nuclear war | >Re-PHOTO

2004 Aldermaston March

2004 Aldermaston March. On Friday 9th April the 2004 Aldermaston March began with a rally in Trafalgar Square before following the route taken by the first march back in April 1958, which had also begun with a rally in the square. The 2004 march was called as a protest against the development then of a new generation of nuclear weapons.

I covered the rally and went with the marchers as far as Hyde Park, and cycled to join them again in Maidenhead on Sunday 11th, walking with them for a few miles before returning to pick up my bike and cycle home. On the final day I caught the train to Reading and walked with them to Aldermaston.

I put many of my pictures from the march on My London Diary where you can still view them, and wrote a post about the events which I’ll reproduce here with proper capitalisation and some minor corrections, along with a few of the pictures I made in London on Friday 9th April 2004.

Aldermaston 2004: No New Nukes Rally & Start of March

Aldermaston isn’t in London, but the ‘stop the next generation of nuclear weapons‘ march from London to Aldermaston started on Good Friday, 9 April 2004, from Trafalgar Square, where there was a ‘No New Nukes‘ rally.

Aldermaston and nearby Burghfield are at the centre of the UK’s atomic weapon programme, and the march was a protest against the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.

In 1958 the dangers of nuclear war were clear to most of us, and almost fifty years of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among members of the nuclear club make them even more of a danger now. We have seen another almost 50 years of lies and deception dressed up as security and national interest. For example we still haven’t been told of the nuclear warheads kept by our American allies at Lakenheath.

It was good to see many familiar faces, both on the platform and off, with addresses from Tony Benn, Jenny Jones, Pat Arrowsmith, Jeremu Corbyn and more, including a fine performance from Susannah York. There were a considerable number who had been on the first Aldermaston march, back in 1958, forty six years ago. I was too young to be involved then, but my two older brothers had been there.

*Street theatre about Trident from Theatre of War*

‘Theatre Of War’ gave a spirited performance, and there was a jazz band to add a little spirit at the front of the march, perhaps a reminder of the trad boom of the fifties. Pat Arrowsmith, Bruce Kent and some other CND veterans were up there too, leading off the 2,300 who led off through St James. The police estimated the march at 1000. I actually stood and counted as they went by, and although it isn’t an exact science with a march this size, I won’t be more than fifty or so out either way.

*A single Trident submarine has warheads equivalent to 3000 Hiroshima bombs.*

It was a cheerful sendoff to those marchers on the long plod to Aldermaston, one of several marches there starting from different parts of the country.

At Hyde Park, the march proper formed up, with around 430 making their way west through Kensington and towards the first night stay at Southall. I couldn’t walk all the way, although I’d probably covered as much distance running around taking pictures and left the march in Kensington.

On Saturday, the march continued from Southall to Slough via Uxbridge. I had other things to do in the East End and central London, but I managed to catch up with the march on Sunday morning at Maidenhead Bridge with some furious bike riding from Staines.

By then, some problems with Thames Valley Police had emerged, with the police trying to force the march on to the pavement, while some marchers insisted on keeping to the road. In the end a compromise emerged, with the police tolerating those who wanted to stay on the road walking close to the edge of the pavement.

From Maidenhead it seemed a long walk along the A4 to Knowl Hill for a rather late lunch stop. There we were greeted from a distance by the sounds of the Sheffield Samba Band who piped the march in to lunch. I regretted not bothering to pick up my meal tickets, but was really too busy to stop to eat. I photographed the column of marchers setting off for Reading and then started a more lonely walk back to Maidenhead and my bike.

By this time I was feeling the strain. Even on my ‘day off’ on Saturday I’d walked over 10 miles with a heavy camera bag, and the weight of a Nikon with a solid lens round my neck was getting to be too much. So for Monday I travelled light, working with a tiny Canon Digital Ixus. It had the nasty habit of often not taking a picture until a second or so after you pressed the button, by which time I’ve usually put the camera down, so I came home with quite a few pictures of random patches of road and grass from Berkshire. However, as you can see on My London Diary, some came out.

On Monday I walked all the way and a few miles more, with pictures from Reading to Burghfield, were we stopped close to AWE Burghfield [where atomic bombs are made] to the end of the march rally at AWE Aldermaston, after which we took a walk halfway round the large site.

Aldermaston2004 was jointly organised by CND, the Aldermaston women’s peace Camp and Slough4Peace.

My pictures from the rally and march start here on My London Diary, with more pictures starting on further web pages for Friday, Sunday and Monday.

