The Cold War is Dead - Long Live the Cold War!

Not once has Britain been directly threatened by a hostile nuclear power.  Earlier this year, when North Korea readied its warheads for launch, the targets were South Korea, Japan and, of course, the USA.  The Cuban Missile Crisis, widely acknowledged to be the moment the world came closest to nuclear destruction, was a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

From the end of World War II onwards, Britain’s global influence has steadily declined. The war left us with a severely damaged economy to rebuild, and the inclusion of Britain in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences was a tokenistic gesture in recognition of Britain’s wartime contribution.  But Churchill, and then Attlee, represented a nation with its glory days fading fast.  As the Empire slowly disintegrated over the next quarter century and the US and Soviet Union grew more powerful than Britain had ever been, even at the height of its influence, the UK was shunted into the wings of the global stage.

Far from being something to lament, as many nostalgic for an era when Britannia ruled the waves believe, it is something to be grateful for.  The number one nemesis of today's rogue nuclear states is the USA.  These states, either known to possess or suspected of possessing nuclear weaponry – Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel and Iran – have little to no interest in Britain as a strategic target.  Though our politicians would have us believe otherwise, Britain is globally insignificant.  We are one of a number of European nations, a little fish in a big pond, and our ‘special’ relationship with the USA is best described as one of those somewhat awkward love affairs, where it is painfully obvious to observers that one party is just a little bit more into the whole thing than the other.  Whether we like it or not, this is how the rest of the world views us.  So maybe it is time embrace this realisation.

That Britain is a declining world power is just one of a long list of reasons why it makes sense, economically, politically and morally, to eliminate the UK’s nuclear capability.  Top of that list is indisputably that nuclear weapons are an ineffective and inappropriate response to the threats we face in a post-Cold War world.

Britain tested its first nuclear weapons in 1952

The Cold War officially ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but it had been drawing to a close throughout the 1980s.  President Ronald Reagan announced in his inaugural address in 1985 that his administration sought “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth,” marking a definitive departure from the pro-nuclear policies that had prevailed in previous decades.  Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin policies of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ (economic restructuring and openness) signalled a shift in the Russian position, as well as conceding the crippling effect that the nuclear arms race had had on the Soviet economy.  The thawing of the Cold War was confirmed by the INF Treaty, signed in 1987, and cemented by START I, signed 22 years ago this week by Gorbachev and President George Bush Snr.

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it was predicted that any future war would result in nuclear holocaust.  This turned out to be erroneous.  The 20th century did not see a reduction in the number of wars being fought with conventional weaponry.  Indicators suggest the 21st century won’t either.  And alongside the conflicts erupting across the globe, in which many more combatants and civilians have been killed than lost their lives during both World Wars, we are facing new enemies against which nuclear weapons will be next to useless.  Terrorists who are prepared to martyr themselves for their cause will not be deterred by the threat of annihilation.  The possession of nuclear weapons by the major powers has not brought peace, nor has it made the world a safer place.

Yet their proliferation increases the risk that nuclear weapons will be used by accident.  There were many near misses during the Cold War.  During the Cuban Missile crisis, having lost communication with Moscow, the commander of a Soviet submarine, not knowing whether or not war had broken out, put it to a vote amongst his senior officers as to whether or not to launch his nuclear torpedo at a US ship blockading Cuban waters: the vote was 2:1 against firing.  There were numerous other incidents of confusion, misidentified flying objects and technical hitches which could have led to World War III.  It is perhaps only luck that prevented this.

Thousands in the UK marched in 1958 against nuclear weapons,
and the protests continued throughout the 1960s.

According to Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), there are “at least 22,000 nuclear warheads still in existence, with a combined destructive capability of around 150,000 Hiroshima or Nagasaki sized bombs.” Why – morally and rationally – do we need this capability on the planet?  Experts believe that even a limited nuclear conflict – say, between India and Pakistan – would result in a nuclear winter, produced by ash from urban firestorms blocking out the sun and “causing devastating changes in weather patterns and rainfall.”

As for the role of Trident as a deterrent, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (commonly known as MAD) no longer stands up to scrutiny.  In 1967, US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, recognising that there could be no such thing as a winnable nuclear war, famously gave a speech in which he advocated the policy of acquiring so many nuclear weapons that it would, quite literally, be madness to start a nuclear war.  However, it is now recognised that MAD is no longer a viable in an unstable world with increasing numbers of nuclear adversaries.  In an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2007, three former US Secretaries of State, including Henry Kissinger, and a former chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee argued that "it is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American ‘mutually assured destruction’ with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.”

If the moral and strategic arguments against replacing Trident aren’t convincing, then the economic ones surely must be.  £3 billion has already been spent on exploring new designs for the submarines.  It is estimated that the final cost could be up to £34 billion.  Maintenance of the fleet will cost around £100 billion over the next 30 years.  For that money, we could build the 100 best schools in the world.  Or, as John Prescott argued yesterday, plug the predicted £25 billion black hole in NHS funding by 2020.  In a time of austerity, we can ill afford to maintain a weapons system which exists only to act as a status symbol of a former glory.

Almost from the moment nuclear weapons were first tested politicians of all guises have committed themselves to disarmament, and yet we remain a nuclear world.  And, like children in the playground, if some countries have them, others will want them too.  Britain could set an example in becoming the first nation to fully disarm.  Unilateral disarmament could be the opportunity pro-nuclear fantasists dream of for the UK to become a world-leader again.