Please Scrap Trident!

See below my letter urging the Crewe and Nantwich MP to vote against the renewing of the Trident nuclear submarines on Monday.  I used various bits of info from www.cnduk.org, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of which I am a member.  You can use this link to easily lobby your MP, there is a template letter which you can send as it is or edit as I did.
.....or you could just tell me to f**k off you tree hugging lefty, which is exactly what I expect Edward Timpson will do when he sends me back another one of his letters saying in a polite round about way that he loves war, nuclear weapons and killing foxes and there's no way he will rebel against his Tory masters.

Dear Edward Timpson MP,

I am writing to ask how you plan to vote when the Government brings forward plans for replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system on 18 July.

The Government has reiterated its commitment to spending at least £205bn on a new generation of nuclear weapons despite public services facing continued austerity.

I believe that nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal under international law as they kill indiscriminately, they are strategically irrelevant in the face of the actual threats we face today.   Each trident submarine can carry up to 40 nuclear warheads on board, each of these warheads is eight times more powerful than the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima!  These weapons have no legitimate purpose: their use would be illegal under almost every conceivable circumstance, as huge numbers of civilian casualties would be unavoidable. That is why the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international law.

Rather than a deterrent, Britain's nuclear weapons make us appear to be a threat and thus encourage proliferation across other nations.  As a weapon system we can never use trident is just symbolic.  Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the biggest supporters of replacing Trident in 2007, has admitted that the only purpose of maintaining the nuclear weapons system is to give Britain status.

Concerns have also been raised about the security of Trident itself in the future, especially with the ongoing development of underwater drones and sophisticated cyber-warfare which could disable the submarines' systems.

The opposition to Trident is growing across society. A number of leading military experts have denounced nuclear weapons and there is widespread opposition amongst faith communities and trade unions and from across the political spectrum.  Trident was a major point of debate in the 2015 General Election, with the spectacular gains of the Scottish National Party (SNP) a stark indicator of opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland. The Scottish people are joined by millions all over the UK who want to see an end to Trident.

The government is in favour of replacing Trident at a cost of at least £205 billion. This money would be enough to improve the NHS by building 120 state of the art hospitals and employing 150,000 new nurses, build 3 million affordable homes, install solar panels in every home in the UK or pay the tuition fees for 8 million students.

I would be very grateful if you would let me know how you would vote on Monday 18 July, and I urge you please to consider the points I have made and vote according to your own personal judgement, which ever way that may fall, rather than follow Conservative Party recommendation.

Yours Sincerley,

John Brand

Tramp buys a bazooka!

 Erm..... Okay here's another article written by Frankie Boyle in The Guardian.
Enjoy!

Persuading Britain to spend billions on Trident is like convincing a tramp to buy a bazooka

