Policy bombshell needs defusing
RMY TWO earliest memories are pretty unusual ones. They’re not vague images of a toddler-infested birthday party, or being splashily taught to swim in the local municipal pool. No. My first clear recall is of two global political events that resonate down the years to this day – the assassination of JFK, and, a year earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I saw, and still see, both traumas through my parents’ eyes. I was sitting with them in front of our black-and-white television on that November evening in 1963, about to watch hit sitcom Steptoe And Son, when a newsflash told us that President Kennedy was dead. I can still hear their cries of shock and see their hot tears of grief. But it was Cuba, a year earlier, when I was six, that planted the more vivid memories.That’s probably because the nuclear stand-off between Russia and America went on for weeks, and my parents couldn’t conceal their fear from me or my sister.
Kennedy’s death would be traumatic, but essentially it was an open-and-shut case. Cuba was different; a gradual ratcheting up of impossible tensions that for the first time since Hiroshima really looked as if it might wind up as the literal outcome of the nuclear-age acronym M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction. No wonder
my parents – and millions like them – were white with fear during those excruciatingly tense October days in 1962.
Since then the iron logic of M.A.D. has kept the world’s nuclear missiles firmly in their silos and submarines.You could argue it’s kept the wider global peace too, in that we’ve seen no return to the sprawling conflicts typified by the First and SecondWorldWars.We live in a world of proxy wars, regional conflicts and terrorism.
But it’s a delicate balance, and I was deeply alarmed this week when – almost without a ripple of serious comment or analysis – Britain announced that it could consider using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state that used “emerging technologies” such as cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence to take down our internet, phone networks and satnavs. “Dismantling society”, as one defence expert put it. But a
nuclear response? Really? 21st-century atomic weapons are multiple times more destructive than the ones that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The effect of dropping a single one on an “enemy” city would be, in terms of instant mass loss of civilian life, cataclysmic beyond imagination.
A 100-page report, Global Britain In A Competitive Age, also reversed the UK’s long-standing policy to cut its stockpile of nuclear weapons, suggesting they be increased by 40 per cent from the current 180 warheads to 260.
I’m a realist and I’ve always believed Britain must maintain its nuclear capability. But dropping our warheads on non-nuclear states? And almost doubling our capacity? These are massive policy changes, and I cannot understand this week’s largely supine response.
It needs thrashing out in Parliament – and soon.