Davey has right diagnosis, but wrong cure

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There are few government policies that are so financially ruinous that they cannot be made more so by a determined politician. And this weekend, it was Ed Davey’s turn, for the Lib Dems. His diagnosis – that the US is no longer a dependable ally and relying on them to allow the use of missiles which are leased from the US may make them potentially unusable – is accurate enough. His cure, however – that the UK should develop a completely new set of missiles on its own – would add vast amounts of additional cost to a programme which is already hugely expensive. It would also have a lengthy timescale before it could be ready for use, and one of the known unknowns is whether the US will remain a hostile actor for the whole of that period.

Whether it would make the weapons any more usable is another open question. Their value as a deterrent has always depended on a series of assumptions. That the UK has the ability to fire them at all without US permission is certainly one of those, but there are others: that ‘the enemy’ will simultaneously be mad enough to launch a strike which will incinerate millions and make large areas of the earth (maybe even all of it) uninhabitable and sane enough to be deterred by the thought of millions of their own citizens being incinerated in return; that the orders given to the submarine commander instruct him to launch in certain circumstances and that the commander, contemplating the scale of destruction already wreaked on the planet, would follow those instructions; and that the enemy would not already have located and destroyed the submarine. That’s a whole load of caveats, without even considering whether the system would actually work anyway.

All of that matters only if the possession of nuclear weapons had anything at all to do with war, peace or deterrence. If, as many suspect, it’s actually more to do with a post-imperial mindset amongst UK politicians – Labour, Tory and Lib Dem alike – that still doesn’t accept the reduced status of the UK in the world and clings to the belief that what the UK PM thinks is of any importance, then whether they work or not is largely irrelevant; the important thing is whether the UK is accepted by other states as being what its leaders think it is. It fails, though, even on that level. One of the consequences of diverting so much resource into a single weapons system is that the UK doesn’t have the sort of forces which can actually be of use, leading to boats spending three days bobbing about in the English Channel. Some of us might think that’s a positive, of sorts – but I doubt that it’s what Davey had in mind.

Avoiding accidents

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During the cold war there were rather more ‘near misses’ than most of us knew about at the time. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that we didn’t know about some of them is debateable. I tend to the view that it might have hardened opinion against nuclear weapons, but others will take a different view.

The one incident which does stick in the memory – at least for those of us old enough to have been around at the time – was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The ostensible cause was the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, although apologists for ‘the west’ often choose to overlook the fact that that deployment was itself, at least in part, a response to US deployment of nuclear weapons in Italy and Türkiye. The roots of such events are always more complex than is obvious, and invariably oversimplified to meet the propaganda needs of one party or the other, but establishing the accurate detail is not relevant to the point here. The point is that both sides sought to deploy their armaments within close proximity of ‘the enemy’.

For a state which wishes to be able to launch a nuclear attack on another state with the minimum of warning, thereby restricting the ability of the other side to respond, locating weapons close to the borders offers obvious advantages. But the party thus threatened then finds itself with less time to think about a possible threat, and reduced thinking time increases the possibility of a mistaken reaction to, say, a flock of birds, to pick just one of the near misses of the past. Whilst the appeal to the military mind (which tends to assume that war is inevitable anyway) might be obvious, from the point of view of those who’d rather like human life to continue for a while longer, siting nuclear weapons as close as possible to their potential targets is a really bad idea.

Yet that is exactly what the Polish president has proposed this week. It’s easy to get into a ‘who started it argument’, given that Russia has already moved nuclear weapons into Belarus, but that doesn’t make responding in kind a rational choice. Ratcheting the spiral ever upwards is a dangerous choice when what is needed is a mutual de-escalation. NATO states choose to believe that Russia is just waiting for an opportunity to send its armies rampaging across the whole of Europe to impose its will on us. For reasons discussed previously, it’s an unlikely and wholly impractical scenario. On the other hand, Russia fears that NATO wants to obliterate and subdue it. For similar reasons, it’s also an impractical scenario. But paranoia feeds on itself, with every move analysed from the point of view of those pre-existing prejudices and suspicions.

Rebuilding trust and assurance once it’s been lost is no easy task, and the folly of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made it even harder. But every journey has to start with the first step, and if the best time to start was a decade or two ago, the second best time is always going to be ‘now’. Ramping up the perceived threat level by deploying US nuclear weapons closer to Russia’s borders will add to the problem rather than forming a basis for a solution - and increase the possibility of an accidental attack by one side or the other. It's not a view which Sir Sabre-rattler Starmer seems able or willing to understand.

Self-fulfilling prophesies

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It is a trademark characteristic of the military mind that ‘the enemy’ is always watching, always waiting, just looking for an opportunity to launch a surprise onslaught to seize territory and impose his will on others. Currently, the prime enemy is assumed to be Putin, who is almost portrayed as a live version of a Bond villain, forever plotting world domination (although, as  far as I’m aware, he doesn’t own a cat, which somewhat spoils the image). In the fictional and real worlds alike, the reason for seeking world domination has never been entirely clear to me, but perhaps I over-analyse: a madman seeking to dominate the world doesn’t necessarily need a logical reason. Like the man who wanted to be world king, maybe Putin just wants power for its own sake. And possibly for a bit of personal enrichment on the side; although – in real life, just as in fiction – being the head of a criminal organisation rarely leaves enough time to relax and properly enjoy the proceeds. Permanent paranoia is an essential attribute, even if those around him really are all out to get him.

