Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 5. September 2011 / Timeline September 5, 2011
Version 3.54. September 2011, 6. September 2011
09/05/2011
Kvindefredslejren ved Greenham Common grundlægges, 1981.
09/05/2011
Kansas City Here It Comes: A New Nuclear Weapons Plant!
By Lawrence S.
Wittner
Should the U.S. government be building more nuclear
weapons? Residents of Kansas City, Missouri don’t appear to
think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the
construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.
The massive plant, 1.5 million square feet in size, is designed to
replace an earlier
version, also located in the city and run by the same
contractor:
Honeywell. The cost of building the new plant—which, like
its predecessor, will provide 85 percent of the components of
America’s nuclear weapons—is estimated to run $673
million.
From the standpoint of the developer, Centerpoint Zimmer (CPZ),
that’s a very sweet deal. In payment for the plant site, a
soybean field it owned, CPZ received $5 million. The federal
government will lease the property and plant from a city entity for
twenty years, after which, for $10, CPZ will purchase it, thus
establishing the world’s first privately-owned nuclear
weapons plant. In addition, as the journal Mother Jones has
revealed, “the Kansas City Council, enticed by direct
payments and a promise of ‘quality jobs,’ . . . agreed
to exempt CPZ from property taxes on the plant and surrounding land
for twenty-five years.” The Council also agreed to issue $815
million in bond subsidies from urban blight funds to build the
plant and its infrastructure. In this lucrative context, how could
a profit-driven corporation resist?
Kansas City residents, however, had greater misgivings. They
wondered why the U.S. government, already possessing 8,500 nuclear
weapons, needed more of them. They wondered what had happened to
the U.S. government’s commitment to engage in treaties for
nuclear disarmament. They wondered how the new weapons plant fit in
with the Barack
Obama's administration’s pledge to build a world free of
nuclear weapons. And they wondered why they should be subsidizing
the U.S. military-industrial complex with their tax dollars.
Taking the lead, the city’s peace and disarmament community
began protests and demonstrations against the proposed nuclear
weapons plant several years ago. Gradually, Kansas City PeaceWorks
(a branch of Peace Action) pulled together the local chapter of
Physicians for Social Responsibility, religious groups, and others
into a coalition of a dozen organizations, Kansas City Peace
Planters. The coalition’s major project was a petition
campaign to place a proposition on the November 8, 2011 election
ballot that would reject building a plant for weapons and utilize
the facility instead for “green energy”
technologies.
The significance of the Kansas City nuclear weapons buildup was
also highlighted by outside forces. In June 2011, against the
backdrop of the Obama administration’s plan to spend $185
billion for modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over
the next ten years, the U.S. Council of Mayors voted unanimously
for a resolution instructing the president to join leaders of the
other nuclear weapons states in implementing U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon’s five-point plan for the elimination of all
nuclear weapons by the year 2020. It also called on Congress to
terminate funding for modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons
complex and nuclear weapons systems. Addressing the gathering, the
U.N. leader declared that “the road to peace and progress
runs through the world’s cities and towns,” a statement
that drew a standing ovation.
Even more pointedly, Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the
Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations, appeared in
Kansas City in July 2011. According to the National Catholic
Reporter, Chullikat “came to this Midwestern diocese because
it is the site of a major new nuclear weapons manufacturing
facility, the first to be built in the country in thirty-three
years.” In his address, the prelate remarked: “Viewed
from a legal, political, security and most of
all—moral—perspective, there is no justification today
for the continued maintenance of nuclear weapons.” This was
the moment, he declared, to address “the legal, political and
technical requisites for a nuclear-weapons-free world.”
Highlighting Chullikatt’s speech, the National Catholic
Reporter declared, cuttingly: “The U.S. trudges unheedingly
down the nuclear path. Now more than ever we need to attend to the
messages of the often marginalized peacemakers in our
midst.”
Actually, peace activists in Kansas City looked less and less
marginalized. Nearly 5,000 Kansas City residents signed the
petition to place the proposition rejecting the nuclear weapons
plant on the ballot, giving it considerably more signatures than
necessary to appear before the voters.
Naturally, this popular uprising came as a blow to the Kansas City
Council, which put forward a measure that would block the
disarmament initiative from appearing on the ballot.
At an August 17 hearing on the Council measure, local residents
were irate. “You cannot divorce yourselves from the hideously
immoral purpose of these weapons,” one declared, comparing
the city’s subsidy for the weapons plant to financing Nazi
gas chambers “for the sake of ‘jobs.’”
Referring to the Council’s charter, which provided for the
appearance of propositions on the ballot when they secured the
requisite number of signatures, the chair of PeaceWorks asked:
“Are we a government of laws or of . . . corporations and
special interests?”
Since then, the situation has evolved rapidly. On August 25, the
City Council voted 12 to 1 to bar the proposition from the ballot.
The next day, the petitioners went to court to block Council
interference. Honeywell, CPZ, and their friends dispatched a large
legal team to Kansas City to fight against the citizens’
initiative, securing a court decision that might delay redress for
years. In response, Peace Planters seems likely to speed up the
process by crafting a new petition—one that would cut off
city funding for the plant.
Whatever the outcome, the very fact that such a struggle has
emerged indicates that many Americans are appalled by plans to
throw their local and national resources into building more nuclear
weapons.
Author: Lawrence S. Wittner Bio: Dr. Wittner is Professor of
History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book
is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear
Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).
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