Lakenheath call to join anti-nuclear treaty
Quakers gathered again at RAF Lakenheath this month
Quakers gathered again at RAF Lakenheath this month, to oppose plans to station US nuclear weapons in Britain for the first time since 2008.
Friends from the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace (LAP), co-founded by Norwich Quaker Lesley Grahame, joined members of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which organised the witness. It was CND’s fourth national mobilisation at RAF Lakenheath since 2022, after, according to LAP, ‘US government budget documents revealed plans for upgrade works at the US-run air base for the storage of the new B61-12 guided nuclear bomb’.
The protest on 2 November aimed to ‘highlight the significant impact of US foreign and military policy on the British public, and the increased nuclear dangers brought by deploying its nuclear weapons in Britain’. LAP said this was particularly pertinent as it was just days before the US presidential election.
The day included an unofficial declaration of Lakenheath as a nuclear-free zone, and called for the UK and other nuclear states to engage with the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Melissa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, who spoke at the gathering, said: ‘Having more nuclear weapons in more countries increases the likelihood they will be used and that threatens all of us wherever we are in the world. Real security doesn’t lie in nuclear weapons, it lies in getting rid of them and the way to do that is to join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which the majority of countries support.’
Other speakers included: Jenny Jones, from the Green Party; Bimal Khadka, from Medact; Kirsten Bayes, from Campaign Against Arms Trade; Peter Burt, from Nukewatch; Gary Champion, a Norwich councillor; Jenn Parkhouse, from LAP; and Quaker Lesley Grahame, from Norwich CND.
