US Bombs Out of Germany

August 3, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Wake up Justice! Protest in front of the Federal Constitutional Court

Germany̓s nationwide campaign Büchel is everywhere!Nuclear Weapons-Free Now! — of the parent network Abolish Nuclear Weapons – Start with Us! — invites you to a protest action during the International Week for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons.

Protest action on Friday, September 22, 2023, in Karlsruhe.

A “Justitia” performance rally is planned in front of the Constitutional Court and in the city center.

Time: Noon to 2:30 p.m.: rally in front of the Federal Constitutional Court and from there walk at 3 p.m. to Stephansplatz, among other places, for flyer distribution until 4 p.m.

Climate-neutral: After the rally, a part of the protesters will ride about 100 km in a bicycle delegation over the weekend to Strasbourg, France. On Monday, September 25, the cyclers will join a rally there at the European Court of Human Rights.

Background:
NATO̓s “nuclear sharing” is practiced at the ari base Büchel. German pilots train to fly and drop U.S. nuclear bombs onto target areas in an “emergency”. NATO operational doctrine also includes a possible first use!

For 30 years, the peace movement has been organizing diverse protests at the gates of the Büchel base. It demands that the approx. 20 U.S. nuclear bombs be withdrawn and that our government accede to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We demand a Europe without nuclear sharing and the observance of international law!

Because of the catastrophic dangers that any use of nuclear weapons entail, and the criminality of nuclear deterrence, peace activists have repeatedly been compelled to resort to civil resistance. There were blockades and also go-in actions. The latter have been prosecuted and the people charged have been convicted and sentenced. Nineteen people have filed Constitutional Court complaints (appeals) over the last 26 years, directly related to civil resistance to the U.S. nuclear weapons at “Fliegerhorst Büchel” in the Eifel. None of the 19 complaints have been accepted for review by the Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest.

All defendants complain that they were denied their “right to a fair trial” under Article 6 of charter of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) because the hearing of exculpatory witnesses was refused by the courts. They were thus denied their “right to a fair hearing” under Article 103 of Germany’s Basic Law. International law stands above national law. Therefore, the designated (international law) experts should have been admitted as witnesses in the court proceedings.

Germany’s Constitutional Court has so far shirked its responsibility to deal with the concerns of the peace movement‘s appeals, without presenting any reasons. Lower court written decisions were merely upheld.

(For 1.5 years we have been waiting for a reply to the first application! In addition, on March 15, 2010, a civil lawsuit for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany by a resident who lives in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear weapons site was rejected.) This is despite the fact that under Articles I and II of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Germany is obliged, among other things, not to accept the transfer opf nuclear weapons either directly or indirectly. The unlawful transfer of U.S. nuclear weapons practiced by our government threatens our right to life and physical integrity (See Art. 2 and 3, ECHR). That is why currently four (soon six) nuclear resisters who were rejected by the Constitutional Court have filed complaints with the ECHR.

With our protest we demand a review of the nuclear weapons deployment by the Supreme Courts!

Please register:
for Karlsruhe, also for overnight stays, and separately for the “Peace bike tour nuclear weapons free 2023” and/or the “Protest in Strasbourg”.

Contact:
Do you have questions about the action? Then write an email to our campaign spokesperson Marion Küpker: aktionen@atomwaffenfrei.jetzt.

Do you have questions about the campaign? Then send us an email to: info@atomwaffenfrei.jetzt.

 www.atomwaffenfrei.de
 www.buechel-atombombenfrei.de
 www.facebook.com/atomwaffenfrei.jetzt
 @atomwaffenfrei

We ask you: Support us with a donation!

By direct bank transfer:
Special account at Förderverein Frieden e.V.
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August 3, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Activists to Join Protests Against U.S. Nuclear Weapons Deployed in The Netherlands and Germany

A delegation of U.S. peace activists will travel to The Netherlands and Germany this August to join international nuclear weapons protests focused on removing the U.S. nuclear weapons still stationed at the Netherlands’ Volkel Air Base, 85 miles south of Amsterdam, and at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, southeast of Cologne. The group of 11 anti-nuclear activists hail from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, and New York.

Both the Volkel and Büchel Air Bases each maintain approximately 15-to-20 U.S. hydrogen bombs known as B61s* as part of NATO’s so-called “nuclear sharing” program in which foreign fighter jets and their pilots routinely rehearse attacks on Russia using the U.S. H-bombs. Alarmingly, in the midst of the ongoing war in Ukraine, operation “Air Defender 2023,” NATO’s largest-ever nuclear attack exercise, ran from June 14 to 23 in the skies over Germany. War planes involved in the practice included U.S. F-35s, F-15s and F-16s from the U.S., Turkey and Greece; Eurofighters from Spain and the U.K.; German Tornadoes; U.S. and Finnish F/A-18s; Hungarian Gripens; and U.S. A-10 ground-attack jets, according to CNN. The A-10 jets fire the controversially toxic and radioactive shells known as depleted uranium munitions.

