Treaty to work in good faith for nuclear disarmament. You are probably also aware that last year President Clinton approved a policy that nuclear weapons would remain the cornerstone of U.S. security for the indefinite future. It is very difficult to reconcile these conflicting positions. Disarm or maintain a massive nuclear war fighting capability? It is impossible to do both. My purpose here is to explain why President Clinton made his decision, what it means to prospects for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and what can be done to promote progress toward a non-nuclear world.

    First, let me tell you why I am here to advocate the abolition of nuclear weapons. I have been personally involved with these engines of destruction since the beginning of the nuclear era. 42 years ago I was a pilot prepared to destroy a European target with a bomb that would have killed 600,000 people. 20 years ago, as the Director of U.S. Military Operations in Europe, I was the officer responsible for the security, readiness and employment of 7,000 nuclear weapons against Warsaw Pact forces in Europe and Russia, weapons which could never defend anything – only destroy everything. My knowledge of nuclear weapons has convinced me that they can never be used for any rational military or political purpose. Their use would only create barbaric, indiscriminate destruction. In the words of the Canberra. Commission, “Nuclear weapons create an intolerable threat to all humanity…”

    Now, to address the reasons for President Clinton’s decision concerning the U.S. nuclear posture. When the nuclear era opened in the U.S. the atom bomb was seen as a source of immense national power and as an essential contribution to efforts to thwart any expansionist efforts by Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was also seen by the United States Army, Navy and Air Force- as the key to service supremacy. The newly autonomous Air Force under General Curtis LeMay saw atomic warfare as its primary raison d’etre and fought fiercely for the dominant role in U.S. atomic plans. The Army and Navy feared that without atomic weapons in their arsenals they would become irrelevant adjuncts to strategic air power.

    This interservice rivalry led to the rapid proliferation of nuclear missions. Without going into needless detail, each service acquired its own arsenal of nuclear weapons for every conceivable military mission: strategic bombardment, tactical warfare, anti-aircraft weapons, anti-tank rockets and landmines, anti-submarine rockets, torpedoes and depth charges, artillery shells, intermediate range missiles and ultimately intercontinental range land and sea-launched ballistic missiles armed with multiple, thermo-nuclear warheads.

    The Soviet Union, starting more than 4 years behind America, watched this rapid expansion of our war fighting weapons with shock and fear and set out to match every U.S. capability. Despite the obvious fact that the USSR lagged far behind, alarmists in the Pentagon pointed at Soviet efforts as proof of the need for ever more nuclear forces and weapons and the arms race continued unabated for 40 years. During this wasteful dangerous competition the United States built 70,000 nuclear weapons plus air, land and sea-based delivery vehicles at a total cost of $4.000 billion dollars.

    As the Soviets’ arsenal grew, Mutual Assured Destruction became a fact and the two nations finally began tenuous arms control efforts in the 1960’s to restrain their competition. This effort was accelerated in the mid-1980 as a result of world-wide fears of nuclear war when President Reagan spoke of the Soviet

    Union as the “evil empire” and doubled U.S. military spending. Unfortunately, the excesses of the nuclear arms race had created an extremely powerful pro-nuclear weapons establishment in the United States. This alliance of laboratories, weapon builders, aircraft industries and missile producers wielded immense political power in opposition to nuclear disarmament proposals. Abetted by Generals and Admirals in the Pentagon this establishment was able to turn arms control efforts into a talk-test-build process in which talks went slowly and ineffectually while testing and building went on with great dispatch. This same establishment remains extremely powerful today and explains why the United States’ continues to spend more than $28,000 million dollars each year to sustain its nuclear war fighting forces and enhance its weapons despite the formal commitment in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to take effective measures leading to nuclear disarmament. Pressure from the establishment is the primary reason why in November, 1997, President Clinton decreed in Presidential Decision Directive #60 that nuclear weapons will continue to form the cornerstone of American security indefinitely. This directive also set forth a number of other policies that are directly contrary to the goals of non-proliferation and nuclear abolition. He reaffirmed America’s right to make first use of nuclear weapons and intentionally left open the option to conduct nuclear retaliation against any nation, which employs chemical or biological agents in attacks against the United States or its allies. He went on to direct the maintenance of the triad of U.S. strategic forces (long range bombers, land-based ICBM’s and submarine-based SLBMs) at a high state of alert which would permit launch-on-warning of any impending nuclear attack on the U.S. This is the dangerous doctrine, which puts thousands of warheads on a hair trigger, thereby creating the risk of starting a nuclear war through misinformation and fear as well as through human error or system malfunction.

