02/18/14 – Corey Hutchins – The Scott Horton Show

Alright you guys, welcome to the show.
Back to it.
I'm Scott Horton, this is the show.
And our guest today is Corey Hutchins.
Let's see, here's his bio.
Staff writer for the Charleston City Paper.
Also writes for the Huffington Post.
Oh, South Carolina Press Association's Journalist of the Year, that's pretty good.
Works with the Columbia Journalism Review and the Progressive and et cetera like that.
And now he's writing for a thing called The War is Boring, which is at medium.com slash warisboring.
And I don't think you need the hyphens, it'll forward you on it, I'm pretty sure.
Medium.com slash warisboring.
Welcome to the show, Corey, how are you doing?
Hey, how are you?
I'm doing real good, appreciate you joining us on the show today.
You bet.
So, listen, my first question is, what's War is Boring?
How long has this been around, and who's behind it, and what's going on here?
Sure, War is Boring is a collection at Medium.
Medium.com is a new media venture launched by one of the founders of Twitter.
And it is fast becoming one of the premier places for all sorts of writing on the internet.
War is Boring is run by David Axe.
Are you familiar with him?
Only from reading War is Boring over the last few weeks, but that's it.
And I understand he wrote a book about the F-35, which is a favorite topic of mine.
Yeah, and he's doing another one on drone warfare, too.
Anyway, David Axe is a war correspondent who has been a reporter and editor for years, and has been in different conflict zones all over the world.
And he used to write for Wired, Wired Danger Room, and he ran a blog called War is Boring.
He wrote a graphic novel called War is Boring, and he now edits the War is Boring collection at Medium, where he reports on conflict all over the world and here at home.
And I am a contributor to that.
Okay, great.
Well, it's not quite as anti-war as I would like, but that's okay.
I've read some very substantive writing there, and I really appreciate it so far.
I'm going to keep looking at it.
And in fact, we're running your piece at AntiWar.com today.
Okay.
Red Cross to the world, eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.
Take us through this.
There was some big conference or something?
I didn't hear about it.
I was late to it.
My plane was stuck on the tarmac.
You said you didn't hear about it, and you're not alone.
I didn't even know this conference was going on.
Not that I am, you know, someone who consistently covers the nuclear industry or nuclear weapons or anything like that.
I did write a big piece about the nuclear weapons industry last summer for Medium.
But in the process of writing and reporting that piece, I got on some mailing lists from nuclear watchdogs, and I got an email over the weekend, I think on Saturday, from Trish Mello, who works for the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, which is a nuclear watchdog group.
And in her email, I think it was blasted out to her media contacts, but it was written kind of in a personal narrative, and it said, Hey, I'm at this conference the past couple of days, and this is what I saw.
There were 147 countries there, and I was like, I hadn't even heard about this.
And so I just pulled up Google News and just kind of typed in some of the keywords from her email, and it turned out there had been this conference going on in Nayarit, Mexico, on the 13th and the 14th, featuring more than 140-something different countries, a whole bunch of different governments showed up, and humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross.
And they held this conference, their second annual conference, about the impact of nuclear weapons in the world.
Last year's was in Oslo, and I think next year's planned for Austria.
So I just thought that was pretty interesting.
I hadn't seen anything in the big papers, in the Washington Post, the New York Times.
I hadn't seen any broadcast coverage of it.
And so I started looking at some of the disparate coverage I could find, and I called up someone at the Los Alamos Study Group and talked to them about what was going on there.
It just seems like one of these undercover stories, you know, I kind of like it, here's the world event featuring more than 100 countries that you didn't hear about, and all we heard about was the Olympics.
Right.
I mean, all the networks were there.
So going through, I saw that the Red Cross had attended and came out with a pretty bold statement in which the International Red Cross said, you know, we're calling for nuclear disarmament, because what I thought was really interesting was their reasoning.
And they said that it would be virtually impossible to do any kind of humanitarian relief effort in the event of a nuclear accident or a nuclear attack.
And they had conference panelists, survivors, and their children of, you know, what happened in Japan.
And so I just wrote this pretty brief piece for Medium called Red Cross of the World will not meet nuclear weapons once for all.
So it was just one more voice in the coverage of it, and there wasn't a lot of coverage of it.
Right, yeah, you doubled the number of news stories in the world this year.
Good thing, too.
No, it's extremely important.
This is, I guess, a little bit of an oversimplification, but it sort of sounds like what you're saying here is that every national government in the world, or virtually every other national government in the world, other than the nuclear weapons states, they were all there.
They have a consensus.
Yeah, that's right.
And that was one of the things that stuck out to me, too.
There are five countries in the world that are acknowledged to be able to have nuclear weapons in some capacity according to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and those countries are the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China.
And none of those countries attended the conference on Thursday or Friday, and I'm told they didn't attend last year either.
Well, now, so I guess part of this is that, well, I wonder about that nuclear blackout.
Do you think that there's any kind of pressure inside the media from the government or from industry to not pay attention to stuff, or just really nobody cares about H-bombs because that's boring old crap?
Yeah, I mean, that's just my sense.
H-bombs are boring.
That's the new URL.
It was boring.
Atomic war is more boring.
Yeah, I really don't know.
I often don't hear a lot of people discuss in general conversations big philosophical arguments about whether countries on this planet should or should not have nuclear weapons.
I'm not sure if it's just a debate that's kind of run its course.
I don't know.
There was a piece in the Huffington Post, a blog that somebody wrote, I think, a couple days before the conference that was pointing out that people need to kind of pay attention to this because people might believe that, oh, this is just so Pollyannish, this is so impossible, the world's never going to disarm, every country's never going to agree.
And the writer who wrote this was Jody Williams.
She's the chair of the Nobel Women's Initiative, Organization of Nobel Peace Laureates.
And she was saying that you might think that that's the case, but there was a campaign years ago called the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and people thought that that was impossible back then, but they ended up able to get that done in 1997.
So who knows?
Maybe H-bombs, atomic weapons, aren't as sexy as landmines.
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, the problem is landmines go off so often that they can catch people's attention.
Here's a little kid missing a leg and all that.
Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to have to wait until somebody H-bombs a city off the face of the earth and say, wow, those are a lot bigger than back in the Hiroshima days now.
Right, right.
I mean, it could go that way.
And, well, it's also worth pointing out, I guess, right?
It seems sort of worth mentioning that the Nonproliferation Treaty, which the U.N. Security Council, the nuclear weapons states you named there, and then, of course, Israel, India, and Pakistan are nuclear weapons states outside of the NPT and the U.N. Security Council.
But all the U.N. Security Council nuclear weapons states, they're all signatories to the NPT, which bans all non-nuclear weapons states from ever trying to get them.
But it also says that we promised to get rid of ours.
Yeah.
And that's been the world law for 40 years now, supposedly.
Yeah.
And the truth is that we're not getting rid of ours, right?
And, you know, last summer, Barack Obama was in Brandenburg Gate in Germany saying that he was going to reduce our nuclear stockpile.
Well, that made a few headlines that day and maybe a couple days after, but I haven't heard much about that since.
And, you know, if you want to go back to a piece I wrote in June for Medium, for War is Boring, it was called The Nuke Factory in Your Backyard.
And, you know, I really kind of stumbled across this story.
At the time I was a reporter for an alt weekly in Columbia, South Carolina, and I got a tip.
It was actually the week that Obama was in Germany talking about reducing the nuclear arms capacity in America.
And a guy who follows the industry, the nuclear industry very closely, said to me, hey, you might not know it, but just a few miles from your office they're building in a civilian nuclear power plant components used in nuclear weapons.
Did you know that?
And I said, no.
And I asked around and I couldn't find anybody who had ever heard about that.
And the folks I did talk to about it who follow the industry told me, well, if that's happening, that's kind of shady because part of the treaty is that you can't have this crossover.
It's called a no-dual-use policy.
If you have a civilian power facility, you're not supposed to be engaging in nuclear weapons material at that facility.
And so I thought, well, if this is being done I'll try and find out.
And it turned out that, sure enough, in this giant facility kind of a little bit near the Gamecocks football stadium in Columbia, South Carolina, there was this Westinghouse facility that worked on civilian uranium nuke power.
But also there were three government contractors for a private company called Westine, which is a subsidiary of Westinghouse, who were making stainless steel rods that went on to another civilian power plant in Tennessee where they were injected with a compound called tritium, an isotope called tritium, which determines how big the blast is going to be in a nuclear weapon.
All right, now we've got to hold it right there and take this break.
We'll be right back.
We're talking with Corey Hutchins.
He's writing at medium.com slash war is boring, the nuke factory in your backyard, and Red Cross to the world, eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all are the articles in question.
