The Long Struggle for Nuclear Disarmament: A Catholic Worker Panel

With multiple Catholic Worker actions taking place this spring around the resurgence of the nuclear arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons—not to mention the Catholic Church’s increasingly vocal opposition to nuclear weapons—now seemed like a good time to gather a panel of people who have been working on the issue for decades.

In an online panel discussion hosted by Roundtable, three longtime activists spent an hour talking about the current state of the nuclear issue, why younger generations are not as engaged with the issue, the history of Catholic Worker activism on nuclear arms, how to hold onto hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and why it matters for people to speak out now.

The panelists included Brian Terrell from Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker in Maloy, Iowa, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy from Saints Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Ann Suellentrop, who is the vice chair of PeaceWorks Kansas City and on the national board of Physicians for Social Responsibility. The panel was moderated by Jerry Windley-Daoust.

The following automatically generated transcript has been reviewed by a human and edited for clarity.

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Jerry Windley-Daoust: Welcome to the Catholic Worker Roundtable, our first actual round table — a virtual round table since the newsletter is called The Roundtable. We thought it might be good to actually do a few. The Catholic Worker Roundtable is the weekly newsletter of CatholicWorker.org. My name is Jerry Windley-Daoust, and I’m both the website and the newsletter editor. I’m here today with Brian Terrell from Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker in Maloy, Iowa. He has long been active in peace and justice work, and we’ll get into some of that background as we go along. Also with us is Claire Schaeffer-Duffy from Saints Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts, also very involved with peace issues, especially around nuclear weapons. And Ann Suellentrop, who is Catholic Worker-adjacent, has been connected with a lot of Catholic Worker houses like Shalom House and Cherith Brook. She’s the vice chair of PeaceWorks Kansas City and is on the national board of Physicians for Social Responsibility. She’s just back from a trip to Japan around the nuclear issue. Did I get that right, Ann?

Ann Suellentrop: Yes.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Wonderful. Well, as we were talking about before we started recording, I thought we could start out by talking a little bit about nuclear weapons in the United States and in the world. Just laying some of the groundwork, some of the facts on the ground about how we got where we are, where we’re at with nuclear weapons, why this is an important issue. I think a lot of the younger generation may not be as aware of this issue or informed about it. So why don’t we start by giving some basic orientation here?

Ann Suellentrop: I would say that there are eight major sites in the U.S. that together make nuclear weapons. They include two sites in California, two sites in New Mexico, one in Tennessee, one in South Carolina, and Kansas City, Missouri, has a plant that started in 1949. It actually makes over 80% of the parts for nuclear weapons — the electronic and mechanical parts, the brains of a nuclear weapon that guide it and set it off.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Okay, so a few different sites where they’re made. What about spending and proliferation? Brian, can you tell us a little bit about how many nuclear weapons we have as a country?

Brian Terrell: We have thousands. I’d like to talk about why the younger generation is not so aware of this as we are. There are a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that starting around 1986, there was a tremendous reduction of nuclear weapons and a lot of discussion, a lot of diplomacy. It was never enough, and unfortunately, people let their guard down. Very few of us kept protesting through that era. I just got back from Nevada, where we were happy to have 50 people together protesting at the nuclear test site, as well as other places. In the late 1980s, there were thousands, untold thousands, and sometimes a thousand people getting arrested in one pop. They couldn’t handle everybody, putting people in corrals. Some people think that (the fact that) we’re still protesting is a sign that we failed. I think it’s a sign that we were more successful than we know back then because of the reduction. Unfortunately, that was reversed by President Obama, who said as a candidate that he wanted ours to be the last generation to live under the threat of nuclear weapons. But shortly afterward, he announced an extension and stockpile stewardship of nuclear weapons. Stewardship means saving things for further generations. We talk about stewardship of soil, stewardship of water, stewardship of infrastructure, like the bridge that just collapsed in Maryland. So now, there’s an intentionality to extend nuclear weapons into further generations. We’re spending $2 billion [Editor: the number is actually $2 trillion] on top of everything else on extending the lives of nuclear weapons. In Nevada, at the nuclear test site, they’re building a machine called Scorpius. It’s an accelerator. I’m not a physicist to understand it all, but it’s the size of a football field, buried a thousand feet underground. The purpose of it is to bombard plutonium with electrons. One of the scientists working on this says that this will be a way we can make sure our nuclear weapon stock is ready to use. He used the analogy: It’s like if you have a car that’s been in the garage for years, you want to be sure that when you turn the key, it starts. But when we turn the key, every living thing on this planet is going to die. We’re spending $1.8 billion on this one machine in Nevada alone.

