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September 2, 2024 USC-led UNM forum undermines opposition to nuclear weapons in New Mexico -- we are disgusted and will protest Permalink for this letter (tomorrow). Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. This is a letter to our New Mexico-oriented activist mailing list, a subset of our whole mailing list.
Dear friends -- The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies (IACS) and the Dornsife College at the University of Southern California (USC, a private school for those who may have forgotten), have organized a day-long “Forum on Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World” to take place this coming Saturday, Sept. 7, at the University of New Mexico (UNM), which is co-sponsoring the event. There are many things that are terribly wrong with this event. It's important to lay them out as clearly as we can, because in many ways this forum is a microcosm of what has gone wrong, and is going wrong, with nuclear disarmament and peace efforts in the U.S. and especially New Mexico. This letter will be fairly long and even so it does not touch on all the important issues. We are joining the ANSWER Coalition, Stop the War Machine (SWM), Veterans for Peace (VFP), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice (ACPJ), the Red Ant Collective, and Students for Socialism at UNM (SFSUNM) in protesting this event, which we regard as entirely misguided (and misguiding). If you can, please come to the UNM Student Union Building (SUB) on Saturday afternoon at 1:30 pm to protest this event. Each of the co-sponsoring organizations doubtless has their own reasons for protesting this particular event, reasons which will be somewhat distinct but overlapping. I will tell you our reasons, after also stating that we agree completely with the issues raised by PSL in their flyer calling for protest. That flyer is available from them on Instagram (abqpsl on Instagram) and was circulated on the SWM mailing list. Before getting to our own additional reasons for objecting to this forum, here are PSL's poster and Call to Action:
Regarding the picket specifically First, it's important to say that we are very strong free-speech advocates and support the idea of controversial speakers being able to say almost anything, definitely including things with which we disagree -- especially in a university setting. That's not the issue for us here. New Mexico has been hearing from officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), its predecessor agencies, and its prime contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) for decades. Throughout all this time, these officials have been constantly privileged over other interests and people in this state. The results of this misplaced respect have been nothing short of catastrophic for New Mexico, which has fallen to the rock-bottom of all states in many if not most important measures of human development. We believe there is no reason to extend for any longer an implicit promise of respectful listening to the official representatives of these nuclear institutions, which are now engaged in arguably illegal nuclear rearmament. As we explained, the new agenda of our nuclear laboratories now appears, more than ever, to violate the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), a U.S. law since 1970 and an important foundation of international security. Even prior to the rearmament proposed and underway in the Biden Administration, many legal scholars have found that the continuing practice of nuclear deterrence, relying as it does on the continued threat of mass annihilation, to be illegal. As discussed briefly in our last Bulletin, according to the unanimous opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whether complete nuclear disarmament is good "strategy" (referring to the forum title) is not something to reasonably ponder amongst selected "experts" and "authorities." According to all the judges of the ICJ in 1996, including the U.S. judge, complete nuclear disarmament is a binding legal obligation. You would never know that from the self-promotional blather introducing this forum. It's just not an open question any more, legally speaking. This raises a pertinent question: are institutions conducting activities in defiance of international treaties fully lawful -- that is, legitimate? If they are not, why are they treated with such respect? There may be, on selected occasions, reasons to listen politely to what LANL Director Thom Mason (for example) has to say. Yet he is paid (over $2 million per year, almost certainly, with performance bonuses), to promote and help achieve U.S. nuclear rearmament. The Triad LLC contract (to manage LANL) does not allow Mason to sit around and ponder any other ethical conclusion than to do what Congress and the President have tasked NNSA to do, or to break his contract and quit. The assumption that citizens will be "good boys and girls" and listen subordinately to what this interest-conflict expert and other "experts" have to say on "nuclear strategy" needs to be consigned to a nuclear-colonial past. Please understand: in their sphere of interest (I do not say expertise) the directors of the nuclear labs have more power than cabinet officials, yet they are neither appointed by the president nor can they fired by him or her, or by the Secretary of Energy, or