The island priest who fought a nuclear rockets range
Seventy years ago, in the early years of the Cold War, East and West were locked in a nuclear arms race.
The UK government needed somewhere to test its first rockets capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
It picked South Uist, a Hebridean island of a few thousand inhabitants on Scotland's rugged Atlantic coast.
What the government did not expect was resistance from within the community led by a Catholic priest, Fr John Morrison.
What was the Cold War?
Kate MacDonald, was a girl growing up in West Gerinish, South Uist, in the 1950s and remembers keenly the furore around the rocket range.
"When they started firing the rockets they used to go wrong and fall in the sand behind our house with a big bang," she says.
"People were upset in the beginning.
"Then they just accepted it because it was bringing jobs."
Fr Morrison, a parish priest, had initially supported the rocket project for that very same reason.
In 1955, when the UK government first announced it planned to open the guided missile testing site, the economy was still recovering after the end of World War Two 10 years earlier.
Jobs were hard to find and in South Uist people earned a living from small farms called crofts.
They supplemented their income by weaving tweed or harvesting seaweed.
The Conservative UK government of the time was under pressure from the US and other allies in the West to help create a nuclear deterrent against Russia and the wider Eastern Bloc.
It needed a location for training troops in the live firing of rockets - minus their deadly payload.
A number of sites were considered, including Shetland and north east Scotland's Moray Firth.
The government went for South Uist.
It was home to 2,000 people and was described as an island with more water than land due large number of lochs, according to a debate in the House of Lords.
On one side of the island was the vast expanse of the North Atlantic where, the government hoped, misfiring rockets could safely crash land.
Landowner Herman Andreae claimed he was given little choice but to sell his land on his South Uist Estate to the Ministry of Defence.
The huge scale of the military scheme soon revealed itself.
Crofters were to be evicted to make way for thousands of military personnel and their families.
Fr Morrison was horrified. He feared a way of life was at risk of being lost.
Many islanders were deeply religious with Catholic the dominant faith, and for most of them Gaelic was their first language rather than English.
"You were talking about the removal of basically all the crofters from Sollas in the north to Bornais in the south," says Fr Michael MacDonald, a priest who looks after Fr Morrison's parish today.
The distance between the two locations is more than 30 miles.
"This was draconian stuff," Fr MacDonald adds.
"A huge village was to be planted in there.
"I think he felt the faith would be swamped. That the Gaelic culture would be swamped."
Fr Morrison spoke out publicly against the rocket base.
Not everyone in South Uist supported his view, but Fr Morrison attracted local and national press attention.
Journalists dubbed him Father Rocket.
His headline-grabbing comments included his suggestion he and his parishioners would leave South Uist in protest and move to Canada.
Historian Neil Bruce said: "Newspapers in the US were carrying stories about the rocket range and these doughty locals who were standing up to what the government wanted to do."
People from outside the islands threw their support behind him. They included anti-nuclear campaigners, conservationists and academics.
There was a spin-off benefit for Fr Morrison.
Since 1952 he had been working on plans for a statue called Our Lady of the Isles, dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Mr Bruce says publicity around the rockets row made it easier to raise the funds needed for the work of art.
It was unveiled in 1958 and some saw it as a symbol of opposition to the weapons facility.
The rocket range did go ahead, although on a smaller scale than planned due to cost savings.
But Mr Bruce says Fr Morrison's campaign should be credited for achieving important concessions.
They included an assurance that common grazings - land shared by crofters to raise livestock - would not be used and access remained available to some other areas rent-free.
The historian believes local road improvements were in part thanks to the priest.
And a promise was secured that only essential maintenance would take place on the range on the Sabbath.
Mr Bruce says: "On balance, there was a very strong local view that he won at the time.
"Whether that holds today is for others to say not me."
Fr Morrison died in 1992.
The range remains operational and is a significant local employer today.
Islanders fought against a proposed closure of the site, before the MoD announced it was "safe" about 14 years ago.
It has been used for training in anti-aircraft weapons and military drones.
In 2015, the facility played a part in the launch of the UK's first rocket into space.
Part of Fr Morrison's legacy is the Our Lady of the Isles statue.
It shares a hilltop with a radar station for the range.
Fr MacDonald says: "When you pass there, particularly at night-time when the statue is floodlit and you see the radar domes and the aviation warning lights, it's striking the juxtaposition of these two symbols of the nuclear age."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
UPI
4 hours ago
- UPI
NATO to increase defense spending to Cold War levels
June 22 (UPI) -- Britain and its NATO allies will increase defense spending by at much as 5% of GDP in the next decade, officials have announced. The alliance's 32 member states agreed to the plan in advance of a heads of nations summit this week in The Hague. The meeting is scheduled to take place Tuesday and Wednesday, where the new spending increase is expected to be approved. This is a boost from 2% of defense spending, and seen as a play to appease the Trump administration in addition to addressing a growing military threat from Russia and China. The hike to 5% of GDP spending would bring NATO back to defense spending not seen since the Cold War. By comparison, Britain has said it has plans to increase that nation's defense spending by closer to 3% by 2034, which would be a boost of .7%. Britain was hesitant about the 5% agreed to be NATO and pushed for the timeline to 2035, which would move the increase beyond the next Parliament. Spain was the last country to sign on to the NATO deal. NATO secretary Mark Rutte was largely seen as the driving force behind the spending hike, and said the actual defense spending would amount to 3.5% of GDP and that the other 1.5% could be used for cyber security and other infrastructure.
