In 1958 Albert Bigelow, a former Navy commander turned Quaker pacifist, sailed the thirty-foot ketch Golden Rule toward the Marshall Islands to place his body inside the H-bomb test zone. Arrested twice in Honolulu with his crew and jailed sixty days for trying, Bigelow inspired the Phoenix of Hiroshima to complete the voyage into the zone weeks later — earning its skipper Earle Reynolds a federal conviction, later overturned.

The voyages, organized with the new Committee for Non-Violent Action, invented the template of direct interposition that Greenpeace would later make famous, and their jailed crews were the first prisoners of the anti-nuclear cause. CNVA's land campaigns — trespasses at Cheyenne's missile fields and the Omaha Action of 1959, where the elderly A.J. Muste climbed the fence — carried the same witness to the weapons themselves.