We publish this story even as nuclear protesters are marching in Japan in response to an environmental and social crisis that has no certain end. – Eds.
On November 2, 2009, five Catholic activists — one nun, two priests, and two laypeople, all age sixty or above — cut through a series of chain link and barbed wire fences surrounding Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, Washington, where roughly one-quarter of the United States’ nuclear warheads are reportedly stored and a fleet of eleven submarines equipped to deploy Trident nuclear weapons is stationed.
The five unfurled a banner reading “Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” poured their own blood over the site, and beat on the ground and the fences with household hammers before being apprehended and arrested. “We walk into the heart of darkness,” they wrote in a statement distributed to supporters and media, “as one step up the holy mountain where all nations can unite in peace” (read the group’s full statement here).
Continue reading at “Blood and Hammers: Elderly Anti-Nuclear Activists Sentenced to Jail”.
