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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004U.S.'s nuclear threatMemphis, TENN.--Several dozen people, many of them college students, gathered here for a meeting on "Nuclear weapons: Global crisis, local challenge” May 6. Sponsored by Pax Christi and the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, the event featured speaker Ralph Hutchison of Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) from Oak Ridge, Tenn. He said that the nuclear threat is escalating because the U.S. is leading a nuclear arms race. He pointed to the overturn of a U.S. law banning design of new nuclear weapons and vastly increased funding for nuclear weapons projects. Having long opposed links between nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear energy programs, the U.S. has done just that by using the Watts Bar, Tenn., commercial reactor to make tritium to be used in bomb production. The U.S. is also moving ahead on designing "mini-nukes,” which it chillingly calls “useable” battlefield weapons. Hutchison cited several former high-ranking officials saying that nuclear weapons make us less, not more secure. For one thing, their presence spurs proliferation. Hans Blix, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, projects that 20 years from now 40 nations or other organizations will possess nuclear weapons. Hutchison contrasted the $6.6 billion nuclear bomb budget with the cuts being made in many programs from environmental protection to childcare to rural health aid. He spoke of the South as the new “nuclear heartland,” with major nuclear weapons production facilities being located in Tennessee and South Carolina. The opposite, he said, is us, advocating a “Stop the Bomb” campaign, which he wanted to link to “another history” of the South, the civil rights movement. Other speakers were Mary Dennis Lentsch, a nun who went to prison for anti-nuke actions, and Jerry Bowen, who spoke on what to do, such as the annual April and August protest actions in Oak Ridge, including blockades or other civil disobedience. In the discussion, I pointed out the environmental racism involved. When Oak Ridge was built in the 1940s, there was total segregation and African Americans were forced to live next to a plant using radioactive and toxic materials. When we talk about this issue, the effects on people who work in or live near these plants should be a major part of the message. This is important, as we see from the fact that, when nuclear weapons production almost ground to a halt in the 1990s, it wasn’t just because of the end of the Cold War. It began with the widespread outrage stemming from the scandals in the late 1980s about how the workers and neighbors of these plants had been poisoned. That history reveals how nuclear weapons are part of an inhuman system that exploits and poisons workers and people of color, and a movement against it needs to build on their force and Reason. --Franklin Dmitryev |
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