If you’ve seen any one of the near-monthly anti-nuke protests that take place at UC Santa Cruz, then you’re probably familiar with the anti-UC sentiments that go along with them.
As it stands now, UC-managed nuclear weapons laboratories are in operation, countries with nuclear weapons are gaining aggression, and—as you read this article—weapons are being developed and retrofitted by UC employees just an hour and a half away from here, in the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.
So how did one of the most prominent research university systems in the world get involved with the most destructive force on earth?
It Started with the Laboratories
There are two major labs in the United States that are dedicated to developing nuclear weapons. First there is the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, and then there is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, with locations in both Berkeley and Livermore, CA. Both labs develop powerful technologies like microchips, but their primary function is to design and develop nuclear weapons.
Erika Layman a student at UCSC, who helped teach a course last year, titled “UC and the Bomb,” said that the labs were funded by weapons projects. “The labs spend over 80 percent of their budget on weapons development,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Where the Laboratories Came From
The Los Alamos Lab was established to design weapons for World War II.
Robert Oppenheimer, and the men behind the Manhattan Project, went to the Board of Regents to ask the UC for financial backing. With the nation at war, and with two successful labs already in operation, the UC jumped at the chance to get involved.
Most accounts of the Manhattan Project say that the Regents did not know what was going on until the United States bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the content of the project became publicly known. When this happened some Regents wanted to terminate the university’s contract, but ultimately the Regents decided to continue their contract; they even lobbied Congress for additional contracts.
This continued until November 2006, when 408 secret documents were discovered by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) during a raid on a methamphetamine lab owned by a Los Alamos laboratory worker.
The documents, which gave detailed instructions on how to release the safety mechanisms that prevent nuclear weapons from firing, were found during the raid. She said that she brought them home and forgot about them.
The Department of Energy (DOE) immediately put the UC contract up for bid.
Then, in a desperate attempt to maintain its contract, the UC system partnered with the company that the United States has been paying to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure: Bechtel.
Bechtel and the UC are both slated to take over lab-management in October.
Recent History, and The Hunger Strike
On June 6, 2007, a $66 million bill supporting the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program passed through the White House. The RRW plan calls for retrofitting W76 nuclear warheads.
Laymen, who was at the protest, said that the RRW program posed a new threat. “It would create new designs for all the nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal,” she said. “The Livermore Lab has already come up with a new design for the W76 warhead, and once it is built it will be the first new nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal since the end of the Cold War.”
When the plan was announced, it stirred tensions among pro-disarmament groups. To voice their discontent, they organized a hunger strike and demanded that the UC Regents renounce their connection to the nuclear laboratories.
Students from across all 10 UC campuses refused to eat solid food for eight days prior to the Regents meeting on May 17 in San Francisco.
When the strikers arrived at the meeting, they were met by Regent Norman Pattiz who told one striker, “Eat some lunch.” They were kicked out of the Regents meeting, only to be let back in moments later, and 13 of the 42 strikers were eventually arrested. The strike was then called off, but not before some strikers were able to secure meetings with UC Regents to discuss severing ties with nuclear weapons labs.
Change, however, remains to be seen.
Lending Legitimacy
Will Parrish is a UCSC alumnus who fasted for 11 days prior to May 17, and is now the youth empowerment director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, based in Santa Barbara. Much of his work now relates to UC’s ties to nuclear weapons.
“[The labs] contract out to the UC—and now these other corporations—and the UC kind of administers the budgets for the labs, [which is] about a quarter of the UC’s operating budget,” he said. “It’s kind of fuzzy how much management the UC is supposed to give, but in reality the UC has never given orders [for specific projects].”
Parrish explained that the project management for individual weapons projects comes from the Department of Defense.
“The main function the UC has always played for these labs is that it has given [them] credibility,” he said. “From a government standpoint and from the labs’ standpoints it makes a lot of sense to get the UC involved, if only for appearances.”
Parrish continued, “The UC has also done a lot to help the labs recruit new scientists; about 40 percent of the scientists come from the university.”
Parrish said that if the University of California came out against nuclear weapons and renounced their contract, it might affect nuclear weapons policy in the United States.
“Nuclear weapons continue to proliferate around the world,” he said, “And countries that have nuclear weapons are adopting policies where they’re envisioning using nuclear weapons in conventional war.”
If anything, Parrish insisted, nuclear disarmament is long overdue.
