If Nuns Ruled the World Read Free Page B

anyone’s eyes. They are out in the open, making the world a better place.

1.
    Weapons Are Made Like Gods
    Putting trust in weapons is idolatry. Weapons are always false gods because they make money. It’s profiteering.
    â€”Sister Megan Rice
    S h e couldn’t keep walking. Sister Megan Rice had been training for this moment for months, but she was tired and kept slipping to her knees into the prickled shrubs and the high grass as she willed herself up the hill to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
    The eighty-two-year-old nun was the mastermind of this plan—a plan that, once completed, would become known as the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex. But she was also the weak link. A person half her age would have been exhausted as they scaled the steep and densely wooded hill on the path into the heart of Y-12.
    It was the very early morning of July 28, 2012, when Megan, a vowed Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two accomplices—Gregory I. Boertje-Obed, age fifty-seven, and Michael R. Walli, age sixty-three, both US veterans—broke into the nuclear weapons facility. Using bolt cutters, the three of them first infiltrated an exterior boundary fence, six feet high with bright-yellow No Trespassing placards threatening a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison. Sister Megan went first. The men mended the fence behind her with twine, and together they began the forty-degree ascent.
    The plan was to hike along the ridge of the hill, breach another set of fences, and then walk toward the facility, which houses the nation’s cache of highly enriched uranium—enough to fuel more than 10,000 nuclear bombs.
    â€œMegan has trouble going up hills, so we walked at an angle,” Mr. Boertje-Obed told me. “We just kept going to the right. Megan was so tired when we got to the top that I said, ‘Let’s just go to the first building that we happen to see.’” Next they negotiated through an infrared intrusion detection system called the PIDAS, a perimeter intrusion detection and assessment system.
    â€œThe motion detectors are set off often by wildlife,” Ralph Hutchinson, a friend of the three, a co-conspirator, and the coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance told me. “That’s why they were ignored. One of the cameras that would have picked them up was malfunctioning, and the other camera did pick them up but the guard wasn’t looking at it.”
    The one thing they all agreed on was that they felt they were being led by the Almighty.
    Maybe they were. Some kind of providence was with them that night. The first building they happened upon was the big one, the site’s mother lode for nuclear storage—a billion-dollar Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. That was where they would carry out their mission.
    Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was where the nuclear age began. Ground was broken on February 18, 1943, in the midst of World War II, for an electromagnetic separation plant—or, in layman’s terms, a place that could make enough enriched uranium for a new kind of bomb. The atom bomb. At peak production in 1945, more than 22,000 workers were producing enriched uranium for Little Boy, the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima that killed approximately 60,000 civilians and ultimately ended World War II in the Pacific. During the Cold War, more than 8,000 people worked at Y-12 to make nuclear weapon “secondaries”—the components of a nuclear weapon’s secondary explosive that are compressed by nuclear fission from the primary explosive and generate the crux of explosive energy.
    Once inside the facility, Sister Megan and her co-conspirators­ swung banners over the walls: woe to an empire of blood, one declared. They looped panicked yellow crime-scene tape reading nuclear crime scene around the site. They chipped bits of