Nukewatch Special Report
Navy Calls it Quits, Announces Shutdown of Project ELF

By John LaForge, Nukewatch staff

On Sept. 17, 2004, three decades of anti-nuclear activism suddenly came to an end when the Office of Space and Navy Warfare Systems Command announced that on Sept. 30 it will shut down and proceed to permanently dismantle its two extremely low frequency (ELF) submarine transmitters — one near Clam Lake, Wisc., and the other near Republic, Michigan. The Navy said in a press release the twin transmitters are “outdated and no longer needed.” The shutdown notice came as a complete surprise, since two years ago Navy PR representative Richard Williamson said in Wisconsin that the system would be necessary for another 25 years.

Campaigners with the Coalition to Stop Project ELF held an all-day public gathering on Sept. 30 at the Clam Lake, Wisc. site to observe the shut down. The Nukewatch Winter 2004-2005 Pathfinder will contain coverage of the event.

For more than 30 years, since it first began test operations in 1968, a wide range of peace and environmental organizations, the general public, a Federal District Court judge, and even the Wisconsin and Michigan Congressional delegations have worked to prevent, restrict and finally to cancel the one-way “bell ringer” as the Navy called it.

Since 1991 and the collapse of the USSR, 639 trespass citations have been issued to activists who converged on the site 58 times over 13 years. Over 40 nuclear weapons resisters who refused to pay court-ordered fines have been incarcerated in county jails or — since the charges went federal in 2001 — in federal prisons. Five times since 1984, ELF’s antenna poles were cut down by Plowshares disarmament activists all of whom endured long prison sentences. (In one hard-won exception in 1996, although they were convicted and sentenced to prison for damage to property, Donna Howard and Tom Hastings were found not guilty of sabotage when an Ashland County jury found that the Tridents can’t be used defensively but only in an offensive war-waging manner.)

Altogether, more than nine years of incarceration have been served by nuclear resisters who acted against ELF. Even now, another 20 trespass defendants are facing trial in Madison for linecrossing actions at the site May 16 and August 8. An assistant U.S. attorney in Madison said Sept. 20 he didn’t see why the prosecutions should not go ahead.

On Mothers’ Day 1997, about 100 activists converging on the ELF compound passed under the antenna at the rear entrance, 16 were later arrested for climbing inside.

Why all the protest? Because the system was built to wage suicidal atomic violence with the Trident submarine’s H-bombs. The Trident’s weapons are 38-times the power of the bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945. Since 140,000 people were incinerated at Hiroshima, one Trident’s warheads can potentially murder more than 5 million people at one blow. Never mind that the Navy’s 14 Tridents each carrying 24 missiles, and that each missile carries up to eight of these unspeakably terrifying weapons.

What the ELF transmitter did – sending signals deep into the ocean — was allow the Tridents to get up close to the Target-ofthe- Day, be it Cuba, Korea, Iran, Libya or Iraq, to stay deep enough to elude detection and still receive orders. The object was to reduce launch-to-target flight time and thereby increase missile accuracy. The only reason to prefer an accurate hit with a mountain-busting 475-kiloton warhead (the Hiroshima bomb was 12.5 kilotons) is to rip off a sneak attack or “first-strike” against missile sites, bombers or command centers. Never mind that this program was the polar opposite of the ‘deterrence’ it was said to be a part of, and that a first-strike is exactly what deterrence is supposed to prevent.

Navy reasons for shutdown are 23 years old

Although anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons activists are celebrating the successful end of a long-term campaign against this nuclear war “ trigger,” the announcement raises more questions than it answers.

The rationale presented by the Navy in its shutdown notice is suspect. “Improvements in communications technology and the changing requirements of today’s Navy” make ELF obsolete, the Navy said. This is something opponents have said for over 25 years. The Navy said communications with the subs will now be done with “12 very low frequency (VLF) transmitters located around the world.” But VLF is no improvement in technology and has been around since the 1970s.

In his 1983 book First Strike, Bob Aldridge notes that VLF stations were set around the world in a “Fleet Broadcasting System” for submarine communications” even then. Flying broadcasts to subs were also done with planes called Tacamo that reeled out a 5-1/2-mile long trailing antenna for VLF communications. In 1983 there were 18 of these planes and two of them were airborne all the time, one over the Atlantic and one over the Pacific.

The “changing requirements of today’s Navy” are nothing new either. The collapse of the cold war and the dissolution of the USSR eliminated the Navy’s “deterrence” cover story more than 14 years ago.

Indeed, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Navy admirals testified that ELF was unnecessary. In 1978, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover said in National Defense magazine that despite the 1,500 sixty-day patrols that had been carried out by the 41 Polaris [and Poseidon] submarines since 1960, the Soviet Union had not detected even one of them.

In 1981, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, then Chief of Naval Operations, testified to the House Armed Services Committee that “ no threat has emerged that causes us concern about our SSBN [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine] force. And therefore it is not essential to press on with ELF at the present time.”

In that same year, then Navy Secretary John F. Lehman recommended to Pentagon chief Casper Weinberger that ELF be shelved.

Rear Admiral Raymond G. Jones Jr., then Deputy Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Undersea Warfare, testified on June 7, 1991 that, “the Soviets do not currently threaten U.S. SSBNs [ballistic missile subs] in the open ocean, nor do we see indications of a future threat.”

More recently, in January 1993, then Pentagon chief Dick Cheney said, “The ability of the SSBN force to remain virtually undetected at sea makes it the most survivable and enduring element of the U.S. nuclear force structure.”

None of this official nay saying stopped the system for long. The threat that the ELF transmitter’s electromagnetic radiation might cause brain cancers, leukemia, reproductive disorders and other illnesses did slow the system down for a while.

MartinLuther King Jr. Holiday, 1999, saw a snow blockade of the ELF site’s outer gate.

In 1984, Federal Judge Barbara Crabb ruled against the Navy in Wisconsin v. Weinberger. In her 72-page injunction which halted construction of the ELF system, Crabb said the Navy was in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because it ignored studies showing human health hazards from ELF’s electromagnetic radiation. The legal victory was the culmination of years of work by the original Stop Project ELF. But Crabb’s injunction was vacated on appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which said the supposed Soviet threat was more tangible than the threat of cancer from ELF waves. A blistering dissenting opinion reminded the majority that the NEPA has no national security exemption, so the majority opinion itself violated the NEPA. The appeals court order allowed ELF to be built without ever answering the health questions raised by Judge Crabb’s injunction.

John Stauber co-founded the original Stop Project ELF which helped convince Wisconsin’s attorney general to sue the Navy under NEPA. The Appeals Court reversal was a heavy hit. “We had essentially exhausted all legal remedies,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “That’s why it became such a focus for nonviolent protest, and many people have gone to jail for quite a while over the last 20 years.”

Bonnie Urfer, senior staff person and co-director of Nukewatch said, “I feel relief for the people of the area and the local environment, knowing that ELF’s million-point-three watts of electricity will no longer be jolted into the ground, shocking the aquatic life and increasing the threat of leukemia and other cancers.”

An undated sign-painting action predicted the recent announcement by the Navy to cease transmission and dismantle the system.

The Navy might still be afraid of liability over ELF’s electromagnetic radiation and its power to promote or cause health problems around the transmitter. It may be worried about the Lac Courte Oreilles Tribe’s investigation into health concerns which began in Hayward, Wisconsin two years ago.

John Heid, of the anti-war Anathoth Community near Luck, Wisc., who along with me served 60 days in Ashland County jail in 2001, said of the announcement, “Today ELF, tomorrow Trident.”

Taking the long view, Jane Hosking, also at Anathoth, who was jailed for 60 days in 1998 and again in 2003, said, “We still have a few issues to work out with U.S. nuclear weapon’s policy — like disarmament and clean-up.”

It would also be interesting to learn the Navy’s actual reasons for stopping Project ELF.