LOTTMAN: I did tape your remarks at AU, and I have brought some copies of that with me. I wanted to come in and do a little one-on-one to sort of supplement that. Now, you seem to be very active in this issue and this debate. The first thing I want to know is, how did that get started?

KUCINICH: Well, as a young person. I remember growing up in the 50s, and having to duck under my desk and put my hand around my head, like this, and then tuck my head in my lap, so as not to be hurt by the nuclear missiles that were coming in. I mean, they didn't tell us that if there was a missile that hit, it wouldn't matter what position we were in; we would not survive. We were told to keep our eyes closed tightly so we wouldn't see the flash. Well, we know now that that was all part of a way to keep the people of the United States from getting too upset about the prospect of whole populations being incinerated in a nuclear exchange.

Since that time, when we've had more information about the impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on human beings, and we've learned that the use of nuclear weapons must never be an option in a civilized world, we've looked to have treaty regimes—formal relations between countries, saying, “we shouldn't use nuclear weapons. We should get rid of nuclear weapons.” And my purpose as a member of the United States Congress, is to keep the faith on the issue of total nuclear disarmament. And that means on earth as well as in the heavens.

LOTTMAN: This goes back a ways with you.

KUCINICH: Sure.

LOTTMAN: I've been asking people who have been involved in this a long time, to just talk a little bit about people's views of outer space. Why is it so important to keep outer space free of weapons?

KUCINICH: First of all, we still have a distance to go on this earth, of settling relations between nations. Of having peace, in the fullest sense. When you have a federal government that has a military budget of over $300 billion, and an arms industry which propagates the acquisition of arms around the world, obviously we live in a world where people have not learned how to handle conflict, and have not learned how to use nonviolence as an organizing principle in relations between nations. We don't even have that in our own society. So that being the case, they haven't solved their problems within this sphere they call the earth.

How in the world can we expect to ever have peace on earth, if we permit the heavens to be used as a staging area for nuclear exchanges. That doesn't even get into the massive environmental problems that would be involved. The problems of damage to the whole eco-sphere. This is madness. And it's time for us to speak out against this madness of hegemony in space.

There is a sense of arrogance about this. That somehow we have the power to dominate, not only the globe, but the entire universe. There is a sense of disconnection from matters spiritual in that, I think. It bespeaks a vacuousness of the human heart, to talk of weapons races that lead to engagement in outer space. It shows a lack of concern for the continuation of the human race.

We need to make a strong commitment, to affirm our belief that the life of the planet has to be the first concern that all of us, as human beings, must engage in. That we have to recognize our responsibility, as individuals, as nations, to each other. So that we can permit each other the opportunity to continue to survive.

Talk of domination of space by a military command, with the idea of somehow being in a position to manipulate the faith of the world, is just not consistent with an attitude that speaks to the necessity of the survival of the human race.

LOTTMAN: We addressed some of the political, environmental, and spiritual aspects of this. One thing I'm also interested in is the psychological. When people are stressed, when things are confusing, people look up to the sky—it makes them feel better. So what would the implications be of the skies potentially becoming a battleground?

KUCINICH: Well, you know, there's a Christian prayer called the “our Father,” which has the words, 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' We view the sky as the connection to that principle of eternity, to that idea of something transcendent in our lives. The violence to that belief in a heaven, in a transcendence, in some universal beneficence; to see the skies, the universe itself, threatened with the prospect of nuclear warfare, in the heavens, it is psychologically challenging, and spiritually punishing to invite the prospect of such an exchange of nuclear weapons between nations in outer space.

And the very fact that a nation would prepare for that while its people do not have decent health care, while its children remain not well educated in many places, while its environment has so many challenges to keep the air and the water clean, while people are still struggling to have meaningful employment... There are so many challenges we face here on earth to make our lives more livable, more meaningful. And it seems as though the projection of fear, of the instrumentalities of violence into outer space, is a threat to all of the aspirations which all of us have. Not only in this country, but on the planet.

We need to encourage people to be more than they are. We need to encourage people to unlock their own inner potential to the fullest. We need to engage with each other as brothers and sisters, to find peace and love, and to reciprocate their discoveries. The idea of a new arms race, of taking that image of a restless quest for discovery and to reach up to the sky as an expression of our limitless potential—to take that and to put it in the context of an arms race is to demean humanity. We must think more of ourselves. We must think more of each other. And we must demand of our nation that it do better.

LOTTMAN: The military powers that be, the Space Command, often express the concern that someone else is going to use outer space to harm the United States. What do you think of that concern? Is it justified, and if it is...

KUCINICH: You know, if we have fear, it's up to us to go to our neighbor, to go to our brother and sister, and say, 'look, let us not proceed in our affairs of state, in a way that we feel that we have to threaten each other. Let us participate in your success as a nation, so that you can take care of your people and receive through reciprocation, a sense of safety and security.' Because I think that the way that we can best bring about peace on this earth is through reaching—opening up our hearts, reaching out to people.

We can never have peace through armaments. That's a false peace. We can never pretend that we can reach security in this country through a matter of piling arms upon arms. There's no security in that. The only real security is through love and compassion and seeking peace. And the military, while they might have important work to do in the sense of basic defense, should not be charged with the responsibility of providing peace. That's an individual matter. It's a national matter.

