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Nuclear Weapons Facilities are Troublingly Insecure

April 13th, 2015

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Hiroshima Peace Memorial, commonly called the Atomic Bomb Dome. Hundreds of thousands in Japan died as a result of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Carl Kabat, OMI, one of the Ploughshares Eight, is featured in a New Yorker article on the faith-based protests against nuclear weapons that started in the 1980’s. Recent anti-nuclear weapons protests have pointed out the vulnerability of high security US nuclear facilities.

“The Y-12 National Security Complex sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by wooded hills, in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 and Oak Ridge were built secretly, within about two years, as part of the Manhattan Project, and their existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War. … [S]ince the early nineteen-eighties a small group of peace activists, devout supporters of the Plowshares movement, have been trying to break into nuclear-weapons sites throughout the United States. They’ve almost always succeeded. Plowshares actions have not only revealed serious vulnerabilities in the security of America’s nuclear enterprise; they’ve also shed light on the inherent risks faced by every nation that possesses weapons of mass destruction. Having these weapons creates endless opportunities for theft or misuse. At the moment, the probability of terrorists staging a successful nuclear attack may be low, but the consequences would be unimaginably high. And, as Plowshares activists have demonstrated again and again, improbable things happen all the time.”

Read this fascinating and troubling article recently published in the New Yorker magazine: “Break-In at Y-12: How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America’s nuclear-weapons sites”.

 

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