Beyond Nuclear International

Not-so-happy Clams open to new anti-nuclear challenge

By Arnie Alpert

When a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went from a technological miracle to a pile of radioactive rubble in a matter of moments in 1979, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire office of the Clamshell Alliance became a hive of activity. I was working there at the time, fielding calls from activists and journalists from around the world. Everyone wanted our opinion since — over the previous few years — our nonviolent demonstrations to prevent the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant put us at the forefront of a growing social movement.

From the arrests of 18 New Hampshire residents in our first act of civil disobedience in 1976 to more than 1,400 arrests the following spring to a permitted rally that drew some 18,000 protesters in 1978, the Clamshell Alliance touched off a grassroots anti-nuclear rebellion that brought the “No Nukes” message to communities across the country and into the popular culture.

With that groundwork in place, Three Mile Island took our message to the next level. The idea that “nuclear power is a bad way to generate electricity” soon became accepted knowledge across the United States. Everyone from Wall Street tycoons to congressional staffers to ordinary voters now understood that the nuclear industry’s promise of safe, clean and affordable power was a fraud.

Unfortunately, in recent years this understanding has slowly eroded, as the industry has worked to tout its product as the answer to climate catastrophe. With the Biden administration now sinking billions into nuclear energy — and Congress on the verge of passing legislation to ease regulatory precautions on new reactors — the nuclear fraudsters are aiming for a comeback.

What can we learn from Philip Berrigan’s quest for peace?

By Brad Wolf

It is April 15 and we can reflect on the life and work of Philip Berrigan and undertake our own ministry of risk for peace—to ease the suffering, to restore human dignity, and to challenge our doomed policy of warmaking.

Each year Americans forfeit a sizable slice of their income to the United States Treasury to fund the government. Tax Day is dreaded. No one likes surrendering their hard-earned cash. But rather than a resigned shrug, Americans should look closely at what they are getting for their money when it comes to government services and policy.

In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon received $858 billion for the preparation of war. This doesn’t include hidden costs for intelligence services, veterans’ benefits, Homeland Security, or the Department of Energy, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. All totaled, over $1 trillion a year is allotted for warmaking. By comparison, the 2023 budget for the U.S. Department of State, this nation’s department tasked with making peace across the globe, was a relatively miniscule $63 billion.

One way to register resistance to this profligate spending on warmaking is that of renowned peace activist and then Catholic priest Philip Berrigan. During the Vietnam War, Phil initiated the destruction of U.S. military draft files in Baltimore and Catonsville, Maryland, to save the lives of both Vietnamese and Americans, actions for which he received lengthy prison sentences.

These draft file actions by Phil initiated a new form of resistance to the Vietnam War, since no copies were kept of the draft files. Hundreds of similar actions followed at draft board offices across the country with hundreds of thousands of draft files destroyed, all stopping young men from being conscripted to kill or be killed.

Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons, he threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation

By Lawrence S. Wittner

Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.

Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation.  In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.”  Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.” 

Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”

Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law.  In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.” 

That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly.  “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said.  “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. . . .  As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”  And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.