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If only, if only nuclear war was just another kind of war.
But it isn't.
If there is a nuclear war,
our foes will not be China or America or even each other.
Our foe will be the earth herself.
Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days.
Rivers will turn to poison.
The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames.
When everything there is to burn has burnt and the fires die,
smoke will rise and shut out the sun.
Nuclear winter will set in.
Then, what shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we breathe?
Shall mankind renounce war or shall we put and end to the human race?
This is the story of the biggest weapons of mass destruction ever created.
It is about the people who use them,
more importantly, it is about people who fight them.
We shall become the next species that becomes extinct
and I don't want that to happen.
I've got 10 grandchildren and I want them to live.
Humanity is engaged in a race against time,
because its moral advance hasn't kept up with the advance in technology
and it could destroy itself.
Chapter 1: Nuclear War
In 1941, competing against a project in Nazi Germany,
the US begins its atom bomb programme, the Manhattan Project.
In 1945, the US becomes the first country to detonate a nuclear bomb.
Humankind enters the atomic age.
The experiment moves from test site to the real world
with devastating impact.
The temperature near the epicentre reaches over 4,000 degrees centigrade.
Everything is vaporized.
All that's left are shadows burnt into the ground.
Carbon remnants of what had once been human.
A mile out from the epicentre, bodies ignite spontaneously.
Further away still, people looking at the fireball are instantly blinded.
I looked at the road before me, denuded, burnt and bloody, numberless survivors stood in my path.
They were massed together; some crawling on their knees or on all fours,
some stood with difficulty or leant on another's shoulder.
No one showed any sign that forced me to recognize
him or her as a human being.
I believe it was about a week after the bombing,
that an unexpected event happened.
The survivors seemed to fall ill in groups of seven or eight,
the same groups appeared to die together.
At the time, as physicians, we could not know that our
our patients were dying because of an atomic bomb,
which could kill them long after the blast.
Three days later, Nagasaki is hit by an even more powerful bomb.
40,000 deaths occur immediately, although the bomb detonates off target.
Further from the epicentre, human beings, burnt and parched, pray for rain and relief.
Black, radioactive rain falls. Its effects will plague the survivors for decades to come
in the shape of birth deformities and cancers.
The combination of a massive fireball, a hurricane force wind
and massive amounts of radiation released into the atmosphere;
I mean if you really think about burning skin and irradiated organs.
It's a horrible way to go and sometimes it's a horrible way to survive. 00:06:42,150,00:06:45,900 You get the long term effects of radiated organs,
i.e. cancers going on for 60 years or more, we're still getting new data
out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I did go to Hiroshima. The thing that I remember most of all was
a little mark on the pavement
and I said 'what was that?'. And they said 'oh, that was where a child was sitting',
and it was completely vaporized by the bomb.
And next to the mark was a metal lunch box that had been twisted
by the heat beside the mark that was a child.
And if ever there was a war crime, it's that.
It is still widely believed that the bombing of Japan was necessary to bring the war to an end and save American lives.
But now there is a growing consensus that Japan's surrender was imminent and the bombing was not necessary.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb.
Her defeat was certain before the first bomb was dropped.
I read it in the papers or heard it in the wireless.
The propaganda that it was needed to defeat Japan was believed very widely, I believed it at the time.
Its real significance didn't dawn on me.
The real purpose for dropping the bomb was to tell the Russians
that America had a weapon of supreme power.
The whole thing was done to frighten the Soviet Union.
The Cold War began at Hiroshima, that's when it began.
If it (Trinity) explodes, as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a hammer over those boys (the Soviets)
The Soviet Union was emerging at that time as a great victorious power,
had it been responsible for the defeat of the Nazi forces
in Eastern Europe and of course Western Europe too
in alliance with the United States
and the United States wanted to make it very clear that it was going to be the dominant power in the post war period.
General Groves, he was the head of the whole Manhattan Project.
From time to time he would come to Los Alamos.
I remember once in early 1944, when Groves suddenly said to Chadwick:
'You realise, of course, that all our work, we are making the Bomb, is against the Russians, we have to be ready against them.'
Now to me, this came as a terrible shock. I never really got over it.
We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population.
