Origins of Japan's Nuclear Program

Joseph Gerson shared this article with the Massachusetts Peace Action Nuclear Abolition Task Force.  It comes from Muto Ichiyo from Japan - a noted scholar, long concerned about the underlying power politics of nuclear weapons policy.

 http://www.southsouthforum.org/Muto%20Ichiyo/Hiroshima%20and%20nuclear%20power%20SSForum.pdf

IRRADIATED - a new report from McClatchy

From "Killing Our Own" the aptly titled book from 1982 by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon to today's new report "IRRADIATED" information abounds about the consequences of nuclear weapons manufacture. This of course, is quite apart from use of nuclear weapons - 50 to 100 would destroy planet Earth, with nuclear winter.

Soldiers who witnessed nuclear explosions saw the bones of their own hands and later died of radiation-induced cancers.  Workers at all phases of the nuclear cycle have suffered exposure to uranium and even plutonium, resulting in all kinds of cancers.

Highlights from the report (thanks to McClatchy for doing this research):

For the last year, McClatchy journalists conducted more than 100 interviews across the country and analyzed more than 70 million records in a federal database obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Among the findings:

• McClatchy can report for the first time that the great push to win the Cold War has left a legacy of death on American soil: At least 33,480 former nuclear workers who received compensation are dead. The death toll is more than four times the number of American casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Federal officials greatly underestimated how sick the U.S. nuclear workforce would become. At first, the government predicted the program would serve only 3,000 people at an annual cost of $120 million. Fourteen years later, taxpayers have spent sevenfold that estimate, $12 billion, on payouts and medical expenses for more than 53,000 workers.
• Even with the ballooning costs, fewer than half of those who’ve applied have received any money. Workers complain that they’re often left in bureaucratic limbo, flummoxed by who gets payments, frustrated by long wait times and overwhelmed by paperwork.
•  Despite the cancers and other illnesses among nuclear workers, the government wants to save money by slashing current employees’ health plans, retirement benefits and sick leave.
• Stronger safety standards have not stopped accidents or day-to-day radiation exposure. More than 186,000 workers have been exposed since 2001, all but ensuring a new generation of claimants. And to date, the government has paid $11 million to 118 workers who began working at nuclear weapons facilities after 2001. 




• 
  
  For the last year, McClatchy journalists conducted more than 100 interviews across the country and analyzed more than 70 million records in a federal database obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
  
  Among the findings:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  McClatchy can report for the first time that the great push to win the Cold War has left a legacy of death on American soil: At least 33,480 former nuclear workers who received compensation are dead. The death toll is more than four times the number of American casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  Federal officials greatly underestimated how sick the U.S. nuclear workforce would become. At first, the government predicted the program would serve only 3,000 people at an annual cost of $120 million. Fourteen years later, taxpayers have spent sevenfold that estimate, $12 billion, on payouts and medical expenses for more than 53,000 workers.
  Even with the ballooning costs, fewer than half of those who’ve applied have received any money. Workers complain that they’re often left in bureaucratic limbo, flummoxed by who gets payments, frustrated by long wait times and overwhelmed by paperwork.
  Despite the cancers and other illnesses among nuclear workers, the government wants to save money by slashing current employees’ health plans, retirement benefits and sick leave.
  Stronger safety standards have not stopped accidents or day-to-day radiation exposure. More than 186,000 workers have been exposed since 2001, all but ensuring a new generation of claimants. And to date, the government has paid $11 million to 118 workers who began working at nuclear weapons facilities after 2001.
  
  Read more here: http://media.mcclatchydc.com/static/features/irradiated/#storylink=cpy

Don't Bank on the Bomb

Our anti-nuke friends in the Netherlands have an interesting campaign going called Don't Bank on the Bomb.

They have a new report out detailing companies that make nuclear weapons - who makes them, who invests in them and how much money is involved (493 billion USD - since 2011).  Financial institutions that have divested from deadly production are listed.

There are 26 companies involved in the production, maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons:  in France, India, Italy the Netherlands, the UK and the US, including Raytheon, Babcock and Wilcox, Lockheed Martin, Textron (US), Airbus Group (Netherlands), Thales (France), Walchandnagar Industries (India), BAE Systems (UK) with the largest number in the US.

Protest at Rocky Flats

Originally published by The Colorado Independent

Revisiting Rocky Flats: Joseph Daniel brings his 1979 protest dispatch back into service

John Tomasic 
January 03, 2014 Civil Rights 2 Comments

Hundreds of people in bandanas, bell bottoms and boxy Buicks came to the Colorado scrubland in the shadow of the Flatiron mountains between Golden and Boulder to sit on a small stretch of train tracks at Rocky Flats. They sat for months. They were pummeled by the elements and finally dragged off by the police and hauled into court. But by that time, the spring of 1979, the world more or less knew about the tracks.

“That little railroad spur, 18 inches of iron rail in Jefferson County, was a true seat of power,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and went onto become an icon of the era’s peace movement.

Close Pilgrim NOW!

Photo by Cole Harrison - Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA)

The Grand Staircase in the Massachusetts State House reverberated with the call to Close Pilgrim NOW this afternoon as citizens held a two hour speak out On October 22nd detailing every aspect of the problem.

The Pilgrim nuclear plant is operated by Entergy Corp. which has said it will close the reactor in 2019.  Even the nuclear-loving NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has designated this plant one of the three most unsafe in the nation.  

From the crowded spent fuel rods on the roof (just like at the failed Fukushima reactors) to the fire safety measures that have never been implemented to the financial losses in the hundreds of millions, this plant is highly dangerous for Eastern Massachusetts.  There is no possible way to evacuate the 4 million people who would be in danger should the plant go critical.  

Longtime leaders in the struggle to shut down a number of reactors Deb Katz (Citizens Awareness Network) and Mary Lampert (Pilgrim Watch) said we have entered the most dangerous time period while the plant is so badly managed and still operating, before shut down and decommissioning begins.  

Bills pending at the State House abound - for requiring Entergy to fund decommissioning, to prevent taxpayer subsidies for the company and to re-direct tax funds to clean energy and conservation.  The next significant date in the struggle will be on November 17 when some of these bills will be heard in the State House.  Politicians helping in the struggle by filing the needed bills include Dan Wolf, from Plymouth and Kathleen O'Connor Ives from Newburyport.  The Massachusetts Congressional Delegation has weighed in by sending a letter to the NRC saying state officials need to be involved in the decommissioning process.  

I'm glad I left work early (using a couple of hours of personal time) to attend this speakout but I have to say the turnout was light, not every chair was filled.  We need many more people to come out for these events.  Hundreds, even thousands of people are needed to get the message across to Governor Baker that we need to avert disaster and CLOSE IT NOW!  

Radium Girl by Dorian Brooks

Katherine Schaub was one of hundreds of  young women who worked at the US Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, in the early 20th century, painting numerals on wristwatch and instrument dials with luminous paint.  Many of the women became ill, some fatally.  Schaub died in 1933 at age 31. 

1. 1917—1921

I was 15 when the company

hired me.  I loved my job!

It was tricky at first,

shaping the tiny numerals

just right; but I soon caught on.

I’d moisten my brush with my lips

to give it a fine point,

as the foreman taught us.

And we had such fun!

When we turned off the lights,

we saw radium glowing

everywhere—on our clothes

and hair and skin.  Some girls

even painted their teeth

to surprise their boyfriends.

Plus—as the company told us—

we were helping the war effort.

I was so proud.

They never told us

what radium does

inside the body,

nor that its half-life

is 1600 years.

Taking it to Wall Street 1979 - Protesting Nuclear Investments

In the fall of 1979, New England activists joined with New York activists to “Take It To Wall Street” and protest nuclear investments on the 50th anniversary of Black Tuesday (the date of the stock market crash that plummeted the world into the Great Depression in 1929).

This action was organized to draw the connections between finance and profit in the nuclear industry that was making money by manufacturing weapons and building nuclear power plants.

Trident Submarine Protests 1979 - Now

1979
On a bitterly cold morning in early March of 1979, one full busload and one van of peace and anti-nuclear activists left Worcester to go to Groton, Connecticut to protest a Trident Submarine launch (or christening?) at General Dynamics Electric Boat Corporation.

At that time, one Trident Submarine carried enough nuclear warheads to wipe out six hundred cities around the world all at once. The trigger for all this destruction was a Colt 45 pistol, exemplifying the cavalier “cowboy” fantasy.

Crowds of very well-dressed people walked on the inside of a chain-link fence to welcome, bless, and worship that submarine.

Crowds of not so well-dressed people stood outside the fence to protest the submarine death machine that could cause so much destruction. A lady in a navy blue coat and white gloves on her way in to worship, told us: “I’m praying for you.” Someone on our side of the fence said drily, “We are praying for you, too.”

Doctors Against Nuclear Weapons/War

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)

Resistance to nuclear weapons has not only come from peaceniks but from the medical profession.

In 1980, medical doctors from the two Cold War nations (Drs. Bernard Lown, James Muller, Eric Chivian and Herb Abrams, US and Drs. Eugueni Chazov, Leonid Ilyin and Mikhail Kuzin, USSR) met and agreed to organize a physicians movement againsat the nuclear threat. 

