St. Mary’s is a small town on the coast of Georgia at the border with Florida. In a graduate environmental education course, 30 students accompanied me as we boarded the Cumberland Island Ferry at St. Mary’s dock to reach the barrier island of the same name. It’s home to loggerhead turtles and feral horses, and very few humans. It’s one of 15 barrier islands along the Georgia coastline. Barrier islands are coastal landforms made of a type of sand dune system that are formed by wave and tidal action parallel to the coastline. They typically occur in chains, as they do along the Georgia coast.[1] Barrier islands are separated from the mainland usually by bays or rivers leading to the open ocean.

Kings Bay

Separating Cumberland Island and the mainland is Kings Bay, which opens to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also home to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet’s home port for U.S. Navy Fleet ballistic missile nuclear submarines armed with Trident missile nuclear weapons. A trident missile is a submarine-launched ballistic missile with multiple nuclear bombs. Kings Bay has been in use since 1979. It’s a big base with more than 16,000 acres of land including 4,000 acres of protected wetlands.

On April 4, 2018, a group of seven Catholic peace activists broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base and engaged in a nuclear weapons protest. They cut through a wire barrier and left symbolic messages to convey their belief that nuclear weapons would result in Omnicide—the destruction of all people. In their 2019 trial, they were found guilty on three felony counts and a misdemeanor charge. Critics of the trial believe the Judge Lisa Godbey Wood prevented the defendants from mounting a full defense. They were not allowed to mention their religious motivations or any mention of international law or treaties restricting nuclear weapons. They were sentenced to 2 – 5 years in prison.

The U.S. government implemented a program for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons and called it Project Plowshares (the USSR did the same thing). Exploding nuclear bombs in the atmosphere or underground and calling this Peaceful Nuclear Explosions was part of a larger goal of exploiting the “peaceful” uses of the atom. An anti-nuclear group began the Plowshares Movement. They initially broke into the General Electric Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Re-entry vehicles for the Minuteman II missiles were made here. The Plowshares group hammered on two reentry vehicles, poured blood on documents and offered prayers for peace.   

I decided to include the Kings Bay nuclear protest because the activists were known as the Plowshares 7. Ever since atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, scientists and citizens around the word began to be increasingly concerned about the destructive power of these weapons. A scientist that I met at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Atlanta (of which I was a member) worked at the Centers for Disease Control,  which was located just a few miles from our church. While in a group discussion he told us he was a young scientist working at Los Alamos when the atom bomb was developed. He was ashamed that he worked with others to develop the bomb. People in the group gave him great comfort, but he wanted us to know that he wasn’t the project’s only scientist who felt this way.

The goal of anti-nuclear activists is to ban nuclear weapons and work toward the elimination of them. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted in 2017 and is a comprehensive treaty to attain a nuclear free world agreed to by 86 nations. Although the Treaty is in effect, all the nations that have nuclear weapons abstained from voting. The two nuclear weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the world-wide testing that was done created great risk to people living in areas where testing was done, especially Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union and the South Pacific.

Trump and Nuclear Weapons

The nuclear threat is rarely discussed.[2] But it should be. These are weapons of mass destruction. I decided to examine the cost of the U.S. spending on its nuclear program. Here is what I found. From 1940 – 1998, the United States spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and weapon-related programs.[3] Most of this money (86%) was spent on launch systems—B52 bombers, nuclear submarines, and missiles.

During the period 1999-2019, the U.S. spent on average $45 billion each year. The Congressional Budget Office is required by law to project the 10-year costs of nuclear forces every two years. For the period 2021-2030, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy combined costs would be $634 billion for the 10-year period or slightly more than $60 billion a year.[4] Over two-thirds of the costs would be for ballistic missiles and nuclear laboratories.

The United States possesses 1,650 strategic nuclear warheads while Russia has 1,700 nuclear warheads. There are seven additional countries that have nuclear arsenals. They are China (350 weapons), France (300), UK (225), India (150), Pakistan (150), Israel (80), and North Korea (20).

Throughout Trump’s term in office, many had great concern about his mental stability and fearedthat he might unleash a nuclear attack on China, Iran or North Korea. After the 2020 election, Gen. Mark A. Milley called his counterpart in China and assured him that the U.S. would not launch a nuclear attack on his country. If it did, Milley told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China’s People’s Liberation Army that he would call to warn him. Milley called Li Zuocheng again on January 8 after the attack on Congress.

I know what I’m about say sounds bizarre, but Trump wondered if we have so many nuclear weapons, why don’t we use them. He even threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons. He said, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States.” If they do, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He later met a couple of times with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and made up.

