New British nukes

Tony Blair announced yesterday that Britain would replace our fleet of Trident nuclear submarines when they reach the end of their life.

Now you may wonder why a politician with only months left, feels the need to comment on a procurement issue 20 years hence, but that’s a side issue.

For the life of me, I cannot see any strategic or tactical reason to possess these continent-busting weapons. The argument for renewing the system as I understand it is as follows:

- we don’t know what risks we may face and therefore we’d better retain the ability to utterly destroy all of mankind, just in case.

This is insane logic. If you don’t know what risks you face, you must surely predict an them, otherwise you wind up in a state of total paranoia. In addition, if it follows that Britain needs nukes, then surely Germany, Italy and Spain also need nukes, along with Poland, the Czech Republic, Canada etc, etc Yet no-one wants this proliferation. In addition, it seems to me that if you are say, an Iranian, with war on your immediate border and a nuclear armed foe, then your needs for nukes must be immediate and pressing?

I don’t see how we can lecture Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about developing nukes, when he lives in a dangerous and unstable part of the world, whilst at the same time, cheerfully announcing, we are getting much more potent ones, when no threat is on the radar. Then there is the argument

- a rogue state might give a terrorist a nuke, and we’d need the return address to frighten them against doing so (along the MAD principle)

This is also incredible. Are we honestly saying that if a leader gave a terrorist a nuke (I really, really can’t see this, because you don’t give someone the means to destroy you, but anyway) and God forbid, London was nuked, and we traced it back to Tehran, we’d really murder 12 million people (i.e. do a double holocaust) in an afternoon? This is total bollocks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Americans should disarm, because as no1, you are always “on offer” so to speak, but independent British weapons? I can’t see the point. Then there is the small matter, that say £20B or whatever it finally costs, would pay for a quite useable armoured division or two with rapid deployment capabilities and self-contained transport to anywhere in 72 hours. Now that would be much more useable.