At the Factory That Makes Parts for World War III, Protesters Call for a Change of Heart

As most residents of Kansas City slept during the pre-dawn hours Monday, dozens of Catholic Workers rose from their beds at Cherith Brook Catholic Worker and Jerusalem Farm. After a hurried breakfast and a few strong cups of coffee, they drove half an hour to the sprawling Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC).

The city may have been asleep, but the factory that makes 80 percent of the components for the U.S. nuclear arsenal was lit up and busy. A long line of vehicles carried the factory’s overnight workers home as thousands more streamed up the facility’s long driveway to replace them. Across the street, giant earth-moving machines idled with their lights on, waiting to continue the construction project that would double the size of the complex.

As the overcast sky began to lighten, the Catholic Workers met up with local peace activists. Including the children, they constituted maybe fifty people—not much, compared to the 7,000 workers and billions of dollars powering the KCNSC.

Even so, their plan was to beg those workers—and the U.S. government—to stop assembling the parts necessary to have a global nuclear war.

In essence, their objective was nothing less than averting World War III.

The history of the KCNSC goes back to 1942, when Pratt & Whitney built a factory on the site to make airplane engines for World War II. In 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission hired the Bendix Corporation to build the non-nuclear components of nuclear warheads there. The plant was taken over in 1999 by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, which today operates it on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The KCNSC includes state-of-the-art laboratories and manufacturing facilities that produce a range of electrical, mechanical, and engineered materials essential for nuclear weapons: fiber optics, firing systems, radar systems, specialized composite materials, containment reservoirs, casings, and more.

The facility has grown rapidly over the past decade, renting or purchasing new buildings and more than tripling its workforce, and it is gearing up to grow even more: the $3 billion construction project currently underway will expand the facility’s footprint by 2.5 million square feet.

The KCNSC plans to hire more people, too, partnering with the KC STEM Alliance to provide “urban core high school students” with funding and training so its graduates might one day work at the KCNSC.

With wages starting at $35 an hour for skilled high school graduates, the KCNSC offers “one hundred percent a path out of poverty,” Martha McCabe, director of the KC STEM Alliance, told Kansas City’s public radio station. “And not only for the individual but for their family.”

The facility operates around the clock, seven days a week, with a payroll that tops $550 billion, the radio station reports.

All of that growth is fueled by a 30-year, $1.5 trillion plan to refurbish, upgrade or replace most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal—a plan that is already over budget, according to a 2023 General Accounting Office report. The plan involves developing new submarines, missiles, planes, and command-and-control systems, and has been widely criticized for fueling a second nuclear arms race.

The program to “burn money while imperiling the world,” as Scientific American recently described it, is widely unknown among the American public. PeaceWorks Kansas City, on the other hand, has been protesting at the facility every Memorial Day for years. Last fall, Ann Suellentrop, the vice chair of the organization, asked Catholic Workers at the annual Sugar Creek Catholic Worker gathering in Iowa whether they would be willing to hold their spring Midwest Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat in Kansas City with a view to doing an action at the KCNSC.

They liked the idea, but didn’t want to come on Memorial Day, when the plant would be closed. Instead, they wanted to protest during a shift change, when some of the plant’s thousands of workers could see them.

With Monday morning’s shift change well underway, the activists began setting up in the shadow of a large sign announcing that the National Nuclear Security Campus was “operated by Honeywell.”

Not far away, a smaller yellow sign offered this warning:

NO TRESPASSING
By order of the
U.S. Department of Energy

This facility is subject to the rules and regulations of
the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended,
and 10 CFR 860.

Unauthorized entry upon any DOE/NNSA facility, installation, or real property is prohibited.

Items such as the following are prohibited unless authorized:

– explosives
– dangerous weapons
– instruments or materials likely to produce substantial damage to property or injury to persons

Not indifferent to the irony of the warning, the protesters soon lined the roadside with signs of their own:

World War III Starts Here
Pope Francis: Nuclear Weapons Rob Humanity
Honeywell: Stop Escalating Nuclear War
We are not here to break the law but to uphold the law
Nuclear weapons are illegal
No taxes for bombs

They received a remarkably positive reception from the workers driving past, said Mike Miles, who traveled more than seven hours from Anathoth Catholic Worker Farm in Luck, Wisconsin, to participate in the action.

“They were reading our signs, giving thumbs up, honks, and waves,” he said.