And we'll be back right after this.
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All right, all right.
Welcome back to the show.
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I'm talking with Corey Hutchins from WarIsBoring.
That's Medium.com slash WarIsBoring.
And we're talking about the Red Cross meeting that took place last week that no other Americans know about, apparently, where there was unanimity in a call for an outright, complete, and total ban on nuclear weapons, which is the only rational conclusion that anyone could possibly make, assuming you have as any part of your motive the continued existence of mankind on the face of the Earth, you know, for the medium term even, especially when you're looking at the size of the arsenals.
So you're talking about the loophole they used there at this Westinghouse facility that, well, this isn't nuclear material.
These are just the steel rods that are used to make the nuclear material for the nuclear triggers, etc.
So we don't have to report this part of it.
But it helps to obscure the extent of what you rightly call the, I guess, the quote-unquote privatized public-private partnership there between, you know, the nuclear weapons industrial complex and the state and how they work together.
And so that leads to the question, just how many nukes are we talking about?
And as you say in here, they have to be replenished with new tritium triggers and what have you all the time.
And so they keep this process going.
And then that becomes many different individual people's vested interest to keep that going, right?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, let's think about why that could be.
So at one point, on one side we have the president of the United States saying that we're going to reduce our nuclear stockpile.
Well, there was a movement back in, and I will just say a few technical stuff about this tritium that we're talking about.
Ken Bergeron, who worked in nuclear labs for years, wrote a book called Tritium on Ice.
And he calls tritium the lifeblood of the nuclear industry, basically, the lifeblood of nuclear weapons.
Because they said earlier what tritium does is determines the blast radius or blast size when the weapon goes off.
So you want to dial it real high or dial it real low.
You use a lot or a little tritium.
So there's a necessary component to that part of the atomic weapon.
The problem is, unlike other components and unlike other nuclear material, it has a pretty short half-life.
You know, only, I think, a dozen years or so.
And so it constantly, at 12.5 years, it decays pretty rapidly.
Uranium or plutonium take thousands of years to decay.
So we're constantly having to replenish the supply.
And there was a movement years ago among, I guess, peace activists who were saying, well, you know, one way to get rid of our nuke supply would just be to let the tritium decay and don't juice it up again.
But that hasn't happened.
We're still doing that.
And as you mentioned, it's private industries that are engaged in government contracts to do this stuff.
And when you have, you know, private companies making a lot of money, their employees, their managers, their CEOs are donating to politicians who oversee perhaps the budget of the nuclear programs.
And so you can understand how it might be a little harder to do than just to stand up there and say, yeah, we're going to get rid of our nuclear stockpile.
In other words, it's like anything else.
It's like the AARP or Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto or, you know, Pfizer and whatever, the biggest of the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies.
They just are rent seeking in D.C., doing whatever they can to rig the law and make things their way.
Only in this case, we're talking about the entire fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
And it is done also pretty quietly.
As I mentioned before, Westside has been manufacturing these rods in this civilian power facility since the late 90s.
And the first time it was reported in the local media was last year.
And, you know, even folks who follow the industry very closely said, yeah, you know, we kind of thought they were doing it there, but, you know, either they could never prove it or didn't ask, you know, the right questions.
And it's not like they're, I don't want to say it's not like they're maybe trying to keep it secret.
I mean, when I asked government officials at the Department of Energy about this, they were pretty open in saying, yeah, we're doing it.
And we've always disclosed it when we had to, like in government accountability reports and things like that.
You know, we're not hiding anything.
But if you go to Westinghouse's website or something, you're not going to be able to find Westside on there.
They don't certainly advertise in their promotional materials, at least none that I saw what they're doing there.
So you've got to wonder, you know, where else are things like this going on in the country?
And do people know about it?
And I would say that probably the neighbors and the community who live around that plant have no idea that they're manufacturing components that are closely linked to nuclear weapons.
And while it's not something that would ever cause a nuclear accident, you might wonder philosophically if people care about that kind of thing.
Right.
Well, you know, it really stood out to me in your article, back to the point about the lobbying and the comparisons to other industries, aside from the secrecy part that you mentioned there.
It just struck me in your reporting here about just how normal this all was, where, yeah, this senator and this congressman, they get a lot of donations.
And this guy, of course, you know, the North Dakota delegation, they're always for nuclear weapons.
