Making a Virtue out of a Necessity: Or, Trident Lite

Having been a ‘ban the bomber’ on those marches in the early sixties I still feel guilty at having failed. I also still feel guilty that underneath all of my marching, speecheefying and giving the thin blue line a bit of a run around, I was always thinking, ‘I hope those Marxist Fascists over there don’t march in when we get rid of these stupid bangers’. By the seventies I was thinking, ‘Well if they do we will go down with our own personal bang which is probably better than inflicting it on the rest of the planet’. Little did I know that the peril to be inflicted would come more from a global economy which made some very affluent, others very poor, and all of us heading for hell in a bucket.

What is my point? Just hang in there a second. Well, at least I recognised the perils and had to decide what the right route was in moral terms. There were those among us then who had no such doubts. Bertram Russell was one, Canon John Collins another. The Canon had been a bomber pilot at the time of Dresden with Hiroshima and Nagasaki yet to come. Not only listen to your radicals but listen to those who have seen into the abyss. Between the two perspectives we all know that ‘MAD’, i.e., mutually assured destruction, is not a defence mechanism but a suicide pact. Against such people I used to feel a bit of a moral coward, and I think I still do, as it is easier to be brave when you have had a great life.

This really does bring me to my point. Why start proclaiming that we will reduce the number of our Trident submarines down to three from four? Come off it Gordon! You know as well I do up here in the agricultural hills that your mini ministers have done so much to undermine, that you can’t afford to do anything else. You can’t really afford three Trident Subs, let alone an ID Card Scheme not to mention a properly conducted land war in Afghanistan. You have written on ‘Courage’ and now is the time to put that noble concept into practice and have the courage to set out the reality. How about saying, ‘We cannot afford a nuclear deterrent so we will reduce it, and at the very least, we will make every effort to further multilateralism’. Not exactly the moral high ground but at least it is honest and will take a bit of courage to express. You have nothing to lose. In any case, and this will appeal to your fragile political judgement, the environmental flip over point might well be reached before anyone actually has to press the button. At least one thing is pretty clear by now. It won’t be you on the hotline to Washington or to Naval Command at Northwood authorising any such depression. Your vaporisation will have already occurred within the next 9 months. ‘Another fine mess you’ve got us into......’

Dacier