Berrigan's Law

Forty witnesses had testified in his defense. Anthony Russo, Daniel Elsberg's accomplice in the theft of the Pentagon Papers, said that he once took a grenade to the computer room of the Rand Corporation, but apparently lacked the "courage" to throw it. "Father" Philip Berrigan argued that "men of conscience have to take a higher law into their own hands." Armstrong himself was unrepentant, for he and his accomplices had planned the bombing for a time when the building was least likely to be occupied. (What more could he be expected to do, eh?)

Where are these apologists for murder now?

In the antinuclear movement, still glorifying violence (of the "right" kind). They admiringly hold up the example of Sam Lovejoy, a self-confessed vandal and saboteur, and give wide publicity to his calls for more sabotage of electric utility installations. Daniel Ellsberg has been convicted of repeated criminal trespass; and any thug who vandalizes, sabotages, or illegally enters a nuclear facility is assured of the ardent adulation by his fellow thugs with academic titles.

But these publicity-hungry extroverts' little games of playing Messiah cost lives; lives taken as "unintentionally" as the life of the Madison physicist whom Armstrong murdered.

This time we are not merely talking of lives sacrificed to non-nuclear, and therefore less safe, electric power generation (the death toll of the power substituting for TMI Units 1 and 2 now stands at 48 each). A new dimension of callousness has been added in making evacuation plans a pretext for shutting down nuclear plants.

First, evacuation plans in case of a nuclear disaster are being required by Armstrong's good friends for one purpose only: to raise the antinuclear hysteria to panic level. What is carefully being withheld from laymen is that the possible disasters by non-nuclear alternatives are not so benign as to permit evacuation. How do you evacuate the population when a hydroelectric dam breaks or when millions of gallons of oil catch fire? Why weren't the 45,000 Americans who died last year in the coal cycle evacuated?

Second, there is indeed a lack of evacuation plans, as the incomparable Dr Edward Teller has pointed out: There are no Civil Defense plans to evacuate the cities in case of nuclear attack. Unthinkable? Not for the Soviets: They can evacuate their population in three days so that their casualties in an allout nuclear war would not exceed 3 million (a pittance by Soviet standards). Suppose they start evacuating and then blackmail the US? Without counter-evacuation plans, the lives of half the US population will be at stake. But that type of evacuation is of no interest to the evacuation hysteria fanners.