Retro: Anti-nuclear sailboat Golden Rule to stop in Baltimore, this time with fewer missiles in the area

When the Golden Rule first set sail during the Cold War, the U.S. Army was busy surrounding Baltimore with nuclear weapons.

The sailboat, a project by Veterans for Peace, will visit the Baltimore region later this month and into next month, and although there are fewer missiles around nowadays, the vessel’s crew still believes they carry a vital message.

“Don’t bomb others as you wouldn’t want others to bomb you,” said Helen Jaccard, a Veterans for Peace organizer and current crew member.

The 34-foot ketch is on a 15-month journey around the central, southern and eastern United States, where it will visit 100 ports to spread a message of peace. The two-masted sailboat is scheduled to arrive first in Annapolis on April 24, before visiting Baltimore Harbor from April 27 to May 3 and then Havre de Grace from May 4 to May 8.

While in Baltimore, the crew will participate in a couple of events, including presentations with Dr. Vincent Intondi, author of “African Americans Against the Bomb,” at 6 p.m. May 1 at Homewood Friends and with Greenpeace General Counsel Carol Booker about the risks of a nuclear power plant and a fracked natural gas terminal at Cove Point in Calvert County from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. May 2 at Ivy Bookshop on Falls Road.

The boat, which has sailed twice from California to Hawaii and back and sunk twice, once in the early 1970s and again in 2010. It was restored in 2015.

The Golden Rule made its maiden voyage in 1958, when four Quaker peace activists, including former Navy officer Albert Bigelow, set sail for the Marshall Islands to protest U.S. nuclear weapons testing. The activists were stopped in Hawaii before they could reach the Pacific Islands. According to an Associated Press clip published in The Sun in August 1958, those first crew members served 60-day jail sentences in Honolulu.

As the sailboat’s activism started, the United States was ramping up its nuclear weapons program and constructing hundreds of bases.

In June 1958, the Army installed the first Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missiles, which had an estimated range of 75 miles and could be outfitted with atomic warheads, in Davidsonville before adding them to 19 other bases in the Baltimore-Washington area. Eventually, 300 sites across the country housed the missiles, which carried a nuclear warhead ranging in yield from 2 to 40 kilotons. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was a 15-kiloton-yield weapon.

“The nuclear explosive will enable the Hercules to destroy enemy planes over a wider area than was possible with the Ajax,” Sun reporter Albert Sehlstedt Jr. wrote in 1958.

According to a story by Sun reporter Laura Sullivan in May 1998, in the Baltimore-Washington area silos for Nike missiles were built in a ragged circle or “ring of steel” in places such as Towson, Davidsonville, Rockville, Waldorf, Chestertown and a 24-acre site near the Bay Bridge. The goal was to strike Russian bombers down over the Atlantic Ocean and spare East Coast cities.

But Sullivan noted that any nuclear explosion nearby “would have resulted in the agonizingly slow death of masses from radiation.”

Cecilia Miller, 84, had lived between her bean fields and the old Bay Bridge Nike site since the early 1950s.

“I never knew they had nuclear things,” Miller told Sullivan. “If they tried to do that today, all the neighbors would have put a stop to it. They put up a fuss about everything today.”

In 1971, according to a story by Sehlstedt, as a cost-cutting measure, the Army began dismantling missile bases in 15 states including Waldorf.

In 1972, the Soviet Union and the United States signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the first agreement between the countries to restrict nuclear weapons, which eliminated the Nike missiles.

The Defense Department held on to many of the sites nationwide until the 1980s, when officials tried unsuccessfully to sell them. Anne Arundel County turned the Davidsonville site into its police academy, and the District of Columbia built a prison on part of a Nike site in Lorton in Northern Virginia.

Around Baltimore, there were missiles at what is now a church parking lot off Greenspring Avenue, a county public works training academy off Paper Mill Road west of Jacksonville, a now-private site off Mount Vista Road, a pad inside Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Edgewood area, another in Kent County across the Chesapeake Bay from the mouth of the Patapsco River, the Children’s Theatre of Annapolis near the Bay Bridge and a site off Fort Smallwood Road in Anne Arundel County.

Jaccard said she is motivated by hope that treaties can be signed and peace can overcome the military-industrial complex. For fiscal year 2023, Congress passed a budget that gives the Department of Defense nearly $2 trillion, 773 times more than the $175.81 billion allocated to the Department of Education.

“We have a culture set by the military-industrial media complex. The media plays a big role in fearmongering and warmongering and we are faced with it 24/7. They dehumanize and criticize other powers with terms like brutal and dictator that are leveled against the leaders of other countries,” Jaccard said.

“We have to be careful about how we listen to things. As a public, we have to understand what is warmongering, what is fearmongering and that it can be possible for people to understand security concerns of other parts of the world. We can understand bullying and nuclear annihilation doesn’t produce peace.”

Every year since 1994, District of Columbia Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton has filed a bill that would require the United States to sign and ratify an international agreement to disable and dismantle America’s nuclear weapons upon certification that other nuclear powers have begun elimination of theirs. The American stockpile of nuclear weapons peaked at 31,225 in 1967, dropped to 22,217 warheads when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and is currently fewer than 4,000.

“People need to have hope. The biggest challenge I deal with is people who don’t have any hope. They just figure we’re going to die from nuclear firestorms or climate change, and they just give up and put their head in the sand because they can’t see a way out,” Jaccard said. “We need to point out at one point there were over 80,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and we’re down to around 15,000, so public pressure and sanity can make progress.”