nuclear weapons

Can David Miliband find a cure for nuclear weapons addiction?

Foreign Secretary David Miliband gave a speech today in London outlining a new '6 step programme' for creating a world free of nuclear weapons. His speech was largely a response to pressure created by recent high-profile campaigns emerging from the US, which have been calling for step by step progress towards the ultimate abolition of the world's nuclear arsenals.

Getting rid of the bomb? Sounds like radical stuff, but what's particularly radical is who is behind these campaigns. Not your 'usual suspect' peaceniks, but rather some of the biggest names in international diplomacy, who have come together to demand action on global security because they see the spread of nuclear weapons as the biggest threat to our immediate future.

If there's a nuclear truck in your neighbourhood - who you gonna call? Nukewatch! © fototruck.com

Few people know that convoys carrying nuclear warheads regularly travel along our roads, past our homes and schools. Containing plutonium and other deadly radioactive material, they are transported between submarine bases in Scotland and Berkshire's repair and maintenance facilities at Aldermaston and Burghfield. An accident involving and explosion or fire could cause a partial nuclear blast and result in lethal radiation contaminating the surrounding area.

A Greenpeace volunteer on the boom at Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland

I don’t know if your remember our Trident Tour last year - that five week frenzy of Faslane blockading, crane climbing, arrests, solitary confinement, losing a ship, getting it back again, bearing witness, gigs, press conferences, political events and rallies.

Well, it’s been a long time coming but, over a year after the event, I can give you the final results of the legal wranglings that ensued.

Four years ago Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was released from jail having served 18 years inside. Yet this month the Israeli government renewed, for the fifth time, an order confining him to Jerusalem, where he is under constant surveillance, banned from talking to foreigners and shunned by Israeli society. He lives with no work, income, home or support. A virtual prisoner.

Thousands joined hands to surround Aldermaston base on Easter Monday

On the Easter weekend of 1958 - a few weeks after the birth of CND - thousands of people braved the icy weather and marched from London to the nuclear weapons factory at Aldermaston in Berkshire to protest the building of nuclear bombs. The march marked the birth of the peace movement in Britain.

Sadly, 50 years on, the peace movement is needed as much as it ever was; last year, our government (which counts many former CND members among its numbers) voted to replace Trident, and to lock the world into at least another 50 years of nuclear bombs. Despite the rhetoric of Brown's recent national security strategy (he wants "to free the world from nuclear weapons", apparently), £5 billion is being poured into building new facilities at Aldermaston to design new nuclear bombs - most likely in contravention of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Watch out world! Hot on the heels of the story that next-generation US designed Trident missiles may be too large to fit in the UK's submarine fleet comes news of another blow to the prestige of our very own nuclear deterrent - Aldermaston, aka 'Britain's Bomb Factory', is set to come under US control for the first time.

Reported in Scotland's Sunday Herald just before Christmas (but not seen by me until a few days ago, hence the delay in passing it on) was a tale to gladden the hearts of peaceniks everywhere - namely that the latest upgrade to the US designed Trident D5 nuclear missiles may not actually fit into British submarines.

Clearly falling well within the parameters of the "you couldn't make it up" school of classic cock-ups, the Herald reported that tender documents for future underwater-launched nuclear missiles issued by the US Navy last November specify a missile diameter of up to 120 inches. The diameter of Trident's D5 missile tubes is 87 inches.