CND is still active, still campaigning for peace and a nuclear free world and opposing the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons. As they say, “Nuclear weapons threaten us all. And they are an obscene drain on public finances.” You can find out more about their actions and sign their petition calling on the government to embrace diplomacy and peace negotiations, instead of nuclear weapons and war and take steps towards nuclear disarmament and a safer world.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

No Trident Lobby & Rally 2007

No Trident Lobby & Rally: On March 14th 2007 the House of Commons were debating the principle to replace the existing UK nuclear weapons and begin a process to design, build and commission submarines to replace the existing Vanguard-class submarines carrying Trident nuclear missiles with updated systems over the coming 17 years. The New Labour government, led by PM Tony Blair and the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett were supported by the Conservatives and one DUP member and won the final division by 408 votes to 160.

Voting against were many Labour MPs and almost all the Liberal Democrats, SNP and other minority parties, although there were a few absentees.

Around Parliament Square there was a day of protest by Greenpeace and others with the main CND rally called for 5pm and continuing into the evening. Here is the account I wrote of the day for My London Diary – with the usual minor corrections and a few of the pictures I posted – more are still on My London Diary

No Trident Lobby & Rally – Parliament Square, London

I missed Bianca and Annie and the others, but I didn’t miss them as there was plenty else going on. As I walked over Westminster bridge there was the banner flying on the crane in front of the houses of parliament, and there were quite a few people stopping to look at it.

Later, Greenpeace activists got on their bikes and cycled across Westminster Bridge to Parliament Square, where they were stopped by police and threatened with arrest unless they left the roadway and moved onto the square. After a while they all did, many cycling away after a few minutes to cycle around London before joining the ‘fish on a bicycle‘ critical mass that arrived back at the square a few hours later, and got the same ‘off your bike‘ treatment from the police.

*Cyclists are ordered off the road and onto the pavement of Parliament Square under threat of arrest*

The square started to fill up rather more from around 5pm when a silent protest attended by a couple of hundred took place in the far corner of the square. By the time the speeches started at 6.15 there was a respectable crowd, perhaps around 500, but people were still arriving and with the addition of the cyclists there were perhaps closer to a thousand present.

A brief attempt by Greenpeace to protest on the pavement in front of the Houses Of Parliament took the police by surprise, but the group were soon escorted back across the road.

*Greenpeace demonstrators on the pavement outside Parliament*

*Veteran peace campaigner Pat Arrowsmith was among those in the crowd*

Throughout the day there had been plenty of signs of the personal vendetta between some Met officers and the regular protesters in the square. Two hapless officers appear to have been deployed just to stand in front of one fluorescent pink placard, and there were some incidents of minor harassment. The injunction thrown out by the judge at Southwark Court recently showed how the police are wasting our money in this respect.

*Brian Haw: Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World. (T-shirt from Dan Wilkins, The Nth Degree.)*

Apparently the latest approach to try and remove the protesters from the square comes from London Mayor Ken Livingstone who is worried about the grass being damaged by the tents there. As I remarked when this was mentioned, “grass regenerates, dead children don’t.” Perhaps we should start a ‘Brian [Haw] For Mayor‘ campaign.

*We need Trident “like a fish needs a bicycle”*

Several Labour MPs came out from the house to address the meeting, along with many activists. Bruce Kent started his speech by thanking Brian Haw for allowing the demo to use his back garden, and Brian later came from his protest at the front of the square to address the meeting.

This time the government got its vote, but there will be later occasions to oppose Trident, as well as the continuing actions at Faslane which those at the demo were urged to take part in.

Trident replacement is still continuing in 2025, with the government being committed to the building of four replacement submarines by the early 2030s and an extension to the life of the Trident missiles potentially to the early 2060s as well as work taking place now to produce replacement nuclear warheads in the 2030s. It is an important support to the UK arms industry but of little or no military consequence with its obscene cost threatening our ability to defend the country by conventional means and it remains – like all nuclear weapons – a definite threat to the peace and future of the world.

Many more pictures on My London Diary beginning here.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Serenading the Bomb Makers – 2008

Serenading the Bomb Makers: Given the current increased tension over the possible nuclear escalation of the Ukraine war – something that would be disastrous to us all and totally insane and irrational, but if NATO keep poking the Russian Bear with a stick could be provoked – it seems appropriate to remember the lunchtime tour around the London offices of some of the companies involved in making the UK’s nuclear weapons on Friday 12th December 2008.

I don’t think I can improve on the piece I posted on My London Diary in 2008 – except by adding the odd word that somehow got missed out, so I’ll copy that here, with some of the pictures from the event. I got too cold standing around and left after an hour and went to take a short look at the work taking place on the Olympic site at Stratford Marsh as the light was beginning to fade.

