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Responses on Lab Bidding Differ
by Urs Cipolat, October 22, 2004

Should the UC Regents bid to renew UC's contracts with the U.S. Department of Education to manage the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories? A recent electronic survey conducted among UC lecturers and librarians says that they should not.

I was among the 58 percent of survey participants who asked the regents not to bid. 34 percent of my colleagues were in favor of submitting bids, while 8 percent could not make up their minds. These results stand in stark contrast with a nearly identical survey conducted among UC professors, of whom 67 percent favored and only 21 percent opposed UC bids.

What explains the big difference of opinion between UC lecturers and librarians, on the one hand, and professors, on the other?

Peter Jackson's “Lord of the Rings” comes to mind, and Frodo's inner struggle between his conscience and his desire for power. Frodo is entrusted with the Ring, which gives its holder enormous powers. These powers, however, consume his soul. Keeping the Ring could ultimately lead to the destruction of Middle Earth. Frodo faces two choices: either follow his conscience and throw the Ring into Mount Doom, or give in to his desire for power, keep the Ring, and perish. Frodo hesitates. In the end, it is only thanks to the moral purity of his simple helper, Sam, that he finds the strength to rid himself of the treacherous Ring.

A closer look at the two opinion polls reveals an interesting fact. While the lecturer survey emphasized that the two labs are the cradle of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal, the professor survey did not. Instead, it stressed science-related aspects of UC's collaboration with the labs. The term “nuclear weapons” cannot be found in the professor survey, while it is used frequently in the lecturer survey.

I am not suggesting that either of the two surveys tried to manipulate its audience. What I'm suggesting is that the professors favored UC collaboration with the weapons labs so strongly because the moral issues relating to this partnership were not touched upon in their survey.

But here comes Sam, reminding Frodo of these moral issues:

First, UC is a university. Its central mission is educating people in the humanist tradition, not destroying them. UC can no longer allow itself to be co-opted into being complicit in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

Second, nuclear weapons are weapons of mass murder. They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians. They kill indiscriminately—men, women and children. That's why their use and threat to use, under international law, is prohibited. By allowing many of the 16,000 UC employees at the labs to maintain the existing and develop new “usable” nuclear weapons, UC is violating international law.

Third, all weapons of mass destruction activities are immoral. We cannot tolerate them in Iraq, nor in North Korea, nor in Iran, nor at home. The U.N. Security Council, in its recent Resolution 1540, asked all countries to criminalize WMD activities. UC and its employees at the labs are running the risk of facing criminal prosecution in foreign countries if they do not stop their WMD related work.

Throw the Ring, Sam says.

Urs Cipolat is an interdisciplinary studies field lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Originally published in the Daily Californian (UC Berkeley)

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