Speak Up, Speak Out! Interview on Current Nuclear Weapons Issues

Ginny Wolff, of Speak Up, Speak Out! on KSVR - FM, interviewed me last week about the work of Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action since 1977 to protest the Trident submarines based at the Bangor Naval Base in Silverdale, Washington. We discussed the history of Ground Zero, the bigger picture of U.S. foreign policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons, ongoing international tension, and the agreement between Congress and the Obama administration to spend a trillion dollars over 30 years to rebuild the entire U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The interview ends with a simple message listeners can deliver to President Obama. After listening, you can click here to send your message to President Obama. You can find additional action alerts at the right hand column (top of the page).

Thanks to KSVR and Speak Up, Speak Out! for covering important issues you won't hear in the mainstream/corporate media.

Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Choose Life

Dear Friends,

The following post is a reprint of an article I was invited to write for the social justice newsletter of Saint Patrick Catholic Church in Seattle.  This past Wednesday (on Martin Luther King Jr's birthday) I participated in a shared Eucharist at the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, Washington.  The Eucharist was led by Fr. William "Bix" Bichsel, the wonderful and notorious nuclear abolitionist and Plowshares activist (among many other fine things) from the Tacoma Catholic Worker. It was intended to bring people together in witness against nuclear weapons as well as in solidarity with the people of Jeju Island, South Korea, who continue to struggle against the naval base under construction that threatens their "Island of Peace."  I thought this an appropriate time to share the article here.

In Peace,

Leonard

P.S. - You can see photos of Wednesday's shared Eucharist by clicking here.

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Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Choose Life 

“In a nuclear war there would be no victors, only victims. The truth of peace requires that all - whether those governments which openly or secretly possess nuclear arms, or those planning to acquire them - agree to change their course by clear and firm decision and strive for a progressive and concerted nuclear disarmament. The resources which would be saved could then be employed in projects of development capable of benefiting all their people, especially the poor.” (Pope Benedict XVI, World Day of Peace, 2006)

Decades before, the Archbishop of the Seattle Archdiocese, Raymond Hunthausen, was active in resistance to the U.S. stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the new Trident submarine-based nuclear weapons system, which included the Bangor Trident submarine base in Puget Sound just 20 miles west of Seattle. In 1981 Archbishop Hunthausen referred to the Trident submarines based there as "the Auschwitz of Puget Sound."

The Church’s condemnation of nuclear weapons is grounded in the Church’s respect for life and the dignity of the human person. People of faith have been active throughout the movement to abolish nuclear weapons, and the struggle to resist Trident mirrors this history. Even before the first Trident submarine sailed into Bangor, people were coming together to build a resistance to it.

The Pacific Life Community (PLC), a small intentional community, formed to resist the coming of Trident to the Pacific Northwest. Two years later, out of the initial PLC experience, Jim and Shelley Douglass co-founded Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (GZ). The GZ community purchased land adjacent to the Bangor base, laying the groundwork for the long work ahead.

As the submarines came and the base grew, so did the resistance. In the early years resisters handed out leaflets at the Bangor entrance gates. When the first Trident submarine arrived it was met by thousands of protestors on land in addition to a small flotilla of boats.

Next came rocket motors, and then nuclear warheads, transported by trains to Bangor for assembly to complete the Trident nuclear missiles. These trains were met by huge numbers of people, many of whom risked arrest blocking the tracks leading into the base. Archbishop Hunthausen was present at some of these actions in solidarity with the resistance.

The Douglasses later moved to Birmingham, Alabama to start a Catholic Worker House, and GZ's work continued. Today that work is as strong as ever. A new Center House has risen from the ashes of earlier structures on the grounds. Three annual actions ground our continuing resistance to Trident - Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Mother's Day weekend and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki commemoration.

This continuing resistance, deeply rooted in nonviolence, is absolutely necessary in this time of renewed pursuit of nuclear weapons as a foreign policy tool. Besides the US Government's buildup of its nuclear weapons research, development and production infrastructure, it is pursuing new nuclear weapons systems - among them a new generation of Trident submarines.

The new submarines, currently in research and development, are intended to replace the aging Trident nuclear weapons system, a relic of the Cold War. Twelve submarines will cost $100 billion just to build, in addition to hundreds of billions in operational costs.

Beyond the costs - For people of faith, killing is simply wrong; and nuclear weapons, which are omnicidal by design, are an abomination in the eyes of God. His Holiness was clear in his 2006 statement - Nuclear weapons must never again be used; they must be eradicated, and we must dedicate ourselves to life-affirming ends.

May we choose life.