We should cease to talk about vague and (...) unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal with straight power concepts. George Kennan, Head of the US State Department's Policy Planning Department, 1948
The end of the war doesn't bring peace, it brings another kind of war.
Chapter 2: The Cold War
The apparently ideological battle between communism and capitalism intensifies,
becoming increasingly militarised over the following decades,
justified as a moral fight between good and evil.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of the US and its Western Allies is founded in 1949.
The same year the Soviets explode their first nuclear device.
Now Russia has the secret. It was of course inevitable.
But President Truman's announcement came as a bit of a shock to many of us.
Six years later the Soviet Union responds to NATO with their own military alliance: The Warsaw Pact.
As time went on, I became increasingly concerned about the direction of Labour’s foreign policy
and about the fact that we took sides in the Cold War, which I thought was a mistake.
Britain's economy is hard hit after the war.
In 1947, during a cold winter of grinding poverty, with the economy in a desperate condition,
the decision is made to start a British atom bomb project.
Atlee reached a secret agreement with the United States
that he would develop atomic weapons and he didn't tell parliament.
A bomb would be an assertion that Great Britain was still a member of the Great Power Club.
In the Berkshire downs,
Britain's Atomic Research Establishment has been set up.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are inextricably linked.
To make a nuclear weapon you need fissile material. Where do we get that fissile material from?
We get it from insides of nuclear reactors.
History is made at Calder Hall, the first large scale nuclear power station in the world.
Back in the 1957, when the queen opened the first
nuclear reactors in Britain at Colder Hall,
they were in fact plutonium factories.
It is with pride, that I now open Calder Hall, Britain's first atomic power station.
The main reason for their construction
was to make plutonium, to generate our atomic bombs, which we exploded in the 1950s in the Pacific and in Australia.
Let's hope British atomic scientists can continue to work for constructive rather than destructive purposes.
The 1950s is a period of intense nuclearisation.
Britain becomes a nuclear state in 1952.
In 1958 alone, over one hundred nuclear weapons are tested,
exposing indigenous populations and military personnel to high levels of radiation.
Radioactivity is invisible. It doesn't smell and it has no taste.
The effect on living beings sometimes only shows decades later.
To date, over 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted releasing 19,000 times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb.
The testing of nuclear weapons was one of the major reasons
for the starting of CND. People were aware that this stuff was
going up in the atmosphere and was falling down in different places.
The meeting that marks the birth of the CND is held on February 17th, 1958.
I was at the first inaugural meeting at Central Hall, something like 4,000 people.
I was a young man and I think I got caught up in that enthusiasm.
Our greatest cultural gift to the world,
the CND symbol, which is on the badge, is just all over the world.
It stands for N D and the semaphore signals, that has become
embraced worldwide as a peace symbol
It became very widely known that Aldermaston was where Britain's nuclear weapons were being developed and so logically
it was then going to become a focus for protest organisations.
And so, in Easter 1948 they marched to Aldermaston.
When politicians fail, people must give the lead.
We organized the first Aldermaston March, march from London to Aldermaston
in Easter 1958 and I was the organising secretary for the march.
What we were saying is 'ban, ban nuclear weapons,
end British nuclear weapons, join the Aldermaston March'
You want to know why we came here? Well, for the simple reason is
we are lovers of good music, for one thing.
And if this hell-of-a-lot goes up, we're not likely to hear good music any more.
And as part of the youth in England, who are going to live in the future, I thought it was my responsibility to take
part in any sort of demonstration which would help to stop warfare and that's why I've come here.
I would never be able to look the children in the face if I'd not come on this march.
We were together in the youth choir in the first Aldermaston march.
[Singing:] Ban the bomb, forevermore, not bad! [laughter]
The Aldermaston marches started a popular movement against defence and foreign policy.
By the end of the decade, the UK's military policy aligns itself further with the US,
with the signing of the Mutual Defence Agreement.
In 1960 the UK abandons its hugely expensive, if independent,nuclear weapons system
and replaces it with an acquisition from the United States, Polaris.
Polaris is a submarine based nuclear weapons system.
It's deployed in Faslane, Scotland
which in turn becomes a target for protesters.
Nuclear War is one mistake away, accidents do happen, not only in films.
