Nukewatch Effort to Track, Trail Trucks Carrying Warheads

Some local peace activists, convinced that most San Diegans are unaware that trucks carrying nuclear weapons routinely travel along county roadways en route to military bases, are participating this week in a nationwide campaign to track and call attention to the vehicles.

The activists plan to meet the unmarked 18-wheel rigs believed to be bearing the weapons when they enter the county and shadow them in convoys of cars adorned with signs and banners identifying the trucks as arms couriers.

The local effort, which continues through Tuesday, is part of Nukewatch, described by one organizer as a national campaign to “show the American people that the arms race is not 1,000 miles away, but right in your neighborhood, going past your home, your school, your church.”

Coordinators at Nukewatch headquarters in Oklahoma City estimated that more than 2,000 people in 38 states are participating in the movement, which ultimately aims to mobilize widespread public support for disarmament. Participants, linked by a national telephone tree and CB radios, are attempting to follow the trucks thousands of miles from weapons production and assembly plants to ordnance depots throughout the country.

In San Diego, a network of about two dozen people affiliated with the Peace Resource Center and the Alliance for Survival have been standing by since Tuesday, awaiting word that one of the trucks is approaching the county line. Once alerted, the activists will station themselves along the routes the trucks are known to travel and then trail the vehicles, most likely to the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station, North Island Naval Air Station and other bases believed to be storage and deployment sites for the weapons.

“People tend to think of nuclear weapons as sort of abstract objects that are off in Europe or in silos somewhere, rather than right here among us in San Diego,” said Bob Holzman, a local Nukewatch participant. “It’s like out of sight, out of mind. But if we alert someone on their way to work that the unmarked truck right next to them is carrying nuclear warheads, it could be a pretty gripping experience for them. It could change their thinking.”

Coordinated by the Progressive Foundation, based in Madison, Wis., Nukewatch is patterned after the White Train Campaign, a movement launched in Washington state in 1982 to draw attention to the government’s transportation of warheads and other nuclear components by rail.

Conceived by the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, the White Train Campaign involves a national network of protesters who gather along railroad tracks to demonstrate against and attract attention to trains carrying arms shipments from the Pantex Corp. plant in Amarillo, Tex., where nearly all of the nation’s nuclear warheads are assembled.

On several occasions, demonstrators have been arrested after blocking the special trains, which are painted white to control interior temperature, and contain two security cars with gun turrets.

Nukewatch also has international roots. Founder and chief organizer Samuel H. Day Jr. said it is modeled after Cruise Watch in England and West Germany, which he described as an ongoing effort to monitor the movement of cruise missiles and “keep the weapons under the glare of public scrutiny at all times.”

“Nukewatch and these other campaigns represent what you might call a new direction in the peace movement, something different than rallies and marches or the traditional fight for legislation to bring the arms race under control,” said Day, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “This is an effort to bring people as close to the weapons as their eyes can take them.”

Day said organizers hope that “if enough people experience these H-bombs emotionally, they will rise up in wrath and push the proper political buttons to get it stopped. It may sound idealistic, but we believe that if people can taste the bomb, see it driving past their kitchen window, then their view of the arms race may well change.”

Using photographs provided by the Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees the production and transportation of nuclear weapons, and data collected by monitors, Nukewatch organizers have compiled a detailed description of the trucks, which log more than 4.7 million miles annually while ferrying new and “stale” bombs between assembly plants, laboratories, nuclear test sites and military bases.

Bearing U.S. government or DOE license plates, the so-called “safe secure” trailers are 40 feet long with unpainted, unmarked steel sides, according to Nukewatch research. Their cabs carry a square-rigged radio antenna that resembles a luggage rack and keeps them constantly linked with DOE’s communication headquarters at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.

According to Nukewatch, drivers are dressed as civilians, and the trucks are followed by one or more “escort vehicles”--Chevrolet Suburbans manned by plainclothes guards armed with pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers. The trucks themselves, described by one DOE official as “mobile vaults,” also carry armed guards.

Nukewatch organizers estimate that a single tractor-trailer can carry as many as 12 Trident missile warheads with a combined explosive yield of 1.2 million tons of TNT--the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

According to a Department of Energy spokesman, there has never been an accident involving these trucks during 30 years of shipping by truck. Nukewatch organizers worry that an accident could allow a release of radioactive material, not that there might be an explosion. Even if the weapons were armed, they would require a complex series of triggers.

The custom-built trucks are exempt from state and federal requirements that the exterior of vehicles carrying explosives or radioactive materials be so labeled.

Anna Bachicha, a public affairs specialist with DOE in Albuquerque, declined to confirm much of the information provided by Nukewatch, citing national security. She did say, however, that DOE fields a fleet of 40 tractor-trailer rigs that serve 110 military installations in all corners of the United States and transports “special nuclear materials.”

Activists estimate that 80% of the total weapons moved are transported by truck, with the balance shuttled by train or by air. Bachicha agreed, “The majority of this classified cargo goes by truck.”

Nukewatch coordinators say their volunteers, who had trailed 11 convoys in different states at last count, none near San Diego County, have no intention of harassing truck drivers or attempting to block their shipments. “We just feel that since this is a democratic society, and our taxes are paying for these weapons, people should know they’re traveling through their towns,” said Carol Jankhow, education director of the nonprofit Peace Resource Center in San Diego.

Jankhow added that because satellites enable the Soviets “to see anything and everything, all of this secrecy really is designed to keep the American people in the dark. We just want to make the invisible visible and let the citizens play a role in making decisions about the arms race.”

But in some cases, apparently, the DOE drivers are unaware of Nukewatch’s peaceful intentions. In April, similar efforts to trail the trucks were frustrated when DOE officials asked sheriff’s deputies to pull over cars carrying the demonstrators. While the protesters were questioned, the truck convoys zoomed onward and were lost.

As the home of 29% of the U.S. Navy fleet at the 32nd Street Naval Station in National City, the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base and General Dynamics’ Convair Division, which produces the cruise missile, San Diego County is a critical front in the campaign, Nukewatch organizers say. It is also a leading destination for nuclear weapons shipments, according to local activists.

Citing longstanding military policy, Ken Mitchell, a Navy spokesman at North Island Naval Air Station, would neither “confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on any aircraft, ship or facility of the U.S. government.”

But according to David C. Morrison, a senior research analyst at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, San Diego Bay is home port for 62 nuclear-capable vessels on the Navy’s active fleet list. Among these are 13 destroyers, three nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers and seven nuclear-powered attack submarines--all of which will be equipped to carry sea-launched cruise missiles.

“There is no heavier concentration of these nuclear-capable vessels on the West Coast,” Morrison said. “San Diego is the hot spot.”

In addition, the authors of a new, highly regarded book on the subject, “Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race,” conclude that North Island and the Navy’s submarine base at Ballast Point on Point Loma are storage areas for atomic weapons.

The authors, noted weapons experts Richard W. Fieldhouse and William M. Arkin, write that 100 nuclear bombs, 32 Terrier missile warheads and 60 nuclear depth bombs are stored in “special weapons” bunkers at North Island. Ballast Point, they estimate, is a storage site for 25 submarine-launched rockets, 55 anti-submarine rockets and about 25 sea-launched cruise missiles.

Although “Nuclear Battlefields” makes no mention of the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station, local peace activists say the DOE trucks have been seen servicing that installation. Their contention is supported in a 1982 study by David E. Kaplan of the Oakland-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

Kaplan described the Fallbrook station, on the southeastern edge of Camp Pendleton, as an annex for the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. The General Accounting Office reported in 1983 that nuclear weapons are no longer stored at Seal Beach, prompting many observers to conclude that Fallbrook is now a primary storage facility.

Nukewatch participants say the abundance of nuclear weapons stored throughout the county means several things for local residents.

To begin with, they “make us Ground Zero,” Jankhow said. “But that’s probably obvious to most people. What San Diegans are not as conscious of is the potential for accident, either involving a spill in the harbor or some sort of collision involving the transport trucks. With all these destinations and deployment sites, there is inevitably a lot of DOE truck traffic through our community.”

Further, Jankhow worries that touch-and-go landings and other air maneuvers at North Island pose a risk given the presence of weapons on that base; county officials, she said, do not have special plans in the event of an accident there.

Marian Wright, chief of planning for the county Office of Disaster Preparedness, agreed that “there is no specific plan for a military nuclear accident on the books.” But she added that the office has focused on the potential for disaster at the San Onofre nuclear power plant and would likely use similar response techniques should there be radiation emission in connection with a military accident.

“The Navy doesn’t tell us any more than they tell the public, so we’re kind of at their mercy,” Wright said. “I would be more comfortable if we could work more closely with them. I can’t say for sure that the safeguards in place are sufficient.”

Although there have been no serious accidents involving weapons recorded locally, nuclear-powered ships have spilled reactor coolant into San Diego Bay on at least three known occasions, according to Kaplan’s study. The Navy said the accidental spills, in 1979 and 1980, did not pose a health danger.

DOE spokeswoman Bachicha, meanwhile, disputed the potential for danger on the highways, noting that in “more than 30 years of shipping nuclear materials, this office has never had an accident that resulted in spillage or the release of radioactivity.”

“In the winter months, during heavy storms, there is some skidding,” she said. “But the materials are in special shipping containers that are tied down and guarded by elaborate safety features. To my knowledge, there has never been any damage to cargo.”

Morrison of the Center for Defense Information echoed Bachicha’s statements, saying he is unaware of any accidents involving the DOE vehicles.

“Certainly, trucking them around the country is undesirable,” Morrison said. “But what is desirable? They’ve got the weapons. They’ve got to do something with them.”

As far as local peace activists know, Coronado is the only San Diego County city to express official concern about the movement of nuclear weaponry along public streets. That was in 1980, when then-Mayor Pat Callahan was irked that Navy officials did not inform the city of a planned 25% increase in weapons storage at North Island.

“As a result, we reached an understanding with the Navy that, when appropriate, my director of police services will be notified when sensitive materials are moved through town,” City Manager Ray Silver said. He declined to comment on how frequently such notification occurs.

“Frankly, I’m satisfied that we know when we need to know. When you live at Ground Zero, I don’t think the manner in which the Navy handles weapons is really of any concern.”