24.5.23

Wednesday 24th May is the International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament. Across the continents we celebrate the historic and current efforts of women for peacebuilding and disarmament. The campaign is for a just and peaceful world, one that meets human needs, not military ones!

In 2023 the demand is pressing. War in Europe, tensions rising between India and Pakistan, and new nuclear weaponry in the South China Sea are just three of the major potential flashpoints.

This year in Plymouth we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day more than 400 women spanned the Tamar Bridge, linking arms in a symbolic joining of our City and Cornwall in a united demand for the dismantling of nuclear arsenals, home and abroad. This week there are repeated presentations of “In Other Words”, the powerful theatrical docudrama exploring the issues surrounding that Plymouth protest. 

The focus of those Peace protests was the placement of nuclear weapons and their associated infrastructure by the United States military at bases across Britain. The most famous of those campaigns was the Women’s Camp at RAF Greenham Common.

Begun in 1981, 36 women marched from Wales to Berkshire and chained themselves to the gates of the Base. Their ensuing encampment became an international focus for the end of nuclear weapons, hundreds of thousands joining their days of action, including trade union delegations offering the women resources and solidarity in the face of harsh prison sentences despite their commitment to non-violent direct action.

This was the time of such nuclear tensions that the government posted a 10 page pamphlet entitled “Protect & Survive” absurdly detailing “what to do in the event of a nuclear attack” with the specific instruction to draw the curtains and make a home shelter from doors and mattresses before the bombs drop. 

Protests were everywhere, including more than a quarter-of-a-million marching through London.

The Greenham Common protest Camp took years to win, and continued until the year 2000, preserved today as a formally acknowledged commemorative and historic site. By 1991 nuclear warheads many times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, were flown back to the USA along with their military personnel, after the signing of a new Treaty restricting siting of weapons, signed by the USA and Russia. The Treaty included the core wording proclaimed by the women of the camp, “…conscious that nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences for all mankind.”

Today, the Treaties broken, the world’s nuclear states are hastening the increased production and placement of nuclear weapons. The UK is spending £205,000,000,000 tax-money on new nuclear weapons systems. The USA is once again establishing its nuclear arsenals in England, with last Saturday’s huge demonstration by the CND at RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk reviving both the ‘80’s memories and the Peace Movement itself.

As world leaders from the seven most powerful nuclear states met last weekend in, of all places, Hiroshima, Japan, to increase the provision of arms in what is now, clearly, a proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia, talk of nuclear war chattered across the political class and their media. 

Western leaders are building more nuclear bases with US nuclear bases in Eastern Europe surrounding Russia, and Putin, if pushed towards failure, has threatened nuclear exchange, including upon Britain. “Our” nuclear bases (actually the Trident nuclear weapons system is owned and controlled by the United States), will be targets, including Plymouth.

Once again it is time to Protest and Survive! Peace! Now!

The “In Other Words” play will be presented at Plymouth Central Library on Wednesday 24th May, 7pm; at The Plot on Union Street, 6:30pm Thursday 25th May; and the Unitarian Church on Notte Street, Saturday 27th May at 2:30pm.

Tony Staunton

Plymouth CND