Tracking the White Train

When did we first see the White Train? Some of us feel we saw it first in Franz Jagerstatter's dream.

Jagerstatter was an Austrian peasant who refused to fight in Hitler's wars because he believed that the Nazi movement was anti-Christian. He was beheaded by the Nazis in 1943, and is now being considered for sainthood by the Catholic church.

The train Jagerstatter saw in a dream five years before his martyrdom (and which he wrote about shortly before his death) corresponded to the White Train that now passes our homes and explodes in our dreams:

At first I lay awake in my bed until almost midnight, unable to sleep, although I was not sick; I must have fallen asleep anyway. All of a sudden I saw a beautiful shining railroad train that circled around a mountain. Streams of children—and adults as well—rushed toward the train and could not be held back ... Then I heard a voice say to me: "This train is going to hell."

The train to hell in Jagerstatter's dream was a symbol of cooperation in the Nazi movement. Our White Train to hell is both symbol and reality: it contains the annihilation it symbolizes.

For the sake of his soul, Jagerstatter had to refuse to board his train to hell. For the sake of our souls and of life itself, we have to stop the White Train.

We began tracking the White Train, although we did not know it existed then, when we moved into our house alongside the railroad tracks entering the Trident submarine base at Bangor, Washington.

We saw the house by the tracks for the first time in 1977, while seeking a piece of land that could become Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. The house we discovered by the tracks was too remote to serve as such a center, but it brought another possibility to mind. It stood on a hill overlooking the gate where railroad shipments enter the Trident base. By living in such a house one could, simply by being there, begin to break through the invisibility and silence of one critical means toward nuclear holocaust: the missile shipments that travel the United States by rail, analogous to the boxcars that moved unchallenged through Europe in the '40s on the way to an earlier holocaust.

Through a series of miracles, Shelley, our son Thomas, and I moved into the house by the tracks four years later. The intervening time had been marked by my knocking on the door of the house every six months or so to ask if the couple living there ever planned to sell it, a friendly "no" always being the answer. Then one day I knocked on the door to no answer at all, and saw through its window a house empty of both people and furniture. From that moment on, the miracles took over. Through the grace of God and the gifts of many wonderful friends, we were able to buy the house by the tracks and move into it in July, 1981. At the same time the Agape Community was born.

We held a workshop at Ground Zero that month on "Christian Roots of Nonviolence" that included a pilgrimage around the fence of the base. It ended at the railroad tracks with a meditation on the trains entering Bangor and their parallel meaning to the trains entering Auschwitz and Buchenwald. As a part of the meditation we named some of the cities and towns along the tracks, as they wound their way up from Salt Lake City, near the Hercules Corporation, source of Trident's missile motor shipments. (At the time we knew nothing of the White Train's journeys to Bangor from the Texas Panhandle.) When we finished our litany of the tracks, we realized that most of the workshop participants lived along those same tracks.

We all recognized that this was one workshop whose community could truly be deepened in meaning by our going home and becoming an extended nonviolent community in our various towns along the Trident tracks. We decided to become the Agape Community and adopted a community statement which said in part: "We believe the spiritual force capable of both changing us and stopping the arms race is that of agape: the love of God operating in the human heart."

As we tracked and opposed Trident missile motor shipments through Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in 1981 and 1982, two truths found a special life in the Agape Community. The first is that evil, especially the systemic evil of a nuclear holocaust, does not like the light. The government and the railroads did their best to keep us from seeing the missile shipments. The second truth we experienced is that once evil is brought into the light, it can be overcome by God's love operating fearlessly in our lives.

Evil's power lies in darkness, our own darkness. Evil's power to destroy life itself comes from our denial of its presence and our refusal to take responsibility for it. The essence of our life-destroying evil lies in our unseen, unacknowledged cooperation with it. As we began to claim personal responsibility for the missile motor shipments and sought to express our love for the train employees, we experienced the faith to overcome the evil which was in us and on the trains: faith in the redeeming power of nonviolent love, faith in the cross. Our growing community of faith and nonviolent action made the tracks linking us a double symbol—not only of holocaust but of hope.

