Over the last six weeks Greenpeace campaigners and active supporters have been energetically campaigning to raise the level of debate about proposals to spend £97bn on new nuclear weapons.
Together we’ve been lobbying candidates, writing to newspapers, polling people on the streets and doing much, much more behind the scenes - helping to make nuclear weapons an election issue for the first time in decades.
With the election itself now only a day away, the Liberal Democrats are now committed to reviewing the question of replacing Trident within a strategic defence review, and the Conservatives and Labour coming under increasing pressure to follow suit.
This is imortant because it means that Trident could well become a redline issue in a hung parliament or a minority government. No matter what happens tomorrow, Trident will remain an important symbol of our post-election priorities, as the next government faces up to the scale of the national debt and the challenges of the strategic defence review.
NPT ConferenceFollow the latest developments on our Twitter feed.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reminded us on Monday why the UK’s decision on whether to build new nuclear weapons is so important. In his opening address to the Nuclear Non Proliferation (NPT) review conference in New York he said, "I urge nuclear-weapon states to reaffirm the 'unequivocal undertaking' to eliminate nuclear weapons. Failure to do so would be a step backward. It is time to translate this commitment into action."
The US is now taking a lead in developing an international plan to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, using the conference to reveal the size of its nuclear arsenal for the first time, and commiting to openness about its arms programmes. Britain needs to get behind this plan and show more eagerness to reduce our nuclear stockpile as part of this process. But instead we are about to embark on building a new generation of nukes - which could undermine this new initiative.
The truth is that by not replacing Trident, and negotiating it away over the coming decades, we would not only be helping to make the world a much safer place, we'd save ourselves a fortune in the middle of a financial crisis.
Obviously Greenpeace is a non-party political organisation, so we'd never dream of telling you how to vote. But if you should get pollsters knocking on your door before the polls open, or find people asking which way you have voted at the polls we'd encourage you to tell them that Trident is an important issue for you. Your concerns will then be fed back to the party apparatus, and may influence the development of policy.
And if you haven't already, please write to your election candidates and ask them to clariy their position on replacing Trident - do they really think it's a sensible use of our hard-earned money in the teeth of a recession?
Read our report: In the Firing Line - the hidden costs of replacing Trident »
