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Two Steps to Zero

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It may be apocryphal but it still says a lot. An inner-cabinet group of Clement Attlee's post-1945 Labour government was discussing whether, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain should develop its own nuclear weapons. Why not instead rely merely on close cooperation with the United States? The ebullient foreign secretary and former trade unionist, Ernest Bevin, was emphatic: "I don't care what sort of bomb it is, as long as it has a bloody Union Jack on top of it" (see Brian Cathcart, "Britain and the atomic bomb", 5 August 2005).

Ever since then, Britain's nuclear forces have had at least as much to do with national status as with the perceived requirements of security. This is as much true for the decision to replace the Trident-missile system as it was for its predecessors (see "Britain's nuclear-weapons fix", 29 June 2006). Yet even as the initial design work is done on a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines, the international climate is changing.

In part this is due to the proliferation of nuclear weapons across south Asia, together with the claims that Iran has nuclear-arms ambitions (see Jan De Pauw, "Iran, the United States and Europe: the nuclear complex", 5 December 2007). But one result of the fears over proliferation is that some surprising voices have begun to stress the need not just to control proliferation but even to move towards a post-nuclear world. In the United States, senior politicians from across the political divide (such as Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn) have advanced these arguments, as have figures (such as Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen, and George Robertson) from centre-right and centre-left in the United Kingdom (see Rebecca Johnson, "Britain's new nuclear abolitionists", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 15 July 2008).

A last-ditch strategy

The British government, too, has spoken of the crucial need to make progress in countering proliferation, with the national-security strategy making this one of the priorities: "Our approach to proliferation reflects our commitment to act early to reduce future threats, our commitment to multilateralism and the rules-based international system, and our willingness to work with partners beyond government" (see Cabinet Office, National Security Strategy, 19 March 2008). In this climate, the 2010 five-year review of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) - which was signed in 1968, and came into force in 1970 - looms large; though many arms-control
analysts are cautious as to whether there is scope for real progress (see Richard Falk & David Krieger, "After the nuclear non-proliferation treaty", 27 April 2006).

For Britain to have any role in getting what the government wants - "achieving a positive outcome to the 2010 NPT Review Conference", according to the national security strategy - one of the major problems is that non-nuclear states simply cannot take Britain seriously. It may point to a planned 20% reduction in warhead numbers for the Trident replacement system, but that will still leave an arsenal of around 160 weapons, most of them very much larger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Trident white paper also made clear that Britain would retain its current option of a willingness to use nuclear weapons first, implying that Britain's nuclear-targeting options go very much beyond the idea of a last-ditch deterrence against a threat to the United Kingdom.

The British people as a whole do not share the nuclear complex of their leaders, though if anything there is more broad-based opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland (where the nuclear-submarine fleet is based). But there does remain a feeling that nukes both are part of the country's status and do provide some kind of insurance policy against attack. Whatever the validity of this argument, it is a political fact of life at present, but it still means that there is scope for innovative moves that could help kick-start real progress at the 2010 review of the NPT.

One option would have six elements:

* Cancel plans to build four large ballistic-missile submarines to replace the current Vanguard-class boats
* Cancel plans for a new generation of nuclear warheads
* Scale down warhead numbers from 200 to just thirty (an 85% reduction); and have modified warheads available to deploy, if ever thought necessary, with cruise missiles on attack submarines (which already deploy such missiles with conventional warheads)
* Phase out the entire Trident system as soon as this much-reduced force is available - certainly within a maximum of five years, and probably fewer
* Adopt an openly stated policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons
* Aspire to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons in Britain when international progress allows

These are actually quite modest proposals. South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all went non-nuclear in the 1990s; this followed the example of Brazil and Argentina, which gave up their competitive nuclear-weapons aspirations a decade earlier.

A farewell to arms?

The last of the United States nuclear weapons based on British soil have now - after fifty-four years, spanning the decades from the cold war to the "war on terror" - been withdrawn from the Lakenheath air-base in Suffolk, southeast England. In the 1980s especially their presence engendered huge political dispute, but their removal caused scarcely a whisper of debate controversy or even acknowledgment (see Hans Kristensen, "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Withdrawn From the United Kingdom", Federation of American Scientists [Strategic Security Blog], 26 June 2008).

Even so, if Britain really is addicted to nuclear weapons as part of its perception of international status, then retaining a minimal force should answer that, a least for the time being, while enabling the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to play a serious high-profile role in the NPT review for the first time ever (see Patricia Lewis, "The NPT review conference: no bargains in the UN basement", 1 June 2005).

There would no doubt be opposition to any such move in some political circles (although all-party support is certainly not out of the question, given the views of the Conservative statesmen Rifkind and Hurd) and there would certainly be major opposition from the armaments lobby because of the loss of some particularly large contracts. Across the armed forces, though, the opposition would be minimal. Both the army and Royal Air Force are facing major funding problems and even in the Royal Navy there are many mid-career and senior officers who regard Trident replacement as an unnecessarily expensive sacred cow (or another kind of animal; see "Gordon Brown's white elephants", 26 July 2007).

Whether the current government has the political courage to drive such a change through is open to question, but one thing is certain - it has no chance of paying an effective role in controlling proliferation without such action. On the other hand, if it does so, then it would be the one state among the so-called "big five" nuclear powers (along with Russia, China, France and the United States) - also therefore among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council - that could claim it was really serious about preventing a slide to a more dangerously proliferating world.

Britain to spend £3bn on new nuclear warheads

Ellie Keen — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:59:00 +0000

The UK is to replace its stockpile of nuclear warheads at an estimated cost of more than £3bn, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Ministers have repeatedly denied there are any plans to replace the warheads as part of the upgrade of the Trident nuclear system, insisting no decision will be taken until the next parliament, probably sometime after 2010.

However, previously unpublished papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal one of the MoD's senior officials told a private gathering of arms manufacturers that the decision had already been taken.

"This afternoon we are going to outline our plan to maintain the UK's nuclear deterrent," David Gould, then the chief operating officer at the Defence Equipment and Support Organisation, told a future deterrent industry day event. "The intention is to replace the entire Vanguard class submarine system. Including the warhead and missile."

According to the government's 2006 white paper, it would cost at least £3bn to replace the warheads, and opponents say the move would commit the UK to a nuclear weapons system for the next four decades.

Last night, peace campaigners said the new warheads would change the weapons' capabilities and may allow more targeted strikes, potentially making their use more likely.

"This document destroys any credibility in the government's claim that it has not yet made a decision on new nuclear warheads," said Kate Hudson, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. "It is a disgrace that the MoD is secretly telling the defence industry one thing, whilst ministers are saying quite the opposite to parliament."

The plans came to light after the MoD was forced to release Gould's "speaking notes" following a request under freedom of information legislation. In the initial release, defence officials blanked out the final sentence, referring to the warheads, because "the notes were incomplete information and therefore potentially misleading". That decision was overturned on appeal and the pivotal sentence was reinstated.

Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, called on ministers to come clean about the government's plans for the country's nuclear deterrent. "Des Browne [the defence secretary] needs to urgently explain how the extract from this speech could so clearly contradict stated government policy on a new warhead ... This government promised an open and transparent debate about replacing Trident, but this feels more like the cloak and dagger days of the cold war."

A spokesman for the MoD said the document was a "speaking note" rather than a transcript of Gould's speech, which was delivered in June last year, adding that it did not reflect government policy.

"[The] decisions on whether and how to refurbish or replace our existing nuclear warhead are likely to be necessary in the next parliament ... No decisions have yet been taken."

Opponents say replacing the warheads would commit the UK to a nuclear weapons system up to 2055, as opposed to the lifespan of the current system, which is expected to become obsolete around 2025. They also claim that pressing ahead with a new generation of warheads before the non-proliferation treaty review conference in 2010 would be seen as inflammatory and could breach international agreements.

Harvey said: "Moving forward on a replacement warhead just two years before key talks on nuclear non-proliferation would be a decision with huge consequences and it demands open debate. The thought that it may have been taken already behind closed doors is deeply concerning."

Last year the government was forced to rely on Conservative party support to get its plans to renew Trident through parliament. Under those proposals, the nuclear submarines would be replaced and missiles upgraded, but no decision was taken on the warheads, which opponents say are the "key element" of any nuclear system.

"Building newer, potentially more advanced warheads will breach our commitment to disarm under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and will send out a destabilising and hypocritical message to other states both with and currently without such weapons," said Hudson.

"A decision to go ahead with new warheads will have a much greater impact than the plan for new submarines, which merely provide the launch platform for these terrible weapons."

Talking Warheads

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:12:09 +0000

When Saddam Hussein’s forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the US led a massive coalition to oust them. Having assembled 600,000 troops and 1,000 planes from more than 30 countries, Operation Desert Storm started in January 1991 with a huge air assault that was confidently expected to force out the Iraqis.

Within 24 hours, however, things had begun to look very different. Iraqi Scud missiles started hitting Israel, leading to a sustained diversion of effort as the Americans and their coalition allies tried to defuse this new threat. To make matters worse, the Iraqis also aimed Scuds at Saudi Arabia, one of them hitting a Marines depot killing 28 people, the worst US loss of life in the war.

Eight years later, it was revealed that another Scud strike had very nearly been catastrophic, and might have affected the outcome of the entire war. It landed in the sea 300 yards from a US Navy aviation support ship and near the amphibious warfare ship USS Tarawa. Both were moored alongside a pier complex at the Saudi port of Jubayl, which included a large ammunition storage dump and a parking lot for petrol tankers. If the Scud had hit its target instead of landing harmlessly in the sea, it could have set off a huge chain of explosions and fires, killing thousands.

Uncomfortable lessons

The 1991 Iraq War was widely seen as a great victory for the West, but behind the scenes in military circles some serious lessons were being learnt. What was expected to be a new world order, in which the ending of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet bloc would lead on to international stability rooted in Western economic and military power, now looked much less certain.

One far-sighted American writer, a former submarine commander called Roger W Barnett, succinctly highlighted the impact of ‘high technology weapons and weapons of mass destruction on the ability – and thus the willingness – of the weak to take up arms against the strong’.

A most uncomfortable lesson of the 1991 war was that a middle-ranking state such as Iraq (previously a close ally of Washington) could use crude 1960s missile technology to probe weak points in the armed forces of the world’s most powerful country.

As a result, during the 1990s, missile defence got a new lease of life. Billions of dollars were poured into ‘theatre missile defence systems’, designed to protect US forces and their allies when they are engaged in military operations in regions such as the Middle East. But the missile ‘threat’ was just one part of a much wider predicament that has brought nuclear weapons right back into the frame for the West.

Nukes for peace

The core problem is that maintaining a world peace centred on Western interests must involve a willingness to use force when those interests are threatened, whether that be in the Middle East, South West Asia or elsewhere. The US may now spend more on its military than every other country in the world combined, and its forces may be pre-eminent in their capabilities, but that does not prevent their use being constrained by crude but powerful deterrents fielded by otherwise weaker states.

Iraq’s Scud missiles were early examples of this, but a much more worrying combination, from the Pentagon’s perspective, is the development of small nuclear arsenals by potentially hostile states such as Iran and North Korea. The Pentagon gets even more concerned when these uncontrolled weapons are combined with delivery systems such as ballistic missiles. The Scuds that hit Dhahran and narrowly missed Jubayl were armed with conventional warheads, but even crude nuclear devices would be far more potent deterrents against Western military interventions.

One response is to call for a nuclear free world in which, cynics might say, conventional military power would rule supreme again; but most strategists don’t buy this. They call instead for robust nuclear forces to be retained indefinitely. This does not mean that arsenals will be kept at anything like the stupefying Cold War levels, but it does mean that nuclear weapons will be with us far into the future.

Just don’t mention the warheads

Britain is a good example of this thinking. It plans to replace its current Trident system of nuclear missiles in a couple of decades with new weapons designed to see the country through to the second half of the 21st century. Alongside them, the UK is planning to build two giant new aircraft carriers, the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy. These will give Britain a warfare capability that will be second only to the United States, enabling it to continue to fight alongside its ally in what it sees as crucial regions such as the immensely oil-rich Persian Gulf.

But what is the use of such warships if regional opponents have their own nuclear arsenals, however small? A 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier and its surrounding flotilla could be destroyed by a single nuclear weapon, so there has to be a back-up. This is where nuclear forces come in useful.

