UNISONActive is an unofficial blog produced by UNISON activists for UNISON activists. Bringing news, briefings and events from a progressive left perspective.

Monday 26 April 2010

The case against Trident‏

The low point of last Thursday’s ‘political celebrity squares’ debate of the main party leaders was the Brown/Cameron portrayal of Clegg as a ‘risk to national security’ for standing by the Lib Dem manifesto commitment to scrap Trident nuclear missile system replacement programme.

Progressive trade unionists, anxious at the unprecedented cuts planned in public expenditure, will have been appalled at this unholy alliance defending unnecessary military costs estimated by Greenpeace to amount to £130bn over a 30 year period.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/18/trident-replacement-hidden-cost-revealed

Dr Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has published a report on ‘The future of Britain’s WMD.’ It argues cogently that Trident should not be replaced; examines British dependence on the United States and concludes that most of the discussion on the replacement is based on the false premise that the UK has an independent nuclear weapon.

To support this conclusion, the report reviews the history of Britain's involvement with nuclear weapons from 1940 to the present day to show a sixty-year-old pattern of British dependence on the US for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
http://www.danplesch.net/articles/6-WMD-Report.html