The Nuclear Resister

by Ralph Hutchison, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance

March 12, 1930, Ahmedabad, India. Mahatma Gandhi and a company of nonviolent satyagrahi set out from the Sabarmati ashram and began his march to Dandi where, twenty-four days later, he would take hold in his hands salt made from the ocean water and declare, “Here I ruin the British empire.”

It was an audacious faith in the power of nonviolence that carried Gandhi on that walk, and that powered him for another seventeen years before the miracle was realized and India was freed from British colonial rule.

Eighty-four years later, to the day, the power of nonviolence entered into the Potter Stewart federal courthouse in Cincinnati, Ohio, where three men sat in black robes to hear arguments challenging the sabotage convictions of Gregory Boertje-Obed, Megan Rice and Michael Walli in the Transform Now Plowshares action. Appellate arguments usually echo in a courtroom empty but for judges, a clerk and the lawyers. But on March 12, 2015, the pews began to fill at 8:30. By 9:00 there were more than forty people in the courtroom—three dozen Plowshares supporters and another dozen high school students on a field trip who were about to be educated about the legal process, and maybe be prompted to think about nuclear weapons and the power of nonviolent direct action in the process.

A Reporter at Large, March 9, 2015 Issue of the New Yorker

by Eric Schlosser

The Y-12 National Security Complex sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by wooded hills, in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 and Oak Ridge were built secretly, within about two years, as part of the Manhattan Project, and their existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War. By then, the secret city had a population of seventy-five thousand. Few of its residents had been allowed to know what was being done at the military site, which included one of the largest buildings in the world. Y-12 processed the uranium used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven decades later, Y-12 is the only industrial complex in the United States devoted to the fabrication and storage of weapons-grade uranium. Every nuclear warhead and bomb in the American arsenal contains uranium from Y-12.

photo by Felice Cohen-Joppa

To conclude the 2015 gathering of the Pacific Life Community, 80 activists held a colorful and lively demonstration on Monday, March 2 at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, protesting nuclear weapons work and other weapons for war.

After sharing poetry, litany, dancing and songs, twelve of the protesters spread across the entrance roadway with a 50 foot banner that read “Lockheed Weapons Terrorize the World” to stop traffic going into the weapons plant.

photo by Paula Orloff

On the afternoon of February 18, six people – including several clergy members and military veterans – were arrested during an Ash Wednesday service at the gate of Beale Air Force Base during an act of “repentance” for the innocent people killed by the U.S. government’s fleet of killer drones.

Participants spread ashes memorializing those of children killed by U.S. drones overseas. The four women and two men who crossed the line also carried an indictment with them onto the base (see indictment below). They were charged with trespassing onto federal land and taken into custody by military police.