Bugger the bomb!
I’ve been listening to the recent debate about nuclear weapons. Gordon Brown has announced that the Government is going to spend billions on a new generation of ‘nuclear deterrents’. My interest was fuelled by meeting the senior civil servant at the MoD responsible for doing the sums.
Of course using the very word deterrent is foolish. It’s like describing those speed cameras on the road as ‘safety cameras’. Just as the speed cameras are used to collect fines so too are nuclear deterrents there to kill people. Not since Michael Foot has a senior British politician been brave enough to call for a real halt to nuclear weapons. Today both parties seem to revere these weapons of mass destruction and consider them essential.
Developed by our American friends to vaporise Japanese cities, nuclear weapons became the ultimate threat in the cold war. Arguably, it was only because Westminster and the Kremlin stood equal chances of disappearing in a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris, that the Cold War eventually ended.
So what’s the threat to world peace today? Well it seems to be religious fundamentalism with Islamic extremists rebelling against fundamentalist Christian American policies. Poverty and hunger are more oppressive than any regime and yet are overlooked in the race to invest taxpayers money in bombs. It’s not even clear who we’re going to point our new nuclear bombs at anyway? To use one to take out a few suicide bombers is literally to use a sledgehammer to crack a few nuts.
Defence these days seems to be about protecting us from terrorism and organised crime. What use are nuclear bombs in those campaigns?