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L3Harris: Convert to Peace Work or We Will Shut You Down
From our position in the imperial core, with war profiteers as our neighbors, it is our duty to do everything in our power to end the genocide and occupation.
Mar 26, 2025
On March 19, 2025, five members of Demilitarize Western Massachusetts were arrested for occupying the public lobby of the L3Harris plant in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serving a “people’s warrant” against CEO Chris Kubasik for perpetrating, and profiting from, the genocide in Gaza. As they read a statement noting that L3Harris weapons shipments violate the U.S. Leahy Law and related laws, they threw fake money splotched with red paint on the floor of the L3 lobby.
Their--and our--demand is simple: L3Harris, convert to peace work or shut down!
Like all weapons manufacturers, L3Harris profits from militarism, genocide, and occupation. Incongruously nestled in the luscious green ecology of the Connecticut River Valley, the L3Harris Northampton plant makes submarine periscopes and optical targeting sights for naval vessels. The plant is merely one node in L3Harris’ global weapons empire reaping $19.4 billion in profits in 2023 alone, making it the world’s 12th largest weapons manufacturer.
By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism.
For decades, L3Harris has supplied weapons systems and components used by the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF, commonly known as the IDF) in Palestine. For example, L3 Combat Propulsion Systems, L3Harris’ former subsidiary, manufactured the engine of the Merkava IV, used by the IOF in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the 2012, 2014, and 2021 assaults on Gaza. L3Harris also manufactures components for multiple weapons systems used by the IOF in Gaza, including Boeing’s JDAM (guided bomb) kits, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 warplane, Northrop Grumman’s Sa’ar 5 warships, and ThyssenKrupp’s Sa’ar 6 warships. L3Harris’ webs of violence extend worldwide. In addition to supplying surveillance technology used at the Qalandia, Bethlehem, and Sha’ar Efraim checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, L3Harris manufactures surveillance equipment used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security against immigrants in occupied Turtle Island.
The Demilitarize Western Massachusetts action on March 19, 2025 came 17 months into the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, 75 years after the mass dispossession of Palestinians known as the Nakba, and after nearly a century of the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. The action came two days after the Zionist entity’s resumption of airstrikes on March 17, which killed over 400 Gazans in a single night, two weeks after the Zionist entity cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza, and during the largest forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.
The occupation’s relentless pursuit of annihilation, trauma and maiming, ecocide and scholasticide is unquantifiable. The numbers we recite to tally this genocide--186,000 direct and indirect deaths, 110,000 injured, 1.9 million displaced, 217 journalists and over 1,000 doctors murdered, 85% of schools bombed, healthcare infrastructure obliterated, and over 85,000 tons of bombs dropped—fail to adequately describe the existential and ongoing horrors of occupation and settler-colonial violence in Gaza. As Palestinian poet and organizer Mohammed El-Kurd writes, “Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation.”
Yet, occupation and violence have been immensely profitable for L3Harris, revealing capitalism’s grotesque and parasitic capacity to reap value from death and destruction. Like other weapons manufacturers, L3Harris has been the target of an ongoing global campaign for demilitarization and an end to war profiteering. In the past year and a half, Demilitarize Western Mass blockaded the entrance to L3 in October, 2023 and again in June, 2024, demanding that L3 stop arming the genocide. In Brighton, England, Stop L3Harris successfully organized to prevent the weapons manufacturer from expanding; The struggle to permanently shutter the factory is ongoing. Over the past two years, L3Harris factories across Canada have been repeatedly blockaded. These and similar actions follow the 2023 call from Workers in Palestine to “intervene and disrupt the flow of arms that sustain genocide.”
For more than a decade, members of Demilitarize Western Mass have held weekly vigils and street protests and blockades of the Northampton plant’s entrances, imploring L3Harris to convert to life-affirming, rather than life-destroying, work.
By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism. From our position in the imperial core, with war profiteers as our neighbors, it is our duty to do everything in our power to end the genocide and occupation. We hope that this direct action at L3Harris inspires others. As the Secretariat of Student Frameworks in Gaza urged in their March 21 statement, “This must not be a moment of resignation—it must be one of escalation!”
