Letters - 18 January 2013
From Trident to Fairtrade coffee
Trident
Michael Bartlet’s clear summary of UK Trident (4 January) encourages us to remind Danny Alexander MP of the medical consequences of nuclear war – the subject of an authoritative report by the British Medical Association in 1983.
Non-state terrorists are unlikely to be deterred by Trident; but a nuclear war between states is still a real prospect, as is the inevitable consequence of a global ‘nuclear famine’. Were India and Pakistan, for example, to detonate much of their combined nuclear arsenal in a hostile exchange, the sun would be obscured and the climate – already destabilised through global warming – would be so disrupted that for the next decade or so crops the world over would fail. At least a billion people would die. The West would not escape humanitarian disaster, but the world’s poor, as ever, would bear the brunt.
A single Trident submarine, with multiple bombs on each of its missiles, has a fire power comparable to, or even greater than, the combined nuclear arsenals on the Indian subcontinent.
In March 2013 the Norwegian government will host an international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. The UK has pledged to send delegates. Civil society, led by ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) will be supporting the decision makers inside the conference hall and alerting the global public to our duty to abolish, in the interests of all humankind, these most pernicious weapons of mass destruction. It may not be rocket science, but it requires a lot of holding in the light.
Frank Boulton
Frank is a board member of Medact (www.medact.org), which supports ICAN.
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