Trident Ploughshares - a campaign for youth and students
Trident Ploughshares should be a high priority campaign for students and student groups, argues Joss Garman, a student at London University.

In recent years, hundreds of people including many students and young people have attended actions and demonstrations at Britain’s Trident- related sites. Many of these people have come from other countries, including Sweden, Finland, Belgium and Germany.

Involvement with Trident Ploughshares allows you to get involved with one of the most important issues on earth, and the privilege of being part of an international peace campaign working at all levels.

To Stop Fees, Stop Trident:
In recent months, we have heard much in the news about top-up fees, and how the government claims they cannot fund higher education for Britain’s young people.



Whilst Tony hypocritically bombs other countries out of concern that they might want to deploy WMD, he does exactly that, deploys WMD, at the expense of funding for education. £1.5 billion that could be spent on 50,000 extra teachers is spent on Trident each year - that’s £2000 a minute.

Nuclear Disaster In Our Lifetime?
It is extremely likely that in our lifetimes we will see the consequences of the dropping of a nuclear bomb. Indeed, Geoff Hoon the UK Defence Secretary said in a statement to the House of Commons Defence select committee on March 20th 2002, that he was prepared to use Trident in the war against terror. The fact that Trident blatantly doesn’t work as a deterrent, and instead is used to bully other countries into complying with British Government interests, makes Trident a focus for highlighting the abuse of power by people in government.



A Polluted Environment
Every day Trident pollutes the environment with radioactive pollution. In fact, according to The Ecologist Magazine, a cancer cluster surrounds virtually every nuclear installation in the UK. The fact that nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste created by both the nuclear powered submarines and nuclear power stations means that we have stockpiles of the material - a sitting terrorist target, and a burden leaving the current nuclear clean up bill at £55 billion. Every time nuclear material is transported the British public are put at risk of a potentially Chernobyl sized catastrophe. Even the Emergency Planning Officer (EPO) for Glasgow admits that were a nuclear convoy involved in a simple road accident, or were it the target of a terrorist group, there is no way that central Glasgow for example, could be evacuated in time.



Youth and Student Co-ordinators
Trident Ploughshares is currently working on building up a greater number of Youth and Student Regional Co-ordinators, in an attempt to better mobilise young people for the campaign, but particularly for mass actions - the next being the Carry on up the Clyde in August.



These co-ordinators will be holding NVDA (Non violent direct action) training workshops, and will organise transport from the regions.