The Nuclear Resister

Action camps are a popular summer activity in Germany for families and activists young and old alike, and this summer saw arrests related to camps focused on nuclear weapons, uranium transport and combat training.

KIEL

The nuclear power industry is dying a slow death. Still its uranium lifeblood courses around the globe from the mines to the mills, on through a handful of commercial enrichment plants and then fabrication into fuel rods for reactors.

Participants in this summer’s anti-nuclear action camp in Kiel during the week of August 9-16 put the spotlight on this still-profitable global circulatory system by monitoring, inspecting and blockading shipments of yellowcake (uranium concentrates) en route to the French processing complex in Narbonne.

Fr. Louie Vitale OFM at Livermore Labs, August 6. Photo by Jim Stevens/Bay Area News Group.

LOCKHEED MARTIN, PENNSYLVANIA

from Brandywine Peace Community

People gathered on the sidewalk in front of the main driveway to the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania complex of Lockheed Martin on August 6, where they held signs next to large banners held by stakes planted in the ground. The underlying message of the day centered around the killing and slaughter of children, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to U.S. drones strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza enabled by Lockheed Martin, the world’s #1 war profiteer and weapons supplier.

Next to large wooden sign with the Lockheed Martin logo and “we’re making a killing” which for years has accompanied demonstrations at Lockheed Martin, we put up A Memorial to the Innocents lined with a child’s stuffed animals and pictures of the Hiroshima Child.

by Ellen Barfield

With the two year anniversary of the Transform Now Plowshares action today, July 28, and with Megan, Greg, and Michael (MGM!) seeming to be stable at their prison assignments for now, it is a good time to review the action, the trial and sentencing, and the subsequent responsibility of all of us to support and move forward their work resisting nuclear weapons.

These hot, humid days of deep summer certainly bring back memories of being in hot, humid eastern Tennessee two years ago and beginning to travel Oak Ridge and Knoxville area roads which later became very familiar after so many visits for hearings, trial, and sentencing. When I took Megan’s first call from jail and heard her elation that they had gotten to exactly where they wanted and done all they had planned, it was clear the blessings of God or the universe had again supported the work of disarmament, as so often has happened with plowshares actions.

At six o’clock in the morning on July 25, a group of local people from Plymouth, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and beyond blocked the main Camels Head entrance into Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth, England in order to stop the refitting of the Vanguard nuclear submarines which carry and launch the Trident nuclear weapon missiles.

People used their own bodies and banners, as well as a car, to block the entrance into the base.