The arms race has become such an integral and pervasive part of our national life that most U.S. residents now live in the vicinity of a nuclear weapons facility. While it is true that every person on the earth is threatened by the dark cloud of impending nuclear horror, we in the United States are in a distinct position to know firsthand both its danger and its physical reality. This is the case because of the wide geographical diversity and multifaceted nature of the nuclear weapons process.
The nuclear tentacles reach into every possible aspect of our business, labor, science, and religion as well as the military. Each of the government, scientific, industrial, and military facilities that are a part of the nuclear weapons process is a deadly link in a chain of events and a way of life that undermine life itself.
Some of us in the United States live near the scientific installations where the horrendous but intellectually captivating ideas are hatched. These laboratories and research institutes, sometimes on university campuses, design and develop the nuclear weapons systems.
Then there are the places where the political ideas and ideologies are constructed to justify and legitimate the never-ending flow of new weapons technologies: the think tanks and university departments of strategic studies.
Perhaps the most visible and culpable elements of the arms race are the institutions and locations of political decision-making, where official policy is set and money is appropriated to pay for nuclear weapons. Included in this list are the Congress, the White House, federal buildings, local congressional offices, and political party headquarters. The political decisions are executed by government agencies like the Department of Defense (Army, Navy, and Air Force) and the Department of Energy, which have countless branches and installations.
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