At last a debate
on
Britain's nuclear weapons
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
March 21, 2007
LONDON - On its submarines Britain has 48 nuclear
warheads, each one eight times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that obliterated
Hiroshima. In other words, Prime Minister Tony Blair theoretically could
order the almost instant incineration of 384 large cities around the world.
Barely anyone in parliament has mentioned it, much
less debated it in the nine and a half years Blair has been in office,
until the government decided to hold a debate last week, pushed to finally
do so because the U.S., the supplier of the Trident missiles (but not
the warheads which are home-made), has made it clear that it will soon
be taking a decision on replacing its own Tridents and the UK must decide
in tandem what to do with its.
As Blair slides gently, but not particularly gracefully, to the end of
his term in office it looks as if the prime minister has decided to kick
this ball down the field for his successor to deal with. If it is, as
is generally believed, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon
Brown, it will be interesting to see how the principled son of a Church
of Scotland minister deals with this moral conundrum, particularly since
powerful voices within the opposition Conservative Party seem to be increasingly
both anti the Iraq war and privately doubtful about the value of an independent
nuclear deterrent.
For the moment Brown is astute enough to know that
if Washington became alarmed it could try and mess up his smooth road
to the succession. But there is a chance that once in office he could
back pedal on Blair’s enthusiasm.
Perhaps there is a window of opportunity for nuclear disarmers, particularly
since the British are at the forefront of a European Union initiative
to persuade Iran to forgo nuclear weapons, a country that lives in a far
more dangerous neighborhood than Britain. After all, the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, which the West brandishes before Iran, demands categorically that
the old ‘nuclear haves’ must seriously engage in nuclear disarmament.
And if Britain can argue the right to have nuclear weapons why shouldn’t
every other self-respecting country?
“History is full of surprises”, argued one participant in
a recent Oxford conference on the subject. That is about as tough minded
as the proponents of nuclear deterrence get these days. But set against
that is the growing consensus among historians that it is now clear in
retrospect that even in the darkest days of the Cold War there was never
a real possibility that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear attack
against the West. Stalin’s ambitions in Europe were satisfied by
the Yalta settlement made with Churchill and Roosevelt.
General George Lee Butler concluded after his many years as head of U.S.
Strategic Command (the man responsible for putting into action a president’s
order to begin a nuclear attack) that nuclear weapons “are irrational
devices” and argues that the U.S. itself should disarm. “I
have arrived at the conclusion that it is simply wrong for any mortal
to be invested with the authority to call into question the survival of
the planet.”
Professor Robert O’Neill, the former professor of the History of
War at the University of Oxford, argues against the notion that in a nuclear-free
world a cheater would be king. “No, because using a few nuclear
weapons or threatening to use them would be of very limited value. Either
the bluff would be called or, if it turns out not to be a bluff and someone
does use them, they would open themselves to unimaginable retaliation
by the whole international community, backed by intense outrage around
the world. For the nation that did use nuclear weapons it would just be
another way of committing suicide.”
Field Marshal Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence
Staff, argues, “The most important thing is to persuade everyone
that the target has got to be total elimination. If you start peddling
solutions which are not quite total elimination you lose the whole force
of the argument.”
Yet against this passion brought by ex military men is ranged popular
inertia on one side and on the other a deeply embedded culture of nuclear
deterrence, not just in the military-industrial complex but in academia
and the media. As former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (ex nuclear
hawk, now a dove) has analysed it, “there is an enormous body of
vested interests not only through lobbying in Washington and Moscow but
through influence on intellectuals, on people who write books and articles
in newspapers or do features on television. It’s very difficult
as a reader or viewer to distinguish by one’s own judgement what
is led by those interests and what is led by rational conclusion.”
But surely it is not beyond the intelligence of the very intelligent Gordon
Brown to develop a mind of his own on the subject and start the anti-nuclear
ball rolling.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
reached by phone +44 7785 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Jonathan
Power
2007 Book
Conundrums
of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice
“Conundrums
of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging
from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can
we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will
China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of
his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the
International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the
hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.
Jonathan
Power's book from 2001
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