Fri, Jan 23, 2009 page9

• Mutually Assured Destruction is a thing of the past

  Politicians see no votes in debating the nuclear issue, but such weapons look ever more costly and irrelevant as a deterrent in the current security climate

  • By Max Hastings / THE GUARDIAN
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  Fears change. Half a century ago, it was widely believed that a nuclear catastrophe was the worst fate that might befall the world. Millions of people in many countries engaged in passionate debate about disarmament.

  Today, by contrast, climate change and threatened economic collapse loom vastly larger in public perceptions. Last week three respected retired British soldiers, Lords Bramall and Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach, signed a letter to the Times newspaper urging the cancellation of the projected £25 billion (US$34.5 billion) replacement for the UK’s Trident nuclear system.

  “Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics,” they wrote.

  

  Yet, after causing a brief ripple, their appeal vanished to the bottom of the pool.

  No major political party in Britain sees any advantage in raising the nuclear issue. Two years ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown followed Tony Blair in insouciantly pledging to create a new-generation deterrent, largely to confirm the government’s electoral credentials as being “safe with defense.” A quarter of the parliamentary Labour party voted against the measure in 2007. This suited the leadership very well, by highlighting its separation from the left.

  The Opposition Conservatives (the Tories) are most unlikely to make waves about the Trident system ahead of an election, because they see no votes in it. If Tory leader David Cameron committed himself to dumping the deterrent, he would merely provoke a gratuitous and possibly fatal party split. So the UK’s Trident submarines will continue to sail the seas. Design work goes ahead on a new system, for which the big building decisions are due out by around 2013.

  Yet it seems mistaken to allow the UK’s politicians to bury this debate merely to suit their own tactical convenience. There are strong, though by no means one-sided, arguments in favor of abandoning the British nuclear deterrent. A real public argument about it, and about defense generally, is badly needed.

  The least convincing case for renunciation is the moral one, the flatulent notion that we would thus give a lead against nuclear proliferation. It is risible to suggest that Israel, India, Pakistan or even France would be encouraged to give up their bombs because the British set an example, or that Iran and other nations might thus be stimulated to forgo nuclear pretensions.

  EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana’s great-uncle Salvador de Madariaga, a prominent figure in the old League of Nations, wrote in his memoirs: “The trouble with disarmament ... [is] that the problem of war is tackled upside down, and at the wrong end ... Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed, they are armed because they distrust each other.”

  Israel might renounce nuclear weapons only if its dispute with the Arab world becomes sufficiently diminished that it no longer fears annihilatory attack; likewise India and Pakistan, if they settle their Kashmir dispute and become peaceful neighbors. Iran might stop trying to build a bomb only if other reliable security guarantees become available, and the Israelis give up theirs.

  A UK disarmament precedent is irrelevant to the world’s regional disputes, and almost universally perceived as such. The only questions that should matter in our own debate are: do we need our own deterrent, and can we afford it? The second point may be addressed first, because it is simpler. Many of Britain’s soldiers have always opposed Trident because it absorbs such a large part of the defense budget and diminishes funds available for conventional forces.

  This consideration now presses because the army, heavily engaged in Afghanistan and committed in several other countries, is badly under-resourced and overstretched. The soldiers say that, if — as Labour and Tories seem to agree — total funding available for defense would not be increased, then money is better spent on an army that is constantly called upon to fight, rather than on a deterrent almost unthinkable to use.

  Among those who want to keep Trident, the least plausible advocates still deploy the argument that Britain’s permanent UN security council seat would be in jeopardy if the UK became a non-nuclear power. For many of us Brits, however, it will no longer do to mouth post-imperial bromides about “keeping Britain’s seat at the top table.”

  Likewise, it seems unpersuasive when some politicians mutter: “Do we want France to be left as the only nuclear-armed power in Europe?”

  It is hard to see why this matters. The sole issue that should matter is that of UK national security. Would Britain in the mid-21st century become a significantly less safe place if the UK no longer possessed nuclear weapons? The least convincing paragraphs in the government’s 2007 white paper, making the case for the Trident replacement, mentioned the possibility of terrorists gaining possession of weapons of mass destruction.

  The threat is real enough. But it is impossible to conceive a scenario in which a British government would retaliate with Trident missiles against a terrorist group that launched a WMD strike on the UK. Where would be the navy’s target? An apartment in north London, or Karachi, or Hamburg?

  Likewise, we may dismiss Trident, and its successor, as a useful weapon in a possible confrontation with Russia or China. If the UK were abandoned by the US in such a showdown, it would be doomed. The UK’s security against big power aggression must depend on the US nuclear umbrella, until a happy and distant day comes when the heavyweights also renounce such weapons.

  By a process of elimination, it becomes plain that Trident is only relevant against a threat from a rogue state such as Iran. It would be naive not to acknowledge that, in the decades ahead, there is ample scope for tensions and possible conflict between the Muslim world and the West.

  Nuclear proliferation is more likely than not, which causes some strategic gurus to fall back on the visceral argument that it seems perverse for the UK to abandon its nuclear weapons at the moment when other nations — some of them plainly unstable and erratic — are straining every sinew to acquire them.

  The former permanent under-secretary at the UK Ministry of Defence, Sir Michael Quinlan, is an exceptionally clever man who has thought more deeply for longer about British nuclear policy than anybody else in this country. Quinlan is notably open-minded about the Trident replacement. He inclines to a view that the UK should retain some nuclear capability, but at a minimalist level, much less ambitious than the present dispensation. He argues that there is an important distinction between retaining very few nuclear weapons and none at all.

  What seems so mistaken about Britain’s present posture is what is wrong with the entire UK defense policy: It is a jumble of political expedients rather than a coherent strategy founded in rational analysis of security needs. The Tories have promised a defense review if they win the next election, and this is long overdue. My own instinct is that Trident should go. In the threadbare condition in which the UK will emerge from this economic crisis, it cannot afford it.

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