It's media spin in overdrive: Major security breaches have jeopardized the
vital work going on at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where scientists
toil to protect America.
But after many years of monitoring key weapons policies, Jacqueline
Cabasso dismisses the uproar as "a sideshow." Cabasso, executive director
of the Western States Legal Foundation, is a perceptive expert on nuclear
arms issues. Her views don't come near the conventional media wisdom.
"The real scandal," she told me, "is that while the media focuses
attention on a couple of lost and found hard drives, the U.S. weapons labs
-- Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia -- are spending billions of
taxpayer dollars busily developing new and improved nuclear weapons, almost
completely shielded from public scrutiny or even awareness. Moreover, the
U.S. is continuing to brandish these weapons on a daily basis."
Meanwhile, as far as most journalists are concerned, the purposes of
America's weapons laboratories are sacrosanct. The professional thing to do
is to echo the assumptions of politicians like Florida Republican Porter
Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who likes to describe Los
Alamos as a bastion of "creativity." In a recent interview on CNN, Goss
extolled the lab's mission of "creating the innovation, the creativity, the
breakthrough that you need to develop these kinds of weapons and have this
kind of progress."
For several decades, a macabre form of creativity has flourished at the
Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico and at Lawrence Livermore in
California. The default position of media coverage is that these are fine
institutions; the alarm is about dysfunction, not function.
So, from coast to coast, news outlets marked the summer solstice with an
outpouring of fiery complaints about Los Alamos -- without the slightest
questioning of its mission. "Management there remains shockingly
lackadaisical," fumed a New York Times editorial. "Tighter oversight cannot
come soon enough." With such fixations on secrecy, there is virtually no
light shed on the fact that America's massive nuclear weapons program is
devoted to being able to incinerate the planet. (Only if duty calls, of
course.)
Behind the countless news reports about Los Alamos is a prolonged
infatuation with notions of protective secrecy. Long ago, Albert Einstein
saw the folly. On April 30, 1947, he wrote of atomic weapons: "For there is
no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control
except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of
the world."
But the usual news accounts and commentaries, amplifying the voices of
policymakers in Washington, refuse to ask why the United States continues
to design, test and deploy nuclear weapons. In the universe of mainstream
media, Einstein's observations are upside down: We keep hearing that there
is a secret and there is a defense. This posture allows the U.S. government
to go unquestioned by citizens, while nuclear design labs stay busy. Their
creations -- if used as intended -- will destroy millions or billions of
human lives. That's an odd concept of creativity.
To Cabasso, the media preoccupations are ludicrous. "While the absurd
question of who took the hard drives, and why, dominates the national
news," she says, "Armageddon is still just the push of a button away.
Today, U.S. Trident submarines are quietly patrolling the world's oceans at
the same rate as the height of the Cold War, armed with thousands of the
deadliest weapons ever conceived, on hair-trigger alert."
As an opponent of nuclear proliferation and an advocate of nuclear
disarmament, Cabasso sees enormous danger in the status quo: "While the
U.S. relentlessly relies on nuclear weapons as the 'cornerstone' of its
national security -- and the currency of global domination -- it goes to
extraordinary lengths to demand that other nations forego this option. This
unsustainable 'do as we say, not as we do' nuclear policy is the real
threat to our national security."
Considering what's at stake, the narrow range of media discourse about
nuclear weapons is outrageous. Forget the hard drives. The most serious
problem at the Los Alamos laboratory is its function. "In the interests of
our human security," Jacqueline Cabasso points out, "a comprehensive, open,
publicly accessible national debate on nuclear weapons and national
security is desperately needed and long overdue."
Info link: http://www.abolition2000.org
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is The Habits of
Highly Deceptive Media.
