We're happy to share this press release from Project HERE, a project of a subcommittee of the Noyo Headlands Working group of the GrassRoots Institute, an Alliance-sponsored project. 

The Headlands Environmental Remediation Education Project (called "Project HERE" for short) is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a Technical Assistance Grant from the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), to engage in community education around the condition of and environmental issues on the former Georgia Pacific Mill Site (Mill Site). This funding is part of the Cleanup in Vulnerable Communities Initiative (CVCI), authorized through Senate Bill (SB) 158 in 2021.  Our grant will allow us to hire a Technical Consultant to review and explain the Mill Site investigation and cleanup reports to the community. Over the next 18 months, Project HERE will be hosting open forum meetings to present this information to members of the Fort Bragg community. We invite you to participate meaningfully in the planning for the remaining remediation of the Mill Site.

Mill Site
The Mill Site covers the western third of the City of Fort Bragg, which consists of about 425 acres of land with about 2 miles of ocean frontage. Abandoned when the sawmill closed in 2002, the Mill Site has been sitting empty since then, with the exception of the Coastal Trail. There have been disputes over who is responsible for cleaning up the toxic chemical residues left from sawmill operations.

Who We Are
We are a group of Coastal residents who are deeply concerned with the lack of progress toward the sustainable cleanup of the Mill Site, particularly regarding the constraints caused by remaining contamination on the Mill Site. Our collective aim is to ensure a safe, productive, and inclusive future for this vital community asset. HERE is a project of a subcommittee of the Noyo Headlands Working Group of the Grassroots Institute.

Our Goals
Our primary goals are to provide the public with meaningful and accurate information about the condition of the Mill Site, particularly "Operable Unit E (OU-E)," the central section with the ponds that contain residual contamination preventing the public from future access. We believe that with this information, the community can effectively participate in the planning process as it moves forward. We aim to ensure that the entire community, including those who have been left out of the process previously, can have their voices heard and affect significant decisions regarding the future of the Mill Site.

What You Can Expect to See Over the Next 18 Months

• Community Public Survey: We will conduct a survey to evaluate public knowledge about the Mill Site and gather feedback regarding its future remediation.
• Technical Consultant: The grant will allow for hiring a technical consultant. Their role is to review and interpret the Mill Site data and present that information in an accessible way to the community. The technical consultant will facilitate community forum meetings in both English and Spanish, to explain the Mill Site history, remediation efforts and opportunities, exposure potentials and risks associated with residual contaminants, and to answer the community's questions. The technical consultant will provide documents in both English and Spanish.
• Community Outreach: We will engage with service organizations, religious fellowships, schools, and other community groups to listen and learn about the community's desires for the Mill Site through small open forum meetings.
• Sampling and Citizen Science Projects: The technical consultant will lead us in sampling and citizen science projects, enabling community members to actively participate in research efforts.
• Walking Tours: During this period, we will host walking tours for the public along the Coastal Trail, fostering a deeper connection with the Mill Site and its future uses.
• Large Forums: Following the community outreach, we will organize meetings to present our findings and discuss the next steps as a community.
  
  

Technical Consultant
We have retained Farallon Consulting, L.L.C. as our technical consultant, working specifically with Steffany Aguilar, who is a bilingual Professional Geologist (P.G.) with over 9 years of experience conducting environmental assessments, including investigations, site characterizations, remediation activities, and compliance work. In addition, Steffany is an advocate for women in STEM and volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area for Scientific Adventures for Girls and Oakland Unified School District.

How to Connect and Participate
Community participation is crucial to the success of this project. We encourage everyone to get involved and share their perspectives, ensuring a diverse and inclusive approach to the Mill Site's future. If you are interested in contributing to the future of the Mill Site, please join our efforts and help us make a positive impact on our community. Please reach out to us with questions or concerns at [email protected], and visit us at Project-HERE.org.

by John Tieman, after Éluard's "Liberty"

on a voter registration application
on a passport
on a newspaper subscription
in the snow
you write your name
 
on enlistment papers
in the forest in the leaves
on a birth certificate
on an agenda on a dais
you write you name
 
in the confessional
on the rising sea
in the solitude
on the border wall
you write your name
 
in your memoir
in Spanish in Yiddish
in the treble clef
with a preamble
you write your name
 
on a copy of the constitution
on the democratic republic
with blood with ash
with petition and protest
you write your name  

John Tieman is a widely published essayist and poet, as well as a city council member in University City, Missouri. Paul Éluard wrote "Liberté" in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France; it was first published clandestinely, and has inspired choral and symphonic interpretations by Francis Poulenc and the Canadian composer Jacques Hétu.  

