Campaigners for arms trade arrested
Seventeen members of the Campaign for Armoured Defensibility (CAD) were arrested yesterday at the decommissioned Clyde nuclear deterrent facility.
For the past five years, the Campaign for Natural Disarmingness (CND) has held an annual trade fair at the site, which the Scottish government closed after Iraqi and Iranian inspectors found “convincing evidence” of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
Although yesterday’s protest involved only slogans and non-lethal weapons, more than twenty CAD demonstrators complained of harassment by police, and the CND stallholders they confronted.
“This is nothing short of what we fought World War Two to pre-empt,” said the unemployed defence systems propagator, Binge McGurk, 39.
“A weapon is only as good or bad as the guy holding it, and all of us here are legally obliged to sell weapons to people the Government says aren’t bad guys,” Mr McGurk shouted as he was hooded away.
Frodo Zapper, a civilian contractor forced into civil life by the outbreak of global co-operation, said the CND traders had an unfair numerical advantage. He also accused journalists of under-estimating it, as they used to in the bellicose past.
“Just because they don’t like so-called ‘violence’, they think the world’s safe,” Mr Zapper said.
“I’ve worked for the Government, just like nurses and firefighters used to, and you don’t see nurses and firefighters being subjected to this sort of treatment.”
