The Plowshares 8: Thirty Years On

While imprisoned after his 1967 Baltimore 4 action, Philip Berrigan, in his Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary, wrote:

When a people arbitrarily decides that this planet and
its riches are to be divided unequally among equals, and that the only
criterion for the division is the amount of naked power at its disposal,
diplomacy tends to be essentially military, truth tends to be
fiction, and the world tends to become a zoo without the benefit of
cages. And war tends to be the ultimate rationality, because reason has
been bankrupted of human alternatives (5).

Post-Vietnam, the American political, economic, and militaristic
landscape described by Berrigan had worsened. The "naked power" of the
United States now included an arsenal of 30,000 nuclear warheads and a
first-strike policy. On September 9th, 1980, Berrigan and seven others
said a decisive "NO!" to nuclear madness by entering the General
Electric Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Along with
Philip, Fr. Daniel Berrigan (his brother), Sr. Anne Montgomery, Elmer
Maas, Molly Rush, Dean Hammer, Fr. Carl Kabat, and John Schuchardt
hammered on two nose cones of Mark 12A warheads, poured their own blood
on warhead documents and order forms, and prayed for disarmament and
peace. With this act, the first of over 75 Plowshares disarmament
actions came into being. The "Plowshares disarmament movement" is now
international in scope. Many of its activists, who understand that
waging peace has its price, have served a substantial amount of time in
prison.

Art Laffin, a lifelong Plowshares activist and community member of
the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC, speaks to what
Plowshares activists hope to communicate through their actions in his
introduction to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions:

...[there is an] underlying faith that the power of
nonviolent love can overcome the forces of violence; a reverence for the
sacredness of all life and creation; a plea for justice for victims of
poverty, the arms race and economic sanctions; and acceptance of
personal responsibility for the dismantling and physical conversion of
the weapons; and a spiritual conversion of the heart to the way of
justice and reconciliation (3).

In this same introduction, he explains why hammers and blood are or
have been used in Plowshares actions. Hammers are used to begin the
literal dismantling of weapons that rounds of "peace" talks have failed
to do. They are also used to symbolize the "building again" process,
e.g., a hammer can be used to build homes and hospitals. Blood clearly
points to the blood that is spilled so carelessly in war. It is also an
essential component of life, which points to our need for one another
and our unity as one people. In their nonviolent actions and their
acceptance of responsibility for their actions, Plowshares activists are
those who accept suffering rather than to impose it upon other people,
as is done, for example, in the waging of armed conflict.

While commemorating thirty years of
resistance to nuclear weapons at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak
Ridge, TN, this past July, John Schuchardt reflected upon the first days of the Plowshares 8,
"We would never be thinking about starting a [Plowshares] movement," he
said. "This was a humble, simple human action by a few people who met
and prayed and studied the scripture together, spent time together for
about nine months and, of course, talked about the practical, logistical
aspects." Daniel Berrigan, in his foreword to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions, writes of how community members struggled to name themselves and their action:

We were locked in a dilemma, eight of us, as summer
tipped into the fall of 1980. We had met for months of prayer and
discussion. But try as we might, one matter escaped us. What to name our
newborn resolve (or better, our not-quite born resolve?)

... According to our Bible, the 'name' must go beyond itself, mean
something, connect. It must evoke a tradition, a vocation, a task in the
world - a gift (even a wildly difficult one!). It must hint at
community desire, passion, hands-on conscience...

What most Americans took horridly for granted as 'normal' - nuclear
weapons studding the earth like the sores of Job, the Pentagon squatting
monstrously on the land, brooding, hatching its hellish eggs, its
invasions, bombings (add in the year 2002 a plague of depleted uranium,
sanctions throttling the Iraqi children). Quite simply, these could not
be taken as 'normal' acts of a civilized people...

We knew it in our bones. That as yet unnamed 'name' of our action must echo the primordial nay.

On that late summer day, 1980, a momentous breakthrough occurred. It
came as I recall, through Molly Rush, grandmother [and] founder of the
Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh. At her suggestion, we opened our
Bibles and took a close look at Isaiah 2: 'They shall beat their swords
into plowshares' ... (ix-x).

Sr. Anne Montgomery, who at 83 years of age has recently been indicted for her participation in the 2009 Disarm Now action,
her sixth Plowshares action, writes beautifully of the communal process
that helps one to prepare for such an action. In "Divine Obedience," a
chapter included in the book, Swords Into Plowshares: Nonviolent Direct Action for Disarmament, she notes:

...we begin our process with community prayers, reflection,
and decision making; we try to reach a harmony, deeper than differences
in philosophy and style, that will maintain our spirit through the
trial and prison processes, which often require reaching consensus under
difficult conditions. To make our prayer and action one, to reach out
to the 'other' in a personal way, requires that we emphasize depth and
relationship rather than numbers and high-powered organization ... In such
communities we can learn the true meaning of 'conspiracy': 'breathing
together' the Spirit of life and beige formed by it into people faithful
to the covenant of love - the law written in our hearts (27-28).

When Molly Rush
walked into the GE nuclear weapons plant in September of 1980, she
hammered on a warhead nose cone and "put a hole in one and a dent in
another. And, I thought, these things are as vulnerable as we are, and
we can undo what has been done. That was an amazing moment." For thirty
years now, Plowshares activists have refused to accept the "nuclear way
of life," a way of life that demands trillions of dollars and,
potentially, millions of lives. With courage and conviction, daring and
imagination, love and patience, they have risked everything to say,
quite clearly, "another way of life is possible. We can undo what has
been done."