Phyllis Cormack: campaigning against US nuclear weapons testing
We have a historic opportunity to deal with the threat of nuclear weapons. There is no military conflict between the great economic and technological powers. Indeed, they cooperate on a daily basis on trade, investment, health and many other issues.
Moreover, the late 1980's and most of the 1990's saw the creation of a positive cycle in which citizen action, political initiatives, disarmament treaties and independent verification that states were fulfilling the treaties they had signed reinforced each other. The world's nuclear arsenals were reduced from over seventy thousand nuclear weapons to twenty seven thousand.
This opportunity is now threatened by the idea that massive investments in new military technologies, including new nuclear weapons, and the willingness to launch pre-emptive military attacks can enable the United States and its Allies to turn "victory" in the Cold War into permanent global military dominance.
This has led to nuclear weapons no longer being viewed as a deterrent. In the US, according to the leaked 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear weapons are now regarded as an instrument which US commanders can used to attack deeply buried targets, to destroy chemical and biological warfare facilities and mobile missiles, and to deal with "surprising military developments."
In the UK part of the Trident nuclear missile force has been converted to the protection of Britain's overseas interests (trade, investments, and oil) and in the run up to the invasion of Iraq the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon stated that if British forces were threatened by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the UK "reserved the right" to use nuclear weapons. This means that both the US and the UK government's official polices have shifted away from saying that nuclear weapons are only to be used to deter an atomic attack on their countries by a nuclear power to saying that they will use nuclear weapons to secure their interests throughout the world and they are prepared to use them against countries which do not themselves have nuclear weapons.
Britain is preparing to develop a new atomic bomb. The government is spending over two billion pounds preparing Aldermaston to build a new nuclear weapon to replace Trident by building the vast new laser which will replicate the conditions inside a star or an exploding atomic bomb, vast new super-computers which can simulate an atomic explosion, and special laboratories that will be needed to build a new atomic bomb without underground nuclear testing (though this may not actually be possible). It is also hiring the scientists it needs to build this weapon and has stepped up cooperation between Britain's nuclear weapons scientists and their counter-parts at US and French nuclear weapons laboratories.
These US and British developments directly undermine the post-Cold War opportunity to deal with the danger of nuclear weapons and to build an enduring peace. Moreover, non-proliferation and disarmament are further damaged by the UK's continued deployment of its Trident nuclear weapon system and preparations to build a new one. A new nuclear weapon would be in direct contravention of the UK's commitment under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to take progressive steps towards nuclear disarmament.
Developments at Aldermaston would also be in direct contravention of the spirit of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) since developing a capacity to build a nuclear weapon without underground nuclear testing undermines the one of the purposes of the treaty, to stop the modernisation of existing nuclear arsenals.
They cannot be allowed to succeed. That is why Greenpeace is calling for an immediate halt to all preparations to build a new atomic bomb at Aldermaston.
These preparations pre-empt any decision by Parliament that we need to have a new nuclear weapon. Moreover, the government has not provided either Members of Parliament or the public with the studies it has done saying why we have to have a new nuclear weapon. There can be no reason for not providing these studies. In the Cold War it was claimed that all details of nuclear decision making had to be kept secret because of the Soviet danger, this argument makes no sense now when the Government itself has stated in its Strategic Defence "...there is today no direct military threat to the United Kingdom or Western Europe. Nor do we foresee the re-emergence of such a threat."
Take action!:
Write to your MP and demand a debate on the replacement of Trident.
