Chris Danowski & Brian Terrell
The Only Sane Solution…
Resisting Nuclear Weapons in Europe
“We still hold that nonviolent resistance is the only sane solution, and that we have to continue to make our voice heard until we are finally silenced–and even then, in jail or concentration camp, to express ourselves.” Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, 1940
March 22, 2025
Brian Terrell
When I arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on February 20, my passport was flagged and I was informed that due to a previous arrest at Volkel airbase, where a U.S. Airforce squadron keeps 20 nuclear bombs ready to load onto Dutch planes in a NATO “nuclear sharing” arrangement, I was banned from entering Europe and would be immediately flown back to the United States. I explained to the immigration officer that I had an order from a German court to turn myself in to the prison at Wittlich on February 26 for a 15-day sentence for taking direct action at Büchel, the German airbase where there is a similar nuclear sharing relationship in 2019. After a short wait my passport was returned and I was waved through the queue to join my good friend Chris Danowski patiently waiting in the arrivals area to take me to Jeanette Noel Huis, the Catholic Worker in Amsterdam.
Before my “surrender,” I spent a most pleasant few days with Dutch Catholic Workers. I spent part of the day after my arrival with an old friend, Abdulhai, whom I first met in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2009 on a delegation with Voices for Creative Nonviolence. It was a joy to reconnect with Abdulhai, who is living in a refugee camp and working at an Afghan restaurant in Rotterdam. Chris and Susan van der Hijden, who recently spent 115 days in prison herself, took me out for a night on the town in Amsterdam’s old central city and a brisk walk at the beach at the North Sea. It was a blessing just to spend a few days in the rhythm of prayer and work and fun with the Jeanette Noel Huis community and their guests.
On February 22, it was an honor to join Dutch campaigners at an “ecotage” action at the Port of Amsterdam. A most moving liturgical direct action in solidarity with Colombian activists, removing stones from the railbed that carries coal taken from Colombia to burn in European powerplants.
On the 25th, Dutch Catholic Workers accompanied me on my way to prison. We were joined by other activists for a vigil at the Volkel airbase, in solidarity with the Global Day of Action to Close Bases. More folks from around Germany met us at Büchel airbase, the “scene of the crime,” for another vigil in the pouring rain. The next morning, our small contingent picked up a few more souls at the prison gates, who sent me off to my “vigil behind bars” with prayers, embraces and the blast of a trumpet.
Catholic Worker Frits ter Kuile had been imprisoned at Wittlich some years before and filled me in on what to expect. Wittlich is a high security prison and I had been informed that I would not be allowed to take any books with me. The chance that I took bringing my Bible paid off and it was the only book that I had during those 15 days of almost unbroken solitude. Most prisoners at Wittlich have work assignments, attend classes or participate in sports, but for my short stay, a morning shower, an hour of exercise in the yard each day and Sunday Mass were the only times that I got out of my clean, spacious and comfortable cell with a large window from where through the bars I could see the rooftops of the town over the wall and the Eiffel mountains in the distance.
In the five years that passed since the international peace camp organized by Nukewatch in the United States and the German GAAA where Susan van der Hijden and Susan Crane of Redwood City, California, and I took bolt cutters to the security fence protecting nuclear bombs at Büchel, the world had grown to be a far more dangerous place. The events of the weeks and days leading up to my incarceration did nothing to dispel real anxieties for the near future.
I had mixed feelings, then, about opting to pay a fee to have a television in my cell, but now it seems unthinkable not to have had access to the news from February 26 to March 12, 2025! I had the news from CNN and from the English language programs of several European countries, as well as bureaus based in Beijing, Caracas, Istanbul and Doha to watch Trump and Vance scold President Zelenskyy in the oval office on February 28 and to hear the international responses to Trump’s “America is Back” tirade before Congress on March 4. As happy as I was to have a Bible, I found more challenge than comfort in its prophetic exhortations, reading it in the context of the times.
It was interesting to be a U.S. citizen inmate in a European prison just as many Europeans are coming the realize that the United States is not the “reliable partner” they thought we were! (What to do when a relationship goes sour and among the common property to deal with is a stash of nuclear weapons?) It is a good and necessary thing that the malevolent influence of the United States outside its borders is waning, but horrifying to hear European heads of state speak of massive rearming to replace the “umbrella of security” that they think that U.S. nuclear weapons provided. When European leaders speak of massive rearmament, they are in effect calling for a moratorium on any real progress toward averting environmental catastrophe.
