At 7am, all seven gates at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Berkshire will be blocked by activists staging their protest against the warheads being manufactured for Trident submarines at the site.

The demonstrators plan to sit down or lock themselves together. It is anticipated that the site will be cut off, halting construction traffic for the multibillion-pound development of a new generation of nuclear warheads - only days after Berkshire Council approved a planning application.

The blockade was initiated by Trident Ploughshares and is supported by a host of other groups including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Aldermaston Women's Peace Campaign.

CND chairwoman Kate Hudson said: "When all major parties are proposing huge spending cuts, this is the time for ministers to realise that scrapping the Trident replacement would be one very positive and popular cutback.

"Polls consistently show a clear majority against Trident while, at the same time, a growing number of senior military figures have described the system as 'militarily useless'."

Jane Tallents, a long-time anti-nuclear weapons campaigner from Helensburgh, is one of many activists in Scotland planning to block the Boiler House Gate.

She said: "This will be the biggest blockade of Aldermaston in years. People in Helensburgh who have lived with traffic jams caused by many big blockades over the years often say: Why don't you go and blockade in England?

"Well a lot of us from Scotland are doing just that. We're going to block one of the seven gates of AWE Aldermaston where the bombs that Trident carries are made.

"We plan to let the British government and all those who work at AWE Aldermaston know that more than 70 per cent of the people in Scotland don't want nuclear weapons."

At the Home Office Gate in the south-west corner of the site, scores of women from campaign groups including Women In Black Against War, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the local Aldermaston Women's Peace Campaign, the London Feminist Network and the Europe-wide Women Against Nato will block the gate.

Activist and author Cynthia Cockburn said: "Our message is simple.

"As women, we are saying that the renewal and modernisation of the British nuclear arsenal and fleet of Trident submarines, at an estimated cost of £97 billion over the next 40 years, is illegal, immoral, pointless and profligate."

Among those attending the blockade are several Church of England bishops, Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jody Williams, who led the successful campaign for the Convention on Land Mines and Mairead Maguire, who worked to end violence in Northern Ireland.

Morning Star Online