Call to Disarm : Ex-Air Force Colonel Pushes for Peace and No Nukes

Thomas Tierney’s life was marked by a series of personal decisions that put him on an escalator to the upper reaches of the military.

Five months ago, the retired Air Force colonel attended a meeting of an anti-war group and began a new course: a determination to help stop the arms race.

Recently, Tierney, 47, of Newport Beach and his wife, Elizabeth, gave UC Irvine $100,000 to explore the possibility of establishing a peace institute on the campus. They also pledged $250,000 to endow a chair for peace research.

This week, in a talk titled “A Hawk Turns to Peace--A Personal Odyssey,” Tierney told 50 UCI students, faculty and visitors that they also could also help de-escalate the arms race.

“You create your own future,” he said, after recounting his own past, which included target selection in the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons management for the Strategic Air Command.

Worked in Feed Store

Dressed in a black, pin-striped suit, the retired colonel ranged back and forth in front of a large map of northern Asia.

The son of a Midwestern, working-class couple, Tierney worked in a feed store as a boy during World War II, shoveling chicken manure and selling seeds by the handful for victory gardens. Admitted to Wayne State University on a trial basis because of a weak high school record, he joined the Air Force ROTC in 1956 because it paid $85 a month, he said, “a lot of money in those days.”

After graduation, he said, he wanted to be a fighter pilot but found that jet fuel made him nauseated. His second choice--intelligence--was too crowded, so he ended up as a supply officer, which he feared would mean managing “sheets and pillow cases.”

Tierney then got himself assigned to a tactical fighter wing in Japan--even though he was a “ground-pounder” without flight qualification--where he dealt with munitions. When he found that the assignment did not hold much excitement, he transferred to Korea, becoming a weapons-loading officer with responsibility for nuclear bombs.

‘Big Kids’ Toys’

As “a young officer, away from home,” Tierney said, the work was exciting, “playing with big kids’ toys.”

Tierney said he was surprised by the “laxness of security around the planes in Korea.” One sergeant demonstrated to Tierney how a launch-key system for nuclear weapons, which was designed to require two people to operate, could be activated by one person and a coat hanger. Another time, Tierney said, an American fighter pilot--not carrying nuclear bombs--was shot down while seeing how close he could get to his “wartime target,” a Soviet submarine base in Vladivostok.

Nonetheless, the guideline for personnel in Korea, he said, was that “only reasonably stable individuals should handle nuclear weapons.” For Tierney, as a logistics officer, this meant “a quick course in spotting nuts.” When an unstable person got close to a weapon, he said, the procedure was to shoot the individual “if you couldn’t get a net over him.”

Secret CIA Base

Tierney’s next stop was Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Neb., for more logistics work. A self-described “quick study,” Tierney learned that “there is no room anywhere in this uniformed culture to question authority.” In the 1960s, he said, the Air Force found that it could use intellectuals “as long as they could be contained.”

After earning a master’s degree, Tierney was assigned to a secret CIA air base in Laos, but because “nothing was happening there,” he transferred to Vietnam. In Saigon, his office was across the street from a military morgue where, for the first time, “the illusion of war became very real.” His downtown Saigon apartment was several blocks from the presidential palace, and in the 1968 Tet Offensive, the war lost all abstraction.

Although troubled by what he called the “Cold War bravado” and “Buck Rogers logic” among fellow officers, Tierney continued his rise within the military establishment. He was one of seven officers chosen to do research at the Rand Corp.’s think tank in Santa Monica. One of his papers dealt with altering the weather to use it as a weapon, a concept blocked by a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence Oversight.

11 ‘Proud Years’

Retiring from the Air Force after 11 “proud years,” Tierney said he “learned how to make vitamins--big deal.” His Tustin-based firm is called Vita Tech.

Five months ago, Tierney attended a talk in Laguna Beach by a group called Beyond War, a meeting that, he said, crystallized his growing opposition to the arms race.

In addition to his contributions to UCI, Tierney has become active in a pro-peace group called Business Executives for National Security and has been urging others to declare Orange County a nuclear-free zone.

“We’re starting on this quest of undoing what we have done,” he said, “what I have helped to do. . . . I know we can create peace.”