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- Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!ukma!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
- From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
- Subject: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Labs: A Bulwark Against Test Bans
- Message-ID: <1992Aug26.215426.28302@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
- Followup-To: alt.activism.d
- Summary: nuke wep labs are quiet, powerful force, driving the arms race forward
- Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Keywords: nuclear weapons lab lobby washington in blatant and subtle ways
- Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
- Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 21:54:26 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 269
-
-
- "The laboratories have given to themselves the task of deciding
- which nuclear forces and arms-control approaches are appropriate for
- U.S. policy," said Christopher Paine, an arms-control specialist
- working for U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "And their
- preferred objective is an endless technical competition in nuclear
- arms." . . .
- [During Carter's administration t]he directors corresponded with
- lawmakers like conservative U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, R-New York, urging
- opposition to the [Comprehensive Test Ban] treaty.
- Paine . . . said such letters--and similar testimony before
- Congress--suggests the laboratories are overstepping their
- responsibility to offer technical advice.
- "They have unilaterally taken it upon themselves to declare before
- congressional committees that U.S. treaty commitments regarding
- nuclear testing should be made obsolete, should be forgotten and
- dispensed with," he said. "They did this even when the president of
- the United States was attempting to negotiate a comprehensive test
- ban. I consider that conduct reprehensible."
-
-
- there has never been a more propitious opportunity to end the nuclear
- weapons "race" than at the very time our dedicated singular adversary
- for more than four decades has ceased competing and existing. WHY do
- we blindly continue testing and developing better ways to incinerate
- evermore surface area of the planet in a single burst? how are we made
- more "secure" by continuing to threaten the entire biosphere with
- absolute toxification and obliteration of biological life? continual
- psychic numbing practiced by all of us is not solving this primary
- problem. rather than simply debating which of the evil of two lessors
- to choose this november, we MUST begin to question the very foundations
- of the system itself that produces such "leaders."
- -- ratitor
-
-
-
- from "The Sacramento Bee" August 2, 1987
- ____________________________________________________________________________
-
- Nuclear Labs: Bulwark Against Test Bans
-
- By Deborah Blum
- Bee Science Writer
-
-
- Since President Eisenhower first tried to end testing of nuclear
- bombs, the California-run weapons laboratories have taken on every
- president through Carter who pursued that goal.
- The labs stand undefeated.
- Despite arms-control treaties, dating back to 1963, declaring it
- national policy to achieve an end to weapons testing, the United
- States still explodes a nuclear bomb beneath the Nevada desert at
- least once a month.
- Physicists from within the laboratories and arms-control experts
- from without say the labs are a quiet--but powerful--national force,
- driving the arms race ceaselessly forward. Three federal
- investigations are now under way into alleged lobbying activities by
- Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories in favor of nuclear
- testing.
- Their angriest critics accuse them of increasing the odds of
- nuclear conflict.
- "The labs have made an enormous contribution toward setting the
- stage for nuclear war," said Charles Schwartz, a University of
- California, Berkeley, physics professor. "They may have made it
- unavoidable."
- Lab offlcials flatly deny that.
- "What we perhaps differ in is the approach to avoiding nuclear
- war," said Paul Brown, Livermore's assistant associate director for
- arms control. Brown upholds the laboratory position that a strong
- arsenal is the best way to preserve peace.
- Lab officials say that in raising objections to a test ban treaty,
- they are simply doing their jobs as the country's designated experts
- on maintaining nuclear weapons. The position of the weapons labs--
- and it has not faltered before one president--is that nuclear tests
- are essential to a first class weapons program.
- "We should either do the job the country has asked us to do or
- change it," said Robert Selden, director of national security studies
- at Los Alamos. "Lab statements provoke huge furor and disagreement
- and charges that the labs are making national policy. But we're
- simply doing what we've been asked to do."
- Unlike that of previous administrations, Reagan's policy has been
- to encourage nuclear weapons testing and development. Both
- laboratories--U.S. Department of Energy facilities managed by the
- University of California--have almost doubled their budgets in the
- past seven years. This year's budget for each was $835 million.
- The recent challenge to test explosions has come, instead, from
- Congress. For the last two years some frustrated legislators have
- tried to block the tests.
- This year, the laboratories responded to that with a vigorous
- "education" effort. An internal memo from a Los Alamos Weapons
- expert recruiting the best lab scientists to "brief congressmen about
- the importance of nuclear testing" was recently made public.
- Three congressional investigations, including a formal query from
- the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, are now trying to
- determine if the laboratories have gone beyond technical advice into
- political lobbying, which is forbidden by law. No results are
- expected before fall, but the initial facts have angered arms-control
- supporters.
- "The laboratories have given to themselves the task of deciding
- which nuclear forces and arms-control approaches are appropriate for
- U.S. policy," said Christopher Paine, an arms-control specialist
- working for U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "And their
- preferred objective is an endless technical competition in nuclear
- arms."
- He and other critics also complain that Livermore and Los Alamos
- have influenced national policy more subtly. They say that despite a
- series of treaties urging an end to nuclear testing, the labs have
- not produced the kind of sturdy weapons that would do well under such
- an agreement.
- Those treaties began with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty with
- the Soviets forbidding nuclear testing anywhere but underground. Its
- preamble states that a principal aim of both countries is a complete
- test ban. Later treaties--signed by Presidents Lyndon Johnson,
- Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter--have reaffirmed that.
- Still, Livermore's director, Roger Batzel, recently testified
- before Congress that the labs have continued, for the last several
- decades, designing weapons with the assumption that they would be
- tested.
- Bill Scanlin, Livermore's deputy associate director for defense
- systems, said that experts at the laboratory, with their better
- understanding of nuclear explosives, consider the old treaty language
- "a little naive."
- "We're smarter now about weapons than they were then," Scanlin
- said. "The philosophy then was that we could do away with nuclear
- weapons. The idea that we could do that--complete elimination--is
- naive."
- But John Jungerman, head of the University of California, Davis,
- physics department and a member of the scientific team that developed
- the first atomic bomb, said the labs were opposing test limits before
- the first treaty was signed.
- In 1957, the Soviets proposed a several-year moratorium on testing
- as preparation for a possible ban. Eisenhower liked the idea,
- according to Glenn Seaborg, a presidential adviser and later director
- of U.S. energy programs.
- But Edward Teller, then director of Livermore, and two fellow
- nuclear scientists visited the White House and discouraged him,
- Seaborg said in his book, "Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban."
- "The scientists stated that with continued testing, U.S.
- laboratories could develop `clean' (fallout-free) weapons within
- seven years and that the Soviets could negate any test moratorium by
- undetectable clandestine tests," Seaborg recalled.
- Jungerman, who became--and remains--a strong arms-control
- advocate, said the laboratory arguments included the suggestion that
- the Soviets might hide nuclear tests behind the sun.
- "Of course, that was ridiculous," Jungerman said. "And, of
- course, the clean weapon never happened. But the point is, that it
- was political lobbying and that they took it all the way to the top."
- Eisenhower never arrived at a treaty--chiefly because of questions
- about Soviet cheating--but did agree to a moratorium on testing,
- which lasted from 1958 to 1961. President Kennedy then picked up the
- question. Two years later, he approved the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
- Herbert York, the first director of Livermore, credits laboratory
- scientists with successfully keeping underground tests out of the
- treaty. But even with that exclusion, lab scientists worked against
- its approval.
- Jungerman, who supported the treaty, recalled visiting Washington,
- D.C., shortly before the vote. He was riding a shuttle bus in from
- the airport and discovered a fellow passenger was the powerful
- Democratic senator, Russell Long of Louisiana.
- "So I said, `Senator Long, I'd like to put in a good word on the
- test ban treaty,'" Jungerman said. "And he said, `Well, Edward Teller
- has already told me that it's a bad idea.' And this was just a
- random meeting. So, obviously, he'd been out there lobbying senators
- about it."
