by Sally Denton
Still, that was only Livermore. A thousand miles away, under the blue skies of the “Land of Enchantment,” Los Alamos National Laboratory was undergoing its own transformation from pointy-headed paradise to neocon corporatism. “People don’t know what Los Alamos was like in the 1970s, when the humanist spirit was strong, if not dominant,” said energy and climate activist Greg Mello. “Little did we know that the world and that tradition was so fragile.” Mello described the Los Alamos of nearly fifty years earlier as a “far more intelligent, demanding, and conscientious environment than Los Alamos is today, with human values at the core—endangered values, to be sure, but those values were active.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Buddhist and the Bomb
“None of my friends, or I, when we grew up, thought we were likely to avoid nuclear war long enough to have a normal life span,” said Greg Mello, a trained engineer who has devoted his lifetime to abolishing nuclear weapons. “Basically, by 1970, it was clear to me from the science and from what I saw around me in Southern California every day that the world was facing an environmental apocalypse.” While president of the student engineering society at Harvey Mudd—the prestigious college of science, math, and engineering located in Claremont, California—Mello came of age at the height of the Vietnam War. The native Californian steeped himself in the works of progressive historians and sociologists, scientists and philosophers, Beat poets and literary figures, essayists and educators, radical priests and counterculture peace activists. “Nixon wanted me in Vietnam. But I was reading Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Gary Snyder, and the Berrigans.” From those thinkers, Mello formed his self-described “strong sense of social responsibility.”
Upon graduating with distinction in 1971, Mello watched as peers went to work for the weapons laboratories. “I was disgusted by what I saw in the engineering world, disgusted by the Vietnam War and the global environmental catastrophe unfolding.” He had studied and worked with some of the most creative and influential minds in America’s budding green movement. As he grew disenchanted with engineering, Mello turned his attention to environmental policy and found a mentor in Paul Shepard—the ecologist famous for his collection of essays, The Subversive Science. He was inspired as well by the chair of the Political Science Department at neighboring Pitzer College, John Rodman, for whom Mello served as a teaching assistant. Determined not to use his engineering degree to aid and abet the war, Mello leaped at the opportunity Rodman presented him to run an external studies program for research projects located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A renowned environmental ethicist and ecology scholar, Rodman ran in a rarefied circle that included John Gofman, the brilliant Lawrence Livermore scientist and UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. Gofman had just founded the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. One of the earliest antinuclear whistleblowers, he had raised some of the most salient questions about the safety of nuclear power, and Mello absorbed what these erudite guides imparted to him.
By the time the tall, sincere young Mello turned up in Santa Fe, his life mission seemed preordained. During the two years of working for an umbrella organization of all the newly created environmental groups in the state of New Mexico—spawning what he called “apprentice activists”—the twenty-one-year-old Mello came to idolize Rodman. “He was just a teacher,” he recalled years later, “but where are such teachers now? He was everything I expected at the time, with the vast expectations of youth, and I was not disappointed. He was all I thought he should be, I having no idea at all how mediocre the world actually was.” Naïve and idealistic, Mello had a passionate belief that he could effect positive and momentous change. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973 to attend graduate school at Harvard. Receiving his master’s degree in Regional Planning, he declined an offer to teach at the university—“I didn’t fit the Harvard mold,” he observed—and turned his attention to mathematical modeling and econometrics. He thought Harvard’s Planning Program was churning out the kind of “economic hit men” characterized decades later by insider author John Perkins.
The more disaffected he became with the direction the country was going—“the Cold War permeated everything,” he said—the less Mello wanted to pursue his doctorate. He became increasingly committed to Zen Buddhism and decided ultimately to focus his energy on his religious practices. By the mid 1970s, he was living at the Zen Center in Rochester, New York. “Essentially a monk,” is his description of his six-year residence in Rochester. Mello returned to Santa Fe in 1981, where he built the Mountain Cloud Zen Center and became involved in interfaith social work and peace activism.
After volunteering for several years with an organization concerned about radiation exposure from Los Alamos—since 1944, the lab had discarded more than seventeen million cubic feet of radioactive waste—he cofounded the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) to expand his work from nuclear safety to nuclear disarmament. “I realized that the Cold War and the arms industry represented a menace to our civilization, and I recognized that it was important to speak up before the moment had passed,” Mello said. He credited two of his Zen teachers—Philip Kapleau and Robert Aitken—as the strongest influences in his decision to zero in on disarmament as a lifetime undertaking.
An outgrowth of the People for Peace movement—and in response to the 1991 Gulf War—LASG grew from an informal association of peace activists, ministers, and political progressives to a formalized organization providing technical consultation to a coalition of over a hundred loosely allied citizen nuclear groups in New Mexico, California, and Washington, DC. “Our idea was that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility [following a raid by the FBI for environmental crimes], we could have citizen-influenced change in Los Alamos. I felt that the institutional configurations of the Cold War of my entire life could finally become unstuck.”
