Anarchistcook’s Weblog

The first nuclear end times generation

Several dozen cars lined the road to Mortan Thiokol’s Brigham City explosives facility on the banks of the Great Salt Lake. The setting sun cast a shimmering acid green and orange glow across the vast salt wasteland to our backs. A row of cars faced the sand and gravel ridge. Families of spectators eager to witness another American success in the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union.

Finally the much anticipated blast and deafening boom startles the vehicular audiences to attention. Shards of shale grey and ochre gravel spray hundred feet towards the blackened heavens. Quartz flakes shimmered salmon against the ominous dark thunderstorm background. Dust clouds of dirt tumbled down the slope.

 A collective sigh of satisfaction from the assembled families could be heard from the string of cars facing the test explosion of detonator TNT. The conventional blast that starts the nuclear chain reaction in the end times weapons perched on top of each Minute Man Intercontinental nuclear missile.

The United States had already proven in Hiroshima that it could instantly vanish an entire city of tens of thousands. And to make sure everyone understood that they could repeat the horror they dropped a second one on the people of Nagasaki.   

My father sat proudly behind the wheel of his powder blue and bright white Bel Air, my pregnant mother leaning romantically next to him as she gently cradled me with her right arm. I was excited to see the drama. 

My father took a job inspecting the blast mirrors that reflect the conventional explosion towards the nuclear core. He was also working on his masters degree in Zoology at Utah State.

I was one of those baby boomers, the first generation to be born into a world with the threat of nuclear annihilation. The first generation to have never woken up in a world free from that fear.

My father’s dream comes true and he takes his first permanent assignment with the National Park Service patrolling the Colonial Park Way between Jamestown and Williamsburg and a year later he takes a position directing the Rock Creek Nature Center in Washington DC. 

Our family moved to a new brick house in Bethesda, Maryland. Like most classrooms in America during the dawn of the 1960s, my Kindergarten class at Bethesda Elementary started the day with a Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag followed by the Duck and Cover Nuclear Attack Drill. 

The tinny alarm bell rang out and as instructed our class of twenty students climbed under our tiny formica desks. I exchanged my daily “this is stupid” glance towards the little girl seated next to me. We laugh together as we rose from the exercise sharing our amazement at the idea that adults honestly thought our flimsy desks would protect us during a nuclear strike. 

The Duck and Cover drills and news of the positioning of nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba heightened fears of a life on Earth ending conflict. 

I had Cuban Missile Crisis inspired dreams of the Red Army marching down Constitution Avenue in perfect formation. Thousands of men dressed in thick green wool uniforms with bright red trimmed caps and amulets armed with long guns thundered towards our place on Bells Mill Road. It wasn’t possible to even escape the horror of nuclear missiles on hair trigger even while asleep.  

During some of the bloodiest periods of the war against Vietnam I witnessed the logic of nuclear slaughter as Realpolitik first hand. My mother’s father John Vanderpool Phelan was proud of his participation in setting up the Pearl Harbor false flag telling me it was the only way they could get the American public to support a war against Japan. He wasn’t shy about his work setting up a network to distribute heroin from his post in Burma to the black neighborhoods in the US as a strategy to blunt dissatisfaction with the unequal GI Bill. His record holding firebombing of Tokyo and his participation in the planning of the first use of nuclear weapons on a city seemed to be two of his proudest public achievements 

Lt. Phelan was in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He was an Intelligence Officer with the 468th Bombardment Squadron in 1944 and 45 stationed in Burma. 

His first floor den in Needham, Massachusetts was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he shot from a B 29 Superfortress flying at 20,000 feet. Filming the progress of that day’s raid during the world’s most deadly bombing campaign, Operation Meeting House.

I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with his friends General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson” he insisted.  Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a one time aberration.  A reminder that the United States called the shots and if your country fails to obey a nuclear assault may be in your future.  America had no limits to what it would do to defend its domination.

A conversation with the Scottish born architect George Stevens while waiting to speak with my father at the National Park Service regional office in Boston lead me to attending Boston University’s Department of Fine Arts and a job at the Old South Meeting House. I took the 50 cent admission, sold past cards and shared the story of the Sons of Liberty and the meeting house rally that launched the Boston Tea Party. 

During one noon brake I strolled onto the Boston Commons with my bag lunch in hand. I came across an older woman teetered atop a Hood Dairy milk crate speaking to a small group of grey haired ladies populating a corner of my favorite lunch time patch of lawn. 

The orator with a magnetic Australian accent bellowed: “The United States has 27,519 nuclear weapons ready to wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the Earth. The Soviet Union has 19,055 nuclear weapons on a hair trigger prepared to kill everyone here in America. The generals and politicians call this nuclear policy Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD for short.”  

The frightening speech ended with an invitation to protest. One of those in the audience, a fragile, white-haired lady, struggled to her feet and said, “Please give Dr. Helen Caldecott a big hand.” 

