Trident and nuclear weapons

So, my first real post on my blog, and it’s about nuclear weapons.  Last night I attended the leadership hustings for the Labour Party leadership election (I’m a Labour Party member), one of the questions asked of the candidates regarded the Trident weapon system and foreign aid, firstly I’ll summarise the candidates views before I detail my own opinion.

Diane Abbott agreed with the questioner and was in favour of unilateral disarmament and an increase in foreign aid, and her position has been fairly consistent on this.  All of the other candidates both disagreed with the premise of the question, that defence issues and foreign aid are directly comparable, and were also opposed to unilateral disarmament.  Andy Burnham seemed to be the most in favour of maintaining the deterrent into the future, though he spoke of multi-lateral disarmament, the other three candidates all claimed to believe in multi-lateral disarmament and said they would be willing to revisit the debate on nuclear weapons and also stated that they thought that Trident should be included in the Strategic Defence Review.  This seems slightly disingeuous, the debate about Trident was held only four years ago, in 2006, and Trident, or any replacement, are systems that are designed to last for decades.  It is unlikely that a new debate would lead to any remarkably new conclusions so claiming to be in favour of a new debate is just a way of trying to appear open-minded and refusing to commit to a replacement as doing so is likely to be unpopular with Labour activists.

So, nuclear deterrence, MAD, massively expensive weapons systems; certainly a topic related to war, politics, and ethics.  My view is that nuclear weapons are unjustified both ethically and militarily.  It is utterly immoral to contemplate killing tens of thousands of non-combatants in a revenge attack, there is no way in which either the requirements of proportionality or of discrimination between combatants and non-combatants can be met.  Given the risks of accidents and mistakes I can see no moral justification for maintaining a nuclear deterrent.

This is not, however, to deny the risks of nuclear proliferation, or to assume that the world is peaceful and stable.  Both state and non-state groups pose potential threats that need to be taken seriously, whilst non-state groups will probably not manage to acquire a nuclear weapon any time soon they could use other WMDs in attacks. But defending against these types of threats, which are the threats we are most likely to face in the future, cannot be done with nuclear weapons.  Who do you attack if a terrorist group containing nationals from various countries, including possibly our own, trained in another country in an area outside of the control of that country’s government, and financed by various criminal enterprises manages to launch a devstating attack on Britain?

From a military perspective nuclear weapons are simply not suited to the type of conflicts we are most likely to be engaged in and are unusable against the types of groups most likely to use WMDs against us.  What we should do is scrap Trident but keep all the money within the armed forces, rather than using it as a money saving exercise.  This would allow us to significantly improve the capacity of the armed forces, and all branches of them, improve the equipment, training, and pay of servicemen and women, and build a military capability that is suited to the type of conflicts we are most likely to face.  This would involve new aircraft carriers and a larger surface fleet to protect them, more helicopters, more ground-attack aircraft to support troops (and fewer ultra high-tech and ridiculously expensive fighter planes), more troops with better equipment (but fewer tanks and artillery), and more special forces.

Trident is both militarily and ethically unjustifiable and our defence needs can be met without it; indeed, they can be better met without it by using the money it costs to invest in conventional forces.  It is ridiculous that in the Strategic Defence Review just ordered Trident is the one thing that is not under review, as this means that all of the cuts in spending on the armed forces will fall on the conventional forces which are, in fact, more important, but this is a political calculation to avoid a debate that the coalition are unwilling to have.