A Blockade on Nuclear Weapons
From the 25th to the 26th of January 2007, a group of IPPNW doctors and medical students blockaded the entrance of the only British nuclear weapons base at Faslane in Scotland. This is an interview with one of the participants in the Blockade, Alex Rosen, of Germany.
If this issue comes before Parliament, which the government will obviously try to prevent, then we have a real chance by lobbying the MPs directly. When we told people to lobby their MP on this issue, it seemed a rather abstract and difficult thing to them. They much rather wanted to just sign a petition and have it done with. A lot to be done regarding direct democracy still....
Alex Rosen: Faslane is a huge complex of buildings, docks, streets and heavy protection facilities right smack in the beautiful hills of the Firth of Clyde. There's a mile-long heavily guarded fence hung with razor wire and the like and police cars patrol the area to make sure no one stops on the road to take pictures or a closer look at the base. Around 6.000 people go in and out of the base each day so that at rush hour times, the base's gates are passed by hundreds of cars, trucks and busses each day. There's police staffing the two main gates in the South and North of the base, but as long as no one blocks the entrance, they seem to handle the situation very well and seem sympathetic to the cause. Perhaps they don't want this nuclear base in Scotland either. There are two submarines stationed at Faslane, two more are patrolling out on sea, carrying illegal weapons of mass destruction aimed at the former Soviet Union.
What a disgrace for a democratic country like the UK - 17 years after the Cold War. Even more astonishing than Faslane is the nearby missile storage facility - almost equal in size to Faslane - on the other coast of the firth. Here the nuclear warheads are stored and maintained and regularly loaded onto the submarines. Faslane is merely a small part of a huge complex of bases, infrastructure and facilities all working on maintaining a fleet of four Trident submarines and their approximately 200 nuclear warheads - each one with many times the destructive power of the bombs that wreaked havoc on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since police constantly patrol the roads, the firth and the bases, many hundreds of men are employed solely for security reasons. The costs of simply securing the weapons of mass destruction stationed at Faslane must be enormous - not to speak of the maintenance costs these radioactive warheads must cause.