People jumped into the river one after another. Most of them appeared to be naked. I could not tell men from women. Some were dead. Some were groaning in pain. Others were asking for water. Still others were just crying and shouting...... Without seeing the sight firsthand, you could not imagine the horror and depth of despair. West End of Sakae Bridge, Hiroshima
I grew up during the cold war. I got soaked in the propaganda of the probability of Russian strikes out of the blue on the cities near my home town of smallsville USA and wondered why my parents hadn't taken advantage of our large back yard to install an underground nuclear bomb shelter. My school actually had metal sign nailed to the wall of the basement cafeteria declaring that it was a designated Fallout Shelter. Every so often, the press would publish another story that analysed the eventualities of shelter tactic. In the event of nuclear Armageddon you would have to be armed with machine guns so that you could kill your neighbours who tried to get in because they were going to die anyway if they didn't. The radio-active fall-out would take two weeks at a minimum to settle out of the atmosphere as long as the bombing exchange was over with very quickly and did not happen over a period of months, say. If you didn't make it to your shelter in time after the warning because you happened to be asleep or not listening to the radio, or your shelter wasn't buried deep enough in the ground, you would get radiation sickness, your intestines would turn to muck and you would have cancers poking out of every orifice. Then the climatologists discovered an effect called the "Nuclear Winter" which could last anything between a year and several decades as the stratospheric dust blotted out the sunlight and cooled the world. This was an event that was powerful enough to kill every single dinosaur across the whole world. To stand a chance of lasting through this, we, as a family, would have to stock up on about 50 tonnes of spam each, live off bean sprouts for vitamins and invest in a water repurification system efficient enough to render our faeces into fine dust.
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As these problems hadn't yet been solved by a viable Mars mission, I concluded that we probably couldn't afford it. We were left with the safety of "Mutually Assured Destruction" and the hope that if Russia did launch a huge missile strike, and Reagan was asked to respond, he would not until he made sure that a) it wasn't a false alarm due to faulty radar equipment, b) it wasn't a missile fired by faulty Russian equipment, and c) there was actually a genuine point to retaliation beyond proving that he was a real man.
We all felt safer when Reagan retired senile and Papa Bush, the former CIA chief, took over the White House. In the meantime, I moved to Britain and had to live through years of Thatcher who seemed to preside over "National Security" alerts about as frequently as I took the rubbish out. In these enlightened days even the press knows that "National Security" or "Public Interest Immunity" are really just highfalutin ways of signposting "Sleaze" in big neon lights.
When it came to "defence", Thatcher didn't trust good old blighty engineering excellence and insisted on always buying American, especially after creating the conditions for them to poach all our best scientists. First there was the early warning system, AWACS, and then the nuclear bombs and submarine delivery system, Trident. All the while she didn't get it into her head one of the main justification of military spending in peacetime is that it is a viable way to support the national manufacturing and technology base. Consequently, as in many other ways, she impoverished the nation.
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Anyways, the Trident missile system was bought, built and commissioned at a cost of six billion quid on the initial contract. Of course, that budget has been far exceeded, and it stands as one of those so-called national "assets" that costs the nation dearly and isn't a lot of use, like the former board of Railtrack plc.
That said, at least we didn't get invaded by the Russians. Such a statement is only relevant if you assume that this was actually likely to happen post-1986. We're not talking about the 1950s here. I'd post the question that if the Russians didn't have nuclear bombs, would we have invaded Poland?
Assuming that the UK nuclear weapons had anything to do with the cold war, why has Trident continued to be expanded and deployed in the years since the end of the cold war? The point is, the Berlin Wall disappeared in 1990 because it was part of that process. Trident did not even slightly change course, suggesting that it was entirely independent of that process. Probably it never had anything to do with the Russian "threat" in the first place.
The dates are as follows. The first Trident submarine, HMS Vanguard, conducted its first patrol in December 1994. HMS Victorious followed in 1996 and HMS Vigilant in 1998. The fourth Trident submarine, HMS Vengeance, is now due for its first patrol in early 2001. The system costs one point five billion pounds each year, every year, not including the really long-term problem of the nuclear waste which is consistently left out of the nuclear cost equation every single bleeding time like it didn't exist!
The important point of the Trident project is that it's not working unless there is at least one submarine armed to the teeth with truly lethal force invisibly patrolling the North Atlantic seas 24 hours a day prepared to launch its missiles within seconds of getting its order. The sailors and technicians on board who service the missiles are insulated from the world outside and have no idea of the targets which are sent to it by computer. Astonishingly, we and they have been brainwashed into being happy with this situation. It's better that they don't know the targets, or they might not fire them. Do you know why they might not fire them? Because the targets are probably within Great Britain, their home country, and it is awfully hard to explain, even to the most disciplined soldier, what possible sense could be behind this.
