Nuclear Weapons

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Monday's Guardian carried an alarming report about safety at the Trident submarine base in Faslane: 

The worst breaches include three leaks of radioactive coolant from nuclear submarines in 2004, 2007 and 2008 into the Firth of Clyde, while last year a radioactive waste plant manager was replaced. It emerged he had no qualifications in radioactive waste management.

The repeated safety breaches, which have been revealed in documents released to Channel 4 News, are so serious that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) has warned that it would consider closing the base down if it had the legal powers to do so. 

This revelation comes at an obviously sensitive time, with the longstanding opposition to Trident renewal in the Scottish Parliament being compounded by growing questions about its affordability at Westminster.

Paul Dorfman (Warwick, University of Warwick): Part two of the Democratic Audit series on consultation (see also part one: Taking Consultation Seriously)

Consultation is an essential component of effective, democratic governance which commands public confidence. For this reason the new government Code of Practice on Consultation is correct to emphasise the need for it to constitute a genuine input into the policy-making process, rather than being a mere ‘tick-box’ exercise; for it to be transparent; for it to be held over a sufficiently long period of time; and for it to properly address the audience for which it is intended. Yet over an issue as important as the future of nuclear energy, government consultations repeatedly failed fully to meet these criteria, and stood condemned both by a professional standards body and the judiciary.

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.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): London's Somerset House marked the 63rd anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on Wednesday with a screening of Stanley Kubrick's classic film Dr Strangelove.

At a lively panel discussion beforehand, there was general agreement that the satire's picture of the cold war nuclear stand-off was all too close to the truth. Peter Sellers' portrayal of the title character accurately reflected an era when the fate of the world hung on the insane logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).

Thankfully, the debate provided reason to hope that today's intellectual climate is moving in a very different direction. The best evidence for this was a line-up that brought CND chair Kate Hudson and journalist John Pilger together with former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, for decades a leading supporter of Britain's nuclear deterrent.

Andrew Blick (London, Democratic Audit):I attended last night the launch of a new Peter Hennessy-edited volume, Cabinets and the Bomb. The event took place at the National Archive in Kew and was a gathering of the great and good from the intelligence and defence worlds. One clear theme emerged from the discussion that took place: the successive decisions made by UK cabinets to keep and then retain nuclear capability - sometimes more prime-ministerial than collective in the making - have always been based primarily on political considerations rather than military. There is a gut instinct that we have to, in Ernest Bevin's immortal words, have a "bloody union jack" on a bomb; this sense is then post-rationalised. And perhaps the biggest motivator of all has been the fear of France becoming the only European power with an independent deterrent.