Press Releases & Updates 1998

Today a couple of hundred commited nonviolent peace activists began their direct disarmament campaign to disable the Trident nuclear weapon system with a march from the permanent peace camp at Faslane to the North Gate at Faslane, where, in a lively and peaceful demonstration they declared their commitment to challenge Britain’s violation of international law.

The activists, from Australia, Belgium, England, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, the USA, and Wales launched their seventeen months of determined actions with a blacksmith beaten on his anvil a model of a Trident submarine into the CND symbol. Today’s historic gathering was supported by theatre, drumming, singing, poetry, juggling and dancing.

Brian Quail of the Peace Artist Affinity Group read out a final plea to the base commander to act upon his duty to uphold the law and show his solidarity with the human race by issuing orders to begin the dismantling of the illegal nuclear weapons system, but the appeal met with deafening silence. This means that the disarmers now have no other option but to enter the installations and damage them with the tools they have to hand.

The disarmers realise that they face arrest and are ready to accept responsibility for their actions in order to show the primacy of international and humanitarian law and to test the readiness of the criminal justice system to recognise that primacy. The events of the next fifteen days will make that issue unavoidable

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