National Space Symposium

Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

After admiring their work for years, this past spring Nebraskans for Peace officially joined the “Global Network Against Weap-ons & Nuclear Power in Space.” Based in Brunswick, Maine, the network literally in-cludes organizations from around the globe opposed to the U.S.’s ongoing effort to mili-tarize and dominate space. Over the past two decades, Colorado Springs, Colorado has served as the center for this space war-fare research and development and today is the official home of the U.S. Space Com-mand. SpaceCom’s eerie activities should be a concern to anyone on the planet inter-ested in Peace & Justice. But the command has special significance for Nebraskans. In 2002, in the wake of 9/11, SpaceCom was placed under the authority of StratCom. All of the ‘eye in the sky’ intelligence gather-ing and war-making-from-space originat-ing from SpaceCom takes its direction from Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha.

Planning for the strategic domination of space is, as you might well imagine, an enormous undertaking, requiring all the combined might of the Military-Industrial Complex. For the past 22 years, accord-ingly, the Pentagon and the defense indus-try have colluded to host a “Space Sympo-sium” in Colorado Springs to showcase the latest state-of-the-art gadgetry available for sale. The “Symposium,” as the follow-ing report by Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network, details, has become little more than a crude ‘trade fair’ for the defense industry and a corresponding ‘shopping spree’ for the Pentagon (paid for, of course, at taxpayer expense).

StratCom, sad to say, has begun repli-cating this unsavory spectacle with an arms bazaar and confab of its own. This coming October 10-12, the third annual “Strate-gic Space Conference” will be held in Omaha. The best thing that can be said for this nefarious gathering is that it gives us an opportunity to focus international at-tention on the growing menace that StratCom has become for the world com-munity since Bush and Cheney launched the “War on Terrorism.”

The trip began on April 2 with a very early morning drive to Portland, Maine so I could catch the bus from there to the Bos-ton airport. After a three-hour wait in Bos-ton, I flew to Chicago where I ended up with a seven-hour delay due to major thunder-storms throughout the Midwest. I finally arrived in Colorado Springs at 12:30 a.m. and gratefully Bill Sulzman still came to the air-port to pick me up.

Bill Sulzman [brother of NFP Vice Presi-dent Jeanette Sulzman] was one of the found-ing members of the Global Network when it was created in 1992. At that time I was the state coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. Bill’s group, the Colorado Springs-based Citizens for Peace in Space, had been working with us in Florida since the ’80s. For some time the two groups were really the only local organizations in the country doing on-going space organizing. It became clear to us by 1992 that we needed to grow this movement, and with the help of journalist Karl Grossman, we created the Glo-bal Network to do just that.

This year marked the 22nd annual meet-ing of the Space Symposium, an event put on by the aerospace industry. It was re-ported that this year almost 8,000 military personnel, aerospace industry executives and technologists were in attendance. In addition, the Space Symposium brought in hundreds of students from elementary, middle schools and high schools as a way to recruit them to work in the industry.

This event draws a protest each year by Citizens for Peace in Space. The sympo-sium is located at the very posh Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. I was told that a membership to the Broadmoor Golf & Coun-try Club has a $100,000 entry fee and there is a waiting list to join. The setting for the pro-test could not be more ideal. We were able to stand with banners on the sidewalk di-rectly in front of the main symposium audi-torium, thus every person entering the event passed directly by us.

The theme of the protest this year was “Only You Can Prevent Truth Decay,” and T-shirts were made with that message on the front and the schedule of protest events for the week was listed on the back—similar to a rock-and-roll concert tour. The sub- theme was “Blow the Whistle on Crime and Corruption!”

The theme could not have been more timely, as the New York Times reported in its April 2 edition that the Government Account-ability Office (GAO) in Washington has been covering up a scientific fraud among build-ers of the expensive “missile defense” sys-tem. The Times reported that the GAO ig-nored evidence that the two main contrac-tors for the program (Boeing and TRW) had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report.

Our first protest at the symposium be-gan at 5:00 p.m. on April 3, just as the confab was to begin with a banquet. Our group of about 25 folks blew whistles and handed out leaflets urging the vast assemblage en-tering the building to “blow the whistle on the deception that is rampant in the military space program.” We even handed out balo-ney sandwiches to those willing to take one, suggesting our baloney was better than the baloney being passed out inside the space symposium.

On April 4 we got to the symposium at 7:30 a.m. just as the crowd arrived. I held a banner that read “Beware of the Military- Industrial Complex—Dwight D. Eisenhower” and would routinely ask military officers passing by if they would like to take a turn holding it for awhile. I got no takers.

From the space symposium that morn-ing we drove north to Aurora, Colorado where Buckley Air Force Spy & Space War Base is located. We held a vigil outside the main gate with the giant white golf ball- shaped “radomes” in view. Loring Wirbel explained how these systems ‘suck in’ all phone, fax and e-mail communications from throughout the entire world as part of the U.S. program called Echelon. I told the story about how Global Network-affiliated groups in Australia, Germany, England and the like continually protest at U.S. “downlink facili-ties” that collect this information regionally, and then send it via satellite in ‘real time’ to Buckley AFB for final processing.

We were met at the Buckley vigil by the three Dominican Nuns, Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson, who were found guilty in 2003 for having symbolically “dis-armed” a Minuteman nuclear missile silo in northeastern Colorado. Their action, “Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares,” put them in jail for a considerable amount of time and Ardeth was the last to get out just a couple MAY/JUNE 2006 NEBRASKA REPORT, P.7 of months ago. This was the first time they had been back in Colorado since their trial. Following the vigil at Buckley, we made the two-hour drive further north to Weld County where the sisters had done their act of disar-mament at the N-8 missile silo.

When we arrived, we decorated the mis-sile silo gate with yellow crime scene tape and hung an eviction notice, signed by all who were there, on the gate. A team of re-porters from several newspaper and radio outlets listened to the sisters make a state-ment about what motivated them to do the action in 2002. They spoke about their Do-minican Order being one of preachers who were obligated to tell the truth. The nonvio-lent Jesus called on them to publicly wit-ness against weapons of mass destruction. Their mission at the N-8 silo in 2002 was to open the gates so the world could see that the U.S. had WMDs, as Bush lectured the rest of the world about the evils of nuclear weapons. Having worked with the poor all their lives, the sisters insisted that the fund-ing of WMDs was a theft from the poor.

Next we drove back to the nearby town of Greeley where the sisters had been taken to jail following their 2002 action. On this April 4 evening, we were to show the new documentary video called “Conviction” that told the story about the nuns and their peace witness at N-8. The only place that would host the event in Greeley was a Mexican restaurant—and fortunately they had a won-derful buffet. Following dinner, the filmmaker introduced the film and a good crowd of lo-cal people, in addition to those on the pro-test caravan, watched the documentary. The film not only featured the sisters, but also included extensive interviews with the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National As-sociation of Evangelicals, who is based in Colorado Springs. During the film, Haggard explains how U.S. military technology keeps the world free and called the disarmament action by the nuns misguided, criticizing their theological interpretations.

On April 5 we were back out to the Broadmoor Hotel for a lunch time vigil. Bill Sulzman remarked that he had never seen so many military personnel as this year. Many generals (one star, two stars, three stars, four stars) walked past us. Former Republican Congressman Robert Walker, a 20-year vet-eran of the House of Representatives, where he served as Chair of the House Science Committee, passed by us on three different occasions. While in Congress he was a big critic of “liberal big spending,” so each time he walked by I would ask him why we were not reading any quotes from him in the news-paper about the “big spending” Bush Ad-ministration. He groaned and gruffed as he slinked by. At one point I also noticed former Sen. Chuck Robb (D-VA) enter the sympo-sium. Robb, a former Marine, became the first senator ever to simultaneously serve on the Senate Armed Services, Foreign Re-lations, and Intelligence Committees. All these politicians are now working as con-sultants and lobbyists for the military in-dustrial complex. I also noted their business suits were cut from very expensive

cloth these days. Following this mid-day vigil I was in-vited to speak to a Philosophy class at Pikes Peak Community College. The class, I was warned, had a couple of recent Iraq war vet-erans in it and some wives of soldiers at nearby Fort Carson, an Army base that regu-larly sends troops to the war in Iraq. About 20 students were in the class and I was asked to speak about Ethics and the Military In-dustrial Complex. My talk went quite well with no real opposition expressed during our lively question and answer period. It was clear to me that this working class group of students clearly understood that the rich were getting richer in today’s America and that the war in Iraq was a war for control of oil that would only benefit the big corpora-tions. It gave me confidence that the public increasingly has figured out the big picture.

The primary question posed by one student was, “What do we do now?” I an-swered by saying that as I walked from the parking lot to the main building on campus, I was nearly blown over by the powerful wind. Why, I asked, can’t you have some windmills here providing power for this col-lege? Think of the money and energy saved, the oil not needed, and the jobs that could be created in America building windmills. Why not solar too with so much abundant sun in Colorado? Why not a public transit system, here in Colorado and across the U.S., giving you an option other than your ex-pensive car? Why can’t we build these sus-tainable technologies instead of weapons and endless war? And why can’t the peace movement, the environmental movement, and the labor movement create a unified campaign and political demand around this issue? The students got it.

My trip to Colorado ended with another early morning vigil at the Broodmoor Hotel on April 6 as the symposium was wrapping up ‘business.’ On my first day in Colorado Springs, the local newspaper had carried an article about the event and one space sym-posium organizer was quoted as saying the whole event was about ‘business.’ He said the aerospace industry sponsors would be cutting business deals during the week. There is huge money to be made moving the arms race into space and the rats are gather-ing around the cheese. In order to pay for, what the weapons industry calls the “larg-est industrial project in the history of the planet Earth,” the aerospace industry has targeted the “entitlement programs” for de- funding. The space business community wants Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and what is left of the Welfare Program, to be de-funded, with the money moved into the new space arms race.

The open question is how will the American people respond? If my talk to the Philosophy class was any indication, they are not eager to see the dismantling of so-cial progress. But first they must learn about the issue. The week-long protest at the 22nd Annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs was an important contribution to this much needed public debate. I’ll be back next year for more. I hope more of you will join us.

More information about the Global Network can be found at www.space4peace.org.

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