Oscar Grant Plaza, Occupy Oakland

Early Tuesday morning, hundreds of police officers descended on the Occupy Oakland encampment, driving campers from their beds. The police arrested those who stayed, gassing some and shooting others with “non-lethal” projectiles. Their property was confiscated, the small temporary village, with its kitchen and library, medical tent and children’s area, was destroyed.

Children’s play zone and medical tent, the kind of threats to public order that required hundreds of heavily armed police to subdue.

But that was just the beginning. When Occupy Oakland residents and supporters attempted to reclaim the plaza– with a march that from most reports appeared, with the exception of scattered incidents, to be nonviolent on the part of the protesters– police responded with overwhelming force. It is clear that large quantities of tear gas and various “nonlethal” rounds were fired at unarmed civilians. I was not there Tuesday night. But I would note that I have been present at many, many demonstrations, including a number that involved objects thrown at police in which the police response was considerably more restrained. I find it difficult to believe in this case that police officers, present in very large numbers, armed and in full riot gear, ever were in significant danger from the demonstrators. It seems more likely that those who decided to deploy the kind of force we saw Tuesday wanted to send a strong message, and perhaps one that would be heard beyond Oakland.

The militarized U.S. police forces of the 21st century also seem to have absorbed the attitudes and approach of the U.S. armed forces: deploy maximum force to overawe all adversaries. If any resistance is encountered, protecting the armed forces of the State takes priority over everything else: civilian lives in U.S. wars of occupation abroad, and Constitutional rights and the last shreds of democracy at home. And perhaps our elites also consider civilian lives a regrettable but necessary cost in what what looked on Tuesday like a war against the expansion of democracy: one demonstrator, a Marine veteran who survived two tours in Iraq without harm, lies in the hospital critically injured, shot in the head with one or another kind of allegedly “non-lethal” projectile.

One might wonder whether if Oakland had suffered a large earthquake and its residents had self-organized to feed and house themselves in its parks and open spaces if local authorities would have felt it appropriate to fly-speck those encampments for health and safety violations, and to destroy and disperse them if they were not up to code. This country has suffered an economic and social catastrophe, and its authorities–local, state and Federal– have proven incapable of responding with measures that can provide for the welfare of all of its people. More and more people, feeling abandoned by governments who respond only to the concentrated economic power of corporations and the wealthiest individuals, are attempting to organize together both for mutual support and to find a way forward that works for the rest of us. The response from the “authorities” is to find ways to declare such activities to be crimes. But the truly “unlawful assemblies” today are occurring inside the halls of government, where every voice and vote is for sale to the highest bidder, not on streets and plazas where people are trying to create ways of living together where basic human needs are met, and where every voice is heard and respected.

Occupy Oakland by night

These are some reflections on the occupations, having spent time at several and followed many others from afar. The occupations share similarities, but also have local characteristics. I can not speak for any or all of them, but as a participant in the debate they have sparked I can speak, and that is the point. This is some of what I have heard, and some of what I want to say. It is not a time to speak with one voice. The conversation is only beginning. The more it grows and the longer it goes on, the more reason for hope.

Occupy everywhere: reclaiming public space

The occupation movement is a response to internal colonization, to a sense that there is no space in our cities and towns and lives that has not been invaded by immense organizations in which we have no voice. In most aspects of our lives we are commanded or exploited, presented with pre-made, limited choices or no choices at all. And even that is only if our existence is either useful or profitable to the huge organizations that control both the necessities of existence and most social space, real and virtual. If we are neither useful as workers nor profitable as consumers, we are thrown away, pushed aside, squeezed out. Soon there will be no place left to go.

A popular trope used by the mainstream media and in professional political circles to denigrate the Occupy movement is to express puzzlement about “what those people want,” to say they have no “demands.” Yet the immediate “demands” of these occupations are clear. The first is that we have the right to reclaim public spaces (regardless of their legal definition) for their rightful purposes, which are the discussion necessary for the construction of communities that are fair, democratic, and work for all of us, and for the physical activity of constructing such a community. The second demand, equally important, is not really a demand but a call, addressed to all who hear in their capacities as human beings. It is “join us.” It is a call that appeals first to all of us who are politically homeless in the current order of things, who lack the wealth or the position in an increasingly rigid, polarized, and inequitable society to have a voice.

The political classes–government officials elected or appointed in or out of uniform, party operatives, NGO professionals, propagandists masquerading as reporters and analysts in the corporate-owned media– can not–will not–hear either the demand or the call. They cannot hear the call because it is not addressed to them as they demand to be addressed– in their status as officers, officials, or professionals. The demand for the moment only says to those who insist on their roles and prerogatives in the machinery of destruction: you have done enough damage. Leave us alone, while we figure out what to do about it. This demand leaves no place for them so long as they remain within their well-paid roles and does not pay homage to their status, so they refuse to hear it.

The call, on the other hand, addresses people differently and presents us with different choices. For those with no organized power or voice, the choice is: remain silent, and sooner or later one or another of the immense organizations that dominate the life of this planet will take what little you have left. The system we inhabit is inexorably using up the world, and those in the upper echelons of organizations deploying great power plan to be the ones who remain comfortable as long as there is comfort to be had. For those with some measure of power, privilege, and status, the choice is: Come down from your office towers and out of your fortresses, shed your uniforms and your suits, your guns and badges, abjure all claims to status and privilege. Begin with us a new conversation about how we can make a democracy, and how we can find a different path forward for a society gone terribly wrong. Here you can claim to be no more than one more human being with one voice, but also will be no less.

Right now, it is difficult to imagine those still benefiting from the current order risking what they have for an unknown future, its vision not yet defined. Those at the top almost certainly will hold hard to power, and today’s true “middle classes”–the experts, professionals, technicians and propagandists essential to the operation of the vast organizations of corporate capitalist modernity–have a long history of hedging their bets but ultimately siding with the powerful. Yet all of us on some level must be aware that we have constructed a society sustained by fragile systems of production designed for short-term elite profit rather than long-term collective survival, and bristling with weapons capable of destroying not only civilization but much of the biosphere. The choice is narrowing down not only to nonviolence or nonexistence, but to one form or another of peaceful, democratic revolution or nonexistence. The need to transform our global energy, agriculture, transportation, and production infrastructure, and with it the values that ultimately determine the demands we place on the planet and each other, will strain all of our capacities for the foreseeable future. We are unlikely to survive this time of transition unless the risks of the changes to come are fairly shared, with every voice being heard.

Occupy the United States: No more company towns

“Our question then narrows down to this: can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State’s contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms.” Marsh v. Alabama (1946) 326 U.S. 501, 505.

In Marsh v. Alabama, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the rights to freedom of expression could not be denied to people who lived in company towns, municipalities whose roads and streets and sidewalks were owned by the employers of most who lived there. Sixty five years later, most of the United States has been reduced towards the anti-ideal of the “company town.” Much of what people experience and believe to be public space is legally defined as “private property,” dealt to one or another enormous real estate developer or opened to “the public” in complex deals that over time have ceded ever more control of our built urban environment and what we can do there to those interested only in how they can profit from our presence. Zucotti Park, location of the Wall Street occupation village, is the product of one such deal. Any lawyer who has represented people trying to be heard in public by speaking or leafleting likely has discovered that significant places where people gather or assemble in American cities and that most everyone experiences as “public spaces” today are, in fact, “privately owned.”

But this is only one symptom of the disease threatening the body politic. Not only direct privatization but the accretion of myriad local rules, regulations, and police practices have favored commercial interests over expressive rights. Events that bring cash-rich “consumers” into public streets and squares, even if they foreclose other uses, are favored over events that have no commercial value, regardless of their character as political expression. At the central square in the large town nearest to my home, a commercialized, permitted farmer’s market is welcomed by local officials and police; Food not Bombs efforts to feed to homeless are greeted with hostility and harassment. Local police even have attempted to exclude people distributing leaflets in what is literally the town square, a traditionally protected forum for expression, at times when permitted events like the farmers’ market were present, claiming that such commercial events foreclose other uses for their duration–despite the fact that such events present a rare opportunity where ordinary people without enormous resources might communicate with large numbers of their neighbors. (The leafletters eventually were allowed to proceed, but the chilling effect remains). The default position in many jurisdictions seems to have become that attempts at public political communication are presumed to be prohibited–especially where they might distract Americans from their primary functions of buying and selling. To many of us, public police agencies look more and more like private security, their main function being to protect the property of their paymasters, and to be sure that only paying customers are allowed on the premises.

