How Britain could become the most admired of nations

Since the Nagasaki bombing on August 9,1945, the massively expensive nuclear weapon arsenals have not been employed simply because they did not make any sense. So, rather than any plan of attack and conquer, the concept of mutual annihilation as being the method of preventing an attack drove the nuclear arms industry. (As if the devastation of WWll was not enough of a lesson for every nation to forget about attacking any other.)

The unavoidable question for the British suffering under increasing service cuts will be; what nation are we attempting to deter when the real and present danger is a bomb stolen from Pakistan's armoury by people doing God's work and who are deterred by nobody? The delivery system is about as low-tech as one could get - just one of the thousands of containers being loaded onto British docks.

The terrorists understand the real utility of nuclear weapons. There is no need to lay waste to the land and all that lives in it. There is only a need to put the population into a panic. A relatively small 10 kiloton-size weapon will do that. Such an explosion would leave the government with a dilemma; if a nuclear device planted by men of no fixed abode has been detonated in London, then what city of citizens wishing nothing more than to be left in peace is to be hit in retaliation?

There is one factor which can bring about popular resistance to a replacement and which has little to do with the wonky logic of mutual annihilation and the immorality of it. This is the provision of essential services on the brink of collapse, co-existing with a defence project based on gut feelings and funded by a blank cheque. Realists know that the estimated costs put on the table by the hawks (scary as those figures are) can be multiplied by two, and even three - and will be once the project is locked into place.

The people have four years to halt the replacement program

The decision of no return on the replacement Trident system will be made in 2016. The British people have four years to build enough anti-weapon pressure to bring about its total nuclear disarmament. The only method of attack is for more anti-nuke journalists to make the masses aware that:

• in the years of the Cold War false alarms brought the world to within minutes of a Armageddon;
• now it is the proliferation of nuclear weapons in developing nations which presents the danger of such indiscriminate destroyers falling into the wrong hands;
• the British high-tech deterrent is sucking resources from essential services and does nothing to protect the nation from a terrorist nuclear attack; and
• the world awaits a high-profile disarmament to set the dominos falling such that all stockpiles (especially insecure stockpiles) are no more.

Would not being seen to lead the world to a higher level of civilization as it did when it led the world in abolishing the slave trade be more impressive than the 16 days of gloss-over-reality that the London 2012 Games provided?