Also, what’s very scary is that only recently, only in the last few years, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a paper in 2019. We hear the same kind of thing echoed from Russia these days, unfortunately, but it starts with us: a nuclear war can be won with these new weapons, such as being developed in Kansas City. They’re more flexible, they’re easier to use, and they can determine how a commander in the field can prevail. For all those years of the first Cold War, there was always this understanding that the use of these weapons would be so horrible that there would be no winners, and it was not a real peace. President Eisenhower said it was like humanity nailed to a cross of iron. There were hundreds of proxy wars in the Congo, Vietnam, and El Salvador. People were dying; the war did not keep any kind of peace, but that horrible tension kept us from blowing ourselves up, and that’s being abandoned. So, we are at a much more urgent and critical time today than we were then, and so we are going to Kansas City to respond to that threat.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Even though they’re saying that with these new flexible nuclear weapons, a nuclear exchange would be winnable, in fact, the war games, when they model this out, all of the models always end up with a larger exchange and the meltdown of everything.

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy: In that spirit, this is my contribution for listeners and young people unfamiliar with U.S. nuclear history. I think it’s important to emphasize at the beginning that this is our currency of power in the United States. The possession of these weapons provides a capacity to commit all kinds of violence against the planet and human beings because their potential destruction is a form of terror that can be held over people. And when did this emerge in the good old United States? It emerged, of course, during World War II, and it was the product of people who thought scientists were fighting evil with new technology and also with people who wanted to exert an unequivocal expression of American power in the context of World War II. But what happened after the bomb was used is not a great moment of repentance but a tremendous pivot in the country to gearing our economy toward the production of these weapons. This is the other key point to know as Americans: there are 12 major sites where their weapons are manufactured, but really, there is an investment in nuclear weapon production in just about every state in the country, either through research and design or through actual manufacturing or through the production of the carriers that contain them. So this is a challenge for those of us trying to extricate ourselves from a system that is so extensive in our economy and has used so much American talent and intellectual force for now seven decades.

And as Brian said, our production of those weapons accelerated to a point that by the ’60s, we had there were over 30,000 to 40,000 in the world, the majority of them being used by the U.S., owned and possessed by the Soviet Union and the U.S. And there was a kind of rampant disregard, some of it rooted in ignorance, for the present-day destruction that these weapons cause. People think they’re a potential form of destruction, but no, all those tests in the Nevada Test Site destroyed the soil, created wind that contaminated babies, contaminated milk in the Northeast, testing that damaged second-generation children in the Bikini Atoll. So there was just a complete kind of thrill with the technology and lack of awareness that in mere preparation of these weapons, we are destroying ourselves and our resources.

So that has evolved; there’s more knowledge about that. And in the late ’70s, early ’80s, there became a tremendous—and this is also important for Americans to know and for young people to know—that in the arc of violence, productive violence, there’s always that arc of resistance and nonviolent movements. And I’m in my 60s; I’ve looked at this issue since the 1980s, and I only learned in the last two or three years about the African-American voices, black voices, that were critical of nuclear weapons early on, at one of the earliest Americans. And why we’re here as Catholic Workers talking about it is Dorothy Day. Days after the bombing or a month after the bombing of Hiroshima, she understood the sacrilege of these weapons, and she wrote about that unequivocally, like, “No, no buying that these weapons saved our boys,” which was the presumption even of people like Phil Berrigan, who became a great nuclear opponent.

But the black Americans were writing in the black press that this is a horrible form of power, a horrible form of power, anti-human form of power. So that was percolating, but it wasn’t until the late ’70s, early ’80s that the momentum for opposition to nuclear weapons became quite vigorous, and it was fueled by a variety of sources. There was a nuclear freeze movement that was really considered too liberal for the more Catholic Worker activist people, but that effort was one of the largest civilian or civic initiatives in the United States. Ordinary Americans, Americans who wouldn’t necessarily get out on the street for different things, collected signatures saying we should freeze these weapons. There was a massive campaign in the state of Michigan to oppose Reagan deploying weapons to the state. The majority of Michiganders voted for that, and that campaign was generated out of statewide faith and resistance retreats.

