MIM Notes No. 200      December 15, 1999

Imperialist militarism fortified by Amerikan universities

While Amerikan universities prepare their students ideologically 
to take their place atop the global food chain, the University of 
California (UC) has taken its role in the machinery of U$ 
imperialism even further. Since 1943, the UC has managed the 
nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and since, 
1952 it has managed the nuclear facility at Livermore, California. 
In doing so, the UC has overseen the laboratories responsible for 
the creation of every nuclear weapon in the U$ arsenal.

The relationship between the labs and the UC goes back to WWII, 
when the Manhattan Engineering District of the War Department 
selected the UC to oversee the Manhattan project under the 
direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Between 1943 and 
1945, the lab at Los Alamos conducted the tests and developed the 
weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 
1945.

After the war, the labs were operated by the Atomic Energy 
Commission (read: "Atomic Weapons Commission"), the forerunner of 
the Department of Energy, which controls the labs today. The whole 
time, though, the University of California has managed the labs.

Originally, the UC agreed to manage Los Alamos only temporarily, 
as part of its contribution to Amerika's war effort during WWII. 
After the war, the government requested that the UC continue to 
manage the lab until the Atomic Energy Commission was up and 
running. By early 1960's though, UC management had become 
relatively permanent. Every five years the UC Regents renew the 
management contract, despite a long history of student and faculty 
opposition. The current contract will expire in 2002.

UC management only serves as a cover for classified weapons 
research totally controlled and directed by the U$ military. 
According to UC Nuclear Weapons Lab Conversion Project (UCNWLCP), 
"in reality, the labs are controlled by the military, not 
civilians, and there is substantial evidence of the very active 
role lab officials have played in shaping US nuclear policy, such 
as their aggressive lobbying for the neutron bomb."

The UCNWLCP continues, "By playing silent partner in this 
arrangement, by lending a mantle of legitimacy to the nuclear arms 
race, and the secrecy surrounding it, the University has committed 
a grave disservice to the people of this nation."

While MIM argues that the Amerikan nuclear arsenal is a direct 
threat to the survival of the entire humyn species -- Amerikans 
included -- MIM's critique of the UC in particular and the 
Amerikan nuclear weapons program in general goes deeper than that 
of the UCNWLP. The scope of the current anti-nuclear campaigns 
needs to be broadened and the critique deepened.

First, as revolutionary internationalists we cannot focus 
primarily on the potential dangers to the Amerikan population. We 
must always keep the central function of Amerikan nuclear weapons 
in mind: to keep Amerika at the top of the global imperialist 
pecking order. Nuclear weapons are just one component of the 
brutal arsenal to defend the spoils of imperialism.

The ruling elite of the nation is very clear on the real function 
of the nuclear weapons program. Bill Clinton, in a statement 
announcing the start of negotiations for contract renewal in 1996 
claimed that "Over the last five decades, the University of 
California made an enormous contribution to our success in winning 
the Cold War. We look forward to working with the U of C to 
promote both our economic and national security."

While the Amerkan educational system and media tell us that the 
Cold War was fought to make the world safe for democracy, its real 
legacy is the First World war against Third World liberation 
movements and Third World civilian populations, some which the U$ 
acknowledges long after the fact.

President Clinton, for example, recently apologized for U$-
supported genocide against the people of Guatemala, while the U$ 
continues to provide more and more military aid to the Colombian 
military, enacting the pattern all over again, under the guise of 
a "drug war."

Imperialist militarism continues to pursue the same primary 
objective that it did during the Cold War. That purpose is to 
maintain hegemony for the sake of the superprofit extraction from 
oppressed nations.

Whether its cheap clothing produced by Mexican wimmin, Nigerian 
oil and gas for Amerikan sport utility vehicles, sex tourism in 
the Philippines or currency speculation schemes in East Asia, 
there is no denying that the U$ and other First World nations feed 
directly off the blood of the oppressed. Without the brutally 
enforced poverty that most of the world's people toil under, the 
wasteful, extravagant, Amerikan lifestyle would not be possible. 
While the conflicts between the superpowers that have 
traditionally dominated debates over nuclear weapons are real, 
they should not be confused for the underlying dynamic that drives 
them: imperialism.