Britain, like the US, France and Russia, has been very careful not to rule out using nuclear weapons to attack first rather than limit their use to self-defence. It has also developed small nuclear warheads whose destructive power falls far short of the feared global cataclysms of the Cold War.

Last year’s White Paper on the Trident replacement did its best to avoid admitting to such thinking, but also had to avoid lying. It therefore limited discussion of such considerations to a couple of short phrases in an otherwise lengthy and detailed document – but these two phrases allowed Britain to maintain the option of first-use of a nuclear weapon as well as the need to have small nuclear weapons, without engaging in an embarrassing public debate as to why.

Moreover, to avoid all talk of nuclear war-fighting, the term ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon was abandoned a decade ago, to be replaced by the more anodyne ‘sub-strategic’, but even that has now been banned from the nuclear lexicon. In polite circles it is simply not the done thing to talk about actually using nuclear weapons.

A slippery slope

These new nuclear realities make it much more difficult for activists to campaign against a world in which nuclear weapons still play a central role. During the Cold War there was a small risk of an all-out nuclear war that would have devastated the Northern hemisphere and much of the rest of the world. We were peering into a nuclear abyss and although the risks might have been relatively small, the consequences would have been utterly disastrous. Now it is more like a slippery slope – a slow descent in which the lead nuclear states refuse to countenance any end to their nuclear dominance.

The risk is that some time in the next couple of decades, a regional crisis will ‘go nuclear’, with two possible outcomes. One is that it might escalate to a global nuclear war. Even if we are down to a few thousand warheads instead of the tens of thousands of the Cold War era, just a fraction of them would cause utter devastation across much of the world.

The other outcome is that a nuclear war stays within a particular region, killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people but not escalating to a global catastrophe. Apart from the dreadful immediate consequences, that could mean that we become accustomed to using nuclear weapons as instruments of warfare. The taboo that has held since Nagasaki
will have been broken, leading to a formidably more insecure world.

For the Western military establishment, nuclear weapons must remain at the centre of their overall approach to security. From their perspective, the coming decades will be fraught with unplanned and uncontrolled developments in which terrorism, extremism, rogue states, mass migration and many other threats all have to be contained. With the ending of the Cold War we had ‘slain the dragon’ – but in the words of one former CIA Director, James Woolsey, we now live in ‘a jungle full of poisonous snakes’. That jungle has to be tamed and controlled. That means we must have the back-stop of nuclear forces for the indefinite future.

Changing the Cold War mindset

The alternative is to recognize that such an outlook is self-defeating. It is best described as ‘liddism’ – keeping the lid on things rather than acknowledging the underlying problems. The main security issues for most of the world’s people are matters such as the widening socio-economic divide, climate change and resource scarcity. If the world’s élites try to close the castle gates and preserve their lifestyles, they will simply end up with an embittered environment in which everyone becomes less secure.

The very fact that nuclear weapons retain their salience is evidence of an utter lack of new thinking by our political leaders. We are still stuck with Cold War attitudes that are at least two decades out of date. But changing this mindset and moving towards an outlook that addresses the real security threats facing the world will require not just the efforts of dedicated anti-nuclear campaigners but the combined work of development and environment activists, North and South.

Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

Trident tested

Ellie Keen — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:02:00 +0000

On the beautiful and rugged western coast of Scotland is an exceptionally deep natural harbour called Faslane. It is home to a British naval base and four Trident submarines equipped with up to 200 warheads. Just one of these has the capacity to deliver eight times the destructive power of the bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This corner of Scotland has also been the setting for a year-long rolling protest, which involved thousands of people giving up several days to oppose, physically, a programme to upgrade Britain’s weapons of mass destruction.

The Big Blockade started on 1 October 2006. By the end of the year the base had been successfully blockaded for 189 days which led to 1,150 arrests.

‘We piled out of the van and ran towards the North Gate,’ recalls Lavinia Crossley. ‘We lay down in the circular formation we had practised, interlocked our arms and super-glued our hands together. It worked a treat! The banner we had made summed up our action nicely: ‘Sticking Together For Peace’. We remained stuck there for three hours, as the Strathclyde police gently prized our flesh apart.’

The youngest to get arrested was 13-year-old Catherine Holmes who locked on to her teddy bear with her Edinburgh group. The oldest was Betty Tebbs who, at 89, thumb-locked herself to others from Manchester and lay down in the rain, with the midges biting, blocking the south entrance to the base. A group from York came dressed as Vikings, pointing out: ‘The Vikings slaughtered tens of thousands of people but they did so over half a millennium. Trident could do the same in a minute.’

Pete Abel dressed as a squirrel with a placard saying ‘Nuts to Trident’. He gleefully remembers the reaction of the police ‘when they realized that they would have to arrest a seven foot furry squirrel, thumbcuffed to two other protesters at the North Gate. And that he was not going to “go quietly!”’ The Bishop of Reading, for his part, was on hand to bless the peacemakers.

People’s disarmament

Faslane365 was a recent manifestation of Britain’s ‘People’s Disarmament’ movement, initiated in 1961 by Bertrand Russell, who argued: ‘If all those who disapprove of Government policy were to join massive demonstrations of civil disobedience they could render Government folly impossible.’

A group of us had launched ‘Trident Ploughshares’ in 1998 to disarm Britain’s nuclear weapons system in a nonviolent, open, peaceful and fully accountable manner. We did not see the destruction of fences and equipment as violent, or criminal damage, or a breach of the peace, but as practical and lawful. Of course, the Government did not see it that way and there have been over 2,200 arrests leading to 500 trials. Myself, Ellen Moxley and Ulla Roder disarmed a multi-million pound research barge that maintained the ‘invisibility’ of Trident; we emptied the contents of the laboratory into Loch Goil. After five months in prison and a trial where we argued that we were entitled to do this under international law, a brave Sheriff and jury acquitted us, causing a legal furore.

By 2005 I had become increasingly concerned that the peace movement was not exerting enough influence. The trickle of disarmament actions, the one-off mass blockades were easily dealt with.

