CND has been working hard at local and national level, in parliament, in the media, and working closely with other groups, to raise awareness of the NPT and the 13 steps to nuclear disarmament agreed in 2000. It has been a lively and busy time, with debates, meetings, speeches, interviews, petitions and postcard campaigns.
Highlighting the UK' s shocking nuclear hypocrisy has -- sadly -- been all too easy . Peter Hain promised in 2000 that “we are unequivocally committed to the…
At the last NPT Review Conference in 2000, against all expectations, the 188 signatories, including the five acknowledged nuclear weapon states (NWS) agreed “an unequivocal undertaking by the NWS to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament” as one of the Thirteen Steps drawn up to implement the Treaty. As Brian Wicker of Pax Christi writes, “You have to be a very clever lawyer or politician not to recognise this as a promise.”
“Counter-…Most of the nations of the world have joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which has its seventh Review Conference in New York this month. India, Israel and Pakistan remain outside, and North Korea announced its withdrawal from the treaty in 2003. Yet the NPT is weak and getting weaker, and forecasts suggest that the conference will fail to find solutions to the most pressing challenges.
Up to the job?Though the NPT is usually represented as a…
In Greece today, militarism manifests itself most visibly in the tens of thousands of young men who every year are obliged to perform compulsory military service.
Unlike most other EU member states, Greece still practises conscription, with the authorities demanding that all Greek males between the ages of 19 and 45 join the armed forces.
Greek men have declared their objection to compulsory military service since long before the right to conscientious objection was…
Three months ago thefour remaining Britons held at Guantanamo Bay were released after being held in confinement for over three years. Yet the family of a British man, Babar Ahmad,30, fear he will face the same treatment if he is deported to the USA under the Extradition Act 2003.
Mr Ahmad is accused of using the internet to raise funds for terrorist/resistance groups in Chechnya and Afghanistan. His family strenuously deny this. Further to that, they ask why he should be extradited…
New moral conundrums (conundra?) for peace campaigners arrive for The Mole's attention. After last month's worries about the ethical (or not) sourcing of the material for military uniforms comes a sneaky suggestion from the Countryside Alliance.
The pro-hunting lobby are apparently talking with some of their rich land-owning supporters about ways of taking revenge on the government for its ban on hunting. They reckon that they could bring military training to a halt in many parts of…
“It's not racist to impose limits on immigration.” This catch-all election slogan from the Conservative party can, conveniently, be interpreted in several ways. As can Labour's rather ambiguous “our country's borders protected”. What are they talking about?
Apart from being grammatically challenged, both manage to say everything and nothing in one vague non-sentence. So ask the questions: why do we need to impose limits on immigration and who do our borders need protecting from…
As the UK delegation to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference pack their suitcases, their speeches on verification and a shiny new presentation about some decommissioning they did several years ago, will they also have room in their briefcases for the Aldermaston Site Development Strategy Plan (SDSP?
We suspect that the government's massive investment in a new building programme at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Aldermaston won't quite fit into the…
The Blackaby Papers are a series of occasional papers on defence and disarmament issues in memory of Frank Blackaby, sometime president of Abolition2000UK. The sixth paper -- available now -- is entitled “The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Rebuilding Confidence” and was written by Ernie Regehr, Director and CoFounder of Project Ploughshares. It is available free from http://www.abolition2000uk. gn.apc.org or for #2.50 by calling…
March was a good month for taking nonviolent action, all over Britain and beyond - as the positive and energising stories and images in this month's Peace News show.
This issue of PN only manages to squeeze in reports on a small proportion of these actions but, rest assured, there are many more taking place each and every week.
Politicians and commentators may publicly wring their hands in despair at “voter apathy”, but they fail to recognise (or are disturbed by) the…
The dismantling of the model Trident submarine in Edinburgh on 10 March (see news item on p2) was a dramatic performance in which different elements, with varying degrees of willingness, played essential parts. The activists inside and around the sub had an ideal plot in mind but realised that it might have to be adjusted as circumstances changed. In the end it went almost entirely to script.
The late evening denouement put the police centre stage. They increased the dramatic…
The biggest bully I knew at school joined the police force. Even at age 16 I thought this entirely logical.
On the other hand, Roy, who was one of my circle of friends, joined the army as a boy entrant. I knew he was lonely and sensed he was unhappy. His mother died when he was eight and he was brought up after a fashion by a succession of “aunts” who lived with his (often absent) father. We were appalled, but the prospect of two years' National Service faced us all and his…
In yet another delicious footnote to “the greatest corporate PR disaster in history” - as even mainstream commentators described the McLibel trial - it turns out that the leaflet criticising McDonald's now has an even larger circulation.
The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that the McLibel Two didn't have a fair trial, and had their rights to freedom of expression infringed, naturally had to include the text of the offending leaflet in its judgement, which has been…
You could be forgiven for thinking that the new Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the result of an almost unprecedented to and fro between the Commons and Lords, is a much-watered down version of the Government's proposals for the replacement of the heavily criticised detention powers in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act.
But the parliamentary tussles perhaps tell us more about the shortcomings of most Westminster debates than about any actual gains made by defenders of…
Well m'darlings, today's Easter love-your-enemy-bunny is Sir Jock Stirrup. I kid you not.
His formal title is Air Chief Marshal Sir Graham Eric Stirrup. But inexplicably he prefers to be known as Jock.
His CV is so acronym-heavy it makes you proud. He's been an “OC 2” a “PSO”, a “CO RAF”, an “AOC No1”, a “FIMgt”, a “FRAeS”, a “KCB” and an “AFC”. Know what they stand for? Suggestions on a postcard please.
So you see, he knows a thing or two about planes, and was director…
Ever since I got into some warm water for including in a press release a quote which compared Trident to Auschwitz I have been alert to the potential danger of such comparisons. The Dresden commemorations have raised the issue again, with much use of the term “moral equivalence”.
Boggy groundThe phrase itself has an interesting history. William James used it in 1906 in an essay proposing a civil substitute for military service which would retain some of the “moral” benefits of war…
Well my lovelies, this month we're meeting mister Kevin Stanley Beeston.
Not heard of him? Shame. He's a busy man. He's top dog at SERCO. Not heard of it? Chances are it's heard of you. It does it all: leisure centres, hospitals, prisons, railways, national rail enquiries, and nuclear weapons. In 2003 it made #11million gross profit from PFI and it's ambition is to be “up there” with KBR in the global “support services” industry.
Who ya gonna call?When a 54-year-old coughed…
Regular Mole-istas will know that this column finds it hard to resist an opportunity to criticise once-Red Ken, Mayor of Greater London. And we all know very well, from recent evidence, that Ken “turn-again” Livingstone similarly finds it impossible (especially when in party mood) to resist slagging off the Daily Mail. Which leaves The Mole, also a hater of the Daily Wail, in an ambiguous position.
The Mail's wilful pandering to (and generation of) the ill-informed…
In a pre-emptive attack on the US, the Campaign Against Climate Change organised a march in London on 12 February to draw attention to the Kyoto protocol - which came into force on the 16th.
The US, Australia, Monaco and Liechtenstein are the only developed nations that have failed to ratify the treaty. We decided to give Monaco and Liechtenstein a little leeway, and marched past the Australian High Commission (Ozzies are the biggest producers of greenhouse gases per capita) on the…
During the weeks and months leading up to the London European Social Forum (ESF) there was much controversy as to whether a minority had managed to undermine the democratic nature of the forum itself. The history surrounding the ESF, the World Social Forum (WSF) and the World Economics Forum (WEF) needs to be understood to see clearly how serious a de-democratisation of the ESF could be.
The WEF has been running for over thirty years in different forms, but always acting as a think…