    Finally, his directive specifically authorized the continued targeting of numerous sites in Russia and China as well as planning for strikes against so-called rogue states in connection with regional conflicts or crises. In short, U.S. nuclear posture and planning remain essentially unchanged seven years after the end of the Cold War. The numbers of weapons are lower but the power to annihilate remains in place with 7,000 strategic and 5,000 tactical weapons.

    This doctrine would be bad enough alone but it is reinforced by continued efforts to extend and enhance the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. A major element of this process is benignly labeled the Stockpile Stewardship Program costing more than $4, 100 million per year to maintain weapons security as well as test and replace weapon components to insure full wartime readiness of approximately 12,000 strategic and tactical bombs and warheads. In March the U.S. Air Force dropped two B61-11 bombs from a B-2 bomber on a target in Alaska to complete certification of a new design for earth penetrating weapons, clear proof of U.S. intentions to improve its nuclear war fighting capabilities.

    Furthermore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently resumed the manufacture of plutonium triggers for thermo-nuclear weapons while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is preparing a new capability called the National Ignition Facility where conditions within an exploding nuclear device can be simulated Supplemented with continuing sub-critical explosive tests in Nevada and extremely sophisticated computer modeling experiments, this new facility will give the U.S. means not available to other signatories of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to develop and validate new nuclear weapons designs.

    To give even more evidence of the power of the pro-nuclear establishment, the U.S. will decide this year -on how and when to resume the production and stockpiling of tritium, the indispensable fuel for thermo-nuclear explosions. The fact is that the military has enough tritium on hand today for all of its weapons until the year 2006 and enough for 1,000 warheads and bombs at least until the year 2024. To invest thousands of millions of dollars for unneeded tritium is a waste of precious resources undertaken solely to placate and reward the nuclear establishment. It is particularly alarming and discouraging to see the United States investing heavily to perpetuate and increase its nuclear war fighting capabilities when only three years ago it was the dominant force promoting indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). To encourage support for extension the U.S. led in the formulation of the important declaration of “Principles and Objectives For Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.” More clearly than Article VI of the NPT itself, this statement reaffirmed commitment to: “The determined pursuit by the nuclear weapons states of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons…” This renewed and strengthened pledge to reduce nuclear capabilities offered as an inducement for non-nuclear states to agree to extension of the NPT makes the current U.S. nuclear program an affront to all of the signatories. It is not only a direct violation of both the letter and spirit of the NPT; it is a provocation, which jeopardizes the goal of non-proliferation. The clear message is that the foremost nuclear power regards its weapons as key elements of security and military strength, a signal, which can only stimulate other nations to consider the need to create similar capabilities.

    What must those who favor nuclear abolition do to counter this threat to non-proliferation? First, as individuals and as organizations, we must redouble our efforts at home to publicize the dangers created by as many as 35,000 weapons still ready for use in the world. A broadly based global demand by all non-nuclear states that the nuclear powers must live up to the letter and spirit of the NPT extension agreement should precede the first review conference in the year 2000. A call for worldwide public demonstrations on the order and magnitude of those, which supported the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980’s, should be made. The nuclear powers must not be permitted to dictate the results of the review conference in the same manner the United States dominated the 1995 extension conference.

    The message to be stressed is that it is illogical and unrealistic to expect that five nations can legally possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons indefinitely while all other nations are forbidden to create a nuclear capability. Pressure to break-out of the Non Proliferation Treaty is further intensified because one of the nuclear powers is actively developing new, more threatening weapons and pronouncing them essential to its future security.

    A good strategy is to follow the lead of the 62 Generals and Admirals who signed an appeal for nuclear abolition in December of 1996. We stated that we could not foresee the conditions, which would ultimately permit the final elimination of all weapons, but we did recognize many steps, which could be safely begun now to start and accelerate progress toward the ultimate goal.

