In Jesus’ discourse on the end of the world, it is said: “And with the increase of lawlessness, love in most people will grow cold; but the person who stands firm to the end will be freed.” (Matthew 24:12-13)

BANGOR, Washington—A tiny room here with dozens of dials and glowing screens pitches, rolls and simulates the lurching, sickening movement of a submarine in trouble.

On the waterfront, a mammoth hole is being pumped dry and dug deep into the bottom of Hood Canal to make room for one of history’s most awesome weapons.

The emergence of the Trident submarine base here is accelerating.

Yesterday, 146 members of the Puget Sound Chambers of Commerce took their annual tour through the 7,700-acre base that will be home port for 10 of the huge, missile-firing “supersubs.”

Now about 30 per cent complete, it gleams with new fixtures and structures reflecting the latest in architectural and engineering design...

The townhouses and dormitory-like buildings where the Trident men will live resemble large, expensive condominiums. Windows look out on the snow-capped Olympics. Colorful playgrounds nestle among clusters of frame houses...

It is all in one of the most beautiful of Hood Canal settings. The Olympics and fir-covered hills form a dramatic backdrop. And deer, fox and pheasants still roam the woods of the base, Navy officers told the visiting businessmen.

(Seattle Times, July 14, 1978.)

I do not know if deer, fox, and pheasants roamed any woods around the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, nor if the S.S. quarters there resembled the townhouses of the Trident men. But we do have reports that the visiting businessmen of such companies as I.A. Topf and Sons, who manufactured the furnaces for Nazi genocide, were given tours of their investments in incineration like the tour now provided by the U.S. Navy to the members of the Chamber of Commerce. There are, of course, differences between the Nazis’ final solution and our own: Their genocide was of the Jewish race. Ours is of the human race. They carried out genocide under a totalitarian state. We prepare the world’s holocaust in freedom. Though both crimes are unimaginable, the extent of our holocaust and the depth of our responsibility for it are greater than the Nazis’. Love in most people will grow cold.

The following interview took place at the end of time. (That time is now.) It was carried by no public media, only the consciousness of a person. The interview began and ended in complete silence.

What is Trident?

Trident is the end of the world.

What do you mean?

Trident is a nuclear submarine being built now which will be able to destroy 408 cities or areas at one time, each with a blast five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Trident is 2,040 Hiroshimas. One Trident submarine can destroy any country on earth. A fleet of Trident submarines (30 are planned) can end life on earth.

I don’t understand.

Good. We’re getting somewhere. What is it you don’t understand?

A submarine which equals 2,040 Hiroshimas. How can anyone understand that?

Begin with a meditation: To understand Trident say the word “Hiroshima.” Reflect on its meaning for one second. Say and understand “Hiroshima” again. And again. And again. 2,040 times . Assuming you’re able to understand Hiroshima in one second, you’ll be able to understand Trident in 34 minutes. That’s one Trident submarine. To understand the destructive power of the whole Trident fleet, it would take you 17 hours, devoting one second to each Hiroshima.

Your meditation is impossible. To understand Hiroshima alone would take a lifetime.

You do understand. Hiroshima was the end of our ability to imagine our destructive power, or to measure its consequences. Trident is the end of the world.

How does one live at the end of the world?

By beginning a new one. Stop Trident, stop the world in an end-time, and build a new world.

You’ve lost me again. Stopping Trident does sound like stopping the world—not a very feasible goal. You’ve been reading too much of Carlos Castaneda. And the world Don Juan stops is a long way from Trident and the Pentagon.

It’s not Don Juan but Gandhi, and Jesus before him, who show the way to turn an end-time into a new beginning.

You mean the power of nonviolence, the power of the cross?

Yes.

What about the Pentagon?

The Pentagon’s power comes from the grip of an illusion, our own egos. The force of truth and love lived in their depths is a force of unity, of life itself. That force is real. We need to join in a community committed to that nonviolent life-force which is the power of the powerless. We need to test the truth by betting our lives on it in the world. If a community can experiment deeply enough in a nonviolent life-force, the power of the Pentagon will crumble.

I find that hard to believe.

So do I, but let’s give it a try.

From the court record of United States of America, Plaintiff, vs. Kevin C. Patz, et al., Defendants; Seattle, Washington; September 12, 1977 (one of many such trials of people who went onto the Trident submarine base to stop nuclear war).

The Clerk: State your full name and spell your last name for the record, please.
The Witness: Taeko Miwa, M-i-w-a.
By Ms. Lunam (another defendant, acting as her own. attorney):

Q Taeko, will you tell the Court where you live?
A I live in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Q Would you tell us what your citizenship is?
A I am a Japanese citizen.
Q Would you tell us why, as a non-American resident, you felt compelled to protest the American Trident missile system (by going over the base fence)?
A I have two reasons

One is, I originally am from Japan, which is the only country having the experience of an atomic bomb attack, and the disaster caused by it...When I was in Japan, back in Japan last year, I was a member of a peace mission with a couple of other Greenpeace members from North America. We stayed at atomic bomb survivors’ hospitals. One of the survivors told us to the tell the people in North America what really happened to them and how the atomic bomb affected the people. The lady told us to work hard to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

So, after this experience I have been feeling very strongly the responsibility for working on this.

That is one reason.

The other reason is that I am expecting a baby very soon, about three weeks from now. When I was doing the actions on July 4th, I felt very strong and confident about what I was doing. It was as if the baby in me was telling me to do that or even at least the baby was demanding all of us to prepare a very safe peaceful place for the baby, and I was feeling all the mothers-to-be and fathers-to-be throughout the world also hoping for a peaceful harmonious place for future generations.

We chose the Trident campaign as our experiment in nonviolence in an end-time: standing firm to the end in hope of seeing a new world begin.

