Biography
Bonnie Urfer is a longtime Nukewatch staff member and anti-nuclear activist who has been arrested more than fifty times at missile silos, weapons sites and military installations. She received an 18-month sentence in 1988 for entering three missile-silo sites and later served six months for a 2000 Plowshares action. For a July 5, 2010 sit-in at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex, a federal jury convicted her of trespass on May 11, 2011 and the court immediately jailed her. She received an eight-month sentence with credit for time served and was released on January 6, 2012.
The Winter 1998–99 Nukewatch Pathfinder names Joel Kilgore, John Heid, Bonnie Urfer and Sarah Arndt as arrested for trespassing during the October 4, 1998 Project ELF protest. It reports possible fines or suspension of Wisconsin driving rights, not an imposed jail term or an individual physical-release date. Source: https://www.laka.org/docu/magazines/nukewatch_pathfinder/1998-4-winter.pdf#page=2
Birth-year sources
- Nuclear Resister, September 14, 2011 — identifies 59-year-old Bonnie Urfer when she was sentenced for the Y-12 anti-nuclear action.
- Nuclear Resister, January 2015 — identifies Urfer as 62 in coverage of her later arrest at the Volk Field drone base. The two dated reports support 1952 as her birth year.
Photograph source
- Wisconsin Historical Society, “Nukewatch at the Gate” — identifies Bonnie Urfer speaking with a local police officer outside Project ELF in January 1999.
1995 custody evidence and limits
The Fall 1995 Pathfinder reports Bonnie Urfer recently released after serving six months for ELF resistance. This is completed physical custody, distinct from her currently recorded 2011–2012 Y-12 episode. It supplies neither an individual intake day nor an actual release day. Cory Bartholomew’s separately stored January admission cannot be copied to Bonnie, and six months is not converted into an exact day count.
Additional individually documented custody
Following the January 30, 1986 Madison courthouse protest, Bonnie Urfer initially signed a citation and was released. Two weeks later she and Sue Nelson pleaded no contest, refused the fine, and actually served two days in jail. Those two completed days are a separate later fine-refusal stay, not continuous imprisonment since the January 30 arrest. Exact admission, release and sentence days are not printed; February 13 is not silently inferred from the rounded phrase two weeks. March 6 trespass charges against Urfer were dismissed after removal from the building, not another multiday prison term.
The Nuclear Resister No.38, March 10, 1986, original PDF pages 2,3.
Nukewatch’s Summer 2002 report says Bonnie Urfer returned home on May 31 after completing a separate five-month term at the federal women’s camp in Greenville, Illinois, for refusing more than $7,000 in restitution to the Navy. It expressly distinguishes this from six months served in 2001 for the Silence Trident action. These were separate custody episodes.
The retrospective chronology reports a May 1993 release from Ashland County jail after discovery that the county trespass ordinance used against ELF protesters did not exist.
In a first-person account in the Winter 1998–99 Nukewatch Pathfinder, Bonnie Urfer described the October 19, 1998 anti-nuclear inspection action at Offutt Air Force Base: participants were searched, handcuffed and held on a bus while exclusion notices were processed, then released at the gate a couple of hours later. Nukewatch Pathfinder, Winter1998–99, PDF page 3.
The contemporary report and John LaForge’s firsthand account individually identify Bonnie Urfer among five activists taken into custody after entering Büchel Air Base to oppose deployment of U.S. B61 nuclear weapons in July 2017. The group entered after nightfall on July 17; the narrative then describes events around 1 a.m. and a meeting with the base commander at 3 a.m. They were searched, photographed and released without charges after about an hour in detention. Because the chronology crosses midnight, no exact calendar arrest or release day is assigned. The reported temporary base detention does not establish a prison admission or completed day in jail. Contemporary report, The Nuclear Resister.
Contemporary reports of the May 11, 2011 Y-12 trial describe a federal jury trespass conviction arising from the July 5, 2010 action in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Judge Bruce Guyton presided, and Jeff Theodore and Melissa Milliken acted for the prosecution. Bonnie Urfer was among seven defendants immediately taken into custody after declining continued supervised release pending sentencing. A June 3 update reports Bonnie Urfer transferred to the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia on May 28.
Sources: The Nuclear Resister, report 886; The Nuclear Resister, report 887; The Nuclear Resister, report 889.
John LaForge’s January 2015 retrospective describes Bonnie Urfer retiring after twenty-eight years as a Nukewatch co-director and identifies her as a co-founder, with Jane Simons, of the Women’s Jail Project in Madison, Wisconsin. Its statement that she had served over six and a half years across roughly one hundred civil-resistance actions is an approximate cumulative recollection, not a new individually dated stay or an exact day total.
Sources: Contemporary report.
Urfer’s June 2011 first-person account describes her confinement in the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia while awaiting Y-12 sentencing. Her discussion of prison conditions and other prisoners’ medical concerns is contemporaneous testimony, not evidence of a new custody episode or a completed nominal sentence.
Sources: The Nuclear Resister report 879.
Bonnie Urfer remained jailed after the August 6, 2005 Oak Ridge protest until court on August 9. The report individually records the release after three elapsed days. The arrest-processing releases of other protesters and their different sentences are separate.
Sources: The Nuclear Resister, No.138.
The September 2011 Y-12 sentencing update places Bonnie Urfer in Knox County jail while she awaited a September 14 hearing. This is a reported location during her existing post-verdict custody; the scheduled hearing itself was not an additional admission. The Nuclear Resister, contemporary source report 848.
