Being prepared to incinerate millions of people by thermonuclear airstrike is a required qualification for the highest office.
Matt Carr
We have known for some time that Jeremy Corbyn is a dangerous man, and the Labour Party Conference has now revealed just how menacing he truly is.
For it is now clear that we have a potential future prime minister who has moral scruples about using weapons of mass destruction, and has specifically said that he can never imagine circumstances in which he would order a genocidal thermonuclear strike that would kill millions of men, women and children.
This statement has sent sent jaws dropping to the floor throughout the political establishment and the media. That forensic interrogator of power, the BBC’s Nick Robinson, the man who once stomped a anti-war placard into the ground because someone was waving it during one of his live reports, has declared how shocked he and his colleagues were on hearing it.
Former CND protester, Guardian columnist, Polly Toynbee has accused Corbyn of destroying his prime ministerial chances through his ‘Christ-like’ position on nuclear weapons.
Naturally Corbyn’s own shadow cabinet colleagues have worked themselves up into a paroxysm of indignation – the better to undermine his leadership and pave the way for his downfall. Maria Eagle, Corbyn’s own defense secretary, has described his comments as ‘unhelpful’.
Now I don’t know about you readers, but personally I find Corbyn’s position much worse than unhelpful. I find it terrifying and deeply disturbing to think that this man might have his finger on a button and he won’t even press it. Because it’s not as if pressing buttons is difficult. I press many of them myself everyday, on my new Samsung phone and kindle, on my electric kettle and toaster.
So I actually don’t see what the problem is in launching a few intercontinental ballistic missiles that could wipe out entire cities, and I want to know that we have a leader who could do it too if crunch came to crunch.
Of course I don’t want that crunch. Who does? As shadow business secretary Angela Eagle rightly argues: ‘I don’t think anyone in their right mind would want to get into a situation where it [the bomb] would be used, ‘ but Eagle also noted that ‘ if you do get to that situation you have to be prepared to use it.’
Tough, hard-headed talk, and no gender stereotyping there. This is a woman who is clearly prepared to walk that walk. And if we do ‘get into a situation’ when we might have to waste a few cities and their inhabitants, I want to know that Labour can do it bigtime. I don’t want us to be led by some pinko like former Labour defense secretary David Owen, who once argued back in 1978 that ‘ a million Soviet dead would be adequate’ as an argument for scaling back Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
No, I want someone in charge like civil servant Michael Quinlan, who told Owen an effective deterrent required ‘options an order of magnitude higher than this’ of up to ten million dead, because the Soviet Union had a different ‘threshold of horror’ as a result of its WWII casualties.
Now that’s strategic thinking, and that’s what helps me sleep at night, and if you aren’t willing to come up with that outcome then you aren’t up to the Big Job and maybe you should become a Quaker or audition as a judge for Strictly Come Dancing.
And if we’re going to have a deterrent, we need the best one we can get. That’s why I want to upgrade the Trident missile system. In fact I positively lust after it. I need to know that those submarines are out there, equipped with part-owned US missiles that are eight times more powerful than the bomb that landed on Hiroshima, prowling the high seas and protecting our national security.
I need to know that in the event that some rogue state or terrorist group turns the UK into a nuclear wasteland, then some lone Trident submarine commander out there on the high seas will open a last letter from a dead prime minister telling him to fire these missiles at whoever was responsible.
Because weapons like that are what holds civilization together. They keep us safe and they keep the whole world safe. And equally important, they keep us great. After all, as Tony Blair once said about Trident with his usual wisdom, ‘the expense is huge and the utility … non-existent in terms of military use,’ but giving it up would be ‘too big a downgrading of our status as a nation.’
Too right. Because if we didn’t have the ability to exterminate millions of people by pressing a button then what kind of great power would we be? Why should we even be allowed to sit on the UN Security Council? Why would the US want us if we didn’t carry their missiles around for them? Why even have the great in Great Britain?
Without those bombs, readers, we would be like Belgium or Denmark, and that can never happen.
So I don’t want some politician trying to act like Jesus. I don’t want to know how many schools and hospitals you could buy with the £100 billion that Trident renewal might cost. I don’t care if that money could employ 150,000 nurses or pay the tuition fees for 4 million students. I don’t want to hear from some traitorous sailor that safety procedures on the Trident submarine base are so dangerously lax that some lunatic could wander into one of them and set one off with Bluetooth.
So what if senior military officers have declared Trident ‘completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism’?
Because I know, just as the Labour right knows, that we need these weapons and we deserve to have them. That’s why I was heartened to know that Andy Burnham is prepared to resign over this issue, even though he couldn’t even bring himself to vote against the government’s latest welfare cuts.
That’s why I like to imagine Burnham riding a Trident missile on its way to obliterate Moscow or some other foreign megapolis, waving a cowboy hat and chanting ‘Come on Everton’. Because that’s the kind of sensible, thoughtful politician who gives me comfort whenever I think of all the threats and all the unbridled evil that there is out there in this mad, mad world.
And as for that bearded man who says there is something wrong with all this, and suggests that perhaps we need to think again about the morality and the logic of mutually assured destruction and reexamine the whole concept of deterrence and security in the post-Cold War world, why that man gives me no comfort at all.
In fact the dude really gives me the shudders.
Source: Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine
