NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/10250

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-24 | 22.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: our plutonium economy & a free democracy are a contradiction in terms
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Summary: our plutonium economy must be protected by police state methods
Originator: [e-mail]
Keywords: totalitarian democracy, plutonium culture, police state methods
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 15:33:50 GMT
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 a passage from the 1983 book "The Russian Threat" about our plutonium economy


    Excerpts follow, from a passage included in full below, about the
    realities of our plutonium economy, created in the ashes of the Second
    World War.  It is imperative all of us grapple with the contradictions
    inherent in the situation we find ourselves in, where, by creating and
    using something as lethal, toxic and certifiably deadly as plutonium,
    we must give up our civil liberties for `national security' reasons.
    "We just cannot have something that can be used for nuclear bombs and
    can damage and mutate human life with the lethalness of millions of
    cancer doses per pound floating about in a free society." The following
    was written almost ten years ago.  But since that time, the Russian
    Threat has disolved into the mists of history and we are *still* left
    holding the nuclear bag.

    For over forty years our society was told the reason we needed nuclear
    weapons was because we had to protect ourselves against our deadly
    adversary in the USSR.  Now that adversary is a thing of the past.
    After WWII, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote about the Manichaean
    Devil in the following terms:  "The Manichaean devil is an opponent,
    like any other opponent, who is determined on victory and will use any
    trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory.  In
    particular, he will keep his policy of confusion secret, and if we show
    any signs of beginning to discover his policy, he will change it in
    order to keep us in the dark."  He was writing about the Soviets.  But
    that threat no longer is credible.  Why do we continue to allow
    ourselves to be propagandized by the those who would have us *still*
    believe in the Manichaean Devil--an opponent who no longer even exists?
    Who's interests are served by believing there are enemies "out there" who
    are worth polluting the biosphere with fundamentally deadly radioactive
    matter, that will annihilate all life on earth for hundreds of millennia
    to come?



                          *   *   *   *   *   *   *



        What the ruling groups prefer . . . is to produce a situation in
    which no one dares oppose their plans.  Their favourite methods
    are therefore to exploit people's dependence on consumer goods
    and on their jobs and exercising prevention controls by means of
    intensive surveillance. . . .[11]

        What needs to be remembered in assessing this state of affairs is
     that plutonium, if it is to be used, must be protected by police
     state methods.  We just cannot have something that can be used for
     nuclear bombs and can damage and mutate human life with the
     lethalness of millions of cancer doses per pound floating about in a
     free society.  *A plutonium economy and a free democracy are a
     contradiction in terms.*  This is a fact that has been recognised by
     leading legal experts and politicians alike.  Writing in the "Harvard
     Law Review," Russell Ayres states flatly that `plutonium provides the
     first rational justification for widespread intelligence gathering
     against the civilian population.'[12]  The reason for this is that
     the threat of nuclear terrorism justifies such encroachments on civil
     liberties for `national security' reasons.  It is inevitable,
     therefore, says Ayres, that "plutonium use would create pressures for
     infiltration into civic, political, environmental and professional
     groups to a far greater extent than previously encountered and with a
     greater impact on speech and associated rights". . . .
      . . .  Social control is justified, particularly as far as the
     plutonium economy is concerned, by the over-riding necessity to avoid
     the catastrophe which might occur either through carelessness,
     disobedience, or `terrorism.'  This cultivated attitude enables the
     Western technocrats to represent themselves to the public as the
     guardians of the society in the emergency situation they themselves
     inspired and engineered. . . .
        The tragedy unfolding in the West is of a people who achieved
     liberty at great cost, but who now, faced with the despotism inherent
     in the plutonium economy, are abnegating it.  They are rendering
     themselves subservient to those few who wish to build a national
     security state supplied with nuclear energy and armed with nuclear
     weapons.  Our leaders are depriving us of the very liberties they
     have been entrusted to defend.  Moreover, they are manipulating the
     `Russian threat' to justify such actions, all the while claiming that
     they are protecting democracy.  Never before have so few asked so
     many for so much for the sake of so little.



 _____________________________________________________________________________

          from "The Russian Threat, Its Myths and Realities" (c) 1983,

     Gateway Books, London, by Jim Garrison and Pyrae Shivpuri, pp 231-236.



