"The impression we get is that Bechtel is more powerful than the US Army"
- Dr. Nabil Khudair Abbas, a top official with the new Iraqi government's Ministry of Education.

This August groups across the country will directly confront the role of U.S. corporations in creating a worldwide nuclear crisis and leading us to war in Iraq as well as expose the hypocrisy of U.S. threats against Iran. One primary target for these actions will be Bechtel's corporate offices and nuclear facilities, as Bechtel is both the world's #1 nuclear profiteer and a leading beneficiary of the Iraq war and corporate globalization in general.

Bechtel, a privately-owned company, is not just a textbook case of war profiteering. Perhaps more than any other corporation, Bechtel "connects the dots" for the anti-war, anti-nuke and global justice movements: Through its sordid corporate history and 100 years of revolving-door relationships with government, Bechtel illustrates the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation, between corporate globalization and war, and between corporate power-brokers and decision-makers at the highest levels of government.

A more thorough exposé of Bechtel's role in fomenting death, destruction, environmental devastation, worker abuses and corporate corruption will be included in next month's issue of The New People. Meanwhile, here are a three salient examples to whet your appetite:

1. Becthel, which built the petrochemical plants that allowed Iraq to make the chemical weapons used against Iran, is now receiving billions to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure that it helped to destroy.

The plans to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime and to invade Iraq began only after George Shultz (Reagan's Secretary of State and former president of Bechtel) and Donald Rumseld (Shultz's special envoy to Iraq and current Secretary of Defense) failed to secure Iraq's approval to have Bechtel build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba. Eventually Shultz, through the auspices of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and Bechtel's CEO Riley Bechtel, through the auspices of the President’s Import-Export Council, and Bechtel senior VP and former four-star general Jack Sheehan, through the auspices of the Pentagon's Defense Police Board, helped make possible the invasion and subsequent restructuring of Iraq's economy...and now Bechtel has received $3 billion worth of contracts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and is setting the groundwork for water privatization. (Bechtel has been at the center of IMF-led water privatization efforts all around the world. When its not polluting the water, its attempting to privatizing it.)

Of course, Bechtel's progress has been less than stellar as the construction and repairs to schools, power, sewage and water processing are delayed and environmental conditions for Iraqis are worse than before the invasion.

2. Bechtel, which was originally contracted to build Iran's first nuclear power plant before the fall of the Shah's regime, is receiving billions to manage the U.S. military's nuclear facilities and is poised to receive even more as Bush threatens to strike Iran.

Just as the war on Iraq was a pretext for Becthel (and others) to plunder Iraq, the threats and potential strikes against Iran are an effort to destabilize the current regime so as to make Iran part of a growing "Middle East Free Trade Area." In addition to Iraq, Bechtel has billions of dollars worth of contracts throughout the Middle East, including Saudia Arabia, Kuwai, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Bechtel may again play a role in the attack.

As Seymour Hersch recently reported in New Yorker, the U.S. plans for Iran include the use of nuclear “bunker busters." On June 23, at the Nevada Test Site managed by Bechtel, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency will detonate a 700 ton bomb to simulate the effects of a nuclear bomb underground. Codenamed "Divine Strake", the test would help the military to fine-tune preparations for the use nuclear bunker busters in places such as Iran.

But the explosion could expose people who live downwind of the site to a dust cloud containing radioactive particulates, since the Nevada Test Site was the location where above ground nuclear weapons were exploded during the cold war era. Starting May 28th, the “Stop Divine Strake Coalition” plans to begin a series of vigils and direct actions at a Nevada Test Site Peace Camp in an attempt to cancel the test. The Nevada Test Site is located on land seized from the Western Shoshone Nation by the U.S. government in 1951.

In addition to the Nevada Test Site, Bechtel either manages or has a hand in managing all of major nuclear facilities that support the US military, including the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Kwajalein missile range off the Marshal Islands, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory here in Pittsburgh. Stories of environmental abuse abound in each of these sites.

3. Bechtel, which has built the majority of nuclear power plants in the U.S. and around the world, is poised to rake in billions more as the Bush administration paves the way for the construction of even more nuclear power plants.

From Three Mile Island, PA--where Bechtel "improperly classified" modifications to the plant as "not important to safety" in order to avoid safety controls--to San Onofre, CA--where Bechtel installed a reactor backwards, and this on a volcano fault line--Bechtel has posed an enormous threat to public heath and the environment.

Yet Bechtel's profiting from nuclear power continues to skyrocket as it reaps more and more contracts to dispose of nuclear waste and clean up toxic messes -- waste that was created in nuclear power plants that Bechtel also constructed.

For example, Bechtel received a multi-billion dollar contract to build the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant. The Hanford site in southeastern Washington State has one of the largest concentrations of radioactive waste in the world. Bechtel has been fined several times for its failure to meet construction standards and there are several reports documenting increasing illness and the threat of environmental devastation.

Bechtel received a multi-billlion dollar construction contract for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada. As with the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear waste depository is also located on lands belonging to the Western Shoshone, who rightfully worry that the nuclear waste will contaminate their groundwater (which, incidentally, Bechtel earlier polluted through its gold-mining operations in the region).

Meanwhile, Bechtel is leaving its mark in West Mifflin, where it also has a multi-billion dollar contract to manage the the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. In 2001, the EPA ordered Bechtel to clean up chemical toxins that were "either dumped or spilled in the soil and groundwater" at Bettis.

Local activists are taking steps counter the twin dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation. On May 6, the Ridgeway Center, Pittsburgh PSR and Faithful Security held a briefing and planning session to discuss how to bring these issues to the larger Pittsburgh community. The following day, anti-war activists gathered to discuss plans to form an ad hoc coalition to organize actions around the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

The developing plans for August include a march, vigil and civil resistance at the Bechtel-operated Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin as well as a teach-in on globalization, war and nuclear profiteering. Jessica Halperin, a new Thomas Merton Center intern and student at Earlham College, is dedicating a large part of her summer break to help organize the Bechtel protests and related events.

- David Meieran

A version of this article was published in the June issue of The NewPeople.