Pinning our security on a nuclear deterrent encourages others to do the same The election campaign to date suggests that decommissioning Trident nuclear weapons is a dangerous, minority demand led by the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymru. Yet poll after poll reveals that it is in fact a majority popular demand throughout the UK. One poll recently revealed that 81% of 500 general election candidates are opposed to renewal. There are increasingly obvious…
NIS exclusive A flagship £600 million construction project at the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment – the centrepiece of plans to rebuild the UK’s nuclear weapons factory to manufacture the next generation UK Trident warheads - has been put on hold following a series of design problems, project management failures, and regulatory setbacks. Work on Project Pegasus, a new facility under construction at AWE Aldermaston for manufacturing enriched uranium nuclear warhead components and highly enriched uranium…
by Jim McCluskey / February 6th, 2015 At last the Armageddon nightmare which is the existence of nuclear arsenals is exploding into the UK’s political consciousness. At last the magical word ‘deterrent’ which is supposed to automatically kill dissent is being examined and unmasked as the delusion by which the paranoid silence that still small voice, the voice which says it is a crime against humanity to prepare to incinerate a large part of the…
After summarising the findings of the Third International Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons, the Austrian hosts launched a national pledge that creates exciting new opportunities for all governments and civil society to stigmatise, ban and eliminate nuclear weapons. The Third International Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons (HINW), attended by at least 158 governments and a wide range of civil society actors, closed on Tuesday with a commitment and call…
REBECCA JOHNSON 8 December 2014 The Third International Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons (HINW) opens in Vienna today, with arguments for humanitarian disarmament growing in strength. This time the UK and the US will attend. What will be the likely outcome? The significance of the Vienna Conference is profound. Its overt outcome is likely to appear quite modest. If you think that sounds like a contradiction, read on. The Vienna Conference, hosted by…
NEWS REPORT Lead European candidate joins campaigners as they challenge nuclear weapons research at Bristol University Lead Green European candidate in the South West, Dr Molly Scott Cato, joined campaigners in Bristol on Monday (19th May) to draw attention to Bristol University being among the top five universities in the UK receiving funding for research into nuclear weapons. Dr Molly Scott Cato reiterated the Green Party’s long held opposition to nuclear weapons, the arms trade…
On April 24th, 2014 one small nation took a stand against the nuclear weapon giants The Islands were the site of US nuclear tests for 12 years after WWII The small Oceanic Marshall Islands is to launch an unprecedented round of lawsuits against nine nations with nuclear arms, including the US, to demand that they meet their obligations to disarm. The Pacific nation was the site of 67 US nuclear tests for 12 years following the end…
Castle Bravo was the code name given to the first United States test of a dry fuel, hydrogen bomb, detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as the first test of Operation Castle. Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States (and just under one-third the energy of the most powerful ever detonated), with a yield of 15 megatons of TNT. That yield, far exceeding the expected yield of 4 to 8 megatons (6 Mt predicted), combined with other factors,…
10:50 10 February 2014 by Stuart Parkinson Weapons of mass destruction get five times as much public research cash in the UK as renewable energy. Time for a rethink, says Stuart Parkinson The scale of a nation’s public spending on different areas of research and development can be very revealing. For example, what sort of a nation would spend five times as much on developing weapons of mass destruction – including delivery systems – than on…
Take your pick of the reasons. The eye-watering cost? Risk of nuclear accidents? Breeches of International Laws? Radioactive pollution from the production sites? The sheer immorality? The list goes on…… Currently there is a rare window-of-opportunity on this issue. As CND Vice-President, Rebecca Johnson, currently touring the UK with her “New Ban the Bomb” show says: “We’ve campaigned for many decades and are now at a tipping point when we could ban and abolish nuclear…
“Spending £100 billion on replacing Trident is a catastrophic folly. I’m sure I am one of many who support the those, like Action-AWE, who campaign actively and imaginatively against it”
– Ken Loach
WORLD IN CHAIINS
TRIDENT ON TRIAL
Nuclear weapons crime in the UK has been reported to Thames Valley Police.