But we were about to experience a still deeper sense of both holocaust and hope along the tracks.

On December 8, 1982, I received a phone call from a reporter asking if we knew anything about a special train probably carrying nuclear warheads that was on its way to the Trident base. It had been spotted in Everett, Washington, two days before: an all-white, armored train, escorted by a security car traveling along highways.

I said we knew nothing of such a train. It bore no resemblance to the missile motor shipments that we witnessed going into the base every week. After the phone call I walked down our front steps to the tracks. I could see signs of unusual activity across the tracks at the base gate. More security cars than I had ever seen for an arriving train were parked inside and outside the gate, waiting for something. I went back in the house, loaded our camera with slide film, and came down the steps just in time to see the train approaching.

Perched outside the first Burlington Northern engine was a man, like a film director scanning his set. After the second engine came a string of all-white, heavily armored cars. Each of the two rail security cars had a high turret, like a tank's. Sandwiched between the security cars were eight middle cars, lower in height, white, and armored. The letters "ATMX" stood out on them. When the final security car came opposite me, the armored flaps on the side of the turret clanked open, and an object was extended in my direction.

The White Train passed by, a train to holocaust, and I remembered the train in Jagerstatter's dream: "This train is going to hell."

The White Train's December 8, 1982 arrival at Bangor moved us to two kinds of research. We went first to documents on hazardous rail shipments obtained from the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission. They included correspondence from the Trident base which spoke of nuclear warheads that would be shipped to Bangor in specially designed "ATMX" rail cars. The warhead shipments would be in Department of Energy (DOE) trains (the letters "ATM" on the car stand for DOE's predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, and "X" simply means that the cars are not owned by a railroad) moving at a speed limit of 35 miles per hour, arriving at Bangor at a rate of two to three trains per year from an unspecified location in Texas. Given this rate of shipments and the rate of deployment of Trident submarines, we estimated that each White Train would carry between 100 and 200 hydrogen bombs, depending on its number of cars. We guessed the Texas source of the warhead shipments must be Amarillo, site of the Pantex plant, final assembly point for all U.S. nuclear warheads.

The second stage of our research was into railroad routes from Pantex to Bangor. A friend and railroad buff, Tom Rawson, drew up a likely rail route between Pantex and Bangor. We then sought old and new friends along this theoretical White Train route, sharing with them the Agape Community's vision of love toward the people on the trains, and nonviolent resistance to their nuclear cargoes. The community along the tracks grew, as we waited for the White Train to come out of its Bangor lair—and, we hoped, follow our route.

It did so on January 5, 1983, rolling past our house in the opposite direction. The fact that the White Train now had less security around it and was soon incorporated into a larger, faster freight train indicated it was probably empty on this return journey. As friends along the tracks monitored the train, we confirmed that it was traveling the route Tom Rawson had drawn up, returning to Amarillo via Spokane, Denver, and Pueblo, until it was seen entering the Pantex plant the night of January 12 by Les Breeding of Northwest Texas Clergy and Laity Concerned.

"It was a haunting sight," said Les, "this white train moving slowly into the distance where amber lights were glowing with a light fog all around. It brought to mind a phantom train bound for Hades."

The White Train is the most concentrated symbol we have of the hell of nuclear war. It carries a world-destructive power within it, guarded by Department of Energy "couriers" who, according to a DOE spokesperson, are armed with machine guns, rifles, and hand grenades, and are trained to shoot anyone who threatens the train. Yet there is another side to all this, as indicated by an experience Les Breeding had with the "phantom train bound for Hades."

