Anti-Nuclear Weapons Groups “Paddle & Boogie to Stop the Bomb” in GA

by Stephen Wing, member of the Back from the Brink Atlanta Hub

By the time No Kings 3 was announced, it was too late to cancel. Our coalition of anti-nuclear groups had already staked out Saturday, March 28, for a “Paddle & Boogie to Stop the Bomb” in Augusta, Georgia. The goal was to call attention to a proposal to manufacture “plutonium pits” at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site, a Cold War nuclear weapons plant turned radioactive waste dump.

On April 10th, the government released an Environmental Impact Statement and will hold public hearings and open a public comment period in May – but public awareness is often limited. As anti-nukers, that’s our job. The public hearing for the Savannah River Site will be held on May 5th at the North Augusta Community Center, with an option to join virtually as well.

 

 

Plutonium, one of the most toxic substances on Earth, is created by processing uranium for nuclear energy. A plutonium pit is the explosive “trigger” in every nuclear warhead. We have thousands of pits in storage, but none have been produced since the FBI raided Colorado’s Rocky Flats plant in 1989 for contaminating its own workers and the surrounding countryside for decades, and the plant was subsequently shut down. Our goal is to prevent that from happening here, as public awareness campaigns have successfully done before.

 

 

The “Paddle” was a five-mile kayak trip down the Augusta Canal to a local park, where a solar-powered “Boogie” took over with music, speakers, and my contribution of poetry invoking the specter of nuclear war. Predictably, our intended audience showed up at No Kings instead, about two miles away at the Augusta riverfront. After my performance, I slipped away for an hour to join them and 8 million other Americans in the largest single day of protest in U.S. history. But the Paddle & Boogie made its point nonetheless with coverage in National Today and a photogenic flotilla of kayaks on Augusta’s WRDW News. All three reports clearly conveyed the incalculable threat of plutonium and its 24,000 year half-life.

 

 

Even more auspicious was the bond that formed over the weekend between a handful of seasoned anti-nukers and a dozen African-American college students who until then had just been faces and voices to each other on a Zoom call. The students were mobilized by Back from the Brink, a national coalition whose Atlanta Hub is led by students and recent graduates of Georgia State and Morehouse College — a new generation awakening to the implications of a new nuclear arms race for their already-precarious future. Paddling together, pulling off an event, and relaxing with them afterward around a campfire gave me fresh hope to offset the shame and sorrow of bequeathing such unspeakable peril to their entire generation, and the ones we hope will follow.

 

 

Resuming pit production is part of a $1.5-trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal championed by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Despite chest-thumping hysterics over nuclear threats from Russia and China, in reality it’s “defense” industry lobbying that drives the $100,000 per minute we taxpayers are currently investing in thermonuclear holocaust. As usual, the other nations in the race are only trying to keep up. But while No Kings 3 was protecting our democracy, a new coalition of young and old was forming to defend the rest of the planet.