Moving Forward

It would be easy to imply from this report that the previous iterations of the UC-labs severance movement were failures.  That is by no means the case, for several reasons.  First, these past movements created historic momentum that continues to benefit us today; for instance, some of the core members of the past campaigns continue to play a role in the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC.  In addition, the movements forced disclosure of information regarding the UC’s role at the labs, without which our understanding of UC “management” might be incomplete.

The past severance movements also provide numerous lessons that, if we heed them, may make all the difference in the success of our campaign.

The UC Regents have demonstrated over and over again that they will never relinquish their contract to manage Livermore and Los Alamos absent an overwhelming level of pressure from the grassroots.  During the late-‘70s and early-‘80s, the governor of California, several hundred faculty members, and a dedicated cadre of students lobbied intensely for the Regents to “convert” the labs to performing non-weapons work.  When that failed, this nascent grassroots movement began a new approach, lobbying the Regents to voluntarily sever their ties to the labs.  This strategy likewise failed, for much the same reason as the first.

As members of the US business elite, the Regents are invariably inclined ideologically to believe that nuclear weapons are justifiable to protect United States “interests.”  In addition, the Regents will forever be psychologically out of reach for anyone looking to change their views, given the vast power disparity between a typical Regent and a typical student, community member, or faculty member.  The problem is a structural one, stemming from a lack of democracy in UC decision-making.  These inequalities have perhaps never been more evident than during the faculty-led severance campaign of 1989 and 1990, when an overwhelming number of both faculty members and students at each UC campus indicated through formal polls and surveys that they favored an end to the UC-labs relationship.  The Regents entirely ignored this clear demonstration of popular will.

Here, it is important to understand another power disparity that has manifested numerous times in the more than five decades the UC has managed the nuclear weapons labs.  Within the context of the UC-labs relationship, the Regents are almost entirely subservient to other, much more powerful entities: the federal government, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Therefore, despite unprecedented support from the governor of California and other influential figures within the California political milieu, the UC Weapons Lab Conversion Project’s repeated attempts in the late-1970s and early-1980s to convince the Regents to convert the labs to non-weapons work was destined for failure.  Even if the Regents were inclined to initiate significant programmatic changes at the labs, the Energy Department would not permit them to do so.   

It is important to understand, as well, the institutional role that Los Alamos and Livermore play within the US nuclear weapons complex.  The Department of Energy, Los Alamos and Livermore officials, and top scientists at both labs have a major vested interest in maintaining substantial nuclear arms programs.  One of the major reasons the Cold War did not end sooner, and one of the major reasons the US still possesses so many nuclear weapons, is that these officials and scientists exercise their influence to the greatest degree possible in maintaining and expanding the US nuclear weapons stockpile, without which their jobs and social functions would become largely irrelevant. The “Stockpile Stewardship Program,” for example, was largely fabricated by Los Alamos and Livermore officials who wanted to justify maintaining the US’ current arsenal of 10,500 nuclear warheads.(70)

In the case of Stockpile Stewardship, the machinations of Los Alamos and Livermore officials have been extremely successful.  Against all logic, the US nuclear weapons budget has ballooned from $3.5 billion in 1990, when the Cold War ended, to $6.7 billion today.

The struggle for UC lab severance is nevertheless a significant one, because the UC’s reputation has long given a fig leaf of academic legitimacy to the development of nuclear weapons.  Absent this false shield of credibility, nuclear weapons science would have lacked the “proper public relations” that so concerned the early planners of the arms race in 1945.(71)  As a general rule, decisions about nuclear weapons allocations are not made based on careful debate and reasoned calculations by legislators.  To a large degree, such allocations are based on proposals by officials at each lab, whose credibility rests on the images of the institutions they oversee.(72)  Therefore, any turn of events that undermines the credibility of the labs, or elevates the political cost for Congress of rubber-stamping the labs’ highly-influential policy proposals, will be a major step toward the ultimate goal of nuclear abolition.

As the UC severance movement moves forward, it faces a set of new challenges.  The UC is no longer the sole manager at Los Alamos.  The Regents have constituted a limited-liability corporation, “Los Alamos Security LLC,” with their primary partner, Bechtel Corporation (one of the most powerful and influential corporations in the world), and a roster of other corporations and universities.  Meanwhile, the Livermore lab management contract is scheduled to be put up for bid in 2007.  The labs have only grown more powerful in recent years, as Los Alamos is increasingly emerging as the primary site in the US nuclear complex for the production of plutonium pits, the cores of nuclear weapons.  Each labs’ budget continues to increase substantially with each passing year.

During this new phase of growth, during which it will invariably continue to encounter an enormously powerful degree of resistance to its efforts from both the Regents and officials at each lab, the UC severance movement can draw great inspiration from the larger disarmament movement Professor Lawrence Wittner describes so well in Toward Nuclear Abolition.  As Wittner notes, “Most government officials – and particularly those of major powers – had no intention of adopting nuclear arms control and disarmament policies.  Instead, they grudgingly accepted such policies thanks to the emergence of popular pressure.”(73)

Will Parrish is Youth Outreach Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and coordinator of the UC Nuclear Free campaign (www.ucnuclearfree.org).

Thanks to Jackie Cabasso and Darwin BondGraham for their invaluable research contributions to this report. Thanks for the inspiration to Michael Coffey, Tara Dorabji, Chelsea Collonge, Josh Kearns, Sophia Ritchie, Erin Hamby, Steve Stormoen, Joanna Nobbe, all the other members of the Coalition to Demilitarize, and all past and present UC disarmament activists for the inspiration.


Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - Los Alamos: "Born at the Crosshairs"
Part 2 - The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the ‘60s
Part 3 - Challenging the UC's “Mantle of Legitimacy”
Part 4 - The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions
Part 5 - The Rise of Faculty Activism
Part 6 - A New Generation Emerges
Part 7 - Moving Forward
Works Cited