&& I o Jim and Shelley Douglass systems can be evil; people are not. No one I who understands the implications of the arms race’s endless spiral of destructive potential can seriously wish it to be sustained, yet new weapons continue to be developed and deployed. One such is the Trident submarine, the first of which, the L/SS Ohio, left its base at Bangor, Washington, on the Hood Canal, fully armed for the first time with its 24 Trident 1 missiles, on October 1, 1982. For the Douglasses, the perpetuation of the arms race relies on one thing: the silent complicity of each and every one of us with the system that develops, builds, and threatens to use a destructive violence unparalleled in human history. The Douglasses believe that the place to start in resisting that system is in their own lives, with a conscious decision not to cooperate with it, with an attempt to learn how to live nonviolently. For Gandhi, the interdependence of each unit of our world on every other one was a source of hope: if everything is interconnected, then pressure exerted in one place will eventually move the whole edifice. Ground Zero newspaper The Douglasses live next to the Bangor Nuclear Submarine Base, in Kitsap County, Washington. Together with seven other people they are the co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a place dedicated to peaceful resistance and exploration of nonviolent alternatives to the Trident systems. The Ground Zero Center shares 330 feet of common fence with the 7700-acre Bangor Base. Shelley and Jim Dougm i - ' lass work full time at Ground Zero and have devoted a majority of the last eight years of their lives to a campaign against the Trident submarines and missiles. The Douglasses’ sense of what is right is based on their perception that Trident was designed to be a first strike weapon, and that its deployment greatly enhances the likelihood of nuclear war. These were the thoughts of Robert Continued on page 28 — LEARNING TO LIVE NONVIOLENTLY Shelley and Jim Douglass's Philosophy o f Resisting the Trident By Simeon Dreyfuss
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