Oliver Kamm

It's no time to ban the bomb: Britain still needs its nuclear deterrent

Sorry for the delay in resuming this blog. Things really will be back to normal next week. In the meantime, this column appears in The Times tomorrow. It refers to an article in The Sunday Times by the former Defence Secretary Michael Portillo. More on this subject when I come back.

SO “DON’T MESS with Britain” gives way to “Ban the Bomb”. The cynic’s account of Michael Portillo’s most recent political evolution — into an opponent of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent — almost writes itself.

The cynic would be wrong. Mr Portillo was an effective Defence Secretary, and has initiated an important debate. He does not argue that nuclear deterrence is futile, or immoral or destructive of international comity. He concentrates on the British independent nuclear deterrent, and concludes that it is an extravagance whose raison d’être expired with the Soviet Union. It distorts our defence budget and our relationship with the United States. Replacing the current Trident programme will also undermine our credibility in countering nuclear proliferation.

This is a serious and seductive argument that suffers only from being the reverse of the truth. An independent deterrent has become more important since the Cold War, not less, as the relatively stable bilateral relationship between the superpowers has been superseded by new potential challengers. Remarkably, the only potential adversaries that Mr Portillo cites are the undeterrable “urban guerrilla detonating a dirty bomb in a suitcase in one of our cities” and the “residual risk” of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. These scarcely exhaust the possibilities.

During the Cold War, the argument was that a second centre of nuclear decision-making within Nato strengthened deterrence. But the effect was marginal. Brutal and expansionist as they were, Soviet leaders were also sufficiently risk-averse not to wish to test the US commitment to Europe’s defence, with or without a British nuclear force.

In our “second nuclear age”, the US and its allies have a common interest with Russia in countering Islamist terrorism, and with China in containing North Korea. But beyond is an anarchic order in which regional powers and non-state actors complicate traditional notions of deterrence. Most potent of these threats are states for whom nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are, in President Bush’s words, “not weapons of last resort, but militarily useful weapons of choice”.

Seeking to sublimate regional conflict in international agreements is a noble venture and occasionally a useful one, but the ultimate guarantor of peace in a world lacking a sovereign international legal authority is the threat of superior force. Mr Portillo decries spending on a new nuclear programme sums that “dwarf our new-found generosity to Africa”, but this is rhetoric: Mr Portillo does not appear to be calling for the money to be diverted to the overseas aid budget, but instead wants it spent on conventional forces. If an independent nuclear deterrent adds something qualitative to our defence for which there is no substitute, then the money must be better spent this way than on additional aircraft or tanks.

Does an independent deterrent in fact provide an extra dimension of security? It does, in circumstances we may not expect but ought prudently to anticipate.

Consider a thought-experiment. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, anti-nuclear campaigners were quick to point out that the independent nuclear deterrent had not deterred. This was true but superficial. Suppose that Argentina had been a nuclear-armed power too. Would the British government still have sent a task force to retake the islands? The likelihood would surely have been diminished, even with a low risk of direct nuclear exchange. Suppose further that Argentina had possessed nuclear weapons and — as the Labour Party then urged — Britain had not. In that case, it would have been inconceivable for any British Government to seek to recapture the Falklands. Merely by possessing nuclear weapons and without any explicit threat of nuclear blackmail, a dictatorship would have won territories it coveted, by force of arms and in defiance of international law.

The initial instincts of the Reagan Administration when the Falklands crisis broke were to mediate rather than take sides against the aggressor. Where the writ of collective security does not run, an aggressive state might rationally calculate (even if mistakenly) that the US would stand aside. The domestic pressures for the US to do that are always present. As the analyst Colin Gray has noted: “Americans may decide that while it is wise to remain No 1, they will remain No 1 solely to protect No 1. It would not be sensible, but domestic politics are not ruled by strategic reason.”

Nuclear proliferation, or even just the suspicion of a rudimentary nuclear capability in the hands of a rogue state, exacerbates the problem.

The risk of nuclear blackmail by an emerging regional power is not negligible. It is as plausible as Saddam Hussein’s annexation and plunder of Kuwait in 1990, which would have been irreversible had he possessed the ability to render Kuwait a radioactive wasteland. A nuclear deterrent allied to, but independent of, the US might in some circumstances cause an aggressor to reconsider, simply because it confers an additional and irreducible political counterweight not possessed by, say, Canada. That European capability cannot be left to France alone, for the reason it is doubtless impolitic to mention that gangster regimes in autocratic states have scant historical grounds for regarding France as an impediment to their ambitions.

