It's da bomb

[davywavy]

Many years ago now, my 6th form debating society (of which I was a particularly gobby member) took part in a political awareness raising event organised by the United Nations. As a part of this we were involved in a Role-play exercise in which we were all given members of various national governments and the UN to play with objectives and various political crises to deal with.
In a moment of unforgivable stupidity which I doubt would be repeated by anyone who actually knew me, I was given the part of the British Minister of Defense. This was at the height of the Thatcher Era* and so I have no idea why they decided to make my character a complete and utter Jessie in terms of foreign policy, but one of my objectives was to do away with Britain’s Nuclear Deterrent.
Anyway, to cut a long story short – and to demonstrate that I’ve always been a disruptive influenc and it isn’t just a recent development – three hours later I had successfully ‘got rid’ of the Nukes and I hope that nobody important was in Paris or Buenos Aires at the time.
The next year, our Sixth form were not invited back to the event. I can’t help but wonder if this was coincidence.

I was reminded of this jolly story of precocious political awareness on my part by the news in the papers recently that Tony Blair is planning to spend the better part of £20,000,000,000 on building some bigger and better Nukes in order to keep the foreigner at bay. There’s actually been some well-informed debate on the subject lately. Is building atom bombs which we’ll almost certainly never actually need worthwhile expenditure when Gordon Brown has already drilled a hole in the National finances so deep it will take a decade to fill it in again?
Leaving aside the comedic irony of an ax-CND activist proposing to spend twenty billion quid on new, improved atom bombs, there’s a serious point to be made here too. Most theories of modern warfare stress that the rise in guerrilla-led insurgency wars and the decline of old-fashioned two-armies-slugging-it-out wars are a direct consequence of the availability of nuclear weapons. After all, if you’ve raised your army and invaded, say, France, it takes a lot of the fun out of the proceedings to suddenly find your capital city is a rapidly expanding cloud of radioactive dust and you’re sitting in a bunker eating orange rats. Enemies without access to nuclear weapons have worked out that not having large, easily identifiable resource points means that they cannot be struck easily and so now a small number of people can make insurgency warfare a cost-effective drain upon the enemy. Even so, the lack of army-based warfare in the last century is largely applicable to atom bombs – and it is undeniable that untold lives have been saved by this.
Moreover, there have been cries of hypocisy at UK and US led attampts to prevent the Iranians developing atom bobs of their own - although the people shouting 'hypocrites!' often gloss over the fact that the Iranians have gone of record as saying that should they get their hands on nukes they will use them on Israel, and a promise to use an atom bomb just as soon as you get one is not one to be taken lightly.
That said, twenty billion quid is a heck of a lot of money and could be spent on many other things; like me, or having David Blunkett tarred and feathered, but sadly the reality is that an injection of that sort of money into the economy probably wouldn’t result in an appreciable rise in the standard of living for anyone involved.
It’s an interesting question – and so I’ve decided to answer it in the time-honoured was of a politically biased, misleading and above all comical* Livejournal poll. The results of this poll will be considered binding by the Government.

[Poll #603366]


*Or “The Golden Age” as many historians call it.
**Stressed for the benefit of jonnyargles, who usually misses it.

Comments

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with the old bombs? Surely they're just as much of a deterent?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Kchah! Everyone knows that atom bombs go stale after a while. They have a 'est before'. And new ones would kill lots more people. Foreign ones, too. What's not to like?

I thnk it's more teh delivery systems - the old sysems are now not good enought o deal with modern anti-missile defenses and so they'd be shot down long before they reached their targets.

[cleosilver.livejournal.com]

So we sell the old stale not so good ones to fund making the new shiny ones :)

[(Anonymous)]

The trident submarine hulls have a finite fatigue life, which, despite them not being used much, is looming (apparently) Hence, new boats. I guess the rockets are getting a bit mouldy too and electronic components tend to go out of spec after a while, usually just when I need them to work properly.

[applez.livejournal.com]

the old systems are now not good enought o deal with modern anti-missile defenses and so they'd be shot down long before they reached their targets

Not true.

The 'going stale' bit is related to the following:

The radiation from the nuclear charge degrading the firing circuitry, perhaps leading to unacceptably high failure rates ('dud nukes'), even if less than 1-5%. Of particular concern to the Reagan-era weapons since they were built on the relatively-cheap.

Support infrastructure is degraded or obsolete ... all the targeting, validation and other computers, all invented and built before the 8086 microchip & non-human-gate networked computing theory; plus the rockets themselves which may have chemically-degraded fuels and problematic engineering prone to hazardous failure - don't want missiles accidentally going boom in a submarine, for example.