A 40-year fight against cluster bombs offers lessons to stop the US-Israel weapons pipeline

This article A 40-year fight against cluster bombs offers lessons to stop the US-Israel weapons pipeline was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After more than two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, popular outrage has mounted against the weapons manufacturers enabling the slaughter. The antiwar movement in the United States has begun targeting local nodes of the weapons supply chain in cities from Oakland to Brooklyn and Boston. These campaigns have deployed a breadth of strategies: pressuring local municipalities to divest, physically disrupting the supply chain through direct action, encouraging airports to adopt arms embargo policies and demanding public and private industrial landlords evict weapons companies. 

As these campaigns proliferate, they can learn much from the anti-weapons movement that arose in the late 20th century. One historic campaign in Minneapolis that originated during the Vietnam War, the Honeywell Project, is particularly instructive. Across four decades of resistance, the Honeywell Project demonstrated that when people organize sustained campaigns, evoke both outrage and camaraderie through art, and take risks, it is possible to slow the gears of the weapons machine. 

On Oct. 24, 1983, at the height of the resistance, thousands of protesters gathered in South Minneapolis to blockade the headquarters of Honeywell, a multinational corporation that supplied the U.S. military with weapons and nuclear technology. Organizers with the Honeywell Project expected a couple hundred people to show up. But turnout far exceeded their expectations.

“We closed the headquarters for a good 12 hours,” said Larry Dunham, a rank-and-file Honeywell Project member. “We had enough people sitting in the street and by the main entryway to the headquarters that nobody could get in.” 

Eventually, the police were called, arresting 577 activists, including Dunham, in one of the largest mass arrests in Minneapolis history. 

“The core goal was simple: to force Honeywell to stop making weapons,”  Dunham said. 

It would take more than five decades, but the Honeywell Project would at least partially succeed in that goal.

Like today’s anti-weapons activists, the organizers of the Honeywell Project argued that resisting domestic weapons manufacturers was the most effective way for people in the U.S. to act in solidarity with people devastated by U.S. imperialist wars. They were focused on one weapon in particular, a favorite of the U.S. during the Vietnam War: the cluster bomb. 

Cluster bombs are “anti-personnel weapons,” meaning they are not designed to damage property, but to kill people. Each cluster bomb consists of what the Air Force called a “mother bomb” that explodes mid-air, releasing hundreds of miniature “bomblets” at velocities capable of tearing through human flesh. Researchers estimate that cluster bombs were responsible for more civilian deaths than any other weapon in the Vietnam War, killing more than 50,000 civilians in Laos and thousands in Vietnam.

The Honeywell Project and its successor, Alliant Action, had three distinct eras of action, beginning in 1968 when organizers uncovered Honeywell’s role in manufacturing cluster bombs, peaking in the early 1980s during a wave of escalated mass protest, and reigniting in the late 1990s when activists targeted a Honeywell spinoff called Alliant Techsystems. While tactics evolved through the decades, the twin strengths of the Honeywell Project remained — persistence and camaraderie. 

Base-building and shareholder action

In 1968, a small, tight-knit group of Minneapolis Catholics, feminists, students, labor organizers, veterans and hippies who shared a disgust for the Vietnam War started scheming. Heeding a recent article by famed organizer Staughton Lynd that called on the antiwar movement to target weapons companies, this motley crew began researching the local supply chain. They uncovered contracts between the U.S. military and Honeywell, a Minnesota-based company known for its HVAC products. Honeywell was quietly the state’s largest weapons manufacturer — and these weapons were being made in nearby suburbs. The activists had found their target.

Sara Driscoll was introduced to the Honeywell Project soon after its founding by Marv Davidov, a charismatic leader whom another activist named Mary Lou Ott described as a “peace guru.” Davidov, who died in 2012, was a gravitational force in the Minneapolis antiwar movement, committed to political education and mentoring future generations of organizers. 

Driscoll met Davidov at an antiwar poetry reading and they connected again a day later. “We sat and talked for two or three hours, and he basically changed my life,” Driscoll said. 

She soon joined Davidov and a core group of Honeywell Project organizers at educational events throughout the Twin Cities, where they raised awareness about the campaign and built a wide base of support. “There were teach-ins happening all the time in churches, community centers, college campuses, everywhere,” Driscoll said. 

This political education raised awareness about cluster bombs and recruited people to the campaign. That base-building bore fruit in a large demonstration outside Honeywell’s annual meeting on April 28, 1970. Inside the meeting, shareholders allied with the Honeywell Project planned on forcing a vote to void military contracts. Meanwhile, 3,000 protesters marched from a nearby park to Honeywell’s headquarters, putting additional pressure on the board.

In an unplanned escalation, some protesters – whom Honeywell Project organizers suspect were goaded by FBI infiltrators – began smashing windows, scuffling with police and storming the building. Honeywell executives seized on the commotion to cancel the shareholder meeting after only 14 minutes, scuttling the vote. Later, the ACLU and activists would sue the FBI and Honeywell for illegal collusion and won a $70,000 settlement from the FBI, which admitted infiltration while denying wrongdoing.

Press coverage of the action was overwhelmingly negative and many organizers experienced burnout. They still planned sporadic actions for a few years, but by 1975, with the end of the Vietnam War, the Honeywell Project had mostly petered out. 

While the defining war of the era was over, this did not spell the demise of weapons manufacturers, nor the end of the anti-weapons struggle. 

The birth of principled escalation

On Sept. 9, 1980, eight protesters broke into a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania, smashing components of two nuclear missiles. This action catalyzed the Plowshares Movement and fomented escalations throughout the antiwar movement. 

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Honeywell still manufactured cluster bombs and had taken a leading role in developing nuclear weapons systems. The dormant Honeywell Project was ripe for revival. 

In 1981, a Jesuit priest and member of the Plowshares Eight, Carl Kabot, gave a talk at the University of Minnesota about the link between global war and poverty. During the Q&A, discussions turned towards methods of combating local weapons infrastructure. Davidov happened to be in the audience. “What about Honeywell?” he asked.

After Kabat’s talk, organizers, including Davidov, relaunched the Honeywell Project. They staged weekly vigils outside of Honeywell’s offices, combining political education with an appeal to spirituality. But to no avail. After many months of vigils, a rumor spread that the Honeywell chairman, Edson Spencer, had said they “could stand there until hell freezes over, as long as [they] don’t cause trouble,” activist Charles Madigan recalled to Mordecai Specktor, a journalist and historian of the Honeywell Project.

It was time to escalate. On Nov. 4, 1982, dozens of protesters padlocked and barricaded the doors to Honeywell’s headquarters. To their surprise, the police did not show up for over 20 hours, and activists held the blockade overnight, shutting down business for nearly a full day before police arrived the next day and arrested 36 protesters. This action marked a new approach for the Honeywell Project, defined by principled disruption. 

Escalation in the antiwar movement coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan and an age of political repression not unlike today. Reagan regularly disparaged the antiwar movement and encouraged crackdowns on college campuses, even once declaring: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” The era was defined by “general lunatic tenor of [Reagan’s] administration’s policies,” Specktor wrote. 

People feared that Reagan might start a nuclear war. Because of this existential threat, the Honeywell Project was able to recruit hundreds and sometimes thousands of protesters to high-risk actions despite the likelihood of retaliation. The thousands-strong Oct. 24, 1983 blockade was one of the largest actions in Minneapolis history in which activists risked arrest. 

“One goal was to try to get so many people arrested that the court system was choked,” Dunham said. Nearly 2,000 arrests were made during this second wave of Honeywell Project protests. Eighty-five criminal trials led to 67 acquittals, and sentences were short: In the first 20 years of the Honeywell Project, activists spent only a cumulative three years in jail.

