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"Shundahai" is a Newe (Western Shoshone) word meaning
"Peace and Harmony with All Creation"

Spring Actions 1997 at the Nevada Test Site

ACTION FOR NUCLEAR ABOLITION!

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Road Blockade 4/3/97

YES, We did SHUT DOWN THE NEVADA TEST SITE

Photos

ACTIVISTS BLOCK HIGHWAY: CLOSE NATION'S NUCLEAR TEST SITE

Anti-nuclear activists braved rare near-freezing temperatures and gusting desert winds to block U.S. Highway 95 early this morning, preventing workers and equipment from entering the Nevada nuclear test site. The demonstrators closed the test site to disrupt ongoing preparations for subcritical nuclear weapons tests and daily low-level radioactive waste shipments. "The Department of Energy is out here preparing to conduct a new series of nuclear weapons tests," said Reinard Knutsen of Action for Nuclear Abolition, a local project created by the Shundahai Network to address nuclear issues in Nevada. "The people locked down on this cold highway this morning are enforcing the recently-signed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which bans 'all nuclear weapons test explosions' and includes a strong call for nuclear disarmament."

The Energy Department plans to begin an open-ended series of subcritical experiments with two tests in 1997 and four more in 1998. Energy Department officials are expected to announce the test schedule soon. The tests are being designed and engineered by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in New Mexico and California respectively, as part of the controversial multi-billion dollar Stockpile Stewardship and Management program. The tests, coupling convention high explosives with nuclear weapons materials such as plutonium, 239, are designed not to produce a sustained nuclear chain reaction - hence the term "subcritical." Energy Department officials claim that the experiments are consistent with the letter of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty but disarmament advocates counter that the United States is violating the spirit of that hard-fought treaty. "The U.S. has the opportunity to drive the nuclear disarmament process forward, but it could also inadvertently drive the world right back into a nuclear arms race," said Greenpeace Disarmament Campaigner Bruce Hall. "President Clinton must make the test ban truly permanent by closing the Nevada Test Site."

Today's action represents a serious escalation of tactics by the organizers of a week-long series of activities at the Nevada Test Site and in Las Vegas. Roughly 50 protestors were arrested at the Test Site gates on Easter Sunday. On Monday, activists sat atop tripods and locked themselves into steel and concrete boxes to successfully close down five test site gates for several hours. Four tractor trailers carrying low-level radioactive cargo were stranded on U.S. Highway 95 until private security squadrons forcibly broke through one of the five barricades.

On April 1, Action for Nuclear Abolition took a lighter approach by organizing the second annual Nuclear Fools' Day Parade through Vegas' downtown casino district. Today the activists brought their message to the highway by barricading both the north and south- bound stretches of the main route leading to the Test Site.

"The DOE still hasn't gotten the message that the Cold War is over and the nuclear age is ending," said Julia Moon Sparrow, a founding member of the Shundahai Network. "We're disrupting test site traffic on the highway because their deadly nuclear business cannot go on as usual."