Use the Surrender Tactic: At Seabrook, the Side That Gave Up Set the Price. Twice.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s twenty-second law says the weaker side should give in rather than lose with honor. At Seabrook, 1,414 protesters surrendered to arrest and left the state holding the bill. Eleven years later the plant’s bankrupt owner surrendered to the courts and came out with a statute.

On May 1, 1977, state police began removing protesters from the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant. Some had to be dragged or carried. By the time it was over, 1,414 people had been arrested for trespassing, one of the largest mass arrests in American history. They did not fight. They did not run. Most of them refused to post bail, which meant the State of New Hampshire now had to house, feed and guard more than a thousand people in National Guard armories. Gov. Meldrim Thomson had called the demonstrations “a front for terrorist activity,” the Associated Press recalled years later. Within two weeks the state agreed to let the 550 still held walk out on their own recognizance.

Robert Greene’s twenty-second law is the surrender tactic. When you are the weaker side, he writes, do not fight for honor and lose. Give in. Surrender buys time, puts the stronger side at ease and leaves it holding problems it did not expect. Handled well, giving up becomes a way of winning.

Seabrook is where New Hampshire learned the law twice. In 1977 the protesters lost the site and won the argument by surrendering to arrest and refusing to leave jail. Eleven years later the plant’s main owner, Public Service Company of New Hampshire, or PSNH, lost the fight for rate relief and surrendered itself to bankruptcy court. It came out with what the courts and a 1979 state law had refused it: a statute and a signed agreement that set up seven projected years of rate increases. Both sides at Seabrook got more by giving up than by holding the line.

The surrender in the marsh

Seabrook was proposed in 1972 as a twin-reactor plant at an estimated $973 million, the AP reported in a 2007 retrospective. Opponents organized as the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition built on small affinity groups and a strict rule of nonviolence. The first arrest came in January 1976, when Ron Rieck spent 36 cold hours atop a weather observation tower on the site, the AP reported. Arrests grew from 18 to 180 later that year. Each round tested the same idea: that being carried off the site could keep the plant in the news. The spring 1977 occupation was the test of whether the method could work at scale.

More than 2,000 people walked onto the site on April 30, some of them through the tidal marshes around it. Thomson sent state police and National Guard troops and ordered the occupiers to leave before construction crews returned Monday. They stayed. They were arrested. And then the surrender turned into a different kind of pressure, because most of them would not pay bail.

The state now had a problem it had built for itself. The detainees were held in National Guard armories across the state, among them Manchester and Concord, for up to two weeks. Harvey Wasserman, a Clamshell organizer, later wrote that the detention cost taxpayers “tens of thousands of dollars per day”; that is an advocate’s estimate, and Granite State Report found no state figure. On May 13, an agreement with the state let 550 remaining detainees go on their own recognizance, with no bail posted.

The Swarthmore Global Nonviolent Action Database, which catalogs campaigns like this one, credits the arrest numbers and “sympathetic media coverage” with turning the occupation into a victory for the protesters. The AP’s 2007 account went further and said the protest sparked a national anti-nuclear movement, with alliances modeled on the Clamshell springing up across the country. Arnie Alpert, who had organized two busloads of Wesleyan students for the occupation, told the AP that its tactics and training later spread to the peace and gay rights movements. Thomson was out of office within two years, replaced by Democrat Hugh Gallen, though the record does not tie his loss to Seabrook. That is the surrender tactic in its purest form. The weaker side gave the stronger side exactly what it demanded, an end to the occupation, and handed it a bill, a news story and a movement in exchange.

The plant got built anyway

The occupation did not stop Seabrook. The plant’s cost kept climbing, and the people paying for it changed the rules. In 1979 the Legislature passed RSA 378:30-a, the law above, which barred utilities from charging customers for a plant before it produced power. For PSNH, which owned the largest share of Seabrook and was borrowing to build it, that law was a wall.

PSNH had already come close to the edge once. In 1984 it avoided bankruptcy only by halting Seabrook construction for three months and borrowing $425 million, the Crimson reported. From October 1987 on, it defaulted on more than $700 million in unsecured bonds, and three banks sued.

By January 1988 the wall had won. The New Hampshire Supreme Court refused PSNH an emergency rate increase and upheld the construction-work law, the Harvard Crimson reported. Two days later, on Jan. 28, PSNH filed for Chapter 11 protection with $2.7 billion in assets, $2.1 billion of it invested in Seabrook. It was the first major investor-owned utility to seek bankruptcy since the Depression and, by the Crimson’s count, the fourth-largest company ever to file under Chapter 11. The reactor had cost $5.2 billion and was finished but still lacked a commercial operating license because of problems with evacuation planning. Robert Backus, a longtime Seabrook opponent, called the filing “the final admission that it was a mistake.” Gov. John H. Sununu, a Seabrook supporter, called it regrettable.

