Biography
On August 10, 1984 LaForge and Barbara Katt walked into the Sperry Defense Systems plant at Eagan, Minnesota dressed as corporate quality-control inspectors, damaged two prototype guidance computers intended for Trident submarines and F-4G aircraft with household hammers, poured blood over the equipment and delivered a citizens indictment accusing the company of violating international law. A jury convicted them on October 11, 1984 of felony destruction of government property; on November 8 Judge Miles W. Lord suspended the entire six-month sentence in favour of six months of unsupervised probation, in a sentencing speech attacking nuclear-weapons production and the contrast with Sperry’s own overbilling of the government. Neither served prison time for the action. John LaForge has been a coordinator of Nukewatch in Luck, Wisconsin since the mid-1980s and has been one of the longest-running U.S. anti-nuclear organizers, focused first on Project ELF (the Navy's extremely-low-frequency submarine command system in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, which Nukewatch helped force the Navy to shut down in 2004) and later on the U.S. nuclear arsenal stationed at Büchel Air Base in Germany. In 2018 he traveled to Germany and entered Büchel multiple times in symbolic disarmament actions; in January 2023 he became the first U.S. citizen since the Cold War to be sentenced to a German prison for anti-nuclear protest, serving approximately seven months at Koblenz before his release in summer 2023.