Meanwhile, there was a movement of Catholic— you could call them just, you know, hardcore Catholic religious—who understood that this is a sacrilege to destroy life so thoroughly, is a denial of God, and is a kind of idolatry. So they were challenging that adulation of these weapons that became inherent in the American system after World War II, partly because they were so fundamental to our economy. And that, so the, this movement was happening. And so by the 1980s, as Brian said, there was Reagan who was a hawk, who advocated for the MX missile, who was big on Star Wars campaign. He signed treaties with the Soviet Union, and there was a reduction. There were bilateral treaties to address the, at least to, to put a mitigating factor on the arsenals, and there were actual reductions of arsenals. And there were lots of reasons for it, you know, the Berlin Wall fell, but it was a credit to the activism, not just in the United States but throughout Europe.

I was in Europe, and Casper Weinberger said, “Well, we can use tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.” And this is what Brian is talking about, it’s a new, it’s an old argument in new form. “We have some small weapons, we can possibly use them in Europe.” And this infuriated the European populace, and there were massive marches in London and throughout European capitals. And that is where I became animated on the issue. And I had, you know, through the grace of God, I happened to just meet Catholics who were seeing this as a central issue to speak up. And it was a really important history to recall because when we get discouraged, we need to remind ourselves that there is the influence of people power.

But now we are on chapter two of a renewed arms race. We’re down to one treaty between the U.S. and Russia. And a new framing to make the weapons palatable. We’re down to about 13,000 in the arsenal, 90% of which are owned by the U.S. and Russia. A lot of global distrust is jeopardizing establishing these treaties between nation-states that have the weapons. But there is the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and this was created in 2017 by a thoroughly grassroots movement, utterly from the people. People who said, “We are not going to think about these weapons as that power currency that I mentioned at the beginning of my long-winded summary here. We’re not going to think about it that way because we’re not going to say that this makes our nation-state more secure when in actuality it destroys our lands, it destroys the people who manufacture these weapons, it destroys the people, God forbid, whoever are victims of them if they should be used.” So they looked at these weapons through the lens that we really should look at all of our armaments: Human beings. What does it do to the human body? And they made that the priority of evaluating the weapons and concluded, as all Earth cries out, that these should be eradicated. They are anti-life.

And so the treaty calls for not just gradual reduction but for total prohibition. And it really looks at the system that makes the weapons possible: their transport, their deployment in different nation-states. So any signature of the treaty is saying that they are unlawful, they are illegal. And so if the treaty is actually implemented, states that have signed it can argue, “You cannot transport your nuclear weapons through my state because those are illegal weapons.” So it is this flare of hope in the midst of, as Brian and Ann said, a very challenging time. But again, the conscience, you know, the Holy Spirit is always afoot in the world, and our task is to find where the wind is blowing and add to it. So I may have said more than I should have.

Ann Suellentrop: No, that was wonderful. And we are having a retreat and resistance event April 12th to the 15th in Kansas City in response to the doubling of the nuclear bomb parts plant here in Kansas City. And they will be hiring up to 9,000 workers, which is the level of workers during the Cold War. So we’re really the epicenter of the new 21st-century arms race. And the other thing that is happening is that the National Nuclear Security Administration, under the Department of Energy, is wanting to resume making plutonium pits, and that is the core of the nuclear weapon. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability has filed suit against this to stop this, and that suit is going forward, hopefully, this summer.

And I might want to just make clear that the nuclear weapons used in the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are BBs compared to the size of thermonuclear weapons today. They’re basically, I would call them portable crematoriums. They bring a huge ball of fire, hotter than the sun, to cities, and they vaporize absolutely everything underneath them in the center. A huge explosion follows that flattens everything for miles, and it is radioactive contamination that makes this different than any other bomb. And that mingles with the soot and falls down on the people throughout the city. And so there are massive burns, all kinds of traumas, but there’s no medical help afterward because medical personnel and hospitals are destroyed. So this is why it is so perniciously evil. And we’ve got to, you know, resist this new upswing. We’re going the wrong way. And scientists have actually calculated that a full-on nuclear war would mean the end of life on Earth because the soot from those burned cities would loft into the stratosphere, covering the Earth, circling the Earth, plunging us into a nuclear winter colder than the last ice age. So there would be no crops, and that would be it.