As physicians, they believed that they had an obligation to prevent what they could treat.  

IPPNW developed a number of important research studies about the effects of atomic bombs by looking at data collected by Japanese doctors who studied effects of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  IPPNW also documented the heath and environmental effects of the production, testing and use of nuclear weapons from the 1980s through the 1990s. 

In 1985, the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Joseph Rotblat, the Only Physicist to Leave the Manhattan Project on Grounds of Conscience

“I saw science as being in harmony with humanity.”  When nuclear physicist and peace activist Joseph Rotblat accepted the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 88, he opened his address with those words.  Nothing in his long career exemplifies his outlook more than his decision in 1944 to quit the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos for reasons of conscience – the only physicist to do so.

Rotblat was born in Warsaw in 1908 into a relatively prosperous Jewish family.  With the beginning of World War I, however, things became difficult for them as they began to endure poverty and hunger.  Rotblat found work as an electrician but dreamed of becoming a physicist.  He managed to enroll as a student at the Free University of Poland, where he earned an MA degree in physics in 1932,  and earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Warsaw in 1938.  He then held two positions:  Research Fellow in the Radiological Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw, and in 1937, assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University of Poland.

Early in 1939, Rotblat began to experiment with uranium.  That year he learned of the fission of uranium and devised an experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons to determine whether neutrons were emitted in the process.  On finding that more neutrons were emitted than produce fission, Rotblat realized that this could lead to a chain reaction in which the enormous amount of energy released could cause a violent explosion – and conceivably be used to make an atomic bomb.   

Joseph Rotblat - abolishwar.org.uk

Dover Diary - Recollections of a Rank and File Clam

Bent over double with a forty-pound, borrowed, Boy Scout rucksack on my back, I was stumbling down Route One in New Hampshire on a Saturday morning at the end of April in 1977.

Speaking at my college, George Wald[1] had said if you believed in justice, freedom, democracy and America, you would sign up for nonviolence training in preparation for the Seabrook occupation. During the training session, moved by role-playing an “occupier,” and singing Woody Guthrie’s, “This Land is Your Land,” I decided to join in the protest.

On site with affinity group - photo Russell Puschak

I formed an affinity group with school friends and local folks in Worcester, Massachusetts. We prepared ourselves by arranging equipment and food, discussing possible scenarios, naming ourselves the “Worcester Quahogs.” We were going to be camping out, and needed sleeping bags, backpacks, food and water. The morning we left, New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson was quoted in The Boston Globe saying, “Terrorists were descending on New Hampshire.” I remember our apprehension as we looked at each other; we did not know what to expect.

We drove to the New Hampshire seacoast and arrived at a farm that was a staging area for the protest. We formed a huge circle with other occupiers and everyone sat on the person behind them: “United we sit.” This was to encourage trust. I slept outdoors for the first time in my life.

The next morning, after eating oatmeal prepared by our support person and putting on all our gear, we set out. By the time we reached Route One, I was bent double under the weight of my borrowed Boy Scout rucksack and my heels were blistered from my boots, but I was determined to keep up with my group. We entered the site easily, with more than a thousand people marching onto it from various access points; some even came by boat. We danced in circles on the site, elated, chanting “No Nukes!”

Tent City on site - photo Russell Puschak

As it got dark, we set up tents and prepared ourselves for whatever would happen next. Streets were established, one named for Karen Silkwood. Karen Silkwood was a worker at a Kerr-McGee plutonium[2] production facility in Oklahoma. She became a union activist in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAWU) and began to uncover serious safety violations at the plant. After being deliberately contaminated by plutonium in her home, so that she set off alarms arriving at work, she died in a suspicious car crash while on her way to a meeting with a New York Times reporter and union official. Documents that friends and family attested that she had with her were missing. Local authorities attributed the crash to her falling asleep at the wheel. After a decade of litigation, her estate accepted a 1.3 million dollar out of court settlement with Kerr-McGee. Her friends put a sign saying “Karen Silkwood – Vindicated,” on the road where she had died.

A little walk from the new town of “Freebrook,” behind some bushes, there were two trenches (his and hers) that served as bathrooms–another first. Every New England state except Massachusetts had sent troopers to assist the New Hampshire authorities. They were around, watching us use the trenches, flying over the site in helicopters. I particularly remember the Rhode Island State Troopers–they looked like German storm troopers to me with their jodhpur-like trousers.

One of my most powerful memories is a pantomime baseball game that happened on Sunday just before the arrests began. There was no bat (it would have been considered a weapon) and no ball, but the crowd knew just when to cheer as the home runs were hit. A completely spontaneous moment that seemed perfectly choreographed.

