No Wars, No Nukes - Carol Turner suggests a new year resolution for us all

Only two weeks in, and 2024 is already looking bleak for anti-war and peace campaigners. Over 23,000 dead in Gaza, no resolution to the Ukraine war on the horizon, fighting in Sudan’s civil war continues, as does the long drawn-out conflict in Niger Delta, no let-up in the Saudi-led war in Yemen – and now the threat of action against Houthi solidarity attacks on commercial shipping as a US aircraft carrier steams towards the Red Sea…

 There are so many military engagements across the globe that most of them don’t even merit a mention in the western media. That’s not the case for campaigners with an internationalist perspective on peace and justice, with a big job ahead this year.

 London CND’s annual conference, No Wars No Nukes could prove a much needed dose of inspiration and determination, as well as practical inputs on what’s to be done, preparing us all for the solidarity struggles that lie ahead. As the name implies, the two keynote speakers and both panels are focussed on nuclear dangers facing Britain and the world, and on solidarity with the Occupied Territories as the prospect of regional escalation draws closer.

Prospects for the Occupied Territories

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is beyond bad. Restricted aid access means the risk of famine grows daily. At least one in four Gazan households face ‘catastrophic hunger’ according to the UN-backed IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification). The destruction and damage to essential water, sanitation and health systems brings disease spreading among a weakened population. Prolonged diarrhoea, for example, puts children in particular at risk from death through malnutrition.

 There are no signs yet of any shift to a ‘less intense’ warfare strategy that Israel claims to be adopting. On the contrary, signs are growing that the conflict could spread across the region. Israel looks determined to pull Hezbollah into all-out confrontation. Its successful strikes on Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and Iraq has resulted in a retaliatory drone attack on northern Israel with tens of thousands of Israelis being evacuated from the border.

 London CND’s keynote speech by Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot sets the scene for a panel discussion, chaired by Murad Qureshi, with Raghad Altikriti, Muslim Association of Britain President, one of the six groups organising the mass mobilisations in Britain. She’s joined by Jenny Manson, a founder member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, and Sami Ramadani, Iraqi Democrats Against War and an anti-war voice in Britain for three decades.

Nuclear war clouds gathering

Bell Ribero-Addy MP, an outspoken Labour voice for Gaza and a Vice Chair of Parliamentary CND, kicks the conference off with a view from Westminster, followed by a panel on Nuclear War Clouds Gathering, with well-known climate change activist Samantha Mason, reflecting on the relationship between war and climate, and Cllr Emma Dent-Coad and myself reviewing the nuclear threats of 2024 and the role the anti-war movement can play in combatting them.

Most immediate and important to peace activists in Britain, is the return of US nukes to Lakenheath, part of NATO’s European nuclear forces; while the renewal this year of the decennial UK-US Mutual Defence Agreement is a good time to remind ourselves that nuclear weapons are at the centre of the so-called special relationship.

 NATO and Russia

The potential of the Ukraine war to stimulate a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia is at the forefront of threats that confront us in 2024. Israel too is a  nuclear armed state, and the far right have already raised the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the Gaza conflict.

 Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested in a radio interview reported in the Times of Israel that the nuclear option ‘was one way’ of dealing with Gaza. As unrealistic as it sounds to consider dropping a nuclear bomb on your own doorstep, Israel does have tactical nuclear weapons. Given IDF belligerence on Gaza, who’s to say a section of the Israeli leadership won’t consider threatening their use, or even using them, should Iran become an issue. What seemed like a hollow threat from a few Israeli government outliers last autumn, could be a step closer as the consequences spread across the Middle East and North Africa.

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London CND’s annual conference takes place online Sunday 14 January, 12 noon to 2.30pm. Register in advance at http://tinyurl.com/NoWarsNoNukes

This blog first appeared in Labour Outlook 

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Carol Turner is co-chair of London Region CND and a CND Vice Chair. She is a directly elected member of CND’s National Council and part of the International Advisory Group.

Carol is a long-time peace campaigner, a member of Stop the War Coalition’s National Officer Group, and author of Corbyn and Trident: Labour’s Continuing Controversy.