Trident is the leading edge of the nuclear arms race, “the ultimate first-strike weapon,” as Trident’s former missile-designer. Bob Aldridge, calls it. A Trident submarine will be 560 feet long (almost two football fields extended end to end) and will weigh 18,700 tons, even heavier than our newest nuclear strike cruisers. A single Trident sub will carry 24 missiles, each having as many as 17 independently targetted warheads. Thus a Trident sub will be able to destroy up to 408 cities or missile emplacements, each with a nuclear blast five times that which obliterated Hiroshima. Guidance systems will direct each of Trident’s 408 warheads 6,000 miles so as to hit their targets within a few feet. This precision and power will give Trident, together with other U.S. counterforce weapons, the ability to launch a disarming First strike, destroying Soviet missiles in their silos and submarines and spewing enormous radioactivity over the world.[1]

As Bob Aldridge sums up Trident:

The Trident II missile in the Trident submarine will be the ultimate counterforce system. In conjunction with a profound system of computer-integrated anti-submarine warfare weapons and sensors, Trident will give the United States first-strike capability. That is why I say Trident is the most lethal weapon ever built.[2]

Wc thought ourselves personally responsible for Trident because of its location, based at Bangor, Washington, 50 miles south of the Canadian border, near Seattle, with its missiles being designed and built by Lockheed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trident is dependent on the acceptance, silence, and complicity of the many people in our Pacific area. We live next to the nuclear final solution, the ultimate first-strike weapon. Our American and Canadian governments are complicit in a nuclear first-strike policy. But in terms of building nonviolent resistance, Trident’s route to the Pacific Ocean through the Canadian-American Strait of Juan de Fuca is ideal for the kind of transnational movement needed to stop nuclear war.

The choice of Trident for a nonviolent campaign was made also on grounds of faith and hope. The planning and development of Trident was far enough along, its priority so high in the Pentagon, that if Trident could be stopped by a grass roots movement emphasizing nonviolent direct action, then one could believe any destructive force could be turned around—even the nuclear age itself. In the context of our nuclear end-time, the Trident campaign in its nonviolent process, transnational character, and “impossible” goal, is a communal experiment in faith and hope which can help open up a new world or confirm the inevitability of our old one’s destroying itself.

As a theologian of liberation says, “Faith is believing that there is hope for our world.”[3] Despair is denying that our nuclear war systems can be stopped or changed. Faith is a commitment to the world’s transformation through God to a kingdom of justice and peace. Faith’s denial is mindlessness and hopelessness—yours and mine—in the face of the Pentagon and its corporations, a despair whose consequences for the world would have no parallel in history. Never before has our despair at changing institutions threatened the extinction of all life on earth. Faith is belief in a Reality, and a transformation, through which it is possible for us to live deeply enough to choose new life rather than nuclear death. A lived faith will stop the Bomb.

The decision to act on faith is always at hand. We live alongside the steady preparation for nuclear holocaust, as unseeing as were the onlookers of Nazi genocide. Yet the decision to act on faith is more possible for us in a liberal capitalism than it was for those who lived in fear alongside barbed-wire fences and guard towers in Europe in the 40’s, and who because they didn’t act, gave up hope for the rest of their world. Despair at political change comes from the heart. Given hearts rooted in faith, barbed-wire fences can themselves become openings to the belief that there is hope for our world.

On our first trip over the Trident base fence, July 4, 1975, 30 of us planted a vegetable garden on the base, to say that the Trident system’s $60 billion could be better used in feeding people. At that time we had little understanding of the base security system. But we did know that it was already a high-security base with Polaris/Poseidon nuclear warheads stored on it. In our nonviolence training for the civil disobedience, we had role-played being shot at and attacked by police dogs—real anticipations that hot Fourth of July afternoon as we clambered over the barbed-wire fence with our shovels, hoes, and seedlings.

Minutes after our garden was planted, we were surrounded by security trucks. A guard demanded through a loudspeaker that we climb back over the fence or face arrest. We caucused, then sent our spokespersons forward to communicate our refusal to go back. A second demand was made, that we get into the security trucks. We refused again. Finally the guards negotiated with us. Our position, now that our garden had been planted, was that our further purpose that day was to walk the mile inside the fence to the main gate sowing wheat along the way. Then we would leave. After radioed consultations, the Navy agreed to our plan on condition that no more of our 125 supporters come over the fence. (No one in the support group had in fact planned on coming in.) So our first day of civil disobedience at the Trident base ended with a joyful celebration march and sowing of wheat on the base roads, escorted by security trucks, and with our friends just outside the fence singing and dancing along with us. We were released without charge. It had been a first act of faith in response to the fence, an initial overcoming of fear.

We believe Trident can be stopped if we are willing to experiment in the truth of nonviolence and give our lives for it.

Trident can be stopped if we can speak the truth over and over again that workers on the Trident base are good people whom we respect and that the weapons system they and we are complicit in building is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound. The truth which has to be realized consists of both of these: good people and the inconceivable evil of Trident—an evil which can then be stopped.

Trident can be stopped if we can realize that all of us, on both sides of the fence and the world, are one in God’s love, in the humanity we share and are on the verge of annihilating. We can realize our unity in a process of truth and love which Jesus called “the kingdom of God” and Gandhi called “satyagraha” or “truth-force.” The Trident campaign is an experiment in the truth-force of God’s kingdom here and now, in our midst—a force of truth and love more powerful than the hydrogen bomb.

Trident can be stopped because good is more powerful than evil. But we have to believe in the good and live it out. Then anything can happen, beginning with the end of Trident.

In a sense beyond sense, the purpose of the Trident campaign is not to stop the Trident submarine and missile system. Its purpose is to change ourselves—all of us—so that there will no longer be anyone to run the submarine or fire the missile. At that point Trident will be stopped, but not as a primary goal and not by any opposing force. Trident will be stopped because the spirit in which we all live will have changed to the point of reducing Trident to what it is in truth: An inert holocaust machine which conscientious people will no more choose to operate than they would an Auschwitz oven. When we become different in truth and in the Spirit, there will simply be no one to run Trident.

