Environment: Trouble over Trident

• Share

Since most military projects are intimately involved with national security, can't they be excused from the requirements of environmental law? That was the question at issue last week when a federal judge in Washington, B.C., refused to issue an injunction to halt construction of a base vital to the Navy's $15 billion Trident submarine program. Judge George Hart's ruling set the stage for a February trial that will pit environmentalists and landowners against the Navy and a new type of "public interest" law firm.

The case dates back to 1973 when the Navy announced that it had chosen an 8,500-acre tract at Bangor near the northwestern corner of the state of Washington as the home base for its Trident submarines. To support these su-persubs*—which are designed to replace the Polaris and Poseidon as nuclear deterrents—the Navy planned a $600 million complex with an estimated population of as many as 55,000 people. But the tract borders Hood Canal, a deep marine estuary leading off Puget Sound, and the more that local environmentalists learned about the Navy's plan the more convinced they became that the base would destroy the area's natural beauty.

When the Navy's plans became clear, a group of local conservationists formed an organization called Concerned About Trident to preserve the canal. After construction of the base began last October, they joined with two summer residents (one is Economist Walter Heller, a presidential adviser in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations) and several environmental groups and went to court. Their attorney, David Sive, who is one of the U.S.'s leading environmental lawyers, focused on what he felt was the weak point in the Navy's justification for the base: it had not filed a proper environmental impact statement, a document that the National Environmental Policy Act requires of all federal agencies before they decide to undertake construction projects.

The Navy had in fact spent $600,000 producing a five-volume statement. But Sive charges that the statement was written not before but after the decision to build the base was made. Trident opponents also claim that while the document did touch on the base's potential effects on wildlife, it completely overlooked the effects on people—the increase in local population and the need for new schools, sewers, roads and police. Says local Attorney Philip Best: "The Navy was looking at gnats and ignoring the elephants." Environmental ists moved for a temporary, pretrial injunction to halt construction.