Tag: nuclear-weapons

Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings.
New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:

  1. The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
  2. The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
  3. An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
  4. The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
  5. The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
  6. Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
  7. The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded.
    There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class.
    Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
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We Shouldn’t Fund Nuclear

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.10.25), asking the obvious, stirring-up dissent in this city dominated by the Navy and the Trident Nuclear dockyard.
The point is to raise the issues for the environmental movement here ahead of COP30. There is an acquiescence to new nuclear power which has to be challenged. With 600 words its impossible to deal with the arguments against both nuclear power and nuclear weapons together, but a longer article does. That’s why the published version is below, followed by the longer version if you have the time and commitment! No to Nuclear Power! Teachers not Trident! Nurses not Nukes! Welfare not Warfare! ☮️

Watch the movie – House of Dynamite – Netflix from Friday!

The threat of nuclear war doesn’t seem to hit hit the top ten on anyone’s worry-list these days. Nuclear radiation is all around us, from Radon gas to reactor-emissions. The new, overpriced and polluting nuclear power plants are supposed to save us from climate disaster. Why should we worry?
Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture utilises the staff and resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable, requiring massive tax-subsidies and ridiculously overpriced electricity charges, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry.
If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to also oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other.
Why is the UK producing nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t we decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, condemned under international law and banned by 150 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the threat of deploying US Tomahawk nuclear-armed missiles to Ukraine, Russia is deploying intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles. The stage is set.
Trump is pushing NATO to be nuclear-war-ready – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.”
Britain is one of 191 countries signed-up to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm.
To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. The total nuclear bill of £210bn should instead be spent on our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits.
We have entered a new arms race as part of European rearmament, with much reliance upon nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, triggered by unregulated, poorly-programmed and hackable Artificial Intelligence.
Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” available on Netflix from Friday 24th October, which exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current deployment of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and stop spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought submarines destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes! http://www.CNDUK.org

_——————-
The threat of nuclear radiation doesn’t hit the top twenty on anyone’s worry-list these days. We’re mostly surviving despite it. Indeed, X-Rays of our lungs and organs are routine, despite releasing the ionising radiation and radioactive particles can cause cancer by damaging DNA. We want the medical diagnosis. How many tumours are caused by radiation damage is not known. The fact of the damage is well proven, not least from the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power stations. Radiation makes people sick.
More locally, the naturally occurring radon gas, formed by decaying uranium found in rocks, is now the subject of controversy at Dartmoor prison – closed-down simply because of radioactive contamination. Radon is a leading cause of cancer in the UK and jail staff supported by their trade union, alongside up to 300 prisoners and former inmates, are seeking a legal challenge over their potential exposure to the gas. Uranium is the hard-to-refine ore essential to the production of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
Plymouth is built upon the same radioactive rock and radon is a recognised threat inside our buildings. That may have been one of the criteria for Plymouth being the chosen centre for nuclear vessels and the Trident nuclear weapons-carrying submarines. Just add some more nuclear radiation to the already-present radioactive cluster, who would notice? In hindsight that wasn’t so clever. It costs the Ministry of Defence more than £30million each year to keep the 13 rotting hulks of nuclear subs from emitting the deadly pollution into our City. In any case, how would we know what radiation levels are attributable to the Devonport nuclear dockyard?
We know that radiation is dangerous and causes sickness and death. However you look at it, nuclear energy is not “clean energy” as currently described by Starmer’s government. And nuclear power is not a renewable. It produces radioactive waste. In every plan for new nuclear power plants, large or small, there is no costing for the “clean-up” and storage of radioactive waste some of which takes hundreds and even thousands of years to decay to a safe level.
We’ll have to just live with it, you say, and anyway “they” will solve the waste problem (whoever they are), eventually. Campaigners against the Sellafield new nuclear build are demanding that the Chancellor of Exchequer adds the cost of radioactive waste storage to the already astronomical cost of the nuclear power plant – the technology now completely outdated and redundant because of the rise of real renewables – energy production from solar, wind and wave power. The private corporations profiting from nuclear will never accept liability – the multi-billion cost of clean-up forever a liability for the tax-payer.
Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture needs the staff and resources in place because of the much larger scale of resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable without massive tax-subsidies and the overpriced charges to the consumer, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry. If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other.
So why nuclear weapons? Surely we should decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, the subject of international law and banned by 148 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the potential use of US Tomahawk missiles, Russia has once again said it will deploy intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles.
Trump is pushing NATO to nuclear-readiness – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.”
Britain is a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm. To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. All this at a huge cost to our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits.
We have entered a new arms race as part of the European rearmament drive, with much focus being on nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, aided and abetted by unregulated, poorly-programmed and unmanageable Artificial Intelligence.
Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” a “must see”! Opening on Netflix this Friday evening, 24th October, it exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current development and placement of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then pledge to join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, and stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and from spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought subs destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes!

Cash for Nuclear War but not Welfare!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.6.25), responding to Starmer’s outrageous and dangerous Strategic Defence Review, representing a drive towards nuclear war. The Idiot! A colossal waste of money in pursuit of personal aggrandisement and ultra-nationalist status at the expense of all emotional security and economic progress. The scale of my anger cannot be printed. Join me on Saturday 7th to protest, shout and scream, rage at the injustice. Welfare not Warfare! Nurses not Nukes! Books not Bombs! 12 noon at the Guildhall Square, Armada Way, Plymouth.

[in the event some 100 dedicated anti-nuclear activists joined the protests despite torrential rain. It was a start, a reconvening of those most alert to the risk of nuclear proliferation and war. Thank you each and every one].

Cash found for War instead of Welfare

What will you feel, say and do on the morning you wake-up to hear that a nuclear bomb has been exploded upon a population? You see, the idea that it’s the end of everything is not quite correct. In the ensuing nuclear war, the majority of the human race will die over prolonged periods of time in pain, homelessness and famine. Nuclear war bears no comparison to conventional warfare, the radioactive fallout keeps on killing, the destruction of infrastructure total.
The UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review has committed an additional £15 billion to nuclear weapons. The British tax-payer is buying F-32A jets to carry air-launched missiles carrying nuclear warheads, and adding a new fleet of nine nuclear “attack” submarines to the four new Dreadnought super-Subs armed with first-use Trident nuclear warheads.
We are in a “pre-War situation”, exclaimed Defence Minister Healey.
Britain will build 6 new munitions factories costing an extra £6billion over the next 5 years. 7,000 long-range weapons are to be built in the UK – a massive arsenal. Clearly the next war will be a nuclear war.
UK troops are part of a wider European military strategy and the entire nuclear weapons system based here will be reliant upon the provisions and infrastructure of the United States of America.
The Trident nuclear weapons system is not independent, always having been reliant upon and governed by the USA. Now it is announced that British-based US fighter jets will carry nuclear bombs, the “air delivery system” carrying “tactical nuclear weapons”. The proposition is that nuclear weapons can be used without mutually assured destruction. It is a nonsense.
The wars in Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine have proved that the classic “Rules of Engagement”, even if they used to be adhered to, don’t apply anymore. Military leaders are clear that they will do whatever they want to civilian targets and use weapons of mass destruction despite any international laws, rules of warfare or moral considerations. Genocide is normalised. Attack-first is the order of the day on all sides.
Public attitudes are being reset. Recruitment and retention in the armed forces is crucial, especially when most young people don’t want to fight and die. The proposed volunteer “Dad’s Army” is designed to demand allegiance. A new ideological offensive of militarisation coupled with patriotism (defined more by hate-filled xenophobia than love of country) is being wheeled-out.
Tax money is plentiful for military rearmament but not hospitals and schools. We are seeing tens-of-thousands of jobs being lost in health, education and social care, far more jobs lost than will be created by the arms industry.
Governments always find tax cash for weapons but not for welfare. It would cost £1.5 bn to reverse the Winter Fuel Allowance to pay £300a year to 10million pensioners, £3.5 billion to reverse the 2-child benefit cap safeguarding a third child with £66 per week, and £5 billion to reverse the draconian cuts to benefits for people with disabilities.
That money would be available now if they scrapped the £13 billion per year being spent on Trident nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
The NATO summit next month will recommend 3.5% of GDP to be spent on military resources and another 1.5% on civil protection and security. That 5% of GDP represents even more Austerity, cuts to welfare services and social infrastructure – the opposite of a safe and secure population.
We must protest against this drive to war – a waste of money, humanity and the environment. Demand the end of nuclear weapons – Welfare not Warfare! Saturday 7th June, 12 noon at Plymouth’s Guildhall Square. Join us! CNDUK.org

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.1.25), back on the anti-nuclear megaphone. We’ll be holding a day of anti-nuclear protest at Devoport Dockyard on Saturday 7th June – a date for your diary. Log it now!
Meanwhile, unedited:

Tomorrow we will hear the annual assessment of the world’s atomic scientists on the level of risks we face. They will publish the 2025 “Doomsday Clock”, symbolising the current likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. The imagery was created by nuclear physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer along with biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch in 1947 as a response to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The closer the clock’s “time” towards midnight represents just how immediate the accumulated and conjoined threats are to human annihilation. In 1947, as the world’s most powerful nations accelerated the race for nuclear armaments and the Cold War started to become inevitable, they startled the world by suggesting we were only 7 minutes before the end – midnight. Bang!
For the last two years the clock has stood at 90 seconds.
90 seconds. It will be difficult to identify any good news for peace and prosperity in 2025. The current clock is so close to detonation because of the entire and accumulated global facts surrounding the developments in hostilities, political conflicts, and scientific and technological advances which, each or together could cause irrevocable harm to humanity.
Today we have never been closer to catastrophe, the contemporary ingredients being nuclear warfare, climate change and unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Putting to one side the contentious but poorly understood development of AI (worthy of a statement on its own and devoid of political controls or safety features), the remaining ingredients should send shivers down our spines.
The President of the most powerful military empire the human race has ever seen is much in favour of nuclear weapons, and has declared his willingness to unleash them. President Trump is ordering the expansion of the US nuclear arsenal from a free-market ideology that welcomes proliferation – let nations have their nuclear weapons, the US will simply have bigger and better ones.
And the leading proponents, Trump and Putin (and now apparently, Starmer), as noting that the new AI assisted generation of nuclear weapons can be unstoppable and make a bigger bang. Dismissing the environment-destroying radiation that makes nuclear an illegal chemical, biological and illegal weapon of mass-destruction they conceive that their “first-use” of nuclear warhead could finish a conflict in minutes. All systems are now set to “first-use, not retaliation. But nuclear weapons were never considered deterrents – just consider how much war has taken place since 1945, and is continuing today.
The true impact of of nuclear-exchange is not Armageddon at all, but the slow and painful death of the human race. After the initial blasts and firestorms there will remain billions of survivors cast into a pain and misery of internal burns, famine and social collapse. The Judgement Day scenario is a myth – Armageddon is a slow death. But hey, who cares, nuclear weapons are a cash-rich investment opportunity right now.
Trump’s fellow billionaire oligarchs include the winners of the US tech giant corporations that modern nuclear warfare relies upon. Elon Musk, friend and financier of the far-Right organisations across the world, owns 45% of all the satellites orbiting the Earth. His Starlink system, a division of the SpaceX corporation, has around 4,500 communications satellites encircling the Earth which encompass and incorporate military systems – right now coordinating all Ukraine’s military capabilities.
White racial supremacist misogynist autocrats are in charge. Whatever could go wrong [see 1930’s, Ed.]?!
Prime Minister Starmer has enjoyed feint praise from the President in recent days, mostly because Starmer is leading Europe in increasing expenditure on military rearmament towards 5% of our annual Gross Domestic Product and in particular, a new generation of nuclear weaponry. Trump has every reason to be pleased, the UK-based Trident replacement systems being licensed and controlled from the USA, but funded by the UK tax-payer.
Some £5billion a year is going towards the UK development of all things nuclear, a further £1billion a year announced for the ailing Rolls Royce only last last week. This, at the same time as more real-income cuts to education, health and welfare benefits.
The US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now invested $1billion in preparations for the placement of US nuclear warheads there, placing the UK on the nuclear frontline. The B61-12 satellite guided bombs have three times the destructive power of the US atomic bomb, which killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.
Polling shows that 59% of the population oppose US nuclear weapons being stationed in Britain. But here’s the rub. You won’t hear a right-wing nationalist ever arguing for cuts to all-things military, nor demands for more welfare expenditure. Our home-grown far-Right, echoing Trump, wants no more action to protect the working class from the storms, fires, droughts and harvest chaos caused by climate change, let alone nuclear war. Instead Farage’s crew want us to gear-up for war – internationally against Muslims and nationally against migrants and all people of colour.
This is a recipe for disaster, speed-cooked in an air-fryer. We have to stop Trump placing US nuclear warheads at USAF Lakenheath in Suffolk or anywhere here. The 59% have to make their voice heard. Join the protests at Lakenheath 14-25th April.

