Education and Nuclear Weapons Don’t Mix

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The U.S. government’s primary nuclear warhead contractor will convene a public meeting at University of California, Santa Barbara this week. That contractor is the University of California’s Board of Regents. This week’s meeting marks its first formal public meeting at the Santa Barbara campus in more than nine years.

The Regents have managed the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) since each facility’s inception in the mid 20th century. In the fiscal year 2005-06, the U.S. Department of Energy gave the University of California $2.85 billion to run the nuclear weapons programs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. That’s more than the $2.8 billion the university system received from the State of California for education during the same period.

Every nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal was designed by a UC employee. Likewise, nearly every nuclear weapon test detonation, both above and below ground, has been conducted by UC-employed scientists from these nuclear weapons labs. Despite the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, the UC-managed labs have continued to experiment with upgrades to existing nuclear weapons systems. In 1996, the labs developed a new nuclear weapon.

In recent years, UC management of the nuclear weapons labs has met with strong opposition from students. The most dramatic manifestation of this took place from May 9-17, when more than 40 UC students, alumni, and faculty, acting independently of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, conducted a hunger fast under the banner of “No More Nukes in Our Name.”

After the Regents failed at their May meeting to vote on a resolution to cut ties with the weapons labs, 13 students and alumni were arrested for an act of nonviolent civil disobedience: refusing an order by a Regent to vacate the room. That same month, a survey question as part of campus-wide elections at UC Santa Cruz revealed an overwhelming majority of students oppose the UC’s involvement in nuclear weapons research and development. Among nearly 5,000 respondents, 74.5 percent responded “No” to the question, “Should the University of California, or their affiliate labs, research, design, or produce nuclear weapons?” Only 14.2 percent answered affirmatively.

The Regents justify their management of the labs on two primary grounds. The first is the UC has a constructive influence on nuclear weapons policy. They say the UC’s status as a publicly accountable institution makes it a better manager than a private corporation. However, the UC now co-manages the labs with Bechtel National, Inc., in a limited-liability, for-profit corporation. UC management of these labs provides a fig leaf of academic respectability for the ongoing development of the most destructive weapons in human history.

The University of California’s other justification is the labs are on the cutting edge of a variety of non-nuclear scientific fields, such as global climate change research and advancement of energy conservation technologies. This justification, too, collapses under scrutiny. The UC’s nuclear weapons laboratories are hugely important to the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The labs’ executives and senior scientists exert a tremendous influence on U.S. nuclear weapons policy. And while important non-weapons research is being completed at the labs, the vast majority of research dollars at Los Alamos go toward nuclear weapon-related programs.

The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, through its UC Nuclear Free program, empowers young people to achieve social change by providing them with the education and resources necessary to make their voices heard. UC students have already made progress in convincing the Regents to reconsider their position. Some Regents have asked the students for further dialogue on the matter. These students believe the time has come for one of the world’s best public university systems to get out of the nuclear weapons business. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation couldn’t agree more.

As more students, faculty, and alumni join the campaign to make the UC nuclear-free, expect the idealism of youth to become the engine of change.

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