Press Releases & Updates 2001

Sylvia Boyes (57), a veteran peace campaigner from Keighley in Yorkshire, is jointly charged with and River, an Open University tutor from Manchester, with conspiring to commit criminal damage. From the witness stand she explained what motivated her action at Barrow when she had gone into the secure dockyard to do what she could to disarm the submarine. She gave an account of her many years of campaigning, including being a signatory to the plea to the International Court of Justice for a review of the legality of nuclear weapons, which led to the ICJ’s landmark Advisory Opinion delivered in 1996.

From the witness stand she told the court that Trident Ploughshares had been set up because of the lack of success in conventional means of campaigning and the urgent need to respond to the threat from Trident. She explained the inextricable links between nuclear weapons and the so-called "civil" use of nuclear power. To illustrate the urgency of the threat from Trident she told the court about the time the early warning system at Fylingdales was triggered by a flock of geese and how, in more recent times, a rocket carrying a Norwegian weather satellite had been mistaken by the Russians for a nuclear missile attack.

A Trident Ploughshares spokesperson said: "It’s really hard to imagine anyone listening to Sylvia’s passion, coherence and downright common sense without admitting that she was right to do what she did."

Earlier, during the Crown case, a security officer at Barrow under cross examination made the astonishing admission that the security personnel there received no training whatsoever about how to respond to a nuclear accident in the dockyard.

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