Let me begin by thanking the Catholic Peace Mission for the opportunity to be with you today. In something like ancient history, Kathleen McQuillen and I were colleagues in the American Friends Service Committee. My subject today is nuclear weapons and the military industrial complex which is not a subject likely to leave you dancing the aisles. But given Des Moines proud history, with former Mayor Cownie having joined Mayors for Peace and with his role in winning nuclear abolition resolutions from the U.S. conference of mayors, I trust that you can go the distance with me.
A week ago, I experienced emotional whiplash. Having worked with Japanese and other atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors for the last forty years, I was beyond excited with the news that Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- & H- Bomb Sufferers Organizations had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Having been involved in nominating them for that award, even at my age, I was bouncing off the walls.
Then on Sunday the New York Times devoted four full pages of its Sunday Opinion section to the massive U.S. industrial, scientific, and social complexes that have been mobilized for the $1.7 trillion “modernization” program that is underway in almost all of our 50 states. This is to upgrade and replace the Pentagon’s entire nuclear arsenal and its air, naval, and ground launch delivery systems for the 21st century. The article demonstrated the historian E.P. Thompson’s truth that the U.S. and back then the Soviet Union “ don’t have military industrial complexes, they are such complexes.” Absent from the article was that the Pentagon had just launched the two-week long Steadfast Noon exercise, practicing to fight a nuclear war.
I have a lot to cover, so please bear with me as I describe some of the importance and meaning of Hidankyo’ s Nobel Peace Prize, how we are now living in the world at its most dangerous moment since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally I’ll describe what nuclear weapons do and how they have been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing. I will then outline some of the dimensions of the military-industrial-Congressional-University complex and conclude more hopefully with some ways that we can build on the Hibakusha’s extraordinary achievement.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Let’s begin with a short, maybe unnecessary, primer on what nuclear weapons actually do. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings, Ian Baruma wrote that “It is even harder to imagine what happened in Hiroshima than it is at Auschwitz for the horror of Hiroshima was compressed into one singular event, which left hardly a visual trace.”
The physicist Naomi Shohno, herself a Hibakusha, provided us with a scientific description of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And remember that by today’s standards, those A-bombs were comparatively small.
Shohno explained that the devastation came in three waves. In the first second, a poisonous wave of radiation spread across a radius of roughly two miles. Then came the blast wave destroying the city. That was followed by the heat wave that burned the city and its people.
Shohno wrote that “…at the moment of the explosion a fireball with a temperature of several million degrees centigrade and an atmospheric pressure of several hundred thousand bars was formed at the burst point….Buildings were smashed to pieces and incinerated… and it was the great quantities of dust from the destroyed buildings, carried by the winds, that cast the city into pitch-darkness just after the bombing. The violent winds also tossed people about…As the fireball disappeared, the vacuum around the burst point pulled in dust, air, and the evaporated material of the A-bomb, causing a mushroom cloud to rise…because of the combined effects of the blast, thermal rays, fires, almost all buildings within about 2 kilometers of the hypocenter were completely razed and consumed by fire in an instant…” When you see the images of the mushroom clouds, you are seeing more than the detritus of A-bombed homes, shops, factories, roads, and bridges. You are also seeing the incinerated remains of many human beings.
120.000 people were killed almost immediately, 210,000 by year’s end. The city’s hospitals were destroyed. Half of the doctors and nurses were killed. There was a severe lack of medicines and bandages. People and their loved ones who they thought had survived later succumbed to radiation diseases. In the months that followed, mutant babies, including some described as jellyfish babies, were born. Over the years many died from cancer. And because so little was publicly known about radiation, for years many Hibakusha were shunned out of fear that radiation disease was contagious. And to this day some third generation Hibakusha are denied marriage partners out of fear of genetic damage.
Several years ago, Physicians for Social Responsibility, in association with some of the nation’s most highly respected environmental scientists, issued a report on the consequences of a comparatively small nuclear exchange, the use of 50 to 100 tactical nuclear weapons of the world’s 12,000 nuclear warheads, targeted against cities in a computerized simulation of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. In the first hours, hundreds of millions of human beings would be killed with many more poisoned and dying in the days and weeks that followed. Worse, the fires ignited by the nuclear weapons would create immense amounts of smoke that would drift over the northern hemisphere. That smoke would block the sun’s rays. Instead of global warming, we would have global cooling that would devastate the world’s agriculture, resulting in global famine and the deaths of up to two billion people.
