PEOPLE’S DISARMAMENT
Our planet is dying – both spiritually and physically. Fear, aggression and greed, narrow-minded national interests and immature dominance and control over others is a common theme in most countries. However, there are more and more people who define themselves as global citizens, who know that life is intimately interconnected, and that we can never be fully human whilst others continue to suffer, and who know that love, justice and nonviolence is the very essence of life. And what gives me hope is the very many different ways in which ordinary people are taking responsibility. They are creating the changes needed to pass beyond war and injustice, control and dominance and towards a free, just, loving, and diverse world.
I would like to share with you just one small part of this web of life and summarise our story of People’s Disarmament.
I come from a nuclear weapon state, where many of us have decided that, as a first step to ending war and encouraging nonviolent conflict resolution, we need to engage in the nuclear disarmament process ourselves – on a very practical level. We cannot wait for our state to disarm. We therefore started a campaign, called Trident Ploughshares, based upon international law which challenges the legitimacy of the UK Nuclear Forces.
The UK nuclear weapon system consists of four Trident submarines, each of which has 48 100 kiloton warheads – that is 192 independently targetable nuclear bombs – each 8 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The use of even one of these warheads would be illegal because it is too powerful and indiscriminate to be capable of being used without violating international humanitarian law. When any envisaged use of force is unlawful then any stated readiness to use such force is a prohibited threat. The UK Trident system is deployed under a policy of “stated readiness to use” – that is what a “credible minimum deterrence” means.
The 7 other nuclear weapon states are also committing crimes against peace which undermine the international legal system. The non-nuclear weapon states seem unable to join together effectively to confront the powerful states and so we are entering a new arms race in space as international law unravels before our eyes.
We have all learnt by now that if we want nuclear disarmament then it is no good waiting for our Governments to do it. They have signed many international treaties and agreements promising to disarm their nuclear weapons – the most recent being at the Review Conference of the Non Proliferation Treaty last year. But what do these promises mean when at the very same time they are researching the successors to the Trident nuclear weapons system, are backing the USA in its Star Wars and National Missile Defence systems and continuing to say that they rely upon nuclear deterrence?
The Government’s promises to disarm their nuclear weapons are useless, just as a Trident Ploughshares activist painted on the side of a Trident submarine last April. If we want nuclear disarmament then we, the people, have to take on this responsibility ourselves. This is what People’s Disarmament is all about. This is why we started Trident Ploughshares, and this is why we work together with the wider peace movement that has been struggling for over 50 years now to rid the world of these monstrous killing machines.
In 1998, Trident Ploughshares issued a direct challenge to Prime Minister Tony Blair to implement international law by disarming all British nuclear weapons or that the campaign’s members would do it. We have organised people to make a personal pledge to disarm the nuclear weapon system themselves and have stated that we will continue with this task until the government takes over the disarmament work and fulfils its promise of complete nuclear disarmament.
Our dedication to peaceful acts of practical disarmament is based on international law and the basic human right to life. People from many different nations come together as ‘global citizens’ and begin the task of peacefully dismantling the nuclear system. This is not violent, or criminal damage, or vandalism, or a breach of the peace but practical and lawful ‘people’s disarmament’.
The people, engaged in practical nuclear disarmament, are bringing a breath of fresh air into the antiquated legal systems, bluntly naming nuclear weapons as terroristic murder machines and stating that the law is not worthy of any respect if it refuses to outlaw state-blackmail and mass-destruction. The district court at Helensburgh in Scotland is the scene of an inspiring historical peoples confrontation with the evil of a nuclear weapon state. The potential for change in the UK is immense as more and more people discover they are prepared to stand up for their beliefs and say clearly and loudly No to nuclear weapons, Yes to non-violent conflict resolution.
Trident Ploughshares currently have 158 ‘global citizens’ from 14 different countries who have Pledged to Prevent Nuclear Crime and have taken part in a two-day workshop on nonviolence. Having citizens from other countries joining in our disarmament work with us, appearing in the courts and spending time in our prisons, has been much harder for the authorities to deal with. The Government and the Courts like to pretend that British nuclear weapons are purely a British affair but they find this position untenable when foreigners appear in court to explain why they feel threatened by Britain and why they are joining with many other nationalities as “global citizens” and why they have pledged to peacefully disarm British Trident. I am talking here of fully pledged members of TP. But of course we have several thousand active supporters and of these there are quite large groups from Ireland, Belgium and Holland, who come over and join our blockades.
We make sure our plans, motivations and organisational structures are open to the public, the government and military. We have a freely-accessible web-site which contains all our materials including our Tri-Denting It Handbook and our letters to and from the Government. We continually ask the UK government a question they have never been able to answer, “How can a 100 kiloton nuclear warhead ever be used in a way that can distinguish between a military target and innocent civilians?”
We encourage Parliamentarians to sign our Petition of Support, which around 80 have now done. They help get answers to our letters, ask questions for us in their various parliaments and are now beginning to join us in our disarmament actions. At the last mass blockade we organised at Faslane in October, when over a thousand people joined in, there were Members of the Scottish, UK and European Parliaments arrested for peacefully blockading the base. We have also been joined in past blockades by over 30 Scottish Church Ministers and a respected senior Scottish criminal lawyer. They sat with us and were arrested for “breach of the peace”. Tommy Sheridan, MSP, was recently acquitted on this charge in yet another court victory. The Crown will undoubtedly appeal which may mean another approach to the European Court. But such follow-through is essential in any campaign and gives us more opportunity to challenge the twisted logic of “nuclear terrorism”.
We work in this safe, open and accountable manner because we want our methods for opposing Trident to be consistent with our vision of what we would like to see in its place. We see our method as part of a process of good conflict resolution. We do not want to have to do this work but hope to persuade our state to do it for us. Therefore, we keep them fully briefed and keep open to dialogue and negotiation. In the longer term we see our method of disarmament as being an experiment in forming sustainable networks of “nonviolent resistance to oppression” and hope that these will eventually replace military force all over the globe.
All Trident Ploughshares Pledgers must be in affinity groups and agree to the safety and nonviolence ground-rules but thereafter they work as autonomously as they wish. They have chosen various kinds of disarmament actions which have ranged from blockades, to fence-cutting, to swimming onto the submarines and destroying equipment, to dismantling a research lab, disabling military vehicles, to painting War Crime Warnings on military equipment and handing out leaflets to military base workers urging them to “Refuse to be a War Criminal”. The majority of these disarmament actions involve people in blockades and fence cutting and have caused minimal damage for maximum court-clogging disruption.
However, there have also been at least nine attempts at substantial disarmament damage in the last 18 months, with three groups managing to complete their actions causing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage and delaying the operation of the Trident related equipment. For instance, Susan and Martin, in November 2000, cut through security fencing at Wittering, broke into a hangar and damaged one of the nuclear convoy vehicles, making it unfit to transport nuclear warheads up to Faslane. We call all of this damage “disarmament” and “nuclear crime prevention”.
Our actions are leading to many hundreds of trials. Every trial is important because each one confronts the state and the legal system where they are most vulnerable – on a major law and order issue. This is why our campaign is causing such political and legal ripples. Traditionally the law has been used against the “people” rather than the “state” – predominantly against the poor and disadvantaged. Yet now, the people have turned this around and have openly challenged the whole legal basis, and thus legitimacy, of the Armed Forces – one of the pillars of the State. They are demanding a people-centred law not a state or corporation-centred law.
Our practical people’s disarmament campaign has led to some spectacular actions that are challenging the whole legal system. To take just a couple of examples: In February 1999 two women swam into the docks at Barrow, climbed aboard “Vengeance” and dismantled testing equipment on the conning tower. This action delayed, by several months, the departure of “Vengeance” to the USA to collect its missiles. After three re-trials over two and a half years, the women eventually had their charges dropped because successive juries could not make up their minds whether their openly acknowledged action was criminal or was in fact justifiable as the women had argued.
Then in June of the same year three of us disarmed a research barge called “Maytime” that maintains the “invisibility” of Trident under the oceans. We emptied the whole laboratory, by throwing everything into Loch Goil – the computers and monitoring and testing equipment – and then we smashed the control boxes for the model submarines and cut the electricity supplies to various other Trident research equipment. After five months in prison we explained that we were entitled to do this under international law.
Our acquittal at Greenock Sheriff’s Court by direction of a brave and humane Sheriff, called Margaret Gimblett, caused a political and legal furore that led to the Lord Advocate asking the High Court to examine some of the international law issues around Trident in an attempt to prevent any other judges from acquitting in the future. The legal debate continues after an appalling opinion by the High Court that incorrectly stated that international law only applies in a time of war and implied that the ongoing bombing of Iraq was not a “war”.
While lawyers will no doubt continue to argue the rights and wrongs of the Scottish legal system denying the very foundation of the humanitarian law that came out of the War Crime Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, we, as ordinary citizens, are not letting the High Court undermine us. We continue to challenge this abuse and distortion of the law, that tries to protect an outdated and corrupt nuclear weapon system. We are attempting to reclaim the law through the common sense and simple morality of ordinary people who have no difficulty in recognising the simple fact that mass murder is a crime. We have filed an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights and continue with our disarmament actions in the faith that all tyrannies fail eventually and that the truth does finally prevail.
The core of our argument is very straightforward. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction and thus cannot be used with any precision or any pretence at righting any wrong. Their use is basically mass murder on a catastrophic scale with the potential for escalation to the use of thousands of nuclear weapons, which could put an end to all life on earth. Law is based upon ethical values and is respected in so far, and only in so far, as it conforms to common human morality. Governments, soldiers and armed forces gain their legitimacy and power from the law and thus the law is of immense importance to them. The only thing that distinguishes a soldier from a common murderer is that he has been given legal permission to do certain kinds of killing on behalf of society. This legalised killing is meant to be carefully controlled by laws – the most important of which are international humanitarian laws, which outlaw indiscriminate mass murder. The acquittals at Greenock and the two at Manchester, cleared us of criminal intent and at the same time clearly pointed out the criminal intent of the British nuclear forces.
This is our message – killing is wrong. Mass killing is wrong. Threatening mass destruction is a denial of our own humanity and is suicidal. When something is wrong we have to stop it. Dismantling the machinery of destruction is thus a practical act of love that we can all join in. Please join us – together we are unstoppable.