We were horrified that a new nuclear arms race was starting and the British Government was committed to replacing Trident. They were so busy wasting our money and the world’s resources that they were failing to address the real mass destruction that threatens our security: the oil-and-industry-driven heating of the planet; destruction of our habitat and environment; and the institutionalized poverty that destroys hope and lives. We needed to escalate our disarmament efforts, to provide the political pressure for change in a year when the Scots would hold an election that might bring an anti-Trident party into power for the first time. So the idea behind Faslane365 was to encourage and support more people to engage in civil resistance by organizing blockades on a daily basis over a whole year.

Scotland: officially anti-nuke

The variety of people blockading, the day-to-day disruption to the base, and the diversity of messages against Trident built up the people pressure in the run-up to the Scottish elections. On 3 May 2007 the Scottish National Party (SNP) – a party long-committed to making Scotland nuclear free – won a historic one-seat majority. Opinion poll data showed that for Labour voters who switched to the SNP, opposition to Trident was a major factor. Six weeks later, a resolution opposing Trident replacement was resoundingly carried by 71 to 16.

We are now giving the Scottish Parliament time to remove Trident. Although under the terms of devolution they are not supposed to interfere in ‘foreign policy’ issues and must defer to the British Government, they can reject Trident based on international law as well as moral grounds. We know that if Trident is removed from Scotland there are no alternative secure locations in England or Wales to base the submarines and store the nuclear warheads. The British Government would either have to find a non-submarine alternative or give up nuclear weapons altogether. We must remain vigilant and may need to return to sustained people’s disarmament. If we do, then we will need thousands of people to commit to nonviolent disruption on a massive level. It is up to us.

Angie Zelter is a campaigner specializing in nonviolent direct action. She has been arrested over 100 times and served 16 prison sentences. In 1996 she and three other women disarmed a BAE Hawk Jet bound for East Timor, causing $3 million worth of damage. A jury found them ‘not guilty’. Her book Faslane 365 – a year of anti-nuclear blockades (Luath) will be launched in June 2008.

The Bomb Stops Here

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:01:06 +0000

‘When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima I was one kilometre from the explosion. I was 14. Now I’m 77 – a lucky number in Japan.’

It’s Easter Monday, and I’m listening to Yushio Sato’s story in the Great British drizzle, outside Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment. ‘My mother and sister died in the months following,’ he tells the crowd. ‘My brother and I survived – but we have had many diseases. 26 years after the explosion, I had an operation to remove half my stomach because of cancer. My brother died of liver cancer. Now I am the only survivor of my family.’

Around 5,000 of us have gathered at our country’s nuke factory to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first protest march from London to Aldermaston. The 1958 march was a defining moment in the history of the peace movement. It marked the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the launch of the iconic peace symbol, and the beginning of annual Aldermaston marches which – at their height in the 1960s – attracted hundreds of thousands of people.

But this isn’t just a symbolic event. We are here to protest about what’s happening today. The British Government is spending $11 billion developing Aldermaston in order to research, build and test a new generation of nuclear weapons – including ‘mini-nukes’ intended for actual use in the battlefield.

After we have all spread out to surround the base and declare to the slightly soggy media that ‘the bomb stops here’, I decide to take a stroll around the perimeter fence. It turns out to be an eight kilometre hike. The place is vast, and the scale of new construction work staggering.

I’ve always found it hard to get my head around the idea that my country even possesses weapons of such indiscriminate and cataclysmic destructive power – let alone that we are prepared to use them. Surely the suffering of Yushio Sato and his family, and the hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, should have been enough to shock the world into banning the atom bomb before it could be used again?

Apparently not. Political leaders express their commitment to nuclear disarmament on a regular basis. But my trip to Aldermaston has provided a grim dose of reality. As I gaze through the fence at the shiny new dome built to house ‘Orion’ – a super-powerful laser that will simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion so that the British Government can bypass the pesky Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – it becomes quite obvious that, behind the rhetoric, maintaining our grotesque ‘deterrent’ decades into the future is the real plan.

So it has come as a welcome surprise to find that disarmament campaigners are more optimistic than they have been in years. In fact, circumstances have converged to create a window of opportunity to begin ridding the world of nuclear weapons for good. The question is whether we can seize the moment.

A new kind of madness

Before I started working on this magazine, nukes weren’t very high up my list of things to be worried about. Like acne and exams, fretting over atomic armageddon seemed to belong to a bygone era. The fact that the NI hasn’t done a magazine on nuclear weapons since the 1980s shows I’m not the only one to have deprioritized the nuclear threat.

Back then, the Cold War was at its height. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were deploying 65,000 nukes, sucking up 85 per cent of the world’s military expenditure. One NI focused on how to break the ‘suicide pact’ of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in which the US and USSR were locked in a state of common vulnerability. Military strategists at the time argued that MAD helped keep the peace, but in fact it was having the opposite effect, fuelling a potentially apocalyptic arms race which was being played out through proxy wars all over the Majority World.

In the 1990s the Cold War melted away, and stockpiles were scaled back substantially. The world stepped back from the brink and breathed a sigh of relief. The NI started laying into globalization instead.

However, in recent years we’ve entered a frightening new phase of nuclear proliferation, and the rules have changed. It’s a new kind of madness. Since Hiroshima, the bomb has been a building-block of empire: every US President has threatened to nuke at least one country, ignoring arms control treaties to continue expanding its arsenal. But now the US is the sole superpower, for the time being. It has attained a state of nuclear supremacy, striving for ‘full spectrum dominance’ whereby it can destroy any country without fear of nuclear retaliation: and thus rule the world.

The 21st century has so far been marked by jaw-dropping hypocrisy, with Bush and his war poodle Blair outraged at the very idea of other countries developing their own nuclear capability; and in the case of Iraq, even using non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as an excuse to invade and occupy.

The US and Britain are not alone in flouting their disarmament commitments. All the other major nuclear weapons states are busy ‘modernizing’ their nukes, although both Russia and China have been more than a little provoked by Bush’s aggressive push for a ‘Son of Star Wars’ ballistic missile defence system that looks suspiciously like it’s aimed at them.