As we have known since the physicist Carl Sagan’s 1980s studies, a thermonuclear exchange between great powers would cause nuclear winter and the deaths of almost everyone on the planet. In 1985, under popular pressure, that contributed to President Reagan finally joined Mikhail Gorbachev in conceding that no one can win a nuclear war, and that therefore a nuclear war must not be fought.
But lessons taught are not always lessons learned.
Let me say a few words about deterrence theory, which has long served to legitimate the US and other nuclear powers’ arsenals and war plans. That dangerous doctrine is rarely critically examined, even as it is widely recognized that the launch of a single tactical nuclear weapon could escalate to a civilization ending, nuclear exchange. Annie Jacobsen’s important new book Nuclear War: A Scenario provides a chilling description of what could happen if deterrence fails: the end of all life as we know it in 72 minutes.
The popular understanding of nuclear deterrence is that no nuclear power will attack another with its nuclear arsenal unless it is attacked first. Few remember that the initial draft of the Bush-Cheney Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations was clear. It stated, and I quote, “The focus of US deterrence efforts is…to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US national interests….”? Our oil, for example, is under their sand. And, in the past, the U.S. prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks to ensure that Saddam Hussein didn’t use chemical weapons on U.S. troops as they gathered to decimate his forces. A similar threat was made in response to Chinese shelling of tiny offshore Taiwanese islands, and during and repeatedly after the Korean War.
There are numerous ways that deterrence can fail, among them technical failures as when early warning systems misread flights of geese, when the wrong cassette is placed in a computer; when a nuclear power’s bluff is called; or when a launch signal is mistakenly sent to Okinawa, as happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
HIBAKUSHA
Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later wrote that the Hibakusha transformed their excruciating physical and emotional suffering into the world’s most powerful force for the abolition of nuclear weapons. With the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, their tortured testimonies and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring more powerfully around the world and provide new openings to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, the danger of nuclear apocalypse.
Because we sometimes feel powerless, let us take a moment to marvel at, and learn from Hibakusha. Like other Japanese, during the war in the Pacific, they were seen by U.S. leaders and the media as “vermin” to be eliminated, but the leaders of their movement awakened the conscience of the world after suffering the world’s worst single war crime. And contrary to Truman’s mythology that the A-bombs were needed to defeat Japan, recall that senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised Truman that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing.” Before the A-bombings, Secretary of War Stimson advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.
Suffering their own serious wounds and agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands, staggering to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers. In the months and years that followed, many died from their wounds, radiation inflicted cancers, and other radiation diseases. Memories remain of giving birth to mutant babies and of other children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages that could affect their offspring, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination. And as a result of the U.S. military occupation of Japan, which continued until 1952, and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. There were also thousands of Korean A-bomb victims, many of whom had been shipped from their conquered nation to work as forced laborers. There have also been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other victims from nuclear weapons tests here in the U.S., Russia, Kazakhstan, and in other nations.
With Hibakusha’s testimonies in communities across the world and in the U.N. they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they played critical roles in winning the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to addressing the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests. Hibakusha’s testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation in 2017 of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of U.S. nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration taught, during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Tragically, this is the playbook that the Russian government has been working from with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats.
WHY NOW – THREATS TODAY
Nihon Hidankyo, along with the first Godzilla movie, was created in 1956 in the aftermath of the Bravo H-Bomb test that poisoned Japanese fishermen, Marshall Islanders, and Japan’s food supply. It was nominated for the Nobel Prize many times in the past, so we have to ask why the Nobel Committee finally decided to honor them. My guess is that it is the Committee’s own desperate way of crying out that as we face the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we must refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the Ukraine War, an accident, an incident, or a miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea could also ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.
The Nobel Committee also knows that with fears of a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. They also know that in Europe there is renewed advocacy for a Eurobomb with French and British arsenals serving as the continent’s nuclear umbrella.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND EMPIRE
As we face the existential dangers of possible nuclear war, just as you have to address the causes as well as the symptoms of a disease, we have to be honest about and address the forces that are driving nuclear confrontations. We are dealing with 20th and 21st century versions of gunboat diplomacy.
