Fr. John Dear's interview with Jack Cohen-Joppa of the Nuclear Resister for The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast
Catholic Worker
Dear Friends, Blessings of Christ’s peace to you!This week marks the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For my part, I plan to join the vigil for nuclear disarmament at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, where the U.S. tests missiles by shooting them off across the Pacific ocean to prepare for nuclear warfare. With the trillion dollars spent to “modernize” the nation's nuclear weapons, they are currently preparing to replace the Minuteman III ICBM fleet with the newly developed LGM-35A Sentinel. Like the Pentagon, Los Alamos Labs, Livermore Labs, Pantex, and many other places, it should immediately close. On today’s new episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I’ll speak with my friend Jack Cohen-Joppa, who along with his wife, Felice, has published The Nuclear Resister newspaper since 1980. With over 200 issues, they have chronicled over 100,000 anti-nuclear and anti-war civil disobedience actions and related prosecutions covering thousands of activists, and encouraged support for the women and men jailed and imprisoned for such nonviolent actions. Please visit their site at: www.nuclearresister.org Their newspaper has tracked every public action that involved crossing a line against war and nuclear weapons, that is, every campaign, every local and regional grassroot effort, and the rise and fall of national movements. When you open its pages or study their website, you discover a whole world of peace activism that few know about, a lifetime of steadfast resistance in campaigns at the Pentagon, Livermore Labs, Los Alamos Labs, the Nevada Test Site, the Trident submarine bases, and the Plowshares movement. “We face a nuclear threat now that is comparable with the threat we faced during the Cold War,” Jack says. “Our challenge is to continue to delegitimize and stigmatize the building of nuclear weapons. I am in touch with the people who believe that hope is a verb and take action. We believe that this is work worth doing.” Listen in and discover an ongoing grassroots movement against nuclear weapons and join it. *The podcast episodes are posted on Mondays, right away on NCR, Apple, Spotify, |