Step Back from the Brink – Join CND!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.12.24) after week of military escalation almost everywhere. The published headline is not chosen by me, and I did sign it as a national vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the Trades Union role. Once an artcile is submitted it is out of your control. The limited space and editing cut my original in half, so below is the full and unexpurgated text. Please do join me in Plymouth City Centre on Saturday.

Step Back from the Brink

We’re not wrong. The sense of living on the brink of historic change is shared by most. Not only can the current status quo not be sustained, it mustn’t be. Tension mounts as a consequence.

There is no debate that climate change is happening, only what should be done about it. There is no debate that our social infrastructure is dilapidated, at least for the majority of the working class, but no consensus about rebuilding it.

There is general agreement that war is spreading – and a new kind of war at that – the mass killing of civilians by huge armaments often launched by computers and targeted by drones. This is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It is the living reality threatening to engulf us all.

The nihilists muse to themselves that global conflagration is inevitable and call out to “bring it on”, as if all life, not just theirs, is worthless. The pragmatists meanwhile, sensitive to their own plight, make preparations as best they can, hoarding durable essentials before the power cuts and alarm calls. We, those seeking peace with social justice, are greeted with distain or completely overlooked when marching in our hundreds of thousands.

What do we want? Immediate de-escalation!

The escalation in Ukraine is very serious. The Biden/Starmer agreement to use missiles into Russia has escalated the tension, Russia ratifying a change in policy, deciding to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state if that state is backed by a nuclear force (ie NATO) should it feel directly threatened.

Reports show Ukraine has lost 40% of the territorial gains it made in the Kursk region through the Summer. The Group of Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, each nuclear armed – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States – recommitted to arming Ukraine and, last Tuesday, NATO concurred.

Britain’s defence secretary said last week that “if Britain’s military were asked to fight it would fight”. Britain is in no way ready for war, nor should we be. A majority of the Ukrainian population want an end to the war through peace talks, as do very large majorities of populations across Europe. The escalation is being determined by politicians in their own interests. Is Biden just looking to stop Ukrainian defeat whilst he is in office, and to what lengths will he take this?

Trump’s election is having a big impact already, with ultra-hawks in his cabinet implying that military conflict is more likely, withdrawing from nuclear agreements and focussing on Iran and China. They promise more sanctions around Iran and more economic challenges to China. Most of the real trade wars throughout history have resulted in military warfare.

Far from being a peacemaker, Trump is ready to magnify tensions in the Asian Pacific, with Starmer adding tax cash to the AUKUS nuclear pact funding nuclear capabilities in Australia, ready for war.

