The real weapons of mass destruction

As Prime Minister in waiting Gordon Brown promises to waste £25billion on a new generation of nuclear weapons that could destroy the Earth over and over, the Voice looks at the issues surrounding New Labour’s rush to nuclear warfare.

Ken Ferguson looks at Brown’s call for a new nuclear build up, without a debate in parliament.
Roz Paterson looks at the history of the nuclear arms race and at America’s plans to take the nuclear madness into outer space.

Former left wing Young Turk Gordon Brown has now turned into a right wing Old Turkey.

That’s the conclusion forced on voters by the latest pearls of wisdom from Blair’s neo-liberal chancellor and one-time left-wing editor Gordon Brown.
First, we had the cringe-making invitation to the far right tabloid Mail on Sunday to join him in his living room to watch his adopted world cup side England struggling against Trinidad and Tobago.
For those left with any doubts that Brown has ditched his left wing past - as editor of the Red Paper on Scotland and author of a biography of Glasgow socialist James Maxton - he spelt it out for the Mail on Sunday readers.
To gasps in the suburbs he launched a sharp attack on the cycling Tory leader David Cameron - for being too left wing!
As In-ger-land fumbled behind him, Brown warned:
“Cameron’s mistake is to drop the aspects of Thatcherism that people like and take up the aspects of liberalism, with namby-pamby policies on chocolate oranges, that people dislike.”
Presumably that will be namby-pamby things like civil liberties, and not getting shot at home by the police.
However, the great hope for a future left turn in New Labour saved his most devastating barb for Cameron’s supposed criticism of Margaret Thatcher.
Positively glowing as he warmed to his theme, the reformed ex-socialist said:
“Thatcher had discipline, leadership, character and conviction. Cameron does not have those qualities.”
And of course the great unspoken is, so does Brown, who has aped Thatcherism throughout his years in office.
Now the good voters of Fife may well be shocked by Brown’s open homage to Thatcher, but worse was to follow.
Having soothed middle England in the right wing press Brown now set his sights on any pesky peaceniks who might still imagine that a Brown-led New Labour government might pay some attention to them.
In the opulent surroundings of London’s Mansion House, he addressed a banquet hosted by The Lord Mayor of fat cats, purring profitably on the plunder of the world’s poor.
Like a polite guest he avoided the sordid topic of money and turned instead to that other ruling class staple - war.
Brown bluntly told the city brokers and bankers that he will fund the £25 billion needed to bring a new generation of nuclear terror weapons to the Clyde.
That this was greeted with surprise among some on the Labour left seems incredible since it was Brown who said he would find as much money “as it takes” to bankroll the Iraq disaster.
Brown’s unambiguous support for new WMD on the Clyde sends clear signals to several groups.
Not only is he clearly marginalising what’s left of the Labour left, along with the peace movement, he is keeping the US sweet and signalling ‘business as usual under Brown’ to the financial institutions and the big business multinationals.
Meanwhile, he’s telling the right wing press what they like to hear and projecting a tough-guy image.
CND have declared Brown’s support for a new generation of nuclear weapons “a blow to hopes for a new orientation in British foreign policy. To replace Trident would make the world a more dangerous and unstable place, and put Britain at greater risk.
“How can the government expect countries like Iran and North Korea to stop developing their nuclear capability when it is building new weapons of its own?”
Kate Hudson, the chairperson of CND, adds:
“When we face no nuclear threat, to decide on a Trident replacement is to begin a new nuclear arms race.”
The replacement of Trident blows the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - the international agreement under which Britain is obliged to work towards nuclear disarmament - out the water. Brown’s declaration of support makes a mockery of the claim that Parliament will debate the new generation of weapons before a decision is made.
Brown has plainly already made up his mind, and intends to break international law and spend £25 billion of our money - which could build hospitals, raise pensions, and guarantee free education - without even a nod to democracy.
What is now clear that Brown will, if anything, be worse than Blair if he becomes PM.
He is totally committed to market forces and globalisation in the economic field and to the poodle like ‘special relationship’ with US imperialism abroad.
Any socialists still harbouring illusions about New Labour under Brown have been warned.
The Scottish Socialist Party stands squarely for an independent socialist Scotland, where our parliament would have the power to once and for all remove nuclear weapons from our shores.

