Fiona Morgan

It wasn’t the first time Colton had been jumped. Last September, three young men, also unidentified, beat him up outside a downtown supermarket in early evening, just hours after obscene comments were written in catsup on his car in the school parking lot. Two weeks later, an unidentified party wrote anti-gay slurs in lighter fluid on the family’s driveway and tried to ignite it. Colton has stayed out of school since the latest incident, and his father has said the student will probably finish high school from home. Colton’s family, which is offering a $7,000 reward for information about the attacks, declined to speak to Salon Mothers Who Think; Colton’s mother said only, “We’re just quite anxious for the whole thing to go away.”

In fact, since the media descent on this small bedroom community north of San Francisco, the Coltons aren’t the only ones in town who are anxious for the whole thing to go away. With the horrific death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was beaten and left to die in rural Wyoming, still fresh in the nation’s consciousness, the incident in Novato got widespread national coverage. And just as the town came under the media glare, the
parents of four black students from Tamalpais High School, in nearby Mill Valley, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Novato Unified School District and San Marin High administrators over racial slurs made by San Marin students at a basketball game last February. The suit charges both the school and the district with allowing a “climate of intolerance” to persist at San Marin.

Together, the two incidents provided plenty of fodder for press
examinations of whether — and why — this particular town is a breeding ground for hatred. Across the bay, the city papers were hot on the story: “Specter of hate” cried the San Francisco Examiner in one headline, while an editorial in the Chronicle — “Rid Schools of Hate Crimes” — cited the incident in Novato as emblematic of school violence across the nation. In Britain, the Economist drew parallels between Novato and Jasper, Texas, where James Byrd Jr., a black man, was dragged to death by white supremacists.

Television cameras and reporters flocked to San Marin, a suburban school with 1,022 students. Journalists examined bathroom graffiti, recorded classroom discussions and conducted interviews with students, in hopes of gaining insight into the nation’s more insidious and invisible lingering elements of racism and homophobia from the mouths of its babes. The story was particularly juicy because it occurred in Marin, Northern California’s notorious counterculture haven, which prides itself on being progressive and tolerant. But within the county, working-class Novato has always had a reputation as backward and less culturally diverse. Minorities actually make up about 15 percent of the town’s population, however, making it one of the most diverse towns in Marin.

Now, as the dust from the media flurry has begun to settle after two months, it is unclear whether the intense dissection of the town has hurt Novato’s efforts to fight its problems or helped them. On the defensive, the school and town responded with a kind of New Age boosterism: citywide “rallies against hate” and school spirit assemblies
where students were urged to “stop such hateful, heinous crimes” amid chants of “Go Mighty Mustang.” Some residents fought off charges of racism and homophobia by shifting the blame to an amorphous group of students known as “the hicks,” who reportedly hold supremacist beliefs and intimidate minorities. Yet while it may be more expedient and easier to single out a community or group for condemnation, in reality it seems that Novato is less an anomaly than a reflection of affluent communities all over America that are struggling with changing demographics.

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Like most suburbs, Novato has that manicured idealism that allows few of its problems to show through on the surface. Blocks of tract houses with two- and three-car garages and front yards with porches and potted plants surround the high school. The campus itself is idyllic, made up of single-level buildings that face a courtyard with grass and large shady trees. The school mascot, the Mustang, stares from all directions, and sports fields stretch behind the campus.

Assistant Principal Candace Curtis recalls that when she arrived here in 1995 from her previous job at a high school in Daly City, an industrial suburb of San Francisco, she experienced a kind of culture shock. In Daly City, she broke up gang fights at least once a week. “I could count on one hand the number of fights that we have had here,” she says. Her first impression of San Marin students was: “These kids don’t know what the real world is.
They’re living in Shangri-La! They’re back in the ’50s.” So Curtis took it upon herself to update them. She began to incorporate diversity training into the school, first through staff workshops and later with the kids. “Not because I felt the kids were racist,” she adds. “I felt that they were just uninformed and had very little exposure to kids of different cultures.” Among the many efforts the school has made during the past few years to expose students to other cultures: Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, ethnic dancing, group seminars and showings of a video entitled “Respecting
Yourself and Others,” storytelling programs and multicultural luncheons featuring international menus.

With the help of the national gay and lesbian organization Spectrum, San Marin was in the midst of developing a Gay-Straight Alliance when Adam Colton transferred in from a private school for his senior year. Curtis describes Colton as intelligent, highly articulate and at ease with adults. When she met him last summer, Colton asked her if San Marin had diversity clubs and showed particular interest in the alliance. “He said, ‘I’ve decided that I’d really like to be an activist and do something to help make changes at San Marin,’” Curtis recalls. Although a number of students became dedicated members of the club, Colton’s leadership skills, verbal openness about his sexuality, “gay-positive” T-shirts and occasional eye shadow made him emerge as its “poster boy.”

For whatever reason — the attacks on Colton or the hostility generated toward the town — San Marin students seem to have been seriously shaken during the past several weeks. The first time I spoke with Curtis, she had spent the morning evacuating the school after a phony bomb threat. Since February, Curtis claims that students have been streaming into the suicide crisis prevention center at the local hospital. “The most difficult thing to deal with has been the extreme depression of many of our students,” says Curtis, whose school provides unusually extensive peer counseling for its students. “There’s all this tension and strain on campus.” Pressure on the students has actually been building since the basketball incident last year. Shortly before the most recent attack on Colton, a San Marin student brought a gun to school. After a friend found a suicide note written by the boy, school staff intervened and the police were
called in to disarm him. Curtis believes that students already suffering from low self-esteem and emotional problems are feeling added pressure because “suddenly they can’t even get esteem out of their school.” The school rally was designed to raise students’ pride in themselves through their school.

In any county but Marin, school pep rallies might seem like an odd way to fight highly personal problems such as depression and suicide. But San Marin also seems to be grasping for any solution as it has come increasingly under siege. At one public forum, Adam Colton’s father, Jerry, publicly blamed the school for not notifying the family immediately when his son’s car was vandalized last fall, the day on which he was later attacked. Had the school taken action then, Jerry Colton seemed to believe, it could have somehow prevented the most recent attack as well. Curtis did accompany Adam Colton to the hospital when his parents could not be reached after the beating on campus. But since Principal Rudy Tassano was abruptly reassigned to the district’s administrative offices shortly after, she has also been forced to take much of the heat for the school’s problems.

This includes its handling of the racial incident at the basketball game last fall. According to the allegations of the lawsuit against the school district, San Marin students yelled “nigger” at visiting black players from Tamalpais High. (At the game, a San Marin administrator contended that they were chanting “Yanger,” the nickname of a visiting player, although he later recanted this.) Later, the school acknowledged the slur and disciplined one student, but the parents’ suit alleges that an entire “cheering squad” of students in Afro wigs and other ’70s regalia took part in the incident.

Further attempts to deal with it by the school and the school district — after formal complaints were filed by some Tamalpais parents — also fell woefully short, according to the lawsuit. The district held a forum to discuss the problem, but Tamalpais High Principal Leigh Akins, who transferred last year from San Leandro High School in San Leandro, Calif., said the meeting was unsatisfactory because students and their parents were forbidden to discuss the actual incident. (Under Akins’ leadership, San Leandro faced controversy about its Gay/Straight Alliance after a teacher was fired for disciplining two lesbian students who were openly kissing and fondling each other in front of the school.)

The county’s athletic league then put San Marin’s athletic programs on probation, but the terms of that penalty were “undefined,” according to Akins. “Our feeling was: How can San Marin make progress if they don’t know what they’re making progress toward? How do we hold a school accountable for something if they don’t know what the rules are?” Finally,
Tamalpais refused to play basketball against San Marin “because of concern for the emotional and physical safety of our players,” Akins says. The two schools continued to play against each other in other sports, but when Tamalpais played San Marin in football last fall, police officers from both cities accompanied the Tamalpais team. This solution infuriated Tamalpais parents such as Ellen Dolores, whose son is on both the football team and the
basketball team that was allegedly taunted with racial epithets.

“I don’t want African-Americans to get the message that whenever they show up in a significant number, they have to be escorted by police,” says Dolores. “If that’s what it takes to be safe, they shouldn’t have to play at all.” The lawsuit contends that the police escorts are evidence of the school’s pattern of cultural insensitivity and practice of “blaming the victim” when racial incidents occur. (The Novato Unified School District declined to speak to Salon for this article.)

Dolores, who did not participate in the lawsuit, sees the explosions at San Marin as part of a much larger problem that exists throughout the county and the nation. “Novato has a reputation for being redneck,” Dolores says bluntly. “[But] I think it’s a little too easy and a little too comfortable for
people in this county to point their fingers at Novato.” Dolores sympathizes with the town residents — especially the youth “who are being portrayed as racists and aren’t” — but she is also frustrated by their failure to take more concrete action. “All they’d been doing is whining about how they’re not racist,” she says. “Their task is to stop whining and do something.”

Yet others find such condemnations premature and say that the town has been found guilty without a trial. In a telephone interview, Reginald Lyles, captain of the Novato police department, points out that there is still no evidence to confirm that those who beat Adam Colton attend San Marin or even that white supremacist graffiti in the boys’ bathroom was scrawled by students. He points out that Novato businesses have contributed thousands of dollars to a reward fund for information about the Colton beating. “A small group of folks are trying to intimidate people, and we don’t want to be known for the actions of a very small group,” Lyles says.

Lyles interrupts his comments to ask if I am white. When I answer “yes,” he seems to feel that he needs to educate me by explaining the situation from his point-of-view as an African-American. The mainstream media’s view of Novato as a hotbed of intolerance is “a sensationalist take,” Lyles says, one which denies the realities that minorities face all over the country. The town’s bigots — whom he estimates at roughly 5 percent of the residents — “are no different than mean and ugly folk anywhere.” Asked about the “hicks,” Lyles says, “I don’t want to demonize a group of people without any proof. That would be totally irresponsible.”

Jack Levin, head of the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence at Northeastern University and author of “Hate Crimes,” agrees that the events in Novato are more typical than they are unusual — as is the town’s response to them. According to Levin, there has been a marked increase since the 1980s in hate crimes occurring in suburbs and on college campuses, places where minorities and gays have made major inroads in recent years — and crimes against the two groups are often linked because they stem from the same mind-set. Levin calls these “defensive hate crimes”: “The perpetrator sees himself as the victim,” Levin says, and sees the victim as the threat to his or her economic or personal well-being. When teenagers take matters into their own hands with verbal or physical assaults, they are often acting out their parents’ fears.

Novato’s defensiveness is also common, according to Levin, because small communities are more stigmatized by hate violence than larger cities. “When a well-publicized hate crime occurs in relatively small community, every resident feels personally involved and personally threatened,” he says, “not only by the crime, but also by the response to the crime in the media.” No one wants their town to be known for bigotry, so people rush to defend their communities in the public’s eye.

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Reading the charges in the suit against the Novato school district, what emerges most clearly is how muddied our perceptions of racism have become. As part of the district’s “continuous pattern and practice of racial discrimination and harassment,” for example, it cites San Marin’s “slave day,” in which students dressed in tattered clothes and chains were “auctioned” to other students, whom they were then required to serve for the day. Although certainly offensive, the school abolished the annual event seven years ago. Another incident cited in the lawsuit involves a multicultural exercise popular with educators, in which a teacher encourages students to list what qualities come to mind when they thought of a “black person, white person, Asian person” and so on. The exercise is intended to open an honest, if heated, discussion of stereotypes and perceptions of racism. In this case, the only African-American student in the class accused her teacher of racial insensitivity in conducting the exercise and she was then sent to the principal’s office.

In order for anti-gay or racist hate crimes to end, Levin says, it is critical that people from the perpetrator’s group — say, in this case, white, straight teenage males — speak out against them and lobby for change. Yet in such a charged climate, Curtis says it’s difficult to gauge the level of serious racism and homophobia at the school: “Do we have racists? Probably. Are there kids at school who feel uncomfortable with homosexuality? Yeah. Is it a large number or a small number? I don’t know. The ones who have been vocal have been those in support of Adam, who’ve been appalled.” Even kids who believe homosexuality is wrong for religious reasons have come forward to her to condemn the attack, says Curtis. And isn’t that what REACH, the students’ multicultural club, has been trying to do, with its slogans and bumper stickers?

As it now stands, some of the San Marin parents are thinking of pulling their children out of the school. But many of the students I spoke to, while horrified by the attack, seem to accept that there is simply no such thing as a hate-free zone.

“How’s a principal going to stop someone from getting beaten up?”
asks 10th-grader Scott Albertson.

“It’s completely out of his hands,” adds his classmate Evan
Churchill. “He has no control.”

Still other students think that too much diversity training is part of the problem. “It’s things that you already know,” says Heather Johnson, “and I think they’re doing almost too much of it. It is a big deal, but they’re making it half of our curriculum. I’m taken out of class once a week
to go to an assembly for all this prevention stuff.”

In fact, because of the large number of cultures being celebrated at San Marin, this year’s “Day of Respect” combined several events into one day, in order to cut down on disruption of class schedules. Rather than exposing students to various cultures by celebrating their traditions, the broad focus was on conduct, on “what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable behavior, and how we can create a climate at school where everybody feels
comfortable and safe,” according to Curtis.

Yet is it really possible to create a “comfortable and safe” environment and still deal openly and honestly with prejudice and discrimination? How much responsibility can schools take for correcting cultural beliefs and buried hostilities? The woman left with the daunting task of finding the answer to questions like those seems honestly at a loss for what
to try next. “Every time you say something, you’re in denial,” Curtis shrugs. “I don’t think we’re in denial. I think we just have problems, like everybody else.”

This is the first bust for Barbara, a Yale University student.

Police say the manager of Chuy’s restaurant called 911 on Tuesday evening after minors — allegedly the Bush daughters — tried to order drinks. No charges have yet been filed, pending an investigation.

So, is this a big deal? In this country, drinking is illegal for anyone younger than 21, but the reality among American college students is usually very different. Drinking happens — and no one expects the restaurant to call 911.

In Jenna’s case, it doesn’t seem to matter if college-age drinking might be considered normal or if our nation’s drinking laws seem a tad unrealistic. Her brushes with alcohol only further her reputation — in the press, at least — as a “bad girl.” And her father’s admitted problems with alcohol have fueled speculation that Jenna might have inherited alcoholism. (This despite the fact that the president has never gone so far as to say he was an alcoholic.) And there is talk, as there often is in these cases, that Jenna’s reckless behavior reflects a lack of good parental guidance, and that she might be acting out.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to comment to the press on the incident. “If it involves the daughters in their private lives, it is a family matter,” he said.

Adolescent psychiatrist Lynn Ponton agrees. Ponton is the author of “The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls” and “The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do.” As a practicing therapist at the University of California in San Francisco — and the mother of two teenagers herself — Ponton is familiar with all kinds of risky behavior among teens.

Ponton laughed when she heard that the Austin restaurant manager had called 911. Minor offenses like underage drinking are best viewed as risk-taking, says Ponton, a process that adolescents need to go through in order to grow into adults. Whether the risk-taking is ultimately healthy or harmful for a child depends in large part on the guidance teenagers get from the adults in their lives.

Ponton spoke from her office in San Francisco about teen drinking, fake I.D.s and the role of parents in the risk-taking behavior of their children.

Would you say that Jenna Bush is taking some risks by drinking?

It’s normal for kids to experiment with alcohol in our culture. Many cultures, European cultures, actually begin with exposure to alcohol in the home and then gradually introduce children and teenagers to it until they gain some familiarity with it. Our culture has a very limited expression of it and we’re even trying to postpone the drinking age later, 21 in all our states currently.

But now we get to risky behavior. Jenna Bush has already had an arrest related to alcohol. This is a pattern of risk-taking behavior, and even though it’s typical — and it is typical of adolescents — again, it makes us think about the importance of parental risk-taking patterns. We know for a fact that her father had a long history of alcohol use and abuse. And this is an opportunity for the parents to talk honestly with their children about risk-taking and really provide guidance and increase communication.

This is an opportunity for the Bushes to have this type of conversation. And I wonder what type of communication is actually taking place.

President Bush has never come out and said that he was an alcoholic. He said that drinking started to compete with his affections. Would there be any value in him, either publicly or privately, addressing that question again?

I think privately it’s important, if your children know about your problems with risk-taking, that you tell them first that we all make mistakes so that they understand this. And you don’t have to tell them the details, or they’ll try to compete with your risk-taking. But it’s important to emphasize that you made mistakes and what you’ve learned from them.

Many parents fail to talk about their own risk-taking; they actually hide it from their kids. And they lose this valuable opportunity and they see it repeat in the next generation. So I think Bush has an opportunity now.

I would actually prefer he do it privately. This is a private matter. It involves his two daughters. It involves an opportunity for him to have this type of discussion. And he’s not alone; this is a problem that parents with teenagers are facing all over the country.

Is the public scrutiny of this behavior — his and his daughters’ — unfair?

Having watched what happened with our last president’s risk-taking, I don’t think it’s any different. We’re a Puritan country still, and we cast a moral eye on our leaders, and we expect them still to be perfect. I think it would be better if we recognized that everybody does make mistakes. Bush’s office could either say “no comment” because this is a family matter, and we would understand that, or he could say, “I am taking care of this in a private and family way and think it’s very important.”

But what I’d also like to see from Bush is that he take an active interest in adolescent risk-taking issues in our culture. Currently there is a report on adolescent risk-taking and sexuality that the surgeon general’s office has not been allowed to release. The report was called “Call to Action” and Bush’s administration has delayed its release.

From what we know, this report indicates that we need to continue to look particularly at sexual risk-taking — and other kinds of adolescent risk-taking — very seriously. I believe that one of the reasons this report has been delayed is because Bush emphasizes no conversation; and he emphasizes abstinence-only programs.

And this report advocates something different?

Absolutely, that’s what we think. He’s suppressing this report.

This brings up another incident that came up in the press — that Bush had been convicted of DUI and had done community service, but that he had not discussed this with his daughters until it was uncovered by the press. He said he didn’t want to talk about it with them because he didn’t want them to make the same mistakes he did.

This is the issue, where a parent refuses to talk about any part of the risk-taking. I don’t think he has to talk about the specifics — he doesn’t have to brag about how much alcohol he drank. See, it’s the bragging that kids respond to and then imitate, when they think they’re going to go one better than their parent.

But I think honestly informing them about what the behaviors were, about some of the feelings about them and, most important, about what you learned from them, is crucial. If you learned, for example, with respect to drinking, that it affected your work for five or six years, that you weren’t as alert — these things are important to disclose. Or if you have a family history of alcoholism — that is another important detail to disclose. In my own family, there are some significant problems with alcohol. My two teenage children — I also have an 18-year-old daughter — are well informed about this problem.

There seem to be a couple of different issues in play with the Bush daughters. There’s the drinking itself, and then there’s the amount of scrutiny that they know they’re under. Are they acting out?

I’m not so sure they’re doing it because they’re under pressure. My best guess is that this is a pattern that had begun a while ago. It’s also age appropriate at 18 — you’re going to try to use the fake I.D.s at 17, 18, 19. Kids leaving for college take fake I.D.s with them now.

I think it’s very hard to be the child of a famous person. That is a risk for both of these girls. That’s why I said that this behavior we’re seeing is really normal adolescent behavior. It really opens up a question much more about how the parents are going to respond to it.

Remember that these girls are going on dates. The Secret Service is there, [but] they’re not calling [911]. On some level they’re looking aside while these girls are doing this. So it is complicated and difficult to be the daughter of a president. But I think we can all respect their privacy.

I don’t think it’s any reason to condemn them or their behavior. I’d say, if anything, we can learn.

That’s why there’s now bipartisan alarm at President Bush’s decision to cut $100 million from highly successful federal programs that keep tabs on Russia’s nuclear weapons and material and prevent those materials from falling into the hands of hostile states and terrorists.

The cuts are part of the administration’s 2001 budget, which was approved by Congress last Thursday. Many in the security field are particularly distressed by the cuts to the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Office, which oversees a variety of programs dealing with both the “loose nukes” and the “brain drain” problems, in Russia especially.

These programs have traditionally received widespread bipartisan support — so much so that in the past, Congress has allocated more than the agency has requested. Now it will face cuts of more than $60 million to its programs in Russia alone, just as those in the field say those programs are most needed and gaining momentum.

Cuts to these programs come at the same time that Bush is trying to sell allies on a multibillion-dollar missile defense system to combat nuclear ballistic missile attacks. On Monday the administration reaffirmed that it would construct a missile defense, despite a chilly response from Russia. Russian officials complain that such a system would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the hallmark agreement of arms control, and have threatened to stop reducing their own nuclear stockpile if the U.S. pursues such a plan.

Furthermore, intelligence reports indicate that the most likely form of nuclear attack the U.S. could face would not involve ballistic missiles, but would likely come under the radar of such a defense system.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the Budget Committee chairman and key founder of the Department of Energy’s nonproliferation programs, is expected to fight to restore the cuts. “The whole idea of cutting programs before policy reviews are completed is of great concern,” Domenici said in a public statement last Friday.

The New Mexico senator says he is “very hopeful” that such a review will show that increasing funding for the programs is “not only appropriate, but urgently needed.” At a conference of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management in Washington on Wednesday, Domenici will call for restoring at least some of the cuts.

But it won’t be an easy task. Nonproliferation programs will have to vie for part of the same pie that will be split among all of the Department of Energy’s programs — cleanup of nuclear sites within the U.S., scientific research at the national laboratories — not to mention efforts to deal with the nation’s energy crisis. No matter how grave the national security issues involved may be, the issue arises at a time when the most pressing energy concerns facing the public are high gas prices and the West Coast electricity outages.

In a country where poverty makes entrepreneurship a necessity, those with access to Russia’s more than 100 nuclear sites face constant temptation. Nowhere is that temptation greater than in Russia’s 10 closed nuclear cities. Built in secret during the Cold War, not officially on the map, they produced nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Now cities like Sarov, Lesnoy and Ozersk are virtual ghost towns. Those who could leave did leave, mostly during the early ’90s. But a few remain there — specialists who used to be pampered by the Soviet government and given free housing, but who now find it difficult to find any work at all. The average monthly wage is less than $100 in most of these cities, and in some it is less than $50.

In 1998, workers at the Sarov nuclear lab were charged with selling nuclear documents to Iraq and Afghanistan. That same year, the Russian Federal Security Service caught staff members at a nuclear weapons plant in Chelyabinsk trying to steal 18.5 kilograms of weapons-usable nuclear material, about enough to make a bomb. According to Russian authorities, there are at least 100 suitcase-sized bombs currently missing from storage

While she served on the National Security Council from 1993-1996, Jane Wales saw some potentially terrifying lapses in security that were caught and stopped by authorities. “There was one case where a janitor who hadn’t been paid in a long time, who didn’t know what kind of future there was for his family, took highly enriched uranium and put it in a mitt and took it home and put it in his refrigerator. Then it occurred to him that he didn’t have any notion of how one sells highly enriched uranium on the market. You can’t exactly take out a classified ad. So finally, after struggling with his situation, he chose to return it and admit that he had done this.”

And while the end of the Cold War convinced many Americans the Russian nuclear threat had been vanquished, “in many respects the nuclear danger has gone up, not down, since the end of the Cold War,” Wales says. “We have lost the tight Soviet controls over their nuclear arsenal and over the expertise that supports it.”

In just 10 years, the anti-proliferation programs have helped lead Russia to agree to close one of its four nuclear weapons assembly facilities (the U.S. has only one). And hundreds of tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been processed down so that they can’t be used for nuclear weapons. One DOE program even recycles that uranium for use in American nuclear power plants, and has so far blended down 110 metric tons of the stuff as of last December — the equivalent of 4,400 nuclear devices.

“This may be the single smartest investment in our security that we could be making,” says Wales, who is currently the president and CEO of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

A top-level government report issued last year agreed. The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board task force on Russia programs, chaired by former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler and former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, praised the Russia programs, saying they had shown impressive results so far.

But the bipartisan task force said the programs were moving too slowly because their funding was inadequate, and urged a $30 billion increase in funding for the programs — in other words, it urged that the funding be quintupled. In that report, Baker called the proliferation dangers in Russia “the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today.”