In a recent confidential discussion with current and former U.S., Russian, and European arms control negotiators and analysts a number of profoundly disturbing points were raised: China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and we are now three scorpions in a bottle instead of two. That also makes arms control diplomacy much more difficult. Most urgently, the U.S. and Russia have reduced the operational threshold in which they would fire their nuclear weapons. There is the danger that with the Ukraine War the nuclear deterrence paradigm may have already failed. Finally, as we approach next month’s election, in Washington nuclear war analysts are competing to see who can publish the most hawkish paper to influence the incoming administration, regardless of who wins the election..
How many of you saw Christopher Nolans film “Oppenheimer?”
Nolan reminded us that the nuclear weapons grew from the amazing dynamics early 20th century physicists as they discovered and explored the atom’s structures and power. And that was followed by the U.S. race to build a deterrent A-bomb before Germany’s Hitler and Heisenberg created an offensive A-Bomb. (Let me add parenthetically that by 1942, three years before the A-bombing of Hiroshima, U.S. leaders knew that Hitler would not have an A-bomb in time for use in the war. That year at Los Alamos, General Groves told the incoming senior physicist Joseph Rotblat that the bomb was no longer about Germany, but about the Soviet Union.) It was then, four generations ago, that the foundations of the nuclear dimensions of the military-industrial-Congressional-University Complex, were born.
Like many in my generation in my youth I read Hersey’s book Hiroshima, the first major description of the devastation of that city to be published in the US. But the danger of nuclear weapons didn’t hit me until October 1973. Working in Europe, I was attending a meeting in Copenhagen. The war in Middle East, designed to reverse Israel’s 1967 conquests was believed to have ended, and attention had returned to the Watergate scandal. Thinking the Middle East War was over, I was shocked to awake and hear on Armed Forces radio that U.S. forces were on a nuclear alert. My first thought was that as Watergate was drawing to its climax Richard Nixon might be attempting a coup. (In fact, we later learned that Secretary of Defense Schlessinger worried that Nixon might be tempted to do just that and had ordered that there be no significant troop movements without his express order.)
Here is what actually happened. Once the Israeli Army had defeated Egyptian President Sadat’s forces, a ceasefire was negotiated. As Sadat’s third army fell back across the Sinai Peninsula, with a green light from Henry Kissinger Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Israeli forces disregarded the ceasefire. They kept pushing Egyptian troops further back, surrounded them, and denied them food and water. Desperate to prevent further humiliation and the loss of his army, Sadat notified Kissinger, who was functioning as commander in chief while President Nixon drank himself into Watergate stupors, as well as Soviet President Brezhnev, that he would appeal to the United Nations to authorize U.S., and Soviet forces to intervene to enf0orce the ceasefire.
That was when Kissinger ordered the nuclear alert. He had managed the outcome of the war to expand and reinforce U.S. Middle East hegemony. The last thing he wanted was to open the field for the Soviets. So, ad he ordered the nuclear alert, Kissinger also insisted that Golda Meir respect the ceasefire. Thus, the war came to an end.
That was when I began to understand the Deadly Connection, the relationship between U.S. foreign military interventions and nuclear war. I deepened my understanding in conversations with Daniel Ellsberg and learned that before 1973. during wars, crises, and coups the U.S. had prepared and/or threatened to launch first strike nuclear attacks in relation to Iran, China, Lebanon, Iraq, Vietnam, Cuba, and Guatemala. This is the nuclear blackmail model that Vladimir Putin is working from today in Ukraine. I regret to have to say, that each of the other nuclear weapons states has similarly prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear war at least once.
Since 1973 the U.S. has threatened Iraq, China, North Korea, and Libya with first strike nuclear attacks. And Robert O’Brien, Donald Trump’s national security advisor recently wrote that during Trump’s fire and fury threats against North Korea we came closer to nuclear war than almost anyone knew.