Since the end of the Cold War, despite – or rather, because of – the refusal of states to disarm, we have seen a new phenomenon: the rise of the ‘nuclear poor’. A Russian entrepreneur making megabucks out of the nuke trade describes how ‘at some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.’William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: the rise of the nuclear poor, Penguin, 2007 India and Pakistan built themselves the bomb in the late 1990s, and North Korea enraged its southern neighbour with a test in 2006. At least 13 nations have the ability to ‘go nuclear’ in the next decade, including Algeria, Indonesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Many more could soon join them as nuclear energy spreads across the world, providing access to bomb-making technology.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, expressed exasperation last February over the actions of the ‘big boys’ which are encouraging poorer countries to want their own weapons. ‘Any country with an average infrastructure can develop a nuclear warhead. Iran is just one example of the new phenomenon of becoming “nuclear weapon capable”: you don’t really need to have an actual weapon. It’s enough to buy yourself an insurance policy by developing the capability and then sitting on it. But let us not kid ourselves. Ninety per cent of it is insurance, because the big boys continue to say “we need nuclear weapons but it is bad for you to have them”. Nuclear weapon states have to lead by example.’

As if the prospect of a multi-polar nuclear world weren’t disquieting enough, it’s conceivable that terrorist groups might get their hands on the technology to build and detonate some kind of nuclear device. ElBaradei can confirm 150 cases a year of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials: ‘But a lot of material stolen has never been recovered and a lot of the material recovered has never been reported stolen. This system leaves a lot to be desired.’Mohamed ElBaradei, speech at the 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy, 9 February 2008, reported by Press TV

Seismic shifts

So what possible reason can anti-nuclear activists have to be so upbeat? Well, quite aside from the moral issues, nuclear deterrence is a laughable dogma these days. A journalist who recently went on a tour round a Trident nuclear submarine asked who the missiles are pointed at. ‘Nobody,’ came the answer. So who is the enemy? ‘We don’t have an enemy. It’s a deterrent.’Sam Alexandroni, ‘The 365 ways to say no’, New Statesman, 26 February 2007

But the real security threats for countries like Britain cannot be deterred by the promise of a nuclear attack. Terrorism, climate change, global economic meltdown – however many ballistic missiles you’ve got, they won’t help. Instead, as Commander Robert Green, now retired from the Royal Navy, summarizes: ‘Weapons stimulate hostility, create instability, promote proliferation and generate an arms race. They are dirty and poisonous and the ultimate virility symbol. They represent terrorist logic on the grandest scale imaginable.’Spoken at CND’s ‘Global summit for a nuclear weapon-free world’, London, 16 February 2008 And they’re incredibly expensive to maintain.

Many countries agree with this analysis, perhaps even some nuclear states, who are realizing that having nuclear weapons makes them more, not less vulnerable. There is growing support in the international community for a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would provide a framework and timetable for disarmament – a ‘palpable buzz about reaching a tipping point, where disarmament becomes respectable and achievable’, reports expert and activist Rebecca Johnson.Rebecca Johnson, ‘Time to outlaw the use of nuclear weapons’, Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue No. 87, Spring 2008 It’s a matter of bringing the big boys on board – and this is just starting to look possible.

In the US, a seismic shift in attitude is taking place. While the Bush administration has continued to love the bomb, many mainstream military strategists have had a startling change of heart, epitomized by an open letter to the Wall Street Journal in January. Entitled ‘Toward a nuclear-free world’, it is signed by four notorious Cold Warriors: two former Secretaries of State (George Shultz and Henry Kissinger); a former Secretary of Defense (William J Perry) and a retired Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Sam Nunn). They argue that nuclear weapons are fuelling insecurity, which is in no-one’s interest, and that the US and Russia must take the lead in disarming.

Congress has vetoed many of Bush’s bids for new spending on nukes, and US warmongering in the Middle East has never been so unpopular. In the Presidential primaries, Barack Obama broke with the tradition of always keeping the ultimate threat up your sleeve by stating: ‘it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan – to snorts of derision from Hillary ‘I’d-obliterate-Iran’ Clinton. Using such weapons in situations involving civilians is ‘not on the table,’ he continued, and has since pledged to work towards elimination. Anne E. Kornblut, ‘Clinton demurs on Obama’s nuclear stance’, Washington Post, 3 August 2007 If he wins the Democratic nomination, and then the election, he could turn out to be the most pro-disarmament President of all time.

Of course, the motives of Kissinger et al are by no means pure. They partly spring from a hawkish calculation that a world bristling with other countries’ nukes is dangerous for the US, and prevents it from the total military domination it could otherwise be enjoying. Nevertheless, it’s an extraordinary volte-face and opens up a political space for campaigners that there has never been before.

In Britain, campaigning against Trident has reached a pivotal moment. The fleet of nuclear submarines is based in Scotland, which now has its own Parliament. In 2007, against a backdrop of year-long anti-nuke direct action, the Scottish National Party came to power. They don’t want their country to host Britain’s bombs anymore, and 70 per cent of the Scottish public agree. A parliamentary coalition has been set up to explore legal options, such as using health, safety and environmental legislation to whack Westminster with a massive fine every time a convoy carrying warheads up from Aldermaston crosses the border.

Finding a new home for Trident would be a headache of ballistic proportions for the British Government, as their attempts to upgrade their WMDs may also prove to be. Blair won a preliminary vote last year to replace Trident, but it caused the biggest MP rebellion since the Iraq war, and another vote will be needed for the final go-ahead. In the meantime, campaigners say a colossal defence spending crunch is looming, and the rhetoric on disarmament coming out of Gordon Brown’s Government is the most positive they’ve ever heard. Britain’s submarines are now the weakest link in the nuclear chain.

Profits of doom

The ball is clearly in the court of the US and Britain to start serious negotiations to eradicate nukes completely. We have perhaps a handful of years before nuclear weapons spread to more countries and are used in anger once again. But let’s not be naïve: the barriers in our way are enormous.

Perhaps the most formidable is the so-called military-industrial complex: a term coined in 1961 by a disparaging President Eisenhower to describe the unholy matrimony of war-making and money-making. Its influence helps explain why the US now spends a third more on nuclear weapons, in real terms, than the Cold War average.

