Thought for the Week: Why did we fight?
Ken Veitch reflects on war and peace
Last year one of my Christmas presents was All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings’ history of the second world war. The excellent reviews were justified – the title sums up the mayhem and the horror that has always characterised warfare. He describes families packed into London tube stations to shelter from the Blitz; seamen adrift in the Atlantic after being torpedoed; the sadistic torture and murder of prisoners in Burma; the waves of Red Army attacks and street fighting in Berlin; and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those of my generation – I was born in 1943, on a day when four people died in a bombing raid close by – refer to ‘the war’ almost as though peace has prevailed ever since; would that this were true.
My mother, by inclination a pacifist and with a close connection to Friends, persuaded me, while I was still small, that war is both terrible and stupid. Her father had been an engineer on a ship taking troops to the Boer war and her aunt served in Church of Scotland welfare units close to the Somme battle front. They both had a tale to tell; I still have their diaries.
I grew up in Altrincham where, as a small boy, I was sent to buy the paper. A lurid headline proclaimed ‘British H Bomb Ready Soon’. I came back troubled, wishing fervently that such a thing would never drop on me.
The next most troubling event was the Thatcher government’s decision to allow the stationing of US cruise missiles in Britain; missiles designed as first strike weapons to be used in pursuit of the US drive for global military supremacy, a drive that continues to this day. Britain had no control over these weapons, and has no control over US H bombs stationed in our country now. I remember how depressed and useless Kay and I felt as television showed those missiles arriving at RAF Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth, and how uplifted we were when we joined the huge protests at these infamous places and later in Trafalgar Square.
Then came Trident. It was the complete contradiction of the UK’s undertaking, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to be working for ‘general and complete disarmament’. Trident is Britain’s weapon of mass destruction paraded, at astronomical cost, as our ‘minimum independent nuclear deterrent’. With a submarine on constant patrol carrying almost two thousand times the fire power of the Hiroshima bomb, it is hardly ‘minimal’. It is not independent because the missiles and other vital technology are supplied by the US. Nor is it a mere ‘deterrent’ because Trident is a precision weapon, designed for a nuclear first strike.
In my correspondence with the Ministry of Defence, no one has been able to explain why, if Trident ultimately guarantees our security, any other country (such as Iran) may not follow our example – so the world becomes safer with every nation able to use its H bombs if feeling threatened. In 1945 Britain ceased to be a major power, yet continues, dangerously, to masquerade as one. In his 1995 anniversary address to the Royal Society, Michael Atiyah stated: ‘I believe history will show that the insistence on a UK nuclear capability was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources and a significant factor in our economic decline over the past fifty years.’
The extinguishing of all life on our planet could happen, by miscalculation, at the touch of a button. Did the politicians of 1914 know what they were unleashing?
Max Hastings describes war in a book. Harry Patch, who served in the first world war trenches, was ‘the last fighting Tommy’. He died in 2009 aged 111. He sums up war in two sentences: ‘Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table – so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?’
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