Trouble over Trident

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.

With that, a new party came to court to buttress the Navy's case: the Pacific Legal Foundation, a California-based "public interest" law firm. Most such firms represent exactly the sort of people who are taking on the Navy; the nonprofit P.L.F., by contrast, represents business interests in environmental and social disputes. Last summer, for example, it had a hand in one successful suit to use banned DDT to control insects in Western timberlands. Supporting the Navy's argument, the P.L.F. contends that 1) the preservation of national defense has priority over environmental law, and 2) vital Executive Branch decisions, such as the one made by the Defense Department to build the Trident base, are not subject to judicial review because of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. Sive insists that what is at stake is simply whether the military is above "the rule of law." Both sides predict that no matter what the decision in federal district court next month, the case will eventually be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

* Each Trident will carry 24 long-range missiles and travel faster, dive deeper, run more quietly, and stay at sea longer than nuclear subs now in service.

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