Now, instead of increases, the programs face cuts. The International Materials Protection Control & Accounting Program (IMPC&A), which puts in place security measures at Russia’s more than 100 nuclear sites, now faces reductions of nearly $40 million. The Nuclear Cities Initiative, which works to combat “brain drain” by creating civilian jobs for nuclear workers in the closed nuclear cities, was cut by $20 million. The Initiative for Proliferation Prevention faces cuts of only $2 million, but the cuts will affect Russian programs most severely, hindering the project’s efforts to couple displaced weapons scientists with private companies doing research in their region.

So far the Department of Energy has been tight-lipped about the impact of the cuts. Sarah Lennon, a spokesperson for the DOE’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, would not discuss the budget issues except to say “None of our programs are being cut entirely. There has been a reduction in funding for some of the programs, but none of them are being phased out.”

But anti-proliferation advocates say the cuts will have ripple effects, touching even nongovernmental programs that work on the same goals. The Nuclear Threat Initiative is a nonprofit organization founded by Nunn and Lugar, with a $250 million grant from CNN media mogul Ted Turner. Laura Holgate, the vice president of Russian nuclear programs at NTI, says, “These cuts are very concerning.” She views the cuts as doubly severe considering that “this was the year when a lot of these programs were scheduled for some very major increases.”

Holgate, who worked closely with the programs a few years ago when she was the director of the DOE’s plutonium disposition program, says that the IMPC&A program in particular had been transitioning from “a Band-Aid approach of quick fixes for glaring problems” — such as bricking up glass windows into nuclear vaults and putting fences around facilities — to a much more systematic approach to help the Russians improve their security. It also aims “to really change their mindset to recognize the importance of the insider threat, which didn’t used to be a problem in the Soviet Union. That takes a lot of effort and time and training. That process will be significantly slowed if these cuts persist.”

The Bush budget slightly increases Defense Department nonproliferation programs, which were created by the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, sponsored by Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in 1991. But the DOE programs work closely with the Nunn-Lugar efforts, and both Nunn and Lugar have opposed the cuts, which Nunn called “a dangerous step backward.”

Ironically, the cuts come at a time when missile defense is on the front page of newspapers across the globe, and there is much talk about the threat of nuclear attack from “rogue” states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and from terrorist organizations. But none of these rogue states or terrorist groups have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental U.S. The biggest threat to the U.S., experts say, may be a bomb made of black-market nuclear material, smuggled over the border in a briefcase, or hidden in freight headed straight for a major port city.

“I think that threat is very plausible,” says Holgate. “Even if it doesn’t work quite as it’s designed to, [a nuclear weapon] can still make a lot of mess and bring a lot of terror and public panic, and create an environmental nightmare. The same goes for nuclear material, you can either make a real mess with it or, in the hands of a knowledgeable and talented proliferator, they may be able to transform weapons material directly into a bomb.”

“The first thing you do to protect against the threat is the same,” says Holgate, “whether you’re worried about Iran or about Osama bin Laden, you have to protect the material where it is and make sure it stays put. So you don’t really have to address the demand side as quickly if you’re taking care of the supply side effectively.”

Restoring cuts to the DOE’s programs now depends on two things: the National Security Council’s review of those programs, still underway, and the final stage of the budget process. In the next couple of weeks, appropriations money will be divvied up and budget priorities will be set into law. And Domenici, who also chairs the appropriations subcommittee on energy, is firmly committed to restoring the programs’ funding, according to a spokesperson for his office.

Holgate says she is hopeful that the budget can be adjusted. “There is consensus that there is a big problem out there,” noting that bipartisan effort created both the DOE programs and her own organization. “There is a very obvious common ground that all sides of the question come to, and say, ‘Whatever you think about missile defense down the road, or whatever you think about the future of Russia — wherever the partisanship differences occur — the bottom line is that this material should be protected, you don’t want the scientists going to places that they shouldn’t be, and you don’t want these facilities to continue to operate with their excessive capability.”

Even if funds are restored later this year, Domenici expressed fear that programs could lose critical staff. “We are sending an unfortunate message to our own program workers, to say nothing of the Russians with whom we are cooperating.”

Wales says she witnessed an impressive level of cooperation on the part of the Russians while working for the NSC. “What stood out for me in this experience was the fact that folks who hadn’t been paid in a long time, who really felt at risk and who had the opportunity to benefit, either by selling their knowledge or potentially by diverting materials, chose not to. By and large the people working at these sites were patriots first, who did not want to be part of spreading proliferation, and they chose to do the honorable thing.

“But you can’t rely on that forever,” she cautions. Scientists who are finding it hard to make a living “would find it quite easy to be employed if they were willing to turn their backs on their own country and on the international community. That’s a huge temptation for people, no matter how honorable, over a sustained period of time.”

Among Broome’s pet peeves, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, are that Darwin “teaches that some humans have evolved further than others.” That he “holds that people of color are ‘savages,’” and that in doing so he has “provided the main rationale for modern racism.”

The resolution, which does not rise to the level of law and would not necessarily change the curriculum of public schools, nonetheless urges the state’s education system “to address the commonalties of people groups and the weaknesses of Darwinian racism.” Sponsors say their next step will be to press for evolution disclaimers in textbooks.

Critics say the race card is only another ploy by creationists to remove evolution from public education and replace it with the religious concept of divine creation.

Joseph Graves, a professor of African-American studies and evolutionary biology at Arizona State University, criticizes Broome’s interpretation of Darwin’s writings, arguing that history has shown the scientist to be “one of the good guys, not one of the bad guys.” He also warns that the measure would open up the state to ridicule. “This type of thing would never happen in the Northeast,” he says.

Yet Louisiana is not alone. Since the beginning of the year, a handful of states — including Montana, Washington, Georgia and Michigan — have proposed legislation and other measures against the teaching of evolution, using tactics that have taken a number of twists and turns.

The National Center for Science Education is a nonprofit organization that has fought to keep the teaching of evolution science in public classrooms. Executive director Eugenie Scott spoke with Salon about the latest efforts of creationists to make it more difficult to teach the theory of evolution.

Is this the first time that people have used the racist label to argue against the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution?

