Trident- what a mess! Time to clean it up.

ICAN-UK patron, Air Commodore Alastair Mackie (pictured), reviews the history of the UK's nuclear weapons, and argues that the government must say no to Trident and yes to a Nuclear Weapons Convention.
 

 
The decision by Liam Fox, Secretary of State for Defence, to exclude Trident from the Strategic Defence Review is a serious mistake. Fox has missed a golden opportunity to put a stop to the folly that is Trident- the UK's nuclear weapons system.
 
Understanding what a mess Trident is requires us to take a backward look at how it came about. To begin with, all states drew important lessons about the post-WW2 global order from the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki- a display of brutal power.
 
The raids took place while, as the US government well knew, Japan was trying to surrender, using the Soviet Union as a go-between. Such an ultra-cynical action is much more deserving of a place in the annals of infamy than the raid on Pearl Harbour.
 
Similarly naked power politics were also apparent at the dawn of the Cold War. That phrase was coined by Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri. So was the phrase Iron Curtain, which he defined as stretching from the Baltic to the the Black Sea.
 
The Soviet Union at the time- 1946- was reeling from a war which had caused an incursion, albeit temporary, into a third of its territory and 20 million deaths: a repetition, still in the Russian folk mind, of what happened in 1812 courtesy of Napoleon.
 
Churchill had initiated British work on the atom bomb in 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War. Yet Britain lacked the resources to develop it under wartime conditions, so the USA took over, beginning the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos which led to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
 
When the war ended the UK asked to be given nuclear know-how and resources: a rather grand version, perhaps, of 'Please can we have our ball back?' That was the genesis of Trident- conceived in power politics and gestated in the womb of national prestige.
 
Re-enter the Soviet Union, still groggy from World War Two and convinced by talk of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain that it was under threat of an atomic attack by the USA.
 
By a stroke of luck the defection from the West of the traitor Klaus Fuchs gave the Soviets the recipe for a bomb of their own. Thus the age of the nuclear balance of terror, later to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction, came into being.
 
Britain by now had convinced herself of the need for a bomb of her own. In 1948, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, back from a begging bowl visit to the USA, where he had been humiliated by his opposite number James Byrne, persuaded the Cabinet that we should have the bomb, with, as he put it, 'the bloody Union Jack on top of it'.
 
Ever since, the British political elite has convinced itself of the need for a so-called independent nuclear deterrent. That conviction soon became a token of virility like a stick-on hairy chest. A variant perhaps, of the power politics initiated with the bombing of Japan.
 
The shaky political case for a British bomb was reflected militarily. It was agreed to only by a majority of what were then the three Chiefs of Staff. One, the First Sea Lord, later changed his mind. In a famous speech in Stockholm in 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten said:
 
'As a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our worries because of the illusions which they have generated.'
 
The succession of top brass nuclear opponents continued with the late, great, Field Marshall Lord Carver questioning:
 
'What the bloody hell's it (the British Bomb) for?'
 
More recently, Field Marshall Lord Bramall has described nukes as:
 
'Completely useless as a deterrent of the scale of violence we currently, or are likely, to face.'
 
Other generals, including Lord Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach, argued in the same vein last April in an article for The Times. Their important statement questioned whether Trident should be replaced, and called for it to be included in the Strategic Defence Review.
 
The last nine parliaments, four Tory and five Labour, have made little progress in reducing stockpiles (William Hague recently revealed that the UK's number of nuclear warheads would not exceed 225) and seem intent on replacing Trident at a cost of £97 billion. Being indiscriminate the weapons contravene international law.
 
As a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the UK is also obligated to act speedily and in good faith to eliminate its nuclear weapons. Moreover, nuclear weapons are useless against terrorism.
 
They gobble up much needed money for health, welfare, education and green energy, whilst aggravating our huge public debt. It takes little courage to say no to Trident - only honesty and the guts to clear up the Tridentine Mess.
 
The sooner we set about clearing up the mess and move towards a global treaty- abolishing nuclear weapons in a verifiable and irreversible manner- the better. One way forward for the UK would be for the government to agree not to replace Trident, then remove its Trident submarines from patrol and store the warheads safely ashore.
 
This would represent a truly responsible use of Trident and inspire confidence amongst other nations in the non-proliferation process, making a Nuclear Weapons Convention- prohibiting the development, testing, production, stockpiling, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons- possible.
 
 
 
Air Commodore Alastair Mackie is a patron of the UK branch of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN-UK). His book 'Some of the People All the Time' covers Trident and is available now.