Editor’s Introduction: Those who continue to keep the dream alive at Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action are grateful for Jim and Shelley Douglass, who were instrumental in co-creating and gently guiding us along the way in this experiment with truth throughout the years. This essay by Jim and Shelley was just published in the July 2024 Ground Zero Newsletter and offers a brief history of Ground Zero and of the Peace Pagoda being built there. Yet far beyond (and embedded deeply within) that history it offers an invitation – a universal invitation to transformation. As Jim wrote in his book Lightning East To West – Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age,
“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.”
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Transformation or Annihilation?
by Shelley and Jim Douglass, June 14, 2024
Ground Zero is the name given to the place at which a nuclear bomb explodes. Hiroshima was ground zero; Nagasaki was ground zero; Bangor could be ground zero, as could be many other places all over this world.
We chose the name Ground Zero for the land that our community bought beside the Bangor base to remind ourselves that we were (and are) a prime target in a nuclear extinction war. We chose to name it Ground Zero because the place at greatest risk of destruction can be the place that begins transformational change.
We believed that transformation has to take place on two levels: the personal and the political, the local and the global. Our own change was begun by Bob Aldridge, designer of the re-entry vehicle for the Trident D5 missile. When Bob realized that he was working on a first strike weapon, he and his family decided to make a radical change. Bob resigned from Lockheed, the family took a big cut in income, Janet began to teach again – and their story inspired the campaign against the Trident system. Bob became one of the foremost analysts of nuclear policy, working with peace people all over the world.
Bob’s change inspired change in us, resulting in the founding of the original Pacific Life Community, then in the founding of Ground Zero. Over time as the Trident system became well known, thousands of people demonstrated against it, and many of us went to jail. There was an amazing peace blockade when the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, arrived at the base. A nation-wide community grew up around the trains that carried the nuclear weapons to the base. Initially stretching from Amarillo, Texas, to Bangor, the Agape Community eventually extended to the East Coast, where another base was being opened at Kings Bay, Georgia. (Which, by the way, is how we wound up in Birmingham, Alabama.) We were also able to forge relationships with indigenous peoples who suffer still from atomic testing, and with people in England and Scotland who resist their own Tridents.
The transformation is slow but it has been ongoing. As a result of Ground Zero’s presence, and especially the leaflets we handed out for years, base workers and military personnel have left their work, as Bob did, for reasons of conscience. The story of our friends, Al and Jerrie Drinkwine, is an inspiring example from the GZ leafleting.
August 12, 1982 was the day on which 99 Coast Guard boats (its entire West Coast fleet) were deployed to deal with the Peace Blockade, when the USS Ohio came into Bangor. On that same day, Al Drinkwine resigned his $22,000 a year job at the base. In a prophetic sense, that step by Al and Jerrie – like Bob’s and Janet’s – was another beginning to the end of Trident, even as the crowds cheered its arrival. Al had been reading leaflets passed out by Ground Zero volunteers every Thursday morning since September 1978. In the winter of 1982, Al and Jerrie attended a Wednesday night meeting at Ground Zero. In June 1982, Al risked his job by testifying in a Kitsap County court in support of arrested Ground Zero leafleter Karol Schulkin. A spiritual chain reaction was in process.
A month after Al’s resignation, he and Jerrie wrote a letter to Bangor friends and workers, which was then passed out as a Ground Zero leaflet to those entering the base. At its heart was the passage: “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 mankind? 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?”
Because of the participation of people like Al and Jerrie and many other questioning base workers in touch with Ground Zero, things began to change – by the weekly leafleting, our home meetings with worker families, our Wednesday Night meetings to explore key questions, and the mutual respect involved in a whole range of GZ activities. We were overcoming the fences between us – and not just by climbing over them in civil disobedience, though that was important in our noncooperation with the evil of Trident.
Over 47 years, many changes occurred. Our geodesic dome was burned down – by two Bangor Marines, as we learned years later by Glen Milner’s Freedom of Information Act request. Our Ground Zero house was burned down – probably by arson but by whom we don’t know. There is now a beautiful eco-conscious house at Ground Zero, and an ongoing relationship with the base built up from 47 years of Ground Zero’s open, nonviolent resistance. Ground Zero folks were not about to go away. And they didn’t. And won’t.
Perhaps the biggest change of all has been the recent support of the County for the building of the Peace Pagoda, after 40 years of obstruction and refused permits. When the Rev. Nichidatsu Fujii came to Ground Zero – on the night Ronald Reagan was elected president – he said that because of the history of nonviolent resistance to nuclear destruction here, and because of the jail sentences and other suffering for peace, this should be the place for the first Peace Pagoda in the United States. Early attempts to build the pagoda soon met massive resistance, especially since it was a Japanese effort in a heavily Navy county that still remembered Pearl Harbor. But the Gandhi-like monks of Nipponzan Myohoji, with persistent Ground Zero comrades by their side, are prevailing against all obstacles. Lo and behold, the Ground Zero Peace Pagoda is arising! A miracle of nonviolence.
So where is Ground Zero today, after a near half-century working for what some might think is the equally impossible dream of abolishing Trident? Is it time to fiddle away, shout Ole, and head for the hay?
In 1921, Gandhi said to the people of India: “Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” His people heard Gandhi, joining with his ashram community in a nonviolent campaign of satyagraha (“truth-force”) to overcome their oppression by the British Empire. Gandhi believed – just as the community that has founded and sustained Ground Zero believes – that nonviolent truth-force is the greatest power in the Universe. It is what Dr. King called its moral arc, where we can walk through the light of the stars by nonviolent living and action.
Yet the daunting question today is: Will we humans draw deeply enough and soon enough on that universal force in our being, as the light fades, to beat the Doomsday Clock – now at 90 seconds to midnight, ticking away, second by second? (The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in 1973, was set at 12 minutes to midnight. It is now closer than ever before to nuclear apocalypse.)
So, for us all, the work of change isn’t done – especially since the grace of the Aldridge family, of Al and Jerrie Drinkwine, and of a host of other nonviolent warriors has given us a piece of the rock at Ground Zero. The reign of nonviolent change is at hand – our hands. Ground Zero shares 330 feet of barbed-wire fence with “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound,” as Archbishop Hunthausen called what lies behind those beautiful trees on the other side of the fence – where the deer jump. But as you keep going, you reach the higher, double fences and the lit-up darkness of Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC) – 1.4 miles from Ground Zero with its approximately 500 nuclear weapons, not far away at all. Ground Zero is the blessed place where we can realize that truth. We have been given that piece of the truth and its invitation to action that is vital to our global human transformation. Beginning at our gathering circle of prayer around the Peace Pagoda. Come and see.
What a gift. And what an invitation to Ground Zero to make a crucial difference by keeping those SWFPAC weapons from destroying the world. Which otherwise, loaded inch by careful inch onto Bangor’s eight Trident submarines, make up “the most powerful military force on the planet” (Hans Kristensen, Federation of American Scientists), bound for their deep journeys and launching points to many ground zeroes.
So how can our Ground Zero make the difference between humanity’s transformation and its annihilation?
Hopefully we shall see.
End Note: Jim and Shelley Douglass appear on the left side of the banner photo, taken during one of the early nonviolent direct actions at the train tracks that enter the Bangor Trident base in Silverdale, Washington.
