What's so special about 2029? or 2030?

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There seems to be a quiet difference of opinion amongst those who want us all to prepare for war with Russia: will the apparently inevitable Russian attack come in 2029 or in 2030? Either way, the dates postulated by defence ‘experts’ are largely arbitrary, carefully selected to be close enough to provoke action, but far enough in the future for that action to be meaningful. The ‘action’ required, of course, is to divert resources from those things which benefit the population as a whole, such as education, health, and transport, into the development and acquisition of armaments. Two years from now, the difference of opinion over the assumed date of attack will be between 2031 and 2032. It doesn’t matter how much is spent, or what weaponry is ‘required’, the need to add to it, or replace it with even newer versions, will always be there in the minds of the warmongers, to say nothing of the arms manufacturers.

Why, precisely, Russia would want to attack isn’t debated as widely as it should be; after all, if the threat was genuine, we’d know why they might want to attack, wouldn’t we? I simply don’t buy the idea that world domination by force is the motivating factor. But there is just a big hole where that question should be, and a vague assumption that Russia simply wants to expand the territory which it controls. From what Putin has said, we know that he has some strange beliefs, based on his curious understanding of history. In his view, Ukraine is not a nation, and its people are just Russians with an odd dialect. He also seems to believe that countries previously ruled from Moscow are destined by fate to be so, and should be brought back into the fold. Whether those beliefs are the driver of his military ambitions, or just a story told to justify them is another question. Telling stories as justification isn’t a trait unique to Putin.

In reality, it is surely much more likely that he genuinely believed the other story that he has told, which is that NATO and ‘the West’ in general intended to surround and dismember Russia, and he was therefore acting pre-emptively in launching the invasion. The biggest reason for striking first is always likely to be a fear that the other side would otherwise do so, coupled with the belief that striking first confers advantage. All of that, combined with a misunderstanding of the extent to which Ukrainians, particularly in the east, wanted to be Russians, and an underestimation of the likely resistance might have made it all a huge miscalculation. But one doesn’t have to be a Putin supporter or apologist to wonder whether, from the perspective of the Kremlin, the threat might have looked very real. It’s a perspective which continued active preparation for war in three or four years’ time is more likely to reinforce than dispel.

The military build-up is always presented to us as ‘deterrent’; the idea is that being seen to have a greater capability to destroy and kill will ensure that the attack never comes. It could, though, simply provoke it. Whether carrying a big stick to ward off invaders actually works is impossible to know. The fact that the putative invaders don’t invade whilst we’re waving the stick doesn’t prove that it worked – they might never have wanted to invade in the first place. But finding bigger sticks every year might eventually convince those believed to be would-be invaders that they had better act before the stick is used against them anyway. Logically, what looks like a deterrent to one can always look like a threat to the other. Discussion and mutually-agreed de-escalation are always going to be the safer route. They also mean that resources can be used more beneficially - 'defence' is about more than territory, there are other aspects to building a secure future for the population.

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.

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.

Threats and deterrence

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If a householder builds a tall wall around his garden, and tops it with an electrified razor wire fence, some might think him to be quite mad, but it might reasonably be considered to be a deterrent against anyone trying to enter his land. It’s still a deterrent if he lurks behind the wall with a loaded shotgun and puts stickers on the outside of the wall warning potential trespassers of the fact. If he then builds a tower just inside the wall and stands on top of it waving his shotgun in the direction of anyone passing by, he would remove all question as to his sanity, but has he also crossed the line between deterrent and threat? The difference between a deterrent and a threat is sometimes, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.

Relationships between states are more complex than that, but the basic point – that whether an action is considered to be a deterrent or a threat depends on one’s point of view – is substantially the same. If Russia moves troops closer to the borders of NATO countries, is that a threat to invade those countries or a deterrent to a perceived threat to invade Russia? If the US moves nuclear weapons to the UK so that it can strike Russia sooner and with less warning than by using ICBMs based in the US, I don’t doubt that the US would intend it to be a deterrent. But I couldn’t blame Russia for seeing it as a threat. To the extent that people contemplating fighting a nuclear war haven’t already, like the guy with the shotgun on top of his tower, removed all doubt as to their rationality, there is a point in the game of deterrent/counter-deterrent (or threat/counter-threat) where it becomes almost rational to strike first, on the principle of ‘use it or lose it’. The question we ought to be asking ourselves is whether those taking decisions, allegedly on our behalf, are bringing that point closer or pushing it further away. Claiming that ‘he started it’ is a kindergarten level argument; the issue is not about who started the spiral towards war, but about how we stop it. There is nothing unpatriotic, and it isn’t being a stooge for Putin, to try and understand that he might just possibly interpret things in a different way. And whether that interpretation is right or wrong is irrelevant – understanding it is a part of the key to any attempt at mutual de-escalation.

There does seem to be a marked increase recently in the number of people telling us that we must prepare for war, although their motives may be mixed. I suspect some merely want to reintroduce conscription in the belief that it will restore ‘traditional’ values, including imposing a sense of ‘British’ patriotism which they think has got lost. Others probably think that ramping up armament production will be good for jobs, and that a wartime economy would be good for capitalism in general. Some, though, are entirely sincere – they really do want to fight an all-out war against Russia, and all pretence that a war between two capitalist economies would somehow be about ideology has long since been shattered. Paranoia even leads some to think about the Republic of Ireland as a potential enemy (almost a case of ‘if they’re not with us, they’re against us’), and even to talk about the need for England to bomb an independent Scotland to prevent the Russians from using its airbases. That wasn’t only about trying to head off independence – some people really do think that way.

I can’t immediately recall any time in human history where huge armies have been built, possessing enormous quantities of the latest and most potent methods of destruction, without them subsequently being used. And I’m not currently particularly confident that we’re on the verge of achieving that for the first time.

Punishment or deterrence?

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All human societies need a system of rules and need to enforce those rules. But approaches to setting and enforcing rules differ. One approach is to maximise social solidarity – to ensure buy-in from all members and work largely through persuasion. An alternative is authoritarianism, where transgressors are harshly punished and where those punishments are intended to deter others from transgressing in future. In practice, the differences are not so clear-cut – real human societies operate somewhere in between those extremes and invariably contain advocates of both approaches.

The coronavirus pandemic seems to have brought out an authoritarian streak in Wales as in the rest of the UK, with even those politicians whom I would instinctively have expected to support an approach based primarily on persuasion and social solidarity apparently baying for police crackdowns and harsher penalties. In the face of hard reality, the differences between those who claim to be on the political ‘right’ and those who claim to be on the political ‘left’ turn out to be less significant than I would have expected. It’s not clear to me what the purpose of higher fines would be – acting as a deterrent is the obvious motive but the rhetoric sounds much more like a desire to punish those who don’t comply. Whether higher fines would act as a deterrent is a moot point anyway; for the scale of the punishment to discourage a particular act depends on an assumption that the person considering committing such an act carefully weighs up the pros and cons first – and to the extent that he or she does that, the calculation of the probability of getting caught is likely to be at least as significant as the amount of any potential fine. For all the publicity given to a few exceptional cases, I suspect that the probability of getting caught is quite low, and that those ignoring the rules know that.

There are those who doubt that we need the restrictions on movement at all but I am not among them. I accept that the best route to controlling the pandemic lies in placing restrictions on our lives for the short term, and I accept the concomitant necessity for some form of enforcement. But where are the traditional advocates of persuasion and social solidarity in all this? It feels as though many have simply given up and joined the lynch mobs.

Protection and insurance

Tweet There is a mantra oft-repeated by politicians keen to spend more and more of our money on acquiring and using weapons that “the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens”.  It’s duly parroted by the media, solemnly pronouncing on whether party A or party B is actually behaving in a way consistent with the mantra.  It’s treated as unarguable truth, largely because it’s ‘obviously true’.

But one of the things that life has taught me is that truth isn’t always obvious; and that which is ‘obvious’ isn’t always true.  In this case, I’m not at all sure that the statement means anything, shorn of context and without defining what ‘protect’ means as well as ‘protection from what’.

The latest outing that I saw for the statement was in the Sunday Times, when former Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall trotted it out in support of the proposition that it is Labour’s ‘patriotic duty’ to back Trident.  In this context, it is, in effect, a substitute for argument and debate; a sort of trump card which over-rules any objection.  That isn’t helpful to rational consideration.

