The Profiteers

by Sally Denton

  That Obama, as president, manifested such a bold, far-reaching, and progressive nuclear-free vision at such a precarious moment was due in large part to his surprising and opportunistic alignment with George Shultz. The rabid anti-Communist hawk and longtime Bechtel principal had joined with three of the leaders in national security to campaign for global disarmament. Shultz, along with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, onetime defense secretary William Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn, “had decided to campaign for the elimination of the nuclear arsenals they had built up and managed as cold warriors,” as the New York Times depicted the turnabout.

  The same man who had articulated in a 1978 speech that “the U.S. was losing its good standing in world trade . . . because of the [Jimmy] Carter administration’s nuclear nonproliferation policies”—an argument he repeated and emphasized in his later nomination hearings for secretary of state—was now a senior US statesman in favor of nuclear nonproliferation. The consummate Cold Warrior and architect of Reagan’s foreign policy of “peace through strength” and its hard-line nuclear deterrent doctrine was now leading a brigade of fellow formerly ardent nuclear proliferators in a global disarmament movement.

  It had begun when Shultz’s “Gang of Four,” as they called themselves, penned an op-ed titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” two years earlier. The jointly authored treatise was published in the Wall Street Journal. The four men who had all been “deeply immersed in the nuclear weapons establishment,” as Time magazine pointed out, were now “united in a call to abolish the very weapons they once saw as projections of their nation’s power.” That at least two of the men had an extensive and long-standing relationship with Bechtel—one of the biggest purveyors of nuclear energy and weapons in the world, and which had just begun managing the nation’s entire nuclear weapons complex—escaped notice by the national media. “All were veterans of America’s cold-war security establishment, with impeccable credentials as believers in nuclear deterrence,” observed the Economist. “They now asserted that far from making the world safer, nuclear weapons had become a source of intolerable risk.”

  The gist of the op-ed was that Russia was no longer the threat that the Soviet Union had once posed and that the dangerous leftover arsenals from both countries were finding their way into the hands of terrorists. Simplistically put, deterrence (though precarious) worked as long as there were only two nuclear superpowers, because, as the four elder statesmen described it, “America and the Soviet Union were diligent, professional, but also lucky that nuclear weapons were never used.” But now, in the age of nuclear proliferation, “the growing number of nations with nuclear arms and differing motives, aims, and ambitions poses very high and unpredictable risks.”

  Dubbed “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” by the media—a futuristic analogy to the four horsemen in the Bible’s book of Revelation that included pestilence, war, famine, and death—the band of “brothers” stunned the foreign policy community with their call to abolish the weapons they once so promulgated. “Detractors regarded [Shultz’s] legacy with alarm, recalling what they saw as unremitting nuclear brinkmanship and ideological anti-Communism,” as one account put it. Still, these “Hawks Against the Bomb,” as some critics labeled them, continued a steady drumbeat with further op-eds, while “an unlikely coterie of fellow Cold Warriors”—all once firm backers of nuclear deterrence, and including sixteen top Reagan administration officials—joined the chorus. “Call it penance, or the desire for absolution,” wrote a Time magazine reporter, “but the four horsemen had spoken, and warned of the continuing danger of nuclear apocalypse.” The scholar and religious reformer James Carroll wrote bitingly about the “sacrilegious renunciation of their nuclear faith” by the “high priests of the cult of nuclear normalcy” and “former apostles of nuclear Realpolitik.”

  Shultz’s newfound belief that the only solution to avoiding nuclear apocalypse was the elimination of nuclear weapons sparked debate within and among governments and foreign-policy think tanks around the world. “We all knew that there were a lot of close calls,” Shultz replied in response to inquiries about his sudden and drastic change in philosophy. “If there were a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States, it would basically wipe both countries out and off the map. And if you think about a modern thermonuclear weapon set off over New York City, say: What would it do? It would incinerate Manhattan Island.” Shultz also denied that his about-face was either sudden or inconsistent, claiming to have supported nuclear disarmament as far back as the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, when talks between the United States and the Soviet Union collapsed. “Unfortunately, such figures had come to Jesus only after leaving office, when they were exempt from the responsibility of matching their high-flown rhetoric with the gritty work of making it real,” wrote Carroll.

  The Gang of Four lost no time in promoting their agenda despite the fact that then president George W. Bush “never invited them to the White House to make their case.” But Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Obama embraced the four. He relished the political cover they provided for a subject that would face powerful challenges from the Right. “Ridding the world of nuclear weapons has long been a cause of the pacifist left,” according to the Economist. Shultz watched with satisfaction as Obama disseminated their talking points, “echoing their message in campaign speeches in places like Chicago and Denver and in Berlin,” the New York Times reported.

  “President Obama has taken up the issue very well,” Shultz would later crow to Time about the plan’s successful bipartisan support. Indeed, Obama had codified Shultz’s recommendations as official foreign policy in his groundbreaking and history-making Prague speech. But Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world was quickly hamstrung, and his retreat from a nuclear-free policy disheartened his activist supporters. While it all seemed lofty at first, after the dust settled, many in the disarmament community saw more cynical, if not sinister, machinations at work. “It would all come to naught. Worse than naught,” said an antinuclear activist who watched, disheartened and disbelieving, as the Obama administration spent the next six years diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from nuclear nonproliferation to nuclear warheads—with Bechtel profiting astronomically.

  In the end, the president who had portrayed himself as an architect of disarmament shepherded the nation’s skyrocketing nuclear weapons spending to levels unseen since the Reagan years, leaving many to speculate about what appeared increasingly to be a “devil’s bargain” with Shultz and the “boys from Bechtel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Captain Ahab of Nuclear Weapons

  Obama had been president for only twelve days when word leaked that he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—a choice that evoked outrage in the United States and abroad, considering the forty-seven-year-old’s lack of foreign policy experience. Those close to the president said he was both humbled and embarrassed by the nomination and did not feel that he deserved it. There rose within the White House a desire to accomplish something tangible to justify the nomination, if not the prize. Expanding on his campaign speeches promoting the horsemen’s nonproliferation agenda, Obama had refined his position, making it a centerpiece of his defense policy as he honed his speech for Prague.

  His vision of “a world without nuclear weapons”—and America’s moral obligation to lead the charge—became the cornerstone of his young presidency. He capitalized on what the Atlantic described as his “no-nukes push to the sky’s-the-limit idealism that had electrified supporters” during his presidential campaign. Obama’s backing of what arms control advocates had begun calling “global zero” was a bold and courageous step for an American president to take. Teaming up with Shultz and his three national security cohorts gave Obama “the cover he needed to endorse global zero and perhaps even paved the way for New START,” according to one account.

  After the Prague speech on April 5, 2009, the “president moved quickly to jump-start glo
bal efforts to secure loose nuclear weapons and poorly protected bomb-making materials, calling an unprecedented summit of forty-seven world leaders to address the problem,” according to one account. It was the largest gathering of world leaders since the United Nations of 1945. All of the attending countries committed to safeguard loose nuclear material.

  From the beginning, the president faced brutal and predictable opposition in Congress. “This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” cowrote Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, Reagan-era Cold Warrior, in response to Obama’s disarmament plan. They ridiculed the president’s naïveté for miscalculating the “nuclear ambitions” of Kim Jong-il (North Korea) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran). James Schlesinger, the former secretary of defense in the Nixon and Ford administrations, mocked Obama, referring to his blurred line “between vision and hallucination.”

