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On August 6, 1945 the United States
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the US
dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons
killed over 100,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured
many tens of thousands more.
Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed,
51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting
a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction
and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I visited them last week.
Their crime? They tried to
disarm one of the 1700+ nuclear weapons in North Dakota. On
June 26, 2006, they went to the silo of a Minuteman III first-strike
nucclear missile and wrote on it "If you want peace, work
for justice. Then they hammered on its lock and poured some
of their own blood over it. They waited to be arrested and have
been in jail ever since. If convicted, they face imprisonment
of up to ten years for criminal damage to federal property.
The Minuteman III is a first-strike
intercontinental nuclear missile with a range of over 6000 miles
and carries 27 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped
on Hiroshima. There are over one hundred fifty Minuteman III
missiles planted in the grounds in silos in just the northern
part of North Dakota.
Fr. Kabat has been a Catholic
priest for over forty years. Greg Boertje-Obed was a First Lieutenant
in the US Army. Mike Walli served two tours in Vietnam. All
three men were born in small towns or rural areas of the Midwest.
Walli and Boertje-Obed are members of the Loaves and Fishes
Catholic Worker community in Duluth, Minnesota. Together they
are called the "Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares.
The Plowshares movement seeks to follow the instructions of
Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to "beat your swords into plowshares.
At the time of their arrest,
the three specifically linked their actions to Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. "Two of the most terrible war crimes occurred
on August 6th and 9th, 1945. On August 6th, 1945, the United
States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan,
killing more than 100,000 people (including U.S. prisoners of
war). Three days later the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the
city of Nagasaki, Japan, killing more than 50,000 people. Use
of these weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations
were abominable crimes against humanity.
They went on to say "U.S.
leaders speak about the dangers of other nations acquiring nuclear
weapons, but they fail to act in accordance with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty which commits the U.S. to take steps
to disarm its weapons of mass destruction. We act in order to
bring attention to people's responsibility for disarming weapons
of state terrorism. We can begin the process of exposing U.S.
weapons of mass destruction, naming them as abominations that
cause desolation, and transforming them to objects that promote
life.
Mike Walli enlisted in the
army as a young man. With the experience of two tours in Vietnam,
he said "This is not about our national defense. The hundreds
of Minuteman III nuclear weapons are offensive weapons of mass
destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached that the United
States is the chief purveyor of violence in the world. We must
become a people-oriented society rather than a thing-oriented
society. We must kick the war economy habit.
Greg Boertje-Obed, who, after
his time as an officer in the military, married and is the father
of an eleven year old daughter, told me "There is a sense
of righteousness and harmony that comes from being in jail on
August 6. When I was in the military, I was trained to fight
and "win a nuclear war. It became clear that all the preparations
for a nuclear war were wrong. In contrast Jesus taught "Love
your enemiesdon,t fear those who can kill the body those who
live by the sword will die by the sword. Now is the time to
turn away from the ways of violence. Treat others the way we
want to be treated. Now is the time to take steps to help the
starving, ill, orphaned, weak, war-oppressed, and down-trodden
all over the world. It is time to turn away from the bomb and
the possibility of ending all life on our planet and to end the
nuclear nightmare.
Fr. Carl Kabat spent several
years in the Philippines and Brazil. "August 6th and August
9th are appropriate times to be in jail, he reflected. "We
are here to witness against the insanity of nuclear weapons.
When these bombs were dropped on the Japanese I was too young
to realize what had happened. Those bombings were war crimes
that we, even today, do not acknowledge. The indiscriminate
killing of children, women, old people and everyone else certainly
cannot be accepted under any just theory of war. Perhaps the
fact that we are in jail can help us as a nation remember the
criminality of those days in the past. None of us can make
up for the killings in the past, but there is a possibility that
our being in jail during this time might help stop such insanity
from being repeated in the future.
North Dakota is home to more
nuclear weapons than any other of the 50 states. The Bureau
of Atomic Scientists estimated that the state contained more
than 1700 nuclear warheads, not counting the ones planted in
concrete silos in the ground.
A friendly cab driver in Bismarck
told me "If North Dakota seceded from the Union, we would
be the world,s third most-powerful nuclear state.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction
Here Plowshares hope their actions will invite the people of
North Dakota, and the rest of the US, to do something about our
nation,s nuclear weapons of mass destruction in light of many
issues of justice, including the deaths of tens of thousands
of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor
of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill is a legal advisor
with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares. He can
be reached at: duprestars@yahoo.com
You can write Fr. Carl Kabat,
Greg Boertje-Obed, or Mike Walli c/o Southwest Multi-County Correctional
Center, 66 Museum Drive, Dickinson, ND 58601.
You can find out more about
the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares at: http://www.jonahhouse.org
You can contact their community
c/o Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community at 218.728.0629.
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