TRIDENT PLOUGHSHARES

PRESS RELEASE – For Immediate Release

PLYMOUTH DESERVES BETTER – TRIDENT IS CANCER, CUT IT OUT.

Anti-nuclear campaigners from as far as Switzerland have been arriving in Plymouth this weekend for the non-violent and peaceful blockade of Devonport Dockyard planned for 6am on the 1st of November 2010, called by the Plymouth-based Trident Ploughshares group, The Tamarians.

Including Trident Ploughshares, those expected to be participating are CND, the Green Party and other environmentalists, religious groups, secularists, and trade unionists. One person has walked from London to Plymouth in order to attend. These are the people once described by the late Kurt Vonnegut as “shock troops of the sane in the war against insanity”.

Tamarians member John Robb described them as “working and educated citizens united against a useless and dumb waste of money.”

The campaigners would like to stress to the beleaguered people of Plymouth that they are “anti-Trident, not anti-dockyard”.

The Tamarians argue that the only way to ‘Save Our Dockyard’ is to cut out the cancerous growth that is Trident. They point to a recent report that shows that Trident costs more jobs than it creates. They say nuclear weaponry is poison for the soul, and Trident is poison for the people of Plymouth, who deserve a better legacy than a radioactive one.

The world-class skills of the work-force in the dockyard could multiply, and inspire the World if they were put to green and sustainable ends, they say. Rather than ever dwindling and ever riskier nuclear work, maintaining an illegal and useless relic from last century.

“Plymouth Deserves Better” say the campaigners, who claim the Trident work in Devonport is turning the City into the “Sellafield of the South West”.

Contacts - John Robb - 07840129247. Press queries – 07969858214. Angie Zelter – 07835354652

Photos available as blockade commences from  http://plymouthtamarians.wordpress.com/

END.

Notes.

CND Report, Trident Costs Jobs –  http://www.cnduk.org/images/stories/briefings/trident/trident-jobs-ukeconomy.pdf

For further info about issues surrounding Trident refit work at Devonport, contact Ian Avent of CANSAR, 07799337433, or email  avent362@btinternet.com

Blockade Briefing Pack –  http://tridentploughshares.org/article1608

Trident Ploughshares – http@//tridentploughshares.org
Tamarians -  http://plymouthtamarians.wordpress.com/
CND –  http://www.cnduk.org

ICM Poll showing that more than half respondents favour nuclear disarmament –
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/13/icm-poll-nuclear-weapons

Article VI of the NPT, ratified by the UK, stipulates –
“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue 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 international control.”

NPT background –  http://reachingcriticalwill.org/

For further info on the international campaigns for the NPT Review Treaty to commit to negotiations towards a Nuclear Weapons Convention, see  http://www.icanw.org