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What the Movement for Divestment Misses
Yes, schools and other institutions should divest from companies involved in war crimes or fueling the climate crisis. But individuals can also divest. Here's how.
Jul 08, 2024
On Sunday, May 26—as graduating students at my school, Wesleyan University, tossed their caps into the air—bombs rained down on a tent camp for displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 45 people, including a number of women and children. The weapons that killed them, GBU-39 bombs, were made by Boeing and supplied by the U.S.
"Many of the dead bodies were severely burned, had amputated limbs, and were torn to pieces," according to a local physician. In addition, the bomb blasts and ensuing fires wounded another 249 people.
The next day, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the bombing a "tragic accident," but by Tuesday, Israeli shelling and airstrikes killed another 37 Palestinians in the area, most of them sheltering in tents. "We will enter Rafah because we have no other choice," Mr. Netanyahu had warned earlier, in his campaign to defeat Hamas after last year's heinous October 7 attack on Israel.
In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.
It is this mounting civilian death toll—carried out with U.S. weapons—that spurred students to protest and set up encampments in the spring on nearly 140 college campuses, including Wesleyan. Although each encampment was different, student protesters were largely united in calling on their school to divest any holdings in companies supporting the war. The divestment they were calling for was strictly institutional, but as I will explain later, it's also possible for individuals to carry out acts of divestment on their own.
In the first three months of the war alone, Israel dropped 45,000 bombs on Gaza, the majority of which were designed or manufactured by the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these weapons is the 2,000-pound "bunker busting" Mark-84 bomb, which has a lethality area equivalent to 58 soccer fields. In the first month of the war, Israel dropped more than 500 Mark-84 bombs, often in densely populated areas, according to a CNN analysis (and these 500 bombs, made by General Dynamics, are only a small fraction of at least 5,000 that the U.S. sent to Israel after the Hamas attack).
As described in a United Nations Human Rights Council report, the explosive blast from a Mark-84 bomb "can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities, and tear off limbs hundreds of feet from the blast site, according to trauma physicians. When it hits, the [bomb] generates an 8,500-degree fireball, gouges a 20-foot crater as it displaces 10,000 pounds of dirt and rock and generates enough wind to knock down walls blocks away and hurl metal fragments a mile or more."
All told, the explosive force of munitions Israel has used on Gaza since October 7 is estimated to be 75 kilotons—five times larger than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the case of Gaza, though, its 141 square-mile territory is less than half the size of Hiroshima. In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.
One of the most catastrophic results of this bombing is that roughly 1 out of every 133 Palestinian children in Gaza has now been killed—a number which, when scaled to match the U.S. population, would translate into the deaths of more than half a million American children.
It is hard to imagine the bitterness and hatred that such a death toll would generate in the United States, yet only three days into the war, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari publicly acknowledged that Israel's bombing campaign was "focused on what causes maximum damage"—not on the accuracy of where bombs land or the need to minimize collateral damage.
In keeping with that focus, nearly half of all bombs Israel used in Gaza during the first two months of war were unguided, and even U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Israel risked losing international support due to its "indiscriminate bombing."
Calls for Divestment
Wesleyan student protesters began sleeping in tents on April 28, and their encampment ultimately grew to more than 100 tents by the time it disbanded on May 20. The tent community was peaceful and advanced a set of demands, the foremost of which was that the university administration disclose its financial investments and then divest from companies and institutions which are supporting or profiting from the war and occupation of Palestinian territory.
As someone with Israeli family members, it pains me to say that I agree with the call for divestment. My agreement is not only because of the profound loss of life on both sides of the war, but for three additional reasons.
(1) Israeli leaders are violating international humanitarian law. Put simply, it's illegal to starve civilians or willfully impede relief supplies as a method of war. Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on October 18 that "we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip." As a result of that policy, "full-blown famine" hit Northern Gaza by May, according to the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. Even worse, the program predicts that if the war continues, more than 1 million people (half the population of Gaza) will face life-threatening levels of starvation by mid-July.
