By Kristin Scheer
About 20 people trickled into All Souls’ Conover Hall on Wed., July 9. They heard from delegates PeaceWorks KC sent to Washington, DC, for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) DC Days lobbying event.
Ann Suellentrop, of the boards of PeaceWorks KC and Physicians for Social Responsibility, opened the July 9 event. She presented the ANA booklet that outlines the issues discussed during this year’s DC Days. You can see it at ananuclear.org. When you do that, go to the centerspread, featuring PeaceWorks actions against the National Security Campus here in KC. “We were all surprised,” she said.
“The over-arching theme of this year’s DC Days was that, after 80 years of the nuclear age, the US is spending more and more for nuclear weapons every year and less and less for nuclear clean-up,” Suellentrop said. “The total needed for clean-up is $880 billion. Every year clean-up is delayed, the price increases! Meanwhile,” she said, “$12 trillion total has been spent on making nuclear weapons, an enormous waste of tax money!”
Suellentrop reported about the court-ordered Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) that was demanded when activist groups got together and sued the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) for their plan to produce 80 new plutonium pits per year. “We won,” she said, “giving the public a rare opportunity to respond.”
PeaceWorks, a contributing member of ANA, and other groups participated in getting the word out about the PEIS and generating letters and e-mails as part of this public response. This winter, there will be in-person events in five cities, including KC MO. There will be opportunities then to generate more public response. We don’t know when yet, maybe February or March 2026. Likely during a snowstorm if they can swing it.
Suellentrop also reported ANA’s concern about the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB), an oversight board that functions as a quorum to post on its website health and safety issues at nuclear weapons production sites. “This is the public’s only window into problems and accidents that occur and endanger workers, the public, and the environment,” she said. “All but two positions on that board have been vacated, and we are bound to lose one of those. ANA lobbied Republican senators to put forth candidates to keep the DNFSB functioning.”
Suellentrop said our crew and other ANA activists were informed of the need to stop new nuclear waste and to contain legacy waste from the Manhattan Project. “There is a permanent repository for this waste in Southeast New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), designated for the radioactive waste from the early days of the nuclear era. ANA is opposed to putting new radioactive waste there,” she said.
Suellentrop said that the KC lobbying crew received ANA scholarship assistance and funding from PeaceWorks KC to cover transportation, lodging, and meeting costs. “Our crew was on fire,” she said proudly. “Three young members from KC are now veterans,” having attended DC Days for 3-4 years, said Suellentrop. She noted, “Kimmy Igla led teams for several congressional meetings. All PeaceWorks delegates showed intense interest and eager participation. Meeting anti-nuclear activists and effective community members from across the country was highly inspirational and motivating” for the young delegates. They attended 2-3 meetings a day for three days, and they saw a film about Yucca Mountain with an Indigenous panel sharing about the health effects of radiation on their families and communities. The delegates learned about the valuable intel that was gathered from their meetings and strategized for the future. They began planning for a fall meeting in Las Vegas that will focus on Indigenous Peoples’ affected communities and their resistance to radioactive racism.”
Mitch Schiller said he went to DC Days to learn about current nuclear weapons and how the US was strategizing for WWIII. “I met amazing people, I became aware of amazing organizations, and Indigenous People working on the ground on these issues. The US is the only country that has ever launched a nuclear weapon,” he said. “We are closer to midnight than ever before.” Schiller noted our unprovoked attack on Iran as proof. “Non-proliferation is dead,” he said. “Disarm this country or the rest of the world” is in danger, too. Schiller also learned more about nuclear waste issues than he previously knew. “I learned about Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS) and how it would require the transport of the most dangerously toxic materials across the Midwest by rail and road. We know accidents happen every day,” he said. These sites would be temporary or interim sites on the Texas-New Mexico border, where they would wait for permanent sites that do not yet exist, nor likely ever will.
Schiller told us of a light-bulb-in-the-face moment he had. He spoke of on-shoring and friend-shoring and escalation dominance bringing more nuke production into the US and making nuclear war more accessible.
