The campaign to make Europe a nuclear-weapon-free zone

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

Editorial Comments

This September will see peace activists and organisations from across Europe engage in a month of co-ordinated action to demand a ‘nuke free Europe’.

Protests will be staged in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy to call for the end of nuclear sharing, a halt to the modernization of nuclear weapons and for European states to sign up to and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

From the perspective of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, this month of action is the product of not just several years of recent work but of efforts over four decades. When Donald Trump announced his intention to sabotage the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a bilateral treaty between the US and Russia which banned intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe, the Russell Foundation produced and circulated a new ‘European Nuclear Disarmament’ statement, calling “on everyone concerned with peace and security to join in raising the alarm over the likely consequences of scrapping the INF Treaty and to work towards the creation of more Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zones, including Europe.”

The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, should be properly understood not simply as an agreement between the then-Soviet Union and the USA but as a product of sustained mobilising, thinking and doing within the European peace movements of the 1980s as well as a mark of profound changes underway in European and Soviet society.

The first ‘European Nuclear Disarmament’ Appeal was drafted by Ken Coates of the Russell Foundation, the historian E. P. Thompson and others in response to the original risks posed by intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The contact address for the original appeal were the offices of the Russell Foundation in Nottingham, England, where this bulletin is written and produced.

We are very proud of our history and of the things we have achieved. Unfortunately, there is much work for a small peace foundation and the very many disarmament, peace and related campaigns to do.

Trump has gone but the increasing tensions, risks, new technologies and the weapons of mass murder that sit at the centre of US, European and other militarisms endure.

Join us in September. Organise your own action. Distribute this bulletin. Get informed through our other publications. Get involved in your closest activist group and make links with the Nuke Free Europe network.