Bruce Gagnon Biography
Veteran, Activist, Organizer, 1952–
“The role of the U.S. in the new world corporate order is going to be to export security. That means endless wars and weapons in space. The Pentagon will send our kids off to foreign lands to suppress opposition to corporate globalization. How will we ever end America’s addiction to war and violence as long as our communities are dependent on military spending for jobs? We must work to convert the military industrial complex to sustainable technologies like windpower, solar, and mass transit.”
When Bruce Gagnon was vice president of the Okaloosa County (Florida) Young Republican Club, he volunteered in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Today, as co-founder and coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, he fights the reach of corporate greed into space, which pits him against most Washington officials.
Gagnon has worked on space issues for more than 20 years, first as state coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice. Valuable resources on the moon and planets form the next battleground for corporate profit, he says, and “defense” programs such as “Star Wars” actually are conceived as offense. “The U.S. intends to control…and dominate space and deny other countries access,” says Gagnon, adding that the means for seizing such control are nuclear, threaten everyone on Earth, and divert funding from the common good.
To raise awareness of what is at stake, Gagnon speaks internationally and has written for publications such as Earth Island Journal, CounterPunch, Z Magazine, Space News, National Catholic Reporter, Asia Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Canadian Dimension. He has produced two videos, Arsenal of Hypocrisy (2003) and Battle for America’s Soul (2005) and he published a book, Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire (2005). He is host of This Issue, a cable TV program that airs in five communities in Maine, his home state. In 2003 Dr. Helen Caldicott named Gagnon a senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, where he also serves on her advisory board.
Gagnon’s work does not yet draw the attention it warrants. Television’s 60 Minutes did tune in to his Cancel Cassini Campaign against the 1997 launch plutonium into space. But Project Censored (based at Sonoma State University in California) found articles by Gagnon to be among the most censored stories of 1999 and 2005. Remembering that his own shift in consciousness began with a handful of Vietnam War protestors who stood outside the Air Force base in California where he was stationed, Bruce Gagnon perseveres—and finds new ways to enlist others’ concern.
In 1971, soon after graduating from high school, I volunteered for the US Air Force because I wanted to be a career military man just like my dad. I flunked my induction physical because of an old football injury and had to get a waiver to get into the military. After my training I was sent to Travis AFB in California that was an airlift base for the war in Vietnam. Soldiers would come to our base from all over the country to fly to Vietnam and when the planes returned they carried the body bags of those who had been killed in the war. Almost daily I could see them lined up on the runway just across from where I worked.
Most weekends a small protest would be held at the gates of the base by the peace movement. We would be threatened by the Air Force authorities that we were not to go near the protest or we could be severely disciplined. This dynamic created much debate in the barracks and as it turned out my first roommate was one of the leading organizers in the GI anti-war resistance movement. At night guys would come into our room and talk about the war for hours. Having grown up a young conservative from a military family this was all very new to me. It ended up changing my life and after about six months I slid my chair into their circle and became a peace activist.
