Should she stay or should she go? I speak, of course, of the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons programme. The debate and controversy surrounding the extension or replacement of Trident seems to be as heated as ever. Time certainly isn’t on our side. The current nuclear deterrent was set up under Queen Victoria in 1872, and tweaked twenty years later during the inter Boer war years. 140 odd years is a long time by anyone’s standards but where military hardware is concerned it’s a lifetime. But I digress.
To the debate at hand. Against us remaining a nuclear power are the usual arguments about the economy being up the swanny, so we can’t afford such luxuries; how Germany and Japan are major economies, even though they’re nuclear free; why we shouldn’t be hypocrites, complaining about rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Belgium developing nukes whilst we still have ours; etc, etc.
Well here’s my take on the subject. Great Britain must remain a nuclear power. I say again, ‘must’. The British are a sea faring nation, as much through necessity as anything else. We have limited resources here, so we have to continue to do what we always have – go out and pinch what we need from other countries. And by Jove we’re the best in the bloody world when it comes to that sort of thing.
Do those fellow islanders who are opposed to our nuclear future realise how difficult it would be to secure tea supplies if we couldn’t threaten to level any country that sought to disrupt them? And how are we supposed to defend the empire with no nukes? We have a duty to protect the places we fooled into believing are independent (and don’t give me any of that nonsense about many of those countries now having their own atomic weapons). A non-nuclear Britain would mean we’d lose our permanent seat at the UN Security Council, not to mention leaving France as Europe’s sole nuclear guardian. No, I repeat for clarity, Great Britain must remain a nuclear power.
God, it’s just as well some of us have thought the whole thing through. . . .
