Episcopal Press and News
Weapons Train Protesters Jailed
Episcopal News Service. March 29, 1984 [84068]
NEW YORK (DPS, March 29) -- Episcopal priest and peace activist, the Rev. Nathaniel Pierce, was one of a number of people arrested during a series of demonstrations last month along the route of a train believed to be carrying nuclear warheads from Texas to Washington.
The train which left Amarillo, Texas, on Feb. 23, was enroute to the Navy base at Bangor, on the Puget Sound near Seattle, homebase of the missile-carrying Trident submarine. Federal authorities would only say that the white, armored train carried a special department of energy cargo but peace activists all along the route met it with prayer vigils.
"We believe that a further escalation of the arms race by the shipment and deployment of such weapons is in violation of international law, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the teaching of our pastoral letter", "The Challenge of Peace", twelve Roman Catholic bishops said in a call that implicitly condoned civil disobedience.
A string of peaceful incidents were reported along the route. Nine demonstrators, including one Protestant and two Roman Catholic clerics, were arrested at Bangor, when the train arrived on Saturday. Also arrested was James Douglass, 46, of Silverdale, Wash., an organizer of the Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action, which helped organize the demonstrations that stretched from Amarillo to the Northwest. He is a Roman Catholic pacifist and author of "The Nonviolent Cross", a 1968 book which held that Christians have a moral responsibility to oppose nuclear warfare.
East of Laramie, Wyo., the train was showered with flowers as it passed under a bridge. In Nampa, Idaho, Pierce and his wife were two of the seven of eighty demonstrators arrested for attempting to lie down on the tracks. Near The Dalles, Ore., fifty persons gathered at the Amtrak station where they held hands and prayed silently beside the tracks.
The demonstrators are looking forward to a further demonstration along the route of the trains from Texas to Bangor on the West Coast, and Charleston, S.C., on the East on Pentecost Sunday, June 10, which peace activists have chosen in recent years to demonstrate.
Interviewed by the Messenger of the Diocese of Idaho after his release on bail, Pierce asserted that the demonstration accomplished several things. "First, now we know that the train comes through Idaho. Before it was always denied." He also noted that the numbers turning out to protest the train were increasing and that the demonstrators are more middle class, middle-aged and feminine than those of the Vietnam war era. Finally, he noted, the bright light of public attention is choking off the previously limitless varieties of routes over which the trains can run.
His wife Audrey added: "I know a lot of people think we support or aid the communists. I don't feel that's the case. I'm very grateful to live in a country where you can do this type of thing. I'm very patriotic."
The bishops said in their joint letter, "One meaning of the tracks campaign is that it can monitor and offer nonviolent resistance to each successive violation of our pastoral letter. Our stand in the pastoral letter is that no further deployment of nuclear weapons can possibly be justified. Every missile and nuclear weapons shipment is both a significant step toward a first-strike holocaust and a violation of the moral step we have taken, with the support of many other U.S. citizens, especially people of faith. What we can all do along the tracks when these shipments come through is stand in prayerful witness to the alternative power of divine love and nonviolent action."