And it's amazing to me to think, you know, when there's supposed to be such a thing as the national interest that, you know, no one should there should be no such thing as a parochial interest involved in whether we have a hydrogen, a hydrogen bomb forward policy or whatever.
But instead, the whole thing, just like any other project of the Pentagon or any other government agency, if you ask me, it's a self-licking ice cream cone.
And they just keep the thing going on.
As you say, I'm paraphrasing you bad, but you say something along the lines of attitude follows behavior.
If you're holding thousands of hydrogen bombs, well, you must be holding them for some reason.
You must really need them for something.
If it ain't the Russians, it's the asteroids or whatever, because you're never going to say, you know what, we need to go into business distributing food or something else.
You're making H-bombs, whether you're working for the government or whether you're working for Honeywell, you're making the H-bombs.
That's your thing.
The laws of thermodynamics are with you to just keep doing what you're doing until somebody makes you stop.
Right?
Pretty much.
Scary.
And now again, we're talking about weapons that can kill an entire city in one shot.
And again, just go back to what the Red Cross said, because that was one of the things I read that really resonated with me, is that they basically said the reason we need to get rid of nuclear weapons all over the globe is because, God forbid, if anything happened, it would be virtually impossible to do any kind of humanitarian relief effort.
Not only just the initial response, but having to keep going back to where it happened or close to where it happened.
It could be, as they said, virtually impossible.
All right.
And now, what was I going to ask you?
It was going to be great.
I know.
It was about Global Zero and establishment figures, the gray old wise men of the CFR and whatever, who have come out and said that maybe we don't even need nukes for an America, obviously, a very, quote-unquote, defense-oriented foreign policy.
All of these guys, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and them.
But they're saying maybe we don't need to threaten the world with H-bombs in order to still get what we want.
Right?
That's pretty legit and mainstream and straightforward.
Well, one of the things I was told when I was looking at – when I was reporting the piece about the nuke factory in your backyard is one nuclear watchdog told me the United States is always wagging its finger at North Korea, and yet we're possibly violating the spirit of the treaty over here in our own country.
If you listen to what the nuke watchdogs say, that they're violating, in America, the no-dual-use policy, which is that you're not supposed to engage in production or manufacture of nuclear weapons components in civilian facilities.
If we're doing it here, why are we telling another country not to do it?
Right.
Yeah, especially when we're beating the Iranians over the head with the NPT and their safeguards agreement that they haven't really violated.
Well, maybe you could argue about the safeguards agreement, but I wouldn't say so.
But certainly they're not in some major violation of the NPT.
But the U.S. beats them over the head with it all day long.
But meanwhile, India is outside of the NPT, and Condoleezza Rice goes over there doing everything she can to help them advance their nuclear program and they'll only help us out in Afghanistan, which is, of course, ridiculous and counterproductive in Afghanistan.
But that's besides the point.
But I mean, that's some serious hypocrisy there.
I mean, really proliferating, firsthand proliferation from the United States for India's nuclear program just in the last few years.
Right.
I can't say I know too much about that, man.
All right.
Well, everybody Google Condoleezza Rice and India's nukes.
It's a sad, sad story.
But anyway.
Yeah, I mean, still making your point that it's all very hypocritical when those most armed with these weapons are being so hypocritical about Korea.
Of course, the story of Korea, John Pfeffer's great on this, by the way, if you want to read about it, anyone, is about how Bush really pushed North Korea to nukes and basically bullied them out of the NPT.
And only then did they start, you know, turn off their cameras and kick out the inspectors and start making nukes because Bush broke the Clinton deal.
Not that it was the greatest deal in the whole world, but they certainly weren't making nuclear weapons under it.
And so, you know, still, Kim Jong Il has to take responsibility for his own actions.
But so does George W. Bush and the people who supported his behavior there because he really screwed that up.
And now they have at least supposedly a half a dozen nukes.
Good old American, you know, forward thinking policy there.
Anyway, sorry.
Sometimes I like ranting about nuclear weapons.
Well, I'll go ahead and mention then Dan Ellsberg, too, about the hundreds of millions who would die in the event of a nuclear war between America and Russia.
At the very least, that would be just the first few weeks of it.
So people want to read about that.
Well, look out, look out for this conference next year around this time, I guess.
Right.
Yeah, there you go.
At Red Cross, they have all that.
All right.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry for talking so much.
Thanks so much for your time, Corey.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Take care.
Corey Hutchins, everybody.
War is boring.
Medium.com slash war is boring.