The Nuclear Resister

photo by Sharon Delgado

Eleven people, including clergy and veterans, were arrested during two days of peace demonstrations at Beale Air Force Base in California, site of the surveillance drone Global Hawk, which performs reconnaissance for armed drones. The demonstrations at Beale were coordinated with Campaign Nonviolence, a national campaign calling for an end to war, poverty, and climate change. Over 250 nonviolent actions have been carried out in coordination with Campaign Nonviolence in the past week alone.

Two people were arrested at Beale on Monday, September 29, at 3:45 p.m. The Reverend John Auer, a retired United Methodist pastor from Fresno, was assisted in his wheelchair by Guarionex Delgado, a veteran from Nevada City. Mr. Delgado pushed Rev. Auer’s wheelchair the length of the mile-long road to the Wheatland Gate. Rev. Auer stated that he was attempting to deliver a letter to Colonel Phillip A. Stewart, the Base Commander, informing him of a recent anti-drone resolution passed by United Methodists in the California-Nevada region.

Attempting to deliver a letter to President Obama

by Ken Butigan, Pace e Bene, Campaign Nonviolence

Fr. John Dear joined scores of activists, including Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, at the White House on the morning of September 23 to announce the launch of Campaign Nonviolence’s long-term movement for a culture of peace free from war, poverty, the climate crisis and the epidemic of violence. The assembly linked opposition to the new war launched by the U.S. this morning — bombing Syria and Iraq — to the violence of poverty and climate change.

Sara Beining and her daughter

A single mother and Iraq war veteran is in jail in Colorado Springs. Sara Beining went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.

Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of the army as many other recent military refusers have been.

But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.

photo by Sam Morris/Las Vegas Review-Journal

from Nevada Desert Experience

On Sunday morning, September 21 – the U.N.’s International Day of Peace – after an interfaith liturgy at ten o­clock a.m., 6 men and 4 women were arrested at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), which is 65 miles from Las Vegas. Prayer-­activists continue to visit the NNSS (formerly called the Nevada Test Site) annually in order to work on a spiritual level for the end of ongoing nuclear violence at this solitary U.S. nuclear weapons proving ground and site of weekly low­-level nuclear waste dumping. Since 1997, subcritical nuclear weapons testing has occurred regularly at the NNSS.

Four years after a series of civil resistance arrests and jailings began to protest groundbreaking for construction of the United States’ first entirely new nuclear weapons factory in decades, three people were arrested on August 22 while speaking out against the official dedication of the new Kansas City Plant. The new, benign-sounding National Security Campus will help develop and fabricate the unique non-nuclear components for a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons intended to threaten humanity through the end of the century.