Cover

PENGUIN BOOKS

GODS OF METAL

Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness, and Command and Control, as well as the co-author of a children’s book, Chew on This. Two of his plays, Americans and We the People, have been produced in London. He was an executive producer of the films Fast Food Nation and There Will Be Blood. He was a co-producer of the documentary Food Inc., an executive producer of Food Chains and Harra Ranch.

Gods of Metal

The Y-12 National Security Complex sits amid a narrow valley, surrounded by wooded hills, in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 and Oak Ridge were built secretly, within about two years, as part of the Manhattan Project, America’s crash programme to create an atomic bomb, and their existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War. By then, the secret city had a population of 75,000. Few of its residents had been allowed to know what was being done at the military site, which included one of the largest buildings in the world. Y-12 processed the uranium used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven decades later, Y-12 is still the only industrial complex in the United States devoted to the fabrication and storage of weapons-grade uranium. Every nuclear warhead and bomb in the American arsenal contains uranium from Y-12.

Strict security measures have been adopted at the site to prevent the theft of its special nuclear materials. Y-12 has some five hundred security officers authorized to use lethal force within its Protected Area, five BearCat armoured vehicles, Gatling guns that can fire up to fifty rounds per second and shoot down aircraft, video cameras, motion detectors, four perimeter fences, and rows of dragon’s teeth – low, pyramid-shaped blocks of concrete that can rip the axles off approaching vehicles and bring them to a dead stop. The management of Y-12 calls the place ‘the Fort Knox of Uranium’.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility was built, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars, to safeguard Y-12’s uranium. Situated at the north end of the Protected Area, the storage facility is an imposing white structure, longer than a football field, with guard towers at all four corners. If the tops of the towers were crenellated, the building would look like an immense, windowless White Castle. Some 900,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium are stored inside it. Little Boy – a crude and highly inefficient atomic bomb, designed in the early 1940s with slide rules – contained about 140 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, and almost 99 per cent of it harmlessly blew apart as the bomb detonated. And, when that happened, two-thirds of the buildings in the city were destroyed and perhaps 80,000 civilians were killed. The amount of weapons-grade uranium needed to build a terrorist bomb with a similar explosive force could fit inside a small gym bag.

At about half past two in the morning on 28 July 2012, three people were dropped off at the Scarboro Church of Christ, a modest brick building with a single white spire in an African-American neighbourhood of Oak Ridge. They walked across the church parking lot, made their way through a stand of trees, reached a meadow, and turned left. Up ahead, in the darkness, they could see the silhouette of a steep hill called Pine Ridge. On the other side of the hill was Y-12. All three had spent time in federal prison. They belonged to a loosely organized group whose members have been prosecuted by the Justice Department for violent crimes, sabotage, and threatening national security. The three hoped to reach the uranium-storage facility before sunrise, having carefully planned the intrusion for more than a year. But they had no desire to steal anything or make a bomb. They wanted to ‘heal’ and ‘transform’ the building with their own blood; to mark it as a symbol of evil, empire, and war; to protest against its role in maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal. Gregory Boertje-Obed was a Christian pacifist in his late fifties who painted houses for a living and worked with the homeless in Duluth, Minnesota. Michael Walli was a Catholic layman in his early sixties, inspired by the life of St Francis of Assisi to live humbly and serve the poor. And Megan Rice was an eighty-two-year-old nun, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Carrying flashlights and backpacks, they headed towards the hill.

Not so long ago, the threat of nuclear terrorism seemed imminent. In the autumn of 2001, during an interview with a Pakistani journalist, Osama bin Laden claimed to possess nuclear weapons, and President George W. Bush’s administration invoked the prospect of mushroom clouds rising above American cities to justify its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘We judge that there is a high probability that Al Qaeda will attempt an attack using a CBRN’ – chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear – ‘weapon within the next two years,’ John Negroponte, Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations, informed the Security Council in April 2003. ‘There is little doubt that Al Qaeda intends to and can detonate a weapon of mass destruction on US soil,’ members of a bipartisan commission on national security wrote the following year.

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.

Dorothy Day sought to emulate Jesus and live the Gospel, embracing a Christianity true to its historical roots. She was greatly influenced by Peter Maurin, a French peasant who’d travelled widely in the United States, taking odd jobs and giving speeches about Catholic social justice. While her downtown contemporaries looked to Marx and Engels for guidance, Day now regarded the Sermon on the Mount as her manifesto: Care little about material possessions or food. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. Blessed are the meek and the peacemakers. In 1933, Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper that sold for a penny. It published the sort of advocacy journalism that Day had written for years, now imbued with a biblical perspective. The print run of the first edition was about 2,500, and she sold copies of it on May Day in Union Square. The paper’s critique of capitalism and defence of labour fit the popular mood at the height of the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, the Catholic Worker had a circulation of about 200,000.

