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On 17 November, 1980, 2,000 women assembled at the Pentagon to weave, dance, chant, demonstrate and perform civil disobedience to communicate to national leaders and military commanders that they regarded the defense plans of this nation to be lethal to the earth. The Unity Statement of the Women's Pentagon Action that the women had crafted for that day proclaimed:
Every day while we work, study, love, the colonels and generals who are planning our annihilation walk calmly in and out of its five sides. They have accumulated over 30,000 nuclear bombs at the rate of three to six bombs a day. They are determined to produce the billion-dollar MX missile… We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and the imagination. We have the right to be afraid.
The women, who would return with increased numbers again and again to mark the anniversary of their action with renewed demonstrations, symbolized the verve and potency with which women would address American militarism in the 1980s (in Jones 1983). Their presence at the very heart of military power served as a warning to those in high positions that women were going to take their place in the national debate concerning the shape of the future and the role of nuclear weapons within it. Women had determined to speak in their own voices and not leave the stage until they had been heard.
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