And we need to, actually, we're at a moment when we need to change the way we look at matters of war and peace. That's one of the reasons that I've proposed a department of peace, which would use nonviolence as an organizing principle, in international and domestic policy. So that we can look at peace as being inevitable, not war being inevitable. We can look at our domestic policy for race relations, for domestic violence, for spousal abuse, for gangs, and all those areas where we have conflict in our society, because really, in truth, the microcosm of conflict which we might have in our own hearts as individuals, really is expressed outwardly as war between nations, as the potential for war in the universe.

So we have to, in a sense, take responsibility. Because as each one of us chooses, so chooses the world. We take responsibility, and in our own hearts create the peace, as that prayer and that psalm goes, let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. So each of us needs to recognize that we can play a role in making this a more peaceful world. But we cannot expect that peace can be brought about through the acquisition of the instrumentalities of violence. It's inherently contradictory, and it will never be reconciled in the human heart. And it will never provide for an opportunity for the deliverance of our human race.

LOTTMAN: Military leaders here talk about space war as though it were inevitable. As though it were simply going to happen. Someone is going to pick a fight with us, and we're going to go to war in space. First of all, what is your opinion of that point of view? And second, how do you dissuade someone from that, since they are apparently so convinced?

KUCINICH: I think what needs to happen is that we call these individuals in front of an open, public hearing before congress, and ask each individual, what are they afraid of? This involves a certain psychology which needs to be explored with respect to the individuals who are promoting this idea of warfare in space. Because if you keep promoting it, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, once the technical ability to do so proceeds, and you know, that's a whole separate issue about whether any of this is technically feasible. At this moment I doubt that it is.

But why even go there? Why even get to a point where you have to have a serious debate about the technical ability of one missile to zap another in space. Let's go back to who we are as human beings. We need to challenge this kind of thinking. Not let it rest, not say that there's some anonymous, or supposed threat somewhere, then go and address it. If north Korea presents some kind of a limited missile threat to any part of the United States coastline, the obvious solution would be to go to North Korea, and to negotiate with them and to talk to them, and to work with them to avoid any confrontation.

The solution isn't to spend $85 billion and put a missile defense across this country which, in truth, couldn't work anyhow. It ends up being a flim-flam. And it really gets away from what we need to be doing, and that is talking, negotiating. And that's why I came up, that's why this idea of a Department of Peace becomes important, because we can start to use the considerable intellectual abilities which we have in this country, and spiritual talents, to talk about ways in which we can nurture each other, and provide for the survival of our specie, and all species. I have a website, and that website discusses this proposal, and we welcome the input from people, because we really need to have participation, and start a new dialogue.

Who says that this is what we are stuck with? That we are stuck with a world which is forever to be at war, and a country that is always going to use the treasure of its people to prepare for war? Why don't we start preparing for peace? Why don't we start making peace an inevitability? And do the work of peace? The daily work of human interaction, of people cooperating and working together and creating a new vision in this new millennium.

When we saw, in city after city, people letting go of their fear this new years eve, and letting go of the predictions of Armageddon, of Y2K failure of all kinds of support systems, of some kind of cataclysm being visited on the day of the new millennium. We saw people let that go, and go out into a joyous celebration of hope on the day of the new millennium, when the clock struck 12 across and around this world, that is what people are waiting to express, this sense of joy, this sense of togetherness. People are ready for that. It's there. We are seeing it. This idea of annihilation needs to continue to be balanced with the hope and the joy that we have as human beings for expression of ourselves and hope for others. We are at a moment in time where we can—it's all still within our hands.

And even though the policy-makers, and the Pentagon, some of them would envision this scenario of assured destruction, even though we have some people in elected office in Washington who want to conjure that, we can through our collective consciousness, create peace, through our desire to see peace, inform policies which are pacific. And we need to do that. We need to take responsibility.

LOTTMAN: One thing we are sort of stuck with is this security mentality. It's a mentality that says it is legitimate, because all of the satellites that we have in space—and to the extent that we do derive some benefit from that—we ought to be sure that those assets are safe. In practical terms, how do we do that?

KUCINICH: If someone is seeking a commercial opportunity in space, they take the risk. There's no obligation on the part of the United States of America to build a whole defense infrastructure to assure that satellites that go up there are always going to work. We don't know if satellites are going to work. They go up, they go down. That's, uh, we're not under any obligation as a nation to change our policy, with all the implications it has for world peace, by the way. It's ridiculous.

Furthermore, we have some real concerns here which we need to address. The NPT is at risk today. The ABM treaty is at risk, simply because the United States wants to put up a National Missile Defense, a nuclear umbrella over this country, which would violate the ABM at a time that the Russians, with their new leadership, have moved to improve START II, which would strongly limit their strategic arms. At a time when the Russians have moved ahead to approve a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while our US Senate has not.

We should be seizing this moment to move toward peace. And take the initiative, once again, which we have through seven US presidents, and find a way to come up with a constructive arms treaty, which does not defeat this whole concept of eventual, total, global nuclear disarmament. That's where we ought to be headed on earth and in the heaven.