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Ukraine: Voices for peace are raised across Europe

On the eve of Saturday’s Peace Talks Now demonstration in London, some readers may have watched the Ukraine war anniversary addition of the BBC’s Newsnight. One year on, a live audience of Ukrainian refugees gave their views and expressed their feelings about the war raging in their country. Who could fail but be moved by their concerns for the fate of their families and friends, the descriptions of what happened to their towns and neighbourhoods, and their hopes and fears for the future?

What struck me most of all, sending a chill down my spine, were the unreal expectations they expressed about the war’s likely end game. One woman’s desire for the war to continue until Putin was crushed and the Crimea and Donbass brought within Ukraine’s borders caused even Mark Urban to raise an eyebrow. The BBC’s Diplomatic Editor, no friend of Russia, felt obliged to highlight ‘the limits of western will’. Recently, he said, ‘it is explicit from the US, Germany, and France that they do not support the reconquest of Crimea.’

The responsibility for such expectations should be laid squarely at the door of the US and UK governments and their media allies whose war fever has encouraged Ukrainians to believe that outright victory and total defeat of Russia is not just possible but likely.

“Calls for escalation point the way to war in Europe and beyond”

In the run up to the 12-month anniversary, President Biden and Prime Minister Sunak have called loud and often for escalating the war in Ukraine. Most noticeably though, they have failed to match their war mongering words with concrete commitments to supply the tanks and aircraft President Zelenskiy is  seeking. Biden and Sunak recognise as we do that escalation is the road to war in Europe and beyond, with the possibility of nuclear war.

 The actual commitment Biden has made amounts to speeding up the provision of ammunition and imposing further sanctions. Sunak has pledged merely to ‘give serious consideration’ to Zelenskiy’s request for fighter aircraft. Even if aircraft were forthcoming, Sunak points out, it would take months, even years, before they were delivered and the Ukraine military trained to use them.

Behind the beat of western war drums a picture of US strategy begins to emerge – that of embroiling Russia in a long and protracted war which drains the country’s military, economic, and political resources; hoping a weakened Putin will be thrown to the wolves by the Russian people to be replaced by a more malleable leader. Needless to say, such a strategy takes little if any account of the war’s impact on the Ukrainian people. Nor does it acknowledge the possibility that, in extremis, nuclear. weapons might be used.

“Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war”

— John F. Kennedy

Compare the rhetoric of Biden and Sunak, with a speech by President John F Kennedy in 1963, a year on from the Bay of Pigs and just weeks before his assassination. ‘Above all,’ Kennedy said, ‘nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.’

Disregard for the fate of the peoples and countries in whose name the US and its allies claim to act can be seen in a long line of recent wars – in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 1991 as well as 2003, in Syria, and in Libya. All of them have left a trail of death and destruction from which each still suffers. This is the real lesson of 21st century wars.

The outcome of a prolonged war in Ukraine is not self-determination, as a few voices in the UK peace movement misguidedly imagine when they support Biden and Sunak’s calls to step up the war. The only way forward is peace talks.

“Backing the calls to step up the war, however unintentional, provide a progressive gloss for warmongering and profiteering”

In backing escalation, however unintentional, these tragically mistaken voices provide a progressive gloss for warmongering and profiteering. The same voices would never be raised in support of the Tories austerity agenda. Why would anyone imagine Johnson, Truss and Sunak have changed their spots when it comes to Ukraine?

On Saturday 25 February 2023, led by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Stop the War Coalition, the peace movement took to the streets of London to mark the first anniversary, demanding End War in Ukraine! Peace Talks Now! The same demands to stop the war and build the peace are ringing out across Europe – in Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Portugal, Austria, France, Brussels, Poland, the Netherland, and beyond.

CND is part of a growing movement across Europe. Every single one of us who marched on Saturday can be proud that our voices were raised for sanity, for the future of Ukraine, and for the future of the human race. When history is written, and the miasma of rhetoric and lies forgotten, our stand will be a small footnote on history’s pages. That is something we should all be justly proud of.

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Carol Turner is co-chair of London Region CND. She is a directly elected member of CND’s National Council and part of the International Advisory Group.

Carol is a long-time peace campaigner, a member of Stop the War Coalition’s National Officer Group, and author of Corbyn and Trident: Labour’s Continuing Controversy.

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War in Ukraine, Cold War with China - The big challenges 2023 holds

As we cross the threshold of a new year, two imponderables demand our attention: how will the new cold war between the US and China shape up in 2003, and what course is war in Ukraine likely to take? Both will come under scrutiny this Saturday at London CND’s online conference.

