Environment and Security

I have not blogged very frequently in 2014 and thus have a big stack of magazine clippings surrounding my desk. One story that caught my eye this past year was authored by journalist Sharon Lerner in The Nation back in November. It concerned alleged links between local pollution from a defense contractor and a cluster of pediatric brain tumors in a small Florida community called The Acreage.

This paragraph caught my eye given that I often work on both environmental issues and national security topics:

“If Al Qaeda sent a team of sleeper cells to poison our groundwater and release toxic materials into the air, people would go nuts. It would be an act of war,” [Law Professor Stephen] Dycus [at Vermont, the author of National Defense and the Environment] notes. “But if we do it to ourselves in the name of national security, in preparation for war, that seems to be sort of OK.”

These are the key paragraphs about the pollutants and area in question:

...the plaintiffs’ attorneys have been constructing their case based on the defense contractor’s well-known history of involvement with projects that involve radioactive materials. Since so many of its operations are top secret, it is difficult to disprove the company’s claims that it has never worked on nuclear planes or spacecraft in Florida. But documents from the 1960s through the ’90s show that Pratt & Whitney had licenses to use at least a dozen radioactive substances [PDF], including radium D and E, thoriated nickel and cesium-137, in Florida. The plaintiffs’ lawyers also unearthed company correspondence indicating that some of these radioactive materials wound up outside of their proper storage places. In court filings, Pratt & Whitney denied having any “contaminations” beyond “properly stored chemical compounds.”

In fact, there is a clear documentary record, stretching across many decades, of Pratt & Whitney contaminating its Florida environs with a variety of toxic materials, both radioactive and nonradioactive. According to a 1985 Department of Environmental Regulation update, the company had soil on its property that contained PCBs—chemicals that have been linked to brain cancer—at more than 200 times the maximum level now allowed even in fenced-off, nonresidential areas. PCBs were also found in fish [PDF] that swam in ponds on the company’s grounds, at more than 7,000 times the safe level set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for human consumption.

Jet fuel, which was the suspected cause of another cancer cluster in Fallon, Nevada, may also have played a role at the Acreage. A mixture of chemicals that can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause cancer in mice, jet fuel was found at the Pratt & Whitney facility in Florida. According to a 1983 report, there were three plumes of jet fuel totaling some 53,000 gallons beneath the company’s property, and a layer on top of the groundwater in certain places as well.

 In 1979, just one year after the Acreage Homeowners Association formed and began constructing a system of canals to make the area habitable, 2,000 gallons of trichloroethylene (TCE), a carcinogenic solvent, leaked into the groundwater and surface water on Pratt & Whitney's campus, as the company later admitted. 

The entire article is worth your time.

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Strangelove, indeed

Photo credit: NASA
Nothing phallic here, right?

Back in September 2001, Dan Lindley published a teaching guide to "Dr. Strangelove" that covered much of the familiar ground about the film's treatment of nuclear deterrence strategy.

The most important theme of the film is that it makes fun of the sad, perverse, and absurd reality that the U.S. and the Soviet Union could destroy each other within 30 minutes.

I use "Dr. Strangelove" in my film class, primarily as a critique of nuclear deterrence strategy. Many former civilian and military leaders around the world now argue for abolition of nuclear weapons and they repeatedly insist that nuclear deterrence strategy is absurd. Ridiculous. I've been working on this theme for a chapter in my comedy book. 

The first time I ever showed the film in a class was while I was a term/visiting professor at Northwestern. To fulfill part of my overload teaching assignment, the department chair had allowed me to teach a small seminar on nuclear deterrence. The handful of students and I watched a video of the film very late in the term after everyone had a strong feel for deterrence theory and the class had read many original declassified documents about nuclear planning, threats, etc.. Back in those days -- around 1990 -- the film did not replay regularly on cable television. Streaming media was not ubiquitous and it was a real treat to be able to see Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece.

Did I mention that every student in that small seminar was male? No women had signed up.

In more recent years, I've adapted the film class to a wider audience of political science students. The course still focuses on "Global Politics Through Film," but it is now regularly taught as one of our senior capstone seminars, a "culminating undergraduate experience." To capture a wider range of ideas from the discipline, I have been addressing some of the other prevalent themes of the film:

Indeed, the gender politics in the film are obviously quite provocative, essentially equating male sexual fantasies with war and nuclear planning. The latest Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation suggests that absurd nuclear fantasies continue to influence today’s security policymakers.

