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Late Tuesday night, 2/18 a group of seven peace activists gathered at the front gate of Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara county California. They were there both to protest against the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) but also to celebrate the lives of Daniel Ellsberg, David Krieger and Fr. Louie Vitale. Daniel Ellsberg was a lifetime peace activist and the author of the Doomsday Machine, a book about his life inside nuclear war planning. David Kreiger was the founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Fr. Louie Vitale was arrested over 400 times protesting nuclear weapons.
Dan, David and Louie were all arrested 13 years ago in February of 2012 protesting an ICBM test launch, along with 12 other people. Since that date all three have died. We honor them by protesting at an ICBM test launch. In 2012 their witness was so powerful, that since that date the base has NOT published the ICBM test launch dates. There is only a 3-day notice time to make it hard to protest these horrible tests.
The wind was chilly, the seven men and women stood the glare of the gates at the front gate of Vandenberg, and celebrated life as the missile of death blasted across the ocean. Elizabeth Murray spoke about the power of these peace actions, how when she was inside the CIA how they did not want the employees to see the protesters. At the same time, at night, friends of Dan, David and Louie gathered online in the middle of the night to remember them and to support the protesters who were at the front gate at midnight. We read poetry and told stories and created a field of love and peace to counteract the death machine, until the horrible missile blasted off at 1 am. The protesters included Elizabeth Murray of the Pacific Life Community and Leah Yananton, an artist from Los Angeles. Leah recited a poem of peace.
This missile lands in the Marshall Islands, 4,200 miles away. These islands have forced to bear the overwhelming environmental costs of U.S. nuclear weapons testing, are still used as a target test area.
ICBMs have been sold to Congress and the public as a guarantor of security. In reality, they are an imminent threat to public safety. In the words of the late Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine, these weapons make “any conflict enormously more dangerous than it has to be” by increasing “the danger that any armed conflict between major nuclear states can escalate to all-out war.” ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and, once launched, cannot be recalled, virtually guaranteeing a strike on the country that launches them. As long as ICBMs exist, we live with the constant risk that misinterpreted intelligence, human error, or a single rash decision could end civilization as we know it within an hour.
Maintaining these weapons is a huge waste of resources. The U.S. has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars to “modernize” its ICBM force, which in practice means replacing the entire system. The ICBM program is now an astonishing 81% over budget. Hidden in the department of Enegry budget is the new hydrogen bomb development being done at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the new plutonium pits that will be built at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We must stop this madness
The tensions among nuclear-armed states are high. The U.S. military paused a test when Russia invaded Ukraine and once again when Pelosi visited Taiwan. They should stop these provocative tests in the interest of peace.
This protest, organized by Defuse Nuclear War condemns these launches in the strongest terms as a dangerous step backward for peace. The existence of ICBMs is a threat to the life of every person in the world.
If you want to be notified of the next launch and protest, please sign up at the Defuse Nuclear War ICBM alert list.
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