Megan Rice: Meet the 85-year-old Catholic nun who breaks into high-security bases to protest US's nuclear weapons programme

In interview, activist says she has no intention of stopping her campaign

Megan Rice has dedicated her life to protesting the US's nuclear weapons programme

For Megan Rice, the 85-year-old nun and peace activist released from jail earlier this month, the most pressing thing about her two years of incarceration was her conviction that most her fellow prisoners should not have been there.

“The most difficult thing was knowing that the root cause of the problems is our nuclear industrial complex,” she told The Independent. “It has teared at the social fabric of our country over the past 70 years.”

Ms Rice, a member of the Catholic Society of the Holy Child Jesus, was released along with fellow activists 66-year-old Michael Walli, and 59-year-old Greg Boertje-Obed.

The trio had been convicted of sabotage in 2013 after cutting through fences at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they hung banners, smeared human blood and spray-painted the bunker that stores much of the US’s bomb-grade uranium.

In the aftermath of the breach, federal officials implemented sweeping security changes, the Associated Press reported, including a new defence security chief to oversee all of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s sites.

The trio were released after a federal appeals court overturned their conviction and ordered them to be re-sentenced on the charge of damaging government property, which they still face.

During the two years Ms Rice spent in the federal Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, and at a facility in Georgia, she said she bonded with the other women.

The activists have spray-painted and smeared human blood at the bunkers used to store uranium for nuclear weapons (US Department of Justice)

She said she considered those locked up for things such as drug convictions to be broader victims of the system she and her fellow activists were fighting.

“Only a minority have been educated. Most people don’t know what is going on in this country,” she added. “Since 1943 [and the US’s nuclear weapons proliferation] people were not allowed to tell their coworkers what they were doing. It’s been one of the biggest secrets in our history.”

Ms Rice was originally sentenced to nearly three years and Mr Walli and Mr Boertje-Obed were each sentenced to just over five years. In overturning the sabotage conviction, the Appeals Court ruled that their actions did not injure national security.

Ms Rice, who comes from New York, has dedicated much of her life to trying to highlight the US’s proliferation of weapons. And she and her colleagues – part of the Ploughshares peace movement - have been arrested on numerous occasions and spent time in jail.

Having been released from jail she voiced no regrets for her actions and said she was pleased the courts had found some “common sense” to overturn the conviction. She also said she fully intended to continue with her protests.

Her priority, she said, was to continue her opposition to the US’s nuclear weapons programme. She referred, disappointedly, to the recent failed attempt to secure an agreement to stop proliferation the Middle East after the US and UK blocked the move.

“Together with the team we have to respond to the crisis of the US government in continuing to design, refurbish and produce nuclear weapons,” she said.

The nun said her faith was inextricably interwoven with her protests. “They are absolutely identical,” she said. “Our faith is in the God of life. These [weapons] represent the very destruction of life.”

The veteran activist said she and her colleagues had been prepared to lose their lives if that was what was needed to draw attention to the US’s nuclear arsenal.

And she said she would be continuing her protests, even if it resulted in her being sent to jail once again.

“I felt it was an absolute grace to be there, among those people who are brave, suffering victims of the state,” she said. “I was really sad when I had to leave.”