No deterrent
Ken Veitch believes the decision to renew Trident is misguided
On 18 July MPs voted by a large majority for the continuation/renewal of Trident, the UK’s weapon of mass destruction, with only the Scottish National Party MPs voting solidly against it. The prime minister confirmed her willingness to use Trident. There was the usual ‘justification’ for Trident as providing us with the ‘best possible insurance policy in an uncertain world’. Our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were not mentioned.
So, for most people, that’s that. But is it? This vote has huge ramifications and these will affect us for decades. I would like to set out some of the key facts that the government would prefer us not to know.
Trident, originally developed in the United States, is a system of thermonuclear weapons (H bombs) launched from nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. The system was procured from the US in 1982 in an agreement between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. At present the UK has one of its four Vanguard class missile submarines always on patrol. Every submarine carries up to sixteen missiles and each one is armed with eight independently targetable warheads with an individual firepower of eight ‘Hiroshimas’. The missiles have a range of 7,500 miles.
Trident was described, in the debate, simply as a ‘deterrent’. But this weapon was designed to provide a ‘counterforce’ capability, with a power and accuracy giving the option of a ‘first, pre-emptive’ nuclear strike against any perceived threat.
Nuclear war could easily begin accidentally. Humans are not perfect. They may perceive incorrectly and there have already been many hair-raising incidents involving nuclear weapons. The US military posture, with the UK as its key ally and supporter, has, I believe, always been the pursuit of global military supremacy, backed by the threat and use of military force. Nuclear weapons, including the first-strike option provided by Trident, are part of this strategy.
The UK buys its Trident missiles from the US, so the continuation of this system will tie the UK into the expansionist foreign and military policy of the US for the projected lifetime of a new Trident system. This would be for at least another forty years.
In the UK, well before the vote on Trident renewal, hundreds of millions of pounds have already been spent on the new system at Barrow-in-Furness, where the submarines will be built at a cost of some £8 billion each, and at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, where some of our top scientists are working to enhance even further the destructive power of Trident.
The current projected outlay for the construction and maintenance of Trident is put by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, using government estimates, at around £200 billion. This is at a time when NHS trusts are being instructed to keep strictly to budget.
One former crewmember of a submarine, in a report that has been dismissed by the Navy, described his Trident submarine as a ‘disaster waiting to happen’. He said safety procedures were regularly disregarded, with secret information accessible to unauthorised personnel, lax security (‘it’s harder to get into most night clubs’), dysfunctional equipment and crewmembers with disturbing personality traits.
The UK’s Trident fleet is based at Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, and the warheads are regularly moved from Berkshire, where they are made, along Britain’s roads and motorways. The convoys are escorted by armed personnel, and sometimes pass less than a mile from my home. An enquiry to my local council about procedures in the event of an accident elicited only a vague reply.
Much derision has been directed at Jeremy Corbyn for his refusal to condone nuclear weapons, not least by one-time CND members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. On this subject I believe he speaks a truth that many Friends also hold.
For me, the key question, which no supporter of our UK ‘deterrent’ has ever been able to answer, is: ‘if nuclear weapons truly ensure the future security of the UK, why should other nations, such as Iran and North Korea, not be allowed to follow our example… and so make the world an even safer place?’
Comments
Ken Veitch (“No deterrent”, 29 July) sets out powerful reasons why Trident is a bad idea. I agree with all of them, including the logical inconsistency with which he ends. But his article seems to me to miss the point. Advocates of Trident are well aware of all these negatives, but see it as the best way to maintain British security in a thermonuclear world of powers pursuing their selfish self-interest. This is the multilateralist position; it is what Trident opponents fundamentally have to deal with, and it is also a big challenge to the Quaker peace testimony. Ken rightly criticises the American military stance. The US is not alone. While Putin is not Hitler, his seizure of Crimea from Ukraine was a carbon copy of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, and his cynical repudiation of the 1994 Russo-Ukrainian security agreement showed the same mentality. Both reflect the old gun-boat “might is right” and “I’ll have my way” attitudes which imperial Britain espoused nakedly in its nineteenth-century foreign and colonial wars but which we hoped had been superseded by the UN. But Security Council members continue to prioritise their own agendas. Timmon Wallis’s The Truth about Trident has exposed the flakiness of pro-Trident arguments, without however persuading the majority of our MPs. How do we counter these arguments, and what can we offer in their place? One response is the ‘human security’ approach: as Rowan Williams put it in last year’s Olivier Lecture, ‘my neighbour’s security is my security’ (see ludlowquakers.co.uk, and Celia McKeown’s TED lecture at tedxexeter.com/2015/06/01/celia-mckeon-video/). Another is the active espousal of non-violent mass action on the (inter)national scale as advocated by Gandhi, Gene Sharp and others. But these are not easy options: they involve costs, risks and vulnerability. And non-violent assertion of principle taken to its limits will, we know, lead to crucifixion (or more modern forms of destruction), even if it may also as a consequence transform the world. Are we modern Friends up for that?
By Roger B on 22nd August 2016 - 23:34
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