CND Press Roundup Monday 13th June 2022

CND

• Kate shares some reflections of Bruce Kent’s leadership of CND on her blog. Tributes to Bruce can also be left on his website.

• BBC News had a report on Bruce’s life and leadership of CND, a copy of which can be found on Twitter.

• The Hampstead and Highgate Gazette reports on the passing of ‘Peace Hero’ Bruce Kent. The obituary contains tributes and some pictures of Bruce.

• The archive of activist, publisher, and would-be-assassin of Franco – Stuart Christie – will be launched at the May Day Rooms on Fleet Street in London, on June 22. Christie was a member of CND, “as well as the more militant Direct Action Committee and Committee of 100, and he took part in the confrontational CND demonstration at the Faslane naval base in 1963.”

Trident

• The National has a special report on the 40th anniversary of the Faslane Peace Camp…but it’s behind a paywall. However, the Metro has a free to read exclusive on the FPC with some great current and historic photographs.

• Blockades at the Coulport naval base were carried out by anti-nuclear activists on Monday morning with police making several arrests, The Herald reports. Scottish CND said the activists from XR peace and Trident Ploughsares were “putting their bodies in the way of business as usual for weapons of mass destruction.”  

• The North West Evening Mail reports on a campaign to return and put on display the UK’s first nuclear submarines to where it was made. HMS Dreadnought was built in Barrow’s shipyard between 1959-60 but has lived at the Rosyth Dockyard in Scotland since leaving service in 1980. Local Tory MP Simon Fell is leading the calls to have the sub returned to Barrow, with the town’s Dock Museum a favoured destination.

AUKUS

• Australia’s Labor government has reached a multi-million dollar settlement with French defence giant Naval Group – over the previous Coalition government’s cancellation of a A$90 billion attack submarine contract. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the €550 million (A$830m) agreement would draw a line under the saga. Tensions between Canberra and Paris boiled over in September after former PM Scott Morrison dumped the French deal in favour of a nuclear-submarine pact with the UK and US (AUKUS). While Labour gave bilateral support to AUKUS, Albanese said Morrison’s handling of the deal had “caused enormous tension in the relationship between Australia and France.”

• Meanwhile, Australia’s former defence minister is in hot water after he disclosed last week an earlier plan to buy two Virginia-class nuclear submarines in order to plug a capability gap. Peter Dutton was accused of political point scoring by the new Labour government, after he suggested they continue with the purchase. However, Dutton has since been on the back foot – due to experts questioning Washington’s willingness to deliver two of its submarines by 2030 and concerns that such a deal would colour the yet-to-be-made decision by Australia to choose either a British or US sub design under the AUKUS pact.

UK Nuclear Energy

• The Express (of all places) reports on serious issues facing Rolls Royce’s plan to build a fleet of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as part of the government’s energy strategy. It quotes a report by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) which found that “most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study.” Speaking to the Express, Professor Paul Dorfman said: “It (SMRs) may well produce more high-level waste than conventional reactors, but will most definitely produce more low and intermediate waste than conventional reactors. And that’s important, those intermediate and low are huge waste streams. In terms of the Rolls-Royce, it’s a slightly bigger design, there is no way you can call it an SMR. It would have fewer problems than the ones in the paper, but nevertheless, it would still produce more waste than a conventional reactor, whichever way you put it.”

• A former Tory energy minister has labelled Boris Johnson’s nuclear energy strategy as having “zero chance” of being delivered on time. Backbench MP Jessie Norman made the comments in his letter expressing no confidence in the Prime minister last week. “As a former energy minister I can tell you that there is, for example, zero chance that this or any government will be able to build a nuclear power station a year at any point in the next decade,” Norman said. Defending the strategy, Copeland Councillor David Moore said Norman wasn’t up to date on what was going on adding: “I believe we are committed to new nuclear. We know that we’re going to get an announcement on fusion this year. We also know there’s a commitment to build 16 SMR reactors here in the UK.”

• The Morning Star looks at a project by the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) to blast undersea seismic airguns off the Cumbrian coast in order to find a suitable site to dump radioactive waste. NWS, a section of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, has contracted Shearwater Geosciences to carry out the work. The work has been labelled as “scientific research,” which allows the work to be carried out without first obtaining a marine licence. The project to build the Geological Disposal Facility is estimated to cost between £20-53 billion.

Global Proliferation

• The Guardian discusses the latest yearbook from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) – which warns that the global nuclear stockpile is going to increase in the coming years. “All of the nuclear-armed states are increasing or upgrading their arsenals and most are sharpening nuclear rhetoric and the role nuclear weapons play in their military strategies,” Dr Wilfred Wan, the director of Sipri’s weapons of mass destruction programme, said in the think tank’s 2022 yearbook. “This is a very worrying trend.”

Hiroshima

• The Mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, has said the Japanese government intends to invite G7 leaders to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum, during a summit scheduled to take place in the city next year. Matsui’s comments come after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Thursday, where they discussed preparations for the summit. Matsui told reporters that it was important that G7 leaders knew the reality of atomic bombs. “It is important to come up with specific actions through discussions of peace in Hiroshima, especially amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and nuclear threats,” Matsui added. Three members of the G7 – the UK, France and US – are nuclear powers while Italy and Germany host US/NATO nuclear bombs.

North Korea

• North Korea’s Kim Jong-un confirmed his country’s arms buildup in a statement published by the state-run KCNA news agency on Saturday. “(Kim) said the right to self-defence is an issue of defending sovereignty, clarifying once again the party’s invariable fighting principle of power for power and head-on contest,” the statement said without mentioning the recent flurry of ballistic missile launches or nuclear test preparations. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Defence Minister Lee Jong-sup said Seoul would up its defence capabilities and work with the US to deter Pyongyang’s nuclear threats.