The Ukraine propaganda bubble, a short military campaign leading to a rout of the Russian invasion, burst months ago. No one doubts the Ukraine war is an extended and devastating struggle. With the potential to spread beyond Ukraine’s borders, it raises the spectre of nuclear engagement.

Nato and the EU are discussing providing another round of heavy weaponry to Ukraine. Modern tanks are top of President Zelensky’s military must-have list, though Germany for one is reportedly reluctant to sanction the further escalation of conflict this would presage. Germany, France, Poland, and others including Britain, have already provided some tanks to Ukraine, but well below the 500 or so Zelensky is calling for.

Recent news that  Britain is considering providing up to 10 Challenger II tanks to the Ukrainian army is a step in exactly the wrong direction. More military hardware will encourage Ukraine forces to stay dug in for a long war which they cannot win without Nato backing or US support. If the west escalates the conflict and Russia finds itself under even greater pressure in Ukraine, who’s to say President Putin won’t consider using nuclear weapons?

Neither is Russia the only party likely to be considering the use of nukes. The notion of a nuclear war in Europe isn’t something circulating among crazed peacenik circles. Since early summer 2022, this danger of has been publicly acknowledged by a growing number of western military sources.

On 9 January this year, the Federation of American Scientists nuclear specialist Hans Kristensen revealed that B61-12s nuclear bombs have been cleared for transport to bases in Europe. They are the United States newest guided nuclear bomb, the same type used on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, though considerably more powerful of course.

Their locations in Europe include RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk which last year became the sixth nuclear base in Europe funded by the US. Guided nuclear bombs were stored at Lakenheath until 2008. The silo facilities at are still intact there.

The first of a new-generation US fighter bomber aircraft, the F-35A which is equipped to carry them, arrived at Lakenheath in December 2021. Crew training began last year, as more of these aircraft began arriving.

Last October, Politico news service reported that the US had brought forward the deployment of the B61-12s from spring 2023 to December 2022. The Pentagon dismissed the report at the time, saying ‘There is no speeding up because of any Ukraine crisis’. In his recent report, Kristensen point out ‘it is unknown if B61-12 shipments to Europe have begun’.

Meanwhile, the strategic background against this threat of escalation between Nato and Russia over Ukraine takes place, is another escalation of tensions – that between the US and China. Under Biden, US rhetoric about the supposed threat to Taiwan posed by China, has been a growing factor in acclimatising western public opinion to the idea that we are heading into a new cold war.

The Guardian recently reported, for example, the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) had wargamed a variety of military confrontation scenarios. Unsurprisingly all of them involved heavy losses on both sides. Of more concern, their report highlighted the need for both Taiwan and the US to build up ‘deterrence forces’.

The immediate material corollary of a propaganda campaign around Taiwan is a real growth of US military forces in the region, including drawing Japan closer via bilateral security arrangements with the US. This includes the use of the Japanese island of Guam, which is a strategic US naval base. In 2009, it was combined with a US air force base, and would be an important facility in any nuclear confrontation.

Britain is already closely tied into the United States strategic pivot to Asia. The UK is part of the Aukus partnership, with the US and Australia, created in 2021 which provides for nuclear powered submarines to patrol the waters surrounding China’s coastline. Only days ago, Rishi Sunak welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to London for the signing of a bilateral defence agreement which allows UK forces to be deployed to Japan. Downing Street has described it as ‘the most significant defence agreement between the two countries in more than a century’.

Each of these developments, and other related realignments in security relations, merit fuller consideration. We are heading into a truly dangerous period, and need to begin mapping out a military as well as political picture of how international relations are shaping up.

As with Ukraine, so with China. The single most important question about both these conflicts is, undoubtedly, whether they will remain non-nuclear.

Such major issues as these raise bigger questions than London CND’s 2023 annual conference alone can answer. With a terrific line-up of speakers though, we hope interest in New Cold War Challenges will extend well beyond the boundaries of Greater London. Register in advance for your free ticket and join us on Saturday.

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This article originally appeared on Labour Outlook website.

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Carol Turner is co-chair of London Region CND. She is a directly elected member of CND’s National Council and part of the International Advisory Group.

Carol is a long-time peace campaigner, a member of Stop the War Coalition’s National Officer Group, and author of Corbyn and Trident: Labour’s Continuing Controversy.

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