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.