Five peace activists, including an 83-year-old nun and an 81-year-old Jesuit, were found guilty this week of a range of crimes after breaking into a nuclear storage facility in Silverdale, Wash. Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York; Father Bill Bichsel, SJ, 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington; and Father Steve Kelly, SJ, 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California will be sentenced in March. They were charged with trespass, felony damage to federal property, felony injury to property and felony conspiracy to damage property in conjunction with a protest action that took place in November, 2009. Each defendant faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

The five admitted from the start that they cut through the chain-link fence surrounding the Navy base during the night of the Feast of All Souls, November 2, 2009. For hours they walked undetected a distance of nearly four miles inside the base to the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC). This top security area is where the Plowshares activists say hundreds of nuclear missiles are stored in bunkers. There they cut through two more barbed wire fences and went inside.

They put up two big banners which said "Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident Illegal and Immoral," scattered sunflower seeds and prayed until they were arrested at dawn. Once arrested, the five were cuffed and hooded with sand bags because the marine in charge testified "when we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them ... so we did it to them."

In their defense the peace activists argued that nuclear missiles at Bangor are weapons of mass destruction; those weapons are both illegal and immoral; and that all citizens have the right and duty to try to stop international war crimes from being committed by these weapons of mass destruction.

During the trial, Father Bichsel said they went "in solidarity with half the people in our world, who are living under authorized lethal force - without food, without housing, without education, without the possibility of employment.  The things that they live under - it's lethal force.  And it's authorized, it's not just happenstance that they are living that way.  It doesn't have to be that way, and we have the power to change it."   

The group will be sentenced in March.

LINK: Previous Plowshares coverage in the Weekly Volcano