Atomic Pilgrim 6700-mile Walk Helped Find Peace <br/>Uncover Long-Held Secrets Nuclear Weapons<br/>

Young man smiling outdoors, wearing a light-colored bucket hat and a graphic t-shirt that reads 'Bethlehem Peace Pilgrim' with a star in the center.

Walking through Greece November 1983

Atomic Pilgrim:

How Walking Thousands of Miles for Peace Led to Uncovering Some of America’s Darkest Nuclear Secrets

Watching a documentary of Mother Teresa shook me out of my comfortable complacency and catapulted me into walking halfway around the world, ending U.S. plutonium production, and uncovering deception in America's nuclear weapons complex.

Group of people gathered on the roof of the Bethlehem Bible College in Palestine. It is Christmas morning 1983.

Christmas morning in Bethlehem 1983

All Mother Teresa said was “love until it hurts.” After I heard those four words, I felt instantly that the rest of my life would be much different. Two months after I began serving people in poverty in Seattle as a Jesuit Volunteer, an apocalyptic pantomime provoked a dark depression about the threat of nuclear war. Striving to free myself from such doom, I joined people organizing the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage. During the next twenty months, I and nineteen other pilgrims walked 6700 miles across the United States and nine other countries as a plea for disarmament. Our oldest pilgrim, Fr. George Zabelka, had served as the Catholic chaplain to the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Black and white photo of a large industrial facility with a tall smokestack emitting dark smoke, electrical wires, and a winding dirt road leading away from the site in a desert.

Hanford plutonium plant, mid-1950s

Returning from Bethlehem, I discovered that my parents lived downwind from an aging plutonium factory that had recently resumed operations due to President Reagan’s nuclear escalation. Within months, I helped organize a citizens’ group to challenge Hanford, America’s first and largest nuclear weapons factory. We successfully campaigned to close that plutonium factory and began advocating for the millions of people exposed to secret radiation releases from more than forty years of plutonium production.

My memoir concludes with me accompanying Archbishop Paul Etienne (Seattle) and Archbishop John Wester (Santa Fe) on their 2023 Pilgrimage of Peace to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We attended the annual commemoration of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and had several interfaith meetings in Nagasaki. Especially moving was our meeting with Setsuko Thurlow who was 13 years old when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Photos and reflections can be found on the Pilgrimage of Peace web page.