And, you know, the danger of nuclear war is increasing. We had Representative Mark Wahlberg the other day saying, “Well, you know, the solution over in the Gaza Strip would be just to do like what they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just make it quick and easy.” Well, the results would be catastrophic and deeply immoral. And I was just over in Hiroshima, Nagasaki with a Pax Christi group, and we met with Hibakusha survivors of the bombings in both cities. And we gave a formal public apology to them, and we also put out a statement of purpose to work together to get rid of nuclear weapons and had a press conference where on TV and in the newspapers and stuff. And I’ve always been inspired by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement because they stood for nonviolence. And, of course, Dorothy Day was one of the people that helped found Pax Christi. And I have been studying the gospel nonviolence in a group led by a follower of Father Emanuel Charles McCarthy. And I’ve always admired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but in the last few years, I’ve come to realize Jesus was totally nonviolent. I don’t know why I never realized that in all the—I mean, I’m a cradle Catholic. But, yeah, no war, especially no nuclear war, I would say, is what we should be about. We should not be normalizing the idea of nuclear war.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: And just to jump in here, and I appreciate that, and I think a lot of us, part of the reason this was such a big issue in the ’80s was the result of some of these made-for-TV movies that showed—we remember The Day After—and similar TV movies that really partially dramatized, they really didn’t show the full extent of what would happen, but partially dramatized the threat, lots of fiction books, and so on. And so just to quickly run down a list here of the impact of this nuclear program: $4 trillion spent on nuclear weapons up until I think the year 2000. Now we’re planning to spend another $1.5 to $2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize the nuclear weapons, which basically involves removing the cores, the weapon cores, and putting new equipment around them. And that’s what the plant at Kansas City is involved in, is improving the technology that would be used to deploy these weapons. So you’ve got the cost of the weapons, all that money being spent on weapons that you can’t use without destroying humanity. And then you’ve got the impact of what the weapons would do if they were ever actually deployed. Right? And as Claire pointed out, of course, the impact of just maintaining the program at all. Am I getting some of the facts right, or need correction?

Brian Terrell: No, that’s a good summary. And I think something that we often miss is that these—the nuclear test site in Nevada, the Sandia Labs, the plant in Kansas City—these aren’t under the Department of Defense. This is the Department of Energy that’s doing this. And we look at the defense budget, and we don’t—all the stuff is not included because this is the Department of Energy. So we’re in 2024, and we’re facing destruction by climate change. Well, you’d think for the Department of Energy of the United States, with billions of dollars and all these brilliant physicists and scientists and engineers on the payroll, and they’re all busy building new nuclear bombs, think of what could be possible if the Department of Energy were working on renewable energy sources at this point in history. But it’s not. The best minds, you know, people graduating from the university with a degree in physics, are not going to get a job trying to work on energy issues. They’ll go from windmills to warheads to windmills.

But I think it’s important in this discussion, because our venue, the CatholicWorker.org, how the Catholic Worker fits in this. And I think it’s especially important because there are voices among us who see these nonviolent demonstrations and this focus on nuclear weapons as a distraction from the works of mercy that we ought to be doing, a distraction from the prayers that we should be saying, a distraction from building the new society in the shell of the old. There’s a Catholic Worker community in Kansas City that says that we’re a tragedy, that the movement is hamstrung because of the people who think we can demonstrate our way into justice. But this is really at the core. Claire referenced Dorothy’s letter, Dorothy’s column after the bombing of Hiroshima. And you should find it; it’s in the September 1945 issue of the Catholic Worker. You can find it on CatholicWorker.org. And the people of Japan, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not abstractions. You know, this was a very personalist piece that she wrote. These were her brothers and sisters, and she writes about how they were vaporized and that even in New York City, she realized she was breathing in the dust of her brothers and sisters from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, that came over the winds around the world.

