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344A la fin février, la DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) annonçait officiellement que les projets d’essai du programme Divine Strake étaient abandonnés. Le journaliste Robert C. Koehler estime qu’il s’agit d’une victoire d’une coalition de citoyens et d’autorités locales et régionales de tendances politiques très diverses contre l’appareil bureaucratique du complexe militaro-industriel. Cette bureaucratie militaire, par sa maladresse, par la présentation qu’elle a faite de l’essai a largement contribué à la mobilisation victorieuse en rappelant les souvenirs catastrophiques des expérimentations nucléaires à l’air libre des années 1950 («“I don’t want to sound glib here,” DTRA director James Tegnelia told reporters a year ago, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, “but it is the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons.”»)
Koehler rapporte que de nombreuses victimes indirectes (surnommées “Downwinders”) de ces essais nucléaires ont soutenu cette mobilisation. L’épisode est clairement présenté comme un épisode de la lutte des Etats et de leurs citoyens contre la bureaucratie fédérale et le complexe militaro-industriel.
«Well, enough is enough. People saw clearly that the horror of the Cold War era was about to begin again, with Tegnelia’s lurid and clueless remark about a new mushroom cloud having a galvanizing effect on residents in four states — Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana — in the immediate vicinity of the site. Massive opposition, cutting across all political lines, formed immediately. The Downwinders had a clear, intractable message for the weapons industry: “You’re not going to make another generation of us!”
»The stunning political diversity of the opposition speaks volumes. Conservative Republicans, such as Utah’s Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. — who described himself as “jubilant” about Divine Strake’s cancellation — were in the front lines of the opposition, right next to antiwar progressives.
»This conveys a crucial truth: A new, complex rationality is gaining political traction in American life. The logic of violence is deeply flawed and its paradoxes, which transcend ideology, are coming home to roost. The drive to create a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons (e.g., bunker busters), of which Divine Strake was a part, has the glaring flaw, which government propaganda can no longer mask, of poisoning U.S. citizens in its testing and production phases. Even “strong defense” patriots see the problem with this, at least when it affects them and their loved ones.
»From here, the logic for a new kind of society, a new national purpose, gains momentum. Surely no Downwinder who fought Divine Strake merely wanted the test site moved elsewhere (“Bomb Indiana instead!”). The test was wrong, period. And a growing number of people are coming to grasp that actually using such weapons on an “enemy” population would be worse, by a factor of thousands or millions, than just testing it. And slowly we are withdrawing the government’s mandate to perpetuate a violent world.»
Mis en ligne le 4 mars 2007 à 14H45
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