1926 - 2022 Bob Aldridge felt privileged: He had both job and income security as an aeronautical engineer at Lockheed Aircraft in California for sixteen years, beginning in the 1950s. By the 1970s, he was designing the Poseidon missile with its cluster of individually targeted re-entry vehicles, each carrying a nuclear warhead. It had a first-strike military potential (destroy enemy missiles before they can be launched in retaliation).
But increasingly, his conscience was deeply disturbed by what he was doing. He tried to compromise. “I built bombs as a profession and worked for peace as a hobby, taking part in public peace activities.” At the time, he and his wife, Janet, had six young children. They finally concluded that they had to do the unthinkable: Bob resigned his secure job, leading them to live a simpler life style, and engaged in peacemaking as a way of life.
Theirs is a powerful message: Families can be called to risk what single peace activists might risk for justice and peace.
Bob went on to write articles, and then books, making clear to his readers the U.S.'s nuclear strategy and its ever more frightening arsenal of nuclear weapons.
I had read Bob’s book, First Strike, 40 years ago. Then, approximately ten years ago, I met him online and joined a forum he established for dozens of people to strategize how we create the Global Satyagraha Movement to bring about unity of all people – what Dr. M. L. King called The Beloved Community. In 2020 he completed his last book, The Goodness Field: A Guide For Proactive Nonviolence.
Bob and Janet have been monthly Sustainers of Meta Peace Team for years, believing in our mission. We hold Bob’s memory and vision for a world of true peace in our hearts and minds.
by Peter Dougherty
A limited number of free copies of Bob’s book, The Goodness Field, are available from the MPT-Lansing office.
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