So this is—and even before the bomb, Dorothy said that nonviolent resistance is the only sane response, you know, to the military-industrial complex. The only sane response. I think the Catholic Agitator from Los Angeles just came out with a lot about nuclear disarmament, and they published a leaflet that was distributed at a civil defense drill in June 15, 1955, protesting the Duck and Cover. “We refuse to cooperate. We, the Catholic Worker, refuse to hide and grovel in fear. Jesus said a new commandment I give you: love others as I have loved you. Then it says, we do not have faith in God if we depend on the atom bomb. We do not have faith in God if we depend on warlike politicians. We call upon Catholics and other Christians and upon true Americans to make this a free country, to make this a country known over the world as a haven for the oppressed, instead of piling up huge surplus of food and doling it out to those countries that will promise to be our puppets.” You know, that could be said today.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: So, talk a little bit about the role of the New York Catholic Worker in ending the mandatory air raid drills, because that all started with the Catholic Worker in New York City, right?

Brian Terrell: Yeah, that was Ammon Hennacy’s idea, and the War Resisters League and other people jumped on board, but it was a Catholic Worker initiative. And for several years, in through the ’50s, there was a program in which everybody in New York City, every citizen, had to be indoors, you know, taking shelter in basements and subways. You know, the idea that an atom bomb on Manhattan could be survived by cowering in the subway. And I think it was not so much about civil defense as it was about inuring Americans to the idea that a nuclear war would be an inconvenience, but you can come out of the subway when it’s all done and go back to work.

Claire Scaeffer-Duffy: These— we should explain, Brian, just so people know, it’s a drill. It was a civil defense drill. So, drill, yes. The citywide, instead of a fire drill, it’s a drill for a nuclear weapon. The sirens would go off, and everybody had to, like Brian said, go in the subways or shelters.

Brian Terrell: So the Catholic Worker, it started out with like a dozen people sitting on park benches in City Hall Park and being very, very public. “We’re gonna do this,” and they were arrested. The judge told them, accused them of murdering millions of New Yorkers by their act of defiance, in effect. And for some years, for the staff of the Catholic Worker in New York, it was like a 30-day sentence every spring was kind of worked into the calendar about who would be going to jail this time. And eventually, there were thousands, thousands, and they simply had to cancel this program, you know, a small victory. But you know, that was deeply ingrained in our tradition. I was at the New York house in the ’70s for some years, and only one time did I merit Dorothy Day mentioning me in her column, and that was in June 1978, on pilgrimage. And Dorothy wrote this: “I rejoice to see the young people thinking of the works of mercy as a truly revolutionary but nonviolent program. The spiritual and the corporal certainly go together and often involve suffering to oppose the nuclear buildup has led to the imprisonment this last month of two of our workers, Robert Ellsberg and Brian Terrell, in Rocky Flats, Colorado. Meanwhile, I am confined another way by weakness and age but can truly pray with fervor for those on active duty and sternly suppress my envy at the activities of our young and valiant workers.” And many today will say that in Dorothy’s last year, she was appalled by the activism of the younger Catholic Workers, that she distanced herself from the kind of activities that were going on in the ’70s. And if she was despondent at all during that time, it was, as she says, she was sternly suppressing her envy of those of us who were out in the street because she wanted to be with us. She wanted to be out there. And you know, this needs to be a part at this time in history especially. This needs to be a part of the Catholic Worker witness. And it shouldn’t be denigrated and marginalized. All of us are called to do something. All of us to speak out. And there are Catholic Worker newsletters that come that have no mention of nuclear weapons or the wars or the war economy, that the Catholic Worker was meant to be a counterweight and a counter witness to all of that. And this is what we need to be.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Yeah, so you could talk about the Plowshares movement too, that grew up in the ’80s, right?

