On Dec. 7, five elderly activists will be going on trial for entering the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor and Strategic Weapons Facility-Pacific (SWFPAC), the largest nuclear weapon storage area in the U.S. SWFPAC holds over 2,000 nuclear warheads, which constitutes for about 20 percent of the entire U.S. aresenal. These activists are members of the Disarm Now Plowshares. On Nov. 2, 2009, they entered the naval base in protest against the first strike Trident weapons system for its “illegality and immorality.”
Disarm Now Plowshares’ mission is to fulfill or embody the vision of conversion from a war economy to a peacetime economy. In 1980, the first plowshare occurred and since then there has been close to 90 plowshares.
The five activists, Anne Montgomery, Bill “Bix” Bichsel, Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald and Kelly, breached the naval base and SWFPAC by first entering the perimeter fence, then cutting through a chain link fence and finally cutting through a double layered fence of chain link and barbed wire. The activists range in age from 61-83 years old. Bix and Greenwald are locals, and Bix has spoken several times at the university over the past several years. Unarmed, they were all arrested and questioned by the FBI and NCIS for over five hours. They are facing up to 10 years of prison and a $250,000 fine.
“We feel that we can take that same kind of inspiration in the sense of the way slavery was abolished, we can abolish nuclear weapons. Polls show that over 75 percent of people in the United States alone want disarmorment and politicians don’t seem to hear that out. I think it’s time to have a sort of wake-up. But it has to be behavior, not just words. So that’s why we felt we would risk prison time or even getting shot at in order to expose the large storage of nuclear weapons. It was a way to start that conversion process, from swords to plowshares,” Kelly said.
Dr. David Hall, former president of the Washington state chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Thomas Rogers, retired USN captain, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are just a few individuals who have spoken up in support or defense of the activists’ actions. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark also testified on their behalf. It seems as though many in the community, locally and internationally, see reason and justificiation in the plowshares’ actions.
“In the plowshares that I’ve been involved in in the past, we’ve been imprisoned immediately. And so you normally get a little more press attention and media interest. But this one has been a slower building up and the news isn’t so immediate and engaging compared to some other things. But nonetheless people have come out to in tremendous support in reaction to the amount of nuclear weapons stores at SWFPAC and because they too have been discontent with these policies,” Kelly says.
On Monday, Dec. 6, there will be a Festival of Hope, which is a sort of potluck dinner with speakers and a presentation, at St. Leo Church in downtown Tacoma in order to acknowledge that those involved in Plowshares will put their best foot forward and adhere to the truth.