MANY TO MANY 64 Trident Ploughshares 2000

Trident Ploughshares 2000

The following is part of the text of a Petition pledging support for Trident Ploughshares 2000:

"On 8th July, 1996, the President of the International Court of Justice (which is the highest legal body of the United Nations), Mohammed Bedjaoui stated, "The nuclear weapon, the ultimate evil, destabilises humanitarian law which is the law of the lesser evil. The existence of nuclear weapons is therefore a challenge to the very existence of humanitarian law, not to mention their longterm effects of damage to the human environment, in respect to which the right to life must be exercised". The Court confirmed that the Declaration of St. Petersburg, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, and the Genocide Convention all apply to nuclear weapons. It stated very clearly that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally contrary to international humanitarian law. The Court could find no lawful circumstance for the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

We understand that it is the duty of every citizen to uphold the law relating to nuclear weapons and under the Nuremberg Principles carefully, safely and peacefully to disarm any nuclear weapon system that is breaching humanitarian law. These Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists are acting as fully responsible global citizens and we support their intentions to disarm the UK nuclear system peacefully, safely, openly and accountably by the year 2000.

We applaud the attempts of the Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists to urge the U.K. Government, NATO, and others in positions of political and military power, to guarantee to completely disarm the British Trident system before the year 2000. The Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists do not wish to have to do the disarmament themselves, however they are willing and ready to do it themselves if necessary and we support them in their intention."

Copies of the petition are available from:
Trident Ploughshares 2000, 42-46 Bethel St., Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1NR, U.K.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children,

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:
a modern brick school in more than thirty cities...
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes
that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road
the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity – BR> hanging from a cross of iron...

From Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 Cross of Iron speech

Anthony Brooke and Gita Brooke, co-founders
Te Rangi, 4 Allison Street, Wanganui 5001, New Zealand
phone/fax: +64-6-345-5714 ~ e-mail: Many to Many
under the aegis of
Operation Peace Through Unity
is a communicating link between
'we, the peoples' of all nations, races, creeds and ideologies offering in the spirit of the preamble of the United Nations Charter an instrument for the furthering of better relationships based on deepening mutual understanding and the aspiration to promote unity and cooperation beyond all differences.