The 96-acre federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia, is surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The penitentiary is set in the rolling Appalachian hills and is modeled after a college campus. Inmates live in ten-person dormitories, called cottages, or in single rooms if they’ve been there a long time. Fifty-eight-year-old Jean Gump receives her husband Joe, and other visitors who make the 12-and-a-half hour drive to see her from Chicago, in a room that resembles an airport lounge, with vinyl chairs and blaring televisions. In nice weather, however, she and Joe can go outside and walk past picnic tables and flower beds and playground equipment provided for prisoners’ visiting children.
The early morning sun was beginning to glow red over the horizon as a trio ran through the dew-soaked Missouri field.
Wordlessly, the three set to work. Ken Rippetoe, 23, swung a sledgehammer at the railway tracks, designed to launch a nuclear missile with the punch of one million tons of TNT.
At site M-10, the threesome sat cross-legged on the ground, held hands, and began to pray. Or rather, attempted to pray. A 60 Minutes crew was filming their actions, and Mike Wallace began to shout questions from outside the chain-link fence.
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A voice came through a loudspeaker instructing the trio to leave the missile site with their hands in the air. The two men were frisked while other soldiers crouched warily in the field keeping their machine guns trained on them. The young soldiers were reluctant to frisk Gump but told her to remove her ski jacket.
Gump tried to discuss the morality of the missiles with one of the men guarding her. He explained that he couldn’t talk to her while he was in uniform. “Perhaps,” she said, “we’ll meet one day for coffee when you’re not in uniform and discuss this.”
Last August, Jean Gump, Larry Morlan, Ken Rippetoe, and two other Plowshare activists who had demonstrated at the air force base Good Friday, Darla Bradley, 22, and John Volpe, 39, traveled to Kansas City for their trial in federal court. The group chose to defend themselves, without a lawyer. Calling witnesses who were well versed in army procedures, the effects of nuclear arms, and the history of civil disobedience in the United States, they tried to demonstrate that they had acted out of necessity. Disarming a nuclear missile, even symbolically, they argued, was an act of self-defense.
