A Good, Hard, Patriotic Argument

Although he remains curiously Trotskyist and Thatcherite about the Cold War, Peter Hitchens writes:

Trident may seem to David Cameron to be a very useful weapon for attacking Jeremy Corbyn. But does it keep Britain safe?

Actually, no.

There is a good, hard, patriotic argument for getting rid of this unusable, American-controlled monstrosity before it bankrupts us and destroys our real defences.

And lazy, cheap politics shouldn’t blind us to these facts.

I write as someone who has nothing against nuclear weapons. I used to deliberately wreck the meetings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, by standing up at the back and asking awkward questions. 

I was howled down at my local Labour Party (to which I then belonged) for supporting the deterrent against the Corbyn types (he may even have been there) who wanted us naked in the face of Soviet power.

When I went to work as a reporter in the Soviet empire, I was greatly amused by a visit to Kurchatovsk, HQ of Stalin’s nuclear bomb laboratories.

All along the main street were witty banners [telling the truth, necessarily?] jeering at the folly of giving up your weapons when your enemy kept his.

How I wished I could have shown them to British ban-the-bombers who (though they were shifty about this) always had a sneaking sympathy for the Soviet Union – as it then was – and scorn for the USA.

In those days, vast concentrations of Soviet troops, tanks and planes sat in Germany ready to move westwards. I went to look at them. They were no myth.

[But they still could not have done anything, nor would anyone in charge of them have wished them to. We have known all of this, for certain, for more than 20 years.]

Our nuclear bombs neutralised this incessant blackmailing threat. They made sure that if those armies moved one inch beyond their territory, it would end in Armageddon.

So they never did move, and the threat was empty. It worked. Then the facts changed. And, as that clever man John Maynard Keynes once drily remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

The Soviet Union collapsed. I watched it happen, before my eyes. Its armies and navies melted away and its empire dissolved.

Modern Russia, for all the silly nonsense about a ‘New Cold War’, would be our friend if we let her be, and has no interest in attacking us or any conceivable reason for doing so.

The USA, meanwhile, has ceased to be the arsenal of freedom and has become instead the headquarters of a bumbling neo-liberal policy whose main achievement has been to turn the Middle East into a war zone, which we could easily stay out of if we wanted to.

The principal threat to this country’s prosperity, liberty and independence has been, for many years, the European Union, whose agents work tirelessly inside our borders to subjugate us, our laws, economy, trade and territorial seas, to foreign governance.

Trident is useless against this, just as it is against the mass migration now transforming our continent, and against the terrorism of the IRA (to whom we surrendered, despite being a nuclear power) and Islamic State.

We do not even control Trident, relying on the USA for so much of its technology and maintenance that we could never use it without American approval. How independent is that? 

Meanwhile the Army is visibly shrivelling, demoralised, ill-equipped, historic regiments hollowed out and merged, experienced officers and NCOs leaving. 

Something similar is happening to the Navy, saddled with two vast joke aircraft carriers whose purpose is uncertain, even if they ever get any aircraft to carry.

The RAF is a little better off, but not much.

This is caused mainly by the giant bill for renewing Trident, which will probably end up more than £100 billion, at a time when we are heavily in debt already.

If there were any obvious or even remote use for it, then maybe this could be justified. But there isn’t. We could easily maintain a small arsenal of H-bombs or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, just in case, for far less.

It is not just bearded pacifists who doubt its use.

Senior civil servants, serious military experts, senior officers in all branches, privately and in some cases publicly reckon it is simply not worth the money.

Even if we decide to go ahead with it, I confidently predict we will have to cancel it (at great cost) when the long-awaited economic crisis finally strikes.

It would be a great shame if we failed to have a proper debate about this, just because it was easier to take cheap shots at the Labour Party.

A grown-up country, and a grown-up government, would address it now.