GREELEY, Colo.—Peace protesters planned to gather Saturday outside a northern Colorado nuclear missile silo where three nuns were arrested during a protest five years ago.
They planned to stay outside the fence around the silo and do not expect to be arrested, Bill Sulzman of Citizens for Peace in Space said Friday.
The protest is meant to commemorate the anniversary of the testing of the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, he said.
In 2002, Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson, and Ardeth Platte were jailed after they cut through a chain-link fence at the missile site and drew a cross on the silo using their own blood.
They were convicted of obstructing national defense and damaging government property and sentenced to prison. All have been released but will not attend Saturday’s protest, Sulzman said.
Lt. Josh Edwards, a spokesman for F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., which oversees the silos, said he hadn’t heard about Saturday’s event and asked about details regarding the exact location, and the size of the group.
He declined to say whether soldiers would be posted at the silo Saturday, which normally is unmanned but monitored from another site.
“We do respect the rights of this group and any other group like it to lawfully assemble,” Edwards said. “It’s our service that keeps these rights in place.”
A Roman Catholic priest, Carl Kabat, was sentenced to prison for trespassing at a Weld County missile silo in 2004. Sulzman said it was the same site where the nuns staged their protest.
Sulzman said missile silo protests have declined in number because activists have been working against a proposed expansion of an Army training site in southern Colorado and the Iraq war.