I wrote a joke the other day, along the lines of: “Our greatest fear is that we die alone – which is why I intend to take quite a few people with me.” And it would be funnier, I suppose, if it didn’t constitute Britain’s actual policy on defence. It’s hard to make a moral or strategic case for Trident, so its cheerleaders have resorted to metaphor. Trident, we’re told, symbolises Britain’s place in the world. Of course, I understand Cameron saying he thinks Britain is still a great country (talking something up is a good way to get the best price when you’re selling it), but we don’t actually have much sense of history, and don’t really travel, so it seems odd that we’re being told to spend hundreds of billions of pounds projecting a version of ourselves that we barely understand on to people we will never meet. Perhaps Trident is really a symbol of the era of late capitalism, where most things we buy are unnecessary to the point of ludicrousness. Persuading austerity Britain to spend billions on Trident is like convincing a tramp he needs a bazooka.
What is the British way of life? What do we value? Daytime drinking; freedom of speech (for anybody who isn’t joking); a big centre-forward who can hold the ball up; making drunken, sexual online threats to respected academics; hating people from a broadly similar town 30 miles away; watching strangers bake; watching someone we know fail; and whatever the opposite of reading a history book is. I’m not saying it’s all bad, I’m just saying it doesn’t justify heating up a 100 million civilians to a temperature where their shadows catch fire. Perhaps we need to face up to the fact that Britain is becoming a sort of redneck country that doesn’t give a shit about education or health, but needs to have the latest weapons; the renewal of Trident casts Scotland as the wife who has given you one last chance, listening wearily to your story about how you’ve blown the benefits money on booby-trapping the driveway and a new sniper rifle.
Cameron has eroded so many flood defences it might just be an act of tactical military genius. Which of our enemies would expect a Trident submarine to be bobbing around a Morrisons car park in York? The PM has derided Jeremy Corbyn’s idea of keeping the subs without missiles as patently ridiculous, and in no way comparable to building two huge aircraft carriers with no aircraft. Scaling down Trident might actually better suit our military requirements over the next century, as it has to be easier hauling two submarines through a desert rather than four. Or maybe the subs could find a non-military role: becoming a place where we put Britain’s worst sexual deviants, perhaps eventually replacing the Premier League.
If we are wiped out in nuclear war, the planet will need to be repopulated by the staff of the submarines, so the fact that they now let women serve could actually be seen as a deeply pessimistic move. The officers in charge of launching the missiles are trained to “fire and forget”. That’s fire up to 160 nuclear warheads, and forget that the world has been reduced to a cursed sandscape where the strongest mutants will rule as Petrol Sheriffs. The government insists that we are prepared for cyber attack, but to be honest we’re rarely prepared for snow in winter. Having Trident (which genuinely has an operating system called Windows for Submarines) might almost be like a half-hearted suicide attempt. As for the supposed threat of North Korea, with their current missile delivery technology it would take years for them to save up for the necessary stamps. Yes, they launched a satellite recently, but remember that it’s much easier to hit a target that is basically The Universe. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that people doing eight hours of gymnastics a day while living on acorns aren’t going to build a viable, targeted intercontinental missile. And if they do, it’s going to be an absolute coupon buster if they decide to send it 3,000 miles to Britain rather than – just to pick a country at random – South Korea.

Corbyn said he would never launch nuclear weapons. He has commissioned a report into the renewal of Trident, and hopefully it will change his mind. It takes a truly humble and magnanimous man to say: “Well, I have to respect the decision of the committee and, if the occasion arises, I will now destroy all life on Earth.” In any case, launching Trident is surely too big a responsibility for one person. The truly democratic method would be to have a giant button somewhere that can only be pressed by the weight of 51% of the population. Think of the fun we will have coming from all over the country to fire our missiles. Peace campaigners waving bedsheets with sad-face emojis from motorway bridges at jeering megabuses of drunken pro-war monsters. Hordes of people living for days on the open Bakelite savannah of the button waiting for their numbers to build. The cheer going up as they finally reach critical mass with the screeching arrival of the Chelsea team coach. It will be an event that the whole country will talk about for ever, which will be a matter of a few minutes.
In the final moments of life on Earth, someone will think of arranging their hands to make a shadow puppet, creating a dragon or a dove to be immortalised by the bomb. They’ll know that nobody will ever see it, but they’ll do it anyway. And this, I think, is what it is to be any kind of artist these days, with no posterity to address but still compelled, for reasons you don’t understand, to work in the terrible now.

Why?

Today's nuclear weapons make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs of 70 years ago look like Chinese firecrackers.

Scary thought.

Even more frightening is the fact that over 15,000 nuclear warheads exist across the world today.  Humans clearly think that nuclear war is a good thing.

Britain, the country I live in, wants to spend £100billion upgrading the trident nuclear submarines.  We already have plenty of nuclear weapons.  Someone somewhere says we need more of them, bigger ones, and better ones.

Japan were already offering peace when the bombs were dropped. The Americans went ahead and did it anyway.  It didn't end World War II.  It was already over.  It didn't save lives.  It killed hundreds of thousands.

70 years on has the world ensured this can never happen again?  No

Will it happen again?  Eventually it's inevitable.

Why?  Because humans are fucking idiots.....

http://stopwar.org.uk/

http://www.cnduk.org/