Christmas Demo at Bomb Makers
Peter Marshall | 10.12.2009 23:36 | Anti-militarism
Bells Not Bombs
Signing the card
On the way to Lockheed Martin
Outside Lockheed Martin
Weapons Inspector
Singing carols at Lockheed Martin
After an hour and a half of handing out leaflets, gathering signatures for their petition and card, a group of the protesters in Santa dress (and an odd reindeer) went to the building housing the Lockheed Martin offices to deliver their card.
At the door they were met by a security man and the premises manager of the offices, which are shared with a number of other organisations, who told them that they could not enter the building and that nobody from Lockheed Martin was prepared to come out to meet them. He offered to take the card and deliver it to them, making sure that they got it, and after a short discussion his offer was accepted. At the request of the premises manager they left room for people to walk past on the pavement and to leave and enter the building.
The protesters then began to sing, start with their specially written "Lockheed Anthem" to the tune of 'Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’, which starts:
Lockheed the big bomb maker
Does some very nasty work
Building new nuclear weapons
Carlisle Place is where they lurk
After singing all three verses and choruses of this, they went on to other anti-nuclear carols for around 15 minutes, while one of the protesters with a Santa mask and a 'weapons inspector' white suit lay on the pavement in a black plastic body bag.
A number of people from the other companies in the building came in and out during the protest, but there was no sign of anyone from Lockheed Martin, who have offices on the second floor of Manning House, a fine example of Victorian architecture that was once the house of Cardinal Manning. Their lease comes up for renewal in around 18 months and it seems that the building's owners - and doubtless the other companies leasing offices there - will be glad to be rid of them. So next year's Christmas demonstration there may well be the last in Carlisle Place.
It's very hard to find any rational explanation for the UK government's dedication to the continuation of the UK nuclear weapons program and the replacement of Trident.
It has of course been many years since we have had an independent nuclear deterrent - the very heart of our special relationship with the USA is that our nuclear weapons are essentially an offshore arm of the US nuclear capability. There has been a massive expansion in the manufacturing capability of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston since 2005 costing well over £5 billion. The AWE is owned by a private consortium led by the major US arms company Lockheed Martin and including another US company, Jacobs along with Serco from the UK. It is perhaps not surprising to read in the Guardian that as well as making warheads for the UK the AWE also makes them for the USA.
This vast investment in increased nuclear bomb-making capacity has taken place at a time when US and other world leaders have been talking about cutting stocks of warheads, and making great efforts to stop countries such as Iran and North Korea developing a nuclear capability.
Our nuclear program was once justified as a deterrent against Soviet attack during the years of the cold war. Since we are now celebrating 20 years since the break-up of the Soviet empire this is an argument that is 20 years out of date, 20 years of entirely wasted expenditure on keeping our submarines with their nuclear warheads at sea.
With our current financial position, continued expenditure on a military nuclear programme seems clearly madness. That it has gone on for so long despite the end of the cold war seems to indicate some very effective lobbying by private arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin.
More pictures on Demotix, and shortly on My London Diary:
http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2009/12/dec.htm#lockheed
Peter Marshall
e-mail:
petermarshall@cix.co.uk
Homepage:
http://mylondondiary.co.uk
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Press Release
11.12.2009 09:58
Trident Ploughshares Press Release
Friday, 11 December 2009
FOURTEEN anti-nuclear peace campaigners from Trident Ploughshares affinity group the Muriel Lesters, the London and Oxford Catholic Worker, Campaign Against Arms Trade, World March for Peace and Nonviolence and Kingston Peace Council and friends dressed in white “weapons inspector” overalls and festive hats and decorations, serenaded employees of nuclear weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin outside the US arms giant’s central London office on Thursday 10 December, UN Human Rights Day. They brought messages of peace and condemnation through the verses of popular festive tunes with specially-modified lyrics and called for the suspension of work on existing nuclear warheads and on the construction of new facilities and research to develop a new generation of warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, south-east England.
As well as serenading employees of the arms giant and fellow occupants of the building they share, participants in the protest displayed banners and distributed hundreds of leaflets to passers-by, many of whom stopped to chat and signed petitions to the Government calling on it to abandon Trident and its planned replacement and sign up to a Nuclear Weapons Convention - a global ban on nuclear arms - and wrote messages on a large Christmas card which was then handed in to the company.
One of the protesters, wearing a Father Christmas mask and hat and a white overall marked “Weapons Inspector” lay down “dead” in a plastic bodybag in front of his singing colleagues outside Lockheed Martin’s building to symbolise the victims of nuclear weapons, including the approximately two hundred thousand casualties from the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and those from any future nuclear strikes, as well as nuclear bomb test veterans and other victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and other cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other nuclear sites, and by the widespread use of radioactive and toxic “depleted” uranium shells in recent conflicts, including Iraq, the Balkans and possibly Afghanistan.