He even had an extended conversation with one of the workers, a young man who, after parking, walked back down to the entrance to talk to Miles.

“He felt like he had to come down in person and see who are these people? Why are they here? What is this all about?” Miles said. “And I was able to have a little bit of an exchange with him. And at one point after we talked about why we were there and what this was about I asked him if he worked there, and he said, ‘Well, for now.’ My impression was that his conscience was appealed to positively in the presence that we brought to the gate.”

When the young man left Miles, he walked further into the group of protesters.

Meanwhile, Ann Suellentrop and a handful of others had walked over to the construction site. It took only a moment for an unmarked Kansas City police car to drive up.

“He was very, very laid back and was like, ‘Well, you guys don’t seem very violent to me,’ and he was just kind of very friendly,” she said.

He struck up a conversation with one of the protesters, leaving the other six free to make their way into the construction site unnoticed. They walked toward one of the earth-moving machines. When its operator saw them, he stopped. Then the site foreman came over.

“He was like, ‘I just don’t want you guys to get hurt. I’m with you, I understand, but I don’t want anybody to get hurt, and they can’t see you up there,’” Suellentrop said. “So we were like, ‘Well, we just want to put this crime scene tape around some machines,’ and he goes, ‘Okay, go ahead and put it on that one.’”

But when they approached the idling machine, its operator ran up and protested: “That’s my machine, don’t put it on my machine!”

Back at the main entrance, Brian Terrell (Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker, Maloy, Iowa) and PeaceWorks Kansas City activist Bennette Dibben were wrapping their own roll of crime scene tape around the large National Nuclear Security Campus sign.

“We are doing your job for you” by labeling the KCNSC a crime scene, Terrell told the KCNSC security officers when they finally arrived. “They got a laugh out of that, but did not remove the tape,” Terrell said. Later, the facility’s head of security arrived and tore down the tape. He “was not laughing,” Terrell noted.

The security officers recognized some of the PeaceWorks Kansas City protesters and asked why they had come “early,” since they were used to seeing them on Memorial Day.

Quite a few of the security personnel and police officers responding to the protest had casual conversations with the activists. Austin Cook, a Catholic Worker most recently from Duluth’s Hildegard House, overheard a police captain telling one of the activists that nuclear weapons are “inevitable,” that the U.S. has to have nuclear weapons because other countries have them. But he acknowledged that it would be good if the world’s nations agreed to disarm.

Cook was busy photographing the protest, so he didn’t engage the officer. He says that if he had, he would have pointed out that the U.S. is leads the global nuclear arms race. “As a world leader, we ought to begin a discussion and forum to work together with Russia, with other countries that have nuclear bombs, to get rid of them. Unless somebody lays down their arms, nobody’s going to. Somebody has to do it first.”

A plan for global nuclear disarmament already exists in the form of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It’s the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination. Seventy nations have ratified or acceded to the treaty as of January 2024, but neither the United States nor any other recognized nuclear-armed state has signed it.

Meanwhile, the global security and stability that nuclear weapons were supposed to ensure seems ever more tenuous. As the Catholic Workers met in small groups Saturday evening to plan the protest, word came that Iran had launched hundreds of armed drones and cruise missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s deadly strike on its consulate in Syria.

The news changed the tenor of the meeting, said Kathy Kelly, the board president of World BEYOND War and co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

“The sense was, you know, we need to make this very, very clear: no nuclear weapons for World War III,” she said. “I think the news sort of catapulted us into a sense of responsibility and accountability, needing to make sure that, you know, we didn’t make ourselves irrelevant to the news at hand, but rather emphasize how relevant this is.”

The conflict between Iran and Israel was on the minds of security personnel at the KCNSC on Monday morning, too.

“They said, ‘Did you see what happened this weekend?’” Miles recalled. “And we said, ‘Well, that’s part of why we’re here, because we don’t want this thing to escalate to a nuclear exchange. I think people were just nervous about that.”

The 1,700 nuclear warheads currently deployed by the United States “is more than enough to threaten the destruction of humanity and Earth’s biosphere,” the editors of Scientific American wrote in 2023 (“The U.S.’s Plans to Modernize Nuclear Weapons Are Dangerous and Unnecessary”). Billions of people would die from the direct effects of a global nuclear exchange, with the survivors likely starving to death in the years-long nuclear winter that would follow. “Even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would kill tens of millions worldwide and cause global famine,” the editors wrote.

