How Thick do they Think We Are? The Trident Argument Continued

Some readers may enjoy listening to this brief, concentrated version of my case against

Trident renewal, broadcast on LBC ( a London independent radio station which also broadcasts on the web) on Sunday. I think it makes quite clear (as does my article) that I���m in favour of this country keeping nuclear bombs in some form. Just not Trident. I stress this because some readers seem to have commented in the absurd belief that I support nuclear disarmament. I can see that this belief makes it easier for them to dismiss my case. But it���s mistaken. Once again, I don���t.

Please listen:

http://www.lbc.co.uk/colossal-pointless-toy-peter-hitchens-lets-rip-at-trident--123315

Arguments about this are of course complicated by the Labour Party���s curious divisions, in which the leader is against nuclear weapons on principle, and the unions support a ludicrous weapon simply because of the jobs it provides. Quite reasonable, even if unprincipled, you may say, and so would I (my father was very fond of Barrow-in-Furness where his favourite ship, the cruiser H.M.S. Ajax, was built, and where the officers and many of the ship���s company lived for some months to supervise her completion)  if it weren���t the case that our economy���s distortion by such things almost certainly destroys manufacturing capacity elsewhere.

Though it is true that our military industries survive because they are the only ones we can protect from foreign competition (nobody admits this, but any government can find ways of giving preference to its own manufacturers for defence contracts, and all do, despite the supposed commitment to total free trade in the EU and elsewhere) .

I am amazed that there is no serious protectionist strand in modern British (or American) politics, given the devastation which has been wrought (and is being wrought) on our mining and manufacturing industries by free trade. Since Ross Perot was defeated by Al Gore���s largely irrelevant comparison of his policies to the Smoot-Hawley laws, there hasn���t been a major protectionist voice in any big manufacturing country. But Germany, by ingeniously using membership of the Euro to effectively devalue the Deutschemark, has achieved a level of protection for its industries ( at the price of reducing its own living standards) without getting into trouble.

Those who laugh at Jeremy Corbyn���s idea of emulating the Japanese, and not actually arming, which he seems to have been a good deal less specific about than you would think (a transcript of the interview is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/17011602.pdf)  really need to consider just how serious Trident itself is.

Submarine drones, now being developed at amazing speed, present a threat to missile submarines which may render them as obsolete as battleships in the age of the dive-bomber, long before the renewal is complete.  The technical battle between hunters and hunted, in which submarines become ever-quieter and hunters become ever more capable of detecting the slightest noise over vast distances, never ceases.  

Thanks to the known ranges of their missiles, the shallow approaches to their home ports, and other factors of depth, currents and water conditions, major world navies all know roughly where these vessels hide.  If they had detected individual submarines, using passive sonars which themselves make no noise,  they wouldn���t boast about it now. I personally would be amazed if the US Navy could not find one of our Trident submarines if it wanted to, which raises an interesting question (see below).

Then there���s the issue, always dodged by the Trident cultists, of the lack of true independence. Why spend all this money on a weapon which, if it came to it, we might find we couldn���t use? How are these missiles guided to their targets? I can���t help thinking that they need to communicate with satellites for mid-course corrections during their ballistic flight. Who owns and runs these satellites? The missiles themselves are American, and are in effect leased from the US Navy by us. The US Navy maintains them at its King���s Bay facility in Georgia.  The warheads, are built to an American design. If modern technology can take over a car from a remote station then what about a missile, one you made, designed and maintained?

Then there���s the point about how we are not the country we were in the 1940s, when Ernest Bevin decided to go ahead with a British bomb at all costs. Actually the original British bomb was mainly directed at the Americans , who cast us aside like an old shoe as soon as the 1941-45 war( as they saw it) was over. This included total ingratitude for our important role in building the first US Atomic bomb, and the disrespectful; treatment of Ernest Bevin by the US Secretary of State, James Byrnes.

It was Bevin���s fury over this humiliation which impelled him to back the British independent bomb, crippling though the cost was.

But in those days we still had a global empire and pretensions to world power. Countries as significant as us now manage quite well without nuclear weapons. Why do we stick with them , when we are much smaller, much less important and when the Cold War is over? Inertia.

Anyway, New Labour is and was crammed by people (including Anthony Blair himself, who concealed his membership of CND until it was definitively exposed) who campaigned against British nuclear weapons when they actually had a purpose and a role.

The same people who savage Jeremy Corbyn for openly opposing British nuclear weapons, fawned on Blair despite his secret, dishonestly concealed, opposition to them (which is surely far more alarming). The Blairites and their Cameroon heirs support Trident because they think we are too thick to grasp that we don���t need it any more, and that we are so stupid we will think they are patriots for supporting it.