Time To Scrap Trident

This article of mine appears over on the Guardian's Comment Is Free site:

The army has never liked Trident. It is the navy's, not theirs. The army has no nuclear weapons, and it hurts. But the generals who wrote in yesterday's Times that Britain no longer needs a nuclear deterrent are simply stating fact.

Far from representing or inspiring national pride or independence, our nuclear weapons programme has only embodied the wholesale subjugation of Britain's defence capability to a foreign power. In December, the government even sold its last stake in Aldermaston to an American company. The US maintains no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, almost none of which have nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations. Those organisations are pursuing a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries. But they govern no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons?

Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to "play with the big boys". That contributes to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time we grew up.

Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without our consent, and so does not depend in any way on our possession of nuclear weapons. On the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that council.

Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor do Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are they therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7 July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of September 11 were against the country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel. Is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East?

It is mind-boggling to hear people go on about Iran. Iran's president is many years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And he only wants one (if he does) to use against the only Middle Eastern country that already has them. What does any of this have to do with us?

The Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain's nuclear weapons. The document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour conference, stated: "Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources."

Unilateral nuclear disarmament did not cause the secession of the SDP. It did not become Labour party policy until two years and a general election after the SDP was created.

For that matter, numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. In March 1964, while first lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of Nato. By 1970 Enoch Powell denounced the deterrent as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle.

Diverting the enormous sums of money invested in Trident towards public services, and towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics – with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.