Two nuclear abolition activists arrested at Nevada nuclear test site
from the Nuclear Resister
March 18 action video by John Amidon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPnpRTJvgtw
Members of the Pacific Life Community converged outside of Las Vegas from March 16 – 18 for their annual gathering to protest nuclear weapons. Two of them were arrested on Monday morning, March 18 during a nonviolent action at the Nevada nuclear test site.
Before Rush Rehm and Jim Haber crossed the line onto the site, 40 people gathered for a ceremony in the desert outside of the boundary fence of the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). They placed a plaque honoring the life of Fr. Louis Vitale, OFM under a creosote bush. Vitale was a co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience in the early 1980s, who often protested and was arrested at the Nevada test site over the years. The activists then joined hands in a circle to take part in the Elm Dance, which “celebrates commitment to life and solidarity with activists the world over”. Following the dance, the group, carrying colorful and handmade signs and banners, processed the short distance to the road leading into the test site. They stopped at the boundary line, where Rehm shared words from Pope Francis with all gathered, including the test site/National Nuclear Security Administration employees and Nye County sheriff’sdeputies waiting on the other side of the line: “The courageous vision of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons appears ever more timely. Nuclear weapons are a costly and dangerous liability. A world free from nuclear weapons is both necessary and possible. We must all be responsible for the well being of our brothers and sisters.”
Once the two men crossed the line, they were escorted to the nearby pen, and briefly held before being processed, charged with trespass and released.
Haber later said, “I have opposed U.S. militarism as hypocritical and offensive for several decades now. Nuclear weapons undergird our illegal and immoral state violence, including the U.S./Israeli genocide against anything Palestinian. Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, our government supports more nuclear weapons not their elimination and makes horizontal proliferation seem reasonable or necessary for other states parties. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us not to be ‘mesmerized by uncertainty,’ so I crossed the line at the Nevada National Security Site in the hope that my little action will be like a grain of sand that helps grind the wheels of injustice to a halt.”
One hundred atmospheric nuclear tests took place at the 1,300+ square mile site between 1951 and 1962, followed by more than 800 underground nuclear tests through 1992, when the U.S. put a hold on full scale nuclear weapons testing. Since then, sub-critical tests have been conducted there in underground tunnels. Today, working one thousand feet below the ground at the site and skirting U.S. obligations under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, three national nuclear weapons laboratories are pursuing a new nuclear arms race by building Scorpius — “a machine as long as a football field, to create images of plutonium as it is compressed with high explosives, creating conditions that exist just prior to a nuclear explosion,” to quote the Sandia National Laboratories website.
More than 15,000 activists have been arrested at the Nevada test site over the past six decades in protest of nuclear weapons testing. The nuclear test site occupies Western Shoshone land, in violation of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The Western Shoshone National Council has declared their nation a Nuclear Free Zone.
Pacific Life Community 