Departures of note

On July 28, 2012, Sister Megan Rice, then 82, and two fellow Transform Now Plowshares activists broke into the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility at the Y‑12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They spray‑painted anti‑war messages on the building and poured blood on its exterior, invoking biblical calls to turn swords into plowshares and citing the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty as moral justification. The intrusion was later labeled by nuclear experts as the largest security breach in the history of the United States’ atomic complex.

Rice had entered religious life with the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus at 18 and earned degrees in biology and cellular biology while teaching in the United States and abroad. From the 1980s onward she became a prolific anti‑war and anti‑nuclear activist, repeatedly engaging in civil‑disobedience that led to dozens of arrests, including protests at the Nevada Test Site, the School of the Americas, and Vandenberg Air Force Base. After her 2012 Oak Ridge action, she was convicted of sabotage, a conviction later overturned on appeal, and she served two years before being released in 2015. Her lifelong commitment to nuclear disarmament made her a prominent figure in the Plowshares movement.