• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Ranchers.net

http://www.sfbayview.com/120804/nuclearweapons120804.shtml

(see list at the bottom, for the links to other articles in this series)
The USA has sold DU technology to 29 different countries. When I get the full list, I'll post it.

Who should control the US nuclear weapons program?

UC Regents lose nuclear weapons program, Part 9


by Leuren Moret


In November of 1991, Richard Berta, the Western Regional inspector for the Department of Energy at the nuclear weapons labs and the Nevada Test Site, told me: “The nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon … and the Pentagon exists for the oil companies.”

This statement reveals the hidden purpose for transferring the nuclear weapons lab management contract to Texas, where the University of Texas-Texas A&M partnership will formally hold the contract. And it is that contract that enables the Bush-Carlyle Group-oil companies cabal to take control.

It is not the mission of any university to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor to control nuclear weapons research and management. Many members of the University of California faculty have long opposed UC management of the labs, and they are supported by a majority of the students and many citizens. Many Texans also oppose transfer of the nuclear weapons program to the University of Texas and Texas A&M.

WMD at the University of California?

The weapons industry is highly profitable. UC is now in the position of managing, developing, producing, promoting, proliferating, investing in and profiting from Weapons of Mass Destruction - thermonuclear weapons and depleted uranium weaponry. In fact, it is a major academic participant and benefactor of research funds from the military (see Fiat Pax for military funding at U.S. universities).

The institutional dedication and focus of UC to projects of mass and indiscriminate destruction - which may lead to extinction of the human species - rather than to education and new energy sources is hardly exemplary. But their profits and funds are not derived from military research grants alone.

In 1999, UC ranked first in the nation, raking in $61 million from academic patent royalties. In 2001, it received $1.8 billion in gifts, the largest single donation of nearly $200 million coming from the estate of UC alumnus Larry Hillblom, founder of DHL Corp., who died in 1995 in a plane crash.

But that wasn’t enough. Recently UCLA was caught in a scandal, selling body parts from 800 bodies that had been donated for scientific research. The buyers had also sold cadavers to the U.S. Army which were blown up in land-mine experiments (see “The UCLA Body Parts Scandal” and “Donated Bodies Blown Up by Army”).

The U.S. Army paid $10,000 for each body to be used for land-mine research, which may have included the ADAM depleted uranium landmine. The official Army response was that they were just “testing boots.”

The fact that UC is developing, investing in and profiting from depleted uranium (DU) weaponry, which meets the definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction under U.S. federal law, makes UC complicit in war crimes. (For a graphic look at war crimes in Afghanistan, see “AC-130 Spectre Gunship video,” a leaked U.S. military combat mission in Afghanistan.)

UC has invested $33,046,370 in Lockheed Martin Marietta, one of the largest military industrial corporations, and $21,471,120 in General Dynamics, one of the two biggest U.S. manufacturers of DU weaponry. Students and faculty should be informed of this.

The University of California investment in war profiteering is small compared to CalPERS, the State of California employee pension fund now worth $177.8 billion (see “CalPERS Pension Fund President Ousted”). CalPERS owns 5.5 percent of the Carlyle Group, with a return on investment of 20-30 percent per year and an option to buy an additional 5 percent within a few years.

As a land grant university, the University of California has a mandate and mission to educate the citizens of California, and it should have special consideration for people of color and people with disabilities. As the state with probably the greatest diversity in the nation, California universities had the chance to provide a vital and creative model for the nation.

Instead, administrators have pigged out feeding at the public trough, giving themselves 25 percent raises while throwing breadcrumbs to the staff – a paltry 2 percent for the workers. This was the pattern I observed at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, where a secret document revealed that the five top administrators in the Geosciences Department, where I worked, gave themselves 25 percent raises on their $120,000+ salaries.

We were given bad annual job evaluations each year to justify the paltry 1.5 percent raises we received annually. Instead of a model for the nation, the University of California is one of the most corrupt institutions I have ever encountered. As a lawyer representing some of the 500 women who filed lawsuits against UC told me “UC is rotten and corrupt from the bottom to the top and back to the bottom” … and I later found out so was she.

The Carlyle Group - shadow government?

Former Manhattan Project scientist and retired Livermore Lab nuclear physical chemist Marion Fulk warns, “The military should NEVER be in control of the nuclear weapons program; it should be in civilian hands.”