Democracy is under threat in several ways. Some of those ways are hidden. Others are in plain sight. On Thursday, February 13, join Alliance for Democracy co-chair David Delk in an online discussion of three threats to democracy, and a deep dive into one: the Military-Industrial Complex. He will also look at corrective measures, including ways to combat militarism.

The discussion starts at 5 PM Pacific, 6 PM Mountain, 7 PM Central & 8 PM Eastern. You can register here.

In addition to his work with the national and Portland OR Alliance, David is a long-time Unitarian Universalist Democracy Advocate, centering on campaign finance reform in Oregon. He is also the founder of the Portland Chapter of Move to Amend, and does anti-war work with the Peace & Action Group of the First Unitarian Church. He is also a board member of the Universalists for Just Economic community as an essential member of its Peace Equity and Climate Task Force.

There is no place in a democratic society for an opaque government institution, with an unknown budget, operating for the benefit of powerful corporations and beholden to no one except corporate investors.

by Jim Tarbell

In the early 1900s, after corporate money took over our political system, Wall Street corporate
lawyers became the chosen political appointees to run the US State and War Departments and later created the Council on Foreign Relations as a think tank to develop pro-corporate military and foreign policies.

In the second half of the 20th Century, the next generation of Wall Street lawyers developed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to serve the interests of their corporate clients and the multi-national corporate class.

Wall Street corporate lawyers Bill Donovan, Bill Casey and Allen Dulles worked to create the CIA. Donovan ran the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that morphed into the CIA, along with its staff of scions of American wealth. Casey served as Donovan’s right-hand man at OSS and served as CIA Director from 1981 to 1988. Dulles met Donovan at a Republican gathering of Wall Street lawyers and soon joined the OSS as a flamboyant agent in Switzerland.

After the war, Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles worked as members of the famously corporate/imperial Sullivan and Cromwell Wall Street legal firm. They carried on that work when President Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles Director of the CIA, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State in 1953. Together they made the CIA a covert military operation to benefit their corporate clients. 

In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democracy in Iran for the benefit of the investors in British Petroleum. The next year, the CIA ousted the elected Guatemalan President Arbenz to benefit the United Fruit Company. 

As European colonial empires collapsed in the late 1950s, the Belgian corporation Union Miniere, that mined copper and supplied the uranium used in atomic bombs, hired mercenaries to break away the mineral-rich Katanga province from the Congo. Days before John F. Kennedy (JFK) became president, the CIA helped assassinate the Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, who opposed the Union Miniere's efforts in Katanga Province. As the Congo exploded in war, United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld worked to bring peace to the region, which caused Dulles to say, "Dag is becoming troublesome … and should be removed." In September 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash blamed on the CIA.

Trying to get control of the CIA, JFK forced Dulles to retire. The new CIA Director, John McCone, famed war profiteer and cofounder of the military industrial giant Bechtel, took oversight of the CIA out of the hands of the corporate lawyers and into the hands of the military-industrial-complex.

Bemoaning his lack of control over the CIA, JFK moved ahead to bring peace to the world. He
started pulling US forces out of Vietnam. He embraced a global peace where all nations “live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.” He built relationships with his political adversaries: Nasser in Egypt; Sukarno in Indonesia; and
Castro in Cuba. He also embraced “general and complete disarmament.”

Many movies and books on the assassination of JFK, implicate the CIA in his murder a few month after he made his Peace for All Time speech at the American University. It leads one to conclude that the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and, who both promoted global peace, may have been at the hands of the CIA. It also leads one to wonder how active the CIA and the military-industrial-complex are in shutting down all current efforts to bring about global peace.

The time has come to clear up all these questions. There is no place in a democratic society for an opaque government institution, with an unknown budget, operating for the benefit of powerful corporations and beholden to no one except corporate investors. We should terminate the CIA, open all its records for public scrutiny and make a place for global peace now!
​
(See Part 1 of this article here.)

Nonviolent movements succeeded twice as often as violent armed movements, against armed
authoritarian regimes.

​by Dave Lewit

The handwriting is on the wall. Centrist President Joe Biden notwithstanding, disaffected millions of Americans seem willing to consider the likes of Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Can pro-democracy Americans prevail?

