Nuclear weapons

At 5am on 1 November, anti-nuclear campaigners began to nonviolently blockade the Devonport dockyard in Plymouth where Trident nuclear submarines are maintained and re-fitted. The blockade, called by the Plymouth-based Trident Ploughshares group “The Tamarians”, was not cleared until 9.45am.

By the end of the day, 14 people had been arrested at Camelshead gate. They had used a variety of methods to blockade, including attaching themselves to a car and joining themselves together…

”Short” is the key word here

Immediately after being fined £500 for blockading Faslane two women painted their judgement on the walls of the Dumbarton court building. Barbara Dowling wrote “This JP court does not uphold international law” on an interior wall while Janet Fenton painted “We want a peace court” over the brass plaque by the entrance. They now may face jury trial for an alleged £3000 worth of damage on vandalism charges.

The painting was an indictment of the Scottish courts’ persistent refusal…

The dogma of deterrence is now so deeply ingrained that the national corruption implicit in the willingness to murder the innocent is ignored. Robert Green dares to differ. For many years he was an aircraft bombardier who, if ordered, would have dropped a UK nuclear bomb near St Petersburg, causing “appallingly indiscriminate casualties and long-term poisonous effects from radioactive fallout” as well as destroying a beautiful ancient capital.

Luckily, he has seen the error of his…

A careful new report from CND demonstrates that replacing the Trident nuclear weapons submarine system will actually cost more jobs than it generates, and that cancelling the project gives Britain a golden opportunity to use its industrial skills for a green economy.

Recent weeks have seen a furious struggle within the military establishment, as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has struggled to plan for the 10%-20% cuts being demanded. Because the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition…

The vigil, authorised by the police under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA), started in May, when the anti-war Democracy Village was already camped in the square. The village was evicted by the greater London authority (GLA) on 20 July, and a high fence erected around the square apart from an enclave for Brian Haw’s round-the-clock anti-war vigil.

Though we had applied for authorisation for the Tuesday vigils up to December 2010, the police phoned Jim Brann…

Thirty years ago this October, the first issue of the Newsletter of the National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective (later renamed the Nuclear Resister) reported on just one anti-nuclear civil disobedience action – that of the Plowshares Eight.

On 9 September 1980, eight US activists made their way into a General Electric factory in Pennsylvania, where they hammered and poured blood on nuclear missile nose-cones. This action inspired a global movement, and scores of similar acts…

On 6 September, as part of a Trident Ploughshares Summer Gathering in Reading, the Aldermaston atomic weapons’ factory was symbolically disarmed.

During the morning rush hour, around 20 supporters of Trident Ploughshares blockaded one gate of the factory to protest at plans to build a new multi-million pound warhead testing facility there. Four chained themselves together inside arm tubes (lock-ons) and lay in front of the gate for two hours, releasing themselves without being…

More than 200 people met in eastern Tennessee, USA, over the 4 July Independence Day weekend to advance the role of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance in the anti-nuclear movement. The Resistance for a Nuclear-Free Future gathering celebrated the thirtieth anniversaries of the Nuclear Resister, a chronicle of anti-nuclear and anti-war civil disobedience and peace prisoner support; and Nukewatch, a group active in public education and resistance.

Plenaries and…

On 8 August, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was released two weeks early from his three-month sentence for the “crime” of breaching legal restrictions on talking to foreigners. Perhaps this was in response to Amnesty International declaring him a prisoner of conscience and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire organising a letter to world leaders calling for Mordechai’s freedom, supported by a large number of celebrities.
You can congratulate Mordechai: < a href…

The urgent need for nuclear weapon states to end their decades-long addiction was a recurring demand from disarmament activists at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference (NPT), held at the United Nations in New York during May.

On 12 May, Liam Fox, the new British defence secretary, showed just how much of a nuclear junkie the UK has become, when he stated in his first speech that: “We have got a very clear agreement that we will continue with the nuclear…

The US is doing its best, once again, to prevent a negotiated solution to the Iran crisis. On 17 May, Brazil and Turkey pulled off a major diplomatic coup by reaching agreement with Iran on swapping Iranian uranium fuel for more highly-enriched fuel for a medical reactor, designed to produce medical isotopes used in diagnosing cancers.

Iran accepted conditions it had previously rejected as humiliating (see PN 2522 for details). It agreed to deliver 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium to…

US president Barack Obama has rejected new concessions from Iran over its nuclear programme, instead demanding a tightening of economic and financial sanctions, leading to growing fears of confrontation. This is the fourth major peace initiative from Iran since 2003 – all have been rejected by the US.

A TRR-ific deal?

The latest breakthrough came in relation to Iran’s stock of low-enriched uranium (LEU), the product of its controversial uranium enrichment programme. Last…

Scottish CND held a post-election conference in Glasgow on 15 May to discuss the consequences for lobbying against Trident renewal in the new parliamentary world of the Lib-Con alliance.

Initial gate

John Ainslie, SCND co-ordinator, started with the projected timescales and costs of Trident replacement. According to the MoD’s 2006 guidelines, the design phase of Trident renewal should have commenced last year. However, the “initial gate” decision which would have given the…

Undeterred by a car bomb that failed to detonate the night before, thousands filled New York’s Times Square on 2 May to protest against a far more destructive bomb.

The International Day of Action for a Nuclear-Free World saw a 15,000 protesters from around the world rally and then march to the UN headquarters, where the month-long NPT review conference was to be held.

There were over 2,000 marchers from Japan alone. Hundreds of organisations were represented,…