‘Muriel Lesters’ Serenade the Bomb Makers

Serenading the Bomb Makers - 2008 — *Lockheed Martin, Carlisle Place – A man sprawls in memory of the many deaths caused by atomic weapons; security men look bored.*

Ten activists turned up in Victoria, London on Friday for a festive protest outside the offices of the US company behind the production of the UK’s nuclear weapons and the huge expansion of bomb production facilities at Aldermaston – costing £6,000,000,000 – which has never been debated or approved by Parliament.

They were the ‘Muriel Lesters*’, a London affinity group of Trident Ploughshares. Dressed in Santa suits, white nuclear inspector overalls and festive hats they called for an end to bomb production at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).

Appropriately, their renditions of festive songs and carols with modified anti-nuclear lyrics were largely less than tuneful (one taking part was hear to say “I’m a Quaker, we don’t sing” and who could contradict him?) They called for a stop to the illegal activities of these companies in making weapons.

First to be serenaded by the group were the offices of the US arms giant Lockheed Martin, makers of ‘bunker buster’ and ‘cluster’ bombs, the worlds largest exporter of weapons and the leading member of the consortium set up to produce the nuclear warheads for the UK Trident replacement at Aldermaston.

After an hour or so of leafleting and displaying banners on Vauxhall Bridge Road just around the corner, the group moved to the front door of the building housing Lockheed Martin and several other companies in Carlisle Place for their half hour carol ‘concert’. It was a site I knew from the ‘Merchants of Death‘ tour by CAAT earlier in the year. A number of people came in an out of the building while this was going on and some took leaflets while others hurried past, often to waiting taxis.

Half way through the performance, a police car pulled up and dropped off two constables who came to talk to the protesters. They asked who was in charge (and of course nobody was) and for a mobile number they could use to contact the group, saying “it’s standard practice for protests“. Oh no it isn’t! They were handed a leaflet with the Norwich details of Trident Ploughshares, but that wasn’t what they had in mind.

The police were informed that the real criminals were in the Lockheed Martin offices, carrying out the vast expansion in UK nuclear arms, a breach of the UK’s obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that they were involved in an illegal conspiracy with some groups we could name down the road in Whitehall. The police chose to ignore this vital evidence but eventually they went away, reminding the protesters that while they supported the right to demonstrate, it was important to keep the pavement clear.

As they left, one member of the group stretched out “dead” on his back on that pavement as a symbol of the many victims of nuclear weapons, including those killed in nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “bomb test veterans, and victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield in Berkshire, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other sites“

I left the group as it packed up and decided to take a short break before going on for a similar protest at the London offices of Jacobs Engineering and Fluor Corporation, two other US companies who are competing for the stake in the AWE bomb-making contract currently filled by the British Nuclear Group. The third player in the contract – the only remaining UK involvement – is SERCO.

A few more pictures here

Muriel Lester, (1883–1968), born in Leytonstone, was a leading Christian peace campaigner and writer. Among many other things she founded Kingsley Hall in Bow, was a friend of Gandhi, Travelling Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and was detained for ten weeks in Trinidad and then several days in Holloway Prison for her activities during the Second World War.

Olympic Site – Stratford

A few more pictures from around the London 2012 site.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

CND Protest US Star Wars Programme

CND Protest US Star Wars Programme – 20th March 2002, twenty years ago today.

The US under President Bush was in 2002 intent on achieving what it termed ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ and not content with ruling the planet on earth were developing a system to ensure their dominance in space. At the heart of this was their ‘Star Wars’ programme, using lasers to form a protective shield and destroy any incoming missiles before they reached US soil, enabling the US to launch a nuclear attack with impunity, knowing they could survive a retaliatory attack.

It was a weapons system that would have destroyed the idea of nuclear deterrence, the mutual assured destruction (MAD) doctrine of military strategy which had supposedly prevented nuclear war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and put the US in a position to threaten Russia with nuclear attack. The Cold War may have ended with the breakup of the USSR, but it was still the basis for US military strategy – with consequences were are now seeing in Ukraine.

But like most military spending and wars, it was a policy with great prospects for the arms industry, and in particular Lockheed Martin, the US’s large weapons manufacturer, with deep roots in the US administration – including at the time the wife of the US vice-President Dick Cheney, whose wife Lynn just happened to be on their board.

The UN had early seen the dangers of war in space with the 1976 Outer Space Treaty which made it an area solely for peaceful uses. And in November 2001 they passed a new UN resolution ‘Prevention Of An Arms Race In Outer Space’ with only the US, Israel and Micronesia abstaining.

The US began its weaponisation of space by setting up the US Air Force Space Command in 1982. The UK lends a helping hand with allowing both Menwith Hill and Fylingdales to be used as a part of the Star Wars programme. I’ve not been to the various protests at these bases but I did photograph the march from Hyde Park to a rally in Trafalgar Square organised by CND against Star Wars on 30th March 2002, twenty years ago today.

