“Letter to a Trident Crew Member” was written by James Douglass, and originally published in the Ground Zero Newsletter, Fall 1986, Vol. 5, No. 3.
Dear Friend,
I write to you in the hope that you are open to reading a letter from someone who believes in you but rejects Trident as a crime against God and humanity. I believe in you as a person of conscience, at the same time as I am deeply troubled by the power you have to destroy the world. I believe and hope in you, but I hate what lies within the Trident missiles which you sleep beside in the depths of the ocean and which you are prepared to launch at any moment in annihilation of the earth.
I am writing you, friend, to ask by what authority you have been given such power to cremate God’s creation. I am writing to ask you to consider in heart and mind, to pray in the depths of your conscience over the question: By what authority on earth or in heaven’ have you been given the right to launch those instruments of hell?
I, too, sleep beside Trident missiles, in a house alongside the Bangor base fence where trains deliver the fuel propellant and hydrogen bombs which end up alongside you in the bowels of Trident. In the five years that our family has lived in this house by the Bangor tracks, we have been shaken in body and soul by hundreds of Trident trains. The house itself seems to rumble from the vibration of these trains, as we see passing beneath our windows the container cars with their bright orange “EXPLOSIVES A” placards. I continue shaking in spirit long after this cargo of annihilation has rolled on through the razor-wire double fencing at the center of Bangor, where the bombs and propellant are deposited in bunker-tombs in the earth, later to be assembled in missiles and lowered into their Trident hatches where they rest in waiting a few inches from your bed.
While you and I sleep beside these instruments of hell, they sleep too, all of us capable of being roused quickly. At any moment you can be shaken and recalled from your dreams of home to launch the missiles on the homes of everyone, doing so supposedly in our defense, in defense of all those who pray that you will never do what you have vowed to do in obedience to authority.
But I must repeat the question at the heart of this letter, a question I hope you will ponder in your soul: By whose authority do you prepare to execute such an inconceivable crime as the destruction of the planet? Who gave you that authority? Who is even eapable of giving it to you?
In raising that question, I am aware that on a Trident submarine you are immersed in work routines which give you little time to question at all what it is you are doing. The final commitment you have made to destroy the world (if ordered to do so) recedes in your mind as you focus on the particular tasks you have been trained to do. In your specialized role on that submarine, you are a proud, well-trained Navy professional, with little time or inclination to question the assumptions of your profession. I remember having a similar sense of reality as an Army professional, firing an M-1 rifle during basic training 30 years ago.
That we recruits were then being trained to kill people was something I took for granted. It was there beneath the surface. At no point in basic training did I question the act of symbolically fixing the sights of my M-1 on the heart of another human being, in preparation for the actual event in war. Nor was I aware that the training I was undergoing was as much psychological, conditioning me to kill, as it was physical.
I learned how to kill with the M-1 by concentrating my whole heart and mind on firing accurately, submerging any thoughts I might have had of future human targets. I imagine that is how it is with you, in your training to kill millions of people (if ordered to do so). You have become totally concentrated on carrying out your special task in that mammoth underwater machine, pushing beneath your consciousness any thought or feeling for its victims. Otherwise the work of a Trident crew would become impossible.
But when the end product of one’s work makes thinking and feeling about it impossible, what kind of work is that? What kind of work is it that would become impossible were we to become fully conscious of its end?
And to repeat again that most basic question: Who gave you the authority to end history? Where did you and your fellow crew members get the right to pull the switch on all of us – east, west, north, south, all of us under the nuclear winter you are prepared to trigger (if given that command to fire)?
Please do not tell me it is by the authority of the President of the United States. President Reagan is not God. Nor has God given him a final power over creation. What the President has been granted by the Constitution is simply the power to command the defense of the United States. You know as well as I do that launching those missiles defends no one. We all know that once they shoot up from the ocean’s depths and streak toward oblivion, the world has reached its end. The President has no authority to end the world. He cannot delegate to you an authority he himself lacks. No one on earth has the authority – no one on earth can have the authority – which your job assumes.
But you say that the question of that ultimate authority over creation is really beside the point. You are assigned, you say, to your duty on Trident not to destroy the world but to “deter” that destruction. The paradox – others would say contradiction – to which you have committed yourself is that only by your willingness to destroy the world is its peace preserved.
Let me suggest that what you are preserving (by threatening to preserve nothing) is in fact not peace but injustice. It is an injustice in which you and I share. Our country, which represent 6% of the world’s population, controls 36% of its resources. Trident, history’s most expensive, most destructive weapons system, is designed to maintain a status quo in which some U.S. citizens live in wealth and most of the world’s people live in desperate hunger and poverty.
