The Promise of Hiroshima

It was all so beautiful.

Mathematics could dissect reality itself,

Complex, but simply balanced,

A logan rock moved by a touch,

and through these mysteries

we came to understand

the energy constrained within a grain of sand.




Infinitesimal becomes

unbounded power.

Three planes, one flash

One whole town gone to dust.

Nothing except a few skeletal lines

Some shadow where a man had been.

Silence,    apart from screams.




For some, that was success.

And this is how it stays. We live

under the sword of Damocles

peace dangling by a hair,

our fallibility denied.

We live beneath a constant threat,

in wilful ignorance of death.




As if the sheer perfection of the truth

could purge the politicians' faults.

As if the discipline of science

that showed them to unlock the door

had somehow spread itself

into the corrupted soul and mind

of those whose stock in trade is lies.

Richard Lawson 

24/7/2015

Lobby against the irrational Trident WMD

CND is lobbying against the replacement of our Trident WMD system.

My MP, John Penrose, is minister for Tourism, and therefore will not sign EDMs.

So this is what I wrote:

Dear John,

I know you will not and cannot consider signing EDM 96 Trident Replacement.

The EDM highlights the conclusions of the Government's own National Security Strategy that the threat of a nuclear attack by another state is of low likelihood.

Following on from that, the EDM is a simple statement of opposition to Trident replacement, highlighting its £25 billion procurement cost and £100 billion lifetime cost.

The conclusion is that there are better things to spend the money on, whether within the Ministry of Defence or in other Ministries.

The key point that I would like again to remind you of is that if Trident is ever used, it will be as part of a general exchange that will almost certainly put an end to human civilisation in its present form.

It is reasonable to use a system whose failure means such a cost if and only if the chance of its failure is zero. The chance of a filure of the nuclear deterrence system is greater than zero, therefore, in supporting the nuclear deterrence system, you are supporting an irrational policy, as well as wasting a significant amount of taxpayers' money.




This is very sad.

Richard

see also - 12 steps to getting rid of Trident

Trident:- 12 steps to rejecting Hammond's illogical organ

This is an actual picture of a Trident launch. Not Photoshopped 

     Trident:

1. Either it will be used or it will be not used.
2. If it is used, human civilisation can kiss its ass a fond farewell. Everything worthwhile, including the reason to live, dies. In short, Omnicide. 
3. If Trident is not used, about £130,000,000,000 will have been spent on nothing - money that could have been spent on creating  good jobs for everyone for many many years.
4. Some will say say that the £130billion will have been well spent because it is maintaining peace through deterrence. 
5. It is true that Trident raises the threshold at which politicians decide that they are bored with talking to each other and decide to kill their subjects instead.
6. But although possession of WMD does raise the threshold for war, it does not absolutely close the door on war.
7. See 2 above.
8. Trident's effect in raising the threshold for war is neutralised by its effect in stimulating nuclear proliferation - i.e. by making nations like Iran think that they need a deterrent of their own. 
9. Since there is a chance it may be used, it is illogical to possess Trident, for the reason set out here.
10. Therefore the Coalition Government, in the middle of its programme of bone crunching attacks on the British people in the name of poverty, is about to spend £1billion of taxpayer's money on an illogical, highly dangerous enterprise
11. And there is nothing that we can do about it.
12. Or is there?

Liam Fox' successor: on your marks, get set - Lobby!

Liam Fox will soon be clearing his desk and making way for a new Secretary of State for Defence.

Illogically, Fox, despite being a pro-lifer, was strongly in favour of Britain's WMD.

We should bring WMD pressure on his successor before his feet are under the table.

The WMD debate has been confused and emotive in the past.. Logic can be brought to bear on the situation.

Here is four step approach to solving the WMD problem:

1. If the consequences of the failure of a system would be infinitely destructive to a civilisation, it is reasonable for that civilisation to use that system if and only if the probability of its failure is zero.
2. The consequences of a failure of nuclear deterrence would be infinitely destructive to human civilisation.
3. The chances of failure of deterrence is greater than zero.
4. Therefore humans should abandon the  nuclear deterrence system.

This argument is developed in more depth here.

A FASLANE PRESS RELEASE

Congresbury GP Dr Richard Lawson was held prisoner for 10 hours in a Strathclyde police cell on Friday 6th July for helping to obstruct access to the base of New Labour’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Four members of the Somerset Peace Group lay down in the road with a Tractors not Trident banner, singing a doctored version of the Wurzel's "Drink up thy Cider" song. Mystified Glaswegian police listened to several renditions, presumably trying to decode the message, before gently lifting the four activists and carting them off to the police station.

"The Strathclyde police were 100% professional, real gentlemen and ladies" said 60-year old Dr Lawson. "We explained to them that just as a police car may break the speed limit if chasing a terrorist, so we have a duty of civil disobedience in trying to stop Labour's WMD policy. There would be no problem if there was a 100% cast iron guarantee that Trident will not be fired in anger. The fact of the matter is that the Government is ready and willing to order it to be fired at some point in the future, causing millions of deaths to civilian non-combatants, men, women and children. This is terrorism writ large. There is no other word for it”.

Dr Lawson, who has three children and one grandchild, adds “I challenge any local politician, be they Labour, Tory or LibDem, who thinks Trident renewal is a good idea, to come forward and try to defend their belief in public in open debate. Trident is not independent, is not a deterrent, and is not a reasonable option for any realistic and sensible politician".

