Nuclear weapons

May is the month of the review of the NPT in New York and we are calling all those activists with a wish for social justice to join the protests in Plymouth. Plymouth contains one of the most deprived wards in Europe and isthe city with the most “looked after” children in the country. May 2005 is the time to point out that Trident weapons do not grow good communities.

Many of you are working towards events at the G8 in Scotland. We invite you to a vivid practice run in Plymouth at the…

Early on 11 March officers from Lothian and Borders Police dismantled a large model Trident nuclear weapon submarine which had blocked the street outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh for 14 hours in a challenge to the Parliament to take a stand against Britain's weapons of mass destruction.

At 10am on 10 March the submarine had approached the Parliament building and, as it crossed the Canongate, peace activists on the inside, from Trident Ploughshares and the Theatre 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.

When a 54-year-old coughed…

Central Scotland MSP Carolyn Leckie was sentenced to seven days imprisonment for refusing to pay a £100 fine for taking part in a blockade of Faslane naval base back in February 2002. Jane Tallents from Trident Ploushshares, commented, “Sadly, while the vast majority of our politicians in Scotland are shamefully silent and inactive about Britain’s weapons of mass destruction at Faslane, there are brilliant exceptions like Carolyn.” A major blockade of Faslane will take place on 4…

Those pesky Euro bombspotters have been up to their naughty tricks again recently.

Kicking off a series of “Bombspotting small” actions, a group representing Flemish NGOs and individual activists, paid a visit to the Kleine Brogel nuclear weapons base in north-east Belgium on 11 October. After breaking into the base the group occupied its runway.

The “small” actions are the unannounced dimension of a wider Bombspotting campaign, which includes large public actions such as…

Every year, in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, people come from far and wide to float lanterns decorated with prayers, thoughts, and messages of peace down the rivers in commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Fifty-nine years have now passed since the event that opened the floodgates for the nuclear age, an era in which our survival as a species is continually under threat. August 6-9 were again days of remembrance and action for many activists from all over the world.…

This is a book which makes a very useful contribution to the literature which already exists about the use of atomic weapons against Japan.

Noritaka Fukami was in Nagasaki at the time that the bomb was dropped. After the bomb fell he was involved in some of the rescue work within the city. Storm Over Nagasaki is a scroll depicting the bombing, and provides a visual record of what he and others experienced at the time.

Suffering from radiation sickness, he committed suicide in…

The International Peace Pilgrimage has arrived in Japan, signalling the final leg of the eight-month journey across Australia and Japan in protest at nuclear weaponry and uranium mining.

The hikers have trekked more than 2273 km since 10 December, from the uranium mining site at Roxby Downs, South Australia, through Port Augusta, Adelaide, Melbourne and Canberra, Australia's capital.

Along the way, the pilgrims visited people affected by the nuclear weapons industry. 124…

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.

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…

Few people know that Canada provided most of the uranium for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Even fewer know the devastating effect that the uranium ore extraction had on the Dene people of Great Bear Lake.

Peter Blow travelled to the north to record this story. White men came to the Dene land and found the “money rock”, as the residents called it. In the 1940s they started mining it, using local people for labour. At the same time the Dene…

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…

Perhaps 2003 will be remembered as the year the world's nuclear states (and aspiring ones) began another chapter in the development of genocidal weapons of mass destruction. Hopefully not.

In early November, while commenting on Iran's cooperation with nuclear inspections, Mr El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned that somewhere between 35 and 40 countries were believed to now have the ability to build nuclear weapons.

During the…

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…

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…