A massive and accelerating crisis faces all of us on Planet Earth: the climate is warming, and we will rapidly reach a point where the damage to our ecosystem will be irreversible. Dismayed by the political inertia which fails to address this emergency, increasing numbers of people are resorting to protest through nonviolent direct action.
International conferences regularly agree on aims but fail to implement action with the urgency and on the scale needed to challenge the hegemony of Big Oil. We are told that the money simply isn’t there. But here in the UK there is one hugely costly project which, if it were cancelled, would release an income-stream which could be directed to the electorate’s real priorities: the climate crisis, the NHS, education and transport. I’m talking about Trident.
Nuclear weapons
I was five years old when America’s atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those events ended WW2 but triggered the Cold War. When the Soviet Union, the UK, France and China acquired their own nuclear arsenals, the Cold War settled into a 35-year stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction (appropriately dubbed MAD), in which it was assumed that a nuclear exchange would be prevented by a ‘balance of terror’.
But in the 1980s, NATO strategists dropped the MAD policy, because advances in military technology gave them the confidence that they could fight and win a nuclear war: their new nuclear-armed Cruise missiles could launch pre-emptive strikes, capable of destroying the Soviets’ nuclear weapons in their silos.
Ordinary people rapidly realised that this development posed an existential threat to millions of civilians on both sides of the Iron Curtain: we had all been conscripted as front-line troops, expendable pawns in NATO’s nuclear game. A re-energised peace movement vociferously opposed Cruise missiles when they arrived on British soil: they were totally under American control, but they made the UK a target.
Embrace the Base at Greenham Common
Greenham Common in Berkshire was one of the Cruise sites. In the summer of 1981, a small group of women from South Wales established a peace camp there. During the first winter of their protest they struggled to get any support or publicity. In conditions of great hardship, they kept the camp going. Their protest grew amid evictions, arrests, imprisonments, and physical attacks. One woman was killed. All of this was accompanied by often viciously mendacious press coverage.
In December 1982, I was one of 30,000 women who responded to an unsigned chain letter, inviting us to ‘Embrace the Base’. We joined hands and encircled Greenham’s 9-mile perimeter fence. We decorated it with objects of significance to us, transforming it into a nine mile work of art.
‘Embrace the Base’ was a high-profile event, but small-scale protests were frequently staged with daring, creativity and humour, either by the women who lived at the camp or by autonomous groups of women who travelled to Berkshire to carry out some anarchic plot of their own devising.
In September 1985, with a group of women from the North East, I made the 300-odd mile journey to Greenham again.
My group had hatched a plan to enter the base to access a small outbuilding on which they were going to paint anti-nuclear slogans, and I was there to support them. By that stage it was ludicrously easy to get through the fence because hundreds of women with bolt cutters had reduced it to shreds. The army kept patching it up, but their efforts were futile. The women from my group walked on to the base, slapped a lot of blue gloss paint on the wall of the outbuilding, then stood quietly, dripping brushes in hand, waiting to be arrested. A group of policemen duly arrived and handcuffed them. To my surprise, I was also arrested, even though I was outside the fence and hadn’t actually done anything wrong. We were all charged with criminal damage and summonsed to appear at Newbury Magistrates’ Court a few weeks later.
From the dock, I made a stirring speech to justify protesting at the base. It cut no ice whatsoever. I was found guilty of criminal damage and ordered to pay a fine and costs, which amounted to £67.75p. I refused to pay. The magistrates, who had seen it all before, wearily referred my case to my local court in Hexham. I knew that the length of time to be spent inside would be calculated pro rata from the amount of the fine I’d refused to pay. It worked out at less than a week in prison, which I felt confident I could cope with.
However, time wore on and nobody arrived to take me away. It was getting perilously near Christmas, when I really didn’t want to be away from my family. I enquired of the clerk to Hexham’s Magistrates when the law would come for me. He said:
“They don’t put people like you in prison. It’s much too expensive. We will contact your employer and put an Attachment of Earnings order on your salary.” I realised that my gesture of defiance would pointless if the only person who knew about it would be the wages clerk at County Hall. Since I was going to have to pay anyway, I decided to turn it into a stunt by making the payment on a novelty cheque.