When it comes to deterrence, if he’s truly mad all bets are off. Deterrence necessarily depends on an assumption that the person being deterred is capable of a rational analysis of the likely costs and benefits of any given course of action so, whilst painting Putin as a madman, the policy of deterrence counter-intuitively assumes that he isn’t. That raises its own problems. If he is indeed rational, then telling a man who (allegedly) is determined to attack and destroy the UK that we’re not ready for him now, but give us three years to prepare and we’ll be able to kill two or three times as many Russians with the same level of armed forces looks more like an invitation to urgent action than a deterrent. Using it before you lose it is far from an irrational position to take if you feel threatened. If he’s not rational, then it has no effect at all. And neither will the additional expenditure on armaments.

In the fictional realm, it’s never entirely clear whether the flunkies and minions who rush to do their master’s bidding are doing so in expectation of some reward for themselves, or out of fear, or out of blind loyalty. They always turn out to be expendable, though. And in most cases, they end up duly expended. In real life, the expendable ones are the foot soldiers, invariably drawn from the working people of all belligerents whilst the ruling elites stay safely out of harm’s way. In a war with a clear conclusion, the elites on the winning side count their profits from the arms industry whilst those on the losing side rue their financial losses. Where there is no such clear outcome from a conflict, the elites on both sides win: the arms industry rakes in the cash all round. Financially, war and peace end up looking quite similar in one important way – wealth gets further concentrated in the hands of the few. In a war which degenerates into a major nuclear exchange, there’ll be no money left to count; just as well, for there’ll be no-one left to count it either.

Nuclear deterrence, they tell us, works. Just look at the fact that there has been no all-out war between two nuclear-armed blocs since the end of the last world war. Maybe. We can’t re-run history without nuclear deterrence to see what would have happened; perhaps there are other compelling reasons why war has somehow been avoided. But even supposing, for the sake of argument, that we accept the lack of war to date to be an indicator of the success of nuclear deterrence, that doesn’t justify an assumption that it will always work. It could be like that little strip of Velcro holding the curtains up, which works really well – until the day that it doesn’t.

The politicians are rushing to agree with the military assessment, and vying to see who can offer to divert the largest sums from promoting the wellbeing of citizens into building weapons of destruction. There is one thing about which they are right – our future prosperity depends on our security. But what they’re not willing even to countenance is the idea that security, in the sense of a lack of war, could be achieved in other ways. De-escalation, removal of threats, negotiation, and building trust aren’t even up for consideration as they continue the slow but inexorable march towards a war. It’s a war which their own actions are making increasingly likely.

Tough talk isn't enough

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The idea that something is a ‘deterrent’ is a regular refrain in politics and international affairs, from sentencing in the courts, through small boat arrivals to the threat of using nuclear weapons. Those in control of, or in a position to apply, the deterrent in question often have a blind faith that it will work, yet the evidence for deterrence as a principle is, at best limited. For any deterrent to work (i.e. to deter someone from taking some action or other) at least four things have to be true:

·        The would-be perpetrator has to believe that he or she will be identified and placed in a situation where the deterrent could be applied

·        Said perpetrator has to believe that the deterrent actually would then be applied in practice

·        He or she must also be convinced that the application of the deterrent would leave him or her in a worse position than they would have otherwise been in

·        He or she has to be in a sufficiently rational frame of mind to weigh up all of these factors before deciding whether or not to commit the act which is supposed to be deterred.

That final point is something of a deterrent-killer when it comes to crime. An awful lot of acquisitive crime is opportunistic rather than pre-planned, and a great deal of violent crime arises from an emotional response at the time of the crime. Even if those things weren’t true, the police forces charged with responding to those crimes are understaffed and under-resourced: for a large number of crimes, the chances of being caught are low. Preventing crime is something most of us want, but it isn’t the same thing as deterring crime, which is where Labour and Tory alike seem to concentrate their attention, instead of considering the causes. I’m sure that there was a political leader once who said something about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, even if he forgot the second part of that once elected.

If the government does manage to get its Rwanda Bill through parliament this week, it’s a policy which fails on at least two of the key criteria for deterrence. It doesn’t take a genius to calculate that if 40,000 people are arriving every year and the capacity for deporting them to Rwanda is somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand or so (even if they can find an airline prepared to carry them, accommodation in which to place them which hasn’t already been sold off, identify people who don’t fit into a category which will still allow some sort of legal challenge, and find enough people to accompany them – each deportee is likely to require at least two escorts to forcibly get them onto a plane and restrain them during the flight) then the probability of them actually being sent to Rwanda is somewhere between negligible and zero. And given the desperation which leads most of them to flee their home country, few are likely to see that remote possibility as being worse than the situation they are fleeing. A government which really wanted to reduce the levels of migration would be looking at the causes of that migration rather than simply punishing migrants. That isn’t the government we’ve got, nor is it the one we’re likely to have by the end of the year.

