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Since 1982, it’s possible that I have written more words about nuclear dangers, past and present, than anyone, in several hundred articles, two books and (in recent years) dozens of blog posts. I was also the editor of Nuclear Times magazine for four years. So I’ve observed, and charted, the rise and fall of American concern about nuclear weapons and their use for over three decades—or more, as I’ve been interested in this subject going back to ducking-and-covering back in my 1950s school days.

Unfortunately, after the heyday of the antinuclear movement of the early 1980s, public protest and political agitation for drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals, or even abolition, have faded. This has happened even though Ronald Reagan, of all people, called for abolition nearly thirty years ago, and now President Obama has done the same.

Yes, the United States and Russia have reduced their arsenals—largely by getting rid of outmoded weaponry and delivery systems—but as I noted last week (and this may surprise you), we still have 7700 nuclear warheads and maintaining that posture costs us $60 billion a year.

Also: we still have a “first-use” policy. That is, we retain the “right” to use our weapons first in a conflict, not just in retaliation.

That’s the key reason that so much of my writing has explored the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, and the “cover-up” in the US afterward (see my book Atomic Cover-up). Although our presidents, top officials, policymakers and pundits all proclaim “never again,” they inevitably turn around and defend the two times these weapons have already been used against people (killing more than 200,000, mainly women and children). In other words: they attest to the usefulness of the weapons in certain extreme cases. That means they have drawn a “red line”—in the sand, where it can easily disappear.

Anyway: Some help may be on the way in turning the tide of inaction and knee-jerk, often uninformed, opinion.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and other books, is out today with his much-awaited Command and Control, filled with scary stories about nuclear accidents and near-accidents in the US, with special focus on a 1980 missile silo crisis. As it happens, two years before that, in 1978, I assigned for Crawdaddy a piece by novelist Tim O’Brien on the threat of just such an accident.

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Hopefully, getting scared about a nuke accident here at home might do what the Cold War “doomsday” scenarios, the mega-popular TV movie The Day After and the threat posed by modern-day terrorists with “suitcase bombs” have not—get Americans talking again about getting rid of these weapons, or at least reducing down to near-zero.

I’ll return this week with more on Schlosser and his book (you can read its first chapter now here), but I see, in an interview with Rolling Stone today, that he agrees with me about steep reductions, now. As he says:

I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, but the first step would be for the major nuclear powers to meet and begin greatly reducing the sizes of their arsenals. The fewer weapons there are, the less likely there is to be a catastrophic accident. I mean, that’s just the law of probability. Realistically, you have an alternative: You can abolish nuclear weapons or you can accept that one day they’re going to be used. It’s just almost unimaginable what that would mean.

Greg Mitchell observes the anniversary of the “Atomic Plague” cover-up.

Harvard University (Flickr/Kelly Delay)

The following is the text of my keynote speech at the first Divest Harvard alumni demonstration, outside Massachusetts Hall in Harvard Yard, on Monday, September 16, 2013. As of this writing, more than 500 Harvard graduates have signed the Alumni Resolution calling on the university to divest from fossil fuels.

Let me ask you something: Why are we here? Why are we standing here, in this place, right now? Why are you here?

I’ll tell you why I’m here. I’m here because I’m afraid. I’m the father of two young children, and I’m scared. And I’m here because I’m angry. That’s right. I’m angry. But most of all, I’m here because I’m determined. I’m determined to fight alongside these students for a just and stable future on this planet.

In the fall and spring of 1986 and ’87, as a freshman at this college, I lived on the top floor of Massachusetts Hall. My dorm room—right up there, in the top northeast corner, two floors above the President’s offices—faced out over the Yard, and I have vivid memories of large protests demanding that this university divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. Suffice it to say, it got loud out here. Very, very loud.

And if any of you, here today, were out here then—thank you. I confess, I was too self-absorbed as a freshman to join you. I knew you were right, but I lacked the courage of my convictions. The kind of courage that these students here today have shown in this campaign to divest from fossil fuels. The courage to stand and speak truth to power.

Now, in the past year, since this campaign was launched, we’ve heard from a few critics—and, frankly, from a few cynics. And that’s just fine. We’re getting their attention.

And one of the things we’re told is that fossil-fuel divestment will be ineffective as a strategy to address climate change—that the economics of it won’t alter the behavior of these companies, the wealthiest on Earth. But this misreads—or fails to read—our clearly stated reasons for divestment. The leverage we aim to bring is not simply economic. It’s moral.

