This week marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I plan to take part in several demonstrations in California as part of my ongoing penance, prayer and witness against nuclear weapons and God’s call for peace on earth.
I speak with my friend Jack Cohen-Joppa, who along with his wife, Felice, has published The Nuclear Resister newspaper since 1980.
With over 200 issues, they have chronicled over 100,000 anti-nuclear and anti-war civil disobedience actions and related prosecutions covering thousands of activists, and encouraged support for the women and men jailed and imprisoned for such nonviolent actions.
Their newspaper has tracked every public action that involved crossing a line against war and nuclear weapons, that is, every campaign, every local and regional grassroot effort, and the rise and fall of national movements. When you open its pages or study their website, you discover a whole world of peace activism that few know about.
It routinely documents nonviolent direct actions—including recent demonstrations at California's Vandenberg Space Force Base where activists protest the testing and modernization of nuclear missile systems.
Jack's nuclear education began in 1978 while participating in a year-long civil disobedience campaign at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant outside Denver, and standing trial with Daniel Ellsberg and eight others that autumn.
Theirs is a lifetime of steadfast resistance in campaigns at the Pentagon, Livermore Labs, Los Alamos Labs, the Nevada Test Site, the Trident submarine bases and the Plowshares
“We face a nuclear threat now that is comparable with the threat we faced during the Cold War,” Jack says. “Our challenge is to continue to delegitimize and stigmatize the building of nuclear weapons.
I am in touch with the people who believe that hope is a verb and take action. We believe that this is work worth doing.”
Listen in and discover an ongoing grassroots movement against nuclear weapons and get with the program.
Please visit their site at: www.nuclearresister.org
Supporters can sign up for action alerts, read chronicled histories of dissent, and find instructions on how to write letters of support to imprisoned peace activists.
For those of us who have spent time in jail and prison for civil disobedience against nuclear weapons, Jack and Felice are longtime faithful heroes.
He continues to study, write and speak publicly about nuclear issues.
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🌻, John