And then we come to nuclear deterrence, aka the expenditure of vast sums on weaponry that no rational person would ever use, but whose possession depends on an assumption that ‘the enemy’ is both irrational enough to want to use them and rational enough to be deterred from so doing, and that said enemy will, in turn, believe that ‘we’ are irrational enough to want to use them and rational enough to be deterred from so doing. Rational irrationality or irrational rationality: both sound like they’ve emerged from the troubled mind of Donald Rumsfeld. We are regularly told that the ‘evidence’ for the efficacy of the nuclear deterrent is that the Soviet Union/ Russia hasn’t attacked the NATO alliance. Whilst it’s true to say that they have not attacked NATO (and, come to that – and in the interests of balance – neither has NATO attacked them), the ‘proof’ that the possession of large armouries of nuclear weapons is the thing that has prevented it is distinctly lacking. And inevitably so – we only live history once, and the only way of categorically proving it would be to live history over again, changing just that one factor. I suspect that the reasons for a lack of war would be shown to be rather more complex than simple fear of one particular type of weapon. The one case where we can be fairly unequivocally certain that nuclear deterrence has ‘worked’ is Ukraine, where Russia’s vast arsenal, accompanied by a threat to use it, has effectively deterred the rest of the world from going to the aid of a country unlawfully invaded by a larger neighbour. That, however, makes nuclear weapons look more like a facilitator of aggression than a deterrent to war. To say nothing of an encouragement to proliferation. And even more recently, Israel’s nuclear weapons have demonstrably not ‘deterred’ Iran.

The thread running through all of this is an assumption that the best or only way of preventing that which is undesirable is to deter potential perpetrators from doing it. In all three cases, however, what is really needed is to address the underlying causes of those actions or potential actions. It’s harder to address the causes rather than the symptoms, but our ‘leaders’ prefer to talk tough and make macho threats than to be effective. In all three scenarios.

Top priorities

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One of the mantras often used in management training courses and business schools is that anyone who has more than three priorities effectively has no priorities at all. Whether ‘three’ is the right number, rather than, say, two or four, is a matter of opinion, but the key message is that setting too many priorities means that each of them gets insufficient attention to be meaningful. It’s one of the reasons for the problems in a large organisation like the NHS – management and staff have so many priority targets that it’s impossible to give appropriate focus to all of them. It’s a mistake that Starmer and Labour are apparently keen not to make, by being clear about their top priority.

Whether they’ve chosen the right priority to make number one for this week is another question, as is whether they’ve thought through the implications. Starmer told us on Friday that his absolute top priority is to increase spending on armaments and military personnel, including especially the renewal of the UK’s weapons of mass destruction. His words left little room for misinterpretation as to the meaning and their implication. If one policy is the number one priority, all other policies must, by definition, have a lower priority. If push comes to shove, weapons will have priority over the NHS (where we’ve already been told that there will be no new money without further use of the private sector reform), education, housing and reducing poverty and inequality. And threatening to massacre millions of citizens elsewhere (and although there are conflicting views on the matter, there are considerable doubts as to whether the UK even has the ability to use the weapons without US say-so) is more important than ensuring the wellbeing of citizens in the UK. Despite the fact that even some in the military have long doubted whether the possession of nuclear weapons is the most effective use of resources. Perhaps Starmer genuinely believes that having the means to incinerate millions of foreigners is more important than eliminating poverty at home. Perhaps he doesn’t believe that, but believes that he has to say that he does in order to win an election. It’s hard to decide which of those two possibilities is the most depressing.

Starmer’s statement has aroused the ire of many in his party who still cling forlornly to the notion that Labour is an internationalist party supporting solidarity amongst workers of all nations rather than an English nationalist party harking back to the days of empire and ruling the waves. It’s just wishful thinking. Starmer has made his choice, and been clear about it.

Or has he?

In February 2021, Labour’s top priority was ‘financial responsibility’, code for more austerity. In October 2023, there were five priorities, none of which related to defence or the military. In November 2023 Labour’s top priority in foreign policy (and defence is surely at least partly about foreign policy) was closer ties with the EU. In December 2023, the top priority was economic growth. Or maybe Wealth Creation. In January 2024, it was knife crime. I’m sure that I can half-remember other examples over the last couple of years as well. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as the saying goes: every audience will find that Labour has a number one priority tailored to its own desires. But if an organisation with more than three priorities effectively has none at all, where does that leave a man and a party with at least 10, and counting?

Talk of shields is misleading

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A good shield is intended and designed to be a defensive tool, not a weapon. The objective is to protect the user against offensive weapons being used by others, not to attack those others. At a pinch, a desperate soldier could probably use a shield to hit an opponent over the head, but it’s poorly designed for that purpose and somewhat unwieldy in use. A similar story applies to umbrellas. Whilst they are good at protecting the user – or the top half anyway – from rain, they are not much use as a weapon. Again, a substantially made one, properly furled, could be pressed into service to hit someone over the head if it’s the first thing that comes to hand, but it’s hardly a weapon of choice.