The current US plan for massive investment in new facilities and warheads is known as ‘Complex Transformation’. William D Hartung, a specialist in the politics and economics of military spending, argues that it has ‘more to do with bailing out the nuclear weapons industry’ than anything else.William D Hartung, ‘Nuclear bailout: a critique of the Department of Energy’s plans for a new nuclear weapons complex’, New America Foundation, 25 March 2008 We’re talking seriously big money: well over $200 billion over the next two decades. The main beneficiaries will be eight companies – including Bechtel and Lockheed Martin – who between them received $11 billion in US Government nuclear contracts in 2005. It’s surely no coincidence that these same eight spent $15.3 million on lobbying in 2006 alone.William D Hartung and Frida Berrigan, ‘Complex 2030: the costs and consequences of the plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons’, World Policy Institute, April 2007

The nuclear industry’s talent for persuading politicians to keep on spending is not confined to the US. The reason the Trident replacement vote was rushed through the British Parliament was that the main beneficiary – arms company BAE Systems – went into lobbying overdrive. Most of it was behind the scenes, but Murray Easton, BAE’s Submarines Managing Director, is on record as warning the Parliamentary Defence Select Committee that any delay in replacing Trident would have ‘a significant impact’ on BAE’s ability to develop and build nuclear subs for Britain in the future. Design and drafting staff would have nothing to do all day, he complained, and so would no doubt leave the sector, taking their skills with them forever.BAE Systems, ‘Investor brief – November 2006’, http://tinyurl.com/6jce2r/

While this may sound, to some, like a perfect opportunity to diversify British industry away from arms, to my Government it sounded like an order. And when BAE tells them to do something, they do it – as evidenced by Blair’s illegal suspension of a bribery investigation into a BAE arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

While the case against nuclear weapons may seem watertight, countering the influence of the ‘defence’ industry will require massive popular pressure. This is where a second problem kicks in: public apathy. The anti-nuke movement is nowhere near the size it reached in its heyday, despite including some of the most dedicated and heroic activists I have ever encountered. People have been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that nukes are no longer a threat. CND were pleased with a turnout of 5,000 at Aldermaston, but much larger mobilizations are going to be necessary to burst the tyres of this military juggernaught.

A final, escalating problem is the rapid spread of nuclear energy, which is being erroneously touted as a ‘clean’ alternative to fossil fuels. Ban-the-bomb campaigners are split on this issue so tend to keep out of the debate, with damaging consequences for the movement.

Seizing the moment

If the moral case were enough, nuclear weapons would have been banned long ago. It’s time for a more strategic approach that makes the triple obstacles of military-industrial power, public apathy and the spread of atomic energy work to the advantage of the anti-nuke movement.

We should be linking the abolition of nuclear weapons to the fight against climate change. Nuclear energy is a dangerous diversion, and nuclear weapons are worse than useless against the multiple insecurities that global warming will unleash. By uniting the two causes, a case could be made for channelling the piles of public money currently being blown on building bombs into financing large-scale changes to cut greenhouse gases and build a safer future.

Let’s take Britain as an example. Trident replacement will cost around $154 billion over the next three decades. Why not use that money to finance a wholesale shift to renewable energy? Britain could supply 50 per cent of its energy from offshore wave and wind power by 2030 by diverting funds and skills directly from nuclear submarine manufacturing.Steven Schofield, ‘Oceans of work: arms conversion revisited’, British American Security Information Council (BASIC), 27 January 2007 A mere 1.3 billion Trident bucks a year would fund the transition from car-dependent gridlock to an affordable nationwide public transport system.Simon Bullock, Tony Bosworth and Vicky Cann, ‘Way to go – paying for better transport’, May 2004, http://tinyurl.com/yu8em5 Junking nukes would go a long way towards meeting the estimated $25.4 billion a year cost of helping every British household become low carbon, cutting overall emissions by 80 per cent.Brenda Boardman, ‘Home Truths: a low carbon strategy to reduce UK housing emissions by 80% by 2050’, University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute, November 2007

This ‘two birds with one stone’ approach could help revitalize an ageing peace movement. It could bring the genuine threats posed by nuclear weapons to the attention of a new audience of activists, and push it up the agenda of an environmental movement growing in strength. It makes a case for diverting funding from the bomb that even the most trigger-happy politician may find compelling – especially when the challenge of publicly financing major carbon-reduction infrastructure projects during an economic recession begins to bite…

It’s time to seize the moment. There are fewer and fewer survivors like Yushio Sato left to remind us of the horror humans can now unleash upon each other. We’ve never been good at learning from history and the signs point towards a whole new generation experiencing a nuclear attack first hand in the not too distant future. This struggle is too important to leave to the committed few. It’s up to all of us to grab the window of opportunity we’ve been given and ban the bomb, before the shutters slam back down, for good.

Join the Peace Chain

Ellie Keen — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:03:55 +0000

Join the Peace Chain around Faslane on June 14th!

From the website of Scottish CND

When? Saturday 14 June 2008 - 11.30am assemble,12 noon march off to form Chain

Why? All the nuclear weapons held by the UK are based in Scotland. The Peace Chain is a peaceful protest against the UK Government's plan to build a new nuclear weapon system ('Trident replacement'), which would be at Faslane until 2055. Opinion polls show that 72% of the Scottish people are against the plan. The new system would cost £75 billion. What else could £75 billion buy? There are better ways to use the money.

The Peace Chain date marks several important anniversaries:

One year ago, 14 June 2007, the Scottish Parliament voted against the UK Government’s plan for a new nuclear weapon system.
The day of the Peace Chain also sees the celebration of the 26 th birthday of Faslane Peace Camp.
40 years ago, 14 June 1968, the first British nuclear patrol – HMS Resolution – sailed from Faslane.
This year is also the 50 th birthday of CND and its struggle against nuclear weapons.

In SCND’s history never before has there been such concerted and widespread opinion against nuclear weapons in Scotland – both amongst elected officials and the general public – and so with this Peace Chain we intend to mark not only anniversaries of past events but a real hope for the future.

Where? We will assemble at Faslane Peace Camp, which is close to Helensburgh (35 miles from Glasgow). See Transport to Peace Chain.

How? We will be forming a chain of people and banners along the main perimeter fence at Faslane, which is about 2000m long. The fence has about 64 panels which will be divided into sections, with a marshal responsible for making sure each section is covered: setting people in place, keeping them in place and spaced out for the duration of the demonstration and distributing people/materials to cover the entire length.