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Look at the facts of human nature. You can get most people, let alone trained soldiers, to believe that bombing a country in the middle of a famine is a good idea on the basis of no credible evidence whatsoever. In a submarine full of seamen cut off from the world, you could make them believe in anything is reasonable, except the bombing of their own country. They should demand the right to know that they are not doing that.
Consider the strategic alternative. If I am in a dangerous country I might be persuaded to carry and use a gun. If I had one, I would not carry it around loaded, cocked and stuffed down my trousers with my finger on the trigger at times when there was no apparent threat. It's simply dangerous. (Anyone who doesn't think that loaded missiles packed with plutonium and rocket fuel is not dangerous is urged to store their fireworks under the grill.) It also leaves you with nothing as far as escalation goes. A sensible person keeps their gun unloaded until a threatening situation comes up. Then you load it and put a bullet in the barrel. If someone approaches you, you might point the gun at his head and tell him to back off. If he still doesn't quite get the message and it is quiet enough, you can cock the trigger and he will hear it. That's usually how far it goes and is a method which gives time enough to build up maximum fear.
The whole point of a threat is that it is directed, and the person or organism knows that he is being threatened, and also knows what is expected of him by the threatener. What the government is selling us is some kind of a system where we don't know where the threat is coming from or who it is pointed at, so we must assume that it is everywhere at once, like some sort of background radiation field. Quite how this helps is anyone's guess. I've noticed that since Trident has become armed, foreigners always treat me like I have a loaded gun held to their heads: they go all silent and try give me their valuable possessions. Well, I haven't got a hotline to the missiles, but maybe that's how the Prime Minister feels when he goes abroad and meets people.
The submarines must be armed and ready at all times because you don't know what sudden event might wipe Britain off the face of the Earth, and it is important for there to be at least one submarine lost and unreachable out at sea to facilitate a retaliation.
Clearly, if the powers that be were not able to spot a military build up of that magnitude in time to re-assemble their safely disassembled missiles (especially if they were stored in small enough pieces so as to be impossible to be knocked out with highly innaccurate first-strike ballistic missiles), these same guys are not going to be able to spot who did it and where they should target them. Better yet, if everything is knocked out, the submarine commander out at sea will not be able to gather the evidence from the bullshit on the TV news enough to mount a retaliatory strike after everyone in the UK is dead. Get real.
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Listen: there is only one event in politics that warrants having a system with the above parameters of secrecy of its whereabouts, secrecy of target and 24 hour readiness (not of surveillance, but of death delivery readiness), and that is a coup d'etat. These events strike out of the blue at the state elite. It might seem unimaginable and crazy to those of us down here, but the rulers up there know it's an ever present danger. They have associations with the rulers of other states, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, South Africa. They read and understand the words of Chairman Mao who said that power flows from the barrel of a gun. Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile, was taking tea in Thatcher's living room when the police arrested him and attempted to prosecute him for the murder of Spanish nationals during his 25 year reign of terror. Our political leaders have had their fingers directly in the downfall and installation of foreign bloody regimes. They know exactly how quickly these events can cascade. I don't see how there could be any line in the minds of their immediate enemies between foreign political meddling and UK domestic political meddling. It's only a matter of what you can get away with. That whole network of fixers and murderers which ran the British empire like a ball of blood and gravy, those people and institutions did not disappear into the atmosphere like volatile vapours at the end of 1945. They all came home with their skills, their connections and their how-to knowledge of political screwing.
Trident is a deterrent, not against the Soviet Union, which does not exist, but against the forces that could overthrow the British government from within. That's why the chain of command and the location of the nuclear button is so shady and probably activated by a dead man's handle -- in the event of suspicious death of this particular man, the launch system is to be activated. In America the nuclear button is openly carried around in a briefcase behind the president by a secret service man wherever he goes. What makes you think it's not a fake, and that the real one is actually in Kissenger's office, as it was during the times Nixon went mad?
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That's why the system must be active at all times, because the threat is to a very small number of individuals and is possible to keep hidden. That's why Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who wanted to be Prime Minister, was informed -- not by public opinion or anything like that -- that his party had to get rid of its policy of nuclear disarmament in order to become "electable", ie to qualify for government. The mandate of public opinion would not be sufficient to act on this policy, it seems. Why do prime ministers, no matter what their previous views, seem totally to back this secret missile system once they come into power? Some good reason persuades them of its necessity, which is too good to tell us.
Now, my conspiracy fears are totally true in the context of other countries. They are true in the context of this country in the historical past. There is no good conclusive reason to suppose that it could not be happening today, now, in this place. Or has there been some sort of wholesale publication of nonstrategic state secrets that I have missed, such that there is no dark corner the size of Belgium in which to fit a room for twenty very dodgy people? No?
What are Trident's ever present targets that it needs to be out there 24 hours a day?! I scream.
As usual, this whole affair could be put an end to by the engineers, technicians, bomb makers and sailors who go on board the submarines. They wilfully, construct, maintain and pilot these tools for our out of control government. Maybe these workers are contented when they believe that the bombs are aimed only at dark skinned non-Christian foreigners and their cities. But how happy would they be going out to sea with a brace of missiles intending to take out Birmingham where their aunt and uncle live? They wouldn't do it. They would tell their military rulers to take their coup d'etat fears and stick it up their collective arse. It's not our problem. Find another way to resolve your pathetic personal differences without playing with our lives.
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Maybe, without nuclear weapons, our government wouldn't feel so invinceable and arrogant that it could go dropping bombs on whomever they chose without thinking of the consequences of alienating more than one fifth of the world's population. Maybe it would have to pursue peace and justice as a foreign policy rather than profitable warfare based on the notion that it has this big stick floating out in the Atlantic capable of beating back any amount of justified rage it manages to inspire.
What are Trident's current targets? If we knew what they were, perhaps we could find a way to neutralize them. Then we could scrap this abomination.
I don't know anything true about this politics really. I simply read trashy fiction. In the absence of explanation, I have to speculate. I will not accept that there is a good reason, but my mind is too puny to understand it. I do not see these leaders of ours as being vastly more intelligent and educated than me. Officially, there is an excuse that the UK must keep nuclear weapons in order to keep its seat on the UN Security Council. Whatever that's worth. We always do exactly what the Americans tell us to. And anyway, being on the Security Council means you set the rules for membership of the Security Council. No one else does.
I'd just like to make sure that those sailors working on the submarines have the presence of mind to wonder, beneath all that training and empty-minded subservience, just whether they are really confident that the missiles aren't going to be delivered directly to their home city post-launch. How far can you trust these leaders of ours? What reason do we have to trust them after so many lies and cover-ups. I would not put any evil past them without hard evidence they wouldn't do it.
Of course, there is a good likelihood of nuclear delivery to one of our towns or cities anyway as the bombs and pieces of nuclear reactor are transported around the country by road or by rail where there is, of course, never any accident. Don't you think it's nice how they keep these movements secret even after they have happened when there is no strategic security involved, so that we don't have to worry about it? The politicians with their nice easy access to their bunkers stocked with fresh water and Geiger counters are, of course, fully qualified to do the worrying on our behalf. They'll balance the equation of our lives, the necessity of production, and the corner-cutting costs involved in the best way possible, as always.
The hell they will.
I found a local CND meeting, signed up to the October 22 Faslane blockade in Scotland, and caught the minibus up to Glasgow with a bunch of Liverpool students. The blockades were inspired by the Trident Ploughshares 2000 which holds with the principle that these dangerous and useless (to us) military devices ought to be torn apart and the metal put to better use. That's what's supposed to happen at the end of a war; the soldiers come home, take their swords round to the local blacksmiths and get them hammered into plough blades which they can use.
In April 1998 the three women who established the movement, after years of trying to talk to the government through the usual channels about why the hell they were continuing to deploy this missile system when we were supposed to be at peace, took the law into their own hands and attempted to disarm it themselves. Since then, activists have broken into the Faslane base on numerous occasions while carrying tools and handbooks on how to disarm the missiles. Sometimes they swam across the water right up to one of the submarines and spray painted words like: "Junk -- dispose of with care".
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These particular women on that particular day helped themselves to one of the police guard boats that are used for patrolling the sea entrance to the base and drove it around the Loch for forty minutes. They trashed the boat by throwing as much as they could overboard, and dropped one of the women off on the jetty right beside a docked submarine.
There followed a long-running and detailed court case where they were prosecuted for trespass and damage to property, but in which they defended themselves on the small technicality that the use or intended use of the Trident missiles violated international law by threatening non-combatants with death and maiming, and on a precedence set during the Nuremberg Nazi trials which stated that when your government is committing or preparing to commit an atrocity -- such as burning the Jews, or burning a civilian city by nuclear warfare -- it is every citizen's duty to resist its actions in every way possible.
The court agreed and they were freed.