The ruling class of the United States of America maintain full support for Israel’s regional ambitions, the devastation of Palestine continuing, Biden continuing to arm, Trump ready to escalate the tension with Iran. The ceasefire in Lebanon is only temporary. The wars in Syria and Sudan funded as proxies for outside military powers.

Trump has favoured restarting of nuclear testing having not ratified the nuclear test treaty when last in office. The USA is looking to undertake underground nuclear testing of a new technological generation of advanced nuclear weapons, destroying any taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

Both the USA and Russia have tested and deployed hyper-sonic rockets that can carry nuclear warheads that rise and fall too fast to be stopped. Russia used one last week, albeit without any explosives, just to show its power. These are all “first-strike” weapons, their strategic use only valuable in hitting before being hit. They are a threat, not a deterrent, demanding escalation on all sides.

Trump is not going to pull out of NATO in Europe but wants Europe to take a far greater degree of the burden of the costs and, no doubt, the impacts.

So the UK’s military spending reaches a record high outside of wartime and is planned to increase further. America’s B52 bombers are here, and their nuclear weapons will be coming to Lakenheath, Suffolk, not least because Turkey has become an unreliable ally having bought fighters from Russia. Starmer has made commitment to NATO and nuclear as a key commitment with £3bn increase in defence spending, the current £6b per year cost of the Trident nuclear weapons upgrade being a sinkhole in Britain’s military funding. No-one dare challenge the tax bill for Nuclear, however outrageous.

The proposed United Nations international study into the global impact of any nuclear exchange has now been agreed between most countries, and only voted against by the UK, Germany and Russia, saying they already know what the effects of a nuclear war would be – the countries to the fore of preparations for wider war.

The study is important. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has commissioned enough studies to know that any nuclear exchange will kill millions and lethally contaminate entire regions with radioactivity. But the hidden fact is that millions more will survive for lengthy periods, in agony as burn casualties and sickened by cancers, struggling to find any nutritious food or potable water. Radioactive contamination is not a quick death.

The slow deaths of starvation and disease will be more common than the sudden flash of vaporisation of those caught beneath the bombs. The impact on all life, the ecology and climate, will only expedite the course of climate chaos we are already experiencing.

Another well-evidenced conclusion is that the mechanics of nuclear weaponry provides for their likely launch by accident rather than intention, especially in this era of “Artificial Intelligence” programming machines for an instant and automatic response.

Starmer’s shift to closer relationship with the nuclear-enthusiast Trump will increase his unpopularity at home. Most don’t want war, death and destruction. It is neither Namby-Pamby nor “woke” to call for Peace. Protests against war represent our collective self-interest for survival.

The safer countries in the world are those without nuclear weapons – the vast majority. Britain’s Trident Nuclear arsenal makes us the prime target.

On Saturday we will rally for a day of action for de-escalation, permanent ceasefire and Peace. Most of all, for the decommissioning of all nuclear weapons, unilaterally and internationally, before it’s too late.

We must step back from the nuclear brink.

May be an image of text

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

As usual the Editor chose the title, somewhat misplaced, for my weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29.10.24). The article should speak for itself in a period where we face not only escalation towards global warfare but the first use of nuclear weapons between nuclear-armed States. Trump may well be elected next week and has suggested the use of “battlefield nuclear weapons”. And Harris has shown herself tough enough to do the same. Netanyahu has been urged to threaten nuclear weapons at Iran by his fascist cabinet colleagues, and Putin keeps threatening the UK with the same. I would encourage everyone to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and to campaign vigorously straight away.

Of all the spats and counter-accusations over this week’s Budget, mainstream commentators will hardly mention let alone question the UK’s heightened military expenditure. This government spends the highest proportion of our Gross Domestic Product of any country in Europe, and is raising that level every further. 

The current “NATO-qualified defence expenditure” is £65billion per year, due to increase to almost £100bn by 2030. Across the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, only the USA spends more than the UK as a proportion of the country’s GDP.