The Russians put on the moon a space vehicle, it was a fantastic thing, like a World War I tank
with caterpillar tracks and it moved across the surface of the moon;
and I had a letter from a constituent, which I've still kept,
it said, 'Dear Tony, I see the Russians have put a space vehicle on the moon...
...Is there any chance of a better bus service in Bristol?!'
Now you can laugh but it is a brilliant question,
what do you do with it, and that is a political question, it isn't a technology question.
One exhibit at the nuclear congress in Philadelphia has the perfect formula for popular appeal.
Two amazing hands plus one pretty girl!
The purpose of the display is to demonstrate the sensitive precision of the master/slave arm, used to handle radioactive material,
but incidentally it shows the boss how his secretary can light a cigarette and can keep right on working.
The skilled operator of the electronic device now sets himself a more delicate and delectable problem.
Hey, what's going on here, this is an atomic age problem they don't tell a girl about at secretarial school.
By 1962 the Soviet Union is the target of short range missiles based in Turkey. In only 16 minutes, they can reach Moscow.
The Soviets respond in kind by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in a clandestine operation that triggers the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On October 27th 1962, a US naval destroyer discovers an unidentified submarine.
Unaware that it is a nuclear armed submarine, they attempt to force it to surface with depth charges.
The three officers on board the submarine fear an attack, two vote to return fire with nuclear torpedoes.
Soviet military protocol requires the unanimous consent of all three.
The man who pulls the world back from the brink of nuclear war remains virtually unknown.
Vassily Archipov refuses consent and insists on awaiting communication with Moscow.
Some say, Vassily Archipov saved the world.
Perhaps it is the near certainty of mutual destruction that moves the conflict away from the theatre of war to the negotiating table.
The USSR agrees to remove its missile bases from Cuba. The US in turn dismantles its bases in Turkey.
A period of nuclear de-escalation follows. The partial test ban treaty bans nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere. It is signed by all nuclear states.
1968 sees the next major milestone towards a world free of nuclear weapons - the signing of the NPT.
The Non Proliferation Treaty was extremely significant,
because it is the first attempt to actually limit nuclear weapons.
In Article 6 of the NPT the nuclear powers pledge to take ‘good faith’ efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Although the dreaded nuclear exchange does not materialize, the Cold War spawns a series of proxy wars.
The US finds the Communist enemy first in Korea in 1950, and again in Vietnam in the late 60s.
We often don't know the impact that we've had on these things, there's a great example of Nixon who had a
Vietnam: Demonstriere für einen sofortigen Abbruch der Unterstützung der amerikanischen Kriegspolitik.
We often don't know the impact that we've had on these things, there's a great example of Nixon who had a
a nuke bomber ready to rock n' roll for the Vietnam War, you know, and Nixon was told by Kissinger,
'beware the hammer blow of the peace movement'. And actually, if you looked at a bunch of tie dyed scruffy old hippies,
you'd think there ain't much of a 'hammer blow' there,but they had a 'hammer blow'.
The early 70s mark an economic and thus strategic turning point for the US.
At this time, the US is the largest oil producer in the world, but in 1971 domestic oil production peaks while demand is rising.
U.S. Foreign policy shifts focus to the Middle East - home to the largest oil reserves on the planet.
A stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history. US State Department on Saudi Arabia, 1945
In 1976, I was sent to see the Shah in Iran.
And at that time the Americans were trying to persuade Iran to adopt nuclear power.
The plan was that Iran would build 20 nuclear power stations, using the Westinghouse Pressure Water Reactor,
on condition that we adopted the American reactor, which I didn't want to do, and if so the Shah would then buy half of our nuclear industry.
Now you put that 1976 to where we are today and you realise the utter hypocrisy. Never believe a word you're told by the nuclear industry.
And of course Israel had the bomb.
In 1986, Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu reveals details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the British press.
A honey trap lures him to Rome, where he is kidnapped by Mossad agents and smuggled to Israel, where he is tried and convicted of treason.
Mordechai Vanunu will spend 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement.
I only discovered a year or two ago that, while I was a minister, nuclear materials were secretly given to the Israeli government
by one of my officials, who's job in my department was non-proliferation - Michael Michaels.
When he retired, when Michaels retired, the Israeli government offered him a job
and so there's a lot going on that I think ministers didn't know about.
