Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

By Beatrice Fihn

Americans like a good comeback story, but the recent revitalization of the nuclear arms race is not one to be cheered. President Trump plans to charge the US taxpayer nearly $100,000-a-minute to expand the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

Other nuclear-armed countries are doing the same.

A new generation of nuclear weapons requires a new generation of workers to develop and maintain these weapons of mass destruction. The National Nuclear Security Administration reported to Congress that 40 percent of its workforce will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

The US government and its contractors have turned to the nation’s universities to provide this human capital. A new report documents formal ties between nearly 50 college campuses and the nuclear weapons complex.

The extent to which universities have joined this endeavor is surprising. Supporting weapons of mass destruction does not show up in any university mission statements. In fact, it’s often the opposite: universities like to talk about bringing the benefits of knowledge to a global community.

The dangers posed by nuclear weapons are clear. Yet universities still choose to support them.

Students and faculty now face a choice. They can become the next generation of weapons scientists. Or they can refuse to be complicit in this scheme, denying research partnerships or internships at nuclear weapons labs.

Currently, universities across the country receive millions and in some cases billions of dollars to support nuclear weapons development. Universities directly manage nuclear weapons labs, form institutional agreements with these labs and related production sites, pursue research partnerships with nuclear weapons scientists, and provide targeted workforce development for these facilities.

Many of the universities with more extensive connections to nuclear weapons are household names: the University of California, Texas A&M University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of New Mexico. Others, such as local technical and vocational schools, are less well-known.

Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction, just like chemical and biological weapons. They carry devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences that do not stop at national borders.

Thousands still suffer from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands more suffer from the effects of nuclear weapons testing in the 20th century, including in the US.

One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study estimated that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests would kill an additional 11,000 Americans due to an increase in fatal cancers. The United States has paid more than $2.3 billion in compensation to individuals affected by nuclear test fallout. Those most affected by tests around the world have been the already marginalized: indigenous and colonized peoples, women and children.

Some see value in the nuclear weapons complex because it supplies thousands of jobs. These boosters fail to acknowledge the studies that demonstrate how defense spending produces fewer jobs per dollar than investment in other areas, like education, health care or infrastructure. The business of nuclear weapons does not provide jobs; it takes them away.

Our choice today is between a future without nuclear weapons or no future at all. Seventy-nine nations (and counting) have signed the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; American states and cities are voting to urge the US to join them. Universities that support nuclear weapons make the wrong choice and their communities should refuse to be complicit.

Students, faculty, alumni, and community members—who often fund these schools through their tax dollars—can also take concrete action to help their universities join the right side of history.

They can push for transparency around any ties to the nuclear weapons complex, install ethical review processes for basic or dual-purpose research funded by the complex, and prohibit classified research. They can ask University administrations to stop direct management of nuclear weapons production sites and dissolve research contracts solely related to nuclear weapons production.

University communities and administrations together can lobby the federal government to flip its funding priorities, so that nonproliferation and disarmament verification research receive more funding than weapons activities.

A society can—and should—actively debate the extent to which universities are to serve explicitly national interests. But there should be no debate when it comes to supporting weapons of mass destruction. American academia must stop enabling mass murder.

—Beatrice Fihn is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winners, and wrote this piece for Newsweek, Nov. 13, 2019.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By John LaForge

The Trump administration has halted, without explanation, the routine practice of reporting the current number of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, the AP and United Press International report. The new secrecy will make it nearly impossible to estimate the true cost of nuclear weapons, to show adherence to arms control treaties, or to pressure others nuclear weapons states to disclose the size of their arsenals.

The secrecy decision was revealed in an April 5 letter from the Department of Energy’s Office of Classification to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Hans M. Kristensen, director of the group’s Nuclear Information Project, said the FAS regularly asks for the information and that it’s been made public for decades.

“The decision walks back nearly a decade of US nuclear weapons transparency policy—in fact, longer if including stockpile transparency initiatives in the late 1990s,” Kristensen wrote in an April 17 memo, according to the AP.

There is no national security rationale for keeping the number secret, Kristensen told the AP, adding that it is “unnecessary and counterproductive.”

“This is curious,” he reportedly said, “since the Trump administration had repeatedly complained about secrecy in the Russian and Chinese arsenals. Instead, it now appears to endorse their secrecy.”

Military classifies news of war in Afghanistan

In April, the Pentagon halted its public disclosure of how much of Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, adding to a long list of progress reports from the war that are now being kept secret.

John Sopko, US Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told the New York Times, “We’re troubled by it.” Keeping Sopko’s reports secret means, “The only people who don’t know what’s going on and how good or bad a job we’re doing are the people paying for it,” he said. Sopko and some in Congress have access to some of the information.

The new restrictions on public information about the 18-year-long occupation of Afghanistan are in addition to the October 2017 halt to disclosing Afghan military casualties, its performance assessments, and anti-corruption efforts by the Afghan Ministry of Interior, David Zucchino reported May 1 for the Times. Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the paper, “There is no reliable way to know who is ‘winning’ or the level of stalemate.”

Pentagon secrecy hides missile defense program

Today’s increased military secrecy follows the March 2018 announcement by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) that it would no longer post the public calendar of upcoming missile tests and will keep the testing schedule classified. The schedule will only be made available to Congress the Seattle Times reported April 11, 2018. Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the MDA which spans 14 time zones and employs over 9,000 military and civilian workers, reportedly said his test results will be made available after launches.

Expanding military control of information continues a pattern. Since June 8, 2002, the Pentagon has been allowed to keep secret all key missile defense test results. The military’s blanket classification of performance data was imposed following the disclosure of scientific evidence of a string of failed or faked tests and fabricated results, and after the FBI began an investigation into fraud and cover-ups inside the program. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also waived all procurement oversight rules for the agency, laws designed to keep federal programs on budget.

Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space wrote in June 2017 that, “Many of the tests are scripted, what [physicist] Michio Kaku calls ‘strap down rabbit tests.’ They can’t afford to release [details]. They would sink their boat.”

With secret test data, secret schedules, and an unaccounted, bottomless budget, the MDA’s mission impossible — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” — has wasted over $200 billion since 1983. Other military impossibilities — like victory in Afghanistan, or winning at nuclear deterrence — have cost trillions. They appear guaranteed to gobble up billions more as long as Pentagon censorship is allowed to hide the facts.

Published at

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/26/trumps-ministry-of-no-information/

also at

http://www.peacevoice.info/2019/06/25/trumps-ministry-of-no-information/#more-13795