TODAY (January 25) the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will announce whether they will move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. These eminent people, many of whom are Nobel laureates, are reported to be particularly concerned about the effects of climate change and the threat of nuclear war.
There is much noise from our Westminster Government regarding plastic pollution and the need for urgent action on that issue. This has been a known danger for many decades. Why act now? Is this a smokescreen? What other horrors are being ignored? I answer my own question by suggesting that the complete lack of any effort to reduce nuclear weapon proliferation and killing power may lead to the destruction of mankind and most living things.
The United Kingdom must set an example to the other eight nuclear armed states by supporting the United Nations Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Logically if we need these mass killers for our “defence” every nation state needs them too. One hundred and twenty-eight countries voted in favour of the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on July 7 last year. So far 56 have signed the document promising to ratify the treaty, enough to make it international law. Preceding UN successes have been banning biological weapons (1972), chemical weapons (1993), land mines (1997), and cluster bombs (2008). These were not supported by some of the biggest arms-trading countries but, eventually, became generally effective as the good nations persevered and shamed the bad ones.
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The United Nations is an organisation whose members work towards world peace, education and healthcare for all. The UK and American ambassadors to the UK. refused, or were told not, to attend talks on this latest vital treaty. The US and UK have been quibbling about their financial contributions to the UN, apparently to influence decisions on various matters. A Britain dancing to the Brexit tune is so anxious to be best friends with the US it appears to have lost its sense of morality.
I have not yet touched on a point most dear to the UK Government’s heart – money. The £260 billion saved over 30 years by cancelling the renewal of Trident could be spent on much needed conventional armed forces, the NHS and education.
Sandra Phelps,
10 Kelvin Drive, Glasgow.
IF anything derives from this icy winter it might be a rethink about global warming. This should not necessarily clash with harm caused by carbon emissions from excessive road and sky traffic, extraction and burning of fossil fuels and so on, but be perhaps less emotively viewed in the context of regular natural historical climate change.
There seems a reluctance sometimes to accept that climate change has occurred over the lifetime of the earth. This irrespective of human and other forms of life possibly impacting upon such geological forces as affect celestial bodies in the universe. Even in the hopefully avoidable event of humans doing irreversible life damage on the earth, geological forces are almost certain to be unchanged in their effects. Acknowledging naturally occurring climate change should in my opinion not run contrary to active intervention by people to, as it is put, "save the planet".
Ian Johnstone,
84 Forman Drive, Peterhead.