Eds Note: Tom Howard-Hastings serves on the National Committee of the War Resisters League. He wrote this article for "Nonviolent Action" from the Ashland, Wisconsin County Jail, where he is awaiting trial for a nonviolent disarmament action at the U.S. Navy's ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) nuclear command centre in the north woods of Wisconsin on April 22, Earth Day.

All my adult working life, I've been a proletariat guy. I've worked very hard for every dollar I've made, and my increasingly afflicted body shows it.

Ah, but this is such a normal beef. There are millions of us.

Indeed there are. I joined the work force in 1968, when I graduated from high school. Though I was never out of work, I rarely had health coverage of any kind. Health care, to me and so many others, has been a privilege and not a right.

A person can deal with that for a long time if one is basically healthy. Lots of us did - I did. Pay the doc as you can from meagre wages. Suffer a bit - no whining. Caring for the kids is the hard part. Health care for kids is a right. If society can't provide it, parents have to find a way, either by paying from what little they get as members of the working poor or by running up bills. I've done both.

That's one of the reasons it hurts to think about this country spending $75 million dollars each day on its nuclear arsenal. To prepare to wage a war of mass destruction 40 million of us uninsured workers are left in pain.

Once I was home alone, too sick to stand up. By the third day, I managed to call the hospital. I was transferred several times, unable to open my eyes, not able to hold the phone. "Insurance?" was always the question. I actually laughed softly as I deliriously hung up the phone, rattling it
around for a long minute searching for the base. "I'm going to die here," I thought.

So I resent it when I hear that the Pentagon is spending $69.3 million on each Trident II D-5 missile, and that they fully intend to build 417 of them. These weapons alone would completely destroy or overwhelm all the health care facilities on Earth if they were ever fired. They are good for nothing constructive.

Some days it's just the bold bare naked irony: the Pentagon does and gets what it wants, which is the lion's share of everything, yet they produce nothing.

The Pentagon pollutes our own land worse than any other sector of the economy, and yet they claim to protect our homeland. The Pentagon twists - and sometimes breaks - any arms to get its way, and yet it claims to be defending democracy.

With protectors and defenders like these, who needs enemy attackers?

And so, for these reasons and many others, Donna Howard-Hastings and I went out to our nearest satanic site on Earth Day, April 22, and we spit in the eye of the Nuclear Beast. Felt great.

The place we went is the world's largest radio station. It broadcasts to a select set
of receivers - just those on board the sixteen Trident submarines and the eight-three hunter-killer subs.

We cut down three poles, and shut it off. Literally, the thing fell down and went dead, temporarily, until they fixed it in a day or two. No orchestrated nuclear war for a day.

The poles we cut support the radio's antenna, twenty-eight miles through the woods of Wisconsin joined by a 165-mile underground cable to the fifty-six-mile antenna in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

This submarine-launched arsenal is the most costly and deadly weapons system ever built by human beings, and we decapitated it nonviolently for a day or so. Just two of us with our little thirty-six-inch swede saws. The little thorn in the Great Lion's paw.

Of course we'll pay for this. The charge is sabotage plus criminal damage, and the judge and D.A. have proven in the past that they're always in a hanging mood for nonviolent nuclear resisters. We are looking at a maximum of ten to twenty years in prison, and they want the maximum.

This kind of act isn't for everyone. It takes years, really, for most of us to discharge other responsibilities and pre
pare as much as we can. But this kind of act - however real for a short time before repairs - is symbolic. We lucked out - we shut something down. Other direct disarmers have not always been so fortunate.

The most crucial thing is to avoid paralysis. If I can't do one thing, I hope to do another. Anything, short of violence.

Consider the seminal case before the World Court right now. This is the case that contests that all nuclear weapons are illegal. It was initiated by a larger group of nationsalmost fiftythan any other case in the history of the court. But what convinced the court to hear the arguments was the presentation of documents attesting to millions of signatures from citizens of the world, all calling for immediate abolition of nuclear weapons.

If the court ever rules that nuclear weapons are illegal that would put tremendous pressure upon the nuclear weapons states to disarm their thermonuclear arsenals. Think about that the next time someone tells you that signing petitions is irrelevant.

It all weaves together, doesn't it?

If Donna and I participate long enough in the system, and are properly impressed that the nuclear danger is a tremendous one, we may feel called to risk years in prison trying to disarm it by hand.

And if you read this, and realise that you have been meaning to write a few letters to the editor or to elected representatives, or if you decide that by God you can do that mass blockading action, then your work is linked to ours.

That's certainly our hope.

Tom Howard-Hasting

You can write to Tom c/o Jail, 221-7th E, Ashland, WI 54806.

Stop Project ELF, 740 Round Lake Road, Luck WI 54853; (715) 472-8714; <jmiles@win.bright.net>.

Reprinted with permission from Nonviolent Action: newsletter of the nonviolent action community of Cascadia, no. 54, Summer 1996.