“(Nuclear) weapons are not about deterrence. They exist for the purpose of imperial projection, and imperial war.”
By Gary Lefley
The basic case in support of Britain’s nuclear weapons has barely changed in the past 72 years: it pleads Defence via Deterrence. The bogey man comes and goes. New ones are invented. For four decades the rationale was supposedly to deter the so-called Soviet threat. The USSR has been and gone. The Warsaw Pact has been and gone. But NATO, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have not. Britain continues to spend multi-billions of pounds on military forces and nuclear weapons in the name of ‘defence’ and ‘deterrence’.
There is a yawning disconnect between the premise and the conclusion for Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons. The conclusion is always the same – “We must have a nuclear deterrent”. But the premise – exactly who it is we are supposed to be deterring – changes periodically, to fit the latest targets of US and British imperialism. We had to deter Stalin, we had to deter Brezhnev, we ‘can do business with Gorbachev’, said Reagan – and they did – resulting in the large-scale privatisation of the Soviet economy, wage cuts, price inflation, mass unemployment and poverty. We didn’t have to deter Yeltsin, we didn’t have to deter Putin – but no, on second thoughts, now we do have to deter Putin.
Not about self-defence
While Britain and the US turn the meaning of self-defence on its head with regard to Israel, a glance at the deployment of global forces reveals the depth of deceit. The US has 750 military bases in over 80 countries. That equates to around 80% of all the world’s foreign military bases. Britain, with 145 bases in 41 countries, has the second biggest number. According to the esteemed Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russia is estimated to have between 12-36 and China, 5-8, depending on how you define a military base. Again according to SIPRI, the United States military budget is greater than the next 9 biggest spenders added together. Of the 193 nation state members of the UN, 175 have a smaller annual GDP than the United States spends every year on ‘defence’! That is 9/10ths of the countries of the world.
If we step away from the relentless messaging of the pro-NATO establishment, is it not absurd to suggest that the US and UK’s global military footprint has anything to do with deterrence? They have 895 overseas military bases – more than four bases for every country in the world and gargantuan levels of military spending. And NATO military strategies are based on the doctrines of power projection and forward force projection – that is deploying and sustaining armed forces and military power outside NATO territory. In other words, they have military dominance throughout the globe). Even with the most blinkered will in the world, this is not about defence. Indeed, does not the rest of the world perceive it as the opposite: an imperial threat of existential proportions?
A cursory look at US invasions and covert regime-change operations over the past 70 years makes it clear that its military and special forces are not purposed for self-defence – unless you think a myriad of states were planning to invade America, including Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia Yugoslavia, the USSR, and more.
As for Britain, are we so insular, so ignorant of how the world has experienced Britain’s savage colonial and continuing neo-colonial occupations, so imbued with the sub-conscious ideology of supremacy, as to believe that the UK’s overseas military bases, across six continents, are somehow about defending Britain? When the Royal Navy cruised through the South China Sea in 2021, with the largest attack force assembled by Britain in over 30 years, did anyone seriously think it was there to defend Plymouth? How do we think the people of Beijing and Shanghai received that deployment? And how might the people of Britain respond to a deployment in kind – with an attack fleet sailing through the English Channel and the North Sea in ‘self-defence’ of China?
Yet Britain repeats a similar exercise – albeit surreptitiously – all year round. Its four Trident nuclear submarines can each deploy up to 192 independently targetable nuclear warheads. Each warhead is eight times as destructive as that which obliterated Hiroshima in 1945. Other than in some Dr Strangelove dystopia, who believes that silently traversing the world’s ocean beds with enough nuclear warheads to destroy virtually every major city on the planet is motivated by self-defence?
Preparing for war
These weapons are not about deterrence. They exist for the purpose of imperial projection, and imperial war. Recent statements from leading political and military figures underline this reality. Grant Shapps, the then Defence Minister, said in January this year: “In five years’ time we could be looking at multiple theatres including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea… We have moved from a post-war to a pre-war world”. (Curiously, those ‘theatres’ do not include Britain. Or western Europe. Or the USA. As if the targeted countries would not retaliate. General Sir Roly Walker has stated that Britain must be ready within 3 years for a war against the “Axis of Upheaval” – again, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. US Air Force 4 Star General Mike Minihan is predicting war with China in 2025.
Germany, France and Japan are all in the process of increasing their military spending by between 50% and 100%. The UK currently spends 2.32% of GDP on defence – £64.6 billion. Starmer has said that will rise to 2.5% – £87.1bn – “as soon as resources allow”. The Ministry of Defence Equipment Plan for 2021-2031 states: “The [defence] department has an equipment plan which balances cost and budget. Over the 10 years from 2021-22 we plan to spend £238 billion on equipment procurement and support (…) Spending on nuclear programmes across the whole Defence Equipment Plan over the next ten years (2023 to 2033) is forecast at £117.8 billion”. If this is anywhere near accurate, it suggests that in the region of 49.5% of the UK’s military equipment budget for the next decade will be spent on replacing Trident nuclear submarines with the new Dreadnought class boats and upgraded nuclear weapons. Even these colossal sums, from the horse’s mouth, are still way less than CND’s estimate of £205 billion, which includes in-service costs for the duration of the Dreadnought programme.