Kimmy Igla then spoke of her third year attending DC Days: “Noting the unprovoked attack on Iran, Mitch Schiller insisted, “Disarm this country!”Lobbying can feel pointless unless you come in with a big bag of money like the nuclear lobbyists do,” she said. “But we do gain valuable information from these meetings. We learned in a meeting with Rep. Julia Brownley that the NNSA had been telling law-makers that land poisoned with radioactive toxic waste was safe for recreational nature hiking and camping, countering the information independent studies produced to the contrary.” Igla said, “If we weren’t there, those voices would be the only voices in the room and they could effectively rewrite history with all that money. We were there,” she said, “in the room, with people who live near the toxic nuclear test site in CA sharing the lived experience of those most impacted by that toxic legacy that the NNSA and Boeing are responsible for.”
Igla concluded, “Thanks so much for your donations supporting this trip and making my participation possible.”
Bree Crawford then introduced herself. “My name is Bree. I am a Tsalagi / Dakota woman. I want to say ‘wado’ for allowing me to go to DC with ANA and I am also thankful to speak about DC Days. It was abundantly clear that they don’t care and funds will continue to go towards destroying lives, unci maka (Mother Earth), and any future for the next generations to come. That’s just the truth,” she said. “But I don’t think that what we did was for nothing. I met more people impacted by nuclear toxicity. I heard what happened to them and their families. Their stories absolutely destroyed me.” Crawford said, “after hearing these stories, it is beyond me that people think this is acceptable or normal! This system has never been normal!”
“Being part of DC Days made me proud to work with others who genuinely care, who have been fighting this good fight for generations! We must stop glorifying nuclear energy as good clean energy,” Crawford declared, “when we know it isn’t! It is destroying unci maka and the lives of many!”
Crawford continued, “Nuclear weapons of mass destruction will not stop unless we as human beings come together as one! I believe that we can have a nuclear free (world), but to get there, we have to face the unknown. We have to face our fears. It’s not going to stop until WE who want change demand it! Fear is a tool they use to continue to push their agendas, their regimes. We cannot give into fear. Fear is an illusion!”
Crawford concluded with the words of Chief Seattle, who in 1854 said, “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do it to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect!”
During questions and answers, we raised nearly $200 for future trips.
Henry Stoever said protesters occupied some of the 150 nuclear missile-silo sites in a 50-mile radius of KC MO in the 1980s. The sites, with Whiteman Air Force Base as command center, were eventually dismantled. His point: Change can happen.
In contrast, Spencer Graves shared a story of an intelligence officer who lost his job for telling the Pentagon to stop lying to Congress. He lost his job for honoring his oath to the Constitution.
Spencer Graves noted that intelligence analyst Richard Barlow was fired and his career destroyed for telling his managers in the Pentagon that they should not lie to Congress. See https://peaceworkskc.org/congressional-gold-medals-for-assange-hale-barlow-winner-manning-edmonds-sterling-drake-snowden-ellsberg/.
Kriss Avery noted that she had worked 1/2 mile south of the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, MO, a suburb of St. Louis. Avery asked for an update on RECA, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. Suellentrop said Trump’s big ugly bill continued RECA for 2 more years, and, for the first time, RECA has been expanded to cover affected people in New Mexico and the St. Louis area. Suellentrop said it was her dream that KC be covered by RECA—that the people hurt by their proximity to the Bannister Federal Complex be included in RECA coverage.
Igla reminded us, “Air blows. Water flows. We all have interest in this fight.” We learned that, on the day of the DC Days report, Suellentrop had an anti-nuke column published in The KC Star, and that Igla now had a seat on the ANA board. And we watched a video by Willow Silverayne, calling us all to Action!
Kristin Scheer, an environmentalist, is a PeaceWorks Board member and chair of the PeaceWorks Communications Team. ©2025, Kristin Scheer, Ann Suellentrop, Kimmy Igla, Bree Crawford, Mitch Schiller, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.
