Excerpt from April interview with Peter
Lumsdaine
By ARMANDO ALCARAZ
The Alarm!Newspaper Collective

Peter Lumsdaine is a founder and coordinator of the
Vandenberg Action Coalition. In 1992. Lumsdane took
part in a Ploughshare Action, destroying a NAVSTAR
satellite, a satellite equipped for space-to-earth military
surveillance and precursor of the civilian Global Position-ing System (GPS), an action that created millions of dollars
in damages. He spent 18 months in prison.

A: What is the mission of the Vandenberg Action
Coalition and what are you trying to accomplish
with the protests?
P: Just like the WTO was identifi ed by people all
over as the place where all of these different threads
of oppressive economic power—the clear-cuts, the
strip mines, the sweatshops—came together at this
pivotal meeting, on the brink of a new century in Se-attle.
Under that same perspective, we are trying to
raise the awareness of what Vandenberg does, how
crucial it is to many different confl icts and oppres-sive
situations of the world.
From indigenous land rights to the military
enforcement of economic and corporate globaliza-tion
through counterinsurgency wars, up to these
regional bombing campaigns and the continuing
threat of global nuclear confl ict, all cross paths at
Vandenberg.
What we are really looking at now, and what I
am very much focused on, is working to establish
a long term vision and an organizing plan to really
build this into a signifi cant lasting statewide regional
campaign, somewhat similar to the campaign that
has developed in recent years around the School of
the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. One of the
things that I say to people is that Vandenberg really
is and it really needs to be seen as the high tech 21st
century School of the Americas of the West Coast.

A: What is the history of resistance at Vanden-berg?
P: Vandenberg has a fairly deep and wide history
of organizing efforts in California that go back for 20
years now, in fact it is pretty much the twentieth an-niversary
of nonviolent direct action at Vandenberg
Airforce Base. There was a large wave of arrests
that occured in the 1980’s. There were a couple of
Ploughshares disarmament actions either at Van-denberg
or related to Vandenberg’s military satellite
technology in the last of the 80’s and early 90’s. But
in the last couple of years we have kinda revived this
direct action campaign at Vandenberg. There have
been around 65 arrests that have occurred among
folks in the Vandenberg Action Coalition and other
25 or 30 among Greenpeace groups. We are now
close to 100 arrests there.

A: Why choose Vandenberg Airforce Base to do
nonviolent direct actions?
P: Vandenberg is right at the center of op-erational
control systems for fi ghting regional wars
and counterinsurgency campaigns throughout the
world, primarily in what is called the Third World.
Then you also have to look at the fact that Vanden-berg
itself is built on Indigenous Chumash land and
the opposite end of the zone is Kwajalein Atoll, the
largest coral attol of the planet and where thousands
of indigenous people have been forcibly relocated
out of their homeland and fi shing grounds to create
a target zone for Vandenberg missiles and a launch
zone for its Star Wars space weapons experiments.
And then, the site itself, somewhat like Vieques in
Puerto Rico is very susceptible to nonviolent direct
action, to people having a dramatic impact. It is very
vulnerable to nonviolent disruption because they
have to keep people out to do their business, and
it is very very diffi cult. They have said themselves
it is extremely disruptive for people to hike into off
limits security zones and it is very hard to seal the
bases’ boundaries because there are 55 miles of entry
points.
So in terms of that convergence of issues, in terms
of that pivotal role of the base and in terms of the
incredible opportunity for people to experience that
land to re-inhabit that land and to really get in the
way in a very concrete way a nonviolent way of
this war global mechanism that is being carried out
there, it is an amazing opportunity. And an amazing
responsibility I think, for people that live in this part
of the continent.

A: How was the organization of the Vandenberg
Action Coalition’s campaign affected by 9/11?
P: I think that people within the Vandenberg Ac-tion
Coalition have tried to grapple like everybody
else with the implications of 9/11 and the present
situation that we are in. There is no doubt that the
organizing has been slowed down or set back in a
major way. What is important is that the recognition
of how crucial that base is, the history of nonviolent
resistance, the history of the last couple of years and
of the last couple of decades, and the potential and
need for the future, those are the factors that are re-ally
going to drive the campaign forward.
Now, whether it will swing back this spring to the
level we had in the spring before 9/11, when there
were 300 people, and 36 people got arrested, and the
base was signifi cantly hampered in many operations
because of the back country affi nity group actions,
if we will swing back, I don’t know, but I think that
there are a lot of people with a very strong vision
and will to build this on a sustained basis. We are
trying to bring it back as fast as we can. I think
that the nature of the actions needs to continue, I
think that these twin dimensions of commitment to
nonviolence and commitment to nonviolent civil re-sistance
will have to remain as the guiding principles
of the work.
I don’t know what the consequences will be. The
sentences might go up, the security reaction may dif-fer
now. I think that if people are willing to risk their
lives—whether they are US soldiers, or fi refi ghters
for that matter, or rebel movements, whoever it is
throughout history (and in the case of soldiers or
rebel movements are willing to risk their lives in
armed confl ict)—then how can we, who are trying
to represent peace and nonviolence, possibly have
anything signifi cant to say to society and to say to
those people, if we are not willing to shoulder some
comparable risks in nonviolent action and nonvio-lent
resistance? I think it is not easy—I get as scared
and nervous as the next person—but I think we just
have to go forward.