[image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes…
May 10, 2013
Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears By JUSTIN
GILLIS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/justin_gillis/…>
The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon
dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday,
reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.
Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily
level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense,
but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring
human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has
not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved,
and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and
the level of the sea.
“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this
problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new
reading.
Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography <http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/> in San Diego,
said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly
losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought
were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.
Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places,
every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively
little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.
China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil
fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more
responsible than any other nation for the high level.
The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna
Loa<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?pagewanted=al…>,
the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for
monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there
sample <http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html> clean, crisp
air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a
record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for
half a century.
Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic
last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna
Loa.
But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa
for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight
Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different
protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per
million, while Scripps reported 400.08.
Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip
below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about
10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a
brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the
ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below
400.
“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E.
Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of
Columbia University.
>From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that
going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight
band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about
280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global
temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.
For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the
carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the
burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the
heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological
instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they
expect far larger changes in the future.
Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level
was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called
the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far
warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level
might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.
Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions
— except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.
“It takes a long time to melt ice, but we’re doing it,” Dr. Keeling said.
“It’s scary.”
Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide
measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The
elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per
million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with
air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.
His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the
seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling
Curve<http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/>.
Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global
warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible
with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well
under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.
Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to
adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater
efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become
impossible without severe economic disruption.
“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can
go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said
Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If
you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best
you can hope for.”
Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are
politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide
represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading,
exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather
undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher,
said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.
But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming
that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research
shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping
heat near the surface of the earth.
“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe
our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in
CO2emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale
geochemist
who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was
yesterday.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
*Correction: May 10, 2013*
An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide
in the air as of Thursday’s reading from monitors. It is .04 percent, not
.0004 percent.
--
William V. DePaulo, Esq.
179 Summers Street, Suite 232
Charleston, WV 25301-2163
Tel 304-342-5588
Fax 304-342-5505
william.depaulo(a)gmail.com
www.passeggiata.com
FYI. Paul
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Public News Service" <newsservice(a)newsservicemail.org>
Date: May 10, 2013 3:05 AM
Subject: WVNS story: Fight Over Clean Water Rules
To: "PaulWilson" <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com>
Cc:
Fight Over Clean Water Rules
Dan Heyman, Public News Service-WV
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1
Join the discussion:
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(05/10/13) CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Congressional Republicans want to force the
Environmental Protection Agency to loosen clean water laws, but coalfield
residents say their water is too polluted now.
Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Shelley
Moore Capito of West Virginia, are backing a bill that would force the EPA
to act on coal mining permits or have them approved automatically.
But coalfield residents say pollution from the mines already threatens
their health.
Bo Webb of Peachtree Creek in Raleigh County, W.Va., says in the last year
and a half, 14 people in that small community have found they have cancer,
including his wife.
"I got home on December the 1st, my wife wasn't feeling good,” he recalls.
“And we went to the doctor, and she'd thrown up some blood. And the doctor
called, so we went in. And my wife had cancer. Then on March 3rd she died.
And so, it takes its toll."
The Republicans say the EPA is sitting on permits in a back-door attempt to
shut down coalmines, part of what they call a "war on coal."
Meanwhile coalfield residents are bringing gallons of brown and red water
to Congress to show what they drink, cook and wash with.
The GOP bill, known as the Coal Jobs Protection Act, has the backing of
coal industry associations and a variety of business groups.
But Ada Smith of Whitesburg, Ky. says the focus should be more about
overall job diversification in the region.
"I think that most people understand that coal isn't going to be the number
one source of employment,” she says. “It hasn't been for a really long
time."
Many citizen and environmental groups say the clean water that coalfield
residents depend on is at risk of being sacrificed for mine company
profits.
Sue Tallichet, a member of the grassroots citizens group Kentuckians for
the Commonwealth, calls the legislation "a bailout for coal."
"McConnell's bill is very deceiving in that, it's even called the Coal Job
Protection Act,” she argues. “They're not protecting jobs and miners –
they're protecting profits."
Click here to view this story on the Public News Service RSS site and
access an audio version of this and other stories:
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1<http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1>
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For those who still think natural gas is a way to reduce greenhouse gases, join the EE campaign team. Lower your bills, create thousands of jobs, and save the planet!
Jim Kotcon
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jennifer Miller <jen.miller(a)sierraclub.org>
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:50 PM
Subject: Report: More US C02 reductions from EE than Switching in Nat Gas
To: CONS-FRED(a)lists.sierraclub.org
http://co2scorecard.org/home/researchitem/27
"Energy related CO2 emissions in the US fell by 205 million metric tons in 2012. CO2 Scorecard breaks it down and shows that nearly 75% of the decline is accounted for by demand reduction primarily due to the economy-wide energy efficiency and conservation measures in the transportation, residential and commercial sectors; the mild winter in the first quarter of 2012 also gave a helping hand."
--
Jen Miller
(614)563-9543 ( tel:%28614%29563-9543 )
Senior Campaign Representative for Energy Efficiency
Sierra Club National Beyond Coal Campaign
Very interesting discussion of PPAs 3rd party power purchase agreements.
Bringing more rooftop solar.
On May 3, 2013 8:18 AM, "Ivy Main" <ivymain(a)cox.net> wrote:
> Jim, the discussion of the PPA is here: powerforthepeopleva.com.
>
> Ivy Main
> 703-967-2876
>
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2013/04/29/the-prophets-of-oak-ridge…
THE PROPHETS OF OAK RIDGE
Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the
exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure
nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old
nun and a house painter. They face trial next week on charges that fall
under the sabotage section of the U.S. criminal code. And if they had been
terrorists armed with explosives, intent on mass destruction? That
nightmare scenario underlies the government’s response to the intrusion.
This is the story of two competing worldviews, of conscience vs. court, of
fantasy vs. reality, of history vs. the future.
CHAPTER 1
Mission
*The devil was* just over Pine Ridge.
>From the deserted parking lot on the edge of town, the three servants of
God looked into darkness.
They clicked on their flashlights, pushed through the initial thicket of
brush and began their trek, aiming for the black wooded slope.
First, the house painter: bearded, calm, quiet.
Second, the Catholic nun: gentle, grandmotherly, short of breath.
Third, the drifter: alert, intense, shouldering supplies.
They crept across the marshy field, led by some combination of God and
Google Maps. Behind them was the city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., 30 minutes west
of Knoxville. On the other side of Pine Ridge was Bear Creek Valley —
cradle of the Y-12 National Security Complex, the “Fort Knox of Uranium,”
birthplace of the heart of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima 67
years earlier.
It was, the house painter would later recall, as if the Almighty were
guiding each step, across 1,000 feet of open field and up an embankment.
By 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 28, 2012, two career peace activists, with
eight years jail time between them, and an 82-year-old nun had reached the
first obstacle in their two-hour, one-mile hike toward one of the country’s
most secure nuclear facilities.