CND were joined by Stop The War protesting against the planned invasion of Iraq, as well as by pro-Palestine protesters following the publication of the Arab peace initiative which had been published two days earlier, but overshadowed by a Palestinian attack on a hotel during a Passover seder the previous day in which 30 Israeli citizens were killed. The initiative was in any case rejected as a “non-starter” by Israel.

Demonstrations back in 2002 still took place largely in black and white – and I was unable at the time to digitise any of the colour film I took. One day I hope to get around to it. Police acted as usual during the march, threatening at times to beat the marchers badly if they got out of hand, and large numbers protected the US embassy in Grosvenor Square to prevent any action there. They issued the usual estimate of numbers present, apparently unable to see half of the crowd.

I only put around a dozen images online – so most of them are here. The link to them is at the bottom of this page, from which you can also view the other events I photographed in March 2002.

Past Time To Act On Climate Change?

Past Time To Act On Climate Change? Seven years ago on Saturday 7th March 2015, 20,000 or so protesters marched through London to remind government and the nation it was Time to Act on Climate Change. Seven years on, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report released a week ago warns “that climate breakdown is happening faster than expected and that the window to take action is closing fast. The report is a call to governments and private sector players to take drastic action against climate change.”

It’s a report that has largely been lost to public sight, pushed together with the stories about Tory sleaze and lies out of the news by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though it has even more far-reaching implications. Not that I want to in any way minimise Putin’s criminal action and its terrible consequences for the people of Ukraine, largely innocents caught up in a situation of others’ making.

Of course the invasion of Ukraine has now raised the spectre of a nuclear war, which would almost certainly lead to mass extinction rather more rapidly than climate change, but the very dramatic prospect fortunately makes this almost unthinkable. Were it to happen it would almost certainly be by accident, something we have come close to several times in the past. Even our maddest politicians realise there is nothing to be gained by mutually assured destruction, and there would be no profits in it for the oligarchs or billionaires.

Climate change doesn’t happen in a massive flash, but is relatively slow and insidious. Even in the richer countries we are just beginning to feel its effects, and some in the Global South have long been suffering extreme hardship. But unless we heed the report and take drastic action without delay it will be too late to stop; many systems are coming close to their tipping points, past which there is no chance of recovery.

Scientists have been warning about the dangers for many years. Even 50 years ago when I was a student I spoke about the need to change the way we used the Earth’s resources and move to renewable systems of energy and agriculture, as many aspects of our current way of life were unsustainable.

Over 50 years ago it was clear to me that we needed to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, not just because of the carbon emissions and other pollutants, but also because thinking in the longer term it seemed a waste to burn what was a limited resource and an important chemical resource for plastics and other materials. I sold the only car I’d owned in 1967 or 8, because we needed to move away from a society based around private cars. It was clear too that we needed to farm in ways that conserved the soil and that many modern agricultural practices destroyed it – my father had joined the Soil Association which was established in 1946.

But of course there were huge profits to be made from fossil fuels and other industries that were driving up global emissions – and huge campaigns of obfuscation and lobbying. Most politicians in most countries were doing very nicely out of exploiting our natural resources – and the workers, who needed to be kept happy by more and more consumer goods as well as a huge and almost universal media promoting consumerism. Bread and circuses is of course nothing new.

Countries around the world, whatever their politics, are almost entirely run by politicians who have prospered from ‘business as usual’, and usually business corruption which they have colluded in by allowing money laundering, allowing huge tax avoidance and evasion and more. They have now learnt to talk the talk about climate change, but, as Greta Thunberg pointed out, it has been all “blah, blah, blah”, promises but little or no action.

There were many different groups taking part in ‘Time To Act on Climate Change’, including the Campaign Against Climate Change who have organised regular protests in London since 2002, Friends of the Earth who I’ve supported since the 1970s, the Green Party, anti-fracking protesters including the fabulous ‘Nanas’ of Frack Free Lancashire, campaigners against Heathrow expansion – and I list a few more in Climate Change Rally, which also has pictures of some of the speakers.

At the end of the rally I went on to photograph a protest by ‘Art Not Oil’ who invaded the steps of Tate Britain with their ‘longship’ and ‘oil spills’ in a protest demanding the Tate give up taking sponsorship from BP, who used their support of the arts to give themselves a positive public image despite the pollution and climate change their activites cause. It’s time to end this ‘greenwashing’.

Viking longship invades Tate steps has a few pictures of the event. The Longship first sailed to the British Museum where BP had sponsored a show on the Vikings. As I commented, the plastic oil spills used by the protesters “are a lot easier to clean up than the real ones BP has created such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, and which could be truly catastrophic in the Arctic.”

More on all these on My London Diary:
Viking longship invades Tate steps
Climate Change Rally
Time to Act on Climate Change