It is right up, or down, there with "Ed Miliband's stand on Syria caused the Russian action in Ukraine," in which case Miliband is far and away the most powerful Briton on earth, whose case to be Prime Minister is unanswerable.
I refer to the theory that if Ukraine had held on to her nuclear weapons, then she would not now be subject to whatever indignity it is that those making that claim contend is being inflicted upon her by Russia, and that therefore the United Kingdom ought also to retain arms of that sort.
That would have meant nuclear weapons in the hands of the Viktor Yanukovich whom they so revile, as well as in the hands of Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who is even more their bête noire.
Admittedly, those would have been joined in the nuclear club by Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, who is easily the worst of the lot. But, or "and therefore", who is the one with their own beloved Tony Blair on his payroll.
Yet even if they were right that Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan needed nuclear weapons in order to deter Russia, then in order to deter whom, what or where would Britain need nuclear weapons?
Or was the whole of the United Kingdom in the Soviet Union until that entity collapsed? Is the eastern half of the United Kingdom Russian-speaking, and historically part of the Tsardom? Was some farthest corner of that eastern half (Shetland, say, or Kent) part of Russia until 1954?
If Ukraine did still have nuclear weapons, then they would now be in the hands of a neo-Nazi regime, to the aid of which neo-Nazis are flocking from all over Europe and beyond.
And if Britain does need a nuclear deterrent, which she does, then the nuclear deterrent that she needs is civil nuclear power. Together with the exploitation of her vast reserves of coal.
I believe the point is that, in order to convince Ukraine to give up her nuclear weapons, we signed a deal to guarantee the inviolability of her borders.
ReplyDeleteBy doing nothing to protect her from violent invasion, we are reneging on that deal.
And we are sending out the message to other regimes that-if they wish to protect themselves from invasion by bigger neighbours-they must join the Nuclear Club.
Nobody is going to give up the bomb and rely on our protection any more, after watching how we abandoned Ukraine to its fate, when she gave up hers.
This does alot for the argument that nuclear weapons and national independence are intertwined.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Buckley used to say that whether you are for or against nuclear weapons ultimately boils down to whether or not you regard liberty as more important than biological survival.
As Ukraine now sees, it gave up its liberty the day it gave up the bomb.
From whom, exactly, is the United Kingdom at any risk of invasion?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about Britain, by the way.
ReplyDeleteWe probably don't need the Bomb any more-although I hope that giving it up wouldn't make us an unofficial protectorate of America.
She uses her monopoly on nuclear weapons ("disarmanent for everyone else except us and Israel") as a protection racket-to bully the rest of the world into doing its bidding, and force them to accept America's conditional 'protection' in exchange for giving up their resources to US investors.
They even threatened Saddam Hussein with nukes if he dared stand up to Israel.
I can very clearly see why some in Iran might want the Bomb-since they rightly suspect it would free them from the tyranny of Israel and America.
ReplyDeleteIt's for precisely that reason that Israel and America fear this so much.
As Norman Finkelstein says, when Israel speaks of its "deterrent capacity" it means its monopoly on nuclear weapons and thus its ability to bully the whole region.
They know Iran would never launch a genocidal strike-they simply don't want it to have a deterrent of its own.