Golden Rule Vs. Nuclear Tests

The story is told by Steward Meacham of the American Friends Service Committee of how a small shirt factory in Western Pennsylvania was struck by its women employees, of how the company threatened to move its machinery, and of how, on the day the trucks began to move machinery, the girls lay down in the road and stopped the trucks “with the weight of their own lives.” Last winter a group of four men decided to sail a 80-foot ketch to Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands to stop nuclear weapons testing with the weight of their own lives; on their second start in May, a half-hour’s sail from Honolulu, they were picked up by the United States Coast Guard and brought back in criminal contempt of court. They were sentenced to 60 days (suspended) and one year’s probation (no civil disobedience allowed). One appeal has been denied; following two further attempts to skip the harbor, both intercepted by the Coast Guard, all four men are now in jail.

There is a dif...