Photo: Brian Terrell.

While participating in an international peace camp on July 14, 2019 organized by Nukewatch and GAAA, Susan Crane of Redwood City, California and Susan van der Hijden of Amsterdam and I were apprehended by German Military police after cutting a hole in the security fence and entering the airfield at Büchel, Germany, with a banner that read “Atomwaffen sind Illegal- Fliegelhorst Büchel ist ein Tator!” (Nuclear weapons are illegal, Büchel airfield is a crime scene). Despite our assurances to the soldiers guarding the base that our intentions were not intended to violate the law but to call attention to the crime of the United States Air Force 702 Munitions Support Squadron keeping about 20 nuclear B61 bombs there, we were turned over to civilian police, cited and released.

It was only when I returned to a protest at Büchel again two years later in July of 2021 that I was served documents by local police informing me that the previous July, 2020, the court in Cochem had issued a penalty order against me and a fine of 900 euros for trespassing and unlawfully damaging property. Susan and Susan had both been served the same papers earlier and had already filed appeals, so I also filed my own, hoping to argue my case in a German courtroom.

If the courts in the hyper-incarcerated United States can be likened to a giant meat grinder, mindlessly pulverizing the bodies and lives of those who fall into it with blind and callous indifference, where due process is a luxury usually afforded only to the privileged few, the courts in Germany might be compared with grain mill, sifting out the wheat and chaff slowly with careful precision and so I go to jail now for a “crime” committed more than five years ago.

In the end, though, the German courts are no more ready than courts in the U.S. would be to hear a reasonable argument that the American nuclear bombs kept at Büchel under a NATO “nuclear sharing” agreement, ready to be loaded onto German planes to be “delivered” when so ordered, are there in violation of numerous laws, including the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty which forbids any transfer of nuclear weapons between treaty signers, not to mention an existential threat to all life........

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