When the arrests began, I was in an area close to the buses that had been brought onto the site. The troopers arrested the men from our group first; when it became clear that the women were not going to leave, they arrested us as well. Although our group was now fragmented, I was still with Jane, my freshman year roommate and friend. We managed to stay together through the hours following the arrest. First we were held on the bus, then we were crammed into a cattle-car without windows; we counted off to find there were 75 of us in there. Someone started chanting “Om” and everyone took it up. A breeze of fresh air swept through the car as if by magic.

Men from the Worcester AGs in armory - photo Russell Puschak

Finally, we were called into the Portsmouth Armory for fingerprinting, matched with our arrest photos, and arraigned. Following arraignment, Jane and I waited together, and then in an awful moment were separated and sent to different armories. I was on a bus going somewhere at 3 or 4 a.m.–had I ever been up that late before?

I arrived at Dover Armory, tottered in, saw Denise from my affinity group, thought to myself everything will be o.k., unrolled my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. In the morning we re-formed affinity groups with whomever was near us and called ourselves “Dunkin’ Meltdown” after the breakfast the National Guard provided.

We were detained for 12 days in the armories around New Hampshire. We read the newspaper coverage of our protest: we were in all the newspapers–local, national, international–and on TV news. New Hampshire authorities had been caught off-guard and did not know how to handle the situation. This became clearer over the next few days as people were brought into court and sentenced to jail in a “sharp break with legal practice” (NYT, 5/6/77) following an “unusual” appearance in court by then State Attorney General David Souter[3].

By agreeing in advance amongst ourselves to “bail solidarity,” and insisting on being released on our word that we would return for trial (personal recognizance), protesters threw a monkey wrench into the legal system. This agreement had several purposes: it protected people who had been arrested the previous year from being singled out and treated more harshly, it prevented the state from getting our cash, and it brought the issue of nuclear power into focus. We were prepared to sit in jail a long time to make these points. We made the authorities nervous, they refused to release us, and we refused to play by their rules. We took away the power they derived out of people’s fear of the stigma of being arrested and going to jail.

The armory experience was many things–lonely, exhilarating, tiresome. We got sick and had to have doctors brought in. We insisted on vegetarian meals. We refused to have male and female sides of the room and the guardsmen had to forcibly separate us. The guardsmen began to like us; one of them named his puppy “No Nukes Luke.” We sang songs all day and half the night. We held an impromptu graduation ceremony for someone who was missing his real graduation. Students who hadn’t finished their semesters were awarded amnesty by various universities. We cheered when people had to bail out to return to families and jobs. I finally called my family to tell them I was fine and managed to convince my dad that the guardsmen would not shoot us like at Kent State. Some people from the Fenway neighborhood in Boston who were in my armory wrote a song to the tune of “Daisy, Daisy” (“Dover, Dover, Dover Armory, it’s been full of the likes of you and me, we just staged a peaceful sit-in, nuclear power should be forbidden, so we believe we’re detainees of the nuclear industry. Clamshell, Clamshell we’re hanging in there with you, we want clean air and healthy children too…”).

Our armory drafted and signed a public letter quoted in the New York Times (5/7/77): “Radioactivity is a silent and invisible killer. You cannot see it, hear it, or taste it. Can we tolerate having such a killer in our midst? Having such a killer strangle our planet? We believe the answer is no.”

I had a deck of cards and played hours of solitaire; I still have that deck of cards. I got a love letter through Core Support that I still have. I still have half my armband (I shared the other half with someone in my affinity group who had lost his) as well as the Clamshell Alliance button given to me by the late, great Guy Chichester, a legendary leader in and hero of the New England anti-nuclear movement.

We made history during those two weeks. We maintained the principal of bail solidarity. When the authorities finally released us, some 700 of us were still in the armories. Freedom and the reunion with my original affinity group was a truly joyous moment. The grass was green, the sky was blue, we were free and it was on our terms.

When I look back I see that we successfully brought the issue of nuclear power to our nation. My own parents changed their minds about nuclear energy as a result of my participation in the demonstration. No new plants have been ordered for more than 20 years, many were canceled and the rest straggled on line under great protest. I feel I had the incredible good luck to participate in a genuine revolutionary moment along with some of the best people I have ever had the privilege to know and love.[4]

[1] Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1967. Harvard professor, important anti-war voice.

[2] Plutonium is a highly radioactive byproduct of the nuclear cycle, used in bombs, lasts tens of thousands of years and is lethal if inhaled.

[3] David Souter went on to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. from 1990-2009.

