This article appears in the October 15, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Nuclear NAWAPA
How To Quench the
Anti-Infrastructure Cultural Fires
[Print version of this article]
The article includes three introductory paragraphs and other passages taken from the pamphlet, The Coming U.S. Economic Miracle on the New Silk Road, published by The LaRouche Organization on Sept. 29, 2021. Illustrations are also reproduced from the pamphlet.
Oct. 8—September 2021: Devastating floods in Germany! Hurricanes drowning New Yorkers in their basements! Historic drought and fires in the West! What do all of these events have in common? If you agree with politicians blaming “climate change,” you’ve been had. In fact, these all are instances of insufficient human intervention into the environment—instances where foreseeable events of nature occurred and caught us unprepared. The difference between a natural disaster that wreaks havoc and one that is merely routine, lies in mankind’s degree of mastery over the forces of nature around us, and our preparedness for them.
Civilizations have always been defined by their ability to control and defend against variations in nature. Whether it be extreme flooding, catastrophic volcanic eruptions, droughts, fires, plagues or ice ages, the universe is testing mankind as to its fitness to survive. Those civilizations which haven’t advanced to a sufficient level, perish, while those that have achieved a sufficient degree of mastery over the variations of nature, survive.
Today, the Western United States is gripped by drought and in desperate need of water. More than 50 years ago, President John Kennedy wanted to build the North American Water and Power Alliance, NAWAPA, the largest water management system ever envisioned.
In reality, droughts, fires, as well as flooding in both the East and West, have nothing to do with the ever-fluctuating climate, which is almost entirely driven by solar and galactic cycles. And while the stalled projects and lack of forest management have certainly contributed to the crises of fire and drought, the actual crisis lies in the cultural revolution of the 1960s when we turned our back on scientific and technological advancement.
Water for the West: JFK and the Senate
The blocking, since the 1960s, of the North American Water and Power Alliance as designed at that time, is critical to understanding this shift. NAWAPA—the continental scale, multi-basin water diversion program which has been called “10 TVAs”—would have provided plentiful water for agriculture, industry, an abundance of hydroelectric power, and mitigating the now-intensifying extremes of the Southwestern deserts.
NAWAPA was supported by President John F. Kennedy, and like many of the initiatives of his day, it died when the neo-colonial morass of the Vietnam War consumed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.
In a speech at the dedication of South Dakota’s Oahe Dam in 1962, Kennedy said:
When we are inclined to take these wonders for granted, let us remember that only a generation or two ago all the great rivers of America—the Missouri, the Columbia, the Mississippi, the Tennessee—ran into the sea unharnessed and unchecked. Their power potential was wasted. Their economic benefits were sparse. And their flooding caused an appalling destruction of life and of property…. This nation began to develop its rivers systematically, to conserve its soil and its water, and to channel the destructive force of these great rivers into light and peace. And today, as a result of this, the face of this nation has been changed. Forests are growing where there was once dirt and waste. Now there is prosperity where our poorest citizens once lived.
The next step was obvious: water-management on a national and continental scale.
The North American continent’s water cycle is not equally distributed. A hugely disproportionate amount falls in the upper Northwest, as weather from the Pacific Ocean gets funneled up the coast by the steep mountains from Oregon all the way up through British Columbia to Alaska, dumping inordinate amounts of precipitation there. This region’s water runoff makes up fully one-half of the runoff of the entire continent.
At the same time, the Southwest, with its exceptionally fertile land and large population, is water-starved, with 40 times less precipitation as the similarly-sized Northwest region. After having been evaporated from the ocean through tremendous solar energy, then travelling thousands of miles to make landfall on the continent, this water in the northern basins runs immediately back to the ocean without having been used by any living processes at all. What a waste! Redirecting a small fraction of that water in the way NAWAPA proposes will radically increase its productivity and its relationship with the continent.
Take another consideration. It is estimated that 60% of water that falls as precipitation on land is incorporated in some way before it runs off to the ocean, either by filling aquifers and water tables, or by being consumed by living processes. This means that most of the water which is added in this way will be absorbed, evaporated, and then precipitated back at least once before it makes its way back to the ocean to start the process over.
