nuclear arms

Trident Ploughshares Press Release 17 November, 2009 - For immediate release

Each fall, in early October, the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space holds Keep Space for Peace Week. The purpose of the event is to increase global consciousness about the need to prevent the arms race from moving into space.

I would like to invite you all to the UK in February next year. Trident Ploughshares is organising a big blockade of Aldermaston for Monday 15th February 2010 from 7am – all day - and we need European help.

Saturday, October 17th and Sunday, October 18th 2009:
International working conference “No to war - No to NATO”

http://tridentreplacement.net is an accessible collection of documents about the replacement of the UK's current Trident nuclear weapons system.
Launched with more than 1,000 entries, the http://tridentreplacement.net database provides a rich source of publicly available documents relating to almost all aspects of the government's decision to replace the UK's current nuclear weapons system.

We're launching the database today, on the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, with the aims of:

Six anti-nuclear campaigners from Trident Ploughshares affinity group the Muriel Lesters visited nuclear weapons profiteers Jacobs Engineering outside their Tower Bridge office in London on April 30.

Trident Ploughshares activists working with Bikes Block Bombs, Scrap Cars-Scrap Trident, Aldermaston Women, and Eastern-region CND have blockaded 4 gates at AWE Aldermaston today. They are protesting at the building of new nuclear weapons facilities and the lack of democratic accountability.

The surprise blockades have caused massive road blockages and construction vehicles have been prevented from getting into Aldermaston.

Programme

The new arms race in space is shaping up to be the largest industrial project in Earth's history. To pay for this project, the aerospace industry has been lobbying Washington for a dedicated funding source. Budget allocations for missile defense — Star Wars — are only part of the huge sums of money redirected toward preparations for war in space.

It’s time to take nuclear weapons out of Europe. As NATO reaches 60, NATO needs to get the message that we don’t need nuclear weapons and neither does NATO. Designed for the cold war, nuclear weapons are worse than irrelevant in the current security context. Even within the military, such weapons are increasingly perceived as “so last century”, militarily inappropriate and a massive drain on resources which the military claim are needed for conventional wars.


NATO has come a long way since the end of the Cold War. Already with the Rome Declaration of 1991 NATO positioned itself with a new strategy, no longer focused at defending the NATO territory from an attack. An attack from the the East was no longer likely, instead NATO formulated as “news threats” the consequences of economic, social and political difficulties in central and eastern Europe, for which NATO had to be prepared.


While diplomats and lobbyists are preparing for the renewal of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and peace activists are preparing for a closure of European nuclear bases on april the 3th, the arms industry is making money of developing new nukes. These are the biggest profiteers making new NATO nukes:

For the US

Honeywell is one of the biggest global arms companies, although only 10% of its profits comes from arms. Honeywell produces equipment for simulated nuclear explosions. Such simulated explosion are essential to develop new nuclear weapons.