SURVIVAL

Mobilization for Survival (MFS) is one group of people which has had the courage to say in response to these and other facts: "We are frightened at the determination of military leaders in all nations to press ahead with weapons systems. We are horrified that our money, the product of our labor, is drained away from human needs and invested in machinery of unspeakable destruction...we will educate ourselves. We will raise the consciousness of our communities. We will move into the streets. We will shake the foundation of any institution which tries to turn our future into a radioactive zone."

MFS has four stated goals: eliminate nuclear weapons, ban nuclear power, stop the arms race, and fund human needs. These goals are deliberately broad and comprehensive as a movement too narrowly focused can collapse if its single aim is achieved or its stated goal ceases to be relevant.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 it was hard for many people in the anti-war movement to realize that what they had been participating in was just that--a movement to end the American military presence in Indo-China. Many tried to maintain the energy of the movement, but without a concrete focus the previously united activists drifted away into their own areas of interest. Even the U.S. complicity in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile was unable to revive the old coalition.

Now, the "new morality" of the Carter administration dismisses the horrors of Vietnam and Chile as characteristic of a bygone era. The U.S. is in the process of re-thinking and re-aligning itself to protect what remains of its global power. Admiral T.H. Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed this shift in testimony before the U.S. Senate:

"Our relative military power throughout the world has peaked and is declining. We no longer possess that substantial strategic superiority which in the past provided us with such a significant margin of overall military power that we could with confidence, protect our interests worldwide. Henceforth we will have to chart our course with much greater precision and calculate out risks much more cautiously,"

Since Vietnam, then, the Pentagon has been forced to adopt a lower profile, but it has lost none of its militarism nor has it modified its insistence on continuing nuclear armaments production and arms race escalation.

Nuclear arms production began 32 years ago when an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a 15-kiloton atomic device on Hiroshima. Prior to this, the largest bomb developed had been the "blockbuster," so named because it was capable of devastating an entire city block. The Hiroshima bomb had a destructive force equivalent to 1300-2000 blockbusters and the one A-bomb virtually pulverized a city of more than 300,000 inhabitants. When President Truman heard the news, he said: "This is the greatest thing in history."

As of 1976, the U.S. possessed a nuclear stockpile of 8000 megatons (million tons of dynamite equivalent), according to Ruth Sivard, the former chief economist of the Arms Control Disarmament Agency. That is equal to 615,385 Hiroshima bombs. When one considers that the rest of the planet possesses another 8000 megatons, one realizes that human history has clearly moved into the age of overkill.

There would perhaps be room for complacency in all this if the policy accompanying such awesome weaponry were that of use only as a last resort or at least that of mutual assured destruction (MAD), thereby insuring what General Douglas MacArthur said of nuclear war, that any conflict at all would be a form of "double suicide."

But the U.S. military has not been satisfied with such a policy. Instead it has argued for the development of first strike capabilities, personified in such weapon systems as the B-1 bomber, the cruise missile, and the M-X missile. It has also argued for the acceptance of the concept of "counterforce" which legitimates "limited nuclear wars" and "surgical strikes" against "enemy" positions. The fruits of this doctrine have been the neutron bomb, the first nuclear anti-personnel weapon: it kills only people. Within hours, an invading army can move in and take over the dead "enemy's" economic political facilities which would have been left standing. The Pentagon has tried to blur any distinction between conventional weapons and both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and within this context to win acceptance for the credibility of a "limited nuclear war." These policies were crystallized by former Secretary of State Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Schlesinger during the Nixon/Ford years and have been accepted in toto by President Carter.

Closely aligned to, indeed derivative of, nuclear weaponry, has been the development of nuclear power.

Each 1000 megawatt reactor (the planned Boston Edison Pilgrim II plant will be 1180 megawatts) produces as much high-level waste as 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs each and every year. There are over 28 different radioactive substances routinely emitted from these nuclear reactors, all of which are ecologically dangerous and some of which, such as strontium-90 and cesium-131, will be a disposal problem for 600 to 1000 years. The most deadly emission, of course, is plutonium. Its lethality is such that one-millionth of a gram is sufficient to cause lung cancer--and a large reactor annually produces 400 pounds. Once produced it must be stored safely for 250,000 to 500,000 years.

In addition to this potential for ecological and human devastation, the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation must be considered: atoms for peace means atoms for war. Reactor fuel and waste can both be used to produce nuclear bombs. Only 17 pounds of plutonium, about the size of a grapefruit, is needed for an atomic device. As the nuclear industry expands, therefore, it increases the risks of nuclear war by making bomb-potential material available to countries with "peaceful" reactors, many of which, including India, Israel, Egypt, South Africa and Brazil, have not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Yet the sales of nuclear reactors and reprocessing plants goes on virtually unabated. As of June, 1977, 21 nations had a total nuclear generating capacity of 47,655 megawatts produced by 138 reactors, and 41 foreign nations have firm commitments to develop nuclear energy.