Both terms are badly misapplied when it comes to nuclear weapons. It’s at least partly deliberate – there’s something mildly reassuring about providing protection through shields and umbrellas in a way which cannot be said about threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, each one intended and designed to kill thousands of people indiscriminately. The ‘protection’ provided by nuclear weapons amounts to a threat to wipe out whole cities in response to any attack. It’s not something that any ‘shield’ or ‘umbrella’ could ever achieve, no matter how well designed. Nevertheless, the ‘friendlier’ terms were both in use this week by German ministers urging some sort of joining up of French and UK nuclear weaponry to provide ‘protection’ for the whole of Europe. Whether nuclear weapons do in fact act as a deterrent is one of those questions which can never be fully answered: the argument that they have prevented full-scale war in Europe since the end of the Second World War depends on an implicit assumption that a war would have occurred had the weapons not existed. It’s an assumption which is essentially impossible to either prove or disprove; an impossibility which only adds to the ferocity of debate on the subject. The clearest direct evidence for their deterrent effect is that the possession of nuclear weapons by Russia has deterred NATO countries from more direct intervention in support of Ukraine, but that makes the weapons look more like an enabler for their possessors than a protection against attack. To say nothing of an encouragement for proliferation.

It is possible that Putin is mad enough to believe that he can restore the old Russian/Soviet empire’s territories by the application of military force (his past words and statements certainly seem to indicate that he would like to do so), but the probability that a madman would be ‘deterred’ by anything is low. The whole concept of deterrence is predicated on the assumption that the actors are all rational, and that’s an assumption around which there must be considerable doubt. The second most probable reason for the outbreak of war would be if Putin believed that ‘the West’ is preparing to strike first and thus decided on pre-emptive action. Talk of establishing a ‘European’ nuclear strike force doesn’t look like the smartest way of convincing him otherwise.

Johnson gives green light for nuclear attack on UK

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The announcement by the PM this week that the cap on the UK’s stock of nuclear warheads is to be increased from 180 to 260 was in direct breach of international treaties committing the UK to work to eliminate such weapons. With each warhead estimated to be around 8 times as destructive as that used on Hiroshima, each is capable of destroying a sizeable city and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. How much extra ‘deterrence’ is provided by being able to obliterate 260 cities instead of ‘only’ 180 is the sort of question that only a psychopath would consider worthy of asking, but it assumes that a state which is not ‘deterred’ by a threat to kill some 30-40 million of its citizens would think twice if the threat was to kill more like 40-60 million. As if someone who doesn’t care about the first 40 million is going to baulk at an extra 10-20 million deaths.

Even worse than the increase in killing capacity is the announcement of a new range of conditions under which the weapons might be used. It has long been at least implicit in the UK’s policy that such weapons would only be used to respond to a nuclear attack on the UK, the theory being that knowing that such a retaliation would follow would deter such an attack. The theory always depended on two contradictory assumptions: the first being that potential enemies are mad enough to want to launch a nuclear attack, and the second that they are sane enough to decide not to if the counter-threat to them is great enough. Seen from the other side, ‘deterrence’ depends on the enemy believing that the UK’s government in its turn would be mad enough to launch a nuclear strike. Assuming that only your own self-proclaimed madness makes other mad people behave in a sane fashion is not the soundest of principles on which to run an international order.

What the PM also announced this week was that the circumstances in which the UK would consider the use of such weapons would be widened considerably. Firstly, page 77 of the document makes it clear that the assurance that “The UK will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 1968” will “…no longer apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations”. Secondly, the UK reserves “the right to review this assurance if the future threat of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological capabilities, or emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact, makes it necessary”. These are major shifts in policy, making it clear that the UK government now considers it both reasonable and proportional to respond, in circumstances which it will not and cannot define in advance, to a cyberattack with a nuclear strike, and to launch a first strike against a country which it considers to be in breach of the relevant treaties.

Making unilateral decisions in such an arena is seriously problematic. In the first place, effectively threatening non-nuclear states with a nuclear strike provides a direct incentive to those states to acquire nuclear weapons of their own – after all, if renouncing nuclear weapons no longer protects them against a nuclear strike, why wouldn’t they also want the protection of this ‘deterrence’ which the UK claims is so effective? And in the second place, the UK is both in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the author of cyberattacks on others; if either of those is justification for a nuclear strike by the UK, on what basis can it be argued that they are not a justification for an attack on the UK? Assuming that other countries will share the UK's opinion about its own exceptional status is both foolish and dangerous. Johnson and his government are making the world a much more dangerous place, wholly unnecessarily, in pursuit of a flawed dream of past glories and power.

Self-identifying as progressive isn't enough

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Last week, the idea of a so-called ‘progressive alliance’ to defeat the Tories made one of its regular outings in the pages of the Guardian. One of the reasons why the argument won’t go away is that it makes obvious mathematical sense: more people voted against the Tories than voted for them. There is, though, more to politics than mathematics, and being united against the Tories isn’t the same as being united in favour of a particular alternative. From the comfort of an armchair, there is an obvious attraction in the idea of a ‘once-off’ alliance committed to introducing a form of proportional representation which would ensure than all views were better represented and that one party could not end up with an absolute majority of seats on the basis of a minority of votes.