Anti-evolutionists have played the race card, shall we say, for a long time. Unfortunately this perspective, that Darwin equals evolution equals racism, is one that is surprisingly prevalent in the black community. Every time I do a radio show on a station with a predominantly black listenership, someone invariably calls in and asks, “Well, why should our kids learn evolution? Evolution is just the source of racism.”

Where does that idea come from?

That comes from confusing turn-of-the-century eugenics with evolution. [A]t the turn of the century there were a number of individuals who glommed on to evolution for rather nefarious purposes. The eugenicists, the free-market capitalists, then later on in the 20th century, Marxism and Hitler.

Now if you think about this, there’s something fishy here. A single scientific idea cannot simultaneously be the inspiration for laissez-faire capitalism and Marxism, and then you toss in Nazism and you really have different systems, all claiming to grow from evolution. What you have here is a very powerful intellectual idea that is being seized upon by ideologues for their own purposes.

In what other states has this idea of Darwin as progenitor of racism come up?

It’s unusual to have state-level legislation, but the idea itself is pervasive both in the anti-evolution literature from the creationists and also, unfortunately, in the black community.

I’ve only known of one previous situation in Tennessee in the early 1990s, legislation introduced by a black legislator there, anti-evolution legislation based on the idea that evolution is racist.

What impact will this have in Louisiana?

The really sad thing is that, by passing the resolution, they make it less likely that evolution is going to be taught in Louisiana, because any time you make evolution controversial, teachers just quietly stop teaching it.

If evolution is taught less frequently, you really are taking away one of the greatest weapons you have against racism. If people understand modern biology, and the modern genetically based theory of evolution, racism becomes impossible — or at least scientifically indefensible. Given what we know about heredity, about population structure, about the way genes pass from one group to another group — which is essential to understanding the process of evolution — we know that there are no human populations that are older than others or more advanced than others, that are superior or inferior to others. That whole notion of being able to rank races goes out the window if you understand genetics and evolution.

I read that the next thing the proponents of this resolution want to do in Louisiana is put disclaimers in textbooks. What effect does that have on teaching?

A disclaimer in textbooks is a very intimidating gesture. Teachers don’t like controversy. They just want to do their jobs. They like kids; they want them to learn.

That’s the worst thing about them, and it just makes it more likely that evolution won’t be taught, which of course is the goal. The second thing is that they really confuse the kids about what is science and what is religion, and they further confuse kids about the soundness of evolution as a science. Because only evolution is singled out among all scientific theories in these disclaimers.

Louisiana has a short memory, because there was a community in Louisiana, a parish called Tangipahoa, which was the site of a recent district court decision against the disclaimer. The Tangipahoa parish required teachers to read a disclaimer before they mentioned the “e” word, or showed a movie or assigned a reading or anything else. The disclaimer was struck down in district court and also lost in appeals court.

What do the disclaimers usually say?

Most use “just a theory” kind of language, which is very confusing as to the nature of science and how we use the word “theory” in science. But they also take the form of, we don’t know everything there is to know about evolution and scientists are still trying to decide aspects of evolution, and we should therefore just teach it as a theory. Of course you could say the same thing about atomic theory or heliocentrism — I mean there’s always more that scientists can discover about a theory. But evolution happens to be the only scientific theory they single out like this. So clearly this is an effort to go after evolution, rather than just improve the general science education of students.

I read that there is similar legislation being considered in Arkansas.

The good news is that the Arkansas legislation did die; it was voted down, which we’re very happy about. The Arkansas legislation was an anti-textbook legislation — actually there’s another bit of legislation under consideration in Louisiana that may be shadowing that. It was a very strangely worded piece, that said textbooks had to be “factually accurate” and because evolution, they said, was poorly supported in science, therefore you couldn’t use textbooks that contained this whole laundry list of topics that are classic evolutionary topics.

Is this a new or an old tactic?

In the old days they used to say [that] if you teach evolution you have to teach creation science to balance it out. More recently because creation science equal-time laws were struck down by the Supreme Court, they’ve now repackaged this general idea. In the Montana bill, they’ve argued, if you teach evolution, you have to teach the evidence against evolution. And of course, there isn’t any.

What other states are considering measures like this? I know the Kansas Board of Education made big news last year.

Well, that’s the success story. They voted the rascals out in Kansas and went back to a really solid science-standards document.

We’ve had problems in Montana, Washington, Georgia, Michigan — that’s still going on. Somehow or another since the first of the year, we’ve had all of these state legislative problems. Ordinarily the largest number of problems we have are with creationism at the local school board level or the classroom level.

I think there may be a climate being generated for working religion into society. From Washington we’re hearing this faith-based charities message. And the religious right is starting to flex its muscles, realizing it has friends in high places. And so even though the federal government has hardly anything to do with education at the local level, I think there’s just a climate of opinion out there that, hey, we can really start pushing this stuff now.

We’ve never had so many pieces of legislation — it’s only been four months, and we’ve had seven states pushing this kind of legislation. I really hate to see it. There’s a trickle-down effect when these things get publicized; the tendency is for local school boards to look into this issue as well. It’s going to be a busy year.

But the president’s focus on modifying or scrapping the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, our 1972 agreement with what was then the Soviet Union, sent a signal to those in the Republican Party who have long argued for a national missile defense — and against continued treaty talks with Russia. In Tuesday’s speech, Bush tried to straddle the line between members of his own party at home who want the treaty done away with, and American allies abroad who want the treaty to remain intact. Choosing his words carefully, the president spoke of “a new framework” for global defense that “move(s) beyond the constraints of the ABM treaty.”

The pursuit of a missile defense will have profound consequences on international relations and translate into billions of dollars in defense contracts. Bush insists that missile defense is part of “a search for security, not a search for advantage.” He says he plans to reduce our arsenal of nuclear warheads from about 7,000 to a range of 1,500-2,000. But critics say that despite Bush’s assurances, scrapping the ABM treaty — the hallmark agreement on nuclear disarmament — will lead to a vast new nuclear arms race.

Over the past four months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear that he is unhappy with the Bush plans to violate the ABM treaty. Tuesday’s speech suggested that this rift between the two leaders will continue, with Russian government spokespersons lodging their complaints to the media, and a handful of Bush administration envoys sent to the capitals of NATO allied countries on Tuesday.