A six-foot chain-link boundary fence bordered a gravel patrol road. Strung
along the fence were yellow “No Trespassing” placards threatening a
$100,000 fine and up to one year in prison.
The house painter gripped a pair of bolt cutters, fixed the jaws around a
link and squeezed. He cut links in three lines, then opened the new flap.
No alarm. No patrol cars.
The nun went through first.
After the two men followed her, they closed the fence with twine, crossed
the patrol road and began the 40-degree ascent to the dark crest of the
ridge. The crime had started, which meant they were one step closer to
justice.
One step closer to rattling the Department of Energy.
One step closer to assailing the nation’s storied nuclear identity.
One step closer to changing their lives and the lives of the people on the
other side of the slope — including the first man they would meet once they
cut through three more fences and entered the kill zone.
John Hendrix, an ascetic who lived in East Tennesse during the early part
of the 20th century, was nicknamed the Prophet of Oak Ridge after his
death. His grave is located near the Y-12 National Security Complex. (Linda
Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 2
‘… and the earth will shake’
*In those same* woods, around 1900, a middle-aged ascetic named John
Hendrix gazed up at the sky and heard a voice like a clap of thunder.
The voice told Hendrix to sleep in the woods for 40 nights. So he did. And
he had a vision of the future, according to “The Oak Ridge
Story<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1440051658/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=17…>,”
a 1950 book by George O. Robinson Jr.
“And I tell you,” Hendrix said to his farming community after his retreat,
“Bear Creek Valley some day will be filled with great buildings and
factories and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will
be. . . . They will be building things and there will be great noise and
confusion and the earth will shake.”
Hendrix often summited Pine Ridge, Robinson wrote, to pray over the vista
of peach orchards and log cabins.
“I’ve seen it,” was his refrain. “It’s coming.”
On Nov. 11, 1942, decades after Hendrix’s death, a letter from the
government arrived at the home of his son: “The War Department intends to
take possession of your farm Dec. 1, 1942. . . . Your fullest cooperation
will be a material aid to the War Effort.”
The government paid Curtis Allen Hendrix $850 for his 60-acre farm, which
would be overtaken by the Manhattan Project, the country’s race to build an
atomic bomb before Hitler did. Three thousand homesteaders were displaced
by the government, which then built a city from scratch by laying 200 miles
of road, constructing 44,000 dwelling units and importing 75,000 workers:
steelmen from Pennsylvania, machinists and woodworkers from Michigan,
riveters and physicists and stenographers and chemists from coast to coast.
The 14-square-mile “Secret City” of Oak Ridge was forested with billboards
that said “Keep mum about this job” and “We will win in ’44 with your help.”
Click or press to view full image
Scores of East Tennessee high school girls were trained to operate the
dials on complex machinery at the Y-12 site. They didn’t know that each
flick of their wrists aided the gram-by-gram production of U-235, the
uranium isotope that can sustain the chain reaction of fission necessary to
create a nuclear explosion.
The science seems simple enough: When a neutron strikes the nucleus of a
U-235 atom, the nucleus splits and releases thermal energy and more
neutrons, which in turn strike and split more uranium nuclei, and on and
on, in an instant, until . . .
The biggest boom, from the smallest of particles.
Around the clock for 18 months, the Secret City hummed and hustled.
Hendrix, his vision borne out, was posthumously deemed the Prophet of Oak
Ridge. For most townspeople, the full nature of their mission became clear
only in bold newspaper ink on Aug. 6, 1945.
“ATOMIC SUPER-BOMB, MADE AT OAK RIDGE, STRIKES JAPAN,” announced the
Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Sunset at the Y-12 National Security Complex, where weapons-grade uranium
is stored and processed. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 3
Sabotage
*It was into* this land and history that outsiders intruded 67 years later:
Sister Megan Gillespie Rice, now 83; drifter Michael Robin Walli, now 64;
and house painter Gregory Irwin Boertje-Obed, 57.
They, like Hendrix, had a vision.
They, like Hendrix, can come off a little batty.
Michael, though fiercely intelligent, often departs on tirades about the
Antichrist.
Sister Megan, adamant about not harming any living thing, vowed that if
they were attacked by guard dogs inside the complex she would not even
raise her hands in self-defense.
Greg is so meek in demeanor that it’s hard to imagine him wielding cutlery,
let alone bolt cutters.
Hendrix envisioned the improbable construction of a wartime city.
Michael, Sister Megan and Greg envision its improbable dismantlement.
With elbow grease and blind faith, they would make a symbolic incursion to
defeat the site’s $150 million-a-year security operation. They would
mortify the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, which since 1940 has cost at
least $9.8 trillion in 2013 dollars — costlier than all other government
expenditures except Social Security and non-nuclear defense programs,
according to nuclear weapons policy analyst Stephen Schwartz’s recent
update of his1998 Brookings Institution
audit<http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/1998/atomic>
.
In short: Nuclear weapons have been the United States’ third-highest
national priority since World War II, in terms of dollars, and we spend a
fortune every year to manage and secure them. Yet a crucial facility in
this nuclear enterprise “wasn’t even nun-proofed, much less
terrorist-proofed,” as a Tennessee congressman would put it in a February
hearing on the break-in, which shut down Y-12 site operations for two weeks.
This is how Congress describes the intrusion and fallout: “Embarrassing.”
“Astonishing.” “Unprecedented.”
This is how Greg, Michael and Sister Megan describe it: “God’s will.”
“Victory.” “A miracle.” Another step toward the eradication of immoral
weapons.
When superimposed on the small-town history of Oak Ridge or the quotidian
mechanics of federal Washington, their anti-nuclear beliefs can look heroic
or treasonous. Nuclear bombs are existential weaponry. They ignite
existential debates. Paradoxes proliferate. Every action has an equal and
opposite reaction, sometimes unclear at first.
Sometimes one must step away from lawfulness in the service of a greater
good.
Sometimes the very thing that keeps us safe is the one thing that can
exterminate us.
Sometimes we bargain over the lesser of two evils.
What is unambiguous: The nun, the drifter and the house painter have been
charged with two felonies whose combined maximum sentence is 30 years in
prison. One of these felonies is rarely leveled against civilians: “intent
to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United
States,” as written under the “Sabotage” chapter of the U.S.
Code<http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscview+t17t20+991+0+…>
.
Their jury trial is scheduled to begin May 7 in Knoxville.
The defendants do not view it as *their* trial, even though they proudly
admit to trespassing and damaging government property. By exposing what
they believe to be the fallacy of national security, by smuggling their
anti-war message into the judicial system through the back door, they
believe they are putting the country on trial.
CHAPTER 4
The summit
*The nun plodded* up the steep and densely wooded ridge.
In front of her was the painter, behind her the drifter and the boundary
fence. Pathless, they snaked slowly in wide turns to ease the climb,
pausing often so she could catch her breath.
Sister Megan Gillespie Rice
*The Holy Spirit directs a person to what is right and what is possible*,
the nun thought, *and *this *was possible*.