On the night of January 12, Les had a unique, 45-minute conversation in the middle of the Amarillo switchyards with the head security guard of the White Train, prior to the train's final movement to Pantex. After this conversation Les lost the White Train when it moved out of the switchyards into darkness. He pursued it by car, discovering it again just outside Pantex. There was a tense moment when he drove up to the train, and a searchlight suddenly glared at his car. He got out of the car and heard the security guard say, "Hey, Les, is that you?"

At the heart of the greatest outward symbol we have of nuclear war, this train bearing instruments of hell, there is a human voice asking if we are there. The question destroys our sense of the train as absolute evil. There are people inside the train. We have to stop this White Train to hell, but we can stop it only through a truthful, loving process which affirms the sacredness of that life within it. The security guard and his question to us are at the center of the tracks campaign.

From January through March, 1983, Agape Community contacts multiplied along the White Train route: in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. In Missoula, Montana, Linda and George Greenwald and several friends held a weekly vigil by the tracks with a banner saying, "Silence is betrayal ... the nuclear train passes thru this valley," which became a wire service photo and story in newspapers across the country. It helped inspire vigils in other places by the tracks. We shared information on the White Train in every town that we could reach along its tracks.

Then on the afternoon of March 18, 1983, we received an unexpected phone call from one of our new friends along the tracks, a woman in a town in Colorado. She said a friend of hers married to a railroad employee was told by her husband that he thought "your train" was just getting under way. We checked this report with friends in Amarillo, who confirmed the White Train's departure from there at 2:03 p.m. It was on its way to Bangor. The White Train odyssey of March 18 to 22, 1983, had begun. The first group of vigilers to see the train were in La Junta, Colorado, at 11 p.m., March 18, in the middle of a snowstorm. They were confronted by several carloads of local police, who then lined the tracks as the train stopped there briefly. The La Junta group phoned up the line, and vigilers in other Colorado towns began to wait by the tracks in the darkness and snow.

During the next four days as the White Train made its way toward Bangor, vigils sprang up along its changing route like instant flowers by the tracks, seeded by the Agape Community's phone network. Vigils were held in 35 different towns and cities along its tracks. A number of these vigils were held along alternate routes to Bangor even after the White Train had been rerouted to avoid them, while about an equal number were created quickly on the new routes taken by the train.

Two people were arrested for approaching the train too closely in Denver, eight for kneeling on the tracks in front of it in Fort Collins, and six for attempting to sit in front of it at the Bangor gate. Thanks to the witness of these people and the hundreds who vigiled and prayed along the tracks, the White Train may have become the most closely watched train in the world by the time it entered the Trident base on March 22, 1983.

In our house at the end of the line and in two other Ground Zero homes, our experience March 18 to 22, 1983, of extended community via telephone was overwhelming. We were on the phone continuously during the 94 hours of the train's journey: monitoring the train, updating vigilers up the line, sharing information with media, and meeting a series of people in the heartland of the United States whom I have never seen and will never forget. We experienced profoundly during those four days the capacity of "ordinary" people of faith to respond with nonviolent action to the nuclear threat, once they see a way.

We suggested three ways: to monitor the White Train by telling us and others up the line exactly when it went through their town, to hold a vigil by the tracks with their neighbors, and to tell their local newspaper what they were doing so that other neighbors would know. Their response in these ways to the White Train's passage through their communities broke open the silence and invisibility of this train to hell.

We have since learned from a Department of Energy statement that the White Train has been on the rails in this country for more than 20 years. The DOE and its two predecessor organizations, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), have all used a special railcar fleet to transport nuclear weapons across the United States. Some of the original rail-cars have been modified and upgraded into the present White Train.

A question immediately presents itself: how did this train carrying holocaust weapons across the United States remain virtually invisible for more than 20 years until its March, 1983 trip to the Trident base?

It is a question that brings other questions to mind: how did boxcars carrying millions of Jewish people across Europe in the 1940s remain invisible until after the victims had gone to their deaths? How did radiation victims of our nuclear testing remain invisible to us until recent years? Have we always known silently that the stark evil we open our eyes to opens an abyss in ourselves unless and until we open our hearts to faith?

