Nuclear weapons

On 7 November, I was due to appear, with others, at Newbury magistrates’ court for “obstruction of the highway” at Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment on 27 October.
First hearings are always just for “plea and directions”. It is only if you plead “guilty” that the case is dealt with at the first hearing. If you plead “not guilty”, the court adjourns hearing the case.
I wrote to the court asking for a plea of “not guilty” to be entered on my behalf. For the first time,…

On 27 October, Britain’s nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston was blockaded by hundreds of peace activists in the largest nonviolent direct action at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) for a decade. Over 30 activists from Trident Ploughshares and CND were arrested by police.

Roads around Aldermaston began to be blocked before dawn as activists from Scotland, Switzerland, Norway and elsewhere converged on the site where Britain’s nuclear weapons are constructed and maintained.…

On 4 October, in terrible weather, demonstrators arrived at Menwith Hill spy station, Yorkshire, for the annual “Keep Space for Peace” demo, part of an international protest against Star Wars “missile defence”.
After a public meeting, with live music and speeches from Rebecca Johnson and local Labour MP Colin Challen, the demonstration circled the base as planned.
The police, expecting a walk, had served “Section 12” notices under the Public Order Act (1986), prohibiting any…

As a physicist myself (though of an altogether lowlier and grubbier variety), Oppenheimer’s story has always interested me.

How did a left-leaning, New York Jewish intellectual end up leading the Manhattan Project (the Second World War effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at Los Alamos in New Mexico), only to be crushed by the political system that he had served so well, in a much-publicised 1954 hearing which ended up withdrawing his security clearance? This book tells the…

This summer, I was one of nine walkers to complete a gruelling 84-day, 1000+ mile International Walk towards a Nuclear-Free Future from London to Geneva, through France.

The other eight walkers were: co-organisers Kerrie-Ann Garlick and Marcus Atkinson, and June, from Australia; Jill Saunderson from Fife; Steve Gwynne from Birmingham; Lena Bladh from Sweden; and Albert Monti and Aristide from France.

The walk was jointly organized by the Australian-American group “…

Once again, Iran’s recent cooperation with UN inspectors, and its positive proposal for an international consortium to control its uranium enrichment, are being ignored, and the Iranian government is being pilloried in the press.

As PN goes to press, a new report on Iran is being presented to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), accusing Tehran of failing to cooperate with IAEA investigations into alleged “weaponisation” research.

The IAEA has also…

The US-Iran nuclear crisis continues, as the world’s great powers disagree on how to move forward, and the west snubs Iran’s proposal for an international consortium to control the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil.
Iran’s consortium proposal was made on 13 May, but has been studiously ignored, not only by diplomats, but by the western mass media.

Public support

This is despite the fact that a majority of people in Britain, France and the US support Iran’s…

Kate Evans’ Thank you Greenham (Laughing Moon Press; 2008;ISBN 978-0956006103; 100pp; £7) is an account of her visits to Greenham in the early ’80s, with a particular stress on “how difficult it was to be a part-time activist”.

Interesting, it’s often hard to read: it’s a very honest account, brutally so at times. The experience seems to have damaged the author emotionally, yet she still manages to make the book a positive read, looking at Greenham as part of a wider struggle against…

Faslane 365 – the year-long blockade of the Faslane nuclear weapons base finished on 1 Oct last year. However as the wheels of justice turn so exceedingly slowly, the resulting court cases are still trundling through the district court in Helensburgh.

It’s a good job that of the 1,150 arrests the Procurator Fiscal (PF) chose to take only 75 prosecutions.
Initially the PF, Andrew Miller, instructed the police to hold people overnight so that he could decide whether to bring…

On 7 May, I represented myself at Helensburgh District Court, facing a charge of “breach of the peace” at the Faslane 365 Big Blockade, 1 October 2007.

The Procurator Fiscal (PF) said, wrongly, that I was on the road, blocking traffic. Surprisingly, the two police witnesses confirmed I wasn’t on the road.
But the PF (equivalent to Crown Prosecution Service in England/Wales and the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland) was allowed to change the charge half-way through…

One dramatic development in relation to Iran has been the revelations that, according to the MoD’s own documents, the 15 British sailors and Marines captured by Iran last April were in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi; the US and UK unilaterally drew a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters – without informing Iran where it was; and that Iranian Revolutionary Guard vessels were crossing this invisible line three times a week.
All this contradicts defence…

Our demonstration in November 07 was able to use the slogan: People and Parliament Against Trident.

We are operating in a new dimension. In the past we have had local authority support (and still do) but now we have the support of a legislature and can work cooperatively with it. Scotland's For Peace brings together peace movement organisations with the main churches, trade unions and other groups in Scotland. Substantial working coalitions have been built and this has strengthened…

On 8 March, Aldermaston Women's Peace Camp (AWPC) read in The Independent that we were packing up our camp for the last time; famous people were mourning our loss and messages of support were flooding in.

This followed the judgement on 6 March at the High Court in a judicial review, brought by AWPC, of the legality of three Military Lands Act Byelaws introduced (as part of a package with SOCPA) in 2007, one of which prohibited camping.
We had argued against this, on…

On 16-17 February, CND celebrated its fiftieth birthday in style; holding a “Global Summit for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World” at London's dramatic glass-walled City Hall (courtesy of mayor Ken Livingstone, who opened the conference).

The most striking aspect of the gathering was its resolute focus on the future.

Despite its being a birthday event, there was no massive exhibition detailing CND's turbulent and fascinating history, no panel of long-experienced…

This was the key message from a conference on "Trident, Trade Unions & Scotland's Economy" jointly held by the Scottish Trades Unions Congress and Scottish CND.

The cost of the Trident replacement won't come from existing Ministry of Defence budgets. Funds will be redirected from elsewhere, which means cutbacks in essential services. UK-wide, up to 30,000 public sector jobs are expected to be lost.

Of these, 2,500 will be lost in Scotland ­ more than the number of jobs…