Harvard political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks are not sure. They want pro-democracy people and sympathizers to be prepared and active. Their 34-page comprehensive, no-nonsense October 2022 report Pro-Democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations is essential and practical. 

Chenoweth is well qualified: she and colleagues studied 323 significant twentieth century (1900-2006) revolutionary movements worldwide, finding that nonviolent movements succeeded twice as often as violent armed movements against armed authoritarian regimes. But supporting authoritarian regimes are “corporations, business and economic elites, media, party officials and staff, civil servants, security personnel, cultural influencers, foundations and philanthropists, religious leaders, organized labor, and other elite and local authoritarians.”

Drawing on their scrutiny of these nonviolent pro-democracy, revolutionary movements,
Chenoweth and Marks prescribe actions in four essential categories:

• Build and maintain a large-scale, multiracial, cross-class, pro-democratic United Front;
• Protect, hold, and build local and community power through alternative institutions;
• Build pressure to induce defections among autocrat loyalists;
• Strengthen resilience against increased state “security” or paramilitaries.

Wow, a tall order! The authors then go into important details for each action. These are helpful because they can engage the talents and drives of the mere five percent necessary for a winning movement, who otherwise might despair of the complexity of effective organized activity. Broadly, a United Front “will require a general secretariat with a federated structure. . . a resource bank that can fund legal support, strike relief . . . and other support for chapters to organize and mobilize people.” It should “develop intelligence, community power building, scenario planning, communications, education, training, conflict resolution, and diplomacy.”

Where to begin? First may be calling out illegal, mendacious, and antisocial behavior by authorities’ agents. When too many municipal and state institutions become controlled by a system of white-only, law-and-order, elitist officers and their favored institutions, people seek companionate support. Some nonprofit organizations can help, but face-to-face, left/populist, movement groups—anti-corporatist, ecological, localist, anti-racist, police-reforming, anti-sexist, pro-immigrant, anti-war, socialist—may be more amenable to “intersectionality’s” call for collaboration, and form alternative institutions.

As corporate and government institutions depend more and more on digital controls, physical proximity of local people may encourage “economic cooperatives, fresh food provision, public health institutions, mutual aid, community safety, strike funds, and other forms of cooperation that dramatically reduce the reach, impact, and legitimacy of the authoritarian state.” To promote defections they emphasize “mapping” of authoritarians’ structures and networks to identify key persons and links to overlapping neutral or pro-democracy groupings. Partnering with foreign resistance groups can provide moral authority for local movements, partly by engaging certain international agreements.

But Chenoweth and Marks outline so much more than we can discuss here. For the short and longer terms we must survey what resistance structure we have, and quickly build a more deliberate, comprehensive “pro-democracy infrastructure.”

We know that our movement, our United Front, must be nonviolent. Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement was top-down — personally driven. Politically, it failed. He had heart and drive, but lacked social infrastructure. Martin Luther King had Gandhi’s drive, and engaged existing organizations like churches as rudimentary infrastructure. Chenoweth and Marks offer a spreadsheet with dozens of critical infrastructure elements, but lack participatory fire — drive, staging, and progressive dynamism. A Trumpist president in 2024 may be a slap in the face — a sting for serious infrastructure building.

Dave Lewit is Professor Emeritus and frequent contributor to Justice Rising. He is the Ombudsman of the Alliance for Democracy.

by Jim Tarbell and David e. Delk

Establishing peace in a world without war requires building a culture of peace while
implementing public policy to rid the world of war. Paul Chappell and his Peace Literacy
Institute published seven books in their Road to Peace series that establishes a clear, doable
path for establishing a culture of peace. Book five in that series, Soldiers of Peace, will turn us all into non-violent warriors for peace. It builds hope, one of their most important muscles of peace, by outlining the sweeping cultural transformations democracy and education can nourish. Their Peace Literacy program can instigate similar changes to our antiquated acceptance of war as inevitable.

After the horrors of both World Wars, politicians, jurists, scientists and publishers were
all enthusiastic to create both a culture of peace, and public policy to make global peace
a reality. Notables from Albert Einstein to Senator J. W. Fullbright endorsed the rationale
and route to international peace laid out in Emery Reves' 1945, world-wide, best selling book, The Anatomy of Peace. Reves, internationally known author, publisher, and close friend of
Churchill and others, calls out the failures of capitalism, socialism, religion and fascism, along with the evils of nationalism and the nation state system. He then goes on to declare “we can protect ourselves against international wars only through the establishment of constitutional life in world affairs by freely elected and responsible representatives.”

