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Buchel Air Base Nuclear Weapons Protests

October 24, 2022 By Bob Kinsey

The Nuclear Resister
Wearing “Weapons Inspectors” signs, Susan Crane, left, and John LaForge got into Germany’s Büchel air base on Hiroshima Day 2018 and climbed atop one of the bunkers that likely houses some of the US nuclear bombs stationed there.

 

Three more Europeans have gone to prison in Germany this year for their protests inside the Büchel Air Base, where US nuclear weapons are deployed. They are the 27th, 28th, and 29th resisters to choose prison over payment of fines during the long campaign to send those nukes back home. COVID had delayed the imposition of their sentences.

In May, Ria Makein, 70, surrendered to serve 30 days for her April 2019 arrest. She chose prison because she wanted to “continue our campaign.” Asked after her release what gave her the strength “to swim against the tide,” she replied, “Through all the mail I received during those four weeks, I became aware of this great network.”

In July, Amsterdam Catholic Worker Frits ter Kuile reported and served 30 days.

Holger-Isabelle Jänicke lost his appeal for taking part in an April 2019 action at Büchel and began serving his 30-day sentence in mid-August. Jänicke, a legal aid worker, dedicated his arrest to the late Fr. Carl Kabat, noting that, “In 1983, he also took part in the ploughshares campaign in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany in which a tractor for the Pershing II [nuclear missile] was damaged. From 1987 to 1995, I lived in Mutlangen in a community of peace workers. We named our house after Carl Kabat.”

Next in lockup for actions at Büchel may well be US activist John LaForge, who has refused to pay and has been ordered to serve 50 days in a German prison starting Jan. 10, 2023. Last spring, following his convictions in district and appeal courts for twice entering the base in 2018, LaForge appealed to the Constitutional Court. However, in Germany, imposition of sentence is separate from the legal appeal. The appeal argues that two lower courts erred by refusing to consider his defense of “crime prevention,” thus violating his right to present a defense. LaForge argues that Germany’s stationing of US nuclear weapons is a criminal violation of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which forbids transferring nuclear weapons to other countries. He also asserts that attempting to stop their use is not unlawful but a justified act to prevent the crime of threatening vast, disproportionate, and indiscriminate destruction from the US nuclear weapons.

While LaForge may become the first US activist to be jailed in Germany for protesting the US nuclear weapons there (Kabat having been released on his own recognizance and never returning to Germany for trial), at least two more Americans, both Catholic Workers who have joined the international protests at Büchel, could follow him into prison next year if they refuse to pay.

Susan Crane from Redwood City, California was convicted on January 18 on four counts of trespass from 2019. Once again, the Cochem court rejected her defenses of international law and competing harms, instead focusing for the record on the cost of hardware to repair the fence she’d helped to cut through. On September 20 Crane was retried in Koblenz Regional Court, contesting the trial court’s refusal to consider her defenses to the four 2019

charges as well as the charges for twice entering the base in 2018. She was convicted and given a sentence of 230 days or a fine of €1,000 ($968.00) and is considering another appeal.

While vigiling at Büchel in July for this summer’s international week of protest, Brian Terrell from Maloy, Iowa was served papers to appear in court on November 23 for the appeal of his conviction from a 2019 fence-cutting action there. He is weighing his options.

A final update: Uwe Lutz-Scholten was summoned to court in his hometown of Korbach, a three-hour drive from Büchel, on September 8, charged with inciting an illegal act. His name was on the website for the July 2021 “Digging for Life” action at Büchel as manager of the solidarity account to support the activists who were arrested.

Last winter the prosecutor discontinued the investigation of those arrested at the scene. Lutz-Scholten, drew a young judge who expressed interest in the issues, admitting she didn’t know anything about them before the trial but had learned a lot in preparation. She allowed him to speak at length about the consequences of nuclear war and the weapons stockpiled at Büchel, and at the end simply terminated the proceedings with no judgment or penalty.

—Felice & Jack Cohen-Joppa, editors of The Nuclear Resister in Tucson, Arizona, where this article first appeared, gave us permission to reprint.

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Disarmament Quotes

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

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

"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

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.

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

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

“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

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