THE FOLLY OF MINDLESS SCIENCE
by
Alice Slater
In
2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the
Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace. About 600 organizations, including some 80
from Pakistan gathered in New Delhi to strategize for nuclear disarmament. India
had quietly acquired the bomb and performed one nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974
but it was in 1998 that all hell broke out, with India exploding five
underground tests, swiftly followed by six in Pakistan.[i]
The
trigger for this outbreak of nuclear testing in Asia was the refusal of the US
Clinton Administration, under the pressure of the US nuclear weapons
scientists, to negotiate a Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty that precluded laboratory testing and “sub-critical” tests,
where plutonium could be blown up underground with chemicals without causing a
chain reaction—hence defined as a non-nuclear test by the US and the nuclear
club. India warned the nuclear powers at
the Commission on Disarmament(CD) where the CTBT was being negotiated, that
it opposed the CTBT because it contained discriminatory "loopholes …
exploited by some countries to continue their testing activity, using more
sophisticated and advanced techniques", and it would never agree to consensus on the treaty unless the
ability to continue high-tech laboratory
testing and computer-driven nuclear experiments was foreclosed.
In
an unprecedented move of colonial hubris, Australia, led by Ambassador Richard
Butler, brought the treaty to the UN for approval over India’s objections, the
first time in the history of that body that the UN General Assembly was asked
to endorse a treaty that had not received consensus to go forward in the
negotiating body at the CD. I spoke to
Ambassador Butler at a UN reception where the wine was flowing a bit liberally.
I asked him what he was going to do about India’s objection. He informed me that he had been visiting with
Clinton’s National Security Advisor in Washington, Sandy Berger, and Berger
said, “We’re going to screw India! We’re going to screw India!”, repeated twice
by Butler, for emphasis.
Unsurprisingly, India and Pakistan soon tested overtly, not wanting to
be left behind in the technology race for new improved nuclear weapons which
was characterized blasphemously by the US in biblical terms, as its “stockpile
stewardship” program to protect the ‘safety and reliability” of the arsenal.
As for the “safety and
reliability” of the nuclear arsenal, in the late 1980s, during the heady days
of perestroika and glasnost, when there was talk of a nuclear
testing moratorium, initially instituted in the Soviet Union after coal miners
and other activists marched and protested the enormous health threats from
Russian testing in Kazakhstan, a debate
in Congress resulted in an annotated Congressional record indicating that since
1950 there were 32 airplane crashes carrying nuclear weapons and not one of
them ever went off! Two spewed some
plutonium around Palomares, Spain and Thule, Greenland that had to be “cleaned up”,
but there was no catastrophic nuclear explosion. There are still some bombs unaccounted for
including an airplane still missing which crashed off the coast of Georgia [ii]
How much more “safer and reliable” would the weapons have to be? Fortunately, General Lee Butler, taking
command of the nuclear arsenal stopped the insanity in 1992 and ruled that the
planes carrying nuclear weapons would be grounded instead of being in the air
24/7 keeping us “safe” and “deterring” the Soviet Union. What could they have been thinking? Sadly, there has been no corresponding move
to ratchet down the lunacy that endangers our planet at every moment from some
1500 deployed nuclear weapons mounted on missiles poised to fire against
Russian missiles, similarly cocked, in minutes.
Even before “stockpile stewardship”,
I remember attending a meeting with the mad scientists at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, home of Dr. Strangelove, and sitting in a circle to discuss the
aftermath of nuclear policy in the shadow of the crumbled wall in Berlin. The scientists were earnestly discussing the
need for AGEX (Above Ground Experiments), to keep their nuclear mind-muscles
alive and limber, which eventually morphed into the diabolically named
“stockpile stewardship” program. Today,
that misbegotten program is funded to the tune of $84 billion over the next ten
years, with another $100 billion budgeted for new “delivery” systems—missiles,
submarine, airplanes—as if the Cold War had never ended!
At the Delhi conference, Dr.
