Britain's chance to banish the bomb
On its submarines, Britain has 48 nuclear warheads, each one eight times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. In other words, Prime Minister Tony Blair theoretically could order the almost instant incineration of 384 large cities around the world.
Barely anyone in parliament has mentioned it, much less debated it in the 91/2 years Mr Blair has been in office, until the government decided to hold a debate last week. It was finally pushed to do so because the US, the supplier of the Trident missiles, will soon decide on replacing its own Tridents - and Britain must decide in tandem what to do with its own arsenal.
As Mr Blair slides to the end of his term in office, it looks as if he has decided to kick this ball down the field for his successor to deal with. If that is Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, it will be interesting to see how the principled son of a Church of Scotland minister deals with this moral conundrum - particularly since powerful voices within the opposition Conservative Party seem to be increasingly doubtful about the value of an independent nuclear deterrent. For the moment, Mr Brown is astute enough to know that if Washington became alarmed, it could try to mess up his smooth road to the succession. But there is a chance that, once in office, he could backpedal on Mr Blair's enthusiasm.
Perhaps there is a window of opportunity for nuclear disarmers, particularly since the British are at the forefront of a European Union initiative to persuade Iran to forgo nuclear weapons. After all, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the west brandishes before Iran, demands categorically that the old 'nuclear haves' engage seriously in nuclear disarmament.
'History is full of surprises', argued one participant in a recent Oxford conference on the subject. That is about as tough-minded as the proponents of nuclear deterrence get these days. But set against that is the growing consensus among historians that it is now clear in retrospect that, even in the darkest days of the cold war, there was never a real possibility that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear attack against the west. General George Lee Butler concluded after his many years as head of the US Strategic Command - the man responsible for putting into action a president's order to begin a nuclear attack - that nuclear weapons 'are irrational devices'. He argues that the US itself should disarm. 'I have arrived at the conclusion that it is simply wrong for any mortal to be invested with the authority to call into question the survival of the planet,' he said.
Robert O'Neill, the former professor of the history of war at Oxford University, argues against the notion that, in a nuclear-free world, a cheater would be king. 'No, because using a few nuclear weapons or threatening to use them would be of very limited value. Either the bluff would be called or - if it turns out not to be a bluff and someone does use them - they would open themselves to unimaginable retaliation by the whole international community ... For the nation that did use nuclear weapons, it would just be another way of committing suicide.'
Field Marshal Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff, argues that 'the most important thing is to persuade everyone that the target has got to be total elimination'.
Yet, against this passion from ex-military men is ranged popular inertia on one side and, on the other, a deeply embedded culture of nuclear deterrence. It is found not just in the military-industrial complex, but in academia and the media. As former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt (ex-nuclear hawk, now a dove) has analysed it: 'There is an enormous body of vested interests not only through lobbying in Washington and Moscow, but through influence on intellectuals, on people who write books and articles in newspapers or do features on television. It's very difficult as a reader or viewer to distinguish ... what is led by those interests and what is led by rational conclusion.'
But surely it is not beyond the intelligence of Mr Brown to develop a mind of his own on the subject and start the anti-nuclear ball rolling.
Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist
