Law On Trial

Early on the morning of July 5 last year, nine peace activists went to General Dynamics' Electric Boat nuclear submarine factory in Groton, Connecticut, to begin the process of disarming the Trident submarine. We named ourselves the "Trident Nein" for two reasons: to demonstrate our resounding "No" to Trident, and to express through the German word our deep solidarity with the European disarmament movement.

There are many moral and legal reasons for our decision to hammer and pour blood on the Trident, a weapon comparable to 2,040 Hiroshima-size bombs. While our nonviolent witness against Trident was primarily a moral repudiation of the nuclear arms race and a call to affirm the sacredness of all life, it also represents in part a legal indictment of this mass murder system.

The tragic reality is that official U.S. military policy holds that nuclear weapons will be used if national security interests deem it necessary. The United States could launch a nuclear war tomorrow and it would be legally sanctioned, according to U.S. principles.

However, international law accords ranging from the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 have, for as long as governments (including our own) have signed them, consistently prohibited weapons of indiscriminate or mass destruction. Nuclear weapons inherently fit this definition.

In 1961 the U.N. General Assembly declared the use of nuclear weapons a direct violation of the charter of the United Nations. A section of the resolution states: "The use of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons would exceed even the scope of war, and cause indiscriminate suffering and destruction to humankind and civilization, and. as such, is contrary to the rules of international law and to the laws of humanity."

In view of the development of first-strike nuclear weapons such as Trident, any moral or legal distinction between using and threatening to use these monstrous weapons becomes absurd. The continued political use of these weapons in maintaining threats between nations can only lead to their actual use.

Despite years of superpower summitry and U.N. conferences, despite some 6,000 arms talks and negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union since 1945, not a single nuclear weapon has been dismantled. In essence, these talks have merely served as a smoke screen to legitimate and to create artificial limits for the deployment of more and more overkill weapons.

Ronald Reagan's START talks with the Soviets, now under way in Geneva, are an example of our government talking disarmament while, at the same time, deploying first-strike weapons designed to achieve nuclear superiority over the Soviets. The recent United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament was a particularly dismal failure, despite a growing fear of nuclear war and urgent pleas worldwide for a freeze and eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. After 37 years of endless talk and self-serving negotiations, our government has proven itself incapable of initiating and producing true disarmament.

Clearly the nuclear nations, ours in particular, stand in contempt and act in defiance of international law. But what is the duty of the individual in view of such governmental lawlessness? It is not an overstatement to compare our nuclear situation with that of Germany during the genocidal campaign of the Nazis. In response to that genocide, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal stipulated that "individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state." The Nuremberg charter thus imposes upon citizens "the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

With a genuine sense of honor we have assumed that same duty in our act of disarmament. We went to Electric Boat not to commit a crime but rather to prevent the unspeakable crime of nuclear war from being carried out.

Article VI, paragraph 2, of the U.S. Constitution provides that any treaty to which the United States is a party prevails in effect over any domestic law, and even over the terms of the Constitution itself. The international conventions on war and the genocide treaties that concluded World War II have in theory the complete force of law and applicability in any U.S. court.

Article VI is the conceptual pivot that connects the standing body of international law to the many nonviolent, civilly disobedient actions around the United States against nuclear weapons and war-making in general. In practice, however, references to both international and constitutional law along this line are consistently ruled irrelevant and out of order by U.S. courts.

In our recent trial following our arrest at Electric Boat, the court was willing to rule only on the basis of legal precedent, rather than of principle as the Constitution allows. Because there is no precedent of a conviction overturned in appeals court with reference to international law, our attempts to speak about the illegality of Trident and its first-strike intent were thwarted by the court.

After the question of legal precedence failed, we challenged the judge in our trial to use his conscience in applying both international law and the higher divine law to our case. He flatly insisted that his conscience could not enter his decision: while he sympathized with our cause and conceded that the United States may well blow up the world, he was obliged merely to uphold the law. This dramatic moment in the trial brought out not only the conflict of ethics that exists but also the more basic conflict of ethos: the clash of civil religion and a statutory creed over against a radical biblical faith.

The failure of the court to uphold these moral principles further illustrates its complicity in perpetuating the nuclear death sentence which looms over the world. The real crime here is not our hammering on the Trident, but rather our government and Electric Boat deliberately preparing for mass murder. Despite the fact that we have been convicted and jailed for our actions, I believe we are innocent under both divine and international law.

When this article appeared, Art Laffin was serving a one-year prison term in Connecticut as a result of his participation in the Trident Nein witness.