Amulya Reddy, a nuclear physicist gave an electrifying talk on the
responsibility of science and its moral failures, explaining how shocked he was
to find documents describing how the German scientists carefully calculated,
with extraordinary accuracy and scientific precision, the amount of poison gas
required per person to kill the Jews who were routinely marched to the Nazi
“showers” in the concentration camps.
And at a workshop on the role of science, there was an extraordinary
conversation with Indian and Pakistani scientists who pondered whether scientists
have lost their moral compass because the system of higher education produced
the growth of the scientific institute, isolating scientists from the arts and
humanities. They examined whether these
separated tracks of learning, denying scientists the opportunity to intermingle
with colleagues engaged in those issues, while narrowly concentrating on their
scientific disciplines, had stunted their intellectual and moral growth and led
them to forget their humanity.
Now scientists are pushing
whatever boundaries might have existed to open a whole new avenue of terror and
danger for the world. In a profound
disregard for the consequences of their actions, US scientists are enabling a
new arms race with Russia and China as the military-industrial-academic-Congressional
complex plants US missiles in Eastern Europe and beefs up military bases in the
Pacific. This despite efforts by Russia
and China to forestall this new arms race by calling for a treaty to ban weapons
in space, supported by every nation in the world except the US which blocks any
forward progress for negotiations.
The US has recently admitted to
cyber warfare, targeting uranium enrichment equipment in Iran with a killer
virus to set back the Iranian program to build their own bomb in the basement,
while at home, we are talking of massive subsidies to the uranium enrichment
factory in Paducah Kentucky. It is hard
to believe how screwy this new venture into cyber warfare is in terms of
providing security to the “homeland”.
After all, cyber terror is not nuclear warfare. Any country, or even scores of various
groups of individuals, can master the technology undetected, and wreak
catastrophic havoc on the myriads of civilian computer-dependent systems,
local, national, and global. Similarly,
the recent expansion of drone warfare, assassinating innocent civilians
together with suspected “terrorists” in eight countries, at last count, with
the President of the US acting as judge, jury and executioner, is the
application of misbegotten science in a recipe for endless illegal war. Just as the US was the first to use the
atomic bomb, opening the door to the disturbing and uncontrollable nuclear
proliferation we witness today, it is again opening the door, taking the lead
in a new global arms race in cyber warfare and drone technology. Despite Russia’s suggestion that there be a
treaty against cyber war, the US is resisting negotiations, indicating their
continued arrogance and disregard of what must be manifestly apparent to any
rational thinking person.[iii] There can be no reasonable expectation that
scientists can keep the dark fruits of their lethal discoveries from
proliferating around the world. It is
just so 20th century, hierarchical and left-brained to imagine that
there will not be others to follow their evil example, or that they can somehow
control an outbreak of the same destructive technology to others who may not
wish them well.
Can
there be any doubt that scientists driving US policy are out of touch with
reality? Officials talk about “risk
assessment” as though the dreadful disastrous events at Chernobyl and
Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of risks and benefits.
Scientists are constantly refining their nuclear weapons and designing new
threats to the fate of the Earth. After
the horrendous devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely everyone with half
a brain knows these catastrophic bombs are completely unusable and yet we’re
pouring all these billions of dollars into perpetuating the weapons labs, as hunger
and homelessness increase in the US and our infrastructure is crumbling. The
high priests of Science are not including the Earth in their calculations and
the enormous havoc they are wreaking on our air, water, soil, our biosphere.
They’re thinking with the wrong half of their brains—without integrating the
intuitive part of thinking that would curb their aggressive tendencies which
engender such deadly, irreversible possibilities. They are engaged in creating the worst possible inventions with a Pandora’s
box of lethal consequences that may plague the earth for eternity. Still, they
continue on. Scientists are holding our planet hostage while they tinker in
their laboratories without regard to the risks they are creating for the very
future of life on Earth.”
Alice Slater is
the NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Advisory
Council of the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space
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