To all those who call me a traitor, I say that I am proud and happy to have done what I did. Mordechai Vanunu after his release
The Cold War again intensifies on the military front.
Reagan escalates the arms race into space. He launches Star Wars, a gigantic industrial project.
NATO announces the decision to station Cruise and Pershing Missiles in Europe.
Cruise missiles are new nuke delivery rockets. They're the result of advances in cognitive science.
They find their targets via visual recognition programmes. Once launched, they can track moving targets on their own.
This was a weapon that was 21 feet long, had a warhead about the size of a wastepaper basket.
And they were designed to knock out the Soviet Union's missile silos.
So it was a first strike weapon.
Their deployment in Europe opens up the possibility of, what is referred to, as a 'limited nuclear war'.
Protests sweep countries both sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK Cruise Missiles are to be stationed in Molesworth and Greenham Common.
Fear of a nuclear war escalates.
The UK government launches a public information campaign advising on appropriate behaviour in the event of nuclear attack.
If an attack is expected, the sirens will sound a rising and falling note like this.
Next: the fallout warning.
When fallout is expected you will hear three bangs in short succession.
They will be sounded by means of maroons, like this.
When the government actually believes its own idiocies and
starts issuing you with sensible advice about what to do
when nuclear bombs fall, you think, well, what's going on here, you know?
We organized a march to Greenham Common, by women.
I heard about the walk to Greenham and decided to join it.
And it literally changed the course of my whole life.
We guessed that we might get 50.
We talked on the way up, we said, what if we're the only two there?
What do we do? Do we go home and pretend it hasn't happened or do we carry on, walk on our own?
We had a pamphlet of a deformed child that had been born after the Hiroshima bombing. This is the real truth of nuclear weapons.
We were going to get there, give our petition in, say our little bit, and come home.
That was it, I sat there and I thought that's what we should do, because we walked a 125 miles and got nothing.
I had five children, I was married and so forth but I could see that it was important to stay there.
When the camp at Greenham started where it was
so explicitly violent, and it was addressing something that was so explicitly violent with non-violence, then that just seemed to be the sort of...it seemed to suit me,
it seemed to be the sort of thing that I wanted to do.
Well I really remember the first time I came here, to Greenham,
the 12th of December 1982 and there was a call-out from the camp,
the women at the camp, they asked us to come in our thousands to embrace the base.
The Cruise Missiles are removed from Greenham Common after Gorbatchev and Reagan sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987
The last women leave in 2000 when the land is given back to the public
For years in my life, I've often heard people dismiss:
'Oh, they're only campaigners'. Only campaigners!?
They are the best people in resistance.
When the intermediate range Nuclear Policy Treaty was signed between Gorbachev and Reagan,
that was a success and I would say that that was a success of the people, of the peace movements.
Although the INF treaty abolished a particular class of nuclear weapons, it was only a small section of the world's arsenals,
there's still round about 30,000 nuclear weapons existing in the world.
Afghanistan is the last proxy war fought in the shadow of the Cold War.
The US recruits, arms and trains the Mujahideen and similar groups to fight the Soviet Army,
sponsoring the forces that will eventually create the Taliban.
The Afghan War, the arms race and a generally mismanaged economy finally collapse the Soviet Union. The Cold War is over.
The American Defence Department has confirmed the loss of 11 atomic bombs.
It is believed that up to 50 nuclear weapons worldwide were lost during the Cold War
The legacy of the Cold War is a massive loss of life and an unprecedented diversion
of natural, financial and intellectual resources to the military.
Still, in the minds of the people, hope prevails,
hope that the end of the Cold War marks the beginning of an era of peace.
Instead, the end of the Cold War marks the beginning of a new world order - dominated by one super power.
Chapter 3: Freedom/ The free market
The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist.
…the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley is the United States Army, Air Force and Marine Corps.
The fall of the wall in Berlin in 1989 and when we went into East Berlin,
I wrote, or my friend wrote for me a poster on the station which said N.A.T.O., and it just said Nuclear American Take Over.
The Warsaw Pact is disbanded in 1991, NATO is not.
In Britain the decision to replace Polaris with Trident is made.
Trident promises independently targeted warheads with greater accuracy.
