Most Americans my age experienced the 1960s
“duck-and-cover” drills in elementary schools, when the notion of getting blown
up in a nuclear holocaust was just a part of everyday life. The fact that the U. S., Russia, and a
lengthening list of other countries still have the ability to vaporize millions
with nuclear weapons has gradually faded from the public’s consciousness over
the years, as the Cold War wound down following the collapse of the old Soviet
Union in 1991. Most of the college
students I teach were born after the end of that era, so it’s not surprising.
But there are a few folks who haven’t forgotten. Notable among them is a team of two U.
S. war veterans and a Roman Catholic nun in her eighties who gathered in the
pre-dawn hours of July 28, 2012 outside the Y-12 nuclear material complex near
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This
high-security facility is one of the main storehouses for the nation’s
nuclear-weapons material: highly
enriched uranium, mainly, which is used in the fission “triggers” of
thermonuclear (fusion or “hydrogen”) bombs. The Wikipedia article on Y-12 says that we also keep
enriched uranium there for other countries that don’t want to bother with
storing it themselves. Needless to
say, a terrorist outfit that managed to steal some of this uranium would be in
a good position to make their own nuclear weapon, so the bunker-style storage
buildings with watchtowers on the ends are surrounded by several security
perimeters: barbed wire, fences,
and the usual security cameras and sensors.
The three anti-nuclear protesters (for that is what they
were) took bolt-cutters to the outer fence and climbed inside with the rest of their
equipment, which they say consisted of “a Bible, hammers, candles,
bread, white roses and blood.”
They surprised themselves by getting close enough to one of the main
buildings to smear blood on its white walls, and spray-painted words on it:
“The fruit of justice is peace” and “Plowshares please Isaiah.” The latter is a reference to the famed
“swords into plowshares” passage of the second chapter of the Old Testament
prophet Isaiah.
Evidently, the guards in charge of preventing this
sort of thing initially believed that the noises their sensors picked up were
wild animals, which occasionally cause false alarms. Eventually, however, someone went down to check and
discovered the intrusion. The
three were duly arrested, jailed (this was not a new experience for Sister
Megan Rice, who has been arrested more than thirty times and served two
previous jail sentences), and on May 8-9, 2013, were convicted of felony
charges in federal court in relation to the break-in. They are in jail awaiting the sentencing phase to come in
September.
Whatever one thinks of the rightness or wrongness of
nuclear weapons, I think most people can agree that as long as a government
cares to deal with such things, it is that government’s responsibility to make
sure that no unauthorized persons can steal the weapons, or nuclear material
that can be used to make a weapon.
Other things being equal, I would probably rather live in a world
without nuclear weapons, but that is not the world we live in now, and as with
so many other things in politics, the problem lies in how we get from here—with
nuclear stockpiles around the world—to a point where nobody has any.
Nuclear protesters such as Sister Rice clearly see
their roles as prophetic. The Old
Testament prophets had hard jobs:
God told them to say unpopular things that usually got them thrown in
jail, or worse. But the real
prophets, as opposed to the popular and successful false prophets, were under
a compulsion to bring God’s message to the people.
I learned of this incident via Joe Carson, a long-time
Department of Energy safety officer who has his own prophetic role that his
Christian faith has impelled him to play.
He has found that many areas of the U. S. government’s civil service are
infected by incompetence, carelessness, and neglect of duty. What is worse, those such as Mr. Carson
who attempt to right such wrongs are often punished by their superiors for
rocking the boat (going outside the organization, or “whistleblowing”), and
even so-called whistleblowing defense organizations can fall victim to
corruption and self-serving activities as well. The breach of security by the protesters at the Y-12
facility revealed how vulnerable the nuclear storehouse is to attackers armed with
nothing more than bolt cutters and hammers. One wonders whether the vigor with which they were
prosecuted arose more from embarrassment than from a genuine concern for
national security. Making powerful
officials look bad can get you in more trouble than almost anything else.
Sr. Rice and her compatriots broke laws, it is true,
but they are in a long and honorable tradition of civil disobedience that goes
back at least to Martin Luther King and ultimately to the Old Testament
prophets themselves. They knew
they would probably go to jail, and they did. When convicted, Sr. Rice was quoted as saying “I regret I
didn’t do this 70 years ago.”
70 years ago, she would have been about 13, almost old
enough to work in what was then a top-secret World War II uranium processing
facility devoted to making the first nuclear weapons. In Y-12’s cavernous hallways, teenage girls fresh from the
surrounding Tennessee hills were hired by the dozen to sit at control panels
all day, turning knobs to keep meter needles at a certain value. The girls knew only that they got paid
well and were somehow contributing to the effort to win World War II.
Sr. Rice would have indeed had to be a prophet to have
protested effectively against the U. S. effort to make the world’s first
nuclear weapon with the Manhattan Project. Almost from the beginning of the program, some of those
involved harbored doubts that it was a good thing to do. Ever since the end of the war, a small
but dedicated number of people have worked to rid the world of nuclear weapons,
but so far they have fought an uphill battle. I can both wish for them to succeed, and also hope that
until they do, we can keep better watch over our nuclear store than we have
been doing lately.
Sources: I referred to several articles on
various aspects of the July 28, 2012 incident: a Knoxville News-Sentinel editorial at
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/aug/10/editorial-doe-must-repair-y-12-security-and/
an article from an alternative newspaper on the trial
at
http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/05/17/1702_kabuki_dance_in_federal_court_equates_radical,
some photos of the scene of the event posted at
http://www.nukeresister.org/2012/10/22/photos-of-transform-now-plowshares-action/
and the Wikipedia articles on Y-12 and Megan
Rice. Thanks to Joe Carson for
bringing this incident to my attention.
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