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy: Right. Yes. Could I just throw in on this topic, and it will touch on the Plowshares—Jerry, I’m interrupting in my rude way—on why Catholic Workers should be concerned about this, for those in communities that identify as more traditional Catholics, this is a very important effort because the pope, it was first of all, the Vatican was the first signature of this treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons. And I encourage all houses to read the John Archbishop John Wester pastoral on that calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons because its opening chapter takes you through the arc of the institutional church’s movement from tolerating deterrence or saying these weapons are bad very, very early in the 1960s. They were saying that to being unequivocally a voice for complete abolishment of nuclear weapons. And it was, you were reminding me, Brian when you were talking, we want to be faithful to the efforts of our ancestors because, you know, during the Vatican big meeting for Vatican II, Dorothy and Jean Goss, and I think some people from, oh, that famous, I can’t, the Del Vasto pacifist Catholic pacifist, they were fasting in Rome for 10 days to, I think this was in ’62. I mean, there’s a marvelous record of this that Dorothy writes about, but other women who were participating in this 10-day fast that nuclear weapons, calling for an anti-nuclear weapons, a nuclear disarm, would be included in the Vatican II teachings. And that voice was ultimately heard. There was a long discourse and offering. But on the Plowshares, a little story because I love stories. Phil Berrigan is one of the late Phil Berrigan, was one of the, you could call him, I think, safely, a founding father of the Plowshares movement. And this was a movement that took its inspiration from the prophet Isaiah, who calls us to beat swords into plowshares. And they would go, Plowshares activists go to weapons facilities and with hammer and baby bottles of blood and banners and bang on these instruments that, to all of us, seem so overwhelmingly permanent and destructive. And there, the gesture, the symbolism, the sacrament, you might even say, is to challenge that acquiescence and to say, no, indeed, God is mightier than all of this. We made them; we can undo them. And often, the bread and wine is offered during these witnesses, and banners are hung. But what about Phil? So Phil was a Josephite priest, and he was a red-blooded American who served in World War II. In fact, his job, he was to make sure that the missiles that were being fired accurately hit their mark. And he was so good at that that they sent him to officer training school in Paris. And when the U.S. dropped the Hiroshima bomb, Phil was with some of the Jesuits because Dan, his brother, was a Jesuit. And they all had a little spontaneous parade and waved the American flag in jubilation that, yay, we won—this bomb, you know, let us win. And he goes on to work in the South as a priest. He’s serving for blacks in New Orleans, and the Cuban Missile Crisis happens. And that just rattles Americans to the core. And he has people out the door and around the block lined up for confession, these very ordinary Catholics. He told me this story toward the end of his life because I asked him, I said, “You know, what got you focused on nuclear weapons?” And so he said, “There I was, and these desperate people convinced that they were going to die because nuclear weapons were en route from Russia towards Cuba.” And so they felt helpless in the face of this impending doom, and they were going to make confession to the priest. And he said, “It made me angry. It made me so angry that two men, Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, two men in the world, could have so much power over human life because of these things.” And that was his conversion moment.

And I, it’s, I think about that story and appreciate the humanness of it. We need to keep our conscience alert, our souls, our heart alive. And so these pitiful little protests, these little, you know, going to these bases with these little banners, it is to keep the heart pulsing because to acquiesce to these weapons as a resource for us is to say, “My peace is fine if it’s purchased at the expense of millions.” And we cannot say that. We cannot. God does not allow that. And we are called to really believe that we are liberated from this enthrallment with death. That is what Jesus is showing us in Easter, that our conviction that death has the last word, death is the powerful thing, you know, the destruction is, is, is, that is not true. But we must live that truth. And that is why, as Catholic Workers, it is, of course, on a, on a, on an immediate assessment, you know, you’re just out there doing a little protest or a little civil disobedience. I mean, this is a whole system in the American power structure. But every gesture, every effort, every human act is an opposition to this agglomeration of death. We cannot be about that. And we have to believe, and it has been, it’s not a naive belief, that God acts in these, in these tiny gestures. There’s only, there, there’s no other way to, to act. I mean, would be wonderful if there was a great sweeping across the Earth and tossing into the sea of all these things, but that ain’t going to happen. That is just not going to happen. And so we have to take to heart what Jesus is saying about the sanctity of life, of life with a capital L, not just our puny little corporeal selves but life, life, and God inspiring, you know, respiring, breathing through it all. And that is what we are trying to proclaim when we oppose these weapons.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: That’s very beautifully said.

Ann Suellentrop: And I might just, uh, give a story about Carl Kabat, Father Carl Kabat. Yeah, he famously went with three others to, we used to have hundreds of ICBMs here in Missouri, and he rented a jackhammer and went out and hammered on the ICBM cover. And he spent 27 years in prison behind that. And in his later years, every Fourth of July, he would go out and spend the night on the campus grounds, the new National Security Campus grounds in Kansas City, and he would splash red paint on the front sign. And, you know, his protest. So he’s very famous. There’s now a Catholic Worker house in St. Louis named after him. And I would also bring up the fact that the intersection of climate change and nuclear weapons is catastrophic. A few years ago, there were floods around the nuclear power plants in Nebraska, and then there was a forest fire near Los Alamos, came very close to it. And then just recently, there was a prairie fire, I guess, around Pantex in Texas, where they actually put together all the parts for nuclear weapons or take them apart. So, you know, and it has also flooded there. You know, you would think Texas, that’s dry. No, there was a flood there.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: So, yeah, so the threat there. Well, we’re almost out of time. But before we end, maybe we can go around and talk about what is going on now. All three of you are involved in different types of activism around this issue. Claire, do you want to begin? You traveled to Ukraine this past year. You also have been involved in some educational work on the test ban, or not the test ban treaty, the nonproliferation treaty. Do you want to speak to that? And then maybe, Ann, you could talk about this event coming up later on this month in Kansas City and the goals for that. And Brian, you can share about your experience both in Nevada and in Europe. Claire, why don’t you go ahead?