In fairness, the article does identify one major problem with the plan, which is “Labour’s self-perceived monopoly status [with] a mindset in which it is the one and only tent on the centre-left”. That’s a big hurdle to clear. Much of Labour’s messaging for decades has been that they are not the Tories and the only way to get a non-Tory government is to vote Labour, in a deliberate attempt to ‘squeeze’ the vote for smaller parties. If they once admit that, actually, there is a route to getting rid of the Tories which does not depend on voting Labour, what are they left with? It’s hard to see them ever doing that so, for Labour, the only sort of ‘alliance’ which they are ever likely to contemplate is one which calls on everyone else to vote Labour. History shows that they can, occasionally, win enough votes in England to gain a majority of seats and form a government, and the simple truth is that they’d prefer to have absolute power occasionally than to share power more regularly.

There is, though, an even bigger problem which the article doesn’t even consider. Can one really consider Labour to be a ‘progressive’ party at all? The word seems to mean different things to different people, but the fact that Labour chooses to self-identify as progressive doesn’t necessarily make it true.

There is a report today that Labour’s shadow defence secretary is making a speech in which he will declare that “Labour’s support for the UK’s nuclear deterrent is non-negotiable”. (He is apparently also going to declare that “Labour’s commitment to international law and the UN … is total”, a statement which seems rather to ignore the fact that it was a UN treaty which made the production, use and stockpiling of nuclear weapons illegal from 1 January this year. Labour’s ‘commitment’ to international law looks awfully similar in practice to the Tories’ ‘commitment’ to international law.) His argument for this stance is firstly that nuclear weapons provide jobs, and secondly that being seen to prevaricate over the possession of nuclear weapons has damaged the party’s reputation amongst certain groups of voters.

In rather blunter terms, in order to win elections, Labour thinks it needs the votes of those who think it morally and legally acceptable to use weapons of mass destruction to wipe out entire cities and their populations. And it would prefer to seek those votes than to form any sort of alliance with other parties to challenge and defeat that barbaric and inhumane viewpoint. It’s hard to see what is ‘progressive’ about that. And that’s the really big problem with the idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ – it assumes that people would be willing to vote tactically for policies indistinguishable from those of the Tories in order to get rid of the Tories. It needs more than that to work.

Is it just cowardice?

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I’m not aware of a single occasion, in the whole of recorded human history, when the citizens of one country have stated en masse that they hate the citizens of another country and want to go to war with them.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t subsequently get caught up in hatred and war fever – I can well remember growing up in the 1950s and hearing adults of my parents’ generation saying things like “The only good German is a dead German”.  That sort of hatred is necessary to sustain a long war, and the elites who start the wars invariably use all the propaganda tools at their disposal to encourage it; the point, however, is that it’s the elites, not the citizens, who decide to go to war in the first place.

It’s the ordinary citizens on both sides who provide (and always have done) the cannon fodder and most of the casualties, but it’s only since some 70-80 years ago that ordinary citizens started to be deliberately targeted through mass bombing of cities, culminating, of course, in the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.  The whole rationale for strategic nuclear weapons is that their only possible actual or threatened use is for the mass annihilation of ordinary citizens – men, women and children alike – as they go about their daily business, for the sole ‘crime’ of living within the boundaries of a state which finds itself at war with another state.  It follows that anyone who supports the possession of such weapons, let alone states that they are willing to use them, is effectively arguing that that is a legitimate way of pursuing a war started by the elites.

And that brings me to the Labour Party’s leadership election.  As I understand it, all five candidates have expressed, at one time or another, their willingness to deliberately target citizens of another country in this way, whilst arguing that class solidarity is more important than nationality.  All five are being utterly disingenuous: there is no way that anyone willing to kill millions of working people solely for being of another nationality can argue any such thing.  Their argument, I’m sure, is that any leader stating that he or she would be unwilling to press the button would be ‘unelectable’, by the standards of the media and those who control them.  But if that’s their only reason, I’m not sure which is worse – their stated willingness to use such weapons, or their cowardice in refusing to say otherwise in order to get elected.  But what does it say about the electorate at large that the majority are willing to be guided into only electing someone who professes a willingness to commit mass murder?

Nuking herself in the foot

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There is little purpose in possessing nuclear weapons unless one is prepared to use them.  And for many of us – including some senior people in the world’s armed forces, that sentence would be equally valid without the last 7 words.  Theoretically, the only debate between the Labour Party’s supporters and opponents of the UK’s continued possession of such weapons is about the best way to get rid of them; but the word ‘theoretically’ is doing a lot of work there.  It would be more accurate to say that the party is divided between a minority who want more-or-less immediate nuclear disarmament, a majority who probably agree but are afraid to say so, and another minority who actually, genuinely believe that the UK should continue to possess such weapons.  And if that’s a fair summary, then the conclusion to be drawn from it is that the party’s policy on the issue is, in practice, decided not by those who have a clear view one way or the other, but by those who are simply too afraid of the Tory-driven reaction which would follow to express their views openly and honestly.

The result of that is to place people who have taken an honourable stance on the issue for almost the whole of their political lives – like Corbyn for instance – in a position where he cannot express his deeply-held view and is forced to pretend that he no longer agrees with everything he’s said on the issue for the past half century.  It also means that anyone aspiring to lead the party must answer the ‘button question’ and will immediately be deemed unelectable if they give the ‘wrong’ answer.  Thus it was that yesterday, Rebecca Long Bailey told us that she would indeed be willing to press the button and annihilate millions of people whilst also telling us that she’s an internationalist and supports a Green New Deal.  There’s nothing that quite says ‘workers of the world unite’ like an announcement of a willingness to use nuclear weapons against workers in another country.  And there’s nothing better for greening the economy than spending billions on turning scarce and valuable resources into weapons of mass destruction.  Apparently.