When our bus got to Glasgow, we were dropped off in some sort of a community centre in a warehouse. There was food and a lot of painting of signs going on, and plenty of forms to fill in. I had to attend a Non-Violent Direct Action training workshop upstairs for a couple of hours. It gave me the sense that I was joining some kind of a rent-a-mob organization. We got issued with "bust cards" with the phone number of the CND duty solicitor to call if we got arrested. The police would liase with the organization as they arrested people to speed up processing through the system. We formed our Liverpool University affinity group (which happened to have no arrestables). One of us had had the idea of issuing our group with black wigs which we wore all day and made it very easy to track one another, although we did look rather silly. I suppose it performed exactly the same function as policeman's hats, or soldier's berets, but was sort of civilian in nature.
As usual, I slept in the minibus. Are you sure that's comfortable? everyone asked. Do I sound like I'd rather sleep on a hard floor in a gymnasium with 300 other people many of whom snore, when I could have a room on my own and stretch out across cushioned seats? I honestly don't see why people think it's such a strange idea as they do. Next they'll think I'm weird for not drinking too much beer of an evening when I'm old enough to have worked out the precise parameters for a nasty hang-over.
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We got up dark and early at four in the morning. Fifty seater coaches took us up the coast to the submarine base and dropped us off. Just before we parked, eight students from London got in the aisle and locked on with their tubes on their arms and chains linking their wrists inside the tubes to make it difficult for the police to prise them apart. They slipped out the door in a hurry, nipped up the road to the gate and threw themselves down on the ground.
My group set up their long sheet banner in the crowd on the pavement and stood there as the police began milling around like iron filings on a table top when a magnet is moved underneath. I grew somewhat alarmed by the way they were forming a column in front of us such that they could trap us against the fence. Recalling what they did in London, I left and went up the hill.
Eventually their tactic became clear. They had surrounded the protestors locked down to the ground and were dealing with them one at a time. As each one was separated and arrested, they would be carried along this channel between the police officers to the edge of the crowd and thence to their vans.
I came down and suggested to my group that instead of standing up against the fence like puddings behind the police lines where no one could see them, why not take yourselves to the opening of the police channel and sort of mill around over there? A little chaos is always a bit more entertaining. But you have to be very careful, for while a policeman has the right to barge into you like a bulldozer, you drop one skin cell on them and you will be charged with assault. The delicate flowers.
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People are sometimes sorry for the police because they are only doing their job, which is supposed to be upholding the rule of law and order. As has been proven, operating Trident is against the law, so to leave the base blockaded would be to uphold the law, provided that we did so non-violently. I see their duty here as being similar to what they should be doing at a strike picket line. It's not their job to get involved and break up a strike in favour of the employer who may be one man with the money working against the interests of a whole community, just as it's not their job to get involved in marital disputes unless there is actual violence. If they were doing their duty, they would have left the base blockaded and made sure nobody attacked us. It's not like anyone was going to starve on the inside with all their supplies and preparations for nuclear warfare. If they couldn't stand the isolation any longer, they could always have ridden the submarines to Southampton to pick up some tea. We were not sitting out in the water.
After a while I decided to take a walk to the South Gate, and chatted with one of the ladies from the Peace Camp along the way who was wearing some underpants on her head. She claimed to have broken into the base a couple of times and told me something about razor wire that I didn't know. Apparently it comes in coils that are under an incredible tension. If you cut it it springs straight and you have these two pieces of razor lined wire whipping around and around in the air in opposite directions slicing everything they touch. Marvelous. I think these people are really brave, unlike those Sun reading war-mongering citizens who believe everything the government says is true, and who dare to call peace protestors "cowards".
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There was a small pile of people locked together on the road leading to this gate. I milled around for a bit, then caught a shuttle bus all the way back to the oil depot gate beyond the North gate. Unfortunately, the police had got it open and were guarding it with several lines which stretched out along the busy main road. If you tried to get in the way, they would legitimately pull you back claiming that it was dangerous to stand in the road, silly. Men in suits in their giant "off-road" gas-guzzling twit-mobiles were managing to drive in and out of the base. Probably going there to sell insurance, or to sign lucrative business contracts to deliver mechanically recovered frozen meat burgers for the soldiers barracked there. They didn't look like useful technicians.
Back at the main north gate there were more policemen than ever before. The samba drum band was still booming away. It can't be difficult playing in one of those things because all you do is play the same rhythm riff over and over again until you get it right, then you move on and practice another riff for a while. Always sounds good.
Is listened in as one of the organizers of the event gave his TV interview, which I was certain would be entirely edited out, firstly, because it wasn't sound-bitey enough, and secondly, because I realized me with my stupid wig was right in the middle of the picture.
