The recent second failure of a Trident missile to test-fire properly has prompted a personal review of more than 60 years’ membership the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) – I still have the battered pin badge I acquired, as a student, on the Aldermaston March of 1960.
The arguments forwarded in those early days were based mostly on the morality of owning nuclear weapons, and were consequently often difficult to make. But after all these decades, simpler arguments based more on logic and on military history have become apparent.
Continuous global conflict since WWII
I cannot think of a single year of the nearly 80 that have passed since the end of the second world war in which there has not been a war of some sort somewhere on planet Earth. Wars can be categorised as wars of aggression or defence, of between religions or close religious sects, of liberation or nationalism, guerilla or conventional, civil or foreign, by direct opponents or by proxy, and most recently over water or food supplies. But another, simpler, way of classifying them would be:
- Wars where neither side has nuclear weapons.
- Wars where both sides have nuclear weapons.
- Wars where one side does, and the other does not, have nuclear weapons.
CND: nuclear weapons are as good as useless
It is clear from a study of the history of all these wars that in none of them have nuclear weapons played any role whatsoever, either in their instigation nor causation, in their ongoing conduct, or in their final resolution.
Nuclear weapons are not military devices; they are not available to on-the-scene military commanders to deploy as any other killing device may be. They are purely political weapons used as bargaining chips in international conflicts or negotiations.
Trident’s effectiveness as a deterrent
The proponents of Trident argue that if we were unilaterally to divest ourselves of them, we would lay ourselves open to invasion. in response, I would ask why none of the Scandinavian countries, nor any of the European countries other than ourselves and France, have suffered invasion. Or, to reverse the argument, we could ask why our Polaris devices of the 1980s failed to deter Galtieri’s Argentinian forces from invading the British territory of the Falklands.
To take this latter point further: the UK owned nuclear weapons during the local conflicts in Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Egypt and others, in which similar undeterred aggressions against us took place. The complex politics behind the wars of Korea and Vietnam (neither nominally nuclear) and the USA and ourselves (both nuclear) make simplistic analysis inappropriate; suffice to say that the nuclear capabilities of the West, or of the USSR, or China, played no part in the conduct or resolution of either war.
But non-nuclear states were actually invaded?
A champion of nuclear deterrence may say, what of Czechoslovakia and Hungary? They were non-nuclear states and they were each invaded by the nuclear Soviet Union. And, even more so, what of Ukraine, which is the one country in the world that once had nuclear weapons, but was invaded after they lost them?
All of that is true, but while the first two were actually being invaded by Soviet armies, they were nominally under the aegis and protection of the Warsaw Pact, fronted and mostly armed by their invaders. And, in the case of the weapons sent back by Ukraine, they were old Soviet (now Russian) weapons, and they can hardly be considered as ever serving as deterrents against their actual owners and sole potential users.
Trident’s failures deemed costly vanity
The excuse offered by UK defence secretary Grant Shapps for the dismal showings of the Trident missiles that, in effect, ‘It’ll be alright on the night’ is so pathetic as to merit minimal response. It would be risible if it were not so appallingly expensive. I test my home fire alarm on a regular basis; I wonder what the response of my insurance company would be if my house burned down and I admitted that the two previous tests had shown that the alarm was not working. Would they pay out? I hardly think so!
Trident is clearly clapped out, but the tragedy in this highly cash-strapped nation, is that most of our politicians believe that we need to go on committing possibly hundreds of billions of pounds in sustaining what is little more than nationalistic vanity.
CND’s philosophy and ambition
To be clear, CND does not advocate, nor has ever advocated, that all of NATO should unilaterally divest itself of its nuclear weaponry. The clear and appropriate way forward is to develop and encourage the bilateral negotiations that began in earnest between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and to encourage the instigation of similar talks between other nuclear pairings in the world, like Pakistan and India.
What CND wants, and has always wanted, is for the UK (we cannot speak for any other nation) to recognise the irrelevance of our relatively puny forces, to recognise that calling them independent is a fantasy (who could contemplate any British prime minister pressing the button without the clear and explicit consent of the USA and the rest of NATO?), and to make the supreme and significant global gesture of relinquishing those that we do nominally own.
A final thought to contemplate
A final question. The state of Israel owns nuclear weapons that they refer to as their deterrent (which was ignored by Hamas), and are as anxious as any other nation to prevent either Iran or Iraq from acquiring them. But if it is acceptable for them, and us, and France, and China, and India, and Pakistan to further the argument of deterrence through Mutually Assured Destruction, why is it wrong for Iran to make the same argument with respect to the Israeli weaponry?
At my time of life, my days of activism are long gone. But I am still capable of applying simple logic and reason, and to sustaining the belief that the UK relinquishing its nuclear weapons will have precisely no effect whatever on any worldwide balance of power, political or military, but that our hard-pressed exchequer, our NHS and our schools, will benefit tremendously
