New York City - The Nuclear-Free Future Award

I. Man-hatta, the hilly island, was used by the Algonquinspeaking
Leni Lenape as a summer fishing outpost. Another
tradition tells of a people living there who called themselves the
Manhattan. Whatever is true, when the annual mosquito plague
was at its worst, here at the mouth of the river the whites would
come to call the Hudson, there was wind enough to keep the nasty
little demons at bay. The Dutch felt comfortable in the surroundings,
and exchanged some sixty guilders worth of trinkets to
purchase the land and
settle. The Native
Amer-icans accepted
the barter without
really understanding the concept of real estate possession; to
fish and trade with the whites they continued to return and set
up their encampments. Manhattan’s new owners built ramparts at
the northernmost end of the set-tlement, de Waal. We know with
certainty where the barrier stood: Wall Street marks the location.
Outside de Waal the Indians could barter their furs, and still today
Wall Street is a place of commerce. Here uranium amounts to
just another commodity.
Foreword
II. Once President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the urging of Albert
Einstein, made the development of the atomic bomb part of the
country’s military agenda, scientists, engineers, and men in uniform
rendesvoued in New York, New York. The code name for
the undertaking lay not far from hand: the Manhattan Project.
Two addresses were important meeting places for the initiates of
the A-bomb program: the Bell Laboratories Building (463 West
Street), and the Woolworth Building (233 Broadway). The secret
project quickly became a mammoth undertaking, branching out
across the continent from Tennessee to New Mexico to way on
up in Ontario. The headquarters were hidden in the mountains of
northern New Mexico: Los Alamos, the birthplace of the Atomic
Age. Here the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
engineered, constructed.
III. Traditional Native Americans concieve of time as being circular.
In 1870 at the newly built academy called Cooper Union,
Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota gave a speech outlining his
concerns about the future of his people. In the Great Hall some
4
On Manhattan and the Manhattan Project.
And on the closing of circles.
ten years prior, Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “Right
Makes Might” address. On September 30th Henry Red Cloud
will give a speech from behind the red velvet of the same lectern,
talking about his work on the Pine Ridge Reservation. There he
trains young Lakota to become solar engineers. His hope is that
renewable energies will save the He Sapa (Black Hills) from a
new wave of uranium mining. Henry is a great-great-great grandson
of Chief Red Cloud.
IV. For our group a circle completes
at the old Bell Laboratories Building,
which today is called Westbeth, and
offers live/work spaces to artists of
many disciplines. In May of 1990 at
the Ramscale Loft on the 13th floor,
we first went public with our plans
for the World Uranium Hearing; two
years later, the WUH gathering took
place in Salzburg, Austria. In 1998
we returned to Ramscale and announced
our follow-up project: The
Nuclear-Free Future Award. Again
this year we will gather at the old Bell
Laboratories site, laureates, organizers,
and many supporters. In 1999
the second annual Awards ceremony
was held in Los Alamos at Fuller
Lodge, the Manhattan Project’s canteen
and Sunday dance hall. To help
undo the grips of the tragic past, it is important to revisit the sites
of its shaping with new drive, new energies, new values.
Claus Biegert
V. We have a clear goal: we demand a future free of nuclear
weapons and nuclear power. Uranium is not simply another commodity.
Our civilization is mired in a dilemma: we take what
we need to preserve our lifestyle, while at the same time we
deplete the earth of life’s essentials. “Whatever we do today, we
must always consider the well-being of the seventh generation
to come” – the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee, whom we call
the Iroquois – can help us from our predicament.