World leaders planned for the United Nations to become such an institution. But the UN bogged down in the “evils of the nationstate system.” It took fifty years for the movement calling for international democratic decision making on global issues to reemerge. Now that idea has been updated in A World Parliament: Governance and Democracy in the 21st
Century by international parliamentarian Joe Leinen and Democracy Without Borders co-founder and director Andreas Bummel. They point out that the need for a world parliament goes way beyond just international peace. Now we need this international, democratic institution to deal with the climate crisis, migration, depletion of global resources, pollution of the earth, multinational corporate tax evasion, and so many other world-wide problems that the nation-states can not deal with.

Unfortunately, the international peace movement is being stifled by multinational corporations and their allied military-industrial complexes. Joan Roelofs lays out how this
works in her book The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why there is so little Anti-War Protest in the
United States. She documents how corporations and their military allies have infiltrated every level of American society with unlimited funds to compromise any movement toward global peace. Then she shows her readers on how to educate themselves and reverse the trend by
hounding their politicians, joining a peace group, creating a peace culture with a national
service organization, and pushing a green New Deal that will convert our war economy into a peace economy.

Medea Benjamin, probably the greatest peace organizer in the United States, and Nicolas
J.S. Davies bring all this together in their seminal book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a
Senseless Conflict. While condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they also point out that the West helped cause the conflict by reneging on promises to not expand NATO into Eastern
Europe, before relentlessly pushing NATO bases toward Russia's border. The West's courting of Ukraine aims at completing that process, while ignoring President Kennedy's warning not to corner a nuclear power, leaving nuclear war as its only option, and causing the annihilation of life as we know it.

Meanwhile, Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the
Human Toll of Its Military Machine is a must read. Americans don’t know how the US military dominates America and the world, fighting or inciting endless wars, spending the
American taxpayers tax dollars without being held accountable.

How can the US military and its corporate contractors receive more than half of federal discretionary funds while the American people are kept in the dark, unable to rise up to say “Enough is Enough?” Norman's book shows how the American “free” press hides all
stories, which would inform the American people, and helps explain how and why our
“free” press makes invisible the American military death machine.

We can create a culture in a school, workplace, family, community, and society that strengthens Peace Literacy and nurtures the full development of our humanity.

Excerpted from an interview with Paul Chappell, hosted by Zoe Weil for the Institute for Humane Education, April 2022

Peace Literacy offers a deep and accurate understanding of the many subjects relevant to the creation of a more peaceful and just world. Peace Literacy consists of the idea that peace is not merely a goal, but a competency — a literacy — similar to reading and writing, which we can learn to use with greater and greater effectiveness. In the Twenty-First Century, we can no longer settle for peace as an abstract concept or sentimental wish. Peace Literacy is a rigorous and strategic approach to peacemaking that is based on the recognition that we must take waging peace at least as seriously as the military takes waging war.

Peace Literacy consists of three basic elements:

The first is the development of human capacities, which we call the muscles of our humanity. One of these capacities is hope, which is like a muscle, because it requires strengthening and development, and can become more powerful in degrees. Peace Literacy cultivates realistic hope based on evidence, experience, and ideals. Realistic hope is proactive and connected to action.

The muscles of empathy and conscience drastically affect how we think and reason. In Peace Literacy, we say that stewardship is the highest expression of the muscle of appreciation, because appreciation allows us to not take the gifts of life for granted. Gifts such as health, friendship, and democracy are fragile, and can be damaged and destroyed when we are not behaving as responsible stewards and protectors. Appreciation encourages us to never take these gifts for granted, to savor and make the most of them, and to do our best to protect them.

The second element of Peace Literacy is the building of skills to flex the muscles of our humanity. To offer just one example, listening is a skill that requires me to flex my muscle of discipline, to focus my mind and concentrate. In order to truly listen, I must also flex my muscle of empathy. When I flex my muscle of empathy, I am capable of hearing not only your words, but also your humanity.