Some £7billion each year is spent on nuclear weapons in the UK and the nuclear industry that supports them. The old myth that this is Britain’s independent defence system has long been debunked – it is the President of the United States that is required to sanction the firing of Britain’s Trident nuclear warheads, the weapons system itself leased from the United States and dependent upon US military infrastructure. 

Rather than being “independent”, in military terms the UK is effectively America’s 51st State and has been so ever since the Second World War. The “special relationship” that Prime Minister Starmer maintains will continue whoever wins the US presidential election next week and will ensure the UK puppets US imperialist intentions. 

Last week, without any debate in Parliament, the government effectively made the UK/USA Mutual Defence Agreement permanent, securing a secretive Treaty with the US that “allows” the UK to have nuclear weapons. 

As tensions multiply in both Europe and the Middle East, Starmer and his ministers appear keen to prove full support for escalation towards global war. The USA has spent $60billion on the war in Ukraine since February 2022, and is set to spend the same amount again, perpetuating that war. The UK has paid across £13billion in lethal weaponry and military assistance, with Starmer promising another £1billion a week ahead of the Budget.

Meanwhile the government supports the bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The UK has suspended only 30 of 350 military export licences to Israel this year, ensuring the continued supply chain for the operation of F-35 aircraft that are illegally strafing and bombing civilians in Gaza and Lebanon right now – the UK complicit in serious violations of international law. 

A budget that shut down all arms exports to Israel would reap more than enough cash to maintain the Winter Fuel Allowance for everyone. 

As the spectre of world war becomes more ominous, rather than suing for peace, for ceasefires, for negotiations and compromise, the USA and UK are ramping-up the tax expenditure, the fire-power and propaganda towards conflagration. This is not “Defence Expenditure”, it is an offensive strategy economically, politically and morally indefensible.

Into the mix comes the USA plans to base hundreds of its nuclear weapons and bombers at Lakenheath in Suffolk. Placing the UK as a primary nuclear target, the first to be hit, Lakenheath, Faslane and of course, Plymouth’s Devonport nuclear dockyard, a centre for the Trident first-strike nuclear submarine infrastructure.

Once again, tens of thousands peacemakers will be protesting on Saturday – in London for a ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon, and at Lakenheath to stop the US nuclear weapons deployment there. We want Welfare not Warfare, green jobs not bombs, 

Spending billions ramping up new weaponry that ensures the other military nations ramp-up their munitions is just an endless spiral of waste and destruction. If Britain were to represent the quest for peace, disarm our nuclear weapons and stop pursuing the wars of others, we would not only lose the label of “target” but have thousands of millions of pounds to spend on social infrastructure and welfare. 

Remembering Hiroshima

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My weekly comment printed in the Plymouth Herald (6.8.24) simply commemorating the dropping of nuclear bombs on human populations. It was heavily edited before publication. There was much else happening in this tense and volatile world as I wrote, but this issue must not be put to one side.

On the day of annual commemoration of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Japan’s city of Hiroshima in 1945, the President of the United States warns of great peril today. Western countries are pulling their citizens out of the Middle East whilst sending more troops and military equipment into the Mediterranean. There are preparations for nuclear war.

Today’s remembrance of Hiroshima’s destruction by a single bomb, we remember the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands caused by nuclear radiation contaminating generations ever since and still to come. Nuclear war is not sudden death. For most it produces lingering suffering.

In 1961 the public news was full of imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the United States of America (USA) tensed for a nuclear stand-off, and ordinary working class families, East and West, were openly educated on the potential of nuclear war, with schools rehearsing duck & cover drills on the sound of an air raid siren. 

As USA missile bases were established ever-closer to the border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union decided to put their less long-distance nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, 90 miles off the Florida coast. For 13 days in October 1962 we came ever closer to nuclear war, the brinkmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev ramping-up the tension to an agreement minutes before midnight. The US agreed to take their nuclear missiles out of sites in Turkey, on Russia’s border, and Russia agreed to dismantle nuclear sites in Cuba, some 14 miles off the coast of the United States. 

Protests were worldwide during that period, the Labour Party amongst many mainstream political organisations leaping to adopt a “unilateral disarmament” policy, meaning each nation should disarm all nuclear weapons whatever other nations are doing. Unilateralism was the obvious political “deterrent” against nuclear use, since, if you ain’t got nukes, no-one can be so threatened by obliteration that they fire at you first. But which nuclear power would be the first to give them up?

Unilateralism did not sit well with the cold warmongers who continually organised for the chance to defeat all opposition and rule the entire world. The first period of imminent nuclear war gave way to a Cold War of continuous and immense military build-up between enemy states, the cost of such rearmament ensuring cuts to education health and welfare. But the threat of immediate nuclear war diminished enough to be sat only at the back of our minds as a distinct but distant possibility.

Between 1974 and 1980 the UK government produced TV and newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts and public information films on how to protect ourselves during a nuclear attack. The very famous pamphlet, “Protect and Survive” went through every home’s letterbox. The BBC made films of the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, the 2-part mini-series Threads still spinechilling today in its depiction of multiple mushroom clouds demolishing Birmingham, and the years of mass suffering amidst social collapse in the decades that followed.

CND produced “Protest & Survive” as a pamphlet detailing how human society collapses in nuclear war, and 250,000 of us marched in London in 1981 to stop the US siting their nuclear missiles in Britain. The historic women’s camp at Aldermaston went on to ensure US nuclear warheads left our island. 

Now, the USA is putting new nuclear warheads at US Airforce base at Lakenheath, Suffolk, with barely any notice other than a few of us CND activists. Putin has twice threatened nuclear attack on Britain as one of the foremost nuclear armed states supplying weaponry to Ukraine, including missiles that can fire deep into Russian cities. Germany is raising its army again, with words of war in Europe. 

No-one seems to be blinking an eye at all this, let alone running public education programmes on how to survive nuclear war. Will there even be a siren offering the famous “four-minute warning”. 

Russia is a brazen Capitalist, nay Gangster economy with a far-Right nationalist President wielding huge powers of repression inside the country and engaging in imperialist wars abroad. There is no “Red Menace” of the 1960’s. 

There is now global Capitalist competition for natural and Human Resources at a time of greater tension and multi-causational crisis than in the 1930’s. In many ways this is far more dangerous and volatile than the Cold War between conflicting ideologies of the post-war era. This is open global imperialist rivalry in the age of climate collapse and mass poverty.

We are now said to be in an imperialist pre-war era, although the hundreds of millions of humans currently caught-up in regional wars worldwide would disagree it is “pre” to anything other than world war that will engulf all humanity. 

To suggest that, at least by having a so-called “British Bomb” we can be mutually assured of the enemy’s destruction even if we also all die in the process, is the most bizarre and ignorant of all nationalistic nonsense. There has never been a more urgent point in history for unilateral nuclear disarmament now, before it’s too late.

We Have to Stop the Drive to Global War

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My weekly Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, published on 30th January 2024. Thankfully, the following Saturday, 3rd February was to see more than 200,000 marching through central London for Palestine and against wider warfare, just as the US and UK dropped hundreds of bombs and missiles on Yemen and sites in Northern Syria. The protests were amplified by local events in Plymouth and across the country (and beyond of course) was to further pressurise western leaders, with the calls for “restraint” by Israel’s government becoming louder the more the street marches grew. But it will take far more, as the increasing bombing of Gaza in and around Ramallah prove all to horrifically.

The narrative has changed suddenly.

We are heading for World War Three and need to prepare society.

The UK’s Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, warned last week that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world”. Debates this week, or rather lack of any democratic debates inside the formalities of Parliament, suggest the UK will increase overt military support for Israel in Gaza despite the International Court of Justice investigation into genocide there. 

And Prime Minister Sunak is falling over himself to support President Biden’s retaliatory actions after three American troops were killed and dozens more injured in an overnight drone strike in Northeast Jordan. There is no questioning as to what US troops and bases are doing there.