Of course there is context, and my wife advises me to tread lightly and kindly as I approach it. During the Cold War there was a powerful taboo against using the terms empire and imperialism. But during the post-Cold War unipolar era the blinkers were removed. Karl Rove, President W. Bush’s senior advisor was quoted in the New York Times as saying “’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities…. We’re history’s actors…”
As you likely know, the authors of our constitution were inspired by the models of the Greek, Roman, French, and British empires. Believing it could be more easily manipulated by the elite. After the conquests and genocide that led to the creation of a continental empire, in 1898 the U.S. launched its overseas empire with the Spanish-American War, conquering Cuba, and Puerto Rico to control most of Latin America, and the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa as steppingstones to the holy grail of capitalism – the China market. With Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Pacific became an American Lake, and much of Britain’s and France’s imperial domains were integrated into Washington’s global sphere.
More than a military was needed to hold the imperial sphere in place. International institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Bretton Woods agreement were largely created and imposed by the United States. That is what is called the “rules based order.”
And within that velvet glove lay its iron hand: global military alliances, the unprecedented network of roughly 800 U.S. foreign military bases and installations, and the nuclear threat – Ellsberg’s gun – to hold the imperium together.
With the end of the Cold War, for a generation, there was no substantive challenge to U.S. dominance. But today, with the rise of China, middle powers, and some of the formerly colonized nations, and with the failures of Washington’s calamitous wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq we are now in what the Italian Antonio Gramsci termed the time of monsters. This is the interregnum when the old world is dying, and the new one is busy and painfully being born. Hence the Ukraine and Middle East Wars, the confrontations with China, and the increased influence of the Global South as we saw in South Africa’s International Court of Justice challenge to Israel’s massive war crimes
WARS AND MOUNTING DANGERS
Halloween is coming, so I’ll add to the list of horrors. I don’t want to scare you, but if we want to prevent war and create peaceful and just world, we need to understand the world we are living in.
U.N. General Secretary Guterres warns that “The world is becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise and it seems incapable of coming together to respond to mounting challenges.” There are disturbing parallels to the forces that triggered the First World War. As in 1914, there are tensions between rising and declining powers, arms races with new technologies, complex alliance structures, intensifying nationalism, territorial competition, economic integration and intense competition, and wild card actors. Yet, unlike Sarajevo in 1914, an incident, accident, or miscalculation, today could trigger escalation to thermonuclear war.
With the Ukraine War, we face the dangers of political and military miscalculations leading to vertical (weapons) or horizontal (geographic) escalation. After its many nuclear threats, what might the Kremlin’s response be if President Biden okays and provides necessary assistance for Kyiv to launch long-range missiles at Russian cities or military bases, or if a senior Russian political leader is killed by a Ukrainian drone in Moscow? How would NATO respond if a Russian missile malfunctions or purposely hits Polish cities?
GAZA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Ukraine and Gaza have served as the murderous escape valves for pressures of the tectonic geopolitical changes that were building beneath the surface during the Post-Cold War period. With my once having been a Middle East specialist, Luke asked me to focus some of my remarks about the escalating Middle East War. Israel after all is a nuclear weapons state that threatened the use of its “Temple Weapons” during the first days of the 1973 war. And until earlier this week, there were fears that Israel would attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. There is also the possibility that Iran, humiliated by its military setbacks, will take a lesson from North Korea, and expedite its development of nuclear weapons.
At root, as Yasir Arafat told a delegation I participated in Beirut just over 30 years ago, it is cowboys and Indians all over again. European antisemitism appeared to climax in the Nazi Holocaust, led to the creation of the Zionist movement which promised a land without people for a people without a land. However, like Iowa and the rest of our country, it was a land with people. With superior weapons, other advanced technologies, and brutal ethnic cleansing, colonizing settlements followed in Israel and then in the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967, as they had across North America.
Neither the Arab states nor Israel fully accepted the 1947 partition plan, resulting in 1948 and 1967 wars, the creation of an apartheid Israeli state, and the Palestinian Nakba, The 1967 Six Day War, which as not a war for Israel’s survival – something we can discuss later – left Israel as an occupying military colonial power over the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. And Palestinians have understandably resisted since then.