The result has been that public spaces, and the city itself, have been reduced to places geared almost entirely to serving business functions: places to work and consume, to make, buy, and sell packaged things and experiences whose crafting is controlled by powerful private organizations.

“More generally, in the course of the last two or three decades, public places, from large urban centers to remote suburban and exurban areas–have been visibly and functionally transformed into simulated theme parks. The intimacy, vibrancy, contact, and contestation of the public realm have been replaced by physical separation, inaccessibility, inertness, and a form of order largely enforced through the built environment itself. Public life itself has been fundamentally altered by these and similar changes. The ‘messy vitality’ of the public streets, parks, and squares has given way to a ‘filtered, prettified, homogenous substitute.’ In short, place has increasingly become less public–both in terms of its title and its character.” Timothy Zick, Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.201.

All of this is how the corporate colonization of everyday life plays out in everything from architecture to the legal lexicon and the informal police practices of American public space. The particular forms the occupations take in the United States are in part a more or less conscious response. They are also a response, however, to other manifestations of the concentration of wealth and power that diminish the significance of traditionally protected forms of public expression. A pervasive “security” ideology in which the smallest imaginable threat of physical danger outweighs any political rights the citizenry might have has been used to eliminate most physical access to public officials in contexts where a critical message might be delivered. Public events where high government officials are present resemble to ordinary inhabitants at street level nothing so much as an armed assault, with one’s town or city invaded by heavily armed units complete with air cover. Only the hardiest protester is likely to venture near in the face of this, and would be even less willing to do so if they understood the vast array of invisible surveillance and monitoring also now routinely deployed.

And, of course, there is the utter corruption of a political system awash in unlimited money, the price of meaningful access to public officials now far out of reach for all who lack great personal wealth and have interests not represented by one or another wealthy, powerful organization. There is also the concentration of the mass media, both within the United States and globally, that has occurred over the last thirty years, with a handful of media giants controlling most of the world’s airwaves and publications. One can point to the countervailing trend of cheap means of communication, from the e-mail and the internet to versatile mobile phones, that have given people with meager resources an unprecedented capacity to communicate laterally with large numbers of people. In a sharply polarized economy and society, however, an expanded conversation among the relatively powerless is only a first step towards a politics that can bring significant change. There remains the key role of the “town square: ” a place where all can have an equal voice in the conversation about who we are and how we will govern ourselves, a place for the expression of a public will that those who claim to rule in our name can not ignore. Such places, real or virtual, have existed only in a few places and always have been incomplete, never achieving fully equal voice for the inhabitants of any country. Today the fragile, partial achievements of democratic movements past are everywhere under threat from the concentration of wealth in an insular upper stratum of immense organizations and by the political power that such concentrated wealth brings. Where fragments of the town square remain, they must be defended. Where none exist, they must be created.

We have discovered that in a starkly two tier world, the wealthy and powerful may be willing to let us chatter among ourselves, so long as we remain otherwise obedient, invisible, profitable objects. Hence the internet discussions and mobile phone networks and whatever organizing they enable remain only a means leading to another end, the demand not only for a hearing but for a collective process of decision where all have an equal voice. When large numbers of people find their participation in the channels that allow them to communicate not only with each other but with their governments blocked or marginalized, there is nothing left but reclaiming public space, and by doing so demanding that the public conversation begin anew.

I’m here in Washington D.C. with my Western States Legal Foundation colleague Jackie Cabasso for a number of events, all potential strands in a movement bringing together those working for peace, for a more equitable and ecologically sustainable economy, and for a political system in which every person genuinely has an equal voice.

