By Jane Stoever
Come on out to the KC MO National Security Campus (NSC), where parts for nuclear weapons are made and procured. Our vast NSC employs some 6,000 people in nuke production. Say it isn’t so! But it is. PeaceWorks KC members each Memorial Day witness for peace at the site of this plant, opened in 2014 at 14510 Botts Rd.
By 11 am on Memorial Day, May 29, we’ll park on Prospect, facing Mo. Hwy. 150, south of Grandview. We’ll walk a mile, passing the NSC, carrying the flags of 60-some countries that have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
At about noon, we’ll begin a rally with speakers including Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn of Physicians for Social Responsibility; Father Terry Bruce will read from the Pastoral Letter for Nuclear Disarmament issued by Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, NM. We’ll enjoy a play by PeaceWorks Board member Tommy Indigo. Some poets may read their works from the May 6 gathering Poets for Peace. Then we’ll conduct a die-in, marking the deaths of more than 154 persons from contaminants at the old nuke-parts plant at Bannister Federal Complex.
Finally, some of us will cross the property line to protest nuke production in our back yard. For info, call/text Henry Stoever, 913-375-0045, who started the Memorial Day walk in 2011. Resisters who refuse to return across the property line will be arrested; other resisters will return across the line before arrest.
