Harsh Justice: Nuns with Traverse City Roots Face Prison for Symbolic Protest Against Nuclear War

On a bleak plain in northern Colorado last October 6, three Dominican sisters cut a lock on a gate and entered a fenced enclosure surrounding Minuteman III missile silo #N-8 at 7:30 a.m.
Sisters Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson and Ardeth Platte were wearing the white suits of toxic clean-up crews. Big letters on the front of their suits proclaimed them as “Disarmament Specialists,“ with CWIT (Citizen Weapons Inspection Team) written across the back. The veteran anti-nuclear activists were there because it was the first anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan, and because the Bush administration had just announced that it planned to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if necessary.
Acting on the biblical prophesy of Isaih: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares,“ the nuns pulled three claw hammers from a bag and rapped on the 110-ton concrete silo lid above the missile, and then hammered on the rail tracks that move the lid out of position for firing. Using their own blood, they made the sign of the cross on the silo lid and conducted a liturgy prayer session.
Deep in the earth below the nuns was a 60-foot-long intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range of over 7,000 miles, one of 530 Minuteman IIIs spread across Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. If fired by its two-man launch crew, the 79,432 lb. missile would be capable of rocketing up to 700 miles into the earth‘s atmosphere at a speed of 15,000 mph before making its parabolic drop back to earth. At its tip is a single nuclear warhead with the destructive power 20 times that of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima in 1945. The warhead is capable of flattening buildings and killing every person within a 2.5-mile radius of ground zero, starting massive fires in an area of twice that range.
After symbolically “disarming“ the missile site, the three sisters waited for the authorities to arrive. Soon, they were staring down the barrels of automatic weapons, surrounded by police cars and soldiers in Humvees. It was a position they had placed themselves in several times before as members of Plowshares, an international peace group.
They spent the next seven months in a Colorado county jail, awaiting trial in a federal court. On July 25, they will be sentenced to a stretch in federal prison.

AWAITING PRISON
Today, sisters Gilbert, 55, Hudson, 68, and Platte, 66, are looking at prison terms of up to eight years on murky charges of trespassing and malicious destruction of property. “Throughout the trial, we tried to understand the charges,“ says Sister Ardeth Platte. “The prosecutor said he wouldn‘t charge us with sabotage, and the judge used the terms vandalism and trespass, but in actuality, they tried us on sabotage, which has a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.“
Platte and Sister Carol Gilbert both have backgrounds in Traverse City. As a nun, Platte taught at Catholic St. Francis Elementary School from 1959-‘65. Gilbert attended both grade school and high school at St. Francis, graduating in 1965, upon which she entered the Dominican sisterhood in Grand Rapids. Both have family in the area and return periodically for visits.
The two nuns will make their next visit on Wednesday, June 25 at 7 p.m. when they speak at Grace Episcopal Church Hall at Washington and Boardman streets in Traverse City as guests of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.
Their story has generated world-wide attention, with the nuns each receiving 30-50 letters each day from all over the earth. Articles have been published in all of the major papers and networks, the New York Times, Washington Post, London press and BBC among them.
“We‘re grateful that finally the story is being taken right across the world,“ says Platte by phone from the Dominican Mother House in Grand Rapids. “We‘re making a tour of all the larger cities in Michigan to regain our physical and spiritual strength before the sentencing.“
Is the government trying to make an example of them?
“I think there‘s no question that this was an extreme over-charge,“ Platte responds. “We were also stripped of our defense; there were 30 or 40 categories of law under the Constitution that we couldn‘t mention in court.“
Gilbert agrees. “I clearly think that in trying to inspect and symbolically disarm these weapons of mass destruction it appears we‘re paying a very heavy price for showing our government‘s illegalities.“

FAMILIAR TURF
This isn‘t the first time the sisters have been under the gun. “We‘ve been doing this for decades, challenging and dissenting,“ Platte says.
Gilbert and Platte were considered “the ‘heart, soul, and central organizers‘ of a series of inter-faith and nuclear resistance retreats in Michigan throughout the ‘80‘s and early ‘90s,“ according to a news release from the Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Platte also served 12 years on the Saginaw City Council, where she was mayor pro-tem. Gilbert is a former junior high school teacher and an anti-war activist of 20 years.
They‘ve taken part in several Plowshares peace demonstrations. Plowshares is an international peace group which has conducted 79 symbolic disarmaments since 1980 in the U.S., Europe and Australia.
The idea is to “hammer swords into plowshares,“ an activity which does little or nothing to damage nuclear weapons, but which often generates harsh punishment. Priests such as Philip and Daniel Berrigan, have served lengthy federal prison sentences for such actions as hammering on a nuclear nose cone at a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania, or for banging on the side of a Trident nuclear submarine. A typical action is the incident which took place at a a Maryland Air National Guard Base in 1999, when four Plowshares activists broke through a fence and hammered two A-10 Warthog jet assault planes, splattering the jets with blood. This Memorial Day, four Plowshares activists hammered on the U.S.S. Phillippine Sea aircraft carrier in New York harbor.
Events that Gilbert and Platte have been involved in include a “Weep for the Children“ Plowshares action at Groton, Conn. for the launching of the 18th Trident submarine; a “Gods of Metal“ action at Andrews Air Force Base following the bombing of Iraq in the ‘90s; and a “Sacred Earth“ action in Colorado Springs to protest “the ongoing domination of outer space with the Star Wars system.“

WHY DO IT?
Why do the sisters put themselves into such dangerous encounters with the law?
“The Dominicans believe in ‘speaking the truth to the powers of the day‘,“ Platte says. “The way we do that is through preaching. We believe in putting our bodies and words where evil exists.“
Needless to say, the sisters feel that the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal is evil on a monstrous scope. Ironically, international treaties have already done much to disarm the weapons. Under the START treaties, for instance, 550 Minutemen IIIs will be cut back to 500 -- the only land-based missiles maintained by the U.S. -- and their warheads have been decreased from three each to a single nuclear bomb. Another 450 Minuteman IIs have been done away with altogether, as were the MX missiles, which carried 10 nuclear warheads in each ICBM. Under federal guidance, firms such as Veit & Company, Inc. have demolished 150 Minuteman III silos with explosives.
Yet, Plowshares groups around the world hope that their symbolic disarmaments will raise public awareness, getting the job of a nuclear-free world done quicker.
“We are deeply opposed to poverty, war and environmental destruction,“ Platte says. “We‘re all one family created by God, and when you injure anyone, you injure God‘s family.“
Gilbert says she‘s not afraid to go to prison. She says -- with a quiver in her voice -- that she‘s more afraid of the climate of fear in America.
“We‘re in a nation now that seems bent on fear,“ Gilbert says. “The president is trying to make us fearful. What I fear is that these weapons will ever be used. I fear the amount of money being spent on war and weapons of mass destruction when 60 percent of Americans cannot make a just living or afford health care. These are the things that I would fear.
“Certainly the government can incarerate our bodies,“ Gilbert adds. “But they cannot incarcerate our minds and our spirits. Each of us receive 30 to 50 letters each day from all over the world, and our example helped give people the courage to go into the streets to protest the war in Iraq. I smile when our prosecutor says he‘s going to see that we get a heavy sentence, because you can‘t deter people from living their faith.“

A 5:30 p.m. peace potluck will precede the 7 p.m. presentation on Wednesday, June 25 at Grace Episcopal Church Hall in Traverse City. The event is sponsored by the Episcopal Peace
Fellowship, Mideast Just Peace, and the Neahtawanta Education and Research
Center. For info, call 946-3693

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