As Dr. Helen Caldecott was declaring a nuclear emergency, I silently declared to myself that my art would speak to an urgency of our time rather than decorate the vaults and walls of those with money.

So that week I gathered my supplies on a table in the basement of the collective house at 41 Gardner Street that I called home. My X-Acto knife sliced out the answers to the issues of the day, cut by cut, into the poster boards of despair at the threat of war to become a public art without permission. This was an emergency. There was no time for money paying art. 

I got blisters cutting stencils, removing thick chunks of cheap poster board to reveal in the grey drafting table rubber the dark underside of a nuclear mushroom cloud and the text “TODAY?” A subtraction of a negative space, sheet after sheet, until I had enough to withstand the soaking of the paint or the police confiscation. I was prepared.

I was determined to wake the conscience of Boston to the threat of a nuclear holocaust spray painting at least 350 impressions of my mushroom cloud Today? on the sidewalks and walls of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. My friends would sprawl out on the pavement looking as dead as possible. I would trace their outline in white chalk then spray the outline in white paint. We would paint dozens of “dead bodies” on the sidewalks and streets representing a mass casualty event. Sometimes with posters and slogans against a US massacre in El Salvador or sometimes as a protest to nuclear weapons bazaar.    We also organize Boston’s Shadow Project painting a white circle around the city at the distance that would vaporize in the event that a one megaton bomb was detonated over the city. 

The campaign inspired a documentary by Richard Kaplan called The Sidewalk Sector contrasting my public art with the sterility of corporate imagery and the Theater Works play Murder Now, a detective thriller in search of an Armenian nuclear dirty bomb threat to the Boston Harbor.  

I joined my Boston University classmates in a trip down to New York to attend a protest against the nuclear arms race organized by Mobilization for Survival and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).  Public support for a ban on nuclear weapon would motivate the delegates at the first United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in New York in May and June 1978 to call for an end to the nuclear threat. When we stepped into the protest we were greeted by huge black and white photos of the nuclear blast survivors that lined the walls surrounding Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Mutilated victims with scarred faces sat below the pictures.

Eight of us who had been taking direct action to stop the construction of the Seabrook Nuclear power station in New Hampshire started the first Food Not Bombs collective in May 1980. One of the groups main focus was building for the June 12, 1982 protest in New York during the Second UN Session on Disarmament. 

Cambridge City Council and Food Not Bombs cosponsored a march for nuclear disarmament held on August 6, 1980, gathering at City Hall taking Massachusetts Avenue and ending at Draper Lab on Portland Ave. Our ragtag group of protesters carried poster boards with the stenciled “Mushroom Cloud Today?” image spray painted on each sheet. 

We organized another march in October in solidarity with the West Germans who were engaged in the country’s largest civil disobedience campaign seeking to force the US to remove its mobile Pershing Nuclear missiles from their streets. 

Our little group held a free concert for Nuclear Disarmament on May 3, 1982 in Sennott Park with the goal of inspiring our community to join in the June 12, 1982, march in New York City. We parked our green van on The Avenue of the Americas at Bleaker Street sharing literature about Food Not Bombs with people from all over the world who had come to participate in the march. The organizing office was in a church a block or so away. We did what we could to provide meals to some of the one million protesters gathered in the Great Meadow of Central Park.

Several new arms control treaties were signed by the US and the Soviet Union. Arms control expert Scott Ritter best known for not finding any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq attended arms control negotiations between the US and Russia. Ritter claims these protests helped push the agreements forward. In recent months he has encouraged another round of mass actions against the new nuclear arms race.

The organization American Peace Test asked Food Not Bombs to help provide food during a ten day protest at the Nevada Test Site. Their funding helped the just formed San Francisco chapter to purchase folding tables and cooking equipment that we brought back to the Bay Area at the end of the protest. We blocked dozens of busloads of workers from arriving to help with Clinton’s underground nuclear test. A group of young women were released after having been arrested by Wackenhut Security for breaching the test site and were shocked to discover a group named Food Not Bombs was providing meals in camp. They had taken a huge banner saying Food Not Bombs to what they believed was ground zero for the test placing rocks on it to hold it safe from the winds. They had no idea there was a group with that same name. 

The nuclear threat is always lingering. When the Russians are no longer useful as the official enemy Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction filled the void. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice famously said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” during a September 8, 2002, CNN interview.  Colin Powell held up a vile of fake yellow cake at the UN. Scott Ritter and his team never found any evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program but the US was able to kill over a million people in a war that created a failed state. 

The only country to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian population and its nuclear armed ally, Israel, has spent years stoking fears that Iran was just months away from building a nuclear weapon. When the US lost their puppet Shah to an Islamic Revolution the country of Iran became enemy number one. The perfect justification for billions in arms sales and billions more in military bases. 

