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/

Noam Chomsky Statement

Seventy years ago, humanity entered a new era with the realization that civilization has advanced (or more accurately descended) to the stage where we have achieved the capacity to destroy ourselves, instantaneously. Since then, we have marched resolutely towards that goal in ways so shocking that it hard to find words to describe them. And from the first moments, when US policy makers literally did not even consider the possibility of an international agreement, which might have been feasible, to bar development of the one major threat to American security, ICBMs with nuclear warheads, a failure that provides startling insight into the thinking of those who hold the fate of the world in their hands.

A review of the history of reckless acts of political leaders and their callous disregard for horrendous consequences, accidents that came ominously close to terminal war, the understanding that a first strike would devastate the perpetrator and everyone else… all of this should leave a rational observer almost speechless. One can easily appreciate the retrospective judgment of the former head of the US Strategic Command, General Lee Butler, that we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And no less the haunting question he raises: “By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear-weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations?”