No security with Trident
After we handed in the CND Alternative White Paper in to No 10 yesterday, I asked Tony Blair, when he made his Trident announcement in the Commons: "At a cost of up to £75bn, including maintenance costs over a 30 year lifespan, how can his proposal conceivably be justified in an utterly different post Cold War environment, when it will severely restrict much more needed conventional defence expenditure, it will clearly undermine the nuclear non-proliferation treaty worldwide and it will drain off colossal sums of money from where it is most needed, dealing with the real threats that face us from terrorism, climate change and long term energy insecurity?"
The only answer, repeatedly, from Blair was that we had to have nuclear weapons because you never know what nuclear armed enemies might arise to threaten us in future. There are three counters to this argument which lethally undermine it.
First, if nuclear weapons are indispensable to our security, why are they not equally indispensable for everyone else's security, including Iran? In other words, Blair's decision will simply encourage nuclear proliferation across the globe - worsening our insecurity, not protecting us against it.
Secondly, it is not and never was an independent nuclear deterrent. We are dependent on the Americans for warheads, the fuse and firing systems, the warhead casings, the guidance systmes and the satellite navigation. furthermore, that dependence ties us in to dependence on US foreign policy, as we have already seen, with disastrous consequences over Iraq, Lebanon and maybe in future in Iran.
Third, what do nuclear weapons actually acheive? None of our wars was ever won by them and none of our enemies was ever defeated by them. General Galtieri was not deterred from seizing the Falklands, though we had the nuclear bomb and Argentina did not. The US had nuclear weapons but that did not prevent their defeat in Vietnam and now in Iraq. The French had nuclear weapons but that didn't prevent their defeat in Indo-China either, nor in Algeria. Israel has nuclear weapons but that did not prevent them being pushed out of Lebanon by Hizbollah.
What price nuclear weapons?