King, Dave

On 26 November, a wide range of groups are organising a Lucas Plan 40th anniversary conference at Birmingham Voluntary Service Council. It is 40 years since the workers at the Lucas Aerospace arms company proposed making alternative socially-useful products, while retaining jobs.

The conference will both celebrate the achievements of the Lucas workers and, we hope, reinvigorate a movement for arms conversion and democratic control of the economy. The Lucas Plan showed that…

Nowadays, technology takes the lion’s share of military budgets and it is technological superiority, far more than numbers of soldiers, that determines who has military superiority. Not content with nuclear MADness, the military in different countries are busy developing cyber-warfare, directed energy weapons, enhancement of soldiers’ capabilities with brain-computer interfaces, drones that take their own targeting decisions, and robot soldiers. They’re also discussing biological weapons…