Award-winning peace activists meet Tuesday in Kapa‘a

Three prominent peace activists will be featured at a free public meeting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Kapa‘a Library to discuss the global effects of U.S. missile defense technologies on an island home to the world’s largest missile range.

“We feel it’s important to draw a connection as to what is happening here on Kaua‘i and what is happening around the world, especially the Pacific Basin,” organizer Kip Goodwin of Kapa‘a said Saturday.

A small village in South Korea is protesting the construction of a Navy base that will house warships implementing Aegis missile technology tested at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua‘i, Goodwin said, and added that such developments threaten ecosystems and cultures throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Bruce Gagnon, a member of Veterans for Peace and co-founder of the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, said in a news release announcing the meeting that he sees parallels between Kaua‘i and his home in Bath, Maine, where the warships that carry Aegis missiles are manufactured.

Gagnon and Dave Webb, chair of the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, will join songwriter and physics professor Lynda Williams as featured speakers at the meeting. The meeting is co-sponsored by the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization.

Webb is a past winner of the Christian peace prize, the Pax Christi, and is the national chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom.

A former space physicist with the Ministry of Defense in London, Webb is now a professor of engineering modeling and head of the Center for Applied Research of Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University in West Yorkshire, England.

Williams, of Santa Rosa, Calif., has performed her “Cosmic Cabaret” around the world.

For more information, call 822-7646 or visit www.space4peace.org.