Here is what Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says about starving civilians and impeding relief efforts:
For the purpose of this Statute, "war crimes"... [includes] Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies.
To be sure, one could argue that Mr. Netanyahu's statement doesn't accurately represent the Israeli government's official position, but several other top leaders have also publicly called for withholding food and humanitarian relief. For instance, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9: "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."
Likewise, on October 12 Energy Minister Israel Katz posted this statement on social media: "No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home."
And National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has gone on record as saying that it would be a "grave mistake" for the Israeli government to allow "the transfer of humanitarian aid" into Gaza unless Hamas frees Israeli hostages.
There's a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.
In other words, the starvation of civilians and suspension of humanitarian aid is explicit, sustained, and willful. Even Israel's closest military ally and defender, the United States, issued a report on May 10 concluding that Israel has "contributed significantly to a lack of sustained and predictable delivery of needed assistance" and likely violated international humanitarian law (for more on that report, and claims by a former U.S. State Department official that it understated violations of international law, see coverage in The Guardian and PBS NewsHour).
Along similar lines, many Americans believe that laws have been broken. A national poll of Americans by The Economist/YouGov in May asked the following question: "Do you think Israel has violated any international laws in Gaza?" Only 28% of respondents answered, "No."
Indeed, on May 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and citing violations of Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute. (The prosecutor also sought to arrest three Hamas leaders for a list of crimes that included rape, torture, and kidnapping.)
In addition, the ICC appointed an independent Panel of Experts in International Law to render an opinion on whether there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that crimes had been committed. In its report, the panel unanimously concluded:
[T]here are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant formed a common plan, together with others, to jointly perpetrate the crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Panel has concluded that the acts through which this war crime was committed include... cutting off supplies of electricity and water, and severely restricting food, medicine, and fuel supplies.
Although President Biden called the ICC prosecutor's charges "outrageous," the next day a report documented that Israeli soldiers and police officers were tipping off far-right activists about the location of aid trucks delivering vital supplies to Gaza, colluding with vigilantes to block the trucks from reaching their destination. Then, on June 12, a commission established by the U.N. Human Rights Council released a finding that "Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law."
(2) U.S. taxpayers are funding Israel's activities in Gaza. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the world's largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, totaling more than $300 billion in American taxpayer money, adjusted for inflation. Moreover, military aid to Israel shows no sign of slowing down. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 70% of Israeli arms imports came from the U.S., and since the Israel-Hamas war began last year, the U.S. has supplied Israel with weapons via more than 100 arms transfers.
Even after the U.S. State Department released its May 10 report concluding that Israel was likely committing crimes, the U.S. has continued to underwrite Israel's actions in Gaza with $12.5 billion in military aid during fiscal year 2024—the second-highest level of U.S. military aid ever provided to Israel.
In a very real sense, then, Israel's war in the Middle East has become America's war—a joint project, as reflected in the results of a national poll conducted in April. When Americans were asked whether they thought the U.S. was at war in the Middle East, 56% said either yes or they weren't sure.
By supplying most of the bombs dropped in Gaza while knowing that humanitarian assistance is being withheld, the U.S. is not only morally culpable—it is breaking federal law. Providing military aid to Israel under such circumstances violates Section 620I of the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which bans foreign aid to any country that "prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance."
On March 11, eight U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden raising precisely this concern, and on March 27, six additional members of Congress sent a similar letter reiterating the point:
It is apparent that the Netanyahu government is repeatedly interfering in U.S. humanitarian operations in direct violation of the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act—Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961... We [are] imploring you to enforce U.S. law with the Netanyahu government.
Providing Israel with weapons used in the commission of war crimes also violates Article Seven of the Arms Trade Treaty, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, ratified by 113 states, signed by 28 others (including the U.S. and Israel), and supported by several Nobel Peace Prize recipients, notable among them Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Nor is the problem limited to the 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States. On June 6, Israel killed at least 40 people—including women and children—with American-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs in an attack on a school where Palestinians were sheltering. One day later, the U.N. publicly announced that it was adding the Israel Defense Forces (as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) to a global list of offenders that violate the rights of children. Because the United States is still supplying Israel with lethal weapons while being aware of how the weapons are being used, many people around the world regard the U.S. as complicit.