I was reminded about this today when I happened across a magazine article about the politics of the Pentagon's F-35 aircraft, also known as the most expensive weapon the U.S. has ever attempted to build. Needless to say, it has been a controversial weapon given those costs, plus various setbacks, delays, and uncertainties about the piloted weapon's purpose in an age of drone warfare. Still, one alleged impetus for the new fighter echoes a theme that Stanley Kubrick emphasizes in "Dr. Strangelove":

"There's always this sexual drive for a new airplane on the part of each service," says Tom Christie, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester from 2001 to 2005. "Persistent, urgent and natural."

That's a gendered lesson about "Dr. Strangelove" that Lindley does not overtly discuss in his film teaching guide. Perhaps it is what he had in mind when he calls nuclear exchange scenarios "sad, perverse, and absurd."


P.S. Coincidentally, I also recently read a book review by Akemi Johnson that discussed What Soldiers Do; Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts. This paragraph gives you an idea of that book's thesis about gender and IR:

“The history of war,” Roberts writes, “cannot be separated from the history of the body.” Beyond combat, the bodies involved—the ones that physically connect, flesh upon flesh—are usually those of male soldiers, arrived from a foreign land to liberate, destroy or occupy, and those of female civilians, attracted or yanked into the military world. The interactions between them are intimate yet iconic, private yet political. A rape by an American soldier threatens to expose harsh realities about American hegemony; another GI’s part in an international romance suggests an entire country’s willing deference to benevolent US control. Harnessed for propaganda and protest, tangled in injustices like institutional lynching, these sexual relationships are essential to understanding war and its aftermath. 

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Sorry, Wrong Number?

Just in case anyone has the wrong idea about the role of the U.S. military in global politics, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta offered a simple reminder last week. From ABC News:

"The United States military is not and should not be a global 911 service capable of arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world," Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Put differently, don't call us, we'll call you.

This comment from Panetta reminded me of a similar one made by Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense, William Perry:

I've said before, and I will say it again, the U.S. Army is an Army. It is not a Salvation Army. We're not in the business of providing humanitarian relief.

I quoted a similar statement from Perry back in 2004. However, I also noted that when Perry offered this pithy turn of phrase, he typically outlined circumstances when the U.S. military could provide humanitarian assistance.

When do we decide it is important to do that? What are the exceptional cases?

First of all it has to be a catastrophe of large proportions. That was true two years ago, during this cholera thing -- 5,000 people a day were dying. It appears to be true today in the refugee problem in Rwanda and Zaire. Secondly it has to be something where the United States military forces have something unique that they can provide. Two years ago we were the only organization that had the combination of airlift, water purification equipment and engineers that could get in and solve that problem in time. So we did. And finally, it has to be an operation which is acceptably low risk, and in which we have an exit strategy.

All of those have applied to operations where we send forces to assist in humanitarian operations. Those are the criteria that we would be applying to any humanitarian operation which we get involved in Africa.

Presumably, the Obama administration would agree with this, by and large.


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CDI Namedropping

Spencer Ackerman has an article today at The Washington Independent called "Women Prominent in Defense Movement." Pictured up top are Sarah Sewall of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights and Michèle Flournoy of the Center for a New American Security. Ackerman describes Sewall, Flournoy, and several other women as

key figures in a loose but expanding circle of defense theorist-practitioners who study, advocate and implement counterinsurgency -- a method of warfare that emphasizes economy of force, intimate knowledge of host populations and politico-economic incentives to win that population's allegiance. At the risk of stating the obvious, they, and many of their colleagues, are women. While women are still underrepresented in the national-security apparatus -- and at the Pentagon specifically -- counterinsurgency, more than any other previous movement in defense circles, features women not just as equal partners, but leaders.

There's no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency's impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women's "emotional IQ," in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military's post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

Sarah Sewall was an intern at the Center for Defense Information in 1983 -- something I know because she worked with a good friend of mine who was in the same position at the same time. My own internship at CDI occurred in summer 1985 -- just in time for CDI and likeminded groups to call for banning all nuclear explosions on the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima.

I mention my internship because it put me in the position to receive CDI's The Defense Monitor for many years. As a pack rat, I still have a stack of them. And on the back of each issue, CDI conveniently listed the names of interns.

Thus, I learned that Flournoy was an intern at CDI in fall 1985, just weeks after my work there ended.

Moreover, Flournoy interned that fall with Lee Feinstein -- who most recently served as Hillary Clinton's National Security Director.

I'm dropping all these names because they are clearly in line for important defense and/or foreign policy jobs in an Obama administration. Conceivably, the first female Secretary of Defense could be one of the women profiled in Ackerman's piece.

And yet, in the mid-1980s, virtually no one in Washington thought anyone at CDI would ever be in line for top government jobs.

Consider this take on CDI from the right-wing Heritage Foundation in 1979.

Given the turnaround, maybe there's hope for U.S. defense policy after all.


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