The United Kingdom is in the midst of a national security crisis – but not the kind that the war-hawks are constantly fantasising about.
Almost 3,000 excess deaths due to unprecedented heat. Half of England and the whole of Wales officially in drought, soon to become an annual event. Wildfires scar huge swathes of countryside in Wales and Scotland, and in Suffolk fires rage only 2 miles from Sizewell B nuclear plant.
Meanwhile, the British military’s only firefighting aircraft are in Cyprus, protecting one of the MoD’s overseas bases instead of Britain itself. And instead of announcing emergency nationalisation of water in England and Wales, the Prime Minister has decided to visit BAE Systems at Barrow-in-Furness to restate his support for an enormous multi-billion pound contract to build nuclear submarines.
Burnham is hoping to rebrand the extortionate Trident renewal programme as an investment in “apprenticeships,” instead of omnicide-capable weapons. As Scottish CND have reiterated time and again, this is woefully misguided economic thinking. The military industries produce a feeble amount of employment relative to the sums of public money invested, especially in comparison to other socially-productive sectors of the economy.
But BAE’s hundreds of lobbying visits to senior government officials over the past decade and more (more than any other private company) are clearly paying off for the multi-national arms manufacturer. BAE’s share value has surged by well over 400% during the same period and they have been awarded multiple enormous government contracts.
But BAE systems submarine products themselves have a questionable performance record: none of the 5 BAE-built Astute nuclear submarines have been available for deployment by the Royal Navy for almost two months, with some vessels having spent years in maintenance.
Delays in maintenance are also causing Vanguard nuclear-armed submarines to regularly operate 200-day patrols, twice the intended duration, undoubtedly causing huge physical and psychological stress to submariners.
Meanwhile, BAE’s Dreadnought submarine programme, already beset by delays, has been scored poorly by the government’s own infrastructure watchdog for consecutive years. Yet the UK government continues to reward BAE and its shareholders with enormous contracts, throwing good money after bad at a time in which nuclear weapons are utterly useless against the national threats we face.
The thing about wildfires ‘burning with the intensity of atomic bombs’ like in Spain, is that they are not “deterred” by atomic bombs.
Today should serve as a startling reminder of how impoverished our political elite’s analysis of the ‘national security’ threat is. The notion of banking on nuclear militarism as a guarantor of either national security or economic prosperity is now so detached from reality as to be comical, if the stakes were not so grave.
We call on all our supporters to contact their MPs and express their renewed opposition to the exorbitant Trident renewal programme. This project goes against the spirit of the UK’s nuclear treaty commitments, contributes to rising international tensions, bakes in military integration with the United States, and puts Scotland on the frontlines of potential nuclear war. Moreover, it is a fiscal black hole that continues to suck up resources immeasurably better spent elsewhere.