We spent the weekend at the New Priorities Network planning meeting. That network focuses on bringing together coalitions at the local and regional level to raise awareness of the impacts of war and military spending and inequitable economic policies on the ability of state and local governments to provide for the basic human needs of their residents. Those attending represented local and national organizations throughout the country, and there was a general feeling that the frozen politics of the past two decades is beginning to thaw–from the bottom up.

Thursday we will be joining what likely will be thousands of others at the peaceful occupation of Freedom Plaza here in the District of Columbia. Although we must return to California at the week’s end, we hope that occupation will build on the momentum generated by the Wall Street occupations and those that already are following from it.

We have prepared a short piece on the place of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the context of the broader global political, economic, and ecological crisis; a pdf version can be obtained by clicking the link: Nuclear Connections: Weapons and Power in the Age of Corporate Globalization.

The Fukushima disaster reminded us of the dangers reliance on nuclear energy implies. On May 14, I spoke at the Alameda Public Affairs Forum in Alameda, California. about the broader implications of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis, ranging from the relationships between the immense organizations that deploy and sustain the world’s nuclear weapons and nuclear power complexes to the ways information about their activities and effects are produced and controlled.

For an MP3 recording of the talk, click here.

Publication note:

I have a piece titled “Nuclear Disarmament, Civil Society, and Democracy” in Disarmament Forum, 2010 No.4, full text available at

www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art3022.pdf

A short excerpt:

Twenty-five years ago there were vigorous and diverse disarmament movements in the United States and elsewhere. In the United States today, those movements are largely gone. What remains is the “arms control and disarmament community,” an insular subculture of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that focuses most of its resources on policy debates and proposals in national capitals and international negotiating forums. These groups mainly deploy the standard repertory of interest group political pressure techniques, with expert policy analysis and top-down publicity and public opinion mobilization used to muster support for proposals initiated by segments of governing elites that can be portrayed as moving toward disarmament.

The disappearance of the movements and the gradual transformation of most of the institutions left behind into professionalized single-issue pressure groups, I believe, are less the result of choices by the particular people and organizations than manifestations of deeper trends affecting not only disarmament work but other efforts for a more fair, democratic and ecologically sustainable way of life. These broader transformations have left us with less voice in the decisions that affect all of our lives than we had two or three decades ago. If we want to have an effect on something as central to the order of things as the ultimate weapons in a system underwritten by overwhelming violence, we must at the same time address the fragile state of what little democracy we have.

In the United States, what public discussion there was in 2010 about nuclear disarmament centered on the new U.S.–Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The treaty, however, did little to reduce nuclear armaments. It changed warhead counting rules to allow both the U.S. and Russia to make minimal changes in their nuclear deployments while claiming more significant reductions in numbers. Further, the package of political commitments and conditions extracted by Senate allies of the military-industrial complex are designed to assure that the U.S. will be able to sustain a nuclear arsenal of world-destroying size for many decades, and to continue strategic weapons development on other fronts as well.

The principal players in the START ratification drama came to it with different agendas. The Obama administration, its lofty disarmament rhetoric aside, appeared mainly to be seeking to capture the polemical and diplomatic high ground, regaining at least some of the credibility lost by the Bush administration’s history of disarmament inaction and counter-proliferation prevarication. As the President put it in a radio address pushing the treaty, “[w]ithout ratification, we put at risk the coalition that we have built to put pressure on Iran, and the transit route through Russia that we use to equip our troops in Afghanistan.” The Senate representatives of the nuclear-military-industrial complex sought to obtain as much as possible in weapons budget increases and policy commitments. Bob Corker, Republican Senator from Tennessee (home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the largest U.S. nuclear weapons facilities) stated the trade-off clearly: “I saw this entire process as an opportunity to push for long overdue investments in modernization of our existing nuclear arsenal and made clear I could not support the treaty’s ratification without it.”

Given that the Obama administration in every other area of policy had proved willing to concede whatever was necessary in Federal dollars and corporate-friendly policies to obtain something that it could claim as a legislative “win,” these two agendas were by no means irreconcilable. The final element needed to seal the deal, however, was the absence of significant opposition to the buy-off insisted upon by the nuclear and military establishments in exchange for even the most cautiously incremental arms control treaty. This piece too fell into place. Most U.S. arms control and disarmament organizations obediently lined up behind the Obama administration, parroting its talking points and saying little that criticized the budget increases and policy promises provided to the nuclear weapons establishment.

A striking aspect of the affair was the absence of debate within the U.S. “arms control and disarmament community” concerning whether the START package as a whole constituted disarmament progress, given the massive political and economic reinforcement provided by the Obama administration’s commitments to the actual institutions that must be disarmed. This likely was the consequence of the kind of vote-counting and assessment of relative interest-group power that passes for “pragmatism”among the professionals who dominate the upper reaches of both the political and nongovernmental organization (NGO) worlds. Disarmament NGO’s in this regard are little different from those that focus on other issues. This predominance of a cautious, careerist professionalism that sees the limits of the politically possible as what those who hold power are willing to give, however, manifests a weak civil society that has lost the essential nourishment of a social movement base. Pushing a treaty whose disarmament benefits required a professional eye to perceive (and perhaps to believe), together with silent acceptance of sweeping plans to rebuild and replace both nuclear weapons systems and arms factories sufficient to sustain a very large nuclear arsenal into the middle of this century, did nothing to make disarmament movements stronger.

The shape of the START deal

The new START treaty was designed to change nuclear weapons deployments little, and to limit the development and deployment of other strategically relevant weapons systems even less. Mainstream arms control groups admit that the new START limits mainly changed the counting rules, allowing both the U.S. and Russia to continue to deploy about the same number of nuclear warheads as had been permissible under the Bush-era SORT treaty. As Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists pointed out, “while the treaty reduces the legal limit for deployed strategic warheads, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of warheads. Indeed, the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty.” The Treaty places no limitation on modernization of nuclear arms, providing explicitly that “modernization and replacement of strategic offensive arms may be carried out.” Regarding missile defense, as the Arms Control Association noted in an issue brief supporting START, “New START is a missile defense-friendly treaty. It does not constrain U.S. missile defense plans in any way.” New START also leaves U.S. “global strike” programs for delivery of conventional weapons with global range untouched.

The Obama Administration tried to preempt the inevitable demands for increased nuclear weapons funding in exchange for new START even before the treaty had been negotiated. The Administration’s February 2010 budget request for the 2011 fiscal year proposed an increase of almost 10% for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs, and continuing increases over five years. By May, the administration had committed to budgeting a total of $180 billion over the next ten years for nuclear warheads and delivery systems, an amount that would assure significant increases over previously projected spending. The increases were of sufficient size that Linton Brooks, head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration under President Bush, observed that “I’d have killed for that budget.”

Facing significant Republican gains in the Senate, the Obama administration continued to up the ante, anxious to obtain consent to START before the seating of an even more hostile Senate in 2011. In November the administration promised billions of dollars in additional increases for the weapons complex, while reiterating its “extraordinary commitment to ensure the modernization of our nuclear infrastructure.” Fearing tighter budget times ahead, the Senate negotiators on behalf of the weapons complex sought to accelerate spending on major projects like the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility (CMRR) in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Given its weak limits on weapons deployment, START was promoted by its advocates in the arms control and disarmament community for its verification provisions and as a first step towards further rounds of reductions. The verification provisions such as on-site inspections, while not without value, are considerably less important than they were during the Cold War, with neither Russia nor the United States currently engaged in large scale nuclear weapons production and frequent rollouts of new delivery systems. With satellite surveillance and other intelligence gathering means there is little reason to believe that any verification crisis or “yawning gap in the collection of strategic information” exists.

Perhaps the strongest argument for the treaty was that it provides a first step for going forward with further U.S.-Russia bilateral reductions. If one goes beyond the disarmament rhetoric of the Obama administration, however, prospects for significant U.S. reductions below proposed new START levels (which really means below current deployments) are debatable. Although U.S. officials use the language of “deterrence”in their public statements, the actual policy of the U.S. government is to pursue escalation dominance at all levels of warfare, with the world’s most powerful conventional forces operating world-wide under the “umbrella”of nuclear forces of sufficient size and flexibility to threaten everything from credible use of small numbers of nuclear weapons up to societal annihilation. So long as that policy prevails, “reductions” in the U.S. arsenal are likely to be of the new START variety–largely cosmetic, and leaving unchanged the fundamental danger that a nuclear arsenal of civilization-destroying size represents. Nor are other nuclear-armed states which see themselves as potential adversaries of the U.S. likely to give up their nuclear weapons so long as the U.S., with by far the most powerful conventional forces, continues to pursue global military dominance.