[4] From Dover Diary-Recollections of a Rank and File Clam, in Peacework Magazine, July/August 1996, New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Karen Silkwood - Vindicated

The realities of the nuclear age - nuclear power and weapons - have often turned "true believers" into opponents.

One such person was Karen Silkwood, an employee at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant outside of Oklahoma City.

The short version of the story is that Karen Silkwood worked as a technician at the plant and her direct experience of being exposed to plutonium and radioactive dust as well as many complaints from fellow workers turned her into an advocate for nuclear safety as a representative of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union.

She began to document safety failures, had assembled a dossier on many violations and problems at the plant and was on her way to a meeting on November 13, 1974 with an OCAWU leader and a journalist from the New York Times when she was killed in a single car crash. It appeared that her car had been forced off the road from behind. The folder of documentation disappeared, never to be found.

Darlene Keju, Anti-nuclear Activist and Marshall Islander

“We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind and to end all wars.” So spoke a U.S. Navy officer in 1946 – the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II – to explain to the people of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean why the U.S. was about to embark on a series of tests of nuclear bombs there. The same year, a U.S. Navy press release included this statement: “The natives are delighted, enthusiastic about the atomic bomb, which has already brought them prosperity and a new promising future.”

Darlene Keju would strongly disagree. Between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 bombs were tested in the Marshalls – atomic bombs like the ones used in Japan, and the much more powerful hydrogen or thermonuclear bombs. Islanders were exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout, resulting in a wide range of devastating health problems, including radiation sickness, cancers, and severe birth defects. Many were evacuated to ostensibly safer islands; many have never been able to return, their home islands were so contaminated.

Darlene was born in 1951 on the island of Ebeye and raised on her mother’s island, Wotje. Due to a veil of secrecy and untruths that surrounded the bomb tests and their effects on living beings and the environment, she was in her late twenties before she began to learn the full story. But in the following years, until she herself died of breast cancer in 1996, she galvanized anti-nuclear sentiment in the Marshalls, documented the experiences of many who were affected, and traveled widely to speak to large audiences and let the world know what had been going on.

Missile Test

Black.
The night is black.
No moon, no stars.

We protest
a missile launch, testing
a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile

capable of carrying
a nuclear-armed warhead to the far corners
of our sad globe.

Shortly after midnight
we walk onto the roadway of the military base
in protest.

The young airmen are polite
as they handcuff us, search us and put us
carefully into vans.

When the missile is later launched
we don’t see its fiery tail – the 15 of us
under arrest that night.

We cannot see it streak away
under the cover of darkness
in the black of night, in the ocean fog.

A half-hour after launch
the missile thuds into the surprised ocean
in the Marshall Islands.

Black.
The night is black.
No moon, no stars.

David Krieger, March 2012

Celebrating Nuclear Resistance - from the Nuclear Resister

This video is kindly shared by the Nuclear Resister network.  Many thanks for their work and the permission to share this video.

WHAT THE NUCLEAR ZERO LAWSUITS SEEK TO ACCOMPLISH

On April 24, 2014, just over a year ago, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) brought lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and separately against the United States in US Federal District Court. The RMI argues that the five nuclear-armed parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which are the US, Russia, UK, France and China, are not meeting their obligations under Article VI of the treaty to negotiate in good faith for complete nuclear disarmament. The RMI further argues that the other four nuclear-armed countries not parties to the NPT, which are Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, have the same obligations under customary international law.

In the ICJ, cases go forward only against countries that accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court, unless they consent to jurisdiction. Since only the UK, India and Pakistan accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court, cases are limited to these three countries. The US, Russia, France, China, Israel and North Korean were invited to have their cases heard at the ICJ. China declined and the other countries did not respond.

Peace and Planet Mobilization for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World

Civil society statement presented to the governmental delegates to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, May 1, 2015, United Nations, New York

Presenter: Jackie Cabasso, United for Peace and Justice and Abolition 2000

The Peace and Planet Mobilization for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World emerged out of last year’s Annual General Meeting of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons. Looking ahead at that time to the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, we discussed and debated “what comes next.”

We recognized the deep flaws in the NPT and the failure of the NPT Review process to move us closer to a world without nuclear weapons. But we nonetheless saw the importance of a strong, visible civil society presence at the 2015 Review Conference that would bring a clarion call for negotiations to begin immediately on the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Peace and Planet was organized by an International Planning Group made up of representatives from 11 international organizations and 43 organizations based in 12 countries.