        The growing erosion of civil liberties in Western Europe and the
     United States is closely linked with the nuclear energy-nuclear
     weapons complex, which mandates a psyche all its own.  This complex
     creates the necessity for secrecy on the one hand and greater
     protection of investment on the other.  Not only are there high
     financial and environmental risks but also potential ramifications
     beyond national boundaries.  Because of the `plutonium culture'
     generated by the nuclear complex, the age old dilemma of striking a
     balance between state authority and the rights of the individual is
     being forced to opt for increasing state control, and diminishing
     individual freedom.  The plutonium culture allows for no other
     choice.
        Each operating nuclear reactor produces between 400 to 600 pounds
     of plutonium waste each year.  Less than one millionth of a gram, if
     ingested, can cause cancer and/or genetic mutation.  Twenty pounds,
     if properly fashioned, can be made into a nuclear bomb.  Because of
     this, *the different aspects of the plutonium economy must be as
     tightly guarded as nuclear weapons themselves*.  Nuclear weapons are
     kept at military facilities generally away from population centres
     and specifically under guard in a military system predicated upon
     discipline, hierarchy and authoritarian leadership.  Similar
     protection for the `atoms for peace' programme will have a
     devastating impact upon the democratic freedoms and civil liberties
     of the citizens.
        The potential problem with the plutonium economy and its relation
     to human freedom has been succinctly expressed by a statement made by
     Dr. Bernard Feld, Chairperson of the Atomic and High Energy Physics
     Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

        Let me tell you about a nightmare I have.  The Mayor of
        Boston sends for me for an urgent consultation.  He has
        received a note from a terrorist group telling him that they
        have planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in central Boston.  The
        Mayor has confirmed that 20 pounds of plutonium is missing
        from Government stocks.  He shows me the crude diagram and a
        set of the terrorists outrageous demands.  I know--as one of
        those who participated in the assembly of the first atomic
        bomb--that the device would work.  Not efficiently, but
        nevertheless with devastating effect.  What should I do?
        Surrender to blackmail or risk destroying my home town?[9]

        The dangers are real, so real that government planners in every
     country with nuclear programmes have undertaken steps to be prepared
     for Dr. Feld's scenario.  In 1975, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
     (NRC) commissioned a specific study of the problem.  One of the
     participants, Professor John Barton, Professor of Jurisprudence at
     Stanford University Law School, prepared a paper entitled
     `Intensified Nuclear Safeguards and Civil Liberties.'  The document
     began by stating that:

        Increased public concern with nuclear terrorism, coupled with
        the possibility of greatly increased use of plutonium in
        civilian power reactors, are leading the US Nuclear
        Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider various forms of
        intensified safeguards against theft or loss of nuclear
        materials and against *sabotage*.  The intensified safeguards
        could include expansion of personnel clearance programs, a
        nationwide guard force, *greater surveillance of dissenting
        political groups,* area searches in the event of a loss of
        materials, and creation of *new barriers of secrecy* around
        parts of the nuclear program.[10]

        It is important to be clear what the above statement implies.  The
     governments supporting nuclear power are attempting to protect the
     plutonium economy from two perceived enemies:  first, those who would
     use the nuclear materials to terrorise the country through some type
     of nuclear sabotage;  and second, those who seek to stop nuclear
     power, meaning anti-nuclear `dissenting political groups'.  This
     requires a nationwide guard force to be created specifically to deal
     with any terrorism and the erection of new barriers of secrecy around
     the nuclear programmes to keep public knowledge and participation at
     a minimum.  Both sets of enemies would be subject to greater
     surveillance through electronic listening devices such as phone taps.
        In Britain, for instance, it is accepted as a matter of course
     that anyone working for the Atomic Energy Authority be `positively
     vetted' before being appointed.  The Official Secrets Act, moreover,
     allows the government and the atomic industry to keep the nuclear
     installations cloaked in secrecy and the employees forbidden to
     communicate anything about their work.  In 1976, Britain also became
     the first country to establish by law a nationwide guard force of
     constables under the direct control of the atomic authorities in
     order to guard nuclear facilities and specifically the plutonium
     stores.  This guard force has privileges in relation to carrying
     weapons not granted to any other British police unit.  Indeed, so
     sensitive are these privileges that under the Official Secrets Act,
     information about them has not been made available to the public.
     This force is mandated not only to guard against possible terrorism
     but to keep tabs on `dissenting political groups.'
        Jonathan Rosenhead, of the London School of Economics, points out
     that this type of political control is very easily overlooked by the
     general populace because it is specifically designed and intended to
     be used as inconspicuously as possible.  In America, political
     scientists refer to this technique as the "politics of the iron fist
     in the velvet glove."  "What the ruling groups prefer", he says,