No longer content simply to advocate on behalf of the dispossessed, Day and Maurin opened a ‘house of hospitality’ on Charles Street, in the West Village. It fed and housed the poor, as well as Day and fellow Catholic Workers. Like Jesus, she’d decided to live with ‘the rejected ones, the scorned ones’, convinced that ‘the more luxurious our lives, the further we are from Him’. About thirty hospitality houses soon opened nationwide, along with rural communes that embodied the growing movement’s ideal of decentralized power and self-sufficiency. Day no longer cared for socialism or communism. She’d become an anarchist – but preferred the term libertarian, not wanting to offend. She opposed most of the New Deal, believed in changing the world through ‘direct action’, and never voted in an election.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Dorothy Day urged young men to oppose the war and avoid the draft. Day had little use for traditional Catholic teachings about the morality of armed conflict. She thought there was no such thing as a ‘just war’. All wars were sinful, she argued, and a true Christian should be willing to shed one’s own blood before taking the life of another human being. Her pacifism alienated many close friends and supporters. Turning the other cheek seemed dangerous, immoral, and ludicrous, at a time when Nazi Germany was massacring civilians. But Day would not budge. She didn’t care if her views appeared ‘impractical’. They were based on the teachings of the early Christian church, and she vowed to live her faith without compromise, however reckless that might seem. The Catholic Worker lost three-quarters of its circulation during the Second World War, and more than half of the hospitality houses closed.

By the late 1940s, America’s growing anxiety about nuclear weapons revived interest in Day’s pacifism. She had condemned the use of atomic bombs against Japan, calling it a ‘colossal slaughter of the innocents’. The possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union gave new urgency to a movement seeking to make war obsolete. Day admired Mahatma Gandhi and adopted his tactics of non-violent resistance. In 1955, she refused to enter a fallout shelter during a civil-defence exercise in New York City, faced prosecution for breaking the law, pleaded guilty, and called the protest ‘an act of penance’ for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her punishment was a suspended sentence. Over the next four years, Day was jailed three times for refusing to participate in the city’s annual air-raid drills. ‘BAN THE BOMB … God is our father, and all men are our brothers,’ one of her handouts said. ‘We are willing to die for this belief.’

Members of the Catholic Worker movement were among the first Americans to protest the Vietnam War. On 6 November 1965, Day gave a speech at a rally in Union Square, urging young men to burn their draft cards and refuse to serve in Vietnam. A federal law had recently been passed threatening a five-year prison sentence to anyone who tampered with a draft card ‘in any manner’. At the Union Square rally, a handful of pacifists, neatly dressed in suits and ties, set their cards on fire, as nearby counterdemonstrators carried signs saying ‘Burn Yourselves Instead of Your Cards’ and ‘Thanks Pinkos, Queers, Cowards, Draft Dodgers – Mao Tse-tung & Ho Chi Minh’. Day told the crowd that being arrested and imprisoned would be an honour, that everyone facing conscription should ‘heed the still small voice’ of their consciences and ‘refuse to participate in the immorality of war’. The speech could barely be heard, as hecklers shouted at Day and called her ‘Moscow Mary’. The escalation of the war in Vietnam made Day’s form of non-violent resistance seem increasingly quaint and irrelevant. Many of her young followers now thought that a stronger dose of direct action was necessary.

killing is disorder

In the autumn of 1967, Philip Berrigan, a priest who frequently wrote for the Catholic Worker, went to the Baltimore Custom House with three other protesters, walked into the draft board, pulled open filing cabinets, and poured bottles of their blood over draft records. While awaiting the legal resolution of that case, he and his older brother, the poet Daniel Berrigan, who was also a Catholic priest, turned the level of non-violent resistance up a few notches. On 17 May 1968, the Berrigans and seven other activists entered a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland. After a brief scuffle with two women clerks, the group grabbed hundreds of draft files from cabinets, carried them into a car park, and set them on fire with homemade napalm. Newspaper reporters and a television crew had been notified of the protest in advance. ‘We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men,’ a handout given to reporters said, ‘but because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America.’ The recipe for napalm – a mixture of gasoline and soap flakes – had been found in a Green Beret handbook.

The actions of the Catonsville Nine elevated the Berrigan brothers to the pantheon of counterculture heroes. In a year that saw the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, riots in Paris, riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the spectacle of Catholic priests destroying government documents with napalm oddly seemed to make sense. The Berrigans had been raised during the Depression, amid rural poverty in upstate New York. Their father was angry and domineering, a socialist who farmed land owned by the church; their mother, loving and kind. The Catholic Worker and its values were an integral part of the Berrigan household. Daniel Berrigan had a shy, poetic nature. Philip was tall, boisterous, and athletic. While Daniel studied to become a Jesuit, Philip was drafted into the army and served as an artilleryman in Germany and France during the Second World War. He was haunted for the rest of his life by images of the bloodshed and the bombed-out cities in Europe.