  In the run-up to the Nobel Prize, which was scheduled to be awarded six months later, in October, White House pressure on Congress to attain the New START treaty was fierce—“no mean feat at a time when Republicans in Congress were opposing the administration on virtually every initiative it proposed,” wrote William D. Hartung, the director of the nonprofit, Washington-based Center for International Policy, national security expert, and author of numerous books about the military-industrial complex. Senate ratification of major arms-control treaties was generally pro forma, but Obama was facing a galvanized body intent on thwarting him. “Extremist Republicans took Congress hostage, and Barack Obama found himself lashed, like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, to the monomaniac incarnation of those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on half a heart and half a lung,” author James Carroll drew a Moby Dick metaphor.

  The president faced a tough battle in the US Senate. But his newfound strange bedfellows—the men who provided “the disarmament hook that Obama latched on to when he entered the White House,” as one account put it—went into high gear on his behalf. Senate Majority Whip Kyl, ranked as one of the most conservative members of the Senate, vowed to stop the New START. Against the backdrop of this intractable opposition in Congress, in October 2009 Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” The Nobel Committee faced withering criticism from around the world, and many political commentators, government officials, and international leaders denounced the prize, citing Obama’s lack of concrete results toward nuclear nonproliferation. Even his New START treaty seemed dead.

  “At this point, the pressure within the White House to attain a nuclear arms treaty must have soared 1000-fold,” wrote a DOE insider using the pseudonym Dienekes—the namesake of a Spartan soldier noted for his bravery. It was clear to the administration that it needed the support of the Bechtel managers of the Los Alamos (LANS) and Livermore (LLNS) weapons labs to win Republican support of ratification. Bechtel and the labs had billions to lose if Obama’s arms control initiatives curbed their long-term, multibillion-dollar financial commitments from the DOE. Greg Mello posed an obvious question: “Without nuclear weapons, what will LANS and LLNS do?” A smaller nuclear stockpile and no new projects to replace old warheads would constrain the weapons labs. So all the vested interests with a strong financial incentive to thwart Obama—Bechtel, NNSA, and the nuclear industry, along with the endorsement of Shultz and the Four Horsemen—redirected the rhetoric away from “disarmament” and toward “modernization.”

  Under intensive lobbying by Bechtel, the private contractors running the DOE nuclear weapons labs persuaded Kyl and a handful of Republicans to support the treaty in 2010. But that was accomplished only after Kyl, who was central to delivering Senate support, demanded that the White House put up $85 billion over ten years to maintain and modernize the weapons systems that had been designated obsolete. This modernization of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, under the auspices of updating an outdated system, ushered in “a full-blown reinvention of the arms cache at an estimated future cost of more than a trillion dollars,” according to one account. In a calculated quid pro quo, the president won a major foreign policy victory, while the nuclear enthusiasts and private contractors controlled the nation’s nuclear policy once again. After Obama’s “year of arms control,” as two national security experts called it, “the topic receded in prominence on the presidential agenda.”

  Not only would progress on disarmament come to a standstill, but the US government also ramped up its modernization of nuclear warheads, delivery systems, and all the laboratories and facilities that designed, maintained, and manufactured the weapons. While the president’s about-face mystified arms-control advocates, one element was thoroughly predictable: Bechtel would be the primary recipient of the lucrative DOE and DOD contracts resulting from the buildup.

  Inextricably enmeshed in American foreign policy for seven decades, Bechtel proved powerful enough to hijack Obama’s nuclear nonproliferation promises. “Obama fell for the Four Horsemen’s propaganda,” concluded Mello. “Now we have entered the twilight of the nuclear gods. This is not nuclear versus nonnuclear. It’s sanity versus insanity. It’s all about the new generation of every nuclear weapon.” Global arms control advocates were stunned by the dramatic failure of the president’s mission, disheartened and baffled at how Obama’s global zero pledge had been so thoroughly derailed.

  Not only would Obama go on to reduce “the size of the nation’s atomic stockpile far less than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including both Presidents Bush,” the New York Times reported, but he would also spend more than previous administrations to modernize the remaining arms and authorize “a new generation of weapons carriers.” Cuts to the nuclear stockpile initiated by the Bush presidencies totaled 14,801 weapons. During Obama’s entire eight years, reductions would stand at 507. The president’s peaceful intentions retreated from center stage.

