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bananas

(27,509 posts)
Tue Jan 21, 2014, 12:08 PM Jan 2014

Remembering a great protest at the space center

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2014/01/remembering-great-protest-at-space.html

REMEMBERING A GREAT PROTEST AT THE SPACE CENTER
by Bruce K. Gagnon
Saturday, January 18, 2014

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Dr. Benjamin Spock spoke at the January 17 protest at Cape Canaveral. In his book "Spock on Spock" he ended the autobiography with a photo of him climbing over the base gates. He wrote, "Every effort made in this direction, every letter and every demonstration, has done some positive good. Without these protests, things would be much worse."


January 17, 1987 was a special day. It was the date of the largest peace protest in Florida history when well over 5,000 people marched onto the front gates of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in protest of the planned test launch of the first Trident II nuclear missile. I was then coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice where I worked for 15 years. We initiated the call for the protest and asked for help from groups around the country. Our march to the gates that day was led by famous baby doctor Benjamin Spock and he was the first person to climb a ladder to get over the barbed wire fence. We called the protest "Cancel the Countdown".

In all 186 were arrested for symbolically trying to enter the base to sit on the launch pad where Trident II nuclear missiles would be test fired. About 50 were arrested in the days preceding the January 17 event when they tried sneaking onto the launch center that is located inside the national seashore and surrounded by ocean and swamps. Some hiked up the beach toward the launch towers along the shore and others trudged through the alligator infested swamp marshes. Some were arrested at night with military helicopters searching for them. For a solid week the media around Florida was intensely covering the arrests prior to the January 17 rally. Peter Lumsdaine from California came to help and was a key organizer of these back country actions at the Cape.

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