The Transform Now Three with their signs, via http://transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com.
In the early morning on Saturday, July 28, three gray-haired
trespassers made their way into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee.
They were armed with human blood, hammers, candles, flowers,
crime-scene tape and a Bible. In the process of their break-in and
after, they have managed to close down operations at the facility for
days on end and raise searching questions about how secure — and how
justified — the United States’ vast nuclear stockpiles really are.
According to
Transform Now Plowshares’ own account:
Michael R. Walli (63), Megan Rice, SHCJ (82), Greg Boertje-Obed, (57), succeeded in a disarmament action at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Nuclear facility before dawn today.
Calling themselves Transform Now Plowshares they hammered on the
cornerstone of the newly built Highly-Enriched Uranium Manufacturing
Facility (HEUMF), splashed human blood and left four spray painted tags
on the recent construction which read: Woe to the empire of blood; The
fruit of justice is peace; Work for peace not for war; and Plowshares
please Isaiah.
Under the cover of darkness they intermittently passed beyond four
fences in a walk for over two hours through the fatal force zone. “We
feel it was a miracle; we were led directly to where we wanted to go”
said Greg.
After navigating through the complex they came to a long, white,
windowless building marked HEUMF. “It was built like a fortress”, Greg
said describing the four guard towers.
Unimpeded by security, they attached two banners to pillars of the
building. “Transform Now Plowshares” read the first with a green and
black icon showing part bomb part flower. A second stated “Swords into
Plowshares Spears into Pruning Hooks–Isaiah”. In addition, between the
pillars they strung red crime tape.
The action was more successful than anyone could have imagined. The local paper
reported on Wednesday (as part of a blog with
detailed and ongoing coverage):
In an apparently unprecedented action, the government’s
contractor today ordered a “security stand-down” at the Y-12 nuclear
weapons plant. All nuclear operations are being put on hold and all
nuclear materials will go into vaults while plant workers focus solely
on security.
The order by B&W Y-12, and supported by the National Nuclear
Security Administration, comes because of the security lapses that
allowed peace protesters to penetrate the plant’s highest security area
on Saturday morning.“The National Nuclear Security Administration fully
supports this step which is necessary to ensure continued confidence in
safe and secure operations at Y-12,” the federal agency said in a press
statement.
The statement said the stand down is effective today and is expected to end sometime next week.
The activists made their anti-nuclear convictions evident
in a declaration, which opens with a passage from the Book of Isaiah:
We come to the Y-12 facility because our very humanity
rejects the designs of nuclearism, empire and war. Our faith in love and
nonviolence encourages us to believe that our activity here is
necessary; that we come to invite transformation, undo the past and
present work of Y-12; disarm and end any further efforts to increase the
Y-12 capacity for an economy and social structure based upon war-making
and empire-building.
A loving and compassionate Creator invites us to take the urgent and
decisive steps to transform the U.S. empire, and this facility, into
life-giving alternatives which resolve real problems of poverty and
environmental degradation for all.
In the report on the incident that appeared
in Reuters yesterday,
the emphasis was much more on the gravity of the security breach that
the action represented than on its actual intent. The writer seems to
struggle with the idea that those who perpetrated the breach, including a
82-year-old nun, were neither terrorists nor citizens acting out of a
sense of concern for their nation’s security apparatus:
Ralph Hutchinson, coordinator for the Oak Ridge
Environmental Peace Alliance, said the group’s intention was not to
demonstrate the lack of security at the plant, but to take a stance
against the making of nuclear weapons.
“It wasn’t so they could show how easy it was to bust into this bomb
plant, it was because the production of nuclear weapons violates
everything that is moral and good,” Hutchinson said. “It is a war
crime.”
Making clear the seriousness of the breach, the article continues:
Peter Stockton, a former congressional investigator and
security consultant to the Energy Department, expressed skepticism at
government assertions the nuclear material was not at risk.
“It is unbelievable this could happen,” Stockton said. “The
significance is outrageous. If they were terrorists, they could have
blown open the door and got inside.”
Stockton said the security breach was the “worst we’ve ever seen.”
In the tradition of
past Plowshares actions,
the combination between tactical sophistication and principled
motivation helps draw attention to the action in ways that just tactics
or conviction couldn’t do alone. By engineering such a significant
break-in, the activists were able to take advantage of public anxieties
about security to spread their message to a much broader audience than,
for instance, the annual, ritualized trespasses at the
SOA Watch protests generally
do. In addition to calling attention to the nuclear weapons themselves,
the activists also shed light on the dangers of an increasingly
privatized security industry that includes WSI Oak Ridge, the contractor
responsible for protecting the facility.
The impact of actions such as these, however, is often lessened by
the fact of being isolated, which limits their capacity to build real
momentum and power against the entrenched military industry.
At least in this case, there has been a national day of action in the
works for Hiroshima Day on August 6, including actions around the
country and a “mass civil disobedience” at the Los Alamos laboratory in
New Mexico. It is being promoted as “
Occupy Nukes,”
and thus will be a test of whether the networks formed through the
Occupy movement last fall can be rallied to reenergize organizing
against militarism. A robust movement can begin with a single,
courageous action like the one at Oak Ridge, but to be successful it
will have to go a whole lot further.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/08/peace-activists-close-nuclear-facility-cause-historic-security-breach/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WagingNonviolence+%28Waging+Nonviolence%29
