Part of the Trident: we don't buy it tour blog 
The Reverend Ainslie Walton casts a floral peace symbol into the waters outside Faslane nuclear weapons submarine base
© Greenpeace/Cobbing
We left the Isle of Arran in calm waters and an early morning light. By late morning on Sunday, we'd arrived at Greenock, near Glasgow.
This is Trident territory; we're just a stone’s throw away from the nuclear submarines base at Faslane, and the warheads depot at Coulport. So on Monday, the Arctic Sunrise set off to bear witness at Faslane, carrying a colourful cargo of crew, staff, clerics, MSPs and peace camp activists.
As the ship wove through islets in the mist, people milled on deck talking - Dutch deckhand to MSP, Canadian first mate to Church of Scotland minister. Listening to Jane Tallents from Faslane 365, Reverend David McLachlan and others talk about their histories of involvement in the campaign (see the videos at the end of this post), my sense of awe at the diversity and the passion of the people working to end this obscenity grew. I felt incredibly privileged to be on this ship, working on this campaign, and lending some support to the amazing work others have been doing day after day, year after year.
I was on the bow when we were first able to make out Faslane through the mist. There it was: a black Vanguard submarine, the UK’s most devastating killing machine. That vessel carries 16 missiles, each carrying up to three nuclear warheads. That’s up to 48 warheads, and each one of them delivers a blast eight times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb... Today (and every other day since the cold war), somewhere in the world, an identical submarine is on patrol, with its nuclear weapons primed to fire.
A handful of us, including the two ministers from the Church of Scotland, climbed into one of our rigid inflatable boats (RIBs). Two days ago, I was gleefully driving one of these boats around an Arran bay on a maintenance and training exercise; today the ship’s bosun drove us sombrely to the edge of the exclusion zone around the submarine. The rib stopped there, and the ministers gave a short memorial service, tossing a peace symbol-shaped wreath of heather and white flowers into the loch in front of the submarine. As the ministers used words and flowers and prayer, our (substantial) police and military escort looked on from boats - and a helicopter - as though, somehow, we were the threat.
Back onto the Sunrise, and the ship turned towards Coulport, where the warheads are stowed. If Faslane was a little eerie, Coulport was comic book scary, especially in the mist; I felt like I was looking onto a Bond villain’s lair. A large explosives handling jetty (a huge grey box) sits at the shoreline, below a mountain that shows the scars of being dug out to house the warheads. Several dark watchtowers sit on the mountaintop, relics of the Cold War. This really is the heart of the UK nuclear war machine – and it feels like it.
I think it was a powerful day for everyone on the ship, in one way or another. One MSP said that they hadn’t done anything so exciting since being elected. Another found it incredibly powerful to be looking onto Faslane from the submarine’s own vantage point - the water - for the first time. A ship crew member from the Netherlands told me how happy she was to be meeting the activists and working on this campaign – "It’s a campaign with heart," she said.
For me it was the day that Trident stopped being an abstraction. Standing in front of the Vanguard submarine and listening to Reverend Walton talk, "nuclear weapons" took on a new and powerful reality for me. These weapons, this submarine, in this misty Scottish loch, have been engineered specifically to create horrific and indiscriminate holocausts.
And now the government wants to build new ones – with our money, and in our names...
Video
In their own words (and with apologies for the sound – it was pretty windy):
Jane Tallents of Faslane Peace Camp:
Rosie Kane MSP for the Scottish Socialist Party (and maker of fine chocolate biscuits):
You can follow the journey in pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeaceuk/.
