By IRNA,
London : The stationing of American troops in the UK is a remaining concern despite reports of the recent removal of US nuclear bombs from their military bases, according to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
CND chair Kate Hudson said that the use of two bases at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, northern England, for the US National Missile Defence System was a particular concern for Europe’s biggest single-issue peace group.
“There’s a strong opposition in Britain to those bases. According to opinion polls in Britain, the majority of the British people think that they make us a greater risk which we very strongly believe in,” Hudson said.
She said it was also known that in the Czech Republic, 70 per cent of the population is opposed to having a radar base there for the controversial US plans.
“There’s a strong feeling that they infringe national sovereignty in Europe and that they are taking us into some kind of a new Cold War as Russia is very livid about this thinking this is aimed at them,” the CND chair said in an interview with IRNA.
American troops are stationed at some nine military bases in the UK as a legacy from World War Two, over 50 years ago. Some were used as forward positions for US B52 bombing raids on Iraq at the height of the 2003 war to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Hudson said that up until a few weeks ago, there were 110 US nuclear bombs located at the Lakenheath airbase in eastern England that were “completely outside any control by the British government.” “That was terrible. Fortunately they have now been withdrawn but it remains the case that there hundreds of other US nuclear weapons in other European countries under the guise of NATO,” she said.
As a result of massive protest, US nuclear bombs were also removed from Greece in 2001, and one of the bases where they were housed in Germany was closed in 2005 and the warheads withdraw.
The veteran campaign group warns that there still remains some other bases not in Germany but in Belgium, Turkey and Italy, where there are strong anti-nuclear protests.
Last year, the Belgian Senate voted for the US to withdraw its nuclear weapons from their country and from the whole of Europe. But Hudson said the Americans refused, showing even the Belgian Senate “couldn’t vote US nuclear weapons out of their own country.” “These bases seem to be outside those kinds of democratic control,” she said, but insisted that CND was not going to give up its campaign across Europe to get rid of them.