Nuclear weapons

In December, the three women leaders of Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales, the Scottish National Party and the Green Party of England and Wales (Leanne Wood, Nicola Sturgeon and Natalie Bennett) agreed to join forces to oppose billions being wasted on the replacement of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapon system, calling instead for investment in communities, creating jobs and rebuilding the economy.

In the event of a hung parliament in May, with these three parties together…

Trident submarine. Photo: Paul O’Shau/MOD

Different groups are using different strategies to try to make an election issue out of Trident replacement. The British decision on whether/how to replace the Trident nuclear weapon system is scheduled to be made in 2016, which means the 7 May 2015 election will elect the government that takes this £100bn decision. This has been described as ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scrap Trident and ban all nuclear weapons’.

Lobbying…

In the summer of 1946, ‘more than half the world’s supply of motion picture film... was loaded aboard US Army Air Force planes and dispatched to Bikini Atoll’ where it was used to photograph Operations Able and Baker – the second and fourth nuclear bomb explosions respectively – generating over a million still images and several million feet of moving image matter.

Some of these pictures are reproduced in this collection of essays and photographs, which ranges widely over the last…

On 22 September, Trident Ploughshares and Faslane Peace Camp blockaded
Faslane, homeport of the UK Trident nuclear weapons system. Photo: Trident Ploughshares

I got a lesson once in how to handle serious disappointment – one that I have never forgotten. It was 2001, and the Scottish high court had just pulled the rug from under a growing hope that Trident might be outlawed in the British courts. This was almost three years after sheriff Margaret Gimblett had famously acquitted…

On 25 July, 10 protesters against nuclear weapons blocked the entrance to Plymouth’s Devonport dockyard for four hours with a red Ford Focus.

Two members of the Trident Ploughshares group attached themselves to the car, which blocked the Camel’s Head main gate to the dockyard, to prevent the refitting of Trident nuclear missile submarines.

The pair were arrested and charged with aggravated trespass.

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Over 50 people were arrested in August in the US for protesting against nuclear weapons.

On Hiroshima Day, 6 August:

On Nagasaki Day, 9 August:

CND Cymru commemorated the 69th anniversary of Hiroshima’s tragedy, when the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the city in 1945, with a slow peace walk around the Eisteddfod Maes in Llanelli, accompanied by Côr Cochion’s songs of peace, and the unrolling of a portion of the 11-mile-long ‘Wool against Weapons’ knitting. The second bomb, dropped on 9 August 1945, devastated Nagasaki.

In memory of its victims, Côr Cochion sang the poetic ‘Lullaby of Oleander’ by a Japanese A-bomb…

On Nagasaki Day, 9 August, many from across Wales joined with others from the UK, Europe and the rest of the world in stretching a colourful 11-mile-long knitted scarf between the Aldermaston and Burghfield nuclear bomb factories.

It was a beautiful, joyful culmination of months of extraordinary effort by so many people and, coinciding with the big demonstrations for Gaza in London and elsewhere, poignantly showed the need for general disarmament and spending of resources in…

Despite its length Paul Ingram’s defence of BASIC’s Trident Commission report (PN 2572-73) leaves many unanswered questions.Your headline to his article suggests benefits. It seems to me that the report has done considerable harm.

How did the members get chosen?

If you asked some senior and respectable fishmongers their views about an essential diet you would not be surprised if they came up with fish.

No surprise that the commission, granted its…

A familiar jibe aimed at people active in the nuclear disarmament movement is that they are engaged in a single-issue campaign. A simple answer has always been to hand: most of those active in anti-nuke work are also up to their eyes in other work for social change. However, this collection of essays adds another dimension to this response by cataloguing in detail the way that nukes are intrinsically linked to many other ills.

Hugely informative, it also aims to persuade more…

Early on 11 July, a military convoy carrying nuclear warheads was stopped for one hour near Loch Lomond by protesters from Faslane Peace Camp. One person climbed on top of a nuclear transporter; four were arrested.

The 20-vehicle convoy, with four special transporter lorries to carry 100-kiloton nuclear warheads, had driven through the centre of Glasgow shortly after midnight.

The convoy, from AWE Burghfield to the Coulport nuclear store, was tracked by Nukewatch and…

On 9 June, the Trident Ploughshares direct action network blocked all vehicle entrances at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (awe) Burghfield for five hours. The factory cancelled all deliveries for the day.

The action, which was part of the Action AWE campaign, began at 6.45am with blockades of all three vehicle entrances. At the Construction Gate, a trailer was steered across the entrance and four protesters locked-on. A ministry of defence (MoD) road leading to the Main Gate was…

At 2.30pm on 30 June, 15 people arrived to report the Trident nuclear weapons system as a crime at Llandrindod police station as part of the Action AWE week of ‘Reportings of Trident Crime’ all around the country.

A Llandrindod police sergeant said that a rural police force could not deal with these kinds of crimes as they had no knowledge of international law. I asked that they deal with it in the same way as they would deal with a report of a threat to murder, because when the…

On 5 July, a 120-metre-long pink scarf, knitted by opponents of nuclear weapons, was unfurled through the centre of Knighton (Tref-y-clawdd).

The unfurling procession was led by a town crier, joined by the Teme Valley Ceilidh Band, hand-bell ringers, the Pales Peace Choir and a huge Welsh red dragon.

Many local residents offered their support to the knitters. Knighton resident Karen Plant said: ‘This protest has been fun but it has a serious message, namely the…

I lead BASIC, an organisation that has been working for nuclear disarmament for almost 30 years, and that on 1 July published the report of the Trident Commission that BASIC convened in February 2011. The commission has recommended that Britain retain its nuclear deterrent (along with other recommendations the government might find a little more challenging).

Some people have been asking whether BASIC has gone over to the ‘dark side’.

Pluralistic thinking

I…