By 8 a.m., seven of the protesters had lined up at the purple line marking the edge of the NNSC’s no-go area, with a handful of KCNSC security officers standing nearby. Then, the seven protesters walked just a few steps forward and were immediately arrested.

Inside the construction site, the friendly police officer warned the protesters that they had to leave. Three refused, and they were also arrested.

The arrested individuals included Paul Freid (Lake City Catholic Worker in Minnesota), Brian Terrell, Tom Fox (former publisher of National Catholic Reporter), Mike Miles and Barb Kass and Albert Zook (Anathoth Catholic Worker, Luck, Wisconsin), Greg Boertje-Obed Hildegard House Catholic Worker, Duluth, Minnesota), Jane Stoever (PeaceWorks Kansas City), Scott Bol of Duluth, Minnesota, and Eric Garbison (Cherith Brook Catholic Worker, Kansas City, Missouri).

Instead of being processed at the site and released, the protesters were searched, then cuffed using zip-ties, and told to wait for police transport on the curb. After they had spent “quite a bit of time” waiting on the curb, Terrell said, KCNSC personnel drove a front-loader down the driveway and blocked it with a concrete barrier.

“It seemed a strange thing for them to do, unless they anticipated more of us risking arrest by physically blocking the road ourselves,” Terrell said.

With the police transport vehicle still delayed, a handful of Catholic Workers—two teen daughters of Catholic Workers at the protest, joined by two adults—performed cartwheels and cheerleading routines near the concrete barrier placed by KCNSC security.

“I laughed out loud,” Suellentrop said. “It was hilarious! It gave a joyful, celebratory, carnival-like atmosphere to the otherwise solemn and serious tone of the police arresting us.”

After the arrested protesters had spent more than an hour waiting on the curb, the transport van finally showed up. The officer driving the van had gotten lost. She later said she had never heard of the KCNNSC and didn’t know where it was.

“So many people don’t know what this place does,” Miles said, noting that his Kansas City relatives hadn’t heard of the KCNSC, either. “That officer had lived in Kansas City her whole life and had no idea that there was a plant here that built hydrogen bombs.”

The protesters were taken to a nearby precinct station, where they were processed and released. They will be arraigned on June 3in the Kansas City Municipal Court.

By 1 p.m., they were back at Cherith Brook Catholic Worker House enjoying a real Kansas City barbecue. As they ate, they assessed how the morning had gone.

“The general sense was that we accomplished everything we set out to do in all the planning that we put into it over the weekend,” Miles said. The highlight, he said, was interacting with the KCNSC employees. “They were reading our signs and, you know, understanding, wow, there’s people here who don’t like what we manufacture out here but they’re probably right not to like that we manufacture hydrogen bombs.”

So: Fifty people set out on a Monday morning to confront the trillion-dollar machine turning out the nuts and bolts needed for a nuclear Armageddon. Did they accomplish anything?

The Kansas City Star filed a 500-word paint-by-number protest story that gave far more ink to supporters of the KCNSC project than its critics, quoting a Republican state representative as saying that the KCNSC is “an incredible economic multiplier for the area.” He’s proposing giving the construction project a sales tax exemption.

The paper also quoted the standard KCNSC press statement: “We respect the rights of our neighbors to express their opinions through lawful demonstrations. This is the type of freedom we protect through our national security mission…. The dedicated employees who work at our facility are proud of our work to help safeguard our nation.”

Of course, for Catholic Workers, such actions have never been primarily about being “effective.”

“With non-violent action, it is important not to focus too much on what you will achieve,” Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day, told an audience in Scotland last month. “You do what you do, not because of the results or that you have stunning success or any of that.”

Kelly, for her part, is convinced that young people within the environmental movement will eventually clue into the fact that the world is spending trillions of dollars on systems that threaten all life on the planet.

“I think people will start to wake up,” she said. “I’m expecting that.”

In the meantime, she said, actions like the one on Monday can plant the seeds of awareness, as with the curious young worker who interacted with the activists. And such actions provide a faithful witness, too—an invitation to trust God, not weapons of mass destruction, for our well-being.

“Catholic Workers are so good about saying…there’s no security that Christians could ever find in killing other people,” she said. She pointed to the witness of Archbishop John Wester and Pope Francis as voices speaking out for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. “In a very profound sense, we are in a moment when Christianity’s voice is crucially needed.”