Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at Sam Husseini’s Substack on Aug. 11, 2023. It is being reposted here in light of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” winning Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.
By Sam Husseini / Substack
Back in the year 2000, I did a news release for my day job about Andreas Toupadakis. He had a high-paying classified position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and decided to resign when he came to grips with how his work was used.
The news release quoted Ted Taylor, one of the architects of US nuclear policy, noting that Andreas “was hired to work on environmental problems associated with getting rid of nuclear weapons. But our government’s policy is not to get rid of nuclear weapons — it is to perpetuate them through the euphemistically-called ‘stockpile stewardship’ program.”
So, Andreas resigned as an act of conscience and became a peace activist. This sort of resignation is remarkably rare.
Part of Andres’s fast education was learning of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which stated:
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
Notably, Robert Oppenheimer’s name is absent from the signers. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin note in American Prometheus, which the film Oppenheimer is based on (pages 559-560), that: “Oppenheimer was certainly not willing to throw in his lot with political activists like Lord Russell, Rotblat, Szilard, Einstein and others who frequently signed petitions protesting the American-led arms race. Indeed, his name was conspicuously absent from one such open letter, dated July 9, 1955, and signed by not only Russell, Rotblat and Einstein, but also such former teachers and friends as Max Born, Linus Pauling, and Percy Bridgman.”
Bird would score a New York Times op-ed as Oppenheimer hit the theaters, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” — but, like a lot of narrow specialists who try to extrapolate, misses the deeper point completely.
He claimed “too many of our citizens still distrust scientists and fail to understand the scientific quest, the trial and error inherent in testing any theory against facts by experimenting. Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”
What is he talking about? “Our public health civil servants” like Anthony Fauci were treated like rock stars even though he was an obvious fraud.
No, it’s quite the opposite. And putting it otherwise, to diminish scrutiny of Fauci and his co-conspirators, and help ensure the creation of deadly pathogens, is to help make future pandemics inevitable.
In detonating the atomic bomb, the scientists, by their calculation, risked the destruction all at once of the entire planet. They presumably were motivated to go down this course to stop Nazism. They didn’t. And they didn’t by serious accounts have any meaningful effect in ending the war in the Pacific, either.
Now, the military-funded scientific establishment, even after Covid, which may well have lab origin, is funding ever-more deadly pandemic pathogens. Sky News recently had a puff report on Britain’s main bioweapons center Porton Down creating more deadly pathogens for alleged vaccine production.
Fauci’s NIAID has funded dangerous lab work which could kill billions.
Oppenheimer, some have argued, effectively was a glorified bureaucrat. One who was useful to the establishment and then pushed aside by it, but never really overtly challenged it. Fauci virtually embodied the establishment and can be viewed as the distillation of the negative aspects of Oppenheimer.
That capture of science by the military industrial complex is the greater tragedy. And that now includes the life sciences.
And the rise of people who pose as scientists but facilitate a militarized agenda are a huge danger.
Russell, Einstein and the other scientists were warning against the uses that science and scientists would be put to. They were attempting to ensure that the public, Congress and especially scientists assert themselves in the face of a militarily-guided technology: “scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction.”
They were primarily concerned with nuclear scientists, but it extends to all workers and scientists, now especially those working on pathogens and for Big Tech.
Toupadakis said when he resigned: “Our nuclear policy is based on irrational fears driven by a tiny group of elites who shape public opinion. We scientists have to use our skills for humanity, not for a machine we have no control over. Scientists are enticed into comfortable positions, grow dependent on the security and then they are tormented, playing tricks on their own minds to justify continuing to work on the weapons. Labs must institute an informed consent upon hiring — and they should stop luring students to visit the labs.”
Toupadakis argues in recent years that “scientists still continue to be hostages to the military, the military to the governments, the governments to the corporations – and the individuals who elect their governments to their own fears for survival and greed.” He taught for years at UC Davis, which ironically helped funnel USAID money to EcoHealth Alliance, which might have triggered the Covid pandemic. He has argued that in our educational system “they force you to teach like a computer to computers” and thus spawn a mental health crisis.
Toupadakis has also argued: “Do nations possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons because of fear of attack from some other nation, or is it mainly because without them the stronger cannot otherwise exploit the weaker?”
Indeed, John Steinbach of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area notes that the US government has used nuclear threats over and over again, as documented by Dan Ellsberg, Stan Norris, and Arjun Makhijani.
Thus, nuclear weapons have been used as a method of global control. I have noted this around the US and Russian opposition to eliminating nuclear weapons.
Such use was obscured by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who claimed recently, in a rare acknowledgment of Israel’s nukes, that Israel wouldn’t use nuclear weapons. In fact, Israel, as well as the US government, has used them repeatedly as a thief uses a gun to conduct a robbery.
I’d argue that nuclear weapons, as well as the Covid pandemic, have been used as methods of control over domestic populations as well. They have effectively been guns wielded at the general public as well as other countries. Fear of death, whether by The Bomb or from a virus has been used as a method of instilling fear and asserting social control. It demonizes the “other” — whether they’re a disfavored nation, ethnic group, dissidents, or the ultimate “other” — Nature.
In the case of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the “red scares” were used in attempts to limit free speech. Such methods have manifested again and again, whether it was “wars on terror” or claims of “foreign influence”.
The Bomb and the pandemic are also linked in that the Ukraine War, with its associated threat of nuclear Armageddon, was largely responsible for shifting attention away from the pandemic. On January 23, 2022, there were protests in DC to “End the Mandates” — which prominently featured Kennedy and Robert Malone. The invasion of Ukraine, committed by Russia but provoked by the US government, was almost exactly a month later. This facilitated reducing the chances of a meaningful assertion of accountability regarding the policies surrounding the pandemic.
“Then there was the hard times, then there was a war….”
And the nuclear weapons labs also do bioweapons work, including Lawrence Livermore. See my “Crucial Points on Pandemic Origins Debate, Part 2” which was written after the DOE’s assessment on Covid origins.
While the threat of nuclear war can be seen as a method of geopolitical and social control, the possibility of actual nuclear war cannot be discounted of course,
US government policy has tried to “game” the possibility of nuclear war, for example by having Trident submarines near the Soviet Union / Russia. This gives the US an ostensible advantage, but actually accelerates the risks, since the Russians only have minutes to decide if there is actually an all-out nuclear attack targeting them. This is an insidious “putting out the fire with gasoline” dynamic which was also in play when the US government would attack counties in the Mideast in an alleged attempt to quell the resentment against it.
A similar dynamic is going on with the creation of more deadly pathogens. Their creation is justified as a “defensive” measure, but it’s not and actually increases the risk of disaster. This should not be interpreted as evidence of the system being irrational however. Rather, it’s another case of the stated goals being very different from the actual goals. And so, we must examine what the actual goals of entire scientific structures actually are.
There is an underlying logic of Empire. It manifests itself through different politicians as I’ve argued. And it also manifests itself through various technologies, perverting the stated goals of science as it has twisted so much else.
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Sam Husseini
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist. He writes at husseini.substack.com.
