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| Protest at women-led Greenham Common peace camp in England in early 1980's opposing deployment of US nuclear cruise missiles to be aimed at the former Soviet Union |
CATCH THE CRUISE
“You can observe a lot just by watching.”
—Yogi Berra, Baseball Star
By 1986, the nuclear testing issue was hot in the peace movement and many activists would head out to the Nevada test site to protest the testing program. I was always looking for ways to make these same issues relevant in Florida.
We learned from the media that the Tomahawk cruise missile was going to be flight-tested over the Florida Panhandle. I remembered that Canada Greenpeace had organized a campaign to resist cruise missile testing in western Canada, and contacted them about a huge net they had used to try to “catch” the cruise. They sent me the 100 foot long net along with a “cruise catcher instructional video” that showed the net being hoisted by weather balloons. On the fifty-foot high net were large letters spelling out the words “Stop Nuclear Testing.”
When I got the net, I took it outside my Orlando office and stretched it out on the grass by the road to have a good look at it. A TV news reporter I knew drove by and stopped to ask what I was doing. I told him we were going to try to catch the cruise missile when it was tested over the panhandle. I explained about the video. He asked me if I’d give him the exclusive on the story, and I said I would if he made me a number of copies of the video. We had a deal. He ran the story first, and it created a media circus.
Next, I took the net, all rolled up, to a news conference in Fort Walton Beach, my old (high school) stomping grounds near Eglin AFB. The cruise would be launched from ships in the Gulf of Mexico, would fly over the Panhandle into southern Alabama, circle around and then crash land on the Eglin bombing range. My plan was to say we’d catch the missile as it flew over the beach in Fort Walton.
The media loved the video which showed Greenpeace launching the net in the snows of Canada. Even though we never raised the net off the ground, the very TV image of the net being lofted with balloons somehow made people think that we were serious about the effort.
Local Panhandle media ran the video footage on several TV news stations and the New York Times picked up the story. The media asked what I’d do with the cruise if we caught one and I responded that we’d split its belly open, clean out the insides, fill it with charcoal and have a fish fry on the beach. That statement made it into the press as well.
On October 19, 1986 the Florida Coalition organized a one day event in Fort Walton Beach called “First Strike! Gulf Coast Symposium on Preventing Nuclear War.” Our guest speakers were Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of Physics at the City University of New York, and the Rev. George Zabelka, the Catholic chaplain assigned to the 509th bomber group that delivered the nuclear death blow in Hiroshima. We met at a hotel in Fort Walton and began with a news conference.
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Italy, Sicily, Demonstration against the base of USA Cruise missiles in Comiso (April 1983) |
This was my first interaction with Dr. Michio Kaku, who would later become one of the founding members of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. At the news conference, I was awed by how Michio held the local reporters’ rapt attention as he recounted his own story about relatives in Hiroshima at the time of the U.S. nuclear attack.
As Michio began to speak to the assembled at the conference, an old man from the local community approached him and yelled, “Give me liberty or give me death,” while hurling eggs at him. Luckily Michio was not hit. I escorted the would-be assailant out of the event.
Rev. Zabelka told the crowd of one hundred that, “In 1945 my change of heart began. I saw real war...and I want to expose the lie of all war—the absolute contradiction to everything our religion has taught us.”
Following the symposium, the participants moved outside for a four-mile march through the heart of Fort Walton’s “Miracle Strip,” past shops and restaurants and across the bridge over the Intra-Coastal waterway. We were led that day by Renee Williams of Fort Walton, whose husband was a colonel in the Air Force and assigned to Eglin. She was followed by a courtesy car carrying older activists who had less tolerance for the sweltering mid-day sun. It was topped with a mock cruise missile.
The US deployed the first-strike Tomahawk cruise missiles in England and Sicily in 1983. At the same time the Pentagon deployed the Pershing II nuclear missile in southern Germany aimed at the former Soviet Union. The Pershing II was built in Orlando, Florida at the then named Martin Marietta weapons plant before the merger with Lockheed.
As we marched in one lane of traffic, a camouflaged convoy of troops passed us heading in the opposite direction. They were on maneuvers, practicing invasions on the local beach as part of a 12,000-strong “Operation Bold Eagle” exercise. Many of them waved and flashed peace signs to us as we passed closely by each other in this military town where I had once lived. You don’t often get that kind of interaction in a peace march.
Earlier that day one of our speakers Shafea M’Balih, from the American Friends Service Committee in Atlanta, told us, “We need to talk with the unconvinced...we must go in the places where we are afraid.”
Bruce
~ This story is just one of many inside my 2008 (updated edition) book entitled Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire.
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