The climb up Pine Ridge was steep, and Gregory Boertje-Obed led the others through the dark woods without a map or a trail, guided only by flashlight.

Michael Walli worried about Sister Megan Rice. She was remarkably fit for an eighty-two-year-old, and she’d spent weeks training for this hike. But she had a mild heart condition. The two men had to stop every now and then so that she could catch her breath. When they resumed, Walli stayed behind her, keeping an eye on her, listening to her huff and puff. He was fierier than most Plowshares activists, a believer in miracles and prophecy, a bold “warrior for peace,” like Philip Berrigan. Walli grew up on a farm in northern Michigan, the youngest of eight boys in his family. He also had six sisters. After dropping out of high school, in 1967, at the age of eighteen, Walli enlisted in the Army. Until then, his travels outside Michigan hadn’t extended farther than Wisconsin. Soon he was in Vietnam.

Two tours of duty left Walli alienated and disillusioned. He’d flown over jungles defoliated by Agent Orange, listened to B-52s carpet bombing at night, and witnessed firefights. After his return to the United States, he was in and out of veterans’ hospitals for a while, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and a spiritual crisis. He took a series of jobs, working at a Christmas-card factory in Chicago, serving as a deckhand on merchant ships that plied the Great Lakes. In 1979, he began to help at a Chicago soup kitchen run by a Franciscan priest. It was a transformative experience. Walli joined the Third Order of St. Francis, choosing to live in poverty and serve the poor. Eventually, he found his way to the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C., convinced that God had led him there. He stayed at various Catholic Worker houses along the East Coast and in the Midwest, gardening, doing manual labor, accumulating civil-disobedience arrests. He was strong and fit, with an intense look and a goatee. He helped clear the brush and cut down trees at St. Peter’s Cemetery.

Walli’s first Plowshares action occurred in 2006, when he and Boertje-Obed broke into a Minuteman complex in North Dakota. They were dressed as clowns to honor Father Carl Kabat, who also wore a clown outfit, and joined them. They found the Personnel Access Hatch unlocked, opened it, hammered on an inner lock, and spray-painted messages on the silo door, such as “God is not the author of confusion.” Walli got an eight-month sentence; Boertje-Obed, twelve months; and Father Kabat, fifteen.

A quarter of the way up Pine Ridge, Boertje-Obed saw a fence. It was chain link and not daunting, despite a “No Trespassing” sign. The fence marked the boundary of the Y-12 complex. A winding dirt road ran beside it, patrolled by security forces. With a pair of red-handled bolt cutters, Boertje-Obed cut a vertical section of the fence along the fencepost, pushed open a gap, and helped the two others climb through it. Once they were all on Y-12 property, he neatly reattached the chain link to the fencepost with twine. That way, a security patrol driving past might not notice, in the darkness, that Y-12’s security had been compromised.

Although Sister Megan had been arrested between forty and fifty times, this was her first Plowshares action. And it was her idea. It had occurred to her a year and a half earlier, while she was sitting in a Tacoma courtroom, watching the trial of five activists who had broken into Kitsap Naval Base, the home port for more than half of America’s Trident ballistic-missile submarines. During perhaps the worst nuclear-security lapse in the history of the U.S. Navy, Father William (Bix) Bichsel, Father Stephen Kelly, Sister Anne Montgomery, and two others had managed to sneak into the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific—a storage area containing hundreds of nuclear warheads for Trident missiles. Those warheads don’t have locking mechanisms. If a terrorist group detonated one at Kitsap, it not only would destroy the base and the Trident submarines but could also deposit lethal radioactive fallout on Seattle, about thirty miles to the east. If the group set off conventional explosives close to the warheads, a toxic cloud of plutonium might blanket the city. The Plowshares activists easily cut through Kitsap’s perimeter fence, hiked around the huge base for four hours, ignored all the warning signs, cut through two more fences, and got to within about forty feet of the bunkers where the nuclear warheads are stored. Father Bix was eighty-one at the time. Sister Anne was eighty-three. Having survived two open-heart surgeries, Father Bix brought along his nitroglycerine tablets and paused to take some during the long hike. About twenty marines with automatic weapons stopped the activists, put hoods on them to prevent them from seeing any more of the top-secret facility, and made them lie on the ground for three and a half hours, while the base was searched for other intruders. When someone later said to Bichsel, Please, Father, don’t get into any more trouble, he laughed and replied, “We’re all in trouble.”

