Even if you take the 'deterrent' argument at face value, we simply don't need our own nuclear weapons.

Has no-one else thought that if a rogue state or dictator was to threaten a nuclear-less future UK with their own nuclear weapons, that the US would intervene? There is simply no chance that they would allow either a nuclear attack on the UK, or a country to gain anything by threatening the UK.

Even the French would surely step in, because a nuclear attack on London would cause some loss of French lives, and be a serious threat to the quality of life for many French people, particularly Parisians. They owe us one after 1945 anyway.

Whether the cost is 110 billion or 97 billion or 20 billion, it's still a huge waste of money for an illusion of grandour.

And what would any country gain from a nuclear attack anyway? They can't steal any resources if they have blown them all up, and it wouldn't be a 'war ending' move as another country would intervene, and in other conflicts such as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear weapons simply have no uses.

 The true costs are being unveiled as nearer £110 billion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/18/trident-replacement-hidden-cost-revealed

as we reported earlier: http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/mike-small/2009/05/15/wmd-jobs-and-the-union

 Savage cuts anyone?

There is no reason to drop the Deterrent, especialy now.

 Britain gained the bomb to a detere certain state from seeking domination over Europe, invade Britain and to keep a certain exra-europan ally reliable. Nothing has changed in this basic analysis and its conclusions.

Reliance on another to defend you is to hand that other the power to betray you.

Trident is the cheapest system for the level of effectiveness available, and once ABM proliforates this cheap option will cease to be cheap if its to be kept effective.

Greenpeace has just produced a new report, In The Firing Line, which reveals true costs of £97 billion for Trident: five times government estimates.

How can this expensive project be justified at a time of economic crisis and emerging threats to national security such as international terrorism, failed states, pandemic diseases and above all, climate change?

And does it really deliver genuine security for the UK?

The report has received the backing of many senior political and military figures, including former shadow defence secretary Michael Ancram, who wrote the report's forward, Lib Dem shadow chancellor Vince Cable, and Lord Ramsbotham, former Adjutant-General of Defence Management.

You can read a summary of the report’s findings at: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/ITFLsummary

And the full report at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/ITFL

Tom,

The scale of the problems that advocates of the anti-nuclear agenda now face is well brought out in an article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta by the noted Russian foreign affairs intellectual Sergei Karaganov.

In Karaganov's view, it is likely that Russia has no option but to accept that it now involved in a new, largely-Western initiated, Cold War.

And like General Mahmoud Gareev, whose views I discussed in my comments on the earlier thread, Karaganov has come round to the belief that Russia has no option but to rely heavily on nuclear weapons.

This last comment is absolutely correct.  For Karaganov was one of the exponents of the so-called 'new thinking' of the Gorbachev era.  One of the central impulses behind this was fear of nuclear war, and one of its central tenets the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Another central strand in the 'new thinking' was the adoption of the 'common security' agenda of the Palme Commission.  What was not widely grasped in the West at the time was that was underpinned by the belief that in large measure the security problems of the Soviet Union were self-created.  In turn, this was bound up with the widespread disillusionment with communism among sections of the Soviet elite.

A corollary of this was the expectation that the security concerns of a non-communist Russia which 'appeased' the Western powers would be respected.

Another fascinating element of Karaganov's article is it articulates a now widespread sense in Russia that this view was hopelessly naive, and based upon fundamentally flawed readings of the Cold War.

Implicit in this change of view, of course, is the collapse of the enormous moral authority which the West enjoyed in Russia at the end of the Cold War.

An irony in all this is that at the time when Gorbachev embraced the agenda for the abolition of nuclear weapons, it was crystal clear that changes in weaponry produced by developments in information technology were in the process of giving the United States an uncontestable superiority in conventional weaponry.

To have successfully converted sceptics like General Gareev and Sergei Karaganov to the virtues of nuclear 'deterrence', in a situation where these were particularly likely to be attractive to actual or potential enemies of the United States, could perhaps be seen as shooting oneself in the foot on a rather spectacular scale.

And of course it means that the possibility of creating a global consensus behind the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons has now faded practically to insignificance, for the forseeable future.