Coordinated by the Amsterdam Catholic Worker community, Peace Camp Volkel runs from August 4 to 10 and is focused on “climate and a future without nuclear weapons.” Participants from around Europe and the United States will conduct nonviolence trainings, and blockades, “go-in” actions, and other protests. On 10 August, the U.S. activists will travel from Volkel to Kail, Germany for four days of protest actions directed at the Büchel Air Force Base, which like Volkel is now undergoing major construction in preparation for the delivery of replacement weapons, the new B61-12 gravity bomb, now in production in the United States.

Most of the U.S. delegates to the two peace camps have worked for years in anti-war and disarmament campaigns, and several have been imprisoned in the United States for nonviolent actions taken against the war system. Ellen Grady, from Ithaca, New York and a member of the delegation said, “We have to take some responsibility for these U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe, because they threaten genocidal violence and they destabilize the reckless and expanding war in Ukraine.”

The eleven U.S. participants are: JACKIE ALLEN, of Hartford, Conn.; VERA ANDERSON, 35, from New York, NY; MARK COLVILLE from New Haven, Conn.; SUSAN CRANE, 75, from Redwood City, Calif.; DENNIS DuVALL, 81, from Radeberg, Germany (formerly of Prescott, Ariz.); JENN GALLER, 27, of Baltimore, MD; ELLEN GRADY, 60, from Ithaca, New York; THEO KAYSER, 33, of St Louis, Missouri; ERIC MARTIN 38, of Los Angeles, Calif.; SUSAN SCHALLER, 69, of Boston, Mass.; and BRIAN TERRELL, 67, of Maloy, Iowa.

Previous international camps involving “go-in” actions at the Büchel base have resulted in trespass charges and series of court trials and appeals in which resisters have attempted to put “nuclear sharing” on trial. The opponents argue that the defense of “crime prevention” excuses their actions in view of the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty which forbids any transfer of nuclear weapons between treaty signers including the U.S., The Netherlands and Germany. Among this year’s delegates, Ms. Crane will in September be the 5^th nuclear resister to appeal from Germany to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasberg regarding alleged errors by German courts which have refused to consider defense arguments offered by the resisters. The European Court has yet to decide on any of the previous appeals. [Biographies of the U.S. participants are available upon request.]

_________________________

* De Morgen (Antwerp), July 16, 2019, https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/eindelijk-zwart-op-wit-er-liggen-amerikaanse-kernwapens-in-belgie~b051dc18/ (De Morgen obtained and published a leaked official NATO report detailing the locations and numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons currently stationed in five NATO states.)

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nukewatch Staffer Appeals to European Court, Claims Unfair Trial Court Decisions in Germany

Wearing “Weapons Inspectors” signs, Susan Crane, left, and John LaForge got into Germany’s Büchel air base on Hiroshima Day 2018 and climbed atop one of the bunkers that likely houses some of the US nuclear bombs stationed there.

By Nukewatch Staff

Nukewatch co-director John LaForge has appealed to a European human rights court claiming that his criminal trespass convictions stemming from nuclear weapons protests in Germany were based on unfair judicial errors.

LaForge was convicted of two charges of trespass and damage to property after separate protest actions at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, 80 miles southeast of Cologne. The base stations approximately 20 U.S. hydrogen bombs, that German pilots train to use in attacks on Russia, as part of a controversial program called “nuclear sharing.”

Now, in an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France filed June 9, LaForge argues that the ECHR’s rules were violated by German courts which, he claims, effectively denied him the right to present a defense. The ECHR reviews complaints from across the European Union if defendants, who have exhausted their legal alternatives in European member states, can demonstrate that their convictions were made in error. The ECHR will initially consider LaForge’s “application,” and then decide whether it merits formal review, a process that can take many months.
LaForge’s convictions were affirmed by the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, Germany’s highest, which over the last 20 years has refused to hear 19 similar appeals by anti-nuclear weapons activists. In January this year, LaForge became the first U.S. citizen incarcerated in Germany in the long-running, international campaign against “nuclear sharing” and the threatened use of the U.S. nuclear weapons at Büchel.

LaForge was sent to Glasmoor prison near Hamburg for 50 days, and was released February 28. A second U.S. citizen, Dennis DuVall, a member of Veterans for Peace who now lives in Germany, finished a 60-day sentence on April 19, 2023 for a similar charge.

