Britain: Trident - Weapons of Mass Destruction

The joint Stop the War and Anti Trident demonstration in London on Saturday February 24th will probably be one of the biggest anti nuclear demonstrations in Britain for twenty years. Successive governments, Tory and Labour, have insisted on the need to maintain an independent Nuclear deterrent in Britain, despite the huge cost and massive opposition to the arms race.

It's a sad indictment of American and British Imperialism that some 17 years after the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, billions of pounds are wasted to further the aims of the New World Order. Yet in the search for new markets for their commodities and new sources of raw materials, nuclear weapons are hardly useful. As The Economist explains:

"This kind of insurance does not come cheap. The government reckons it will spend £15 billion ($29.6 billion)-£20 billion at current prices to build four new submarines, warheads and other infrastructure, plus £1.5 billion to replace the American-made Trident D5 missiles after 2042. Running costs will remain 5%-6% of the defence budget, or £1.6 billion-£1.9 billion a year at current prices. Savings may be possible if the fleet can be reduced to three boats." (The Economist, December 7^th, 2006)

Recent leaks from the Israeli military, claiming that they had contemplated the use of tactical nuclear weapons to take out the Iranian nuclear research programme, illustrate the fact that it is impossible to dis-invent nuclear weapons. But on the other hand, as this tendency has consistently pointed out, the biggest barrier to the bourgeois countenancing the use of good old British and American "Weapons of Mass destruction" is the fact that nuclear war would ensure the destruction of society and particularly the Goose that lays the golden egg, the working class.

So who needs more scrap iron?

So who needs nuclear weapons and what use are they? From the point of view of Marxist Economics, investment in nuclear weapons is completely unproductive (unless of course you are an arms dealer or you own the ACME Bomb Company). All that money is wasted producing a load of scrap iron, which if it were ever used would make the popping of the South Sea bubble look a little insignificant. Even the Financial Times commented in December 2006:

"Put simply: do we need Trident as ‘the ultimate insurance' as Mr Blair says? Or are we clinging to the ultimate vestige of the great power delusions to which this prime minister seems especially prone? If we did not already have Trident, would we set about acquiring it from scratch?"

Intimidating

From the standpoint of imperialism of course, having nuclear weapons is handy from the point of view of intimidating the ex-colonial countries and of course guaranteeing you a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After all, in the case of Britain, its relative role as a world power is far weaker now than it was at the end of the Second World War. Yet the British State and the British bourgeois insist on attempting to maintain the semblance of a great economic and political power.

Even sections of the British bourgeois agree: "An unspoken factor is the desire to preserve Britain as a serious player among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (all of them nuclear powers). Leaving France as the only state in Europe with nuclear weapons is not something any British government would lightly contemplate. Britain's deterrent costs less than half the amount of France's force de frappe, not least because Britain relies heavily on America to provide Trident missiles and even components for its warheads. This saves money but also means that Britain can be left in the lurch when America changes its equipment." (The Economist, December 7^th, 2006)

During the Cold War period, the ruling class in the West used the threat of Stalinism in the East as a justification for the continuing arms race. But as we explained on many occasions, the real role of the state, and particularly the armed forces under capitalism and formerly under Stalinism, was to control their own people.

Power, prestige and the fear of the working class, combined with a fear of encirclement by the West, were some of the major motive forces in the development of the Soviet nuclear capacity. But the collapse of Stalinism completely altered the relationship of forces on a world scale. The USA and its puppets in London have sought to carve out for themselves a new role, at the enormous cost to the workers and peasants in the ex-colonial countries. Nuclear weapons are far more of a threat than a deterrent in the New World Order.

As Socialist Appeal has explained consistently over the last 15 years, the collapse of Stalinism has not resulted in peace, love and harmony. On the contrary, the world has entered a very different period from that which grew out of the impasse that developed between these two social systems at the end of the Second World War.

American imperialism in particular as the world's only superpower, has sought to massively expand its sphere of influence. This is very clear in respect to the Middle East. This has been a massively destabilizing factor in world relations.

Twenty-five years ago the Falklands War was something unusual. Relatively speaking Britain had passed through an extremely peaceful period if compared to the period of the two world wars in particular. It would have seemed unthinkable to most Labour and Trade Union activists, and to most workers for that matter, that a Labour government could end up taking Britain into five separate wars in less than ten years. Indeed, it would have seemed impossible that war could have broken out on the European mainland. Yet that is precisely what happened in the Balkans with the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990's.

There are many examples of this increasing volatility, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism being just one example. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has resulted in a whole series of wars and struggles as well. Instability in Russia and the power struggles between different wings of the ex-bureaucracy saw the recent murder of Alexander Litvinenko, an ex KGB/FSB man. It is ironic that after decades of propaganda regarding the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union, that it is a Russian spy who ends up being bumped off by some radioactive sushi. 

9/11 and mass destruction

Just how much good have all these nuclear weapons done the Americans and the British in Afghanistan and Iraq? The answer is quite clear: Absolutely none at all. During the first Gulf war it transpired that some forces had been found to have used depleted uranium as part of their conventional armaments. But as the last few years have demonstrated, the achievement of a "victory" for imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Lebanon or now Somalia, is not dependent on the initial firepower of the armies, but on the consolidation of power after the initial stage of the war.

It is now the case that the US in particular, is utterly dominant from a purely military point of view, but the enemy they are fighting plays by completely different rules. The strategists in the White House and the Pentagon talk about "asymmetric war", essentially war between hugely different forces. The attacks on America on September 11, which were a tragic waste of workers' lives and which Marxists could never support, were carried out by hijackers who overpowered the cabin crew using plastic knives. Terrorist suspects in Britain are on trial for making bombs out of hair bleach and chapatti flour. Dozens are killed everyday in Iraq by individual suicide bombers. The argument for the nuclear deterrent has probably never been weaker.

As CND explain in their alternative white paper on the replacement of Trident: "It is widely agreed that the main security threat facing Britain today is terrorism carried out by non-state actors. The Defence Committee Inquiry in 2006, looking into the strategic context of Trident Replacement, concluded that: 'The most pressing threat currently facing the UK is that of international terrorism. Witnesses to our inquiry overwhelmingly argued that the strategic nuclear deterrent could serve no useful or practical purpose in countering this kind of threat'. In October 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair had also come to this conclusion, 'I do not think that anyone pretends that the independent nuclear deterrent is a defence against terrorism'."

Capitalism means War

Lenin once pointed out that far from being the war to end all wars, the First World War would be followed by a second, third and subsequent world wars, unless capitalism was overthrown. Trident is a mad weapon in a mad world. Capitalism as a social system has long outlived its usefulness and its parasitic nature is clear to see in the rubble of Kabul and Baghdad.

Nuclear weapons were a product of capitalism and specifically the contradictions between Stalinism and imperialism. The struggle against nuclear weapons must be bound up with the struggle for a Socialist Britain and a Socialist world. The level of technology, skill and resources that are currently wasted in the production of Trident, could be redirected into the production of useful commodities and could begin to address the huge destruction that the greed of capitalism has inflicted on the planet.

January 2007