thank you. may. still you. know you loaded to the. right there you know you got a bite you know where they're going to see if you shoot regions to ruin the management of the weapons to know this morning and this morning universally is basically doing science. so chancellor yang promised us on monday that you would personally deliver our demands to the u.c. board of regents i just want to read our demands to everyone here briefly so that you all know it's being forwarded on. as we call on the university of california for the regions to withdraw fully and immediately from their contracts to manage the los alamos national laboratory and lawrence livermore national laboratory on the grounds that the reliable replacement for a program most of the most is ongoing preparations to come to our plutonium pit

manufacturing fault clearly violate article six of the nineteen seventeen nuclear nonproliferation treaty. it's almost inconceivable to illinois to believe those who work the worst is over. the. moon university. the university of california from the inception of nuclear weapons has been right there involved. you see since day one has been in charge of researching designing and testing nuclear weapons and to some extent producing weapons every single nuclear weapon in today's arsenal was designed by university of california and every nuclear weapon. from the days

of the manhattan project in one thousand forty two the university of california has been involved through the science its provision of scientists and their relationship to the university. in the late one nine hundred forty two disease site twitch is now will sell most lab was selected by the army for. a place to assemble the first time the book through the scientific problems associated with. the university of california who was selected as the contractor to run the stuff and that was considered important because the army needed scientists to leave their university positions and come to a place i say didn't even know about. u.c. berkeley had built up an unparalleled scientific organization within the united

states at the u.c. radiation laboratory which ernest old warrants was the director of there was the most cutting edge research in the country the types of science that eventually led to the development of nuclear bombs and clued in theoretical forms of physics that she robert oppenheimer was one of the premier scientists in the country in regard to you had oppenheimer who was kind of chosen as the scientific leader to put together the scientific team robert oppenheimer was their pick because he was not only a really sophisticated and leading scientists involved with nuclear physics but he was also in an administrative position at u.c. berkeley so he worked closely with leslie groves he was the leader of the army corps of engineers at the time. that had been a university involved grows well. scientists wouldn't want to leave the university

and go work for a private defense contractor in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere. and they liked. most sites in part because there were solved buildings already and they figured they could get started in those buildings. so he had his university. moving toward then both the first bombs and the first you. one thousand nine hundred forty five of course the united states used those first atomic bombs the first one on our staff meeting here sima and i guess six thousand nine hundred forty five. and one hundred forty thousand people more or less were incinerated or dead by the end of one nine hundred forty five tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of others injured and people today still suffering from

radiation related illnesses and unknown effects to subsequent generations and the second bomb was dropped by the united states and that sackey on august ninth one thousand nine hundred forty five with similar catastrophic results. world war two came to an end rather abruptly and instead instead of ending the manhattan project the united states government decided to make it permanent by creating an institution called the los alamos national laboratory in new mexico at the original home of the manhattan project. but this whole relationship i mentioned earlier should have never existed and the universe is in tension in after world war two about nine hundred forty seven was the terminated. robert sprawl president of university california said i've had enough of new mexico plutonium and bombs.

he was what they were worried about liability they were worried about the oral implications but that changed up quickly after the cold war began. you see was then primarily researching designing the weapons and after you know like the first decade of running the lab there really wasn't any question from them then on and those upper circles that you see about whether you can see should run this or not i mean you talk about a guaranteed stream of revenue so it was a no brainer for the regions to. grab his contracts and. then of course they were joined by a livermore whose purpose was to develop the h. bomb. which was a thousand times more powerful than the a bomb that destroyed the second when it comes to the lawrence livermore national laboratory that was basically a pet project of ernest lawrence and it was also a pet project of a guy named edward teller they lobbied the government to create the lawrence

livermore laboratory of the government did create the lawrence livermore national laboratory and so the u.c. naturally became the manager of that facility to. what was clear at that time and it's still there i think is that there are two major reasons why the a couple of major reasons why the universe. did want to keep them on the one hand they got a certain amount of money directly from allegedly managing the labs in fact they did very little oversight but for lending their name to the nuclear project which is basically why the government wanted. to give a white coated scientific. or a to what is actually a process like that of the final solution of all the polls. in order to lend their name as a grant. to this process they go. some money if you probably know

