Defendant Elizabeth McAlister, the 79-year-old widow of Phil Berrigan from Jonah House in Baltimore, who donated her own blood for the action said: “The government has set up a religion of nuclearism. It is terrifying and dead, dead wrong. It is a form of idolatry in this culture."
After entering the base on April 4, 2018, exactly 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, McAlister, Steven Kelly, a Jesuit priest, and Carmen Trotta of the New York Catholic Worker went to "limited area." Like a prophetic expedition of Fivers out of Watership Down that had seen the signs that others couldn't understand, they went down Rabbit Run Road to the actual weapons.
Indeed, the book was the one item the prosecution didn't place into evidence. Special Officer Kenney, a juiced up contemporary Officer Obie from "Alice's Restaurant" produced photo after photo of Kind bar wrappers, spray paint cans, as well as the the actual fence the activists cut through to get into the base. The purpose of his prolonged testimony was ostensibly to "prove" that the activists did what they openly declared they did, but the actual effect allowed the prosecution to continually depict the defendants as vandals and to portray the goverment as the source of "facts."
In fact, Art Laffin, editor of the two-volume work Swords into Plowshares, who spoke to supporters at a nearby church one night after their common dinners noted of the 100 actions since 1980, there have been "several Plowshares actions where people were not charged with a felony; Aegis Plowshares in 1991 in Maine; Riverside Plowshares in 2004 in NYC and Crane Plowshares in 2011 in Kansas City, MO."