American missiles cause storm in the tearooms =============================== By Ian Herbert, Northern Correspondent The Independent Today 28 February 2001 Americans adore the tea-rooms of Goathland, with their roaring coal fires, fat butterfly buns and heavy slabs of walnut cake, so they have been shocked to find their hosts at the centre of a heated international debate, amid dire warnings of a new Cold War. Goathland is the nearest village to RAF Fylingdales, the radar base on the North York Moors which, under the United States National Missile Defence (NMD) programme, will sound the warning when a missile is fired. The US press, alert to the eventual potential for a pre-emptive strike on the Yorkshire base, has been arriving in the village in droves. USA Today said: "Suppose Mr Blair turned up at the White House to say 'Mr President, I've come to ask if we can build a missile tracking station in the Yosemite National Park to defend Britain against missile attack for a rogue state we've yet to identify'." The Baltimore Sun was equally disturbed, concluding that while "for the world, 'son of Star Wars' is about power politics, ground-breaking science and nuclear proliferation, here, it's a potential next-door neighbour." Most of those locals who have grown up with the secretive base - a 32 metre-high irregular pyramid that no British minister has ever entered - are more phlegmatic. But there is a quiet, stealthy development of a new kind of peace movement to resist North Yorkshire's part in nuclear proliferation. It is more sophisticated than the Greenham Common direct action days - though at its head is a veteran peace campaigner, Lindis Percy, a Bradford health visitor who has made dozens of peaceful incursions into US bases and served time in prison. Last year, she attempted to sue the Secretary of State for Defence and the Defence Land Agent over the alleged complicity in contravention of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, which obliged Washington and Moscow to pursue peace. She was unsuccessful. But the case - designed to tease out information on the bases - was notable for the weight of intellectual backing it secured from US scientists. The Government took it seriously enough to appoint an international relations specialist to the case. In December, the head of the missile defence research programme sponsored by Germany cast grave doubt on NMD at a conference on global security. Mrs Percy said: "I get irritated with some people who just think it's about non-violent direct action. It's about working with academics and getting involved." A willingness to do so was demonstrated by the remarkable turn-out of 100 people at a public meeting at Whitby two weeks ago, when the services of Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, vice-president for the Center for Defense Information in Washington DC, were secured to rehearse the issues. The Whitby meeting has equipped Jackie Fearnley, a mother-of-six from Goathland, to argue with authority against the view that NMD will strengthen the state of mutually assured destruction which prevented nuclear strikes through the Cold War. She said: "They say our relationship with America is a special one - well, a friend does not get another friend into trouble." The Baltimore Sun said this week: "Make no mistake, there is a potential for protest." * The US endorsed Europe's planned new rapid reaction force yesterday in an effortto dispel fears of a transatlantic rift under the Bush administration.