Nuclear proliferation in terms of technology, then, is linked to the growing demand by other nations for military strength. Indeed, the world trade in conventional military technology has risen from $3.8 billion per year in 1965 to $9.2 billion in 1974. Since May, 1977, when President Carter announced that military sales to foreign governments would be the "exception" rather than the rule, he has signed 45 agreements to sell armaments worth more than $4.1 billion.

This resurgence of militarism and the proliferation of nuclear technology harms us all, for there is no real division between foreign and domestic policy. In an era of "the closing circle," of limited resources and increasing competition for those resources, resources used for weapons are unavailable for human needs. It is a question of priorities. One United Nations statistic should suffice: between July 1974 and June 1975, ten million people on this planet starved to death. At the same time, the world governments collectively spent more than $300 billion on armaments. The U.S. and the Soviet Union alone accounted for 70 percent of all arms spending.

The damaging impact of militarism in the domestic sector is compounded by the fact that military spending industries are capital-intensive; military spending therefore creates fewer jobs than an equal amount of spending in the civilian sector. Additionally, armaments production is disproportionately high-skilled. Consequently, while a defense contract can in the short run boost a sagging local economy, in the long run it exacerbates both inflation and unemployment.

There are other results. High unemployment rates set one group of workers against other groups of workers against other groups trying to get into the job market. Established union see "affirmative actions" by women and ethnic minorities as intolerable competition for already scarce jobs. Further, social action groups are forced to compete with each other for the little that any of them receive, for to the degree that military expenditures consume public resources, needed social programs are reduced. The biggest losers are of course the poor, and those either already unemployed or on fixed incomes.

At the international level, one can observe similar distortions. The resources exploited from the Third World by the wealthy nations to build up their own industrial and military establishments leave few resources for the underdeveloped countries themselves to use. When the industrial countries, in turn, sell back to the undeveloped countries weapons systems and defense technologies instead of the technology of peace, the spiral of continued militarism amidst crushing poverty continues.

All struggles for resources to meet human needs, therefore, must confront the new militarism of the United States nuclear industry and a military which sells more arms to developing nations than the rest of the world combined. The U.S. can no longer afford both guns and butter; we must choose between them. Foreign policy has become domestic policy. Those who propose real changes in our society, therefore, must bring these issues into every possible political arena--from the electoral campaigns and the unions to the churches and the streets. Such a movement was successful when organized against the Vietnam War. It can be done again.

Indeed much is being done. For the past three decades, the Japanese movement against the atom and hydrogen bombs has warned against the nuclear danger. In Britain and Europe the International Confederation for Peace and Disarmament has consistently worked on this issue. The World Peace Council, too, continues to push for detente and disarmament. These international movements are working closely with non-governmental organizations all over the globe to create maximum impact on the U.N. Special Assembly on Disarmament in May, 1978. There is clearly a growing international sentiment expressing the demand for zero nuclear weapons and a stop in the arms trade.

In the U.S., the Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice, which culminated in Washington, D.C. in October, 1976, raised the consciousness of thousands of movement people to the need to act again in confronting the military establishment and to renew their efforts in working for human welfare.

The nuclear ecology movement has also coalesced into an active political force. The Clamshell Alliance, in particular, in its last occupation at Seabrook, N.H. demonstrated to the entire world community a powerful display of non-violent action.

Given these developments, it is not surprising to note that we are on the threshold of a new mass movement seeking to abolish nuclear weapons, ban nuclear power, stop the arms race, and use the money saved to address human needs. These are the challenges which speak directly to the issues of human survival in our time.

FACT: World military expenditure averages $12,330 per soldier. Public expenditure for education averages $219 per school-age child.

FACT: The cost of the existing stockpile of weapons in the world is estimated at more than twice the value of the capital stock in all manufacturing industry in the United States.

FACT: By reducing world military expenditures by 2.5 percent, 200 million malnourished children could receive supplementary protein feeding and primary schools could accomodate 100 million new students.

FACT: One ounce of plutonium is potentially equivalent to 200 million lung cancer doses. Four tons of plutonium are already missing in the U.S. alone.

This article was written collectively by the following members of Mobilization for Survival: Jim Garrison, a Ph.D. candidate at the Divinity School; Geoff Bernstein '80; Sybil Highes '81; Geoff Wisner '80; Paige Tolbert '79; Joan Lancourt; and Kathi Matthews.

The Mobilization for Survival will sponsor a "teach-in" this weekend at the Cambridge High and Latin School. Daniel Ellsberg and others will speak in the school auditorium on Friday, October 21 at 7:30 p.m. On Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon, workshops will be held on nuclear power; military spending vs. jobs, unmet human needs, campus organizing, nuclear weapons and transnational corporations, and nuclear technology from a feminist perspective.