They carried the dead alongside with them in white body bags, making clear the toll an attack would take and the likelihood that few, if any, of the people outside would survive.įive separate groups were participating, all with different but complementary ideas. Many of the women dressed up as victims of radiation poisoning, their faces splotchy with burn marks, to illustrate the horrific aftermath of a nuclear attack. Photo: (The Chronicle Herald/Halifax Public Libraries) (The Chronicle Herald/Halifax Public Libraries) That's why I'm here today.Ī newspaper article in The Chronicle Herald published in the summer of 1983 galvanized a group of women to protest the government's plan for contingency of government in the event of a nuclear attack. How are they going to feel walking out of their homes, leaving their wives and their children behind, who are going to be detonated and incinerated, vaporized and radiated? It makes me angry. What happens to the families of those men who are going into the bunker? asked Sue McManus, who was part of a group who had travelled from P.E.I. for the protest. They began planning a series of direct actions that would culminate on the day. The purpose was simple: to remind the people allowed inside the bunker that day of the cost of nuclear war. The women protesting that day, many of whom were linked to legendary Nova Scotia activist Muriel Duckworth and Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, first learned of the exercise from a small article published in The Chronicle Herald in July 1983. The spots inside were reserved solely for high-ranking government and military officials and even some members of the media - nearly all of whom would be men.Īnd the women outside were incensed about who the government had been deemed worthy of protecting. On that day, an estimated 329 people were expected to go inside the Debert bunker to participate in a dress rehearsal for nuclear war. The protesters had come from all over the Maritimes, wielding signs and body bags, wearing clown wigs and lab coats. On Feb. 29, 1984, a leap year, they stood chanting outside the gates of Camp Debert, home to Atlantic Canada's only government fallout shelter designed to withstand a nuclear attack. It was the end of the world as they knew it and these women felt anything but fine.
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