The third element of Peace Literacy involves increasing the accuracy of our understanding of how the world works. When people with empathy and conscience don’t have an accurate understanding of the root causes of problems, they can cause harm. As the old saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Soldiers of peace must understand the tangles of trauma; the root causes of aggression; the
critical importance of our non-physical needs such as purpose, meaning, belonging, and self-worth; the relationship between our human vulnerability and our technology; the behaviors that can reliably build shared trust between individuals, communities, and nations; the limitations and risks of waging war, and the power and potential of waging peace.

The elements of Peace Literacy can be taught in three ways. They can be taught through curriculum, scaffolded in age-appropriate ways for pre-K through adult education. They can be taught through example, when adults lead by example by practicing Peace Literacy. The third way that Peace Literacy elements can be taught is through culture. We can create a culture in a school, workplace, family, community, and society that strengthens Peace Literacy and nurtures the full development of our humanity.

Paul K. Chappell is an American activist. He is the Director of the Peace Literacy Institute. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of the war in Iraq, he created the idea of Peace Literacy after his time in the military.

Working together, we can build the foundations for a more peaceful, equitable, sustainable world.

by Riane Eisler
(Excerpted and abridged from The Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer 2014)

Can we build a more peaceful world where our great human potential for consciousness, caring, and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it?

To answer these questions, my examination of social systems looks at the whole of humanity, including the thousands of years we call prehistory. This more complete picture makes it possible to see two historical social systems — a domination system and a partnership system.

Until just a few thousand years ago, archeological records show we lived in a partnership system. Archeology shows no signs of warfare; houses and burials do not reflect large gaps between haves and have-nots; and these earlier societies were neither patriarchies nor matriarchies, but cultures where women and men were equally valued in partnership.

However, archeology and myths since that time show a major cultural shift toward the domination system. Fortunately, over the last centuries there has been strong movement to reverse this shift in cultural direction back toward a partnership system.

One modern progressive movement after another has challenged the oppressive features of this dominator system. These include democratic challenges against: the “divinely-ordained” right of despotic kings to rule their “subjects;” the anti-colonial liberation movements that challenged the “divinely-ordained” right of one race or nation to rule over another; the women’s rights movement that has challenged the right of men to rule women and children; all the way to the environmental movement challenging man’s “divinely ordained” right to dominate and conquer nature.

Unfortunately, the focus of these progressive movements toward a more equitable and peaceful society has only been on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid. The primary relations between men and women, and between them and their daughters and sons, on which the pyramid keeps rebuilding itself, has remained largely in place. Since these relationships have been ignored, we lack the solid foundations for a peaceful and caring society.

Moving toward the partnership side of the continuum requires a more democratic organization in both the family and state or tribe, where both halves of humanity are equally valued, and stereotypically feminine values such as caring and nonviolence (which are considered “unmanly” in the domination system) are highly regarded, whether in women or men.

The relationships of women and men shapes families, education, religion, politics, and economics. The social construction of gender roles and relations also shapes a society’s guiding values.

As long as boys and men learn to equate “real masculinity” with violence and control we cannot realistically expect an end to the arms build-ups that are today bankrupting our world, and the terrorism and aggressive warfare that in our age of nuclear and chemical warfare threaten our survival.

A peaceful way of living fosters mutual respect and accountability. It uses power to empower rather than disempower others. The partnership configuration is a blueprint for a more equitable, caring, and peaceful future.

We must show that the struggle for our future is not between religion and secularism, right and left, East and West, or capitalism and socialism, but within all these societies between traditions of domination and a partnership way of life.

Every one of us can play a role in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership. Working together, we can build the foundations for a more peaceful, equitable, sustainable world, where all children can realize their capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity — the capacities that make us fully human.

Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. She is president of the Center for Partnership Systems (CPS), and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies.

graphic: Raj Phairembam

Young feminists took the stage with rousing singalongs and demands to demilitarize, denuclearize, decarbonize, decolonialize, and defund militaries.

By Cindy Piester

In November 2022, I headed out to COP 27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, as an NGO delegate with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). I hoped to move forward the conversation on the need for the United Nations to count all emissions, including military emissions, so that we might limit warming to the 1.5 C (2.7 F) rise above pre-industrial times by this century’s end.

Our military is the world’s largest institutional user of fossil fuels and the world’s largest institutional producer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet, thanks to the US government, these emissions have flown under the radar since the Kyoto Accords in 1997. Globally, military emissions are 5% of total annual emissions, yet reporting them remains optional, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) protocols serve to intentionally obscure any military emissions reported, by mixing them in with civilian emissions.