“It was the scale that allowed us to be successful,” Dunham said. 

Joy and outrage through art and camaraderie

Davidov estimated to Specktor that 80 percent of participants in Honeywell Project actions had previously never been to a protest in their lives. 

The effective use of art at Honeywell Project events was the kindling that ignited many to join the movement. To help people visualize what the weapons they were protesting actually looked like and how they functioned, artists crafted clay models of bomblets, designed satirical bomb-shaped puppets and made flyers featuring images of civilians mutilated by cluster bombs. The images elicited a visceral fury in the aftermath of the war. 

“Marv [Davidov] was great at emphasizing in-depth imagery of how the cluster bombs killed people,” Dunham said. “People felt a lot of guilt and rage from the Vietnam War.” 

Outrage alone was not enough, however. To build a durable movement capable of material disruption, the Honeywell Project also centered camaraderie. Driscoll recalled an action at Honeywell’s CEO’s office where protesters were “combative and serious but also laughing half the time.” 

For Mary Lou Ott, who joined as a young mother in the 1960s, contemplating the nightmarish possibility of her six boys getting drafted to Vietnam “set her on fire,” and the camaraderie she found in the Honeywell Project led to a full life of political action. 

“I remember the first time I ever went to jail, the parking lot was filled with people hollering and singing,” Ott said. “I was never frightened because there was so much solidarity.”

Ott, who is now in her 90s, was arrested 20 times and jailed eight times during her four decades of Honeywell Project involvement.

“The camaraderie we built was lasting,” Ott said. “We weren’t just a group of people out there objecting to the way things are done, but we also took care of one another.”

Corporations as adversaries, workers as potential allies

Even Honeywell workers were moved. From the onset of the Honeywell Project in the 1960s, one of the first tactics was leafleting workers outside Honeywell’s manufacturing plants. “When we went to the factories and talked to workers, it was not to be anti-worker,” Driscoll said. 

The Honeywell Project was not afraid to disrupt business, but the activists distinguished between the corporation — their adversary — and workers, as potential allies who were often unaware of Honeywell’s role in the Vietnam War.

One engineer, Mark Paquette, quit his job working on a nuclear missile system and about-faced to attend Honeywell Project protests and develop software for an antiwar education initiative.

A former marketing writer for Honeywell, Bill Weinstein, quit his job in 1984. “By your protests of Honeywell … you make the company acknowledge that their business may be considered morally repugnant, work that should be best done hidden,” he wrote in a memorable letter to Honeywell Project organizers. “I have quit for this reason; others have quit for the same; more will, for I have never talked with anyone at Honeywell who hasn’t volunteered that he or she found the work sordid. … Your voice has a profound effect. I think it’s important you know that, and important that you continue to protest.”

The success of sustained pressure

After years of escalated protests, thousands of arrests and workers defecting, Honeywell’s reputation was steeped in infamy. In 1989, this reached a tipping point. “They knew that their secret was out,” Ott said, “and they couldn’t get away with it anymore.” 

Honeywell decided to spin off its weapons business into a separate corporation called Alliant Techsystems. While Honeywell denied that the protests factored into the decision (as is typical in such cases), organizers felt otherwise. A couple of years later, the Honeywell Project disbanded.

Yet cluster bombs and other weapons were still being manufactured in Minneapolis suburbs, under the new corporate banner. 

Once again, it was a visiting speaker who triggered a new era of anti-weapons action. Susan B. Walker of the aid nonprofit Handicap International (now Humanity & Inclusion) spoke to Community of St. Martin, an ecumenical Christian congregation in Minneapolis, about how landmines, another anti-personnel weapon, had maimed thousands of people around the world. Outrage was building over unexploded landmines deployed by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Human Rights Watch had recently uncovered that in addition to the cluster bomb, those landmines were being manufactured in a Minneapolis suburb by Alliant Techsystems. 