Iran fought a brutal eight year war defending itself against the US backed and armed Iraq. America even sold Saddam Hussein satellite images and the chemical weapons used against both Iran and his opponents in southern Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died in this US/Israeli instigated war. While Iran was suffering war and sanctioned from banking and business with the west the US taxpayers were dumping billions into companies like KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and V2X Inc. to construct military bases across the Persian Gulf. 

America spent billions more building bases surrounding Russia. I was born in a former Nazi Hospital run by the US military in Frankfurt, West Germany when my father was taking part in the US occupation of the country after World War II. The U.S. maintains over 40 military installations in Europe with 50,000+ troops, serving as a cornerstone of NATO. The bases are inGermany(Ramstein Air Base, Stuttgart EUCOM), Italy (Aviano AB, NAS Sigonella), the UK (RAF Lakenheath), and rapidly expanding sites in Poland and Romania.

 In Micheal Parenti’s essay “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia” he writes about the destruction of the first domino in NATO’s campaign to gain control of Russia. “In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men.” I visited the Belgrade Food Not Bombs activists at the Rebel Squat, the mansion of someone who was free to flee the war. When needing to use the restroom they directed me to the crater left by an unexploded US cruise missile. Their stories of cruise missiles lumbering over the city until they dashed towards a housing block were horrific. One volunteer Emma worked at a hospital with over 700 children deformed by the US depleted uranium bombs during pregnancy.

Yugoslavia was the first in the march by the US and NATO to take control of the Kremlin.  The 2014 Obama Administration coup of the elected government of Ukraine was another step in their campaign to overthrow the Russian government. A nuclear armed government that is unlikely to let the US install a puppet regime. A growing threat of nuclear conflict concealed from Americans.

The Obama Administration agreed to a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) treaty with Iran. A treaty Trump pulled out of in his first term, providing Israel and the US with a new pretext for war. US intelligence agencies have repeatedly verified that Iran is telling the truth when it claimed it was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. 

Even so the war against Iran has started. The US and Israel seemed to believe their own lies and may have backed themselves into a corner. It wasn’t the three days to topple the regime war promised by Israel. Now that Israel is facing the possibility of catastrophic damage in another round of unprovoked assaults on Iran the Zionist child murderers may believe that launching their “Samson Option” could be their ticket to some warped idea of victory. 

The Samson Option is Israeli’s plan to launch nuclear weapons “as a final, catastrophic resort if the state faces an existential threat, such as being overwhelmed by a conventional military invasion.” This policy is named after the biblical figure Samson who destroyed a temple, killing himself and his enemies.  This doctrine was intended to act as an “ultimate deterrent by threatening to bring down surrounding forces if Israel falls.” It is clear it failed to deter Iran from defending itself.  

After seven decades of being held hostage by the specter of a nuclear conflict, that threat is closer today than ever as the wars against Russia and Iran teeter on the edge of nuclear annihilation.

According to Ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson there was an emergency meeting at the White House on Saturday April 18th where General Dan Caine stopped Trump from using a nuclear weapon on Iran.

Caine may not be in his position for long as Trump continues to fire anyone in military leadership that opposes this unprovoked war and the threats to bomb the beautiful 5,000 year culture of Iran back into “the stone age.” 

Are we really at the end of the nuclear age as Palantir’s Alex Karp claims in his manifesto “The Technological Republic, in brief” number 12. “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.”

Are we at the beginning of the era where US leaders take seriously  claims by Beltway think tanks that the US can win a nuclear war against Russia and China and the sparks start flying. The Wall Street Journal published  Seth Cropsey  April 27, 2022 essay “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War,” adding “Washington might study Cold War-era practices that had a major effect on Soviet policy making,” outlining a fascist version of the “propaganda by deed” terror of a message sending nuclear attack that would show the US means business so obey.

The three of us heading to my friend Micheal Parenti’s memorial on Saturday April 25th passed a billboard on interstate 880 advertising the virtues of an AI driven nuclear defense. Is this robotic reality going to be our future? The future that Santa Cruz mayoral candidate Ryan Coonerty’s predictive AI targeting software has built to enforce the rule of the Epstein class. A future with no Dan Caine to interfere with the logic of the technocrats and the PayPal Mafia at Palantir.

In many ways the hopes of the June 12, 1982 march to end the nuclear arms race was shattered in the ruthless June 12, 2025 unprovoked attacks on Iran. 

That energy of 1982 is needed more today than at any time in this nuclear age. If any group can spark that energy that brought a million protesters to the streets of New York it’s Food Not Bombs. 

FOOD NOT BOMBS

PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA

menu@foodnotbombs.net

SOUP STREET

A memoir by Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry

You can join me in my journey from the adventures I enjoyed as a child living the wilderness of America’s National Parks, the events that inspired me to dedicate my life to ending capital’s exploitive system to the founding of Food Not Bombs and the decades of traveling the world preparing and sharing meals.

Soup Street / by Keith McHenry 2026
ISBN: 979-8-234-00487-1
Price: $24.95
Pages: 332
Size: 6 x 9 inches

https://foodnotbombs.net/soup_street.html