A group of approximately 20 peacemakers from around the country have reached the midpoint of an 11-day, 110-mile walk from Savannah to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in southern Georgia. Walkers plan to arrive in Kings Bay on September 14. Named “Disarm Trident: Savannah to Kings Bay Peace Walk,” the walk is a call to abolish nuclear weapons globally. It is inspired by and in support of the dramatic political action at the Kings Bay base on April 4 that led to the arrest of seven Catholic activists. Walkers carry placards and banners as they process single file, heading toward Brunswick and beyond along Highway 17.
The activists facing trial conducted the latest in over a hundred so-called Plowshares actions undertaken worldwide since 1980, named after the call in the book of Isaiah to “beat swords into plowshares.” They hung banners, hammered on a Trident missile monument, poured blood on the base logo, delivered an indictment, and used crime scene tape at three sites on base. This was all meant as a symbolic statement of moral resistance to the nuclear weapons on the Tridents which have the power to end all life on this planet.
The Kings Bay naval base is home to six of the fourteen nuclear-armed Trident submarines in the U.S. arsenal. One submarine carries twenty missiles, each of which has multiple warheads, amounting to an explosive power per submarine that is thousands of times greater than the single bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Kings Bay Trident fleet also threatens the habitat and calving grounds for endangered right whales.
Senji Kaneda, a Buddhist monk who traveled from Seattle to join the walk, said, “We will walk and chant in prayerful nonviolence.”
