An anti-nuke watchdog is outspoken with his criticism-for his peers.
Greg Mello sits behind his desk at the Los Alamos Study Group reading his morning e-mail. Mello is the executive director of LASG, a nuclear-advocacy group founded in 1989. Its headquarters is located in a house near the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and resembles a library dedicated to nuclear issues. Books and reports from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy fill an entire wall. A different cat walks by at regular intervals as Mello continues to read.
"This is absurd," he says, as he comes across an e-mail from Deepti Choubey, director of the Peace and Security Initiative for the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based foundation.
Over the past 22 years, Ploughshares has awarded approximately $40 million worth of grants to initiatives dedicated to preventing the spread of arms and nuclear weapons. Its Peace and Security Initiative, created in 2003, was designed to bring together a variety of people and groups working on nuclear issues to create shared goals-and a shared strategy in the face of declining funds for their work in a post 9.11/recession environment, according to Paul Carroll, Ploughshares program officer.
"They faced a fiscal crisis-several major funding foundations had left the field," Carroll says. More than 100 foundations and non-profits are part of the PSI.
Today's e-mail includes the results of a poll in which PSI organizations were asked to prioritize their goals depending on the results of the Nov. 2 election. The consensus is that if Bush
wins, PSI should focus on "preventing terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction." If Kerry wins, it should be the reduction and elimination of the "risks and roles of stockpiles."
"I don't know what 'reducing and eliminating current risks and roles of stockpiles' means," says Mello, reading further. "Nuclear disarmament isn't even an option."
Mello, long an outspoken critic of the federal Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government-run nuclear activities, these days also is a critic of other nuclear activist groups.
He, and some others, contend that disarmament has slid, unacceptably, off the anti-nuke agenda. They maintain that collaborative efforts such as PSI, as well as the spearheading of grantmaking through centralized, large foundations, has unacceptably softened the goals of anti-nuke groups around the country and New Mexico.
The result, Mello says, is a disturbing shift away from promoting the complete destruction of nuclear weapons. Recently, LASG launched a disarmament petition.
In New Mexico, a group of 12 anti-nuke groups received $200,000 from Ploughshares in 2004 for their work. Together, they have created a new organization, New Mexico Sustainable Energy
and Effective Stewardship. They maintain that while the complete reduction of nuclear weapons is an ultimate goal, the on-the-ground work they do, such as monitoring the environment, fighting for proper regulation and educating the public, is a key step toward the goal. Further, they say, their work is going better than ever. "We've had so many victories this year," says Joni Arends, executive director of the Santa Fe-based Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety.
Mello's criticisms are well enough known to other activists who, for the most part, say they'd prefer not to publicly argue about the issues he's raised. In some ways, it's about the difference between nuclear activism as a moral issue and a pragmatic one. The word "abolition," when used to describe the elimination of nuclear weapons, harkens back to slavery. Mello believes that anti-nuke groups should be fighting a cutting-edge battle to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. And it's impossible to do this, he says, if groups take money from foundations that promote other goals. "Politically and organizationally, there has never been a cutting-edge social movement in the US primarily funded by foundations," says Mello. "Foundations have a hard time criticizing nuclear weapons."
Ploughshares was conceived as a nuclear disarmament
foundation when it was founded 22 years ago by Sally Lilienthal. "In the past, we supported groups working for abolition," says Carroll, the organization's program officer. "Now we have more
of a non-proliferation flavor. There's insecure nuclear materials and nations have blatantly violated nuclear treaties."
Concern over non-proliferation-preventing the spread of nuclear weapons-can be traced to the end of the Cold War. It was then that concerns arose that additional measures were needed to secure the nuclear material scattered throughout the new satellite Soviet states. In 1991, Sam Nunn, a Democratic senator from Georgia, and Richard Lugar, a Republican senator from Indiana, teamed up to create programs that would help Russia secure its nuclear material.
Nearly a decade later, frustrated with the level of government funding for that program, Nunn moved to the private sector. The Nuclear Threat Initiative was created, with funding pledged by Ted Turner's Foundation. Today, NTI is an active foundation that not only contributes directly to securing nuclear material around the world, but also supports special projects developed cooperatively between non-profits and the NTI.
