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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.”


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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

Follow this link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book written for the 40th Anniversary of Amnesty International

"Like Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty International"

 

 

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