Sixty years of proliferation, protest and Polaris

When the world’s first nuclear weapon detonated, on a summer’s morning in 1945, on a test site near Los Alamos, New Mexico, its architect, J Robert Oppenheimer, commented, “We knew the world would never be the same.”
He was right. Thanks to his brilliance, we would come to live in a world where no government believed it was safe unless it had an arsenal of massive nuclear warheads, capable of vaporising the planet several times over.
In January 1947, when the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had barely had time to cool, the British government, under Clement Attlee, authorised the development of the first domestic nuclear weapon.
William Penney, a veteran of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project in New Mexico, led the team and had his base at Aldermaston, a former World War II airfield, while the necessary plutonium would be produced at Windscale, on the Cumberland coast, renamed Sellafield after a horrendous nuclear accident in 1957.
By 1952, Britain’s first bomb was ready to test, and the island of Monte Bello, off the coast of Western Australia, was chosen as an ideal site. It was ideal because, for one, the Australian prime minister would say yes to anything the ‘mother country’ asked of him, and secondly, apparently, it was so far from human habitation that no-one would get hurt.
That is, apart from the aboriginals who were later prohibited from returning to land that had become hugely contaminated, and the military personnel who became sick as a result of their unwitting, massive exposure to radiation, and the wildlife and sealife whose ecology was warped by the radioactivity... all of which is another, huge story in itself.
Needless to say, the Brits were jolly pleased as the war-time frigate, HMS Plym, that carried the bomb from Sheerness to Australia, was vapourised by the explosion, whose continent-sized plume was blown out of its mushroom shape by that morning’s turbulent sea winds.
In 1953, the first device went into service.
Blue Danube, aka Small Boy (the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was called Little Boy), weighed in at 10,000 lbs and like its American forerunners, was designed to be dropped from a plane.
But Britain kept testing, including the infamous Christmas Island tests, and developing bigger and bigger weapons.
In 1958 came the first chorus of sanity against this madness. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) marched the 60 miles from London to Aldermaston, and thus instigated an annual event which ran till 1963.
Before 1958, legislation had prohibited the US from sharing its nuclear technology, even with close allies. Thus the British bomb developed independently. But on 3 July 1958, the Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes was signed, which meant that the UK could now have weapons fitted with nuclear warheads made from American designs.
An Act passed the following year allowed the buying and exchange of fissile and thermonuclear material.
In 1963, John F Kennedy and Harold MacMillan signed the Polaris sale agreement. Kennedy had offered Polaris to France as well, in pursuit of a tripartite alliance against the Great Red Menace. Well, he claimed it was a tripartite alliance he was pursuing, but in truth he was nothing more than a slick salesman for the biggest military industrial complex on earth. And Britain had her cheque book out.
The first Polaris submarine, HMS Resolution, was launched in 1968. It carried 16 missiles, each bearing three warheads with a capability in the kiloton range. It cost £300 million.
But by 1980, we needed more! The Thatcher government announced its decision to produce Trident, representing a massive escalation in both capability, accuracy and range.
While this was on the drawing board, Cruise missiles came to Greenham Common. Cruise missiles were guided devices which could be fired from a ship or a plane, and thanks to inbuilt mapping systems, could ‘find’ their target, even when that meant changing direction in flight. They were designed to evade defence systems, such as radar, and once fired, could not be recalled.
Many people recoiled at this vile weapon, including the Women for Life on Earth, who marched to Greenham in 1981 to protest the decision to install Cruise, and later set up one of the most famous peace camps of them all.
In 1994, HMS Vanguard, the first Trident submarine, was launched. HMS Vigilant, Victorious and Vengeance were to follow, and all are based at the Clyde Submarine Base at Faslane.
Oppenheimer said something else about his scientific breakthrough. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Each Trident submarine bears 16 warheads, making 48 in all. Each of these warheads has a nuclear capability seven times that of the warhead dropped on Hiroshima. If these were ever fired, they would destroy all worlds, forever.
n www.tridentploughshares.org

Star Wars: no science-fiction

On 23 March 1983, Ronald Reagan, the then president of the United States, delivered a speech to the nation proposing a defence system that involved shooting down nuclear missiles from space.
This system, the Strategic Defence Initiative, was to become known as ‘Star Wars’ due to its uncanny similarity to George Lucas’ fantasy sci-fi film series. But then, Reagan had formerly worked as an actor, if a rather piss-poor one.
His dream of shootin’ down nukes using early warning satellites that would detect their presence using infra-red sensors, thereby triggering the launch of interceptor missiles, quickly foundered.
The technology was too complex, the test-runs were embarrassing failures, the million dollar costs were indefensible.
Yet the idea of Star Wars remained a touchstone for conservatives and, inevitably perhaps, it was revived by the administration of George W Bush.
It’s still costing a fortune and not quite working, even under its big grown-up new name of National Missile Defence (NMD), but that’s no reason not to be scared witless.
NMD is designed to act as a ‘shield’ for the entire US against nuclear attack, through the interception and destruction of ballistic missiles.
This means that, unlike any other nation on earth, the US could fire a nuclear weapon at someone without fear of retaliation. In other words, it can wage nuclear war yet itself be OK.
The so-called deterrent of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) no longer applies.
The Bush administration has already ‘legitimised’ the concept of pre-emptive strikes through its National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, which asserts its right to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively to stop ‘rogue states’ from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The US insists NMD is to protect it from ‘rogue states’ and nuclear blackmail (which is what, if not MAD?), but no-one is buying it. That ‘rogue state’ is whoever the US says it is.
And while we wait to see who gets vaporised first - Iran? North Korea? - we can watch as NMD triggers a race to develop the first nuclear weapon that can penetrate it, thereby kick-starting another epidemic of nuclear stockpiling. The only winners will be the guys who tout this stuff; the losers will be the health and welfare systems whose funding is sucked dry by the ravenous needs of the national military.
NMD, which is also known as ‘son of Star Wars’, has implications for us in the UK, and not just that we’ll be part of a world convulsed by nuclear terror.
RAF Fylingdales and RAF Menwith Hill, in the North Yorkshire Moors, are part of the NMD system, the former housing a ground-based early warning radar, the latter handling information concerning missile launches.
This makes us a major target for any ‘rogue nation’ that seeks to blast open the US’s defensive shield.
It also ropes us into America’s pursuit of full-spectrum dominance. That is, of land, sea, air, information... and space. NMD’s ambitions extend way beyond the earth’s atmosphere, revealing the US’s contempt for nation states and borders, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the extension of war into space.
This week, a US army spokesperson said they were now “very confident” they could shoot down any US-bound missile from North Korea.
What he meant was, the US is now contemplating a ‘limited’ nuclear war. One in which one, or two, or who knows how many, countries get nuked and the US doesn’t. That means the US can control the whole world and if we don’t like it, we’re dust. This is no movie.