countless hours in her late teens. But she hadn’t been inside the house since her mother, a University of Nebraska physicist, and Kimiko, both prominent late ’70s and early ’80s antinuclear activists, had planned one of their final missile-silo protests in the living room. Dead for more than twelve years now, her mother had once been editor of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, a member of the peace activist group NukeWatch, and a close friend of many of America’s leading antinuclear activists, including the leading activist of that period, Philip Berrigan.
Sarah had been in her early teens during most of her and her mother’s visits to the cottage on Fourth Street. Old enough and well schooled enough to appreciate and understand what Kimiko and her mother were involved in.
She had marched beside the two of them back then. Walked and chanted “No more nukes” with them and scores of other antinuclear activists, including her now common-law husband, Buford, who was currently resting at their Hawk Springs, Wyoming, home, nursing his pride and testicular injuries following their morning grilling by OSI officers at Warren.
It was hard for her to believe that thirty years earlier, Kimiko’s house had been the staging place for demonstrations that would for years wave the antinuke flag and goad air force personnel, FBI agents, and the police. A place where Kimiko and Sarah’s mother had planned how to vandalize nuclear-missile sites and where she’d learned to antagonize silo guards without being arrested and to chain herself to the entry gates of sites across the Rocky Mountain West.
Then, in a flash, it was all over. The notoriety, the glamour, the purpose. First came two strategic arms limitation treaties, SALT I in 1972 and then SALT II in 1979, followed by the INF treaty of 1988 and the current international strategic arms reduction treaty. All of these pacts bargained away America’s intercontinental ballistic missile strength while at the same time marginalizing the antinuclear movement.
It didn’t matter that developments in missile guidance technology now made long-range nuclear missiles all but obsolete, or that in the more than forty years since their introduction nature’s veryown forces—water, erosion, and corrosion—had rendered the missile silos beneath the American heartland virtually useless. What mattered to her now was the fact that most of the people she’d grown up idealizing, even worshipping, were dead, and their cause and many of the reasons for it had come and gone.
She’d therefore been surprised and certainly curious when, six months earlier, Rikia Takata, two years her junior and a boy she’d played with as a child in the house on Fourth Street, had called her and suggested that they meet and talk about a new battery of antinuclear strategies.
Since then she’d met half-a-dozen times with Rikia and his now reclusive cousin, Kimiko, but never at the cottage on Fourth Street. They’d discussed ways to try once again to put the antinuclear movement on American front pages and back in the public eye.
Their meetings, however, had usually turned out to be unproductive and almost always consisted of Rikia sitting and reading or staring off into space while Kimiko, a World War II–era Japanese internment camp survivor, reminisced about bygone nuclear protest days or pined over the loss of relatives at Hiroshima.
Now, as Sarah continued up the sidewalk toward the front door of the house on Fourth Street, realizing as she reached the porch that it had settled so that it now sloped badly to the east, she thought about the recent events at Tango-11 and why she was really there. She found herself regretting the fact that just six months earlier she’d become a part of an antinuclear revival party that she never should have joined.
She’d called ahead from Hawk Springs to let Kimiko know she was on her way to Laramie to talk about things they dared notdiscuss on the phone. As
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, a member of the peace activist group NukeWatch, and a close friend of many of America’s leading antinuclear activists, including the leading activist of that period, Philip Berrigan.
Sarah had been in her early teens during most of her and her mother’s visits to the cottage on Fourth Street. Old enough and well schooled enough to appreciate and understand what Kimiko and her mother were involved in.
She had marched beside the two of them back then. Walked and chanted “No more nukes” with them and scores of other antinuclear activists, including her now common-law husband, Buford, who was currently resting at their Hawk Springs, Wyoming, home, nursing his pride and testicular injuries following their morning grilling by OSI officers at Warren.
It was hard for her to believe that thirty years earlier, Kimiko’s house had been the staging place for demonstrations that would for years wave the antinuke flag and goad air force personnel, FBI agents, and the police. A place where Kimiko and Sarah’s mother had planned how to vandalize nuclear-missile sites and where she’d learned to antagonize silo guards without being arrested and to chain herself to the entry gates of sites across the Rocky Mountain West.
Then, in a flash, it was all over. The notoriety, the glamour, the purpose. First came two strategic arms limitation treaties, SALT I in 1972 and then SALT II in 1979, followed by the INF treaty of 1988 and the current international strategic arms reduction treaty. All of these pacts bargained away America’s intercontinental ballistic missile strength while at the same time marginalizing the antinuclear movement.
It didn’t matter that developments in missile guidance technology now made long-range nuclear missiles all but obsolete, or that in the more than forty years since their introduction nature’s veryown forces—water, erosion, and corrosion—had rendered the missile silos beneath the American heartland virtually useless. What mattered to her now was the fact that most of the people she’d grown up idealizing, even worshipping, were dead, and their cause and many of the reasons for it had come and gone.
She’d therefore been surprised and certainly curious when, six months earlier, Rikia Takata, two years her junior and a boy she’d played with as a child in the house on Fourth Street, had called her and suggested that they meet and talk about a new battery of antinuclear strategies.
Since then she’d met half-a-dozen times with Rikia and his now reclusive cousin, Kimiko, but never at the cottage on Fourth Street. They’d discussed ways to try once again to put the antinuclear movement on American front pages and back in the public eye.
Their meetings, however, had usually turned out to be unproductive and almost always consisted of Rikia sitting and reading or staring off into space while Kimiko, a World War II–era Japanese internment camp survivor, reminisced about bygone nuclear protest days or pined over the loss of relatives at Hiroshima.
Now, as Sarah continued up the sidewalk toward the front door of the house on Fourth Street, realizing as she reached the porch that it had settled so that it now sloped badly to the east, she thought about the recent events at Tango-11 and why she was really there. She found herself regretting the fact that just six months earlier she’d become a part of an antinuclear revival party that she never should have joined.
She’d called ahead from Hawk Springs to let Kimiko know she was on her way to Laramie to talk about things they dared notdiscuss on the phone. As