A good friend of mine was fined £75 at Helensburgh last month for her third "blockading sit-down" at the Trident nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the Gare Loch. I myself spent Whit weekend there for the Christian peace witness; and though I don't feel called to "direct action", I accept that the recent 365-day campaign there raised public awareness of the danger to our planet constituted by the WMDs which are liable to be used unless eradicated in time.
Gordon Brown's encouraging start as Prime Minister is, alas, marred by a few blots. In 1983 he called Trident "unacceptable, expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound", yet last year he spoke of having "the strength to take all long-term decisions for stability". But if our stability depends on H-bombs, other nations cannot be criticised for making a similar claim in response to ours. Each Trident missile has 50 times the firepower of the A-bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. It is a weapon of genocide and suicide, the fallout from which would be lethal on a continental scale. It is therefore useless against the terrorist threat, which can only be averted by policing and spying and public vigilance.
I am proud, therefore, of my friend for persisting until she secured a court hearing rather than a cat-and-mouse overnight "imprisonment without trial"! In this connection, however, I am wondering whether police and prosecutors have given enough attention to the International Criminal Court Act (Scotland) 2001 which was passed after the High Court in Edinburgh had ruled that international law could not be cited to legalise actions against WMDs. The new law means that incitement to genocide is now an offence in Scottish law see Part 1, Sections 1 and 7(b); and since, if ever a Trident missile were fired, the sailors releasing it would have been incited by their seniors, the incitement is a present-day offence committed during training.
Is it possible that following two-and-a-half decades under the old law, the legal authorities have continued under its momentum without due recognition of the change? Should not a test case be taken to appeal, say by Scottish CND? Are we not all spurred by the campaigners to press in political circles for the decommissioning and banning of all diabolical weapons of mass destruction?
I have complained to the Police Complaints Commission (Scotland) that the otherwise excellent Strathclyde Police has failed to attend to this point.
Frank R McManus, OBE MA JP(Retd), Locksley House, 97 Longfield Road, Todmorden, Lancs.
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