(3) Divestment can promote political change and moral alignment. Divestment movements have been around since at least 1783, when Quakers urged members of their community to divest their holdings from the slave trade. As explained by sociology professor David S. Meyer:
[T]he idea wasn't to financially cripple the slave trade. The idea was to get their [own] conduct in line with their beliefs so they could advocate more effectively, sort of a strike against hypocrisy.
Consistent with this explanation, modern-day divestment campaigns rarely have a major financial effect on the targeted countries or businesses, but they can raise public awareness about an issue, signal its urgency, and generate political action. One such political campaign was the global movement to divest from South Africa, which is widely credited as having hastened the end of apartheid in that country and provided a model for the movement to divest from Israel.
When I asked Wesleyan student protesters why they were calling for divestment, some said that they hoped it would help publicize the plight of Palestinians and contribute to political change. Others spoke of moral alignment, saying that they didn't want Wesleyan to fund or support war crimes. And still others felt that schools should not profit from war, arms sales, or the death of civilians. As climate activist Bill McKibben famously said when explaining the logic behind divesting from fossil fuel companies, "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from the wreckage."
Joining the call for divestment also offers a way for student voices to be heard, for protesters to network within and across campuses, and for students to exert more collective leverage than if they act alone. In the case of Wesleyan, for example, students were able to secure a promise from the administration to have the Board of Trustees consider a proposal later this year to divest Wesleyan's $1.5 billion endowment, $25-30 million of which is currently invested in aerospace and defense businesses.
The Missing Element: Personal Divestment
One of the most powerful aspects of university divestment is that it makes a statement from a respected institution known for its erudition and scholarly expertise. At the same time, a promise to consider divestment is not the same as a promise to divest, and even if a school were to opt for divestment—as Wesleyan has with respect to fossil fuels, and as it may in the future with respect to defense contractors—the process could take months or years to complete, by which time the war in Gaza would presumably have ended.
In the meanwhile, there's a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.
This is no small thing. American college and university endowments total an estimated $839 billion—an astronomical amount that would have far-reaching political effects if it were divested—but the divestment campaigns on college campuses miss a source of funds 45 times larger: $38.4 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts held by individual employees.
Even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.
In a matter of minutes, many employees with retirement accounts can divest by moving their assets into environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that exclude defense contractors. ESG funds also typically exclude fossil fuel companies, the tobacco industry, and corporations known for worker abuses.
In days gone by, these "socially responsible" or "sustainable" investment funds tended to perform more poorly than broad mutual funds set up to mirror market indexes such as the S&P 500. Not anymore. In fact, according to a New York University meta-analysis of more than 1,000 research papers, today's ESG funds often outperform other funds.
To take just one example, the Statista Research Department compared the classic S&P 500 index and an ESG S&P 500 index between 2021 and 2024, and it found that by the fourth quarter of 2021, "the S&P 500 ESG index began to steadily outperform the S&P 500 by four points on average."
A Morgan Stanley study of more than 10,000 mutual funds from 2004 to 2018 also found that ESG funds tend to be less risky than other mutual funds, especially when markets are turbulent. The conclusion, according to the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, is that "incorporating ESG criteria into investment decisions makes good sense financially."
Of course, not everyone has a retirement fund, but for those who do, these results are reassuring. What they suggest is that individual employees can divest from defense contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics—makers of the GBU-39 and Mark-84 bombs discussed earlier—without compromising retirement savings.
This divestment option applies to a broad range of retirement accounts, including traditional and Roth IRAs, 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans, and 457(b) plans. For further details on how to divest, see these tips on how to divest retirement accounts.
All well and good, you might say, but what about after a cease-fire or the war ends—would it still be worth the effort to divest? Without question, my answer is yes. First, cease-fires are often fragile. In the 2014, for example, Israel and Hamas had nine truces, during which more than 2,000 people were killed, before there was a relatively lasting agreement to stop the fighting. And even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.
