The Scottish Cardinal Keith O’ Brien and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland Bishop Alan McDonald have condemned the decision of the British Government to ignore an appeal made in recent months to dismantle the Trident nuclear deterrent and allocate the funds instead to aid and development. “The use of weapons of mass destruction is a crime against God and humanity and should never take place”, declared the cardinal. “Since it is immoral to use weapons of mass destruction in an act of war, it is equally immoral to deploy, stockpile and renew them because these gestures, far from eliminating the causes of war, only aggravate them”, declared the cardinal. In recent days, too, the Catholic organization “Pax Christi” has written to the over seventy Catholic MPs expressing its own concerns about the line adopted by the government on nuclear rearmament. According to British legislation, the Prime Minister may proceed with the decision to replace the nuclear arsenal without consulting Parliament, but Catholic activists are asking that MPs be given the chance to vote on the question. The Catholic activist Sarah Hipperson called the government’s plans “un-democratic”. According to some activists, the decision of Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown even violates the commitments signed up to by the British government when it signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
