They brought messages of peace and condemnation through the verses of popular festive tunes with specially-modified lyrics and called for the suspension of work on existing nuclear warheads and on the construction of new facilities and research to develop a new generation of warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, south-east England.
As well as serenading employees of the arms giant and fellow occupants of the building they share, participants in the protest displayed banners and distributed hundreds of leaflets to passers-by, many of whom stopped to chat and signed petitions to the Government calling on it to abandon Trident and its planned replacement and sign up to a Nuclear Weapons Convention - a global ban on nuclear arms - and wrote messages on a large Christmas card which was then handed in to the company.
One of the protesters, wearing a Father Christmas mask and hat and a white overall marked “Weapons Inspector” lay down “dead” in a plastic bodybag in front of his singing colleagues outside Lockheed Martin’s building to symbolise the victims of nuclear weapons, including the approximately two hundred thousand casualties from the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and those from any future nuclear strikes, as well as nuclear bomb test veterans and other victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and other cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other nuclear sites, and by the widespread use of radioactive and toxic “depleted” uranium shells in recent conflicts, including Iraq, the Balkans and possibly Afghanistan.
Full article and more pictures
by: Jon Swinden
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