When we monitored the White Train's return trip to Pantex April 11 to 15, 1983, we were startled by its traveling all the way east to Topeka, Kansas, before cutting back southwest to the Pantex plant. The government was willing to send the train far out of its way to avoid those places where it had met the most opposition going north. This pattern of governmental avoidance has continued to be true in the tracks campaign. The DOE now regularly avoids one entire troublesome state, Colorado, at the expense of re-routing the train through Kansas and Nebraska. The DOE command center for the White Train, located in a bunker at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, regularly re-routes the train in progress onto whatever is perceived to be the track of least resistance.

The new route through Topeka prompted the Agape Community to invite friends in Kansas and Nebraska to join in the tracks campaign. Research into alternate routes has led to an expansion of the tracks campaign into every Western state. The Agape Community and friends are now working along every possible railroad route from Pantex to Bangor to alert our neighbors to the possibility that the White Train might come their way.

On June 23, 1983, our knowledge of the White Train grew as the result of a subpoena issued by Denver Judge Larry Lopez-Alexander ordering the Burlington Northern Railroad to turn over documents on the train to Bill Sulzman and Marshall Gourley, the two men arrested for approaching the train in Denver on March 19. Bill and Marshall had argued successfully before Judge Lopez-Alexander that such documents were necessary to their trial defense that the White Train was in violation of international law and that it was the train's criminal cargo, not they as people protesting it, that had no right to be there. The government, alarmed at the direction the case was taking, dropped the charges, but not before several revealing documents had been turned over by Burlington Northern.

The first of these documents includes the minutes of a meeting held in Denver on June 4, 1982, at which Peter Armstrong of the Department of Energy's Transportation Safeguards Division did a two-hour briefing for Burlington Northern personnel on the Bangor shipments. Concerning the contents of these shipments, Armstrong said their "uranium" was "not dangerous unless eaten or breathed." His comment on the shipments' "plutonium" was: "More potent than uranium, however considerable exposure required to be hazardous, keep up-wind, stay away." The "high explosives" contained in the shipments he acknowledged as "very hazardous, especially if involved in a fire because they can become unstable (like crystal dynamite)."

DOE policy on demonstrations by the tracks, set forth in an April 7, 1983 "Personal and Confidential" letter from Burlington Northern executive T.C. Whitacre, is to keep the White Train "moving at all times including rerouting as necessary to avoid demonstrations or demonstrators." A public relations officer, J.D. Martin, adds more specifically in a memorandum to Burlington Northern Vice President W.L. Arntzen, "I would heartily endorse your thoughts on routing the next train differently; going through downtown Fort Collins is like crossing a stage for demonstrators."

According to the Whitacre letter, Burlington Northern is instructed by DOE to have railroad personnel on board the train "advise demonstrators that armed couriers are present and that these couriers will take appropriate action if the shipment itself is threatened."

The Whitacre letter also identifies state agencies as unwanted outsiders to DOE: "Would again mention that they do not want outsiders, including state agencies, etc., notified of the tentative operation of these trains or their location, etc., while in route."

During the next Pantex-to-Bangor shipment, August 13 to 17,1983, DOE succeeded in its secrecy measures to such an extent that it managed to get a 22-car White Train all the way to Elma, Washington (70 miles short of Bangor), before it was seen by a member of the Agape Community. Because there had been no one in Amarillo watching Pantex on August 13, the train had departed in darkness and silence, and the Agape phone network had remained silent as the death train moved through its midst.

After the train's arrival August 17, a call went out from the Agape Community for a full-time White Train watcher in Amarillo. Word of this need was passed across the country by friends and on August 20 reached Hedy Sawadsky, who was then serving in the Pittsburgh Mennonite Church. After a period of discernment and preparation with friends in Colorado, she moved to Amarillo in September, 1983, to follow the active contemplative vocation of watching a train depart periodically with shipments of hydrogen bombs.

