"Golden Rule" Vs. Nuclear Tests
Oppenheimer, Marvin
The story is told by Steward Meacham of the American Friends Service Committee of how a small shirt factory in Western Pennsylvania was struck by its women employees, of how the company...
...First it must be borne in mind that a demonstration may take place under a number of motivations...
...To the latter, it had said: "Four of us...
...on their second start in May, a half-hour's sail from Honolulu, they were picked up by the United States Coast Guard and brought back in criminal contempt of court...
...They were sentenced to 60 days (suspended) and one year's probation (no civil disobedience allowed...
...The four crew-members now imprisoned at Honolulu are Albert Bigelow, a former Lieutenant Commander in the Navy during World War II and a Quaker and father of two, grandfather of four...
...the picket line against nuclear weap ons testing is still extremely vulner able to scabs...
...The answer comes down to an "existential" argument: They did it because they could do no other, because no one else did it for them, because politics failed to do it, because the hour was late and because they had to...
...THE ENIWETOK TRIP was the third action project undertaken by Non-Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons, which consists largely of pacifists and Quakers...
...During the last series of nuclear tests, a Japanese fishing vessel didn't make it away far enough fast enough and was severely contaminated...
...criticism by such individuals of NVA's anti-Soviet stand and of the European project which was contemplated has been carefully answered but has not changed the group's position...
...We recognize the equal guilt of Russian authorities in this matter and plan parallel action to carry the same moral and political message to them .. For years we have spoken and written of the suicidal military preparations of the Great Powers, but our voices have been lost in the massive effort of those responsible for preparing this country for war...
...last November, featured by silent walking before the White House and poster walking before the AEC's buildings...
...The strike against the shirt company was won...
...If public opinion is ripe, it can be mobilized into action by a demonstration...
...we may all of us not live long enough to succeed, because all mankind is in that same boat which is now locked up in Honolulu Bay under the surveillance of the U.S...
...The first was a civil disobedience demonstration in which eleven pacifists were arrested when they trespassed upon the AEC's proving grounds near Las Vegas about a year ago...
...George Willoughby, executive secretary of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, also a Quaker, father of four school-aged children, and former chairman of the Socialist Party of Iowa (he quit on the "war question...
...There is a difference between the women strikers and the crew of the "Golden Rule": the experience of most of our lives makes the story of the women meaningful to us, while the nuclear protest has as yet failed to be translated into terms which any significant body of American public opinion can understand...
...It would take much harsher experience than America has had, or, failing that, years of education and political activity to get an individual vaguely worried about Carbon 14 across the sidewalk and into the street to do something about it...
...in an effort to halt what we feel is the monstrous delinquency of our government in continuing actions which threaten the well-being of all men...
...They knew the risks and they realized what might be the pitiful inadequacy of the result...
...If the project was not undertaken primarily for effectiveness, why then...
...On April 11, the Atomic Energy Commission issued regulations barring U.S...
...One appeal has been denied...
...They have failed, for now...
...The group had written to Bulganin and to Eisenhower...
...A poster walk will not do it...
...The sailboat "Golden Rule" originally put out from San Pedro, California, bound for what the anthropologists call Micronesia, via Hawaii, on February 10...
...plan to sail a small vessel into the designated area in the Pacific...
...But in a very real sense their failure is our failure...
...The group is quite clear on the equal guilt of the Soviet authorities, but a contingent eager to carry the message into Russia was turned back by Soviet refusals to issue visas...
...There was no reply...
...obviously, public opinion is indeed concerned about nuclear weapons testing, but few would stretch their necks out so far as to say that this concern is at present very actionable...
...Court appeals of the crew are challenging, among other things, a possible violation of freedom of the seas in the original AEC regulations—which, it has been pointed out, discriminate against American citizens by not equally barring from the poisoned zone citizens of other nations...
...Their rejection of socialist and radical politics (if not ideology) is partly because of their historical frustration within radical movements, and partly because while the world is about to go up in flames we sit and read DISSENT and have no movement into which to integrate their legitimate frustrations...
...citizens from a 390,000 square-mile area, and an injunction specifically barring the "Golden Rule" from violating the regulations followed soon thereafter...
...Along a continuum of Quaker theology blending for some into revolutionary and anarcho-pacifism, this is what the "Golden Rule" project boiled down to...
...We mean to speak now with the weight of our whole lives...
...They know what they are about...
...The second was a "Prayer and Conscience Vigil" in Washington, D.C...
...After a shuffling of the organizational letterhead the boat project was conceived...
...Effectiveness had little to do with it...
...and Orion Sherwood, a teacher...
...It might be added that the group has not been afraid to lose the support of a number of individual fellowtravelers of Stalinoid complexion both here and abroad...
...There is no cause here for us to sit back and smile benignly at their "naivete," or simply to reject their refusal to relate to the broader politics of the day...
...These are no naive muddleheads...
...Some of the participants in the "European Project" had indicated that civil disobedience was a possibility, but all have now returned to the States...
...In this age of recession, walking is becoming ever more popular as a sign of protest, and larger groups walked from New Haven and Philadelphia to the United Nations on a similar errand last Easter...
...following two further attempts to skip the harbor, both intercepted by the Coast Guard, all four men are now in jail...
...Last winter a group of four men decided to sail a 80-foot ketch to Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands to stop nuclear weapons testing with the weight of their own lives...
...This was the individual act undertaken against a state and a condition which seemed omnipotent...
...THEN IF, as they admit, their effort may bring no real change, why do it at all...
...A few hundred miles out at sea heavy storms forced the crew to turn back, upon advice of the ubiquitous Coast Guard...
...William Huntington, a former conscientious objector and a member of the board of directors, AFSC, father of three and a grandfather of three...
...Violation of this injunction on May 1 resulted in the suspended sentence...
...above all this was propaganda of the deed, one's physical body thrown into a void where no other bridge seemed to exist...
...The Iate Pacific Project, certainly as imaginative as anything can be, will not do it either...
...The story is told by Steward Meacham of the American Friends Service Committee of how a small shirt factory in Western Pennsylvania was struck by its women employees, of how the company threatened to move its machinery, and of how, on the day the trucks began to move machinery, the girls lay down in the road and stopped the trucks "with the weight of their own lives...
...Coast Guard...
Vol. 5 • July 1958 • No. 3
