• Last updated February 08, 2006

By Will Parrish

Over the past several decades students and faculty of the University of California, often in tandem with nuclear disarmament NGOs in California and New Mexico, have conducted a series of campaigns to end the UC's involvement in nuclear weapons research, design, testing, and production at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. These campaigns represent an important contribution to the global nuclear abolition movement, which State University of New York historian Lawrence Wittner has described as “the largest, most dynamic international citizens' movement of modern times.” (1)

This larger disarmament movement has always formed the context for these grassroots efforts to disassociate the UC with the labs. When the global nuclear abolition movement was at its pinnacle in the 1980s, the UC-labs severance movement likewise peaked, with literally thousands of students and faculty members participating in various rallies, sit-ins, petition drives, and other forms of (often highly-creative) protest. When the disarmament movement dwindled in the ‘90s, the UC severance movement fell from the radar of most students and other would-be disarmament activists.

Today, the UC severance movement is again on the rise, enlivened by a new generation of student activists who have injected it with a fresh analysis of how the campaign's goals might be achieved. This overview of the history of the UC's ties to the labs, written from the perspective of people who have mobilized to oppose it, aims to provide current UC peace activists with crucial insights to inform their efforts.

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

(The descriptions and analyses on the following pages are not intended as a definitive account, but instead are the author’s interpretation of a series of historical events and a starting point for further discussion. )