Trident Nuclear Submarine, HMS Victorious. Image: Flickr/Some rights reserved
Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon didn’t really want to talk about
Trident in his Times article and
Radio Four appearance yesterday. He wanted to talk about Ed Miliband. The jarringly
shrill claim that the Leader of the Opposition would “stab the United Kingdom
in the back” by failing to renew Trident, just as he had “stabbed his own
brother in the back” by contesting the Labour leadership, is part of a long-standing
and increasingly desperate effort to portray Miliband as an untrustworthy
and dangerous “other”.
As well as being distasteful in its own right, Fallon’s outburst has also precluded
more mature debate over a rather important question; namely whether or not the
British government should retain its ability to exterminate millions of
innocent people.
Since the demise of the USSR, Trident’s defenders have invented an
ingenious new excuse to retain the system: the fact that we live in an
“uncertain world”. As Fallon
told the Today programme, “the main argument is very simple….You can’t be
clear what the threats are to this country that might emerge in the 2030s, the
2040s and the 2050s…. Therefore it would be foolhardy to abandon our nuclear
submarines”. Miliband used the same argument in an interview last weekend,
saying that Trident needed to be renewed “in
an uncertain and unstable world”. The fact that the political class speaks
in unison on this says everything you need to know about the artificial nature
of yesterday’s row.
What is disingenuous about the official line is that the future, by
definition, can never be anything other than uncertain. To refuse to abandon
nuclear weapons as long as the future remains uncertain amounts to saying that
there are no realistic circumstances under which Britain will ever decommission
Trident. The problem is that Britain, like practically every other nation on
Earth, is obliged under the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty to make good faith efforts toward complete global disarmament. The
Tories and Labour can either honour that commitment or stick to a line that
effectively pledges Britain to be a nuclear armed state forever. They cannot do
both. If the latter path is chosen, the message then goes out to the whole world
that a top five nuclear power regards the NPT as a dead document. Needless to
say, this is a recipe for greater instability and insecurity, not less.
This is why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board recently
pushed its famous “Doomsday Clock”, illustrating the world’s proximity to
disaster, from five to three
minutes to midnight. The accompanying statement, drawn up in consultation
with 17 Nobel Prize laureates, said that together with climate change, “global
nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose
extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,
and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to
protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political
leadership endanger every person on Earth.”
When I was a child during the final years of the Cold War, there was a
palpable sense that we were living in the shadow of the bomb. Expressions of
that anxiety continually appeared in the popular culture, from song lyrics to movie plots
to off-hand remarks in conversation. Those signs have since disappeared, but there
is nothing to justify our new complacency. A sharp escalation of tensions over
Ukraine, for example, could result in a series of miscalculations or
misunderstandings with unthinkable consequences, as former Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev recently warned. On the previous
occasions that we now know of when the world dodged the nuclear bullet,
sometimes by a hair’s breadth, sober calculation has had very little to do with
it. Don’t let men in
suits convince you that “nuclear defence” is a rational, controlled
business. It’s nothing of the sort.
Security means dealing with risk. The Westminster pro-nuclear consensus
will directly increase serious risks to national and global security.
Anti-Trident campaigners are not wrong to emphasise the system’s exorbitant cost, but
the far bigger reason to oppose renewal remains the terrible threat nuclear
weapons pose to continued life on this planet.
