Land, sea, air, space Bath Iron Works launches a new Aegis destroyer; a life-long activist wonders about its greater purpose, and who this ship is really meant to protect BY JESS KILBY
	CONVERGING FOR PEACE   Maine Veterans for Peace (VFP) organizers are expecting hundreds of activists from around the region to turn out for the USS Momsen protest. If you want to show your support or just check it out, here’s a schedule of events: 7 a.m.: gather in Library Park (Bath, Maine) 7:45: speakers and music 8:45: march to BIW front gates 9: hang out until half-hour after the launch 11:30: closing circle Speakers at the protest include Bruce Gagnon, Kathy Kelly (founder of Voices in the Wilderness; she’s led more than 70 humanitarian missions to Iraq to deliver medical supplies), and Liz McAlister (widow of well known peace activist Philip Berrigan, and a lifelong activist herself). Just before the march to BIW’s gates, organizers have planned a christening ceremony of their own, for the USS Philip Berrigan — a fishing boat that will be the "flagship for Maine’s Peace Navy." Berrigan did jail time back in 1997 for his participation in a highly publicized, symbolic "disarming" of the USS Sullivans (another Aegis) at BIW, in which he and four others took to the ship with household hammers and baby bottles filled with their own blood. "We will be asking all attending to leave a symbolic gift in the boat," says VFP’s Jack Bussell. "A doll, a peace sign, a penny, a flower (incidentally, roses were Phil’s favorite flower) along with a renewed commitment, from all who do leave a gift, to work for peace and justice in the coming months and years." For more information about the convergence, call (207) 772-1442 or email jafabussell@gwi.net — JK

On August 9, dignitaries and elected officials will gather at Bath Iron Works to celebrate the launch of the USS Momsen, the twentieth Arleigh Burke Class Aegis destroyer to be built by BIW. And at 11 a.m., when the ribbon is cut and the champagne bottle is smashed against the hull of the world’s newest, most advanced fighting machine, the world will witness another historic moment: the fifty-eighth anniversary of the US bombing of Nagasaki, which killed 73,884 people and injured another 74,909. Of course, the synchronicity is a bit off: Fat Man detonated over a tennis court in residential Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. Japan Standard Time.

Not surprisingly, activists have planned a massive protest on the day of the christening, spearheaded by Maine Veterans for Peace and dubbed the "Convergence for Peace at Bath." Though the Nagasaki anniversary adds insult to injury, the convergence was planned long before the ship’s launch was rescheduled from late July to August 9, and the agenda for the day includes speakers from various walks of the peace movement.

The Phoenix caught up with one of those keynote speakers: Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Originally an activism organizer in Florida (which is how, with his proximity to Cape Canaveral, he got involved in space issues), Gagnon recently moved to Brunswick with his family. He talks to us about space as an extension of our natural environment, the dangers posed by engaging in a space-based arms race, and how America’s ocean-going military fleet fits into the bigger picture of plans for global domination by the US military-industrial complex.

Phoenix: Can you tell me a little bit about your organization?

Bruce Gagnon: It was created in 1992, to essentially build a global constituency around the space issue. Most people haven’t been and still aren’t aware of how space has really become the linchpin of all warfare on earth . . . The recent Iraq war was all coordinated with space technology.

And then, more importantly, [we’re concerned with] the plans for putting weapons in space — and having the US "control and dominate" space is really the agenda of the future.

So today we have 168 affiliates on virtually every continent of the earth, groups that are working on [these issues]. And I spend a lot of time traveling and organizing and working on events in all these various places around the world.

Q: Do you find that the people who are interested in these issues fit the typical activist demographic, in that they’re involved in other issues, too, or are you starting to see more people from the general public becoming aware of these issues?

A: I think initially it was just the "peace and environmental" folks who were interested. But now, interestingly enough, it is reaching out, and because of practical necessity. For example, there are people who work in the business of cable TV and cell phones who use satellites for their business. They’re beginning to realize that if there’s war in space, that as you blow up rockets or other countries’ satellites, you’re going to create what’s called space junk, orbiting debris — there’s already a problem today — orbiting at 15,000 miles per hour that would knock out your satellites for your cell phones or cable TV, and everything else. So there’s starting to be a growing consciousness in the industry that "Hey, by god, this would be a disaster."

Q: When you say there’s already a problem with space junk, can you talk a little bit more about that?

