F ears change. Half a century ago, it was widely believed that a nuclear catastrophe was the worst fate that might befall the world. Millions of people in many countries engaged in passionate debate about disarmament. Today, by contrast, climate change and threatened economic collapse loom vastly larger in public perceptions. Last week three respected retired British soldiers, Lords Bramall and Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach, signed a letter to the London Times urging the cancellation of the projected GBP25bn replacement for Britain’s Trident nuclear system. “Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics,” they wrote. Yet, after causing a brief ripple, their appeal vanished to the bottom of the pool. No major political party sees advantage in raising the nuclear issue.

Two years ago, Gordon Brown followed Tony Blair in insouciantly pledging to create a new-generation deterrent, largely to confirm the government’s electoral credentials as being “safe with defence”. A quarter of the parliamentary Labour party voted against the measure in 2007. This suited the leadership very well, by highlighting its separation from the left. The Opposition Conservatives (the Tories) are most unlikely to make waves about Trident ahead of an election, because they see no votes in it. If Tory leader David Cameron committed himself to dumping the deterrent, he would merely provoke a gratuitous and possibly fatal party split. So Britain’s Trident submarines will continue to sail the seas. Design work goes ahead on a new system, for which the big building decisions are due around 2013.

Yet, it seems mistaken to allow Britain’s politicians to bury this debate merely to suit their own tactical convenience. It is risible to suggest that Israel, India, Pakistan or even France would be encouraged to give up their bombs because the British set an example, or that Iran and other nations might thus be stimulated to forgo nuclear pretensions.

Javier Solana’s great-uncle Salvador de Madariaga, a prominent figure in the old League of Nations, wrote in his memoirs: “Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed, they are armed because they distrust each other.”

A British disarmament precedent is irrelevant to the world’s regional disputes, and almost universally perceived as such. The only questions that should matter in our own debate are: do we need our own deterrent, and can we afford it? The second point may be addressed first, because it is simpler. Many of Britain’s soldiers have always opposed Trident, because it absorbs such a large part of the defence budget, and diminishes funds available for conventional forces. This consideration now presses because the army, heavily engaged in Afghanistan and committed in several other countries, is badly under-resourced and overstretched. The soldiers say that, if total funding available for defence will not be increased then money is better spent on an army which is constantly called upon to fight, rather than on a deterrent almost impossible to imagine being used.

The sole issue which should matter is that of British national security. Would Britain in the mid-21st century become a significantly less safe place if the UK no longer possessed nuclear weapons? The least convincing paragraphs in the government’s 2007 white paper, making the case for the Trident replacement, mentioned the possibility of terrorists gaining possessions of weapons of mass destruction. The threat is real enough. But it is impossible to conceive a scenario in which a British government would retaliate with Trident missiles against a terrorist group that launched a WMD strike on Britain. Where would be the navy’s target? An apartment in north London, or Karachi, or Hamburg? Likewise, we may dismiss Trident, and its successor, as a useful weapon in a possible confrontation with Russia or China.

The former permanent under-secretary at the UK Ministry of Defence, Sir Michael Quinlan, is an exceptionally clever man who has thought more deeply for longer about British nuclear policy than anybody else in this country. Quinlan is notably open-minded about the Trident replacement. He inclines to a view that Britain should retain some nuclear capability, but at a minimalist level, much less ambitious than the present dispensation. He argues that there is an important distinction between retaining a very few nuclear weapons and none at all.

What seems so mistaken about Britain’s present posture is what is wrong with the entire UK defence policy: it is a jumble of political expedients rather than a coherent strategy founded in rational analysis of security needs. The Tories have promised a defence review if they win the next election, and this is long overdue. My own instinct is that Trident should go. In the threadbare condition in which Britain will emerge from this economic crisis, it cannot afford it. —The Guardian