Today’s Times has a pow­er­ful let­ter from Field Mar­shal Lord Bra­mall, Gen­er­al Lord Rams­both­am, and Gen­er­al Sir Hugh Beach argu­ing against the renew­al of Britain’s nuclear deter­rent, the Tri­dent II D‑5 sub­ma­rine-launched bal­lis­tic mis­sile:

“Nuclear weapons have shown them­selves to be com­plete­ly use­less as a deter­rent to the threats and scale of vio­lence we cur­rent­ly, or are like­ly to, face — par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ism; and the more you analyse them the more unus­able they appear. […] Our inde­pen­dent deter­rent has become vir­tu­al­ly irrel­e­vant except in the con­text of domes­tic pol­i­tics. Rather than per­pet­u­at­ing Tri­dent, the case is much stronger for fund­ing our Armed Forces with what they need to meet the com­mit­ments actu­al­ly laid upon them. In the present eco­nom­ic cli­mate it may well prove impos­si­ble to afford both.”

Let’s hope that the words of a for­mer Chief of the Defence Staff might change the minds of the politi­cians who recent­ly vot­ed to renew Britain’s nuclear deter­rent. You can read the whole let­ter here.

There is also a very good arti­cle by Paul Rogers, Pro­fes­sor of Peace Stud­ies at Brad­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, on the need to change the Cold War mind­set of our lead­ers, today’s Dooms­day Men, online at the New Inter­na­tion­al­ist.

A fas­ci­nat­ing and chill­ing report by the BBC’s Gor­don Cor­era about the crash of a B52 bomber in north­ern Green­land in 1968, dur­ing which a nuclear weapon was lost beneath the ice, illus­trates some of the dan­gers of the nuclear arms race. Read his report here.