from The Guardian, 2 November 2016
In 1992, when the first submarine armed with Trident nuclear missiles arrived on the Clyde near Glasgow, John Ainslie was in a canoe. Along with a flotilla of other protesters, he was buzzing the huge dark boat as it cut through the cold water. He had just been appointed as the coordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (SCND), and he was arrested by the Ministry of Defence police.
John, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the quiet, unassuming heart of the peace movement in Scotland for the last 25 years. As well as putting himself on the line, he became an authoritative and internationally respected nuclear researcher. He was the author of 20 reports on aspects of nuclear policy, starting in 1992 with Cracking Under Pressure, about defects in nuclear submarine reactors.
His most recent report, in July, written with Dan Plesch from the University of London, argued that successive UK governments had deceived the public by pretending that Trident was a British bomb when it is actually American. Other reports exposed Trident’s safety flaws, its targeting strategies, and its secret workings. In 2008, he discovered problems with a mysterious top-secret warhead ingredient known as fogbank.
He backed Scottish independence as a way of triggering UK nuclear disarmament. In the run-up to the referendum in 2014 he showed how Trident warheads could be removed from the Clyde within two years – and how they could not safely be based anywhere else in the UK.
John played a crucial role in breaking the story of the Trident submariner, William McNeilly, who went on the run in 2015 after alleging 30 safety and security flaws. John was a skilled user of freedom of information law, and helped to prise open the MoD’s secretive nuclear citadel and expose its inadequacies.
He was a son of the manse, born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, the sixth child of Emily (nee Peters) and the Rev Duncan Ainslie. After attending high schools in Kirkcaldy and Arbroath, in 1971 he joined the army.
He served with the Scottish infantry regiment, the Black Watch, studied international relations at the University of Keele in Staffordshire, and became a junior officer. According to his family and colleagues, he was involved with military intelligence in Northern Ireland, though he never spoke about it.
In 1980 he had a big falling-out with the army and resigned his commission, as a conscientious objector. Before he was allowed to leave, he had to argue his case before a tribunal, and to pay back some of his university fees. He then became a youth worker with the Church of Scotland, and studied divinity at the University of Glasgow. He worked for more than five years in the late 1980s as a community minister in Easterhouse, a deprived area of Glasgow. He was appointed coordinator of SCND in 1991.
John was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2012 and, despite treatments and operations, it spread to his brain. During his illness, he kept doing many of the things he loved – hill walking, cycling, sailing and rowing.
He also took SCND’s two giant puppets, Big Sandy and CiNDy, to festivals and protests, and followed nuclear bomb convoys around Glasgow in the early hours of the morning. In the weeks before he died, he was trying to finish a report on the impact of a convoy crash.
John married Alison Bush in 1986, and two years later they had a son, Duncan. Despite being apparently fit and healthy, Duncan died suddenly in 2009 from a suspected heart condition. John is survived by Alison, and by his siblings: Margaret, Andrew, Eric, Alan and Catherine.
• John Ainslie, anti-nuclear campaigner, born 3 May 1954; died 21 October 2016
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