Tony Blair is having quite a week. Today he's explaining why it will be good for us to travel further for emergency medical treatment. I may come back to that topic another time (though perhaps not, if I suffer a heart attack and die in the ambulance on the way to a hospital in another time zone). But for the moment I want to concentrate on Monday's announcement that the Government is going to spend £21 billion to "upgrade" the UK's "independent" nuclear "deterrent".
Now, it would be foolish to deny that having control of its own armed forces has served the UK pretty well in the past. The course of world history would have been much different if Churchill had needed permission from President Roosevelt to get the Spitfires aloft in June 1940. ("Yo Churchill! We aren't even going to decide about getting into your war for another 18 months, so those planes are just going to have to stay on the ground!")
The argument for an "independent" deterrent is that a situation might arise when the UK would feel the need to fire off a nuke, in a conflict where the US is once again not involved. I can't really see what that situation might be, but it's probably not relevant anyway. The Government is anxious to stress that the weapons could only be fired on orders from the Prime Minister. However, it seems to be well-established that the firing codes will remain under the control of the United States. Blair or his successor may get in a mood to go all Hiroshima on some terror-state's ass, but he can't do it unless some guy at Norad gives the go-ahead. To use a bit of economics terminology, Blair's willingness to go nuclear is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the weapons to be used. That doesn't seem much like "independent" to me.
As for the "deterrent" bit, we seem to be in the biggest era of nuclear proliferation in many years, with half the Middle East thinking about joining the club. (Saudi Arabia! Morocco!!) It's striking that the countries that are pushing the hardest, like North Korea and Iran, are the ones that are most likely to come under a direct threat from the US. The west's nukes seem to be encouraging them to tool up, rather than deterring them; however, the difference between the way the US has acted in Iraq and Iran (or Korea) suggests that they are certainly succeeding in deterring us. If lots of countries of dubious political stability are going nuclear, we'd look pretty foolish making a unilateral decision to go in the opposite direction. Politicians hate looking foolish. But we shouldn't pretend that this week's decision will do anything to improve global peace and stability, or even to reduce the threat to the UK.
As far as I'm concerned, what Blair has announced is a plan to build three new nuclear subs for the US Navy. (Actually they'll probably build four; once you've done the expensive design work, it would be rude not to). It may have been a predictable decision, but it's still a sad one.
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