By John LaForge
Democracy Now! put Nukewatch on the air for the first time on August 10, tying together protest stories from the Netherlands and Germany, with host Amy Goodman announcing: “Ten peace activists were arrested on the runway of [a Dutch] air base in the Netherlands, where 15 U.S. nuclear bombs are stockpiled for NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear sharing’ program. The action came on the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’ll speak with John LaForge, co-director of Nukewatch, who just served a 50-day sentence in Germany for protesting U.S. nuclear weapons stationed at an air base there.” In a prompt for the report, LaForge said, “We take the Pentagon’s threatened use of nuclear weapons, known as ‘deterrence,’ very seriously, because, under law, this ongoing, credible, and well-rehearsed readiness to attack people with hydrogen bombs is an international criminal conspiracy to commit massacres using radiation and firestorms.”
Goodman interviewed Susan Crane, the Plowshares activist and Catholic Worker from California, and then asked LaForge to explain the protests.
He said in part, “We argued in trial that the stationing or the transfer of U.S. nuclear weapons to Germany is an unlawful act, a violation of Articles I and II of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. … We argued the case that nuclear weapons, their components and their delivery systems, in Germany and everywhere, are principally just instruments of international criminal activity, repudiated and prohibited, by international law, including and especially the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg judgment and the Nuremberg principles.”
— Democracy Now! online at: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/8/10/nuclear_protests_netherlands
Leave a Reply