So the United Kingdom and Japan are investing billions in security, and billions in insecurity. Neither government dares challenge the nuclear monster it has created. Using taxpayers' money to charm, cajole and threaten both the government and the taxpayer, this self-serving, self-reproducing industry, which makes nothing which could not be made more cheaply elsewhere, has secured such resources, such concessions, such flat contradictions of policy that we have ended up sponsoring the major threat to our own security.

When power resides with private companies, the British government will nest with them and raise their young. When it resides with a state-owned monster which would not have looked out of place in Brezhnev's Russia, the same government will happily mate with that monster. One moment it will warn of such threats to our security that the police must have access to our email accounts, protesters must be classified as terrorists and Afghanistan must be bombed; the next it will dismiss such concerns as nonsense in order to ship plutonium round the world in civilian freighters.

The nuclear industry must be destroyed before it destroys us. We must, in other words, wrench political power away from nuclear power.

By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 11th June 2002
Reprinted with permission of the author.