Press Releases & Updates 2009

They brought messages of peace and condemnation through the verses of popular festive tunes with specially-modified lyrics and called for the suspension of work on existing nuclear warheads and on the construction of new facilities and research to develop a new generation of warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, south-east England.

As well as serenading employees of the arms giant and fellow occupants of the building they share, participants in the protest displayed banners and distributed hundreds of leaflets to passers-by, many of whom stopped to chat and signed petitions to the Government calling on it to abandon Trident and its planned replacement and sign up to a Nuclear Weapons Convention - a global ban on nuclear arms - and wrote messages on a large Christmas card which was then handed in to the company.

One of the protesters, wearing a Father Christmas mask and hat and a white overall marked “Weapons Inspector” lay down “dead” in a plastic bodybag in front of his singing colleagues outside Lockheed Martin’s building to symbolise the victims of nuclear weapons, including the approximately two hundred thousand casualties from the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and those from any future nuclear strikes, as well as nuclear bomb test veterans and other victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and other cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other nuclear sites, and by the widespread use of radioactive and toxic “depleted” uranium shells in recent conflicts, including Iraq, the Balkans and possibly Afghanistan.

Trident Ploughshares member Daniel Viesnik, 35, from north London said yesterday, “Christmas is a time of year when we would all do well to reflect on what we personally can do to bring about peace and justice in the world in these increasingly troubled times.

“We welcome recent initiatives by the Prime Minister, President Obama, receiving his Noble Peace Prize in Oslo today, on Human Rights Day, and others in the direction of achieving a nuclear weapons-free world, but the UK must show leadership by taking its submarines off patrol and abandoning its Trident nuclear white elephants.”

1. Trident Ploughshares is a campaign to disarm the UK Trident nuclear weapon system in a nonviolent, open, peaceful and fully accountable manner. http://www.tridentploughshares.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/TridentPlough

2. British Trident nuclear warheads are manufactured at AWE Aldermaston in Berkshire on behalf of the Ministry of Defence by AWE ML, a private consortium comprising US firm Lockheed Martin (22 Carlisle Place, Victoria), US firm Jacobs Engineering and British firm Serco. Thus AWE ML has, since December 2008, been two-thirds under US ownership (with the Ministry of Defence retaining a “golden share”).

Furthermore, Britain’s nuclear-armed Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, also manufactured by Lockheed Martin, are leased from the US and maintained there, whilst the guidance systems software and certain critical components of the warheads, including the neutron generators http://bit.ly/8NeHqx, are also sourced from the US. Hence Britain’s Trident nuclear weapon system, referred to by the Government as being “independent”, is in fact very highly dependent upon the transatlantic “special relationship”.

3. Since 2005, a multi-billion pound expansion of the warhead manufacturing facilities at AWE Aldermaston - on the scale of Heathrow Terminal 5 according to AWE itself - has been in progress. At the same time, hundreds of scientists and other members of staff have been recruited, including warhead designers.

4. Campaigners are opposed to new nuclear weapons developments on account of the cost, especially in light of the current economic situation in the UK and globally, but also on moral, legal, international security and democratic grounds. It is argued that the developments breach the UK’s disarmament obligations under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) [see 5 below], and that they have a destabilising effect by setting a bad example and encouraging other states to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Furthermore, it is argued that the developments at AWE are undemocratic since they have never been put out to a national public consultation, nor has Parliament ever been consulted.

5. Article VI of the NPT, ratified by both the UK and the US, stipulates: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

6. On 15 February 2010, members and supporters of Trident Ploughshares, CND, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp(aign) and others will nonviolently blockade AWE Aldermaston, seeking to prevent workers and contractors entering the site. http://blockawe.blogspot.com http://www.cnduk.org http://www.aldermaston.net

7. In an ICM poll for the Guardian published on 13 July 2009, 54% of respondents indicated that they wanted to see Britain abandon its nuclear weapons and not replace its Trident system. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/13/icm-poll-nuclear-weapons

8. On 9 September 2009, during the parliamentary recess, Quentin Davies MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Defence, announced that an average of £1bn per annum of taxpayers’ money would be spent on capital investment at AWE. http://bit.ly/481R0E

9. The Ministry of Defence submitted an application in November 2009 for an enriched uranium handling and storage facility, codenamed Project Pegasus, at AWE Aldermaston. Critics claim this facility would be used to produce vital nuclear components for a new generation of nuclear warheads.

See the following briefings from the Nuclear Information Service for further details: http://nuclearinfo.org/view/item/a2038 http://nuclearinfo.org/view/item/a2040

10. On 9 February 2009, The Guardian revealed that the United States makes extensive use of the facilities and expertise at AWE for its own nuclear warhead programme, which critics claim undermines the UK and the US’s international treaty obligations, including the NPT. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/09/us-uk-atomic-weapons-nuclear-power 11. In a recent report by Greenpeace (In The Firing Line, September 2009), the lifetime cost of replacing Trident, including running costs, is calculated as £97bn. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/firing-line-hidden-costs-supercarrier-project-and-replacing-trident

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