NTI's board consists of former generals and current elected officials, such as US Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), a long-time supporter of LANL and other nuclear initiatives in New Mexico. Joan Rohlfing, NTI's senior vice president, had a long government career that ranged from
being a staff member at the House Armed Services Committee, to the director of National Security and Nonproliferation within the Department of Energy. Rohlfing also serves on PSI's policy working group.
Foundation connections to government such as these have helped spark concern from people like Mello. "The people we had been struggling against are now in senior policy positions in the largest foundations," he says, adding that it's one of the reasons his organization no longer seeks funding from Ploughshares. He and others also believe it's the reason why groups that promote abolition of nuclear weapons have been shut out of the funding cycle.
Alice Slater is president of the New York-based Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, which heads Abolition 2000, a group of more than 2,000 organizations from 95 countries that support nuclear disarmament. "Foundations have stopped funding our groups in the US," she says. "The foundations have gotten together and decided not to support abolition."
Jacky Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which monitors activities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, also believes her
group lost foundation funding because it advocates for disarmament.
As for New Mexico, Mello is critical of other local groups, which he accuses of working on what he calls "displaced issues," such as monitoring pollution from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He believes the focus should be on nuclear weapons, period. In fact, he believes that LANL wants anti-nuke groups to focus on issues like pollution because it keeps the focus away from the larger ramifications of nuclear weapons. "What disturbs the leadership the most- a pretty good indicator of what you're doing is working-is the moral narrative," he says.
In other words, the nuclear fight should not be an "environmental" battle, based on the damage nuclear activities do to air and water and health. Fighting nuclear weapons, Mello believes, should be a moral battle. "Santa Fe has never said that making weapons of mass destruction is something they can't support because they want to be inclusive," Mello says.
But many other activists, whose work in New Mexico has the same long and intense profile as Mello's, disagree with his assessment of the situation. They say that eliminating nuclear weapons is still their ultimate goal. The difference, they believe, is in strategy.
"We are supporting nuclear disarmament by raising awareness
that LANL impacts New Mexico's air and water, now, and for future generations," says Joni Arends. Arends is CCNS' executive
director. The group is one of a dozen that received funding this year from Ploughshares and comprises a new joint effort to change the mission of the state's nuclear labs.
The joint effort, New Mexico Sustainable Energy and Effective Stewardship (NMSEES), has as its goal to address the new security needs of the US by cleaning up the environmental damage of the nuclear era and creating energy independence for the coming years.
Of the dozen New Mexico groups that comprise the joint effort funded by Ploughshares, several are old war horses in New Mexico's anti-nuke community. CCNS began in 1988 to fight against the opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, and was instrumental in delaying WIPP-a nuclear waste depository in Carlsbad, New Mexico-for more than a decade. That battle helped create the same anti-nuke movement that still exists in Santa Fe. The Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center was founded in 1971. It focuses on a variety of issues such as uranium mining and current plans to build a uranium enrichment plant in New Mexico. "We tend to work with people that ask for our assistance, like community groups," says the director of the
organization's nuclear waste safety program, Don Hancock. "We think it's valuable." Another group, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, founded in 1999, focuses primarily on the production of nuclear weapons in New Mexico.
These groups' work run the gamut. SRIC has an intense focus on the impacts uranium mining has had on New Mexico. Nuke Watch was one of the aggressive litigants that has helped stall LANL's plans for a bioweapons lab. "We draw blood, but we are up against powerful forces," says Jay Coghlan, the group's executive director. "We cannot claim victory. There's still a lot of work to do." CCNS has had major successes in air and water monitoring from LANL. All the groups emphasize public health, environmental monitoring and education.
"It really gets down to strategy," says Arends. "There's a myriad of different strategies. We're all drawn to this work for different reasons and we need to focus because it's so difficult, we have to focus on the parts that we love. There's so much work to do. There's plenty of work for everyone."
New Mexico SEES, says Carroll from Ploughshares, works from the point of view that the national labs "are an incredible brain trust. The way the group is approaching this is: Let's turn those resources toward renewable energy issues, because the Cold War is over. There's no rationale to update the arsenal. It's like an economic conversion."