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Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2013 edition of Roots of Justice: A Social Justice Newsletter of Saint Patrick Catholic Church in Seattle, Washington.

Behold Your Nuclear God

DearFriends,

Tom Krebsbach wrote the following poem on Monday, August 12, 2013, following his participation in Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action's weekend of remembrance and action (at the Bangor Trident nuclear submarine base) around the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor represents the largest operational concentration of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, and possibly anywhere in the world.  The nuclear missiles and warheads on a single Trident submarine are capable of destroying an entire continent - incinerating millions of human beings and leaving the land uninhabitable for generations.

A new book by Eric Schlosser, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety", poses questions about just how much "command" or "control" we have over these awesome and horrific tools of terror that are quite capable of ending life as we know it on this small planet.  Tom's poem turns the idea of command and control of nuclear weapons on its head, making clear the Faustian bargain humans have struck in our delusional power quest.

So much for "command and control" of nuclear weapons... in reality, they have controlled us since their creation in the minds of the scientists who developed them. Can we summon the strength and courage to turn away from them and embrace life?

With Tom's permission I am sharing his poem publicly for the first time.

In Peace,

Leonard 

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Behold Your Nuclear God

Oh, foolish Homo sapiens, earth’s mistaken child,

In your puerile quest for indomitable power,

You have acted the obeisant midwife in my momentous birth,

Carefully hewing my cradle in the cauldron of ruthless war and strife,

Unleashing my fearsome powers to ravage and decimate earth. 

Bow down now before me and celebrate my awesome power,

For I am omnipotent and in charge.

I grow giddy with destruction fever as my time draws near,

When I shall consume all earthly existence in a fearsome ball of fire,

And render once and for all earthly life extinct. 

In fits of farcical delusion, you maintain that you are king,

Quite capable of restraining the primal powers I derive from sun and stars.

Continue on, foolish knaves, in your supreme complacency and unbridled arrogance!

Your very lust for unlimited power and defensive safety guarantee my ascendancy,

As I wait the fateful moment when I shall extend control over all of heaven and earth.

When that moment arrives in the devil’s hearse, there will be no turning back,

As all of life on earth tumbles into the fiery pits of hell. 

At this moment I will bite off man’s head like a voracious beast,

And sear the flesh of man and animal to a crisp and charred texture.

My apocalyptic frenzy of fire will cause Lucifer to bow down in envy before me. 

The structures and edifices of man will perish in a cloud of dust and twisted steel;

The seas will roil with the hot poison of radioactivity;

Children of man will vaporize into a cloud of radioactive dust;

And I will ascend my throne as man’s sole surviving heir,

The conception of his twisted mind, a product of his deviant progress. 

Gone for eternity, Beethoven’s music.  

My music is the moan of hot wind over charred and desolate plains.

Reduced to irrelevant ash, Rembrandt’s paintings. 

I paint a bleak and haunted landscape of blackened tree remains, 

Single black silhouettes against a gray and ominous sky.

Even now my human minions prepare the day of my ascendancy,

Stockpiling and upgrading my nuclear fuel to ludicrous extremes,

Assuring my day of coronation is near at hand,

When the short existence of man and life on earth will become irrelevant in the cosmic chaos, 

And I will rule on earth for evermore. 

Homo sapiens, bow down now before your only god. 

Nuclear Weapons Threaten Life and Waste Resources

Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) just aired it's newest TV interview show, "Nuclear Weapons Threaten Life and Waste Resources."   Olympia FOR's Glen Anderson interviewed two members of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (Ground Zero).

Ground Zero is located next to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, the home port of the West coast Trident submarine fleet and the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific. Bangor represents the largest operational concentration of nuclear weapons in the U.S. and quite probably the entire world.

Ground Zero offers the opportunity to explore the meaning and practice of nonviolence from a perspective of deep spiritual reflection, providing a means for witnessing to and resisting all nuclear weapons.

Tom Rogers is a retired U.S. Navy captain and former submarine commander.  Leonard Eiger is a retired public health professional and coordinates communications for Ground Zero.

In this show we focus on the Trident nuclear submarines based at Bangor in Kitsap County, just 60 miles north of Olympia and 20 miles west of Seattle. Tridents out on patrol are on constant alert status and poised for a suicidal first strike against Russia or other target.  Trident is a Cold War relic.

A single Trident submarine has enough nuclear warheads to destroy an entire continent. As Rear Adm. Joseph Tofalo, commander, Submarine Group 10, at Kings Bay, Georgia once said, "A single Trident submarine is the sixth largest nuclear nation in the world all by itself."

So it’s worth spending an hour watching this program! Click the image below to watch Nuclear Weapons Threaten Life and Waste Resources.