While the five member states of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) signed in 1968 is being violated with impunity by all five member states, since they have failed to commit themselves to pursue in good faith the treaty’s stipulation that negotiations be undertaken  toward ending the nuclear arms race in order to achieve total nuclear disarmament, three anti-nuclear weapons peace activists have been punished with prison terms ranging from 3 to 5 years for entering a woefully inadequately secured nuclear storage facility in order to register their protests.

The three activists, Gregory Boertje-Obed, Sister Megan Rice, and Michael Walli were convicted for damage done to a security fence and for human blood splattered on a wall of a facility where enriched uranium is stored.

These activists, just as former Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, are upstanding members of their respective communities, and were obviously no threat to anyone, and simply did what their conscience compelled them to do to warn the world that the weaponization of nuclear energy is a serious threat to our global survival and that nuclear weapons are not the answer to conflict resolution as they shown not to be when the only nation on earth, the United States, used them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the Japanese were ready to surrender, an attack on innocent civilians which General Eisenhower decried.

Israeli Mossad agents abducted the Israeli whistle-blower, Mordechai Vanunu, in Italy (about which this writer wrote the narrative for a half hour public access TV documentary), and after subduing him with drugs he was whisked in a speed boat to a freighter which took him to Israel where without a proper trial he was sentenced and placed in solitary confinement in a small cell for 11 years.

The three non-violent American activists, Sister Rice an 84-year old Catholic nun, Walli a 64 year-old Vietnam veteran, and Obed a 57 year-old house painter, were accused nonsensically by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Theodore with a “…disruption which hindered the national-defence preparedness and the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrence.”   His assertion constitutes an absurdity without bounds.

So, while with total impunity the US, along with China, Russia, Britain, and France continue to violate the NPT Treaty, and while Israel did not even sign on to the NPT treaty, after it started in 1969, as the result of a secret agreement between PM Golda Meyer and President Nixon, to develop an arsenal of nuclear WMD’s,  since it forbids the proliferation of nuclear energy weaponization, and Israel, now an Apartheid state, intended and has proliferated documentably said technology for more than a decade to the Apartheid racist regime of South Africa (see “The Unspoken Alliance – Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, by Sasha Polakow-Suranksky),  these three heroic, gentle, solid American citizens are sentenced in what could become a life sentence for making a statement inside a nuclear plant by availing themselves of the incredibly deficient security of the Y-12 nuclear-weapons production facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was characterized as having inoperable surveillance cameras and a monitoring system that was compromised by false alarms, to the point that the guard of said facility was fired.

The sentence of these three conscientious supporters of lawful implementation of the NPT Treaty and the ideal of the elimination of all nuclear weapons globally is a scandalous miscarriage of justice which should be immediately addressed.

Incidentally, the following is a summary of the stipulations of the NPT  Treaty.

– Forbids the five member states with nuclear weapons from transferring them to any other state
– Forbids member states without nuclear weapons from developing or acquiring them
– Provides assurance through the application of international safeguards that peaceful nuclear energy in NNWS will not be diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices
– Facilitates access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy for all NNWS under international safeguards
– Commits all member states to pursue good faith negotiations toward ending the nuclear arms race and achieving nuclear disarmament.