Renewing Trident

Gordon Brown supports the renewal of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, according to the BBC:

Mr Brown is expected to use his Mansion House speech to indicate his personal commitment to renewing Trident. Estimates of the cost vary from £10bn to £25bn, depending on what form the new missiles or submarines take. Labour had a manifesto commitment to retain an independent nuclear deterrent but it only applies until the next general election.

Mr Brown, seen as the most likely next prime minister, will speak of retaining the deterrent in the long term. It is thought he wants anti-nuclear campaigners to know that he is just as committed to replacing Trident as Tony Blair.

This will be the right decision, for reasons I argued here. It's also a relief that the argument will be made at, in effect, prime ministerial level. The two most interesting aspects of the debate so far are, first, that the case against renewing the deterrent has been made by mainstream figures on pragmatic grounds (Michael Portillo is of this camp), and secondly, that the case for the deterrent has hardly been made at all, by the Government or anyone else.

I'll place here a plug for a new book to be published in the autumn by SCM Press called Britain's Bomb: What Next?; the book deals principally and from various viewpoints with the ethical issues in this debate, and the contributors are mainly churchmen and theologians. The editors did a valiant job of searching for someone to contribute a chapter on the case for renewing Trident, and came up with me (I am, of course, no theologian or churchman). You can pre-order the book from Amazon here.