Strengthening nuclear counterproliferation measures is important, but the impact of a British nuclear renunciation would be minimal. The states most amenable to diplomatic pressure are not Iran or North Korea, but those such as South Africa (which voluntarily relinquished its nuclear capability) or Brazil that threaten no one. Israel has compelling independent reason not to commit to nuclear abolition; Pakistan will do so only if India does; India will not if China does not.

Mr Portillo perceives an internal political dynamic to Labour’s deliberations. Having been electorally crippled by its anti-nuclear policies in the 1980s, Labour now wishes to avoid any hint of being soft on defence. But that is not an ignoble motivation. Labour Governments took Britain into Nato and modernised the old Polaris fleet, whereas the last Conservative Government disgracefully acquiesced in Serb aggression against Bosnia’s multi-ethnic democracy. It will be historically appropriate if Labour takes the right and patriotic course once more.

Voice of Reason

This BBC profile of the late Harvard physician John Mack is extraordinary. It begins:

Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who was killed in a road accident in north London last year, did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job, hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere him.

This type of story is an interesting counter-example to the notion (which I have never argued and do not believe) that the BBC is politically biased. The inability to discriminate among the claims of self-interested lobbies is a common BBC failing across subjects, not confined to politics. In this case, an extraordinary claim is presented without even a modicum of scepticism, Dr Mack is depicted as an embattled fighter against hidebound orthodoxies and academic prejudice, and his cause is imbued with a romantic - almost messianic - quality. The piece concludes:

Mack's work lives on with an institute which now bears his name; the hundreds of people who count themselves in "the experiencer community" still hold him in particular affection. His search for an expanded notion of reality, which allows for experiences that might not fit traditional perceptions and worldviews, is one they, at least, will be hoping continues.

If there is one thing you can say with certainty about Mack's theories of widespread alien abduction it is that they do not offer "an expanded notion of reality". As the science writer James Gleick noted in a fine review of Mack's preposterous book in The New Republic over a decade ago:

Mack never manages to discuss the world's most widely shown piece of popular entertainment on his subject, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though surely many, if not all, of his patients saw Steven Spielberg's lovable little bug-eyed aliens long before they came up with their own memories of virtually identical aliens. In fact Mack's whole new mood about abductions isn't new at all--it's all there in Close Encounters: the Eastern mysticism, the spiritual save-the-planet denouement. (Remember the closing sound-track of the original version? "When you wish upon a star,/Makes no difference who you are,/Anything your heart desires will come . . . to . . . you.")

Gleick also alighted on the single most frightening aspect of Mack's theoretical edifice - not the alien probing human bodies with needles and so on, but this:

In a chilling aside, Mack writes that Ed and his wife, "Lynn," have had "a number of fertility problems, which may or may not be abduction-related, including three or four spontaneous terminations of Lynn's pregnancies." It's a reminder: This man is practicing medicine. He is telling patients that their miscarriages may be due to imaginary aliens. Why do the medical licensing boards permit this?

It's often forgotten, but before he became known for this theories on the reality of alien abductions, Mack was an active and very prominent anti-nuclear campaigner. With no training or expertise in international politics, Mack wrote with world-weariness of the need "in the sphere of international relations .... [for] what might be called political maturation". Maturity in this sense was defined as agreeing with Mack's political opinions:

There is no place for dominance, greed, and the power to control in addressing these new global challenges. But self-restraint and renunciation of force, combined with the exercise of that power which connects us with the Earth and is most fully expressed in our love for one another, can bring us back from the abyss.

The most obvious manifestation of "dominance, greed and the power to control" in the international order at the time of writing was the Communist domination of Eastern Europe. A few months later that system collapsed, to the immense benefit of everyone living under or menaced by it. This outcome was secured not, as it happens, by the exercise of that power which connects us to the Earth, but by a determination to defend our liberties through the collective security provided by the Nato alliance.

At the time, I was dismissive of Mack's political views, but his later preoccupations make them - I now see - mainstream and unexceptionable by comparison.

The fire next time

In a search for information, I interrupt my brief sabbatical. The Guardian reports today:

MP George Galloway today warned fire chiefs that plans to remove a fire engine from his east London constituency would have to be carried out "over the bodies" of demonstrators.... The MP, who was expelled from the Labour party over his opposition to the war on Iraq, said the fight for the fire engine was of a piece with his anti-war stance.