The relationship between nuclear weapons and imperialism is 
expressed in the current "non-proliferation" concerns of the U$ 
government. The U$ has no problem with First World 
capitalist/imperialist nations developing weapons of mass 
destruction, even aiding in the arming of the Israeli settler 
state, for example, but continues to work against development of 
these same weapons by nationalist regimes in India, Iraq, North 
Korea and other states.

We don't suggest that these regimes are revolutionary. But the 
fact that it is acceptable for violent, militaristic, imperialist 
appendage states like Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not for 
a violent, militaristic nationalist state like Iraq, only supports 
the argument that the whole purpose maintaining a monopoly on 
nuclear weapons is to impose a particular political and economic 
regime on the rest of the world through force and terror.

Second, we do not stay within the liberal framework that 
universities should not dirty their hands by getting involved with 
weapons research. Universities are no less dirty when they fill 
classrooms with imperialistic propaganda. The existence of any 
type of opposition within the university to imperialism, whether 
by faculty or students, by its very rarity, is proof that 
ideological indoctrination into parasitic, consumer driven 
Amerikan individualism is the rule on U$ campuses. That a major U$ 
university system is intimately involved in all of this should not 
come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of U$ 
imperialism.

But just as the university apparatus can be co-opted, so can it be 
the breeding ground for revolutionary resistance, and so it has 
been. The UC especially has shown this to be true, as its campuses 
were sites of prolonged resistance in the 1960s and 1970s to the 
imperialist war in South East Asia and oppression in the U$. The 
resistance to the UC-nuclear lab relationship is a part of this 
history, but it is vital that any opposition to university 
involvement with nuclear weapons is grounded in the reality that 
nuclear weapons are only one component in the political and 
economic system of imperialism.

This is why only a political line that recognizes the relationship 
between the nuclear labs, the U$ military, U$ educational system 
and other institutions of imperialism can effectively oppose it as 
a system. Singling out one issue is ultimately inefficient and 
even counterproductive. Singling out the "dirty" relationship 
between the UC and the nuclear labs only strengthens the 
legitimacy of the bourgeois university system as a whole, with its 
assumption that if the relationship was terminated or transformed 
the integrity of the university would be restored.

Friends and enemies

Once we identify imperialism as the main problem, we have to ask: 
Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? The staunchest and 
currently most advanced force in the anti-imperialist and 
communist movement is the international proletariat -- which 
resides almost exclusively outside of Amerikan borders. The 
majority of white Amerikans, however, have a share in the 
imperialists superprofits and form a new petit-bourgeoisie called 
the labor aristocracy. Commenting on this segment of the working 
class in Britain, at the birth of imperialism, Engels wrote, "the 
workers share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market 
and the colonies."

Even though Amerikan militarism could damn the entire humyn 
species to oblivion if it expands unchecked, many Amerikans do 
continue to support it because their petit-bourgeois standard of 
living depends on it. The military sector has, since the end of 
WWII, been a steady source of high paying, relatively stable jobs 
for the largely white, Amerikan working class. Militarism stands 
at the core of Amerikan industry and Amerikan prosperity. Even 
with the supposed end of the Cold War, "defense" jobs, including 
military jobs, still provide income and benefits to millions of 
workers. Furthermore, the Amerikan workforce has traditionally 
embraced these jobs, often fighting to protect them, thus 
demonstrating their support for militarism, chauvinistic 
nationalism, and imperialism.

The nuclear labs are a perfect example. Los Alamos and Livermore 
employ, between them, almost 20,000 people. Although not all of 
them work in weapons research and development, all need to be held 
accountable for being employed by and involved with the labs 
responsible for creating and maintaining the U$ nuclear arsenal. 
When a high level committee appointed by the Secretary of Energy 
under Clinton recommended closing down nuclear weapons research at 
Livermore in 1996, Clinton refused, bowing to Pentagon pressure, 
and referring to the 3,000 jobs that would be lost in the move: a 
clear example of labor aristocracy parasitism.

Once these relationships are recognized, it becomes clear that 
until revolutionaries seize state power from the capitalist-
imperialist elites who now control it in all its aspects, no real, 
lasting change will be realized, and we will be stuck with the 
endless ebb and flow of reform and counter-reform. MIM believes 
that until we seize and wield state power in the interest of the 
international proletariat, the universities will only serve the 
interests of the imperialists who created and control them.