Episode 2: We Charge Omnicide with Patrick O’Neill of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven

On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we explore how the United States is engaged in a new and potentially cataclysmic nuclear arms race. Despite the tremendous financial, environmental and human costs, this new nuclear arms race has largely gone unnoticed by the public.

Since the nuclear arms race of the 1980s, members of the Plowshares movement have engaged in a bold acts of civil disobedience in an effort to break through the malaise and to protest the United States’ preparations for omnicide—the death of everything.

On April 4, 2018, seven Plowshares activists infiltrated the Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, the largest nuclear submarine base in the world, containing six Trident submarines, each capable of holding 200 nuclear warheads.

Some of the peace activists strung up crime scene tape and hung protest banners that read “The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide.” Others symbolically disarmed the deadly arsenal by pouring their own blood around the base and using hammers to beat full-scale replicas of the Trident missiles, a reference to a verse in the book of Isaiah that calls on nations to “beat swords into plowshares."

In this week's episode, host Jonathan Michels talks with one of the members of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven, Patrick O'Neill, about the Plowshares action and its impact on the movement to abolish nuclear weapons. O’Neill is a longtime peace and anti-racist activist and a co-founder of the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House in Garner, North Carolina.

For a transcription of this episode, please click here.

Show notes:

• Kings Bay Plowshares 7 website for more information about the action and the trial
• “The New Nuclear Threat” by Jessica T. Matthews
• “The Pope and Catholic Radicals Come Together Against Nuclear Weapons” by Paul Elie