Brad Lyttle: A Pioneer Anti-Nuclear Resister, Still Going Strong - Rosalie Riegle

Brad Lyttle is a professional peacemaker. He was 18 on August 6, 1945 when he heard that the US had bombed Hiroshima, and he said to himself, “The human race either has to end war or war is going to end the human race.” 

Acting on that belief, he has worked his entire adult life as a professional anti-war organizer. Whether coordinating demonstrations against Polaris nuclear submarines in Groton, Connecticut, organizing the California to Moscow peace walk, or working against the Vietnam War in Chicago, Brad has been contributing planning and logistical skills to the peace movement since completing his first prison term in 1955—served for refusing alternative service during the Korean War.

He learned to organize by working first on providing radical pacifist theory to the movement with Bob Pickus of the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago. Then he moved on to the CNVA (Committee for Nonviolent Action) which planned the first direct actions against nuclear weapons. CNVA resisters participated in nonviolent civil disobedience in Wyoming against the Atlas missiles in 1958, and then at Mead Air Force Base (now Offutt), near Omaha, Nebraska the following year.

Brad remembers that Nebraska protest:

We took a whole offset printing press with us and printed our leaflets out there. . . The television stations in Omaha came out and took pictures of our demonstrations and showed them on their news program. Later they said, “Well, we can’t send a team out but if you take the pictures and give us the film, we’ll use ‘em.” So we did that for a number of weeks before the Air Force got wind of what was happening and closed down the operation. They had the news director fired and… [Laughter] But it was… We drew people from all over the country for that demonstration. I did civil disobedience there, and got six months and was shipped down to Springfield again. The Chief of Parole was kind of horrified to see me. There’s a famous picture of A.J. Muste climbing over the fence at the Air Base.

Courtesy Nebraska State Historical Society, RG1861

Offutt Air Force Base is still crucial to the US nuclear arsenal with almost 7,100 nuclear warheads under its control. About 2,080 of these warheads are deployed or launch-ready on missiles and bombers, and another 2,680 are in storage and could be hastily brought into use. (For details, see the revised edition of the Nukewatch book, "Nuclear Heartland.”)

A fast forward through a busy resistance life finds Lyttle arrested in 2010, perhaps for the last time, in a nonviolent protest at the place where the bomb begin, the “National Security Center” at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Oak Ridge produced the highly enriched uranium that fueled the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan.

Courtesy of Disarm Now Plowshares 

In his sentencing statement in September 2011, Brad called to mind the pictures of the catastrophic destruction wrought in New York on September 11, 2001. Then he told the court that if the W76 warhead, currently being refurbished at Y12, were to be exploded in lower Manhattan, “[The borough] would all be wiped out, probably every human, and a large number of people in Brooklyn. Every borough of New York City would be on fire. One thousand times the destructive power of Hiroshima.”

As a teenager, Brad Lyttle realized that the US has the power to end the human race. He still does. Join with him to end the madness.

Rosalie Riegle, August 2015