Groundbreaking at Livermore Lab - protesters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory against new National Ignition Facility which would create tiny nuclear explosions - Column

Progressive, The, Sept, 1997 by Gina K. Thornburg

Livermore, California

Just when you thought the Cold War was over, the bomb-makers come up with "Science-based Stockpile Stewardship."

Over the next ten years, the Department of Energy plans to spend $40 billion to build new facilities to ensure the "continued safety and reliability" of the existing stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The program's crown jewel is the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $1.2 billion football-stadium-sized edifice to be constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The facility would create tiny nuclear explosions.

"Old Cold War programs are given a fresh coat of post-Cold War paint and a new name," says Marylia Kelley, president of Tri-Valley Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment.

The National Ignition Facility's real, albeit tiny, nuclear explosions would be created by a laser forty times more powerful than the Nova laser, currently the world's most potent (also located at Livermore). Critics say these explosions fly in the face of the Comprehensive Test Ban and Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaties.

Activists have already opposed Department of Energy tests on stockpiled nuclear weapons conducted early this summer at the Nevada Test Site, and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories.

The Livermore lab invited Kelley and nine other activists to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Ignition Facility on May 29.

While about 150 protesters demonstrated outside the laboratory's gates, the ten activists inside, all representing different organizations, made a bold statement in front of a crowd of 2,500. Wearing "Nuclear Insanity Forever" T-shirts, they planted sunflower seeds in the freshly turned earth and filled in holes dug by lab officials. (Sunflowers are becoming an international symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons.)

"It was disruptive in an extremely dignified way," says Jacqueline Cabasso, director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which, along with thirty-eight groups around the nation, has filed a suit against the Department of Energy for its failure to comply with the nation's environmental laws.

Officials from Lawrence Livermore and the departments of Defense and Energy defend the facility. They laud the pioneering astrophysics research and the potential energy applications of the National Ignition Facility's experiments.

"The National Ignition Facility could create the conditions of the center of the sun," says Jeff Richardson, director of communications at Lawrence Livermore. "If successful, that could be developed into an inexhaustible source of energy."

"Can't you see the benefits of harnessing the power of the sun on Earth?" Richardson asks.

Many activists can't.

"What the laboratory is really trying to do," says Kelley of Tri-Valley Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment, "is hang onto its old mission, which is nuclear-weapons development."

This notion has been hinted at from within the Department of Energy, which issued a task-force review of the National Ignition Facility in February 1995.

The report stated that if the facility were built at Livermore, it would "reinforce the weapons-design capability at that laboratory."

Ted Taylor, a former nuclear-weapons designer who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratoty during its heyday in the 1950s, opposes the facility.

"I think NIF will keep the weaponeers thinking about new and different ways to make bombs," he says.

Taylor had a change of heart in 1966 and has been actively campaigning for the dismantling of all nuclear weapons ever since.

"I'm a total abolitionist " says Taylor, who is now a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. "We had better deal with the bare truth. We made a terrible mistake in going after this cosmic energy, which is millions of times more powerful than anything humans have dealt with before. We have not established ourselves as a people capable of dealing constructively with these forces, "which so far have only been used destructively."

For more information, contact the Western States Legal Foundation at (510) 839-5877; or call Tri-valley Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment at (510) 443-7148.