I don’t disagree with the statement as such; I think that governments should seek to protect their citizens from those things which threaten them.  But I don’t see nuclear blackmail as one of the biggest threats facing me or most other citizens.  Nor, in reality, do I see terrorism – a blanket word which in itself needs a lot more definition and refinement – as being the biggest threat to citizens of the UK.

For most of the population (although I’d accept that this isn’t true for those who move in the same circles as most of our politicians) their economic situation, and concerns about health care and education are much bigger threats to their lifestyles and well being.  And it’s hard to see how diverting money away from those fields to pay for a new nuclear weapons system does anything other than increase those threats.  In essence, even if the politicians really do believe that the mantra is one by which they should govern, their actions seem destined to achieve the opposite.

Another argument which is regularly advanced for Trident is that it’s some sort of ‘insurance policy’, and that wise people don’t go around without insurance.  But that’s simply not true.  Insurance policies don’t prevent things happening; they can’t.  Insurance is about pooling risk so that those who lose are, in effect, compensated for their loss by those who don’t.  The ‘protection’ offered by Trident is more akin to that traditionally offered by the mafia than a conventional insurance policy.  Insurance is about compensation for damage, not striking back - there’s nothing in my life insurance policy about posthumous retaliation.  The comparison with insurance is nonsensical.

Trident isn’t about protection; it isn’t about insurance; and it has little to do with the threats currently facing most of the UK population.  What it is about is keeping the UK government in the big boys club, pretending that the UK is still some sort of global power, and closing our eyes to the realities of the twenty first century.  It’s no way to build a safer world.

Truth and lies

Tweet There were two related stories in the Sunday Times this week (sadly hidden behind their paywall) about the renewal of the Trident nuclear ‘deterrent’.

The first was about Cameron and the fact that he, like previous Prime Ministers in the nuclear age, had to write personal letters to the captains of all four Trident submarines.  Described as ‘letters from the grave’, the hope is that these letters are never actually opened, but simply destroyed when they are replaced by new letters from a new PM.  The letters give the submarine commanders instructions as to what they should do in the event that the UK has already been destroyed by a nuclear attack.

He didn’t talk about the content – he could hardly do that.  But insofar as the idea of deterrence has any credibility at all, the ‘enemy’ (whoever that may currently be) has to believe that the instructions would be for the commanders to unleash their destruction and obliterate between 15 and 20 cities and all their inhabitants.  If the enemy doesn’t believe that, then it is hardly a deterrent.

But if the letters are ever opened, then clearly deterrence will have failed.  The enemy will have weighed up the odds and decided to press the button anyway.  At the point at which such letters ever get opened, it’s way too late for deterrence – by then, it’s purely about posthumous revenge.  Oh, and incidentally making the world even less hospitable for anyone who survived the first attack than it already will have become. 

It serves only to underline the madness of the idea that possession of such weapons can ever make the world a safer place that the concept of deterrence depends on each side thinking that the other would sooner add to the death and destruction that has already been caused than try and save whatever would be left of humanity.

The second story was about a former senior US defence official called Franklin Miller trying to debunk the suggestion that the UK’s nuclear force is not as independent as is claimed, and that there is some sort of US veto on its use.  The idea of such a veto has been around a long time, and is credible, not least because the UK’s missiles aren’t actually UK property; they’re merely leased from the US.  It is only the warheads which are the property of the UK.  It is entirely possible that there is some sort of software or hardware lock on the firing of missiles without US agreement.

Clearly, for an ‘independent’ deterrent to be of any value the enemy have to believe that it is truly independent; otherwise they do not need to fear the UK, only the US.  So people like the UK Government and Mr Miller need to convince the enemy that it is truly independent, even if it isn’t.  That in turn means that we can never know whether they’re telling the truth or not.  They are truly caught in a logic trap of their own making.  No matter how many times or how forcibly they re-iterate the claim that there is no veto, we can never be certain that they’re telling us the truth.

In a sense, both stories come together at this point, because they both underline the fact that we can never know whether governments are telling the truth or lying.  And this isn’t exactly some unimportant little issue…

Morality in politics

Tweet In the first two elections that I can remember, those in 1964 and 1966, I was too young to vote.  But I can remember a certain amount of excitement at the time, and also some of the promises being made by the Labour Party under Wilson.  One of the headline policies was that Polaris, the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines, would be scrapped.  It didn’t happen, of course; and far from divesting the UK of its nuclear arsenal, the Labour Party have either taken, or been complicit in, every subsequent decision to modernise and replace the nuclear arsenal.  I ended up disillusioned with the promises of the Labour Party before I was even old enough to vote.

