By Lora Lucero

Koohan Paik-Mander, a Hawaii-based journalist, is currently on a speaking tour in the U.S. to ring an alarm bell – to wake up Americans. The paradigm shift in the way we wage war is rapidly pushing us over the proverbial cliff. The U.S. government is building a “high speed kill web” to encircle the entire planet with 5G capability to summon unmanned weapons and spacecraft at a moment’s notice, all operating on a sea-land-space infrastructure comprised of satellites and a “smart ocean” made up of undersea sonar and radar networks. The data cloud for the new war fighting paradigm will be developed by Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google, which collectively received $9 billion last December from the Pentagon to begin research.

The facts and figures rolled off her tongue quickly as Koohan explained how this hyper-costly infrastructure is creating a new reality with dead oceans and atomized warfare. “A weaponized Pacific is a dead Pacific. And a dead Pacific is a dead planet.” Her pictures and diagrams showed how whale poop is keeping our oceans alive. Their poop is rich in nutrients that stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, capturing an estimated 40% of all the carbon dioxide produced. But roughly a 100,000 whales are being killed each year by the U.S. military using the Pacific Ocean and islands as a testing ground for new weapons systems and live-fire training, along with the use of sonar for anti-submarine warfare training.

Connecting the dots between the military’s new type of global warfare, ecological destruction in the oceans, and the U.S. role in pushing humanity off the cliff — Koohan ended her presentation by sharing the story of Moloch, that ancient deity who demanded dire sacrifices. This arms race is a suicide race, and we’re racing mindlessly forward. Can we reframe the story of our future from one of death and destruction towards a future for life and creative joy?

During the Q&A that followed, Marcy Matasick drew a stark reminder of how Moloch has an incestuous relationship with New Mexico. There are currently plans to build 30 nuclear bomb cores (a plutonium “pit”) per year and increase production in the future to 50 per year; one plutonium pit costs over $60 million. That’s 700 nurses’ salaries. To make 30 of them will cost around $2 billion each year based on current costs, but costs of the nuclear weapons program keep rising exponentially. And bomb core production is just one component of the multi-state nuclear weapons “modernization” program. The whole program is costing us $60 to $70 billion annually and rising. We could end all homelessness in the U.S. for $20 billion. We could end all hunger across the US for $25 billion.

“Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!” — Allen Ginsberg’s meditation about Moloch in his poem Howl (1955).

Koohan Paik-Mander is a board member of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and on the advisory committee for the Global Just Transition project at Foreign Policy in Focus in Washington, D.C. She is also a member of China is Not Our Enemy, a working group at CODEPINK.

Stay tuned to Alternative Radio planning to air Koohan’s presentation in the future. https://www.alternativeradio.org/

Sign Marcy’s petition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. https://www.change.org/p/stop-making-nukes Contact the Albuquerque Center for Peace & Justice to learn more about the current plans and to make a donation. https://www.abqpeaceandjustice.org/