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Now, dressed in a sweatsuit that fellow inmates had given her, the nun was traveling to the American headquarters of her order in Rosemont, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia. The agenda was to confer with her superiors about her future — one in which she plans to continue her anti-nuclear activism. One threat was that the federal government might challenge the recent ruling and try to have her thrown back in prison.

“It would be an honor,” Sister Rice said during the ride. “Good Lord, what would be better than to die in prison for the anti-nuclear cause?”……..

Sister Rice, thin but seemingly healthy, was in high spirits and voluble as she talked about her religious order, her atomic radicalization, her life in prison and what may come next.

Even before she broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Sister Rice had been arrested dozens of times for acts of civil disobedience. She and other peace activists once blocked a truck rumbling across a nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. Twice she had served six-month jail sentences.

The pacifists belong to the Plowshares movement, a loose, mostly Christian group that seeks the global elimination of nuclear arms.

The Tennessee action took place on a Saturday night in July 2012. Sister Rice, then 82, Michael Walli, 63, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 57, cut through barbed-wire fences at the Oak Ridge complex. Making their way to the inner sanctum, full of uranium, they splashed human blood on the windowless building, spray-painted its walls with peace slogans, hammered at its concrete base and draped it in crime-scene tape.

After being convicted in May 2013, Sister Rice was sentenced to three years and the two men to five years. She was imprisoned in Tennessee, then Georgia, and in March 2014 was sent to Brooklyn, just off the Gowanus Expressway.

The nun told how a single large room at the Brooklyn prison had housed more than 100 women. …..She said a gifted legal team, working pro bono, had seemingly materialized out of thin air to fight the government’s sabotage charge. The court’s overturning of the anti-nuclear conviction this month was hailed as a legal first……..

she insisted that the United States, by keeping a vast arsenal, was violating its global disarmament pledges and ultimately courting disaster.

“It’s making other countries feel compelled to have nuclear weapons,” she said, going on to mimic the me, too logic: “If you have them, we have to have them.”…….http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/science/sister-megan-rice-anti-nuclear-weapons-activist-freed-from-prison.html?_r=0