When the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cities were obliterated. By 1950, over 340,000 people had died as a result and generations were poisoned by radiation.
Today 13,000 nuclear weapons still threaten our survival, even though the majority of people in the world and their governments support an international ban on their development and use. Nuclear rhetoric around the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has showed us how these weapons can make a dangerous situation even riskier. The possibility of nuclear war is the greatest for many decades.
The UK
The UK government announced in 2021 that it will increase the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal for the first time since the Cold War. But we don’t want any more of them. In fact, we don’t want any.
We should not be spending billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction when investment is urgently needed in our NHS, education system and green jobs. We may now have a new Labour government but they are committed to replacing Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons spending, and to increasing military spending.
A further development is that US nuclear weapons look set to return to Britain – a further undermining of prospects for global peace, and a move that will increase global tensions and put Britain on the front line in a NATO/Russia war. This must be stopped.
