Iran: The Aftermath

The ghastly John Bolton's incandescence at being denied his war with Iran is magnificent to behold.

But are these sailors and marines now to be sent back to Southern Iraq, where they were a lot less safe than in Iranian custody? If that realisation - that our forces are actually safer, better fed, better looked after, and what have you as prisoners of the Iranians - doesn't prompt (among much else) full British withdrawal from Iraq, then what the hell ever will?

This whole situation has at least brought it home to people in this country that Britain will never use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. But the whole rest of the world has always known that, anyway. Nasser knew it, Galtieri knew it, the IRA knew it, everybody has always known it.

Even the Soviet Union was deterred by the American and French ones, if at all (there is mounting historical doubt that there was ever any serious Soviet threat to invade Western Europe). And even the Americans never used them in Vietnam, never dropped an atom bomb on Korea, and never nuked Afghanistan even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The first George W Bush Administration was the only one that might ever have used them, and it didn't. There'll never be another.

The Russians and the Chinese would use them, if sufficiently provoked. So would the French, though with a much higher provocation threshold, and even then it would depend who was President at the time. India and Pakistan might use them against each other, but probably wouldn't. It's not at all clear against whom North Korea might ever actually wish to use them. And it says a great deal, on several levels, that Israel has never used them.

But America, almost certainly not ever since 1945, and certainly not now. And Britain, never, ever. So why we're spending another £76 billion on them, I cannot begin to imagine.