COLUMN LEFT : Go Small and Clean, Not Big and Green : The defense Establishment has its eye on environmental action as a way to protect its empire.

When Sen. Sam Nunn proposed last month that military forces be used for environmental protection, I got a queasy feeling in my stomach. Not that I disagree with him; many disarmament activists, like myself, for years have argued that environmental destruction was a fundamental threat to the nation’s well-being.

But the imprimatur of Sam Nunn made me first blink in disbelief, then look twice at the small print.

Nunn and his Democratic colleagues Albert Gore, Tim Wirth, Jeff Bingaman and James Exon are proposing a “Strategic Environmental Research Program” that would use the skills and resources of the military, the CIA and the Energy Department to blunt the assault of this new national security threat, environmental degradation. Nunn, the hard-nosed chairman of the Armed Services Committee, saying that ecology was the stuff of generals and admirals, jet pilots and spooks? How did this happen?

The proposal has roots in the work of peace researchers, who insisted that America’s obsession with military security ignored other perils, such as global warming, deforestation, ozone depletion, loss of croplands and overpopulation. (Similarly, drug addiction and economic deterioration should be treated as security threats.) The federal government spent little money on such problems while lavishing resources on increasingly antiquated military strategies.

A small cottage industry of researchers sprouted in the mid-1980s to develop this analysis. Magazines like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Nuclear Times published the first articles attempting to redefine security. Long accused of reflexively opposing all weapons (and the U.S. doctrine of national defense), peaceniks could instead offer a positive notion: global security.

This concept holds that environmental decay is international, unmindful of boundaries and sovereignties, and that it can cause serious social strains that lead to conflict. For example, overpopulation and over-grazing can lead to drought, which sends masses of starving people across borders in search of food. The reluctant host country might be no better off, and the pressure erupts in war, involving allies and enemies far away.

The idea of global environmental security became widely accepted, particularly in the U.S. policy Establishment, after the hot summer of 1988. Articles touting the link between the environment and security began to appear in influential journals like Foreign Affairs. Polls showed that the American public, with little prompting, saw global warming, cocaine and trade imbalance as far greater threats than the Soviet Union.

So when I saw Sam Nunn’s suggestion, I felt a certain satisfaction. But the purpose of this “natural security” initiative has a side never intended by the concept’s originators. Nunn & Co. are apparently using the high public concern about the environment to keep the bloated and increasingly irrelevant Pentagon afloat.

This is doubly ironic. The U.S. military is the nation’s--perhaps the world’s--largest polluter. Its use of fossil fuels and other natural resources is awesome; it has created 15,000 toxic waste sites; the radioactive hazards at its 17 nuclear-weapons plants are a national scandal. The first aim of Nunn’s “Strategic Environmental Research Program” should be to clean up the ecological disasters spawned by the armed forces, a cleanup that rivals the savings-and-loan crisis in financial scale.

Equally important, the Nunn initiative fails to understand that military approaches are inappropriate to the new threats we face. The global security concept includes reducing the role of the military in the political life of nations. The sources of armed conflict in the Third World--poverty, for example, and depletion of resources like forests and croplands--are impervious to armies and nuclear doctrines. In short, applying military ideas and assets to environmental issues will solve nothing. Environmental restoration requires sensitive economic development, tough regulation of industry, birth control, and sweeping changes in attitudes--tasks for which the military is ill-equipped.

We do need to accept and act on the realization that environmental degradation threatens our long-term health as a society. But acting on a new agenda for global security and keeping the military-industrial complex intact are incompatible. A better mission for the Pentagon brass is to scale down dramatically--matching the scaled-down Soviet threat--and let the savings be used to attack the horrific mess they’ve created.