        is to produce a situation in which no one dares oppose their
        plans.  Their favourite methods are therefore to exploit
        people's dependence on consumer goods and on their jobs and
        exercising prevention controls by means of intensive
        surveillance.  In the event of open conflict breaking out in
        spite of that, they would hope at least to contain it by
        `limited operations.'[11]

        What needs to be remembered in assessing this state of affairs is
     that plutonium, if it is to be used, must be protected by police
     state methods.  We just cannot have something that can be used for
     nuclear bombs and can damage and mutate human life with the
     lethalness of millions of cancer doses per pound floating about in a
     free society.  *A plutonium economy and a free democracy are a
     contradiction in terms.*  This is a fact that has been recognised by
     leading legal experts and politicians alike.  Writing in the "Harvard
     Law Review," Russell Ayres states flatly that `plutonium provides the
     first rational justification for widespread intelligence gathering
     against the civilian population.'[12]  The reason for this is that
     the threat of nuclear terrorism justifies such encroachments on civil
     liberties for `national security' reasons.  It is inevitable,
     therefore, says Ayres, that "plutonium use would create pressures for
     infiltration into civic, political, environmental and professional
     groups to a far greater extent than previously encountered and with a
     greater impact on speech and associated rights".  Sir Brian Flowers,
     in Britain, has come to similar conclusions.  At the end of his
     environmental impact statement for the plutonium economy in the
     United Kingdom, known as the Flowers Report, he made it quite clear
     that Britain could not have both plutonium and civil liberties.
     Rather, he said, to adopt the plutonium economy would make
     `inevitable' the erosion of the freedoms that British people had
     fought for over the centuries and have come to assume and accept as
     inalienable rights.
        What is happening to Western Europe and the US should not be seen
     as an abnormal occurrence;  rather, it should be viewed as the
     *logical progression* of what the adoption of the plutonium economy
     in any country implies.  There are certain psychological implications
     inherent in the use and development of nuclear weapons.  There are
     direct physical results on both workers and public alike from the
     nuclear fuel cycle.  So, too, the plutonium economy makes inevitable
     the erosion of human rights.
        Observers in the Netherlands and West Germany refer to the decline
     of the "Rechtsstadt" (meaning a state guided by laws which are both
     just and accepted) and the rise of the "Machtstadt," where state
     authority is based on power equations.  In the US, it is sometimes
     referred to as a `national security state'.  We prefer the term
     "totalitarian democracy" to characterise the governments of the US
     and Western Europe.  It denotes a governmental system of
     parliamentary democracy within which the official bureaucracy, the
     police, and the legal authorities are vested with almost total power
     over the individual.
        It has been apparent for some time that the drive in the West for
     all-out growth, dictated by the need for capital accumulation and
     profits, has been creating problems that existing institutions, be
     they national or international, are simply not equipped to handle.
     These include:

         * the alienation through and ruthlessness of the
           multinational corporations;

         * the frustrations of an economy where automation and
           machinery are replacing human skills and ingenuity;

         * the gnawing fears and anxieties aroused by the `diseases
           of affluence,' notably cancer, heart disease and stress;

         * and the looming threat of environmental destruction, be
           it at the local or planetary level, from chemical
           pollution, or the plutonium economy.

