NH #711: Plowshares Peace Activist Susan Crane Out of German Prison + Libbe’s Nuclear Play ATOMIC BILL Heads for Production!

This Week’s Featured Interview

Activists from around the world gathering to demonstrate against U.S. nuclear weapons housed at the Buchel Air Force Base in Germany (Susan Crane far right, Nukewatch’s John LaForge behind Nukewatch banner in red hat)

  • Peace activist Susan Crane, 81, is a member of the California Catholic Worker movement and the Plowshares anti-nuclear-weapons and Christian pacifist movement. After decades of civil disobedience to bring attention to the need to rid our planet of nuclear weapons, she was arrested in Germany for protesting US nuclear weapons stored and maintained at Germany’s Buchel Air Force Base. She was sentenced to jail time in German prison in 2024. She was released last month, on January 17, 2025 and we spoke with Susan Crane just four weeks later, on Friday, February 7, 2025.

Libbe’s Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE Coming to Wilmington Peace Resource Center in Ohio!

  • Regular listeners to Nuclear Hotseat will have heard me mention a play I’ve been working on, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, centered around the Trinity test blast in New Mexico on July 15, 1945. Theatre being at best a slow motion endeavor, I didn’t put much emphasis on it because you never know what will or will not happen in the arts, and I hate to feed false hopes – yours or mine. .

    That is why I am thrilled to tell you that ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE has been selected by the internationally respected Wilmington College Peace Resource Center as one of the events of their 50th anniversary celebration. It will be presented as a staged reading on September 9, 2025, produced in cooperation with the Wilmington College Theatre Arts Department.

  • ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE is the Oppenheimer-adjacent true story of media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story. It asks and answers the question: How do you hide an atomic bomb blast in plain sight?

    For the record, I spent 35 years in theatre – 50 productions internationally, many awards, one show on incest survivors that ran 2-1/2 years in Santa Monica. I co-founded a musical theatre development lab and interviewed dozens of musical theatre legends in front of live audiences. When my last musical production deal fell apart – after 12 years of writing and too many dashed hopes – I gave up on theatre. Shortly thereafter, Fukushima happened, I started Nuclear Hotseat, and that’s been the “theatre” with which I’ve been involved ever since.

    ATOMIC BILL tells a story I stumbled across while doing research for the show on the Trinity blast, the first nuclear bomb explosion on, July 16, 1945. It took me more than eight years of digging to find the play hidden within the history, and another 4+ years to get it to the current draft.

    As this continues to move forward, I’ll keep you informed. Meanwhile, even in these desperately difficult times, in my little corner I am dancing the Happy Dance. I hope you are, too.

Numnutz of the Week (For Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Leave it to DOE to hand-hold nukesters and boost them up by providing grants to underwrite their applications for funding from… DOE!

LINKS:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3MK_JWT0aVM%3Fsi%3Dv_zG865kHo4NwsJN