In terms of an underlying reality, the goal of the Trident campaign is therefore not a political victory but spiritual change, a direct consequence of which would be the effective end of a system of death which no one can justify (and which everyone would then cease operating and trying to justify). This is the process of spiritual change which Gandhi called “satyagraha,” a word which combines the Hindi terms for truth (satya) and force (agraha).

Anima Bose, a respected scholar of Gandhian nonviolence teaching at a university in India, has observed that the Trident campaign is one of the few contemporary experiments in a satyagraha campaign as defined by Gandhi.

Gandhi said of satyagraha:

Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence Truth-force. I have also called it Love-force or Soul-force. In the application of Satyagraha I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponents but that they must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.[4]

Satyagraha is truth-force, love-force, soul-force—words describing a process of spiritual transformation which goes far beyond the usual meanings attached to “nonviolence.” Satyagraha is rooted in the belief that truth/love/soul-force is the most powerful force in existence, a spiritual reality as unexplored today as the power of the atom was a century ago. The other side of truth is love, and the union of the two in our hearts and lives is the overwhelming presence of God. As satyagraha, the Trident campaign is an experiment in uniting truth and love, personally and socially, so that we can begin to realize the presence of God in our midst and thus reject the terrible choice of destroying humankind by nuclear war.

Gandhi went on to say that satyagraha is “a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of society and in the end makes itself irresistible. Violence interrupts the process and prolongs the real revolution of the whole social structure.”

“The conditions necessary for the success of Satyagraha are: 1) The Satyagrahis should not have any hatred in their hearts against the opponent. 2) The issue must be true and substantial. 3) The Satyagrahis must be prepared to suffer till the end for the cause.”[5]

Before applying these conditions to the Trident campaign, we should briefly summarize what has happened. Since the campaign began in 1975, more than a thousand people have engaged in civil disobedience. Many times that number have attended rallies, marched, kept vigil, and passed out leaflets at Bangor. In December 1977, in order to maintain a continuous nonviolent presence at Bangor, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action was established alongside the fence of the base. Ground Zero’s weekly leafleting of the Trident base, with positive challenging messages, has been—together with civil disobedience—the mainstay of our satyagraha campaign. The love-truth dynamic of the Trident campaign is evident in the two actions of leafleting and civil disobedience, a dynamic of dialogue and resistance.

The Satyagrahis should not have any hatred in their hearts against the opponent.

For 220 consecutive weeks in the campaign, Ground Zero people have passed out a new leaflet each week to workers driving into each of the gates at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, and more recently, to workers entering other Trident-related military sites. We have also passed out buttons saying “I’d rather make toys,” and on each Thanksgiving, hundreds of freshly baked loaves of bread. Our first purpose in leafleting has been one of demonstrating our intention and attitude: to respect and will the good of each worker driving past us whether or not he or she accepts a leaflet—to hold that person within as a brother or sister, a primary attitude of nonviolence.

A second purpose in leafleting has been to seek a common truth in our leaflets—not to assert a protest against base workers but to discover a truth deep enough to be shared from either side of the Bangor fence. In writing leaflets which seek this common bond we have felt that humor is often more to the point than righteousness, and openness to dialogue more helpful than lectures. We have tried to speak a challenging truth about Trident and the arms race but not against those on the other side of the fence, who belong to the same family we do and will always have parts of the truth unseen by us.

A more personal dialogue than leafleting takes place in the homes of workers and Navy personnel living in Kitsap County, the extremely conservative rural area where the Bangor base is located. Our family’s decision to move down from British Columbia and live in Kitsap County while working out of Ground Zero has made us neighbors and friends of people who have never known personally a “protester.” Kitsap house meetings are held at which the Trident campaign is shared with such friends, who would be afraid to be seen publicly at an anti-Trident gathering.

In 1981-82 four key Bangor workers resigned their jobs for reasons of conscience and gave strong public support to the Trident campaign. All had been affected by the nonviolent dynamic of dialogue and resistance, love and truth. We believe the lives of these friends are deep signs of hope for the future.

The issue must be true and substantial.

The issue of the Trident campaign is life itself. Life is sacred. Deploying a first-strike nuclear weapons system which threatens all life on earth is a sin and a crime beyond all reckoning. We are concerned with the truest, most substantial issue of history—the preservation of life itself, through nonviolent faith and action. As we hear increasingly of resignations and noncooperation within the base for moral reasons, we sense a deepening recognition of that issue. All kinds of fences are beginning to come down.

The Satyagrahis must be prepared to suffer till the end for the cause.

Besides dialogue toward a deeper, more inclusive truth, a satyagraha or “truth-force” campaign also involves active resistance to this threat to life itself. On the resistance side of the campaign, civil disobedience to Trident has included a series of small-group actions which have gradually increased to mass actions involving hundreds of people climbing the base fence and going to jail. The largest civil disobedience was on May 22-23, 1978, as the first U.N. Special Session on Disarmament began, when 4,000 people marched to the base and 300 were arrested for climbing over the fence and displaying an enormous United Nations flag on the side of a hill. After the planting of our 1975 vegetable garden, small-group acts of resistance have included people going into the base to dig graves, giving out candy canes to kids living on the base (with the resisters dressing as clowns), praying at nuclear weapons bunkers, having a picnic, and talking with workers at different base facilities. In one major action Bangor’s fence was cut down so that the “Trident Monster,” a 560-foot-long portable symbol of Trident, could be marched onto the base. Other Bangor entries have included landing boats on its Hood Canal beach and swimming into the base.

Repeaters in civil disobedience have served escalating sentences of up to six months per conviction. The acceptance of fairly heavy jail sentences is in order to take on personal responsibility and suffering for Trident and to appeal to others for a deep change of heart.

The change of heart sought in the Trident campaign begins by each of us resolving to live out the truth as he or she sees it: Ground Zero people have to climb fences and block submarines to say with our lives that we are all on the edge of spiritual change or total destruction. We have to be prepared to risk our lives and go to jail for the sake of the truth as we see it. There is too much at stake—life itself—for us to do less.

