Witness in the Atomic Age: In Memory of Sister Megan Rice

November 19, 2021 | By Stephen McNulty MY ‘25

In 2013, an eighty-three-year-old nun stood before a court facing an odd charge — the year prior, she had broken into a Tennessee nuclear site, in what was perhaps the largest security breach in US atomic history. She and her collaborators were part of the Plowshares movement, a pacifist Christian movement infamous for direct action against US nuclear facilities. Their goal, as it were, was to beat the swords of the military-industrial complex into plowshares, as alluded to in the Book of Isaiah: