When we got to the ‘out of the way’ gate we chose to enter, it didn’t take long to clip the lock, and for all seven of us to walk in.
Things changed when, shortly before the action, we decided that once we got inside the base we would go to three different sites: Liz, Carmen and Steve would be going to the highly militarized, highly ‘secured’ bunkers where the Trident missiles were housed Mark and Patrick felt called to topple the ‘Missile Shrine,’ a concrete replica of the missiles, displayed at an easily accessible intersection inside the base and Martha and I chose to go to the Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic (SWFLANT), the administration building near the ‘Shrine.’ My choice to go to SWFLANT, and not the bunkers, lifted a great deal of weight, and allowed me to breathe with my choice. In particular, I did not want to hurt my children by taking the big risk involved. The two years leading up to that night were rich with preparation, and the three questions I carried with me in my discernment were: 1) does this need to be done? 2) does it need to be done now? 3) does it need to be done now, by me? The answer for the first two were a clear YES, but I was still discerning my role up until shortly before the action. Edited excerpts from their responses follow: fuller versions can be accessed here.Ĭlare Grady: It was a warm evening, I remember singing on the drive to the base. To mark the anniversary, I conducted email interviews with three of the Seven - Mark Colville, Clare Grady, and Martha Hennessy - as well as with Bill Ofenloch, an eloquent spokesperson and tireless advocate for the group and Christine Gwynn, a young peace activist who flew from Cape Breton to Georgia to attend their trial. This, as the KBP7 tried to show us, is the sacrilegious ‘nuclear normal’ our suicidal ‘deterrence-dependence’ has created: where nothing truly sacred is sacred any more. One movement… Because if they move once… Granted, if we respond, it is World War Three, but we have a sacred obligation… We will defend every inch of NATO territory – every single inch – with a united, galvanized NATO. NATO leaders often speak of the “sacred duty” to defend “every single inch” of their massively-expanded territory - a tauntingly ironic mantra, given the multiple vows offered to Moscow at the end of the Cold War to move the Alliance “not one inch eastward.” Here’s President Biden, announcing on March 11 the deployment of 12,000 American troops to the Baltic borders of Russia: They acted to protest the pathological orthodoxy of American nuclearism, an idol worship reducing, as moral philosopher Elaine Scarry argues, the Republic to a “Thermonuclear Monarchy” - they were remanded in custody for weeks e-carcerated under strict house arrest and (with the exception of McAlister) imprisoned, during a pandemic, for between 10 and 33 months. Many Spectator readers are familiar with the case and courage of the ‘ Kings Bay Plowshares Seven’ or KBP7: Mark Colville (55 at the time of the Action), Martha Hennesy (62), Clare Grady (59), Father Steve Kelly (69), Patrick O’Neill (61), Carmen Trotta (55) and Elizabeth McAlister (78).
SEVEN MOMENTS WORTH REVISITING FULL
As it is, alas, far from irrational to worry that President Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine may spread and spiral to a full nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia, it is salutary to recall the un-hyperbolic description of Trident in a 2017 National Interest article as probably “the most destructive weapon system created by humankind” and “a nightmarish weapon of the apocalypse.” seven Catholic Plowshares activists conducted a ‘symbolic disarmament’ of the Kings Bay naval base in Georgia, home to America’s East Coast fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, a mere six vessels -“boomers,” in Kings Bay English - each armed with up to 20 Trident missiles, each carrying up to eight warheads, each up to 30 times more powerful than the ‘little boy’ Bomb which incinerated Hiroshima. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964 Nobel Peace Prize Lectureįour years ago - on 4 April 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. A world war – God forbid! – will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death.
A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.
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