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Anti-war protesters have rallied at the gates of Y-12 for decades around the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Some deliberately trespass or block traffic to provoke arrest and call more attention to their cause. Some years, authorities have tried to deprive them of the notoriety by refusing to prosecute. Sometimes they go to federal court, but the stiffest sentence ever meted out was less than a year in prison.

This time, federal prosecutors have thrown the book at the three protesters, charging them with offenses that could carry cumulative prison sentences of 16 years for Sister Megan Rice of Las Vegas, Michael Walli of Washington and Greg Boertje-Obed of Duluth, Minn.

“That’s the reaction to the embarrassment,” said Ralph Hutchison, of the loose-knit Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

While the media coverage of the non-violent civil disobedience protest focused almost solely on the security breach at the top secret weapons facility, the activists – part of the religiously-based Plowshares movement launched in 1980 by the Berrigan Brothers and other Catholic activists, were determined to draw attention instead to what they see as the “illegality and immorality of these horrific weapons and our nation’s continuing pursuit of them.”

Rice said she hopes to return to Nevada next month to take part in NDE’s upcoming interfaith celebration of non-violence. You can meet her in person, where you’ll find that she’s more like Mahatma Gandhi than James Bond.

Some might find it odd that an 82-year-old nun and her companions — aged 63 and 57 — are protesting nuclear weapons. In a way, though, the weapons themselves are just as odd these days. They are aging, too. But, unlike the protesters, nuclear weapons are no longer relevant, and they need to be quietly laid to rest. Instead of creating new materials to renovate old warheads, it is time to let them go gently into that good night. In other words, it is time for nuclear weapons to retire and, in time, to be buried.

In interviews this week, Sister Rice discussed her life — somewhat reluctantly at times — and kept emphasizing what she called “the issue.”

“It’s the criminality of this 70-year industry,” she said. “We spend more on nuclear arms than on the departments of education, health, transportation, disaster relief and a number of other government agencies that I can’t remember.”

Eiger is media and outreach coordinator for Disarm Now Plowshares, a like-minded group. He said today: “The three Plowshares activists who breached security at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility did so not to demonstrate the lack of security as has been the focus of most, if not all, of the mainstream press. They engaged in their action, as do all Plowshares activists, to hasten the process of disarmament and to stress that there is absolutely no ‘security’ in nuclear weapons.

Mr. Walli said his movement, “Transform Now Plowshares,” was committed to nonviolence, but that he was concerned that “these anti-Christ nongovernmental terrorists, Christian militias up in Michigan that are getting ready for Armageddon, to kill for Jesus, or the Nazi party or the Taliban, might just as easily have gotten to where we got, with evil intention.”

They share an easy conversation, touching upon religion, life and politics.

By all appearances, there is nothing out of the ordinary about these two — but appearances can be deceiving.

… “We are not guilty of what they say,” she said. “We entered the base, but for a purpose. It is everybody’s responsibility to stop crime.”

How pow­er­ful a pin­prick on the great nuclear Leviathan! How much judg­ment on us, as well as those con­trac­tor legions whose bread and but­ter comes from an enor­mously par­a­sitic weapons complex.

Someone kills a lot of people and the media swarms.  Not so if your action was a peaceful attempt to prevent massacres.

While the press over-kills the multiple murder story in Colorado, our TV nation seems to agree with George Carlin: The United States isn’t warlike, it just likes war.