Letters - 08 February 2013
From Trident to Holocaust Memorial Day
Trident developments
There has been a significant development regarding Trident, the UK’s own weapon of mass destruction.
Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, has stated that Britain does not need to replace the Trident missile fleet with ‘like for like’ nuclear submarines that will cost the country billions of pounds at a time of national austerity. He said the military should accept that there are ‘credible and compelling alternatives’ to continuous at-sea deterrence, adding that the Treasury has no ‘magic pot of money’ for Trident, and that the costs of a new system must be met by the Ministry of Defence.
Senior officers in the army and air force have denounced Trident as an unaffordable irrelevance to the UK’s real security needs. This comes at a time when opinion polls show over fifty per cent of people in the UK opposed to Trident. More than seventy per cent are opposed in Scotland.
The cost of upgrading Trident has been put at about £97 billion for its projected life to the 2060s. This weapon is a clear breach of UK obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and is likely to entice other nations to also base their ‘security’ on nuclear weapons.
Mohamed ElBaradei, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: ‘it is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and are about to buy a new pack.’
Ken Veitch
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