And the beat goes on.....

This week, on Hiroshima day, I went to Somerset House to sit in on a debate, and during the evening I found myself sitting within three feet of a former defense secretary refusing to offer any sort of apology for his involvement in British nuclear proliferation in the 1970s.

After the talk, I walked out onto Waterloo bridge in the sticky evening mist. With my new eyes I can see all the way to Wharf Tower in the east and down to the crennelations of Parliament Square. I smoked a cigarette, and another, tossing the butts into the rolling, muddy river
underneath, like sins. Like prayers.

Unlike in poems, the river doesn't really wash away sins. It washes them together, all the swelling, teeming crimes of this city carried away until they're someone else's fault, a fairy story.

That's what nuclear weapons are, three generations on from the war crimes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fairy story. Think about it. 25,000 nuclear warheads exist on the planet right now, most of them 8 times the power of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Someone can decide that pride is more important than sense, someone could make a bad decision, someone could make a mistake, and that would be it. All human life, at the touch of a button or the clatter of a key-code. The enormity of this has become one of the salient facts of contemporary culture, a reality so huge and fucked-up that it doesn't even register anymore, and nor does the sheer criminality of the fact that eight or nine countries possess nuclear weapons. (Yes, not everyone has nuclear weapons. Eight or nine countries still do, and many, like South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, have dispensed with the technology.)

Media silence on the matter may give the impression that nuclear politics are a hangover from the 1980s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The UK's current project to replace the Trident missile system is going to cost upwards of £30 billion. Enough to provide free public transport for generations, enough to train and employ hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and teachers. The decision to carry out this pre-emptive replacement was taken unilaterally, with very little media fuss, around the same time that states began discussing 'pre-emptive strike action' as a possibile tactic in their war on terror (please don't ever dignify that phrase with capitals around me, ever.)

There needs to be greater media acknowledgement of the inherent criminality of nuclear proliferation and of the feasibility of global disarmament within our lifetimes. Kate Hudson, Chair of CND, who spoke at Somerset House, spoke of a 'drumbeat' of anti-nuclear sentiment being heard around the world. John Pilger also acknowledged that British steps towards disarmament 'would also be heard around the world.'

What we can do, very practically, is make a conscious effort to sound back the drumbeat - as thinkers, as writers, and as voters. If no newspaper will put nuclear proliferation developments before Madeleine McCann in their line-up, let's talk about it online. Let's talk about it in the citizen media. Because one thing's for sure - in the latter part of this decade as much as ever, nuclear politics is something that this generation needs to take very, very seriously indeed.


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A full write-up of the debate will be live at Red Pepper soon. Meanwhile, a far superior analysis than any I could hope to bash out is up at Comment is Free now, by John Pilger. Who, incidentally and exclusively for Pennyred readers, I did manage to snatch a little one-on-one time with. A transcript of the conversation follows:

JP: Oh, dear, am I in the ladies?
PR: (washing hands) Yes, Mr Pilger. You are in the ladies.
JP: Ah! Well, er...never mind, eh?

I blame the meeja.

We will all go together when we go....

Over the past week, Pennyred has been investigating employment law, the minimum wage, disability living allowance reforms (DLA) and other such thrilling indictments on the State of the Union. This was intended as a nice, gentle, sweet-and-teenage proto-socialist rant. I was planning to use the tricolon a lot and perhaps even put in some swears for extra emphasis.

This piece of news, however, was tucked away in the middle section of the Grauniad today, right under 'Government Proposes Cookery Courses For Fat Children - Jaimie Oliver Declared Home Secretary'. Not to worry you at all, but we (and by 'we' I mean the West, that ultimate 'US' that the UK continues to buy its way into with senseless and brutal defence over-spending) appear to be on the brink of doling out screaming fiery death to millions in the Third World, shortly before succumbing to said fiery death ourselves.

Read it. Then read it again, and see if you can make any logical sense out of what the NATO commission is saying, because god knows I can't. We have to consider pre-emptive attacks (on powers whose allies already have nuclear missiles!) because of:

. Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism. (Are they suggesting we nuke middle America, then? No, didn't think so.)

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. (We tried that. We've been trying that for five years, and it hasn't worked so far. What the Afghans have in the west's conception of 'weapons of mass destruction' amounts to a few really BIG rocks, and they're still kicking our collective arses. Sorry.)

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale. (Great. So rather than make major systemic changes to the way we're currently destroying our planet, we'll just kill everyone else so that we can have all the oil and water for ourselves and so those filthy poor people in other countries won't come over here begging. Right.)


There used to be a name for this. It was 'Mutually Assured Destruction' (MAD).

So NATO is getting pissy because a bunch of peasants in the gulf are giving them a right kicking, because its member states' (i.e.u.s.a) grip on global resources is threatened, and because it's being humiliated on the world stage by its own ill-conceived attempts to bully the Gulf into submission. Now it wants to whap its big, shiny, fission-powered dick on the table and show the whole world Who Da Man.

This dispute could easily be solved by gathering key heads of state and military leaders in a small (preferably very cold) room and commanding them to unzip. Whip 'em out, boys! We have nothing to lose but our dreams, our loved ones and our lives!