this because seven trillion dollars of us since we're in a certain truth. it's a lot of money and you get the kind of money floating around there's a lot of people at the trough that are intent on keeping good position they're out to create big powerful universities as university administrators their goal is growth it's just a corporation grow get bigger get more powerful bring in more revenue bring in more students believe that the region see this as a success most of them as a successful business feel that is helping american national security and that is you know just part of the national and patriotic project that right thinking people would naturally support. you see it is run by the board of regents these twenty six individuals determine

all of the major policies the structure of the institution as a whole that's grounds and buildings finance and missions policies. and of course the nuclear weapons laboratories. eighteen of them are appointed by the governor and then seven of bama are ex-officio members of the state bureaucracy that are inside as peripheral members of the board of regents the governor selects the regents and he tends to select guys or every once in while women too but mostly guys who are big campaign contributors or who are allies politically influential allies of of the governor ever since tuesday was founded one hundred forty years ago the regions have been appointed by the governor primarily on the basis of political patronage corporate elites who have given tens

if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to the governor in his political campaigns usually get rewarded with a seat on the border regions. and essentially at that appointment of range and then sort of as. a reward if you well for a service to the governor service of the state. you see regents are basically the economic leaders of stick up for any of these guys who are the directors most often of the major industries that are prominent california in any given time. regions are in most cases we wealthy business elites who are in some cases c.e.o.'s of major war profiteering multinational corporations.

you see a lot of regents who are in charge of big media companies military industrial for arms real estate firms is really like a circle at the top they come in dominates the. goings on the circles generally composed of the. chair of the regions in the past chair the president and a few of the executive officers. the current chair of the board of regents is richard bloom. richard is someone who i see as a very conflicted individual on one hand he has a free tibet bumper sticker on the back of his b.m.w. he has said on several occasions that he is a passionate advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons on the other hand he was deeply invested in the your ass corporation and perini corporation both of whom received construction contracts to rebuild iraq after u.s.

imperial forces leveled that country on the other hand richard blohm is the chairman of the board of regents who is managing the national nuclear weapons labs a lot of business connections get maine for example arnold schwarzenegger's personal financier paul wachter who is second only to his wife in terms of people who have influence and sway over governor shorts and. paul walk there is a you see region it's that sort of connection that gets people appointed you see region. the large body of people of the university are reaching out to the reader to asking them and trying to get them to understand some of the problems of the university fundamentally and the at the regions they and they don't listen i sense that it's have our rank and file people on the ground at the university they don't represent the students the faculty the staff they don't actually represent their constituencies and the question is can the regents have the courage in the insight

to recognise that the best thing if they truly care about abolition of nuclear weapons is to end their management of the weapons right now they have i think there's a little bit of denial there they don't see that and the question is can we persuade them of that long term change in universities cannot be affected by people who assume that it is a democratic institution it has to be worked through back channel bureaucratic methods which is how it normally operates or through public pressure. thanks guys he was who these were i feel i truly want to see me in primary in general and community. on the basis of how my feet

thank you. thank you i was. surprised that you see. campaigns like you see nuclear free came together. and the early part of the two thousand and especially leading up to the iraq war when we started the campaign we believe that if students found out about this if they knew more about it if they understood that their university was involved with making nuclear weapons the most dangerous and destructive weapons ever created by humans that the students would want to respond to that that they would want to react to that and protest it i decided to get involved in the you see nuclear free campaign because i feel very passionately that universities should educate and work

for peace and justice sustainability in the commonwealth and managing nuclear weapon labs the exact opposite. i try not to get involved in anything that i don't think i can have an impact and i feel it because i mean you see student because i'm you know essentially a part of this machine. that i have the power to stand up and say every part of this machine i'm not ok with the way that she is running. i am movement need someone to sort of work against and the incredible unfairness of the u.c. regents as the perfect target for a broad based student led social movement. in the name it sounds like our ultimate goal is just to make d.c.