A: Yeah, today there are over 110,000 pieces of space junk larger than a half an inch [being] tracked on the big radar screens at NORAD in Colorado, at Cheyenne Mountain, and they’ve already had to, for example, move the international space station to another orbit because they were tracking these bits of space junk that they thought were going to smash into it. The Challenger shuttle, on its previous mission, before it blew up, it had its windshield cracked by a tiny speck of paint traveling at 15,000 miles an hour.

And so what we’ve been trying to get people to do is view space as an environment, an extension of our earthly environment, that needs to be protected. There’s a whole plan to put massive amounts of nuclear power into space, to fund all different kinds of space technology, including nuclear reactors . . . to power space-based lasers that would knock out other countries’ satellites and hit targets on the earth below.

Q: Where does the space junk come from, and is there any way to clean it up? I’m guessing not.

A: No, there’s not — like a big vacuum cleaner or something [laughs]. It doesn’t exist.

It comes from all the years of the space age, by the US and the former Soviet Union. Things that have been left up there, wrenches, and other things that have been lost from space walks. All different little bits of satellites that have broken up in space. All a mess of things up there.

Q: It’s my understanding that your organization views both the mining and the weaponization of space as harmful things. Are there any uses of space that you advocate, or that you’re okay with?

A: Well, actually, there are quite a number of our members around the world who are very much interested in space. Some of them have actually worked in the space industry, at one time or the other. So we’re really not opposed to the exploration of space. But our clear position is that, right now, the military industrial complex has taken over the space industry.

If you listen to the new director [of NASA] under Bush, Shawn O’Keefe, former Secretary of the Navy, he said everything we do at NASA from now on will be dual use — meaning every single mission will be both military and civilian at the same time. Because all space technology now really is dual use. So there really is no separation any more between civilian and military. And so to say, "Well, we support civilian [uses], but we don’t support the military," is almost impossible anymore. Because it’s all the same thing.

So our position is, until the day comes when we can separate them again, we’ve got to essentially stop this massive growth of research and funding and development — and now they’re moving, under the Bush administration, toward the deployment of military space weapons systems. We’ve really just got to shut the whole thing down, and have the public intervene and reseparate them because, right now, it’s the same program.

Q: The first commercial, unmanned mission to the moon was launched on December 20, 2002, by a company called Transorbital. What’s your position on commercial space exploration?

A: All this commercial stuff with the moon and ultimately Mars and some of the asteroids is all about mining operations. They say that there is helium-3 and water on the moon, there is gold on the asteroids and cobalt and uranium on Mars. And part of the space command’s job is not only to control and dominate the earth to benefit the US multinational corporate globalization of the planet, but they also want to create a parallel military highway between the earth and the planetary bodies in order to preserve them, or control the shipping lanes. Think of it like the British Empire with their ships that ruled the seven seas; their military navy was really all about protecting the global empire of the British all over the world. It’s the same way now, as technology allows for the going out and the mining of the heavens.

Q: So we’re letting the corporate interests go in there and do the trailblazing, and then the government is going in to secure what private companies have staked out?

A: That’s the plan. On two levels there is something at work here. Number one, it allows US corporations to go and control these places. And secondly, this whole proposition to control this highway, [these] shipping lanes — just think of the expense involved in doing that. It is unbelievably massive, trillions and trillions of dollars — and who will benefit from that? Of course: the big aerospace corporations, the military industrial complex.

So this is where they view that they will secure massive profits in the next 50 to 100 years. And they are now calling for, in the documents they write, the defunding of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, because they say we’ve got to transfer those dollars into the military budget in order to pay for these enormous, enormous projects of the future.

So it is really going to create a head-long collision between people’s needs here on the planet for security — elderly security, educational security for our children’s future, those kind of securities — up against this notion that we’ve got to have security of the skies above our heads.

Q: How do you secure shipping lanes in space?

A: Well, you fundamentally deny other countries access to space. And the way you do that is by putting systems in orbit like space-based lasers that would be powered by nuclear reactors, giving them ample projection power to fire a laser through space to knock out other countries’ satellites, to hit rockets as they try to leave the planet.

There have been plans going back years and years to the 1950s to have bases on the moon, to have orbiting space stations that are outfitted with weapon systems. These are all in the vision for the future. So all these systems together would give you the ability to control who can get on and off the planet earth.