Trident Ploughshares member Daniel Viesnik, 35, from north London said yesterday, “Christmas is a time of year when we would all do well to reflect on what we personally can do to bring about peace and justice in the world in these increasingly troubled times.
“As politicians from around the world negotiate in Copenhagen for a new treaty to avert climate catastrophe, we must not forget that the many thousands of nuclear weapons that still exist in the world could wipe out humanity and destroy the biosphere in a flash.
“Instead of wasting tens of billions of pounds on a new generation of nuclear weapons and submarines, we should be investing in developing a sustainable, nuclear-free society, in education, in health and social care and other socially useful things.”
“We welcome recent initiatives by the Prime Minister, President Obama, receiving his Noble Peace Prize in Oslo today, on Human Rights Day, and others in the direction of achieving a nuclear weapons-free world, but the UK must show leadership by taking its submarines off patrol and abandoning its Trident nuclear white elephants.”
ENDS
Notes:
1. Trident Ploughshares is a campaign to disarm the UK Trident nuclear weapon system in a nonviolent, open, peaceful and fully accountable manner.
Twitter:
2. British Trident nuclear warheads are manufactured at AWE Aldermaston in Berkshire on behalf of the Ministry of Defence by AWE ML, a private consortium comprising US firm Lockheed Martin (22 Carlisle Place, Victoria), US firm Jacobs Engineering and British firm Serco. Thus AWE ML has, since December 2008, been two-thirds under US ownership (with the Ministry of Defence retaining a “golden share”).
Furthermore, Britain’s nuclear-armed Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, also manufactured by Lockheed Martin, are leased from the US and maintained there, whilst the guidance systems software and certain critical components of the warheads, including the neutron generators
3. Since 2005, a multi-billion pound expansion of the warhead manufacturing facilities at AWE Aldermaston - on the scale of Heathrow Terminal 5 according to AWE itself - has been in progress. At the same time, hundreds of scientists and other members of staff have been recruited, including warhead designers.
4. Campaigners are opposed to new nuclear weapons developments on account of the cost, especially in light of the current economic situation in the UK and globally, but also on moral, legal, international security and democratic grounds. It is argued that the developments breach the UK’s disarmament obligations under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) [see 5 below], and that they have a destabilising effect by setting a bad example and encouraging other states to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Furthermore, it is argued that the developments at AWE are undemocratic since they have never been put out to a national public consultation, nor has Parliament ever been consulted.
5. Article VI of the NPT, ratified by both the UK and the US, stipulates: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
6. On 15 February 2010, members and supporters of Trident Ploughshares, CND, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp(aign) and others will nonviolently blockade AWE Aldermaston, seeking to prevent workers and contractors entering the site.
7. In an ICM poll for the Guardian published on 13 July 2009, 54% of respondents indicated that they wanted to see Britain abandon its nuclear weapons and not replace its Trident system.
8. On 9 September 2009, during the parliamentary recess, Quentin Davies MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Defence, announced that an average of £1bn per annum of taxpayers’ money would be spent on capital investment at AWE.
9. The Ministry of Defence submitted an application in November 2009 for an enriched uranium handling and storage facility, codenamed Project Pegasus, at AWE Aldermaston. Critics claim this facility would be used to produce vital nuclear components for a new generation of nuclear warheads.
See the following briefings from the Nuclear Information Service for further details:
10. On 9 February 2009, The Guardian revealed that the United States makes extensive use of the facilities and expertise at AWE for its own nuclear warhead programme, which critics claim undermines the UK and the US’s international treaty obligations, including the NPT.
11. In a recent report by Greenpeace (In The Firing Line, September 2009), the lifetime cost of replacing Trident, including running costs, is calculated as £97bn.
Trident Ploughshares Media
e-mail:
media [at] tridentploughshares.org
Homepage:
http://www.tridentploughshares.org
More pics
11.12.2009 10:39
Trident Ploughshares Media
e-mail:
media [at] tridentploughshares.org
Homepage:
http://www.tridentploughshares.org
Get organised for the Aldermaston Blockade! - 15 Feb 2010
11.12.2009 10:50
Overnight crash accommodation and hot vegan food will be available afer the blockade, as well as legal support, snacks and hot drinks during the blockade, police station pick-ups and a post-blockade debrief.
As well as groups to blockade, we also need volunteers for various "non-arrestable" roles, such as drivers and gate support. Please get in touch for more details.
To find out more about the arrangements for the blockade, please look at the detailed briefing pack now up on the Trident Ploughshares website:
For reports and pics from recent blockades at Aldermaston and other Trident Ploughshares actions, see:
Trident Ploughshares website:
Aldermaston Blockade blog:
For all the latest on the developments at Aldermaston, see:
Follow Trident Ploughshares on Twitter:
Trident Ploughshares
e-mail:
blockawe [at] yahoo.co.uk
Homepage:
http://blockawe.blogspot.com
WN Article+Pics of Demo
12.12.2009 14:13
Jules Mattsson
Homepage:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/julesmattsson/