By ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

When John Burroughs wants to highlight the horrors humanity could face in the event of a nuclear attack, he begins by harkening back to Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s largest extermination camp. There, says Burroughs, an international law specialist who serves as the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, up to 1.5 million people lost their lives, incinerated in gas chambers.

Keeping that number in mind, he then draws attention to the Naval Submarine Base Bangor, situated just northwest of Bremerton on Hood Canal’s eastern shore. Based at the station, says Burroughs, are nine Trident submarines, each with the capacity to carry 14 million tons of explosive power, roughly 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. All told, in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 200,000 people were annihilated due to nuclear weaponry, he says.

“So, the scale of killings that could be inflicted by just one of these Trident submarines,” asserts Burroughs from his NY home, “goes way, way, way beyond what the U.S. did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what the Nazis did at Auschwitz.”

Burroughs’ propensity to recall past abominations in an effort to suggest possible future calamities, will be on full display Jan. 20 when he arrives at Town Hall for his talk, “From Auschwitz to Trident: The Nuclear Weapons of Puget Sound, the Power of International Law, and Citizen Responsibility in Abolishing Nuclear Weapons.”

Sponsored by the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, Burroughs says the talk not only centers on comparisons of Nazi-era atrocities, but will address an outcome of the prosecution of Nazi Party members during the Nuremberg Tribunals: namely, the aspect of individual responsibility.

The Tribunals, says Burroughs, found that individuals were accountable for their commission of or their complicity in the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression. Anti-nuclear activists in the United States and abroad, Burroughs says, want to go one step further than the Tribunal, insisting that everyone has the collective duty to command nuclear states to disarm.

“We want to say that, as citizens,” says Burroughs, “we will take the step of saying we have the right and the responsibility to prevent the infliction of large-scale atrocities like would occur with use of nuclear weapons.”

Though when Burroughs talks of what “we” can do as anti-nuclear activists, he’s also speaking of himself: In 1979, the Spokane native participated in a protest at Bangor. Twenty-six at the time, Burroughs recalls traveling with other activists to the naval base. He says he climbed a fence leading into the base, only to be arrested soon after. While serving no jail time, he says he was slapped with a misdemeanor charge and a fine, the amount of which has faded from memory.

Protests such as his date back to the late ’70s at Bangor, he says. An action there last fall, leading to the arrest and overnight detention of three individuals — including an octogenarian Raging Granny — carries on with what he considers to be direct opposition to Trident missiles “at a time when the nation has lost track of the problem of nuclear weapons,” Burroughs says.

In his view, with the deployment of Bangor’s Trident arsenal being in direct violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and their potential use contradicting opinions set forth by the UN’s International Court of Justice, Burroughs says American citizens must include nuclear abolition within its future objectives. Until then, he believes the United States military could always opt to launch a missile at, say, North Korea, Iran, or Russia. The effects, he laments, would be catastrophic:

“Even the use of one Trident warhead is a potential holocaust.”

[See him]

John Burroughs will give his talk “From Auschwitz to Trident” at Town Hall, Sat. Jan., 20, at 7 p.m. Tickets, $10 each, can be purchased through Brown Paper Tickets, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/9277

[Hear him]

Burroughs will also be featured on the radio program, “Weekday,” on KUOW — 94.9 fm and www.kuow.org — on Wed., Jan. 24, from 9-10 a.m.