Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

^2. Protest and Universities

Laray Polk: What was the rationale for the protest when the Iranian students came to MIT in the 1970s?

Noam Chomsky: There was a secret agreement made between MIT and the shah of Iran, which pretty much amounted to turning over the Nuclear Engineering Department to the shah. For some unspecified but probably large amount of money, MIT agreed to accept nuclear engineers from Iran to train in the United States; it could have become a nuclear weapons program. There was not much question about that. They called it nuclear energy. It was being pressed in Washington by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz. They wanted Iran to develop nuclear facilities and they were allies at the time. That was pre-1979. Well, the story leaked, as these things tend to do. And what happened then was pretty interesting. The students got pretty upset about it, there was a lot of student protest, and then finally a referendum on campus. I think about 80 percent voted against it. Of course, that’s not binding; that’s student opinion.

But there was enough of a protest that they had to call a faculty meeting about it. Usually nobody goes to faculty meetings—too boring to go to—but at this meeting everybody showed up; it was huge. The proposal was presented by the administration, and then there was discussion. There were maybe five of us, I think, who stood up to oppose it, and it passed overwhelmingly.

How did you present your opposition?

MIT, first of all, shouldn’t be taking support from states developing nuclear capabilities. And if the US government wants to do it, I’ll protest that too, but it shouldn’t be done here. That’s not the task of a university to help other countries develop nuclear capabilities. They shouldn’t do it here either, but certainly not for another country ruled by a brutal tyrant just because it’s an ally. But it was a straightforward argument. Essentially, the students’ argument.

It’s quite interesting if you think about it sociologically. The faculty of today are the students of a few years ago, but the shift in institutional role completely changed their attitudes. So the students were outraged and the faculty thought it was fine.

Incidentally, there are worse cases than this not involving the universities, but the press won’t report on them. Reagan and Bush were practically in love with Saddam Hussein—after the US basically won the war for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War, Bush wanted to increase aid to Iraq over a lot of objections from the Treasury Department and others, mostly on economic grounds, but he wanted it. In fact, in 1989 Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production.[16] Then, in 1990, he sent a high-level senatorial delegation to Iraq led by Bob Dole (later a presidential candidate), with Alan Simpson and other big shots, and their mission was to convey Bush’s greetings to his friend Saddam and also to inform him that he should disregard criticisms that he hears in the American press. They promised Saddam that they would remove someone from the Voice of America who was being critical of Saddam. This was long after all of his worst atrocities—the Anfal massacre, the Halabja massacre—which the Reagan administration tried to cover up, said they were done by the Iranians, not by Saddam. All of that has been deep-sixed. You can find it in congressional hearings, but nobody will report it or comment on it.[17] That’s even worse than what was happening with Iran under the shah. The record is not a very pretty one if you look at it, and it certainly is not one of trying to reduce proliferation.

How can we be sure that any government is going to remain stable? For example, when the Iranian students came, the shah was in power, nobody knew that the Islamic uprising was coming—

They don’t care whether it’s Islamic or not. Take, say, Pakistan, in the 1980s: Pakistan was under the rule of a dictator, the worst of their many dictators, Zia-ul-Haq, who was also pushing a radical Islamist agenda and was receiving extensive funding from Saudi Arabia. They were trying to Islamize society, that’s when they were starting to set up these madrassas all over where the kids just study the Koran and radical Islam and so on. Saudi Arabia is the center of radical Islam, the most extreme fundamentalist state anywhere, and Reagan was supporting it.[18] They don’t care about radical Islam.

Like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, bin Laden before—

The US supported them. And in fact, they explained why. It had nothing to do with liberating Afghanistan. The head of the CIA mission in Islamabad, that’s where the planning was going on, was frank about it. Basically he said, “We don’t have any interest in liberating Afghanistan, what we want to do is kill Russians.” And this is their chance. Brzezinski, to paraphrase, said things like, “This is great, it’s paying the Russians back for Vietnam.”[19] What were the Russians doing in Vietnam? Well, they were providing some limited support for resistance to US aggression, but that’s a crime, so we’ve got to pay them back by killing Russians and if a million Afghans die, it’s their problem.

Do you think it ever occurred to planners that al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, might come up with their own agenda?

Probably not. You can say the same about Hamas. Israel supported Hamas in the early days because they were a weapon against the secular PLO.[20] The US and Israel have quite consistently supported radical Islamic stands and it goes way back. Back in the early ’60s—in fact, the ’50s and the ’60s—there was a major conflict in the Arab world between Nasser, who was the symbol of secular nationalism, and Saudi rulers, who were the guardians of extremist, radical Islam. Who did the US support? The Saudis, of course. They were afraid of secular nationalism.

The British too. There’s a book by a British diplomatic historian—which will probably barely get reviewed in England—which is about Britain’s support of radical Islam, and it was quite extreme.[21] Same reasons, secular nationalism is much more dangerous. Sometimes you catch a tiger by the tail and don’t expect it. This is pretty much the same with Hezbollah. They developed in reaction to the US-backed Israeli invasion and occupation. That’s the way the world works.

Sometimes it’s called blowback. There are some analysts who argue that this is a self-defeating policy. But I’m not so convinced. I mean, the big mistake is supposed to have been installing the shah and overturning the parliamentary system, but it’s hard to see where that was a mistake. For twenty-five years it kept Iran completely under control, kept the US in control over the energy system. Planning doesn’t go much beyond that. If things work for twenty-five years, that’s a success.

The Tehran Research Reactor requires highly enriched uranium fuel to operate; the same is true for MIT’s reactor. The Department of Energy has told MIT it must convert to low-enriched fuel, but the head of engineering at the reactor said they’re most likely not going to meet the deadline.[22]

I don’t know anything about this.

It’s contentious on two points. One, there’s a reactor in a densely populated urban area. And two—

It’s what they’re using as fuel. So, you can do things with the high-energy fuel that you can’t do with less enriched fuel?

According to a Boston Globe story from 2009, the “MIT reactor could be converted quickly if it were willing to give up some performance.” The same report states the reactor “brings in about $1.5 million a year from commercial work, which covers about 60 percent of the annual operating costs.”[23]

Where do they get that from?

I’m unsure of the specific entities, but mainly from producing radiotherapies.[24]

There hasn’t been an inquiry at MIT into research, as far as I’m aware, since 1969. At that time, under the pressure of the student movement, there was a faculty/student inquiry. Actually I was on the committee, the Pounds Commission, which looked into MIT’s finances and also into war-related activities on campus. It was pretty interesting. It turned out that nobody, even the administration, knew the financial details. It turned out that roughly half of the institute budget was running two classified military laboratories: Lincoln, and what’s now the Draper Lab. The other half of the budget, I think, was approximately 90 percent funded by the Pentagon in those days.

The Pentagon, contrary to what people believe, is the greatest funder there is. They don’t pay all that much attention to what you’re doing; they just know that they’re the way to funnel taxpayer money into the next stage of the economy. We did look into military work. It turns out there was no classified work on campus and no direct military-related work, but anything that’s done is likely to have some military application. The only department that had any war-related work was the Political Science Department and it was being done under the rubric of a Peace Research Institute—straight out of Orwell—which had villas in Saigon where they were sending students for PhDs on counterinsurgency. And they were also running secret seminars in the Political Science Department on Vietnam strategy and so on. I found out when I was invited to take part in one.

Outside the Political Science Department, it was pretty clean. Now, if you take a look over the years, Pentagon funding has declined and funding from the NIH has increased. And I suspect almost everybody understands it. The reason is because the cutting edge of the economy is shifting to biology, away from an electronics-based economy, so you have to rip off the taxpayer in some different fashion. We don’t have a free-market economy. Federal spending, government procurement, and other devices are huge components. Funding is also getting more corporatized. I suspect what is going on here is more corporate funding, and the corporate funding has a general cheapening effect.

Federal funding is long term, it’s nonintrusive, and they just want things to be done. But if big corporations fund something, they’re not interested in the future health of the economy. They want something for themselves. So it means that research becomes more short term, it becomes much more secret. Federal funding is completely open, but a corporation can impose secrecy; they can indicate you’re not going to get refunded unless you keep it quiet. So it does impose secrecy. There are some famous cases that have come out; one big scandal even made the Wall Street Journal.

As long as it stays secret, they can do as they like.

Robert Barsky wrote that during the protests on the MIT campus in the 1960s, you held an extreme position even among the liberal faculty. Basically, you didn’t believe shutting down the labs involved in military research was the solution, but rather, “universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do so openly.”[25] What is to be gained by that approach?

These matters came to a head at the Pounds Commission. Its primary concern was the relation of MIT’s academic/research program to the two military laboratories it administered, Lincoln and the Instrumentation Lab (now the Draper Lab). The commission split three ways. One group (call them “conservatives”) favored keeping the labs on campus. A second (“liberals”) favored separating the labs from MIT. A third (“radicals,” I think consisting just of me and the one student representative) agreed with the conservatives, though for different reasons. If the labs were formally separated, nothing much would change in substance: joint seminars and other interactions would continue pretty much as before, but now with formally separate entities. What the labs are doing would disappear as a campus issue. But what they are doing is vastly more important than the appearance of a “clean campus,” and their presence would be a regular focus for education and activism. The liberal view prevailed, and the outcome was much as anticipated—a step backward, I think, for the reasons mentioned.

Pentagon funding was a major device used by the government from the early postwar period to lay the basis for the high-tech economy of the future: computers, the Internet, microelectronics, satellites, etc.—the IT revolution generally. After several decades primarily in the public sector, the results were handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. By the 1970s government funding was shifting from the Pentagon to the biology-related institutions: the NIH and others. The military was a natural funnel for an electronics-based economy. Fifty years ago the small start-ups spinning off from MIT were electronics firms, which, if successful, were bought up by Raytheon and other electronics giants. Today the small start-ups are in genetic engineering, biotechnology, etc., and the campus is surrounded by major installations of pharmaceutical firms and the like.[26] The same dynamics have been duplicated elsewhere.

The Pentagon itself gains little if anything from this, not even prestige. In fact, few even know how the system works. To illustrate, I once wrote an article about a speech to newspaper editors by Alan Greenspan—called “St. Alan” during his day in the sun, and heralded as one of the great economists of all time. He was hailing the marvels of our economy, based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, the usual oration. He made the mistake, however, of giving examples, each of them textbook illustrations of what I have just described: the role of the dynamic state sector of the economy during the hard part of research and development (along with government procurement and other devices of what amounts to a kind of industrial policy). Greenspan’s illusions are the common picture.[27]

The system as a whole certainly merits critical examination, for one reason, because there is virtually no public input in crucial decision making. But I’ve never seen the force of the argument against employment at a university that is being publicly funded for research, development, and teaching, and it seems of little moment whether the funding technique happens to be via the Pentagon, the NIH, the Department of Energy, or some other formal mechanism.

In general, what matters is what work is being done, not how it’s funded. Biological warfare is no more benign if it’s funded by the NIH or by a private corporation. Universities are parasitic institutions. They don’t (or shouldn’t) be geared to production for the market. If they are to survive, they have to be funded somehow, and there are few options in existing society.

For what it’s worth, while the MIT lab where I was working in the ’60s was 100 percent funded by the armed services (as you can see from formal acknowledgments by publishers), it also happened to be one of the main centers of academic resistance against the Vietnam War, perhaps the main one; not protest, but active resistance.[28] And by the late ’60s MIT probably had the most radical student president of any US campus, with plenty of student support and related activism, which had quite positive and long-lasting effects on campus life.[29]

What are alternative ways of viewing campuses?

A campus is primarily an educational institution. A crucial part of education is coming to understand the world in which we live, and what we can do to make it a better place. Any college, and particularly a research university like MIT, should also be a center of creative and independent thought and inquiry, along with critical evaluation of the directions that such inquiry should pursue, with cooperative participation of the general university community.[30] It should also bring in, as feasible, the outside community. My own courses on social and political issues—which I was teaching on my own time—were usually open to the public, sometimes at night for that reason, others too.

I don’t suggest any of this as an “alternative,” but rather as an ideal, approximated more or less, and a guideline for commitment and choice of action.