The interconnected stories of Quaker resistance to nuclear ‘tests’ in the Pacific

Dale Hess

The following is a very short summary of three books: Grappling with the Bomb, The Voyage of the Golden Rule, and The Forbidden Voyage.

In the spring of 1957, the British had scheduled the Grapple Series of hydrogen bomb tests at Christmas Island, located 1000 miles south of Hawaii. An item appeared in the Communist newspaper, Daily Worker, announcing Harold Steele’s intention to sail a little fishing boat into the test area to halt the tests. He was 63-years old, white-haired, and in poor health with limited income. Both he and his wife Sheila were Quakers. Harold had a history of protest. During World War I, while at Exeter University, he refused an officer’s commission if he enlisted in the army. He served three years of a seven-year hard-labour prison sentence as a conscientious objector, being released months after the war ended. The British intelligence service tracked his and Sheila’s travel from London to Tokyo in his quest to stop the tests.

Harold Steele

The Emergency Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War formed out of the Peace Pledge Union to raise funds for the venture. There were delays in obtaining a visa, and Harold received his visa to Japan too late for the first test. He hoped he could work with Japanese peace activists to create a flotilla of boats to stop the tests, but there was disunity among the activists about his plan. Also, the fund-raising efforts were insufficient, and funds ran short.  Harold and his supporters were unable to organize a ship and crew in time. However, a number of mass protests were organised in Japan. He returned to Britain without having succeeded in his dream of creating a flotilla. He then turned his attention to influencing public opinion. Under his influence, the Direct Action Committee emerged in Britain, which led direct action campaigns and sit-ins at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, the US Polaris Submarine Bases in Scotland, and elsewhere.

Harold Steele was discouraged by the result in Japan, yet he provided a powerful inspiration to Bert Bigelow and many others.

In 1958, Bert Bigelow, a former US Navy Captain of the destroyer escort Dale W. Peterson—DE 337 enters the picture. After the war Bert was looking for a life philosophy or religion based on nonviolence, truth, love and a world without war. He started worshipping with the Quakers and his wife, Sylvia joined in 1948, but as late as 1955 he was still fighting off joining the Society, because he saw it as involving a great, awesome commitment.

Then he had the experience of having two of the Hiroshima maidens, who had been injured during the Hiroshima bombing, live in his home for more than a year. Two things about these girls struck him very forcefully that made him see he had no choice but to live a life of nonviolence and reconciliation. One was the girls were seven and thirteen years old at the time they were bombed. It was utter blasphemy to think there could be anything moral about such behaviour. The other thing was these young women loved him and his family, they harbored no resentment against them or other Americans.

The Hiroshima maidens who were brought to the USA for reconstructive surgery.

Bert planned to sail the ketch Golden Rule with two Quakers and a Methodist as crewmates from California to Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to disrupt the US military’s test series codenamed Operation Hardtack. Rather than Congress passing a law, the Executive Branch of the government contrived a ‘law’ while the Golden Rule made its way across the Pacific. The Atomic Energy Commission, without public hearings, made a regulation that made it a crime for US citizens to enter the Eniwetok-Bikini bomb area.

Bert Bigelow

The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule landed in Hawai’i. Bert told the US government officials of their intention to go to the test zone, where upon the government obtained a restraining order stating the vessel could not be moved. Bert and his crew decided to ignore the order.  Bigelow’s 30-foot ketch was seized by the US Coast Guard just inside the three-mile limit.

Meanwhile, a new yacht showed up across the dock from the Golden Rule. It was a 50-foot ketch named Phoenix of Hiroshima.  The crew of the ship were a couple in their late 30’s, Barbara and Earle Reynolds, their son Ted, nineteen, daughter Jessica, fourteen, and a Japanese crewman, Niichi (Nick), in his late-twenties.  Earle, the skipper, was an anthropologist. He had been studying the effects of radiation resulting from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing.

Earle Reynolds

Earle & crew on the Phoenix

The crew of the Phoenix were interested in the purpose of the Golden Rule’s voyage and the executive branch’s efforts to stop it. When Earle first heard of the Quaker plan to enter the test site he thought, ‘I don’t necessarily approve of their method – they sound a bit like crackpots to me – but they have plenty of courage, if they go through with it. Anyway, it’s about time somebody did something about those tests.’ Then he did some research and found out how the Atomic Energy Commission consistently downplayed the dangers of radiation.

Of all the hundreds of visitors to the Golden Rule two stood out. One was a man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He was crying unashamedly. The tears ran down his cheeks and onto his suit. In badly broken English, with a thick Japanese accent, he told them he was a native of Hiroshima. All of his immediate family, his wife and twelve children, had been killed by the first atomic bomb. He pressed Bert’s hand and kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

The other visitor was also in tears. It was Barbara Reynolds. She was breathing quickly and told Bert, ‘we think we have to go. Can you please come over, all of you, right now, and help us and talk with us?’

The test explosions had started. The crew notified the President and hung a sign on the stern of the Golden Rule that they would sail again for the bomb-area on Wednesday 4 June at noon. Bert was arrested ten minutes before noon. That afternoon the rest of the crew left and sailed towards the test zone but were arrested nearly six miles out to sea. They pled guilty and received a 60-day sentence.