"The same people killing Iraqis are taking our fire engine away, and they're doing both for the same reason," he said.

I have thought a lot about this. I am familiar with the arguments that run, respectively "the Iraq War was launched by Bush to avenge his daddy", "the Iraq War was launched by Bush for oil" and (my own assessment) "the Iraq War was launched by Saddam with his annexation of Kuwait in 1990, who then failed to adhere to the ceasefire requirements embodied in UN Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687, and therefore was liable to the rightful and necessary exercise of force by the US-led Coalition". But I cannot recall ever having heard before the argument "the Iraq War was launched by the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority in order to redeploy a fire appliance to Enfield".

My regular Respect-watching correspondent, who coincidentally has a good deal of expertise in this area, advises me that the process by which each Fire and Rescue Authority draws up and publicly consults on a so-called Integrated Risk Management Plan (which was the basis of the LFEPA decision) derives from the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. Can any of my readers point me to a single occasion on which the Hon. George Galloway MP ever spoke in the House on the FRS Bill, let alone voted against it? I think my Internet Service Provider will be able to cope with the traffic.

An ex-Constitution

A quick word, at least, on the rejection of the proposed EU Constitution by the French and Dutch electorates, before I disappear for a week.

I think there was, and remains, a good case for the draft Constitution, and believe European Governments will, and ought, to come back to the issue in due course. Daniel Finkelstein, in The Times, disagrees with this view, despite (a point that weighs heavily with me, and is more acute in continental Europe than the UK) the large representation within the 'No' camp of political cranks and extremists. Of these people, he argues:

Many people behind the no camp were thoroughly objectionable, but by derailing the train as it chugged towards a federal Europe they have done us a favour, whatever their motivation.

The policies they are urging France to pursue would be a disaster for France, as would quickly become apparent should they ever be able to implement them. Yet they are correct to argue that they should retain the ability to determine France’s policy. For only if they retain their right to be wrong can anybody else have the right to be right.

To my mind, the same argument could be deployed in support of the anti-globalisers campaigning for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation, CND calling for the abolition of Nato, and in the case of any organisation founded on international treaty that binds (as is the point of treaties) signatories to a code of rules. These would be bad outcomes. Such institutions do not curtail democracy, but rather establish a framework of rules in preference to discretionary intervention. Rules, which generate predictable outcomes, have beneficial consequences in, for example, realising the economic benefits of comparative advantage or in assuring collective security against potential aggressors, but they also serve essential liberal values (removing discrimination on grounds of national origin; coming to the defence of weaker states that share our values). The French Front National and Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire were being consistent in opposing the draft Constitution. Those who subscribe to the values of internationalism and the open society ought at least to be open-minded on the principles behind the terminally-damaged draft Constitution.

Argument of the week

The letters page of The Independent is a soft target, but this - from one Dan Mayer (fifth letter down) - is a peach of an argument about the origin of the modern state of Israel "in the interests of Western imperialism to have a colonial settler state in Palestine". It is, moreover, written with an attention to syntax commensurate with the author's historical perspicacity:

As the great-grandson of Sir Leon Simon [one of the original members of the 1918 Commission to Palestine], let me assure you that I believe that the world would be a far better place if the Balfour declaration which he helped draft ("A scrap of paper that changed history", 26 May) had never been drafted.

Let me assure my readers that, as the cousin of Sir Herbert Samuel, first High Commissioner to Palestine under the British Mandate, I may be trusted as an undeniable authority on all matters to do with the politics of the modern Middle East. Further, as the cousin of the same Sir Herbert Samuel, Liberal leader from 1931-35, I have plenty of definitive judgements to dispense on the subject of the modern Liberal Democrats.

Intermission

Sorry for the lack of posts. I'm meeting a deadline for writing a short book on the left-wing case for an interventionist foreign policy. Please check back next week, when I expect to have done it and to be resuming the blog.

In the meantime, thanks are due to my brother, Richard, among many others, for voting at the AUT meeting last week to overturn that boycott, and to my friend Norman Geras for, in the felicitous words of Socialist Worker, going "hand in hand with the right to mobilise all possible forces of reaction" on this issue. (For 'reaction' read 'decency' - but you don't need me to translate.) It is a minimal achievement, but a necessary one.