Dear friends \u2013<\/p>\n
I recently returned from a week in Washington, where I was mostly at the annual \u201cNuclear Deterrence Summit<\/a>\u201d organized by the Nuclear Weapons and Material Monitor<\/a><\/i>, along with a couple of meetings on The Hill.<\/p>\n That summit (themed \u201cMaintaining a Credible Deterrent\u2026Amidst Funding Constraints\u201d) was, as it always is, a pretty good venue for listening and talking to lab directors, plant managers, subcontractors, and the various government decisionmakers involved in nuclear weapons policy and management.\u00a0 We were grateful for the opportunity to go.<\/p>\n In the nature of things, any conference of nuclear weapons leaders is a twisted affair, as you might well imagine.\u00a0 In that business, black is white and up is down.\u00a0 \u201cModernization\u201d of nuclear weapons (\u201cevil\u201d things \u201cconsidered in any light,\u201d as Fermi and Rabi, the scientific progenitors of the scientists attending such meetings today did not hesitate to say in 1949) is considered not just a good<\/i>, but an essential<\/i>, activity.<\/p>\n The corporations and executives attending such a conference comprise a small universe of \u201cmutually-assured self-interest\u201d selling \u201cmutually-assured destruction\u201d to government.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n That said \u2013 and I think this is something the \u201cactivist\u201d community needs to hear \u2013 most of the people in the nuclear weapons business, and those making decisions about it, are quite as decent and honest as most U.S. citizens today, including their critics on the political left and in the \u201canti-nuclear movement\u201d (such as it is).<\/p>\n Of course the values expressed by the enterprise as a whole are, by our lights, profoundly wrong.\u00a0 But most of the people in it try to be as upright as they can be in day-to-day matters \u2013 while avoiding thinking much about the purpose of their work.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The evil that was new and frightening to Fermi and Rabi is normal today.\u00a0 Our moral vision and identity have contracted, not been expanded, by the scientific \u201cprogress\u201d produced in our weapons labs.\u00a0 Vannevar Bush\u2019s \u201cendless frontier\u201d has become a nightmare of nuclear claustrophobia, broken dreams, and seemingly eternal environmental dangers and costs.<\/p>\n Most of us see the urgent necessity of looking beyond the blinkered \u201cmorality\u201d of the \u201cgood soldier\u201d or \u201cgood engineer,\u201d the one who goes to work every day in order to produce the worst objects in the world, the ultimate death machines.\u00a0 At least three of the world\u2019s major religions flatly condemn such work, and so do we.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 But how do we do that?\u00a0 We are in this country and this world together, and the menace of nuclear weapons is just the beginning of the contradictions in our lives and policies.\u00a0 We now know that without lowering the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quite soon, we and everything else we love will be cooked.\u00a0 Nuclear weapons per se<\/i> are not our biggest problem, by far.<\/i><\/p>\n At this conference, like the previous ones, the most tedious aspect is the fundamentalist flavor of much of the discourse \u2013 the intense intellectual and psychological attachment and rehearsal of a nebulous and highly abstract construct, into which great power is projected.\u00a0 This is the exercise and refreshing of ideology that is so essential to the enterprise.<\/p>\n That concept is Nuclear Deterrence, which in such a conference must be spelled with a capital \u201cN\u201d and a capital \u201cD.\u201d\u00a0 It reminded me of Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy, or their evil twins.\u00a0 The root of this faith is simple.\u00a0 The nuclear tooth fairy leaves billions of dollars under the pillow each and every year.\u00a0 And that, in our culture, is pretty much the highest value there is.<\/p>\n There was much discussion over the money and how it will be spent, i.e. shared out.\u00a0 But all the talk only goes to show that \u201cIt\u201d \u2013 Nuclear Deterrence \u2013 truly is an essential, precious, and many-splendored thing which cannot be praised highly enough.\u00a0 This year, like other years, aging cold warriors are brought forth to lead the hosannas, renew the faith, recall the glory days when the enterprise was running on all eight cylinders (when it was as large and \u201cimportant\u201d as the U.S. automobile industry itself) and contribute their ideas as to how to keep faith alive in an age of doubt.\u00a0 I stress these ideological components of the discourse because I think they are much more important than the management ideas expressed, which after all only implement the former.<\/p>\n I have been to all but one of these conferences, and I think the tone of this conference was different than last year\u2019s \u2013 and very different from the first one (a triumphalist celebration after the \u201celection\u201d of G.W. Bush; a giant image of Senator Pete Domenici was projected onto a screen during the keynote address and Albuquerque Operations chief Rick Glass urged all parties to work together without squabbling to build the new weapons and infrastructure that would make real the latent promise of the new, neoconservative-flavored Administration).<\/p>\n This year the mood was detectably somber.\u00a0 When Dr. Johnny Foster, who has spent his life inventing, managing, and promoting nuclear weapons, offered his usual panoply of ideas as to how to renew the nuclear weapons field I really did not detect that much enthusiasm in the audience.\u00a0 Privately, some contractors told me they expected the field to shrink.\u00a0 This did not trouble them in the least.\u00a0 \u201cHow could it not shrink?\u201d said one, whose name tag said he was part of a recent successful bid for the $22.8 billion contract to run the Pantex and Y-12 nuclear weapons plants.\u00a0 \u201cAll the generals in the Pentagon are post-Cold War generals,\u201d he went on to say.\u00a0 \u201cWhy would they think nuclear weapons are very relevant to today\u2019s needs?\u201d<\/p>\n I tend to like the plant managers, who seem to me direct and grounded.\u00a0 On the other hand, the directors of the two physics laboratories are invariably the greatest bullshitters in the room, offering the greatest ratio of arrogance and prevarication to truthful content of anybody in an active management role.\u00a0 One government official present privately characterized their talks as boiling down to a very simple message: \u201cWe do great science; send us money.\u201d<\/p>\n But is it \u201cgreat science?\u201d That\u2019s a long story, and my time is nearly up.\u00a0 To me, it almost goes without saying that nobody should think that the directors of the NNSA weapons laboratories are highly educated<\/i> people, or people with very sophisticated ideas about science policy or technology.\u00a0 Many of their flagship projects don\u2019t make much technological sense \u2013 that should be your first clue \u2013 and their talks often don\u2019t make much sense.\u00a0 They are highly-incentivized science promoters, to be sure.<\/p>\n Invariably, the labs are the drama queens of the complex.\u00a0 Perennially, they \u201cprotest too much.\u201d\u00a0 Blame \u2013 and there is plenty of it to go around \u2013 is for them something that must always be shifted to the federal hand that so bounteously feeds them.\u00a0 This is an endlessly creative process; after all, science \u2013 which at these laboratories is mostly an amalgam of propaganda, careerism, institutional advancement, personal bank-account-building, and lobbying \u2013 must march on.<\/p>\n Former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks remarked that he had never heard any nuclear weapons plant manager<\/i> complain about federal micromanagement.\u00a0 He left it at that.<\/p>\n Despite its internal contradictions, this system is remarkably resilient as long as its ideology remains unchallenged \u2013 which is to say, as long as the dollars continue to flow in very large amounts and the salaries are “to die for.”\u00a0 Right now, the nuclear bureaucrats are furiously writing nuclear work requirements to make sure there is lack of that in the coming years. \u00a0The White House will soon ask for more money than ever for the plants and labs, but it is far from clear that they will get it all.\u00a0 I would like to tell you, in general terms, about those plans, but that must wait for the next Bulletin.<\/p>\n Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> One of the speakers made the interesting private suggestion that these actors could be called a \u201cfaction\u201d in the sense of Federalist No. 10<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> I think the real challenge to the nuclear enterprise posed by the break-in of the \u201cY-12 three<\/a>\u201d (Michael Walli, 63, Sr. Megan Rice, 82, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57) was not exposure of security and operational lapses, or even exposure of failed management and federal oversight overall, but rather the intrusion of the suppressed moral values which these three embodied and represented.\u00a0 Fences, cameras, and guards are no barriers to truth, especially truths about human security and how it should be fostered, which is very inconvenient and threatening to the nuclear weapons enterprise.\u00a0 Denial is not just a physical security measure but also a way to minimize cognitive dissonance, manage personnel, and maintain ideological coherence.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> This has management implications.\u00a0 The failure to acknowledge<\/i> \u2013 and to the extent possible attempt to reconcile<\/i> \u2013 the moral, legal, and strategic imperative to disarm along with<\/i> NNSA\u2019s mandate to maintain the stockpile, is the biggest root cause of NNSA\u2019s management difficulties.\u00a0 How does one reconcile such opposites?\u00a0 One of these mandates is supported \u2013 as polls repeatedly show \u2013 by citizens; the other, by the militarized state.<\/p>\n In place of acknowledging this difficult but potentially fruitful contradiction, NNSA\u2019s mission, as it is portrayed by its leaders at conferences such as this, is entirely one-sided, so much so that it is strongly at odds with universal human morality \u2013 and standing U.S. treaty law.\u00a0 And that is how the agency is managed \u2013 with very poor results.\u00a0 \u00a0NNSA has trouble recruiting, managing, and above all, trouble deciding what to do<\/i>, which is rather devastating.\u00a0 In the suspension of decision from higher authorities, people who are very sure of themselves, because they have oversimplified the problem and eliminated things they should not have eliminated, acquire and exercise power.<\/p>\n There is no political consensus supporting NNSA\u2019s program \u2013 discounting for example the armed services committees which really have only the military as stakeholders (and funders!) and so, with our present system of elections, have only the most tenuous legitimacy.