from Sunday Herald, 26 April 2009
He’s not one of the usual suspects, and he didn’t mince his words. “Trident is no bloody use,” he said. “Let’s not waste money on it”.
General Sir Hugh Beach, the former deputy Commander-in-Chief of UK Land Forces, was in Glasgow yesterday to talk about Britain’s nuclear bombs. The submarines based on the Clyde and armed with Trident nuclear warheads should not be replaced but immediately scrapped, he argued.
His dramatic call echoes those of a series of former military top-brass demanding government action on nuclear disarmament. And it comes against a background of international moves to cut nuclear weapons stockpiles, initiated by US President, Barack Obama.
The UK government under Tony Blair in 2006 gave the go-ahead to a £20 billion programme to replace Trident submarines and missiles in the 2020s. But the decision has been strongly opposed by the Scottish government and the Scottish Parliament.
Now Beach, who was also a member of the government’s Security Commission and a senior adviser to the Ministry of Defence, has powerfully questioned the justification for replacing Trident. The idea that the UK can only deter threats of nuclear blackmail by continuing to possess nuclear weapons is wrong, he said.
“Britain cannot claim to have derived any direct security benefit from the possession of nuclear weapons,” he argued. “British nuclear weapons did not deter Argentina from attempting to annex the Falkland Islands in 1982, nor did they help Britain to recover them, despite the belief that a Polaris submarine was patrolling the South Atlantic.”
In a speech to a conference on Trident in Glasgow yesterday (Saturday), Beach pointed out that about 30 countries which had the ability to develop nuclear weapons had chosen not to. “They seem to suffer no disadvantage from this fact,” he said.
The ownership of nuclear weapons by the US had not prevented it from being defeated by the North Vietnamese in 1975 or from backing down in the face of casualties in the Tehran hostage crisis in 1980, in Beirut in 1983 and at Mogadishu in 1993, he said. The Soviet Union’s nuclear bombs hadn’t prevented defeat by the Afghans.
“It is time to reflect on how thin the justification for Trident really is and to evaluate it fairly and rigorously against the opportunity costs,” said Beach, who is now on the board of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London.
At the very least the government should delay the Trident replacement programme for years, he concluded. “It would be better to cancel it now and better still to decommission the existing Trident boats forthwith.”
Another speaker at yesterday’s conference, Dr Nick Ritchie from the University of Bradford, criticised the government for offering a “false choice” on Trident by suggesting that the only two options were unilateral nuclear disarmament or business as usual.
In a report to be published in the next month, Ritchie will set out a series of disarmament steps that the government could take, short of abandoning Trident. One, called “Trident lite”, involves cutting the number of submarines from four to three and reducing the number of missiles and warheads they carry.
Another option would be to cut the number of boats to two or three and ending the need to always have one at sea. A third option would be to stop the submarines from routinely carrying nuclear warheads.
“The government has repeatedly said it wants to play a major international leadership role in making significant progress towards a world free of nuclear weapons,” said Ritchie.
“There is now a clear opportunity for the government to examine and implement additional steps to reduce not only the size but also the operational status of the future Trident force and demonstrate real leadership with its own nuclear arsenal.”
Nigel Griffiths, the Edinburgh Labour MP who resigned as deputy leader of the House of Commons over plans to replace Trident, pointed out that the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had recently spoken out in favour of a world without nuclear weapons
“However talk is one thing,” he told the Sunday Herald. “What peoples around the world are crying out for is action by our leaders. Nothing less will be accepted.”
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