nuclear free but everyone has been involved with the you see nuclear. as a nuclear movement within the u.c. . i've yet to meet one person who thinks that's the actual goal. we all tend to agree that the actual goal is the abolition of nuclear weapons the university of california severing ties with the nuclear weapons labs i think would have a very a very important impact on the united states and beyond the united states social change movement in the united states and around the world in least in modern times have almost always been led by young people. so young people. students have a significant role to play basically students have been the backbone of some of the most powerful movements in american history the civil rights movement the free

speech movement these are forces of history that we learn about now and i think that students have just as much power as they did. and it turns out that our when we choose to. do something that is as important as this we need to stop using the nuclear weapon. as a possible war strategy and we're going to start by divesting this educational institution that's supposed to further a supposed to further this country for the state it's supposed to further every single one of us we divest that institution from nuclear weapons we need to completely make the split the students could be the spearhead of the campaign for u.s. leadership for a nuclear weapons free world we're not going to get to a nuclear weapons free world without u.s. leadership and we're not going to get u.s. leadership and. begin to demand such leadership

and wouldn't it be wonderful if the students at the university of california awakened and helped lead that movement for u.s. leadership for a nuclear weapons free war. if you look at just how much the movement has grown in my four in the four years that i went to school and it's really amazing what the back because my freshman year is really started out and there were like five of us on campus to me what was going on with the university and it seemed almost like it's like you know i was like. i had this amazing secret and we just look at each other and go. you know and i know what's going on and i mean out.

during the seventy's and eighty's and ninety's there were questions about whether the university should. manage the nuclear weapons lab records as the center report which was about an eight hundred seventy seven which was a faculty reporter and they can somebody said. the same thing about the whole range

when it was the university of california it was mongering the language of it is simply point when you're in the laboratory. i think there's one famous one where this said to describe the university oversight of the laboratory is being sold permissive as to being licentious the university of california was sort of an absentee landlord and it was. you know it was the source of a great deal of profit. working closely in the weapons program for quite a while you do become aware that. you know nuclear weapons the materials they are used to make them i mean by nature kind of far hazardous and you have to be. careful with that. number of bizarre terrible accidents up their arch every six weeks or so there'd be something happening that

they had of had a bad effect on health effect on somebody. on at least one person. and an essay as well solid most is not operating to nuclear industry safety standards they actually found that at livermore lab they were storing plutonium in paint cans food cans the thing about plutonium is it has to be stored in an airtight container. i worked and the plutonium facility in p a four in the glove boxes there were a number of incidents in the glove boxes there were accidents actually they weren't incidents they were accidents they resulted in people being exposed to plutonium in various forms. there were some pretty. good i think your radio voice all over it this morning is on fire they were worried

that there would be a sampling critics however in the more senior a known because it was completely out of control and as a community we were extremely lucky that there wasn't just sacking even larger criticality. but it really illustrates the extreme houser of nuclear weapons development activity i met one young man whose wife died in her late twenty's and it was his high school sweetheart. she had skin cancer and she lived across the street from a park that they call big trees park but a lot of the people in livermore call it plutonium park because for decades livermore lab routinely release plutonium to the city sewage so we're in big trees park here in livermore and when the e.p.a.

came here and took us to oil sample from right over there that day down in the top two inches of jerk. they found elevated levels of plutonium that obviously came from livermore laboratory. as far as the publisher be in accidents. yeah i would say that it at each lab we've certainly had our share i've been lucky enough not to be involved in any of them but especially with the livermore lab being right next to a population center preventing those things has to be not a top priority but the top priority is just the way it has to be what is. fairly dismaying in recent years is that as their role has been questioned for

entirely different reasons namely that security was bad. the people were careless in their safes for their handling of classified and materials and information at at livermore emotional level was when the question was raised for that reason the university fought hard to keep keep control of it rather than letting it go if you went up there and actually noticed and actually could investigate their security environment you would not be happy. for instance in an area that's that a lot of people are notices that the laboratory does nuclear pits you know which of the the the primary the the pits being plutonium primary that is the first stage of a thermo nuclear weapon. earlier this year two thousand and eight the department of energy sent a mob terrorist team to livermore lab. livermore lab needed a mock terrorist were coming livermore lab knew almost

a year in advance and knew to within two hours of when the mock terrorists would arrive. and yet the mob terrorists were able to carry out their to mean a jap to the terrorists came in the would be mock terrorist came in and succeeded at some things that we didn't really want them to succeed at. in spite of some of the precautions that. it had been. their first job was to get access to livermore labs to tonio and to hold their ground long enough to create an improvised nuclear device which is a not just a dirty bomb but an actual crude nuclear bomb their second to objectives that they also were able to carry out was to steal and they were using simulated plutonium

but essentially they were in the superblock in the building if they had been real terrorists it would have been the real deal they were able to steal the plutonium and take it off site get off site with it so that they could detonate a bomb at a later time and place of they are choosing.

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