No nukes!

Submitted by Anon on 16 July, 2006 - 11:14

By Sacha Ismail

In a speech to the City of London on 20 June, Gordon Brown committed himself to “retaining an independent nuclear deterrent”. A Brown government, in other words, would spend tens of billions of pounds on a weapons system whose use would necessarily mean tens of thousands of deaths and which exists for no reason other than to bolster British imperialism’s prestige and power to terrorise. The commitment to replace Trident exposes the real motivations of those who claim to be for “multilateral” disarmament, but are in fact committed to maintaining Britain’s nuclear arsenal at all costs.

The Trident missile system costs £1.5 billion a year to maintain, and there is no suggestion that a replacement would be any cheaper. Moreover, constructing a new system when the UK’s four Trident-carrying Vanguard submarines and 16 D5 missiles end their operational life in the mid to late 2020s could cost as much as £25 billion, depending on exactly what type of replacements are chosen - and certainly no less than £10 billion.

At a time when public services are being strangled by underfunding, these figures are doubly outrageous. Even if nuclear weapons were cost-free, however, it would be vital for the left and the labour movement to oppose them.

Each Trident warhead has seven times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 — causing an explosion and fall out which killed 140,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands more. The vast majorities of casualties would inevitably be civilian since, far more than any conventional weapon, nuclear weapons cannot be precisely targeted. Their whole purpose is to terrorise civilian populations while strengthening the capacity of capitalist or bureaucratic imperialists to impose their will - across a particular region or, in the case of Britain, across the world.

Solidarity has consistently opposed those on the left who defend and justify the weapons programmes of anti-Western regimes like North Korea and Iran. Equally, however, we want to expose the hypocrisy of the biggest nuclear gangsters of all — the Britain and American governments. The labour movement must raise a storm of protest against Brown’s speech and demand the dismantling of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme — not when Trident expires, but immediately.

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