Boston Globe
8 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Europe is finally ready to spend more on defense. The hard part is how.
Advertisement This is a 'global reset,' Lieutenant General Sean Clancy, the new chief of the European Union's military committee, said at a security conference in Brussels this month. But 'we haven't even defined what the transition looks like.' Money, though, is far from the only issue Europe confronts now that it has reluctantly accepted the reality that it must be able to protect itself without help from the United States. Formidable political, strategic, and regulatory hurdles remain. EU leaders must maintain public support for common military spending and joint weapons procurement, even as right-wing nationalist sentiments oppose giving the bloc more power. And the farther from the Russian border, the less urgent the threat feels. Poland, for instance, is already spending nearly 5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense while Spain dedicated just 1.3 percent last year. Advertisement The European Union and Britain must also figure out how to prepare for the new kind of war that Russian aggression presents. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe's military has been focused on deploying troops to hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq. Now they must be able to defend their own territory. Intelligence officials warn that Russian forces could be ready to attack a NATO country in five years. Complicating the decision-making are rapid advancements in intelligence, surveillance, battlefield management, and cyber technologies. Warfare is undergoing a transformation that is akin to what occurred during World War I, when horse-drawn wagons, muskets, and swords were replaced by tanks, machine guns, and airplanes. Look at Ukraine's battlefields. They are dominated by new technologies and throwback strategies, millions of drones and muddy trenches. 'Today 80 percent of targets in Ukraine are destroyed by drones,' said Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for defense and space. 'Every two months, there is a need for radical innovation of the drones in operation.' In recognition, the British Defense Ministry announced this month a startling overhaul of its warfighting approach, moving away from the Cold War-era focus on heavy armor and mechanized infantry. Under the plan, 80 percent of combat capability will rely on remote-controlled, reusable ground vehicles and drones as well as missiles, shells, and self-destructing drones. The EU has also taken steps to revise its strategy. In March, the 27 member nations issued a blueprint for combat readiness by 2030. Last month, the EU created a 150 billion euro (about $173 billion) program allowing joint investments in security. (Twenty-three countries are members of both the EU and NATO.) Advertisement But higgledy-piggledy rules and practices still hamper efforts to rapidly turn Europe's fragmented defenses into a unified and efficient fighting force. Joint financing is more the exception than the rule. Red tape, lack of coordination, and slow decision-making across the continent are causing delays, supply shortages, waste, and duplication, according to political and industry leaders. Overall strategy and standards are set by NATO commanders, but military budgets, specifications, quality control, export licenses, purchasing, and planning are handled by individual nations. The result is that a German-made component going into a French-made plane needs a separate export certification that can delay delivery by months. And though 12 European countries use NH90 helicopters, there are 17 versions, said Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official who leads defense studies at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Europe is also looking to decrease its dependence on American weaponry. The share of military equipment supplied to the European members of NATO by the United States has grown to nearly two-thirds, from about half less than a decade ago, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Europe has put a priority on investment in its own defense industry and is looking to make its supply chains for key materials, like gunpowder, more resilient. 'There is an adjustment in terms of the business model for the European defense industry,' Grand said, as it shifts to standardized mass production. That, he said, will require more consolidation to create economies of scale and joint procurement. Industry leaders, meanwhile, complain that they cannot invest in expanded production and research without more direction from government officials. Advertisement 'The political machinery is slow,' said Jan Pie, secretary-general of ASD, a trade group that represents 4,000 companies across Europe. 'So it's difficult to scale up.' Environmental approvals needed before a new weapons factory may be built can take up to five years, Pie said. He said that despite the talk about the need for urgency, the defense industry was not given priority in times of shortages. Nammo, a Norwegian ammunitions manufacturer that supplies Ukraine, for instance, was unable to ramp up production in 2023 because a nearby TikTok data center had already bought up the region's surplus electricity. As economies slow across Europe, budget battles are expected to continue to soak up the spotlight. It's doubtful that some countries will ever reach the 5 percent target. Still, as far as funding goes, Europe has turned a corner, several European leaders and military experts said. 'There's a lot of discussion about numbers, percentages, financing,' Nadia Calviño, president of the European Investment Bank, the EU's lending arm, said in Brussels recently. 'But I want to be very clear: Europe is a rich continent, and we can mobilize the necessary financing.' This article originally appeared in
Hamilton Spectator
8 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Mark Carney's minority government has an unexpected partner in the Conservatives — for now
