Press Releases & Updates 2000

The campaign’s first concerted action against the site was in May this year when 53 activists were arrested for a variety of alleged offences, including cutting their way into the base and blockading the gateways. The Aldermaston camp comes hot on the heels of the highly successful action at RAF Wittering in Cambridgeshire in the early hours of Friday morning, when TP activists Susan van der Hijden and Martin Newell put out of action one of the trucks which carries Trident nuclear warheads to Coulport in Scotland, causing an estimated £25000 worth of damage.

A wide range of actions against AWE Aldermaston is expected as activists explore ways to carry out safe disarmament there. A Trident Ploughshares spokesperson said: "However mundane it may appear to the casual passer-by, Aldermaston is a key part of a nuclear weapons system that is constantly threatening us all with annihilation. It is an ongoing crime that neither the government nor the civil police are prepared to prevent. Someone has to take on that task."

On Saturday 11th November at noon, in Tadley Community Centre, Dr Rosalie Bertell, the internationally recognised expert in the area of the effects of low-level radiation, will speak on "Radiation and Health". On Sunday 12th November, from 11 a.m., at the main gate of Aldermaston, there will be a Vigil for to remember all the dead of all wars.

NOTE: Plutonium "pits" (bomb cores) are produced at AWE Aldermaston and then taken to Burghfield to be assembled into Trident warheads. A convoy of specially built articulated trucks take the warheads to RNAD Coulport where they are loaded onto Trident submarines before being deployed on operational patrol. All parts of this process have now been the target of Trident Ploughshares disarmament action.

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