February 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Telling Which Way the Wind is Blowing

Long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote The Last Energy War: The Battle Over Utility Deregulation (Seven Stories Press, 2000). He gave this talk, transcribed by Thea Paneth and abridged here, at an event sponsored by Somerville-Medford United for Justice with Peace and the Peace and Justice Task Force of Watertown Citizens for Environmental Safety on November 5, 2003.

Livermore, CA wind farm Photo: Paul Mozell, www.mozellstudios.com

The US anti-nuclear-power movement started in the town of Montague, Massachusetts. This is a good story for dark times, because it’s a tale of how what goes around comes around, even for the powers that be.

In 1968, a group of us were running a radical news service in New York called Liberation News Service. To make a long story short, we were infiltrated by the FBI as part of COINTELPRO. This is not a conspiracy theory — we have the documentation, gathered through the Freedom of Information Act. On orders signed by J. Edgar Hoover, they sent people into our news service, not with the idea of gathering information, but with the explicit order to break us up and destroy the news service.

They created a terrible rift inside the news service. There was gay-baiting, there was everything you could imagine. So, some of us absconded with the money and equipment from the news service, and fled to Montague, Massachusetts. That’s how our farm started.

So, this is how J. Edgar Hoover became the godfather of the movement against nuclear power. Had he not gone in and broken up our news service, the Montague farm never would have started. In 1973 the local utility company said they were going to build a nuclear power plant four miles from our house. We were thrilled. The war was winding down and we were wondering what we were going to do for the rest of our lives, and this was a whole new world that opened up.

Of course I was already the expert at the farm on nuclear power, because I’d done a report on nuclear power in the ninth grade. Sam Lovejoy, from the farm, knocked over the weather tower, we made a movie about it (Lovejoy’s Nuclear War — see the video-film library). I actually coined the phrase "No Nukes," which I should have copyrighted. Someone was obviously going to do it, but it came through my typewriter first.

When we started fighting nuclear power in the 1970s, there was probably 75-80% approval among the American public for commercial atomic power, and nobody thought we would have any impact.

In 1973 there was very little precedent of people fighting nuclear power plants and even less precedent of anyone winning. But when we first started in western Massachusetts there were plans for a thousand nuclear plants in the US by the year 2000. All the wild and crazy stuff people said wouldn’t have any impact had an enormous impact.

Among other things, it was probably the first large-scale social movement in this country to be conducted with virtually perfect nonviolence. Nonviolence has worked for the anti-nuclear movement. We knew we would have to be nonviolent right from the start. With nuclear power you can’t even think about violence because of the nature of the plants and the disasters that could occur. So when we first started demonstrating at Seabrook in 1976, it was determined that we would use nonviolent civil disobedience. With the help of trainers from the American Friends Service Committee, we developed a whole modus operandi using affinity groups.

Instead of a thousand nuclear plants, we have 103, and the number is going down. We now have zero reactors either under construction or on order in the United States — and it’s due almost entirely to the work of the anti-nuclear-power movement.

There has been a technological revolution in energy. Wind power is one of the biggest, fastest growing industries in the world today; twenty-five to thirty-five percent growth annually [www.awea.org]. We have a theoretical wind-power generating capacity of three times the total electricity consumption of the United States just between the Mississippi and the Rockies (see www.nrel.gov/wind/wind_potential.html). You would have problems getting it to where it’s being used — at this stage of the game with currently available technology — but there is absolutely no excuse for building anything but a windmill west of the Mississippi. The entire western United States could and should get all its new capacity from wind power and it will be cheaper, safer, cleaner and more reliable in straight capitalist terms than anything else they can build. Wind will be even cheaper than natural gas because the price of natural gas is about to skyrocket as the supply falls off a cliff.

So how do we win? Well, the first and foremost thing we have to do is continue to operate in the great historic democratic tradition of the United States. Our Bill of Rights is, I believe, as great a document as any ever written for civil society. We have to continue to exert our freedoms in whatever sense we possibly can. We need to remember our successes to provide hope for the future. One way or another these people will overstep, but it’s up to us to remember that when things look darkest — that’s when you start to win.

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