U.S. Citizen Enters a German Prison for Anti-Nuclear Weapons Protest on February 26

While participating in an international peace camp on July 14, 2019 organized by Nukewatch and GAAA, Susan Crane of Redwood City, California and Susan van der Hijden of Amsterdam and I were apprehended by German Military police after cutting a hole in the security fence and entering the airfield at Büchel, Germany, with a banner that read “Atomwaffen sind Illegal- Fliegelhorst Büchel ist ein Tator!” (Nuclear weapons are illegal, Büchel airfield is a crime scene). Despite our assurances to the soldiers guarding the base that our intentions were not intended to violate the law but to call attention to the crime of the United States Air Force 702 Munitions Support Squadron keeping about 20 nuclear B61 bombs there, we were turned over to civilian police, cited and released.

It was only when I returned to a protest at Büchel again two years later in July of 2021 that I was served documents by local police informing me that the previous July, 2020, the court in Cochem had issued a penalty order against me and a fine of 900 euros for trespassing and unlawfully damaging property. Susan and Susan had both been served the same papers earlier and had already filed appeals, so I also filed my own, hoping to argue my case in a German courtroom.

If the courts in the hyper-incarcerated United States can be likened to a giant meat grinder, mindlessly pulverizing the bodies and lives of those who fall into it with blind and callous indifference, where due process is a luxury usually afforded only to the privileged few, the courts in Germany might be compared with grain mill, sifting out the wheat and chaff slowly with careful precision and so I go to jail now for a “crime” committed more than five years ago.

In the end, though, the German courts are no more ready than courts in the U.S. would be to hear a reasonable argument that the American nuclear bombs kept at Büchel under a NATO “nuclear sharing” agreement, ready to be loaded onto German planes to be “delivered” when so ordered, are there in violation of numerous laws, including the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty which forbids any transfer of nuclear weapons between treaty signers, not to mention an existential threat to all life on this planet. After my two accomplices and some 18 other resisters in recent years had no success in their appeals to the various German courts, including the Federal Constitutional Court and up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasberg, I decided to stop waiting for my day in court and dropped my own appeal.

On December 12, 2024, the court in Koblenz sent me a letter reminding me of the 900 euro fine (plus 77.5 euro costs) with the order to pay up or report to the prison at Wittlich, Germany, on February 26 to serve a 15 day sentence. I chose prison.

The world is a more dangerous place today than it was five years ago when we took bolt cutters to “de-fence” Büchel. For one thing, the old B61 nuclear bombs that had been kept ready at Büchel and at five other European bases since 1968, are being replaced now with new, more “flexible” and more “easily deployed” B61-12 bombs.

In January, 2022, officials at the Kansas City National Security Campus, 100 miles from my home in Iowa, announced the completion of the B61-12 Life Extension Program’s First Production Unit: “It is with great pride and excitement that we see the B61-12 achieve FPU,” said Eric Wollerman, President of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies which manages and operates the campus.

Three years later, on January 7, 2025, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the completion of the last production unit of the B61–12. Just weeks ago on January 16, as my accomplice Susan Crane was being released for prison for her “crimes” at Büchel, NNSA administrator Jill Hruby, in an address at the Hudson Institute, spoke glowingly of “the future of the nuclear security enterprise.” Despite the challenges we face, “all is not gloom and doom” because, she said, “The new B61-12 gravity bombs are fully forward deployed, and we have increased NATO’s visibility to our nuclear capabilities.” The B61-12 presumably in place at Büchel is just part of a $2 trillion program to extend the “lives” of and exercising “stewardship” over the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

“I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out,” wrote William McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban missile crisis in his 1995 memoirs. “It was luck” McNamara insisted, not careful diplomacy nor any show of power, “that prevented nuclear war” in those cold war years.

It was not just luck, though, but also the persistence of anti-nuclear activists in the 1980s and ‘90s that brought the world away from the brink of nuclear destruction, demanding and getting meaningful international agreements and drastic reductions of nuclear stockpiles. Today, profiteers like Eric Wollerman and bureaucrats like Jill Hruby do not view the reduction of nuclear weapons of those recent decades as lifesaving progress toward a more peaceful and sustainable world to build upon, but as years of regrettable neglect. Today, they have reason to celebrate “the long-term future of the stockpile.” “It has been the honor to serve as the NNSA Administrator, and a pleasure to observe the progress” said Jill Hruby on January 16, “I am fond of saying that my proudest accomplishment is getting our mojo back in NNSA.”

While the officially stated “fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons,” according to the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, is to “deter nuclear attack,” they also “allow us to achieve Presidential objectives if deterrence fails.” The new U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) Command and Control Facility at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, according to a USSTRATCOM press statement, “will conduct strategic planning, warfighting operations, provide global situational awareness to the National Command Authorities and combatant commands, aid the president’s nuclear response decision-making process, and, if called upon, deliver a decisive response in all domains.”

Simply put, “Presidential objectives” and “a decisive response in all domains” both are ways of referring to the planned total destruction of life on this planet. If such power at the personal discretion of the President of the United States was of less concern before the 2024 election, it should be a terrifying thought today.

My first visit to Germany was in October of 1982, a time referred to as the “long hot autumn,” an exhilarating time when millions of Germans took to the streets to protest the short-range Pershing II nuclear missiles then deployed by the U.S. on trucks roaming the border between east and west. In solidarity with activists protesting around the globe, the Pershing program was successfully ended.

The need for a mass movement like the world saw back then could not be more urgent than it is today. I look with both fear and hope for one to arise. In the meantime, I know that mass movements are not made by people waiting for a mass movement to arrive. A mass movement is built by people joining with others to speak and act for peace the best they can in their circumstances and who are willing to risk apparent failure in their efforts.

On February 23, there will be a Global Day of Action to Close Bases taking place at military sites around the world. Two days later, on the day before I turn myself in to the prison at Wittlich, I will be joining Dutch and German friends protesting again at the gates of Büchel and the NATO nuclear sharing base at Volkel, in the Netherlands. From March 3-7, while I am quietly protesting in a German jail, the Atlantic Life Community will be in the streets of New York City for the 3rd Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations. At the same time, on the other end of the country, the Pacific Life Community will be conspiring on their future actions on retreat at a monastery in St. David, Arizona. I am grateful to be part of this grand movement.

As I prepare for my brief sojourn at Wittlich, I am looking forward to joining my friends in Europe who will be seeing me off and greeting me on my release. I am grateful for the support and prayers of many friends, for Betsy, who with help from friends and neighbors will be holding down our farm in Iowa and for the support of my colleagues with the Nevada Desert Experience, with whom I will be joining in April for our annual Sacred Peace Walk from Las Vegas to the Nevada Test Site.

The post U.S. Citizen Enters a German Prison for Anti-Nuclear Weapons Protest on February 26 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.