With 'knowing your future friend in mind' and in advance of the academic seminar blockade ar AWE Burghfield on 16 June, I found watching this propaganda film very interesting: Keeping the peace: A history of AWE. Echoing those Open University programmes that one can probably still find on BBC2 in the wee small hours (?) the film sometime seeems laughably anachronistic in style and tone. AWE's business is, though, the most deadly serious. The film concludes with the statement:
'The mission is the same as it was fifty years ago: To deliver the United Kingdom's requirement for nuclear warheads and support the national security; coupled with a vision to be internationally recognised for delivering scientific, manufacturing and business excellence in strategic defence. AWE stands well equipped to face the challenges of its next half-century.'
Now, if that is voice of our future friend, I feel it's the most invigorating challenge to pick apart every aspect of that statement and change their mind. For ASB participants, not only the statement but the whole film provides a wonderful basis for structuring our resistance. Not least because the film provides aerial footage of AWE and its physical surroundings... So, given all our theories from, for instance, assemblage through performativity to an ethics of care, how might academics best counter the logics of AWE in words and actions during a day of intervention? Over to us.