Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed with nuclear weapons on August 6 and 9, 1945. See new piece by IPA executive director Norman Solomon, “Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ‘Nuclear Tests’?”
SUSAN CRANE, susan.s.crane@gmail.com
MARK COLVILLE, markcolville9761@gmail.com, @AmistadObrero
Crane is with the Redwood City Catholic Worker community in California. Colville is a founding member of the Amistad Catholic Worker community in New Haven, Connecticut.
They are among the members of a delegation of U.S. peace activists gathering in the Netherlands and Germany. They join international nuclear weapons protests focused on removing the U.S. nuclear weapons still stationed at the Netherlands’ Volkel Air Base, 85 miles south of Amsterdam, and at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, southeast of Cologne. Other U.S. activists hail from Arizona, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, and New York.
Coordinated by the Amsterdam Catholic Worker community, Peace Camp Volkel runs from August 4 to 10 and is focused on “climate and a future without nuclear weapons.” Participants from around Europe and the United States will conduct nonviolence training, blockades, “go-in” actions, and other protests. On 10 August, the U.S. activists will travel from Volkel to Kail, Germany for four days of protest actions directed at the Büchel Air Force Base, which, like Volkel, is now undergoing major construction in preparation for the delivery of replacement weapons, the new B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb, now in production in the United States.
See more information at the Catholic Worker Movement website. Most of the U.S. delegates to the two peace camps “have worked for years in anti-war and disarmament campaigns, and several have been imprisoned in the United States for nonviolent actions taken against the war system.” Ellen Grady, from Ithaca, New York and a member of the delegation said, “We have to take some responsibility for these U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe, because they threaten genocidal violence and they destabilize the reckless and expanding war in Ukraine.”
The Volkel and Büchel Air Bases each maintain approximately 15 to 20 U.S. hydrogen bombs known as B61s as part of NATO’s so-called “nuclear sharing” program in which foreign fighter jets and their pilots routinely rehearse attacks on Russia using the U.S. H-bombs. Alarmingly, in the midst of the ongoing war in Ukraine, operation “Air Defender 2023,” NATO’s largest-ever nuclear attack exercise, ran from June 14 to 23 in the skies over Germany. War planes involved in the practice included U.S. F-35s, F-15s and F-16s from the U.S., Turkey and Greece; Eurofighters from Spain and the U.K.; German Tornadoes; U.S.and Finnish F/A-18s; Hungarian Gripens; and U.S. A-10 ground-attack jets, according to CNN. The A-10 jets fire the controversially toxic and radioactive shells known as depleted uranium munitions.
