Faith leaders were the first to sign, and the rest of us queued to add our names to a letter that would travel from the gates of the nuclear installation at Faslane to No 10 Downing Street. The letter to Theresa May couldn’t have been clearer – as Christians, we were joined in solidarity by friends of other faiths and none to ask the Prime Minister to ‘develop and publish a transition plan so that the UK is ready to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the earliest opportunity’.
The letter added the pledge that we would continue to do our part to realise a world without nuclear weapons. I’m ready to play dirty.
Bishop William Nolan, Justice and Peace Scotland’s Bishop President, signed the letter and said ‘The young people of today have not lived through the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis and the real threat of nuclear war. They are very passionate, though, about climate change. We need to tell them that the nuclear weapons housed here will cause a climate change catastrophe, well beyond what our co2 emissions can achieve. For the sake of our climate we want a low carbon economy, but we also need a nuclear free world.’
What would convince that young generation?
My mind went back to the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I was at school, and as the US President John Kennedy and the then Soviet Union’s leader Nikita Khrushchev postured over a situation that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, we teenagers discussed how we would spend our last four minutes.
Our world seemed to be hurtling towards a violent end. The very best we could hope for was a nuclear winter in which, the public service adverts on our black and white TV sets told us, we should shelter in a cupboard under the stairs with our windows whitewashed against the nuclear heat. We were to buy in stores of canned food. The advice was unbelievably naïve in itself – but the adverts were a comforting (?) piece of propaganda that suggested survival was possible. It wasn’t.
Nuclear submarines were installed at Faslane 50 years ago as an insurance policy against the Soviet threat. I wasn’t alone in thinking that at least if someone pressed the legendary red button, we’d now be the first to cop it with nuclear subs on our doorstep. We knew the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we didn’t want to be around. Nuclear weapons had increased in devastating power in the years following the obscene destruction of two Japanese cities and with the best will in the world, we could only pray for a quick end.
By 2008, the journal New Scientist told us that ‘Even taking global warming into account, the models predict that the cooling of the planet for a decade following [a nuclear] exchange would be nearly twice as great as the global warming of the past century, causing colder temperatures than Europe’s “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 18th centuries.’
Ten years on and we have a president in the United States who doesn’t believe in climate change and is happy to play nuclear chicken with the leader of North Korea.
Bishop Nolan voiced what so many of us believe – that the money spent on these are weapons of war should instead be used to build peace and to eliminate the causes of war - poverty, insecurity, and the injustices afflicting so many.
I don’t want our young people to feel the fear we felt during the Cuban missile crisis – a heart-squeezing terror that turned into a cold calculation of how to use our final 240 seconds.
But if it helps to bring a generation on side, I don’t think it is an unfair tactic to fill them in on every last detail of what ‘nuclear holocaust’ really means.