The testimony of Bigelow and his crew during their subsequent trial, so impressed Earle and his wife Barbara, who were in the audience, that they visited them in prison. The Reynolds and their children then took up Bigelow’s voyage, and sailed their yacht, Phoenix of Hiroshima. to waters off Bikini Atoll. Earle made a radio announcement asking hearers to inform the civil authorities that the Phoenix was sailing into the test zone. The US Coast Guard caught up with the Phoenix and arrested Earle.

During the trial period, which was to last two years, Barbara and Earle became convinced Quakers. Barbara, Nick and Ted had to sail the Phoenix back from Kwajalein, so they could testify. If the Phoenix remained there too long without maintenance, worms would get into the hull, and it would sink. Also, the boat was their chief asset, and they may need it for legal expenses.

Earle had been prepared for a rigged trial, but had not realised how very cut-and-dried it would be. The jury returned and found Earle guilty, as expected. A motion was filed for a judgment of acquittal, or a new trial. This was denied. The Court sentenced Earle to confinement of two years, with six months in a jail-type institution and the remainder on probation. A notice of appeal was immediately given. There was news that the French were building their own bomb. After 60 days at sea Barbara, Ted and Nick had managed to sail back from Kwajalein.

Earle out on bail met with Russian, US and British officials and went on a speaking tour of the US sponsored by AFSC, raising awareness of nuclear dangers.

A new trail was granted to Earle because of procedural errors by the judge. The jury came back with the verdict: guilty. The Judge said he wanted Earle to know that he had a great deal of respect for him. Then he sentenced Earle to a period of two years confinement with six months in a jail-type institution and probation for a period of five years. It was a harsher sentence than in the first trial.

On December 29, 1960 the San Francisco Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the regulation the Earle had been convicted of violating was not authorised by statute and therefore invalid. The conviction therefore is without legal authority and must be set aside and the judgment reversed. This ruling had significance for the Golden Rule case also. The five men were jailed on a conviction rooted in this illegal regulation.

In 1961 the family sailed to the USSR to protest Soviet nuclear testing. The next year, Earle was invited to captain the Everyman III, on which members of A Quaker Action Group (AQAG) sailed from London to Leningrad via Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

Everyman III

Divided on approaches to peace, among other things, Earle and Barbara divorced in 1964. Barbara dedicated herself to helping the Hibakusha share their experiences and their message that nuclear weapons should never be used again. She established the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima and the Peace Resource Center and Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Collection at Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio. There is a monument dedicated to Barbara at Peace Park, Hiroshima.

During the Vietnam War, Reynolds and his second wife Akie Nagami, a citizen of Hiroshima and a graduate of Hiroshima Women’s College, sailed the Phoenix to Haiphong with AQAG to deliver humanitarian and medical aid to victims of American bombing.

They made two attempts to sail to China to build peace between Japan and China but were prevented by China and Japan. Japan then deported Earle, where he had lived for 13 years. He and Akie sailed to San Francisco and settled in Ben Lomond, California where they became the resident hosts of the Quaker Center.

In 1971 Quakers Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Marie and Jim Bohlen and others from the ecology movement formed an organization they called Greenpeace. When they learned of the US plans to hold a 5-megaton  thermonuclear bomb test, Cannikin Project, on remote Amchitka Island, Alaska, Marie and Jim reminded the group of the witness of the Golden Rule. Greenpeace chartered an old 80-foot halibut fishing trawler Phyllis Cormack which they renamed, Greenpeace, and sailed from Vancouver to Alaska in an attempt to halt the US nuclear test.  The US Coast Guard intercepted the ship, but the resulting publicity helped end the tests.

Phyllis Cormack, Greenpeace

Dorothy & Irving Stowe

Marie Bohlen

Jim Bohlen

Greenpeace continued the protests of nuclear testing in the Pacific. The Greenpeace yachts Vega, Fri, and Rainbow Warrior, sailed into the French nuclear test zone at Mururoa atoll to disrupt their nuclear bomb tests.  France ended their nuclear testing program in 1996.

Vega and Greenpeace flotilla

Fri

Rainbow Warrior

In 1981, Bill and Lorraine Ethell mortgaged their home in Australia and took their four children aboard the Pacific Peacemaker and sailed across the Pacific to the United States as part of a protest flotilla to stop the deployment of nuclear-armed US Trident submarines based in Bangor, Washington.  https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=968732983153036.

David Carline, Queensland Quaker, recounts his experience protesting French nuclear testing at Mururoa in a podcast: https://rtrfm.com.au/podcasts/understorey/understorey-david-carlines-mururoa/

The Pacific Peacemaker

The story described here illustrates an important message about taking action. Even though you think you have not succeeded, your action can create ripples, and these ripples can spread and inspire others.

References

• Bigelow, Albert The Voyage of the Golden Rule, New York: Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1959, 286 pp.
• Maclellan, Nic  Grappling with the bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-bomb tests. ANU Press, Canberra, 2017, 385 pp.
• Reynolds, Earle, The Forbidden Voyage, New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1961, 281 pp.