Bruce Kent was there at St Nicolas Church last night at the invitation of the Abingdon Peace Group.
Bruce introduced Tim Wallis, who has written a book on the arguments for and against keeping Trident, called ‘The Truth about Trident’. Tim said that none of the arguments for keeping Trident, even that of deterrence, stand up to scrutiny. His presentation was made on the day after parliament voted overwhelmingly to renew Trident.
I suspect that this could be another topic where MPs do not accurately reflect public opinion. Trident allows Britain to punch above its weight on the world stage, even though the United States provides nuclear missiles for our submarines, and has to replace them regularly.
Onee major problem with any policy of deterrence is that you have to convince those that you intend to deter that you will act when they try it on. This applies to the threat to stop pocket money if your children break the discipline required of them, or to drink-driving, or whatever.
The only way you can prove this is by regular policing to detect signs of infringement and then – the big challenge – acting.
A second difficulty is that deterrence often doesn’t deter. People will take a chance that they won’t be found out. One of the arguments in 1957 for retaining capital punishment in the UK was that it was a deterrent. Obviously, it didn’t deter everyone, since murderers still murdered.
Nuclear deterrence is a very extreme example of deterrence. For seventy years it appears to have worked, but it is very expensive and it might not stop a determined adversary who didn’t care about losing his/her/their own life.
I don’t know how I would vote on the issue; I suspect that I would think that nuclear weapons were a necessary evil – whatever that may mean!
We should renew Trident. There are countries who have, or are developing nuclear weapons. If they thought that they could attack Britain and not suffer any consequences they would. Not all Governments are reasonable. Just study North Korea. Appeasers are treated with contempt. We only have to see what has happened in the past. We all know about Nevil Chamberlaine and ‘Mr Hitler has promised us peace in our time’. Less than a year after that Hitler laughed and said the agreement was just a scrap of paper and he gave the ordered to attack Poland.
Godwin’s law is strong with our Janet
…it never takes long for someone to bring up Godwin’s law….
Given his reputation at the time as a warmonger, more concerned with military than social spending, I’m pretty sure Neville would have been first in line to vote for Trident.
I find this blog very interesting as I had never heard of Godwin’s law. I suppose the appeasement policy of Chamberlain was the most recent example of the futility of reason and appeasement with an aggressive country. I was not aware that he was a warmonger. He was part of Churchill’s war cabinet but that was after war was declared. It seems to be a common trait for some countries to bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is happening. Anyone could see that Germany was arming for war. Our intelligence has not been too good in the past. We can see signs happening around the world such as China’s claiming the South China sea etc, I do hope that our intelligence is better now than it was in the past.
We could certainly do with the money spent on trident being spent on something useful – like housing for starters
Anyone could see… but a lot of people didn’t – and those who did also remembered the millions killed in 14-18 conflict and probably hope to do anything to avoid a repeat.
It’s easy after the event to see what went wrong, but a recent book on 1914 suggests that the arguments about what was the right thing to do stil continues.
This is not the forum to argue foreign policy and defence strategy, but I am not sure that we can do very much about China’s activity in the South China Sea. I think they’d rather resent (and ignore) any advice from a European offshore island – tongue in cheek…
Janet et al., Chamberlain followed the theory that you built up your military ( in his case navy and air power) and this then meant the other party would negotiate for fear of retaliation. You’ve already mentioned how well that worked in the past and there’s no reason to believe it will work any better in the future. The labour party of the time called him a warmonger for initiating an arms race instead of spending money on welfare.
Maybe we can lure some pokemon into our midst to help protect us….
Just saying….
Who was it that said the only way to avoid war is to prepare for it ? Roosevelt? And isn’t it curious how things that apparently happen by chance really come about through momentum? For instance if we hadn’t had a commonwealth and even dare I say been imperialistic we certainly wouldn’t have had the military might to have fought the Nazis! That said politicians poster and noise about this and that but more often it’s the civil service ( officers even) that steer and guide us, and so it was with WW1 & 2, so no matter what “we” say, momentum will decide .
Captain, toungue firmly in cheek I hope your comment “momentum will decide ” is reflecting history and not your thoughts regarding the labour leadership election.
The Moral Maze on R4 this week tackled this subject. It was very interesting. iPlayer link
While this debate is about keeping Trident or not, it is the submarines that carry them that need to be replaced not the US-supplied missile system. The new vessels will be built by BAe Systems which has a long history of delays and cost overruns. Coupled with the incompetence of MoD procurement as evidenced by the problems with the latest Type 45 destroyers which cost £1bn each and now need upgrades to the generating system which continually break down leaving the ship without electrical power (which drives the engines too). We could probably save a lot of money by getting the subs built overseas – or would have done had not Brexit caused a slump in the value of the £. In another magnificent deal, Britain has just bought eight P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft as a long-overdue replacement for the Nimrod MR-4 (another BAe cock-up). The Poseidons cost $4bn although the US Navy managed to buy 12 of the same aircraft for just $2bn. Good to see the MoD are such tough negotiators but they were probably under pressure in case the £ falls any further.
Small correction – the number of Poseidons ordered by Britain is nine, not eight so they are more of a bargain than I thought. India did however buy eight for $2.1bn!