By 1997, LASG had become a nonprofit entity funded by small local foundation grants and private donors, with Mello its full-time executive director and primary financial contributor. Under his direction, LASG filed and prevailed in litigation, lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, including energy and climate issues, generated thousands of news articles, and halted two major nuclear projects at Los Alamos. Mello and his wife and fellow activist, Trish Williams-Mello—the former operations director of Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping (STAND) of Amarillo, Texas—“have made standing up to the nuclear industry a way of life,” as an Albuquerque newspaper described them. LASG filed two lawsuits under the National Environmental Policy Act, and in 2012 blocked a planned $4.6 billion plutonium warhead plant at LANL. The couple is passionate about thwarting the nuclear warhead complex Mello called “a gigantic self-licking ice-cream cone for contractors.” He has been successful in garnering respect on all sides of the aisle by creating what Charles Perkovich, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, described as a “strange bedfellows” coalition. By making disarmament a budgetary issue, he persuaded congressional Republicans that the weapons lab was largely an obsolete and overstuffed boondoggle. University of Chicago anthropology professor Joseph Masco was equally impressed with Mello’s methodology. “Greg has always been one of the few people who has consistently tried to put nuclear policy in the broader context of what kind of a civilization America is becoming,” Masco told a reporter.
For more than a decade, Mello had found himself up against a formidable nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos. But once the Bechtel-led LANS, LLC, took over management, Mello faced not just one lab but also the nation’s entire nuclear weapons complex managed by the same team. “Few realized that the nuclear weapons business had become ninety-seven percent privatized, with Bechtel controlling the monopoly,” Mello told an interviewer. “Just as the country was swinging so hard to the right, Los Alamos and Livermore were becoming more and more corporate, more secret, and more openly partisan to a new Cold War mentality. It’s become a tapestry of lies and irresponsibi
lity.”
Immediately after what one of Bechtel’s own executives described as the corporate takeover of the labs, Mello saw the manifestation of the quintessential Bechtel culture. “Los Alamos lost all of its public character and became a classic private corporation,” he observed. Many of the longtime scientists were uncomfortable with the new corporate management and dominant profit motive, and quit or retired early. “A new mentality took hold,” Mello said, “with the corporate idea that ‘we work for our company, not for the taxpayer,’ ” as he described the pervasive attitude. “There were now private incentives all based around how well corporate goals could be met.”
Still, Mello remained optimistic about an emergence of “an antinuclear complex that could challenge the nuclear complex,” the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. Encouraged by LASG’s successes—in the courts and with public opinion—Mello was gratified by the attention Americans were paying to what he saw as the bigger picture. Finally, the big environmental issues such as climate change were on the table, and the social and environmental effects of nuclear weapons came to the forefront. In the past, the antinuclear weapons movement was focused on pollution, peace, and safety—the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons possession. “Now we have the threatened extinction of the biosphere,” he said. “The peace dividend is now the climate dividend. The species and the planet are at stake.”
Mello was encouraged by government oversight and findings that cost overruns and technical failures were rampant at the lab, such as the leaking nuclear waste drum at Los Alamos. “It’s like a Laurel and Hardy movie, starring Bechtel-led LANS and NNSA,” he told the Associated Press. “It happens again and again, on almost all projects.” The nuclear labs began receiving heightened government and media scrutiny after several security lapses, especially including the brazen elderly nun who broke into the “Fort Knox of nuclear facilities: the Y-12 National Security Complex, which houses 300 to 400 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium,” as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported the humiliating event. The amount of weapons-grade uranium needed to build a terrorist bomb with the equivalent explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb “could fit into a small gym bag,” writer Eric Schlosser reported.
Using bolt cutters, Sister Megan Rice and two other activists managed to cut through three eight-foot-high security fences, hang protest banners, light prayer candles, paint Bible verses on walls, and come within twenty feet of nuclear material—all as a point of civil disobedience to reveal how easily fissile materials could end up in the hands of terrorists. The half-billion-dollar Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility at Y-12 was built after September 11, 2001, to protect the nation’s uranium stockpile. Yet the eighty-two-year-old nun from the international ministry Society of the Holy Child Jesus triggered three alarms before a lone guard arrived. She hoped her intrusion “would begin the process of shutting down Y-12 and transforming the American empire from a source of bloodshed into one of world peace,” wrote Schlosser. Rice was convicted on charges of sabotage and spent two years in a federal prison in Brooklyn before being released in May 2015.