Although there has long been a strand in the Labour Party which has opposed the possession of nuclear weapons, and the issue looked like it might come to the fore again when Michael Foot was leader, time and time again the Labour Party has proved that it is not a serious party of disarmament, and with the other two main UK parties committed to retention as well, it has never really been an election issue for the last half a century.

The anticipated closeness of the coming election has created a situation where the Green Party, SNP, and Plaid can again put the matter on the agenda.  There’s a certain amount of posturing in this, of course (there is no conceivable outcome to the election which doesn’t result in a House of Commons containing an overwhelming majority in favour of the continued possession of nuclear weapons), and talk of ‘forcing’ the government into abandoning them is fanciful at best.  But at least it’s an issue which can be discussed in a way which hasn’t really happened for 50 years – and almost everyone in the UK looks like having an opportunity, at least, to vote for an anti-Trident candidate.

It’s hard to discuss the issue without getting into moral arguments.  For the three main UK parties, that’s something to be avoided at all costs.  For them, the ‘fact’ of deterrence is a given, the possession of these weapons is an inalienable right, and the only question is about the most cost-effective way of renewing them.  But for most opponents, there is always and inevitably a moral dimension to the debate.  

For the ‘deterrent’ to be in any way credible, those in charge of it have to be able to say convincingly that there are circumstances in which they would be prepared to give the order to obliterate whole cities. I have no doubt that Cameron, Clegg, and Miliband are all, in effect, saying that there are circumstances in which they would indeed be prepared to give that order, even if it meant killing millions of civilians whose only crime was to live in a particular place.

The comparison between the jobs provided by Trident and those provided at Auschwitz which was used by Dafydd Wigley earlier today was unfortunate, for a number of reasons.  The comparison is far from being a direct one and the timing on the day after the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was awful.  It has also helped enable the cheer leaders for Trident to divert attention away from the morality of the possession of nuclear weapons and on to ground on which they feel more secure – criticising the poor choice of words of a political opponent.

Of course there's a huge difference between the actual deaths of the 6 million Jews slaughtered under Hitler’s orders, and the potential slaughter which would result from the use of nuclear weapons.  One is very real, it actually happened; the other is merely a potential scenario for the future.  But in the knowledge of the horrors of the past, the fact that any politician could seriously consider that it is ever right to threaten to unleash death and destruction on the scale of a nuclear war certainly makes me wonder whether we have really learned anything from the past.

Trident is more than just a technical matter; for many of us it is, at heart, a moral issue.  And I hope that those opposing it will continue to make that point, even if they need to choose their words with a little more care.

Not just Scotland's dividend

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There was a suggestion a week or two ago that Wales could gain the dubious privilege of hosting Trident if the Scots vote for independence.  It was described as Wales being the ‘winners’; not the sort of thing that I’d call much of a ‘victory’, although in the light of the St Athan debacle, I don’t doubt that there’d be plenty of politicians queuing up to welcome such a move.

I’m not over-worried about it though – I just don’t see it happening.  Firstly, it depends on the Scots actually supporting independence.  Much as I’d like to see such an outcome, I still have a feeling that the result of the First Scottish Independence Referendum will be a ‘no’; albeit by a closer margin than many supporters of the union are expecting.  Given the multi-billion pound cost of relocating the base, it’s not going to happen before a ‘yes’ vote.

But let us suppose that it does happen.  The top brass in the MoD will then be faced with deciding whether to site any new base in England or in Wales.  I can’t believe that, having seen the base kicked out of one departing country, the idea of putting it into another country where there is also a movement seeking independence, no matter how weak, is likely to come anywhere near the top of the MoD’s list.

For sure, they won’t state that as their reason, and there’ll be a Welsh site on the list for consideration before the carefully chosen experts come out with all sorts of practical reasons why the Welsh site isn’t the best one.  It’s the way they work.

However, an American Peace Institute came out with a much more helpful suggestion today.  They propose that if the Scottish base has to be closed, then the UK should be seriously thinking about nuclear disarmament, rather than relocation.  That would mean that it isn’t only Scotland which would see a significant dividend from becoming an independent state.  England and Wales could get one too.