Press Releases & Updates 1999

Yesterday, Wednesday 14th July 1999, the 4 Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists (including Marlene Yeo from Burton-on-the-Wolds), who entered the "secure" Nuclear Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston early on Monday morning, were released from Newbury police station, pending further investigations. They will return to Newbury on 24th August for further questioning, which is likely to lead to charges of criminal damage.

Their major aim in entering the secret factory, which designs and makes components for the nuclear warheads deployed on Trident submarines, was to engage workers in dialogue about the appalling nature of the work in which they were engaged. In their attempts to do so they met with some hostility and much apathy.

Marlene Yeo said:

"Last weekend I watched a TV documentary about the Gulag in the former Soviet Union in which a number of people who had been part of that machine of death and repression were put on the spot. Their response was exactly that of the workers I met inside the nuclear bomb factory. They said they didn’t care. Obviously people who build and plan to use weapons of mass destruction have to develop thick skins."

From Cornton Vale prison in Scotland, where she is being held after the successful disarming of a Trident -related lab in Loch Goil in June, Danish citizen Ulla Roder commented:

"We saw the same reaction at Nato HQ in Brussels in May. However, as we put the facts to them, some of them were obviously beginning to think about the enormity of what they were involved in. We have to continue to work at peacefully "disarming" the humans who make this dreadful system tick. We will do this by giving them the information and arguing the case."

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