Then to the history of preparations and threats to initiate nuclear war in the Middle East. It began in 1948. During World War II, when the U.S. and the Soviets were allies, President Roosevelt encouraged Moscow’s occupation of Iran in order to facilitate the supply of weapons to Russia to defeat Hitler. After the war, the Soviets were slow to withdraw from Iran. Given the centrality of oil in the industrial era, President Truman drew his nuclear gun. He warned Moscow’s ambassador that if the Soviets did not begin their withdrawal within 48 hours Moscow would cease to exist. The Soviet withdrawal began within 24 hours.
During the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Israel invaded Egypt at Britain’s and France’s behest, Soviet Premier Bulganin threatened London and Paris with a nuclear attack that he probably could not have implemented. President Eisenhower responded with a nuclear threat of his own and applied the financial pressure on France, Britain and Israel that forced their withdrawals. Suffering guilt over having lured Israel into playing the cat’s paw for the European powers, the French with Prime Minister Shimon Peres began the collaboration that led to the creation of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
In 1958, during the first spasm of what later became the Lebanese civil war, the U.S. positioned nuclear weapons off the Lebanese coast and threatened to use them. Soon thereafter Eisenhower threatened to use those same nuclear weapons to prevent left wing forces from coming to power in Iraq.
In 1970 President Nixon signaled U.S. preparations to initiate nuclear war during the Black September War in Jordan. Three years later, in the first defensive throes of the October War, Gold Meir threatened to use Israel’s “Temple Weapons” to open the floodgates of U.S. military spare parts and weapons, and Henry Kissinger, as I have described, placed U.S. forces on nuclear alert.
In 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, President Carter announced his doctrine, that the U.S. would use any means necessary – that includes nuclear weapons – to reinforce U.S, vital interests in the Middle East. The following year President Reagan reaffirmed the Carter Doctrine.
In the run up to the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, and British Prime Minister all threatened Iraq with nuclear attack if Hussein preemptively used chemical weapons against allied forces as they prepared to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. That threat was repeated during the Bush/Cheney 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bill Clinton threatened Libya and Iraq with nuclear attacks in 1996 and 1998, And in 2006 W. Bush also communicated an implicit threat to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
To the north, with help from a Pakistani nuclear weapons designer, Iran developed its nuclear infrastructure. Since President Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama, Iran’s sophisticated centrifuges have brought Teheran to within a hairs breath of being sufficient for nuclear weapons. Restrained at least for now by a religious fatwa prohibiting possession of nuclear weapons and fears that Saudi Arabia will go nuclear if Iran tests a nuclear weapon, Teheran has proceeded cautiously. But continuing revelation is nothing new in world’s religions.
MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-CONGRESSIONAL COMPLEX
With this unpleasant history of empire out of the way, let’s turn to the nuclear dimensions of the military-industrial-Congressional-University Complex. In his valedictory address, as President Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial complex’s tentacles which subvert democracy, he eliminated his reference to Congress that was in his initial draft. He had been advised that it was impolitic for an outgoing president to be so critical of the second branch of government. When was the last time that you heard a member of Congress oppose a new military contract in his or her district or state? In the tradition of the banality of evil – and we are talking about the evil of nuclear weapons – bringing home the military bacon is an essential role for most members of Congress. They certainly do not want to be criticized for being weak on defense.
To speak with authority about the complex, I turned to the leading expert on the subject William Hartung who is currently at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, D.C. Then came the New York Times’ comprehensive report that described the massive nationwide infrastructure that I referred to earlier.
As we see in the likely underestimated $1.7 trillion dollar upgrade of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems, the weaponization of space and cyberspace, U.S. conventional weapons dominance, and the more than $100 million that the largest armaments corporations spend to lobby Congress, the military-industrial-Congressional-university complex survived both the Cold and Post-Cold War eras, and as Eisenhower warned, its appealing tentacles are subverting U.S. democracy.
My reading habits are different from many. So, when I received the invitation to join you today, my thoughts turned first to Albert Speer’s memoir when Honeywell’s cluster bombs were wounding and killing untold thousands of Vietnamese in the early 1970s. Speer was Hitler’s armaments minister, and he wrote his apologia as an imprisoned war criminal. Included in the book was Speer’s description of his role in Germany’s failed effort to build a nuclear weapon and how the Nazi armaments system worked.
