Fiat Lux: The University of Nuclear Bombs Documentary Film Trailer Now Online! 10/7/2008
Film makers Joshua Ortiz and Mohamed Elsawi have been documenting the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC and our movement to end UC management of the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore for nearly two years. This trailer is the first for their forthcoming feature-length documentary about this struggle!
This movement is more than just a film, of course, it's still going on, and we need your involvement now more than ever! To get involved at a UC near you, attend one of the events in the calendar to the right, or contact one of the groups in the left-hand column!
Students, Hiroshima Survivors Speak Out at UC Regents' Meeting 10/01/2008
On Thursday, September 18, the UC Student Department of Energy Lab Oversight Committee (DOELOC) and two survivors of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, presented to the UC Regents at their bi-monthy meeting in Irvine, in an emotional and powerful day. Steve Stormoen, a UCSC grad, advisor to DOELOC, and Youth Empowerment Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, gives the a full report at http://wagingpeace.org/
Of course it’s passion that motivates us, not a feeling of obligation or even duty. At 6:00 in the morning, having lain down to sleep less than five hours ago, with barely the energy to untuck the sheets from the unfamiliar hotel bed and slide in, after braving 300 miles of Southern California traffic and preparing the next morning’s breakfast for our guests of honor next door, telling them in stunted gestures and broken English their schedule for the next day, it’s passion that flowed through me when my cell phone alarm harmonized to the drone of the obnoxious air conditioner, with the first fluttering of my eyelids, passion that told me it was time to get up and go...
DOELOC Public Comment at Regents Meeting, July 18, 2008 7/22/2008
The following is a collective statement prepared by the UC Student DOE Laboratory Oversight Committee for the UC Board of Regents meeting Public Comment period on July 18, 2008:
As the UC Student Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee, an Associated Student Government Committee present on multiple UC campuses, we are charged with educating the students, faculty, and staff at this University as well as media and the general public about the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories managed by the UC and its partners, Bechtel, B&W, and the Washington Division of the URS Corporation. Last month, members of the Student Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee here at UCSB held a potentially productive meeting with Regent Pattiz. Mr. Pattiz assured us that he would encourage the other Regents on this board to meet with our committee. We believe that it is our responsibility to provide the Regents of the University with accurate, factual information about the work of the laboratories which we do not believe is adequately provided either by the laboratories themselves, or by the Regents Committee on Oversight of the Laboratories. This inadequacy was apparent in Mr. Foley’s testimony at the Regent’s meeting occurring in May of this year, at the UCLA campus, when he was unable to immediately and adequately answer Lieutenant Governor Garamendi’s queries regarding pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. We will provide a comprehensive and factually accurate report to any individual Regent or group of Regents on this board. You can contact us through our website, http://doeloc.org. We have the facts on pit production, and we will not skirt the issue.
"Bored of Regents" -- UC System-Wide Convergence, July 14-18 at UCSB 7/14/2008
*UPDATE!* The AFSCME Service Workers Union, which includes custodians, dining hall workers, shuttle drivers, and more for the entire UC system, has agreed to go on strike this week, July 14-18. In solidarity, "Bored of Regents" has moved all of its workshops and scheduled events, except for our comments at the Regents' meeting, to the UC Santa Barbara main entrance, at the end of Highway 217, and will be joining the workers in their demands for an end to poverty wages for the people who make this university run!
The Bored of Regents convergence has posted a draft schedule, which you can view here.
All UC students, friends, and allies are encouraged to come to UC Santa Barbara for the proceedings, detailed below. Contact boredofregents@gmail.com for any travel, lodging, or other coordination or accommodation you may need.
Please join the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC at the UC Santa Barbara campus for a UC-wide convergence taking place from July 14-18, 2008. The "Bored of Regents" convergence will coincide with the bi-monthly UC Board of Regents meeting occurring at the same time on the UCSB campus.
This convergence will offer a space in which organizations and students across the UC system can come together to meet with each other and form connections across areas of concern and campus boundaries. This is a space in which we, as organizers and engaged students, may challenge ourselves to build power through solidarity and honesty and where we can meet new friends and reunite with old friends in struggle.
