World on fire: New book shows how protests at the Nevada Test Site helped end the Cold War

BY SAAB LOFTON

"I remember hearing at Berkeley the notion -- or the dream -- that perhaps by the end of the year, or perhaps by the end of two years, every single military and nuclear facility in the United States should have a Christian witness outside of it. And I got to the test site and I thought of that. And I thought, 'Nobody's out here. This one's still available!'"



--Michael Afleck, after he first visited the Nevada Test Site in 1981

The city slicker that I am, I can't imagine staking out the Nevada Test Site on a regular basis. When I covered a NTS protest on Mother's Day weekend in 2003, it marked my first camping trip, and I was definitely a fish out of water. To withstand the elements year after year -- for what's assumed by many to be a lost cause -- takes a certain special something. Now there's finally a book that acknowledges this.

Ken Butigan's Pilgrimage Through a Burning World: Spiritual Practice and Nonviolent Protest at the Nevada Test Site proves how "Power to the People" isn't just a '60s slogan. According to Butigan, "The U.S. peace movement played a key role in ending the Cold War." And Burning World backs this up by citing a series of historians -- including Lawrence S. Wittner, author of 1997's The Struggle Against the Bomb.

Writes Butigan: "In his book, Wittner argues that the missing ingredient in any explanation of this reality is the world nuclear disarmament movement that has mobilized millions of people around the world. Wittner confesses that he hadn't expected to reach this conclusion. He assumed that the anti-nuclear movement had failed because nuclear weapons had not been definitively abolished. Yet as he pursued his research, he came to understand that this 'people power' movement had played an important role in curbing the nuclear arms race and preventing nuclear war."

Butigan even writes, "The [Nevada] test site was situated in a remote location, in part, to discourage protest."

This is similar to how the World Trade Organization evades anti-globalization protests by meeting in isolated places like Qatar in the Persian Gulf, for instance.

But Burning World isn't just a feel-good Chicken Soup for the Activist. Butigan gives readers a step-by-step account of how exactly anti-nuke activists saved the world.

"By the 1980s many of the original nuclear socialization practices had disappeared (due, in part, to previous anti-nuclear movements)." Butigan is referring to Cold War-era mock attacks and air-raid drills, which radical Catholic Dorothy Day protested with two-dozen people in 1955 by not entering a New York City fallout shelter during such a drill. By 1961, "nearly two thousand people refused to take shelter, an act that directly resulted in a definitive end to compulsory participation."

As a professor of religious studies at Saint Martin's College, Butigan fixates on the spiritual contrast between pro- and anti-nuke forces. Comparing Catholic Dorothy Day's protest with the air-raid drill, Butigan points out: "Here two public rituals are in conflict: one officially sanctioned, with the aim of instilling consent and participation in the public work of consolidating a nuclear state; the other embodying refusal and resistance, and an insistent allegiance to contrary values."

In one corner, Butigan says there's fear -- which he calls "a central part of a smoothly efficient nuclear war machine." In the other, there's the hope that you're making a difference -- and who'd have ever thought Nevada would provide such hope.

If anything, Butigan implies Nevada is the perfect spot to keep the faith.

"People of faith and goodwill are being drawn together in the Nevada desert," wrote activist Anne Bucher in 1985 and included in Burning World. "And together they are bringing life and goodness and re-creation to a place of evil, death and destruction. The location is perfect: the vastness of the desert, the desert in all its stark beauty. It is a beauty which is appreciated slowly, over a period of time. It is conducive to prayer, meditation, soul-searching, purification."

Aside from the obvious damage a nuclear attack or accident can cause, Butigan also notes the injustice of it all. "The Western Shoshone nation has never ceded its right to this land; under the terms of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, it considers the U.S. government and its nuclear testing facility to be illegally occupying their ancestral lands," he writes.

Therefore, the real test of faith lies in waiting for the public to finally discover the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Hopefully, Pilgrimage Through a Burning World will help in that regard.

Saab Lofton is a local artist and freelance writer. His pop culture and politics column Fear No Evil appears weekly in CityLife.