As much as possible we want to link everyone, at least all the people in the same section, by a common chain. This can be made from anything that you like (that you think has a chance of withstanding the elements)! Bunting, rope, old sheets, washing line... SCND will bring as much material like this as possible but we need you come along with whatever you can. We welcome organised groups to sign up with us beforehand and to take responsibility for a certain length of the fence, whether this is 10m or 100m.

We are looking for the strongest possible participation on the day, but from those who are not able to attend we would welcome some kind of representation to be sent to us or brought by someone else on the day - for example decorate your own personal CND peace sign, or put your name to a big banner representing your local area. There will be an opportunity to make/sign these at CND local meetings and street stalls which will be happening across Scotland in the next few weeks. Or you can send us items to slot onto the Peace Chain: SCND, 15 Barrland Street, Glasgow, G41 1QH

Join in Please use our online form if you would like to take part

Need to know more ?
Visit the SCND website
email: scnd@banthebomb.org or phone: 0141 423 1222.
Download information pack

The Bombs Didn't Work

Ellie Keen — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:12:41 +0000

The two big war and peace issues involving the UK since the founding of Scottish Left Review have been the Afghan and Iraq wars and the further entrenchment of Britain’s nuclear commitment with the decision to undertake the Trident renewal programme. The enthusiastic militarism of New Labour went further than most people on the left could have expected and, far from there being any interest in phasing out the Trident base, we had the decision to commit us to another fifty years of nuclear weapons (all of them now in Scotland).

SLR was far from being alone as a critic of these decisions. That went well beyond the traditional left and the peace organisations and involved much of civic Scotland. But we did produce a consistent critique since the Afghan war and have explored new approaches to international justice and peace issues. In the middle of the first phase of the Afghan war we said the implications were (January 2002):

1) The brutality threshold has been lowered. If you say you are engaged in an anti-terrorist campaign, you can do anything no matter how brutal and the NATO powers will give at least tacit support. You can destroy a whole city as in Chechnya or hundreds of Kurdish villages in Turkey and this will be ‘understood’.
2) Civil rights are disposable. If you say it is in the name of anti-terrorism, you can lock people up without trial or access any form of private communication.
3) The cowboys are in charge. International institutions and treaties are completely marginalised and the US will do what it wants, where it wants.
4) The UK is seen by the rest of the world as the European voice of America, just another client state.
5) Unless those with grievances are encouraged to develop non-violent resistance strategies, terrorism will be regarded as the only way to make an impact. The type of terrorism will become even more underground and difficult to track.
6) Good news for the arms industries. The message is that those with the most powerful modern weapons win. No-one may feel they can take on the US in a conventional military conflict but in relation to their own regional conflicts, the drive to acquire new weapons systems is set to increase.

A very accurate prediction except we have retrospectively to modify the last point. It was certainly good news for the arms industry and the security services industry but the ‘winning’ of this war and the later Iraq war was very short term.

There were many, including some on the left, who went along with the Afghan attack on the assumption that it would have a liberating effect from an oppressive regime, especially for women. Some simply thought it was inevitable that the US would have to find someone somewhere to bomb in revenge for 9/ll and that a ‘big bang’ success would be sufficient to satisfy the dented pride and prestige of the US. It might as well be the unpleasant Afghan regime as anywhere else and it was weak enough to be defeated quickly. Never mind the massive destruction of infrastructure and people in a poor country and the franchising of much of the fighting on the ground to brutal warlords. But even we underestimated how stupid and arrogant the Bush government would be in failing to focus on economic and social development for several years in Afghanistan before embarking on another major military adventure. While few can now defend the Iraq war, we are still subject to a stream of propaganda with the Labour Government, the Royals and the media spinning together a Boy’s Own tale of goodies, baddies and the prospect of victory, all of it just as deplorable and stupid as the initial war.

With the Iraq war we were in the mainstream and that mainstream has seldom been so right in its predictions. While opposition to the war brought Scotland’s largest demonstration for decades, it was one of the low points of the Scottish Labour Group at Holyrood that they refused to support a motion against the war that would have reflected the majority view of the Scottish public. In retrospect, it would have been opposition to this war and later to Trident renewal that could have given Scottish Labour a distinctive, non-Westminster identity but there was no vision or courage to offer that leadership.

The Iraq saga undermined most of what remained of Labour’s moral authority and, while there were individuals who honourably stood out against their leadership, the impact of the war diminished even further the numbers and conviction of the rank and file. On the other hand it encouraged alliance-building among all the others – the trade unions, the churches, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the SSP, the Greens, the Muslim community. This alliance was to continue around the other big war and peace issue – Trident – and was important, particularly for the SNP in helping it to gain acceptance among the left and civic activists.

In the third issue of SLR (February 2001), the late Tony Southall comprehensively outlined the case against Trident and the British nuclear role.

“When we take on Trident we should be clear that we’re taking on a critical part of the British capitalist state. Nuclear weapons were developed from 1946 when a state that had been getting economically weaker and politically less influential since the late 19th century tried to reassert itself by becoming the world’s third nuclear power and developing its own supposedly independent nuclear deterrent. Thus Britain was able to continue to justify a permanent position on the Security Council and its claim to sit at every table. The British bomb was one of the components in promoting the myth for its own population that Britons still ruled the waves. It took its place alongside the royal family, the supposedly democratic parliament, the legal system and a myriad of institutions that provided the kernel for the kind of flag-waving patriotism that’s a feature of English culture in particular……….It (the Blair Government) showed its manifesto commitment to pursuing worldwide nuclear disarmament was so much hot air as it voted against a UN resolution to set up a conference with exactly that aim.”

The only British nuclear weapons are now based at the Coulport/Faslane complex so the constitutional issue is closely interlinked with the disarmament issue. Were Scotland with full state powers to decide that Trident should go, it would be very difficult and expensive for Westminster to find a suitable site and build the necessary infrastructure. Campaigning against Trident had already accelerated over the past decade with the base blockades and hundreds of arrests so the announcement that the UK Government was proposing to spend billions on a new generation of nuclear weapons that would be operational for another fifty years was seen by many beyond the organised peace movement to be an outrageous decision and one that flew in the face of our commitments in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even before the vote was taken at Westminster, a massive and expensive project related to the new Trident programme was well under way at Aldermaston. This involved building the largest computer in Europe, a huge laser and other experimental design facilities and new bomb manufacturing development at Burghfield. The assumption was always that even if some Labour MPs rebelled, it would go through the Commons with Tory votes.