At the same time, if questioning nuclear weapons converts Trident workers to a new truth, God will give them the power to resign their jobs and will sustain them and their families in other ways: Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything you need will be provided. That truth of Providence as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is more firmly rooted in reality than any physical law. If followed, it is a truth that provides a security one can find nowhere else on earth, least of all through nuclear weapons.

An example of this is found in the lives of Al and Jerrie Drinkwine.

On August 12, 1982, the day on which the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, arrived at its Bangor base, Al Drinkwine resigned his $22,000 a year job inside the base. Al and Jerrie Drinkwine’s decision that their family not be sustained by what they call the “immoral nuclear buildup” came after long reflection.

Al had been reading leaflets passed out to Bangor workers by Ground Zero volunteers every Thursday morning since September 1978. In the Winter of 1982 Al and Jerrie attended a meeting at Ground Zero, at the invitation of their friend, Father David Becker, who was in the process of resigning his position as Bangor Catholic Chaplain because of his moral opposition to Trident.

In June 1982 Al Drinkwine risked his job by testifying in a Kitsap County court in support of an arrested Ground Zero leafleter. Al stated his belief that Ground Zero had a right to leaflet and that the weekly leaflets gave Bangor workers hope that “there was another way.”

The arrival of the USS Ohio prompted Al and Jerrie to choose another way. A month later they wrote the following letter to Bangor friends and workers, which was then passed out as a Ground Zero leaflet to workers entering the base.

September, 1982

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

When my wife and I were asked if we would write a letter for use in leafleting, which would address the reason I left my position at Bangor, our first reaction was, “Lord, why us? Don’t you know how painful the decision to leave was! I’d like to leave quietly, but you say you need more.”

Firstly, we consider ourselves the average, all-American family. We are one couple, three children, one niece, a dog and two cats, living happily under one roof. After high school, I served with the Air Force for four years, which enabled me to gain my B.A. through the G.I. Bill. Our first home was purchased through a VA loan. The day I was selected for my position with the Navy was a day we all celebrated. The government has been good to us. We are more than grateful.

During the past 7 years, we couldn’t help but become more aware of the American economy, the mission of Bangor, and how they directly interacted. This developed into many inner conflicts: Social service and educational programs are being stripped to the bone. We’ve witnessed hunger in our own community. While on the other hand, extravagance flourishes at Bangor.... We felt the comfort of job security, but could no longer ignore the anguish it contributed to others around us.

Ultimately, the greatest questions of all still loomed over us. As a person, a couple, a family in the human race, do we honestly believe that “peace at any price” is how our Creator wishes us to live? Peace, at the expense of all humankind? Is it right to use nuclear arms against any other human in the name of defense, or peace? Could we continue being instruments in the potential destruction of all life?

This year’s Armed Forces Day theme of “Peace Through Strength” blatantly portrayed an attitude being passed down to our children. As we walked through the hallway of our elementary school, we observed pictures the students drew depicting this theme. The majority were drawings of bombings, killings, machine guns, warships and warfare. What kind of hope does this attitude offer the next generation? It is our firm belief that our strength does not come from military power, built out of fear; but rather, it is a gift from God which we have the responsibility to nourish and give thanks for.

We are a great nation! As world leaders, it is our task, and privilege, to reach out and show others alternatives to warfare. Suicide has always been the easy way out. At best, that’s the only promise a nuclear war offers. We, as people, are being called and challenged to use our talents, skills and gifts in a more life-giving manner. We believe in America. We can meet that challenge by working together and creating those alternatives.

Lovingly,                      
Al and Jerrie Drinkwine

The nonviolent process of the Trident campaign has touched people beyond the Bangor base, including Seattle Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.

In the fall of 1976 Archbishop Hunthausen asked all the priests in the Seattle archdiocese to consider joining in prayer and fasting in support of a 30-day fast by members of the Trident campaign, who were appealing to the presidential candidates to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons. The following spring Archbishop Hunthausen sent his clergy a resource booklet with the title, “Repent Trident,” suggesting that they preach on this theme. In 1979 the Archbishop attended his first Bangor demonstration. In 1981 he identified Trident as “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” and spoke in favor of unilateral disarmament as an expression of the cross of Christ. His subsequent tax resistance to nuclear weapons has been his personal statement for unilateral disarmament.

In August 1982 Archbishop Hunthausen and the other religious leaders of the Church Council of Greater Seattle kept vigil together in a sailboat in support of the Peace Blockade, which tried to stop the first Trident submarine with rowboats. Archbishop Hunthausen’s prophetic voice and actions have profoundly deepened the spiritual center of the Trident campaign. He has helped to keep us focused on love as the center of nonviolence, truth as a mutual sharing across the fence, and conversion as a constant inner call to us all.

In a satyagraha campaign, unlike war, it is the force of truth and love which determines the outcome—not violence and not even political pressures. The purpose of the Trident campaign is to awaken that nonviolent, love-truth force in everyone, on both sides of the fence. We all need conversion to a new spirit of nonviolence. Through such an ongoing conversion Trident can be stopped.

Beneath the nonviolent dynamic of dialogue and resistance, then, is the conversion of the heart. The process of opening our hearts to conversion means accepting suffering out of love. Nonviolent resistance to the Trident submarine is an outward expression of our ongoing conversion from the Tridents within, carried out in suffering love. Thus suffering violence out of love for the other, while speaking and acting out the truth, is the nonviolent way not simply to convert an opponent but to transform the very situation in which the opponent and we are living—a double conversion. That is the process we are discovering more deeply in the Trident campaign.

The double conversion we are seeking might become visible by widespread resignations of Trident jobs and by tens of thousands of people expressing their willingness to be jailed for loving disobedience to Trident. Or, because we ourselves are subjects of the conversion we seek, transformation of the situation may surface—in fact almost certainly will—in ways totally unforeseen by Ground Zero people. In any case, the way to such nonviolent change, as discovered by Jesus and Gandhi, is through suffering love in “experiments in truth”; absorbing violence out of love for the sake of the emerging truth we both bear witness to and seek in deeper forms.

Our Peace Blockade of the USS Ohio in August 1982 offers a way to reflect critically on the process of the Trident campaign, in terms of a resistance action which took place seven years after the campaign’s beginning. Was the August 12, 1982 Peace Blockade of the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, a truly nonviolent action?

The “Battle of Oak Bay,” as the news media called it (a “battle” in which only one side had weapons), pitted a Coast Guard fleet of 99 ships against our two flagships, two launches, a canoe, and 16 rowboats. The Coast Guard used water hoses extensively, and threatened the use of machine guns, M-16 rifles, and pistols. The government used the Coast Guard to launch a first strike on the Peace Blockade, making preemptive arrests at dawn on August 12 before the Ohio was in sight. It then dropped its charges one week later.

According to the media, the Coast Guard won. They prevented all but two Blockade boats from approaching the Ohio, and the Ohio did not stop. (In fact the Ohio had stopped earlier, several miles to the north, awaiting word that the preemptive arrests had removed blockaders.) The scene was volatile, the use of the heavier weapons being threatened by nervous hands and heads. One reporter has written that had a firecracker gone off at a critical moment, a massacre could have resulted.

The Coast Guard’s preparation for a possible massacre was, I think, the result of a higher order to “clear the protesters out of the way of the Ohio by any means necessary”—leaving the details of that, as at My Lai, to subordinate officers. Those surprised by the threatened use of such force should not have been. It was being deployed to protect history’s most destructive weapons system from what the government perceived as the humiliation of being confronted and possibly stopped by “a ragtag fleet,” an example it wished to discourage.

The immediate question of nonviolence on August 12 was, in Gandhian, Christian terms, one of response to violence: Did we suffer the violence in love?

A scene I witnessed on our Peace Blockade trimaran, the Lizard of Woz, was that of Eve and Ted Phillips saying repeatedly to a Coast Guard officer, holding a pistol to Ted’s back, that they loved him. I joined them in that, and we said the Lord’s Prayer together while kneeling by the officer. Did we love our Coast Guard brother deeply enough? Not enough to disarm him; perhaps enough to prevent a shooting. The pistol in Ted’s back was cocked, and the finger on its trigger shaking.

Had the trigger been pulled, I believe Eve would even then have loved the Coast Guard officer. Her nonviolence, from a Christ-centered faith and love, is radiant and profound. In reflecting back on that moment, I believe it may have saved Ted’s life.

How strong our blockading community as a whole would have been in our love of someone responsible for a shooting I don’t know. As things turned out, I believe we were too concerned after the blockade with the Coast Guard’s treatment of us. The handling we experienced was not gentle. It was consistent with the policies Trident was made to protect. The same government has been to Vietnam and El Salvador. By resisting Trident with our whole lives in the Peace Blockade we had the momentary experience of being treated in return like peasants under imperialism. The guns were trained on us. Yet nonviolence is a steadfast love, in resistance, of the people behind those guns, no matter what they do. It is that force of unrelenting love which can overcome anything.

It is often claimed that Trident is protecting the protesters’ freedom to protest. In fact, it is protecting the privileges of American power, shared by Peace Blockaders to the extent that we accept the assumptions of our being somehow different and privileged. In our insistence on our rights after arrest I felt a tone of indignation that we were being treated like other people in the world. Our only real power in nonviolence is to stand with those people (or lie bound with them), and to continue to love more deeply.

The Peace Blockade was always incapable of “winning the Battle of Oak Bay,” if the government were to choose—as it did—to deploy the force at its command. But nonviolence was never meant to win battles. It is meant to turn the battles into new directions, for everyone concerned.

The Peace Blockade raised for some the question of our provoking violence. A “Peace Blockade” was said to be a contradiction in terms. It was said to be too confrontational, too military in nature, to be nonviolent—a point made especially by editorial writers and military commanders. The military people seemed to believe, as the encounter with the Ohio neared, that between the Peace Blockade and the U.S. Navy there was “a rowboat gap”—an acknowledgment that Ernie Baird (Peace Blockade Boat Building Director) makes a more sturdy boat than General Dynamics does.

The sobering truth in those rowboat-gap statements was the underlying sense of threat felt by speakers on behalf of the militarism which now controls the United States government. It was a glimpse into just how rarely in the peace movement we choose actions which are confrontational enough to state the seriousness of nonviolence, and a glimpse into the power of such actions over the most destructive, therefore most empty, military force in history. The government knew it had to keep our rowboats away from the Ohio. Our rowboats were a force more powerful than Trident. People who love life to the point of risking their lives for peace express a spiritual force whose ultimate power is unknown.

I was startled by the power of nonviolence in the days before the Ohio’s arrival when the government kept parading its Coast Guard armada, in D-Day-type formations, past our Peace Blockade mother-duckling maneuvers. Not only was the government shutting down 18 miles of the Hood Canal in an unprecedented security measure, but it had called out a fleet larger than some nations’ navies to corral our blockade flotilla. It made one wonder. Choosing nonviolence in the right place—directly in front of a holocaust machine—could make a difference. At least our military friends realized that. Maybe we should, too, and make more choices of that kind.

The Peace Blockade was just confrontational enough to give one a sense of nonviolent revolution, really changing our lives and our structures, as distinct from crying out in the night.

While the Peace Blockade was incapable of winning any military battles, it succeeded in deeper ways. Ground Zero member Karol Schulkin has recounted some of them:

There was the response of the Coast Guard man who was aiming his water hose at 78-year-old Peace Blockader Ruth Youngdahl Nelson. She looked up at him and said, “Young man, not in my America, please.” He laid down his hose and walked away.

There was the woman who drove her van into the base camp with the “Welcome USS Ohio’’ banner on the side. She didn’t agree with us she said, but she was a Christian. She knew the campground had no water supply. For days afterwards she brought us large cans of water, and loaves of bread as well.

There was the federal marshal who spent hours accompanying the prisoners from the Bangor base to the Federal Court House in Seattle. As the journey ended he asked a woman prisoner, with whom he had been dialoguing, for her peace button. He pinned it on his uniform above his badge.

