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Time that UK Labour rejected replacement of useless Trident Nuclear Submarines

Pro-nuclear propaganda in 1983: lessons for 2013 50/50 Inclusive Democracy REBECCA JOHNSON 9 August 2013  Read the first.]

“……..As nuclear weapons are increasingly marginalised in the 21st century and Britain faces another hundred-billion-pound question on whether to replace the Trident system we didn’t need for the past 30 years and can’t find any good reason for getting now, it’s time for the Labour Party to stop running scared about reframing security and nuclear policy.

The intellectual and security arguments against Trident replacement are overwhelming. It’s time to change the discourse on nuclear weapons in Britain. If this country is to avoid committing the stupid, expensive mistake of signing away billions of pounds more to build some lumbering submarines to chain us to nuclear dependency for the next fifty years, we need our politics to catch up with the facts and arguments. Since so many in the Labour Party still seem paralysed by the mistaken belief that advocating nuclear disarmament kept them out of power for the 1980s, let’s take a look at that time again, assisted by hindsight and the 1983 documents……

By the time the first of the very expensive Vanguard submarines rolled out of Barrow in 1994, the Cold War had been consigned to the trashcan of history. Sadly its nuclear assumptions and doctrines live on in the minds of those responsible for the 2013 Trident Alternatives Review…………..

Is it too much to ask that today’s media would stop perpetuating the Tory narrative and its over-simplification of unilateral and multilateral disarmament? As noted in a 2000 programme of action for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, negotiated and adopted by Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) parties (including the UK), unilateral, bilateral and multilateral steps will all be necessary. Similarly, getting prohibition treaties in international law as well as decisive steps to reduce and eliminate existing arsenals are not mutually exclusive but jointly necessary measures to achieve the world free of nuclear weapons that so many leaders now say they want.

Britain’s politicians seem to be sleepwalking into disaster.  What will it take to overcome Labour’s “electoral defeat traumatic syndrome” so that we can have a sensible, fact-based discussion of the pros and cons of Trident replacement? http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/rebecca-johnson/pro-nuclear-propaganda-in-1983-lessons-for-2013

August 16, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general