Historic sailboat to begin 10,000-mile anti-war voyage on St. Croix River

Golden Rule first sailed to stop nuclear weapon testing in Pacific Ocean in 1958.

September 9, 2022

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Golden Rule arrives in Hudson, Wis. on Sept. 7 (Photo courtesy Veterans for Peace)

From Sept 2022 through Dec 2023 the Golden Rule will sail around the eastern United States, called the “Great Loop”, on a mission to educate the rest of the country about how they can help stop the possibility of nuclear war.

Golden Rule arrived by truck to the St. Croix Marina in Hudson, WI near Minneapolis to begin “The Great Loop”. The voyage will take 15 months and we will visit approximately 100 cities and small towns in 10,000 miles. Learn more.

The Golden Rule is a project of Veterans For Peace. We aim to advance Veterans For Peace opposition to nuclear weapons and war, and to do so in a dramatic fashion.

We have recovered and restored the original peace ship, the Golden Rule, that set sail in 1958 to stop nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, and which inspired the many peace makers and peace ships that followed.

The Golden Rule was the very first of the environmental and peace vessels to go to sea. In 1958, a crew of anti-nuclear weapons activists set sail aboard her in an attempt to interpose themselves and the boat between the U.S. Government and its atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

At that time both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were conducting aboveground tests of very large nuclear weapons, which produced readily detectable clouds of radioactive fallout that wafted around the planet. Radiation contamination began to turn up in cows’ and mothers’ milk. Public concern grew, and for the first time many middle-class Americans began to wonder if their government knew what it was doing.

She was twice boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard at Hawaii, and the crew were arrested, tried, and jailed in Honolulu. But, far from being defeated, their example helped to ignite a storm of world-wide public outrage against nuclear weapons that resulted in the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, and which has continued down to the present in the many organizations still working to abolish weapons of mass destruction.

The reborn Golden Rule is sailing once more, to show that nuclear abolition is possible, and that bravery and tenacity can overcome militarism.

The Golden Rule crew spreads the word about the continuing dangers of nuclear power, and the poisoning of the air, water and soil from the entire nuclear cycle, from uranium mining to the disposal of nuclear waste.