Unbowed and unrepentant, Sister Megan Rice, Greg Boertije-Obed and Michael Walli of the “Transform Now Plowshares” were sentenced on February 18, 2014 by U.S. District Court Judge Amul Thaper. They are to serve 3 to 5 years in federal prison and pay $53,000 in restitution for their July 2012 call for disarmament action by cutting through multiple perimeter fences to enter onto the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, splashing their blood and spray painting on a silo containing nuclear weapons grade uranium.
The protesters against the preparation for thermonuclear annihilation remained resolute in their charge that the production and possession of these weapons of mass destruction is a crime against humanity in violation of international law that includes the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, the Geneva Protocols, the United Nations Charter and U.N Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
In fact, modern civilization has devolved to make real the ancient and cruelest wish of Caligula, “Would that the Roman people had but one neck.”
It was President Richard Nixon who said, “I can go into my office, pick up the phone and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” He was describing the minimal effort it takes to initiate a tight chain of command to annihilate entire societies with the “first use” of nuclear weapons. It would be decades after his shamed departure as America’s Chief of State before it was disclosed that Nixon had contemplated using nuclear weapons no less than four times in “the madman” strategy. President Truman had already demonstrated America’s indiscriminate “first use” policy twice with the 1945 atomic bombings on human populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Eisenhower contemplated initiating nuclear strikes in 1954 in the Taiwan Straits and against the Soviet Union over Berlin in 1959. President Kennedy considered launching an all out nuclear war in 1962 against the former Soviet Union over Cuba and two other undisclosed lands. President Johnson considered a pre-emptive nuclear attack on China to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. President Reagan would deploy hundreds of first strike nuclear weapons to the European borders of the former Soviet Union entrenching the hair trigger policy of “launch on warning” that precariously persists to this day.
Never before have so few had so much power to exterminate so many, so quickly. Where an obedient German people under the Third Reich brought a captive people to the crematoria, today we as a society are poised to bring unimaginable crematoria to the people of entire countries with a more dispassionate and efficient system of command and control.
The courageous actions and self sacrifice of Rice, Boertije-Obed and Walli to begin nuclear disarmament here in the United States give us the glimmer of hope that there is also a global future beyond nuclear weapons.