The big bang

With echoes eerily reminiscent of an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the Daily Post tells us today that "Peace protesters, including activists from North Wales, yesterday blockaded a nuclear weapons site where warheads for Trident submarines are made."

In the '60s the CND was a force to be reckoned with, but it seems their rhetoric hasn't changed much to adapt to the modern world. Brian Larkin, from Trident Ploughshares which helped organise the protest said:

“This comes at a time when even major political parties are questioning the logic of spending up to £97 billion on useless weapons. Although the Government now seems to have delayed the next phase of Trident replacement until after the general election, the ongoing construction of facilities at the AWE for the design, development and manufacture of new nuclear warheads is illegal and immoral and will only lead to further proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

Nuclear weapons are interesting things. They're probably the only weapons which cost as much as they do, are fiendishly complex to manufacture, design and test, and which everyone desperately hopes will never be used. But useless?

In an age where the boundaries between the goodies and the baddies are no longer clear-cut or identifiable, when countries filled with people who have not only made it pretty clear that they hate anything Western and will happily die in the process of taking a few Westerners down with them are slowly acquiring the technology that will enable them to build their own nuclear weapons and when there's never been a time when nuclear material has been less clearly accounted for, then it might be argued that it's probably sensible to ensure we're at least on something of a level playing field.

At some point in the future someone, somewhere will detonate a nuclear weapon on their enemies. Of that we can be certain.  Why?  Because in the entire history of the human race, there's never been a weapon devised that wasn't eventually used.  The countries that have their own weapons at least have the capacity to make the aggressors stop and think.  And that may be all we can hope for.