        As long as the boom lasted, and Western affluence was sustained
     these pressures could be ignored.  But that `boom-balloon' has burst.
     The energy crisis is deepening.  The economic reality of increased
     unemployment and inflation is becoming more and more depressing.  The
     pressures of burgeoning populations, as also the youth demanding
     employment and a piece of the good life, are becoming unbearable.
        In order to survive this `crisis of capitalism', the dominant
     forces in industry and government are forcing through a ruthless
     restructuring and re-grouping of the economic system.  In Western
     Europe this is reflected in the wholesale writing-off of vast sectors
     of traditional industry such as steel and textiles and the resultant
     social decline of whole areas.  The trend is to form blocs such as
     the EEC but this in turn places increased strain on the member states
     and does little more than paper over the fundamental problems with
     another layer of bureaucracy.  Under this weight, the welfare state
     that grew up in the decades after World War II is being dismantled,
     to squeeze just a bit more money to spend, as often as not, on more
     weapon systems.  In the process, yet another safety net is removed
     for the individual who is the victim of the capitalist system.  If it
     is any consolation, Marxism hasn't come up with any answers either.
        Those in power know they have no way to solve the problems or meet
     the demands of their youth, of the millions of unemployed, of the
     anti-nuclear movement, of the populations in economically depressed
     areas, of the victims of industrial disasters, or of any other
     discontented groups.  The only valid answers are ones which involve
     fundamental changes in our thinking and in our system itself, and
     these are ones which those in power are not in a position to offer.
     So they placate their constituencies with promises which they know
     they cannot fulfil.
        This only adds to the frustration of those who can no longer wait.
     The next stage after fruitless protest cannot fail to be a challenge
     to that part of the system of which the individual has become the
     victim.  If this challenge is met with either refusal or with
     repression, the frustration of those in protest can lead to violent
     action.  Protest by violence against the system which cannot meet
     their demands when peacefully presented is labelled by those in power
     as `terrorism.'
        Foreseeing this scenario, the reaction of the dominant groups is
     to proclaim the necessity to prepare in time to deal effectively with
     those who are discontented.  When there are violations that cannot be
     put right, then freedom to criticise and, in the end, democracy
     itself become hostage to `effective governance.'  It is an axiom of
     history that when the people begin to question the right of their
     leaders to govern, the leaders question the right of the people to
     question.
        The irony of this situation within the conflict of East-West
     relations is that although the starting point of their analyses are
     different, the conclusions drawn by the Soviet leaders and the
     governing groups in the West are the same:  both regard effective
     governance as being hindered by a genuine democratic government.  The
     result in the East has been the `dictatorship of the proletariat';
     in the West, `totalitarian democracy.'
        While it is true that the system of repression in the West is not
     as extensive or as brutal as in the East, except in isolated cases,
     what is necessary to remember is that the *mentality* of the
     oppressor, whether in the Kremlin or in 10 Downing Street or in the
     White House, is the same.  What is different are the *mechanisms*
     which oppress the people below.  In both cases what is achieved is
     the setting up of a *standard of behaviour* which, because there are
     no alternatives allowed, becomes the *pattern of behaviour.*  This
     creates a dangerous person-into-machine social norm.  In the Soviet
     Union this has been done with a ruthlessness that needed only the
     unity and discipline of the Party;  in the West mass control has been
     achieved by subtle manipulation that needs either public ignorance or
     public apathy to be effective.  Social control is justified,
     particularly as far as the plutonium economy is concerned, by the
     over-riding necessity to avoid the catastrophe which might occur
     either through carelessness, disobedience, or `terrorism.'  This
     cultivated attitude enables the Western technocrats to represent
     themselves to the public as the guardians of the society in the
     emergency situation they themselves inspired and engineered.
        The tragedy of the Russian people is the suffering of individuals
     endowed with a passion for personal freedom so profound as to verge
     on the anarchic, and yet who have been forced to live under a
     despotism resolutely intent upon the suppression of that freedom.
        The tragedy unfolding in the West is of a people who achieved
     liberty at great cost, but who now, faced with the despotism inherent
     in the plutonium economy, are abnegating it.  They are rendering
     themselves subservient to those few who wish to build a national
     security state supplied with nuclear energy and armed with nuclear
     weapons.  Our leaders are depriving us of the very liberties they
     have been entrusted to defend.  Moreover, they are manipulating the
     `Russian threat' to justify such actions, all the while claiming that
     they are protecting democracy.  Never before have so few asked so
     many for so much for the sake of so little.


      [9] In Robert Jungk, "The Nuclear State," trans. Eric Mosbacher,
          London, 1979, pp. 118, 19.

     [10] "Intensified Nuclear Safeguards and Civil Liberties," Nuclear Reg.
          Comm. Cont. No. AT(49-24)-0190, Washington, DC, 31 Oct. 1975, p. 1.

     [11] In Jungk, "Nuclear State, op. cit., p. 132.

     [12] In Ibid., p. 142


--
                                              daveus rattus

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.