Out of the spin cycle and into the future

All sides claimed victory once the START deal was done and the treaty ratified. The Obama administration had another “win”that it could spin for a few news cycles, together with another formal marker of disarmament “progress” to raise as a shield in debates in other treaty forums and at the UN. The weapons establishment and their Senate advocates walked away with a bundle of policy promises and $185 billion in budget commitments, allowing Senator Corker to claim that “the New START treaty could easily be called the ‘Nuclear Modernization and Missile Defense Act of 2010.” National arms control and disarmament groups painted START as disarmament progress in celebratory e-mail blasts–which they could do more easily because most had chosen not to inform their constituencies about the Devil’s bargain made for the “win.” Having decided not to make an issue of the budgetary and policy promises made by the administration, the NGO’s were in no position to educate their constituencies about their meaning and likely effects, much less to offer a reasoned analysis of why the modest and in large part speculative disarmament gains the Treaty might offer were or were not worth their very large, quite concrete and material, price.

This approach did nothing to inform the public about U.S. nuclear weapons policies and programs, or to provide people with reasons that they might want to oppose them. The failure of less militarist elements in the U.S. Congress and most disarmament NGO’s to oppose the START bargain, or even to discuss its anti-disarmament aspects, also makes it more difficult to create effective opposition to the nuclear weapons establishment “on the ground,” in the regions where these immense and politically powerful institutions exist. When local opposition has played an effective role in stopping nuclear weapons facilities or deployments it typically has done so by creating multi-issue coalitions that also gained the support of some local federal elected officials. The START bargain captured legislators in commitments to the weapons complex, including funding for facilities like the CMRR and the UPF that are being fought locally. Furthermore, the public was presented with a contradictory picture, with local disarmament groups attempting to block new or modernized weapons facilities, pro-treaty politicians and the mass media portraying nuclear weapons “modernization” as necessary for Senate consent to ratification, and national disarmament NGO’s insisting that the treaty is an urgent priority while saying nothing about the massive new spending on nuclear weapons facilities that is part of the package.

With their agenda largely confined to reacting to the routine cycle of the Congressional budget process and to whatever the administration in power chooses to propose, U.S. arms control and disarmament groups are facing something worse than “losing”on one or another Congressional vote: they are risking political irrelevance. At this writing, the messages I am receiving from national groups regarding nuclear weapons-related budget matters are stressing two themes. One is to oppose nuclear weapons plant modernization (with no acknowledgment that this might be difficult given the political commitments made by the administration and democratic legislators to obtain consent to START ratification). The other is to promote restoration of cuts to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “nonproliferation” programs, and to do so by attacking the cuts as contributing to the risks of “nuclear terrorism.”

The logic offered by some to reconcile this year’s opposition to the same funds Obama promised in exchange for START ratification with last year’s unconditional support of the deal is that Congress must approve a new budget every year, so such commitments always can be revisited. So far, however, all indications are that the Obama administration plans to follow through on its commitments to the weapons establishment. The President’s February 2011 budget request for the next fiscal year, calls for spending on such delivery systems as a new long-range bomber and a new ballistic missile submarine, as well as significant near-term spending increases for the UPF and CMRR, and for nuclear weapons programs overall. Congressional Democrats on the key House Strategic Forces subcommittee signed a letter to the Republican chair of the House Budget Committee, protesting proposed cuts to nuclear weapons spending in the still-pending FY2011 budget, stressing the importance of the commitments made in exchange for START and describing spending for nuclear weapons as a “national security priority.”