There was the Coast Guard man who drove to Ground Zero to apologize for the harsh treatment people had received and who stayed to talk for several hours with a volunteer who had served in the Coast Guard himself some years before.

There was the crew member of the USS Ohio who came the next day to talk with us at the court-house steps. He told how he and a number of the crew agreed with us—that Trident was a dangerous weapon and needed to be stopped.

And there was the Trident base worker, husband and father of three, who resigned his job in protest the day the Ohio arrived; and another worker who knelt in prayer at the dockside ceremony while others cheered and the band played “Anchors Aweigh.”[6]

The power for change in the Peace Blockade was a largely invisible one even to those expressing it. We identified too much with the action of blockading, some of us feeling afterwards that we had to blockade again, as soon as possible, if we were to stop Trident. The loving, nonviolent process of stopping Trident was expressed through the blockade, at the same time as it went deeper than that action. We found it hard to leave it behind, when the spirit had been expressed through it.

Blockading was the action, but the power for change was the spirit of love running through it. Love has to find ways to meet the holocaust head on, and break open the personal/collective power of our souls. We experienced the blockade as a beginning way for love to meet death and explode into the soul-force Gandhi felt and the resurrection Jesus promised.

The power for change in the Peace Blockade wasn’t just in blockading the Ohio. The inner power for change was in a love that was willing to suffer. Had we blockaded the Ohio in any other spirit, we would have lost everything.

Was the Peace Blockade nonviolent?

As measured by Jesus’ and Gandhi’s criterion of suffering love for the sake of truth, I believe it was nonviolent—sometimes profoundly so and sometimes by a hairline only. Conversion and transformation remain down the road, (or down the Hood Canal) from the blockade. We would have to learn a deeper, more disciplined, more loving process for future nonviolent action, a process that can be sustained and intensified to the point of transformation.

There is a mystery of love involved in the Trident campaign. This was present in the Peace Blockade. But it has come home to us especially in recent years in the form of the Peace Pagoda. The coming of the Peace Pagoda to Ground Zero is an event which has given further meaning to lightning striking from east to west.

In the spring of 1979 Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist monk, came to Ground Zero because he was attracted by its spirit of nonviolence. Suzuki arrived at our doorstep and discovered that a Buddha had been sent to him in the mail, and this he took as a confirming sign of his calling to Ground Zero. He stayed with us three years.

In the first year Suzuki followed his spiritual discipline by walking around the Trident base, chanting outside its fence, “NaMuMyoHoRengeKo.” He also shared with us his vision that the first Peace Pagoda in the United States would be built at Ground Zero, alongside the fence of the most destructive site in Western civilization. Suzuki’s Nipponzan Myohoji Order had built over 50 Peace Pagodas, usually in sacred places in the Far East. The purpose of the pagodas is to fulfill the Lord Buddha’s teaching in the Lotus Sutra: “When it seems all are burning, my land will be safe.” Constructing Peace Pagodas will realize a widening peace at a time that threatens universal fire.

During his second year at Ground Zero, Suzuki brought into our midst his venerable 97-year-old master, Nichidatsu Fujii. We were won over by the love and wisdom of “Gurudji,” who came to visit Ground Zero on the night Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. That night was a time of spiritual revival at Ground Zero, expressed in three religious traditions: the Nichiren Buddhism of Gurudji and his chanting monks and nuns; the Native American tradition of Tullalip elder Janet McCloud; the Christian faith of our Ground Zero prayer group. Whatever Reagan’s presidency might bring, that night promised a time of deepening spiritual power at Ground Zero.

On the following day when Gurudji was shown around Ground Zero, he decided that the first Peace Pagoda in the United States should be built there. The pagoda would radiate peace to the base, as Ground Zero had sought to do in other ways. Gurudji said that his experience while living in Gandhi’s ashram in India was his reason for believing that Ground Zero was a sacred place. Just as people went willingly to jail from Gandhi’s ashram, so, too, did people from Ground Zero make that sacrifice. And that made the Ground Zero land sacred—a proper site for the Peace Pagoda.

In Suzuki’s third year at Ground Zero, he was joined by a growing community of monks who began construction of the Peace Pagoda. But as the power and symbolism of the pagoda became more widely known in the military context of Kitsap County, opposition to it built up. The project was halted abruptly by the Kitsap County commissioners, who refused to grant a bulding permit for it. They claimed that according to the zoning code Ground Zero was incompatible with our neighbors to the west, the Trident base.

Shortly after the commissioners’ decision was made public, a geodesic dome at Ground Zero was burnt to the ground. The monks had been chanting in it every morning. The unidentified arsonists had poured a flammable substance around the temporary altar where the Buddha for the pagoda rested. But in burning the Buddha the arsonists also burnt Christ. Opposite the Buddha had been a crucifix. The symbols of compassion and love were fused by fire. The spirit of that vision moved us to issue a public statement asking forgiveness from the burners for any violence we might have caused them in provoking their attack.

Eight months later a judge overruled the Kitsap commissioners’ decision: The Peace Pagoda could be built. By that time, Suzuki was no longer with us, having become a pilgrim to other places. We thank him in our hearts for the gift of peace to Ground Zero which has come through his life.

The mystery of the Peace Pagoda, the continuing mystery of the Trident campaign, is a mystery of Love. Love has brought our lives together in a mysterious way, and Love will sustain us in the truth-force we experience and become. Seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be yours as well.

The hope of the Peace Blockade and the Peace Pagoda, the continuing hope of the Trident campaign, is to resist a doomsday machine in such a way as to realize a profound unity in the world—in and through the very act of resistance. To do that we must resist Trident not by some means external to ourselves, a form of violence, but by actions which deepen our own lives at the same time as they touch others.

