About Us

Meet the Youth and Student Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Youth and Student CND is the branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for anyone under the age of 25 or in education.

CND was formed in 1958 and has been campaigning non-violently ever since to achieve British nuclear disarmament – for scrapping the Trident nuclear weapons system and preventing its replacement. Youth and Student CND is a specialist section of the national organisation.

Youth and Student CND believes that nuclear weapons are now more irrelevant than ever. While education, healthcare and other public services are squeezed and underfunded, more money keeps being poured into anachronistic weapons of mass destruction. We believe that the billions wasted on dangerous, immoral, illegal and strategically useless weapons would be better spent on a whole variety of things of greater social value.

We want to create a more peaceful world: a world which isn’t pointing weapons of mass destruction at itself, and a world which spends its efforts and money building better working and living conditions for people everywhere.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous

Nuclear weapons are immoral and hugely damaging to life and environment. The single bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 has led to 324,129 deaths so far, and modern nuclear weapons are significantly more powerful even that this. The Red Cross estimate that a 'small' nuclear war could lead to the starvation of up to one billion people.

Nuclear weapons are illegal

There are different international obligations covering nuclear weapons. The UK is a signatory of the legally-binding 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which includes a legally binding commitment to working towards nuclear disarmament. Nuclear weapons are now also banned under a UN Treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Nuclear weapons are expensive

CND has calculated that replacing Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system, will end up costing at least £205 billion. In real terms, that's the equivalent of 650,000 affordable new homes, or nearly the entire cost of ending world hunger. This estimate doesn't even take into account that Ministry of Defence projects typically go well over budget.

"Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil."