How a New Peacebuilding Institute and an Old Missile Plant Came to be Neighbors in Utah

The new Heravi Peace Institute at the land-grant Utah State University has its origins in Iran-Utah ties that predate the nuclear era and nearby ICBM plant.

Hi,

Yesterday I published a story about a remarkable new peacebuilding institute I learned about while reporting in Utah. It feels like an odd time for a good news story, but I also know that many people are eager to build new relationships and community given the uncertainty and setbacks they expect over the next four years. I hope all readers interested in peacebuilding and nuclear weapons will keep the Heravi Peace Institute in mind if they have opportunities to engage its students and faculty.

A New Peacebuilding Institute in Utah’s Missile-Making Lands

I’ve been up to the dry, shrubby lands of northern Utah’s Great Basin twice recently, first to visit Northrop Grumman’s final assembly plant for the new intercontinental ballistic missile. The facility, which Northrop workers call the Promontory plant, snakes along over six miles of single-lane highway through dunes dotted with bunkers that engineers use to watch fiery missile tests, a dangerous endeavor that has killed at least nine workers over the plant’s nearly six decades of existence.

The second time was to visit the new Heravi Peace Institute at Utah State University, which aims to train students in peacebuilding the way other academies train students for warfighting. It’s a rare institute of its kind both in the intermountain west and as one serving a public, land-grant university where many of the students work to pay their way through school and have never had the opportunity to travel abroad other than on Mormon missionary trips, a professor there told me.

That weapons of mass destruction and a peacebuilding institute of mass instruction ended up cohabitating on the northern side of the Great Salt Lake is, in its origins, a story about place and what different people saw when they saw that vast arid terrain. 

(From Iran and Utah State University: Half a Century of Friendship and a Decade of Contracts)

Northrop Grumman’s final assembly plant for the new intercontinental ballistic missile in Corinne, Utah (Taylor Barnes/Inkstick)

Read more here about how a nuclear missile plant and a peacebuilding institute are really not just happenstance neighbors in northern Utah but have decades-long roots in its unique terrain and a long cultural and professional exchange between the college town of Logan and Iran.