And one of the country’s leading peace activists of the past half-century, Father Daniel Berrigan, is celebrating his 90th birthday today. In 1968, Father Berrigan made national headlines when he and eight others burned draft files in Catonsville, Maryland. In 1970 he spent four months living underground as a fugitive from the FBI. In the early 1980s, he helped launch the international anti-nuclear Plowshares movement when he and seven others poured blood and hammered on warheads at a GE nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Father Berrigan talked about that action during an interview on Democracy Now! five years ago.

Daniel Berrigan: “We went in with the workers at the changing of the shift and found there was really no security worth talking about. Very easy entrance. In about three minutes we were looking at Doomsday; the weapon was before us. It was an unarmed warhead about to be shipped to Amarillo, Texas, for its payload, so it was a harmless weapon as of that moment. And we cracked the weapon. It was very fragile. It was made to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere from outer space, so it was like eggshell, really. And we had taken as our motto the great statement of Isaiah 2, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares.” So we did it, poured our blood around it, and stood in a circle, I think reciting the Lord’s Prayer until Armageddon arrived, as we expected.”