The struggle of such a campaign is to resist a killing machine while always seeking our inner unity, one discovered in silence, and our unity with the people involved in the machine, who are never the same as the machine. Satyagraha, or truth-force, confronts the world of injustice in direct action while seeing the people of that world from within, as belonging to a vast unity of life. We struggle to confront death and discover our inner life at the same time. It is the inner side of the campaign which will be decisive in both overcoming Trident and realizing oneness in the world. We rediscover that oneness by going deeper than our own Tridents: inner assumptions of the ego, fears about reality which divide us from the unity of life.

The Trident campaign as an experiment in truth-force is meant to connect with the lives of all people, all threatened by nuclear death. If we were so graced as to feel the most distant life at its center, we would know from within its pain and compassion, its loneliness and its love—the human feelings of Jesus and of Hitler, as different as they were in acting those out and failing to do so. There is no one who doesn’t feel at the deepest levels something of our living unity. An experiment in truth-force is meant to touch that level in everyone.

Trident with its thousands of Hiroshimas is the end of the world. The Trident campaign is meant to re-discover a new world, one world, the only world remaining. The campaign can be seen as both spirit and body: Seeking first the kingdom of a deepening, widening community...in and through experiments of nonviolent direct action. Renouncing any fixation on the fruits of action...while trying to choose actions which in themselves carry the seeds of a moral and political crisis. Discovering life...through a faith willing to suffer.

The Christian experience of faith is in a God of hope to humanity, a loving God who will finally bring justice and peace to the world. The Christian prays, “Thy kingdom come,” knowing that when the kingdom does come, swords will be beaten into plowshares—or more difficult to believe today, that nuclear weapons will be abolished and the world’s masses freed from hunger and oppression. The Christian experience of faith is in a God who will finally transform the world as we know it, filled with violence and suffering, into a new heaven and new earth where love and truth will reign in people’s hearts and be embodied in a global community. Thus faith in God means hope for the earth, a hope for all of humanity.

Christians hold in common this hope toward an ultimate justice and peace for the world, “the kingdom of God.’’ They differ about whether this new earth will be in or out of time, and they differ on the extent to which they are themselves responsible for bringing it about.

The most popular Christian view of a new earth is that it will occur at the very end of time or somewhere beyond time, and that God alone will bring it about—with only one human instrument, the returning Christ. This view of a “Vertical Coming” of the new earth sees God, as it were from above, striking an abrupt end to history. Only through Christ’s Second Coming, and with no other human mediation, will the old earth suddenly give way—at the end of time and beyond it—to the new. What faithful humans can do in the meantime is simply watch and wait, as the Gospels tell us. The Vertical Coming is found in the New Testament, though not in the form it has taken in our own time. It was originally preached by poor apostles as a vision of hope to the poor and suffering, who could expect a final justice. Today the Vertical Coming of the new earth has lost favor with the poor because they have heard so much of it from the rich, who profit while the poor watch and wait for a justice beyond time.

A second Christian view of the kingdom, or the new earth, is that it will occur somewhere within time, as a culmination of human struggle through the power of God. If one were to eliminate that final phrase, “through the power of God,” this second view is similar to the Marxist vision of history—a vision of people struggling toward a new earth, a society of justice where it will be from each according to her ability, to each according to her need. The kingdom of God on earth is its description for Christians. Or one could call it the Horizontal Coming, the coming of the kingdom from within history. And it, too, has sources in the New Testament: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Or the parables of Jesus where the kingdom is seen as a leaven, a seed, or a tree, in a process of growth rather than coming only through the intervention of a God beyond history. The Horizontal Coming of the new earth is a process whereby God is already present in history, and becomes embodied in the struggles of the poor for their liberation.

The first point to note about the two Christian views of the kingdom’s coming, the Vertical and the Horizontal, is that both views agree in seeing total justice and peace as the goal of history. However perverted it has become in a capitalist society, the Christian faith by everyone’s definition is faith in a God of ultimate and complete justice. Whoever experiences this faith experiences the hope that we will finally live in justice and peace.

Perhaps the view of Jesus himself lay somewhere in a combination of the Vertical and Horizontal Comings of the kingdom. The original feature of Albert Schweitzer’s interpretation of Jesus, and of the kingdom of God, is that Jesus tried to “force”—that is, he tried to activate or precipitate—the coming of the kingdom. Schweitzer thought that Jesus, by the movement of metanoia and then by his suffering and death, sought to fulfill humanly the divine conditions of the sudden breaking in of the kingdom. A special value of Schweitzer’s apocalyptic-activist view of Jesus is that it opens up the way in which the human being, Jesus, experimented toward a transforming truth in what he saw as an end-time. In Gandhi’s terms, Jesus was experimenting more and more deeply in truth—in an age and place where truth took the form of apocalyptic revolutions, when it was felt that the deepest human experience of truth could prepare the coming of the kingdom of God on earth.

Thus the question is raised: What did Jesus discover? Not: What did Jesus, the Son of God, reveal? Rather: What did Jesus, the human being, discover—in his experiments toward a transforming truth, and in what he perceived as an end-time? What in the depths of Jesus’ life gave birth to the transforming power of the Gospels, as these have been transmitted to us?

The question is not one which can be answered in a definitive way. But it can be explored in such a way as to open up the question of our own end-time’s transformation. Jesus was seeking such a transformation. And if we can look on him as a brother, opening up a way, we may be helped by him in seeing the beginning of a transforming way for ourselves.

In his Asian Journal, Thomas Merton describes a transforming way which opened up for him, the experience given to him in his contemplation of the great stone Buddhas at Polonnaruwa in Ceylon one week before he died:

I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything—without refutation—without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening...

Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious...The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life is charged with dharmakaya...everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.[7]

Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. In our resistance to humankind’s destruction, we need to live and act in that spirit of ultimate perfect emptiness and compassion if we are to experience a way of transformation.