In 1964, Senator Frank Moss of Utah brought a proposal to the U.S. Senate to put in place the most far-sighted project ever imagined, the North American Water and Power Alliance. NAWAPA proposed to redirect 20% of the runoff from a number of major rivers in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory southward, to fulfill the needs of the rest of the continent. This included the Southwest, the plains states, refilling the Great Lakes, and even northern Mexico. Unused water in the northwest part of North America—water that fell as precipitation on the mountainous coastline and then ran “unharnessed and unchecked” right back to the ocean—would instead be utilized where it was actually needed, to green the continent and benefit mankind.
Enjoying both bipartisan backing in the United States and substantial support in Canada, NAWAPA was introduced as a U.S. Senate resolution in 1965, with an accompanying resolution in the House. Then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy was one of the co-sponsors. However, with the commencement of American involvement in Vietnam, NAWAPA was soon pushed to the backburner and never revisited. Subsequently, NAWAPA became the subject of increasing attacks from the environmentalist lobby to “protect nature.”
NAWAPA and a Bering Strait Crossing
Lyndon LaRouche and his associates have fought for the revival of NAWAPA for decades, and in 2013 proposed a “Nuclear NAWAPA XXI”—for the 21st Century and beyond—which expanded the original design to utilize nuclear power for the pumping systems of NAWAPA and the coastal desalination facilities, thus freeing up more water to be used for agriculture and industry.
Nuclear NAWAPA XXI must be accompanied by development of the North American region of the World Land-Bridge—the concept of world growth through a globally integrated series of development corridors, advanced since the 1990s by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. This calls for corridors of rail, highways, utilities, farming, manufacturing, and new cities, integrated with the NAWAPA project. Bringing water from the precipitation-rich Northern Yukon and Alaska to the rest of western North America, immediately calls forth the long-sought Alaska-Canada Railroad project and the rail crossing of the Bering Strait into the Eurasian Land-Bridge rail corridors.
The LaRouche Organization has just published its blockbuster report and organizing manual, The Coming U.S. Economic Miracle on the New Silk Road, which features that update in a Section called “Nuclear NAWAPA XXI.” The pamphlet shows how that project would be integrated into America’s joining the New Silk Road (or Belt and Road Initiative—BRI) initiated by China. The NAWAPA program in the World Land-Bridge framework, can therefore be considered the “North American Belt and Road Initiative” (NABRI).
The development corridors of NABRI will be essential, not only to transport resources and equipment needed for NAWAPA’s construction, but to develop new industries within the vicinity of the NAWAPA system. Through NAWAPA’s development of the Arctic region, the Bering Strait connection to Eurasia will become a necessity, and would connect NABRI to the ever expanding BRI in Eurasia—realizing the LaRouche design for a World Land-Bridge of cross-continental development corridors.
All these solutions, centered on LaRouche’s idea of development corridors and designs for continental water and power management, require global cooperation among sovereign nations—especially between the United States and China, as well as Russia and India. There must be coordination for these great projects, particularly for the World Land-Bridge. The Pacific Rim nations have a crucial role in sharing engineering and technological capabilities. This cooperation is critical to ending the dominance of British geopolitical designs which have pitted nations against each other in wars over resources, including the potential for wars over water resources.
As the West Burns
According to the October 7, 2021 U.S. Drought Monitor’s map, published by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, some rains have fallen in the Western states, but almost 99% of the region remains in the “abnormally dry” (D1) to “exceptional drought” (D4) categories, with nearly 59% of the West in the “extreme drought” (D3) to “exceptional drought” (D4) categories.
The drought, intensifying for years, is affecting agriculture and livestock in all western states of the United States, as well as Canada’s prairie provinces. California’s agricultural output is known to be massive—at times ranking in the top ten for nations, surpassing the output of Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Spain—but its variety is also unparalleled, with field crops and dairy, in addition to orchards and vineyards that have taken generations to cultivate. Other high-output areas of the drought region, including in Canada, are seeing significant losses that will have global impact.
This year’s U.S. harvest of Spring wheat, however, is down 40% over the yearly average of the last five years. (Spring wheat refers to durum and other hard varieties that are planted in the Spring, not the prior Winter). The five-state northern High Plains region (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming) is the center of U.S. spring wheat cultivation and was hit hard by the drought. There are significant Spring wheat areas in Washington and Idaho as well. Spring wheat like durum is the prime wheat variety for pasta and couscous, and U.S. harvests are important to Mediterranean countries. Dairy and meat animal producers have also been hit hard by high prices and short supplies of feed, as well as lack of water directly for their livestock, in addition to reduced forage on rangelands and public lands.
Wildfires have ravaged the western states, capturing international headlines. From the September 16, 2021, U.S. Drought Monitor:
Meanwhile, several dangerous wildfires remained active across northern California and the Northwest. Nationally, year-to-date wildfires through mid-September had charred more than 5.6 million acres of vegetation [approximately the size of New Jersey and Rhode Island combined—ed.].
Even as Western wildfire activity has slightly waned in recent days, broad reductions in air quality have continued in parts of the region. Four of California’s active wildfires—the Dixie (more than 960,000 acres), Caldor (219,000 acres) and Monument (215,000 acres) fires, along with the River Complex (187,000 acres)—were among the 20 largest blazes in state history. The Dixie Fire, initially sparked on July 13, has burned a vast area near Lake Almanor and has made several impressive runs while threatening to become the largest wildfire in California history. That blaze has also destroyed more than 1,300 structures. The Caldor Fire, which was ignited on August 14 just south of Grizzly Flats, California, has destroyed more than 1,000 structures—only the seventeenth wildfire in state history to do so.
The ongoing drought in the Western states of the United States and the Western provinces of Canada continue to strain water resources. California has been especially impacted, where, as of the end of August, the two largest reservoirs of Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville were at 43% and 34% of historical average capacity, respectively. Lake Powell, straddling Utah and Arizona, is at 31%, and Lake Mead, which borders Arizona and Nevada, is at 35%. Those reservoirs service the Southwestern states, as does the lower Colorado River System, which is at 40% capacity, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation—down 10% from just last year. In the middle of August, the federal government declared a state of emergency for the entire Colorado River Basin System, which has never been done before.
Meanwhile, fairly extreme disparities in the water supply of the North American continent are reported by the U.S. Drought Monitor, which noted in its September 30, 2021 report:
As the 2020-21 water year came to a close, the West, northern Plains and upper Midwest had the poorest recorded precipitation while portions of the South and Southeast have recorded 110-150 % of normal precipitation during this time.
In recent years, even the western states have experienced extreme fluctuations. In early 2017, after one of the worst droughts on record, northern California experienced its wettest winter in nearly a century, breaking its previous record set in 1982-83. Those same storms in 2017 also impacted the water systems of Oregon and Nevada.
California Reservoir Projects Delayed
To deal with these historic fluctuations, reservoirs like the Sites Reservoir in the northwest part of California’s Central Valley, which would flood the small town of Sites, would be the largest project built since the California State Water Project. The Sites project was approved in 2018, and is among the more than a half dozen smaller projects that have been approved by the voters of California, yet it remains unbuilt due to opposition among the British-directed environmentalist lobby, and a failing political system. Part of that environmentalist opposition is centered on minnows that swim in the Sacramento River, called Delta Smelt, which have become more important to save than the human lives that are impacted by not allowing that water to irrigate the agriculture crucial to California farmers and their livelihood, as well as the food supply for humanity.
Various legal battles have occurred to deal with water allocation. On Sept. 1, a group of California water agencies in the farming areas sued to freeze the latest round of emergency drought rules. Their lawsuit filed in the Sacramento County Superior Court argues that the agencies were denied due process when state regulators ordered thousands of landowners to cease diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta due to drought conditions. The agencies claim this would damage fruit and nut orchards, as well as other agricultural products.
Both the legal battles surrounding the existing water infrastructure and the fight to complete plans for the smaller, already proposed, water projects are crucial and important. However, they do not address the problem adequately. Only through NAWAPA’s continental water management design could we address these problems, and only through NAWAPA and NABRI could we address the economic destruction we have allowed to be imposed upon our nation over the last half century of “globalization.” The fight for these development projects is also the only way to stop the anti-production, anti-population “green” operations like the “30 by ‘30” land and water lock-up, the huge, new nature preserve attempts, and other assaults on the resource base by the Great Reset agenda of the Davos billionaires, who take their cue from Prince Charles and his co-thinkers in the City of London.
