Video: Why do our politicians want to waste £97bn on new nuclear weapons?
Weapons of mass destruction
Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction - they indiscriminately incinerate people and contaminate air, soil, and water across national boundaries and across generations.
That's why the world agreed to work to eliminate nuclear weapons decades ago.
How many weapons?
The weapons [which nearly led to nuclear war in the Cuba crisis etc] are still there and the potential for misjudgment is still there, and the only way to avoid that in the long term is to eliminate nuclear weapons, that should be our objective, in a very real sense it's the lesson of the cold war. Robert McNamara, Former US Secretary of DefenseToday, nearly two decades after the Cold War ended, there are still 23,000 nuclear warheads in the world.
They are held by just nine countries: the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Worryingly more than 2,000 of them are still on hair-trigger alert - ready to launch at short notice, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And these weapons are far more powerful than those that wreaked havoc in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every submarine in Britain's Trident fleet carries up to 48 nuclear warheads, each of which is eight times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Breaking international law: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Together with the world's other nuclear weapons states, Britain pledged to get rid of its nuclear weapons in 1970 by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). They reaffirmed this pledge in 2000. In exchange, non-nuclear weapons states agreed that they would not pursue their own nuclear weapons.
“Many non-nuclear-weapon States accuse the nuclear-weapon States of
retreating from commitments they made … For these countries, the NPT 'grand bargain' has become a swindle"
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General
40 years on many non-nuclear countries are understandably feeling a bit nervous and are fed up that the nuclear states have not kept up their end of the bargain to disarm. Inevitably this has led to some of them trying to develop their own bombs, with greater or lesser success.
And the nuclear states refusal to talk about anything other than preventing other countries gaining nuclear weapons at NPT meetings has lefy the process close to collapse. So much so that at the major NPT conference in 2005 delegates spent much of the time failing to even agree an agenda.
Former UN Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix warns: "So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic."
Provoking non-nuclear states to acquire weapons
Right now the UK’s Trident submarines carrying nuclear armed missiles are on constant patrol 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each submarine carries up to 48 nuclear warheads. Every single one is eight times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
"You cannot continue to have a cigarette dangling from your mouth and ask everybody else not to smoke."
Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
This despite the fact that all government analyses say that we face no conceivable threat from a nuclear-armed state today or for the foreseeable future.
Worse still, Britain plans to spend £97 billion on building new nuclear weapons to replace Trident - weapons designed to last well into the 2050s. Politicians tell us this is because they can't be certain that a threat won't emerge in the future.
This is in clear breach of our international commitment to disarm. Worse still - if we say new nuclear weapons are essential for our defence, how can we tell other countries they don't also need them?
As the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, put it: "You cannot continue to have a cigarette dangling from your mouth and ask everybody else not to smoke."
Waste of money
A recent investigation by Greenpeace shows that this will comes with an enormous price tag. The in-depth report 'In the firing line' revealed how building and operating a new generation of nuclear weapons will cost the UK some £97 billion.
A distraction from the real threat - climate change
This £97bn expenditure is being committed at a time when the greatest threat we face is not a nuclear attack, but climate change.
The government agrees that the greatest threat we face is climate change; 150,000 people already die each year due to climate change impacts.
But they are still determined to waste £97bn on Trident, instead of putting the UK on a low-carbon pathway essential to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. And, in the process, place extra stress on international relations at a time when we all need to work together to tackle the threat of climate change.
