WHEN, on the night of April 4 2018, seven US peace activists crept onto the United States naval submarine base at Kings Bay in Georgia, only one outcome was certain: they would be arrested. 

After more than an hour, they were. But for the seven, getting arrested was not so much an inevitability as an intention.

Kings Bay is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world and houses six Ohio-Class Trident submarines, comprising close to 200 missiles, as well as two guided missile submarines.

As Patrick O’Neill, one of those arrested at Kings Bay, said in an article he wrote for the Baltimore Sun, Trident missiles “collectively include enough firepower to kill 14 billion people and make the Earth uninhabitable,” effectively slaughtering twice the world’s current population.

O’Neill, along with co-defendants Liz McAlister, Fr Steve Kelly, Martha Hennessy, Clare Grady, Carmen Trotta and Mark Colville, will stand trial in a Brunswick, Georgia, court, starting today. 

Known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7), they are charged with three felonies and a misdemeanour and could each face 25 years in jail.

The actions of the group follow in a long tradition of similar break-ins conducted by the Plowshares movement at nuclear weapons sites. 

Plowshares is founded on non-violent civil disobedience and Catholic beliefs inspired by the Biblical words of the prophet Isaiah — “and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares.”

The first Plowshares action, in 1980, took place at the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, led by the movement’s founders, brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan. McAlister is Philip Berrigan’s widow. 

The KBP7 are all members of the Catholic Worker movement, whose mission, says Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, its co-founder, is “to give a voice to the voiceless, to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked.”

The KBP7 chose April 4, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, to cut wire fences at the Kings Bay base, spray-paint messages of peace, and hammer at symbols of nuclear firepower. 

Their sense of urgency was compelled, they say, by US President Donald Trump’s bellicose rhetoric and his then threatened suspension of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which subsequently occurred on February 1 2019. 

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Since then, they say, the risk of imminent nuclear annihilation has been further substantiated by the decision of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January of this year to move the hands of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight.

Once on the base, the KBP7 separated into three groups. O’Neill and Colville sought out a circle of monuments to nuclear weaponry where, O’Neill said, they intended to “smash idols.” 

Wielding a hammer made of melted-down guns, O’Neill instead heard a ringing sound and found his hammer shattered. The concrete monuments stood firm.

Grady and Hennessy headed to the base headquarters where they put up crime scene tape and posted an indictment for war crimes. 

Kelly, Trotta and McAlister breached a second fence, reaching into a more secure area in a “shoot to kill” zone. All seven were instead arrested without incident.

The group’s lawyers filed pre-trial motions for dismissal, all of which have been rejected. An international petition signed by celebrities, including Nobel Peace Prize-winners Mairead Maguire and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also called for dismissal of the case.

The seven were detained in a Georgia county jail to await trial, a place O’Neill described as “a hell hole.” 

The food was poor, there was no access to the outdoors, all correspondence other than plain postcards was forbidden, and there were few books. They were allowed one, monitored, 15-minute phone call a week.

Although scarcely a flight risk, given they had waited peacefully to be arrested, their requests to be released on their own recognisance were refused. 

After seven weeks of incarceration, Grady’s health began to fail. “I wanted to get out alive,” she said. 

She, Hennessy, O’Neill and Trotta all accepted conditions of release that included a $50,000 bond each and the obligation to wear a painful ankle monitor at all times.

McAlister, who turned 79 in jail, along with Kelly, 70 and Colville, 57, refused those terms. In August, McAlister and Colville persuaded the court to free them without bond or ankle bracelet. 

Kelly, the only ordained priest of the group, declined to co-operate with the court and remained in prison. All are now back in jail on the eve of the trial.

During their months of freedom, Grady, 60, Hennessy, 63, O’Neill, 62, and Trotta, 56, made public appearances and gave press interviews. 

Hennessy, who, like Trotta, had never done a Plowshares action before, remembered feeling “the utter fear in my heart of walking in the dark to challenge the greatest, most violent force on Earth — my own government and its military.”

Grady said she was motivated to act for those for whom “the Doomsday Clock has already hit midnight.” 

The defence intended to use the First Amendment (freedom of speech), the Defence of Necessity (that the defendants acted illegally to prevent a greater harm) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (that they acted out of sincerely held religious beliefs). 

But in an October 11 2019 order, presiding judge Benjamin W Cheesbro denied all three.

The judge also ruled against the defendants’ argument that they were legally authorised to take their actions because nuclear weapons are illegal under domestic and international law.

The only pre-trial win for the defendants came when Cheesbro ruled that the prosecution could not exclude details about the presence and lethality of nuclear weapons on Kings Bay, along with some basic security information. But the defence can only use this provided it is not part of a Defence of Necessity argument.

Jury selection begins today.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the curator and editor of Beyond Nuclear International and the international specialist at Maryland-based non-profit membership organisation Beyond Nuclear.