White Train At Ground Zero People Who Protested Transportation Of Nuclear Warheads Want To Preserve Focal Point Of Cold War

The White Train, long used to transport nuclear warheads for Trident missiles, now sits idle at the Texas plant where the weapons were made. Most of its cars will be destroyed.

That once would have pleased nuclear protesters, who faced arrest in the early 1980s when they tried to block its deliveries of warheads to the Bangor Submarine Base near Bremerton.

But today they envision a better purpose for the aging rail cars. They want to preserve one or two of them as a reminder of what they consider the folly of the Cold War and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

“As thousands of people stood along those tracks and prayed and protested, the people of this country became more conscious of the arms race and took many means to protest it,” recalled Jim Douglass, a founder of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. “And the arms race was eventually stopped.”

“Why not give one of those cars to Ground Zero?” suggests Douglass, who once lived in the house closest to Bangor with his wife, Shelley, to monitor warhead shipments. Today he runs a homeless shelter in Birmingham, Ala.

The rail cars are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Energy Department office in Albuquerque, N.M., which has not yet taken a position on the issue.

Most of the almost 60 cars are to be dismantled and scrapped, but the Energy Department will preserve about eight of them.

After conferring with historic preservation officials in Texas, as required under the National Historic Preservation Act, they concluded the cars are significant relics of the Cold War.

The White Train was so-called because it was painted white to deflect solar heat. It was later painted several colors in a futile attempt to fool protesters. In 1985, the Energy Department began using tractor-trailer rigs to carry nuclear shipments on the highways, where they are harder to monitor.

Among the rail cars slated for preservation are one bomb car and one escort car, used to carry armed special agents. Those two cars have been requested by the National Atomic Museum, now on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. DOE spokesman Mark Sifuentes said he expects the cars to be on display at an off-base site in about two years.

Another six cars will remain at Pantex, the weapons manufacturing plant operated by the government since World War II near Amarillo, Texas. The plant now dismantles nuclear weapons and may eventually use the rail cars in telling the Pantex story - including the controversy that surrounded its mission.

“However we tell the Pantex story, protest is a part of it,” said Carl Phagan, Pantex’s environmental resources protection section manager.

But the anti-nuke activists want to tell their own story.

“What we would like is a park that celebrates the human resistance to nuclear weapons, not a celebration of them,” said Brian Watson, a spokesman for the Poulsbo-based Ground Zero.

“It could be a lesson that citizens can speak up and make a difference, that they can change the outcome of the world,” said Glen Milner, a Lake Forest Park electrician who was arrested with Douglass for trespassing in 1985 during a White Train protest.

“Years from now, people would look back and realize how close we were to nuclear war.”