Speer wrote that, “We owed the success of our programs to thousands of technicians with special achievements to their credit to whom we now entrusted the responsibility for whole segments of the armaments industry…I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities.” Sound familiar?
I have a physicist friend who focuses on quantum computing and the spin of the atom’s highest quark. I once asked him how his fellow scientists live with what should be a sense of guilt about their roles in building dimensions of weapons systems for foreign intervention wars and the nuclear arsenal. Consistent with Speer, my friend responded that they think only of the technical and scientific challenge before them, not the moral implications. And that pays their mortgages.
From another angle, Kevin Phillips, once a Republican oriented journalist, wrote about the Bushes. He reminded readers that beginning with World War I, the Bush dynasty played essential roles and created much of its wealth in the arms industry. He wrote that “George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush were the dynasty’s founding fathers during… and after World War I.” Walker “made his mark in corporate reorganizations and war contracts.” Sam Bush, W. Bush’s great-grandfather, ran Buckeye Steel Castings which produced weapons, and in 1917 he went to Washington to head the small arms and ordinance section of the federal War Industries Board.” During World War II, W’s grandfather Prescott Bush was a director of Dresser Industries. Dresser produced incendiary bombs which burned 66 Japanese cities to the ground. Dresser also produced gaseous diffusion pumps for the Manhattan Project. Later, before becoming president, as CIA Director, one of George H.W. Bush’s priorities was “US weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.”
Turning to the complex’s nuclear dimensions, we need to begin with the Manhattan Project. As Hartung wrote, the Manhattan Project was “one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history.” At its peak, the Project employed 130,000 workers and cost $38 billion in today’s dollars. One of the factors contributing to Truman’s decision to A-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was his fear that if voters learned about the cost of the Bomb and he hadn’t used it they would vote against him in the 1948 presidential election.
Today, as Hartung writes, “The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Nuclear-armed submarines, bombers and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming.” And when you factor in subcontractors “most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.” The New York Times puts that number at nearly 50.
Alicia Sanders-Zakre, director of research at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and my former intern, recently prepared a report about the roles of universities in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The leading scientists of the Manhattan project, she reminded us, came primarily from “the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Purdue University, the University of Rochester, and Iowa State University.” After World War II, when Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories were established, much of the work was moved off campus. But the Universities of California and Texas remain deeply involved in running those labs.
Alicia also explained that the Universities of Chicago and California at San Francisco, MIT. Columbia, and the Universities of Rochester and Washington “participated in numerous unethical studies about the effects of radiation on human subjects from the 1940s through the 1970s. Permit me a few words about those studies.
In the first years that I travelled to Hiroshima, I was shocked to hear Japanese and Marshall Islands A- & H- Bomb victims charge that they were used as “Guinea pigs.” They described being forced for years to undergo medical examinations by the ABCC Commission (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) and the 4.1 project without being provided medical care.
In 2000, I hosted a delegation of global hibakusha for meetings at the United Nations, and a colleague arranged for an off the record meeting for us with the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. There I explained the charge that Hibakusha make that they been exploited like guinea pigs. I offered that it is natural for victims to think the worst of their victimizers. Referencing Dr. Mengle’s evil medical experiments on Jews during the Holocaust, I asked if he could deny the Hibakusha’s claims. “On no” he replied. “We use those studies for everything including the design for new nuclear weapons.” Since then, a Japanese researcher found a document in which a U.S. official, advised that Hibakusha “are more like animals than us” in his advocacy of testing.
A positive step was taken during the Clinton Administration when the U.S. and Russia negotiated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It outlawed kinetic nuclear weapons testing. But there was a catch. While the treaty prevents radioactive fallout from testing, it allows computerized simulated tests. These tests are conducted with the help of university partnerships for the Stockpile Stewardship program to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the development of new nuclear weapons like those being deployed across Western Europe.
One more word about universities. As Hartung wrote “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense became the biggest patron of American science.” That remains the case with “the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons guided by artificial intelligence.” Combine that, Hartung writes, “with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms, and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state.”
The most recent data we have is from 2022 when 14 universities received at least $100 million in Pentagon funding for their miliary-related research.
There is of course the Congressional dimension of the complex. One example is the Senate ICBM Coalition which plays a leading role in maintaining and updating the most dangerous leg of the nuclear triad: land based ICBMs. These strategically armed missiles are based, maintained, and primarily produced in Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. They are the most dangerous weapons because they are sitting ducks, immovable, and thus vulnerable to either a disarming first strike nuclear attacks or more likely mistaken alerts. Remember the false alarm that terrorized Hawaii a few years ago? These are the classical “use them or lose them” omnicidal nuclear weapons. U.S. doctrine is to launch them before they are destroyed.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry and many others assert that the naval and bomber legs of the nuclear triad are more than sufficient for deterrence. But the bipartisan ICBM coalition, led by Democratic Senator Tester, insists not only on maintaining these missiles. but on upgrading the system with new and staggeringly expensive so-called Sentinel missiles. Not surprisingly, Hartung reports that “Northrop–Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing Sentinel…They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch.”
Another massive MICC boondoggle is the F-35 fighter-bomber. It is designed to be dual capable, supporting U.S. ground-based troops and launching nuclear weapons. As Hartung writes, the F-35 is “The poster child for such costly, dysfunctional systems….a plane tasked with multiple missions, none of which it does well. The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the air force, marines, and navy…[it is] the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons system ever.”
Before closing with more hopeful words, let me briefly list some of the names of U.S. corporations most complicit in preparations for nuclear omnicide: AECOM, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Bechtel, Boeing, Babcock and Wilcox, Charles Stark Draper Lab in my home town, Fluor, General Dynamics, Honeywell International, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Jacobs Engineering, Lockheed Martin, Moog, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Raytheon also back in Boston, and Textron
CONCLUSION
I am sorry if I have depressed you with this recitation of evil, banal or otherwise. This is not the country or the world that we want for ourselves, for our children, and our grandchildren. We can take courage and inspiration from the generations of steadfast and courageous struggles for civil, human, women’s and workers’ rights in our country and others. And in this vein I can speak from personal experience and promise that nuclear weapons states are not invincible.
Grassroots and scientific opposition, in the forms of vigils, boats defying bans and sailing into nuclear test zones, children’s strontium laced first teeth being sent to officials, publications, letters, petitions, and more, U.S. and internationally, forced the negotiation of the Test Ban and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaties. The NPT requires the original nuclear powers to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals.
In the early 1980s a small study group of students and professors at MIT and voters in town meetings across New England launched what became the massive nuclear weapons freeze movement that forced President Reagan to negotiate the Intermediate Forces Treaty with Russia and to join Mikhail Gorbachev in declaring that nuclear wars cannot be won and must not be fought. And I am here today in part because in that same period, dedicated community based efforts in Boston and San Francico overcame the Pentagon’s, Senators Kennedy’s, and Feinstein’s. and their corporate backers’ campaigns to transform their harbors into nuclear weapons bases.
Today the leading edge of the U.S. nuclear disarmament movement is the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated and led by Physicians for Social Responsibility. It calls for pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. renouncing first use; ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. President to launch a nuclear attack; taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and cancelling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons. In response to community-based organizing, the campaign is backed by 43 members of Congress, and 85 cities and states.
And it was international disgust at the nuclear weapons states’ hypocrisy and double standards in their refusal to implement their Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, as well as searing testimonies of hibakusha – including U.S. downwinders – about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons that fueled the popular and political forces that led 122 governments, the majority of the world’s nations, to negotiate the U.N. Treaty on Prohibition on Nuclear weapons.
We also have the international Don’t Bank on the Bomb campaign which has led people, corporations, and other institutions to divest many millions of dollars from companies involved in manufacturing nuclear weapons.
Several years ago, Noam Chomsky remarked that we know how to overcome the existential nuclear and climate emergency threats. The question, he said, is whether we have the will to do so. I have had the rare privilege of participating in U.N. disarmament conferences. In every one, the Vatican ambassador has been uncompromising in decrying the omnicidal threat posed by nuclear weapons. I hope as religiously committed people you will follow the Vatican’s lead and the exemplary efforts of Santa Fe Archbishop John C. Webster in willfully mobilizing your fellow and sister Catholics and others to work for a nuclear weapons-free world.
*Joseph Gerson can be reached via email at josephcgerson@gmail.