As Bush pointed out, “Today, Russia is not our enemy.” In fact, the only state named by the president as an enemy was Iraq. Instead, Bush justified the missile defense plan as a way to protect allies from states that “hate our friends, they hate our values, they hate our democracy,” and “for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life.”

Now, Bush must sell the plan to our allies. Though Tuesday’s speech marks the beginning of the public campaign, the hard sell of a missile defense system to Europe began months ago. From the beginning of the new administration, Bush’s advisors have tried to convince European Union leaders to buy in to a system the EU could never afford on its own but one from which it could benefit. In reality, any new system would need an OK from Europe — particularly from the governments of Britain and Denmark, where we would need to upgrade radar stations.

But many European leaders appear skeptical. Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said, “We urge President Bush to abstain from the national missile defense, just as we urge China, India and Pakistan to discontinue their nuclear arsenals.” British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said, “The important issue is the clear commitment we have seen today to work together with allies and with Russia. We will work closely with the Bush administration as we always do — as close allies, with common strategic interests.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Can Bush simultaneously reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons and pursue a ballistic missile defense? Will Europe be wooed? Salon asked three analysts.

Christopher Makins, president of the Atlantic Council of the United States, coauthored the September 2000 report “European Views of National Missile Defense” with Stephen J. Hadley and others in the defense field.

I do not think that there is much support in Europe for simply a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and I do believe that many Europeans believe that it is important that there be some international agreements or regimes that limit the competition in strategic arms, both offensive and defensive.

I think it would be fair to say that many European governments are willing to accept the idea that the specific restrictions in the ABM treaty, both the 1972 text itself and some of the separate understandings that have been negotiated since then, need to be changed — maybe in fairly radical ways. But what they would be still very unhappy about is the idea that the U.S. would decide to leave the ABM treaty. They would expect that at the least there would be very serious discussions with the European governments and with the Russians on what might be the international agreement that would take its place.

As to the Russians, I think there has been some reason to believe that they would consider modifying the ABM treaty. Of course, none of this has been put forward to them either by the previous administration or more especially by this one, in a particularly detailed fashion. So it’s difficult to be confident in what they would or wouldn’t be able or willing to agree to. But I think they’ve given fairly clear signals that they’re not wedded to the specific text of the treaty from 1972.

And of course we know that all throughout this period, they have been more sympathetic to the idea of defending themselves against ballistic missile attack than perhaps some people in the United States have been. One of the major reasons there were willing to go along with the treaty in the first place was because they were afraid that the U.S. might be able to advance more quickly down the path of missile defense and therefore get some sort of a strategic advantage during the Cold War. But even Putin himself in his proposals clearly accepts that defense against ballistic missile attack is something that should be part of the strategic arsenal, both for Russia and for Europe.

One of the great changes that the Bush administration has made is that they registered very well the point that Europeans in particular and others in general were not happy with, the idea that Clinton was in effect putting forward, that the U.S. would defend itself but that that defense would not be available to others. So early on the Bush administration made it plain that when they were talking about defense, the were talking about a defense that could be available and provide protection to allies and friends around the world. And that was seen in Europe, and I think in other places around the world, as a very positive change.

When you talk about a global defense, that conjures up in the mind something akin to the Ronald Reagan Star Wars concept. I think that this administration has made it very plain that they are not talking about a Strategic Defense Initiative type concept. They’re not talking about an impermeable shield against hundreds or thousands of ballistic missiles. They are talking about dealing with very limited missile attack or missile threats, and with the threat of accidental or unauthorized launch. So it would be misleading to describe their willingness to extend the coverage of this system to allies and friends, to confuse that with Reagan’s global shield idea.

We now have some 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons and what they’re saying is, Look, we don’t even need to think about threatening an attack against Russia of the scale that was involved in the Cold War period. What is the largest threat that we might need to pose for deterrence purposes against Russia or China? It’s one that could certainly be posed by a force of maybe 1,500 weapons.

And yet we’re sort of in this situation where these arms control agreements encourage everybody to stay with the figures that have previously been agreed. What [the administration is] saying is, wouldn’t it be much simpler if we just moved to the level that we’re comfortable with, that meets all the possible needs that we could see even on pessimistic assumptions? Then we would have set the example, and the Russians, who anyway probably can’t afford a force that’s much larger than that these days, would feel more comfortable settling for the largest force that they could afford. And so that’s the reasoning, and I think in some ways that it’s easier to get to that level by unilateral action. And by not locking ourselves or the Russians into a particular level through a detailed treaty, we have the flexibility to move either up or down in the future, if the situation evolves further, either good or bad.

I’m trying to describe this, though I’m not saying I would agree with all of these arguments. I think that there’s no doubt that we do not need the levels that we’re currently at. We can, without difficulty, go down to 1,000 to 1,500 long-range warheads. I may be slightly more inclined than the administration, though it’s hard to tell exactly what they will think when their position is elaborated in greater detail, to believe that a negotiated agreement is important. And I might be more inclined to look to enshrine that in some more formal agreement than what they’re talking about.

A lot depends, frankly, on the attitude that the Russians take to all this. Because if the Russians are going to be difficult about changing either the offensive levels or the defensive levels, then there is a compelling case to, as Bush put it, to “lead by example.” That would have a positive effect in terms of the broader objective which is fundamental to what Bush and company are talking about, which is trying to discourage and if possible reverse the trend of proliferation of both the ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Frances Fitzgerald is the author of “Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.”

He didn’t lay out a plan at all. In fact, there was nothing more than he said in the campaign. It may be that they’re just not going to change policy very much at all and that this is all talk. Could be. We don’t honestly know much more than we knew this morning.

I really thought from that speech that he was selling the Republican right on this. Because he was not very rhetorical otherwise, except in the terms that they like, which is getting rid of the ABM treaty and about these nasty tyrants and so forth. But he wasn’t very rhetorical about the system itself. It was an incredibly short speech.

Half of the Republican Party — the right half — has absolutely always hated the ABM treaty, because it’s the foundation for all other arms control agreements, and they don’t like arms control agreements, and they don’t like treaties very much.

