Vandenberg is about 50 miles north Santa Barbara, Calif. In a few days, activists will start converging on a nearby four-acre plot of land that Bud Boothe, a World War II veteran, donated to the Military Globalization Project. They're going to camp there and train to breach the base's security and possibly vandalize some of its equipment.

Lumsdaine, the Military Globalization Project coordinator, is a 48-year-old who has been arrested at Vandenberg twice. He describes the base as "the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance, and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war." The base is 99,000 square acres, with a perimeter running through rugged, wooded terrain. "If people are committed and determined and in halfway decent physical shape, it is possible to get in, because it's enormous and much of the land is still fairly wild," he says.

Within the base, Lumsdaine says, are "major off-limits security zones," that, when breached, "set off a series of responses in their own security procedures which require disruption and partial shut down of regular activities," which means the base can't operate at full capacity.

Other kinds of interference are also expected. "There's the possibility of people blockading roads and bridges inside Vandenberg and chaining themselves to gates," Lumsdaine says. "There are ways in which people can put small objects, aluminum foil or Mylar balloons in front of equipment to nonviolently get in the way of electronic telecommunications systems where they transmit attack orders or targeting data to Tommy Franks and his assault forces. We are not organizing people to disable equipment, but that potential exists. I can certainly say I as an individual do not oppose the disabling of equipment which is being used to conduct mass killing on the other side of the world."

Indeed, Lumsdaine served two years in federal prison for doing just that. In 1992, he was arrested for disabling an Air Force targeting satellite at the aerospace company Rockwell International. He's aware that a similar danger exists with this operation. Master Sgt. Lloyd Conley, a spokesperson for the base, is aware of Lumsdaine's plans, and while he declined to specify exactly what penalties would-be saboteurs might face (or what damage they could do), he emphasized that they would be subject to federal prosecution.

A Christian pacifist whose wife, Meg, is a Lutheran pastor, Lumsdaine is inspired by so-called plowshares actions that the late Philip Berrigan pioneered in the '80s, in which activists set out to destroy military equipment. In fact, Lumsdaine says that before Berrigan was diagnosed with cancer last year, he planned to join the action. Other big names in the protest movement have endorsed the Vandenberg plan, including Global Exchange's Medea Benjamin and Kathy Kelly from Voices in the Wilderness, a group that runs sanctions-busting trips to Iraq.

Lumsdaine is dismissive of the notion that a war could bring anything but carnage to the Iraqi people. "Saddam Hussein is unquestionably a murderous tyrant, but the argument that we're going in to right the wrongs of his regime is absurd," he says. "Even after the Gulf War, we specifically made a decision to throw the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings to Saddam's dogs. We could easily wind up in a situation where you have U.S. troops locked in battle with anti-Saddam forces. You could have a situation where you have many Iraqis taking turns shooting at Saddam's elite security forces and shooting at American invaders."

If U.S. troops do get bogged down, he believes only a robust domestic peace movement will stop Bush from using massive bombs that would kill civilians as well as enemy soldiers. In fact, contrary to Berman's argument, he's convinced only civil unrest stopped Nixon from going nuclear in Vietnam. "Resistance by people of conscience in the U.S. and other countries is going to play a key role in how far this war goes and how bad it gets," he says.

Though most of the planners of the Vandenberg action are religious people like him, Lumsdaine is also hoping the camp draws the kind of young direct-action aficionados who converged on Seattle to protest globalization in 1999. Vandenberg, he says, is "the WTO of global military terror. This is where people need to go. If I'm going to risk arrest, wouldn't I rather do that blocking strategic command operations targeting facilities than blocking traffic in San Francisco?"

Still, plenty of people are planning to protest the war by blocking traffic in San Francisco. Using an organizing model borrowed from anti-globalization demonstrations, Direct Action to Stop the War has mobilized "affinity groups" to take over different sections of downtown San Francisco the morning after a war begins. Interested parties can choose from a "menu" of targets on the group's Web site; they include major intersections, corporate headquarters and government buildings.

"We're going to occupy the Financial District, put our bodies out on the line to draw the connection between this war and some of the forces of cooperate globalization creating insecurity and the breeding grounds for terror," says Reinsborough. "Thousands of people, potentially tens of thousands, will be blockading streets and targeting the financial infrastructure. If war does break out, San Francisco is going to be a city to watch."

But not the only one. Kauffman expects many thousands to flood Times Square and midtown Manhattan and says that in London "the whole city is going to be shut down, I think for days."

Berman foresees something similar, but the prospect fills him with dismay. "It would be dreadful to think we might find ourselves stuck in a war abroad which might not necessarily go well, and also find ourselves in a situation at home where police are out fighting protesters in the streets," he says.

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