We issued our Call to Action on September 26, 2014, the first International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, urging “all people who hope to build a fair, democratic, ecologically sustainable and peaceful future to join us in New York City and around the world for international days of action” on the eve of the NPT Review Conference. It reads, in part:

Blockading the Bombmakers With My Mother and Grace Paley

Poster from the action

On Monday, June 14 during the War Resisters League organized civil disobedience at the nuclear nations missions to the United Nations, my mother (Elma Paneth) and I protested the nuclear arms race and got arrested together. Three years earlier, Mom had been inspired by legendary activists from Holliston, Massachusetts - Joe and Izzy Hines - when they participated in the Wall Street action. Protests were not limited to young people and Mom had decided that next time she was going. She got her non-violence training in New York and I arranged with my Boston affinity group that she could join us. A couple of my friends decided to join our group at the last minute.

We got up at the crack of dawn to go downtown. At 181st Street, on the A train platform, led by Harry Levine of Citizen's Band, we began to sing Al Giordano’s song based on the anarchist Emma Goldman’s famous quotation: “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be, In your revolution, That’s no solution, If I can’t sing and shout, You can count me out, And I’ll dance my way to freedom” and “If there is some struggle, there can be some progress,” based on the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.[1]

We got down to the U.N. to find the police were guiding protesters to an “official area” to be “officially arrested.” They were carefully placing people on stretchers and carrying them away to buses. It was very orchestrated, but luckily my affinity group had a number of experienced protesters, so we formed a circle to discuss the situation and decided to walk around and see what was happening elsewhere. Perhaps there was a better place for us to sit down and lodge our protest.

We learned that people were accessing their offices at the U.S. Mission through a nearby hotel. An all women’s affinity group from the Women’s Pentagon Action, which included veteran activist and writer Grace Paley, was already weaving colored threads through the doors to close them off. We sat down and blocked the doors as the women wove the threads. People could not get in or out. “No business as usual. Call in sick of bombs,” we told them and then we began to sing. People got mad because they were missing planes, trains, and business appointments.

What do Joan Baez, Dorothy Day and A.J. Muste Have in Common?

Air raid drill protest

They all resisted the propaganda campaign waged by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) to prepare for a nuclear attack by participating in compulsory air raid drills. These drills had school children hiding under desks when teachers gave the command, had people building bomb shelters in their backyards, and in general created a climate of hysterical unreality with regard to what would happen should nuclear weapons be used.

In 1958, while at Palo Alto High School Joan Baez refused to leave her high school during a drill. She told the Palo Alto Times that: "I don't see any sense in having an air raid drill.  I don't think it's a method of defense.  Our only defense is peace."

In June of 1955, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker and A.J. Muste (Fellowship of Reconciliation) refused to take shelter in New York City during the first nuclear-age air raid drill. Instead, they (and others) sat on park benches with signs objecting to war and nuclear weapons. Their statement said, in part:  "The kind of public and highly publicized drills...are essentially a part of war preparation.  They accustom people to the idea of war, to acceptance of war as probably inevitable and somehow right if waged in 'defense and retaliation'"...

These actions of refusal to comply with air raid drills were held over a six-year period eventually involving thousands of people. City-wide air raid drills ended in New York City after a protest that resulted in 52 arrests and a picket that surrounded the criminal courts building until 6 pm and was widely covered by the press and television.

Thanks for some information from:  The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States, New Society Publishers, 1987.

Women's Pentagon Action

Link to WPA website:  

Women's Pentagon Action

Poster by Yolanda V. Fundora
Women's Pentagon Action

Randy Forsberg 1943-2007 - Remembrance and Appreciation

In the winter of 1979,  Randy Forsberg wrote a Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race which led to the Nuclear Freeze Campaign. The idea came out of a kitchen table discussion in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

Centered in New England, the Freeze Campaign organized to place a simply worded question on local (and some state) ballots around the United States calling for a mutual, verifiable freeze on the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons systems.

For the first time since the detonation of the first nuclear bomb - Trinity -  in 1945, just weeks before the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima (August 6, Little Boy) and Nagasaki (August 9, Fat Man), the general public had the opportunity to vote on nuclear weapons policy.  

Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice - 1983

The Seneca Women's Peace Camp was modeled after the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England where for 19 years women in England nonviolently protested the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles.

In the summer of 1983, twelve thousand women from around the world participated in nonviolence training, direct actions and civil disobedience at Seneca Depot which was a storage site and departure point for Cruise and Pershing II missiles bound for Europe.

A website dedicated to the history of the encampment is at:

http://peacecampherstory.blogspot.com/2015/01/wvc-august-6-1983.html

Reindeer Alliance Actions - Christmas 1978 and 1979 - David Slesinger

We did a Reindeer Alliance action on Christmas Day 1978. 

Four of us dressed as Santa Claus and got arrested at the Pilgrim Nuke in Plymouth, Mass. 