Report from Take Hold! University, and Regents' Meeting Action in UCLA, May 13-15 5/23/2008
Last week in UCLA, student activists organized an event called Take Hold! University from May 13-15, centered around a meeting of the UC Board of Regents at which the Regents were expected to vote to raise student fees for the seventh time in eight years. The event, which received endorsements from a broad coalition of student activist groups from a myriad of issues at UCLA and attracted attendees from four other UC campuses, hosted workshops, nightly town hall meetings, art, music, food, discussions, and more, in an attempt to transform the UCLA campus, however temporarily, into a true community area focused on students and self-directed, grassroots education, as well as serve as a gathering point for students to take action at the Regents’ Meeting regarding the issues most important to them. At all of these goals, Take Hold! was overwhelmingly successful and, starting Tuesday afternoon when I first arrived at UCLA, I could feel the energy building for important and inspiring actions. Moreover, the students I met that week at UCLA will continue to be powerful friends and allies in the coming years.
5 Years Too Many, 65 Years Too Many:
Completing the Nuclear Triangle on March 19, 2008
A special report from Steve Stormoen, Youth Empowerment Initiative Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
On Wednesday, March 19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, I visited three sites that had been subject to the use of nuclear weapons. On the news, you may not have heard about the use of these weapons – there has been a stunning indifference towards covering this story for more than 65 years. And, walking around the bay, you wouldn’t have been able to identify any of the after-effects typically associated with the use of a nuclear bomb – no mushroom cloud, no shockwave, no blast crater, fallout, or hordes of innocent victims dying of radiation sickness. For the most part it was a typical March day in San Francisco – the weather predictably schizophrenic, the morning rush hour traffic innavigable as usual. The bombs in this case were not used in the same way they were used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they were used nonetheless.
Early that morning, I attended a demonstration at a University of California Regents’ meeting where chief amongst the demands of the nearly 100 students present were an end to the UC’s management of the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and an overhaul of the undemocratic Board of Regents that keeps the university in that managerial position. The students’ tactic was simple: inside the meeting, they have no power, are unable to speak, and the Regents are able to make violent and destructive decisions enabling and legitimizing nuclear weapons development and production with absolutely no accountability to the rest of the world. So the students would act outside the meeting, risking their necks for justice – quite literally...
Over 150 Danish Scientists Sign Letter to UC President Dynes Protesting UC Nuke Lab Management 1/25/2008
Concerned scientists and scholars from the Danish National Pugwash Group have implored the UC to end its management of the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in a recent open letter addressed to UC President Robert C. Dynes. The letter serves as a sharp criticism of the UC's primary public reason for lab management -- that lording over and revitalizing the nation's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a public service -- and calls for a critical reassessment in UC policy, stating, "...the corrupting involvement of the University of California in the production of illegal and immoral nuclear weapons is a perversion of its true role. Instead of leading the world towards catastrophe, the scholars of your great university ought to be seeking constructive solutions to the many pressing problems that face humanity today."
This letter has been signed by over 150 Danish scientists and scholars, and is available in full here as a .pdf. President Dynes, a physicist and former advisor to Los Alamos, has not yet issued a public reply.
At this January's meeting of the UC Regents in UCLA, members from the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC joined with representatives of the University of California Students Association (UCSA), a body of student government officials from across the UC system, to oppose increases to student fees. A collective statement written by members of the Demil coalition compared student fee increases to the UC's continued management of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Labs, stating: "We, as students of the University of California, demand that our university ends its management of the research and design of nuclear weapons and concentrates instead on an undertaking which is not only more befitting of the nation’s greatest public university system, but which actually constitutes a public service: use the University of California to provide the public the most accessible, highest quality of education possible." As a result, all decisions about increasing student fees were successfully postponed to a future meeting.
UC Demil Coalition Convergence in Santa Cruz, November 17-18 11/07/2007
The Coalition to Demilitarize the UC will be gathering in beautiful Santa Cruz on Saturday and Sunday, November 17-18, for their Fall '07 convergence. Activists from several UC campuses use these quarterly convergences to meet, discuss plans and strategies, build community and support with one another, and have a good time. Read more...
*Update!* Voices from Think Outside the Bomb: Photos, Notes, and Recap Available Now 10/24/2007
At the third Think Outside the Bomb conference in as many years
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC had a major presence.
