Dear all,

 

Please find some of this week’s main stories below. Thank you all for your continued support.

 

 

 

Nukes in Britain

• Britain’s nuclear weapons projects are in serious trouble, with one to build the reactors for Dreadnought submarines deemed “unachievable” for the third year in a row, according to the latest Infrastructure and Projects Authority watchdog report. You can read more and find the report on the The Ferret and The National.
• The UK Defence Journal does its bit for Britain’s nuclear industry by attacking claims made form Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard about the operational independence of Trident, ie. that the US are the ones who really control Britain’s nuclear arsenal.

• The Canary both covered the news of CND’s legal letters to the MoD and Suffolk County Council, over their failure to provide an emergency plan for a radoactive accident at RAF Lakenheath.

• War Resisters’ International has a piece on their website about Lakenheath and the upcoming peace camp.

Disarmament

• “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things,” Donald Trump said on Thursday, suggesting fresh arms control talks with the US, China, and Russia - which could eventually lead to the halving of military budgets.
• Reuters: Trump’s comments comes after “Russia warned on Monday that the outlook for extending the last remaining pillar of nuclear arms control between Moscow and Washington did not look promising and that the situation appeared to be deadlocked. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them, is due to run out in less than a year – on February 5, 2026.
• Meanwhile, Secretary Ian Murray has told anti-nuclear weapons campaigners in his Edinburgh South constituency he would lobby for Britain to attend a ban-the-bomb meeting in New York next month. In an email shared with The National, Murray said that the UK attending a meeting of countries signed up to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) would be a major boost for “global disarmament efforts”.

NATO / Europe

• The Munich Security Conference kicks off today with the BBC warning the “old” world order is at risk of crumbling.

• JD Vance won’t meet Germany’s Scholz at Munich Security Conference. “We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long,” a former US official said of Vance’s thinking.

Ukraine

• Chernobyl nuclear power station hit by ‘Russian drone’. Despite hitting the nuclear plant, the small fire was quickly contained and officials said there was no apparent radiation leak.
• The heartlessness of the deal: how Trump’s ‘America first’ stance sold out Ukraine.
• Ukraine still on ‘irreversible path to joining NATO’ Starmer tells Zelenskyy.

Iran

• The Telegraph has reported that senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commanders are putting pressure on the Ayatollah to remove a fawta on nuclear weapons.However, Iran’s embassy in Britain has refuted the claims, calling is disinformation against the country.

Indo-Pacific

 

• Kim Jong un said on Saturday that North Korea would continue to expand and mondernise its nuclear weapons programme, accusing the US of wanting to create a NATO-style bloc in the region.

Radioactive experiments

• The Guardian reports on a medical experiment carried out in the 1960s on South Asian women living in Coventry, who were fed radiated chapattis without their consent.

UK Nuclear Energy

• David Toke writes that money not planning laws or the Welsh language that has got in the way of a new nuclear plant at Wylfa.
• Coverage of CND Cymru’s comments on a government plan to roll our SMRs across Britain.
• Great British Nuclear has announced its leadership team while the winners of its SMR competition will be unveiled around the time of the spending review in June 2025.
• Bylines Scotland explains why the Regulatory Asset Base (RAB) funded Sizewell C nuclear project is likely to be classed as “on book” in national accounts terms.

Best,

 

Pádraig McCarrick

 

Press and Communications Officer

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament