Three members of the Catholic anti-nuclear Kings Bay Plowshares 7 peace group were sentenced last week to between 10 and 14 months in prison.
The seven members, most in their 60s, broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia on April 4th, 2018 to nonviolently and symbolically protest against the six nuclear submarines housed there.
Each submarine is armed with twenty ballistic missiles, each missile containing numerous nuclear warheads capable of killing millions of human beings.
The group chose the date because it was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
On that date in 2018, the activists entered the base, splashed their blood on a wall, spray-painted an anti-war slogan on a sidewalk, and hammered at a monument to nuclear war.
They caused minimal damage to property.
For these transgressions, six were sentenced to time in prison, to begin during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One defendant, 62-year old Clare Grady said in her sentencing statement, “To be clear, these weapons are not private property, they belong to the people of the United States, they belong to me, to you, to us. These weapons kill and cause harm in our name, and with our money.”
Many Nobel laureates and others around the world, including Desmond tutu, have signed a global petition to dismiss all charges agains the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