The main near-term impetus for military spending cuts comes not from the activity of disarmament groups but from the arrival of a block of “Tea Party” members in Congress, born by a wave of populist discontent channeled by organizations backed by large amounts of right-wing corporate money. Amidst the general anti- “big government”fervor, some calls for military cutbacks may result from a kind of ideological blowback when newly elected austerity crusaders discover how big a chunk of government spending the military-industrial complex consumes. In the larger scheme of things, however, dominant factions deploying concentrated wealth are engaged in a top-down, divide and rule class war that strives to pit American workers against each other and the poor for the fruits of the sparse remaining wealth-redistribution mechanisms of American government and equally endangered public goods. The most powerful players, perceiving fragmentation and weakness in the general population amidst continuing economic crisis, are intensifying the level of conflict in an effort to consolidate their wealth and power. The likely result of all this is growing economic and political instability. In this context, the technocratic adjustment of policies on the margin via legislative compromises that has been the familiar terrain for a generation of NGO professionals long removed from their social movement roots loses its relevance. The chances that a weak patchwork of expert-professional-dominated NGO’s will be able to prevail over against the concentrated wealth and power of the military-industrial complex in this volatile conjuncture are slim to none.

Another theme-of-the-current-news-cycle in U.S. disarmament circles is a call to oppose cuts in the “nonproliferation” portions of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget. The suggested talking points stress the dangers of “nuclear terrorism.” Here too, the goal seems to be paper “wins”rather than actions that reflect any discernible long-term strategy for disarmament. Much of the “nonproliferation”spending in the NNSA budget constitutes cross-subsidies to the nuclear weapons and power industries, mainly in the form of technologies to transform weapons useable materials into one or another kind of less-weapons-useable nuclear reactor fuel. The “nuclear terrorism”trope has been a losing gambit not only for disarmament but for democracy. In the militarist climate of early 21st century America, it is far less likely to build support for getting rid of nuclear weapons than to stoke fears that will be assuaged with yet more military spending and further erosion of human rights in the name of “security.” Meanwhile, the Middle East, the region that has been painted 24/7 for decades as the place from which that “nuclear terrorism”will come, is being swept by waves of largely nonviolent movements demanding democracy. Against this background, banging the “nuclear terrorism” drum seems profoundly out of touch, a kind of desperate groping in the flotsam of past propaganda campaigns of the powerful for some talisman that can magically confer political significance on those lacking any convincing vision of their own.

The Cold War confrontation between the Western and East bloc nuclear powers was grounded in a distinctive set of antagonisms that now lies in the past. Many of those who do “disarmament work,” however, behave as though the only reason nuclear weapons ever existed was the Cold War and its particular dynamic. Two decades later, ruling elites in the majority of the world’s most powerful states still consider nuclear arsenals–although less immense and baroquely varied than Cold War arsenals–to be useful implements of state power. We are in a time of accelerating history, in which the fundamental drivers of conflict among the elites who control the most powerful states have re-emerged with new intensity: competition over key resources, growing political tension within states over wealth distribution, and general collapse of a prevailing “normal” order of international economic and political relationships. We have not seen a period like this since before the dawn of the nuclear age. We must consider the possibility that little real disarmament progress is likely to be achieved by inter-elite bargaining under these conditions.

If disarmament work is to remain relevant, we must focus on the relationship between the causes of the persistence of nuclear arsenals in a global conjuncture quite different from the Cold War, and the causes of the ills addressed by other struggles that are attempting to build a more fair and peaceful world amidst the quickening pace of overlapping global economic and ecological crises. The path to the elimination of nuclear weapons likely runs not through attempts to lobby one or another government firmly in the grip of anti-democratic, interpenetrated state and corporate elites, but through the equivalent of many more Tahrir Squares, each closer to the places where the powers lie that sustain and are sustained by the existence of nuclear weapons. The question we should ask ourselves is: how can those who work for nuclear disarmament become a useful strand in the broader fabric of the movements needed to create the conditions that could make disarmament possible?

Almost 30 years ago, in a collection of essays with diverse contributors intended to spark debate adequate to the nuclear dilemma of that time, E.P. Thompson wrote, “We are at the end of an epoch, when every old category begins to have a hollow sound, and when we are groping in the dusk to discover the new.” The same surely is true of this moment or perhaps simply has remained true, and so far we have not sufficiently risen to the challenge. I hope those who work for disarmament are willing to re-examine familiar routines and ways of working in light of the evidence of crisis, of danger and perhaps of opportunity, that now is all around us.

