Tom Griffin (London, OK): As much as Charles Clarke deprecates talk of 'Blairite plots' against the Prime Minister, his article in the New Statesman today will inevitably be seen in that light.
However it is worth noting some less predictable and more interesting elements, notably a significant departure from New Labour orthodoxy on foreign policy:
Liberal interventionism must be underpinned by military force, but its moral authority was undermined by the glacial progress in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ill-considered determination to renew Trident.
It seems that Clarke has joined the growing number of Western politicians who believe that nuclear de-escalation by the major powers is necessary to prevent proliferation of WMD.
However, as reader David Habbakuk noted in an OK thread on this subject last month, the Georgian crisis and the prospect of operational NATO missile defence may make that much harder to achieve.
If the Georgian government had decided to attempt to reincorporate a reluctant South Ossetia in such a situation, the Russians could be inhibited from responding by the proven capability of the U.S. military to destroy the infrastructure of adversary states by conventional methods. They do not want to be in this position.
If people are seriously interested in a nuclear-free world, they must take the security concerns of countries who perceive themselves at potential risk from U.S. military power seriously. Otherwise this is just pious woffle.
Reconsidering Trident renewal might be one way of demonstrating a serious intent to avoid a new cold war that would provide a fertile ground for illicit WMD proliferation.
Comments
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.
We have a stronger but still relatively weak army. It must be made stronger and made elite, so that it always works as it did in Ossetia. It is perfectly obvious that in the event another “cold war” begins — it will be necessary to raise the flexibility and political feasibility of nuclear forces. I am saying this with bitterness. I so much wanted to move the nuclear club onto the sidelines of history for good.
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.
At one time, during the Communist times of the weakening and decay of the USSR, members of the dissident intelligentsia and simply intellectuals were asking the strictly speculative question: what if the country throws off the stranglehold of Communist ideology and the socialist economy and becomes capitalist and free? Most believed that a free and capitalist world would welcome us with open arms. A minority of these unrestrained romantics said that a strong capitalist and economically more effective and free Russia would cause no less opposition than the Soviet Union.
It appears that the latter came out the “winners” in the argument.
The basis of the cold war was more geopolitics than ideology.
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.
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
Greenpeace is avowedly anti-nuclear weapons (if not anti-nuclear per se) and thus is highly biased. To treat a report by them as valid for a debate about nuclear weapons is to not want a debate at all, merely the abandonment of the Deterrent regardless of the costs to our defence.
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.
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?
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.
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