Friends,
It was
remarkable to see this op-ed in The Baltimore Sun. For the many years I
have lived in Baltimore and have protested JHU’s weapons contracts, I have not
ever seen such a detailed report on JHU’s Applied Physics Laboratory. In 1994,
I was arrested at the APL for handing out leaflets, and in 1995 I served a 30-day
sentence in the Howard County Detention Center.
Today
the protests continue. The Baltimore Nonviolence Center hosts a
demonstration outside Johns Hopkins University at 33rd and North Charles
Streets on Tuesdays from 5 to 6 PM to condemn the university’s weapons
contracts. Join us, and speak out against this misappropriation of tax
dollars. Kagiso, Max
Johns Hopkins University among schools furthering
nuclear weapons
BALTIMORE SUN |
NOV 20, 2019 | 6:00 AM
(David Horsey)
When choosing
a university, students should be weighing class sizes, major options or even
the dining hall food quality. But what they shouldn’t have to consider is if
their dream school helps to build nuclear weapons.
A new report
reveals that nearly 50 U.S. colleges and universities contribute to building
and maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons, in direct contradiction to their mission
statements and often without the knowledge of their students and faculty. Three
local universities are among these schools of mass destruction: Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore and George Washington University and Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C.
Johns Hopkins’
Applied Physics Laboratory is a Defense Department-affiliated research center
that works on nuclear weapons, which helped Johns Hopkins receive $828 million
in research and development grants from the Defense Department for Fiscal Year
2017 — more than twice as much any other American university. The laboratory
renewed a seven-year contract in 2017 to
continue a strategic partnership with the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center.
The laboratory
operates away from the prying eyes of most students and faculty in a 453-acre,
off-campus location. While Johns Hopkins generally exempts classified research,
there is a blanket exemption policy for
classified research at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
George
Washington University maintains a Stockpile Stewardship
Academic Alliance Center of Excellence, receiving $12.5 million in grants over
five years for research relevant to the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
Georgetown
University is a university partner of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. While the details of the partnership are not
public, Lawrence Livermore receives 86% of its funding from the U.S. National
Nuclear Security Administration Weapons Activities Appropriations for the
design, engineering and evaluation of nuclear warheads.
College
students should learn how to make the world a better place, not how to develop
the tools to end it. Universities themselves make this point in their mission
statements. Johns Hopkins sums up its mission as “knowledge for the
world.” The mission of George Washington University is to “educate individuals
in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses
and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the
findings of such research.” Georgetown University’s website states that at the core of its Jesuit
tradition are “transcendent values, including the integration of learning,
faith and service; care for the whole person; character and conviction;
religious truth and interfaith understanding; and a commitment to building a
more just world.”
It is time for
these universities to live up to their own moral objectives.
As a first
step, universities must provide more clarity about their work to support U.S.
nuclear weapons so that students and faculty can make informed choices about
where they would like to invest their intellectual capital. Johns Hopkins
should reconsider whether permitting classified research at the Applied Physics
Laboratory is in line with its “commitment to openness in documentation and dissemination
of research results.”
George
Washington University should shut down its “Stockpile Stewardship Academic
Alliance Center of Excellence,” unless it receives a legally-binding guarantee
that none of the basic research the center conducts will be applied to
maintaining and expanding the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
Georgetown may
continue to partner with Lawrence Livermore on the minority of the laboratory’s
research that contributes to “building a more just world.” But it must explicitly
reject research for the laboratory’s main objective — building and maintaining
nuclear weapons.
Universities
can play a key role to equip the next generation of leaders with the knowledge
and skills to make the world better a place. Nuclear weapons don’t belong
there.
Alicia
Sanders-Zakre (alicia@icanw.org) is
policy and research coordinator of ICAN, Winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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