ROBERT C. KOEHLER
For release 3/1/07
HOLD THE MUSHROOMS
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut
and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest - the same stuff that
legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago's
Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago - enabled a bunch of
little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and
win.
This unprecedented development must be
savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at
the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas - which would have raised a
10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what - has been scrapped for
good. After several postponements and a round of power-point
presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did
nothing but fuel people's outrage, it ain't gonna happen.
"There was such a public outcry," said
Salt Lake City resident Mary Dickson of Downwinders, one of the
organizations leading the fight against the blast, the possibility of
which revived hellish memories of the era of above-ground testing that
ended in 1962. "I like to think the people will prevail, so I can go on
thinking this fighting we do does matter," Dickson, a cancer survivor,
told me. "I just want people to know, if they think they can't make a
difference, look at this case."
"Back in the '50s," said Idahoan
Preston Truman, who heads Downwinders, "we were given a booklet on the
first day of kindergarten that said, 'You people who live near the test
site are, in a very real sense, active participants in this nation's
testing program.' Well, I think it just got demonstrated!"
But banding together Alinsky-style to
thwart the powers that be and stop a test blast isn't what the era's
propaganda writers had in mind. That it was the last thing they had in
mind is more than just bitter irony. It's a raw example of the
unfinished nature of American democracy, and the struggle ordinary
citizens still have - well, let's face it, it's never-ending - to wrest
control of their destiny from virulent special interests.
And there's no special interest more
virulent, or arrogant, than the weapons establishment: "I don't want to
sound glib here," DTRA director James Tegnelia told reporters a year
ago, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, "but it is the first time in
Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped
testing nuclear weapons."
As of March 2006, a sham
"environmental impact" study had been conducted and the big blast,
composed of 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, was seemingly a
done deal, scheduled to be detonated in June within a mile of a
radioactive hot spot at the test site. A total of 928 above- and
below-ground nuclear tests had been conducted there between 1951 and
1992, and millions of people - the Downwinders - reaped the horrific
consequences of the fallout they were told was perfectly benign.
The "active participation" assigned to them, it turns out, was to die quietly of cancer and not make a fuss.
Well, enough is enough. People saw
clearly that the horror of the Cold War era was about to begin again,
with Tegnelia's lurid and clueless remark about a new mushroom cloud
having a galvanizing effect on residents in four states - Nevada, Utah,
Idaho and Montana - in the immediate vicinity of the site. Massive
opposition, cutting across all political lines, formed immediately. The
Downwinders had a clear, intractable message for the weapons industry:
"You're not going to make another generation of us!"
The stunning political diversity of
the opposition speaks volumes. Conservative Republicans, such as Utah's
Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. - who described himself as "jubilant" about
Divine Strake's cancellation - were in the front lines of the
opposition, right next to antiwar progressives.
This conveys a crucial truth: A new,
complex rationality is gaining political traction in American life. The
logic of violence is deeply flawed and its paradoxes, which transcend
ideology, are coming home to roost. The drive to create a new
generation of low-yield nuclear weapons (e.g., bunker busters), of
which Divine Strake was a part, has the glaring flaw, which government
propaganda can no longer mask, of poisoning U.S. citizens in its
testing and production phases. Even "strong defense" patriots see the
problem with this, at least when it affects them and their loved ones.
From here, the logic for a new kind of
society, a new national purpose, gains momentum. Surely no Downwinder
who fought Divine Strake merely wanted the test site moved elsewhere
("Bomb Indiana instead!"). The test was wrong, period. And a growing
number of people are coming to grasp that actually using such weapons
on an "enemy" population would be worse, by a factor of thousands or
millions, than just testing it. And slowly we are withdrawing the
government's mandate to perpetuate a violent world.
But there's such a long way to go, and
the cost of enlightened self-interest is so high. When I asked Dickson
what was next for her, she noted that a friend and fellow activist had
just been diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. "We take care of the
people who are still dying," she said. "It's never over for us."
- - -
Robert Koehler, an award-winning,
Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and
nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at
bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.
© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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