On October 11,1983, Ground Zero was alerted by Hedy (and by Bill Sulzman, then visiting Hedy from Denver and watching the tracks with her) that the White Train had just departed on Santa Fe tracks heading northeast toward Oklahoma and Kansas. It was then that several other documents obtained in the Sulzman-Gourley court case became critically important. We knew from Burlington Northern memorandums that the White Train also went east, delivering nuclear warheads on a route we had traced to the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina. We had alerted people in seven more states to that possibility.

As Hedy and Bill drove with the train up through Oklahoma and Kansas, and as others joined in the vigils and tracking, it soon became apparent that this White Train was in fact turning southeast and would go through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—a journey whose story is told in this issue of Sojourners by Don Mosley (see "This Train Is Bound For ... ?," page 17). Another chapter in tracking the White Train was beginning.

The government has shown signs of responding to the tracks campaign by means other than re-routing the White Train. The Department of Energy is now proposing regulations that would ban the publicizing of "Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information" (UCNI), including the sharing of any information on the transportation of nuclear weapons. These proposed regulations bear a civil penalty of a $100,000 fine imposed by the secretary of energy and a criminal penalty of 20 years in prison. The crossroads which we may be approaching as a people is the incompatibility between a free society and the possession of nuclear weapons.

But the train to hell means more than the end of a free society. It carries within it the extinction of all life on earth. The White Train's very whiteness brings home the white night of its contents. The Department of Energy has said publicly that it painted the train white to reduce temperatures inside the cars, unaware of the power of whiteness on this train to speak to us both consciously and subconsciously.

In our self-revealing consciousness, to those of us whose skin is white, white speaks to us of purity. Our conscious mind is startled by the White Train's revelation of what is being prepared by our white culture and politics: annihilation and nothingness. But to other cultures and races white is not purity. The Orient recognizes white as the symbol of death. Others have seen further dimensions. Herman Melville in Moby Dick takes us into the whiteness of an annihilation which today summons up thoughts of the White Train:

A nameless horror which overpowered all the rest. Yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable, it was the whiteness above all things that appalled me. Is it, that by its indefiniteness, it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation?

A white light of annihilation is carried in the cars of the White Train. It is an evil so profound, so inconceivable in its annihilation of every living thing, that it calls forth an opposite kind of power.

We remember again Franz Jagerstatter's train to hell, and more importantly, his refusal to board that train. His resistance to it was a choice of the kingdom of God. It is said that Jagerstatter's eyes shone with such joy and confidence in the hour before his death that the chaplain who visited him in prison was never able to forget that look.

Jagerstatter had to refuse to board his train to hell at the cost of his life, for the sake of life. Resisting that train to hell was identical with choosing the cross, and in it, the kingdom of God.

For us to reject hell, we have to stop the White Train, which not only symbolizes our cooperation with an ultimate evil but bears within its cars the annihilation of life itself. In being called to stop the White Train, we, like Jagerstatter, are being called to the cross and the kingdom.

The White Train can be stopped through education, reflection, and prayerful, nonviolent direct action: prayer vigils by the tracks, loving disobedience on the tracks, until there are more people on the tracks prepared to go to jail for peace than there are people to remove them or jails to contain them. Critical to this vision of stopping the White Train is a transforming love, agape, realized through prayer. Out of the White Train's trips toward total destruction has come the presence of people praying along the tracks; more and more people praying as the train passes, more and more considering that prayer of standing in front of the train. What we seek through agape is the conversion of ourselves, through the love of God transforming our hearts, so that we might realize a vision of active, contemplative peacemaking.

We remember the kingdom of God that shone from Jagerstatter's eyes in the hour before his death when he chose life. Out of the nightmare of a White Train to hell can come a realization of the kingdom of God. Now we are to choose.

Jim Douglass was co-founder of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, located next to the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington and author of Lightning East to West (Crossroads, 1983) when this article appeared.