Her parents taught her that life is about moving toward one’s purpose. She
had been working her way toward this climb since the age of 9, when she
learned her family’s next-door neighbor in New York City was a Columbia
University biophysicist privy to the secret Manhattan project.
She remembers Pearl Harbor and covering her eyes when the newsreels played
war footage before matinees at Trans-Lux movie theaters in Manhattan.
She remembers her obstetrician father, who spoke of impoverished patients
at Bellevue Hospital; her mother, whose PhD thesis explored the Catholic
opinion on slavery; and her uncle, Walter Hooke, a Marine who was yoked
with “the terrible weight of knowing” after surveying the decimation of
Nagasaki, where all that survived in the city’s cathedral was a scorched
wood statue of the Virgin Mary.
She remembers committing as a teenager to the teaching order Sisters of the
Holy Child Jesus because of their work in Africa, and learning at Boston
College how radioactivity affects human cells.
The servants of God stopped to rest.
A dog barked in the distance. From town? From over the ridge?
She had known danger. Kneeling down to block traffic at the entrance to the
Nevada Test Site in the ’80s.
She had known hardship. Sleeping in classrooms in rural east Nigeria. No
running water, no electricity.
She had known Sister Anne
Montgomery<http://ncronline.org/news/people/sr-anne-montgomery-plowshares-leader-again…>,
who, in 2009 at 83, broke into Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, which harbors
nuclear submarines, and was convicted, with four others, of trespassing and
damaging federal property.
How can I get involved? Sister Megan asked Sister Anne after the trial.
Call Greg Boertje-Obed, Sister Anne said.
“It’s idolatry, putting trust in weapons. And weapons are made like gods. …
Weapons are always false gods because they make money. It’s
profiteering.”Sister
Megan Rice
And now there she was, an old lady in sturdy shoes, reaching the limits of
her mortal energy at the top of Pine Ridge with Greg, about 90 minutes into
the mission. There was the vista over which the Prophet of Oak Ridge had
prayed more than a century before, where a national security complex now
winked in the darkness.
There was still a slope to descend, and three more fences to cut through.
The plan was to hike along the ridge, breach the fences away from the
facility’s guard towers and then walk casually toward the Highly Enriched
Uranium Materials Facility, which houses the nation’s cache of highly
enriched uranium — an estimated 400 tons of it, racked in cans
floor-to-ceiling across 110,000 square feet.
Inside the building was enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000
nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over.
Sister Megan was tired and fading with the night, so they recalibrated.
They started down the slope immediately.
Once clear of the trees, they would head for the first building they saw.
The woods of Pine Ridge, which separates the city of Oak Ridge from the
Y-12 National Security Complex. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 5
The belly of the beast
*Mission planning involved* searching the Bible and the Internet.
All of the relevant information on Y-12’s layout was available online. All
of the relevant motivation was available in the books of Psalms, Proverbs
and Isaiah.
The Y-12 break-in is the latest “Plowshares” disarmament action, a
tradition of symbolic and intrepid civil resistance dating to September
1980, when the Berrigan brothers and six others hammered on Minutemen
missiles and poured blood on documents at the General Electric weapons
plant in King of Prussia, Pa. The Plowshares activists take their name and
inspiration from Isaiah 2:4, a verse prophesying a world without war.
A parade of actions, each with its own name, has followed over the years.
The Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Petworth is home to several
Plowshares alumni, including Michael, and a home away from home to Sister
Megan, who resides in her order’s residence on Newton Street NE. (Greg
lives with his wife and daughter in Duluth, Minn.)
In the context of Plowshares history, the July action was both typical and
astounding, says Paul Magno, a Plowshares veteran and a leader of D.C.
nonprofit Witness for Peace.
“To me, it goes to not only the over-hype, the over-sell of the whole
security mythology, but it goes to what you can do with an act of faith,”
Magno says. “God’s people can be faithful and the Red Sea parts and lets
them through when there’s no reason to believe that should be possible.”
Sister Megan Rice holds her bible. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
The action last summer was dubbed “Transform Now Plowshares” because its
three participants desire the immediate conversion of all nuclear weaponry
from agents of war to resources that benefit mankind.
Michael and Sister Megan live in the world as they believe it should be,
not in the world as it is.
Sister Megan doesn’t vote.
“It would mean I would be a citizen of this regime. I am a citizen of the
world. I act in consequence.”
Michael derides Washington as the belly of the beast.
“Did you know that the last president who wasn’t a war criminal was Herbert
Hoover?”
Says Sister Megan of Michael: “His mind is never still.”
Says Michael of Sister Megan: “She’s a visionary.”
Together they’re like an overactive younger brother and patient older
sister. Michael summons the brimstone, Sister Megan the bromide.
When she and Michael retell their story, which they do often to eager foot
soldiers of social justice groups, they put it in tidy parable form on
PowerPoint: We saw injustice at Y-12, so we broke in to bring truth and
attract the world’s attention, and here is the U.S. government’s
seven-decade budget for nuclear-weapons infrastructure. After one such
presentation, at the weekly “Clarification of Thought” at the Dorothy Day
house, a visitor asks about the forces they faced once they made it through
the final fence that summer night.
“The first person to really lose his job was this lovely security guard,”
says Sister Megan, adding that she hopes to meet him when she, Greg and
Michael go to Knoxville for a pre-trial hearing on whether they can offer
moral conviction as a defense in court.
CHAPTER 6
The descent
*The lights of* the Antichrist flickered through the trees.
The drifter prayed.
*Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and
on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and
the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating
its swords into plowshares.*
Michael Robin Walli
He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a
sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun,
clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen
vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.
On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on
the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their
backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three
hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter
they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a
packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross
molded into the top.
And six baby bottles of human blood.
Click or press to view full image
This was easy compared with Vietnam, where he carried briefing boards of
heavy hinged plywood out of Phuoc Long province during the Cambodia
incursion. Michael was an Army specialist, an expert marksman with an M-14
and M-16. The carpet-bombing from American B-52s still echoes in his head.
“Like thunder, but it didn’t stop.”
He earned a Bronze Star.
He considers himself a war criminal.
He left the Army after two tours, found Jesus, became an ascetic, worked in
a homeless shelter in Chicago, stormed the gates of the CIA with 1,500
other activists in April 1987, wound up in Fairfax County’s jail and
decided to stay in Washington upon his release.
And now, 45 years after his enlistment, he was at the edge of the woods on
the other side of Pine Ridge, the flood-lit expanse of Y-12 in front of him.
“In heaven Jesus has no arsenal of nuclear weapons. And as we pray in the
Our Father prayer: ‘Here on Earth as it is in heaven.’ … Nuclear weapons
are a product of hell and we need to send them back there.”Michael Walli
As predicted long ago, the valley was filled with great buildings, many
rusted and dating to the Manhattan Project. But right in front of them was
a vast, new fortress of reinforced concrete with a foundation anchored in
bedrock.