Admittedly, personal and institutional divestment are both blunt instruments, and ESG investing has its critics. Nevertheless, ESG investments are growing worldwide and estimated to reach $53 trillion by next year (one third of all global assets under management). The reason for this meteoric growth is not just that ESG investment strategies exclude certain industries. They also embrace prosocial values and goals that are aligned with emergent global regulations, priorities, and needs.
In short, ESG investing is here to stay, and personal divestment can serve as a refusal to support or profit from the use of American-made weapons in Gaza—a small but significant statement. As Mahatma Gandhi reportedly said with respect to the impact of individual actions, "Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
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No, We’re Not Stuck With Nuclear Weapons
To say an technology will always be with us because it can’t be disinvented is like saying you will always be alive because you can’t be disborn.
Apr 09, 2024
After seeing the movie Oppenheimer, a friend glumly commented, “I certainly don’t like them [nuclear weapons], but what can we do? We can’t put that genie back in its bottle.”
Those of us eager to get rid of nukes hear this a lot and at first glance it seems true; common sense suggests that we’re stuck with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s genie because after all, it can’t be disinvented. But this “common sense” is uncommonly wrong. Technologies have appeared throughout human history, and just as the great majority of plant and animal species have eventually gone extinct, ditto for the great majority of technological genies. Only rarely have they been actively erased. Nearly always they’ve simply been abandoned once people recognized they were inefficient, unsafe, outmoded, or sometimes just plain silly.
Don’t be bamboozled, therefore, by the oft-repeated claim by defense intellectuals that we can’t put the nuclear genie back in its bottle. We don’t have to. Plenty of lousy technologies have simply been forsaken. It’s their usual fate. (Dear readers, please don’t misunderstand. Our argument is NOT that nuclear weapons shouldn’t be actively restricted and eventually abolished. They should. Indeed, doing so is a major goal for basic planetary hygiene. Our point is that we, as a society and as antinuclear activists, shouldn’t be buffaloed by the widespread, influential claim that we are stuck with nukes simply because “that genie is out of the bottle.” Our argument isn’t, in itself, a profound case against nuclear weapons; we have made that point in other contexts, and we intend to keep doing so. Rather, we write to dispute one of the troublesome arguments that, for some people, has inhibited discussion about the necessity of nuclear abolition.)
Why isn’t it possible to imagine that they will be abandoned—just as other technologies that are dangerous and essentially useless?
Now, back to our thesis: that we’re not necessarily stuck with bad genies simply because they have somehow gotten out of their bottles. There are many instructive examples. The earliest high-wheel bicycles, called penny-farthings in England because their huge front wheel and tiny rear one resembled a penny alongside a farthing, were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s. They were not only difficult to ride, but dangerous to fall off.
Between 1897 and 1927, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company sold more than ten thousand Stanley Steamers, automobiles powered by steam engines. Both technologies are now comical curiosities, reserved for museums. Perhaps transportation intellectuals warned at the time that you couldn’t put the Stanley Steamer or penny-farthing genies back in their bottles.
Technological determinism—the idea that some objective technological reality decides what technologies exist—seems persuasive. After all, we can’t disinvent anything, nuclear weapons no less than penny-farthings and Stanley Steamers. There are no disinvention laboratories that undo things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place. To say that nuclear weapons will always be with us because they can’t be disinvented is like saying you will always be alive because you can’t be disborn.
Pessimists clinging to the myth of disinvention also argue that nuclear weapons can never be done away with because the knowledge of how to build them will always exist. Inventing something is conceived as a one-way process in which the crucial step is the moment of invention. Once that line has been crossed, there is no going back.
Again, this is superficially plausible. After all, it’s almost always the case that once knowledge is created or ideas are promulgated, they rarely go away. But there is a crucial difference between knowledge and ideas on the one hand, and technology on the other. Human beings don’t keep technology around (except sometimes in museums) the way they keep knowledge around in libraries, textbooks, and cultural traditions.
Bad ideas may persist in libraries, but not in the real world. The physicist Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” had some bad ideas. He urged, for instance, that H-bombs be used to melt arctic ice in order to dig seaports and also to free up the Northwest Passage, while other physicists, including Freeman Dyson, spent years on Project Orion, hoping to design a rocket that would be powered by a successive series of nuclear explosions. Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.
Useless, dangerous, or outmoded technology needn’t be forced out of existence. Once a thing is no longer useful, it unceremoniously and deservedly gets ignored.
To understand how nuclear weapons might fit this mold, and be eliminated, look at technologies more generally, and how they go away. Venture capitalists, for example, are aware that new things don’t become permanent the moment they’re invented, nor do they disappear because they’ve been disinvented. Technologies have a life cycle whose two end points aren’t birth and death, but invention, then (sometimes) adoption, followed by either modification and continuation, or abandonment.
A new device can be utterly brilliant, but if it isn’t widely used, it won’t persist; certainly, it won’t live on forever just because it has been invented. Technologies go away when enough people decide to give up on them. This applies to weapons, too. Stone axes didn’t disappear because people couldn’t make them anymore, or because our ancestors ran out of stone. Iron replaced bronze, steel replaced iron. Spears, blowguns, bows and arrows, matchlock rifles, blunderbusses, the gatling gun: Each went extinct because they were simply abandoned, and for good reasons.
Consider the hand mortar. Developed in the 1600s, these guns (sort of like a sawed off, wide-barreled shotgun) were supposed to fire an exploding grenade at an adversary. At the time, however, triggers that could ignite on impact had not yet been developed, so the hand mortar relied on a somewhat complicated process: You primed the gun, set it down, grabbed the grenade (carefully!), lit its fuse, stuffed it in the gun’s muzzle, and shoved it all the way down the barrel, picked up the gun, aimed, and fired.
In theory, hand mortars ought to have been effective weapons. But there were lots of things that could go wrong, and did. The fuse could touch the grenade and detonate it in the barrel. Or the fuse could get doubled on itself as it was stuffed down the barrel, shortening the burn time, again detonating it in the barrel. The gun could misfire, leaving the grenade in the barrel, where it would eventually detonate. (None of these events were healthy for the soldier firing it.) The shock of shooting it could separate the fuse from the grenade, making it no more deadly than a thrown rock. If you mis-estimated the amount of powder needed to fire the grenade out of the gun incorrectly, it could either deposit the grenade at your feet or just a few yards away among your own troops, or it could send it sailing far over the heads of your adversaries.
As a practical matter, there were too many things that could go dangerously wrong with hand mortars, such that ultimately killing a knot of enemy soldiers if everything went right wasn’t worth the many risks involved. Even though hand mortars had been invented, and even though any madman who wanted to could have armed his forces with them, they had a negligible impact on war fighting. They were never outlawed or disinvented. Being a technology that was both dangerous and not very useful, they were simply abandoned.
And nuclear weapons? They are certainly dangerous, given that deterrence cannot persist indefinitely without someday failing. Bertrand Russell noted that one can imagine watching a tightrope walker balance aloft for five minutes, or even 15, but for a whole year? Or a hundred? At the same time, nuclear weapons have never been very useful, if indeed they have been useful at all, except to benefit those relatively few individuals, civilian and military, whose careers have profited from designing, developing, and deploying them.
So why isn’t it possible to imagine that they will be abandoned—just as other technologies that are dangerous and essentially useless? They could readily go extinct even though the memory of how to make them persists.
Yes, nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented. Oppenheimer and his colleagues bequeathed us something that was remarkable, not very useful, and very dangerous. The way to eliminate the danger is to understand that they were never a very good technology to begin with. And to recognize that insofar as they are bad genies they needn’t be stuffed back into their bottles. They can be left to fall of their own weight, or, alternatively, to suffer the fate suggested by Brent Scowcroft—no peacenik—when, in retirement, he was asked what should best be done with them: “Let ‘em rot.”
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