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Prisoner of conscience Nuclear Weapons Immoral

April 17, 2021 By Bob Kinsey

Kelly being released in Georgia
 
Kitsap Sun
https://www.kitsapsun.com/…/imprisoned…/7216308002/
April 14, 2021
TACOMA — A priest who has spent more than a decade behind bars for breaking federal laws in a stand against nuclear weapons, including at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, was released from prison Tuesday at the U.S. District Courthouse.
The Rev. Steve Kelly was brought across the country by the U.S. Marshals Service from Georgia, where he’d finished prison time for breaking into the East Coast Trident submarine base, to face allegations that he’d violated probation for trespassing onto the Bangor base in March 2017.
Kelly, 72, refused to follow probation requirements for the same reason he’s broken into federal properties for more than 25 years: as a matter of conscience.
“I think that it’s probably best said that while there are nuclear weapons out there, my conscience will probably be very consistent about this,” Kelly told Magistrate Judge David W. Christel on Tuesday.
Christel, acknowledging Kelly had served the maximum sentence for a probation violation, released him. A U.S. Marshal walked the Jesuit priest, still in prison khakis, out the front door of the courthouse where he was met by other anti-nuclear weapon activists.
Kelly, among the most ardent nuclear weapons protesters in the country, said he will continue acts of civil disobedience “while there’s still breath in my body.”
“It’s his purpose in life,” said longtime friend and fellow activist George Rodkey. “He’s very focused.”
He also risks a quick return to prison. If he fails to check in later this week with a probation officer in Georgia, where he completed a sentence for breaking into Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, another warrant will be issued for his arrest.
Kelly has participated in five “plowshares” actions — named for a Bible chapter in which the prophet Isaiah calls to “beat swords into plowshares” — including one that led to his arrest in November 2009 at Bangor. He joined four others in cutting into both the fence of the base and another of Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific, which stores nuclear missiles for the base’s Trident submarines. They held a sign, “Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” and were arrested by Marines.
Kelly, who is from the Bay Area, returned to Kitsap in March 2017, where he and other activists were arrested for crossing a blue line denoting federal property at the Bangor base. But instead of a jail sentence, as he had requested, he received a fine, community service and probation — and didn’t comply with all three aspects.
In April 2018, he and six others broke into the Kings Bay base, a crime that sent Kelly to prison for a 33-month sentence. But because of the probation violation from the Bangor trespassing, he remained in custody for a 3 1/2-month journey involving quarantines, COVID-19 tests and flights between prisons in Florida, Oklahoma and Nevada before arriving here at the end of March. His release Tuesday comes after more than three years behind bars.
Kelly isn’t sure where he’ll go next; he’s currently staying with fellow Jesuits in the area.
“I’ll have to go where the sails are full from the wind,” Kelly said.
 

Necessary trouble | Beyond Nuclear International

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Disarmament Quotes

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

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