“If there is anything to be learnt we will learn it, because safety is our number one concern”, said energy secretary Chris Huhne on 14 March, after the horrendous nuclear accident at Fukushima in Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami.
While this is being written, the worst has not happened, and hopefully it will not. It is highly likely that a partial meltdown of the reactor core is underway at one of the three reactors, and possibly at all three. But so far, the…
On Tuesday 21 April, Mordechai Vanunu was released after spending 18 years in prison. He had been jailed after divulging Israel's secret nuclear activities and capabilities to the British Sunday Times in 1986.
With one swift blow, he undid Israel's policy of “strategic ambiguity” whereby Israel neither accepted nor denied the existence of nuclear weapons. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and does not allow inspections of its nuclear sites.
Unbowed…Crossing the Irish Sea, the “Battle of the Bog” reached London at the end of September, as protests were held outside Shell's South Bank headquarters.
Carried out in solidarity with the Irish “Shell to Sea” campaign to resist the development of a gas pipeline in a pristine conservation area in Rossport, Co Mayo, protesters managed to catch the police and local security off-guard when they dumped two tonnes of sand on Shell's doorstep and dropped a 40-foot banner reading “danger - keep…
Even the most quixotic of observers must surely have been forced to admit, in the light of the shocking pictures of abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US (and probably British) soldiers and security personnel, that the state of affairs in Iraq is not quite the rosy one that some wish to portray it as.
But while the macabre photos from Abu-Ghraib jail may have shocked many people around the world, they came as no surprise to members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams,…
This Easter, biologically and culturally time of new life and hope in western Europe, saw a new and very large step taken by hundreds of anti-nuclear activists in Britain.
Hundreds of people of all ages took thousands of steps, walking the 50+ miles from London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston where Britain's nuclear weapons are developed. The journey took four days with marchers receiving the hospitality of Sikh, Hindu and Christian communities along the way as well…
1 May is International Workers Day - traditionally a day of struggle against exploitation and capital - and each year there seems to be a widening of the issues focused on by activists globally, as detailed knowledge of the interconnectedness between oppression in all fields of life becomes widespread.
The global and creative nature of May Day activism also illustrates that people have more power and more creativity when we know that, around the world, others are acting on related…
In late January, 28 peace activists were sentenced to a cumulative five years and ten and a half months in prison, five years probation, and US$8,500 in fines as a result of a nonviolent protest at the School of the Americas - now officially called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation - in Fort Benning, Georgia, USA.
Defendands process to court.
The protesters were arrested for trespassing after walking onto Fort Benning…
The deployment of Japanese troops in Iraq, which began in January and is the first such operation since the second world war, continues to attract opposition from the majority of Japanese people.
Many view the sending of troops to Iraq as a violation of the country's post-war constitution, which renounced war forever; and though the soldiers are serving in a purely “humanitarian” capacity, there are fears that they could be drawn into armed conflict.
The defence ministry in…
Trident Ploughshares (TP) activists seem fuelled by something as long lasting as radioactivity, never ceasing in taking bites, sometimes mosquito size, at the bases and companies in England and Scotland that manufacture and protect Britain's weapons of mass destruction.
In February, Lockheed Martin, the world's largest manufacturer and exporter of weapons, had their London offices visited by four TP women who locked staff out of the arms giant's HQ for six hours. Amazingly there were…
Up to 15,000 people took to the streets of Paris in January to protest against a new nuclear programme about to kick off in France and across Europe.
The nuclear project, worth E3bn, focuses on building the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPWR), a new generation of nuclear reactors, the first of which will be built in Finland by a consortium of the French state owned Areva group and the German engineering company Siemens. The programme aims to gradually replace the 58 nuclear…
In October a US jury found 19 peace activists not guilty after their trial for trespassing at a depleted uranium weapon maker's headquarters.
On 2 April 2003, 28 activists walked into AllianceTech System's Edina office to deliver a letter to CEO, Paul David Miller, urging the company to take responsibility for the damages caused by depleted uranium to protest against the use of radioactive waste in weapons' production.
A higher power?In a rare case where an international…
On 25 October hundreds of citizens from Belgium, Britain, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy carried out an inspection of SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), the NATO military headquarters in Mons, Belgium. The action was organised by Forum for Peace Action, For Mother Earth and Bombspotting.
Good citizens enter NATO HQ in search of evidence of preparations for war crimes.. PHOTO: COURTESY OF FOR MOTHER EARTHEarly in the morning 12 citizen…
It is estimated that nearly half million people walked from Perugio to Assisi on 12 October on the traditional peace march which first took place in 1961. Participants were united in their emphasis of article 11 of the Italian constitution - which repudiates war as a means for solving international conflicts.
Tens of thousands of coaches and private vehicles reached the area by the early morning, having travelled from distant places such as Sicily and Venice. The national media did…
The fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) opened in Cancun, Mexico on 10 September 2003. The talks collapsed five days later amidst clashes between countries from the developing South and the economic superpowers of the Northern hemisphere.
The main topic on the agenda was trade in agriculture, an issue which is vital to the survival of farmers and indigenous cultures throughout the south. When no agreement was reached on this topic the EU attempted to move…
The FSB, one of the successors to the KGB, have accused humanitarian organisations working in Chechnya and Ingushetia of producing “anti stability” propaganda harmful to the efforts made by the Governments involved to seek a resolution of the “Chechen Problem”.
These organisations have been working with refugees from the continuing bloodbath in the Caucasus, providing necessary materials for the refugee camps in which they live. The FSB has been monitoring these organisations for…
Fifty-eight years after the first use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima this year fell under the shadow of the continuing Iraq conflict and aggressive overtures between the US and North Korea.
At a ceremony conducted at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the morning of Wednesday, 6 August, Hiroshima mayor Tadakoshi Akiba led the crowd of 40,000 in observing the traditional minute's silence before…
US anti-sanctions activists have had a long-threatened civil action brought against them by the US Treasury Department.
At the end of June, campaign group Voices in the Wilderness (US) were sent a summons for “judicial enforcement of a civil penalty of $20,000 assessed by the United States Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for violations of the Iraqi Sanction Regulations”. The summons gave the group 20 days to respond, otherwise a default judgement…
Between 2 and 15 August, citizens from Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the United States and Britain joined together in taking action against nuclear weapons at Faslane and Coulport - the nuclear submarine and warhead sites (respectively) in western Scotland.
More than 40 people were arrested over the two-week international disarmament camp, most for obstructing access to the bases and for “criminal” damage to security fences and military buildings.
Some brave…
International Solidarity Movement activists have been taking action with local Palestinians against the ongoing construction of the “apartheid wall”. (ISM point out: “The officially stated reason for building the `security fence' is to prevent the unauthorised passage of Palestinians out of the West Bank. However, the route of the so-called `security fence' does not follow the internationally recognised pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel”.)
The wall has recently gone up around…
An itinerant exhibition of 27 photographs has been put together in an effort to share the process of dealing with the past alongside the relatives of the disappeared and those executed for political reasons in Chile.
The photos are from my personal archive. Some have been taken by me and some by Clem McCartney, Kenneth Jensen, Jose' Araya and others. On 11 September 2003 it will be exactly 30 years since Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Doctor Salvador…
