Photo by Ryuno
From Los Alamos to Kwajalein (the Bechtel-built Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site in the Marshall Islands) to Iraq, war, preparation for war, and profiting from war’s devastation are all profit centers for Bechtel.
—Western States Legal Foundation
One June 10, during a week of talk about bombs before bombs fell, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped her own before she apparently caved under pressure from Trump:
This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now, because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.
Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.
The Bechtel Corporation, second largest construction firm in the United States, manages both Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the major construction contractor at the federal Department of Energy Savannah River Site, a nuclear-waste management complex. The three nuclear facilities are embarked on a multi-billion-dollar project to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons triggers, a vital component in the new nuclear arms race. Brendan Bechtel, fifth-generation CEO and chairman of the board of his family’s company, is a member of the political elite and leads a company with its own foreign policy. It is “an entity so powerful, so international in scope, that its officers…could move to the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State respectively as if they were merely shifting assignments at Bechtel,” wrote California historian.
Sally Denton, author of The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World (2016), began her chapter on Bechtel’s takeover of the nation’s nuclear laboratories:
With the labs run at a profit, and with the cost-plus, risk-free business model invented by Steve (Bechtel) Sr. and John McCone in the late 1930s to build pipelines in the Middle East, Bechtel’s 30 percent guaranteed management fee and indemnification from liability would give it a monopoly on the country’s nuclear stockpile.
Western States Legal Foundation concluded, “From Los Alamos to Kwajalein (the Bechtel-built Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site in the Marshall Islands) to Iraq, war, preparation for war, and profiting from war’s devastation are all profit centers for Bechtel.”
When Bechtel took over the LANL and LLNL from the University of California in the early 2000s, “Operational costs at the labs soared … with American taxpayers shelling out $40 million more per year for Livermore alone. Fees paid to … administer Los Alamos and Livermore jumped by 850 percent and 600 percent, respectively,” Denton reported. “Executive salaries also swelled, with the Los Alamos director’s salary shooting from $348,000 to $1.1 million—more than double that of the US president.” When Bechtel took over LLNL, they fired 430 career employees in the first week, one senior official at the lab describing the new management style as combining “the worse aspects of the Department of Motor Vehicles and Goldman Sachs,” Denton wrote.
Denton reflected, at the conclusion her 300-page study of the Bechtels:
The Bechtel story is most important for how the company embodies the rise of a corporate capitalism forged in the American West that over the decades took the world by storm—a capitalism much more in line with cronyism than free market ideology. Bechtel pioneered the revolving door system that now pervades both US politics and the American economic system–a door that came to shape foreign policy not always in the interest of the nation and its citizens, but for the interests of multinational corporations.
In the end, this is the ugly, untold story of America. A story not of the triumph of laissez faire capitalism, but of Profiteers whose sole client was government itself.
The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Doomsday Clock still stood at three minutes when Denton finished her book in 2016. This year it stands at 89 seconds, closer to nuclear war than it ever has since it was begun by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and others in 1947.
Several anti-nuclear-weapons activist groups have joined in a lawsuit to fight the production of new warheads, using the National Environmental Protection Act. A federal district-court judge in South Carolina1. agreed with the groups’ attorneys that since the production of plutonium-pit triggers involved at least two nuclear labs across the nation, the environmental impact statement the government had prepared was inadequate and that a programmatic EIS must be prepared to reflect impacts across the nation from the transport and the design and development of the triggers in South Carolina, New Mexico, and California. The South Carolina Environmental Law Project represented the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, and Tri-Valley CAREs in the successful suit against the National Nuclear Security Administration, “a semi-autonomous agency within DOE that designs and delivers a safe, secure, reliable, and effective U.S. nuclear stockpile.” Denton reported that in the first seven years of its existence, NNSA’s budget “jumped to one and a half times what the nuclear weapons budget had been at the height of the Cold War.”
Republican Congressman David Hobson called it “the ultimate white-collar welfare.”
“Profits and nuclear weapons don’t mix,” said a former general counsel for NNSA.
“The labs were now run by outsiders from private industry who reflected a different ethos than that of the traditional scientists,” Denton wrote.