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy: Sure. So I did go to Ukraine a year ago with a team that was experimenting on using civilian protection to address the risk that is still there around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. And would there be a nonviolent sort of civilian barrier around the plant to support the International Atomic Energy people who were there supervising the protection of the plant? That project is a little bit slowed because of the gravity of the war, but it is a remarkable story that the inspectors are still going in unarmed to kind of keep the plant from having a meltdown and jeopardizing the ecosystem and, of course, all the human beings that live there. It’s a densely populated region in southeast Ukraine.

There are two things happening in the New England corners. I’ll just talk about that quickly. One of them is that a group of Pax Christi people have been trying to get their, the Archbishop Wester’s pastoral on that calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons into various parishes. And in that effort, they were meeting regularly, and what came out of it was to host initially, it was going to be a workshop under the offices of the Archdiocese of Boston on animating faith communities to work on nuclear discernment. And at the last minute, the archdiocese pulled out of backing that workshop, which was a great misfortune. And the group, though, was undeterred, and so they decided to host a big webinar, and they had Archbishop Wester speak, Marie Dennis, and Ira Helfand, who was one of the founders of Physicians for Human Rights, which was a central group in working for the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And he’s now engaged in the Back from the Brink campaign, which is kind of a second iteration of what the nuclear freeze was, mobilizing cities, mobilizing towns, mobilizing states if possible, parishes to come out publicly and say, “We are calling for these five policy changes in our nuclear weapons policy,” one of them is to take the weapons off first use, which is what the U.S. currently has right now. And that’s a more tame engagement, but certainly one that people are working very hard on. How can we get our parishes to talk about this and to take action?

The other really interesting thing that Scott, my husband, is doing, and that’s why he should be in the room, the Trident submarine program is getting re-energized by this modernization effort that has been referenced in our hour together today. And so they are now building Trident submarines, not now, they always have, at Electric Boat in New London, Connecticut, located about a mile and a half from where we are in Worcester, Massachusetts. And in the ’80s, there were big demonstrations at these sites that harbor nuclear weapons, that manufacture submarines that would hold the weapons. The weapons are not manufactured there, the subs. And there were even some Plowshares actions at the subs. Now they’re trying to restart that. The Atlantic Life Community, which is a coalition of many different Catholic Worker communities, and they had a demonstration in November, the blocking the gate entering to General Dynamics, which is the corporation responsible for manufacturing the subs, and people were arrested. Not much news coverage, not much local engagement. But the group said, “We want to come back,” and they came back earlier this in March, right around the time of the Oscars, and they came back with huge, not huge, but life-sized cutouts of Oppenheimer, and they had about 24 Oppenheimers, the cutouts of Oppenheimer, nailed together that blocked the gate and the gate where workers were going in. And the arrest lasted all of two minutes, literally. One of the people that I was participating, I didn’t participate, he kind of came in thinking it was going to be at six, and he had to ask the police, “Where can a person get arrested around here?” Whisked off and had fascinating conversations with the local police about their support for what the protesters had done and an awareness from the local police and actually the prosecutor that this is just an absurd overkill and unnecessary spending. It was fascinating, and they received more press than you can imagine for being two minutes on a driveway. They, it, because of the Oppenheimer association, and they energized some local interest. So, so it’s a story of persistence because the first action was a bit of a non-one, and then they come back, and something is getting energized. And so we have to persist.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Good. Thank you for sharing that. Ann, what’s going on in Kansas City here coming up?

