i L i n d . n e t

William Cole’s story in the Advertiser a couple of days ago concerning the former nuclear weapons storage facility at Waikele brought back a lot of memories.

While a slightly later cohort of Marines like those interviewed by Cole were trying to keep prying eyes away from their classified bunkers, peace activists associated with the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee and catholic Action of Hawaii were trying to generate public discussion and debate over the threat of the international nuclear arms race by openly calling attention to local nuke storage.

I have a few photos online now from the series of peaceful protests between 1975 and 1980, including this set featuring a mock nuclear weapons convoy from the lower end of Kipapa Gulch below the Waikele base to the front gates of the West Loch Naval Ammunition Depot.

One year we celebrated easter by climbing over a fence by the highway and walking down a winding road in Kipapa Gulch. Our destination–a small landing field where helicopters would pick up nukes from storage in Waikele and then fly them down to Pearl Harbor.

Photographs we took of one of those weapon movements made the Associated Press wire and appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere across the country in around 1978. I’ll have to track down some of those clips.

And I would have loved to read about the recollections of those Marine guards the next time they cordoned off that landing pad and found our plastic easter eggs with messages like “Hop right out of the arms race”.

Looking back from the vantage point of post 9-11 security attitudes, it’s amazing what we managed to do.

The military, of course, was at a political disadvantage. Publicly, the official line was that the U.S. “will neither confirm nor deny” the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere. But without reference to those nuclear arms, attempts to crack down on our open and peaceful public protests would have been difficult.