PeaceWorks, Kansas City, will convene its annual witness for a nuclear-weapon-free world this Memorial Day, May 28, in Kansas City, Mo. “This will be the seventh Memorial Day on which we’ve rallied for freedom from nuclear weapons,” says Henry Stoever, chair of the PeaceWorks Board of Directors. The group will begin its events at a boarded-up entry to Bannister Federal Complex, where non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons were made from 1949 to 2014.

PeaceWorks invites all to share in its May 28 events:
--10 a.m. rally at a closed entry to Bannister Federal Complex (east of Troost, on Bannister);
--11 a.m. walk (1 mile) from Prospect, just north of Mo. Hwy. 150, to the entry road to the new nuke-parts plant, the National Security Campus (NSC), 14510 Botts Rd.; and
--11:30 am Rally, Die-in, and Civil Resistance at the NSC entry road.

Among those who will cross the NSC property line in civil resistance are Stoever; Tom Fox, former editor of National Catholic Reporter; Sunny Jordan Hamrick, of Jerusalem Farm in Kansas City; Lu Mountenay, a Community of Christ minister in Independence, Mo.; and Brian Terrell, a national leader of Voices for Creative Non-Violence, based in Chicago.

Mountenay reflects on the uranium and plutonium that are the core of nuclear weapons: “I feel we have perverted our stewardship of these elements by combining what is not meant to be combined. We have processed and manipulated and applied triggers to and detonated elements in a manner created by humans not God. Sometimes, what humans have joined togetheer, no one can put asunder. No ONE. But MANY can take a stand. Many can join as a peaceful community to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

Being asked why he’s planning to cross the NSC property line, Stoever says, “The world is in ever greater peril of a nuclear exchange or the use of one or more nuclear weapons.” He highlights the international recognition that the world is “on the cusp of a new (nuclear) arms race,” according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Trump Administration’s budget for 2019 would escalate funding for the NSC from $530 million this year to $796.8 million next year. “We know the (weapon) parts are in fact creating more deadly and dangerous weapons, for the new parts are an upgrade and improvement in the weaponry. It is a violation of treaties to create new nuclear weapons,” says Stoever.

Out of the almost $800 million budget request, some $569 million is labelled for directed stockpile work. Ann Suellentrop of the PeaceWorks Board says that, in large part, refers to “life extension programs,” which she says are “extending and enhancing the most heinous, barbaric weapons ever invented by humans.” She adds, “Nukes are a blasphemous sin of the nth degree. Jesus weeps, I’m sure.” Suellentrop and another PeaceWorks Board member are lobbying Congress this week on nuclear issues with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.

Tom Fox, in a statement he will read May 28 before crossing the line at the National Security Campus, says, “We come here to cry out against, with every moral fiber of our beings, our nation’s nuclear weapons policies. The weapons being made here represent fear, death, annd an imprisonment to mad policies and a runaway military mindset.”

Mountenay, whose grandchildren will watch her cross the property line, comments, “I’m sure peace activists like myself do not bother the Military-Industrial Complex in the least. When we face complacency and even derision from others, and we begin to feel we have lost the cause, we remember that we do it for our children and grandchildren. My grandchildren understand why I go to jail. They get it, even if the Military-Industrial Complex doesn’t.”

*https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/03/f49/DOE-FY2019-Budget-Laboratory-Table.pdf

See page 4 to find the budget information for sites including Kansas City.