COP 27’s opening day was also the annual International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. Coinciding with that, WILPF partnered with the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and World BEYOND War (WBW) to release two bold letters. One called for, while the other requested, that the UNFCCC add the impacts of military emissions and military expenditures on climate to its 2023 agenda.

Our days began with informative and inspirational gatherings of feminists at the well-attended Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) meetings, where we mixed and mingled with women leaders from around the world. At times, the young feminists took the stage with rousing sing-alongs and demands to demilitarize, denuclearize, decarbonize, decolonialize, and defund militaries. Inevitably, these concerns were also included in WGC’s negotiations and reports.

We must understanding how quickly the planet and oceans are warming and how devastating the impacts — among them, droughts, desertification, fires, ice melt, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, catastrophic storms, hurricanes, flooding, and loss of keystone species and biodiversity — are to life on the planet. Clearly all emissions, including military emissions, must be counted and reported. So, when the US State Department called an informal meeting with all US delegates at COP 27, I raised the issue that, because of pressure from the US government, military emissions were exempted from mandatory UNFCCC reporting. These emissions and their reduction targets need to be included in our Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) consistent with GHG emissions protocols.

Among other questionable reporting mechanisms: emissions from hundreds of US overseas military bases are charged to host nations rather than to the United States; emissions from overseas transport associated with military supply lines are not charged to the US Department of Defense (DoD), but reported separately as “bunker fuels;” and war-related emissions are ignored entirely. The US State Department noted these issues as concerns, and moved on. Many US delegates, however, paid careful attention. Axel Michaelowa, senior founding partner of the Perspectives Climate Group, called for solutions that included reporting military and conflict-related emissions in the Global Stocktake — a long, hard look at the state of our planet, Stocktake charts a better course for the future, and for COP 28, held in Dubai, November 30 – December 12, 2023.

Our Department of Defense with its unsustainable annual budgetary allotment and global emissions is a disaster for our country and for the world. We seriously need to rethink our national security as we speed past climate tipping points dooming our youth to triple nightmares of out-of-control climate change, unbearable debt, and permanent war. 

Cindy Piester participates in the alternative media, documents US war crimes, and stands with VFP, WILPF, the Unitarians, Code Pink and justice lovers everywhere.

graphic: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 

by Bruce Gagnon

The 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty prohibits ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in space or on ‘celestial bodies’ like the moon. Virtually all warfare on the planet is now directed by space technology.  Thus, filling up the increasingly limited parking spaces in various orbital regions will determine which nation has an advantage.

Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) have been tested by India, US, Russia and China. ASAT’s need no explosives. At orbital speeds, kinetic energy — one thing smashing into the other— does the job.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes rockets and satellites to build Starlink, a roadband Internet system that once completed will cover the entire world. SpaceX has so far put 12,000 satellites into orbit and plans for 40,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO), occupying 80% of this space.

The Pentagon funds and tests Starlink for its military capabilities. Starlink satellites are being utilized by the Ukrainian military to communicate, as well as help guide drones, artillery shells, and missiles into Russian positions and at civilian targets. Very recently Musk has begun to slightly restrict the use of Starlink by the Ukrainian military as he feared that Russia might take action against the Starlink constellation.

In early 2023 China announced that it was preparing to launch close to 13,000 satellites into LEO in a move to counter Musk’s SpaceX network. China stated that they intend to: “ensure that our country has a place in low orbit; and prevent the Starlink constellation from excessively preempting low-orbit resources.”

NATO in 2019 announced a new doctrine calling space a ‘fifth operational domain’. NATO maintains that the US-led bloc will use commercial satellites as a military booster. Russia has issued a warning to the US-NATO that they are “exposing civilian space assets to potential attack by utilizing them for military purposes.”

In early February, Ukrainian troops fired rockets from a US-made HIMARS system which hit a hospital in Novoaydar, killing 14 Russian ethnics and injuring 24. Russia claimed that Kiev used western satellites operated by NATO personnel to target the hospital.

Currently, “weapons of selective destruction” fall outside of the Outer Space Treaty. Thus, a new treaty is urgently needed. Russia and China have been leading the effort at the UN to create a new treaty to ban all weapons in space for many years. But the US and Israel have been blocking such a step for peace in space. The official US line, through Republican and Democratic administrations, is “there is no problem in space, and no new treaty is needed.”

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and lives in Brunswick, Maine. 
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