Inter-Basin Transfers
Originally drawn and studied for feasibility in the 1950s and 1960s, the initial NAWAPA plan is a series of projects designed to take freshwater from seven large untapped Alaska and the Canadian Yukon rivers, divert it before its runoff into the Pacific Ocean, channel it across Canada, the western United States, and all the way to northern Mexico. This would be achieved by a series of dams, canals, tunnels, lakes, and pump lifts, guiding the water down the continent, allowing for the potential irrigation of an estimated 86,000 square miles, transforming the arid landscape along the way.
As by the intention of the original NAWAPA design, some of the most severe water shortages of the United States could be solved.
For example, large amounts of water can be added to the desperate water systems of California. In the original NAWAPA design, California would gain 220 million-acre feet per year (MAFY) of new, permanent supplies of water, increasing the amount of water that can be involved in agriculture and industrial activity in California by more than 50%. It could reverse the depletion of the massive Ogalala Aquifer, which is supplying a diminishing amount of fossil groundwater to millions of acres of farmland in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and other states. Texas would receive 14 MAFY from NAWAPA, which would increase its available water supply by nearly 80%. While the majority of the NAWAPA system is oriented to the western states, a significant amount of water would also reach the eastern states. Water would be diverted into the Great Lakes system via the navigable Canadian Prairie canal (creating the long sought Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific), refilling the supply in the Eastern United States. 20 MAFY of water would be made available to the Missouri and Mississippi River systems through the Dakota Canal.
By connecting these river basins, the NAWAPA system is able to regulate water availability. The fairly regular flooding of the northern plain states could be diverted through these canals into Texas and Louisiana, if needed. The entire NAWAPA system would of course utilize the reservoirs for flood control and water management, but the ability to have inter-basin transfers would allow for continental water management—similar to how an electrical grid deals with surges in demand by drawing from available power in other parts of the grid.
The construction of NAWAPA itself will be a tremendous step in rebuilding the U.S. economy. In total, it will require the construction of 1,200 miles of tunnels, 8 large pumping stations, 5,400 miles of canals, dozens of locks, and 45 dams in a massive series of reservoirs and distribution systems. If it is upgraded to a nuclear-powered NAWAPA, as proposed by the LaRouche movement in 2013, an additional 52 GW of nuclear power plants will need to be built. All told, the construction of NAWAPA would create 7-10 million productive jobs over the course of 25—30 years, and another 10 million building the power plants to run it, making it the largest project ever undertaken by man.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy certainly dealt a major blow to building NAWAPA in the 1960’s, but there have been ongoing attempts since then to bury the project—particularly through this issue of inter-basin transfers. While NAWAPA advocate Sen. Frank Moss (D-Utah) put the project on the Senate record through a water resources subcommittee that he chaired in 1963, it would be Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington), who would work to sabotage the project years later. Jackson, as chair of the Senate Interior Committee, incorporated into the Colorado River Basin Project Act of 1968 a provision that importing water from outside the Colorado Basin could not be studied for 10 years. While ostensibly designed to protect the export of water from the Columbia River basin, this barred further study of NAWAPA as well. Wall Street weighed in over a decade later, where in 1979, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City held a symposium entitled, “Western Water Resources: Coming Problems and the Policy Alternatives,” which denounced the idea of inter-basin transfers, and specifically stated that “colossal concepts such as NAWAPA will not be practicable.” They instead proposed deregulated “water markets,” where speculators could price and sell local transfers of water already in use.
Furthermore, ambiguous language in the 1972 Clean Water Act has provided fertile ground for legal battles around the issue of inter-basin transfers. The Clean Water Act was implemented by the newly created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 1970) and its first (and later, fifth) director, William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus also oversaw the banning of DDT, as part of the British Crown’s program to ban DDT globally in order to accelerate deaths from malaria and other mosquito born illnesses that DDT was so effective in stopping. Ruckelshaus would go on to other positions in the “deep state,” and become acting director of the FBI in 1973 before a brief stint as US Deputy Attorney General.
