Written for Nuclear Free Scotland the publication of the CND
The British public greet the new year with a VAT tax increase, along with the phase-in of the coalition-government’s savage cuts to public services which even The Telegraph reported will hit the poorest households (with incomes of under £10,000pa) 15 times harder than the richest. Meanwhile the British National Debt approaches nine hundred and ninety seven billion (£997,000,000,000) and each household will have to pay around £1,880 just to cover the interest on this massive figure, almost unfathomable to those of us who still believe that the purpose of paying tax in a liberal democracy is to fund public services rather than to pay off the rich corporate banking oligarchs. In a time where the most vulnerable members of society are being asked to bear the brunt of what are euphemistically termed ‘austerity measures,’ we see the true measure of parliamentarian hypocrisy in light of the majority support, both in the Conservative coalition and the Labour opposition, for continuing to upkeep Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, at the cost of £2 billion a year. I add my own emphasis to the turn of phrase because “Nuclear Deterrent” in itself is a misnomer. It is difficult to see the practical return we have rendered from the exorbitant amount of money successive governments have spent on nuclear weapons systems in the past, as they won us none of our wars, and deterred none of our enemies. Argentina was not deterred from seizing the Falklands even though we had the bomb and they didn’t.
Set to the backdrop of a volatile geopolitical landscape in modern times, we are entreated to believe that states such as Iran and North Korea may soon pose an imminent nuclear threat (as we were with Libya in the past) in order to justify a renewal of our nuclear arsenal in the not-too-distant future at a further cost of £76bn. Yet when our leaders make the argument from deterrence, they concomitantly empower other nations that may have nuclear aspirations to do the same. The sense of this is clear. Having initiated two legally (not to mention morally) questionable wars in the last decade, enemies of our state, and indeed those our state consider enemies, now more than ever have a compelling argument to present for their own place on the nuclear world stage.
Politicians allege that Iran develops its (perhaps ill-advised) civilian nuclear energy program only to front a desire to obtain nuclear weaponry, conveniently neglecting to mention that in order to produce weapons-grade material from uranium enrichment reactors, Iran would require thousands of centrifuges which they do not have, not to mention a nuclear warhead and delivery system. Iran’s nuclear energy initiative is also protected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who monitor for the diversion of fissionable materials to military programs. The mainstream media plays its role in supporting this agenda by blurring the lines between the Shia Muslim nation of Iran and the Sunni Muslim extremist group we know as Al Qaida, despite the fact that in their own words, Al Qaida are “sworn to kill Jews, Christians and Shias.” What is more the US accepted Iran’s help in Afghanistan against the Taliban as they were a mutual enemy. As for North Korea, the television coverage has been extremely selective, such as recently when they reported that North Korea was threatening to launch military strikes against the South, while failing to give equal notion to the fact that South Korea and the US were joining in running provocative military drills in which shells were fired close to the North Korean border. South Korea fired thousands of shells into waters within the standard 12-nautical-mile-limit of what North Korea may claim as it’s own waters. Such provocations could easily be stopped by simply instituting a no-fire zone running from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan between the 37th and 39th parallel, but where is the profit in peace? Warfare, coupled with a culture of fear, is the health of the state, allowing the justification of costly corporatist military programs such as nuclear weapons which play into the hands and pockets of the military industrial complex, the biggest industry in the world, trading at $500bn yearly. Our nation sells weapons to other countries to win influence and to reduce the unit cost of producing our own, claiming to stand up for human rights while at the same time supplying arms to dictators and despots. A great deal, perhaps over 50%, of publically funded research goes into arms development, yet it is a myth that arms spending is an effective way to create jobs. as the technology becomes more sophisticated and mechanised, it becomes less labour intensive. A Lucas aerospace worker said: “the taxpayer buys Harrier jump Jets and kidney machines. Lucas say it’s not profitable to buy kidney machines. We collected pennies on street corners to buy a machine for a little boy who was dying because the NHS couldn’t provide one. I wonder if it became unprofitable to produce aircraft , how many people would give pennies when the government wanted a new Harrier.” We could say the same of nuclear weapons, if ministers want them so badly, let them raise the money by donation, not at the cost of our vital public services. In the meantime, weapons are more profitable because government often guarantee manufacturers costs as well as an agreed profit, which is hardly to incentivise cost-efficiency.
It's time to start shaking hands instead of fists. At this point, the best thing the west could do in the interests of peace is open up communications and trade with countries like Iran and North Korea in good faith. As soon as there is a commercial stake in maintaining peace between nations the risk of conflict diminishes as neither nation stands to gain from losing any mutual benefit. Nato, which has been a block to disarmament since its inception, could be replaced with a much more loose alliance of non-nuclear European countries, each of whom would have their own independent arrangements but would agree to come to the aid of anyone who was attacked, because you don't need parity in weapons to fend off an aggressor, all you need is to create a situation where initiating aggression would come at great cost with no eventual gain to be had from success. Just look at the hiding our troops continue to receive from resistance fighters after over 9 years in Afghanistan, a poverty stricken nation!
There may be an argument for maintaining military strength in order to prevent terrorism, but far from serving as a deterrent to terrorists, nuclear weapons have no anti-terrorist application. On the other hand, they would provide fertile ground for any terrorist organisation who may become resourceful enough to buy, beg, borrow or steal one. This horrific scenario belies the tragic irony of the case that states that the more weapons you have the more safe you are, it seems our security is inversely proportionate to the size of our nuclear arsenal.
The biggest nuclear threat is not from any enemies, real or perceived, but by accident or mistake. Lets not forget the horrors caused by the Chernobyl incident, and that was only a tenth of a kiloton of fallout, one nuclear missile can involve 6,000 kilotons! No one in their right mind would use such a weapon because while the target gets the blast, the aggressor gets the fall out, and the whole planet gets a nuclear winter. The idea that maintaining nuclear weapons makes the world safer is to assume that although there are tens of thousands of these weapons, none can ever be released by mistake, in response to a false alarm or worse still fall into the hands of terrorists who would love to get their hands on one. The only safe nuke is a dismantled nuke.
In 1980 the decision to replace our Polaris-Chevaline nuclear weapons system with Trident was made by Maggie Thatcher without any parliamentary discussion at all, let there not be a repeat! We want nuclear disarmament at home to stimulate multilateral agreements. Brazil and Argentina mutually agreed to end their rival nuclear programmes, South Africa abandoned their nuclear programme post-apartheid, and when the Soviet Union was no more, Ukraine and the former soviet states renounced their inherited nuclear capacity and offered America a pact to permanently eliminate all atomic weapons, but no response was fourth-coming. If Britain gave up on the idea of renewing Trident, dismantled our weapons, and began a phased withdrawal from Nato, it would undermine the justification for nuclear weapons abroad and put us in a position to make a strong case for a nuclear convention, banning the weapons world-wide.