And on that score, we’re also told that we have the wrong target—that the fossil fuel industry isn’t the enemy, that we ourselves, as consumers—who, yes, in spite of our best efforts, still depend on fossil fuels—we are the enemy. As though the fossil fuel companies are somehow blameless—despite everything we know to the contrary. And as though the working, poor, and struggling families of this country and every other country are somehow responsible for solving the climate crisis, which they did nothing to create, by themselves—even as they’re forced to rely on fossil fuels, through no fault of their own, simply to put food on the table. This is a basic issue of justice. The wealthiest corporations on Earth have the power to help solve the crisis they have done so much to create, and from which they have profited—and continue to profit—so richly. And they must use it. Not stand in the way of solutions. Not, for God’s sake, deceive the public, deny science, and obstruct solutions.

So we’re told these things, but at the end of the day, what we’re mainly told is that divestment is…well, you see, children, it’s complicated. It’s difficult—for various technical reasons.

No, in fact, it’s really not. It’s not. I mean, come on, this is Harvard—I think we can figure it out!

In fact, what this really means is that Harvard just can’t be bothered. “Climate change, yes, it’s very serious,” we’re told. “Indeed, Harvard’s faculty is contributing much to our understanding of climate change and its solutions. But you see, children, it doesn’t rise to such a level that we would take any such radical or extreme course of action as divestment.”

Only in the rarest of circumstances, we’re told—indeed, only in “extraordinarily rare circumstances,” in the words of the administration—will the university go so far as to divest.

This is what all of us have heard. As though to say, Harvard is a busy place. It has a lot of important things on its plate. All you climate change people will simply have to understand.

Well, climate change people, do we understand? I think we understand all too well.

So let’s consider this language, this boilerplate, emanating from Massachusetts Hall. Only in “extraordinarily rare circumstances” will the university divest.

Presumably such circumstances would include—oh, I don’t know—humans melting the Arctic.

Presumably such circumstances would include humans rapidly acidifying the oceans—and raising them.

Presumably such circumstances would include burning the planet’s great forests. Drying up its great rivers. Flooding its great cities.

Presumably such “extraordinarily rare circumstances” would also include the fact, famously reported by Bill McKibben, class of 1982, that the fossil fuel industry controls in its reserves more than five times the amount of carbon that climate science tells us can be burned, over the next four decades, if we’re to have a chance of preserving a livable climate this century—and the fact that the industry shows every intention of extracting and burning every ounce of it, unless and until somebody stops them, or makes it unprofitable for them to do so.

In other words, it is perhaps among the rarest and most extraordinary of circumstances that the power of a single industry holds the fate of the planet and of humanity in its grip.

Presumably these circumstances are rare and extraordinary.

Here’s what else they are: Given what we’ve known about climate change for decades, to willfully obstruct any serious solution is to knowingly, willfully allow entire countries and cultures to disappear. It is to rob people of their land, their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives and their children’s lives—and their children’s children’s lives. For profit.

There’s a word for this. These are called crimes. They are crimes against the Earth, and they are crimes against humanity. They are crimes against humanity.

So, yes, divestment may be bothersome. It may be—inconvenient. Well, I hate to tell you, but nobody ever said that taking on this crisis would be convenient. Or that business as usual—or academics as usual—would be enough. Nobody ever said it would be easy.

Ask the folks on the front lines of global warming how easy it is:

Ask them on the bone-dry farms out west.

Ask them on the beach fronts of Jersey and of Queens.

Or on the floodplains of Asia.

Or on the drought-stricken plains of Africa.

Or on the heat-stricken streets of Chicago—or of Roxbury and Dorchester. Or Cambridge.

Or ask the people of the disappearing nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans, entire societies going under the waves.

There is nothing easy about the climate fight. Nothing.

And all we ask—all we demand—is that this university stop investing in all this destruction, all this death.

We’re here today, graduates of this proud university, to demand that Harvard divest from fossil fuels, not because it’s easy—though it is. And not because it’s profitable—though it will be. But because it’s right. And because it’s necessary.

“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary.”

Henry David Thoreau wrote that, in an essay called “Civil Disobedience.” He was a graduate of this College, class of 1837. And in that great abolitionist essay he also wrote this:

“If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself…. This people must cease to hold slaves…though it cost them their existence as a people.”

This university must cease to invest in crimes against humanity—even if the cost were to be its existence as a university.

Fortunately, as we all know—as they all know in that building behind me—the cost will be nothing of the sort. Not even close. In fact, quite the opposite. Divestment may be inconvenient, but it will do no damage to this great institution. It will only make Harvard stronger.

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It will reassure the world of Harvard’s leadership.

It will ensure the faith of its alumni in its integrity.

And it will demonstrate to its students and to future generations that it understands the meaning of “action from principle,” of moral courage—of conscience.

And in doing so, it will change things and relations. In taking this principled action, Harvard will live up to its history and its calling. It will be, and rightly so—rightly so—revolutionary.

One whistleblower with the courage to fight climate change.

Police block off the M Street, SE, as they respond to a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, September 16, 2013. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts)

At least thirteen people were killed at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, including a suspected gunman, in the latest iteration of a now-familiar US news event: a mass shooting that claims victims apparently at random.

As the streets of DC came to life Monday morning, reports emerged around 8:20 am that shots were fired at the naval facility on the city’s southeast waterfront, less than two miles from the US Capitol. It quickly became clear that multiple people had been shot during a rampage, and at a 2 pm news conference on the perimeter of the crime scene, police confirmed that twelve people lay dead inside. The number was later updated to thirteen.

During a press briefing at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center not long after the shootings, a spokeswoman speculated that “it had to be a semi-automatic [weapon],” based on witness descriptions of gunshots heard in “rapid succession.” Authorities later confirmed that indeed the suspected gunman had an assault rifle as well as a pistol.

Police identified the deceased suspected shooter as Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old man from Fort Worth, Texas, who reportedly worked at some point as a contractor for the Navy.

In the context of increasingly frequent mass shootings and a highly visible congressional debate on gun control, any further mass gun violence is sure to become a political issue—all the more so when it happens in Washington itself.

Had the scene outside the Navy Yard been in a movie about a fictional gun control debate, it probably would have been rejected as too didactic.

The Capitol dome was part of the nearby skyline as reporters, television cameras, scattered passerby and law enforcement officers converged on M Street Southeast at the western edge of the perimeter set up by police. To the east, all one could see was a small army of emergency responders in the street; the sidewalk-to-sidewalk flashing lights made individual vehicles almost indistinguishable. A US Park Police helicopter flew in tight circles extremely low overhead.

In isolation it was not that unusual of a sight in DC: it looked like perhaps one of the many motorcades that criss-cross the city from time to time. But people on the street were unusually quiet and unsettled, because of course there was no dark limousine nor group of dignitaries in the middle of the chaos but rather the scene of a grisly multiple murder.

Many of the reporters at the scene wore congressional press credentials and might have otherwise been covering a comparatively dry budget debate, but instead scoured around for witnesses to the shooting. Blocks away, Senate office buildings were placed on a two-hour lockdown, with staffers unable to exit or enter, and intimidating military-style vehicles surrounded the Capitol complex.

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In that fictional movie, this is where a dysfunctional Congress finally springs into action and helps solve the problem. The very same staffers who worked behind the scenes to scuttle this year’s big gun control legislation, now trapped in their offices because a mass shooter might be on the loose, suddenly see the light and pull the Manchin-Toomey legislation out of their desk drawers.

But will that happen here? While it’s clearly very early on, and the gun control debate has taken some surprising turns in the past year, this scenario seems unlikely. Senator Manchin already told reporters Monday afternoon he still didn’t have the votes to get his gun control legislation passed; no previously opposed members suddenly announced a new position. Only hours before the shootings, members of Congress and gun control advocates were bemoaning a recent loss of momentum in Congress thanks to recall elections in Colorado that cost two longtime legislators their jobs because they supported tighter gun rules earlier this year.

Continued inaction seems likely because the gun control debate has never suffered for an absence of bloodshed. Manchin-Toomey didn’t fail because the slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School weren’t quite tragic enough. More indiscriminate killings—even right in the backyard of Congress—probably won’t change the fundamental calculus made by Senators to sidestep the wrath of the National Rifle Association (on display in Colorado just last week) and extremely pro-gun conservative voters, who value “gun rights” to the exclusion of almost any other issue.

That said, the gun control package was only a couple of votes short in the Senate this year. Maybe more shootings will finally convince someone to change his or her vote. But more likely, until the fundamentals of the debate change, this mass bloodshed will only serve as gruesome illustrations of a problem nobody in Washington can seem to solve—nor even meangingfully address.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel went on Democracy Now! today to speak about how the United States should “test Russia’s resolve” to disarm Syrian chemical weapons. She said that while she was not an “optimist” with regard to US-Russian relations, collaboration was key to help sort out different conflicts in the Middle East. For example, she explained, “you have to engage Russia in resolving Iran.” vanden Heuvel added that such collaboration would lead to a “new internationalism that is not defined by military strikes, by drones, certainly not by land wars anymore.” She continued: “And to seize that non-imperial, democratic narrative of a new national foreign policy seems key.”

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—Nicolas Niarchos

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