Why we need to cut Trident

By Tom Miller

Nationalisation of the commanding heights, nuclear disarmament… though I suspect it might not meet his total approval, Michael Foot must be somewhat pleased at some of the post-Blair developments in Labour’s thinking.

Ministers must be pleased too. The dynamic force that is Barack Obama has opened up large stretches of political ground in the UK (witness the isolation of the Tories on fiscal stimulus packages) and internationally.

As a fan of nuclear disarmament, but a distinctly multilateralist one, I find the noises coming out of the US extremely encouraging. According to the National Resource Defense Council Nuclear Notebook (as published in the spring 1997 edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist – yes, they of the Doomsday Clock), the United states under Clinton possessed nuclear weapons capable of producing 1,800 megatons of explosive force; enough to kill every person on the face of this planet eighteen times (providing that a substantial enough number of them have refrained from ‘doing a Paul Weller‘). Since then George Bush has put us behind a nuclear shield that seemed to involve the Russians pointing all their nukes at Europe (this decision is to be reviewed), and helpfully ploughed ahead with development of extremely small battlefield nuclear weapons. I suppose they’re more effective than M-16s.

Though some will always paint the US as global villain-in-chief, the situation in Russia is even worse. They have enough to polish us all off roughly 29 times. You’d think they’d stop after two.

The international stockpile is truly horrific.

So it is welcome, then, that President Obama aims to drive forward a deal involving an eighty percent cut. Of course, this would still leave both states with plenty of world-destroying potential. But it’s eighty percent towards zero, so this move (as opposed to the overall situation) can only be a good thing.

It’s nice to see that this stuff hasn’t gone unnoticed in the UK. David Miliband, while rejecting calls to ditch trident, has called for countries to adhere to the comprehensive test ban treaty, called for a new treaty on production of fissile materials, and asked for multilateral disarmament talks to being. In his speech he squarely rejects unilateralism.

The problems with this are many and wide ranging: what can ultimately be done to nuclear states who don’t comply with test bans? We’ve already seen this particular approach fail many times. With regard to banning fissile materials, what guarantee is there that we don’t end up in some kind of Iraq-like scenario, wasting time endlessly carving out the details of inspection regimes without actually achieving anything? Perhaps it could provide a nasty pretext for conventional wars?

The biggest issue David Miliband will have to counter is that of multilateralism. Like him, I am of the opinion that multilateral attempts to get rid of nuclear weapons are firstly impractical – who will follow – and secondly unambitious… surely the diplomatic clout provided by having nukes is worth leveraging on other states, so that they are forced to get rid of theirs.

The other part of the argument is that multilateral imperative requires national governments to act. It’s no good standing around saying you believe in multilateral disarmament , but without actually disarming, what does any of this actually mean?

For some, this argument is extended. A friend who is a CND member describes his unilateralism as a practical manifestation of multilateralism; we’re all multilateralists, he contends… but we happen to live in this country, and we need to do something about it. Plus, you have to ask what exactly is so bad about being a neutral country. But I digress. Perhaps he’s right about the necessity of acting within your own state. Maybe CND have more in common with initiatives like Global Zero than either would care to admit.

According to the release on the FCO site, the nuclear yield of the UK has been decreased by 75% by the end of the Cold War. This leaves us with 58 current service missiles in total. While we still have any remaining, we have reason to be concerned. The cost of replacing them, to which Labour is committed, are huge, eating up funds that could be better spent on something that people will actually use (God forbid that we do ever use Trident). They roughly equate to 1000 new schools. Imagine the recession-busting potential that even half of this could have.

What the FCO site Miliband’s speech launched does do is encouraging. It sketches out the required political and technological groundwork for the abolition of any amount of nuclear weapons in the UK. In fact, it goes a long way to complying with Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a measure which, despite being a signatory, Britain under Labour has so far defied, possibly under the diplomatic weight of the USA:

‘Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.’

I can’t say I disagree with any of the principles contained in Miliband’s document, but I certainly have issues with what it conspicuously omits: commitments.

It seems to me, particularly given the costs, that this is of particular importance. But there are also legitimate arguments about the level of control Britain has over its own nuclear destiny. The political gains to be had are also vast. In a Populus survey conducted in February 2007, 72% of the British public oppose Trident replacement. In an ICM poll poll in July 2006, when also given the cost of replacement, 59% of the public also opposed replacement.

I won’t call for the immediate abolition of Britain’s nuclear weapons, or therefore the entire process of updating them. But I think it’s time we started making serious steps to take up our end of the bargain, and to encourage further bargaining in the future. Fortunately, this desire is now shared in the United States.

I’ll finish this piece with a link to Wikipedia, about the technology itself, and some stuff from YouTube.

This is what happens when they go wrong:

You wouldn’t really want that happening anywhere near you with live warheads.

Then there’s this. The missiles burn lines in the sky as the warheads split into five separate bomblets, to drop separate nuclear weapons on multiple locations:

Maximum kills. If you ever see this, I’m afraid it’s not worth doing ‘duck and cover‘.

I’m glad that the post Bush age has led us towards talking about how we can cut nuclear weapons together. What a breath of fresh air! But that does mean that we’ll need to do something about it in Britain, as much as anywhere else. Tory governments always come into office with a list of things to cut. First on ours should be Trident.

UPDATE: Greenpeace and Russia both have a response to Miliband.