She could, of course, be lying.  I’d go further: she is certainly lying about something because there is no way that internationalism, green policies, and the use of nuclear weapons can coherently be combined, although the fact that she’s definitely lying about at least one doesn’t prove that she’s not lying about the rest.  Yet again, Labour are managing to fall into the nuclear trap from which the only escape is a series of attributes which most of them seem to be lacking – like integrity, honesty and courage.

Circular arguments

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The Secretary of State for Defence has told us this week that the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea justifies the UK’s possession of such weapons.  Unfortunately, he does not set out the logical process he’s used to get from the premise to the conclusion. 

Insofar as there is a degree of logic there, I can understand why a state which fears that another nuclear weapons state might attack it could convince itself that it therefore needs to have its own nuclear weapons to act as a deterrent to a potential attacker.  But isn’t that precisely the logic which has driven Kim Jong-Un to acquire nuclear weapons in the first place?  In essence, Fallon’s argument seems to be that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons to counter what it sees as a threat from us, so we need nuclear weapons to counter the threat that they will pose us as a result.  It’s a circular argument which leads inevitably in only one direction – nuclear proliferation.  If the existence of nuclear weapons in one state justifies the retention or acquisition of such weapons by another, the solution has more to do with getting rid of them than with upgrading them. 

I can understand why Fallon might honestly believe that Kim is mad enough to use his weapons once they are ready, and I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment.  A closed dictatorial society where people are afraid to tell the supreme leader anything that he might not want to hear could well create the conditions for a nuclear conflict to break out, but that’s not much of an argument for threatening all-out retaliation; it just proves that ‘deterrence’ doesn’t work in those particular circumstances.  The whole concept of deterrence is based on an assumption that possessors of nuclear weapons will carry out a careful assessment of the likely retaliatory damage to their own side before using them.  It also assumes both that those involved will make a rational assessment, and that weighing up the probable millions of deaths on both sides to decide who wins is in some way a rational act.

The real reason that the UK insists on retaining and upgrading its nuclear weapons – despite treaty obligations forbidding it from doing so – is to maintain the fiction that the UK is one of the world’s great powers and keep hold of its seat on the UN Security Council.  It’s one of the most expensive seats in the world.

Setting the wrong specification

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It is already clear that a major part of the Tory election platform will be to compare and contrast May and Corbyn, in the belief that May will come out better.  And I suppose it’s a fair tactic, even if strictly speaking most of the electorate can’t vote directly for either of the two individuals.  Assessing which of the two best meets the perceived person specification for the top job is a fair question to be asking.  The more important question, though, is who decides what that person specification is?

The Tories and their allies in the press and media are in no doubt at all: they will set the specification, and the rest of us will be expected to make the assessment on the basis of the specification which they set.  From the interview which Corbyn did yesterday, it appears that two of the most important attributes for any Prime Minister of the UK according to the specification with which we are being presented are a willingness to annihilate millions of men women and children in a revenge attack, and an enthusiasm for extra-judicial killing of perceived enemies.  In both cases, the only acceptable answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’; anything else can and will be used to suggest weakness, and the idea that any PM should want to consider the detail of the situation at the time is to be officially regarded as risible.

I almost feel sorry for Corbyn that an intelligent and reasoned response to such a black and white question is being interpreted as unsuitability for the job; for me, a willingness to declare in advance that death and destruction will be unleashed whatever the circumstances makes a person far less suited to the job.  But only ‘almost’ feel sorry – because for decades, the Labour Party’s leaders have been part of the consensus which has narrowed the acceptable range of responses to one.  The Labour Party has collaborated in setting the person specification in such a way that their own leader is now regarded – even by most Labour MPs – as being unsuitable for the job.

Buying and selling nonsense

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One of the key policy differences between the leader of the Labour Party and the man seeking to depose him is the issue of nuclear weapons, and specifically the replacement of Trident.  Whilst there seem to be some in the Labour Party for whom the main justification for keeping Trident is that it provides jobs (making it the most expensive job creation scheme ever), the position of Owen Smith seems to be that he actually wants to get rid of nuclear weapons completely, but believes that the only way to do that is through bargaining with other nuclear weapons states, and to get a seat at the table, the UK needs to spend a vast sum of money renewing its current systems.

Whet they have not explained to date, as far as I can see, is why the UK so desperately needs to have a seat at that particular table in the first place.  If we didn’t currently possess such weapons, would anyone – in the Labour Party or elsewhere – seriously suggest that we needed to develop them simply in order to take part in the negotiations to get rid of them?  Of course not – the idea is a silly one.

But if that looks like nonsense, stop and consider another aspect of the question for a moment.  Does possession of such weapons actually guarantee a seat at the table, even if we were to agree that it was desirable to have one?  The evidence suggests otherwise.