the NNSA Administrator, or any other government official. In 2021, as the nuclear posture of the United States was being written, they were brought to the literal cabinet table, even though they are contractors representing corporations which profit immensely from nuclear rearmament. Of course, that power would disappear the moment Mason or any other lab director expressed dissent with the overall consensus of the national security state. The nuclear weapons industry has never been democratically overseen. Only political infants would think it is. It is a "separate sovereignty," in the phrase of the Atomic Energy Commission's first General Counsel Herbert Marks, "one that can bring an end to all other sovereignties." (And it nearly has, in New Mexico.) Officially, this short analysis prepared for Vice President Biden and leaked to Greg will give you part of the picture. In reality, the situation is far worse than described there. Another example of fora which do not merit respect are the upcoming hearings (when?) on the draft LANL Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) (Federal Register notice of the process, our scoping comments pointing out its illegality, etc). Despite appearances, these hearings and this process are not designed to give the public a democratic voice. They are designed to take away that voice. Given all that has come before, these SWEIS hearings should be a catalyst for protest and a locus for protest, not for co-opted compliance. That road, the passive road, goes toward cultural if not civilizational death. Regarding the forum overall The organizers describe what will happen as follows:
Most of the invited speakers are hardly "intellectual architects" of any approach to nuclear weapons policy. The fact the main conference organizer referred to "two," rather than three, major U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories in one of his video introductions is not a good sign either. We believe the conference description makes little sense, incorporates unwarranted hawkish and Russophobic assumptions, and -- most important given the Catholic context -- gravely misrepresents and undercuts the Pope's teaching on nuclear weapons and disarmament. The more personal of the two video introductions suggests that unresolved issues from personal and family history play a motivational role, along with the usual selfish factors we need not explain. From a functional point of view, this is all about side-tracking and neutralizing potential opposition to nuclear rearmament and preventing nuclear disarmament, whether the organizers and attendees understand that or not. (Some may later, after it's over and they wonder what in the world it was all about.) Especially in the New Mexico context, this a psyop -- a psychological operation aimed at a political outcome. The main nuclear deterrence advocates on the playbill simply would not be attending if they thought this forum would not be worth their time and advance their cause. Those who think it won't help weaken opposition are just being naive. One question we are just beginning to ask is this: who is paying for this conference? Travel for all these speakers is expensive. From the introduction:
"Undebated?" Where have these people been? What insufferable ignorance and arrogance! Many of us have been debating them in Congress, in the executive branch, in New Mexico, and at the UN for the past 35 years. The Los Alamos Study Group was founded in 1989 for the initial purpose of conducting precisely the kind of discussion promoted at this conference, and we have done and continue to do a lot of it. We quickly graduated to having discussions with the actual federal decisionmakers, from the Secretary of Energy on down. Over in Texas, Trish was doing the same thing. We were soon involved in multilateral international negotiations as well, over the course of two decades, something Archbishop Wester and the organizers of this conference suggest should be the repository of all our hopes. Dream on. How foolish, distracting, and disempowering! The phrase "revanchist Russia" gives away the game for the hawkish organizers, right along with the conference title, "Disarmament and Deterrence in a Dangerous World." To the extent "a dangerous world" is not a vacuous phrase selected more for its alliterative sound than any actual meaning, we have to ask, why is the world so allegedly "dangerous"? It looks to me that this phrase cannot but refer to the dangers created by the U.S. empire itself, with its 800 or so military bases and attendant imperial ambitions all over the world. A Heritage Foundation issue brief from March of this year is entitled "The World is Becoming Ever More Dangerous: the President Must Revitalize the U.S. Strategic Arsenal." The "dangerousness" of the world is largely a U.S. construction, as for example in the case of the Ukraine War, a war for which that poor country was groomed over many years. The U.S. makes most of the war danger on this planet. Why not do something real? Why aren't these Catholic leaders taking their arguments directly to our Catholic President? He might even listen. He is undertaking terrible nuclear initiatives, which will be difficult to undo in the next administration (a theme in our recent public discussions; see these briefing slides). If he wouldn't meet with such a delegation, that would be news. The timing -- right before an election -- is ideal. Is Biden a man of peace? Is his Party a party of peace, or of war -- nuclear war, for which Biden's recent decisions are preparing? Or is all this talk just that -- empty talk? Will the Archbishop oppose LANL's nuclear weapons factory, so essential for the new nuclear arms race, or will he continue to use the nuclear issue in public statements, triangulating between the Pope and the labs, without ever taking a tough stand in his own archdiocese? The hypocrisy is hard to bear. The contrast between our Archbishop, and Trish's mentor Bishop Matthiesen, is striking. "Bishop Matt" told all the Catholic workers at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant that making nuclear weapons was a sin, and they should therefore quit. The Diocese, he said, would help them find other work. In the end two Pantex workers did quit, and the Diocese helped them both get jobs. Prior to taking that stand, Bishop Matt was the parish priest of the St. Francis church, located in the shadow of the Pantex plant and heavily dependent on plant workers for membership and support. He knew the people who would be affected. It was personal for him. We want Archbishop Wester to take a stand against the $22 billion nuclear weapons factory being built right under his nose. The conference organizers are misrepresenting the evolution of Catholic thought about nuclear weapons under the leadership of Pope Francis. Given their unmistakably conservative bent, the forum organizers basically ignore and undercut Pope Francis's teachings on this topic, which represent a clear break from prior Catholic teachings. Here's what the organizers say:
First off, relatively few "strategists" with real-world diplomatic experience have argued for "multilateral and verifiable nuclear arms control and disarmament." Why? There have never been any concrete, multilateral nuclear disarmament treaties between nuclear weapons states. Nor are there likely to ever be any for the foreseeable future. There have however been quite a few bilateral treaties, all but one of them in the dust bin today. Holding up "multilateral negotiations" as the only or main approach to nuclear arms control and disarmament is so peculiar and so uninformed that it looks mischievous. It's hard to tell where naivete ends and insincerity begins. Calling for "multilateral" negotiations is the same as calling for no negotiations, as all but the most devious diplomats understand. The U.S. and Russia have roughly 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world. The Chinese nuclear arsenal stands at roughly 10% the size of the total U.S. arsenal. Why in the world would China negotiate nuclear disarmament or even arms control with such a disparity, especially given that there are two other nuclear powers in NATO -- which now wants to operate in East Asia? Expecting China to come to the negotiating table to limit or decrease its nuclear weapons, while the U.S. is improving its plans to destroy them, is just silly. If disarmament is what we want, and we do, we have to first get along with Russia, not insult them ("revanchist") for not being our impoverished vassal, as Russia under Yeltsin was. That term suggests Russia's present state of affairs -- its relative security, prosperity, and overall social health -- is something bad, something fearful, something we don't like. Where are the Russian participants at this forum, we might ask? Are they being Zoomed in? Or would that offend the seven or so nuclear establishment speakers or the sponsors paying for all this -- whoever they are? Getting back to Catholic teaching, those of us participating in the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons Conference in 2014 (HINW14) heard something quite new in the Pope's message, carried to the Conference by his representative. The Pope's message rejected the "interim" ethic of the American Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, which accepted nuclear deterrence and the possession of nuclear weapons, pending successful disarmament negotiations. It didn't "approximate" that 1983 message at all, contra the forum organizers. Pope Francis said that the very possession of nuclear weapons, not just the use, must now be rejected. In our judgment, this new Catholic teaching on nuclear weapons played an important role in the successful negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which commenced in earnest following HINW14. Forum organizers should have understood that this Pope broke with 30 years of Catholic tradition, a fact widely reported in the Catholic press. It is impossible to miss. Failure to acknowledge this suggests that one of the purposes of this very expensive forum might well be to undercut that message. The differences between the new and older Catholic teaching on nuclear weapons are thoroughly discussed in an excellent paper by Christian Braun that was sent our way by Suzanne Schwartz ("Francis and the Bomb: On the Immorality of Nuclear Deterrence" (Journal of Military Ethics, February 2024). As Braun notes, the Holy See's contribution to HINW14, entitled "Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition," brought this new thinking into international fora for the first time.
That's all for now. There are a few more issues we can take up another time. Best wishes, Greg |
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