    As a first step toward nuclear disarmament, all nuclear powers should positively commit themselves to unqualified no-first use guarantees for both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Their guarantees should be incorporated in a protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty at the review conference in 2000.

    Concurrently, the process of actual reduction of weapons should begin with the United States and Russia. They should proceed immediately with START III negotiations, particularly since the implementation of START II has been delayed for four years. Even with the delay Russia cannot afford all of the changes required under that Treaty and has suggested willingness to proceed with additional reductions because far deeper reductions by both sides would be less costly.

    At the same time, both nations should agree to take thousands of nuclear warheads off of alert status. This action would reduce the possibility of a nuclear exchange initiated by accident or human error. Once fully de-alerted, warhead removal (de-mating) should commence and the warheads stored remotely from missile sites and submarine bases. Verification measures should include international participation to build confidence between the parties.

    Disassembly of warheads under international supervision should begin in the U.S. and Russia. When a level of 1,000 warheads is reached in each nation, Great Britain, France and China should join the process under a rigorous verification regime. De facto nuclear states, including Israel, should join the process as movement continued toward the complete and irreversible elimination of all nuclear weapons. Finally, an international convention should be adopted to prohibit the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear explosive devices just as current conventions proscribe chemical and biological weapons. All fissile material should be safely and securely stored under international control.

    Verification of this entire process could best be accomplished by U.N. teams formed and operating in accordance with principles developed by UNSCOM teams operating in Iraq today. This model provides a precedent already accepted by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the nuclear powers.

    None of these progressive steps will happen until the community of nations comes together to make the United States understand that non-proliferation will ultimately fail unless the U.S. abandons its delusion that nuclear superiority provides long term security. Even when the dangers of this delusion are understood, progress toward the complete, final abolition of nuclear weapons will be painfully slow. Nevertheless, the effort must be made to move toward the day that all nations live together in a world without nuclear weapons because it is clear that our children cannot hope to live safely in a world with them.
    * Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. US Navy, Ret. Carroll’s service included the Korean Conflict and Viet Nam War. Promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral in 1972, he served as Commander of Task Force 60, the carrier striking force of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. His last assignment on active duty was in the Pentagon as Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations, engaged in U.S. naval planning for conventional and nuclear war. Presently he is the Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C.

  • Santa Barbara Pacifist to Document Life in Iraq: She’ll share information she’s gathering with friends, students she teaches in Santa Paula

    She’s going to be gone for only four days, but it’s where Leah Wells went that makes Devon Chaffee so nervous.

    “I’m extremely concerned,” said Chaffee, who works with Wells in Santa Barbara. “My cell phone never leaves my hip.”

    Wells is in Iraq. She left Monday and isn’t scheduled to be back in United States until Friday.

    The 26-year-old Wells, who works for the Santa Barbara-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said she felt compelled to go there despite Iraq being in President Bush’s cross hairs.

    She said she has no illusions that her trip will change Bush’s mind, even though she is being joined by 1,000 students from around the world protesting any use of force against Iraq.

    “I think the goal isn’t to be successful. It’s to be faithful to what we believe in,” Wells said Monday while on a stopover in Chicago. “We have to act as compassionate human beings toward those who have been through 12 years of hardship.”

    The State Department isn’t condoning trips to Iraq. Its Web site informs travelers that there is no U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In fact, the Polish Embassy, which was being used for Americans in distress, also is closed.

    “It’s not a real good idea to be going there,” a State Department official said. “We’re asking people not to go to that particular region.”

    That doesn’t matter to Wells. What does matter is the story of the people who live in Iraq. She said her job is to document the lives of average Iraqis using her digital video camera and interviews.

    Wells will bring this information back to the United States to share both with her Santa Barbara friends and some students she teaches in Santa Paula.

    “Raw vegetables are hard to come by for the average citizen there,” she said. “The water is contaminated. They need help, not bombs.”

    As for Saddam Hussein, she knows his government is repressive, and she does not support it. But, the pacifist said, war isn’t the answer.

    Instead, she likes to quote an ancient proverb that says when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets hurt.

    “Nobody is talking about the grass,” she said. “That’s why we have to.”