Philip Berrigan later attended Holy Cross, joined the Josephite Fathers and Brothers, a Catholic order formed to help the African-American community, and lived in New Orleans for six years, teaching at an all-black school. Daniel travelled to France and spent time there with radical ‘worker priests’ who left the pulpit to walk picket lines and toil in the fields. The Berrigans became active in the civil rights movement and marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King. Their efforts to end poverty, racism, and militarism coalesced into direct action against the Vietnam War. They supported the overthrow of the American-backed South Vietnamese Government, and Philip Berrigan even considered going there and fighting alongside the Vietcong. But he’d sworn, after the Second World War, never to pick up a gun again.

The trial of the Catonsville Nine became a media circus. Thousands of demonstrators marched through Baltimore to support the defendants, and hundreds of anti-war activists waited in line every morning for a seat in court. Philip Berrigan had already been sentenced to six years in federal prison for the customs house case. ‘You have transcended the tolerable limits of civil disobedience,’ the judge said, justifying that punishment. ‘You deliberately set out to use violent means to destroy the very fabric of society.’ During the Catonsville trial, Judge Roszel C. Thomsen allowed the Berrigans to discuss their motives on the witness stand, to tell the jury why the war in Vietnam was immoral, to explain why the foreign policy of the United States was illegal, not the burning of draft records. ‘We say: killing is disorder; life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize,’ Daniel Berrigan told the court. He later adapted the transcripts of the trial into a play, composed in free verse, that was widely performed and made into a film by Gregory Peck.

Dorothy Day supported the Berrigans but felt uneasy about their form of direct action. It was one thing to burn your own draft card, quite another to burn someone else’s. In 1970, after being found guilty in the Catonsville Nine trial, the Berrigans strayed further from her notions of non-violent resistance by going on the run instead of reporting for prison. As a fugitive, Daniel arrived at Cornell University on a motorcycle, gave a speech before thousands of students, and left campus with his head hidden inside the head of a Bread and Puppet Theater puppet. Philip went into hiding with help from Elizabeth McAlister, a nun whom he’d secretly married the previous year. The Berrigan brothers were soon captured and imprisoned. But their war with the government had not ended. While behind bars, Philip Berrigan was indicted, along with McAlister, for conspiring to blow up the steam tunnels beneath federal buildings in Washington DC – and for plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger, who was President Nixon’s national-security advisor at the time. The case against Berrigan and McAlister ended in a mistrial.

When Philip Berrigan was released from the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, in December 1972, a large crowd of supporters awaited him at the prison gate. But the national mood had changed during the two years he’d been away. As the war in Vietnam wound down, so did the movement to oppose it. Once featured on the cover of Time magazine, Berrigan found that his latest acts of resistance, such as depositing broken and bloody dolls on the White House lawn, attracted little media interest. Now openly married and excommunicated by the Catholic Church, Berrigan and McAlister helped to organize half a dozen ‘resistance communities’ on the East Coast. Berrigan thought that ‘some of us would have to accept God’s Word as a handbook and try to embody it’. Only one of the communes – Jonah House, in inner-city Baltimore – lasted beyond the 1970s. And it got off to a rough start. Determined to live outside the capitalist system, members of Jonah House sometimes obtained food by dumpster-diving and theft. Berrigan was arrested at a grocery store for shoplifting, McAlister at a Sears, Roebuck for trying to steal tools. Chastened and embarrassed by the arrests, Berrigan started to work as a house painter.

hammers and blood

The threat posed by nuclear weapons soon became the focus of Jonah House’s activities. As a young second lieutenant training for the invasion of Japan, Philip Berrigan had felt grateful to President Harry Truman for ending the war with two atomic bombs. Now Berrigan saw these weapons as symbols of ‘the violence and criminality of the American empire’, as a profound threat to all of God’s creation. Members of Jonah House carried mock-ups of atomic bombs to the Capitol Building, accompanied by someone dressed as the Grim Reaper. They poured blood on the Pentagon, dug a symbolic grave on the lawn of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s house, disrupted services at President Jimmy Carter’s church. They went back and forth from Jonah House to jail and looked after one another’s children. Berrigan and McAlister eventually had three kids, dressing them in hand-me-downs, sending them to inner-city schools, bringing them to peace demonstrations. None of the protests against nuclear weapons seemed to be having much effect. And so Philip Berrigan decided upon a new approach.

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