Direct action news from the US from the Nuclear Resister about actions around the Hiroshima-Nagasaki anniversaries, when we remember the destruction of those cities by US atomic bombs in August 1945.
On 5 August, the day before Hiroshima Day, four activists from the Brandywine Peace Community were arrested for blocking the entrance to Lockheed Martin in Pennsylvania. They were holding a photo of a Japanese child taken in Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
Lockheed Martin’s involvement in the production of nuclear weapons includes building the Trident II D5 nuclear missiles carried on US and British Trident submarines.
The four arrested were: Beth Centz, Patrick Sieber, Tom Mullian, and Paul Sheldon.
On Nagasaki Day, 9 August, 48 people were arrested during a die-in outside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US equivalent to Britain’s Aldermaston nuclear bomb factory.
This came after 250 people took part in a a ‘March for Nuclear Abolition & Global Survival’ to the lab, which delivered a copy of the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Also on Nagasaki Day, Christian peace activists Bill Frankel-Streit and Eric Martin refused to go into the designated protest zone at the Pentagon and were arrested on the pavement while holding photographs of Nagasaki victims.
They were part of a group of 30 faith-based activists who marched behind a banner saying: ‘US Nuclear Bombing of Nagasaki, August, 9, 1945 – Repent’.
An earlier ceremony at the White House, on Hiroshima Day, was also organised by Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, and also involved 30 people.
On 14 August, seven people were arrested for blockading the entrance to the US Trident base at Kitsap-Bangor. One of their banners read: ‘No Nuclear Strike On N. Korea!’ The seven arrested were: Philip Davis, Susan DeLaney, Ryan DeWitt, Sarah Hobbs, Mack Johnson, Ben Moore and Charles (Charley) Smith.
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