Taking The Fight To Star Wars

Menwith Hill is an American base rented from the British Ministry of Defence (MOD). It’s part of George W Bush’s National Missile Defence plan, which is known as ‘Star Wars’ and is a continuation of his father’s work. Menwith contains these nuclear missile-tracking radars, which form an early warning system.

Many people feel that Star Wars is a dangerous threat to world peace. They call it the National Missile Defence, but it’s actually an offensive plan because it’s going to make the US more aggressive in its foreign policies. They can throw their weight around because they believe they have a missile defence system. It’s going to start a new arms race, and the presence of bases like Menwith puts the UK at a high risk of being one of the first targets of attack.

On the 3rd of July this year, I was one of about a hundred volunteers taking part in a Greenpeace action against the base. My team consisted of twenty volunteers, and our role was to get in via the south western corner of the base. We’d seen photographs and we knew that we had to scale three 3-metre fences topped with razor-wire.

It was with military precision that we entered the base. We had A-frame ladders to get over the fences. The first person to go up covers both sides left and right of the ladder with a piece of carpet so that no one gets caught on razor-wire.

We scaled the first fence and had a 500 metre jog across a car park. We came to a double fence, the one that we’d feared the most, and we scaled that in the same way. So far we’d met only one MOD guy. He was being as nice as he could be in the situation; he knew that he couldn’t stop us all from going over and we knew that as well, and in the end, after we’d scaled the last fence, he said “OK, keep coming down, just don’t fall.”

Our team were aiming for the two newest missile defence installations believed to be involved in the Star Wars project. They look like giant golf balls, big white globes.

We managed to scramble onto the top of this building using the ladders, and then some of us, including myself, secured ourselves to a metal post on the roof using chain links that go round your waist, locking ourselves one onto another. There we intended to stay till Independence Day, the 4th of July. Everyone had been given food and water rations beforehand.

It was really exciting because as I was running across the car park I was just waiting for a van to pull up and all these police to come spilling out, but nothing happened at all. When we got over the third fence I thought, “This is incredible, how come we’ve got this far?” I couldn’t believe that we were so deep inside a military defence base. Imagine if we weren’t Greenpeace! I remember looking across the roof and everyone was ecstatic that we’d managed to show how easy it was to break in.

I looked across the roof and it was hilarious because another group of volunteers had managed to scale a water tower and there were eight foam nuclear missiles dancing round the top of it. About an hour later we heard a single-engined power parachute that we could see in the distance coming towards us. We knew it was Greenpeace people, and they dropped down a banner which said Star Wars Starts Wars.

As the day went on we kept hearing reports that the action had got into the media. We were delighted because we felt that it was the first time in a long time that a peace issue had gone right to the forefront. It was a huge embarrassment to the British and American governments that we’d been able to occupy a military surveillance base on the 4th of July. I think there were a lot of red faces amongst MOD.

Some people volunteered to go down off the roof and they were taken by van and simply dropped outside the gates, free to walk away. Eventually they came round for us. They built this massive and very elaborate platform. We were cut out of our padlocks and they took us down one-by-one and put us into the van, which simply just drove us to the gates.

I came down about 2 o’clock in the morning. I’d been on locked onto the roof for twenty hours.

Before you do any Greenpeace actions you have to do non-violent direct action training. In situations where there’s lots of tension it’s up to you as an individual to keep that situation calm and watch out for other people. We have a buddy system, where you always look after one other person and keep them within eye-shot.

When I’m doing an action I’m always focused on what the objective is. I like to be an active optimist rather than a sitting pessimist.