Among the more than 100 participants from throughout the country, roughly one-quarter were affiliated with
the UC. During a plenary on the second day titled "Localized Resistance to Militarism," UCSC graduate Steve
Stormoen and UCSC student Jamie Thompson were featured speakers. Visit thinkoutsidethebomb.org for photos, notes, and more ...
No More Nukes In Our Name!: Reflections
on the UC Demil Hunger Strike September 12, 2007 9/12/2007
From
May 9-17, 2007, over 40 individuals at four University
of California campuses conducted the "No More
Nukes In Our Name!" Hunger Strike. Through
this bold act of civil resistance and personal sacrifice,
they demanded that the UC Board of Regents fully
and immediately withdraw their management of the
US government's two foremost nuclear weapons facilities
-- the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in
New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(LLNL) in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Read more ...
Two Dozen UC Nuclear Abolitionists Protested July Regent's Meeting
9/12/2007
The UC Regents' July 19th meeting public comment period and nuclear weapons labs oversight committee
("Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee"] sessions were dominated by members of the Coalition
to Demilitarize the UC. Those in attendance used the meeting as a platform to announce a forthcoming Student
Department of Energy Labs Oversight Committee-led international weapons inspection of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, to announce a new UC alumni funding boycott, and put the heat on Regents Chair Richard Blum (to
which he attempted a response at one point, and then later resignedly accepted the public shaming he was receiving).
Read the Santa
Barbara Daily Sound article about the action.
UC Student Hunger Strike: No More Nukes In Our Name! May 9, UC Campuses
5/3/2007
May 9th will see the beginning of a hunger strike to demand that the University of California stop engineering, testing and manufacturing nuclear bombs. This bold act of civil resistance is being coordinated by students and community members across multiple UC campuses. Some of us have pledged to go without solid food - permanently, if necessary -- unless our demand is met!
The hunger strikers' basic position is this: At this critical time in our world, with the survival of our planetary ecosystem hanging in the balance, it is imperative for the UC Regents to stop providing a fig leaf of academic respectability to the creation of the world's most toxic and deadly weapons, and instead use their position of political leverage to spur the US toward genuine nuclear disarmament, democratization, and demilitarization. Read more...
On April 25, the UC Santa Barbara Associated Students Legislative Council unanimously approved a resolution to create a Student Nuclear Weapons Labs Oversight Committee. The committee is charged with monitoring and investigating the work of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons compounds. The creation of the committee is historic. It gives students a basis to carry out physical weapons inspections of each facility, with cooperation from high-profile advisors and specialists (such as, perhaps, United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix). Read
more...
Is The UC a University Or Just Another Military-Industrial Firm?
By Darwin Bond Graham 5/1/2007
Robert Foley, Robert C. Dynes and Richard Blum, three
of the most powerful men in the University of California, each have
extensive connections to military-industrial firms and the US nuclear
weapons complex. All three came into the university’s highest circle
of power quite recently, during a time of flagging morale at the UC’s
nuclear weapons labs, and all three have since helped to shore up the
university as a major military-industrial corporation in its own right.
Each has sought to keep their ties, financial and otherwise, with some
of the firms and institutions they worked with prior to joining UC. Read
more ...
UC DEMIL CONVERGENCE March 10-11, UC Los Angeles 3/3/2007
Students,
alumni, and supporters from across the University of California will
gather to reflect on our projects of this past academic year and decide
on our next major actions in the movement to demilitarize the University
of California. The meeting will take place days prior to the UC Regents’
March meeting at UCLA. Read more ...
The Coalition
to Demilitarize the UC made great strides throughout
2006! The year was chock full of meetings and teach-ins
and protests and momentary disappointments and
exhilarating break-throughs. To mark the dawning
of the new year, following is a collection of collection
of some of the highlights, as well as some pictures
to accompany them. Read more ...
Upcoming Events
March 19: Iraq War anniversary. April 1: Mock Nuclear Waste Dump at UCSB, part of Fossil Fools Day April 24-26: California Student Sustainability Coalition Convergence at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
"NukesaPalooza" '06:
Spring Tour of UC Campuses (4/19/2006)