The Discharge of a Naval Nuclear Weapons Protester

[muriel_volestrangler]

In the early 60s:

I alerted the system, but the system wasn’t listening. This memo went into a drawer in my boss’s desk. I remember him looking at me quizzically. Never a word, but no trouble either. I think it made me angry, not being listened to. Anyone who has tried to buck the system understands how difficult it is for an enlisted man to tell an officer what to do. All I wanted was for them to put a lockable cap on the main warhead connection. I wanted them to protect these devices from me and my madness. Stop me from doing something foolish. And thinking of something foolish became an obsession. I saw myself holding the president and the programme hostage, single-handedly bringing about disarmament. People would finally understand how dangerous these weapons were.
...
You write a good memo and there’s no taking it back; no stopping the bullet once it leaves the barrel. I lost my top secret clearance and was eventually transferred to Treasure Island near San Francisco. I cleaned urinals, swept the parade ground, and did guard duty at the brig. Every morning thousands of men were marshalled in the parade ground. Many of us were awaiting orders to ship out. My number was 3039, and every morning I was there waiting for it to be called. As the months went by, and all my shipmates came and went to other assignments, I began to understand that this was punishment duty, that I was going nowhere until my enlistment was up. San Francisco at that time was a hotbed of the peace movement. They couldn’t have thought of a worse place to put me in cold storage. There were demonstrations all the time against atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union had violated an informal test ban earlier that year, and the Department of Defense’s desire to test its modernised missile warheads resulted in the US conducting a series of dramatically stupid hydrogen bomb tests in the spring of 1962 near Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific.

Perhaps some of the guys I trained with in Albuquerque were on Johnston Island. Early-model Thor rockets, returned from years of deployment in England, were used to test out the feasibility of anti-ICBM defence by being detonated at high altitude. The range-safety officers had to abort four of them. The fallout came down. It wasn’t like other tests where the military were held back a decent distance from ground zero. One of the Thors blew up on the pad, making practically the whole island radioactive. There were barracks on that island, and probably a detachment of my fellow GMTs to install the W49 bombs on the Thors. Naval aviators flew seaplanes in and out of the fallout. They brought in an army detachment with bulldozers who pushed many acres of radioactive coral into the lagoon. After Vietnam the island was used to store thousands of barrels of Agent Orange, and then it became a disposal site for chemical munitions. Today it’s not used for anything and no one can visit without special permission.
...
I got the afternoon off. I went to my locker and got out my dress whites. I never had the occasion to wear them because we were always in dungarees. I spit-shined my shoes. There was a sit-in that day at the Atomic Energy Commission building in Oakland. There were five or six people sitting on the front steps when I arrived, and a small crowd milling about. They looked at me with some puzzlement. I think one of them got up and moved out of the way, thinking I wanted to go inside. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Gimme a sign.’ There was one I really liked: ‘Why repeat Khrushchev’s crime?’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mike-kirby/diary