Dennis Kyne is a Desert Storm veteran, founder of Veterans For Peace
Chapter 101, former board member of the San Jose Peace Center, and an expert on
depleted uranium who testified at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in
Hamburg (2003)
September 26 is
the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, and I have
a personal stake in it. I served in Desert Storm, where hundreds of tons of
depleted uranium munitions were fired, and I saw the problems that followed
among the people who were there. I have spent the years since testifying about
radioactive weapons, including at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in
Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear
War," and at universities and conferences in Japan, Africa, France and
across the United States. I believe that low-level radiation threatens the
human gene pool over generations, and I have said so wherever I have been
invited to speak. I founded Chapter 101 of Veterans For Peace and served on the
board of the San Jose Peace Center, which began in 1957, when atmospheric bomb
tests were spreading fallout around the world and a few neighbors, including
Rev. George "Shorty" Collins and his wife Evelyn, decided to speak
up. Today the threat of nuclear war is growing again, and I am angry to say
that the institution they built has lost its way.
The Peace
Center’s work was disarmament and education. Its members protested at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and the Nevada test site, trained people in
nonviolent resistance, published The Peace Times for decades, and counseled
young men on alternatives to the Vietnam draft. In 1966, Lisa Kalvelage and
other women blocked a napalm truck in Sunnyvale, an act later remembered in
song. The Center stood in the tradition of Pete Seeger, and it kept a library
of anti-nuclear books and materials so that people could learn as well as
march. That kind of record matters to me because of the people I have stood
beside. In August 2008 I was in Japan for the Hiroshima anniversary ceremonies,
where I spoke about the health effects of depleted uranium, as reported by the
Chugoku Shimbun’s Hiroshima Peace Media Center under the headline "U.S.
veteran speaks in Hiroshima about the health effects of depleted uranium."
I testified at the conference there together with Dr. Shuntaro Hida, the
physician who treated radiation victims in Hiroshima after the 1945 bombing,
and Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the Grey Nun and epidemiologist who spent her life
documenting the effects of low-level radiation. Our testimony is on the record.
Both of them understood that the record of what radiation does has to be kept
and taught, and a peace center with a library is where a community keeps that
record.
Dennis Kyne with Dr. Shuntaro Hida, the physician who treated radiation
victims in Hiroshima after the 1945 bombing, at the August 2008 memorial
ceremonies in Hiroshima.
Dennis Kyne with Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the Grey Nun, epidemiologist and
radiation researcher, in Hiroshima Japan. August 2008
The founders were
also wise enough to protect the place. In 1985 they formed the Collins
Foundation to give the Center, in the Foundation’s own words, "a permanent
secure home," and the Foundation bought the building at 48 S. 7th Street
and named it Collins House. As a former board member, I know why it was built
this way. It is, I believe, the last peace center in the country that owns its
own building. The design was deliberate, and it was genius: no landlord,
developer or later faction could take the building away from the cause it was
bought to serve.
Then came the
changes. The Peace Center became the "Peace and Justice Center," and
the new name was not a formality. I watched a mission built on nuclear
disarmament give way to a different agenda run by labor and housing activists
whom I consider communist in outlook, with ties to Workers World and other
far-left groups. The anti-nuclear library was dismantled. The Center now calls
itself the Foundation’s "principal project," and its account of its
own history says little about the library, about Pete Seeger’s tradition, or
about why the Center was founded. I call that a rewrite of the story. What they
have not been able to do is break up the Center and sell the building, because
the founders’ structure stands in their way. I fear that the time is close.
Old members,
donors and neighbors need to act now. They should demand that the Collins
Foundation’s board keep to the purpose stated at its founding, restore the
anti-nuclear library, put disarmament education back at the center of the
Center’s work, and give no ground on the ownership of Collins House. The
founders and builders of the charter did not buy a building so that later
generations could sell it or turn it into a Yoga studio. I know from my own
work what the weapons this Center was founded to abolish do to human beings and
to the generations after them, and a community that hosts the region’s weapons
science needs a place that tells the truth about it. On September 26, I ask
everyone who remembers the Peace Center to help take it back.