In the appeal, filed by attorney Anna Busl of Bonn, LaForge argues that the German courts erred by refusing to consider expert witness testimony, which he says would have corroborated his defense of “crime prevention.” In particular, the courts refused to hear from University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis A. Boyle, author of The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and many other books. “The courts mistakenly neglected to consider international law, binding on the United States and Germany, that criminalizes planning and preparation of nuclear weapons attacks, and which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons from the United States to Germany,” LaForge said.

The appeal to the ECHR is not altogether new in the campaign to oust the U.S. weapons. In April 2022, Stefanie Augustin and Marion Küpker of Germany’s campaign “Büchel is Everywhere: Nuclear Weapons-Free Now!” filed an appeal which has not yet been answered. In addition, Johanna Adickes of Germany filed an appeal April 26, and two other resisters, Ariane Dettloff of Germany, and Susan Crane of California, intend to appeal later this year.

In a related initiative, while nuclear resisters were facing trial and prison sentences in Germany, Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, recommended in July 2022 that the U.S. withdraw all its nuclear weapons from Europe as a demonstration of good will and trust building that they said could move Russian President Putin to support negotiations leading to a cease fire and eventually an end to the war in Ukraine.

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

John’s Letter from Jail

Artist Mark Taylor’s rendition of Uncle Sam and his German doppelganger sentencing John LaForge.

January 15, 2023

This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously toward the court system here and have refused to cooperate with its deeply corrupt and dishonest protection of the nuclear weapons establishment.

Because Susan Crane and I had the gall to occupy the top of a nuclear weapons bunker that holds U.S. hydrogen bombs here in Germany, and then refused to apologize by paying a fine for trespassing, the court has decided that seven weeks in this modern prison ought to mend my ways, or at least discourage other abolitionists.

The three war-weary events are Martin Luther King Day, January 16; the second anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, January 22; and the yearly setting of the “Doomsday Clock,” January 24 – that weirdly formulaic gauge of nuclear armageddon’s likelihood concocted by a group of scientific nuclear eggheads.
The establishment of the MLK holiday and of the TPNW were both monumental achievements made against fierce, wealthy, bigoted, and colonialist forces of reaction. Advocates of nonviolent action and campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons this Monday and next Sunday, then get back to work Tuesday when the alarm goes off again on the Doomsday Clock. Of course the clock’s “up one year, down the next” assessment of nuclear war risks has been ignored as a worn out rewrite of the Chicken Little tale. Yet the five metric tons of plutonium dust that was lofted into the upper atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests is all making its way back down to Earth. So yes, Mr. Watson, in fact the worst part of the sky is falling.

Dr. King and opposition to nuclear weapons will always be connected in my mind because MLK said, “We have guided missiles and misguided men” and “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and because nuclear weapons are nothing if not genocidal.

Dr. King’s books, and the hard-won triumphs of the fearlessly nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, inspired a group of us in the 1980s to repeatedly blockade the entrance to the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota which then controlled 150 land-based, long-range nuclear-armed missiles. Over a ten-year period, our band of nuclear resisters served enough county jail time after staging so many marches, protests, and stunts – once pouring blood across the 100-ton concrete lid of a locked-and-loaded Minuteman III missile silo – that when the Air Force later decided to eliminate over half of its land-based missiles, the Grand Forks nukes were some of the first to go.

Our small group efforts were encouraged back then by news of hundreds of thousands across Europe who took to the streets demanding – successfully, it turned out – the ouster of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles. Any prospective use of the weapons was almost universally viewed in Europe as suicidal.

We never know if our demands will be realized – only that nothing is gained without venturing. Anti-nuclear marchers in the ‘80s never guessed they’d see the UN General Assembly vote 122-to-3 to endorse a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have agreed that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, that any chance of a successful medical response to their effects is impossible, that these effects would illegally cross neutral borders, do long-term criminal damage to the environment, and then recoil to maim and destroy the very militaries that unleash them. (That’s why I wrote “B61 = Suicide” on the weapons bunker just before being detained.)

Today, the groundbreaking TPNW has permanently shamed and stigmatized the nuclear weapons states as hypocrites, scofflaws, and rogues who ridicule and ignore the treaty’s means while cynically claiming to desire its ends.

The nine-member thermonuclear cartel, like a gang of coldblooded mobsters, acts outside and above the law by rewarding their judicial, police, and prison authorities for the cover they provide – authorities who then wink and pretend that the protection racket is necessary and that the Bomb is legal.

Maybe our marching, our rebellion, and the law of nations can’t denuclearize the cabal of atomic weaponeers. Maybe the nuclear mobsters won’t re-direct their war chests to useful purposes before they run our earthly train off the rails. But then nothing changes unless we demand it.

— Written by John LaForge

Wake up Justice! Protest in front of the Federal Constitutional Court

U.S. Activists to Join Protests Against U.S. Nuclear Weapons Deployed in The Netherlands and Germany

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