Trident's renewal was based on lies

In the small town of Goldsboro, North Carolina there lies a casual road sign saying that it is a site of a “nuclear mishap”. If that's not an understatement, what the hell is? In 1961 a B52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs blew up mid-air, dropping the nuclear payload which came excruciatingly close to detonating. The surprisingly long list of barely averted accidents involving nuclear weapons has gained a new member. Last week it was revealed that Britain's nuclear deterrent experienced a catastrophic test failure in which unarmed Trident missiles were fired on the coast of Florida in the summer of 2016 before being aborted. Whilst they were unarmed, it does dispel the idea of ‘smart weapons’ – the missiles were targeted on West Africa instead of North America, so were only off target by a few thousand kilometres. Furthermore, what is outrageous was the inexcusable concealment of the important failed test results from MPs before parliament voted in favour of a £100 billion multi-decade commitment on the next generation of Trident. Even the government’s excuse of secrecy in the name of national security does not hold weight considering that nations usually inform other nuclear powers, especially their rivals, before conducting nuclear tests to prevent dangerous misunderstandings. In 2012, the last time Britain conducted nuclear test, Russian ships monitored and even congratulated the Royal Navy after carrying out the successful tests.

However, perhaps most worrying is the near-universal acceptance of the need to expand the British nuclear arsenal amongst the political elite. Gone are the days of the 1980s when hundreds of thousands around the world marched for nuclear disarmament, forcing right-wingers like Nixon, Thatcher and Reagan and their Soviet counterparts to commit to arms reduction treaties. Whilst it would be naive to unilaterally disarm, what is worrying is that the last ten years experienced the slowest world wide reduction of nuclear weapons since the 1970s – weapons which even five-star general and US Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted to being unusable. Today we no longer face an ideological, antagonistic nuclear-armed state in the form of the Soviet Union. The real threat posed by Russia or China in our globalised economy is cyber-warfare targeting the theft of intellectual property. Trident ballistic missiles are also useless against non-state actors committing terrorism, which instead requires counter insurgency.

Should we not spend our limited resources on defence measures we actually need rather than relics of the cold war? Maybe the time has finally come to pressure our government to eliminate the illusion that there is a widespread consensus that we must recommit to a new generation of Trident. And perhaps the time may come again that the world truly begins the process of universal disarmament.