Like many preceding him in this anthology, Mike Kirby (b. 1937) began his path to war resistance while still in the military—in his case, as a young sailor, he was so alarmed by a security flaw in the design of a nuclear missile warhead, and failures to correct it, that he began to imagine doomsday. Punished for his whistleblowing, Kirby drifted into the antiwar movement, donning his civilian clothes at first to join the “raggedy-ass kids” then opposing nuclear testing. Finally he sat in, spit-shined and correct in his dress whites, at the Atomic Energy Commission in Oakland—the uniform an especially resonant detail in his account, reminding us to try to imagine, in every peace action depicted here, what people wore and what they looked like; “the dress ball was going into battle,” writes Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night (1968), and suddenly we see the diversity of appearance among those united in their opposition to war.
Kirby’s early life is set out in the piece included here, published in the London Review of Books on July 31, 2014; his later life he described vividly to me in a letter. He has driven cabs, worked in factories and as a home health aide, been involved in local politics, written books on local history, a novel, and a novella called The Technician (1981), which more fully depicts his time with the bomb. Now retired, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is working on another novel.
IN the winter of 1961–62, things were slow in the electrical bay, and I was transferred to the mechanical bay, where I worked doing retrofits and supervised the library, checking weapon manuals in and out. I inevitably did quite a bit of reading in the process of updating manuals, and it was there, sitting at my desk, that I started to do a little research that might have made me very dangerous to everyone on the planet. But it didn’t. I went to the local community college and took a couple of evening classes, and avoided talking about what I was thinking and learning to Lt. Commander Karlsven, the base commander. Karlsven was a taciturn Swede who always looked splendid in his uniform. He came to work in a green Department of Defense sedan; we came to work on a little grey school bus. There was gold on his collar buttons, gold in the braid on his hat that hung on the three-legged hat-stand, silver in his thinning hair that he wore combed straight back. When I left, Karlsven encouraged me to read the Bible. In the college library I found all these books and magazines I never knew existed: the New Republic, the Progressive, Partisan Review and Dissent. I went to see On the Beach, which portrayed the final days of life on Earth after a nuclear war. I started subscribing to the magazines and soon the base security officer wanted to talk to me.
Some time in the spring, a new warhead for the Polaris arrived, the first of many that were to be shipped to the submarine fleet. I went through the warhead manual and found a number of things that disturbed me. This particular warhead was designed for use against cities. It was very compact, a weapon with a small bang and a small cross-section, but its ablative shield was an alloy of uranium, and it produced very heavy alpha fallout downwind. I thought about the world laid waste by these warheads. I wondered if you could be a good soldier and have an imagination.
There was also this. When installed on the rocket, the main warhead connection was safety-wired in place and hidden. But in our bay and out in the storage depots these warheads were stored with an unlocked weapons connector. Unzip the weather cover, and it was right there. The safety mechanisms were in the fusing assembly, not in the warhead. Bang the right pins with the right voltage, and the warhead would blow. I wrote a technical change memo, suggesting a locked cover for the warhead connector while it was in storage.
I alerted the system, but the system wasn’t listening. This memo went into a drawer in my boss’s desk. I remember him looking at me quizzically. Never a word, but no trouble either. I think it made me angry, not being listened to. Anyone who has tried to buck the system understands how difficult it is for an enlisted man to tell an officer what to do. All I wanted was for them to put a lockable cap on the main warhead connection. I wanted them to protect these devices from me and my madness. Stop me from doing something foolish. And thinking of something foolish became an obsession. I saw myself holding the president and the programme hostage, single-handedly bringing about disarmament. People would finally understand how dangerous these weapons were.
I walked out in the desert nights dreaming of doomsday scenarios. I wrote my first poem about the bomb. One day I thought I was about to laugh and cried instead. I found my symptoms in one of my college books on psychology. World War One veterans exhibited it. Reversal of emotions. And so I wrote another memo, the memo that is probably buried in classified files in the Department of Defense, the memo that was hot enough for my boss to look at me with a startled expression and send it on to Karlsven, who sent it to the security officer. “I want out,” I said. “Or else.” And this “or else” got through to them. “I will not be responsible for my actions if you keep me here in this programme.”
You write a good memo and there’s no taking it back; no stopping the bullet once it leaves the barrel. I lost my top secret clearance and was eventually transferred to Treasure Island near San Francisco. I cleaned urinals, swept the parade ground, and did guard duty at the brig. Every morning thousands of men were marshalled in the parade ground. Many of us were awaiting orders to ship out. My number was 3039, and every morning I was there waiting for it to be called. As the months went by, and all my shipmates came and went to other assignments, I began to understand that this was punishment duty, that I was going nowhere until my enlistment was up. San Francisco at that time was a hotbed of the peace movement. They couldn’t have thought of a worse place to put me in cold storage. There were demonstrations all the time against atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union had violated an informal test ban earlier that year, and the Department of Defense’s desire to test its modernised missile warheads resulted in the US conducting a series of dramatically stupid hydrogen bomb tests in the spring of 1962 near Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific.
Perhaps some of the guys I trained with in Albuquerque were on Johnston Island. Early-model Thor rockets, returned from years of deployment in England, were used to test out the feasibility of anti-ICBM defence by being detonated at high altitude. The range-safety officers had to abort four of them. The fallout came down. It wasn’t like other tests where the military were held back a decent distance from ground zero. One of the Thors blew up on the pad, making practically the whole island radioactive. There were barracks on that island, and probably a detachment of my fellow GMTs to install the W49 bombs on the Thors. Naval aviators flew seaplanes in and out of the fallout. They brought in an army detachment with bulldozers who pushed many acres of radioactive coral into the lagoon. After Vietnam the island was used to store thousands of barrels of Agent Orange, and then it became a disposal site for chemical munitions. Today it’s not used for anything and no one can visit without special permission.
I started going to the demonstrations against testing in civilian clothes, but I had my navy buzz-cut. These were my people. They were raggedy-ass kids like I used to be, and they were staging sit-ins and getting themselves arrested. I wanted to hold a sign and join them.
And then one day me and the master at arms had it out. I handed in my fifth or sixth chit asking for an early discharge and he told me that I was here for keeps. They weren’t going to discharge me until my four years was up. “You’re going to serve every goddamn day you enlisted for.” So that was it.
“Well, if you won’t let me out early, can I have this afternoon off?” I said.
I got the afternoon off. I went to my locker and got out my dress whites. I never had the occasion to wear them because we were always in dungarees. I spit-shined my shoes. There was a sit-in that day at the Atomic Energy Commission building in Oakland. There were five or six people sitting on the front steps when I arrived, and a small crowd milling about. They looked at me with some puzzlement. I think one of them got up and moved out of the way, thinking I wanted to go inside. “No,” I said. “Gimme a sign.” There was one I really liked: “Why repeat Khrushchev’s crime?”
I sat down. The crowd got bigger, there were people at the windows looking down at me. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed me. Twenty minutes later, the shore patrol arrived. My leave was cancelled; I was placed in custody for conduct unbecoming. There was cheering from up above when I was picked up and tossed into the paddy wagon. And for the first time in my life I felt I was where I ought to be, in full rebellion against the existing order. I was told on numerous occasions that I was going to face a general court martial on six or seven charges. Then word came down from Washington to discharge me quietly. An honourable discharge. Maybe the thinking was that the peace movement didn’t need a martyr. On 16 June 1962 I was escorted to the administration building. The admiral’s office on the third floor looked over the great expanse of parade ground where we were marched and stood for inspection, and where the morning meat market was held. I stood braced at attention for twenty minutes while this two-star admiral told me what he would have done to me if he had his way. Shot as a goddamn traitor, keelhauled, condemned to life in a marine brig. And as he roared and belched fire and pounded his desk my orders were tucked safely in my pocket. I touched them every now and then to make sure they were still there, and stole a glimpse out of his window from time to time at the distant chequerboard where until three days ago I had stood in square number 3039. Maybe a small smile showed itself on my face and made him that much madder. I was young and a little arrogant then.