Scottish CND

03/09/2026

THE BIG SMR SHORT:

Wall Street sceptics of Small Modular Reactors cashed in as stocks tumble for several startups.

The "hype cycle" has begun to collapse given many SMR companies are "lossmaking or have little to no revenue".

Read more from Linda Pentz Gunter at Beyond Nuclear, 22nd August...

03/09/2026

THIS IS AMONG THE GREATEST SCANDALS IN BRITAIN, says former defence minister about nuclear test veterans' bloodwork:

"In December 2018, as defence minister, I inadvertently misled parliament. Asked whether blood samples had been taken from service personnel for radiological monitoring during the nuclear bomb tests, I relayed the line provided to me by the Ministry of Defence: it was “unable to locate any information” suggesting blood samples had been taken for radiological monitoring at the tests.

I now know the reality was very different – these samples were taken across the armed services branches. But those veterans seeking compensation for serious illnesses developed after radiation exposure have been unable to access them. This is among the greatest scandals in Britain, and it must be addressed."

Thousands of service personnel took part in dangerous cold war-era nuclear tests. The government owes them the truth – and compensation, says former defence minister Tobias Ellwood

01/09/2026

The system that underpins "deterrence" is the same one that sends false signals and miscalculates threat. Escalation risks are built into the whole nuclear system.

That's why the world has come a hair's breadth from nuclear war multiple times since 1945 - and will continue to as long as nuclear weapons exist.

Read the excellent full article by Connor Kerr in 'Afterburner', 25th August, which covers the 4 closest calls since 1945, and explains how risk of accidental nuclear war is a perpetual threat to humanity.

30/08/2026

Last weekend, Kate Whitaker of Friends of the Earth Scotland wrote our column in The National, highlighting the connection between conflict, the climate crisis and cost of living crisis.

We cannot address climate change while accepting militaristic ideology and war as inevitable. Moreover, drilling additional fossil fuels solely to continue business as usual will do little to lower energy costs for British citizens.

National security and energy security means a rapid pivot from a fossil economy. Some countries are far further ahead on this trajectory than the UK - but they are showing it is possible.

28/08/2026

Is the US nuclear arsenal even a strategic asset?

Writer Sina Azodi scrutinises the limited coercive leverage of nuclear weapons in current and historical conflicts involving nuclear-armed states.

Far from preventing war, nuclear-armed states are most commonly military aggressors. But when waging war against non-nuclear-armed adversaries since 1945, nuclear weapons have played a virtually null strategic role, and certainly fail to dissuade adversary states from retaliation.

Note: Azodi surprisingly ends up concluding that nuclear weapons are better at "deterring" than "coercion". Aside from this being a doubtful analytic distinction, this is surprising given his previous admission that Russia's nuclear weapons failed to deter NATO from providing strike capabilities to Ukraine. A worthwhile read in any case...









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27/08/2026

27/08/2026

History shows us that nuclear weapons are no guarantee of security for the countries that possess them.

Recent and ongoing wars show that the traditional norms of "deterrence" have broken down: Nuclear-armed states struggle to deter retaliation and aggression by their adversaries.

Conventional conflict between nuclear-armed powers is being normalised, and the arms-control architecture designed to mitigate nuclear escalations has been eroded. The possibility of nuclear conflict is as plausible as it has been for decades.

Read more from Melissa Parke, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), in Newsweek last weekend.

25/08/2026

22/08/2026

The £50bn+ permanent nuclear waste dump planned for Cumbria, without which industry figures doubt the sustainability of UK nuclear, was badged "unachievable" by the Treasury last year.

The UK's aging waste storage facility, Sellafield, has caused radioactive pollution of the Irish sea and poses ongoing environmental risks.

Waste management and decommissioning are not fully accounted for in the costs of building/operating nuclear power stations. These legacies can last for generations, as we see with the decommissioning of Dounreay in the north of Scotland.

The nuclear waste problem has been kicked down the road for decades. Future generations will bear the costs.

21/08/2026

What lessons can be learnt about "nuclear deterrence" from the South Asian context?

Sadia Tasleem explains how Pakistan's nuclear weapons policy has not only failed to deter conflict, but poses a serious strategic and security liability during conventional warfighting.

The promotion of nuclear weapons as the "ultimate" security guarantor obscures that these indiscriminate weapons are in fact useless against a multiplicity of threats.

And once the "deterrence" threshold is broken - and there are many historical examples of this - possessing nuclear weapons risks uncontrolled escalations due to miscalculations and misunderstandings of nuclear signalling.

Nuclear states no longer pretend that nuclear weapons prevent conventional conflict - since they tend to be the primary purveyors of military aggression themselves. But nuclear weapons make conventional conflict all the more dangerous and volatile, when the grey areas of "deterrence" policy, which is ultimately a house of cards, are tested.