Nukes: The Devil That Never Left

By DON ROLLINS

It was spring 1989 when I joined a crowd gathered outside the Ohio statehouse to protest nuclear proliferation. Students, clergy, musicians, educators, social workers, ex-nuclear scientists, WWII and Vietnam vets — all taking the mic, all steadfastly calling on the government to defund nuclear weapons programs.

The Quakers were there. The Catholics were there. Likewise the Mennonites, Unitarian Universalists, Jews, Buddhists, progressive Protestants and a whole lot of folks for whom religion stopped making sense sometime in the Middle Ages.

We’d come together because we feared for our lives. George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director and cold warrior, had only months before assumed the presidency. And while his hawkish ways would later moderate, there was no mistaking his larger commitment to a “soft voice/big stick” foreign policy with nukes as the stick.

It was in the course of the speeches many of us first heard about the Berrigan brothers, and Plowshares, the pacifist, anti-nuclear movement they helped found in 1980. Named for a passage from the Hebrew bible, and inspired by the Catholic Worker Movement, Plowshares quickly became the most overtly activist of American disarmament groups.

Accompanied by six others, Philip and Daniel Berrigan stormed a Pennsylvania facility making nuclear components, damaged missile parts and poured human blood on files. Dubbed the Plowshares Eight, they were arrested, jailed and convicted of ten misdemeanors and felonies. The average length of sentence was two years.

Over the course of the next 40 years, Plowshares and sympathetic groups across most of the globe would use similar tactics to press the anti-nukes cause. So often and bold were their actions against mostly private-contractor suppliers, Defense Department officials required major security upgrades. If bands of protestors keep breach existing safeguards, is that not an invitation for terrorism?

But not every facility, every minute can be secured. On April 4, 2018, seven Catholic Plowshares activists cut through fences guarding the submarine base at St. Mary’s, Ga. Once inside, they poured their own blood on statues, spray painted slogans and placed crime scene tape across several areas. Their age range is 57-70. Most are grandparents. Steve Kelly, 70, is a Catholic priest.

All seven were arrested, detained, tried and found guilty, but Kelly’s case has taken center stage. On Oct. 15 he was sentenced to 33 months imprisonment, although adjusted for pretrial confinement will likely not enter prison. Another member of the group received 14 months, and the rest are scheduled for sentencing in mid-November.

Even such a terse overview shows why Plowshares has flummoxed progressives since its inception. On the one hand, the movement continues to do the dirty work when it comes to keeping before us the quickest, surest path to destruction: an estimated 13,410 nuclear warheads remain operative worldwide — this, no matter the COVID count, or an American president’s latest assault on the democratic process. A reduction in nuclear capacity translates to a safer world, but not a safe world. And somebody, somewhere has to keep that reality before us.

On the other, the sheer optics of gate-crashing pacifists fitted with hammers, spray paint and bottles of blood is about as welcome among polite progressives as Judas on Good Friday. While Plowshare’s capacity for grabbing headlines has always been the method behind the mission, mainstream liberalism has labeled it extremist, a political neckstone.

So, what to make of such a raw response to such a raw threat? Ultimately, neither a complete defense nor complete dismissal of Plowshares will further anyone’s grasp of today’s geopolitical and nuclear realities. Means may not justify ends in Plowshare’s case, but consider the risks of mindlessly continuing down the path Trump has taken with regard to Iran and North Korea’s nuclear proclivities.

It seems the only viable tack is as technically simple as politically foreboding: make the case for giving an existential threat its grim due, and stay the course. Sell the need. Find the resources. Expect withering assaults from the military industrial complex.

Containing the virus, ending white supremacy culture, mitigating climate change, tackling poverty and joblessness - the list of immediate, competing demands will only grow longer the other side of the election. But toward the top should be thoroughly auditing the status of nuclear armaments, at home and abroad. Plowshare protector or detractor, it ought not take somebody’s grandma or priest to remind us of the devil of our own doing, the one who never left.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020

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