OTTAWA—There's a new coalition in town. If the last Parliament was dominated by the Conservatives' insistence that the Liberal-NDP alliance had spun the country into an irreversible state of disarray, the opening weeks of the latest session has put a new pact on the map. 'It appears to me, and it remains to be seen, that (Prime Minister) Carney's new majority coalition is Liberal-Conservative, delivering Pierre Poilievre's policies with a more friendly face,' said the Green Party's Elizabeth May on Monday, as she raised the alarm over C-5, the Liberals' major projects bill. The Grit-Tory co-operation around that bill, which led to the proposed legislation being bulldozed through Parliament this week, prompted members of other federal parties to make the same dig. The Bloc Québécois warned of a 'new cross-party alliance,' while the NDP accused both parties of joining forces to steamroll over environmental protections and Indigenous rights. Of course, there is no actual coalition at play. But charges of one, combined with a fledgling Carney government pulling the Liberals away from the left, means the Conservatives must make a new case as to why they are still the top alternative in a post-Justin Trudeau world. 'Mark Carney is governing like a Progressive Conservative. So where's your opportunity?' said Tim Powers, a former Conservative strategist and chair of Summa Strategies. Carney's 'One Canadian Economy' bill, which proposes, in part, to grant Ottawa temporary powers to fast-track major resource and infrastructure projects, contains some promises that are not altogether different from what Poilievre pledged during this year's campaign. Rapidly spurring Canadian resource projects and accelerating approvals were key commitments in the Conservatives' platform, even if they were accompanied by other promises like scrapping the industrial carbon price and repealing the Liberals' contentious Impact Assessment Act. Bill C-5 is unlike any piece of legislation we have seen in Canada federally. Because Bill C-5 doesn't go that far, it doesn't have Poilievre's complete approval. And while his decision to be the Liberals' dance partner this week quickly drew the ire of other opposition parties, others believe it wasn't a damaging move. 'Canadians ultimately want them to work together,' said Shakir Chambers, a Conservative strategist and vice president at the public affairs firm Oyster Group. 'If you're going to co-operate on some things, co-operate on the things that you have been championing, even pre-election, to move forward and get them passed.' Powers said Poilievre now has heavyweights in his caucus like Edmonton Northwest MP Billy Morin, the former chief of Enoch Cree Nation, to push back against narratives that the Conservatives aren't attuned to concerns from Indigenous communities about the bill. MPs are expressing reservations about the push to fast-track major development projects. The Liberals, too, don't seem particularly bothered by the 'coalition' barbs. 'I don't take them very seriously,' London Centre Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos told the Star. 'I'm very glad (the Conservatives) are coming to the game and playing a constructive role. It's been a very long time since they've done that,' Liberal MP and former House Speaker Greg Fergus said. Nevertheless, the early weeks of Canada's 45th Parliament have offered a few glimpses into where the Conservatives see their lines of attack. One emerged this week in the form of the Trudeau-era target that zero-emission vehicles should make up 20 per cent of new car sales starting in 2026, growing to 100 per cent by 2035. 'Well, somebody wants to tell you where to go and how to get there,' Poilievre said in a five-and-a-half minute video posted on social media Thursday. 'It's the Liberal government's new attempt to ban your gas-powered vehicles.' Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman introduced a defeated motion this week, calling on the Liberals to scrap the policy and posting on social media that 'the government has no place in the driveways of Canadians.' The policy is not a 'new attempt,' nor is it a flat-out 'ban' on gas-powered vehicles: it's a regulatory scheme aimed at incentivizing the sale of more EVs. 'That's another thing that Justin Trudeau was focused on,' Powers said. 'Guys, wake up! And girls. Justin Trudeau is gone. He's gone. There's a new Liberal leader, and he's not giving you much ammunition.' But Chambers said zeroing in on the EV mandate is a natural next step for a party focused on buoying the oil and gas sector. 'It's a good point to attack,' Chambers said. 'If you bring back … the industrial carbon tax issue, again, opposing the EV mandate kind of fits with that overall blanket of policy ideas.' Other issues the party focused on this week, such as bringing forward a motion imposing a lifetime ban on ArriveCAN contractor GCStrategies, were more successful. But Chambers said that the past few weeks of Parliament have mostly been a 'test run', and that Canadians are currently focused on more pressing issues like affordability, trade disruptions and international conflicts. That's where he says Poilievre's focus should lie as he prepares for a fall session, where it's expected that the Conservative leader will make his triumphant return to the House of Commons after a summer byelection, revamp his shadow cabinet with fresh faces, and set Carney's first federal budget in his sights. He'll also have to factor in the Conservative party's national convention, set to be held next January, where he will face a leadership review following his election loss. Powers said that by the time the calendar rolls over into September, he wants to see more 'maturity' from the party. 'I think Conservatives need to lead a little bit again in thought, not just in (social media) clip, and in meme,' Powers said. 'Poilievre's a smart fellow. How can he do that? Where can he put a marker down?'