- That treaty marked a critical time when halting nuc1ear tests
- might have halted the arms race, according to York, who now heads the
- Institute on Global Connict and Cooperation at the University of
- California, San Diego. York said that in the 1950s and early 1960s,
- weapons development drove the race. Now, it is paced by new and
- exotic missiles to deliver the warheads.
- "Was it a missed opportunity? Probably," he said recently. "It
- might very well have come unstuck due to all the problems in our
- relationships with the Soviets. But, on the other hand, it might
- have worked."
-
-
- _________________________________________________________________________
- | |
- | [2 photographs and their captions:] |
- | |
- | A hole melted through a rock by a nuclear particle beam at Los Alamos |
- | shows the potentially destructive power ot the weapon. At right, a |
- | technician works at the control panel ot the accelerator, which is |
- | part ot the particle beam experiment. Los Alamos is an empire built |
- | on some four decades of refining and expanding nuclear weapons. |
- |_________________________________________________________________________|
-
-
-
- Still, president after president has indicated support for ending
- nuclear tests. And Carter reopened negotiations on a full-scale
- Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The laboratory response was
- immediate. The directors corresponded with lawmakers like
- conservative U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, R-New York, urging opposition to
- the treaty.
- Livermore researchers insisted that the Soviets would cheat. And
- Harold Agnew, then director of Los Alamos, in a 1977 letter to Kemp,
- also warned that a lack of tests could give the untrustworthy Soviets
- an advantage in number of weapons.
- "As Custer found out, there comes a time when there is no
- substitute for quantitative advantage," Agnew wrote, referring to the
- American general killed with his troops in 1876 when he attacked an
- encampment of Indian warriors who outnumbered him more than 3-to-l.
- Paine, Kennedy's staffer, said such letters--and similar testimony
- before Congress--suggests the laboratories are overstepping their
- responsibility to offer technical advice.
- "They have unilaterally taken it upon themselves to declare before
- congressional committees that U.S. treaty commitments regarding
- nuclear testing should be made obsolete, should be forgotten and
- dispensed with," he said. "They did this even when the president of
- the United States was attempting to negotiate a comprehensive test
- ban. I consider that conduct reprehensible."
- Los Alamos's Agnew took credit for talking Carter himself out of
- the treaty negotiations. He and Roger Batzel of Livermore were
- invited to appear before the president to explain their views on a
- comprehensive test ban. According to Agnew, it was their resistance
- that persuaded Carter in 1978 to drop the idea.
- York, who was then Carter's chief negotiator on the treaty, said
- the labs were only one voice in a chorus of opposition.
- "The labs are a substantial political force," York said. "But
- they aren't the only ones dedicated to a nuclear future. I think
- some of the groups working more directly with the Pentagon may have
- even greater influence."
- Still, in Washington, D.C., the recent discovery that David
- Watkins, Los Alamos defense program manager, drafted a memo this
- March lining up pro-weapons speakers to brief lawmakers has raised
- new concern--and the official probes.
- Investigators with the House Energy and Commerce Committee,
- chaired by U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., have collected more
- than eight boxes of correspondence between lab employees and federal
- lawmakers. Five legislators have requested a General Accounting
- Office investigation. And U.S. Rep. Fortney Stark, D-Oakland, is
- looking into laboratory activities.
- Federal regulations bar the use of government funds by contractors
- to influence matters before Congress. The weapons labs fall under
- that provision because the University of California operates them
- under a contract with the federal government.
- DOE spokesman Jack Vandenberg said a preliminary inquiry by the
- department suggests the lab employees acted legally, within their
- charge to provide information. And lab representatives say they did
- nothing wrong.
- "The real issue is, are DOE and the administration right to go out
- and inform Congress on nuclear tests," said Livermore's Brown, who
- said he talked with several lawmakers at the department's request.
- "I believe they are."
-
-
- --
- I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
- me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been
- enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the
- money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working
- upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few
- hands and the Republic is destroyed.
-
- --- Abraham Lincoln (quoted in Jack London's "The Iron Heel").
- --
- daveus rattus
-
- yer friendly neighborhood ratman
-
- KOYAANISQATSI
-
- ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
- in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
- 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
-
-
-
-