The threat is allegedly coming from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Yet nobody is seriously projecting a scenario under which any of these states actually initiates war against Britain. The US and NATO are surrounding these countries, by land and by sea, with nuclear-armed military bases and submarines. There are no equivalent deployments by any of the four targeted states. The cold-war-to-hot-war allegations against them are conspicuously devoid of any evidence, or any raison d’être.
The real threat to the British Isles is if Britain implicates itself as an aggressor in a war against them. In other words, the real threat to Britain comes from our self-inflicted relationship with the US and our self-inflicted membership of NATO. Any nuclear threat derives from our self-inflicted possession of nuclear weapons.
Alongside US-NATO-UK warmongering there resides a familiar narrative: McCarthyism, Islamophobia, Russophobia, Sinophobia; the demonising of leaders like Gaddafi; and plain lies, such as Iraq’s non-existent nuclear bomb.
The US has for over a century been the world’s dominant, imperialist power and has proven repeatedly that it will use the terror of war. It remains the only country ever to drop nuclear bombs on people, killing more than 300,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is hardly surprising that Russia and China today choose not to, unilaterally, be rid of their nuclear weapons while the US has them deployed on every continent, in every ocean.
The concept of self-defence is a viable principle for international relations if its application is consistent, universal and upheld in conjunction with multilateral commitments to peaceful coexistence and cooperation. But the perversion of this principle becomes apparent the moment the West applies its validity selectively. Manifestly, the US, UK and NATO do not extend the right of self-defence to their chosen victims. Today the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran, are not afforded this right. Netanyahu, in pursuit of annexation and expansion, under the pretence of self-defence, is given the go ahead and the weapons to displace a nation, destroy a civilisation, and exterminate a people. Those who dare to resist – those who are acting in self-defence – are labelled terrorists.
The British peace movement
Today there is a heavy burden on the British peace movement. The establishment media, and the Labour Party under Blair, did a job in marginalising the objectives of nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. Yet since 2010, under the leadership of Kate Hudson, CND has made impressive strides forward in developing a world view that has a broader appreciation of global developments and Britain’s role within them. CND began to campaign for Britain to leave NATO, and for US and NATO forces to be expelled from the UK.
From CNDs recent briefing, No To NATO, and from Sophie Bolt’s excellent inaugural speech as Hudson’s successor it is clear that CND is developing a world view that is incompatible with the interests of imperialism and militarism.
While Britain has nuclear weapons, and remains allied to the US, the threat of mutually assured destruction is as real as it ever was. The development of tactical/battlefield weapons has lowered the threshold for initiating nuclear war. But they have done nothing to prevent – and everything to incite – the escalation of war to the nuclear-strategic level. And as recent warfare has demonstrated, there are no ‘Iron Domes’.
If nuclear disarmament had slipped down the pecking order of priorities for the British Left, then that is being reversed, and not by demoting the profile of campaigning for a free Palestine, or a sustainable planet, or for a ceasefire and a negotiated peace in the Donbas. Rather, nuclear disarmament is now a key component of a positive alternative strategy for Britain as a nuclear weapon-free state, out of NATO. As Sophie Bolt said recently: “a peaceful, just, sustainable and nuclear-free world” necessitates “overcoming the major obstacle, which is US global dominance (…) Our efforts for an independent foreign policy, to secure Britain’s progressive role in the world and break with the US military project, are absolutely critical”.
The peaceful alternative
We may want to make British membership of the Non-Aligned Movement integral to that independent foreign policy. No to nuclear weapons, US bases and NATO, becomes a less isolationist, more attractive proposition when we add the positive vision of joining up with the 120 member states of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). And at some point, BRICS – already representing nearly half of the global population. The positives of being a non-nuclear weapons state and a member of NAM are not only about enhancing Britain’s security.
The multi-billion-pound construction and operational costs of the Dreadnought programme represents a huge potential peace dividend. The past 15 plus years of enduring economic crisis is reflected in Britain’s crumbling social and economic infrastructure. An increasingly needy and indebted British public may now be a little more susceptible to claiming that peace dividend, scrapping four submarines and 770 warheads, and joining the global non-nuclear mainstream.
It’s a win-win-win:
- Give up threatening other countries with nuclear annihilation and stop being a target for nuclear retaliation
- Resign from the swaggering nuclear weapons club of 9 countries (conceivably encouraging others to do likewise) and join the 184 nations that defend their independence without stockpiling nuclear weapons
- Release multi-billions of pounds to invest in the people of Britain.
Scrapping Britain’s nuclear weapons, leaving NATO and joining NAM increases Britain’s security, enhances the country’s legitimacy, status and opportunities within the global community and affords a multi-billion-pound peace dividend. With Britain now contributing to missile attacks deep within Russia, we are directly provocative of, and susceptible to, a nuclear conflagration. To sidestep the issue of British nuclear disarmament is perilous. A fundamental re-alignment of foreign and domestic policy is required urgently.
- This article was originally published by The Socialist Correspondent– you can find out more and subscribe to them here.
- The Labour Outlook Editorial Team may not always agree with all of the content we reproduce but are committed to giving left voices a platform to develop, debate, discuss and occasionally disagree
