Trident being tugged to Faslane Scotland. Photo: Rebecca Johnson
Two decisions, Trident replacement and British membership of
the European Union, that are usually considered separately, but which are both
claimed by their advocates as serving a vital security role for Britain and
beyond. Then along comes UKIP's Nigel Farage, who is not known for
championing women's safety, deploying nuclear imagery to scare voters and
demonise migrants with his claim that remaining in the EU will unleash a "nuclear
bomb" of "sex attacks on women".
Equating migration with nuclear weapons is of course
ludicrous and needs to be challenged on all levels. Not only are such claims racist and bizarre,
but they ignore or downplay the serious risks and prevalence of sex
attacks on women in Britain – and in all patriarchal societies.
Farage appears to have used the nuclear metaphor because of the
widespread understanding that nuclear bombs are a really really bad thing. About that at least, he is right. So why is he gung ho for Trident replacement,
by which the UK would build new submarines and keep making more nuclear bombs
at an estimated price tag of £205
billion?
While Farage was likening violence against women to a
nuclear bomb, I was one of three women protecting guerrilla projectionist Feral
X in lighting up the Ministry of Defence and Parliament with the stark messages
"Stop Trident Replacement" and "Trident is a War
Crime". These London actions drew
attention to the start of the Trident
Ploughshares month of action at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE)
Burghfield, where Britain's plutonium warheads are packed with high explosives
and then transported up to Faslane in Scotland.
Trident Ploughshares' blockade – now into its second week – is
intended to highlight the alternatives.
As stated by Liz Khan, from London Women in Black. "Instead of squandering our money on building
more weapons of mass destruction it's time for Britain to join negotiations
with the majority of UN member states to ban and eliminate all nuclear
weapons." Though
multilateral nuclear disarmament talks are taking place this year at the United
Nations in Geneva, David Cameron's government decided to boycott.
The Trident and EU debates are both highly contested and go
to the heart of Britain's role in the world and what is best for our peace and
security in the 21st century.
Given Cameron's demonstrated predilection for risky political behaviour,
which of the two decisions he is gambling with should we worry about most? In terms
of deterrence and war prevention, which should we keep, Trident or the EU?
Opponents of both the EU and Trident have made a big thing
of the costs. But the real issue should
be what we get for that money. Trident
advocates like Cameron and Farage are fond of equating it as deterrence and an "insurance
policy". If such weapons really
provided us with 100 % security, peace and war prevention (which Cameron seems
to assume nuclear deterrence is able to guarantee), then no-one would question
the price. But no weapons are capable of
delivering such a guarantee, and any mistake with Trident could cause mass
destruction and unspeakable humanitarian suffering.
Arguing that it's "foolish to neglect the role" of
the EU in securing "relative peace in Europe", Anders
Fogh Rasmussen joined four other former heads of NATO to make the security
case for staying in the EU, using language more often associated with a
justification of nuclear deterrence.
At some point in our lives, people and countries face
situations in which they want to signal "don't mess with me". An
important component of deterrence from time immemorial is to communicate:
"I'm stronger than I might look, so don't threaten or attack me because
you'll find that whatever you hope to gain will be much less than you risk
losing".
We're told that Trident deters by threatening our potential
enemies with mass destruction. To help
people believe in Trident, we are taught to call it "the deterrent".
This helps us believe in it and turn a blind eye to the costs and problems. But
if you don't have nuclear weapons does that mean you can't have deterrence? If that were true, any leader failing to
acquire nuclear weapons would be in dereliction of the first responsibility of
government – the safety and security of the people. Though the occasional analyst, such as Kenneth
Waltz, makes an argument for nuclear security in numbers, the
notion of nuclear bombs in many hands actually causes the rest of us –
including the pro-Trident lobby – to shudder.
As I've argued in a recent UN working paper, deterrence is not an inherent or failsafe
property of nuclear weapons. Deterrence
is, rather, a communicative relationship and process of defensive signalling to
anyone who might want to attack us. Applied appropriately, deterrence is practised
by most of us in different ways. For nations, it can prevent and contain military
escalation of rivalries and disputes about territory, resources, regional
power, ideological, religious or economic interests. Deterrence entails convincing a potential
aggressor to refrain from any plans they might have to attack, coerce or
blackmail us. It's useful to do this at times, but not with nuclear weapons.
While NATO governments remain stuck in contradictions
and dangers arising from nuclear deterrence policies and deployments, the
large majority of UN member states exercise deterrence as part of their defence
and security policies without depending on nuclear weapons. The mechanisms the non-nuclear nations rely
on for deterrence and security have much in common with the best of the tools
developed by the EU for mutual peace and security. Instead of sacrificing the EU and building
more nuclear weapons, we need to think about deterrence more intelligently.
If
deterrents are thought of as weapons, then one country's deterrent is another's
dangerous threat. In preparation, military operations and impacts, nuclear deterrence
requires the UK to operate credible threats to commit the mass murder of
innocent noncombatants (including children), environmental devastation on a
massive scale, and our own probable national suicide. What does that say about the British?