The embarrassing break-in attracted widespread national and international attention—especially to the fact that private contractors, including Bechtel, were managing the nation’s nuclear enterprise. Even though the US government owned the land and the facilities, corporations were running them. “The fact that an eighty-two-year-old nun had broken into a high-security nuclear-weapons complex seemed unbelievable,” reported the New Yorker.
Not surprisingly, the event prompted a DOE investigation of the privatized management team of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. Mello welcomed the attention and oversight. He hoped it would bring about a more enlightened government nuclear policy. But his sanguinity faltered when his natural allies—the arms control and disarmament community, along with President Barack Obama—joined in an agenda to modernize the nuclear enterprise at a cost of $31 billion per year. Mello saw the plan to “freshen up our bombs and cut down the number of nuclear warheads,” as a former presidential science advisor put it, as a red herring. He thought America was walking “back down the limb we got ourselves out on with nuclear weapons.” Comparing the lab’s confidence in the nuclear deterrent to confidence in the tooth fairy, Mello wrote: “What with fallout, reactor meltdowns, and nuclear winter, nuclear ‘deterrence’ amounts to a suicide vest for humanity. . . . The labs are political heroin. As long as our politicos remain addicted to them, they won’t think straight.”
Advocating for the nuclear mission to be minimized rather than maximized—to maintain existing facilities rather than expand them—Mello was up against an ever more potent force in Bechtel. The ubiquitous and long shadow of George Shultz would be unmistakable.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” With great fanfare, Obama launched his doctrine for a nuclear-free world during his first foreign policy speech in April 2009. “I’m not naïve. This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime.” Speaking to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands in Prague in the Czech Republic—a city symbolic for its peaceful toppling of Communism as the Cold War ended—Obama vowed to lead an international movement to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, nuclear weapons. “As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”
Against the backdrop of Prague Castle, the president described how his administration planned to “put an end to Cold War thinking” by reducing both America’s arsenal of warheads and stockpiles and the role of nuclear weapons in US national security strategy. In the speech, given less than three months after his inauguration, and just hours after a missile test by North Korea, Obama outlined his ambitious plans to negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia before the end of the year. He also promised to include “all nuclear weapons states”—Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel—in this endeavor. He pledged to ratify a nuclear test ban treaty and to convene a global summit for the eventual elimination of nuclear stockpiles as part of his vision for a nuclear-free world.
This commitment to promoting “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” was heady, even revolutionary, stuff. Obama’s optimistic and stirring speech was greeted with excitement in the global arms community. No previous president had ever advanced a specific program for the ultimate elimination of nuclear arms. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time,” said one of his political science professors. New START was to be the first full-scale arms control treaty between the United States and Russia in two decades, reinvigorating a worldwide disarmament agenda that had grown stagnant.
It had been a dream of Obama’s since he was a college student during the Cold War. As a senior at Columbia University in 1983, he wrote an article about his vision for a nuclear-free world and his abhorrence of the “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that furthered the interests of the military-industrial complex, with its “billion-dollar erector sets.” Titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” the story, published in a campus news magazine, revealed the prescience of the man who would become president twenty-six years later. Having come of age during the Reagan presidency, Obama disdained Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” to justify the largest peacetime military buildup in history, and scorned the extreme ideology of some Reagan aides who posited the winnability of a nuclear war. When Obama’s long-unnoticed article surfaced decades after it had been written—in July 2009—his conservative enemies attacked it as “naïve, anti-American, and blind to the Soviet threat.”
The 2009 Prague speech was a crucial moment for Obama and his timing was critical. The nation’s nuclear arsenal was aging and decaying in sixty-year-old, poorly maintained silo
s. Even though the United States had reduced its nuclear stockpile from 31,000 to about 4,800 as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union and various arms control treaties over the previous forty-five years, the average age of a US nuclear warhead was twenty-seven years, and many of the country’s missiles, warheads, strategic bombers, and nuclear-powered submarines had not been maintained or stored safely. Many in the military thought the more serious nuclear threat to America was not an enemy strike but an accident. In the few years previous to Obama’s speech, several near disasters had occurred. Four missile nose cones were accidentally sent to Taiwan, where they sat for two years before being discovered. It was but one incident in “a recent spate of hair-raising, Homer Simpson–style nuclear blunders,” as a journalist described the terrifying scenario. Another potential catastrophe ensued when six nuclear missiles from a North Dakota facility were accidentally attached to an airplane’s wings and flown across several states before being left unattended on a public tarmac. There were reports of air force officers falling asleep while guarding launch codes for nuclear weapons.
There was another chilling vulnerability: that of what was called the “insider threat.” Epitomized by Edward Snowden, the private contractor working for the National Security Agency who gained access to the NSA’s classified secrets, including the “launch codes for America’s nuclear weapons but also for designing the equipment that decrypts the codes,” the insider threat was far more sophisticated and opaque than in the days of the Manhattan Project.
