Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

A few weeks back, the CND, along with Scotland’s establishment Left had organized an anti-Trident rally which became the stage for an amusing little incident. While the all too few ubiquitous figures of the Scottish Left were making strong statements against renewal of the missile from the stage, one anarchist, along with his friend, started denouncing the overly managed nature of the protest. He pointed out that this type of protest will not make one whit of a difference, therefore everyone should consider direct action instead. The organizers immediately descended on him of course, and he was silenced, furnishing him with ample grounds for righteous — and self-satisfied — indignation. Personally, I think his proposed action would have been just as, if not more, futile. Even though there has been a 365-day blockade of the Trident Submarine base in Faslane, the Blair junta, along with its Tory allies, seems to have succeeded in stealing taxpayer money for a £25 Billion boondoggle. [I say stealing, because the government does not have people's consent. The majority oppose this plan]

The Left fails once again — and it could all have been predicted. There is a complete absence of strategic vision in its approach; which tends instead to console itself with token gestures and futile posturing. There is no attempt to identify the sources of power, and hold them to account. Had the people who spend 365 days blockading Faslane, instead spent the year shadowing Arms Forces Minister (or whoever it is who signs off on this), and tried to expose the conflicts of interests, they would have been far more successful. Take the example of Greenpeace, which challenged the government on the issue of Nuclear power, and finally succeeded in checking the government’s drive towards renewing nuclear energy by getting a high court injunction against it. The campaign was focused, determined, and ultimately successful — unlike the feelgood activism of CND etc.

Another thing that really annoys me is the use of words like “rebellion”, or “revolt” to describe the lame attempts by certain New Labourites to cast token votes of opposition and keep the illusion alive that Labour still has retained some redeeming futures. It has not. And next election, people must ensure that every Labour candidate is rejected, regardless of their position. If an individual has integrity, then there is no reason why they shouldn’t declare their independence from Labour’s criminal enterprise.

Shortly before he died, Robin Cook was in Glasgow and I asked him why he was campaigning for a party whose policies seemed to be against his declared principles? His answer was a vacuous, “I was born in the Labour party, and I will die with it” [A friend of mine recieved the same reply from Tony Benn to a similar question]. Sadly for Cook, the words became reality, otherwise his eloquent denunciation of the policy would be so much more potent today. Cook called Trident “worse than irrelevant“.

Down at Aldermaston they are spending hundreds of millions of pounds of your money on a refit of the production line for nuclear warheads…

The justification for both Polaris and Trident was that we faced in the Soviet Union a great, hostile bear bristling with nuclear claws. The missiles were put on submarines precisely because the ocean bed was the only place they could hide from Russian firepower. But those are calculations from a long-vanished era. The Soviet Union has disintegrated, its satellites are our allies in the European Union, and the west is now sinking large funds into helping Russia to defuse and dismantle the warheads that we once feared.

No other credible nuclear threat has stepped forward to replace the Soviet Union as a rationale for the British nuclear weapons system. To be sure, two or three other nations have emerged with a crude nuclear capability, but none of them has developed the capacity or the motivation to attack Britain.

It is not easy to see what practical return Britain ever got out of the extravagant sums we invested in our nuclear systems. None of our wars was ever won by them and none of the enemies we fought was deterred by them. General Galtieri was not deterred from seizing the Falklands, although Britain possessed the nuclear bomb and Argentina did not. But the collapse of the cold war has removed even the theoretical justification for our possessing strategic nuclear weapons.

However, the spirit of the cold war lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go of fear and who need an enemy to buttress their own identity. Hence the vacuum left by the cold war has been filled by George Bush’s global war on terror. It is tragically true that terrorism, partly as a result, is now a worse threat than ever before.

But nuclear weapons are hopelessly irrelevant to that terrorist threat. The elegant theories of deterrence all appear beside the point in the face of a suicide bomber who actively courts martyrdom. And if we ever were deluded enough to wreak our revenge by unleashing a latter-day Hiroshima on a Muslim city, we would incite fanatical terrorism against ourselves for a generation.

Investment in a new strategic nuclear system would be worse than an irrelevance. It would be an extravagant diversion of resources from priorities more relevant to combating terrorism. Trident cost us more than £12.5bn – roughly half the whole defence budget for a year. Even if its successor did not have a higher price tag, it could not be bought without cutting back on the conventional capacity of our armed forces. It will be more difficult this time to find the funds for a new nuclear weapons system without those cuts being painful, because the defence budget as a percentage of GDP is now much less than the level that accommodated the Polaris and Trident programmes.

Our army is already shedding both troops and tanks. Yet Britain’s most valuable role in global stability is the professional, experienced contribution of our soldiers to peacekeeping missions, which earns us much more goodwill round the world than our nuclear submarines prowling the seas. The world would be less stable and Britain would be less secure if we were to trade in even more of those army units for son-of-Trident. It is not just peaceniks who would oppose such a choice. I suspect a clear majority of the officer corps would vote against diverting the defence budget into another generation of nuclear weapons.

It is not as if the large sums that would be required to keep us in the nuclear game would buy us an independent weapon. Dan Plesch documents in an impressive forthcoming report that all levels of the Trident system depend on US cooperation. The missiles are not even owned by us, but are leased from the Pentagon in an arrangement that Denis Healey once dubbed as “rent-a-rocket”. Renewing our collaboration with the US on nuclear weapons will deepen the bonds between Downing Street and the White House, at the very time when the rest of the nation longs for a more independent stance.

It is therefore against Britain’s national interests to replace Trident. It is also against our international obligations, notably the commitment in the non-proliferation treaty to proceed in good faith to nuclear disarmament.

To be fair, New Labour has so far had a decent record on progress towards this objective. In the past decade Labour has scrapped Britain’s other nuclear weapons, signed up to the test ban treaty and reduced the alert status of our submarines by several days. But these positive steps will be reversed if we now charge off in the opposite direction by ordering a brand-new nuclear system.

There is a chasm too wide for logic to leap, between arguing that Britain must maintain nuclear weapons to guarantee its security, and lecturing Iran et al that the safety of the world would be compromised if they behaved in the same way.

Despite the current anxieties over proliferation, more nations have given up nuclear weapons over the past generation than have developed them. Brazil and Argentina negotiated a treaty to terminate their rival nuclear programmes. Ukraine and other former Soviet states renounced the nuclear capacity they inherited. South Africa, post-apartheid, abandoned its nuclear programme and dismantled its weapon capacity.

None of those countries regards itself as any less secure than before. Nor need we, if our leadership can find the courage to let Trident be the end of Britain’s futile and costly obsession with nuclear-weapon status.