“So a group of us that were part of the Honeywell Project decided to start a campaign at Alliant Tech,” said Steve Clemens, a conscientious objector who was in the audience at St. Martin’s. 

The ethos of this new campaign, Alliant Action, was unremitting persistence. For 15 years, from 1996 to 2011, protesters held an hour-long vigil outside Alliant’s headquarters every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. 

“We were out there even — and especially — when it was 30 below zero, or when it was raining,” Clemens said. “The workers had to drive by us going to the plant every single week.” 

Eventually, Alliant moved its headquarters from Hopkins to another Minneapolis suburb, Edina. When demonstrations continued in Edina, it relocated to yet another suburb, Eden Prairie, claiming this new facility was “protester proof.” But Alliant Action kept showing up. 

The group also organized bi-annual escalations like blockading the doors of Alliant’s headquarters, stalling business for the day. Clemens was arrested 15 times at these protests and served two 10-day prison sentences, which he chronicled afterward on a blog “to demystify the jail experience so others might consider taking those risks themselves.”

In 2010 — after 14 years of protest — Alliant Action members, including Clemens, met with Alliant’s then-CEO Mark DeYoung to persuade him that being associated with cluster bombs, landmines and nuclear weapons was bad for his legacy. A year later, Alliant Techsystems moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., which Clemens believes was partly a result of the sustained protests. Shortly after the move, Alliant spun off its weapons business, which was sold in 2018 to Northrop Grumman, the third largest global weapons manufacturer. But the new owners found they had inherited something toxic, even by the standards of a company whose sole purpose is making weapons.

In 2021, Northrop Grumman announced it had stopped manufacturing the cluster bomb, citing investor concerns about the human rights implications. But Northrop Grumman continues to manufacture other weapons, like missile guidance kits and automatic cannons, outside Minneapolis. These operations have been the target of recent anti-weapons actions, including a February 2024 blockade in the suburb of Plymouth.

Building a united front

Was the Honeywell Project successful? To an extent. The Honeywell Project certainly was bad for business, made it difficult to manufacture weapons locally and factored into the eventual demise of U.S.-made cluster bombs. 

Forcing weapons companies to slow production and expend resources on moving locations — as the Honeywell Project did — is a local win, but should also be understood in a broader antiwar context. It is not enough to resist weapons in one city if the weapons manufacturers are able to pack up and move somewhere else. Today, wars continue to be waged and weapons forged throughout the U.S. 

After nearly 60 years of antiwar activism, Clemens believes that the most important thing today is that “people should be aware of what companies are in their own communities.” 

The Palestinian Youth Movement, or PYM, recently announced a global campaign to do just that. During a webinar launching the People’s Embargo for Palestine on Nov. 22, a PYM organizer named Kaleem shared that “since 2023, our research unit has developed a series of methodologies for tracking military cargo, weapons, fuel and coal shipments that are critical in the supply chain for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.” This research was published in a series of reports, detailing local nodes of the global weapons supply chain and leading to the development of local arms embargo campaigns.

As this united front grows, it can draw many lessons from the Honeywell Project.

For one, the antiwar movement need not alienate workers. Strategic organizing and disciplined messaging have the potential to move workers at complicit companies into alignment and even action. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign led by technology workers, for example, is already gaining momentum. On Sept. 25, under pressure from employees involved with the campaign, Microsoft decided to stop providing Israeli spy agencies access to its Azure platform, which was being used to surveil Palestinians.

Today, the weapons of choice for countries waging war are somewhat nebulous in the imagination of everyday people. Autonomous drones and missile guidance systems made with computer chips and artificial intelligence technology may feel less tangible than a plane spraying deadly projectiles. This points to a crucial task for today’s movement artists: helping the public visualize the new age of war and weaponry. 

But according to Ott, the most effective factor throughout the Honeywell Project’s long history was consistency: “They need to know you’re not going away.”

This article A 40-year fight against cluster bombs offers lessons to stop the US-Israel weapons pipeline was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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