I think this is part of deep ideology. Particularly to the Republican right, who come from a tradition of the Middle West in the 19th century, the notion of America invulnerable is terribly important. Everybody knows that ground-based interceptors are not going to do it. So the only conceivable thing that could possibly do it is stuff in space. But it’s also part of a military pattern that comes again from the 19th century, which is that these people have never been part of the Army, but rather of the Navy and then the Air Force — it’s about exerting power at a distance, and not getting involved in other people’s politics.

He didn’t tell us that he was going to move away from Mutually Assured Destruction, what he said is that we’re going to have a mixture of defenses and deterrents, which is indeed Mutually Assured Destruction. So really, it’s about getting rid of this treaty. I don’t know whether they’re going to do it tomorrow or whether they’re going to hold off, he didn’t give any timetable. The fact is that there is no system he can possibly deploy during his first term. What the Pentagon is saying now about the ground-based interceptor that’s being tested won’t be deployed until 2006.

But honestly, all of that is sort of way out there in the blue, to coin a phrase, because you know you can’t imagine Iraq or Iran sending a strategic nuclear warhead at Britain or France, who have many more than they do, right? Deterrence already exists.

The theme is there, which is: Get rid of these treaties. Then the question is whether they’re actually going to do anything different otherwise.

Bill Hartung is a fellow of the World Policy Institute.

On one level it’s very similar to the speech he gave in May of 2000 on the campaign trail, the one where he had all the Republican luminaries standing behind him — Powell and Rumsfeld and George Shultz, and Kissinger I think. But I think that the context is a lot different now, because he’s got all of these missile defense advocates — like Rumsfeld, like Wolfowitz, people like Stephen Hadley — at the top levels of his administration.

He seemed to be trying to put a historical gloss on his desire to push missile defense: It’s a new era and Russia’s not our adversary in the way the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. It was almost as if he was saying, Russia was not that important a consideration for our security, which is a little strange considering that they’re still sitting on thousands of nuclear weapons, that they don’t really have control of their military in the way that they did during the Cold War. I would think that alone would be a reason to still consider them an important potential threat. But it seems like he’s more concerned with the countries that don’t actually have the capability to reach us yet, more than the ones who have nuclear weapons. It seems sort of backwards.

The fact that he’s talking about sea-based and space-based and land-based interceptors means that he wants to go for a quite ambitious system. I don’t know how you even estimate the cost, but if you consider that the Clinton plan was going to be $60 billion for basically just a land-based element, it could run into some substantial dollars. And that’s the part he didn’t deal with today. How are you going to fit that in? Are you going to cut something else in the Pentagon budget?

It seems like he was trying to set the theme, and it’s an interesting theme: Moscow’s not our adversary anymore, we don’t need to be in a balance of terror, we can modify the equation a little bit with some defenses combined with a reduction in weapons.

A lot of this stuff depends on perception — I think that’s the biggest problem at the moment. The U.S. has taken various actions going back into the Clinton period that have been viewed harshly by Russia, from NATO expansion to the way the intervention in Kosovo was handled without running it through the U.N. Security Council, to missile defense itself. The U.S. is not perceived by these countries as a country that works and plays well with others. So Bush saying, well they’ll understand — they probably won’t understand. I don’t think they’re going to buy this package.

If you made deep reductions in nuclear weapons and you had some defensive systems that the various players agreed did not negate their deterrent, and were negotiated at least with reference to a modified ABM treaty — maybe you could make all those elements come together. But if it’s perceived as the Bush administration saying, we’re going to rip up the rules on nuclear weapons as they exist in the Cold War, and these are the new rules, take them or leave them, you’re going to have a lot of problems.

China will probably crank up from 18 long-range missiles to some hundreds, or more. Russia will be less inclined to take their weapons off alert and might even modernize them. India and Pakistan will say, well, maybe we need more than just a few of these things. The whole thing could start to unravel. And the problem is whatever defensive ideas [Bush and his advisors] have, they’re mostly on paper now. So they’re not going to be available to deal with the repercussions, if other countries perceive this as a threatening move and they start building up their arsenals accordingly, it could be ten years before we have anything in the way of a defense to deal with that. So it’s taking a lot of risks up front with very uncertain gain.

[Disarmament] doesn’t really work unless other countries decide to do it too. When his father decided to do things like that, it was within the structure of arms control agreements … then they were using unilateral moves to go further. Whereas what George W. Bush was saying seems to be: We don’t need the treaties anymore.

Bush said: Nobody who’s not planning to blackmail us with nuclear weapons needs to worry about this. But that’s really not how defense planners think, that’s not enough for them to go by. They’ll think, it looks like they’re going for this elaborate system; maybe we can’t cut back right now, maybe we should modernize. You lose the advantage of unilateral reductions if it’s not done in some cooperative spirit, at least, someone on the other side with some incentive to follow suit.

He’s got half a good idea, but it doesn’t really fit well with the other half of his plan. And that may not be the last word. They did make a point about these consultations [with Europe and Putin].

The European defense industry, given that it’s consolidating, that they’ve taken some heat for not having technology for their conventional forces that are comparable with the U.S., they would welcome any infusion of R&D money that they could get. But then of course, the Bush administration will have to figure out how much money they want to spread around here.

I think the strong advocates are trying to argue that the ABM treaty is hamstringing us, we’ve got to get out from under it or we’ll never know whether we could build a viable defense. But people who look at it with a more skeptical eye feel that there’s quite a bit of research and testing they could do and quite a bit they could learn about what’s possible without having to step out from the treaty. There’s a gray area. Certainly at least for the next year, they could probably have a fairly robust R&D program without having to junk the treaty. But some people seem to think that there’s an interest in stepping out of the treaty, just to sort of force the U.S. to do this, full-steam ahead — almost a political statement of intent.

He’s left himself a little bit of wiggle room. Because he hasn’t said, I’m going to walk away from it tomorrow. The Russians and Europeans and even some Democrats on the Hill are going to embrace whatever wiggle room Bush offers. So if he says he’s going to consult, they’re going to try to turn that into something real. And if he hasn’t said, I’m trashing the treaty tomorrow, they’re going to feel maybe there’s still some room for discussion. At some point the ambiguities will be cast aside, but I think there’s still further discussions that have to happen in the administration.