As luck, or providence, would have it, this was their original target: the
Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, a large part of Y-12’s mission
to reduce its physical footprint, improve its safety and modernize its
operations.
>From the treeline, they watched a patrol SUV pass one way on Bear Creek
Road, then the other. Then they walked across the two lanes and approached
the first of three eight-foot chain-link fences. This outer fence, with
three lines of barbed wire on top, was part of Y-12’s “perimeter intrusion
detection and assessment system.”
It was no match for bolt cutters.
The house painter began cutting links in the first fence near a sign that
said “Danger: Halt! Deadly force is authorized beyond this point.”
Somewhere on the site, according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s nuclear
reporter Frank Munger, were Gatling guns capable of firing 3,000 rounds per
minute — a fusillade that could reduce a trespasser to pink mist.
The painter pulled back the flap of chain links like a curtain.
The nun entered the kill zone first.
Oak Ridge, Tenn., was created in 1943 by the U.S. government to play an
integral role in the Manhattan Project. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 7
The Secret City
*Nestled in a* river valley, Oak Ridge looks unremarkable on the surface.
Its old town square has been overtaken by a congested turnpike lined with
fast food joints, credit unions and parking lots. Cul-de-sacs of
single-family homes unfurl up the foggy foothills of the Smoky Mountains.
Roads are named Hickory, Poplar and Whippoorwill, and Manhattan, Palladium
and Boeing. Flagpoles clang. The Panera is always packed. Locals pronounce
their city “Oh-*kridge*.”
On a knoll on the front lawn of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a six-foot
marble statue of the Virgin Mary gazes southward over the low-rise
downtown, toward Pine Ridge. Her face shaded by dark green mold, the Virgin
stands barefoot on a spheroid plinth that represents Earth. This Mary, like
most Marys, has her foot on a serpent, but there’s a curious non-biblical
icon on the Earth under her toes: a nucleus framed by a whirl of electrons.
The atomic symbol is on the facade of the public high school. It is
rendered in stained glass inside the public library. It is on the big green
sign that heralds the Y-12 National Security Complex just over Pine Ridge.
Click or press to view full image
At noon on the first Wednesday of every month, the DOE tests its
public-warning sirens for three minutes. Every June, reenactors stage the
Allied invasion of Normandy in the town park.
Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak
Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed. It’s still a company town, and the company is
the government, and the business is bombs.
Its centerpiece, Y-12, has become a large processing shop and warehouse for
most of the country’s highly enriched uranium. It’s one of five production
sites connected to three research labs under the umbrella of the National
Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous entity within the
Department of Energy created in the year 2000 to manage and secure nuclear
weapons and non-proliferation programs.
Y-12 processes highly enriched uranium for a variety of purposes, including
“life-extension programs” for three classes of warheads and the B61
bomb<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-b61-bomb-a-case-s…>.
The renovation of these weapons
programs<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-nuclear-arsenal-is…>
could
take 25 years, officials estimate, and cost $20 billion. The site also
dismantles weapons components and “downblends” the highly enriched uranium,
reducing its radioactivity for use in research and nuclear reactors.
Weapons, war and secrecy are the city’s economy, its legacy and, for now,
its future. Concrete guard stations from the early 1950s lurk on the
roadsides. A “commemorative walk” salutes the 43ers — those thousands of
people who moved to Oak Ridge at the government’s behest in 1943. One
plaque says residents’ work “made possible a weapon that was instrumental
in bringing peace to a world anguished by the brutal six-year war in which
54 million people died.”
The activists of Transform Now Plowshares are in West Knoxville in early
February, at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, testifying
to the congregation after a Sunday service. Church members ask them how
they can claim nonviolence when they destroyed property.
“Maybe the triviality of that destruction comes from a truth that is
monstrous,” Sister Megan says. “Those very fences are illegal, and guarding
lies and secrecy and corruption and great danger to the world.”
White-haired Lillian Mashburn stands, arms crossed, in the back of the
church. She’s thinking of her father, who was an infantryman stationed in
the Pacific when Oak Ridge’s uranium fell toward Hiroshima.
“He was saved by that bomb,” Mashburn, a church board member, says after
the discussion. “They were told when they landed they would be killed as
part of the first wave. . . . There’s a whole generation of people, most of
whom would’ve been dead, who were saved.”
What saves Oak Ridge are the dollars that gush from Washington to East
Tennessee.
The complex is the second-largest employer in East Tennessee and creates
24,000 indirect jobs, according to the site contractor’s Y-12 Community
Relations Council. Eight thousand people go to work there, including
contractors, subcontractors, protective-force guards and 80 federal
employees of the Department of Energy. For 2014, $1.2 billion was requested
by the NNSA for the management and operation of Y-12.
Y-12 is slated to construct a new Uranium Processing Facility, a massive
building that will ensure that America’s nuclear arsenal remains
operational. Peak construction of the UPF will create 1,500 construction
jobs and 5,000 support jobs.
“This community serves the DOE,” says Ralph Hutchison, 56, the coordinator
of the nonprofit Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance <http://orepa.org/>,
whose ultimate goal is to abolish nuclear weapons, which means halting
operations at Y-12. “It’s the environment in which they live. It’s the air
they breathe.”
CHAPTER 8
The miracle
*The trio stood* in a moat of white rocks between the first and second
fence.
The complex was lit bright as day.
No one was racing to apprehend them.
The middle fence was intimidating, and wired for something.
Motion sensoring?
Electricity?
*This is not going to work*, the house painter thought. *We are not going
to get through this.*
Gregory Irwin Boertje-Obed
He had known doubt before. Greg was a Presbyterian Iowa farm boy who joined
the ROTC to afford Tulane University. He went into active duty at Fort Polk
in 1981, as the nuclear-freeze movement rallied against President Ronald
Reagan’s stockpile buildup. He read Daniel Berrigan.
His government said: Be ready for nuclear war.
The prophet Isaiah said: Do not put your trust in horses and chariots.
He couldn’t reconcile the two. He left the Army as a conscientious
objector, he says, and returned to New Orleans in time to hear Berrigan
talk about Plowshares actions.
Greg heard an inner voice say, *Go in this direction*.
Within two years, he was living at Jonah House, the Catholic Worker
residence in Baltimore, where he met his wife, Michele. While raising their
daughter, they scheduled their protests to make sure that only one of them
was facing jail at any given time. His first action was hammering Trident
II missile tubes at Quonset Point shipyard in Rhode Island.
Twenty-six years later, a nun would call him up, looking to make her own
first action.
“We are a little bungling. We are just ordinary people, and inept. … So we
chose a date and said come in advance. We thought Sunday. We thought maybe
there would be fewer workers, maybe they would be in a more charitable mood
– if it’s a Sunday, they’re less likely to shoot you.”Greg Boertje-Obed
And now this middle fence, and the possibility that their mission was over.
Surely security cameras had spied them by now. Surely this fence would trip
an alarm.