Ann Suellentrop: Well, it will start with a film on the 12th, Friday night. And it is called “Downwind,” and it is about the effects of nuclear testing in the U.S. and how we’re all downwinders. Ian Zabarte is in it; he represents the Western Shoshone Indigenous people. An activist from Utah is in there, and New Mexico downwinders, Kevin Camps from Beyond Nuclear is in the film. It’s excellent. And I might mention that there are people in St. Louis and Kansas City who are affected peoples from the nuclear weapons work. And we have been talking to Congressman Hawley, actually, about getting compensation and health care through the RECA act, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. So that’s going on. The events will be held at Jerusalem Farm, so you can find a scenario and how to sign up on JerusalemFarm.org. And also, Cherith Brook isn’t also holding some of the activities. Saturday morning will be a panel by Brian and Kathy Kelly and myself and others. We will go in the afternoon for a walk in front of the plant and also to see what’s going on where they’re building the new plant right across the street. Nonviolence training. And then 10:00 a.m. Sunday mass. And then the afternoon will be spent planning for the action. We’re going to have it on the 15th in the morning at shift change because it’s misusing our tax funds. So that’s Tax Day, you know, April 15th.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Good. Good. That’s an interesting tie-in that I hadn’t connected on before. Brian?

Brian Terrell: Yes, I just got home on Monday after three weeks in the desert in Nevada. And most of that was spent walking from Las Vegas, from the Nuclear Testing Museum on the strip in Las Vegas, to the nuclear test site, almost 70 miles away, and ending with an act of resistance at the test site. Nevada Desert Experience has been doing this for some 40 years, and always with the permission and the leadership of the Western Shoshone people. We pay each, pay them $10 a year for a permit to be on their land. And the Department of Energy, which occupies that land, just, in 1950, I believe it was, they just went in with guns and chased the people away, and they just took the land. There’s no—they have no claim to it. And so the real trespassers—we get arrested for trespassing over and over again—but the real trespassers are the Department of Energy. And it’s so, I’ve been, since 2018, I’ve been in Europe at least once a year. I was, as Claire was talking about, in 1983, I was in Europe, in Germany for a month, and gave talks in 15 cities about nuclear weapons while there were millions of people in the street. Then that was a very exciting time. That was my first visit there. So I’m currently facing criminal charges in Germany and Netherlands. Last summer, I was expelled from the European Union for these actions and eventually have got some jail time that’s going to catch up with me, with some unpaid fines in Germany. Our friend Susan Crane from the Redwood City Catholic Worker is in June going to begin a seven-month sentence in a German prison. And our hearts will be with her. Many of these today, the Amsterdam Catholic Worker and Hamburg Catholic Worker are among the organizers of these events. So, and it’s a very joyful time. I just think we both, in the desert and in these trips to Europe, I think at a time like this, our choices are we can be in denial that it’s going on and ignore it, or we can be in panic, or we can get together with people who are doing things. And I just find the greatest joy and the most fun gathering together with people of like mind. And it’s the only way to keep hope alive is through action. We don’t act because we have hope; we have hope because we act. And it gives our prayers—couple of years ago, I was arrested; they actually allowed us to dig a tunnel into the base at Volkel where the F-16s are, owned by the Dutch Royal Air Force. There’s a squadron of U.S. Air Force on that base that maintains 20 nuclear bombs, B61s. And the police, for some reason, allowed us, stood by and let us dig a tunnel four feet under the ground and up and around, and we actually got on the runway where the planes were taking off for this big NATO exercise before we were arrested. And it was just one of the great sacramental moments to be putting the resistance to nuclear weapons into muscle. You’re actually getting sweaty and getting dirty and digging a hole. It made it less abstract and it makes it far easier for me to deal with. And so I encourage people to come to Kansas City and join together with people with hope and faith.

Jerry Windley-Daoust: Good. Yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks to all of you for spending this more than an hour now talking about this really important issue. And I think we could probably be talking for another two or three hours if we wanted to, but we will link out in the show notes, link out to some of these resources that have been mentioned, and hopefully generate a transcript for people too. Thank you all for joining us today, and God bless you with all of your efforts coming up.

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy: Thank you for organizing, Jerry. Really out for all your work. God bless you for your work.

Brian Terrell: Thank you, Jerry.

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy: Have a great retreat, all you good people out there in the Midwest and good action. And always good to see you both, Ann and Brian. Take good care.