Scrap Trident nuclear programme, protesters demand

[bananas]

Source: The Hindu

Shouting “Wrap up Trident” and holding up placards reading “Books Not Bombs” and “Climate not Trident” thousands of campaigners took to the streets of central London on January 24 in a novel protest.

‘Peace scarf’

Organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Action AWE, the marchers wrapped the Ministry of Defence in a two-mile-long pink “peace scarf” knitted by volunteers from all over the world in protest against government plans to spend £100 billion to upgrade the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear sea-based weapons system based near Glasgow in Scotland.

On January 20th, a parliamentary vote saw an overwhelming endorsement for the upgrade, with only 37 Members of Parliament voting to not renew the Trident programme, and 364 voting for it. However, 250 MPS — including Labour leader Ed Miliband — abstained from voting.

The “Wrap up Trident” demonstration sought to raise awareness over an issue on which there has been little public debate in recent years — the last big anti-Trident protest was in 2007 — to ensure its inclusion in the election agendas of political parties in the May 2015 general elections.

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Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/scrap-trident-nuclear-programme-protesters-demand/article6821268.ece

[Ken Burch]

1. They should scrap it. The damn Cold War's been over for twenty-five years now.

No reason to keep anything associated with that loathesome and nearly mega-catastrophic era.

[iandhr]

2. I am glad that an ally like the UK has independent nuclear capability.

People like this have their heads in the clouds. However I would be all for reducing the number of nukes (e.g. START with Russia) When it comes to the power to destroy the world once is enough.

I am against the building of a doomsday machine however.

"RAND strategist Herman Kahn proposed a "Doomsday Machine" in 1960 that would consist of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them all and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. The key aspect of the doomsday device's deterrent factor is that it would go off automatically without human aid and despite human intervention, providing a highly credible threat that would dissuade attackers and avoid the dangerous game of brinkmanship that brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device