How can we nonviolently prevent nuclear war?
1. Like so many in Congress we can ignore nuclear weapons and
hope they go away—some in the new administration want to
restart talks—that’s progress.
2. The pope condemns war every so often but diplomatically
hasn’t mentioned anyone by name.
3. Political oppositions must rise up in all nuclear nations and press
governments to reduce their numbers—zero’s a nice number.
4. Convince the military to dismantle them—yep, that's right.
5. Wave a magic wand
No one knows how effective the new government will be. Obama promised to rid us of nukes and to close Guantanamo—still waiting.
The pope has spoken for himself but most bishops are hardliners.
Activist efforts continue despite setbacks.
The fourth method is an outlier, but it has been tried. Ground Zero’s attempt last year to urge submariners to disobey unlawful orders (viz.,“Fire the missiles”) didn’t dent Trident.
Keep waving that wand, Bubba.
What do you do though, if writing your congress-person or upholding honkable banners are not yielding the desired results?
One method I didn’t mention is direct action (civil disobedience/ nonviolent resistance) first advocated by Henry David Thoreau against slavery and the war with Mexico. Ghandi employed it for civil rights in South Africa and against colonial rule in India. More recently Martin Luther King, Jr., and others used the same principles effectively in the struggles of the ‘sixties. Unlike the others direct action has a distinct risk of financial loss and/or incarceration.
It’s one thing to claim imprisoned heroes like Plowshares7 Jesuit priest Steven Kelly or Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange or soldier and intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, leaker of National Security Administration (NSA) surveillance techniques methods; it’s quite another to follow in their footsteps.
In May of 2019, the Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action (GZ) emailed me about their proposal to protest at the Bangor-Kitsap Trident Base the weekend of May 11. Activists were invited to perform brief gestures of non-violent civil disobedience. They scheduled a morning of inspirational talks by GZ leaders and a keynote by Kathy Kelly, a well-known war-crime protestor and Afghanistan activist. In the afternoon a lawyer sympathetic to the cause would present legal information and instruction. Replying I’d attend, I ordered an 8’ x 3’ vinyl banner prepared and contacted other Olympians to rideshare that day.
By scheduling the event the day before Mothers’s Day they wished to remind people that holiday had close connections to peace advocacy. Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia used her Mothers Friendship Day in 1868 to reconcile former Union and Confederate soldiers. Two years later the suffragette and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe authored her Mother’s Day Proclamation urging mothers to unite in promoting world peace.
At the entrance of the Trident Base a one-foot-wide blue line, labeled US Government brightly in white, has been painted on each lane of the highway at Trident Boulevard, the Navy property. Knowledge of this line is critical to understanding the GZ protests.
After lunch GZ’s legal advisor clarified for us that protestors who stand (dance, read poetry, sing peace songs, etc.) blocking highway traffic on the state side of the blue marker and who also refuse to disperse when ordered to do so by the highway police will be cited for blocking access on a state highway and must report to a state court as notified to answer the charges. Those protestors who cross the blue line onto the base and stand (dance, read poetry, sing peace songs, etc.), who refuse to return to the state property when ordered by base security (the Marines) will be cited for federal trespass and informed they must report to a federal court. He could not make it plainer the federal violation is regarded as more serious—occasionally much more serious—than the state offense.
We were then asked as to what course we’d choose (without judgment as to our sincerity or dedication to the cause): 1. to stand alongside the highway; 2. to violate the state law; or 3. to violate the federal law. Eight stalwarts opted for the state side; I chose the federal side: the rest, about fifty in number, chose to march, sing, witness, and cheer.
GZ and Navy base security had earlier agreed on the site and timing to avoid dangerous surprises. Banners and sign in hand we proceeded to the base as state police cars parked on an overpass, and Marines with protective vests and weapons, parked their van near the blue line.
First the eight formed a line in front of the blue demarcator and began with a song together, followed by each demonstrator presenting his or her rationale for blocking the road: citing international law, recounting other heroic stands, praying and announcing recent comments of the pope. Finished, they stood in place, and as each was approached by the highway police to disperse, they refused, and were in turn politely taken by an arm and led off to the roadside where individual citations were drafted and delivered.
As the last was led away I stepped forward with my banner held chest high, got to the center of the road, and took two steps behind the blue line. A Navy security officer told me to step back to the state side. I stood still and did not answer. Then he asked if I knew the meaning of the word trespass. I acknowledged I did and was approached by two guards, one who took the banner out of my hands while the other led me behind the van out of sight of the crowd.
They took several photographs of (presumably for Navy and NSA records) while a guard asked for my ID and address.
One guard, fearful I might faint, inquired if I preferred to sit on the van floor where the side was open. I did and gladly accepted a paper cup of water besides. Despite our training to remember carefully everything we were asked and said, there was some casual conversation before they returned my banner and took me back across the blue line. My allies cheered my return. The citation told me I would be advised of my court date.
I had no strategy for the court appearance and became concerned that for all my bravado at the gate I could easily fail in court and have little to show for my vaunted defiance. Consulting the GZ lawyer I decided to plead not guilty at the arraignment, and then negotiate to enter a statement if I changed my plea to guilty. The trial was scheduled for October 23, 2019 at 1:30 PM before Judge Theresa Fricke at the Federal Court Building in Tacoma, Washington.
Arriving with my colleague Joanne Dufour of the Olympia Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (OCANW), we were met at the courtroom door by several GZ members.
