Activists ‘Spy’ on Bases to Spot Nuclear Weapons

With a frisky family of tourists from Montana only inches from his elbow, Michael Steinberg aimed his binoculars across the entrance to San Diego Bay and began spying on the North Island Naval Air Station.

“See the two rows of odd-looking bunkers with the pink doors?” Steinberg said, gesturing to a cluster of igloo-like structures facing each other on the base. “Those are what they call ‘special weapons’ bunkers.

They have the right characteristics--double fencing, armed guards around the clock, special lighting. Inside, we believe there are nuclear bombs, warheads and other components.”

Shifting his gaze slightly, Steinberg focused on a flat gray building: “Usually there are darkly clad guards scurrying all around that structure. We think they assemble weapons in there.”

Steinberg, 37, is a founding member of the San Diego Military Monitoring Project. Last spring, the loose-knit group of anti-nuclear activists began stationing binocular-equipped volunteers at Cabrillo National Monument twice weekly to watch activity surrounding the unusual bunkers at North Island and the Navy’s submarine base at Ballast Point.

Their mission? To determine, through observation and comparison with research data, just what is stored at the two bases and to then share their findings with the public.

“I think it’s easy for people in San Diego to become numb to the fact that there are all these nuclear armaments right here in their backyard,” said Steinberg, a lean redhead with wire-rimmed glasses who works at the People’s Food Co-Op in Ocean Beach. “To stand up here and actually see them handling warheads is a very educational experience. It chills you to the bone.”

On a clear day, Steinberg said, one can get quite an eyeful. During the months he has stood alongside tourists toting instant cameras and monitored the scene, Steinberg said, he has seen a stack of apparently unarmed cruise missiles lying on the ground; piles of green torpedoes outside bunkers at the Ballast Point submarine base; forklifts moving black, cylindrical objects from the North Island bunkers to trucks that take them to the mysterious gray building on the edge of the base, and more.

Although the monument and another prime observation point, Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, are federal property, Steinberg and fellow “spies” have yet to be questioned. Once, however, “we did see a groundskeeper take down our license plate number.”

Ken Mitchell, a Navy spokesman at North Island, declined, according to government policy, to say whether nuclear weapons are stored at the base. But he did have a word on the Military Monitoring Project:

“We’ve got nothing against them expressing their opinion as long as they stay behind the blue line.”

But Mitchell may not yet have heard Steinberg’s latest idea--to escort regular tours of San Diegans to Cabrillo for a bird’s-eye view of the base.