Richard Lawson is Joint International Coordinator of the Green Party and Press Officer for North Somerset Green Party.

Lying Down in the Faslane

Wow! 50 hits yesterday; not presumably because of a sudden interest in greening lifestyles, but as a result of a newspaper piece, after a press release I sent out. This one:

Congresbury GP Dr Richard Lawson plans to help obstruct Britain's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on July 6th. With at least four other members of the Somerset Stop Trident Replacement campaign, he will take the train up to Faslane, the Scottish base of Trident nuclear submarines. The "independent"* nuclear “deterrent”** has the combined destructive power to kill somewhere in the region of 160,000,000 (one hundred and sixty million) people.

Dr Lawson, who is International Coordinator for the Green Party, said

"It is the duty of all citizens to disobey their Government when it is acting illegally and foolishly. I do not relish the prospect of jail, but there comes a time when we have to stand up and be counted. Or in this case, lie down and get arrested."

The Somerset group's action is part of the Faslane 365, which is a year-long daily disruption of the doomsday base. 600 people have been arrested in the action since it began in October 2006. The Green MEP Caroline Lucas has been arrested, as has the Somerset-based political folk band Seize the Day. At the end of October 2006, five elderly Quakers from Bristol (combined ages over 360) were arrested.

"Gandhi used civil disobedience to make the British quit India. His actions were ignored at first by the British Government, but in the end, the tide of history was with him.

We have a choice: nuclear WMD will either be abolished or used in a final act of catastrophic folly.

Nuclear weapons do indeed raise the threshold at which politicians go to war, but Iraq shows that war making is not a logical process, and possession of WMD is not a guarantee that they will not be used".

Dr Lawson, who has a wife and three children, feels driven to take direct action because of the lack of national debate.

"Tony Blair said he wanted a Trident debate, but then he suppressed the poor old Labour Party hacks who tried to raise the matter at their sorry excuse of a party conference. The Tories of course are always 100% in favour of anything of a warlike nature, although I am sure they will want to paint it a fetching shade of green when they come in to power". Labour and Tories were noticeably absent from the Trident debates held earlier this year in Bath and Wells.

The logical case for nuclear disarmament is on this blog, on 9.6.2007

*in fact Trident is totally dependent on George W Bush

** in fact “deterrence” is old hat. In modern military doctrine these are tactical war-fighting weapons.

That (non-existent) Trident Debate

[Illustration: a Trident missile seeking a target.]

A sample letter to your MP to get the Trident Debate ball rolling:

John Penrose MP

House of Commons

London SW1A 0AA

Dear John,

I am writing to ask whether you would very kindly either vote against or abstain in the Parliamentary Trident debate in March.

This is a lot to ask of you I know, as the Conservative position it to support an early decision on replacement of an independent nuclear deterrent because it is our insurance policy against future uncertainties. However, there is another side to this argument.

Dan Plesch and other experts can show beyond reasonable doubt that Trident is not independent. It cannot function without American agreement. Neither is it a deterrent, in the sense of a last ditch act of massive retaliation in the event of an attack from a nuclear armed enemy state, since it now functions as part of a first-use and nuclear war fighting strategy, although Mr Blair is at pains to conceal this change of strategy.

The ethical case for using nuclear WMD as a means of keeping the peace depends entirely on the premise that their hideous effect means that they will never be used. While it is true to say that they raise the threshold at which nations would go to war, it is not true that it is impossible that they could ever be used, since it has been shown that a combination of political crisis and uncertainty, coinciding with technical and communications failures. (see 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War, by Alan F. Philips, M.D. www.nuclearfiles.org )

This leaves the insurance policy argument, which is a powerful argument at the emotional level; after all, who would like to go into an uncertain future without insurance of some kind? Insurance is prudent and sensible. But does the insurance metaphor stand up to scrutiny?

In the case of insurance, we pay a certain amount of money regularly into a common fund. The fund increases, and if in time something happens (let us call it a Contingency) to one of those paying into the fund, that person receives an amount of money from the fund which enables them to make good the loss that they have sustained.

It is impossible to see how this analogy has any bearing on our possession of weapons of mass destruction.

In the case of Trident, we certainly pay into a fund, (£75 billion estimated, free of tax, but not free of upward cost revisions) but it is not a common fund in the sense that any other nations pay into the same pot. It is only a fund for the UK and America. If however we accept for the sake of argument that all nuclear weapons states are paying in to some kind of common security policy, what do we get out of it if the Contingency happens? Do we get an amount of money to make good the damage done to our nation by a nuclear attack? No. What we get is the satisfaction that the person or persons who launched the nuclear attack on us will suffer just as much death, injury, burns, destruction, disruption, disease, misery and cancer as we have suffered. If not more.

So Trident is in no way analogous to an insurance policy, and in describing it as such, Prime Minister Blair is demonstrating once again what a stranger he is to the truth.

I have written briefly to cover some of the main points of the argument. I do hope that this open letter will persuade you and some of your Conservative colleagues at least to sample the views of your constituents on this vital matter before the vote, since the pro-Trident position is now a minority view, especially since the Churches have taken a stance against WMD. I hope also that you will find a way to avoid giving succour to the Blair Government in this matter.

With best wishes

Richard Lawson