I know you believe it is not hungry Third World citizens but the Russians who are the reason for Trident’s firepower, and I grant that holding off those two opponents is intermixed in our policies. In terms of nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union, Trident’s purpose is not, however, to deter. It is to strike first.
“First strike” and “Trident” are synonymous for me because I know well a former Lockheed designer of the Trident missile system, Robert Aldridge. Bob Aldridge resigned from Lockheed after 16 years designing Polaris, Poseidon, and finally Trident missiles because, in the case of Trident, he could not in conscience continue to work on a I first strike weapon. Bob, his wife, Janet, and their six children at home (they have ten in all) decided to live more simply, relying on their faith in Christ, so that Bob could leave his Lockheed job. In the classic book he then wrote, First Strike, Bob identified Trident as “the ultimate first strike weapon” because of its missiles’ extraordinary accuracy, high explosive power, and short flight time to Soviet missile silos.
How I wish that you and your fellow crew members could meet Bob Aldridge and hear personally his analysis of Trident’s first strike nature. I believe that you would be moved to a terrifying yet hopeful realization. But if that miracle should not come to pass, I ask you to read First Strike as if life on this planet depended on your understanding of that book.
I am afraid that the nature of Trident provides no basis for avoiding the question with which this letter began: By what authority have you been given the power to end life on earth? If anything, a closer examination of Trident brings the question home in an even more soul-shattering way – to me as well as to you.
I have read recently of a man who haunts me. During the Second World War, he was the traffic superintendent of the Treblinka village railway station in occupied Poland. This traffic supervisor, who was also a member of the Polish underground, counted the cattle cars filled with Jewish victims being shuttled to the Treblinka extermination camp. On each car the Nazis had written in chalk the number of Jews inside. From July 1942 through August 1943, this man counted 1,200,000 Jewish victims in the trains passing him. Then the trains stopped. They had accomplished their task. There were no more Jews to be sent to Treblinka.
As I write down the numbers on Trident missile shipments rumbling past our house, I wonder how long this process can possibly continue before it concludes in a global fire. In terms of our hope, I wonder what more I can do, what more our community can do – how many more trains we must sit in front of, how many more vigils we must hold – before the trains and Trident can be stopped short of accomplishing their task.
I choose to believe, friend, that it is not already too late. I choose to believe that you and I can be joined in a miracle of nonviolence, in a community where Trident crew members and Trident resisters are one in the spirit of nonviolence – saying no to this system of global extermination which now joins us in complicity, saying yes in faith and hope to the spirit of nonviolence in our hearts which can join us in a more profound way than we ever imagined was possible. I believe in the God who can and will work that miracle in our lives, who will stop Trident before Trident stops the world. I believe in that God, and I believe in you.
During our 12 years resisting Trident, Shelley, my wife, and I have been separated for almost two years by either she or I being in jail. We take turns going to jail for peace so that the other is free to stay with our son at home. In the course of those separations, we have felt a strange solidarity with the families of Trident crew members who go beneath the sea for months at a time. We recognize that you and we are both engaged in sacrifices for what we believe in. We also recognize that much deeper sacrifices are called for in all of our lives by a God of Love if our world is to survive. There is no faith without suffering, no hope without the voluntary crucifixion of our own fears.
By what authority will you act if you launch those missiles and end the world? There is no President or commander who can grant you such authority, and no God who will. If you fire those missiles and destroy creation, you will be acting on your own authority. You will not be the only one to commit that final sin – I and others are complicit with you – but in the deepest sense you will be acting on your own. In doing such evil, each of us acts in the solitude of our own being. When we cooperate with evil, we act under the authority of our own wills. In choosing annihilation, we have no divine authority to justify us and no human community to sanction us. We alone are responsible for our own evil.
I ask you to refuse to cooperate withthat evil. I ask you to choose the power of nonviolence in community, in the God of Love.
In peace and friendship,
Jim Douglass
Original letter transcribed in full by Leonard Eiger, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, April 2020
Editor’s Note: Jim and Shelley Douglass lived, during the early years of the formation of what became Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, in a house overlooking the railroad tracks that enter Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor from the south. Those tracks were later discovered to be used by trains carrying nuclear warheads to the base. Other rail shipments carried rocket motors and missile components for the Trident submarine-launched nuclear missiles on the OHIO Class “Trident” ballistic missile submarines deployed out of Bangor.
