A large and boisterous rally has gathered near the gates to HMNB Clyde, known best as the base of the United Kingdom’s Trident-armed submarines. The base is no stranger to protests and rallies, so while the military are present and watchful, they are not tense. Though the continually swelling size of the crowd and louder and louder chants seem to push at that. Signs are waved all about for the press who are in attendance. Slogans like: “Kill the Bomb, Save the Planet!”, “End the Arms Race, not the Human Race!”, and “Make Love, not Nuclear War” displayed on them in bright colours, alongside Solidarity symbols. While an organised chaos in some ways, a proper stage is not able to be produced that can provide a view above the still growing crowd. After moving a van into a better position, /u/NicolasBroaddus climbed atop it with a megaphone to start getting the attention of the crowd. With his vantage point he could see a few people further within the base watching the growing tally.

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“Glad to see everyone so fired up! Here I was worried that the fight for a safer world, a world where we didn’t strap our planet with yet more poisonous time bombs, had been abandoned in the UK! I’m glad that is not the case, because if we do not finally win this fight, if we do not force the arc of moral justice towards rightness, then within the next ten years a future Government of the UK will inevitably attempt to replace Trident with a bigger and more expensive program! Even conservative estimates for this replacement, a comparable but modernised system to replace Trident would cost over two hundred billion pounds!”

This gets the jeers and boos aimed for before he continues.

“Two hundred billion pounds, and for what? For a slightly more efficient version of our institutionalised murder suicide pact? To ensure that we can make the world a worse place should the worst possible fantasies of Cold War ideologues comes to pass? And yet, even if we do nothing, the same cowardly stance taken again and again by parties like Labour that the status quo has yet to cause a disaster, so why bother changing it? If we do that, we are still spending two billion pounds per year just maintaining Trident! But what disturbs me most of all, what keeps me up at night and what has kept me coming back to this issue, despite failing to pass it through Parliament in the past…are that it is only a matter of time before a serious accident occurs here.”

His tone changes from angry and provocative to one of genuine seriousness and dread.

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“The numbers on accidents regarding Trident have not been publicly disclosed for years now. The last ones we know for sure are that there were eighty nuclear accidents in 2016, and seventy three nuclear accidents in 2017. We know at least two A grade events occurred, meaning serious risk of nuclear material ejection or dispersion of radiation. What’s more, in the last full scale tests with the HMS Vengeance, a Trident missile failed! I want everyone here to consider for a moment the implications of that. More than that, I want each and every one of you to go read the words of William McNeilly. He was, prior to being discharged for leaking his concerns in a desperate attempt to fix the situation, a submariner in the Trident program. His words and testimony are still available online, despite attempts to hide his story. I am inclined to believe almost every word he writes down, even if he may have lacked context for some incidents, there was no context that could have justified the secrets being kept. So tell me, what do you think the Government should do about William McNeilly, should they continue to slander him, or should they own up to the problems here and pardon him?”

There’s several shouts to pardon him, which /u/NicolasBroaddus grins and nods at.

“I agree! I believe that the moral fortitude it takes to make a decision like that is incredible. To know that you are going to alter your life inexorably to attempt to prevent the possibility of an accident, and to do the right thing anyway…is incredible. Because that submariner understood what a disaster would mean, it could mean poisoning the land of Scotland, or the waters of the seas surrounding the UK. The forty eight nuclear warheads Britain possesses could on their own poison the air of the planet to a point that would impact every nation on Earth.”

“Yet, the UK government continues to ignore the desires of the people of Scotland. We don’t want this here! We don’t want it to exist at all! Yet we are the ones strapped to the side of the ticking bomb, with no autonomy in the matter at all. What’s worse, even their own priorities clash with this stance. What are the top stated issues regarding domestic security in the UK? Terrorism and Cybersecurity, two priorities that make sense given their presence in the last decade. Tell me what use these rotting suicide pills are in those fights, other than as a possible security threat themselves. Indeed, William McNeilly commented that he was very glad none of the men on his submarine were terrorists, as security was so lax that it would only take one man to unleash nuclear devastation.”

“I tell you Scotland, we are at a crossroads. The growing fear of foreign militaries has begun to stoke in us the same xenophobia and anxiety that once kept the world forever on the edge of the abyss. We have to decide, are we the same nation that plunged the world into conflict over duplicitous aims at imperialism? Are we the same nation that would rather see the entire world burn than face any consequences ourselves? Or are we going to build a better and more moral Britain? A Britain that values every life, human or not, and does whatever it can to lessen the suffering we export to the rest of the world? I know the Britain I fight for, the one that all of Solidarity is fighting for. So tell me, are you all with me?!”

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