Guest post by Kevin Lister
Fairford is darkening the skies of Gloucestershire again as it hosts B52 and B2 bombers as part of
the Saber Strike exercise as they practise for destroying targets in Russia,
which happens to be the main gas supplier to the military industrial complexes across
Europe.
We would not stand by and do nothing if someone did this to
us, and neither does Russia. They have
started reciprocal exercises in the Baltic and their nuclear bombers are
patrolling off the US West Coast. It has done nothing other that ratchet up the
threat of war.
Does this have any military utility? The answer is an
emphatic, "no". We do it to
ostensibly dissuade Russia from seizing the Baltic states. If they were to do so, would we really set
about bombing Russian forces from Fairford? This would almost certainly
escalate into a nuclear exchange, one of the first targets of which would be
the Fairford Air Base. It would be a suicidal response.
These exercises create too high a risk of error. With the
stealth technology of the B2 bombers a tiny blip on a radar screen, that might
actually come from migrating ducks, could be interpreted as hostile intent
triggering the worst possible nightmare response when thousands of nuclear
weapons still remain on hair trigger alert.
Instead, we should be challenging the legitimacy of Russia's
new military posture of "de-escalation", which is an Orwellian
distortion of language meaning they will fire a first nuclear strike in event
of conflict. But we don't do this because to do so would be to undermine our
refusal to sign a clear and unambiguous no first use policy for Trident. This
is the essence of Trident, so having Trident means we cannot challenge Russia
in the international courts and fight to make nuclear weapons illegal.
And the final question for the enthusiasts of the B52 and B2
bombers in the press and who are camping at the end of the Fairford runway is
what system are they protecting? A system that see millions of people
impoverished by a capitalist banking system while enriching the richest and
which has comprehensively failed to address climate change so consigning much
of the planet to become a baked wasted land by the end of the century.
We need to speak out against the presence of these bombers
in our backyard and all that they represent.
You can read Kevin's blog here - http://kevsclimatecolumn.blogspot.co.uk/
