Summary
Greenpeace's campaign to stop a Star Wars missile system evolves from a thirty-year history campaigning for nuclear disarmament.
In fact, the nuclear weapons threat is what prompted the international organization to be founded in 1971. Determined to stop a U.S. nuclear bomb test, a small group of Canadian and American activists chartered a small boat, the Phyllis Cormack, and sailed straight into the test site near Amchitka, Alaska, just as the U.S. Defense Department were poised to explode the bomb. Although the action was not successful and the test went ahead as scheduled, Greenpeace's action sparked an international outcry leading the Defense Department to close its Alaskan test site for "political and other reasons".
First published: February 2001