The surrender in the courtroom

Here the law turned again. A utility that could not win one emergency rate increase from the Supreme Court went into bankruptcy and came out with a statute. In a December 1989 special session the Legislature enacted RSA 362-C, titled “Reorganization of Public Service Company of New Hampshire.” The chapter’s findings say the bankruptcy threatened the adequacy, reliability and cost of electric service and that the state needed a prompt resolution.

The fix was an agreement signed for the state by the governor and the attorney general with Northeast Utilities, the Connecticut company that would buy PSNH. RSA 362-C ordered “a 5.5 percent temporary rate surcharge” on PSNH’s retail rates starting Jan. 1, 1990, and said any later change that could raise rates further would need the Legislature’s approval. In July 1990 the Public Utilities Commission, after 21 days of hearings and in a 200-page report, found the takeover consistent with the public good. The Bangor Daily News reported that the rate agreement projected seven annual increases of 5.5 percent and valued the plan at $2.3 billion. Special Commissioner John Nassikas called the 5.5 percent figure realistic but said there was “no guarantee” it would hold for all seven years. Testimony at the hearings had suggested increases could run as high as 8.5 percent, which drew public criticism.

The surrender also spread. RSA 362-C let the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative put the same 5.5 percent surcharge on its own members while it worked out a rate plan to stay out of bankruptcy. And it froze the way base rate revenue was split among classes of customers for the life of the fixed-rate term, so no class could be handed a bigger share while the deal ran.

Read it as Greene would. In 1988 PSNH was the weaker party. It could not raise rates, could not pay its bondholders and could not win in court. Fighting on meant more lost cases and a slower collapse. Surrender changed the board. Bankruptcy put a federal judge between PSNH and its creditors, made the state a negotiator instead of a judge, and gave a stronger company, Northeast Utilities, a reason to step in. Northeast Utilities took over PSNH’s management in April 1990 and agreed to a total price of about $2.36 billion, according to a company history. Ratepayers got a utility out of bankruptcy and a schedule of increases. The utility got the rate path the 1979 law and the Supreme Court had denied it.

The Legislature’s own findings explain why the stronger side gave ground. A sound electric system, RSA 362-C:1 says, supports the public welfare and the state’s economic growth, and growing demand for power required a prompt end to the bankruptcy. A state that needs the lights on cannot let a major utility fail slowly. That need was PSNH’s real bargaining power, and bankruptcy was how the company got to use it.

A fair objection

The case against reading Seabrook as a double win is strong. The Clamshell Alliance did not stop the plant. Seabrook Unit 1 received its commercial license in March 1990 as a single reactor, the AP reported, at a cost of $6.5 billion. The movement grew; the reactor got built. It still runs. In 2024, Granite State Report found from federal energy data, the plant made 57 percent of the electricity generated in New Hampshire. Surrender won the Clams an audience, not the outcome they occupied the marsh to get. Their second reactor never came, but the record does not tie its cancellation to the occupation.

PSNH’s surrender also had a price, and its customers paid much of it. They were handed a statute that set up rate increases, and the commissioner who approved the deal would not promise they would stop at 5.5 percent. The anti-construction-work law, written to protect ratepayers from paying for an unfinished plant, ended up as the reason ratepayers paid for a finished one through a bankruptcy settlement. A surrender that wins for the surrendering side can still lose for the public.

And Greene’s version of the law is cynical in a way the Clams were not. He describes surrender as a way to buy time, gather strength and wait for the victor to weaken, with the real aim kept hidden. The occupiers said what they were doing and why, and did it in public. They used the form of the tactic without hiding their aims.

The verdict

Greene’s twenty-second law holds in New Hampshire, and Seabrook shows it from both sides of the fence. In 1977 the weaker side gave up the site, kept its discipline and left the state holding 1,414 arrests, a row of crowded armories and a story it could not control. In 1988 the weaker side gave up the company, walked into a courtroom it could not lose in the same way and walked out with a statute. Neither side got everything. Each got more than it was winning by fighting.

The lesson travels past the seacoast. The party that cannot win a fight can still choose where the fight ends, and the terms of a surrender can be worth more than the battle. In New Hampshire the stronger side at Seabrook kept winning the battles. The weaker side kept setting the price.

Next: Law 23, on concentrating your forces, tested against the New Hampshire record.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. The 1977 occupation is reconstructed from Associated Press, History.com, the Swarthmore database and accounts by Clamshell participants, each attributed. PSNH’s bankruptcy and reorganization rest on the statutes at gc.nh.gov, a federal bankruptcy court order and contemporary news reports. Rate figures are the agreement’s projections as reported, not a record of bills. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data. Granite State Report did not request comment from Eversource, the Public Utilities Commission or Clamshell participants for this piece; any of them may write to the address above and a response will be added with its date.