We should scrap our Trident submarine defences. It's easy to see why. Using them in any circumstances is immoral.
Suppose Bad Country A has done the dreaded thing and left Britain flat, black and glow-in-the-dark. What would our sign-off as a nation be? With what act would we close our day on the stage? Launch Trident from a secret submarine. Turn the children in a thousand playgrounds in Bad Country A into overdone french fries. The senseless evil done to us, we would do back. To the fried children of either country we would look just the same as Bad Country A. We would have become Bad Country B.
I suppose there are many other arguments.
Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the Scandanavian lands: none of these have nuclear weapons and yet they seem to manage without having to spend their days cowering in a bunker. We, like Canada say, have plenty of ways of defending ourselves and even projecting power abroad without these cursed weapons.
Who are we frightened of anyway? Is Russia going to bomb the people it sells its gas to? North Korea's nuke is apparently so small that you could let if off in Hyde Park and no windows would be broken. Pakistan's mighty army can't even protect its own cricket team: perhaps we can be forgiven for thinking that no nuclear missile launched from Pakistan would land anywhere other than, well, Pakistan. And I would love to see the faces of the Ayatollahs when we told them how immoral and decadcant and un-Islamic they were to build a weapon of mass destruction. How medieval. The truly righteous nations have got rid of them, just as they did with chemical weapons and landmines. O ye of little faith, come join the civilised world.
When you've got stuff in the attic that you realize you are never going to use, you throw it out, especially if it's going to cost you £20 billion to keep for another few years.
We are the country that unilaterally abolished slavery, shaming the world into doing the same. Even the US caught on eventually, fifty years late. Let's do it again with Trident.
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1 comment:
The height of hypocrisy is when the UK and USA tell Syria, they must give up poison gas ( which they should) because it kills a few thousand people, when they keep nuclear arms that could kill a few million!
In our effort to get the UK back to work let's scrap Trident ( most of the parts come from the USA) and either build another 50 ships in their place and spend the money in the UK and staff the ships with young people. Thus keeping a useful navy hat can respond to defending others and he UK in a meaningful way.
We could of course scrap all the armed forces and use the money for schools, NHS etc.
Ron P, your friend.
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