*You won’t know unless you try*, the inner voice told him.
He began cutting links in the middle fence, severing fiber-optic sensors.
No one came for them.
*This is grace*, he thought, and he climbed through after the others.
He cut through the last fence, and they were through the Red Sea, and there
was nothing between them and the Fort Knox of Uranium.
*God is with us*, he thought. *This is a miracle*.
They shook cans of red and black spray paint.
They gripped the baby bottles of blood.
They spray painted the building’s north wall, which was designed to
withstand the impact of aircraft but not the words of the Book of Proverbs.
They poured and splashed blood that had once been in the veins of a
painter-activist named Tom Lewis, one of the Catonsville Nine who, on
Hiroshima Day 1987, hammered on the bomb racks of an anti-submarine plane
at the South Weymouth Naval Air Station near Boston. In 2008, Lewis died in
his sleep, and his blood was frozen so that he might one day participate in
one last Plowshares action.
In bright red rivulets, the last of Tom Lewis streaked down the concrete.
They removed the hammers from the drifter’s backpack. “TRANSFORM NOW” was
written in red marker on the handle of the claw hammer. Burned into the
handle of the small sledge hammer was “Repent! God’s kingdom is at hand!”
They began to strike the pentagonal base of a guard tower at the northwest
corner of the building. Chips of concrete fell to the asphalt. Blood
dribbled into the scar.
They believed they were also hammering on what had not yet been built. The
wide open space to the right of the tower was designated for the Uranium
Processing Facility, now projected to cost at least $6.5 billion, a
stockpile of money that they wanted spent on life-extension programs for
people.
They rang their hammers down on the senselessness of it all.
They waited to be arrested.
In a matter of minutes, a single guard would be sent to investigate.
>From left, Sister Megan Rice, Shelley Wascom, Sarah Hutchison, Michael
Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed pray before dinner in Knoxville on Feb. 4,
2013. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 9
The quantum theory of physics
*Greg is prepping* baked potatoes.
Sister Megan is setting silverware.
Michael is carrying armloads of firewood in from outside.
They are gathering for a dinner of salmon, tofu and broccoli with a couple
of other members of the Transform Now Plowshares support group at a
supporter’s house in south Knoxville. From this home base, in the days
before their February pretrial hearing, they bring their anti-bomb evangel
to various settings.
At the University of Tennessee, where they are guest speakers in a systems
theory class, Greg talks about the diffusion of social responsibility and
how he feels personally responsible for nuclear weapons because his taxes
have paid for them. Michael, who is wearing a T-shirt that says “GROUND THE
DRONES,” calls Y-12 “a failed rogue terrorist state.”
“I think there’s a deafening silence about what’s going on at Y-12,” says
student Rochelle Butler, “but I do know people who work there are good
people. Why would I believe outsiders rather than people who work there,
who I believe to be good?”
“We love these people in a deeply compassionate way,” Sister Megan says of
the Y-12 employees. “Our motivation was in solidarity with people who spend
their time making nuclear bombs to feed their children. . . . We are all so
intertwined and empower each other. A thought creates its own energy. The
quantum theory of physics is always at work.”
The theory is at work a couple of days later at Maryville College, where
the trio eats pizza with 15 students from a progressive Christian group.
“They are each connected to 50 others,” Sister Megan whispers before
chatting with music student Chris Hickman.
“I know nothing about the anti-nuclear movement,” Hickman tells her. “I was
born in ’92, and it’s kind of an afterthought for my generation.”
Greg, Michael and Sister Megan visit with two dozen people at a meeting of
the Presbyterian Peacemaking Committee of East Tennessee.
“Prince of Peace, we thank you for your prophets who’ve spoken your word
down through the ages, and we thank you for the prophets among us,” says
host Scott Brunger during his opening prayer.
The attendees chat about the fallout from the break-in. Someone asks about
what their intrusion has cost taxpayers — at least $15 million in security
alterations by the NNSA, according to the Knoxville News
Sentinel<http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/feb/01/nnsa-cost-of-y-12-break-in-at-leas…>
—
and Greg says that they saved taxpayers $12.2 million that was docked from
the management contractor’s award fee. Sister Megan again brings up the
first guard they encountered inside the facility and how he lost his job.
She says how he saved their lives by not escalating the situation.
“I feel very guilty not contacting him,” Sister Megan admits.
The guard’s number is listed.
He’ll answer the phone if you call.
And when you ask about the three people who broke into Y-12 last summer,
you can almost hear his grip on the phone tighten as he says: “You mean the
people who ruined my life?”
Security guard Kirk Garland on the property of his former home, now in
foreclosure after he lost his job at Y-12. (Linda Davidson/The Washington
Post)
CHAPTER 10
‘I’ve served my country’
*Two weeks after* the break-in, Kirk Garland was handed a letter from the
site’s protective-force contractor that said he “failed” in his
responsibilities as a guard on the morning of July 28, 2012. The letter
said he showed “blatant disregard for the seriousness of the situation.” It
said he was terminated, effective immediately, and his health insurance
would expire two days later.
Kirk Garland
A solid man with a cinnamon-colored mustache, Kirk started working in
nuclear security in 1983 at Colorado’s now-shuttered Rocky Flats Plant,
which processed plutonium for weapons. For three years, he worked in a
similar job at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Tex., where nuclear weapons
are put together and taken apart. Then he moved to Y-12, where the fuel is
processed.
What Oak Ridge built, he says, he was proud to protect.
“In my eyes, after being a guard for 30 years, I feel that I should be
treated the same way as somebody who served in Iraq,” says Kirk, 52. “I’ve
served my country for 30 years by protecting my nation’s nuclear assets.”
He was four years from retirement, bringing home $85,000 a year with
overtime, with a pristine employment record.
The sign on the front door of his modest house says, “This property has
been determined to be vacant and abandoned.” He could rescue it from
foreclosure, but doesn’t have the money. What he has is a rental home in
nearby Clinton, a sick wife, a month’s worth of losing lottery tickets, a
16-year-old daughter who has curtailed her passion for barrel-racing
horses, and a small contingent of German shepherds that he raises to sell
to police department K-9 units.
“I do okay,” he says, standing in the ransacked backyard of his former home
in Lake City, Tenn. “My wife don’t. She can’t come up here. Nothing I can
do about it. Thirty years with DOE. And you’re looking at everything.”
Scattered cinder blocks. Sodden heaps of pink insulation. The kennel hauled
off by vandals, the small stable stripped of its roof and most of its
siding. It had been a good life in Lake City, 20 miles north of Y-12, where
he worked for nearly 5 1/2 years until those people, he says, decided to
overexert their First Amendment right.
The report on the break-in by the inspector general of the Department of
Energy faults Kirk for not pulling his weapon, for not securing the area.
The site’s management contractor, Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Y-12,
faults him for not immobilizing the intruders and for turning his back
while they rummaged through their backpacks.
The site’s protective-force contractor, WSI-Oak Ridge, faults him for an
“embarrassing” and “casual” response to the intrusion. NNSA officials were
“horrified” by surveillance video of Kirk first addressing the intruders
from his car, instead of immediately jumping out, and for making
assumptions about their intent.
If he had acted too aggressively, on the other hand, Y-12 might have had a
dead nun on its hands.
Kirk says there was no reason to unholster his gun, that it was unsafe for
one man to try to cuff three people, that an entire patrol team should’ve
been dispatched to a zone with multiple alarms. He had previously dealt
with peace protesters at Rocky Flats, which is how he knew that the three
trespassers were not dangerous, he says. The “blatant disregard,” he says,
lies elsewhere.
In fact, the security camera that watched Zone 63, the area of the trio’s
incursion, had been out of service for six months, according to a
subsequent report from the Department of Energy’s inspector general. At the
time of the break-in, there were 56 busted security tools across Y-12,
seven broken security cameras surrounding the HEUMF and an average of 2,170
sitewide alarms per day — many caused by wildlife, weather and foliage.
None of this was Kirk’s responsibility.
“In my eyes they’ve ruined my name,” Kirk says of the government and its
contractors. “I worked hard. I mean, I put my family second a lot of times
to keep this clearance for 30 years, just to have it jerked out from me
like that. . . . I think they were embarrassed that an 82-year-old got in
that far. And they used me for their scapegoat. They used me to say, ‘Well,
he messed it up. We got rid of him.’ But I wasn’t the problem.”
The problem, according to a string of reports over the years from the DOE’s
inspector general and the Government Accountability Office, was a lax
security culture and hands-off federal oversight. The problem was “a
culture of compliance, as opposed to a culture of performance,” according
to a B&W Y-12’s post-mortem of what became known internally as “the
Security Event.” A GAO report released, coincidentally, three days after
the break-in admonished the NNSA for cost overruns, mismanagement and an
absentee relationship with contractors.
To date, Kirk is the only individual to have been fired outright because of
the incident. The guards who failed to detect and initiate a proper
response to the breach were suspended, and the supervising lieutenant was
disciplined. B&W Y-12 removed four managers, allowing the top two to
formally retire. Four federal officials with security oversight jobs were
reassigned. The leaders of the guard force retired or were reassigned, says
Paul Donahue, chief executive of G4S Government Solutions, the parent
company of the protective force company, which lost its contract. The
management and operations contractor lost $12.2 million of its award
incentive fee, and the same firms, with different partners, have bid on a
new 10-year contract for both Y-12 and Pantex worth $23 billion.
Kirk has a car repairman dogging him for a $1,000 debt that he can’t pay.
In March, he took a guard job at a county jail that he says pays $24,000 a
year. His case is slated for arbitration this fall through the
International Guards Union of America.
He’s reached for his Baptist faith to temper his anger. He attends services
at Faith Promise, a massive church on a hill on the outskirts of Oak Ridge.
He doesn’t understand how law-breaking activists can be inspired by the
same God that guides his life down the straight and narrow.
“I’ve got to sit down and ask a priest,” Kirk says. “Doing the Lord’s work
is not protesting and getting arrested. You don’t get to heaven on your
works anyway. You get to heaven on salvation. . . . God’s got a different
plan for me. Everything happens in his timing, whenever he’s ready to move
us along.”
When told that Sister Megan thinks he saved her life by not escalating the
situation — that, in fact, he was her salvation — Kirk is speechless. His
wife is not.
“That’s amazing that she’d make that kind of statement,” scoffs Joann
Garland. “She is safe — because of him — to be able to go and do what she’s
doing. . . . The joke of it is they came in God’s name. God does not say to
break laws. Sorry. God does not say that.”
Knoxville attorney Francis Lloyd Jr. listens to his client, Sister Megan
Rice, during a meeting before their February pre-trial hearing. (Linda
Davidson/The Washington Post)
CHAPTER 11
Scales of justice
*If religion gives* meaning to the chaos of the cosmos, the law developed
alongside to order society’s unruliest parts.
Greg, who represents himself in court, stood behind the microphone and
delivered his testimony in monolithic terms.
“So when you build a nuclear weapon, you are planning and preparing to
commit mass murder,” he argued in a November pre-trial hearing in
Knoxville. “You are giving your assent to the killing of civilians.”
In that precursor episode to *The United States of America v. Walli et al*,
the defense argued that it is illegal for the United States to possess
nuclear weapons because their sole purpose is to inflict damage that cannot
be contained: Civilians perish en masse, the environment is poisoned for
generations and the mere threat of this scenario — even under the guise of
deterrence — constitutes “imminent harm” that cannot be ignored for one
more minute, let alone successive generations.
After the defense cited the Geneva and Hague conventions and invoked the
Nuremberg principles, the government argued that international treaties do
not take precedence over laws Congress enacts to ensure national defense,
including nuclear weapons programs. At the notion of complicity to war
crimes, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey E. Theodore balked.
“They say if they didn’t act, that they are somehow complicit in this
‘illegality,’” Theodore argued in November. “Well, then, therefore, all the
people here who have not acted, not [broken] in to Y-12 to stop the
‘illegal’ operations there, then . . . they’re complicit in war crimes, I
guess, which is . . . a ludicrous argument.”
William Quigley, the defendants’ pro-bono counsel, told the court his
clients should be allowed to testify about their moral imperatives for the
break-in.
“The effort to preclude necessity, international law, nuclear policy, God,
conscience, history, who knows the other things — I think it’s, it’s
inconsistent with our search, our mutual search for the truth,” Quigley
said.
After Michael, Greg and Sister Megan refused a plea bargain, the government
hit them with the more serious charge under the sabotage act. That led
Transform Now Plowshares and its support group to Courtroom 3B of U.S.
District Court in downtown Knoxville in Feburary, for a second hearing on
obstructing the national defense, scheduled between a case of bank robbery
and a case of Social Security fraud.
That morning, Sister Megan has trouble getting through security.
“Any metal on you, sister?” a guard asks during her third run through the
metal detector.
“I have titanium in my wrists,” the nun says, then gestures to the X-ray
machine. “Do you wear lead vests standing next to this all day? I think you
should.”
The support group swells to 25 people and fills all rows on the defense’s
side of the courtroom. Ralph Hutchison and folks from the Oak Ridge
Environmental Peace Alliance are here.
As they await the start of the hearing, the supporters begin singing softly.
“Peace is flo-wing like a riiiii-ver,” they warble from their seats.
“Flo-wing out into the deeeeesert.”
Hutchison chuckles. “Oh the judge *loves *it when they sing,” he says.
Click or press to view full image
CHAPTER 12
Reaction
*In Washington, a* congressman asks the nun to please stand up.
“We want to thank you for pointing out some of the problems in our
security,” says Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.).
Another congressman expresses a different kind of gratitude.
“Thank you for your willingness to focus attention on this nuclear weapons
buildup that still exists in our world,” says Rep. Edward J. Markey
(D-Mass.), “and how much we need to do something to reduce it.”
