It was somewhere around 1975. At the time, I was working for the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee as director of a small local program, mostly working with volunteers.
During the Vietnam War, the office provided draft counseling and public education about public policy issues of war and peace.
As the Vietnam War wound down, we had started reading and studying about the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union. One thing led to another, and we decided to explore whether, or where, nuclear weapons were stored in Hawaii.
And on this day, a small group of us ended up along a muddy road that led off from the original phase of homes in Mililani Town. The road eventually led to the Naval Magazine in Waikele Gulch, where we believed nuclear weapons were stored in tunnels built into the side of the gulch.
So here we are, in the former pineapple fields that are probably now filled with Mililani homes.
From left to right: Howard Ehrlich, a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii; Ian Lind; Jim Albertini, longtime peace activist; Carol Ehrlich; Barbara Jensen; Meda Chesney-Lind, then on the faculty at Honolulu Community College; and a volunteer whose name escapes my memory.
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So were there A-bombs stored in the area developed as Milani Town? What happened to them if they were there? I was drafted and spent two years as a soldier at Schofield Barracks.
Eventually the Naval Magazine there was closed. Too much publicity, too much urban encroachment. One photo of ours made it into the NY Times via AP back in the mid-1970s or so, as I recall. The former ammunition tunnels have been leased for storage. One of the tunnels was the scene of a huge fireworks explosion in which several people were killed a few years ago.
Maybe you remember me running photos on KGMB of the movement of those nukes from Waikele to West Loch. Waikele and Lualualei were major storage sites for the Pacific Fleet.
I didn’t remember your role there. We had staked out the helicopter landing pad down in the gulch and got our own photos of the helicopters being loaded up, and later the trucks through Waipahu from the lower end of the gulch down to the West Loch docks.