14 Feb Golden Rule Sails against Nuclear Armageddon

Activists Joanne Steele, Art Roche, Holly Clements, Jan Passion and Glenn Carroll preparing to sail past the Kings Bay Trident Nuclear Submarine Base

On Feb 11, 2023 activists sailed the Golden Rule to the Kings Bay Submarine Base in St Marys, Georgia to protest against the eight Ohio-class submarines whose home port is here. A land-based action followed at the gate to the base – an action that has taken place for decades.
 
Patrick O’Neill wrote an excellent article, published in Peace & Planet News about the action and why we must put an end to nuclear weapons before they put an end to most life on earth.
 
Why do we protest against the Trident submarines?
Each submarine carries 24 Trident II D5 missiles and each missile can carry 12 UGM-133A (182,000 kiloton) nuclear warheads. The Hiroshima bomb yielded 13 kilotons. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
 
Use of just 100 of the 192 warheads each submarine carries would start fires and suck so much soot into the upper atmosphere to bring about “nuclear autumn”. The soot would block out the sun enough to cause massive crop failure and 2 BILLION people would starve as a result.
 
The New START Treaty currently limits the number of UGM-133A warheads to 4 or 5 per missile and a total of 1,550 nuclear warheads on each country’s ICBM missiles. New START does not cover short and medium range missiles, as did the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty which President Trump tore up. In fact, the only remaining nuclear treaty between the US and Russia is New START and it expires in February 2026.