Milan Rai
On 27 October 1962, a Russian naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.
Twelve US navy ships (part of the US blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis) were dropping practice depth charges on B-59, a submerged Soviet submarine, trying to signal that the sub should surface. The captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, panicked, believing that the Third World War had started. He gave orders to fire a nuclear torpedo, saying, according to one account: 'We're…
On 10 September, local fisherman Anthony John, 44, was shot dead by Indian police while taking part in a blockade protesting against the completion of a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Two 1GW reactors have been built on the site and were being loaded with uranium fuel as PN went to press: the authorities plan to build a further four 1GW reactors on the site.
The protests were organised by the People’s Movement Against Nuclear…
Nuclear sub HMS Vanguard arrives back at
Faslane, Scotland. PHOTO: CPOA (PHOT) TAM MCDONALD
@UK MOD / CROWN COPYRIGHT
Britain may not be able to maintain its nuclear missile submarine capability because of shortages of navy and civilian personnel.
That was the stark message of the ministry of defence’s official risk register, obtained by the Nuclear Information Service (NIS) through the Freedom of Information Act. On 9 August, NIS placed on its website both the…
We’re guessing that PN readers divide roughly 50/50 on the Olympics. Half of us are blissfully ignorant of the whole thing. Half of us know varying amounts about what happened. (At a UK level, 90% of the population watched at least 15 minutes of coverage, according to the BBC.)
If you want to take the most positive, Colin Ward-ish perspective, you can cherish the fact that ‘the British nation’ has taken a black man (an immigrant from Somaliland) and a mixed-race woman to its heart, as…
In April 2003 Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old British peace activist and photojournalist, was shot in the forehead by an Israeli sniper. Wearing bright orange jacket and trousers to identify him as a peace volunteer, and clearly unarmed, he was trying to rescue a Palestinian child pinned down by gunfire in the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. He died after nine months in a coma.
The Israeli marksman responsible, Taysir Hayb, convicted of manslaughter, obstruction of justice, incitement to…
We’re still digesting the long interview we carried out with veteran US activist George Lakey earlier this year, the last part of which appears on p8. We’re bringing George to the UK for a two-week speaking tour (which culminates in a day-long whole-camp workshop at Peace News Summer Camp) and we’re very much looking forward to learning more about the multi-dimensional Movement for a New Society that he initiated, which, among other things, took a number of buildings into collective…
The first thing that really struck me about the ‘International Symposium on Nonviolent Movements and the Barrier of Fear’ was that it was really international. It brought together activists and academics from Zimbabwe, Uganda, Sweden, South Korea, Palestine, Kenya, Israel, India, Hercegovina, Germany, the UK and the US – and that was just in my first small-group discussion! Apart from the World Social Forum and the War Resisters’ International Triennial, it was the most international event I…
Consensus decision-making has become dominant in activist circles. Not everyone practises it, but almost everyone wants to be using it, or to lay some claim to be using it. Among some folk, consensus decision-making has become not only an essential part of social change, but a pre-condition of working in a group.
We discovered in earlier segments of this interview (PN 2544 and 2545), that US activist and trainer George Lakey was one of the people who helped spread the ‘affinity-group-…
On 23 June, Climate Siren activists hung banners on the gates of Buckingham palace. PHOTO: Peter Marshall
The human race may be pushing the Earth towards a rapid, catastrophic and irreversible ‘state shift’ leading to mass extinctions, according to a paper by 22 leading scientists published in the world’s top scientific journal, Nature, in the run-up to the failed Rio+20 environment conference. The Nature paper set out possible measures for avoiding or limiting the state shift, which may…
The police march in London on 10 May was ‘supported’ by some radical protesters, holding sardonic signs: ‘Without us, democracy would triumph’, ‘Kettling: a transitional demand’, and ‘Not all cops are bastards’. People joked that the police might be less conservative than usual in their estimates of how many marched (in the event, Scotland Yard refused to give a figure).
The protest was against plans to cut police numbers by 16,000 over four years, as part of a 20% cut to the policing…
In late May, I was invited to a meeting of the Edge Fund, which is attempting to create an activist-led or -advised grant-making body in the UK, breaking down some of the inequalities that exist even in radical-minded philanthropy. The discussion was lively, and the openness of the Edge Fund to activist input was dizzying in its latitude.
Much of current UK activism depends on grants from bodies like the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (the major donor behind the PN-initiated…
When we look around the world, when we look around this island that we live on, it’s clear there is an urgent need for a total transformation of society and the economy: a radical democratisation, a drastic carbon cut-back, justice for the oppressed, and thorough-going demilitarisation in every area. Peace News has been committed to ‘nonviolent revolution’ for 40 years. How are we going to make progress towards this goal?
What do we mean by ‘nonviolent revolution’ and is it feasible…
The diplomatic signs before Baghdad had been positive, as Iran indicated its willingness to give way on two major stumbling blocks: allowing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check a suspect base, and freezing the enrichment of uranium to 20%, widely regarded as dangerously close to weapons-grade (90%).
In Baghdad, Iran learned that in return for these major concessions, it was being offered very little. ‘Giving spare parts for civilian aircraft is…
George Lakey photo: john Meyer
Nearly 200 years ago, revolutionary English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The poet ‘not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered’, Shelley argued, she also ‘beholds the future in the present’, and her thoughts are ‘the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time’.
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Between 12 and 24 May, trade unionists and climate activists from the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign will be touring the UK in a Climate Caravan inspired by the Trans African Climate Caravan of Hope of 2011.
This month’s British Climate Caravan is demanding massive government investment to create one million new ‘climate jobs’.
Climate jobs are not ‘green jobs’ in the national parks or in pollution control. Climate jobs actually cut emissions of greenhouse gases: insulating…