With United States military bases and routine intervention growing across the Middle East, the focus is upon Islam as a threat and Iran as the primary enemy, allegedly funding every nation state and group that is challenging western domination. The charge comes with little evidence, Iran experiencing a crisis economy that suggests they can’t afford war, and the denying complicity. But the links between States across the Arab world are certainly made stronger in the face of US imperialist domination of their homelands and resources.

Wall to wall, we are being fed fear and focus upon the enemy abroad, the “them” who are determined to destroy the “us”. Despite escalating climate chaos, economic crisis and corrosion of our social infrastructure at home, we are being asked to accept the unifying threat from “outsiders” – whoever we choose to believe them to be. 

Internationally, beleaguered ruling classes are driving for war, perhaps in a desperate attempt to survive the general and global crisis of Capitalism, reminiscent of the 1930’s.

In Europe, the German government is moving to end the curbs on its military activities since the Second World War, on the premise that Russian troops could march westwards from Belarus, despite Russia’s economy at a condition impossible to fund military expansion by even a tenth of the level the West is already spending. Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the war as an extension of the escalating tension between East and West, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) accelerating fast, nations queuing-up to join the West’s military alliance which has both global and offensive capabilities.

Following this month’s general election in Taiwan, the mainstream western media is hyping the potential for China to invade the island and the need for increased US presence in the South China Seas.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has tested more missiles and pledged to build more nuclear weapons, simply mirroring the Western expansion in nuclear weapons which appear, at least, to be the required marker for the level of ultimate military power that ensures national security. 

But there comes a point where nuclear weapons become useable, and we appear to be very near. The so-called “nuclear deterrent” said to prevent use becomes an obvious target when the threat becomes too great. At such a point they need to be used before anyone else does. 

Populations have to be won to the reasonableness of firing-up nuclear warheads, the threat against us needing to be understood as imminent and beyond reasonable doubt. But how do you know – remember the lies of Iraq’s WMDs? The latest pre-war propaganda exercise is now in full swing, once again full of lies. 

So in all current commentary about the threat from the “East”, twentieth century imagery of the threat of “communism” is being regurgitated despite the USSR being demolished thirty years ago  (Putin’s Russia being a privatised capitalist State) and China now challenging the USA as the world’s most successful economy inside global capitalism. They don’t need to invade anywhere. 

We are being whipped-up to prepare for war when we need to be whipped-up to protest for Peace.

The BBC has broadcast warnings of the increased potential for the use of nuclear weapons in any of these flashpoints, peppering radio and TV news reports of the renewed tensions and the potential for global war. America is preparing to place its nuclear weapons at Lakenheath, Suffolk, their long-wished-for retaliation for the women’s protests in the 1980’s which forced US nukes out of Greenham Common and off UK shores. It puts the UK on the nuclear front-line, a proxy target to shield the USA.

Perhaps the most bizarre pro-war propaganda exercise was last Monday’s Radio 4 Women’s Hour programme which began with a convincing statement from a current RAF Group Captain explaining that the next global war is “inevitable”, human history showing these cycles repeat themselves, whatever. Women had better prepare. 

On the back of all this, ultra-nationalists and xenophobes in the UK get airtime and oxygen for the call for Britain to return to conscription, euphemistically dressed-up as “National Service”, as the essential preparation of our young working class to be ready for call-up as cannon-fodder, able to use arms and fit enough to manage battleground conditions.

Our ruling class is ramping-up the drive to war. Central to this is separating out nation from nation, strengthening and militarising borders, and damning as “wish-washy liberal” any suggestion that international co-operation, heaven forfend “International Aid”, “International Law”, negotiations and ceasefires should be the most urgent response to the rising tension.

Right now the Hawks have it at Government level. They are in turn sponsored by the military-industrial complex of corporations selling arms to all sides and reaping the massive profits from the growing human carnage. 

We have to counter the propaganda and lies flooding into popular consciousness. Challenge the warmongers, Stop the War! 

Tony Staunton, Plymouth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament