More than a decade later, a nuclear-weapons catastrophe has not yet occurred. The threat has been dismissed as ‘alarmist’ by some academics and no longer inspires much public concern. But since the early 1980s, a small group of peace activists, devout supporters of the Plowshares movement, have been trying to break into nuclear-weapons sites throughout the United States. They’ve almost always succeeded. Plowshares actions have not only revealed serious vulnerabilities in the security of America’s nuclear enterprise, they’ve also shed light on the inherent risks faced by every nation that possesses weapons of mass destruction. Having these weapons creates endless opportunities for theft or misuse. At the moment, the probability of terrorists staging a successful nuclear attack may be low, but the consequences would be unimaginably high. And, as Plowshares activists have demonstrated again and again, improbable things happen all the time.

love your enemies

The origins of the Plowshares movement can be traced to the work of Dorothy Day. At the age of eighteen, Day dropped out of college in Illinois and moved to New York City. She was an aspiring writer, a free spirit drawn to the radical politics and bohemia of Greenwich Village in 1916. She soon had a job as a reporter with The Call, a socialist newspaper, covering protest marches, strikes, and the birth-control movement. Her family was conservative and Episcopalian, but Day rejected all the trappings of middle-class respectability. She lived in a communal apartment, took lovers, spent time with anarchists and communists, with John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, and John Reed.

By the time Day was twenty-four, she’d been arrested outside the White House while demanding the vote for women and sent to jail for a month; worked as an assistant managing editor at The Masses, a left-wing monthly that was shut down after opposing the draft and the First World War; got arrested during the raid of an Industrial Workers of the World flophouse and mistakenly been charged with prostitution; worked as a library clerk, a restaurant cashier, an artist’s model, a nurse; had an illegal abortion; gotten married and sought a divorce; moved to Europe and lived on the island of Capri for six months; interviewed Leon Trotsky; and decided to write a novel. After selling the film rights to her first book, she bought a beach house on Staten Island and had a daughter with a common-law husband. And then Dorothy Day did something so radical that few of her radical friends could comprehend it. She became a Catholic. She took a vow of poverty. And she devoted the rest of her life to the practice of a new kind of American Catholicism – one that was uncompromising in its service to the homeless, its opposition to state power, its resistance to all forms of violence and war.