Europe

Active opposition to the Bourget arms show

1 September 2001News Francois Maliet

In June, the 44th international aeronautics and space show took place in Paris at Le Bourget: shorts, ice- creams, air displays and tanned pilots. But that's not all. There were also fighter planes, helicopters and antimilitarists opposed to the arms trade. Francois Maliet reports.

The Bourget air show is generally presented as being a fair for big kids, with aeroplanes, and parachutists performing impressive technical feats.

One leaves with the impression of having been to the circus, and of having entered the cocooned world of the arms dealers. Indeed, the positive or, at best, indifferent reaction of the public to the material exhibited at the show leaves one feeling a deep sense of irony.

Chained to the Tiger

Sunday 24 June, the last day of the…

Castor - a real opportunity?

1 December 2000News Andreas Speck

In October anti-nuclear activists in Germany recommenced their resistance to nuclear waste transports (Castor) - one of which is due to leave the nuclear power station at Philippsburg in the south of Germany for the reprocessing plant in La Hague, France.

This would have been the first Castor transport since the one to Ahaus (see PN April 1998) and the total ban on transports following the discovery of radioactive contamination of rolling stock (see PN July 1998). This would also have been the first transport since the red-green government took power in October 1998, and reached the so-called “nuclear consensus” with the nuclear industry, wrongly presented as a slow process to shut down all nuclear power stations.

The strategy of anti-…