The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the '60s

Despite the emergence of a powerful worldwide disarmament movement in the late-1950s, there was little documented opposition to the University of California 's weapons lab ties during this period, least of all at the UC itself. The disarmament movement, which claimed success after the United Nations' passage of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, was far and away largest in Europe.(7) Other than the southern universities that were strongholds of the African-American civil rights movement, American campuses were not significant sources of activism at this point.

Those circumstances changed dramatically in the mid-‘60s, though the nuclear arms build-up was not so much a focus as an overarching inspiration for most student activists of the time. In 1962, members of the newly-formed Students for a Democratic Society, a nationwide student group committed to non-violent revolution, published their seminal Port Huron Statement (written in part by current UC Santa Barbara sociology professor Dick Flacks), which attributed the growing politicization of their generation to two sources.

“First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others' we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.” (8)

Thus, the Cold War was among the most influential factors in forming this generation of students' political consciousness. However, the primary vehicle of protest for most student peace activists in the ‘60s was the Vietnam War; large, documented campaigns and direct action against the arms race occurred only sporadically. For instance, it is known that UC Berkeley students organized at least a handful of sit-ins at the Livermore lab during the ‘60s,(9) but specific dates and locations are hard to come by, because they were not a primary focus of activists at the time.

However, as the Livermore lab website admits, "As the decade progressed, the laboratory became the object of growing criticism from the University of California community and from outside as well. It was also the scene of active demonstrations."(10)

The UC Berkeley War Crimes Committee formed in 1970, by far the most dramatic challenge to the UC's management of the weapons labs of its time. Its purpose was to mobilize radical direct actions against the UC's role in the US war effort, which included both the UC's role as weapons lab manager and the inordinate amount of military research conducted at UC campuses.(11)

In the fall of 1970, the group organized two “hearings” to examine the UC's role in the academic-military-industrial complex. Following the second, an angry crowd of several hundreds students tried to march on Edward Teller's house in Berkeley proper, only to be halted by a police barricade. In February 1971, the WCC organized a protest against the US invasion of Laos, the biggest of the year at Berkeley. The rally gave way to a march, with several thousands students storming the Atomic Energy Commission building on Bancroft Avenue to call for removal of US nuclear weapons from Thailand. Skirmishes soon broke out between police and the protestors, and an AEC car was burned.(12)

Largely as a means of quelling the protest, the AEC disassociated the Livermore from the Lawrence Berkeley facility in 1971, and all nuclear weapons-related research moved from Berkeley to Livermore, where it would be more effectively sheltered from student protest.(13)


Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - Los Alamos: "Born at the Crosshairs"
Part 2 - The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the ‘60s
Part 3 - Challenging the UC's “Mantle of Legitimacy”
Part 4 - The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions
Part 5 - The Rise of Faculty Activism
Part 6 - A New Generation Emerges
Part 7 - Moving Forward
Works Cited