Trident: this £100bn Armageddon weapon won't make us one jot safer | Simon Jenkins

The consensus among the three main parties on Trident merely illustrates that the defence lobby scares politicians stupid

It must rank as the daftest, costliest question in British politics. How many Trident submarines does Britain need? Medieval schoolmen sharpened their brains by counting angels on pinheads. British policymakers sharpen theirs by counting warheads on missiles. They know it is irrational but the money, the language, the whiz-bangs, the uniforms turn their heads and dazzle their minds. Ordinary guns and soldiers they can understand. They slash their costs with ease. But cut nuclear weapons? That would be risky.

Every time I dip into the Trident debate I am reminded of Great War generals gulping on chateau champagne while the trenches filled with blood. David Cameron was confronted with a bold option on taking office: whether to cut back on Labour’s glamour sea and air projects, many already out of date, and invest in the army instead. He flunked it. In the case of Trident, he muttered that his “real concern” was a threat from North Korea. It was mad.

Last spring there were signs that Labour’s Ed Miliband might summon up the guts at last to challenge the “independent deterrent”, given that its submarine replacement would consume a third of defence procurement for a decade. The press was briefed that he was “set to scrap Trident strategy”. He too flunked it. There was no mention of the most expensive project on the Treasury books in his speech yesterday.

Earlier this month the Liberal Democrats mooted a scheme to keep submarines, but with their warheads locked up ashore. The idea had emerged to cut costs from within the Ministry of Defence, where a former minister, Nick Harvey, spoke of the “frankly almost lunatic mindset” among nuclear strategists. The idea was crushed by the union of former defence secretaries and service chiefs, led by Lords (George) Robertson and (Michael) Boyce. They dismissed it as “hare-brained”.

The entire debate is hare-brained. Nobody can explain when, where or how these terrible weapons would be deployed and used, despite the essence of deterrence being credibility. (Yet we want to bomb Syria for using far less drastic chemical ones.) They bear no reference to any plausible threat to Britain that could possibly merit their use. Meanwhile their possession by Britain is a blatant invitation to nuclear proliferation, making opposition to an Iranian bomb hypocritical.

Yet Labour, like the Tories, is supporting a Trident renewal programme that is set to consume £20 billion and rise to a reputed £100bn over 20 years. Even current defence chiefs have been careful to excuse themselves from this debate, saying it is “for politicians to decide” on the deterrent, and for the Treasury to pay for it outside the defence budget (which the Treasury refuses).

The mesmerising effect of “the bomb” on Labour recalls the party’s ancient fear of being thought weak on defence. It was seen in Nye Bevan’s shift from “no first use” to deriding …read more