On January 16, five weeks before I went to prison, U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration administrator Jill Hruby, announced that the old B61 bombs in place at Büchel and other NATO bases in Europe since 1968 had been replaced with the new improved more flexible, more precise and easily deployable B61-12 bombs. The B61-12 presumably in place now at Büchel is just part of a $1.7 trillion program to extend the “lives” of and exercising “stewardship” over the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
Despite admitted security challenges, Hruby spoke glowingly of “the future of the nuclear security enterprise.” “All is not gloom and doom” because, she said, “The new B61-12 gravity bombs are fully forward deployed, and we have increased NATO’s visibility to our nuclear capabilities.” “It has been the honor to serve as the NNSA Administrator, and a pleasure to observe the progress” said Jill Hruby on January 16, “I am fond of saying that my proudest accomplishment is getting our mojo back in NNSA.”
On January 20, just four days after the NNSA got its mojo back, Donald Trump was inaugurated president of the United States and on his very first day Jill Hruby and more than 300 other NNSA employees lost their jobs. Most of them, but not Hruby, were rehired a few days later.
The mission of the U.S. Strategic Command’s Command and Control Facility, housed in a bunker outside Omaha, is to “aid the president’s nuclear response decision-making process, and, if called upon, deliver a decisive response in all domains.” It was scary enough before (delivering “a decisive response in all domains” means the death of most species on this planet) but the thought of anyone aiding Donald Trump’s “nuclear response decision-making process” is especially chilling at this moment.
On March 12, Chris and Bernd Büscher of the Kana Soup Kitchen in Dortmund met me coming out of prison. The next day, I met Barath, another Afghan friend who had arrived in Germany with his family last December and is now in a refugee camp in Delbrück. I joined Barath, his mother, wife and two children as they broke their Ramadan fast with a traditional Afghan meal. From Delbrück, a visit with more old friends, Hanno and Gisela Paul in Bünde. Sunday evening March 16, I gave a talk at the Kana Kitchen and the next evening, took part in a discussion with local activists at the Café Aufbruch in Dortmund. On the 18th, Chris brought me back to Amsterdam to fly home the next day.
My first visit to Germany was in October of 1983, a time referred to as the “long hot autumn,” an exhilarating time when millions of Germans took to the streets to protest the short-range Pershing II nuclear missiles then deployed by the U.S. on trucks roaming the border between the capitalist West and the communist East. In solidarity with activists protesting around the globe, the Pershing program was successfully ended and a few years later there was vast reduction of nuclear weapons that lasted until 2009. Today, profiteers and bureaucrats like Jill Hruby do not view the reduction of nuclear weapons of those recent decades as lifesaving progress toward a more peaceful and sustainable world to build upon, but as years of regrettable neglect and they have reason now to celebrate “the long-term future of the stockpile.”
The need for a mass movement like the world saw back then could not be more urgent than it is today. I look with both fear and hope for one to arise. In the meantime, I know that mass movements are not made by people waiting for a mass movement to arrive. A mass movement is built by people joining with others to speak and act for peace the best they can in their circumstances and who are willing to risk apparent failure in their efforts.
Considering the enormity of the danger that the world is facing, do our small efforts, our protests and jailings make any difference? In our movements there is a false dichotomy, I think, between being faithful and being effective. “I’m convinced that if the world survives these dangerous times, it will be tens of millions of small things that do it,” said the folk singer, Pete Seeger. Perhaps the best, the most effective contribution we can make to save the planet will be for each of us to accomplish one or two of the tens of millions of small things that need to be done.
In this time of climate catastrophe, famine and pandemic, the waste of resources to build nuclear weapons is an unspeakable crime and the conceit that they provide security is dangerously insane.
“The only solution is love,” said Dorothy Day, echoing Jesus and the prophets. She also called nonviolent resistance “the only sane solution.” I am growing to realize that these are two ways of saying the same thing.
We can no longer, in the world as it is, dismiss loving our neighbors and even our enemies as ourselves as a “council of perfection” or as a utopian, impractical, unreachable and dangerously sentimental ideal. Love, today, is the only truly pragmatic option. Albert Camus called realism “the art of taking into account both the present and the future” and it is clear that there is no realistic course open to humanity other than to lay down our weapons and learn to care for our planet and share its resources equitably with all. The alternative is the end of life as we know it.
I am grateful to all the friends whose prayers and solidarity went with me. I started the penitential season of Lent, 2025, on Ash Wednesday in a German prison and expect to finish it on Good Friday at the nuclear test site as the Nevada Desert Experience ends its annual Sacred Peace Walk.