The closest the world has actually come to an agreement to rid the planet of such weapons was in 1986, when Gorbachev proposed to Reagan that nuclear weapons should all be scrapped within ten years.  Sadly, the proposal came to nothing, largely because Reagan was not prepared to abandon the Strategic Defence Initiative.  But where was the UK in this?  Er – nowhere.  No seat at the table, no invite to the talks.  Although, formally, it was agreed that the nuclear capabilities of the UK and France should be excluded from the US-Soviet talks, it was implicitly assumed that if the ‘big boys’ did come to an agreement, then the ‘minor players’ would fall into line.  It’s unthinkable that they would not.

It remains true that any serious progress on nuclear disarmament depends on the US and Russia, and that the UK’s input to that will be close to zero, with or without weapons.  And that must be as obvious to the pro-nuclear lobby in the Labour Party as it is to me.  So why are so many people buying a line which is such patent nonsense?

Bigger sticks

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Last week, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister (for the time being, anyway) invited us to consider the scary prospect of the whole world giving up nuclear weapons – except for North Korea.  Who, he invited his audience to consider, would fancy living in such a world?  To him, the answer was obvious – but it’s one of those rhetorical flourishes which don’t stand up terribly well to detailed analysis.

Even from a simplistic perspective, would a world in which the Russian, American, Chinese, UK, French, Israeli, Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals had ceased to exist, leaving just a handful of weapons in the hands of one small isolated state, be better or worse than the situation today?  I can’t immediately see any argument which says that it wouldn’t be better.

But of course Benn was looking at a much narrower context than that.  If I understand his argument at all, it is that the UK needs to retain its nuclear deterrent so the North Korea wouldn’t ever dare to attack us with its own nuclear weapons.  But hold on a minute there – why would they want to?  I mean, it seems to me that they have other enemies which they are much more likely to pick on than the UK.  In that context, if they really did decide to fire one of their bombs at South Korea, say, would the UK really respond by firing a Trident missile at them?  It doesn’t seem a very credible scenario to me.

Perhaps the argument is that they are so irrational that they just might decide to go for the UK, and that’s why we need Trident to deter them.  But the whole point about a nuclear deterrent is that it assumes that ‘the enemy’ is not irrational, and will think very carefully about the potential consequences of their actions – if they cannot be depended on to rationally weigh up the costs and benefits of their actions, then there is no deterrent, only a mechanism for exacting revenge.

I suspect that the US Defence Secretary was much closer to the truth about why so many Labour-Tory politicians want to keep nuclear weapons, when he talked about the UK ‘punching above its weight’.  It’s nothing to do with deterring anyone, it’s all about being the big boy in the playground; one of the ones with the biggest sticks.  So, let me ask a variant of the question which Benn posed: “And finally, who fancies living in a world in which those with the biggest sticks tell everyone else what to do?”

Losing the plot

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The latest comments by the Labour leader on Trident look like the sort of fudge which we’ve seen far too often from Labour on a range of issues.  Half-baked would seem to be an inadequate description of the suggestion that we should build a new generation of submarines which are specifically designed to launch nuclear missiles and then not arm them with nuclear weapons.  Insofar as there is any point at all to Trident, it is that it has the capacity to remain hidden at sea and exact revenge for a nuclear attack by posthumously wiping out a few cities somewhere.  As a means of delivering conventional explosives, it would be a hopelessly over-engineered and expensive approach, and all done, apparently, to keep people employed in the shipyards where the submarines would be built and the docks where they would be based - and to keep a few trade unions on side.

Labour have form on coming up with compromise and fudge designed first and foremost to maintain some sort of precarious party unity (as anyone familiar with the history of Welsh devolution will be only too aware).  But this suggestion takes that to a new height.  I can think of lots of ways of spending the £100billion which would produce more jobs and deliver more useful outputs.

Another example of the way in which Labour is losing the plot on Trident was the comment by the sacked shadow minister Michael Dugher, reported in the same story, that “We tried unilateralism before.  It ended in electoral disaster then.  There is no evidence to suggest that it won't end in disaster again.”  I’m sure that he is entirely sincere in his belief that nuclear weapons are essential to Labour’s electoral prospects, but the thing that struck me was the complete absence of any attempt to put forward any reason for possessing such weapons other than electoral success for Labour. 

Both his comments and those of Corbyn go to the heart of the problem that Labour faces.  It no longer has any raison d’être, in the eyes of most of its own MPs, than to win elections at all costs.  Corbyn started out with a different view – slowly but surely, he’s being brought back into line.

Comrades in arms?

Tweet The report that Wales’ First Minister will no longer be extending an invitation to base the Trident nuclear weapons submarines in Wales is welcome, albeit belated.  It’s not entirely clear whether his change of heart is a reflection of the views of his new boss, or merely a recognition that an off-the-cuff remark in a debate in the Senedd, intended merely to score a political point in debate, came to look rather silly after the event.  It always looked more like a case of foot-in-mouth disease than a thought-through policy pronouncement.

At UK level, the Labour Party is still struggling with the whole issue.  Silly and wholly uncomradely remarks made by Ken Livingstone didn’t help, of course.  But some of the Labour Party’s own MPs have succeeded in giving the impression that they are quite happy to have a review of the party’s policy as long as the review is conducted only by people who agree with the current policy and doesn’t include anyone who might actually want to question it.  Sir Humphrey would be proud of them.

