“I’m so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We’re like the bullies of the world, you know. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet: “Pick it up.” “I don’t wanna pick it up mister, you’ll shoot me.” “Pick up the gun.” “Mister, I don’t want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, mister.” “Pick up the gun.” Boom, boom. “You all saw him. He had a gun.”
-Bill Hicks
The government wants to waste at least £20bn (they aren’t good at estimating so lets call this a floor) of their pounds on renewing the UK’s ‘nuclear deterrent.’ Now lots of people like to harp on about the cost of this versus say a few new hospitals, schools or whatever socialismo initiative is popular with the Guardian readership today. Alas I couldn’t care less whether they spend it all on dancing lessons for the elderly or a reintroduction programme for the red squirrel. What is important is that our ‘nuclear deterrent’ perpetuates a global environment of fear and our government wants to continue to do so.
Now I am no apologist for Kim Jong-Un as the guy is clearly a paranoid egomaniac. I know this because he is a politician. However if I were feeling pretty isolated and marginalised and my greatest enemy was the United States; which is the only country to have ever deployed a nuclear weapon (or two; against civilians) then I might just want to get one myself. The existence of nuclear weapons by any state perpetuates nuclear proliferation. Yet David Cameron tells us because of the Korean nuclear ‘threat’ this is the time to renew our weapons programme. Would this be the same bogus ‘threat’ we saw from all those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction our paranoid leadership and military have been identifying?
The existence of our ‘deterrent’ is just a way of obscuring the environment of fear being perpetuated by the fevered egos of our political class who of course represent our own fears and anxieties. This is the same as rebranding the War Office as the Ministry for Defence circa 1964. We obscure the overt intent of our fear and anger by couching it in appealing pacific terms such as ‘deterrent’ and ‘defence.’
Britons love to decry crazy Americans with their lax gun control. We point out that even our police are not usually armed and therefore our society is safer with fewer guns floating around. Yet having a nuclear weapon is merely the global equivalent of lax gun control. If you have it you might use it and everybody in the world has to live in fear that it might be used so they want to get theit own 'deterrent.' We thus all live in a state akin to pointing guns at one another's heads.
Should we not expect our leaders to exercise some leadership and lead the way to a safer world? If they really want a safer world lets show the way by taking the first step towards peace and decommission our weapons programme.
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| This is what Nuclear war looks like. |
Nuclear weapons are never a deterrent because if they were ever required we would face annihilation. How can our government and our people live in this state of denial and parade around the world decrying human rights abuses whilst harbouring a weapon on 24hr alert capable of burning and poisoning millions of people indiscriminately?
Rarely even Hitler had something intelligent to say about this;
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
The nuclear 'deterrant' is a big fucking lie. So lets drop Trident and show our commitment to a truly peaceful world where people no longer live in perpetual fear of total annihilation. This requires all of us to change our hearts and minds and stand up for nuclear disarmament. If Democracy is government by the people, for the people, then lets get involved;