The lesson is that if you get arrested on Christmas, they’ve got to cover it. There’s nothing else happening. One of the 3 (pre-cable) Boston TV stations showed right as I was offering the station manager a huge lollipop with my comment, "In honor of the fact that Boston Edison thinks their ratepayers are a bunch of suckers, I offer you this Christmas present." He refused. 

Clamshell Alliance Oral History Project

This link will take you to an ongoing oral history project with interesting interviews of Clamshell Alliance members:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4739.html

Return of the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule in San Diego for the Veterans For Peace annual convention
Photo by Ellen Davidson

Veterans for Peace (and friends) have resurrected and restored the historic Golden Rule.  This 30-foot ketch and its crew ignited a movement to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in 1958 when they attempted to sail into the Marshall Islands nuclear testing zone.

"Nuclear weapons are still with us and the threat of nuclear war is very real," said the Golden Rule's current captain David Robson, a Veterans For Peace member from Baltimore, Maryland.  "We are dismayed that the U.S. government plans to invest One Trillion Dollars into upgrading its nuclear arsenal, instead of reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, as called for in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Hiroshima, Nagasaki and 7 Decades of Nuclear Terror - War Resisters League

Sent by War Resisters League member, Ed Hedemann this is an excellent review of the history.

A Candle in August Hiroshima/Nagasaki August 6/9, 2015 - Dorian Brooks

A Candle in August
Hiroshima / Nagasaki
August 6 / 9, 2015

If I float a candle

over decades of distance

will it help us remember

two girls skipping and laughing

on their way to school

when the bomb fell then

two shadows on a wall

If I float a candle

will we picture in our minds

the blasted cities

people running burning

screaming into the river

thousands

and thousands dead

Will we not shy away

from photos of scorched skin

sloughing off hair falling out

in handfuls

blood and vomit

everywhere wounds oddly

lingering not healing

Will we mouth the words

of our generals and leaders

and know the taste of ash:

“We have to do this

in order to save lives.”

“No they may not surrender

and keep their emperor.”

“No we cannot warn them

with a demo bomb.”

“We will do all we can

to avoid killing civilians.”

“This is the greatest thing

in history.”

If we each float a candle

on memory’s dark river

will we keep the promise

borne now seventy years

on wind in summer trees—

never, never again

and will that river be

a river of peace

—Dorian Brooks © 2015

Women Strike for Peace

Women Strike for Peace (WSP) was formed in 1961 to end the above ground testing of nuclear weapons.

Strontium 90 was found in milk from above ground testing of nuclear weapons and women were concerned about giving contaminated milk to their children.

Fifty thousand women in 60 cities marched for an end to the testing in November of 1961.

In 1963 The Test Ban Treaty was signed and ratified, prohibiting all test detonations of nuclear weapons (except underground) in no small part because of the public pressure that Women Strike for Peace was able to mobilize.

WSP was founded by Bella Abzug and Dagmar Wilson.  Coretta Scott King was a delegate for WSP to a disarmament conference in Geneva in 1962.

The 70th Anniversary of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki A-bombings: Contradictions, Dangers and Opportunities - Joseph Gerson, Ph.D.

Excerpted from Dr. Joseph Gerson's address at the World Conference against A and H Bombs in Hiroshima, Japan on August 2, 2015

See the full text: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/31/our-70th-anniversary-homework-confronting-myths-and-learning-lessons-hiroshima-and

Friends, I am honored to return to the World Conference on this anniversary of the criminal and indiscriminate A-bombings.

With the development and use of nuclear weapons, humankind crossed the threshold in which all life is held hostage to those willing to inflict genocide, possibly omnicide, to protect their power and privilege. Since then, we’ve been more than lucky to survive nuclear blackmail, reckless dependence on deterrence, miscalculations and nuclear accidents.

Hibakusha, who have channeled their excruciating physical and emotional pain into the most powerful force for the abolition of these weapons of mass murder courageously warn us that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist. And the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, like the poet Toge, instructs us to remember our humanity and forget the rest.

Shadow and Ashes April 28 Action - Outcome - Ed Hedemann

Shadow and Ashes Action
April 28, 2015
New York City
Photo by Felton Davis

The outcome of the April 28 Shadows and Ashes action was that 22 were arrested blocking the two entrances of the U.S. Mission to the UN. We were saying that we've had enough of just talking and no action and that it was time to start disarming nuclear weapons without waiting for even more talks.

All the arrestees got an ACD -- adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which normally means all charges are dismissed after 6 months if individuals weren't re-arrested in NYC but in this unusual decision the time period was shortened to 30 days. Our lawyers said the judge was very sympathetic, thus the unusual time period.

