Trident blows our defence apart

HOW sad that the argument about replacing Trident submarines is always expressed as Trident or nothing. The insane cost of this weapon is destroying the Royal Navy and the Army. I’ve said before that spending £100billion on Trident and neglecting conventional forces is like spending so much on insuring yourself against alien abduction that you can’t afford cover against fire and theft. And so it is.

But it’s worse than that. Trident was designed to deter the USSR, a state that ceased to exist 25 years ago. The system isn’t independent. The USA owns and services the missiles and knows where our submarines are. To be really independent, it would have to be usable even if the USA didn’t want us to use it. It isn’t.

Sir Michael Quinlan, the brilliant civil servant who strove to maintain a British nuclear deterrent, said before he died in 2009 that even he wasn’t in favour of Trident at any price. The truth is that nuclear weapons are a giant bluff. I don’t believe Mrs May, whose Christian faith I don’t doubt, would ever actually order a nuclear strike on a populated city. But she has to pretend she might and we have to pretend to be able to.

All we need to do is to hang on to a few H-bombs and the planes to drop them and we can have all that Trident gives us, for 100th of the cost. We might also be able to afford a Navy and an Army again, not to mention boats to patrol our coasts, which we haven’t got at the moment.