The University Should Not Play a Part in the Production of Nuclear Weapons

For over six decades, the University of California has been the United States government’s primary nuclear weapons research and design contractor. It has managed the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons compounds since their inceptions. Scientists at these laboratories—UC employees, all—have designed every nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal, of which there have been 65 designated types. UC nuclear weaponeers have also carried out close to every U.S. nuclear weapons test detonation since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, of which the official tally is 1,054.

The fealty of the UC Board of Regents to the nuclear industry is such that, during Fiscal Year 2005-06, the UC received almost as much money from the Department of Energy to conduct nuclear weapons programs ($2.76 billion) as it received from the State of California for education ($2.85 billion).

On May 9, 41 UC students, alumni and faculty members began a hunger strike to demand that the UC retract its management of the Los Alamos and Livermore labs. The hunger strike marks a new approach for a student-driven UC labs severance campaign that has taken place for the past five years. Individuals at four campuses—Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Santa Barbara—are part of the hunger strike roster. They are being joined by one “solidarity faster” in Albuquerque.

This bold act of civil resistance comes at a critical time. In March, the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council, an interagency committee of executives from the Departments of Defense and Energy, announced that the UC's Livermore facility would develop a new hydrogen bomb. Officially, this is to be the first new U.S. nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War. Los Alamos is slated to manufacture the plutonium bomb cores, or “pits,” for these weapons.

The larger context for these programs is that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is attempting to renew itself, to prepare its infrastructure and employees for the task of building dozens of new nukes a year by the year 2030. The DOE has outlined that plan in its “Complex 2030” document, released this past November.

The university stands to play a central role in these developments. But it is instructive to note that the regents do not really “manage” Los Alamos and Livermore in any meaningful sense. The regents rubber-stamp everything the labs do, providing no actual oversight of their programs and policies—precisely as the DOE requires of them.

From the perspective of the DOE, then, what is the benefit of UC weapons lab management, or the illusion thereof? As the largest public research university system in the world, the UC provides the ultimate fig leaf of academic respectability to nuclear weapons science. Over 30 years ago, the late grassroots organization the UC Nuclear Weapons Labs Conversion Project noted: “The UC does not manage the nuclear weapons labs, but rather the public relations about the weapons labs.” By casting the UC’s intellectual and political capital on the side of the nuclear weapons industry, the regents help to legitimize everything these labs do.

By contrast, if the regents withdrew their management of Livermore lab and Los Alamos lab, they would effectively do the opposite: They would provide the weapons labs with the worst publicity possible. The political consequences of their doing so would be vast. A major crisis would ensue for the nuclear weapons complex.

That is particularly so at this critical juncture. The regents have rarely been more politically vulnerable in their capacity as nukes lab managers. The labs' new hydrogen bomb program, misleadingly referred to as the Reliable Replacement Warhead, has virtually no technical justification and is clearly contrary to the terms of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The program is deeply unpopular even among many long-time nuclear weapons supporters. It is even opposed by the Navy.

If the Reliable Replacement Warhead dies, the U.S. nuclear weapons complex will be, in turn, one step closer to the grave. One of the complex’s dirty secrets is that it is currently in a constant state of crisis. The post-Cold War world is producing increasingly few young scientists interested in working on nuclear weapons. Many of the weapons labs’ projects lack a clear purpose. UC weapons lab severance would cause this crisis to deepen appreciably.

The focus of the UC hunger strike is, in many ways, on the UC Regents meeting at on May 17. The hunger strikers and their supporters attended that meeting en masse. We are attempting by every non-violent means possible to pressure the regents to sever their nuclear ties. If the regents fail to withdraw their weapons lab management, many of those participating (including the author) have pledged to sustain their hunger fasts indefinitely.

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