Ed Hedemann, New York City

Shadow and Ashes Action
April 28, 2015
New York City
Photo by Ellen Davidson

Arresting the Wrong Suspects (from Counterpunch) - John LaForge

From John LaForge of Nukewatch, originally posted at Counterpunch

APRIL 30, 2015

More of the Same, But With Handcuffs!

Arresting the Wrong Suspects

by JOHN LAFORGE

New York, New York

Here at the United Nations, talk is focused on the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (N-P.T.). At about 11 a.m. Apr. 28, I was handcuffed with 21 other nuclear realists after blocking an entrance to the US Mission. I say “realists” because US media won’t pay much attention to US violations of nuclear weapons treaties unless somebody is taken off to jail.

Barrels of ink are used detailing Iran’s non-existent nuclear arsenal. The US has about 2,000 nuclear weapons ready to launch and used as ticking time bombs every day by presidents — the way gunslingers can get the dough without ever pulling the trigger. Deterrence it is not.

When we were ordered to leave or face arrest, we called ourselves crime-stoppers and asked the officers to arrest the real scofflaws. We were packed into vans and driven to the 17th Precinct. Our band of nuclear abolitionists concluded long ago that US nuclear banditry and pollutionism was worth dramatizing for a day, or a month, or a lifetime.

We talked while the cops worked through the booking routine. David McReynolds, 85, the long-time staff member of War Resisters League (Ret.), asked us all to watch when he exited the van to see that he didn’t lose his balance. I wondered if I’d have the guts to keep doing these actions if I get to the wobbly decades.

The day before, Sec. of State John Kerry double-spoke to the Gen. Assembly, promising both to continue with US nuclear posturing and to dream of a nuclear-free world. I skipped his puffery and went to hear Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico explain the US government’s plans for three new H-bomb factories (one each in Tenn., Missouri and New Mexico), and plans for building 80 new plutonium warheads every year until 2027. In 1996, the World Court declared the N-P.T.’s pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons to be a binding, unequivocal and unambiguous legal obligation. Our arrest citation is ironic because it’s the US that has “refused a lawful order.”

Back in the police truck, time dragged. Somebody said we should share a few political jokes. Q: “Why are statistics just like prison inmates?” A: “If you torture them enough, they’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” Bad prison puns are easy to come by among political dissidents.

Finally inside the precinct, I sat in the holding cell next to Jerry Goralnick, a playwright with The Living Theatre, who is trying to get a script staged involving the jail-house relationship between Dorothy Day and a colleague who shared a cell for 90 days. Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and her friend were jailed in New York City for refusing to obey civil defense officers and go down into fallout shelters. It was during the delusional era of “winnable” nuclear war. Their defiance was a simple case of refusing to lie about nuclear weapons. They were realists who knew that the 10-square-mile firestorms ignited by H-bombs suck all the air out of fallout shelters where the huddled then suffocate. They knew there is no defense under such nuclear conflagration, that survivors would envy the dead.

These days, nuclear war planning goes on 6 stories below Strategic Command HQ at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. Deep in Strat-Com’s sub-basements, technicians with the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff select people and places to be incinerated if need be. The targets are lands belonging to US trading partners, allies and friends that have the Bomb — China, Russia, India, Pakistan — and non-nuclear countries like Iran and North Korea (which may have 3 nukes but have no way to deliver them).

This target planning has been going on for decades. A few thousand hard-bitten, nuclear-obsessed optimists have been crying “foul” about it the whole while. I was in custody with 21 of them for a few hours. It was a relief to be there.

Our complaint, which should be on display at the June 24 court arraignment, is that nuclear weapons producers, deployers and trigger men in the US (the ones we’re responsible for), are criminal gangsters, dangerous sociopaths, members of a global terror cell making non-stop bomb threats that they disguise with a theatrical hoax called “deterrence.”
I’ve seen this legal argument succeed in court only twice, but those two not-guilty verdicts convince me that the law is on our side. Dum-dum bullets, nerve gas, landmines, cluster bombs, chemical agents, biological weapons and poison are all illegal — banned by Treaties. Nuclear warheads do all the harm of these outlawed weapons combined — plus mutagenic and teratogenic damage to multiple generations. Our State Department man says the Bomb is unfortunate and legal — but the Secretary Has No Clothes.

While UN member states argue over whether the possession of H-bombs violates the N.P.T., I’ll stay with the realists just out of handcuffs — at least until the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff and Mr. Kerry are charged with disturbing the peace.

— John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, edits its Quarterly newsletter, and is syndicated through PeaceVoice.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/30/arresting-the-wrong-suspects/