When my case was called Judge Fricke began by explaining my pleading guilty now precluded any future legal action by me on the charge at hand. I told her I understood and requested to make my statement. The courtroom was fairly large and empty except for a few accused and their supporters. A microphone at a nearby desk had been provided for answers, questions, or statements. She directed me to take the chair and I began reading my statement, periodically looking up to the judge and the others about:
“After study and prayer I concluded our nuclear policy of Mutually
Assured Destruction is an irrational delusion which, by accident or
intention, will inevitably one day annihilate all life on earth—an
omnicide where neither we nor roaches nor viruses survive. We
have ignored this for close to 75 years as if, cowed and lulled by our
country’s militarism, we slept on an ever costlier, ever larger pile of
dynamite, trusting that diabolical MADness to prevent our
obliteration.
"But we have seen ingenious systems fail and we know fissile
materials have been misplaced, lost, or stolen. For decades we
presumptively feared it would be a maniac from some other
country who might topple the Jenga tower of worldwide death. I
decided I could no longer by silence be complicit in this risk of the
greatest conceivable evil.
“Heartened by the heroism of protestors and filled with a hope of
responding rationally and creatively to the prospect of planetary
horror, I had a banner made asserting Nuclear Weapons Are
Immoral to produce, stockpile, and use and displayed it on the
ground of those most likely to benefit from reading it and taking its
message to heart. I did not just trespass on the base which—without
my banner—I had no cause to do—but with it I finally and publicly
answered the duty of my conscience and exercised my right of free
speech where the federal government seemed not to want me to.
“Your honor has the opportunity—as do all—to join the community
resisting nuclear madness. Declare the money, genius, and effort we
have so far expended out of fear a moral waste. Declare we could
have aided the world to have cleaner water, wider education, more
hospitals, and all manner of economic development instead of
spreading a debilitating fear of impending doom.
The courtroom had grown quiet before and during my delivery. The silence persisted as if to underscore my message. Then the Navy prosecutor stood and recommended a $50 fine. Judge Fricke accepted my guilty plea and stated: “In recognition of the defendant’s conscientious plea I will lower the fine to $25.” She closed her remarks with, “I respect your First Amendment protest and your firmly held beliefs.”
Unlike standing at the corner of Fourth and Water Street in downtown Olympia, where you can disagree with the government’s nuclear policy for free, doing so on their territory up close and personal, will cost $65: $25 fine, $10 mandatory fee, and $30 to cover court costs. The maximum penalty allowed was six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. The GZ lawyer had advised me my instance of trespass was a misdemeanor and, depending on the judge, a harsh sentence was unlikely. Other than creating a federal record, this civil disobedience fell well within my tolerance.
The support from GZ, from Olympia friends, from OCANW, and others transformed the shame of a guilty plea to the euphoria of realizing I had (however briefly) placed a thorn in the briefs of the military and gotten away with it.
Although in the larger picture my action did not create national notice as had the Kings Bay Plowshares7 at the Georgia Trident Base on the Atlantic coast. Except for a couple of peace movement newsletters, my nonviolent resistance disappeared in the flood of Mother’s Day stories and other news of the day.
If so, was it worth the effort, or was it just theater for anti-nuclear partisans? As an answer I’d like to enter a quotation from Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges on the nature of protest and hope:
“Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires
personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about
peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more
futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an
act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd.
Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the
lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. . . . Hope posits that
people are drawn to the good by the good. . . . Hope sees in our
enemy our own face.”
Are we crazy? That's what so many around us are thinking. Are they really advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? How naive. How utterly unrealistic. Russia . . . China . . . North Korea would not hesitate to blast us from the face of the earth but for our ability to exterminate in retaliation any attacker and not bat an eyelash doing it.
I’d like to go farther than reducing stockpiles or totally eliminating nuclear weapons. I’d like to end war itself in any form, small bombs, big bombs, chemical agents, biological weapons, even poking each other in the eye with Pic-Up-Stix.
The present reality is any war we’re in today (or conceive of being in tomorrow) can escalate into full nuclear exchange without a prayer of stopping it before every last weapon is hurled along its deadly path.
Only very recently we witnessed the irresponsible shenanigans of two toddler personalities—North Korea and the good ol’ US of A. The recent resurgence of activity against nuclear weapons can be laid at the feet of Un and Ump.
How did we ever give any mortal the opportunity to expunge all humanity from this part of the universe? George Washington set this country on the wrong path when he stated, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Unmindful of our demonstrated aggressive disposition we accepted his profoundly paranoid orientation to foreign nations. We devised modern equivalents of unchallenged xenophobia: “Peace through power.”
We refused to see the dangerous but only way out. President Kennedy told the General Assembly of the UN on September 25, 1961:
“We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.”
Rather than devise a system of checks and restraints (all fallible) to prevent anyone flipping a Doomsday switch, we must disassemble Doomsday itself. Dismantle every weapon starting with our own. Risky? You betcha. In the long run though is Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament truly any more risky than relying on the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction? The people of our so-called enemies have no more desire to exterminate us than we have of exterminating them--including their military.
International Workers of the World (Wobblies) almost stopped World War I before it began when they openly questioned, “Why should French workers kill German workers?” Today will the classic pacifist rationale, War will end when men refuse to fight, remain unaddressed?
Today among nuclear and non-nuclear there is no shortage of powerful incentives:
- GONE—the budget busting waste of maintaining, modernizing, or developing weapons
- FREEDOM of scientists and engineers to work on peace-producing projects among all nations: clean water, higher education, better no-cost health, new economic development
- ELIMINATION of debilitating fear of annihilation among both nuclear and non-nuclear nations
- FUTURE of resolving disputes without resort to fighting
Through accidents of history we stumbled into international leadership. I am no gambler, but for the seventy-five years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this nation has been gambling that threats of war and death will keep us safe. To me personally, gambling on hopes for peace and life is a far better bet.
