Putin already knows Trident is an obsolete monster. The real question is: DO YOU?

IF TRIDENT missile launches are so secret, why was I invited by the British Embassy in Washington to go and watch one? It was May 1994 and HMS Vanguard was launching Britain’s first ever D-5 Trident rocket down the 5,000-mile range towards Ascension Island. It was held in conditions of total publicity.

The US Navy was rather embarrassingly in charge. I and several other invited guests watched the occasion from an American support ship, where we were given souvenir baseball caps, lent powerful binoculars and plied with hot dogs.

It was more like a day at the races than a rehearsal for Armageddon, not least because Greenpeace activists were trying their best to get in the way.

They nearly succeeded, but just as time was about to run out, the sinister cylinder leapt from the warm Florida sea (we weren’t far from Orlando and Disney World), ignited and hurtled off towards Africa, via space.

I have absolutely no doubt that the Russian Navy was also watching the £17 million spectacular. It had long been a tradition for them to do so, as the launches are announced in advance to make sure aircraft stay out of the way.

A Polaris captain once told me how he had just surfaced after despatching one of his missiles when the international frequency crackled into life and a Russian voice said in perfect English: ‘Congratulations, Cap- tain, on a successful launch!’ So whatever the reason for staying quiet about the failed flight of a Trident missile last June, it wasn’t to keep it from the wicked Russians. Every intelligence service in the world will have known within minutes.

The reason for keeping quiet was to keep it from us, the British people, in case we start wondering whether we really need this wildly costly Cold War superpower weapon. Given that we’re broke, that the Cold War ended in 1991, and we aren’t a superpower, I should have thought the answer is obvious. We don’t need this colossal weapon any more than an elderly suburban couple need to starve themselves to maintain a Lamborghini.

The huge Soviet armies in Germany, which Trident was rightly designed to deter back in 1972, are gone for ever. It’s not unpatriotic to want us to have a smaller, more modest nuclear weapon. On the contrary, it’s unpatriotic for Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, to carry on ignoring the terrible state of the conventional Army and Navy, rapidly losing their technical strength and their hard core of experience, so that we can pay for this obsolete monster.

PAUSING for a physical needs break in Cambridge’s beautiful but wildly Leftist King’s College the other day, I found myself baffled at the lavatory door. Where were the Gents’ and Ladies’ conveniences I had used so many times before, just behind the Junior Common Room?

They had been abolished. Instead, I could choose between ‘Cubicles and Urinals’ or ‘Cubicles’. Fuddled with flu, I eventually worked out which of these I preferred. But, of course, the whole point was that it wouldn’t have mattered. There was no more right or wrong, on this subject at least.

Thus has ‘gender neutrality’ arrived at the college once adorned by the mighty economist Maynard Keynes (who went in for a bit of gender neutrality himself).

I laughed quite a lot. But is this a bad thing? In itself, not really. But the huge, expensive effort to pretend that there are no objective differences between the sexes is very bad, because it simply isn’t true, and I think much sadness will result from it.