On Wednesday, March 19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, I visited three sites that had been subject to the use of nuclear weapons. On the news, you may not have heard about the use of these weapons – there has been a stunning indifference towards covering this story for more than 65 years. And, walking around the bay, you wouldn’t have been able to identify any of the after-effects typically associated with the use of a nuclear bomb – no mushroom cloud, no shockwave, no blast crater, fallout, or hordes of innocent victims dying of radiation sickness. For the most part it was a typical March day in San Francisco – the weather predictably schizophrenic, the morning rush hour traffic innavigable as usual. The bombs in this case were not used in the same way they were used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they were used nonetheless.

Early that morning, I attended a demonstration at a University of California Regents’ meeting where chief amongst the demands of the nearly 100 students present were an end to the UC’s management of the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and an overhaul of the undemocratic Board of Regents that keeps the university in that managerial position. The students’ tactic was simple: inside the meeting, they have no power, are unable to speak, and the Regents are able to make violent and destructive decisions enabling and legitimizing nuclear weapons development and production with absolutely no accountability to the rest of the world. So the students would act outside the meeting, risking their necks for justice – quite literally. The students felt that preventing their university from continuing to manage nuclear armageddon was so urgent that they locked bicycle locks around their necks and to the doors of the building, to prevent the meeting from happening at all. If the Regents still wanted to meet and make decisions regarding the university, they would have to do so outside, cooperating with the students rather than silencing them. And though the students were removed from the doors eventually and the meeting was able to take place more or less as planned, their action was successful in sowing dissent even within the ideologically stark ranks of the Board of Regents. While the students’ protest continued outside the meeting, ex-officio Regent Lt. Governor John Garamendi and faculty representative to the regents Michael Brown asked a series of targeted and critical questions about UC lab management to Norman Pattiz, UC Regent, founder of Westwood One media, and chairman of both operating corporations through which UC co-manages the nuclear weapons labs along with Bechtel and other war profiteering corporations. Pattiz, for all his official positions, proved less informed on the issues than the students on that day, and stumbled in his attempts to answer these questions.

The students are also knowledgeable enough to know that nuclear weapons have been used against them, by occupying their education. The struggle against UC nuclear weapons lab management is nearly as old as the struggle against nuclear weapons themselves – Los Alamos opened to UC management during the Manhattan project, and immediately after World War Two there was a push from within the university to end this curatorship. The Department of Energy disagreed, opting to keep the lab under management from the prestigious UC in large part to lend Los Alamos the appearance of academic legitimacy. In other words, every breakthrough, discovery, patent and paper written and developed by UC faculty and students would help cast nuclear weapons development in a more positive light. Furthermore, the labs have long looked to UC campuses as the recruiting grounds to enlist their bomb-makers of the future. Present UC-lab joint institutes at four UC campuses take this strategy to its extreme, with the labs paying millions of dollars to effectively buy large sections of select UC science and engineering programs to be used to target select students for lab internship and employment opportunities. Classes in these joint institutes also feature direct internet links from the UC classroom to the labs, repurposing entire university classes for on-the-job training at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

After the Regents’ meeting, I walked with a few students to the protests commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War downtown – another reaction to the use of nuclear weapons. Even though, thankfully, the people of Baghdad have not had to suffer the same horror as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did over 60 years ago, nuclear weapons have indelibly left their mark on their neighborhoods, psyches, and bodies. Nuclear weapons have been called the “cornerstone” of US defense policy in every posture review since World War II, have emboldened and enabled an increasingly aggressive and militaristic US foreign policy, and serve as the unspoken ultimatum in every US military conflict. The protests against the war in downtown San Francisco, under the heading “Direct Action to Stop the War”, recognized the interconnected nature of a society at war with the everyday actions that make such wars possible, targeting demonstrations at the offices of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, military recruitment offices, and a tour of war profiteering corporations with offices in the city, including Chevron, URS (whose former vice president, Richard Blum, also serves as the chair of the UC Board of Regents and is married to Sen. Feinstein), and Bechtel, co-manager of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs and manager four other major nuclear weapons sites. The Bechtel office, where protesters used numerous tactics to disrupt “business as usual,” was the second point I visited in what I dubbed the day’s “nuclear triangle.”

The third point was in Livermore, California, about an hour east of San Francisco, home to one of the nation’s two nuclear weapons research and design laboratories. That evening, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) held a public comment session on Complex Transformation, their version of the future of the US nuclear weapons complex. Dozens of Livermore residents attended to speak out about the danger the lab poses to their community. This includes environmental damage – the lab’s lengthy history of radiation releases and safety violations has turned Livermore into a federal “Superfund” site as one of the most contaminated areas in the country – but also the damage and destruction nuclear weapons threaten to the entire world. A Hibakusha – a survivor of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima – was also present at the comment period. As a living legacy of the destruction these weapons cause, he spoke at length against nuclear weapons and was warmly received by the sympathetic Livermore community, and even commanded words of respect from the staid and unenthusiastic NNSA representative present, Ted Wyka.

For my part, at the public comment period, I was emboldened by what I had seen that day in San Francisco, both at the Regents’ meeting and downtown. I brought the realization I’d garnered from watching the incredible commitment of UC students and huge numbers of concerned citizens, mostly youth, from the San Francisco Bay Area involved with Direct Action to Stop the War: Complex Transformation, or any other name the NNSA would like to put on the policies that will try to perpetuate the threat of nuclear weapons into the indefinite future, has no meaning to the young people of my generation, who know that nuclear weapons are destructive to the environment and dangerous to continued life on Earth. I said at the public comment that with my generation as knowledgeable, as passionate, and as fearless as they had displayed themselves to be on March 19, 2008, nuclear abolition not only must happen – it will happen. And when it does, even if the official story reads that their abolition took place in Washington, DC, or in an international summit, we’ll know otherwise. We’ll know that the true work that accomplished nuclear abolition took place within these oppressed and affected communities, took place on these points on the nuclear triangle, and other points like them around the world.

Photos courtesy of Matthew Taylor, Tristan Bunner, and Felix Barrett at http://indybay.org/