Whilst Livingstone’s comments were quite rightly turned upon, his silliness and his subsequent apology have unfortunately diverted attention away from the substance of the views being put forward by the MP he attacked, Kevan Jones.  As the BBC reported, Mr Jones said “I'm not sure Ken knows anything about defence.  It will only damage our credibility amongst those that do and who care about defence”.

Whilst he did not deserve the personal attack to which he was subjected, his view does need to be challenged.  It’s a very dismissive view to adopt towards any alternative viewpoint – in effect, he’s saying that ‘credibility’ means agreeing with him.  It’s a classic example of the way in which conservative politicians of all parties attempt to close down debate and restrict the range of opinion which can be discussed – and it avoids the substance of the issue completely.

Attacking the wrong target

Tweet Jeremy Corbyn seems to have upset some of his shadow cabinet colleagues by saying openly and honestly that, if he were Prime Minister, he would not authorise the use of nuclear weapons.  Both Labour and Tory MPs - ably aided and abetted by the BBC who seem to have swallowed their argument hook, line, and sinker - have jumped on his words as an indication that the result will somehow be to weaken the UK’s defences.  The whole point of a ‘deterrent’, they argue, is that the unspecified ‘enemies’ out there have to believe that they would be used, otherwise they’re useless.

Some of us think such weapons are useless anyway.  It’s impossible to conceive of a situation where any rational person would authorise their use.  (But perhaps that’s my problem - expecting rationality in a politician?)  Possession seems to be more about being one of the big boys in the school yard than anything else – but it’s an awfully expensive way of getting one of the biggest sticks.

Seriously, even if Corbyn had answered the question in any different way, would he have been credible?  Labour’s warmongers seem to want him to say something like, “I’ve campaigned against nuclear weapons all my life, I believe that the use or possession of such weapons is morally indefensible, but of course, if I were Prime Minister, I’d be willing to use them”? 

One has only to ask the question to see the flaw in the argument that he could or should have answered other than as he did.  He would not have been in the least bit credible.

What would be far more useful and meaningful would be to ask all those who are now criticising him to explain, or to give one hypothetical example, how and when they would be willing to authorise the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians in some distant cities.  I’m sure that they’d all respond by saying something along the lines of ‘not wanting to let the enemy know in advance what he could or could not get away with’.  But the fact that they’d all say that there are circumstances in which they would be willing to use such weapons tells us all we need to know about their moral compasses.

Corbyn isn’t the one who needs to defend his stance.

Learning the wrong lessons

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Over the past week, there have been a number of events to mark the 70^th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War.  And media coverage has been accompanied by some of the usual rationalisations for the action taken, and for the continued possession of nuclear weapons.

The customary justification of those who support the use made of the weapons is that it helped to end the war early, and saved more lives than it cost.  I’ll admit that I don’t know if that’s true or not; the nature of history is that we can only ever live it once, we can’t go back and do something different to see what would have happened.  There is some evidence in support of the view that more lives were saved than taken, but there is also plenty of evidence against it.

Bridgend’s Green Leftie has set out some of the evidence to suggest that the argument about saving more lives than it cost wasn’t true – and that the people involved had enough knowledge at the time to know that what they were saying was untrue.  Maybe.  It looks convincing to me, but then I start from a pre-disposition to believe that. 

But let’s give those who justify the bombings the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and assume that they really did believe that what they were doing was the lesser of two evils.  It seems to me that even on the basis of that assumption, there are two serious questions to be asked before one can excuse their actions.

The first is whether there really were only two choices – all out land invasion fighting inch by inch over the Japanese islands or dropping atomic bombs to annihilate two cities.  Reducing the options to two is a technique often used to justify taking a particular course of action; but such a simplistic binary choice rarely reflects the subtleties of life in the real world.  The argument that it saved more lives than it cost stands up only if we accept the premise that there were only two choices; those making that argument are wilfully over-simplifying. 

But the second question is, for me, the crucial one.  Even supposing it were true, on what basis does any civilised human being decide that killing 200,000 plus citizens, selected solely on the basis of where they live, in an act of deliberate mass extermination, is ‘better’ than the possibility that a greater number will die elsewhere, based on what can only be estimates and guesses?  It’s not that I don’t understand the mathematics of it – it’s as simple as believing that X is greater than Y.  But it’s the dehumanisation involved which is the issue; the treating of people with names and families as just numbers whose lives can be weighed and valued against the lives of others as though on a giant set of scales.

It’s too easy to dismiss that attitude as the product of a vicious total war which had already raged for 6 years and taken millions of lives.  It might, almost, be comprehensible (even if not excusable) in that context.  But those who support the continued possession of weapons of mass destruction are effectively applying the same type of judgement today, because there is no purpose at all in possessing such weapons unless those who possess them are willing to use them.

That includes every UK Prime Minister, Tory and Labour alike, since the end of the war in which nuclear weapons were first used.  All of them, even free of the pressures of immediate war, have effectively declared their willingness to eliminate whole cities and all those who live in them, selected for death solely on the basis of location. 

The lesson which we should learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it should never happen again.  The lesson which our ‘leaders’ actually seem to have learnt is that possessing the biggest stick and being willing to use it on randomly selected victims allows the big boys to get their own way in the world.

Sometimes, ‘human progress’ sounds like an oxymoron.