In 1991, the remaining Superpower unleashes its unchallenged military might against a former ally - Iraq.
Saddam Hussein, who has been armed and financially supported by the US and the UK throughout the 80s
invades Kuwait in a dispute over an oil field.
The US steps in with the claim to re-establish democracy in Kuwait.
An estimated 200,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers meet their deaths in the desert sands.
The number of casualties on the US side totals 358.
In warfare there are many many many toxic agents,
which are released and many of these have teratogenic effects.
That's what we're talking about, in other words, affecting
the embryo and the foetus when they're inside the uterus.
And when I see these pictures of malformed babies, it breaks my heart.
The Gulf War marks the first war time use of the deadly radioactive substance Depleted Uranium.
Depleted Uranium is a direct product of manufacturing nuclear weapons and is a real radioactive waste problem.
It is used in munitions in warfare by three countries: The United States, Britain and Israel.
When a Depleted Uranium munition hits its target, part of it volatilizes, in other words, becomes an aerosol and people breathe that in,
and that lodges in one's lungs and travels to bone and can cause various cancers in the body.
The main people who are seriously affected, adversely affected, by Depleted Uranium is the indigenous population, Iraqis.
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people, who are being exposed.
‘…(Depleted Uranium) can induce DNA damage and carcinogenic lesions in the cells…’ The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, 2001
From the end of World War II to the turn of the Millennium, the US has been at war with, or bombed, the following countries:
China Korea Guatemala Indonesia Cuba The Belgian Congo Peru Laos Vietnam Cambodia Grenada Libya El Salvador Nicaragua Panama Iraq Bosnia Sudan Yugoslavia
2001 is a tragic year for the American people.
The biggest killer in the United States that year is heart disease, killing over 700,000 people.
More than half a million die from cancer. 62,000 from pneumonia.
There are nearly 30,000 firearm related deaths and over 30,000 suicides.
14,000 die from Aids related diseases.
3,500 people die from malnutrition.
And 2,500 die in a terrorist attack on September 11th.
There is no war pronounced on cancer, AIDS or malnutrition,
but billions of dollars are instantly available to fight the evil taking center stage following the exit of the Soviet Union.
'The War on Terror' is launched.
The US spearheads a NATO war against The Taliban.
Next on the attack list is Iraq, located on the so called 'Axis of Evil'.
The alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction are given as the legal ground for the attack.
The people on the streets disagree.
Who gave him the weapon? Donald Rumsfeld gave him the weapon.
I'm a doctor, orthopaedic surgeon, I worked in the old, conflict areas in Iraq.
We are three days per week from the hospitals out of oxygen.
This is the privatisation that you start when the oxygen litre
that we use for our hospitals jumped from 150 Iraqi dinar to 1,800.
I left 2,500 families in the middle of desert, no water,
I'm seeing the children dying in front of me, I cannot do anything there,
all what I'm doing is not treating, just collecting bodies, head, limbs.
For God's sake, anyone knows what's going on there?
How many Iraqis have died?
To initiate a war of aggression …is not only an international crime
it is THE supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. The Nuremberg Trial Principles Adopted by the UN General Assembly
During the crusades, the European arms manufacturers sold bows and arrows to both sides.
When weapons are your number one industrial export product,
what's your global marketing strategy for that product line?
And what does it say about the soul of our nation that we have to have endless war
in order to put food on the table and provide people with jobs?
Corporate Globalisation says we don't need these American people anymore, we're going here, we're going there, we're moving jobs out of the country.
The only thing we need the American people for is to continue to supply their tax dollars
so we can become the military arm of corporate globalisation, that's our role in the world.
The United States Government has spent over 1.4 trillion dollars of our hard-working people's tax money.
The goal of the war has been a wealth transfer program
from the working people of the United States to the corporations.
Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater and others.
And in naked defence of the Corporate Interests of the Oil Giants: Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and others.
As of 2006, US company Halliburton generated $20 billion in revenues from the Iraq war.
Former CEO, *** Cheney, stands to cash in on his holdings, when he leaves office, in 2009
Neoliberalism has always been a violent project.
And I was in Argentina when the war in Iraq began and I was
at the anti marches in Buenos Aires and what people were saying was:
They're doing to Iraq what was done to us in the 70s, kwhich was imposing this economic model through violence.
