Virtual Tour of U.S. Nuclear Facilities

Leading U.S. Anti-Nuclear Activist Greg Mello's Visit to the European Parliament

Summary:

Greg Mello believes that the failure of U.S. liberals to confront the contradictions inherent in nuclear deterrence has led to an absence of vigorous and effective debate over the current aggressive nuclear plans in the US.

The result, Mello argues, is that the American neoconservative agenda has for all intents and purposes come to dominate U.S. nuclear policy, with devastating consequences for diplomacy.

There is an urgent need for society to react - to act now - to put disarmament back on the agenda. The urgency is due to the imminence of the next Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty Conference, which could see an abandonment by the US and other nuclear powers of their commitment under that Treaty to disarm themselves of nuclear weapons. Such an abandonment would seriously destabilize the world, especially the Middle East.

In hopes of building greater understanding of the U.S. nuclear complex and its imperatives, Greg Mello, Director of the Los Alamos study Group, visited London and the European Parliament to deliver a a “virtual tour” of the major U.S. nuclear facilities together with a review of their programs and initiatives. Greg presented findings of the "citizen's inspection" of nuclear facilities in Los Alamos to MEPs and NGOs, bringing slides and full briefing materials - in effect bringing the inspection to the European Parliament.

He hopes that elected leaders from Britain and from Europe in general will undertake their own fact-finding missions to America, linking with civil society leaders both inside and outside government in the U.S. to shed light on nuclear programs – and roll them back.

In 2005, the world and in particular, the key nuclear powers, such as the US, Russia, France and Britain will decide whether to turn its back on nuclear disarmament, and thus in effect to 'invite' non-nuclear nations like Iran to try to join the nuclear club, with all the huge attendant dangers of such an invitation and of such an effort or to take a step back from the abyss. Greg Mello offers vital information to those interested in this choice and interested in trying to influence it. 

For the full visit agenda click here

For the London visit Press release click here

Jean Lambert's Role

Britain and the NPT

Greg Mello Article

Action for Change!

Greg giving a presentation at the European Parliament

!!COMING SOON - EXPERT SEMINAR DE-BRIEF IN WORDS AND PICTURES!!

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GREG MELLO

Greg Mello lives and works in New Mexico, where the world’s two best-funded nuclear weapons facilities (Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories) are to be found. A former engineer, for the past decade thirteen years he has been the Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a non-governmental organization devoted to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.

The Los Alamos Study Group has a web site which can be accessed here

Map of Nuclear Facilities in US

Mello hopes to pique greater interest on the part of British and European elected representatives and NGOs in U.S. nuclear policies. “We need help from western democracies less given over to the imperial thinking. The direction of U.S. nuclear policy is dangerous, and the state of debate in the U.S. is utterly incapable of restraining these dangers.”

“The genuine security benefits of nuclear weapons have always been, at best, unclear. In the post-Cold War world, effective norms against proliferation are inseparable from norms against nuclear weapons per se. Without such norms, and the strong fabric of laws and practices which could be made from them, the use of nuclear weapons becomes steadily more likely. In the meantime all policy and diplomacy remains colored by an acceptance of apocalyptic violence, crippling efforts to deal forthrightly with the challenges faced by humanity in the 21st century.” Greg Mello

Jean Lambert's Role

Jean Lambert MEP, who hosted Greg Mello's visit, is the Green Party co-author of the successful European Parliament resolution on the Non-Proliferation Treaty 2005 Review Conference – Nuclear arms in North Korea and Iran The passage of this Resolution was important because the NPT review conference this May will decide if there is to be continuation of the nuclear weapons race or if we can finally enter a process of global nuclear disarmament. Jean is a leading anti-nuclear MEP.

For the text of the resolution click here

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At the seminar Jean stated:

"Given the terrible state of the US nuclear weapons programme, its extent and its continuation, the EU needs to learn from citizen's inspections – not least because there are US nuclear weapons situated in Europe. I was very interested by the discussions among MEPs about the NPT in the last plenary session in Strasbourg, and how horrified people were that nuclear development was going on outside the EU. Yet, we are not facing up to the realities within Europe; we are just burying our heads in the sand. We are now at the point where citizens must make a choice about spending millions of euros and dollars on spurious security measures."

For the Brussels press release click here

For the press briefing click here

Why Britain should pay particular attention to the NPT

Eminent lawyers, Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin of Matrix Chambers advised in July 2004 that the NPT takes precedence over the Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) between Britain and America, under international law. Their advice, which found that the MDA was directed towards "improving the UK's state of training and operational readiness …[and] atomic weapon design, development or fabrication capability", was particularly concerned with Article I of the NPT, which forbids the transfer of nuclear weapons or devices, and Article VI, which requires that all NPT parties should pursue nuclear disarmament. Renewal of the MDA, intended to continue and enhance Britain's nuclear programme, would hence breach the NPT.

Renewing the MDA would pave the way for replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system, options for which are already being considered. On June 14 2004, President Bush recommended the amended US text for Congressional consideration, saying "it is in our interest to continue to assist [the United Kingdom] in maintaining a credible nuclear force". This is in direct conflict with the "unequivocal undertaking" given by the nuclear weapon states in 2000 "to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament", in accordance with their NPT obligations. The British government has ignored repeated requests from MPs for a parliamentary debate on the MDA, and rushed through the renewal of this bilateral nuclear collaboration accord on the quiet.

