SAN DIEGO — Their take on the facts is open to debate but their perseverance is beyond question.
Outnumbered and outflanked, a loosely knit group of environmentalists, community activists, outraged homeowners and unreconstructed peaceniks has spent most of the last decade fighting the Navy's plan to bring nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to San Diego Bay.
They have few supporters among the local establishment. The Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce dismisses them as "a very, very small group that is very vocal." The editorial page of the dominant local newspaper is against them. Most local politicians shun them.
When the group went to court, it lost. When its members seek information about the Navy's record on nuclear safety and shipboard incidents, they often hit a stone wall called national security.
When the group commissioned a local artist to paint an outdoor mural showing a nuclear carrier beside a hooded death figure, the mural was mysteriously painted over within two hours.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and President Clinton, like President George Bush before him, are lined up on the other side.
Even Vice President Al Gore, environmentalist nonpareil, has expressed confidence in how the Navy has handled its shipboard nuclear reactors and kept radiation in check.
And when the secretary of the Navy was in San Diego recently, he refused to meet with the anti-nuclear activists and instead expressed annoyance that they refuse to go away.
Still, the Environmental Health Coalition, the group that has taken up the anti-nuclear Navy fight, soldiers on, undeterred, gathering information, peppering the Navy with questions and doubts and requests, besieging local officialdom and the press to keep the issue alive.
"What keeps me going is the fact that the powers that be in San Diego--the Union-Tribune, the mayor, the City Council, the Board of Supervisors, the elected officials in D.C.--just won't take the issue on," said coalition member Ernie McCray, principal of an elementary school across the bay from where three nuclear-powered carriers may someday be moored. "That's what keeps me tilting at windmills. Somebody has to do it."
Coalition members were there to protest when the first of the nuclear carriers, John C. Stennis, steamed grandly into the bay last summer--amid much civic hoopla--to make North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado its home port. The Navy has tentative plans to send two more nuclear-powered carriers, the Nimitz and the Ronald Reagan, within a decade.
