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 […]
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Choose Life: Abolish Nuclear Weapons (a Good Friday reflection)
by Leonard Eiger March 29, 2024 TRIDENT IS GENOCIDE CHOOSE LIFE NOT TERROR On March 13, 2024 Ray Towey of Catholic Peace Action in the United Kingdom marked the Ministry of Defence building in London with the sign of the cross and those words. Why would someone, particularly a person of faith, do such a thing? Let’s take a step back and take a walk down memory lane in order to answer that question. In his message to the First Meeting Of States Parties To The Treaty On The Prohibition Of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) on June 21, 2022 Pope Francis […]
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Archbishop Hunthausen: A Lesson on Faith & Disarmament
By Leonard Eiger Originally published by the National Catholic Reporter on Aug 23, 2021 “I am grateful for having been invited to speak to you on disarmament because it forces me to a kind of personal disarmament. This is a subject I have thought about and prayed over for many years. I can recall vividly hearing the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. I was deeply shocked. I could not then put into words the shock I felt from the news that a city of hundreds of thousands of people had been devastated by a single bomb. Hiroshima challenged […]
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PLC Six found guilty of trespass on west coast nuclear weapons base
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Nick Mele for his stellar onsite reporting of the Federal trial of the PLC Six. Click here to read more about the March 7, 2017 nonviolent direct action that led to yesterday’s trial. Tacoma, Washington, September 6, 2017: Nuclear resisters were found guilty in US District Court of criminal trespass for their nonviolent protest at a US Navy nuclear weapons installation in Washington State. In a trial of six nonviolent activists who conducted an act of civil resistance on March 7, 2017 at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Silverdale, Washington, Magistrate Judge David W. Christel found the […]
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From Trinity to Trident, and Beyond…
Dear Friends, Today marks the anniversary of the Trinity test, where the United States detonated the first nuclear device. I ponder the perilous journey we have taken since that first test of a nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Since the United States dropped the first two bombs on Japan soon after Trinity, nuclear weapons have never been used by one nation against another, although we have neared that precipice numerous times. Since those first two bombs the U.S. built a total of over 70,000 nuclear warheads and bombs at astronomical costs, both economic […]
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