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As some of them kept saying, they were against Trident no matter what. Nothing can happen to make it right. And they get lost in some kind of moral argument. This kind of talk is easy to counter with the claim that this is not a moral world, you starry-eyed ideologue. Our government always has our best interests at heart. We can trust it with our lives.
There are situations where I might change my mind and think that Trident was a good thing. For example, if space aliens in the form of giant tentacled worms landed in Morocco and started spreading out from there, eating every living thing in their track and they were invulnerable to all other forms of defence. Maybe then there might be a reason for re-assembling the warheads. But you wouldn't need a submarine. They could quite easily be launched from a battleship.
It is no coincidence that the fictional, optimistic use of nuclear weapons generally follows the above plot. That one, or deflecting a oncoming meteor, or something. These are applications for which the present system is entirely ill-suited. Now, I believe that popular science fiction writers want to deploy these nuclear devices within their imaginary worlds as much as the politicians do in, unfortunately, our real world. Oh yes, politicians are one of the greatest consumers of science fiction around. The publishers of this pulp science fiction they read are called "Think Tanks", and I don't have reason to believe that they think any more deeply or creatively than Philip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein did. These writers are honest. You know when they are lying. Edward Teller, the disputed father of the Hydrogen Bomb, sold the idea of a missile shield to Ronald Reagan, saying that the whole thing could manifest as an orbiting device the size of an "executive desk", was really lying. He was using a powerful metaphor that works on ignorant business people like that, who think that, well, if one important CEO can run the whole of General Motors' billions and billions of industrial activity from one single desk, then why not an automatic missile system from the desk alone?
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After a good bit of internal ranting to myself like I have done here on this page, I spent the rest of the protest sitting on the pavement, staring at the policemen with their handcuffs, their mean telescopic metal truncheons, their little tube of spray which looked like an asthma inhaler, their shiny boots. I was deeply sad about the whole world.
A few of the soldiers in the base came up to the gate from the inside, wearing their camoflage clothes and red berets. I stared at them. Most of the personnel I had seen patrolling the fences as I had walked around were very young. Almost children. I thought to myself about how, although they were armed and numerous and had the authority to exercise state violence, they always seemed call on the civilian police to guard them. It's kind of strange. You have a different police forces covering different parts of the country, and there is an entirely separate force called the British Transport Police for guarding the railways. Why not have all these highly trained kids inside the base put on uniforms and become the MoD police when necessary? Seems more efficient.
Then it occurred to me the fact that using soldiers to police civilians is kind of a taboo in Western democracies. Somehow it doesn't work, and the authorities know it doesn't work (unlike a lot of other stupid ideas that they feel free to experiment on us, like rail privatization and self-regulation of the food pesticides industry). The military training program, as it must apply to the young, is a carefully schemed work of art. They put them through the processor and fill their heads with a certain high grade of bullshit that it makes them entirely incapable of interacting with civil society on a professional level. The authorities know that what they've turned these young lads into are unstable and dangerous. That's why they cannot be used to guard their own property. They have to pay civilian people to keep other civilian people away so that the two sides can never interact. It's funny how, when they go abroad, they are then suddenly qualified to deal with ordinary people, don't you think? I find it really spooky. It's like we have a separate nation within our nation that has all the killing power. That's why I don't trust any belief that the military one would not sacrifice our nation completely, for its own ends.
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This month, Tony Blair's government has shown that it is willing to starve 7.5 million Afghan peasants over this winter without batting an eyelid. I don't care how much his minister, Claire Short, blusters -- there is no way that she is better informed about the technicalities of the situation than the majority of reputable NGOs who are working in the area. It's just not credible. Do you really think that, if it was politically expedient, Tony Blair would not drop a nuclear bomb on, say, Manchester? I stare at this question, and I have no trouble believing it, just now. In fact it would be a whole lot easier for the case that there would be no international retaliation to contend with. Maybe Ireland would complain about the fall-out a little bit, but they've been drinking our Sellafield radio-active waste products for years, so they know how to deal with it.
When Global Warming takes hold, genetically modified plagues sweep the nation and there is starvation and disease, as there always has been in ages past, we will get civil war. Horror will come. We will curse the policemen who felt it was right to guard these devices in peacetime when we had a chance to get rid of them, we will curse souls of the technicians who built these nuclear devices for pay and handed the keys over to a raving class of nutters I wouldn't trust enough to turn my back to. And we will curse ourselves for letting it happen.
At around midday, we all formed a circle in the road and then had a mass hugging session in the middle of the roundabout, which cheered me up somewhat.