View a slideshow of the Mar. 6 protest at Vandenberg.
Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) security detained seven people after they refused an order to leave base property on March 6. They were a part of a larger group of roughly 30 people who gathered at the base that afternoon to protest the military’s use of nuclear missiles.
The Sun was at the base to watch the scene unfold.
Security was heavy for the demonstration, which was announced in a mass email days in advance. In addition to a handful of California Highway Patrol and Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office deputies, there were about two-dozen Air Force security personnel.
Just a few days prior to the protest, the group met at the La Casa de Maria retreat center in Santa Barbara. Men and women came from the west and east coasts of the U.S., and some from as far away as the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, to voice their opposition to nuclear missile tests.
Beginning in 1946, the Marshall Islands were the scene of 67 nuclear weapons tests, including the Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1954.
Adam Horowitz, who was filming the recent protest, has been documenting the aftermath of the testing on the islands for more than 30 years. Much of what he documented can be seen in his film, Nuclear Savage.
“The place is highly contaminated,” Horowitz told the Sun. “It’s more or less safe to live there if you don’t eat any local food or drink any local water.”
Real nuclear weapons are no longer tested at the Marshall Islands, although it’s still a destination for intercontinental test missiles launched from VAFB.
“I wanted to come to the place where they shoot the long-range missiles into my atoll,” native Marshallese the Rev. Julian Ricklon told the Sun. “My other islands were condemned by nuclear testing. So I am without a native island.”
Before gathering in front of the base, the group, which also included Buddhist monks, marched south along Highway 1 before they crossed the road, and headed back in the opposite direction.
Out of all the protests at the base in the past, this was a move VAFB spokeswoman Technical Sergeant Tyrona Lawson said she’s never seen before.
After an hour, the group of seven broke away and walked toward the front gate with arms locked where they met a line of Air Force security personnel. They were arrested after refusing an order to leave the base.
Base media relations personnel didn’t return follow-up inquiries from the Sun before press time.
According to Dennis Apel, who was at the protest, the seven were booked at the base visitor’s center at around 2:45 p.m., cited for trespassing, and released around 4 p.m. in nearby Vandenberg Village. They were driven in three separate vans, Apel added. Neither Ricklon nor Apel were arrested.
“It took a little longer than usual, but that’s pretty good,” Apel told the Sun, adding that one person refused to identify himself at first.
Apel’s seen his fair share of missile protests at Vandenberg. He was arrested in 2010 and took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, twice, although the justices refused to make any rulings based on his First Amendment right to assembly.
“You raise it, but we don’t have to listen to it,” Justice Antonin Scalia told Erwin Chemerinsky, Apel’s attorney, according to court transcripts from 2013.
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2016.