It's a concept that resonates with a speech given by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry when he spoke in Santa Fe recently and noted that, just as the Manhattan Project, which led to the atom bomb, began in New Mexico, so can a new generation of innovation for alternative forms of energy.
Through these collaborative measures, these groups believe disarmament, abolition of nuclear weapons, will happen-over time. It's a strategy of progressive steps.
Mello says it's not enough.
Like other anti-nuke groups, LASG's work has many components.
It's led citizen inspections of LANL, posted huge anti-nuclear billboards, litigated for public records. Recently, it launched a disarmament petition. In a letter on the group's website about the petition, Mello writes: "Nuclear weapons are by far the most destructive
kind of weapon. The conscience of humanity recoils from them. Yet without a public registry of resistance here in New Mexico, our stifled silence is taken as enthusiastic support for these weapons and everything they stand for."
Mello believes large-scale grassroots opposition to LANL is what's needed. He cites the shutdown of the Rocky Flats site in Denver in the late 1980s as an example.
Due to several major fires in the facility that resulted in plutonium releases, the public gradually found out and grew angry. Activists held demonstrations that highlighted how the Rocky Flats bomb
factory had wantonly disobeyed environmental laws under the rubric of national security. Their protests finally led to an FBI raid that shut the factory down.
Don Hancock of SRIC points out that things aren't as cut and dried at LANL. "The US nuclear weapons program can continue with the shutdown of Rocky Flats, but it could not operate without LANL," he says.
Jay Coghlan from Nuclear Watch says also that the protests surrounding Rocky Flats were not based on its role as a
nuclear weapons manufacturer. "At Rocky Flats, the environment horrors started to be revealed," he says. "The shutdown was more environmentally propelled."
Additionally, Coghlan and Hancock say it's unlikely that national policy change could come from New Mexico. "You have to affect national policies-it's futile to try and end nuclear
weapons here in New Mexico," says Coghlan.
Mello believes this thinking is a result of LANL's successful public-relations machine. "LANL holds secret seminars on how to neutralize activists," he says.
The activists in question say that far from being neutralized, they are working together. "In order to be effective, we have to rely on each other to do the best that we can," Arends says. "I'm sure it was the same for the civil rights movements, the women's vote movement. There's a lot of collaboration going on."
She, and others, say they don't
want to be drawn into a conflict about strategy within the nuclear activist world because there's too much work to be done. "We're all so very, very busy in this new world that we live in," Arends says. "You have to find something to get people interested in this issue. You have to show where it's impacting them."
One thing that is certain is that the future of nuclear weapons in
the US, and the approach taken in general to the myriad complex issues, hangs in the balance right now.
As PSI's poll suggests, the outcome of the Nov. 2 presidential election will have great influence on
the
tactics taken by all parties within the peace and security community. Arms-control issues-internationally and in the US-are one of the central issues of the presidential election, because proliferation of weapons of mass destruction speaks directly to national security.
For the anti-nuke community, the outcome of the election will have very practical impacts on national policies and their work.
"If Bush is re-elected, there will be full-scale testing underground in Nevada by 2007," Coghlan says, referring to a test site run by the Department of Energy. There has not been a full-scale nuclear bomb exploded by the US since a 1992 moratorium, but activists
are concerned such tests will be re-ignited if Bush is re-elected.
For Mello and the disarmament community, the ramifications of Nov. 2 also are intense. Another review of the Nonproliferation Treaty begins in May 2005. The Nonproliferation Treaty's ultimate goal, first ratified by the US in 1970, is for worldwide nuclear disarmament.
"When Bush came in, he trashed all the treaties," says Slater, of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, who fears what Bush might do to the Nonproliferation Treaty. That review also coincides with the 60-year anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. GRACE's initiative, called Abolition Now, will bring in 100 mayors from cities around the world-including the only two cities to have felt the bomb's full force-to ask that disarmament be put back on the agenda.
As far as the election goes, Mello agrees with his peers:. "Kerry will allow us to ask questions and provides a tomorrow."