The reasons for taking what many, including some pro-nuclear sources, considered to be a premature decision was probably explained by technical developments in the US, the commercial interest of Lockheed Martin which runs Aldermaston, and the determination of Blair to commit to a long-term nuclear weapons strategy. It is to Brown’s shame that in the notorious Mansion House speech, he unequivocally said ‘Me Too’. This was a shock to many in Scotland who still believed that Brown would be different when he became Prime Minister. As with the Iraq war, opposition in Scotland covered a wide institutional range as well as a substantial popular majority.

But changes have taken place in Scotland over the last year. After the new Government came in last May, the Greens took the initiative to table a motion against Trident replacement. This time Labour abstained and the Liberal Democrats voted with the SNP and the Greens so the motion was passed with a substantial majority and is now official Holyrood policy. It has enabled the Scottish Government to convene a working group on Scotland Without Nuclear Weapons to examine what initiatives the Government could take within the devolution powers.

There is, of course, another dimension to the war and peace issues. What positive initiatives could we take in Scotland to promote peacemaking and global justice? Over the years in this magazine activists like Helen Stevens, Margaret Lynch, Judith Robertson, Liz Law have written about our need to develop alternatives to war and exploitation. Scotland needs to generate a new international vision. The Left has been right in its critique of militarism. It needs also to show that there are alternatives.

Isobel Lindsay is Vice Convener of Scottish CND

Misguided weapon

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:47:53 +0000

Thank you Dr Nick Ritchie and Bradford department of peace studies. This new report on Trident is a model of analysis and dissection. Every justification ever produced for spending astronomical sums on yet another generation of British nuclear weapons goes under the magnifying glass and gets dealt with briskly and effectively. The report should find its way onto the desk of every person who is in any way responsible for this policy and also onto the desks of those so far silent about it.

It's high time that the major development agencies too had something to say about this vast expenditure. Making poverty history means making Trident history too. The millennium goals would be a doddle if Trident money were redirected. Not just poverty abroad but here as well. For instance, dozens of post offices are to close because, we are told, we cannot afford the subsidies. Trident money could keep the entire post office network going for 125 years.

The "we need Trident because the future is uncertain" argument gets fair but robust treatment. By definition, the future, for good or ill, is always uncertain. Tidal waves, asteroids and mad dictators are all possible, but Trident is no answer to any of them. In terms of nuclear threats "our" Trident will increase not reduce dangers. The longer nuclear weapons are around the more likely accident, miscalculation and proliferation into the wrong hands: in fact, there are no "right" hands.

At one or two points I came up with a grunt of disagreement. "In sum nuclear weapons contribute little to British security." Do they add anything to British security? It seems to me that Sweden, New Zealand, and South Africa (which gave its own up without fanfare) are all safer in terms of international threats than we are here.

There was also the assumption that Britain would go on trying to be the world's junior policeman. "It is highly likely that the UK will continue to intervene in regional crises over the coming years with conventional military forces." If we are to do so it must only be with the authority of the UN security council which is itself bound by the terms of the charter.

There is now another study for Ritchie to undertake on an equally important issue. Someone has got to examine the cultural prejudices which lie behind all this. For over 50 years the great British public have been told by all shades of politician that nuclear weapons were the road to security. They were the only way of bringing the second world war to an end. They kept the peace for 40 years. Unless they get into the hands of mad or suicidal people they are quite safe. These are the cultural myths that are just as important as the technical issues.

The UNESCO Courier got it right in 1993. "The problem is that belief systems have been built up to support the idea that they [nuclear weapons] are usable and indeed almost indispensable to international security." Yet there is now a detailed draft treaty, lodged with but not discussed at the UN, aimed at the elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere. It covers all the key issues of inspection, verification, criminality and whistleblowing. Maybe there is more interest in it today. Gordon Brown and Des Browne have both recently said that a world free of all nuclear weapons is their ultimate destination. They won't get there while a massive roadblock labelled Trident sits stubbornly in the way.

CND says No New Nukes

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:33:48 +0000

Just one year since the huge backbench rebellion on Trident replacement, we have seen the largest protest at Aldermaston for two decades. Five thousand protesters converged on the Atomic Weapons Establishment, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Aldermaston march in 1958. But more importantly, we were protesting about what is taking place there now.

The government is currently pursuing massive redevelopment of Britain’s nuclear bomb factory. The scale of building works, investment and recruitment taking place make it inconceivable that these are just routine improvements to facilitate ongoing work. It is clear that this work — which includes supercomputer and laser facilities which can simulate nuclear weapons testing — is for the development and manufacture of a new nuclear warhead.

But Parliament has not yet made a decision to endorse such a development. In March 2007, Parliament agreed to proceed with the ‘concept phase’ of a Trident submarine replacement — no more than that. In the 2006 White Paper on the nuclear weapons system, it was made clear that a decision on a future warhead would be taken in the next Parliament. We have not yet reached that point, and no decision has yet been taken.

It would seem that the government has made a pre-emptive decision with its £5 billion spending on Aldermaston, and the work going on there, on the scale of Heathrow Terminal Five.

This continuing development is just one side of the contradictory approach which the government has pursued over nuclear weapons during the past year.

Some of what has happened has been positive. There has been an interesting shift by the government on multilateral initiatives for nuclear disarmament. On several occasions, there have been high level statements indicating that steps need to be taken. And crucially, the government has now recognised that there is a link between the failure of the nuclear weapons states to meet their disarmament obligations, under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and an increased likelihood of nuclear proliferation. In other words, disarmament and non-proliferation must go hand in hand. This was something that Blair refused to admit, somehow trying to argue that we are entitled to have nuclear weapons.

Recently, Defence Secretary Des Browne has announced that Britain intends to host a summit for nuclear weapons states, to discuss decommissioning nuclear weapons. This is a welcome initiative.

But if Britain is serious about contributing to global nuclear disarmament, it cannot say one thing and do another. A halt must be called to the Trident developments — both submarines and warheads. That will be a real indication of good faith to the international community, and will help support any initiatives towards multilateral negotiations.