The Daily Californian November 24, 2004
Nuclear Spin Zone
By Andro Hsu
Last week, the House passed the $388 billion Omnibus Appropriations bill, which allocates U.S. government spending for 2005. Democrats will bemoan the last-minute insertion of a rider that allows hospitals and insurers not to inform pregnant patients of their right to an abortion. Small-government conservatives-a few still exist-will have a fit over the $15.8 billion of pork attached to the budget. But there may be a piece of good news for those who have been following UC's debate over whether to bid for continued management of the Department of Energy's national laboratories at Livermore and Los Alamos.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein notes that the "Omnibus Appropriations bill contains no funding for new nuclear weapons programs" such as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (the nuclear "bunker-buster") or the Advanced Concepts Program, which was to develop low-yield tactical nukes. Some of this research would have gone forward at the Livermore and Los Alamos labs.
To understand the importance of this turnaround, we need to go over some history. According to the Web site Globalsecurity.org, the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review suggested that "the nation's nuclear forces ought to reflect the reality that the Cold War is over and that required capabilities may now need to be different."
In other words, in the post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world, our nuclear forces no longer serve as a deterrent to the former Soviet Union's. Instead, they must be turned toward more practical, immediate uses, such as eliminating facilities that produce weapons of mass destruction in "rogue states." To this end, the Bush administration authorized funding research into mini-nukes that would actually be usable on the battlefield.
Objections came from many corners. Anti-nuclear activists decried the development of a nuclear weapon that might be used in a first strike. Foreign policy pragmatists complained that mini-nukes would encourage other nations to continue developing their own nuclear deterrent.
In a letter to the U.S. Senate, the Union of Concerned Scientists said "low-yield earth-penetrating weapons cannot burrow deep enough and do not have a large enough yield to destroy deep underground targets; moreover, the explosion would ... necessarily result in large amounts of radioactive fallout." Furthermore, a nuclear explosion might not completely destroy biological or chemical weapons, but instead spread them throughout the environment.
Given the chorus of protests, the stoppage of funding for new nuclear weapons research provides ammunition for proponents of continued UC management of DOE labs, many of whom argue UC's involvement allows for better public oversight of the labs.
But the joke's on them. In reality, nuclear policy is out of UC's hands. As the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, the United States already has a nuclear bunker-buster: the B61-11 bomb, partly developed and tested at the Livermore and Los Alamos labs under UC's management. UC can no more direct the Bush administration to stop producing the B61-11 than it could tell them not to use it on hardened nuclear facilities in Iran, should Iran recommence production of nuclear weapons fuel.
Unfortunately, UC's bidding decision is likely to be a foregone conclusion. At their meeting last week, the UC Regents released a survey of undergraduate opinion on management of the DOE labs. Only 35 percent of the 17,296 respondents favored or strongly favored UC's bidding to continue management of the labs, while 51 percent were undecided or did not have enough information.
No stranger to spin, the UC Office of the President announced that because 72 percent of respondents with a preference favored bidding, "these results parallel those of the faculty survey, where 67 percent of respondents favored bidding for renewal of the management contracts."
This flagrant misrepresentation shows UC has always had a clear intention to bid for continued management of the DOE labs. The survey allows the regents to claim they listen to students while running roughshod over them-just as they entertained concerns of the student regent and president of the UC Student Association but voted to raise student fees anyway.
No, the university is not a democracy. But the regents shouldn't go through the farce of pretending we students have a say.
© Copyright 2004, The Daily Californian
