'They keep arresting us for breach of the peace. Trident is the breach of the peace'

The Trident submarine glided out of the grey drizzle shrouding the hills overlooking the Clyde right on cue yesterday afternoon. A small flotilla of tugs, Marine commando inflatables and police launches fussed around its wake.

On the foreshore just 100 metres from its sprawling base at Faslane, a small, damp band of protesters watched the sleek black silhouette through battered binoculars. "It's really hard to grasp what that thing can do," said the veteran peace campaigner Angie Zelter as she followed the submarine's slow progress. "It just looks like another piece of technology. It's scary beyond belief."

Several hours earlier, about 50 demonstrators had clustered outside the submarine base's main gate, battered by gale-force winds and driving rain, to protest against yesterday's confirmation from Tony Blair that he wanted a third generation of nuclear deterrent for the UK.

Faslane, built to house Britain's first nuclear fleet, Polaris, now hosts four Trident submarines and two nuclear-powered hunter-killers.

Eric Wallace, at 70 long retired from his business renting out pleasure boats and yachts on nearby Loch Lomond, had tumbled out of bed before dawn to join the protesters berating the base's civilian workers and navy staff as they drove in for yesterday's shift.

Mr Wallace is a local man; his opponents are his friends and neighbours in the navy-dominated town of Helensburgh nearby. More than 6,000 people - civilian administrative staff, submariners, engineers, policemen, cooks and cleaners - work at Faslane. For a committed anti-nuclear activist with a CND badge on his lapel, it can be a lonely role. "They make all these ridiculous arguments that we need the jobs, when even military men say that it could be spent elsewhere much more effectively. It's such a wildly expensive, useless weapon," he said.

Fuelled by the prime minister's quest for a successor to Trident, Faslane is now the focus of a year-long campaign by Britain's anti-nuclear movement called Faslane 365, involving a series of blockades and protests at its gates that began on October 1.

Coordinated from Faslane peace camp, a chain of shabby caravans and makeshift lean-to shacks which has sprawled along the verge of the main road near the base for nearly 25 years, the first wave of protests has already seen 330 demonstrators arrested and held overnight in local police cells.

Its organisers expect to see MPs, Scottish parliamentarians, bishops, priests, academics and lawyers arrested in the coming months. Tomorrow, the writer AL Kennedy, poet Adrian Mitchell, folksinger Roy Bailey and journalist Hilary Wainwright will appear.

The campaign is unpopular locally. The local paper, the Helensburgh Advertiser, complained loudly last week after it discovered that policing costs could reach £20m; in the first 23 days of the protests, the bill hit £1.7m. "It's absolutely ridiculous," said a local councillor, Danny Kelly. "The police have better things to do with their time."

But Ms Zelter said: "They keep on arresting us for breaching the peace. We say that Trident is the breach of the peace. The police keep saying that our protests are political. We keep saying it's a matter of law - it is illegal under international law and under Scottish law."

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