Notes and links:
Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin, 'Mutual Defence Agreement and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Joint Advice', July 20, 2004, available from http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd78.gif

The original MDA, entitled "Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes", was agreed on July 3, 1958. The last renewal was in 1994, for ten years, so both governments are pushing for a further 10 year extension before the end of 2004.

The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in 1970. The next Review Conference of states parties will be held in New York, May 2-27, 2005. For the NPT text and reports on the Review Conferences and outcomes of 1995 and 2000, see www.acronym.org.uk

George W. Bush, Message to the Congress of the United States, and Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Energy on Proposed Amendment to the United States/United Kingdom Agreement for Cooperation on the Use of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, June 14, 2004, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040614-16.html

'US-UK nuclear weapons collaboration under the Mutual Defence Agreement: Shining a torch on the darker recesses of the special relationship' BASIC report, available at http://www.basicint.org/nuclear/MDAReport.pdf

In sum: British and U.S. nuclear weapons projects, politics, management, and science are thoroughly linked.  Unless Britain says otherwise, the implication is support for U.S. nuclear plans and policies, throughout.

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Can We Achieve Security through the Production of Danger?

By Greg Mello

The South Asian tsunami has now claimed more than 150,000 lives. Thousands more may die from injuries, disease, and famine. Many nations have pledged aid; President Bush finally increased the U.S. offer from $15 to $35 to $350 million.

Let us imagine, if we can, a catastrophe of this scale caused by human negligence. It would be a great crime. Unspeakably worse in our scale of value, however, would be a planned catastrophe. Who could contemplate creating such a catastrophe, or put the machinery in place to make it happen?

Actually, thousands of people in the United States do so every day. These are the men and women who lead and work in the government’s nuclear weapons industry. Their job is to produce great danger for others.

It’s been done already. On Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb with an explosive yield of 15 kilotons of TNT was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Before Japanese authorities could digest this event, a second 20-kiloton bomb was detonated above Nagasaki on Aug. 9. By the end of that year, 210,000 people had died from these two explosions; roughly another 90,000 have prematurely died as a result of these bombs since then.

Those deaths were fully premeditated. Like the invasion of Iraq, which has also caused casualties roughly comparable to the tsunami, the atomic bombing of Japan was a clear crime under existing law.

So let's call a spade a damn spade. The US's two nuclear labs, Los Alamos and Sandia National laboratories, are the world's foremost facilities for the production of mass death on demand.

Their weapons are like portable death camps; instead of laboriously bringing victims to gas chambers and ovens, the ovens can be brought to the victims in a matter of minutes - once all the preliminary work is done by so many willing hands.

These labs help provide our rulers a way to inflict on as many others as possible the most extreme opposite of what we would like others to do to us - the most extreme opposite, in other words, of the Golden Rule. Conservatives, take note. This arguably makes nuclear weapons the central exemplar and metaphor for all that is upside down in our scale of values today. If it's OK to threaten complete annihilation, surely all lesser forms of violence, both overt and structural, are also justified.

Over the past 60 years, our country has spent $7 trillion of its citizens' labor and money to generate 70,000 nuclear warheads at an average cost of about $100 million apiece. We retain 10,400 such weapons today in our nuclear arsenal.

The $350 million in aid promised is worth three or four nuclear weapons. Since morality and even law are somewhat out of fashion in the hallowed halls of the national security state, we ask only this: Which is the better national security investment today?

This year, Los Alamos Lab will spend about $200 million to produce plutonium bomb cores ("pits"). Making pits is the most expensive, most dangerous to workers, and most waste-producing step in making nuclear weapons. After spending about $1.7 billion over a decade-long period, the lab hopes to start manufacturing pits in earnest in 2007 in order to augment the 23,000 pits the U.S. already has. The aid we have pledged amounts to just 20% of these grotesque efforts to build that 23,001th pit. Again, which is the better security investment?

This year's budget for Los Alamos Lab is more than twice as much as will be spent on all the programs of the World Health Organization for the entire world; the Iraq war, 250 times as much. Which is the better security investment, aggressively creating hatred against us while killing and maiming thousands of our own people in an unprecedented invasion of a foreign country? Or providing clean water, child immunization programs and increasing food security all over the world?

It is pathetic and tragic that any of this has to be asked. If journalists and editors could find the courage in their hearts to speak up clearly, and to ask obvious but embarrassing questions, we wouldn’t be in Iraq right now, where war-related mortality is running at greater than 1,200 persons per week. Los Alamos would not be making more plutonium pits for nuclear weapons, and you and I would not cry out in shame for what our country has become.

Where will those editors and reporters find the courage to question and to speak? From our own, from our own.

See also http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf00mello

and http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj97mello

Suggestions for action:

Greg Mello wants influential anti-nuclear campaigners, such as for instance the Mayor of London, to make a statement calling on mayors everywhere, and especially in the U.S. and Europe, to:

Political action:

Get U.S. nuclear weapons out of Europe.  What's to say that some of the new weapons now being studied in the U.S. will not be built - and end up in Europe?  In any case, doesn't Europe passively share in U.S. nuclear hypocrisy, and to this extent isn't Europe also part of the problem?  How can Europe condemn proliferation or potential proliferation when Europe is itself a locus of proliferation in the name of nuclear deterrence?