Is there a connection between how you feel about the oceans and your desire for peace? No matter why, the number of peace ships has been growing over the past 100 years.
Most likely, the first of these ships was the infamous Ford Peace Ship, which was built in 1915 and caused more laughter than peace during World War I.
Almost forty years later, on March 1, 1954, in the Marshall Islands, a huge U.S. H-bomb exploded, releasing radioactive particles that fell on the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon. By the time the ship got back to its home port in Japan, 23 of its crew members were already very sick from the radiation. A person died. This “Lucky Dragon incident” caused a huge backlash against nuclear weapons testing, and groups to get rid of nuclear weapons were set up in Japan and then around the world. So, the Lucky Dragon became a ship for peace. It is still shown as such in a Lucky Dragon Museum in Tokyo, which was built and is kept up by Japanese peace activists.
Later voyages made the link between ocean-going ships and peace even stronger. In 1971, Canadian activists set sail from Vancouver on the Phyllis Cormack, a rusty fishing trawler, for the Aleutians. They wanted to stop a planned U.S. nuclear weapons test on Amchitka Island. Even though they were caught by the U.S. coast guard before they could get to the test site, the crew members not only got a lot of people to help them, but they also set up Greenpeace. David McTaggart, another Canadian, was given permission by Greenpeace to sail his yacht, the Vega, into the French nuclear testing zone in the Pacific. There, the French navy purposely crashed into the peace ship and broke it. When McTaggart and the Vega came back in 1973 with a new crew, French sailors were sent by their government to attack them. They did so by storming the ship and beating them badly with truncheons.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a lot of peace ships. Peace squadrons made up of sailboats and other small boats stopped U.S. nuclear warships from getting into major ports in New Zealand and Australia. Also, Greenpeace used the Rainbow Warrior to get people in the Pacific to speak out against nuclear testing. Even after French secret service agents attached underwater mines to this Greenpeace ship while it was in the harbour of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985, blowing it up and killing a Greenpeace photographer in the process, peace ships kept coming.
The American peace ship Golden Rule was the source of a lot of the ideas for this sea-based attack on nuclear testing and nuclear war.
Rule of Thumb
Albert Bigelow was a retired U.S. naval commander from World War II. He was the first person to tell the story of the Golden Rule. He became a Quaker after being horrified by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1955, he worked with the American Friends Service Committee to try to get a petition against nuclear testing to the White House. After being turned down by government officials, Bigelow and other pacifists started a small group called Non-Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons to fight the Bomb without violence. After the U.S. government said it was going to test nuclear bombs near Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, a chain of islands ruled by the U.S. as a “trust territory” for the native people, Bigelow and other pacifists decided to sail a 30-foot protest boat, the Golden Rule, into the nuclear testing zone. Bigelow said this to explain their decision: “All nuclear explosions are horrible, evil, and not worthy of humans.”
Bigelow and three other crew members wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower in January 1958 to tell him about their plans. As you might expect, the U.S. government was very upset, and top officials from the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the U.S. Navy met to discuss how to deal with the pacifist threat. In the end, the government decided that no one could go into the test zone.
So, after Bigelow and his crew sailed the Golden Rule from the West Coast to Honolulu, a U.S. federal court said it couldn’t go to Eniwetok anymore. Even though there might be legal consequences, the pacifists set sail. When they were caught at sea, they were brought back to Honolulu, where they were tried, found guilty, and put on probation. Then, as brave as ever, they went back to the bomb test zone, where they were again caught, tried, and this time given prison terms.
In the meantime, their dangerous journey caused a lot of people to protest. There were protests against nuclear weapons all over the United States. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which had just been set up, went on the attack. Earle Reynolds, an American anthropologist, continued the mission of the Golden Rule with his wife Barbara and their two children on their sailboat, the Phoenix. In July 1958, they went into the area where nuclear tests were done. In August of that year, President Eisenhower announced that the United States was stopping its nuclear tests while it prepared to talk with the Soviet Union about putting an end to nuclear tests.
Even though talks about a test ban moved slowly, resulting in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and, finally, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, the Golden Rule was lost sight of. Then, in early 2010, the ship was found wrecked and sunk in Humboldt Bay in northern California. Historians asked the Smithsonian Museum to keep the Golden Rule alive for future generations, but they weren’t interested. But peace activists saw how important the ship was. Within a short time, the Golden Rule Project was set up by local chapters of Veterans for Peace to fix up the damaged ketch.
The ship has been mostly fixed up thanks to donations of time and money from these U.S. veterans and other supporters. Right now, money is being raised for the last part of the project. Veterans for Peace wants to send the ship back out to sea in 2014 to teach future generations about the importance of the ocean environment, the dangers of nuclear technology, and the need for world peace.
So, the Golden Rule will sail again and get back to being the most important peace ship in the United States.