Listening to the testimony in court, Sister Megan thought she not only could do that; she had to do it. Her activism had been limited mainly to protests at the U.S. Army School of the Americas, in Georgia, and at the Nevada Test Site, where the country tested nuclear weapons. She’d spent time in prison for civil disobedience. Born in 1930 and raised for the most part in Manhattan, a block away from Barnard College, Megan Rice had been taught from an early age to oppose racism, to care for the weak and the dispossessed. Her father was a professor of obstetrics at N.Y.U., and he routinely treated indigent women at Bellevue Hospital. Her mother taught history at Hunter College. Rice’s parents were friends with Dorothy Day before the launch of the Catholic Worker. They supported her work throughout the Great Depression and discussed social problems at her hospitality house every Friday night.

At the age of eighteen, Rice joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. She wanted to teach at a girls’ school in Africa. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Fordham and a master’s in biology at Boston College, then moved to Nigeria in 1962. Sister Megan helped to build the school where she later taught, slept in a classroom while it was under construction, and lived in a rural village without electricity or running water. She remained in Africa for most of the next thirty years. One of Sister Megan’s uncles had spent time in Nagasaki, not long after its destruction by an atomic bomb, and his stories of the aftermath greatly disturbed her. When she moved back to the United States in the late eighties, to help look after her mother, she got involved in protests at the Nevada Test Site—and persuaded her eighty-four-year-old mother to get arrested there, too. Sister Megan’s time in Africa and the Nevada desert led her Catholic faith in a mystical, transcendental direction. She developed a profound love of nature, a belief in the interconnectedness of all things.

When Sister Megan raised the idea of a Plowshares action with Gregory Boertje-Obed, he agreed to join her. Boertje-Obed had already done five of them. His wife, Michele Naar-Obed, had done three, and they’d even done one together. They always tried to insure that their daughter, Rachel, had at least one parent at home, not in prison. Sister Megan had lived at Jonah House for a while, helping to take care of Rachel. Michael Walli heard Boertje-Obed and Sister Megan were going to do a Plowshares action and asked to join them. The three spent time together at spiritual retreats, prayed together, read the Bible together, enlisted more than half a dozen others for logistical support, and discussed potential targets. They considered a direct action at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and at the Kansas City Plant, where weapon components are manufactured. But they chose the Y-12 complex to honor a late friend, Sister Jackie Hudson, who had been arrested at the site the previous year—and to oppose plans to construct a vast uranium-processing plant there. Although the building would be used for the disassembly of old weapons, its size suggested that new ones would also be produced there. The big, white, newly completed Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility seemed like a fine target for direct action. Sister Megan chose the name: Transform Now Plowshares. She hoped it would begin the process of shutting down Y-12 and transforming the American empire from a source of bloodshed into one of world peace.

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Boertje-Obed did most of the planning. Using Google Earth and other satellite imagery, he looked for the best route to the uranium-storage facility. Two large white storage tanks on the northern edge of Y-12 promised to be a useful navigational aid. In addition to relying on the Internet, Boertje-Obed travelled to Oak Ridge and scoped the complex, taking notes on the security forces and their routines. He’d already broken into a missile complex and a naval air station, sneaked onto a submarine, and used a crowd of tourists as a diversion to get onto a battleship. The security at Y-12 was far more extensive than anything he’d ever confronted. Boertje-Obed wasn’t sure if they could even get near the Protected Area.