A third congressman is incredulous at the nun’s mere presence at this
September oversight hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
“Why are they even here in this hearing room?” says Rep. Michael C. Burgess
(R-Tex.). “Why are they not being held in — in detention somewhere?”
Since July 28, Congress has been sputtering with indignation. Hearings were
scheduled on Sept. 12 and 13,Feb.
28<http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/hearings-display?ContentRecord_id=…>
and March 13<http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/doe-management-and-oversight-its-nu…>
so
legislators could vocalize how “shocked” and “appalled” they are. The
phrase “wake-up call” is uttered and re-uttered. “Peace through strength”
becomes a refrain. The word “culture” is used 72 times to explain how a
complex, highly funded operation could be so vulnerable. Federal officials
at the witness table get lost in a maze of their own jargon. Congress
members wonder over and over what would have happened if the intruders had
been terrorists, not peace activists. Brig. Gen. Sandra Finan, commander of
the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, appears several times to present her
task force’s findings on “Lessons of the Y-12 Security
Failure<http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Tes…>”:
NNSA has muddled lines of authority, and its security culture has “focused
on fiscal limitations over effective performance.”
Megan Rice and Michael Walli attend a hearing on nuclear security conducted
by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Between them is activist and
supporter Paul Magno. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Sister Megan and Michael witness each hearing in sweat pants and parkas.
They are lost in the navy thicket of young legislative assistants. On one
of these field trips, they get off the Metro at Capitol South station and
grimace at the giant Raytheon ads that feature military vehicles and mottos
like “Any threat, any mission.”
On Feb. 28, the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic
forces tries to sniff out blame.
“And as the chairman correctly pointed out,” says Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.)
at one point, “it’s hard to find that anybody was punished except the
lowest-level guard.”
At a break, Sister Megan approaches one of the expert witnesses, retired
Maj. Gen. C. Donald Alston, the former Air Force assistant chief of staff
for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration.
“I’ll give this to you,” she says, handing him a folded sheet of white
paper. It’s a letter calling for the immediate suspension of funding for
the Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12.
“The whole thing can be solved by changing the mission,” Sister Megan says
to the major general. “Change the mission, brother.”
“We have a lot of stability in the world because of” nuclear weapons, says
Alston, smiling, towering over her in uniform.
“It’s impossible to even secure *one*,” Sister Megan says. “We can change
the mission. It’s possible.”
“Okay,” he says.
“We can have projects that sustain humanity.”
“Okay,” he says, starting to leave the witness table.
“This is the nun,” Michael says, coming to her side.
“*Oh*,” Alston says, before turning away.
Sister Megan is not concerned with this slight. The world needs positive *
and *negative charges, she says. You can’t have energy without both.
On March 13, during a second hearing in front of the Energy and Commerce’s
oversight subcommittee, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) cites a 2010 Department
of Energy memo<http://hssoutreach.doe.gov/documents/meetings/20100316_SafetySecurityReform…>
in
which Deputy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman called for the elimination of
“excessive Federal oversight” of contractors and the awarding of
“decision-making authorities” to “the lowest level of contractor and
Federal management.”
The subcommittee, as a body, wonders if the department had farmed out the
stewardship of nuclear assets to contractors who self-police and
self-appraise, and therefore continue to collect fees while cutting corners.
“What we were trying to do, sir, was to get rid of the check-box mentality
of just looking at paperwork and creating paperwork,” Poneman replies. “To
get back to performance testing so we could be better, safer and more
secure.”
Sitting just over Poneman’s shoulder at each one of these hearings are two
of the people who have put him on this hot seat for the past eight months.
“I appreciate what you did,” a staffer for the Government Accountability
Office tells Sister Megan after the hearing adjourns. “But don’t do it
again, because I don’t want you to get hurt.”
The mushroom cloud at Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force)
CHAPTER 13
‘A sheet of sun’
*The last shipment* of highly enriched uranium bound for Japan left Oak
Ridge on July 25, 1945, and arrived two days later on the island of Tinian
in the oblivion of the Pacific Ocean. On Aug. 6, a 9,700-pound,
10-foot-long atomic bomb was loaded onto a B-29 bomber, flown 1,500 miles
northwest, and dropped over Hiroshima.
Eyes melted from the heads of those who had been looking skyward at the
“sheet of sun,” as John Hersey’s
“Hiroshima<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/148258798X/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=17…>”
described the light of the explosion.
Some 160,000 were dead, dying or injured.
Five square miles burned.
“A harnessing of the basic power of the universe,” President Harry Truman
announced.
“One of the greatest blunders of history,” wrote physicist Leo Szilard, an
architect of the Manhattan Project.
“WAR ENDS,” The Knoxville Journal declared.
Our national complex was just beginning. The bomb created to stop one war
imbued all future wars with apocalyptic power. The United States raced
Russia to amass nuclear weapons — a peak of 30,000 stateside in the
mid-1960s — then began to reduce the stockpile as other nations pursued and
attained nuclear capability.
This past January, the Indian government distributed to Kashmiris a
nuclear-war advisory<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/01/201312382354914360.html>
that
encouraged the building of bunkers.
In March, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told ABC News that
“confrontation becomes more possible” if Iran continues its plan to enrich
uranium and develop nuclear weaponry.
In April, North Korea publicized its desire to strike the United States,
and the White House announced that it had helped the Czech Republic remove
its entire stockpile<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-says-us-h…>of
highly enriched uranium — all 150 pounds of it, or enough for two or three
nukes.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
The United States possesses roughly 4,650 active nuclear weapons plus
another 3,000 awaiting dismantlement,according to the Federation of
American Scientists<http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/publications1/TrimmingNuclearExcess.p…>,
a non-partisan think tank created by Manhattan Project scientists. To
satisfy the New START Treaty with Russia, our 1,950 strategically deployed
high-alert nuclear weapons must be reduced to 1,550 by 2018. In order to
get the treaty ratified by the Senate in 2010, President Obama promised $85
billion<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/17/fact-sheet-enduring-c…>
through
2020 for modernizing the U.S. stockpile.
In a time of austerity, our weapons budget is rising as our stockpile is
falling.
The officials who lay awake at night worrying how to safeguard Cold War
leftovers have a delicate, intricate mission fraught with peril and
obstacle.
“Of course, what’s also undeniable is that the threat remains. There are
still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials, and these
dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places. It would not
take much… to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”President
Obama, March 26, 2012
“We have been running a system a certain way for such a long time and not
really thinking about whether it was working or not,” says acting NNSA
administrator Neile Miller, charged with overseeing the politically
choreographed — and therefore incremental — transition from proliferation
to disarmament.
Miller, during an interview in April at the DOE, acknowledges failures in
management and says she understands the protester mentality and
frustration. But the wish for a nuclear-free world of the future, she says,
can distort perception of the policy that guides the world of the present.
“I know people want to believe that everybody here is just of one mind . .
. and we’re all somehow of this military-industrial complex — and it just
doesn’t work that way,” she says. “ . . . People tend to be religiously for
or religiously against. And as a result, they tend to attribute motivations
and actions to all sorts of things that, in my personal experience, so very
rarely turn out to be anywhere near what’s actually happening.”
Our very national position on nuclear weapons, though, is a paradox.
“As long as nuclear weapons exist,” says the administration’s 2010 Nuclear
Posture Review<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/2010NuclearPostureR…>,
“the United States will sustain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces.”
As long as nuclear weapons exist, Sister Megan, Michael, Greg and their
fellow activists will hammer on their infrastructure. Incrementalism is the
danger, they believe, because the threat is imminent, the consequences are
catastrophic and society suffers financially and morally.
And what if these backpack-wearing peaceniks had been terrorists, for whom
obtaining highly enriched uranium is the likeliest way to create mass
destruction?
With those 20 minutes of uninterrupted access to the site, they could have
blown through the doors or walls of the HEUMF with an explosively formed
penetrator and rigged an improvised nuclear device using highly enriched
uranium and conventional explosives. A 10-kiloton detonation at Y-12 would
cause an estimated 60,000 casualties, including 18,000 deaths, in East
Tennessee. Radiation would have sickened people over 40 miles.
This worst-case scenario is presented in a yet-to-be-published report on
UPF by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, which combines a
“design basis threat” scenario from the Department of Energy with a
Department of Defense hazard-prediction algorithm employed by the Natural
Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy nonprofit.
NNSA officials, noting classified security measures inside HEUMF, call this
worst-case scenario “very, very far-fetched.”
But then so is a nun breaking into the Fort Knox of Uranium.
The intruders who weren’t terrorists admit to their actions.
The legislators have thanked them for initiating security reforms.
The deputy secretary of the Department of Energy said in February — during
the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Arlington — that the intrusion, while
“unacceptable,” did not compromise the uranium and therefore did not
directly imperil the nation.
The Justice Department has charged the trio with intending to do just that.
So what is really on trial the second week of May?
The limits of the judicial system, or the limits of social-justice actions?
The moral arch of the universe versus the bottom line of governance?
Is it the bargain we strike with ourselves?
CHAPTER 14
Fission
*In the late* afternoon of Friday, July 27, 2012, the guard drove to Y-12,
put on his camouflage uniform, embroidered with “Semper Vigil,” and
holstered a Sig P226 9 mm on his hip.
Over his 12-hour shift, day became night.
For his last two hours, 4 to 6 a.m., he rotated into a patrol vehicle.
Around 4:20 a.m., a three-second tone came over his radio — a low-priority
alarm that was cleared by an officer in short order. Soon after, the
guard’s cellphone rang.
The cleared alarm keeps bouncing back, his supervising lieutenant said; the
alarm station was suggesting “something is not right” in Zone 63, and that
a maintenance crew might be at work. The guard was then dispatched to a
sector of the security fence that runs around the Highly Enriched Uranium
Materials Facility. He arrived there in less than a minute and pulled
slowly to the fence in his vehicle. Nothing seemed amiss, until movement
caught his eye. He turned his head away from the fence to the HEUMF.
An old woman was walking toward his vehicle, a grizzled man on either side.
At first he thought it was a painting crew — it wasn’t uncommon for
maintenance to be done overnight — but behind them were three phrases
spray-painted red and black onto the white building.
THE FRUIT OF JUSTICE IS PEACE.
PLOWSHARES PLEASE ISAIAH.
WOE TO AN EMPIRE OF BLOOD.
Click or press to view full image
Their hands were up.
*Peace protesters*, he thought, as his phone rang again.
It was his lieutenant, checking in.
“I’ve got three individuals here who have appeared to have breached our
system,” the guard told him, “and they’ve written graffiti all over the
walls.”
His lieutenant thought he was kidding.
“I’m telling you what I got. They’re peace protesters. I need backup.”
He then identified himself through the vehicle window and asked the trio:
“What are you doing here?
“God led us here,” said one of the men.
“Stop where you’re at,” the guard said, exiting his vehicle.
The old woman bowed to him.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Will you listen to our message?” she said.
The three began to recite text from a white piece of paper.
“Brothers and sisters, powers that be, we come to you today as friends . .
.”
The two men retrieved candles from their backpacks nearby and lit them.
“A loving and compassionate creator invites us to take the urgent and
decisive steps to transform the U.S. empire, and this facility, into
life-giving alternatives which resolve real problems . . .”
It would be five minutes before another security officer would show up,
brandishing an M-16, ready to help cuff the intruders on the ground as they
sang “This Little Light of Mine.” It would be another two hours until
special agents from the Department of Energy arrested the trespassers and
mobilized the wheels of justice, and six hours until the trespassers were
booked in the Blount County Jail, and one day until the biblical graffiti
was scrubbed clean, and 10 days until the three were charged with
“maliciously” attempting to destroy a structure within the Y-12 National
Security Complex, and two weeks until the complex reopened and the guard
lost his job, and nine months until the trespassers would face trial before
a jury of their fellow citizens that would have the power to convict them
of intending to endanger the United States.
But for those next five minutes the scene was simple, almost sacramental.
Four servants of God, drawn together by conviction and coincidence,
regarded each other as dawn approached.
The Lord may have been there.
The devil, too.
Or maybe human beings colliding in the quantum theory of physics was
almighty enough.
*About this story.* The intrusion at Y-12 in Tennessee was re-created for
this article through reporting in the city of Oak Ridge, extensive
interviews with the three activists and former protective-force guard Kirk
Garland, and interviews with federal officials and site employees. This
account also draws upon congressional testimony and detailed written
reports on the security event from the inspector general of the Department
of Energy and the contractor partnership Babcock & Wilcox Technical
Services Y-12.
WRITER
- Dan Zak
EDITOR
- Ann Gerhart
ART DIRECTION
- Janet Michaud
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
- Andrew Metcalf
- Tim Wong
ILLUSTRATION
- Jeffrey Smith
TEXT AND VISUAL EDITING
- Brian Cleveland
- Kat Downs
- Jesse Lewis
- Sarah Sampsel
PHOTOGRAPHY
- Linda Davidson
- Anne Farrar
- Dee Swann
- Sarah L. Voisin
GRAPHICS
- Laris Karklis
- Todd Lindeman
GALLERY: The activists
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-activists/2013/04/29/d2da…>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-activists/2013/04/29/d2da…>
GALLERY: The Secret City
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-secret-city/2013/04/29/06…>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-secret-city/2013/04/29/06…>
GALLERY: Wartime billboards
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/words-to-live-by/2013/04/29/8…>
--
William V. DePaulo, Esq.
179 Summers Street, Suite 232
Charleston, WV 25301-2163
Tel 304-342-5588
Fax 304-342-5505
william.depaulo(a)gmail.com
www.passeggiata.com