While taxpayers in the West fund Iraq's destruction, Iraq will foot the bill for the reconstruction.
A controversial oil law gives foreign corporations unprecedented access to Iraq's oil wealth.
The lie about the freedom of the market is perpetuated and believed. For the short term gain of the few,
massacre, destruction and looting at the site of one of the oldest civilisations on the planet is carried out.
Regarding weapons of mass destruction, government policy remains undeterred.
Chapter 4: More Nukes More Nukes More Nukes
The choice that this generation has to make is the gravest choice ever made by the human race.
You kill one or two people with a bow and arrow, kill a few more people with a machine gun or a bomb,
but with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons you can destroy the human race.
Our country, this country, has around 200 nuclear warheads;
they could destroy the whole planet, if they're used.
In the 2006 White Paper 'On the future of The United Kingdom's Nuclear Deterrent' the government states:
'We believe that a nuclear deterrent is likely to remain an important element of our national security'.
The idea that nuclear weapons bring security is frankly
unbelievably absurd, if we use that argument every country in the world should have nuclear weapons.
It's about how you see security, it's actually about using the resources that are used for the military
and using them for real security, you know, water, hospitals, schools, places to live, that sort of stuff.
The White Paper further states:
'The UKs nuclear weapons are not designed for use during conflict'.
Yet it also claims:
'We will not rule in or out the first use of nuclear weapons'.
Geoff Hoon, the then defence minister, was asked why the UK
I hope everyone in here knows - has a policy of first use.
He said: 'because of our obligations to NATO'. Obligations to NATO?! Not obligations to people, security, safety.
So he'd kill millions of children, innocent children, because of obligations to NATO.
The government has put forward a proposal to spend 70 billion pounds on new weapons and the delivery system
and the administration of them for the next two and a half decades.
A 100,000 strong demonstration called by the CND and The Stop the War Coalition
demands a rethink of the country's nuclear weapons policy and the return of the troops.
Beyond the discussion of national security, billions of tax pounds are about to benefit military contractors.
The production of new submarines means full order books, above all, for BAE Systems.
BAE systems said, that they want to have a throughput, they call it a drum beat,
of submarine production every 22 months. At the moment, they are building the Astute Class submarines,
but they want the new Trident system to follow on straight away to ensure their industrial capacity and their profits.
So the idea that Britain's security policy, and whether or not, we have nuclear weapons is driven by the commercial requirements of a company which is known
to have been engaged in corrupt practises and so on. I mean it's absolutely outrageous and that our government should go along with that and condone that is shocking in the extreme.
They're highly protected by the government in terms of finances.
If you're putting money into your military, then you'll also be looking at that military using its technologies to export abroad.
So you're looking at the way export credit agencies work. So if you're supporting BAE Systems by spending money on them,
you're also spending money on helping them export and, again, that's with the export credit guarantee department
providing underwriting with public money, with taxpayers money, so if the default happens, if you're exporting abroad
and you get a default, then the British tax payer covers that default and that money goes onto that country's debt.
They created something like 96-97% of developing world debt owed bilaterally to Britain.
And this is a huge cog that actually creates or sponsors conflict,
sponsors the growth of the military industrial complex and creates an enormous debt, using tax payers money.
The government's protective hand ensures that in 2007 the U.K. becomes the world's biggest arms exporting nation.
Parliament votes to give the go ahead on the design and concept phase of new nuclear submarines.
A decision on building new nuclear warheads is still pending.
Even yesterday in parliament the new defense minister denied the money was spent in Aldermaston in order t
help the government build a new generation of nuclear weapons,
but we know from documents that were leaked to the CND that
they have already made the decision about warheads.
The warheads are made at Aldermaston, in Berfield,
which is about 50 miles from where we are standing today.
They are stored and deployed at Coleport, Scotland and they are moved from one to the other in unmarked military convoys.
It's all, you know, heavily classified stuff, but it's also all happening on public roads.
The ministry of defence revealed that a terrorist attack on a nuclear weapons convoy, and I have to quote this, because you wouldn't believe me otherwise:
'A terrorist attack on a nuclear weapons convoy has the potential to lead to the damage or destruction of a nuclear weapon within the U.K.
and the consequences of such an incident are likely to be considerable loss of life
and severe disruption both to the British way of life and to the U.K.'s ability to function effectively as a sovereign state.
You see we don't have nuclear weapons in Britain, if for example Brown wanted to press the button to use the Trident,
it would go up and come down again, because the Americans wouldn't target it.
You're not supposed to share military nuclear information, it's against the Non Proliferation Treaty.
You're not supposed to regularly ship out bits of nuclear technology from Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to the US
for them to have a look and then to ship it back, you're not supposed to do the stuff that they do.
In the U.S, five billion dollars are spent annually on a programme nicknamed Manhatten 2.
It develops a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Technological advances allow for so called tactical nuclear weapons like bunker busters, developed for use in the battlefield.
And nukes with 400 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
The United States is the world's biggest nuclear hypocrite. As we lecture the rest of the world about the
evils of weapons of mass destruction and we're building new generations of them.
The weapons industry pushed through the US nuclear India deal, that's now going to help India build
more nuclear weapons in a very, very dangerous part of the world, because they're want to use them as a checkmate against China.
This deal would not simply legitimize India's nuclear status,
it would also mean that India joins the substantial number of
countries that are legitimising American nuclear irresponsibility since the end of the Cold War.
And Pakistan is responding to this,
by building up its own nuclear weapons programme.
US policy, which is also actually UK policy, to support this nuclear dealwith India, feeds the arms race in South Asia.
The logic of deterrents is actually the logic of proliferation,
eventually everyone will have their weapons
and the only people who will benefit from this are those who make the weapons.
Nuclear weapons are the terror weapons; you know, they terrorize people by threatening them with nuclear weapons, that's what it does.
We're bullies, that's what it says.
You know, if you can drop a nuke that would just obliterate, you know, a whole city,
kill millions of people, then, you know that's, I think that's a devastating indictment of, of a country.
If you see a whole government possessing an enormous army and enough weapons to destroy the world then actually
there's no irony in you having a knife to be able to have the same power in your own little community.
Direct action is actually a way of confronting power in such a way that it makes you feel empowered.
Direct action isn't about breaking the law for, just for the sake of, breaking the law.
It's climate change which is my big issue and this is taking all the money and effort away from what the real danger is.
Our real danger is climate change, it's not terrorists or enemy, so it's an absolute waste of time and money this Trident.
There's no way we'll solve poverty or deal with environmental damage unless we include militarism and the cost of militarism as part of that thing.
So much money that could be used for schools, for houses, for hospitals it's a tragic, tragic waste of money.
Nuclear Weapon States
Nuclear Weapon states - Countries which gave up nuclear weapons
Declared nuclear free zones
A Standard world map does not reflect actual size relation between countries and continents
A map displaying accurate size relations looks like this:
Argentina and Brazil have dropped the nuclear capability that they were developing
after negotiating a non-nuclear pact between themselves
and I think it really is important to stress that disarmament isn't a distant dream, it does happen, it can happen and it will happen again.
The road to nuclearism is built by the politics of hate and fear,
but it is always paved with the stones of moral indifference and that's the kind of thing that we have to break.
It's not parliament that initiates change, parliament rubberstamps change.
You can never give up on a solution of an unsolved problem, it is an unsolved problem, but it can, it's soluble,
the root to solving it exists, it can be pursued, it can be done.
Chapter 5: The future
One out of eight people in this world still have no access to clean drinking water About 3 million people die every year from scarcity of clean water
$ 1.5 billion a year could achieve basic sanitation for the entire world within 20 years This equals 1% of annual world military spending over the same period
A system that sucks wealth to the top of the pyramid is propped up with taxpayers money going to big banks and the military.
The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
Worldwide arms expenditure is rising with NATO countries accounting for 70% of the world's military spending.
The war in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, is escalated.
People continue to be slaughtered for the ever persistent evil that just won't go away.
The Iron Curtain has vanished.
The front lines might not be physical borders anymore, but the arms race is alive and well:
It has moved into space.
The Global Positioning System GPS guides cars and missiles to their destination.
In 2004, the emergence of a solely civilian European competitor, Galileo, was met with fierce opposition from the US.
The project was subsequently shelved due to US threats to shoot it down.