However, according to Ben Cunningham of South Carolina-based SCELP,2. the use of environmental law in court so impressed the Nobel Prize Center that it has invited SCELP members to Oslo on August 6, the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing to speak on the importance of the greater environmental scrutiny provided by the programmatic environmental impact statement. The groups were also honored in Washington DC on June 10 by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.
The PEIS will be ready in about a year. Comments on its scope3. may be made until July14 and can be emailed to PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov. After completion of the PEIS, in-person public hearings will be held in Livermore, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Kansas City, MO; Aiken, SC; and Washington, DC.
Many speakers in two virtual zoom meetings with NNSA commented that the government had not allowed enough time in the scoping period. Others, experts in specific aspects of the EIS, took them on in detail. Two people from Santa Fe, NM also noted that there was no place in the scoping requirements for “moral, ethical, or spiritual concerns.” This is presumably because such things are neither material nor quantifiable, therefore do not exist in the ideology of materialist scientism that dominates the nuclear “community” and the government regulators drawn from its midst, whose addicts are capable of blowing up the world for somebody’s profit.
Meanwhile, the Trumpers are busy trying to destroy any mention of environmental law forevermore. In the words of Sacramento lawyer/blogger, Casey A. Shorrock:
…Everyone4. from law firm bloggers to the Rolling Stone are reporting on the Trump Administration’s recent evisceration of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations and standards. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” which, most notably: (i) revoked a 1977 Carter Administration executive order directing the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to adopt binding NEPA regulations; (ii) provided 30 days for CEQ to propose rescinding its NEPA regulations; and (iii) directed CEQ to issue guidance on NEPA implementation “to expedite and simplify the permitting process.” A day later, President Trump issued Executive Order 1417, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunity,” rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to address environmental justice issues in minority and low-income populations, which ultimately has resulted in nearly 30 years’ worth of NEPA documents including environmental justice analyses. Then, as a kind of regulatory hat trick, in order to comply with Executive Order 14154, on February 25, 2025, CEQ published its interim final rule, “Removal of National Environmental Policy Regulations,” to take effect 45 days from publication and remove “all iterations” of CEQ’s NEPA regulations, including the version changed during the first Trump Administration in 2020 and the version promulgated thereafter by the Biden Administration.
It isn’t just that the environment is losing in this scenario; special private interests, not the public, are being handed a very large prize, all bought and paid for. In the words of an oil executive in the movie, Syriana:“Corruption is why we win.”
But what will be left for the political elite and warmongers to win after their “winnable” nuclear war? What good is a wholesale attack of dubious legality on environmental law if the environment is reduced to flames and ashes because certain elites figure they could survive nuclear war and get richer while snuggled together a half a mile beneath the tree roots negotiating a no-bid contract with the president for reconstruction of the country?
In a letter titled, “On My Participation in the Atomic Bomb Project,” published by the Japanese socialist magazine, Kaizo, in 1952, Albert Einstein wrote against the weapons governments produce, not yet imagining the profit motive presently driving American warhead development:
As long however, as nations are not ready to abolish war by common action and to solve their conflicts in a peaceful way on a legal basis, they feel compelled to prepare for war. They feel moreover compelled to prepare the most abominable means, in order not to be left behind in the general armaments race. Such procedure leads inevitably to war, which, in turn, under today’s conditions, spells universal destruction.
Under such circumstances there is no hope in combating the production of specific weapons or means of destruction. Only radical abolition of war and of danger of war can help. Toward this goal one should strive; in fact nobody should allow himself to be forced into actions contrary to this goal. This is a harsh demand for anyone who is aware of his social inter-relatedness; but it can be followed.
Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time has shown the way and has demonstrated that sacrifices man is willing to bring if only he has found the right way. His work for the liberation of India is a living example that man’s will, sustained by an indomitable conviction is stronger than apparently invincible material power.6.
NOTES
1. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/hot-plutonium-pit-bomb-redux/
4. https://somachlaw.com/policy-alert/nepa-and-ceqa-the-times-they-are-a-changin/
5. https://imsdb.com/scripts/Syriana.html
The post Doubleplus Unsmart: Mixing Profits and Nuclear Weapons appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.