When I was in my late teens I used to dream about the bomb. That’s the nuclear bomb. I’d see it going off in the distance and experience this terrible sense of doom, that everything and everybody was over, finished, no way back. My friends, who dreamed about girls, laughed and told me to get less pretentious nightmares.
I mention this because the dream of nuclear warfare still exists. Not in my head but in the head of such as former Chief of Staff General Sir Michael Jackson (he of Bloody Sunday) and in the heads that constitute the British government. In a time of austerity, British politicians are getting ready to to press on with Britain’s nuclear deterrent in the shape of four nuclear submarines. These over their lifetime will cost £100 billion.
So who are the enemy on whom such expense must be lavished? Well, not Russia. Or Libya. Or Iraq. Or Iran. In fact, nobody seems to know who this enemy of Britain is, that she must load her holsters at such expense. There is a debate within the British military and within British politics, that there really isn’t the need to have four nuclear submarines constantly patrolling the seas, three would do. And what would those three do? Why, if push came to shove, they’d direct nuclear weapons at the country they saw as threatening Britain. Practically nobody – Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems – is suggesting Britain should get rid of its nuclear weapons entirely. That’s what Iran should do, and North Korea – unreliable states. Britain, the US, France, Israel – that’s a totally different matter.
Leaving aside the obscene amounts of money involved, let’s concentrate on what nuclear weapons, by definition, do. They kill people by the million. Not just soldiers but everyone – soldiers, civilians, men, women, children, animals, vegetation – the lot. So the people who lecture us about using politics to resolve our differences rather than violence are themselves prepared to use nuclear weapons or the threat thereof to slaughter the enemy, even though they don’t know who the enemy is, and in doing so probably spark a nuclear exchange that would be fatal for the planet.
Are the British people mad? Have their senses deserted them, that they allow these crazies to take their taxes and spend vast amounts to protect them from nobody knows who, using insane civilian-killing weaponry? No, Virginia, don’t answer that. Just let it sit. There are some actions so monstrous, so indisputably evil, words shrivel and die before them.
Scotland has weapons that it does not need – like Trident which both the Tories and Labour have committed to replacing at a cost of billions of pounds. Civic Scotland has consistently opposed the siting of nuclear weapons here; an independent Scotland will commit to their removal ( White Paper – Scotland’s Future)
Scotland urgently requires marine patrol vessels and that’s where the money will be spent.
Jude :
Younger readers may not be of an age to remember the Cuban Missile Crises of the Autumn of 1962. Personally , I was an innocent ten year old schoolboy back then but I clearly remember the absolute fear the adults of that time felt, specially when they asked us at school to pray for a peaceful resolution. That ,”on the brink of chaos” ,fear was tangible then and is now mostly forgotten.Thankfully everyone stepped back from the brink.
I think many of us have now all but forgotten that background threat of total and absolute annihilation . It did in many ways impact on a generation of thoughtful people growing up in the 1960s and shaped much of our subsequent thinking. There is still justified fear of nuclear power. The “Them and Us ” fears have echoes in all those alien invasion and monster movies that were so popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
Our fears have now mostly been dissipated and diluted and side-lined by more mundane fears of cultural and religious feuds worldwide but those same potentially unstable hands in power ,are still capable of dropping us all into a holocaust.
Cue another watch of Kubrick’s” Doctor Strangelove”. and may Pete Seeger rest in peace.
“Where have all the flowers gone….”
I think the British people are so accustomed to the rhetoric (nearly used another word there) spewed forth by their political leaders, they never question them. They will foam at the mouth about Romanians and Bulgarians, they will rant about benefit scroungers but they ignore the really big problems. Like the waste of money that is the royal family and the obscene money spent on these hideous weapons of death. God alone knows the circumstances in which these things would be used.
Jude
Much as it pains me I have to agree with you on this one.
Trident is a scandalous and useless waste of public money. in what scenario would they ever be used?
How is it that other European countries get by without such weapons? Germany, Italy, the Scandanavians, Spain etc.
Are their people trembling under their beds every night for fear of nuclear attack? I doubt it.
Gio : I think the “need to have ” the potent weaponry is a residual vanity , a leftover from days of glorious empire that many establishment politicians still like to mentally and nostalgically, hark back to. The idea that they are still somehow the big policeman on the block, with the biggest truncheon and “Johnny Foreigner” in Spain , Germany and the like, had better believe it.
Believing that they won the war single-handed in the pages of “the Hotspur”, “the Victor”, “Valiant” and “Warlord” as children, is one thing but the prosaic truth is that without American and Russian intervention we’d probably be speaking German by now.
That was then…The world is a different, more connected place now but still insular, closed societies like North Korea, China and Iran have the potential to build nuclear weaponry.
Education about the potential dangers would be more useful than building an even bigger club than the the other guy.
This kind of weaponry , as long as it exists, has the potential to destroy all life on earth….not just the perceived threat .Russia[ as it was then] and the U.S.A. in the wake of the Cuban missile Crisis, had to do a major rethink about the very existence of nuclear missiles. The Arms Race had to stop. for a while we had the less innocuous “Space Race ” to get a man to the moon to keep idle hands busy
.
If they now want to waste more of our collective money [and what’s new in that?] encourage them to explore space in friendly rivalry and send a few poor buggers to live on Mars or develop a new and novel fuel that will keep us warm in winter cheaply or free. What about a “Perpetual Motion Machine”?….any bloody thing but a new way of killing us all!
Jude
Its China.
Pure and simple, China is the biggest threat to the 21st century.
Or rather its The USA.
The west have hegemony on oil. China wants it. They’re getting bigger, there will be resource wars and it will be China vs the US in the future.
Is THE UKs arms industry/military,the real reason they have not engaged fully in the European Union,which was created to ensure peace ? .Is the military and all that goes with it,the most important part of the British identity/society/economy ? I think it might be.