28th November 2007
Armageddon revisited
Bring back Margaret Beckett. One of her last acts as Foreign Secretary was to write an article for the Jerusalem Post committing the Government to a nuclear-free future:
”Mine is a generation that has always lived under the shadow of the bomb. But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us all will lengthen and it will deepen. It may, one day, blot out the light for good. We cannot allow that to happen. “
Two days later she was sacked. So what does the Post-Marxist-general and his minions have to say on the matter? Well, last month at a meeting of the UN’s First Disarmament Committee HMG voted against a motion in favour of a nuclear-weapon free world. Apparently, it didn’t say nice enough things about what we have been doing on disarmament. Erm, like replacing Trident.
Far more bizarre was our decision to vote against another motion calling for nuclear weapons to be taken off high alert. Asking that nukes are no longer on a hair-trigger alert is what in traditional labour movement circles might be termed a ‘modest demand’. Does Miliband know something we don’t?
This is particularly worrying after Newsnight earlier this month revealed that Britain was unique among nuclear powers in allowing submarine commanders to launch nuclear weapons - Hunt For Red October Style - free from central oversight. The RAF used to make do, apparently, with a coin, an allen key and a bicycle lock so God Knows what the Navy are using.
Britain lost the vote, unsurprisingly, 124 to 3, with only the two other western nuclear powers, France and the US supporting us. The rest of NATO and even our erstwhile enemies, Russia and China, abstained. It now goes to the full General Assembly meeting in New York in its 62nd session this week.
John Duncan, Britain’s ‘disarmament’ ambassador, said in our defence: “We think the emphasis should be on other things, the number of nuclear weapons, not the operational readiness and also the concerns of proliferation”. What, like the other motion we voted against? Something tells me this lot want to hold on to their Allen keys. Let’s hope they don’t lose them in the post.
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