A shorter version of the article appeared in Peace Magazine (Canada) April-June 2011.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster is catalyzing a reassessment of the risks of reliance on nuclear power for energy generation, as illustrated by this IPS story about the United States. The results will be increased regulatory oversight and higher costs, as investors shy away. The already oversold ‘nuclear renaissance’ is definitely over.

What understandably is not currently receiving attention is the close link between production of electricity by means of nuclear reactors and the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Every nuclear reactor produces spent fuel containing plutonium, which with chemical processing can be used in weapons. And with some adjustment, as the world has learned in monitoring the Iran situation, the same facilities used to produce low-enriched uranium fuel for power reactors can produce high-enriched uranium suitable for use in nuclear weapons.

The linkage has been known from the beginning of the nuclear age. In 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal report stated that “the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.” The weapons-nuclear power connection must be part of the reassessment of nuclear power. In the view of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, while the global elimination of nuclear weapons must not be made dependent on a prior ending of reliance on nuclear power, a nuclear weapons-free world will be best sustained by the phase-out of nuclear power.

The nuclear disaster also should cause reflection on the hazards of reliance on advanced technology. US and Russian nuclear forces still are configured for quick launch, within minutes of an order to do so, in large, society-destroying, numbers. It should not be assumed that such a risky posture will forever not be subject to human error, technical malfunction, or sabotage.

Undoubtedly the disaster will give rise to renewed demands for truth-telling by the nuclear power industry and its regulators. That same demand should be extended to nuclear weapons establishments in the nine countries that possess nuclear arsenals and the many countries in nuclear-weapon alliances.

In the 1970s and 1980s, opposition to nuclear power was a generation’s entry point into opposing nuclear weapons. The same spillover effect can be expected now.

The battle over ratification of the new START treaty is in its final stages, yet from a disarmament perspective the debate over its meaning has barely begun. The treaty will have little effect on the material institutions of the arms race. It will have only minimal effects on current nuclear weapons deployments, and places no meaningful limit on the modernization of nuclear arsenals or the development of strategically significant weapons systems such as missile defenses and conventional “prompt global strike” weapons with global reach. The principal purported benefits of new START, given that it requires only marginal arms reductions over seven years, mainly fall into two areas: resumption of on-the-ground verification measures, and re-establishment of a negotiating framework for future arms reductions. The concessions extracted by the weapons establishment in anticipation of ratification, in contrast, will have immediate and tangible effects, beginning with increases in weapons budgets and accelerated construction of new nuclear weapons facilities. These increased commitments of resources are intended to sustain a nuclear arsenal of civilization-destroying size for decades to come, and will further entrench interests that constitute long-term structural impediments to disarmament.

One would think that the START deal, with a treaty constituting at best very small arms reductions coming at the cost of material and policy measures that are explicitly designed to push any irreversible commitment to disarmament off many years into the future, would spark considerable debate within the U.S. “arms control and disarmament community.” Most U.S. arms control and disarmament organizations, however, have obediently lined up behind the Obama administration, parroting its talking points and saying little or nothing about the budget increases and policy promises provided to the nuclear weapons establishment. The vast majority of the e-mail blasts I receive from disarmament groups ask me to tell my Senator to vote for ratification without mentioning these commitments at all. The occasional message that mentions them seldom mentions their significance, despite the fact that it is quite clear that without these commitments–which, furthermore, have constantly increased as the ratification battle has dragged on–the chances for approval by the Senate are nil.

From the disarmament perspective, do the vast concrete negatives of the START deal outweigh its considerably more intangible positives? The “arms control and disarmament community” has concluded that the answer is yes, but has done so without any visible debate.

I have written a piece in which I examine the START treaty and deal in more detail, and also offer some reflections on the implications of the absence of debate on the matter among those who work for disarmament. That piece, published as a Western States Legal Foundation commentary, is available at the link below.

The START Treaty and Disarmament: a Dilemma in Search of a Debate

A shorter version of the piece is forthcoming in Wissenschaft und Frieden.

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