The trouble is that deterrence only works if the threat is believed. So according
to today's arguments, relying on nuclear weapons for deterrence means having
armed nuclear submarines doing 'continuous at-sea deterrent' patrols, with the
Trident missiles physically able to be fired at a moment's notice. Any failure of any component
in the weapons or the military and communications elements assigned to nuclear
deterrence could lead to unintentional catastrophe. Any firing of Trident would lead to
intentional catastrophe, not just for the people in targeted countries, but for
humanity, including future generations.
"Trident is a war crime” projected onto the House of Commons on 6 June 2016. Photo: FeralX"
US nuclear policymakers George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn
noted in 2007 that expecting nuclear weapons to
provide deterrence is "increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective". In a later critique they
described nuclear deterrence as "precarious" and "psychological,
depending on calculations for which there is no historical experience". Former nuclear weapons
commanders, including General Lee Butler, and the US Defense Secretary at the
time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert
McNamara, have ascribed the avoidance of nuclear
war to "dumb luck", not deterrence.
Trident is a weapon of mass destruction. Cameron, Farage and other proponents may
believe it is a deterrent, but they hold that belief irrationally, without credible
evidence, and only by dint of ignoring relevant events, warnings and
experiences of nuclear commanders and practitioners from the past 70 years.
At least one UK nuclear armed submarine has supposedly
carried out continuous deterrent patrols, but since Trident was deployed in
1994, has there been one incident anyone can point to where it has played an
actual security or deterrent role? On
the contrary, Trident has been involved in a series of accidents, collisions
(including with a nuclear-armed French submarine in 2009) and fires. Thankfully
none of these resulted in nuclear detonations, but as Chatham House reported in its 2014 report "Too Close for Comfort", miscommunications and
miscalculations involved in nuclear deterrence and war games have brought us
perilously close to nuclear use, not just in the cold war (like the 1962 Cuban
Missile Crisis and 1983 Able Archer near miss), but since 1991 as well.
By contrast, the EU's security role is less about military
forces and hardware than about fostering cooperation and mutual
interdependence. The founding 1950 Coal
and Steel Community was not just an industrial venture, but a means to prevent further
European wars. Its purpose was to embed essential industrial cooperation and
interdependence and make it much harder for individual countries to equip
themselves for military aggression against each other.
Over time the EU developed a range of collective, democratic
institutions and actions for peace, security, human rights, and environmental
protection, as well as workers' rights, equality, fairness and justice. Though notions of "national
security" continue to drive old military thinking, the EU sought to advance
human security rather than issue threats of military force.
When nuclear deterrence theorists argued the importance of creating uncertainty and fear in a potential aggressor’s mind about the
risks and consequences of threatening any vital assets or allies, they seemed
to assume this would induce restraint rather than increased insecurity. There appears to be little evidence on which
to base such an assumption. As
demonstrated by the brutal experiences and mistakes of 20th
century militarism, uncertainty is more than likely to increase the perils
of crisis instability. Target states,
regimes and actors often fail to recognise a deterrent warning – especially if
conveyed through a military build-up or exercise. Instead, they perceive such actions as
threats to their own interests and security. The immense destructiveness of nuclear weapons and short flight times of
ballistic missiles such as Trident mean that uncertainty can accelerate the
fears that lead to pre-emptive strikes in a "use them or lose them"
fog of war panic.
Mutual security and deterrence with fewer risks has been a
conscious, crucial, and underestimated role of the EU. A Brexit vote would put this at risk,
increase uncertainty, and make Britain less
secure.
By contrast with the serious risks and rigidity inherent in nuclear
weapons, as well as the humanitarian consequences if they are used, the EU's
long-standing and largely effective security role can adapt to different
situations, reduce and address the causes of risks, and overcome mistakes.
The EU has had some notable successes, including its leading
role in persuading Iran to move away from developing nuclear weapons. But there have also been failures that shame
us all. Fortress Europe is not the answer when desperate refugees are seeking
safety and dying on our shores. European
security needs to be built on humane values, shared with those in need.
Tragic though some of these EU failures have been, they are
survivable in a way that failures of nuclear deterrence are not. And while it is refreshing to hear NATO
leaders acknowledge the vital security role that the EU has played, we should
admit that NATO's own policies of expansion and nuclear reliance have
exacerbated and sustained the insecurities of some neighbours, notably Russia,
and that EU independence from NATO's military alliance and agenda is
complicated by the fact that all but six EU members are in NATO.
The EU's security institutions and agreements have benefitted
British people in myriad ways. Brexit
would not end that overnight, but it would make it very much more difficult for
us to contribute our skills and personnel, and we would also lose our access to
participating in the day to day decisions.
The EU is still a work in progress. Integrating so many countries since the Cold
War ended has been undoubtedly very expensive, but not as costly as war. We shouldn't gloss over the EU's problems of
wastefulness, economic corruption and accountability, which need to be tackled
collectively. But as Caroline Lucas and progressive Greens and
socialists argue, "Another Europe
is Possible", and the transformations necessary to achieve this are best undertaken together with our EU partners, with
the shared objectives of cooperative security and war prevention.
