Anti-nuke activist
Trigger-happy US president is living in cowboy land
Donald Trump is treating the nuclear threat from NorthNorthKoreaKorea as if he was a “cowboy”, a veteran peace activist said yesterday.
Bruce Kent, vice president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, also branded Trident a “gross waste of money”. Kent, 88,88, said: “It is a very dangerous time because a man like Trump really is not sufficiently informed to know what he is dealing with.
“He is still living in a kind of cowboy world, where the one with the bigger gun wins. Nobody wins with a nuclear war.”
He said the situation was even more threatening than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the US under president John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war.
Kent said, “We have had precarious times before, like the Cuban crisis, but this is quite a dangerous one” because the US president could get “into a paddy and press the button”.
The former Catholic priest said the billions spent on Trident submarines “could be spent on housing or hospitals, or social services, or overseas aid”.
Kent said the UK could have no nuclear weapons within six months i f the US stopped supplying missiles.
He added: “We would have the warheads but we wouldn’t have anywhere to put them.”
Kent was spea k ing as supporters of CND and the I nternational Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) gathered outside the Ministry of Defence in London.
ICAN will receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize today.