Early this morning (27 June 2016), members of Christian peace groups blocked the three entrances to AWE Burghfield using super glue and arm tubes. 14 men and women, aged between 20 and 80, six of them Quakers and others from faith groups Put DownThe Sword and the London Catholic Worker lay in the road to symbolically prevent the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Alongside the protests, which may lead to arrests, people from local Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Sikh groups gathered to pray outside the base for the victims of war, and will maintain their witness all day. This ‘No Faith In Trident’ day is part of a month of action at nuclear weapons factory Burghfield AWE in the run up to the government’s final decision on the replacement of Trident later this year.( http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/23211) Trident – Britain’s current nuclear weapons system – will soon be redundant, and leading anti-nuclear groups and academics saying that replacing it will cost over £205 billion over its lifetime.
Faith leaders have repeatedly called for the abandonment of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons programme. In 2015, 26 faith leaders made a statement calling on all states to ‘make good their commitment to negotiations on the universal, legally verifiable and enforceable elimination of nuclear weapons’.
* The month of action is organised by Trident Ploughshares
* London Catholic Worker http://www.londoncatholicworker.org/
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