The peace movement in Scotland calls out the UK’s commitment to US jets and nuclear bombs as an ethical outrage that contradicts international law.
The UK’s commitment to an additional nuclear weapon system totally contradicts the spirit of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), further degrades the UK’s sovereignty by deepening UK dependence on the USA and complicity with US warfighting strategies.
The deployment contradicts the NPT at a time when the majority of non-nuclear states want the nuclear states to turn back from threatening world annihilation and use the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to step back. The TPNW is a mechanism that will finally enable the nuclear powers to fulfil commitments made in the NPT to take steps towards total nuclear disarmament until it is fully achieved.
The planned new nuclear weapon system locks in the UK’s dependence on the USA and the UK’s inevitable complicity in the twists and turns of USA’s warfighting strategies. This is already obvious in our government’s muted response to the illegal bombing of Iran by the USA and of the multiple illegal acts of Israel in Gaza and Iran, our government’s failure to end all UK military support to the Israeli military or to ensure that UK manufactured arms are completely unavailable to Israeli use.
In Scotland, we already live with the fear of catastrophic nuclear accidents and the knowledge that our land and sea is used to threaten world destruction despite our wish to face the world in friendship. Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate, inhumane, genocidal and ecocidal, all of which contradicts the international laws that prohibit indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the infrastructures and ecosystems needed for life. This is not in our name.