Drop the nukes and take the power back

Scottish Labour voted against the renewal of Trident on Sunday. There was a 70% majority, landing a poke in the eye for Conservative and New Labour nuke-lovers alike.

George Eaton writes that this vote has deepened the divisions in Labour and that if the party holds onto its position of renewing Trident, Nicola Sturgeon will be quick to assert that the vote proves independence from Westminster is necessary.

It is starting to feel like Scotland really might leave the Union. Sturgeon says that a second referendum is inevitable if Westminster persists with ideologies like Austerity and nulcear weaponry, far removed from Scottish desires. That’s without a possible, and clear mandate granting break with the E.U in 2017.

With this in mind, given that we are legally committed to abolishing nuclear weapons, they are morally abhorrent and that they have already almost been fired 6 times accidentally and 7 times through political crisis – would it not be a good time to take a deep breath and let them go? They hang like a guillotine over our planetary neck, held in place with rusty screws, swaying menacingly in the political winds.

It’s a complex issue, but ultimately it comes down to our security arrangement with the U.S and domestic politics.

The House of Commons website states “Anchoring itself to the US is a fundamental part of British security strategy, and nuclear weapons are seen as both an important part of the anchor and a symbol of its strength.[6] The UK, however, remains heavily dependent on the United States for its ongoing deployment of strategic nuclear weapons in the Trident system. Without ongoing US support the UK would likely cease to be a nuclear weapon state.”

That’s a polite way of saying; we are a client state.

The Oxford Research Group says “the politics of the UK’s nuclear weapons system, known as Trident, exists on two levels. The first level – the public realm – is visible and open, where citizens, mainstream media and most interested MPs debate the pros and cons of nuclear weapons based on what they believe is the most salient information.”

“The second level – at the highest reaches of Whitehall – involves, for Nick Ritchie, a ‘tightly controlled and secretive’ policy-making process, where top-level bureaucratic, military and political figures make the key decisions on nuclear weapons. In addition, it is vital to appreciate the degree to which British nuclear dependence on the US, from Polaris in the 1960s through to Trident and beyond, narrows the parameters for UK political decision-making.”

Dan Plesch writes in 2011 “[t]he absorption of the UK into the US nuclear force was made explicit only this year. Stephen Johnson, the American admiral in charge of the US Trident programme, gave his annual progress report to Congress. Among his top accomplishments for “sustainment of our [ie the US] sea-based deterrent” was sending HMS Victorious to sea after a refit. He does not list the British Trident submarine separately. No, the British Trident submarine is simply listed with the American ones under the heading ‘Today’s Force’.”

So our military is a branch of the American military. So what? Has that not kept us safe so far?

The Oxford Resreach Group continues “the UK’s imperial history, nuclear status and unwavering support of the US have caused it to maintain both disproportionately high military spending and a low threshold for using force as a tool of foreign policy, leading to continuous overseas interventions.” Open to debate on scrapping Trident, ex defence secutary Eric Joyce said “Britain [has] no independent foreign policy… and [is] simply locked into “US electoral cycles”.

Donald Trump continues his strong run in the Republican candidate race. Just sayin’.

The Nuclear Education Trust and the Nuclear Education Service conducted a joint study into UK military attitudes towards nuclear weapons and disarmament. The majority advocated keeping a deterrent stating “the need to deter against future unspecified threats; to deter nuclear blackmail, to deter against nuclear threats, and the importance of not specifying what Trident is deterring.” A significant minority opposed renewal and “contested all these views arguing that deterrence is implausible and an empty threat.”

There is fear that if we don’t have nukes, we could easily be invaded or challenged. As we can never actually use our nuclear weapons, Argentina went ahead and invaded the Falklands anyway, despite our nuclear sub lurking around in their waters, warheads poised.

Henry Kissinger, strategic genius and general king war hawk extraordinaire, points out the strategic dilemmas that nuclear weapons bring their owners in his ‘Nulcear Weapons and Foriegn Policy’. Yogesh Joshi paraphrases: “nuclear weapons provided belligerents with an excess of firepower. Unlike the wars of the past that were restricted by the dearth of resources and ability to project power, nuclear weapons have obliterated all constraints on war limitation…Why would any country whose national survival is threatened resort to nuclear weapons? If they are used, would nuclear war achieve anything?” Kissinger goes on to point out that restraint on the ability to apply full force stunts the ability of the State to carry out its political objectives.