Along such a way, there is no us and them, no problem of evil fixed insolubly in the lives of others. The truth is that there is no intentional evil or sin of which we can be certain except our own. It is thus our own sin which is the metaphysical key to the apparent sin of all—an insight with shattering political implications which is the undiscovered basis of Gandhi’s vision of nonviolence identifying profound personal change with a global transformation. One can make an analogy to Einstein’s scientifically revolutionary formulation: Just as mass is resistance to change but in the process of change (i.e., motion) has energy, so is sin resistance to change but which nevertheless can be converted into great energy for change. If I can know for certain in reality only the responsibility of my own sin, then the essence of reality involves my accepting as an extension of that insight the responsibility for all evil—turning a recognition of the radical nature and extension of sin into a new energy for revolutionary personal/social change. Our own sin can, through a responsible insight, be converted into an undiscovered energy for change. We are all one. and the person responsible for global evils, as confirmed by our own radical insight into consciousness, is not somewhere out there but right here.

But as Gandhi taught—together with Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, and basic to them both, Jesus in the Gospels—because an experiment in this reality has to go so deeply into ego-shattering truths, we seldom experience the primary truth: the responsibility of each for all through the recognition of one’s own sin as fundamental to the most destructive violence and evil, as seen in widening circles from one’s own immediate situation (the first sin-barrier we refuse to acknowledge and cross) extending outward to the entire world. Without denying that evil has many external agents in the world, its ultimate source and responsibility comes home with startling clarity when we are finally humbled enough by reality to see simply and clearly—that as we are, so is the world. At that point, we become open to Merton’s way of transformation, as experienced in his encounter with the Buddhas, where everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. We begin then to walk on that transforming way of ultimate perfect emptiness and compassion.

In our valley in the mountains of British Columbia where I am writing this, the native people once went on vision-quests into the Reality of the valley. There are still ancient reminders of those vision-quests, to be discovered today by the lonely person of vision who continues to walk the valley floor and to explore its rock walls in pursuit of an ancient and present truth. There is one such person who is our friend, and because of him, David Kurkhonen, we have been led to see the pictographs, symbolic paintings done by the Indians on boulders at the foot of great cliffs and rock slides. These pictographs of trees, animals, persons, and unexplained visions sketched by a people on our valley rocks hundreds of years ago are our invitation into a unified Reality, a Oneness of Being, lost with the passing of that people. The pictographs are an invitation into Reality, like the wind passing through the pine trees all around them.

At the bottom of one rock slide in our valley, there is another expression of a vision-quest, a low, rock wall with strange outcroppings moving aimlessly (aimlessly in terms of walls which act as barriers) along the foot of the slide for several hundred feet, obscured by trees and boulders. A wall—or more accurately, a rock sculpture—whose meandering form was built up patiently by a person who once saw a vision, perhaps while on retreat on the cliffs high above, which demanded form in the world. The vision of that strange sculpture was formed out of piled rocks, for months and maybe years on end, so that the person, or community of persons, who had sensed it could live in truth and peace.

In our nuclear end-time, a vision of the kingdom demands concrete expression in the world if we are to live in truth and peace. We need the patience and single-mindedness to form that vision of a global community out of the rocks of our own lives and communities, and to build up a vision of the kingdom of God on earth, from life to life, from community to community. In our own valley of division and darkness, there is an invitation into Oneness, a transforming way to follow.

I believe that you and I are invited. We are invited over the fences into the heart of the Trident base. We are invited down through tunnels and through vaulted doors into the War Room of the Pentagon. We are invited into acts of ultimate perfect emptiness and compassion in the places of total destruction of life on earth. We are invited into these places because they are ours. In the nuclear age we live in darkness, in the absence of God, and the darkness is not separate from ourselves. Going to the heart of Bangor or the Pentagon will bring no revelation of destruction. We’ve been there every day of our lives. In a time of total violence, our love has grown cold.

In walking into the darkness of these places which we know already in ourselves, we may eventually discover a tiny ray of light. As we go more deeply with more faith and love into our own responsibility for darkness, that ray of light could intensify and fan out into the brilliance of a billion suns. The Light in our darkness is real. The transforming unity we seek is here.

1. [↩] Bob Aldridge has documented the first-strike technology of Trident in a series of articles for The Nation. The most definitive of these is “Trident—The Devil's Pitchfork,” The Nation (December 27, 1980). The overall U S. first-strike policy is evident in the current development of five major systems: 1) a space warfare ability to destroy the opponent’s early warning and communications satellites; 2) extremely accurate missiles and bombers to destroy enemy missile silos and other land targets; 3) an antisubmarine warfare force able to sink hostile missile-launching submarines; 4) a ballistic missile and bomber defense capable of intercepting any surviving enemy missiles or aircraft that are launched in retaliation; and 5) an intricate network of command, control, and communication to coordinate and integrate 1 through 4. For the description of these interlocking systems see Robert C. Aldridge. The Counterforce Syndrome (pamphlet published in 1978 by the Institute for Policy Studies. 1901 Q Street. N.W., Washington. D.C. 20009).
   Bob Aldridge’s full-length study of U.S. nuclear policy. First Strike, will be published by South End Press in early 1983. This particular book will be as important for our understanding in the 1980’s as Hitler’s Mein Kampf was in the 1930's. Hopefully it will be more closely read. There is no single evil genius behind U.S. nuclear policy to write with open ambition its Mein Kampf. The anonymity and secrecy of U.S. policy is more sinister. At last someone, Bob Aldridge, has exposed this final evil with a clarity that will allow no excuse for not undertaking a nonviolent commitment to stop it.
2. [↩] Robert Aldridge. “By Land, Sea and Air.” Sojourners (February 1977), p. 14.
3. [↩] Jose Miranda, Marx and the Bible (Orbis Books: 1974), p. 227.
4. [↩] M. K. Gandhi, The Voice of Truth (Navajivan Press: 1968), p. 179
5. [↩] Ibid., p. 186.
6. [↩] Karol Schulkin, “A Force More Powerful Than Trident," Ground Zero (October/November 1982), p. 11. The way to keep informed on the Trident campaign is to read Ground Zero, 16159 Clear Creek Rd., N.W., Poulsbo, WA 98370.
7. [↩] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions: 1973), pp. 233-35.