On Saturday lunchtime I was desperate for a plate of couscous, and I was just about to go into Edinburgh’s best cafe (“Uncle T’s”) when a big antiwar march steamed past and I was carried away.
It wasn’t entirely clear what the march was about: many people there were just pro-peace in general. Others went further, some making the strikingly false claim that “we are all Palestinians”, others complaining about the insufficent radicality of other marchers.
I couldn’t find a marcher who was pro-Trident, even though Trident is claimed to be a way of perpetuating peace; but the march was nonetheless a good chance to air the fundamental issues.
The deterrence argument for keeping Trident got short shrift: marchers argued that nukes can’t deter conventional weapons attacks, since any nuclear response would be disproportionate (and since non-state actors don’t present easy targets or worse come from the cities of the very state they are attacking). So they can only deter nuclear attacks from other nuclear powers. Well, it looks like this is as good a reason as any to keep them! But there is something fishy here.
If it is true that a nuclear power can’t launch a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear one, then getting rid of Trident would be the best deterrent. So it must be that people who are pro-Trident are seriously envisaging that there will come a time when a nuclear power will be thinking about launching a nuclear attack on the UK.
I wonder whether extreme scenarios like this should even be considered when making public policy. Think of a parallel: philosophers often discuss the possibility that they have had their brains removed and placed in fish tanks and that this whole world is an illusion – but they never suggest that consideration of these extreme cases is meant to be an actual guide to life. They are purely thought experiments; and if you find yourself getting too caught up in them you ought, David Hume suggested, to invite a few mates round, have a drink and play a few board games.
Maybe something similar could hold for defence policy too: once you’ve started scaring yourself with nuclear attack scenarios, a nuclear deterrent is going to seem essential. Maybe the answer is just to chill out a bit — and this could apply to people on peace marches too.
14 August 2006 at 11:02 am
I was at the Edinburgh march – and I was definitely bothered by the idea that we were “all Hizbullah”, as one of the speakers at the start proclaimed. If you are living on the actual land where Hizbullah are based you can say that kind of thing if you feel it’s appropriate – but one speaker does not have the right to label everyone on an anti-war march that way, particularly not in Edinburgh. I personally don’t want to be allied with any group that bombs anyone. That’s the whole point. And I think that this does have parallels with the nuclear deterrence issue – in their nationalist heart-of-hearts, I reckon the “we are Hizbullah” people would actually be pro-deterrent. It’s based on the idea of it being okay to hit back when you’re attacked – even if there are innocents and civilians in the way. Staying angry is fine- in fact it’s probably necessary – but the anti-war movement does need an injection of intelligent pacifism.
14 August 2006 at 9:54 pm
If I was a pro-nuke governemtn strategist I would give loads of funds to world poverty campaigns like Make Poverty History and Oxfam, hoping that all the intelligent activists would get professionalised and caught up in really complicated issues. This would pretty much take them out of domestic politics, and would leave a ragbag of easily dismissed radicals to be antiwar. They spend their time attacking each other and making up dumb slogans, and are useless for real antiwar stuff. In fact they turn people off it.