This summer I participated in my third International Walk for a Nuclear-Free Future, from Geneva to Brussels. This year’s “pilgrimage”, organised by Footprints for Peace and Sortir du Nucléaire, set off from Geneva on 26 April, the 23rd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The walk passed through Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, covering around 850 miles on foot over 10½ weeks, staging events at the World Heath Organisation headquarters in…
On 17 August, five citizen inspectors from Trident Ploughshares entered Britain’s most important military site, the nuclear submarine base at Faslane, north of Glasgow, by walking in through the main gate.
Sylvia Boyes, Mary Millington, Brian Larkin, Penny Stone, and Angie Zelter reminded the Faslane workers of the commitment by the UK government, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, to nuclear disarmament. They warned that the failure of the Scottish government…
For the first time in Britain’s nuclear history, an opinion poll has found that a majority of people in Britain are in favour of Britain abandoning its nuclear weapons - without regard to considerations of cost.
ICM conducted its poll for the Guardian on 10-11 July, asking: “Do you think Britain should replace the [Trident] nuclear weapons system with a new one or should it no longer have any nuclear deterrent?”
There was no prompting about the high cost of the Trident…
After the turmoil of the post-election protests and repression in Iran, we believe that the most important thing that outsiders can do to help the people of Iran is to push for a new relationship between the west and the Islamic republic. Massive protests flared up after the 12 June Iranian presidential election because of the strong indications of fraud.
While it is possible that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election, millions of Iranians do not believe he won 63% of the votes,…
As a CND poll demonstrates massive public opposition to US Star Wars plans, it seems the nuclear log-jam in Britain may be moving. On 17 June, the Liberal Democrats became the first mainstream political party to reject the replacement of the Trident nuclear weapon system with a similar nuclear submarine-intercontinental ballistic missile system.
After seeing estimates of the total costs of Trident replacement in the region of £100bn in 2009 figures (10% of the military budget), Lib…
Whilst supporters of the Trident nuclear weapons system continue to claim that 10,000 jobs will go if Trident submarines are not replaced, a different picture is painted by a report which was re-launched at a joint STUC/CND conference held on 6 June in Glasgow.
The report, sponsored by the Scottish Trade Union Congress (TUC) and CND, shows that less than 1,600 civilian jobs are directly or indirectly dependent on Trident and that spending the money on any other area of the Scottish…
On 15 June, Trident Ploughshares activists working with Bikes Block Bombs, Scrap Cars–Scrap Trident, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp (AWPC) and Eastern Region CND blockaded four gates at the Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston, protesting at the building of new nuclear weapons facilities and the lack of democratic accountability.
The surprise blockades caused massive road blockages, preventing construction vehicles from entering Aldermaston. Activists were locked onto concrete…
Professor Peter Hennessy is a tremendously well-connected insider, who has over the years lifted the lid on Whitehall in a way that no other historian has managed. His latest book Cabinets and the Bomb is perhaps the ultimate in revelation, in that it reproduces (photographically) top secret cabinet documents relating to the most sensitive topic in British politics: the British nuclear arsenal.
62 documents from 1940 to 2007 are presented (often in full), along with explanatory text,…
This amazing book is a political treatise, personal journal, lively commentary, an invaluable history and a guidebook to sustained activism, all in one volume. This is a work to be read and consulted for many years.
In 2005 activist Angie Zelter and her friends contemplated the weakening of the peace movement and its lack of energy. Instead of moaning and hand-wringing they created an ambitious plan to galvanise British activists. They came up with the idea to blockade Faslane in…
Plans are afoot for CND to attend several festivals this year including Shambala, the Greenpeace Fair and Glastonbury. At Glastonbury, CND will have two areas – an information tent close to the Pyramid Stage and a campaigning tent in the Green Futures field. Our main focus this year is to raise awareness and get people involved in the “No Trident Replacement” Campaign.
The MoD’s first report on the replacement process (called the “Initial Gate”) is due in September this year – the…
As PN went to press, Iran and the United States were preparing to make significant peace offers (or at least gestures) to each other. Iran’s proposal is almost certain to include international co-ownership and joint operation of its enrichment facility, the “consortium” option rejected by the US and Britain in the past.
In this delicate situation, Israel, predictably was doing its best to provoke a wild statement from Iran that might destabilise diplomacy. Thus the threats to bomb…
Set at the time of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 and the days leading up to it, this opera looks at these events through the focal characters of J Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, fellow physicist Edward Teller, and general Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project. The libretto created by Peter Sellars is based on original source material including interviews, memoirs and declassified documents, as well as other works such as the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of…
As PN went to press, Iran was digesting US president Barack Obama’s surprise New Year (Nowruz) message to the Iranian people. It appears that both the Obama speech and British prime minister Gordon Brown’s recent initiative are designed to mask an unwillingness to accept a compromise on the Iranian nuclear crisis that is supported by former diplomats and by the government of Iran itself. In his 554-word video speech on 20 March, Obama offered a “new day” (but no specific proposals) to both “…
On 7 March, I was at Newbury Magistrates' Court, Berkshire, putting Trident nuclear weapons on trial. I was charged with “obstruction of the highway'' for a peaceful sitdown protest outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston last July, during the 86-day, 900-mile Footprints for Peace walk from Dublin to London which I completed.
The court heard how I joined three walkers from the US - Liana and Aleta Johannaber from Georgia, and Bernie Meyer (aka “the American Gandhi”)…
Scottish CND has succeeded in obtaining copies of two risk assessments on the dangers incurred if there should be a major accident involving a Trident submarine in the shiplift at the submarine base at Faslane.
The reports, undertaken by the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), date from 2000 and were requested by CND in 2007. Figures have probably been “redacted” (removed) from the documents. One of the reports contains diagrams illustrating sequences of events which could lead to…