Brief History of Nuclear Weapons

In 1945 the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing between 129,000 – 226,000 civilians and soldiers.

The United States conducted 1,032 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992: at the Nevada Test Site (NTSW), at sites in the Pacific Ocean, in Amchitka Island of the Alaska Peninsula, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Fallout downwind contained radionuclides and gases transported thousands of miles away from the Nevada Test Site by wind. A radionuclide is a radioactive form of an element. When a nuclear explosion occurs about 12 different radionuclides are produced including iodine and cobalt-60. People living in the US during these years were exposed to varying levels of radiation. American government released very little information warning people of potential effects of nuclear fallout. Fallout of radiation moved through the food chain causing cancerous diseases.

In Area 10 of Yucca Flat at the Nevada National Security Site, a shallow (636 feet) underground nuclear test was conducted on July 6, 1962, to investigate the use of nuclear weapons for mining, cratering and other civilian purposes, such as the open pit mines, railroad and highway cuts and dams. The program was called the Plowshares Project. Plumes of radioactive fallout from this test contaminated more people in the US than any other nuclear test carried out by the U.S. military.  Radionuclides carried to the east over Nebraska, South Dakota and Illinois, and continued eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean bringing lower levels of nucleotides. At the time, I was living in Boston which would have been in the path of minor levels of fallout. The test released 7% of all radioactive fallout on the US since testing began. The government dropped the idea of using nuclear weapons for excavation! It, however, continued testing devices until 1992.

In 1962 the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear holocaust when the U.S. learned that the U.S.S.R. was installing medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. Although the United States held an overwhelming nuclear weapons advantage over the Soviet Union, the nuclear age became front and center of international policy and politics. The American and Soviet people did not know the truth about nuclear weapons until many years later. We were told to shield ourselves with aluminum foil and newspaper and hide in the bathtub. Weapons were being used like chess pieces as one side confronted the other. Little has been done to make the world safer from nuclear weapons. No country should have these weapons.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korea shot down an American spy plane.[5] Recent documents show that there was a plan to target 12 military targets each with a nuclear bomb. These bombs were at least 20 times as powerful of those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The plan was scrapped soon after it was ordered.

However, in 1974 on the eve of Richard Nixon resigning as President, there was so much concern about his drunken state, that the nuclear football that always accompanies the President was removed from his presence during his last two hours before flying Nixon back to California after he resigned.[6] [KHG3] 

In September 1983, while I was in Moscow in a meeting with AHP and Soviet researchers, just days after Korean Airline 007 was shot out of the skies by the Soviets, a Soviet satellite report showing incoming U.S. nuclear missiles was received at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow. Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, the duty-officer felt the report was a false alarm. He acted on a hunch that the report, which indicated only 5 incoming American missiles, was wrong. If it were an attack, there would have been hundreds of missiles. He was right. And because he reported a false alarm to his superior officers, the world escaped nuclear war.[7] The false alarm was triggered by reflections from the tops of clouds. A similar episode happened in 1995 when, again, Russia thought it was under attack and nearly launched a nuclear strike.

Since the advent of these weapons, the U.S. has had dozens of nuclear accidents, including the dropping to two live atomic bombs on North Carolina. In fact, a commander of US nuclear forces said that the real nuclear threat on America is an accident.

[1] I have taken graduate students (mostly Atlanta area middle and high school teachers) to four of Georgia’s barrier islands including Skidaway, Sapelo, Jekyll and Cumberland islands.

[2] There are more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world spread unevenly among 9 countries. The US and Russia account for more than 90 percent of them. There are several organizations that report on nuclear weapons. These include the Ploughshares Fund, Federation of American Scientists, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook

[3] The hidden costs of our nuclear arsenal: Overview of project findings. Brookings. (2017, April 14). Retrieved September 15, 2021, from https://www.brookings.edu/the-hidden-costs-of-our-nuclear-arsenal-overview-of-project-findings/.

[4] Congressional Budget Office (2021, May). Retrieved September 15, 2021, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-05/57130-Nuclear-Forces.pdf

[5] McGreal, C. (2010, July 7). Papers reveal Nixon plan for North KOREA nuclear strike. The Guardian. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/07/nixon-north-korea-nuclear-strike?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.

[6] Graff, G. M. (2017, August 11). The madman and the bomb. POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/11/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-richard-nixon-215478/.

[7] Long, T. (2007, September 26). Sept. 26, 1983: The man who saved the world by doing … nothing. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2007/09/dayintech-0926-2/.