The Carlyle Group, worth about $14 billion in 2001, with vested interests and ties to the Bush crime family and oil companies, cannot be investigated or subjected to any oversight whatsoever because it is a private corporation. For that reason, it should not have any control or influence over U.S. nuclear weapons policy and development.

Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and his associates in the intelligence business have demonstrated their systematic and treasonous abuse of the internet, voting machines and American civil liberties. Should we give them the trigger, the nukes, the budget they want, and the cover of secrecy?

Eliminating resistance to change?

The “old guard” at the nuclear weapons labs is being systematically targeted, scapegoated and run out of the labs to “clear out the old and bring in the new” by those “UC admirals” and Homeland Security folks. Recently, the lab badge of a retired Livermore scientist Marion Fulk was cancelled by Homeland Security without explanation.

Fulk remarked, “This is ridiculous. Hell, I have higher security than anyone in Homeland Security. What does Tom Ridge know about nuclear weapons?”

You can bet Fulk will get his badge back when they call him to one of those “problem meetings.” At the last problem meeting, he discovered that the plutonium canisters in the high security vault at Livermore were puffing up like muffins in a hot oven, which could have led to a major criticality disaster wiping out the Western United States and beyond.

Younger scientists had arbitrarily changed the canister design, which allowed moisture to enter the canisters, dangerously generating hydrogen gas. Eliminating the older and more knowledgeable nuclear weapons experts from the labs is a dangerous practice. It is time to demand some answers from the “UC admirals” in charge now about their motives behind such changes.

National Science Foundation?

Management and oversight of the nuclear weapons labs belongs at a place like the National Science Foundation, a U.S. government agency with the resources to make rational decisions and reign in the planned unlimited proliferation of nuclear weapons on earth and in space.

Nuclear weapons are now obsolete. If the money spent on the nuclear weapons program had been spent on alternative energy development, the U.S. would now be a healthy and wealthy country. Instead, the U.S. economy is bankrupt, with an unhealthy population suffering from the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing, a radiation contaminated environment and little choice left but to steal oil resources from other countries.

A young student at a San Francisco antiwar demonstration two years ago held up a sign, “Nuke their ass and take their gas.” That sums up the present U.S. foreign policy.

Professor Butler Shaffer of Southwestern University School of Law put it this way: “There is a toxic quality to war that affects the inner life of individuals and, as a collective consequence, the society itself. In the degradation and dehumanization of the individual lies the destruction of all mankind.”

References

“Fiat Pax (Let there be peace): A Resource on Science, Technology, Militarism, and Universities,” http://www.fiatpax.net.

“How Research Turns Into Royalties,” Stanford University Alumni Magazine, March-April 1999.

“Gifts to UC Total $1.8 Billion Last Year,” by Helen Hwang, Daily Cal, Feb. 7, 2002, http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=7600.

“Asian Children Finally Get Part of $550-Million Estate,” by Mary Curtius, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1999, http://www.wright.edu/~tran.dung/vn_boy.htm.

“The UCLA Body Parts Scandal,” by C. Ornstein and A. Zorembo, March 10, 2004, Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bodies10mar10,1,6780091.story?coll=la-headlines-california.

“Donated bodies blown up by Army” by Stewart Yerton, The Times Picayune, March 10, 2004, http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a856.htm.

“CalPERS Pension Fund President Ousted,” by Ben White, The Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25537-2004Dec1.html.

To read Parts 1 through 8 of this series, go to http://www.sfbayview.com/091504/ucregents091504.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/092204/nuclearweapons092204.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/092904/nuclearweapons2092904.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/100604/nuclearweapons100604.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/101304/nuclearweapons101304.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/110304/ucregents110304.shtml, http://www.sfbayview.com/112404/ucregents112404.shtml and http://www.sfbayview.com/120104/nuclearcorridor120104.shtml. Leuren Moret, a geoscientist who worked at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab where she became a whistleblower in 1991, has survived 13 years of retaliation from the Livermore Lab and the University of California and has lived firsthand the experiences of Karen Silkwood. A radiation specialist, she works around the world educating citizens, the media and lawmakers about the impact of radiation globally on the health of the public and the environment. She assisted with Al-Jazeera’s recent report on depleted uranium weapons which quickly became one of the most read articles produced by the website. “DU: Washington’s Secret Nuclear War” can be read at http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Secret-Nuclear-War14sep04.htm. She is an independent scientist and an environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley and can be reached at [email protected]
Top