\u00a0 Without strong disarmament progress, and progress in limiting the roles of nuclear weapons and thus their perceived probability of use, there never will be such a consensus.\u00a0 The \u201ccredibility of the deterrent\u201d is precisely what undermines NNSA\u2019s public support.\u00a0 Long-continued preparations to blow up the world, or fanciful thought about a \u201climited\u201d nuclear war to halt somebody\u2019s \u201caggression\u201d \u2013 \u201copening the nuclear umbrella,\u201d as such war was delicately described at this conference \u2013 will never be successfully managed because it is at odds with the mores of this and any society.<\/p>\n NNSA or its successor agency can and should do much better, but it will take White House and military leadership, and it will take a new and more qualified senior management team at NNSA.\u00a0 But the resulting gradual resolution of the management contradictions posed by nuclear weapons will be, even in the best case, dynamic and temporary.<\/p>\n The alternative path to \u201ctrouble-free\u201d management of the weapons complex \u2013 and which also would only be temporary, because it would lead to nuclear war \u2013 implies a fully authoritarian society strongly given over to the death instinct and thus accepting of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n Nuclear weapons management is and always has been a dynamic, uncertain, and temporary<\/i> business, one way or another.\u00a0 Norris Bradbury used to tell new hires at Los Alamos, \u201cWe\u2019re only here to buy time for the politicians,\u201d which made enough sense to most.\u00a0 That saw is dull today.\u00a0 Attempts to make nuclear \u201cstewardship\u201d permanent, as we see today, insufficiently appreciate the instability of the arrangement.<\/p>\n Some of the \u201clifers\u201d in the nuclear weapons business have found meaning in \u201cThe Bomb\u201d and indeed do want to make that permanent.\u00a0 It is their \u201cimmortality project\u201d (sensu Becker, The Denial of Death<\/i>).\u00a0 Some of these old men have really \u201cgone over to another order\u201d (Plotinus), resolving any doubts they may once have had by \u201cdoubling down\u201d on death-dealing power.\u00a0 One of the truly unfortunate things about this conference and the previous ones is that the least mentally healthy people are often showcased and lionized.\u00a0 This has happened because there is no moral clarity forthcoming from any part of government.\u00a0 There is no balancing authority or celebrity to relativize The Bomb and re-place it in its all-too-flawed human and historic context.\u00a0 It is a real myth, a god. The iconic cultural reference to these weird phenomena is of course \u201cDr. Strangelove,\u201d and you might think there would be at least some<\/i> ironic distancing in such a gathering, but there never is.<\/p>\n A deeper portrait of this malady, and a very American one, is in the character of Ahab, whose demonization of the White Whale could easily be a portrait of the Cold War psyche, the forge of today\u2019s nuclearist ideology, and the end toward which it drives.<\/p>\n All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale\u2019s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart\u2019s shell upon it\u2026<\/p>\n Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab\u2019s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab\u2019s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object\u2026.<\/p>\n Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate\u2026<\/p>\n Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses Job\u2019s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals\u2014morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask\u2026What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. (Melville, Moby-Dick<\/i>, Chapter 41)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Today\u2019s weapons complex abjures charismatic leadership.\u00a0 A highly-edited Oppenheimer, placed with his colleagues like so many dolls in a doll-house in a highly-edited version of history, is on display at Los Alamos \u2013 like Lenin in his tomb, beyond the vicissitudes of time.\u00a0 No great leader is required or desired.\u00a0 An impersonal and automatic bureaucracy, guided internally by ideology and sustained externally by propaganda, has been established.<\/p>\n Ideology is \u201ca specious way of relating to the world\u201d (Havel, in \u201cThe Power of the Powerless\u201d). It serves power, not truth, and therefore is as antithetical to science as it is, in this case, to life. The ideology of nuclear weapons casts a very dark pall over the human condition and especially over our own country, far more than the physical weapons themselves, in my opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear friends \u2013 I recently returned from a week in Washington, where I was mostly at the annual \u201cNuclear Deterrence Summit\u201d organized by the Nuclear Weapons and Material Monitor, along with a couple of meetings on The Hill. That summit (themed \u201cMaintaining a Credible Deterrent\u2026Amidst Funding Constraints\u201d) was, as it always is, a pretty good… Read More »Bulletin #165: Reflections on the Deterrence Summit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","neve_meta_reading_time":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[7,6,4,9,8],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bulletins","tag-deterrence","tag-greg-mello","tag-los-alamos-study-group","tag-modernization","tag-nuclear"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s2ZtEt-01","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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