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Polly Mann and Lisa Ann Pierce, W A M M
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Project ELF Shut Down!
The Navy’s Space and Navy Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) announced September 17, 2004, that it will permanently shut down and then dismantle its embattled extremely low frequency (ELF) submarine transmitter system, Project ELF. The giant transmitter sends one-way messages to submerged British and U.S. submarines around the world. It was built to allow Trident ballistic missile submarines to get close enough to the USSR to launch a sneak attack or first strike with nuclear weapons.
The U.S. still deploys fourteen Tridents, the deadliest and most expensive weapons system in human history. The $155 billion Trident fleet carries over 2,880 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, some of which-the 475 kiloton D-5s-are 38 as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.
Calling the twin ELF transmitters (one in Clam Lake, Wisconsin, and another in Republic, Michigan) “outdated and no longer needed,” SPAWAR in San Diego said it will cease transmitting ELF’s secret codes September 30, 2004, and that over the course of three years it will disassemble the two antenna grids.
Anti-nuclear-weapons activists celebrated the surprise announcement, recalling the 36-year-long campaign against what they dubbed a “nuclear war trigger.” The struggle involved statewide referendums, federal law suits, marches, pole-cutting disarmament actions, and an eighteen-year-long campaign of line-crossing civil resistance. Over 40 of the nuclear weapons resisters who refused to pay court-ordered fines have been incarcerated in county jails and state and federal prisons. Altogether, more than nine years of incarceration have been served by the abolitionists.
Bonnie Urfer, senior staff person and co-director of Nukewatch, said, “I feel relief for the people of the area and the local environment, knowing that ELF’s million-point-three watts of electricity will no longer be jolted into the ground, shocking the aquatic life and increasing the threat of leukemia and other cancers.”
“We did it,” said John LaForge, also at Nukewatch, which has helped coordinate the Coalition to Stop Project ELF. “This is another victory for nonviolence, because everybody who has confronted this nuclear war system has been made stronger by the experience,” LaForge said. “No attention was ever paid to ELF unless we were out there putting ourselves in legal jeopardy. After so many years of actions, trials, and jail-going, cynics said to us, ‘You’ve failed.’ But we hadn’t lost, because we never gave up” (Nukewatch).
Reform Movement Acts for Peace
The Forward, a U.S. Jewish periodical, announced that America’s largest synagogue movement is urging the White House to step up its peace efforts in the Middle East and criticizing Congress for passing one-sided pro-Israel resolutions. The recommendations were outlined in a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell from Rabbi David Saperstein, the Reform movement’s top representative in Washington. |
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© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete October 2004 Index - click here
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