  For their part, the Four Horsemen backpedaled away from “disarmament” and shifted to a return to the nuclear deterrence days of the Cold War. First Kissinger split from the other three, aligning with former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft in expressing concern that nuclear reductions would weaken US strategic stability. Soon Shultz, Perry, and Nunn joined in calling for “deterrence in the age of nuclear proliferation” instead of global zero. The “quartet barely make mention of abolition,” Time magazine said of the turnaround. “One can’t help notice that these opinion pieces are becoming increasingly chastened and unambitious as time goes on.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A Trial Lawyer Goes to Battle

  Born in 1937 in Ogden, Utah, and raised throughout the American West, J. Gary Gwilliam came by his David v. Goliath passion honestly. From the roots of childhood abandonment, family dysfunction, and juvenile delinquency, from reckless adolescence and gang membership, from drug use and alcohol addiction, Gwilliam escaped his past to become a trial lawyer.

  A descendant of nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers—Welsh sheep farmers on his paternal side and polygamist zealots on his maternal—Gwilliam fought from his earliest years to escape the oppression of the religious community. He watched as his peripatetic Mormon father dissolved into alcoholism while leaving his daring mother to seek a life for herself outside of Utah. Reared in Eugene, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, Gwilliam’s innate and inherited rebellious nature kicked in. By junior high, he was drinking and carousing, and by high school, he was tattooed and running around with “rougher and rougher guys.” He pulled his long hair back into a ducktail, pegged his pants, and carried a switchblade. His anxious mother watched as her smart son’s grades dipped below those acceptable for entry to a four-year college. When Gwilliam realized that only three kids in his gang of twenty would graduate from high school—and of those three, one went to prison and another committed suicide—he woke up. “Most of my friends were addicts, thieves, and lazy bums,” he realized. His rescue came in the form of his family’s Mormon matriarchy, which helped him relocate to Southe
rn California to begin anew.

  While holding down jobs at a nursery and Western Union, Gwilliam got serious about school, and in 1957, at twenty years old, he received an Associate of the Arts degree from Citrus Junior College in Glendora. Even though it was only a two-year college, Gwilliam recalled, “it was still a college degree.” When he heard his name called to receive the award for “The Man Most Likely to Succeed,” he put his wild past behind him and applied to Pomona College. “Have you ever thought of being a lawyer?” the venerated philosophy professor Fred Sontag asked Gwilliam one day. No one in Gwilliam’s family had ever attended college, much less law school. “I had never met a lawyer. I had never seen a lawyer.” But Sontag pressed. “You could be a great lawyer. You have a good mind, the gift of gab, and you get along well with people. You are able to think on your feet. You should give it a try.”

  Gwilliam considered it and dashed off applications to Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. He was accepted by all three. After graduating “just short of Phi Beta Kappa,” he lit off for Berkeley, wanting to remain in California, where he joined “the most competitive, hardworking, anxious bunch of guys I had ever been around.” He graduated in 1962 with a determination to become a trial lawyer and with the initial dream of pursuing a career as a prosecutor.

  He was recruited by the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office, which was one of the busiest prosecutors’ offices in the Los Angeles area. He quickly advanced to the position of chief trial deputy. After four successful years as an assistant DA, Gwilliam decided to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area with the hopes he could mend his struggling marriage. He leaped at the chance to join the Jesse Nichols law firm in the East Bay—the best-known plaintiffs’ group in the region. “I didn’t know much about plaintiffs work,” Gwilliam later wrote, “but it seemed to me that it was fairly simple. As a prosecutor, I was carrying the burden of proof and going after the bad guys. The same seemed to be true with a plaintiff’s attorney. But it turned out not to be that simple.”