There were many attempts to stop NAWAPA since its inception, but it was NAWAPA’s champion, Senator Moss, who identified the Vietnam War as being responsible for its death. Years later, Lyndon LaRouche would identify the Vietnam War and the 1960’s U.S. version of its “cultural revolution” as killing a productive and scientific culture in the United States. LaRouche and his associates have waged war on that cultural transformation for decades while being the leading advocates for NAWAPA and other great infrastructure projects. That fight is continued in The LaRouche Organization’s recently released mass-distribution report, The Coming U.S. Economic Miracle on the New Silk Road.
NAWAPA and NABRI:
Bering Strait to Tierra Del Fuego
In developing the Nuclear NAWAPA XXI design, LaRouche’s scientific research team explored other aspects of NAWAPA, including the impact that NAWAPA would have on creating or altering regional weather patterns. The medium for this potential is the increase in evapotranspiration of water from the earth’s surface, caused by increasing the growth of life through agriculture and forestry. Lyndon LaRouche later stressed that the development of the Arctic region of NAWAPA should ultimately be an aspect of the space program, since our breakthroughs in weathering the airless cold of space could ultimately be applied to the harsh conditions of the Arctic, and vice versa. LaRouche and his associates had also explored for decades, the possibility of integrating NAWAPA into the proposed major water projects in Mexico, known as the Hydraulic Project for the Northwest (PLHINO) and Hydraulic Project for the Gulf of the Northeast (PLHIGON).
To accomplish this type of development of the expanded NAWAPA design would require the development corridor concept of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche had developed that concept in his proposals for a New Silk Road in Eurasia, which would ultimately be expanded as the World Land-Bridge. With the NAWAPA design connecting with PLHINO and PLHIGON in Mexico, the development corridors required—in terms of the transportation required for the construction of those projects, but more importantly the development of the manufacturing and refinement facilities required along those transportation corridors—would extend nearly to the Darien Gap between North and South America. The proposal for a “North American Belt and Road Initiative” (NABRI) of development corridors for North America, could then be connected to those development corridors proposed in South America. The criminal neglect of the “Washington Consensus,” where the development of the nations of Central and South America has been prevented in favor of the City of London’s Dope Inc., could finally be overturned.
Through the Bering Strait Tunnel, NABRI, extended through the Darien Gap and connected with the development corridors of South America, would realize LaRouche’s design for a World Land-Bridge. Building a NABRI together with NAWAPA, would provide the required productive employment of many millions of people for generations to come.
As the trans-Atlantic system continues its breathtaking collapse, potentially leading into a dark age for all of humanity, LaRouche’s development corridors of the World Land-Bridge and hemispheric water management are now the only alternative. These projects are an essential component of his “four laws,” the economic actions to save the nation which start with enforcing the Glass-Steagall bank separation principle in every nation and the creation of national banks for development.
Moreover, infrastructural integration with the nations of Eurasia through the Bering Strait Tunnel, will involve cooperative action by the Four Powers—the United States, China, Russia, and India—LaRouche long cited as the concert of nations with the power to sideline London’s financial empire.
Lyndon LaRouche himself spoke of the North American Water and Power Alliance in this way in an essay, “Learn from NAWAPA: Mind or Body,” written July 27, 2010, and published in the August 20 issue of EIR.
When sung from the right throat, “Creation” can be a wondrous word. So, as I shall show here, the true song lives, not in the note, but, when song and mind, alike, dwell only in that process of constant change which resides “between the notes.” The secret of the economy lies not in the thing produced, but, rather, in the ordering which subsumes, and surpasses each mere, made thing. Man’s power to exist lies not in the things which exist, but in the process through which things, and mortal human lives, come and go, in the domain of the immortality of each soul of a very special species, mankind. Such is the true, and only form of real human knowledge.
Such is the meaning of “man’s universe.” Such is the true meaning of “infrastructure.” Such is the rarely understood grandeur of the intention of a NAWAPA whose idea could not be killed, even decades later, still today. Such is the true practical meaning of man’s access to the immortality of each great dream. It partakes of the immortality of a Creator. NAWAPA could not be killed, because it was the immortal feat on which man’s future presently depends.
So be NAWAPA, in our present hands.
