Jim Springer Pages RAIN Oct./Nov. 1982 Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen addressing anti-Trident peace rally four days before arrival ofU.S.S. Ohio. For peace to take hold we must surmount the barriers to peace that exist on many levels, from our shrouded psyches to our armament industries. 20,000 Kilotons Under The Sea: By Jim Springer It was a lopsided battle in a war of nerves. A 560-foot nuclear submarine protected by 99 Coast Guard vessels against a rag-tag flotilla of small boats, many of them powered only by oars. As the Trident submarine U.S.S. Ohio approached its berth at Bangor, Washington, peace activists attempted to execute a plan months in the making. They intended to mount a “peace blockade" in the path of the behemoth submarine and force it to a stop. To deter it even slightly, or get arrested in trying, would fulfill the goal of the protesters to express their opposition to this new weapon of unimaginable potential. Early on the morning of August 12, 1982 when word came that the Ohio was near, the blockade boats moved out from the bay where they had lain in wait for the sub's arrival. The “always ready" Coast Guard was ready now and pounced on the demonstrators, hitting them with water cannons, snagging them with grappling hooks, and threatening them with .50-caliber machine guns, M-16s and pistols. In the words of one demonstrator, the Coast Guard was “horribly efficient." Although three people managed to get their speedboat to within 100 feet of the Ohio, most of the 45 activists did not even get near the 1,000-yard security zone around the sub. When the confrontation was over, 31 activists had been arrested and 14 of their boats had been seized. Curiously, 17 of those arrested were quickly released without being charged with any crime. The other 14, among them a Lutheran pastor and a 78-year-old former national Mother of the Year, were charged with violating a Coast Guard security zone and failure to obey a Coast Guard order, and then were released on their own recognizance. A week after the arrests, the government surprised those involved and dropped its charges against the 14 saying, “The cases simply do not present circumstances aggravated enough to merit felony prosecutions." An alternative explanation for the government move, offered by some of the activists, was that the government wanted to avoid a trial that would have given the anti-Trident movement more publicity and brought revelations of illegal and dangerous actions by the Coast Guard during the blockade smashing. Since the activists promise further harassment of the Trident as it moves in and out of Hood Canal, future arrests are inevitable. The $1.2 billion Trident submarine, and the extremely accurate missiles it will carry, is this country's newest major weapons system to go on line. It would not be an overstatement to call the destructive potential of a Trident submarine earthshaking; it might be earthbreaking. The force within the hull of one sub will be more than that used by all the world's navies in all the wars in history, according to the Navy. The sub will carry 24 H-bomb- crowned missiles with ranges of 4,600 miles. The number of independently-targetable warheads per missile is classified information but could be as many as 14. This would allow each sub (there may eventually be 20) to target 336 sites. Yield per warhead is said to 1^ in the 100-kiloton range, about seven times the explosive force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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