When Clinton was president the Pentagon issued a statement about 'Full Spectrum Dominance'
the United States aim to dominate the world in land, sea, space, air and information.
The Pentagon says that all warfare on the earth today is now controlled and directed by space technology.
So whoever controls space, then, wins all the wars on the earth below.
What the aerospace industry refers to as the largest industrial project in the history of mankind
is Reagan's Star Wars project, now renamed National Missile Defence.
In the U.K. two base facilities in Yorkshire are already integrated into the US National Missile Defence System.
When I first saw this base in 1993,
at that stage, it was over a trillion dollar's worth of investment and most of that investment you will never see because
it's embodied in the satellites that are too far out of sight.
It's not only linked to the Missile Defence system, but it's also linked to US spying. The ability to take information,
whether it's telephone, whether it's, you know, mobile, whether it's email, and scoop it up,
out of the ether without anybody knowing about it and the fact that there's no accountability for this.
MPs are not allowed to see the agreement that exists between the US military and Britain
for the establishment of Menwith Hill spy base, they simply aren't allowed to see this.
First time in 17 years, since the end of the Cold War, that we have had short range nuclear weapons
directly pointed at any particular target in this country and they're smack *** on that base.
'An extensive command and control battle management...
...communications infrastructure is the foundation...
...of the missile defence system...
...three, two, one, intercept, directed through...
...first target is destroyed...
...The massive communications network, connecting all ballistic...
...missile defence sites is of unprecedented global proportions...
...intercept, directed through, first target is destroyed, destroyed, destroyed, destroyed..."
In order to fund this plan for global domination through space technology,
they have to destroy social progress in my country and I think in around the world too.
All that this base represents is theft, massive theft, theft so grand that you can't get your head around it.
Another world may not be possible, but unless we try, we are certain to fail.
Epilogue
The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil – human greed
At the heart of capitalism is a practise of lending money at interest.
You lend a hundred pounds, you expect to get 105 pounds back.
Now unless that growth in the money supply or the velocity
of the use of money is matched by a concomitant growth
your intake of money becomes five percent inflation.
Do we know that when politicians talk to us about growth
and about competition, that we are actually in a finite world now,
where we've practically used up all the resources.
As a series of equations, produced recently by professor Rodney Smith at Imperial College, show:
A doubling in economic activity means, in effect, a doubling in resource use.
Not a doubling in the resources used in the previous 20 years. No!
A doubling in the resources used since humanity first stood on two legs. In other words, in 20 years, between now and 2027 -
at current rates of growth - we will use as many resources as humanity has ever used.
What we hear of as 'business as usual' it is really, the right metaphor for that is:
How fast can you run to the edge of the cliff? And I don't want to go to the edge of the cliff.
You cannot, ladies and gentlemen, have green capitalism, it is a contradiction in terms.
And you don't even have to take a political position to say that,
you don't have to say that you're a socialist or a communist, you just have to understand that mathematically it cannot work.
We can have growth, we can have growth in quality of life, we can have that.
More than technical thinking, more than economic thinking, more than political thinking
it requires a profound ethical and philosophical shift which can only take place within our own hearts.
Fight for something, even if it's, you know, the maintenance of your local retirement home for cats or whatever, you know,
you must fight for something, do get involved, cause then you'll realize, you'll get involved in everything anyway.
To sit around like a kind of lemming and do nothing seems to me is, is to deny your humanity.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter. Martin Luther King
I don't know that youth are particular apathetic. I hope they make a better fist of it all than our generation has.
The planet has to be saved, it's going to be saved by younger people than I am now, I suppose.
Old people were sent into workhouses, the man into this one, the woman into that one,
when this country was the richest country in the world, that was the answer to old age and there was a campaign that got a pension.
There's a kind of paradox that people should be aware of when they campaign, which is:
it always takes more effort than you think, BUT: you've always got more power than you think.
Our biggest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our biggest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Nelson Mandela
When Mandela was in prison, he'd been there 27 years, he said to the jailors: I'm the only free man in this prison.
Until we have a change in the way we conceive of ourselves, until we reject militarism and look at
kinder and better ways of dealing with the world, then get rid of one weapon and then we have to work on the next one.
There is no path to peace Peace is the path. Mahatma Gandhi