Sister Megan Rice, a peace activist octogenarian nun with a criminal record, walked across New York’s East 34th street, negotiating her way through the bustle of taxi horns and pedestrians.
“Every time I am in the city, I notice it’s more crowded,” she said before descending into the subway, where she took a train uptown to have someone fix her cellphone. She travels alone, unbothered, which is no small feat: Rice is 85.
Then again, it takes a lot to faze Rice.
Three years ago, at 82, carrying a backpack and a deeply held conviction that the United States was breaking international law by quietly keeping up a multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons program, she took part in a middle-of-the-night break-in to a high security nuclear facility in Tennessee – an action that was later described as the largest security breach in American atomic history.
Rice’s non-violent anti-nuclear action, which involved walking through a wooded hill for two hours in the dark, crawling underneath four fences that had been cut through, and avoiding patrol cars, resulted in her being sentenced to almost three years behind bars.
This May, after serving two of those years, Rice was released. Her conviction, which relied on the US sabotage act, was vacated by a federal appeals court. Rice is set to be re-sentenced this August; the sentencing is expected to be less than the two years of her served time, meaning Rice should remain – pending any upcoming action – a free woman.
Rice, who holds a master’s degree in radiation biology from Boston College – which she obtained before embarking on a journey to Nigeria and Ghana where she taught schoolchildren for decades – maintains that the crime being committed in this story is not hers, but the US government’s.
Her actions three years ago were designed around that very idea.
That morning, together with fellow activists Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, both two decades her junior, Rice actually delivered an indictment to the US government, laying out three ways in which the targeted facility, the Y-12 national security complex in Oak Ridge, was in violation of international law.
While her companions spray-painted the outside of Y-12 with peace messages, Rice said she deposited baby bottles filled with human blood at the foot of the “very long building that seemed like the length of a city block”. Blood had been willingly donated to the trio and was meant to act as symbols of nuclear weapons’ deadly nature. She also wrapped crime scene tape around three pillars “so that the workers would know that it’s criminal activity”.
“The US is criminally acting against international law by producing weapons of mass destruction, testing them, storing them and threatening with them,” Rice explained just a few weeks into her newly found freedom, sipping on a chai latte.
Of particular contention in Rice’s mind is what she described as the US’s noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970 and to which the country is a signatory.
John Burroughs, the executive director of Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, agreed the US is failing to live up to its obligations.
“The Obama administration, and also the UK, France and Russia, have refused every opportunity to enter into multilateral negotiations toward nuclear disarmament,” Burroughs said, adding that the treaty is “without a question a binding and important international legal obligation”.
Last year, the Monterey Institute in California released a study, financed by anti-nuclear foundation the Ploughshares Fund, estimating the cost of America’s nuclear weapon plans over the next three decades amounted to around $1tn. The budget includes the maintenance of current arsenals, upgrading of nuclear bombs and warheads, and buying of replacement systems.
Beyond the threat of loss of life, it is this exorbitant cost that motivated Rice to draw attention to the issue and put her own freedom on the line.
Rice said military spending is money not being spent to address the vast socio-economic problems going on at home, which she believes is a crime.
Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, a professor in political science at the University of Southern Denmark, and an expert in western security studies, said of “all the money the US government has to spend every year” – from the running of parks to the issuing of pensions – 17% goes to military spending, amounting to $620bn. Of that, he estimated the US government could shave off $25bn without “significant national security effects”.
But Rice seemed to suggest it is the paradigm of war and our conception of global dynamics that need to change.
Brought up in New York in the 1930s and 1940s by academic parents, Rice said that from an early age she was preoccupied with injustice, and “struck by the unfair treatment of African Americans in this country over the centuries”.
By the time she was 20, she had taken her orders and was ready for a life of service.
Today, 65 years on, Rice said she is still shocked by inequality, including what she has seen in homeless shelters in New York, and during her recent bout in prison.
“It felt like a treat,” she said when asked what being released from prison felt like. “But it was bittersweet. Many of those women [cellmates] should not have been in there.”
Rice spent the last year of her served sentence in a Brooklyn detention center – acting as a federal prison – which held her and around 100 other female inmates in one single, large bunk bed-filled room on the sixth floor of a high-rise building.
The communal cell was the site of almost all her daily activities, she said – from eating, talking, writing and sleeping to walking through and around the beds to get some exercise.
While there, Rice said she saw New York through the cracks of a small window, but was not once allowed outside. In an article earlier this year, the New York Daily News described the dire, cramped conditions of her confinement as “a hellhole”.
Not someone to be easily pushed down, Rice remains upbeat, committed to her cause and warm toward others.
She had turned up to our interview wearing a chunky knit sweater, jeans for trousers and a denim shirt. Her clothes have all been donated to her, she said, dismissing frivolity. But when informed at the end of our meeting that jeans-on-jeans are a very cool look this season, she appeared baffled by my statement – but only for a second.
“Ah. You are saying that I am in fashion.” She indulged me with a twinkle and a smile.