‘Cheque in the Post’
At that time, a cheque could still legally be written on any object provided it contained all the features of a normal paper cheque. I decided to make mine look like a section of the Greenham fence, so I bought a concrete post from my local builders’ merchants. At Greenham I’d collected some razor wire and some sections of the green plastic-coated wire from the fence which had been lying on the ground. (For the record, I never did cut the fence.) I fixed those bits to the post along with some dried flowers and a postcard reading ‘Take a Risk for Peace’. I wrote my bank details in black paint on the four surfaces of the post and sent out a press release headed ‘Cheque in the Post’.
With some local supporters, I turned up at the office of the clerk to the local magistrates’ court which at that time was in Hexham market place. Some press photographers took pictures, and I gave a couple of interviews to reporters before lugging the post up two flights of stairs and paying it in. I was careful to ask for a receipt.
The resulting publicity was far from critical. The local and regional papers covered the story and printed pictures. CND’s magazine ‘Sanity’ featured it in their regular column ‘Novelty ways to pay a fine’. The next time our bins were collected, our bin man asked if that was me in the paper. When I admitted it was, he gave me a huge bear hug which lifted me off the ground. It certainly taught me that making people laugh is an effective way of getting a message across.
I’m retelling that story now because recently activists were handed another opportunity to marshal the power of humour against nuclear madness. In January 2024, off the coast of Florida, the UK test-launched an unarmed Trident II D5 nuclear missile from HMS Vanguard, one of our fleet of four nuclear submarines. Instead of soaring into the sky, it plopped ignominiously into the sea.
News of this dismal failure (swiftly re-badged by the MoD as ‘an anomaly’) did not leak out until The Sun newspaper published the story in February 2024. To add to official embarrassment, the Minister of Defence, Grant Shapps, and the Admiral of the Fleet, Ben Key, were both on board, presumably anticipating some triumphant press coverage and a suitably macho photo opportunity. It was the second test firing in a row to go wrong for the Royal Navy. The previous misfire took place in 2016 when a missile veered off course and was destroyed. Pluckily, Grant Shapps has declared that he has “absolute confidence that the U.K.’s deterrent remains effective, dependable and formidable.”
The carbon footprint of the UK military
All this is good for a laugh, but what it says about our priorities is far from funny. It is high time we looked at this issue from the perspective of the climate catastrophe, factoring-in what the military contributes to the UK’s carbon footprint. Dr Stuart Parkinson, of Scientists for Global Responsibility, calculates that the annual carbon footprint of the UK military is roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions of six million average cars. Trident must account for a sizeable proportion of that. Of course, the government omits all mention of those figures when it claims we are progressing nicely towards net zero.
The cost of Trident
We also need to challenge why we spend such colossal amounts of money on Trident, when there are so many urgent rival claims on the public purse. The arguments against the possession of nuclear weapons are as valid now as they were when I wrote my novelty cheque nearly forty years ago.
- the moral objection to threatening the deaths of countless numbers of people.
- nuclear weapons make their possessors a target.
- early-warning systems make it more likely that nuclear war will be triggered by accident.
- nuclear war will be followed by nuclear winter, causing ecocide and wrecking forever any chance of addressing climate change.
But let’s focus on the cost of Trident, which falls on the UK at a time when serious investment in public services is urgently needed on a huge scale. The figures bandied about are quoted not in millions but in billions. The difference between those two quantities is so vast it is hard to grasp, so try this analogy: a million seconds would last for about eleven days, but a billion seconds would last for 31 and a half years.
The Nuclear Information Service calculates the cost of Trident as £172 billion (including its new warheads and its running costs over its projected lifetime). That is a stupendous amount of money to lavish on maintaining the fiction that the UK is a world-class power. Neither the Tories nor Labour dares to question that expenditure. By contrast, Labour’s new idea for a Green Investment Fund (a mere £28 billion) was recently cancelled as unaffordable.
Apparently, we haven’t the money to save the planet, but we can stump up any amount to fund nuclear death.
Why are our priorities so badly skewed?