Kissinger was not against nuclear weapons at this point. To the contrary, he was delighted with the ultimate freedom promised to the nuclear state – no need for allies and tiresome diplomacy when you have a shed-load of nukes. After several years tinkering with the prospect of a ‘limited nuclear war’, in which each side entered into a sort of gentleman’s agreement not to annihilate the whole world but just drop a couple of bombs in order to diffuse tensions and settle disputes, he gave up and admitted that they were useless; there are no circumstances under which the political objectives of the state could justify detonation, due to the sheer scale of their destructive power. He has since written in support of multilateral disarmament. He points out that the U.S cannot disarm alone, and not until regimes like North Korea are brought back into the fold. Along with some other former high profile WMD advocates, he later wrote an open letter in the Wall Street Journal, urging U.S leaders “to support a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world… in recognition of a clear and threatening development.”

Multilateral disarmament – everyone puts their guns down at the same time – is nice but it is unimaginable in today’s world. Could the UK play some small part in moving the world closer to the conditions that would allow a wind-down?

A broader perspective of safety

With nuclear weapons it is necessary to consider our safety from a global perspective because wherever they go off we all have serious problems. We live in a single ecosystem as well as a global economic system.

As a permanent member of the U.N Security Council and a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, our decision will not affect only ourselves. We will set a precedent either way, having effects both in terms of proliferation (more countries will go ahead and develop their own bombs if we are saying the only way to be safe is to have nuclear bombs) and on the behavior of current nuclear states (our decision not to renew our weapons will reduce legitimacy for the other nuclear states that are all currently engaged in full scale and illegal modernisation programs).

New states are acquiring nuclear weapons at a rate of around one new state every decade. With each new state, the odds of an accident happening or a crisis escalating goes up a notch. Human fallibility and technical glitches occur and will continue to occur like clockwork. Whatever strategic advantage there was, will be diluted over time, as more and more states join the nuclear elite.

Tony Blair said of Trident “The expense is huge and the utility … non-existent in terms of military use”. In the end he thought giving it up would be “too big a downgrading of our status as a nation”. Our politicians will not want to challenge the status quo; that is their nature. But they do want to get re-elected. If enough pressure comes from domestic populations it can change foreign policy. When forces combine at the right moment; progress is made even in areas that seem impossible to change.

Question is: will we still be safe if we don’t have those badass subs out on the prowl? No less safe than we are right now. It is a time of high turbulance, with violence errupting all over the world. Our nuclear arsenal makes no difference in our ability to counter that. To be safe we all need to disarm.

There is no country better placed to make the bold move of abandoning it’s nuclear weapons, or scaling them down and opening the door for others to do the same than we are right now. The French are a declined power like us, but they don’t have the prospect of a broken Union around the corner. We have a lifelong campaigner against nuclear weapons in Labour leadership and a U.S president who genuinely wants multilateral disarmerment.

The possibility of loosing Scotland gives a good solid geopolitcal reason to make a break with our long standing arrangement with the Americans, and means none of our nuclear P5 buddies loose too much face. The break up of the Union would also be a ‘big downgrading’ of our nation and there would then be a land boarder to defend with a country possessing a rather intimate knowledge of our military and government.

Getting rid of Trident will not free the world from the tyranny of nuclear weapons and it might ruffle some feathers at first. The guillotine will still be up there and we will still be members of NATO – with all that brings and requires, but it could be a beginning. John Muir said “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

Since our weapons are extortionaite, useless, hinder our military, are not under our control, are causing a rift between England and Scotland, are vulnerable to mistakes and systems failures and could potentially bring about the end of life on Earth; it’s got to be worth a shot.

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The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament is organising a day of collective action tomorrow, November 4th. You can do this one from your living room; it is a mass lobby of our UK MPs via email.

Learn more about the arguments against nuclear weaponry from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. They have lots of ways you can get involved, including writing an article to your local newspaper.