The Nuclear Resister

Mordechai Vanunu

by Kathy Kelly

October 14, 2017

Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs”  at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.   

Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump’s new strategy on Iran, Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.

Early on the morning of September 20, at least 150 French police were involved in raids on the House of Resistance in the small village of Bure and other activists’ residences. Dozens of police broke through the door at the house of Resistance to enter, and also forced their way into camp trailers and vehicles parked on the property to gain entrance. Residents were held for up to ten hours in the rooms or camp trailer where they were found, many asleep at the time.

At the same hour, fifteen police raided and searched an old railway station in Lumeville occupied by dump opponents, while three homes of activists in nearby Commercy and Mandres were also searched. Police acted on a warrant related to vandalism last June at an affiliated hotel/restaurant at the research center outside Bure. The identities of all who police encountered were recorded, while the entire contents of the office in Bure were seized as evidence, including a copy machine, computers, hard drives, phones, papers, books and other property. Similar property seizures took place during the other four raids.  Two people in Bure were taken into custody and to separate local police stations, then released later in the day.

Clowns en marche for Nuclear France – photo by desobeir.net

On August 8, about fifteen “clowns-in-reverse” demonstrated in front of the headquarters of La République En Marche, the new political party of French President Macron. “We came to thank him, because the war is a lot better than the Treaty!” said the Chief of Staff of the Clown Armies. Under a super-sized inflated bomb, the clowns celebrated “Jupiterian France” for opposing with all its might the introduction of the international treaty to ban nuclear weapons. They were soon joined by some fifty men in blue who forcibly expelled the clowns from the building and detained them, recording their identities before they were released.

Photo by Bob Thawley, taken in San Francisco, March 19, 2017

William Coligny Doub II

San Francisco, Spring 2017. Several years into worsening dementia, Bill listened to a recording of Pete Seeger singing Little Boxes. The lyrics include:

And the people in the houses all go to the university
And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same
And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same

After the song ended there was a pause.  Then Bill declared: “Not me, baby!”

Bill “Terry” Doub died peacefully in San Francisco the evening of August 3, 2017, with his daughter and her family singing a gentle chant of passage:  

Photo by Leonard Eiger, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action

from Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action

Activists blockaded the West Coast nuclear submarine base that would likely carry out a nuclear strike against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) should President Donald Trump give the order.

Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, just 20 miles from Seattle, is home to the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S. More than 1,300 nuclear warheads are deployed on Trident D-5 missiles on the eight ballistic missile submarines based at Bangor or stored at Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC) at the Bangor base.